Save Vs Rant

Today’s episode of Save Vs. Rant is about making one time exceptions for the awesome things that happen in your RPGs as a way of rewarding creativity by your players and generally promoting a more interesting game. Join us as we discuss this more or less universal gaming phenomenon!

Almost every game has a built-in framework for integrating Rule of Cool style material in the game. In many games, these are called “circumstantial modifiers,” which are fiat bonuses (or penalties) given to situations where things beyond the raw skill, abilities and equipment of the character meaningfully influence the outcome. In short, the DM simply decides the situation is favorable or unfavorable, selects the bonus or penalty from a proscribed range, and applies in.

Strangely enough – and, yes, this is a tangential rant – a large number of games generally agree that the range is +/- 1 to 5 even though what such a bonus or penalty actually represents varies between systems. In D&D, for example, +3 gives a +15% change of success on any given d20 roll (provided it doesn’t create a situation where only a 1 fails), while in World of Darkness’s Storytelling / Chronicles of Darkness system, that same +3 bonus represents an average of 1 success and a variable improvement to the odds depending on how many dice were already in the pool. Here’s a great article from AnyDice that goes over it with charts and everything! Only rolling 1 die? +3 is a HUGE bonus that will probably spell the difference between success and failure. Rolling 7 dice? That +3 is just a drop in the bucket that doesn’t significantly increase your chances of any success (but DOES significantly increase your chances of an Exceptional Success). Strangely, though, both systems recommend that same range of 11 circumstantial modifiers (including the most commonly used modifier of 0). Huh.

Back to the topic at hang – what is cool? You might think that cool is entirely subjective, and you would, of course, be extremely wrong. That’s not to say there’s no subjective elements to what is cool, but, as a general rule, we can describe “cool” actions in terms of how they represent a departure from the norm in favor of what’s unexpected, bold and exciting. Let’s break that down.

The Unexpected: There is an unfortunate phase that almost everyone goes through wherein they think of bizarre, random and arbitrary as being synonymous with “unexpected,” and, in a sense, they’re right. Assaulting a dragon with a rubber chicken, for example, is in fact unexpected, but definitely not cool (well, not by default – there’s probably some hyperbolic circumstance where everyone agrees it is awesome, but that’s not what we’re on about at the moment). What we mean by the unexpected is “that which follows logically, but that is not the most obvious choice.” Ideally, something that preempts the foregone conclusion of the situation’s outcome by subverting typical expectations – wow! What a mouthful! One example that has been, to some degree, beaten to death in cinema, television and literature is where a character evades a dead end situation through a clever solution.

Consider a few examples: (all of these are spoilers, of course)

• In 2014’s Captain America: Winter Soldier There's an escape scene? Cap is trapped on an elevator full of Hydra Agents. He wins the ensuing fight, but ends up cornered. Trapped, he leaps out through the glass outer wall of the elevator, plummeting an inhuman distance before rising, injured, but alive.
• In 2010’s Salt I don't remember that movie at all! Evelyn Salt is cornered by a strike team intent on taking her alive. She conceals her activities by covering the camera with her panties, then improvises an explosive rocket using furniture, available chemicals and a fire extinguisher. Her surprise attack allows her to escape.
• In 1991’s Silence of the Lambs Also a spoiler for the novel, and predictably horrific... Dr. Lecter escapes by disguising himself as a badly mutilated guard by cutting off his face and wearing it as a mask, then switching clothes with him and making it appear that he tried to escape while wounded. Once secured with paramedics, he removes this gruesome disguise.

Unexpected methods of escape – automatically cool. All of these are great candidates for the Rule of Cool, be it by way of a saving throw to resist damage, a crafts check to determine if a jury rigged solution works, or a series of disguise, bluff and stealth checks.

The Bold: Sometimes, it can pay to reward players for taking the direct approach. Video games – especially CRPGs where multiple saves are permitted (or where save scumming is possible) – have spoiled players into timidity. Often, dangerous, bold or brazen decisions are undertaken with extreme caution or avoided altogether in tabletop RPGs, typically out of fear that a beloved character will be lost or ruined. One way to reawaken this spark in the players is to consider the old adage “fortune favors the bold” and literally favor players who make bold decisions. A number of games have officially integrated ways to favor risk taking and bold play. D&D 4th Edition granted Action Points to parties that forewent the opportunity for extended rest. 5th Edition’s Inspiration and Hero Points systems likewise reward actions that otherwise may not be the optimal choice. In all three editions of White Wolf’s horror role playing games (Old World of Darkness, New World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness) players are specifically rewarded with Willpower and / or experience for playing to archetypes that represent their character’s flaws and personality.

Beyond official systems, however, consider throwing your players a proverbial bone for choosing to take actions that might be risky, difficult or sub-optimal but achieve their goals in a way that doesn’t rely too heavily on controlling every element of the system. Maybe allow them to dictate some useful aspect of the scene. If during the course of a very risky infiltration they ask about whether a chair has metal legs, for example, you might consider asking why they would want (or not want) it to have them, then allow the answer that is more favorable or determine randomly (in the open for all to see) whether it does (“If this die comes up even, they went with cheap plastic chairs”). By doing so, you will promote a style of play that will empower your players to be bolder, make cinematic moments more common and hopefully make your games that much more entertaining as a result.

Exciting: Ok, maybe this is a bit redundant to the Bold point above, but one of the biggest draws of roleplaying is the ability to experience something larger than life, unique or outside one’s threshold of ability or risk tolerance. While your players, as real flesh-and-blood humans might be reluctant to face a dragon in combat, the player characters are not so limited.

