Wednesday Night Writing Exercise: Infestation

Posted by Ravyn on May 23, 2013

This is the beginning of a very bizarre idea that popped into my head today. The idea itself doesn’t quite make it into the text, but the character it created does.

The door was opened by a man whose suit and loose tie gave me the impression that he was, in fact, the man who had called me and thus the owner of the house, so I skipped the “Are they in?” routine and went straight to the introduction. “Rhiannon Pearce, supernatural plague investigator.” (In this business, we don’t talk about being an exterminator; supernatural plagues aren’t sapient near as often as the customers assume they are, but enough of them seem harmless and even personable until the point of no return that we feel we need to sidestep the potential hesitation due to compassion.) I extended a hand to shake; he took it. Strong but a bit shaky; since he was asking for my services, nerves rated somewhere between “highly probable” and “foregone conclusion”. “And this is Lyn, my assistant,” I added, tilting my head to indicate my right shoulder, and the gray rat perched thereon. He took her presence calmly, particularly as she was wearing her embroidery floss harness, but kept an eye on her as he welcomed us in.

There was glitter on the floor of the entry hall. “I keep telling Martina to clean up, but…” my host said apologetically, attempting to sweep it under the rug with his shoe. I shook my head and leaned down to collect a sample. Glitter on its own, in a house with a seven year old girl, isn’t necessarily evidence of a problem. It’s more dubious when it’s as fine as this, with specks that look more like pearlescent dust than like the little square sparkles of my misspent youth, but manufacturers have been refining their product for years; they already make the stuff. Even knowing what they’re imitating probably wouldn’t make them stop. Lyn ran down my arm to investigate the remainder; as her nose slipped in just above the sparkling pile, she sneezed. Not a good sign—but not a bad way of ingratiating her to the host, either. Even people who shrink away from rats have been known to find it adorable when she sneezes.

“She does art projects like this a lot?”

“Yes, absolutely. Our glue budget….”

“Say no more. Does she usually do them in here?” I let Lyn run back up my arm as I asked him, and stood up. Eye contact was next to impossible from down here.

“I don’t think so,” he said. He colored slightly, and didn’t quite meet my eye. Most people would assume he was hiding something. It wasn’t impossible—I don’t know of any enemies I’ve made in my time as a plague investigator, but traps aren’t unheard of in this business—but it was just as likely that he was embarrassed about not being familiar enough with his daughter to know where she did her crafting.

It would be best to eliminate the most likely possibility first. At least, I hoped I could eliminate it.

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Things You Can Do When the Party Hates Your NPC

Posted by Ravyn on May 21, 2013

Yesterday, I talked about situations in which the party hates an NPC you need them not to hate, and how not to make it worse. Today, I’m going to look at the positive side—ways to actively try to get the NPC back into the party’s good graces.

If it was something they did, admit error. Yes, sometimes it seems like it’s a stretch character-wise for the NPC to do this; yes, it might be taken as a sign of weakness rather than humility. On the other hand, if the PCs are reasonable people (it’s more common than you think!), a little bit of humility can go a long way.

Balance the role that requires the party to keep them around with keeping them from stealing everyone else’s spotlight. Yes, having a reason why the NPC has to be present does increase the likelihood that the party keeps the NPC around. On the other hand, if the NPC has to strike the final blow in such and such a fight, or is otherwise required in ways that one normally associates with the hero of a story, that’s not going to go over well. It’s better to give them more of a support role—buffing, exposition, drawing enemy fire (though if you’re going to do that, keep the melodrama to a minimum and make it just a thing the character does), hanging out and designing items for people, that sort of thing—and to make them, if not willing to help in general, than at least possessed of a strong enough sense of duty to help out in a pinch.

Give them a C-plot character arc. Character arcing is important, since that lets the character move away from whatever characteristic(s) got the group irritated with him in the first place. On the other hand, the NPC’s arc can’t dominate the story; that’s part of what causes problems with NPCs in the first place. It’s better to just have it quietly changing in the background, particularly in response to things the characters do—or to have new details incidentally coming out that potentially increase the character’s sympathy without shoving it down the PCs’ throat.

