Category Archives: Story Gaming

I Hate President Snow

I was reading a social media profile by someone trying to sound very smart, and he tried to make the point “President Snow doesn’t exist, but I hate him.” It’s a powerful statement in lack of self awareness that runs right into the soul of writing. Characters aren’t real.

From my perspective it illustrates a thin line of warning that demonstrates a step towards riding a dangerous wave of peer pressure. Does the character really exist? Is he in the room with you right now? Did the author manipulate you? Is it just bad writing?

We create emotional attachments to fictional characters, some so strongly that we treat them as real people. In the case of Sherlock Holmes you’ll hear phrases like “the greatest detective since Sherlock Holmes!”, with no awareness that Holmes never existed.

The sadder reality is that the author behind Holmes lost a fortune to con artists posed as mediums in a pursuit to speak to the dead. The legacy of the character exists in the literal personification of the character as infinitely clever, with no regard to the actual creator of the character as lacking good sense.

From writing to film, we are upset at the death of a character, and even mourn them. As natural story tellers, our human brains lead us to either empathize or sympathize with their situations. We learn lessons from stories about impossible talking chickens, magical fish, and worlds behind mirrors. In some way the lessons and allegories of fiction help to shape our ability to navigate reality.

For me, there’s some problems here. The inability to connect an author to a character is the biggest red flag that a popular wave could lead to something dangerous. I cannot connect with hating a fictional character. The ability to have that visceral reaction shows a willingness to not ask why.

Let’s take President Snow, or Draco Malfoy, or the generic lead cheerleader in the more traditional high school drama. These are projections of the author. They are sometimes strawmen, one dimensional caricatures of something the author wants you to hate, who regularly turn into a trope known as “strawman has a point.” They are not just fictional characters, they are the author putting part of themselves, something they hate, into the entirety of the role.

When fans blindly hate the character as the boogey-man, because they were told to, it is scary. What if this strawman is an unfounded stereotype of someone the author just didn’t get along with. What if the man the pop culture zombies learned to hate is just Joey from Full House? Did we internalize an allegory that was an unjust hate to someone’s perfectly normal rival?

When the strawman is a piece of self, it is bad writing. When the strawman is a political whipping boy, it is bad personality, and bad writing. When the strawman is unresolved hate towards someone that an idea represents, it is dangerous. Regardless of all of those qualifications, when the strawman is all powerful, it is a bad reader for giving him that position, and not closing the book.

Remember, the same writer that set up this bad guy to scowl at on the stage with your hands clenched in fists of rage, is the same person who locked your protagonist in the closet and beat him as a child. The big bad evil guy didn’t do that, the author did. Leveling cities. Burning down orphanages. Threatening a worldwide genocide. All the author.

So I propose viewing these manipulations for what they are. Be careful before you hate a character in a book. Never do so just to become a fans. Think critically about what’s before you.

I started early with “from my perspective” because acknowledging how much I viewed an “insurmountable foe” as bad writing gave me the perspective that helps me with tabletop games and RPGs. Setting up evil with nothing but luck and a chosen one is just manipulation, but setting up evil when there is an opportunity to overcome it works.

Our heroes in a campaign get the opportunity to make that change. They aren’t limited to rereading the book and wishing chapter 2 went differently. They get to shape the solution and learn from what’s in front of them. And if they want to be that evil, so be it. It’s their world to shape.

I’ll end with one last observation.

When I see tabletop gamers express how much they hate a character, it’s usually something from a canned adventure. It’s an unfair creature. It’s a rule that feels like cheating. It’s some badly written NPC that wasn’t allowed to interact with their free will because “it’s technically not a spell.”

When you start to isolate the way the content is consumed. You can view that people who internalize hate for characters, often just hate the way it was given to them. Take away the manipulative author and they will happily think critically and build on the world with choices and imagination.

P.S. I irrationally hated Donald Sutherland for repeating “sandman viper command” a bajillion times long before you irrationally hated him for portraying President Snow.

What’s Important in RPG groups?

It’s a broad topic, and everyone is out there telling each other the “right way” to be a game master, but something that has come up in conversation is what is important in a game.