An interesting scenario that frequently comes up in action and combat oriented games is a situation where the player characters are involved in a large conflict such as a battlefield, siege or other mass combat situation. While almost every modern game system has some way of resolving this scenario, most of them revolve around a fairly simple set of rules that don’t provide a great deal of excitement. Many games (Pathfinder RPG, for instance) essentially break down the participating groups into individual creatures that then engage in a single symbolic combat that determines the outcome. This is a good system if you just need to figure out whether a small army of trolls can best a much larger army of human irregulars, but it’s not especially cinematic and it doesn’t emphasize the player characters well. A system I have used, and that I recommend you consider drawing inspiration from, is one wherein I resolve the combat between these two groups, then pit the player characters against a symbolic representation of the army which I nickname the “Showdown.” Typically, I’ll plan the Showdown as a “fair” fight with a representative group of enemies (six troll warriors and a leader, for example), then modify this conflict based on how the symbolic conflict between the armies resolved (which, in turn, represents the conflict up until this final symbolic Showdown). If, for example, the fight was very close with a very narrow troll victory, I might simply inform the player characters that they have to begin the fight with the trolls at near-melee range with weapons drawn but no time to cast augmentive or defensive spells. If the trolls badly beat the army, I might inform them that they will each take a number of d6 points of damage equal to 1/3 the troll army’s remaining hps, but that they may spend spells, magic item uses or other resources of remove dice from this pool of damage. Finally, if the conflict went especially poorly for the trolls, I might give the player characters a round (or several rounds) worth of prep time before they place their characters on the field and, further, might even handicap the trolls. Importantly, I have been open to suggestions from my players as to how best to represent the dominance or desperation of the party and, as always, I would like to stress that it’s almost always better to say “yes, and” than “no, but.”

Perhaps, someday, I’ll actually codify the complexities of this Showdown system into a set of concrete rules, but for now I’m quite content to use a fairly dull framework (in this case, the mass combat resolution) to spice up a genuinely exciting part of the game (a combat encounter) and make the player characters feel more important. Excitement, in a sense, is a recognition of the importance and significance of events. It’s hard – if not impossible – to get excited about something where the outcome is known, does not matter and cannot be influenced, and much easier to get excited about something you directly influence. Anything that gives influence over a situation to the players tends to increase the excitement of a situation.

Consider those aspects when deciding how best to represent the Rule of Cool in your game, and remember that every player wants an opportunity to shine, to feel cool and important, and to let their creativity show.

Today’s episode is all about the economics of RPGs – how gold coins work, what the labor market of a fantasy world looks like and how games like Pathfinder RPG approach macro-scale economics within their game worlds.

We at Save Vs Rant really do understand that RPGs aren’t economic simulators. We realize that the purpose of an in-game economy is to support a game experience first and foremost, and to provide the illusion of a functional game world as a secondary feature. Different games not only approach this differently, but accomplish it with wildly varying degrees of success.

Games with more freeform systems for tracking wealth (The World / Chronicles of Darkness, d20 Modern, FATE, et al) tend to be more realistic for modern settings. In the modern world, institutions such as credit, banking, payday loans and securities markets mean that above a certain fairly low bar, wealth and capital are somewhat fluid. You don’t have to buy a house or car outright, you typically purchase them on credit. Day to day tracking of individual dollars is not as important in a lot of cases, since small purchases of food, goods and services are a constant feature of modern life. In medieval and fantasy settings, by contrast, typically supports a much more granular and meticulous tracking of wealth. Individual gold, silver and copper can be tracked, with every expenditure being tracked individually.

Beyond that, one can consider the list of Trade Goods provided in the D&D Player’s Handbook or Pathfinder Core Rulebook when attempting to transport wealth, but I’ve always felt that this was a poorly considered list in general, with some genuinely baffling content. The system seems to assume that the game world has standardized regional distribution of all these trade goods, which is bizarre to say the least (given, especially, that the list is full of spices, which are a traditional real world conflict agrigood). Furthermore, some of the goods are products, in the real world, of the Columbian Exchange (tobacco, for example), which is a shame, given that the existence of exotic goods from faraway lands is a potentially intriguing plot point.

Something I had wanted to mention in the podcast, but did not have the time, is the fact that D&D officially sets the weight of a coins at 1/50 of a pound. This is extremely heavy for a coin intended for daily use. Real medieval silver coins frequently weighed only about 2 grams, which is the weight of two United States dollar bills of any denomination (and a little less than 1/200 of a pound). Even the Austrian gold ducat weighed only about 3 grams, or a little more than 1/150 of a pound. While I concede that D&D and its variants take place in a fantasy world, I’ve genuinely run into issues in game where carrying concentrated wealth in the form of coins was prohibitive. Frankly, I don’t understand why these coins are so heavy, save that it’s a legacy element first introduced by Gary Gygax and crew that no one has ever seen fit to change.

According to the trade goods list, a pound of gold has a given value of 50 gold pieces, which makes sense at first glance, but historically currency has been minted at a value higher than the physical constituents in precious metal (a process known as debasement that is generally viewed by historical economists as a genuinely useful process or as a necessary evil at worst). One could argue that the values of precious metals in the game world are fixed, with silver being by definition ten times as valuable and one-tenth as valuable as gold, but this is a system that’s only sustainable if the materials have either been functionally mined out, or if the supply is controlled.

