Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

My gaming group is getting a little bit of a boost. One of my players has decided to try out being a DM, which means that a new D&D game is being launched, and I recently had the opportunity to roll up my first 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons character.

Perhaps it’s the nature of the beast, but I always seem to really enjoy playing the characters that I create — at least since I reached this “adulthood” stage of life. And because I have this little corner of the Internet, I thought I might write Mr Topp’s Guide to Character Creation.

Treat the steps below with caution. While they are generally the order in which your blogger does things, sometimes steps need to be revisited and reconsidered later. In particular, step two and three are interchangeable, and are repeated (in step four) until they are settled and in sync — although they should never lose sight of the decision made in the first step.

Step One: Find a part of the game that you want to explore

Perhaps this is easy for you.

If you’re a longtime gamer, as I am, you probably remember making characters when you were a kid. You wanted to have the Fireball spell. Or get to have a Mount by virtue of being a Paladin. Or you just got the latest Complete Guide to some class or other, and wanted to try out the Spy kit, or the Gladiator kit.

When I hit my teenage years, however, this stopped being rewarding. A “new” character class (or a twist on an old one) simply did not make characters interesting anymore. As a result, I started to play blank slates — characters that were jack-of-all-trades, or just fit into the party, and counted on random “growth” and interaction with the world in the game to make them come to life.

This was mostly unsuccessful. Over a ten year period, playing a character I liked became something rare and accidental. I decided that I did not like playing PCs, and should only GM.

And then along came the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. I read the novels. I read the rulebook. I re-read the novels. I played in a campaign, ran a short-lived game, and played in numerous one-shots. It is a game I enjoy very much.

But there was a part I did not understand. The power called Logrus Mastery.

When a friend decided that he was running a game based around the Courts of Chaos, that seemed to be my opportunity. I created a character around the idea of Logrus Mastery — he was an exploratory vessel for a part of the game that I did not understand, but wanted to.

And I rediscovered that childhood joy in playing something new. I rediscovered the power of discovery in playing a character. And it was good.

Today, it is the first thing I decide about my character — in terms of the game, what am I looking at? What am I exploring? What part of the game am I trying to experience?

In this new game, I have chosen — quite generally — the incorporation of fey into the game. It has always been there, somewhere, in the background. But in fourth edition it really comes alive. The fey races — Eladrin and Gnomes — have special racial powers built around their fey nature. The Feywild — Fairy-land, if you will — has been expanded as a real and reachable place. And Warlocks can have pacts with fey creatures, from which their powers originate.

All of this explores something not available in the D&D games of my youth, and the central theme to my character concept involves exploring this in the game. A PC steeped in the Feywild gives me a starting point, and grants a heavy focus to the entire character creation process.

Step Two: How does my character get to their starting point?

This step is, essentially, the character’s background and history.

This is a standard part of character creation, but for some reason it tends to be treated as an afterthought. Not here. We are all shaped by our experiences — I, for instance, am not a set of my skills and abilities. Five points of fencing, seven points of blogging, and so on. I am a sum of my experiences — my schooling, my parents, my teachers. Where I have lived, what I have lived through.

Once you have fleshed out your character, these choices are limited. But when your only limitation is the overriding character concept (see step one), you have a lot of freedom to define who your character is before the sum of their experiences has been limited by what is written on a character sheet.

Like most long-time roleplayers, I have seen (and written) all sorts of character backgrounds, from short novels to single paragraphs. What works best for me is to have a very lightly mapped out history, with more detail as it gets closer to the game.

For instance, in this game, there is a sentence or two about my character’s family. A paragraph about his life up until recently, and then about a page on the events that lead him to where he is at the start of the game. Excepting some early-in-life character-shaping event, this seems to work well.

Step Three: How does my character interact with their environment?

Once we have the basic drive of the character — and probably a good idea of what they’re going to look like once skills have been assigned and powers chosen — my next consideration is how they interact with their environment.

Are they bold? Quiet? Arrogant? Confident? Proud? Humble?