If you go looking at all the advice online it’s research, it’s engaging players, it’s letting them live, it’s letting them die, it’s fudging dice, it’s never fudging dice. Anything and everything that contradicts another idea is the “most important.” I don’t buy that.

So I wanted to just cut things down to basics. What do you need to play a tabletop RPG?

#1. You need a group, and someone willing to GM. That is literally the most important part. Even things I have stood on the soup box and called the most important part, are several rungs on the ladder below having these 2 things.

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GM’s Discretion – A Top 10 Countdown

In my experience, the term “RAW” didn’t have purpose in D&D until 5th edition. It means “Rules as Written” as opposed to “Rules as Intended.” The simplest example is the net weapon. It is implied that the net can be thrown 5 feet normally, and 15 feet with disadvantage. However, rules as written state that all thrown attacks are ranged and have disadvantage in close combat. No matter how clear intention is, the rules were written this way.

Although there is a lot of value in reading the material, RAW vs. RAI is not about clearing the rules to better understand them. It is about following rules, even when they are nonsense. What seems to make it more important is that 5th edition requires the phrase to be said a lot, since so many general rules are incredibly separated from the content they govern.

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The Fantasy Cutoff

Behind the scenes I’ve been working on a project that has to do with Germanic word origins of modern English words. It has been very interesting to see old Germanic words for battle and how close a lot of words are to modern English. With that background I had the good fortune of stumbling into a conversation on the origin of words and fantasy creatures. To boot, I’ve even recently made a video about Fairy houses. That inspires an article about modern fantasy words.

Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Faeries, Trolls, Goblins… We have a mental picture for every one of these. Elves are fair, graceful, and magical. Trolls are big, and regenerate. Goblins are small and green. Orcs are big and pig faced. Dwarves live under the mountain mining and carving great mazes. Where did we get these pictures.

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Monsters not Knight Eaters

If there is anything that puts me off about modern fantasy role playing games, it’s the obsession with making monsters defined exclusively by how they deal with adventurers. You never encounter a strange bear. You encounter a bear with anti-platemail can opener attachments and the ability to cast spells invented by humans. Why isn’t it just a bear?

What this really means is that games often are limited by their combat system, and both unwilling and unable to have traits outside of combat with people. You end up with horses with no hit points and tigers with tentacles.

Speaking of, the displacer beast is the most significant example of this. A large cat has tentacles specifically to prey on knights. No, tentacle cat it is not a repository for your source code with a funny mascot. It’s something people seriously use to define their franchise. Dragons, chimeras, and hydras were not interesting enough. They needed tentacle cats.

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Epic Poems

In Akkadian Rhythms you play epic heroes. Literally! As the game progresses you write your epic poem.

It describes the biography of who you started as, and includes how you’ve grown along the way in your adventures. It’s works as your renown among. You can even use it to quickly tell other players about your character. It’s how characters know you.

Through the past campaigns, this player’s epic poem has been my favorite.

Simple, yet descriptive.

By the end of the campaign, the player spent their epic verses, the points you gain to progress, on an unusual heroic trait. Every living thing he killed exploded into blood and stained the area around it. Even things not made of blood.

The first time he colored all of the monsters in range a shade of red, they ran. That’s the kind of thing that breaks even the most hardened monster’s morale.

Greylanders are golem-like humanoids made of muck, that usually have no fear. Seeing one of their fellows bleed, when it shouldn’t be possible, changed the way the monsters acted. It lead to some of the most fun combat encounters.

That’s why Akkadian Rhythms sits comfortably in the middle between strong combat strategy, and player narrative control. Although strategy defines a character, it’s their use of narrative devices that makes the most difference.

Get started with the player handouts and monster guide, and keep a look out for expanding your world even further with the GM Guide, coming soon.

Encanto Even

Disney, and other animation studios, have been taking a world tour as of late. It has been a long term theme to stop basing Disney movies in renaissance Europe, but highlighting specific cultures has become more specific as time goes on. Which leads to the impossible to understand Encanto.