Speaking of precious metals, at one point in history, aluminum was one of the most valuable metals in the world, owing to the fact that it is very rarely found as a native metal, usually being a constituent of minerals. In the late 1800’s an electrical method for extracting it from common stone was discovered, and the price (and, consequently, value) of aluminum plummeted. Presumably, one of the reasons this is never important in RPGs is that it would likely result in the metagame plan of every wizard to invent the electrolytic process of extraction and become immensely wealthy… which might actually be an interesting plot development on par with The Tale of an Industrious Rogue (warning – mild vulgar language) from /tg/, but I digress.

What we hope you take from this is that the economic models of the games could use a bit of investigation. Consider the needs of your campaign as well as what would make for a compelling story. Consider the creative opportunities afforded not only by real world inspiration, but from the presence of magic and fantasy elements. In the real world, agriproducts and conflict minerals drove political and military conflicts that sometimes spanned entire continents – how much moreso when potions with the power to reverse aging or raise the dead might be traded on the market? Bizarre economic bubbles have formed in the most unlikely places, and one can only presume that in a world of strange and wondrous things, this would be ever more the case!

Today’s Save Vs. Rant is about the design philosophy of NPCs in RPGs. While every game system has its own guidelines and rules for the design of characters (some unifying the systems for PCs and NPCs, some treating the two completely different), the basic philosophy behind designing NPCs remains the same across the entire spectrum of RPGs, and in today’s episode, we’ll discuss different approaches, exploring their strengths and weaknesses.

Erwin Schrödinger was a physicist who, in an attempt to disprove the apparent absurdities of quantum mechanics, designed a famous thought experiment that describes the behavior of fundamental particles. The simple version is, you put a cat in a box with a flask of acid, with the flask attached to a detector that would check if a certain radioactive particle had decayed, then either break the flask (killing the cat) or not depending on the results. Until the box is opened, the closed system is unobserved, and can be described as being in both states at once – the cat is alive and dead (although, if you don’t open the box soon, you’re just going to have a cat that’s dead two different ways).

Physics is, apparently, more fun when you’re abusing imaginary animals, but the experiment proved to be so successful that it’s recognized as a pretty solid illustration of how these systems actually work, thus allowing Schrödinger to join the ranks of Albert Einstein in the coveted category of “scientists who tried to disprove something and accidentally proved it,” which is pretty crowded in the quantum physics world. I digress…

When we talk about an character being Schrödinger’s NPC, what we mean is that any element of the NPC that is hidden from the players (or simply not written yet) can be ANYTHING up to and until the moment that the players discover that information. Any given beggar is a disguised fairy, former criminal, down-on-his-luck former spice merchant, ruthless assassin and slumming royalty until he does something that serves to conclusively prove (or disprove) one of these theories.

Now, virtually any NPC is going to have some elements that are not yet defined and, if need be, the DM will reasonably fill these in as appropriate. You probably aren’t going to decide if each and every NPC you create prefers sweet or savory snacks, is a cat person or a dog person, believes they have ever seen a ghost, has credit card debt or knows what “dabbing” is, and while many of these might be inferred from other information about them (any random middle class character probably has credit card debt, an ultraloyal Russian gangster probably prefers dogs, and so on) for most characters, these factors can exist independent of any other information about then. What we are suggesting, is that, until such time as you have to answer these questions, you get in the habit of thinking of them not as being “neither” or “undecided,” but as being “both.”

The practical element of this suggestion is that instead of simply deciding – on the fly – which way the answer tilts, consider – even as a kind of thought experiment or exercise – exploring multiple options, and only locking in one once it becomes clear that it is necessary to do so.

So the Russian gangster lets slip that he has a bet named “Sasha.” There’s no reason, unless it becomes clear that you have to answer the question, for you to decided that Sasha is a cat, a dog, or even a trained black bear or python until you have to. There might even be scenarios where it is desirable to decide the answer based on what is best or worst for the story, and base the answer on outside information.

Suppose you were thinking that Vladimir (a naming decision I just made) was a dog person because, y’know, loyalty. What would it imply, though, if Vladimir owned a cat instead? Suppose that a cat doesn’t seem to suit Vladimir’s personality. You could easily rationalize that Vlad just has different tastes than some others in his position, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But, perhaps, Vlad has the cat for a reason that does tie into his loyalty. Maybe the cat belonged to a former partner (romantic or otherwise) who has died, been imprisoned or simply gone away, and Vlad is caring for the animal out of a sense of duty. The player characters are looking for a way to ruin Vlad’s reputation with his boss who, it is revealed, is currently in hiding. Perhaps the cat would not take well to the boss’s method of concealment. Perhaps he’s constantly on the move or in an airplane or another environment that would be uncomfortable or impractical for his feline companion. When the player characters begin their research on how to ruin Vlad, one of their contacts drops a hint about the cat’s special relationship. Now, Vlad is a cat person – or at least his pet is a cat – and we’re locked in, but up until then, we might abruptly decide that it’s better for the story for Vlad’s pet to be a dog, or the python, or a very talkative parrot.

Now, some may recoil at what we’re suggesting – after all, isn’t it cheating to change your mind about things to suit the player’s decisions? And the honest answer is, it certainly can be, and to that end, it’s important to discuss why “cheating” exists in RPGs.