How will they react to those monsters, characters and dilemmas they are likely to face in the game?

Most importantly, can I, as the player, find something inside myself that can be drawn upon to behave in the appropriate fashion? It seems to me that I have moments in which I behave — or would like to behave — in a manner that would fit any of the characteristics I would place here. Chances are you do too, but be aware of them right now. If you decide to be a proud character, but normally deflect praise yourself, be aware of this when creating the character.

It is the differences, personality-wise, between you and the character that make them an interesting person to play and explore. The alternative is to play yourself with superpowers — there is nothing wrong with that approach, but make it a decision and not an inevitability.

Step Four: Stir

Here we take our steps two and three, and revisit them. Adjust them until they fit together.

The character’s past ought to either inform the manner in which they interact with their environment, or be consistent with it. In other words, there should be an event (or events) which lead towards their behaviour, or the character’s story needs to be consistent with that form of interaction all along.

For instance, if you want to fulfill your commuting fantasy about pushing your fellow jerk commuters down the stairs, your character will probably be short-tempered and violent. They might have a past that involves being imprisoned, living on the street and fighting for cash (consistency), or have suffered a recent trauma (event). They likely should not have had a happy childhood with good relationships and had top grades in school.

People do “just snap”, but there ought to be a trigger. Do not count on encountering a proper trigger in the course of the game, unless you have already agreed such a thing with the GM, and decided what it would be.

Step Five: Put your character into the game’s framework

Only now do we turn to rulebooks and character sheets. Create your character based on what you have already decided.

While there will likely be a few painful choices — two things that both fit the character as written, where only one can be chosen: where to spend the last few points, what skill gets the last slot — most decisions will be made by your character concept (Step One), with the peripherals informed by your character history (Step Two). Your circus-raised Sorcerer, for example, is more likely to know acrobatics than history.

Step Four: Development

No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

All of the above is designed to give you an interesting person to drop into the midst of a game that somebody else is designing. What happens from there is anybody’s guess.

In the majority of games, the events in-game are supposed to be the defining moments of a character’s life. Unless you’re playing retired superheroes who are called to action one last time, this is likely to be the case in the game that you are playing.

And there’s something about experiencing life-defining moments. They change you.

And so they will change your character as the game progresses.

Think of the four Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. Merry and Pippin go through profound changes over the course of the story. Sam and Frodo, on the other hand, are more stalwart and bent to the purposes they have been assigned at the beginning of the story. But they are also much changed by the adventure. Their future selves are quite different to the Hobbits who were plucked from the Shire by adventure.

There is little point in trying to plan it out. Certainly, your character can have goals, but how reaching (or failing to reach, or being sidetracked) will change them is difficult to guess. The events with the most impact to the character do not have to be those most important to the story: A friend in danger can turn a reticent hero into the one leading the charge. Wielding a flaming sword could change the character’s own self-image, and alter their approach to dangerous situations.

Whatever happens, let it happen. Your character might continue to be interesting long into the future.

Top photo by Steve Barry.
Bottom photo by Lydia.

A few weeks ago, I read a Gnome Stew article in which player character death was called a “hot button issue”. It puts the argument out there that PCs should not die in game — in books and movies, we often know that the protagonist will be successful in the end, after all, so there is no reason for a protagonist to die in your game.

Secondly, it argues that character death is akin to punishment for the player, as it pulls them out of the game.

Around the same time, I read an article at D&D With Porn Stars which — in its coda — looked at character death and character creation through the lens of how the game is approached.

These two articles mixed and merged in my head, and are now forcing themselves back up onto the pages of the Big Bad Blog.

What is death in roleplaying?

In a roleplaying game, death is not the same as it is in real life. Depending on the game you play, it does not even necessarily mean that the character is gone — it could simply be like a hockey penalty. But if death is not death, what is it?

Again, this depends on the death in question. Some deaths might be sacrifice, suicide (at least in the kamikaze sense), or storytelling. But most deaths will be consequence.