Make sure they need the party at least as much as the party means them. They shouldn’t be the Load, but you don’t want them capable of doing everything without the party either—for one thing, that’s verging into obnoxious competence, and for another, traits like gratitude and admiration are really good for softening up an initially hostile PC.

Give them one quality the group thinks is pretty cool in an NPC, then follow two basic rules with it: don’t rub it in the group’s faces, and do use it for the group’s benefit.

Taking these steps, and not doing any of yesterday’s actions, may not guarantee that the group eventually warms up to your NPC, but it will certainly help.

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Things Not to Do When the Party Hates Your NPC

Posted by Ravyn on May 20, 2013

They tell you in the real world that first impressions are everything. It’s even more the case with RPG characters, particularly the ones you want to keep around—and sometimes it’s just going to go wrong, and for whatever reason the entire party is going to decide that they loathe the character you’d wanted to pin your next plot hook on. At that point, you might be able to save the character—but only if you don’t do any of the following.

  • Tell them they’re wrong to hate him. Okay, yes, it’s important to you that the NPC not be an object of hatred because you’ve got a couple plot points pinned on him. But there are ways to go about things. Telling the PCs “No, this is a stupid reason to hate him” is likelier to make them hate him more for having your obvious favor than for whatever he did to offend them in the first place. (You know “Show don’t tell?” It is vital here. Absolutely vital.) And if his justification for whatever he did to make them doubt his finer qualities ends up implying that half the party are cowards? ….yeah, you’re not going to get anything done.
  • Pump up his reputation with other things that he has done. (Show don’t tell, again. This seems to be a common thread.) Honestly, they don’t like the NPC already; talking up improbable things that he is done is likelier to make him come across as a GM’s pet than convince them that he’s worth keeping around. And as with last point, if what he’s done is something that they don’t consider all that impressive, or actually goes against some point of their characterization (i.e. a victory of discipline as related to a couple of Chaotic characters), it’s not going to help.
  • Hijack their current favorite plan. I really shouldn’t need to say this, but if you’ve got a group that is enthused about something coming up, and suddenly that something coming up has to be for the benefit of a character they hate, they’re not going to be enthused anymore. Which is bad enough when they just give up on it, but even worse when you have to backtrack to try to get them re-interested, and by the time you’re done they’ve lost interest in the original plan.
  • Kill them. If you want the NPC to survive, “Try to kill them” is probably also something to avoid. The one thing worse than offending them by existing is starting the battle, because then they’re justified in retaliating with deadly force.
  • Push one or more PCs’ berserk buttons. The fastest way to make the hole the character is in deeper is to touch of one of the things that any PC—especially several at once—can’t stand. Ingratiating works a lot better than irritating.
  • Stay obviously emotionally invested. Seriously, unless you’re willing to slog the character through the long process of convincing the party that he’s not a waste of resources, you’re just going to find yourself butting heads with the players if you try to keep him around anyway. He’s not liked. Drop him and move on, and everyone’s lives will be easier.

The big thing to remember is that if the NPC needs to be kept around, forcing him on the party is the fastest way to ensure that’s not going to happen. It’s not going to work if it isn’t in some way there idea, and most of the above tactics will only serve to tick them off more.

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The Generic Villain Runs Protagonists Into a Wall

Posted by Ravyn on May 19, 2013

Taking a break from the Evil Overlord List to talk about something near and dear to our hearts—keeping those blasted protagonists out of our hair. Sometimes, we just need to stall the living daylights out of them. We know we probably can’t kill them, or at least not all of them; we know that we can’t just keep them away, so the best thing to do is to keep them occupied with something else long enough for us to do what needs to be done—run them into a wall they’ll just keep bashing and bashing.