The well known Rule 0 of RPGs is “The DM Is Always Right,” but this rule is definitely to be interpreted in the spirit that with great power comes great responsibility. Different groups will, of course, have their own comfort levels with things like rules calls, narrative flexibility and the oft-maligned “cut scene” privilege, but there are two aspects that serve as a very good test:

• Will this make the players doubt that they are playing a game?
• Will this make the player characters doubt that their actions have consequences?

One common issue that assails beginner DMs is having an entire story planned out in their mind, and knowing what, exactly, will happen in that story. While a lot of DMs have specific stories they want to tell and, furthermore, specific events with predetermined outcomes. Anyone who has played in a game like this knows that, regardless of how well written it is or how engaging the narrative, it is an underwhelming experience. One common way in which DMs railroad these sorts of games is through the exact kind of Schrödinger’s NPC we’re discussing. The wizard who always has the right counterspell. The expert who just happens to be skilled at every field. The evil warlord that flawlessly predicts every one of the PC’s methods of infiltration so he is never off guard (though let’s circle back to this last one in a minute). These situations, which undermine the dice rolls, words on the character sheets, and rules in the rulebooks, make the game itself meaningless in pursuit of desired outcomes.

But, even if you don’t do it for this reason, you can separately run the risk of ruining the consequences of actions. You can, for example, make up an NPC’s stats, possessions and abilities as you go, but if you do this specifically in response to, for example, an unexpected attack (“this important NPC is currently wearing a shield ring!”), success on an unlikely pickpocketing check (“You rolled a natural 20 to pick the captain’s pocket? Um… there’s nothing in there.”) or merely an undesirable choice (“You can’t capture the werewolf, because he possesses the power to shed his outer coat and escape your grasp!”). When these things happen to frequently, players start to notice the pattern and realize that certain things are going to succeed – or fail – to get them the desired outcome regardless of the results. If you use Schrödinger’s NPC too frequently to persecute or assist (regardless of whether you’re doing this for one or to PCs or the group as a whole), the players begin to realize that things are always going to turn out a certain way and may lose interest. Again, we might consider our evil warlord where he might have prepared for the specific attack types the PCs possess – having immunity to whichever element the PCs use in a fight, suddenly having a battalion protecting their rear when the PCs attack from there, or simply having the exact counter-spells prepared for each of the PCs spells. The players might rightly realize that preparing or approaching the battle with the warlord creatively is futile and stop considering other options.

But even the exact same scenario can work given that the explanation is believable and the outcome still feels like a game. Consider, once more, our warlord. If you were trying to portray a warlord of astounding intellect who is known for being a tactical genius, the PCs might very well find any possible plan they consider being foiled by a foe that flawlessly anticipates their plan. To finish this illusion, perhaps the players could still circumvent (or at least, believe they could still circumvent) this characteristic through in game wheeling a dealing. Perhaps they could deceive him, or apply a tactic that he is known to have a weakness for, or simply catch him off guard through careful observation. And, as a final sneaky note, this doesn’t even have to be the case, the players just have to really, truly believe that this is the case. Consider these two narrative scenarios:

The player characters, in infiltrating the warlord’s castle, determine that they can enter the warlord’s castle clandestinely through the catacombs – an option the DM suggests among a group of other more obvious sounding routes of attack. The catacombs are, however, full of undead raised by a necromancer the warlord hired for the purpose of attacking the PCs as they approach the castle. The necromancer and his 5 skeletons and 2 zombies are slain by the PCs, who emerge from the catacombs into the waiting arms of a half dozen guards. They sound the alarm, and the whole castle is on high alert. Throughout the rest of the adventure, the PCs are attacked by roving groups of troops, drawn the to PCs. In all, the PCs have to evade and defeat 4 bloodthirsty patrols. Finally, the get to the warlord’s chambers, where he, his three bodyguards and his general are ready to do battle.

This course of events is likely to frustrate your players and make them believe that there was no possible way to attack the warlord at even the slightest advantage. Now, consider this second scenario:

The player characters, in infiltrating the warlord’s castle, discover references in the records of the warlord’s noble family to a family catacomb that had a long-forgotten entrance for the now-defunct priests of the local death god to enter to bless the dead. They search for and discover, the entrance and begin to infiltrate through the catacombs. While in the dungeon, they come upon an unfriendly necromancer who has taken up residence in the dungeon. They defeat him and his 5 skeletons and 2 zombies, eventually discovering the entrance to the castle. When they emerge, two guards – the customary, but largely unnecessary defenders of the catacombs – confront them but are, likewise, defeated. As they continue through the castle, they have to contend with 4 sections of the castle watch. Finally, they arrive in the warlord’s chamber where he, his general and his three bodyguards are scheming.

Exactly the same encounters, flavored (and potentially positioned) slightly different, but the stories are completely different. The first feels like each encounter is just a sequence of uphill battles to the goal, while the second suggests that this is an improvement over what would be expected in a frontal assault. While discussing exactly what you can do to help maintain that illusion of choice and sense of accomplishment is a rant for another day (and we will definitely rant), the basic guidelines of making it feel like a game where choices have consequences is the gold standard for making that determination.

This blog post is, of course, really only scratching the surface of Schödinger’s NPC (which could be discussed in regards to narrative, rules, worldbuilding or even just the incredible I know a guy rule, courtesy of LA Based Twitter user David Nett), to say nothing of the other aspects of character building, and, our schedule permitting, we hope to touch on this topic more.

Next up on Save Vs. Rant – economics in games! We promise it won’t be anywhere near as dry as it sounds!