What Gnome Stew misses is that in many — dare I say most? — roleplaying games, death merely represents defeat. In games like Dungeons & Dragons, it’s not even permanent. It needs to be kept in mind that death is not the only — and often, is not even the best — consequence for failure.

Game style and death

The D&D With Porn Stars article makes clear that playing styles can strongly influence the impact of death on the players, and the way death is used.

Hack and Slash games must have death as a consequence. If you are playing kill the monster and take the treasure, the monster gets a chance to kill you. That’s just how it goes. As a GM, fudging die rolls takes the fun out of the game — which is essentially a small scale tactical battle game with odd weaponry. When the point of the game is to win the fights, the players need to actually win the fights.

Winning cannot occur if there is no opportunity for loss.

Character-driven games are often better when a consequence other than death is chosen.

If you play a roleplaying game which is about building a character, understanding the character and playing that character’s role to a T … well, this is where death becomes as much penalty as consequence — not only do you say to the character “this is the consequence of your actions”, you also force the player to go back to square one and start over.

This is not necessarily cool, or warranted.

In these situations, there is often a better consequence to throw at the players, as they are emotionally invested in the well-being of their characters.

World-driven games ought to have death as part of the landscape. If you are playing in a sandbox game in which the players (through their characters) explore the world you have built, with strange peoples and places, danger hidden around every corner, et cetera … death should be part of the landscape. Such a world ought to be littered with the bones of old heroes — and your players should be in constant danger of being such heroes.

Storytelling games should also feel free to use death — though it does not seem as necessary as it does in the Hack and Slash and Wolrd-driven games.

I was amused by the Gnome Stew article — it mentioned that there was never any doubt that Frodo would live (in Lord of the Rings) or Luke Skywalker (in Star Wars). But, of course, the entire company does not survive the whole distance in Lord of the Rings — Boromir dies, much as Thorin does in The Hobbit. And Obi Wan dies in Star Wars, as do some lovable Ewoks. Most stories involve death and loss at some point — if the story calls for (or looks like it will be improved by) PC death, then PC death should be possible. Perhaps even desirable.

Other types of consequence

As a GM, it is always important to remember that consequence comes in different forms. In the epic Dungeons and Dragons game I ran during University there were two large consequence scenes which went beautifully.

The first was a death scene — an injured party member went wandering around town alone, although the Big Bad was certainly in the area. A battle ensued and the character died. The interesting part is that it was not the player who played the character who was most distraught, but one of the other players whose character had lost a travelling companion. It is not necessarily the player who loses the character who “experiences” the greatest consequences.

The second was a session in which the PCs were trying to drive an enemy army from a city that they had captured. While the players were “successful”, their tactics were not — the city burned, and many NPCs died. At the time, I thought this consequence — the tactics and approach seemed a little laissez-faire to me, with the foregone “we’re PCs, so it’ll work” attitude — was a light slap on the wrist, as it did not impact the PC’s directly. However, it stuck rather heavily with one of the players.

The lesson here is that the negative consequences do not have to fall directly on the player’s character for the consequence to strike home. Nor does that consequence need necessarily to be death. In fact, with more experienced players, a more complex and indirect consequence can be better — waiting around for a Raise Dead spell can be a bit ho-hum.

Take the kid’s gloves off

Gnome Stew puts forth the argument that because character death is a penalty that can emotionally impact players, it is not fun and should not be part of your game.

This ignores what people actually enjoy. Sad movies, scary movies, games in which there are winners and losers, games in which there are penalties (hockey, for example), and driving too fast are just a few of these.

Penalties are okay if they are built in to the game. Any time a player has their character do something risky, they should be doing so with the understanding that it might remove their character from the game if it does not go well. That’s what the game is — PC’s, in almost every game I have ever played, are huge risk-takers. Nothing wagered, nothing won.

And players who are emotionally invested enjoy the games because of the emotional investment. Character death — their own, another player’s, or even an important NPC’s — can actually play as a trigger for exactly what they are trying to get out of the game.