Let’s operate on the assumption that you want, not necessarily to kill the heroes (though if it does that too, it’d be a bonus), but to keep them busy throwing themselves at the same wall for a long, long time. How do you do it?

First off, get the right lure. Preferably a lure on multiple levels, if you can swing it. I find that playing to both their compassion (or teamwork, or wish to foil your plans, or whatever their predominant intangible hero-quality motivation is) and to their innate sense of greed is your best shot; whatever they’re doing, it needs to have some sort of incentive to both.

Second, give them a nice straightforward run-up; challenging enough that they think they earned every inch of it, but easy enough to build up their confidence. You want them to come into your brick wall feeling like they can do anything. The faster they’re running, the harder they splat.

Then hit them with the wall. You’re going to want to choose the wall carefully; there are multiple factors it needs to balance. First, unless you’ve managed to rig a circumstance in which they absolutely have to go through this thing, it can’t be completely invincible, nor even practically invulnerable as far as they’re concerned. They need to be able to have a visible impact on it, enough to make them think that they can indeed wear it down, it’ll just take a while and require Tactics and Determination and Clever Use of Powers and Teamwork and various other things with an obnoxious tendency to be capitalized and capitalized on by protagonist-types. The longer they keep telling themselves that, and the longer they hang around trying to slowly wear this thing down… well, the longer they’re out of your hair. For extra credit, delay their attempts at wearing it down by sending in small mookish things; sure, the mooklets may not last very long against them, but not only will that keep them from finishing off the wall, it’ll also convince them that the reason why the wall is taking so long is the mooklets and not just that they really aren’t up for the task. Rinse, repeat….

And watch as the heroes are kept busy and worn down for hours.

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Impractical Applications: Articulating the Problem

Posted by Ravyn on May 18, 2013

One of the things I brushed on this week was a person being just that oblivious—and at least some of it possibly being my fault. I’m not sure how much of it is and how much of it isn’t. The phrase “It’s not fun anymore” came up, but wasn’t believed until one of our other group members delivered it.

I don’t think it’s that I didn’t say something. The problem in that game isn’t getting me to say something. On the other hand, the problem in that game sometimes is getting me to stop saying something, since… well, it’s a combat-heavy 3.5 game, and I find 3.5 combat frustrating. Even more so when it seems like everything and the dog is immune to mind-affecting effects and has no discernible anatomy (note that the first two PCs to sign on were playing a rogue and a beguiler, and the third player took over an NPC cleric), and my character depends entirely on feinting and making things roll Will saves, and when it seems like my dice are loaded to lose. And the GM took several tries to realize that no, making joking comments about our misses was not helping. Failure is much better when you get to describe it yourself. So I’d comment. I’ve suggested we stop a session on a couple of occasions when things were getting really bad. Neither of them was a joke. Neither of them was listened to, either.

The problem is, my getting annoyed and saying something about it has happened so much that I think me being irritable is just written off as me being irritable, so it’s harder to get things across when it’s something that matters. That, and I fold like a house of cards if I’m the only one complaining. After all, I have idiosyncratic tastes. This is no secret. And I am playing the character least suited to the directions that the game has been going in. So it’s highly likely, if nobody else says anything, that the problem really is ‘just me’. Add to that never being quite sure which points I’ve addressed and which I haven’t, a severe case of esprit de escalier, and a tendency to try to avoid actively arguing unless I’m sure of my point, and you get a failsafe recipe for being walked all over.

Joy.