Do you aspire to be a tabletop game designer? In this episode, we will be discussing our experience with The Game Crafter, a company that provides print on demand services for game designers, allowing both prototype testing and even storefront shopping for games without necessitating a full print run. Join us for our discussion of this exciting service!

Today, in addition to giving a basic overview of the service, we discussed three games.

The Captain Is Dead (available in the Original Game Crafter Version) is a riveting co-op experience. The game is an ever escalating series of unfortunate events. As with all well-designed cooperative games, it can be extremely difficult and can sometimes be a frustrating exercise in constantly falling behind where you started. The variety of playable characters – as well as the unique art style – add charm to the experience. The simplicity and power of the mechanics make me almost wish for more games set in the same world and using the same basic ruleset. Perhaps a more aggressive game wherein you need to defeat enemy ships reminiscent of the PC game FTL: Faster Than Light? In any case, an excellent game for my money, and an awesome example of how the transition from a Game Crafter game to a fully published release might look.

The Fate of the Mortals is a quick play and another great example of the component quality of The Game Crafter. The pieces, while not especially complex or unusual, are quite functional, and the creative use of the dice as pawns that indicate different artifacts with their different faces is a great example of the kind of out of the box thinking that you can accomplish with a platform like The Game Crafter.

Finally, Jeremy and Timmy Skittles’ baby, Tales of Eventyr, is a cooperative deck building game with some RPG elements and a fantasy theme. With over 500 cards representing a substantial array of monsters, character races, classes, items and environments, the game is nothing if not an ambitious first foray into game design for us here at Save Vs. Rant, and we hope to make it the first of many.

It’s been said that many a man has a garage full of their unsold magnum opus. Not every designer can create a full print run of their game. Nor, for that matter, is Kickstarter the be-all-end-all of funding for the new designer (assuming the new game designer has the social media chops to run a successful crowdfunding campaign at all!). For this reason, we are always pleased and grateful for the existence of websites like The Game Crafter that allow for limited runs and print-on-demand to empower designers to try their ideas and reach for their dreams without having to shoulder massive up front costs.

Today’s episode of Save Vs. Rant is focused on bizarre board games – those that evoke a perplexity or, perhaps, intrigue. The qualifying factors for this discussion are not whether the game is good or bad or anything particular in between, but just how strange a given game is. How unique its mechanics or play style. Join us on this adventure, won’t you?

Legacy Games represent a tremendous innovation in gaming history, and while it is completely fair to credit Rob Daviau with the formal invention of them, arguably the Roleplaying Lite games (Hero Quest and its ilk) were the first to do this, and roleplaying games themselves serve as a framework for the concept. Risk Legacy is typically cited as the first legacy game, but Gloomhaven and Pandemic Legacy represent true refinement of the concept. Gloomhaven is especially interesting (and a little strange) in that it introduced the concept of personal goals and hidden scenario goals. These accomplish one of the most groundbreakingly important concepts in cooperative games – giving the players a reason to not cooperate without making someone a “traitor.” Historically, coop games have either been of the sort where there is no significant reason that a single player couldn’t solo the game just taking multiple turns himself as different players, or the sort where there’s a player who secretly works against all the others. Gloomhaven introduced a third mechanic wherein a player not only might want to selfishly obtain resources for himself (gold coins and treasure strewn about the dungeon) but also might have goals that run counter to the best move, giving them a reason to do something other than play the most optimal strategy they can determine.

(At the time of this blog post, Gloomhaven is the #1 game on BoardGameGeek.com, while Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 has fallen to the #2 position.)

Vast: The Crystal Caverns is one of the most bizarre and unique multiplayer experiences we’ve had in a fairly simple game. Each player takes on a different role, be it the tribe of goblins, the adventurer or the dragon (additional players may be the rogue or the cave itself). What makes Vast so bizarre is that everyone plays with a completely unique set of rules for how they interact with the cavern and their resources.

The Grizzled is a game set in the miserable trenches of WWI where the only point is to survive. It’s a fairly straightforward game, but the rules forbidding table talk make it a tense and sometimes frustrating experience. Notably, not only do you have difficulty in knowing which hazards to be prepared for, the support tokens you place are likewise secret and require you to anticipate and balance the group’s needs. Like Gloomhaven, this avoids the common quarterbacking problem of cooperative games by introducing a reason other than simple betrayal to not always make the “optimal” move.

Flick ’em Up is a unique concept, flicking “bullets” at meeple to simulate a wild west gunfight. It does not, however, permit flicking with the index finger supported by the thumb – merely a loose single-finger flick. This is, genuinely, more difficult and results in sometimes wild shots. Catacombs does permit such powerful flicks, so if the integrity of a game’s flicking mechanics are important to you, you might prefer it.

Terraforming is a hard scientific look at what transforming Mars into an earth-like planet would conceivably entail. Introducing hard scientific concepts into a game is not completely unprecedented (Evolution likewise contains strong scientific inspiration) but it is an interesting and, frankly, unusual approach in a game not explicitly intended to be educational.

Of course, there are other board games (and, indeed, entire categories of board games) that might also qualify as WTF, and we may very well revisit the topic. Hopefully, in part, because of the emergence of bold new concepts in tabletop gaming!

Join us next time when we discuss The Game Crafter!

Today’s episode of Save Vs. Rant is brought to you by all the designers who choose to take risks and create something truly unusual and unique. Where’s the Fruit? Who’s the Foreman? What the Fudge? Why the Face?