Arguments which state that consequences should be avoided in roleplaying games, particularly when they claim that this is for the player’s own good, miss out on a great deal of the fun in roleplaying — it arbitrarily decides that great moments (and set-ups for great moments) in roleplaying games are de facto not fun.

Here at the Big Bad Blog we disagree. Consequences are a necessity if a game is to be fun. Otherwise you might as well just sit there with a bored expression rolling dice until all the bad guys are gone.

I’m still brewing over what happened on Sunday night, when my regular group gathered around a table to play another chapter in my D&D game.

It has been nearly twenty months since we started the game. The cast consists of …

… Me, an experienced DM who is used to experienced players.
… Them, a group of first time players — the most experienced among them having played one or two one-shots.
… The game, Dungeons and Dragons – Fourth Edition.

The last time I had played Dungeons and Dragons, the game was on its second edition. And wow had it changed.

At the end of the game Sunday night, I remarked on how well it had went. The players — doubtlessly thinking of the infamous April game where they had made useless all the planning I had done — thought that I meant that my plot was intact. That they had not screwed up the plot by killing a major bad guy.

But I learned that lesson earlier this year.

Sure, they screwed up a plot — but it was a plot belonging to the bad guy they killed, not me. Confusing my plot with the plots being carried out by the characters in the game is what screwed me over before.

The world has places, and people. And things. There are bad guys, good guys, and guys that don’t clearly fall to either side of that line. These characters all have their own plots and plans and goals. So the players cannot screw up “the plot”, they can only foil the plots of their enemies — or, if they prefer, their allies. While their actions changed my plans for a scene later on in the session — they caught him earlier than expected — that’s OK. A third scene was also eliminated, in which the bad guy’s plot was successful, but there was always a good chance that said plot would be foiled at some point.

If the triumph of my approach over potential game-changing action by the players was not what made Sunday’s session great, what was it?

The answer is a simple one: The Game Flowed.

Until Sunday, there had been two types of sessions: They were either roleplaying intensive, where the dice tended to stay put and the rules were not needed, or they were combat intensive, with lots of rolling, rulebook referencing, and the game was a constant trying-to-figure-out-what-is-going-on. In a bad way.

On Sunday? There was a ton of dice-intensive action — robberies, fist fights, sword fights, invasions of underwater temples, ambushes — but it flowed. They would describe what they were doing. I’d say “roll against [insert skill/stat here]“. They would tell me the result of the roll, and I would describe the result of their action.

It was an absolutely beautiful game, the way roleplaying games ought to be, but seldom are. The conflict felt like conflict — sometimes it was dangerous for the PCs, sometimes it was dangerous for their enemies. The players explored creative ways to solve their problems that were not written explicitly on their character sheets.

Rather than having conflict be a series of checking character sheets (for both the good guys and bad guys), and referencing charts and rulebooks, it was a quick describe-roll-react scenario.

A quick caveat: There were no huge drag-’em-out fights in this one. Only small skirmishes, usually with one side or the other mismatched. We will have to see if the Big Fight can possibly go so smoothly.

But for one glorious afternoon, we (largely) left the 4E power structure behind, and used it’s other mechanics — and it was devastatingly simple and effective.

This year’s — and last’s, come to think of it — personal roleplaying renaissance has been interesting. All my players were new to gaming back at the beginning of last year, when we began. And while my new group is quite a bit of fun, I still hold some nostalgia for those who I played with previously. We were all close friends, and we had all been playing roleplaying games since we were children.

Here in London, I have the choice of close friends who are new to roleplaying or experienced strangers. And my mind turns to ways in which a remote game would be possible, and this dichotomy might be resolved.

Play by mail

The first solution that comes to mind is one that has been tried, tested, and repeatedly failed by my group: play by e-mail. This was first tested when my old roleplaying group graduated from University, and again when we became more geographically diverse.

Each and every one of these play-by-email games floundered.

On the surface, this should not have happened. All of us spend “too much” time online, are avid writers, readers and roleplayers. We made an assumption that changing the game into a written story format would work well for us, but it failed all three times it was attempted, no matter who was running it.