So maybe at some point I just need to write a letter. “Dear GM, I don’t know what we’re playing for in this game, but I’m not sure it’s actually touching on any of the things I play for. I’m looking for an agency fantasy, the illusion of having some control over decisions and consequences, but we’re shuttled from one plot point to another, where the two things we’ve most wanted to do have been, respectively, delayed to the point of irrelevance and reenvisioned with a beneficiary none of the group can stand. You agreed to having PCs with ‘comparatively benevolent con artist’ as primary concepts, but we are almost never in any situation where those concepts are of any use. The angst does not come with catharsis, and there’s really no point in wanting anything, since there’s no time to get what we want, and there’s far too much in-game evidence that wanting to save the lives of the NPCs caught in the crossfire is delusional at best and self-defeating at worst. The only people who appear to have time for character development are your NPCs, as everyone else is too busy being run from one combat to another, even in situations that would have been much more interesting if they hadn’t been interrupted by random people/things trying to kill us. More, your attempts to recover our good opinion of your pet NPC of the day are only more frustrating (really, you think that convincing us that Mr. Spoiled The Invisibility That Saved His Life telling the person who only survives battles due to invisibility and the King of Sneak Attacks that such tactics are cowardly and he has no use for them is going to improve our opinions of him?), there’s hardly any room for interesting tactics, and the ‘I’m going to roll to see if they have any of the items you want, and five deliberately reasonable items later you’re still going to be empty-handed’ thing, particularly when combined with the fact that we do not fight people of our approximate classes and therefore almost never upgrade our weapons, is making the team effectiveness imbalance already created by your apparent obsession with the undead and constructs even worse.”

Or words to that effect.

I cannot shake the feeling that the only reason why I don’t walk is that it only vindicates the stereotypes if I walk alone.

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Wednesday Night Writing Exercise: Paperweight

Posted by Ravyn on May 16, 2013

Tonight’s exercise is a bit odd. I’ve been of the opinion for a while that one of the biggest problems in writing these days is people who write things that should be creepy—or at least, that come across to me as pretty disturbing—and apparently miss how creepy they actually are. On the other hand, it’d be pretty hypocritical if I didn’t try to learn to see it in my own work. And since I haven’t done too much with in-text acknowledgment of the potential off-ness of one of my characters and the pretty little paperweight that used to be her worst enemy… it made as good a prompt as any.

She thinks sometimes that it is unbelievable, that the lizard is her work—the artistry put into its design, from partial drawings done between official assignments, the sheer improbability of the magic she had required to make it live. And, perhaps, the fact that a few seasons ago, had she been handed this incarnation of her old enemy in precious metals and precious stones, her first impulse might have been defenestration. Or possibly fleeing. Or perhaps even freezing, on the assumption that somehow she could not outrun a foot-long automaton. The idea that it would have been her work would have been inconceivable.

Proximity is a peculiar thing. So too is time.

It does not quite speak with his voice. His words, yes, the mind has not changed, but the voice has. This has nothing to do with old fears, of course, she simply does not wish the construct’s true nature to be found out, and the fact that those few who may have heard him speak did so long enough ago that the voice must have been tangled with those others of their many lifetimes, that of those she knows have heard his voice within her lifetime, one is someone to whose identity she would like a clue or two—that is irrelevant. A person who never forgets a sound cannot assume that others’ memories will be faulty, can she?

It cannot lie to her. Nor can it disobey, not that it has tried particularly. It crawls across the desks to seat itself on her papers, it retrieves pencils, it makes subtle suggestions for tactics when her coworkers have left the office (and is usually right—the advantage, and the price, of having a creation more experienced than one’s own self). On the way home, it sits among her papers, or on her shoulder facing the rear those times when she uses her danger sense to tell her what is safe rather than what is a threat, as it does not have her range of false positives.

How could it be a threat? All it can do is talk.

How can it not? Talking is all that it ever needed to do.

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Freewrite: Things I Learned This Weekend

Posted by Ravyn on May 14, 2013

It’s been an educational last four days, let’s put it that way.

Some people really are that oblivious. This is one of those “I have this DM, see…” things; I’d thought I was being clear that the fun was not being had, apparently the “this isn’t fun anymore” went straight over the GM’s head, misunderstandings were had by all. (Either that, or it needed to be one of the guys who explained it. This happens sometimes.) It doesn’t matter if I feel like I’m not going to be taken seriously; if I can articulate a problem, I need to do so with as much precision as I ghostwrite work orders for computer malfunctions with. Which would also help with the being taken seriously.

