Fully formed characters springing forth from the brow of Zeus

One of the things I'd do over with my Autumn Frontiers campaign is to curtail my instinctual desire to give the players pretty much whatever they want at character creation, within the bounds of the typical "buy what you what with your starting money" setup.

We're now 10 sessions into my campaign, which is set up as a location-based fantasy sandbox and interpreted through Savage Worlds. What I'm seeing is that the players are quite content to use their starting funds ($500 in Savage Worlds) to buy a few really cool bits of gear—and then cling to these items throughout the campaign, forsaking anything else that might come up during their exploration of the wilderness. And it's tough to deny them these pieces of equipment because they're so essential to the players' character concepts. (Example: "I want to play a dark elf who fights with a sickle. Can I buy a sickle?") This concept has backfired because nothing they find out there comes close to being as cool as the neato stuff they bought at character creation. I mean, the sickle-wielding dark elf isn't going to put aside his trademark sickle unless it freakin' breaks apart in his hands.

This is pretty much at odds with classic fantasy campaigning, where characters would encounter new and better equipment, weapons and spells, trading up as they went along to increase their overall potency in the campaign.

Here's another example: Out of an abundance of shared enthusiasm and generosity, I allowed our paladin character to pay a ton of money for a magical sword during character creation. It didn't boast outrageous damage, and it fits really well with his character concept (a paladin serving a flame goddess). It's all well and good—but no other magical sword will ever interest him as much as the one he's carrying right now. After 10 sessions, this character has begun to feel like a toy action figure that was taken out of its box, fully formed and ready to kick ass.

I recognized this during our last session, and I did something about it—I had the ghouls scavenge the paladin's magic sword and his large shield from his paralyzed body during a particularly brutal battle. They ran off with it, and the paladin scourged the lands in search of his special sword, which he found at the session's end.

But I felt lame about the whole affair, like I (the GM) was somehow punishing the player for something. We talked it over afterward, and there were no hard feelings, but still.

Should characters get whatever they can afford at character creation? The answer is probably no, but at the same time it's important for GMs to understand that not every player wants to start off as a bottom-of-the-barrel fighting-man who has to go after goblins with naught but a sharp stick and some lucky dice rolls. Heirloom equipment is fun. How can it be employed to both reward players and keep them excited about venturing forth again and again into the wilderness?

I also think I just need to play up the notion of equipment breaking and degrading over time out in the wilderness. Shields and bucklers don't last forever. If a backpack gets wet, it could ruin stuff stored inside. Chainmail rusts and weakens under repeated blows. Cloaks and robes can mildew and rot in damp weather. And magic swords become instant targets for monsters with more than a shred of intelligence...

Meet the magnificent bastards

For a long time, I resisted the idea of morally gray characters — those self-serving scoundrels who would just as soon ransack the crypt than save the curator, for example. To me, they were the crutch of unimaginative players. Twas infinitely better, I thought, to dig deeper into the game’s source material and craft a nuanced character festooned with plot hooks and ulterior motives — red meat for the GM, in other words.

Gradually, though, I’m coming to appreciate the idea of the “magnificent bastard” — the magnanimous, perpetual ego trip of a character whose only goal in life is to leave behind a handsome corpse in some lonely, forgotten dungeon. These adventurers have as much of a place in today’s fantasy gaming as the Tolkienesque Dwarf fighter and Elf ranger. Right now, at least, I'd like to see more of them.

This is a gaming philosophy

OK, so I promise this blog isn’t going to become a link-farm for noisms over at Monsters & Manuals, but I find myself returning again and again to his post from a couple weeks ago about creating your own gaming philosophy. That’s something I’ve never really dabbled in, mainly because I never really had a stable group to inspire me.

Now, though, I’m starting to give it some more thought. I’ve been gaming with the same core group of dudes for more than a year (with a much larger cast of additional players rotating in and out), and I’m starting to formulate my own gaming philosophy. Here’s a rough draft of the thesis sentence:

Be on the same page.

I mean this both literally and metaphorically. My best games (both as player and GM) have come about when everyone around the table knows what they’re getting themselves into. This can be as simple as a broad genre (steampunk) or a specific sub-setting (the Five Fingers port city in the Iron Kingdoms setting). The campaign itself should adhere to this rule, too: it’s troublesome and ultimately not so fun if a minority group of players has wildly different expectations about the gameplay and/or ruleset being used.