It turns out that e-mail games have a few detrimental things that need to be worked out logistically in order to function.

First, there is the problem of writing styles. Each player would write their character’s actions and scenes at a different place, find different places to stop for the GM’s input — or that of another PC — and when not in the same place, with different pacing. This means some players fall behind, others move ahead. Different playing styles become more pronounced, and the tools for dealing with them are not the same as they are around a table — not that I can give much advice on these tools, as I have not had much success in running these games.

Second, there is the problem of encounters. Long drawn out conversations can take tens, or even hundreds, of e-mails. Combat is drawn out as players describe their actions, the GM describes the resolution of those actions … and that’s two e-mails for one round with one character. You could not play a 4E D&D game with its long fights over e-mail.

Finally, there is the problem of volume. When playing, I found these campaigns to be easy. But as a GM, they became logistical nightmares. The e-mails could not just be fired off (usually), but often had to be thought out, written carefully, and sent. And the more players you had, the more e-mails were required. In the end, if you have a normal-sized group for tabletop play, it can become too much.

Video conferencing

But that was then, this is now, and we would like to explore further options that might now be available.

Conference calls and speaker phones have been with us with some time. But as anybody who has been in a business meeting or two knows, it is easy to forget to participate or crowd people out who are on the other end of the phone, and those running the meetings need to take care to remember who is on the other end of the line and not saying anything. And while roleplaying by conference call sounds possible, it is hard to believe that it would be fun.

But what of video conferencing?

With the near universality of VOIP (such as Skype), this is certainly a possibility, but one that I have not tried. Gnome Stew — and its commenters — offer up some Skype advice which sounds useful, and gets me thinking about attempting a Skype-based game at some point.

The Chatroom

Chatrooms seem to be a thing of the past. In the early days of the Internet, they were all the rage — go online, go to a chatroom, and find some strangers (or friends!) to chat with. Eventually they got overrun with bots, and this blogger no longer has any idea whether or not they still exist.

Still, they strike me as an ideal interactive tool for remote roleplaying.

If the chatrooms are private — accessible only to those playing — you can have a main chatroom: The Game Table. If the party splits up, you can divvy them into two chatrooms, monitor who is in each (the GM should be the only one in both) and play the two groups near-simultaneously. One-on-one conversations can occur through private messaging.

Encounters can happen in real-time, in a way that e-mail does not allow. Radio silence which is often required in conference calls (making the event less friendly and fun) does not need to be maintained, as people can talk on the side all they want — even have an extra room for it, players can have multiple windows open at once.

The Web Destination

Building on the idea of a chatroom as the ideal remote gaming platform, what about a full website for your game? There is no shortage of open source software out there, nor of cheap — or even free — hosting solutions.

Require a log in. Have chatrooms present for the gaming sessions. A message board/discussion forum for between games. Character sheets, character illustrations, player/character blogs. An online dice-roller.

All of which sounds like a lot of work. But who said running a game was easy?

Never forget the drawbacks

A piece of advice for those who intend to attempt a long-distance game: never forget the drawbacks.

While we outlined the problems with running games via e-mail above, our other methods cause difficulty as well. Video conferencing requires good lighting and background noise be kept to a minimum — that includes music, chit-chat, young children and your significant other watching TV.

Chat rooms suffer from the opposite effect. Distractions can be invisible, and with a lack of face-to-face interaction, keeping sufficient discipline around the “table” to have the game moving will likely be difficult. Make sure that your players are going to be sufficiently dedicated to the game before you begin.

And the website? That’s a lot of work if you are not sure that the chatroom method is going to work for your group.

Finally, whatever you do, do not forget about time zones. Any sufficiently diverse group of players, geographically-speaking, will be spread across multiple time zones. Real-time games need everybody to be awake and free to play simultaneously. The more time zones that are involved, the more difficult this becomes.

(Top image is the original artwork for the Dungeons and Dragons game. Bottom image is from Pen and Paper Portal)