Dark Heresy

Set in the wildly popular grimdark distant-future world of Warhammer 40,000, Dark Heresy puts the player characters in the roles of Inquisitors within the Empire of Mankind, stomping out heresy wherever they might find it. The game is over-the-top ultraviolent grimdark fantasy sci-fi, and definitely not a run of the mill gaming experience.

Cthulhutech

Basically Pacific Rim before Pacific Rim, in Cthulhutech you battle elder horrors and eldritch beings from beyond the stars using state of the art warmechs and one of the strangest basic resolution mechanics in any game I’ve ever played. Also, because it’s the Call of Cthulhu, there are investigators.

Gamma World

Gamma World is your standard-issue Saturday morning cartoon series interpretation of a post-apocalyptic world, reminiscent of the modern classic Adventure Time. It features, magic, supertech and bizarre radiation effects, and despite its sense of surreal whimsy, it is possible to run a very serious Gamma World Campaign.

In this episode, we also mention the trading rules aspect of Gamma World, which was a bold move by Wizards of the Coast. Frankly, it was a terrible idea, and the inevitability of this approach has been a perennial joke in the RPG community.

Engine Heart

How do you find purpose in a post-organic world, when you were created for the service of organic life? That’s the primary philosophical question of Engine Heart, but, of course, that’s not what you have to explore with your game of Engine Heart. Like any good RPG, the setting has some versatility to it and a variety of stories are possible.

Underground

Underground is a grim-and-gritty superhero game involving surgically enhanced supersoldiers and supercorporations that control the world. It’s a game of underground resistance, vicious struggle and trans/posthuman angst. Since this is an old-school game, expect chunky rules and a steep learning curve.

Puppetland

Ah, there’s nothing like a wholesome bedtime story… and this is nothing like a wholesome bedtime story. Puppetland is a game in the style of a bedtime story – a session is played in 30 realtime minutes, and at the end, everyone goes to sleep no matter what is happening, the player characters are all puppets. Also, the game is played in a constrained style where the players describe the action by speaking in character, while the DM is expected to tell the story in an active, depersonalized voice.

Tales from the Loop

It strikes us here at Save Vs. Rant as kind of weird that it took until the 80’s revival heralded by Stranger Things to see an RPG in the style of an 80’s science fiction mystery movie. Although the World of Darkness featured a book called Innocents that featured rules for playing as children in the World of Darkness (which inevitably implies such stories), the approach of Tales from the Loop is decidedly more Stand by Me / E.T. / Stranger Things than the World of Darkness’s more strongly implied It style of horror.

Nobilis

Wow. Wow wow wow. There is nothing quite like Nobilis. Thank God. The world only ever needs one Nobilis. To call Nobilis “unique” doesn’t do it justice. To call it “original” might be a bit of an understatement. To call it “strange” only begins to scratch the surface. It’s worth noting, also, that all the Nobilis quotes from this episode are from the 3rd edition of the rulebooks. That’s right – this is the result of TWO full revision cycles of the game.

But, for real – the world is better for having Nobilis in it. Somewhere out there, someone had a Nobilis shaped hole in their heart that this game fills perfectly. The game has the misfit beauty of an early 2000’s deviantart diva who refuses to believe that their art is terrible. It’s the fanfic writer who ignores the haters and chooses to accept the ironic adoration of their “fans” without a shred of irony. In short, I love it not because it’s a great game, but because it’s a throwback to the absurd culture of the early internet, and I can love it forever for that.

Deadlands

Or “How the West was weird” – Deadlands is an alternate history game set in an American Wild West motif. Think Jonah Hex. Think Wild Wild West. Think Preacher‘s Saint of Killers. Think Hard West. Think mad scientists, demons, cowboys and hucksters. Think poker hands, chips and dice.

Don’t Rest Your Head

Wanna play a game about terminal insomniacs trying everything they possibly can to not succumb to the sleep that will drag them into the insanity of a living death? No?! Too bad. We’re playing Don’t Rest Your Head tonight! A game where you have a superpower that’s going to destroy you.

Bliss Stage

Bliss Stage has fascinated me since I first read it. Of course, it’s not for everyone. I’ll wager it’s not for most people. To be honest, I’ve found exactly 0 people who were enthusiastic about playing it, and all of 2 that seemed open to it at all, and, honestly, I can’t blame anyone for feeling that way. From the designers website:
Bliss Stage has sex in it. If you’re skeeved out by the idea of sex in a role-playing game, don’t play Bliss Stage.
Fair enough. That’s pretty much all most people need to know to be completely turned off (pun intended?) to the game. It’s a unique experience, though, and definitely qualifies as RPG WTF.

Fiasco

Play your own Cohen Bros. film! The Big Lebowski! No Country for Old Men! A Serious Man! Whatever terrible sequence of awful events you want to play out is yours to explore in this RPG of bad things happening for (sometimes) absolutely no reason.

The Cloud Dungeon

LOOK AT THE PICTURES AND VIDEO! LOOK AT THE GAME! LOOK AT IT!
Honestly, isn’t it incredible? Doesn’t it look amazing?
No, I have no idea how it’s played. I don’t know the rules. I don’t want a single spoiler. I want to go into it knowing only that there are some bizarre-ass pictures of people playing the game.
There is a very close to 100% chance that we will do an episode on The Cloud Dungeon.

Next episode is going to be Board Games WTF, which is going to be a grab bag of bizarre tabletop games.

Today on Save Vs. Rant, out episode is about the Halloween game Jeremy runs annually, and the art of the bespoke gaming experience. Is the title a bit much? Too late to reconsider! We’re committed now! Let’s dive right in! 