Even if it’s three pages of braindump in character voice, my GM really, really likes my writing.

I don’t like D&D combat. I really like a board game that is practically nothing but D&D combat. Somehow this is not a contradiction in terms; I’m pretty sure it’s not just the effects of one particular GM, either. There’s probably a post in this—there have certainly been a lot of conversations gotten out of this—I just have to write it.

Sometimes you really, really need to know when to quit, not every situation is winnable, and the best time to remember this is when it’s half past nine, you’re in the middle of the above board game, people are dying faster than you’re inflicting damage, half of you have work tomorrow, home is twenty minutes’ drive away and you don’t have a blog topic yet. Even if there is a nice reward and the scenario hook is one that in a standard RPG you’d be trying to rewrite the laws of physics to complete. There’s probably a post in this, too.

When releasing product, test thoroughly with people who will question every rule. This way, you don’t have to put out reams of errata riddled with enough errors to spawn almost as much errata and a similar amount of debate.

My group is capable of being distracted by a half-grown sparrow on the other side of a sliding door; it isn’t just me. (Baby sparrows have amazingly large beaks for their body size.)

It’s amazing how many non-geeks, upon hearing that I have taken up miniature painting, still want to see the result. I never doubted that art is art even when it does involve carefully tracing gold streaks onto a flaming mantis-thing with a toothpick, but every now and then it surprises me how interested people who otherwise tease me about my hobbies can be when they can see the generalized applications.

If I have Monday off and we’re gaming in the evening, I really, REALLY need to get the blog post done before I head off to game. If I’m working Monday and we’re gaming in the evening, I need a first draft done on the trolley or during lunch break. (See also the third point above.)

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Campaigns I Want To…. Errrr….

Posted by Ravyn on May 13, 2013

When I saw this month’s RPG Blog Carnival topic, Campaigns I’d Like To Run, the first thing I thought of wasn’t of campaigns I’d like to run. At least, not entirely. For one thing, I’m already running some undefined number between one and three, and I’m not even sure I want to think about adding another one. For another, most of the things I want to run aren’t because I want to run them, but because nobody else is going to run them and I want to play in them.

One of the things I most love in my games is complexity. Lots to puzzle out, lots to explore, nuances for everyone. This definitely shows up when I’m running, and three or four different plots are piling over each other to get at the PCs like puppies. (It could, come to think of it, explain a thing or two about why I’m slightly burnt out on running games—the plots I love are a lot of work.)

Most of them tend to involve, in some way, the long, complex process of building something—a structure, an organization, a reputation, a core of knowledge, it really doesn’t matter. It’s something that lasts; it’s something that matters; it’s something that was earned by the PCs. Granted, most of the games that have mechanics for the nuts and bolts of building up most things tend to get downright tedious about it, and my taste for that sort of thing is not other people’s taste, so what I run tends to involve rebuilding cities reeling from disasters or attempting to establish a social standing and some political power in a new and decidedly alien organization.

The games I run—particularly the games I choose to run, rather than the ones that happen to me—tend to have a few character types in common. The antagonists are cunning and charismatic, and if given half a chance they will find some character to preferentially engage in conflict with. The cast in general is usually liberally peppered with profoundly broken people patching themselves back together, typically with varying degrees of success and mostly keeping their cracks and crevices out of the main storyline unless invited.

What it comes down to is this: I want to run a highly complex game where the PCs’ impact on the world around them is both variable and visible; where the backdrops are memorable whether they manifest as breathtaking, mundane, or downright quirky; where the antagonist is intimidating, perversely admirable (at least in a couple of respects) and prone to character dynamics beyond “Oh, hey, you’re foiling my plan, you die now”; where what is created within the story will last far beyond the lifespans of the characters. But I want to play in it even more.