I’ll start all the way back with Moana, which was a smash together of Polynesian culture, and got criticism for changing young Maui into a stereotyped obese, adult islander. It created a positive start to the sub genre. Hearing the Rock sing was fun and novel and showed you that he has drive, he has power.

This continued, with another notable stop at Coco, which somehow shines despite being a diluted genre. Not the smallest achievement in the film is the artistic style of animating paper cutouts and creating a complex emotional finale for kids who actually morn the loss of the titular character.

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Superman meets Mad Magazine

Mad Magazine’s iconic mascot is Alfred E. Nueman. A mischievous looking face with great big ears and a toothy grin. He represents youth up to no good, and the voice of an uneducated everyman.

Most people recognize the character for Mad Magazine, which got its start from Entertainment Comics (EC), a part of what we know of now as DC Comics. What is virtually unknown is that he got his start in Action Comics.

Mad Magazine started using the character as a mascot in the 1950’s, but the Max Fleischer cartoons, a 1941 incarnation of superman, featured the face first.

Louis from the 1941 Superman Cartoons
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Revisiting Locations

I have a really strong conviction that RPG players should want to go back to locations they already visited.

Whether the bad guy’s lab had a vat of acid that could destroy the lich’s phylactery, or a magical being might have some insight into their quest, or they cleared out an old castle ruin and made it their new home. It doesn’t matter why, it should just feel like something they can reach out and use.

I usually set my adventures either in or around civilization for this reason. Their changes become more tangible and there are always people and sights to return to. They can overlook that giant crater they made after causing a portal to hell to implode, or come back to some NPC that screwed them over and give him “a fate worse than death.”

I don’t think canned adventures support this very well. It takes GM’s personal world building to pull it off.

Anyway, just a thought.

How to Run an Encounter

No matter the RPG you are playing, the overriding factor in all things is player expectations. This is usually about story elements. A steak to the heart should kill a vampire. When it doesn’t, players get pulled away from the world. But it also matters when it comes to combat and mechanics. When the rules of a fight break player expectations, you lose the group for a moment. And what better example than 5e?

Recently playing a campaign the players came up against an obvious trap. And so the players all said they were looking for obvious trap. Then they identified exactly where obvious trap should be. Then they slowly approached obvious trap. Unfortunately they didn’t roll high enough to overcome some arbitrary number and the rules turned obvious trap into a total surprise that somehow nobody expected.

What we saw was that when player expectations didn’t match the Rules As Written, the game lost its players.

There’s more detail to this example, but we are going to step back a moment. I am obviously not a 5e fan, so I am always curious what real fans hate about the game. I am predisposed to just get annoyed about things that most players are more than ok with. So if I have a low threshold, what does a high threshold look like?

What I find is that phrase is true across the board. If Rules as Written (RAW) breaks the clear expectations of players, they are out of the headspace to play the game immediately. I would go one further and say that the fact that “Rules as Written” comes up so often that it has an acronym IS the problem. Of all editions of D&D, 5e is the only time I’ve seen rules lawyering, nitpicking, and tying the GM’s hands be celebrated. These things would be travesties to OSR folks.

Back to the example. The single monster that was part of this ambush was given a huge range, speed, and damage. If it rolled max damage, it would one shot every player. Was it a dargon? A demon? A Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG)? No, it was a random NPC that barely had any hitpoints. It was a nothing to the plot. A random mook.

This is important because once the insignificant detail in the story was killed, all of its equipment was gone over. If it is capable of killing hardened characters in a single shot (before they even see it coming) then it must have some kind of artifact or magic weapon. I mean if a single attack rolls more dice than all of the players combined, and it gets two attacks per round for no discernible reason, clearly this weapon must be a legendary item foretold by countless generations.

What did the players find? NOTHING! All normal weapons with significantly less ability than was seen. The random mook simply had some ability written into its character that gives it an unreal amount of extra damage. No in game or out of game explanation. No ability to quest after this skill. No ancient rituals to follow. It was a horribly written, empty feeling that the players just had to swallow. 5e fans HATE this aspect of the game.

So how could this even happen?