“The Halloween Game: A Bespoke Gaming Experience” – there’s a lot to unpack in that title.

Halloween – What is Halloween about? I don’t mean, of course, its oft revised and dubiously reported origins, but its modern connotations. Candy. Costumes. Make believe. The fun of voluntarily being scared. Horror movies and ghost stories. Parties. Celebrating autumnal fear tropes. That’s what this game is largely about. Pumpkin monsters. Cenobites. Scarecrows. Trick or treats.

Game – This game is D&D 5th Edition. Simple enough.

Bespoke – A (somewhat pretentious) way of saying “made to order.” Boutique. Unique. Exclusive. Every homebrew game of D&D could, in a sense, be described as bespoke, but, in this case, the emphasis is on not only the game but the craftsmanship of components. The handmade puzzles, the unique components. The ongoing story.

Gaming Experience – One thing the modern era of open source and narrative driven games has done is create an incredible array of options, allowing nearly unlimited opportunities for truly unique games. An unfortunate side effect of this is the loss of shared experience in gaming. In the bad old days of D&D 1st and 2nd Edition, while homebrew games were common, so, too, were players who played – nay, devoured – the pregen and tournament modules that were available. Many gaming groups could find shared history in The Keep on the Borderlands, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, The Tomb of Horrors and other classics, and players often swapped stories of their approach to the challenges thereof. The Halloween game is an opportunity to return, in part, to that philosophy, as it gives the players a change to compare their notes, discuss approaches and share stories.

Prior to the beginning of the tradition, Jeremy would run a game in October with the intent of playing the same brief modular scenario with groups he did not typically play with. These proto Halloween games were frequently adaptations of existing modules. Starting with The Grinning God, in which the player characters were chasing a curse levied by a malicious beholder-esque jack o’ lantern god. This game had some fairly simple puzzles with a few physical components that could be manipulated, and introduced the existence of time limits and the bloodstains that marked the positions of dead player characters.

The response was enthusiastic, and a Tabletop Gamer’s Guild tradition was born! 

How do you make puzzles like this? Well, to begin with, usually you want to work backwards. Come up with the solution to the puzzle, then work backwards to a scrambled state that makes the solution obscure. Add a few clues as to how to solve the puzzle and, if possible, a red herring or two. It never hurts to playtest a puzzle, ideally with someone who does not intend to play in your module, and increase or reduce how well concealed the solution is based on the results.

The most obvious puzzles are word puzzles, and the use of runes, roman numerals concealed in words, and even fantasy languages can add a lot of variety and spice to these puzzles. Use caution when employing non-native languages, however – you aren’t Tolkien, and no matter how clever you are, the players probably don’t want to have to go through a course in linguistics to enjoy your dungeon.

Meta-puzzles can be fun. While a lot of DMs are afraid that any meta-material (references rules or out of character / game concepts) ruin the mood of the game, in a one-off game like the Halloween dungeons, they can be an enjoyable and welcome change of pace. Be sure that the concepts are correctly transcribed. Nothing is as vexing as a puzzle that can’t be solved correctly because the answer is wrong.

Don’t stress out about being extremely creative or original. It’s ok to use familiar trappings like tarot or conventional playing cards, riddles, runes or mythological sources. These all give an air of familiarity to the material, which makes it feel comfortable and accessible to the player characters.

Finally, the dungeons, while each featuring branching paths, largely avoided tricks and trappings that would require extensive retracing of steps. This lends itself well to a forward motion experience. In the case of the Grinning God, there was only one ending. In another, there were several individual dungeons to choose from. In still another, there was a central hub with multiple paths. In each case, the goal was to not make the adventure too open ended and sandboxy. In this case, an “on rails” experience was desirable to keep the action moving.

Finally, subtly and importantly, there was a need to have the adventure on a real-time clock to ensure that the game would not drag and that the player characters would be encouraged to make bold moves, lest they run out the clock.

It is our sincere hope that this episode and its accompanying blog post inspire at least one person to try their hand at running their own one-off game with the intent of playing with groups that they do not normally game with. This episode it a bit of a hint at the Open Table concept that is growing in popularity in the gaming community, and that we hope to see more of in the future.

Today on Save Vs. Rant, we’ll be discussing some of our biggest tips for being a good player. Our tips are about both how you can best enjoy the game and how you can be the kind of player others want to play with.

We need to dispel a myth about roleplaying, so let’s start where our episode ends:

0. You Don’t Have to Become a DM

Being a player is not inferior to being a DM. Being a good player does not inevitably lead to DMing. Being a player is not even a necessary step that must absolutely precede becoming a DM. I DMed before I ever played as a player. I have had players who tried to DM who found they didn’t like it at all. I actually prefer DMing to playing overwhelmingly. None of this is good or bad. We all enjoy things differently. Not all soccer players are coaches, or goalies or centers. Not all players are DMs (or spellcasters, or tacticians, or party faces).

1. Dive In Feet First

Even and especially if it is your very first time gaming, we strongly recommend that you jump in with both feet. if you’re not sure how to play a roleplaying game, it might help to watch any number of videos or listen to any number of podcasts dedicated to live games, but a word of caution: people don’t chronicle their games publicly if they’re not confident in their abilities to both run and play entertainingly. If you do check these things out, don’t be intimidated by their knowledge of the rules, eloquent play or general charisma.