For my own part, I’ve been a fairly conformist player: I’m happy to reshape my characters within the first few adventures to fit the direction the story seems to be going. In my Mutants & Masterminds campaign for example, my Swamp Thing-inspired tree-dude morphed from an aimless beatstick into a more focused support character (with requisite healing and protection powers) shortly after his introduction. This transition didn’t offend me as a player, and I’ve derived even more satisfaction from the game as a result.

Now, none of this is meant to suggest that originality and character-driven stories have no part in today’s RPGs. Rather, it’s intended to point out that there are a series of small, mostly painless discussions that players and GMs ought to have before embarking on a new game because they can head off potentially larger problems down the road.

Why I Like Building Worlds. In Theory.

Reading Pat's recent post made me think about why I love collaborative world building in rpgs.  To get it out on the table: I like collaborative world building a whole lot more than playing in a prepackaged setting.  Some settings are especially good, and I don't have a problem playing in a setting under these conditions.  For example, I thought Eberron and Blue Planet were a whole lot of fun in terms of details, tone, and potential for lots of different kinds of games.  But many others - like the array of sourcebooks for Mutants and Masterminds or the splatbooks for Vampire - leave me completely cold.

As a player, I like collaborative world building for the reason Pat mentioned below - that players have buy-in and a stake in the story before the game even begins, and because it give players an opportunity to hardwire their characters into the world in a way that's not otherwise possible.  It's one thing to have a "relationship" with your mom, who's a reporter.  It's a whole other thing to have a "relationship" with your mom, who's a reporter for a monolithic, media corporation in a setting that's all about who controls information, because you built it that way.  That said, it's not that much more important to me as a player to game in a collaboratively built world.

As a GM, it's a different story.  A collaboratively built world does a couple of significant things for me.  First, it makes it easy for me to think of plot hooks and story threads that will motivate the characters to act and to force them into hard decisions.  Second, it helps me get what I want to out of rpgs.  Many players like watching their characters grow, building them up in a way that will make them more effective in the story and that makes sense given what happened to them (if they're not complete munchkins).  As a GM, I like the same thing for the world and for the story.  Collaborative world building gives me the outline and frame of a world we all care about, but it also give the me plenty of space to elaborate as the plot moves forward.  It gives me the freedom to build the world and story in a way that's going to be particularly effective, given what happens to the characters.  In my mind, building a world from scratch allows for more creativity and strategy on the part of the GM.  And it lets me watch my world grow.  In a sense, the world becomes my character, even if it's not defined by rigid categories like strength, intelligence, and wisdom.

But then again, I've only done this once as a GM (in a short Burning Wheel game that I'll discuss in a later post).  So this discussion is, as are most other things in my life, only in theory.

Is it the players or the system?

I was having a discussion recently with Ben, a great friend and member of my local group here in Chicago, about the merits of gaming systems vs. gaming groups. Lately Ben's been on a ruleset kick; he's been buying PDFs of various games and monkeying around with different mechanics. I guess you could view this as something of a research project, since Ben is set on writing his own full-length RPG in the next year or two.

Anyway, we were discussing the recent rash of indie games that take narrative control out of the GM's hands and distribute it amongst the players. Games like Burning Wheel (whichn I'm currently playing) encourage players to base dice rolls around their more esoteric traits, rather than waiting for the GM to instruct them to. (Ex: Using "Nobleman's Son" to defuse a potential combat scenario rather than Persuasion or simple fighting. There's no stat attached to it, but the GM can react appropriately when the player asserts the trait.) This drives players to resolve encounters in a variety of ways, both social and combative.

Ben is really jazzed about systems that provide for this sort of character-driven interplay. I, on the other hand, have been playing devil's advocate a little and suggesting that the right gaming group doesn't need to be poked and prodded by a quirky ruleset. Roleplaying will just happen, without any sort of conditional system to encourage or refine it.

Case in point: the d20 system is the yardstick for measuring most new RPGs. It's fairly traditional, somewhat versatile and satisfies most rule-hungry gamers. It doesn't really promote roleplaying through written mechanics - but that hasn't been a problem in my D&D campaign. I'm playing Midnight, a fantastically dark setting by Jeff Barber, with a group of guys here in Chicago. We're all about the same age (late 20s to early 30s) and we're all remarkably on the same page as far as what we want out of our game.

As such, we don't have any problem engaging in some nice meaty roleplaying within the parameters of the d20 system. I'd point to this as evidence that the game group, not the system, ultimately determines how satisfied everyone is with the RPG experience.