There are a lot of factors. They are not the main point of this article, but the problem is that 5e is too much of a video game. Monsters are entities with properties, and when they die they become game objects. I’m not exaggerating, this is true in RAW. Their swords and magic fall to the floor as extra meshes on their models, which cannot be interacted with. Just details to try to flavor a predefined game play style that you are being led into by the nose. And with that video game aspect, comes canned monsters in canned adventures, with canned text that has no bearing on the players, characters, or plot. Basically, the story is empty on purpose.

If this were a rare occurrence, then maybe it’s just a bad roll or a bad session. Things should look up, right? But that’s not how things went. The next event involved triggering a trap and spawning monsters. Those monsters were overpowered with abilities that just destroy players (that are not considered magic because its convenient to the system to play semantics). Now you’d think the way this encounter shakes out is that the monsters attack the group. Nope, because of a bad initiative roll and a terrible transition from free-narrative to combat, the monsters ganged up and almost killed one player in a single round. All going before anyone could react.

Let’s back up a second here. Do we really think that monsters that are magically spawned into existence should start at a full sprint? They don’t need time to see the threat? They don’t take time to get to the players? There is not such thing as a reaction to that stimuli? Not even for the players to yell “oh no!”. They literally just teleport in, then move from spot A to spot B without time moving forward.

And when they are dead, are any of these events something that the players can interact with? Do the monsters drop time stopping amulets? Does the source of power in the trap glow and provide some kind of clue to who placed it there? Nope. It was a game scripting event more programmed into place than written. There is no story.

That’s where we break because we need to talk about how this could be made better. As a GM, know how to run an encounter. Never break story with an encounter. Sure, the rules don’t always have to be a perfect story telling tool, but they should never make players angry that the story is meaningless to the game creators.

Sometimes its really easy to do this. D&D’s initiative system is horrible. It is extremely bad design. The most famously bad player build in 5e is the Assassin who is designed to get advantages in initiative. If the system wasn’t so broken, you wouldn’t need a class build dedicated to trying to fix it. And even if that were ok, it would be fun to play. So disregarding the system for a group system (players turn, monster turn), or making it based on static values, or just giving some players bonuses based on the situation, is all it takes. It’s actually no work at all. Saying “you saw it coming, so you just go first” is not that hard.

The position of the battlefield is a fun part of the combat, but 5e is very good at making this painful. In fact all of D&D is good at this. No matter what is going on, you are where you are when they GM says “roll for iniative.” That’s it. If you were being a good player and letting another share the spotlight, and the combat erupted, then the chokehold you were about to put on the rowdy bar patron doesn’t count. You didn’t say it fast enough, and by the way you never entered the bar because you didn’t say that you did yet.

It’s like picking a random position on the page of a book, refusing to read the rest of the page, and then starting on the next page with only the events from where you chose being valid. You do have a chance of it being ok, but you should statistically always be missing half of the important details.

As a GM, you should keep your players engaged. Pause the spotlight from time to time to ask how others are reacting. If you know something is about to spring, use this as an opportunity to ask everyone what they are doing. Even if it gives away the danger, it’s ok to let the warrior draw his sword. It’s NOT THAT BIG OF A DEAL. But forcing all of the melee characters out of the door while the squishy wizard is completely surrounded by demons is being a bad GM. You don’t just lose player engagement, you can lose a player over this.

And the last piece of advice that is the golden rule that encompasses all that is needed to solve this problem is something that will fly in the face of what you were told. The GM is not god.

If you want to turn a bad experience around at a table in less than 5 seconds, allow the players to challenge you. We see this as losing the group, but it’s not. This only goes bad when the players have been stifled and beat down for months and finally flip out. If they have input into the story and rulings from the beginning, they are invested in the game.

This is not allowing them to make GM rulings. But it is entertaining the idea that throwing sand in someone’s eye helps them run away. You know for a fact that RAW doesn’t allow that. But the moment the story feels like something the players can control, they are part of the story. They are not just killing your monsters anymore. They are now helping you paint a picture… of your monsters being killed. Which is pretty epic as far as paintings go.

So remember, as a GM, RAW is not your friend. Player expectations first. Listen to feedback. And stop making overpowered monsters for no discernible reason. At least make up a reason, even if it’s aliens.