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Impractical Applications: Nope, Not Ready—Yet

Posted by Ravyn on May 11, 2013

Earlier this week, I talked about the problems with playing a powerful character when inexperienced. That post was almost entirely personal experience; due to my tendency to end up as the new player in groups that had been doing their respective games for a while, that sort of thing happened to me multiple times—twice I particularly remember, various other games that weren’t near as interesting—and hit hard.

The first time was an Exalted game. Half a year later, I might have been able to make a smooth transition from a slightly-overpowered Solar group to ridiculously high-powered Sidereals, but at the time, the skills were not there, and doing custom work did not help. I got through that one by finding a Move that was more about description than any sort of tactics and making sure I used it constantly. (For various reasons, this involved parrying for other people with coincidence. I was still new, so it was strained coincidence, but it was still remarkably effective.)

Second was a D&D game. It’s not that I hadn’t played before, mind you. Most of the groups had been fumbling (you know you’re in trouble when you’re the newest person to the group and you still know not to fire into melee better than the person who invited you), I don’t think I’d ever made it past fourth level, and nobody had ever managed to land a grapple where I could see them, and one group involved two generations of the same family and played a bizarre 2/3.x/who-knew-what mismatch, in which it was only the decisions that played to the local flavor rather than the rules (involving abuse of a teleportation trap, followed by unexpectedly applying a greatclub to a window) that really worked out in my favor. But I had played. At least, I had played mostly low-level rogues, with a mid-level fighter for flavor the one time with the group in Oregon… and there was a druid and a sorcerer in there at one point, I believe. My assignment this time, though: level double-digits cleric I hadn’t even built, in a group that had never met an official book it didn’t like. On the one hand, we were always fighting demons, and the fellow player who’d done the build explained divine metamagic to me, so it was pretty easy to figure out what the best way of doing damage was (and then, being in a group that was all over the morality axis but all Lawful, learning the wonder that was Dictum-spamming), but it was still disorienting, and I was nowhere near as effective as I would have been if I’d gotten to learn my spell list in sections rather than having to pick them all up at the same time. I tried a couple of other characters near that level—and the sorcerer/paladin mix was remarkably effective, probably due to having a very small, very specialized and coincidentally exceedingly useful spell set—but I don’t think I was ever comfortable with a caster until my current round with a hand-raised beguiler.

On the other hand, learning things one at a time? Limited tools meant I didn’t have to worry about indecision paralysis, and could look for multiple applications for few abilities–and that made me scary.

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Wednesday Night Writing Exercise: The Storm Chamber

Posted by Ravyn on May 9, 2013

I’d had a plan this week for theming places around colors without their usual association (red without fire, green without plants, and so on). Then this happened–or rather, the first part of this happened, and it fell to me to try to figure out why in blazes anyone would have a chamber where the floor was shaped and textured to look like a stormy sea. I’m still not entirely sure, but I want their room. As long as I don’t have to go through it in the dark.

The floor is rough—polished, yes, but uneven. It rises, it falls, it curls over itself, streaks of white marking the highest points, a stormy sea in polished, blue-green stone. One cannot tell walls from ceiling as they curve inward to loom overhead, gray like pigeons. The air itself carries mist and the scent of brine, just condensed enough to swirl about my fingers as I wave them through the air. And the light—there must be a source somewhere, for the mist to be so visible, but I cannot find it, cannot even begin to look for it, everywhere and nowhere like shadows on a cloudy day, and with a slight shift to it that makes the entire room seem to move the moment I focus on one point.

What purpose could such a place hold? I am well aware of the builder’s disdain for the ground, and her architectural revels in the fact that as she may never need to touch the floor, neither need she concern herself with such trivial things as one’s ability to walk across it. No, it is not this strange floor that bothers me, but the lack of shelves, of tables, of so much as a place to seat oneself and admire the seamless expanse of stony waves.

I pick my way to the center of the room, where the floor dips, then fountains up, not much higher than the tallest of the other breakers. The mist seems to shy from this point, so it seems logical that there would lie my answer. Or, equally logical, that this location is too logical, and there lies a trap. The builder was only above such tactics in the positional sense.

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