2. Be Prepared

A counterpart (rather than counterpoint) to this, is to be prepared with everything you need to play the game. For the overwhelming majority of games, this will be at minimum a character sheet and dice. For many games, counters, miniatures and game aids might be helpful. New players might also benefit from cheat sheets.

3. Keep Notes

Good notes are important for a DM, but also for players who want to get the most out of their game. There are lots of potential categories of notes, but you as the player should focus on notes for things that are interesting to your character. Plot hooks, personal goals or anything else that strikes you as such are great. It also helps to have someone creating a map (and some DMs prefer that the players do this based on description to allow for potential cartographic errors, while others will gladly ensure that the map is 100% accurate) and someone chronicling the overarching action of a session.

4. Coordinate with Other Players

Not only should you be communicating in game to ensure that the party has a comfortable balance, that inter-party conflicts remain enjoyable for everyone involved, and to improve your strategy and planning, but you should also be communicating out of game to make sure people have rides, that availability is well communicated and that anything needed to play the game is available.

5. Know What Makes Your Character Fun

Every well built character will have cool things about them. Know what the cool things for yours are, and why. One of the best pieces of advice we can give in this regard is for your to make a personal cheat sheet including all your favorite (or most obscure) abilities. Try to memorize, as much as possible, the unusual ones, but at least have a strong understanding of your options, especially the obscure ones.

6. It’s Not About Winning

Roleplaying games are about the journey, not the destination. A roleplaying game will always be more of a road trip than an international flight. And yes, of COURSE, you want your character to survive and thrive, but being willing to accept that this won’t happen – that the story won’t have a happy ending, or that the character will die with his stories not yet resolved – is part of playing a roleplaying game, and keeping this in mind will give you a richer enjoyment of the story.

7. Combat Is Not the Only Option

Always remember that, just as in real life, not every challenge can be overcome by brute force alone. Furthermore, many challenges that CAN be overcome by brute force, can be overcome another way. Try to keep in mind the open world nature of RPGs. Every problem has open ended solutions, and most DMs will welcome creative solutions.

8. Don’t Be a Distraction

Back in the early days, the biggest distractions were food, conversation and doodling, with the occasional player audacious enough to bring a book. We’ve evolved a lot since then, and now every one of us contains the ultimate ADD distraction device in our pockets, to say nothing of laptops, smart watches and, still, books. Don’t be that guy. Be engaged in the game but, even more importantly, don’t distract OTHER players. Even if you are dinking on your phone or whatever, at least keep it to yourself.

9. Let the Other Players Play

I cannot stress enough how frustrating it is for new players to have others tell them how to play the game move-by-more. This isn’t just true for roleplaying games, but in games where your personality and creativity are forefront, it’s absolutely vital that you let people run their own characters and learn from their mistakes.

10. Your DM Is Your Friend

Just as the correct paradigm in the workplace is for everyone to work together regardless of their role in the company, the DM, while empowered by rule 0 to run his game basically however he wants, is not playing against the players in the vast majority of roleplaying games (with only a few having actively adversarial roles as a deliberate design choice). The DM is most frequently an unbiased arbiter of events. It is important that you avoid falling into the mindset that the DM is your enemy.

If you follow these guidelines, you will find your roleplaying experiences both easier and more satisfying. Next up, we have The Halloween Game: A Bespoke Gaming Experience.

Welcome to another edition of Save Vs. Rant! Today, we’re focusing on Golarion – the official campaign setting of the Pathfinder RPG.

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Golarion is a big place, and there’s an alarming amount of material for the Pathfinder Campaign Setting. While some of the regions have been explored in great detail – Varisia, The River Kingdoms and Katapesh, for example – there are some criminally underused portions of the setting. I’d like to take a moment to mention just a few of the unique locations of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting that I would love to see used in upcoming material.

Hermea is part of an ongoing (and allegedly benevolent) eugenics experiment to determine the pinnacle of human evolution that can be achieved. This creates several interesting opportunities for adventures. What sort of problems are faced on this isolated island society? Under what circumstances and for what purposes might outsiders be permitted to visit? What of the exiles who fail to live up to the exacting standards of the Gold Dragon Mengkare? All of these have barely been touched upon by any of the extant material.

The Realm of The Mammoth Lords could be the site of many low-tech bronze-age adventures as well as exploration expeditions. A rugged land still ensconced in a sort of localized ice age and home to megafauna that rose from a region of the underworld called Deep Tolguth (accessible via an enormous megadungeon called The Earthnavel).

The 24th adventure path is going to take place, at least partially, in Lastwall, the nation charged with keeping watch over the eternal tomb of the Whispering Tyrant, as well as the origin of the Shining Crusade against the demons of the Worldwound.

Geb and Nex, the warring wizard lands, are fertile grounds for adventure, given their incredible histories of ancient conflict between incredible powers. Some of the nature of the magic of these realms was explored in the Legacy of Fire Adventure Path (and I won’t say much more about that – spoilers, after all), but the realms themselves are largely unexplored.

Speaking of Geb and Nex, I’ve long thought The Mana Wastes might make a great setting for a low-magic wild-west inspired setting for the Pathfinder RPG, allowing firearms and gunslingers to really make their way in the world, fighting back in their prairie wilderness against the encroaching forces of Geb’s undead hordes.

Finally, Jalmeray is a sort of fantasy exclave of the Pathfinder equivalent of India combined with an Arabian Nights theme, and has fascinating ties to the powerful Aspis Consortium – the famed and unparalleled rivals of the Pathfinder Society (and, in a sense, one of the greatest antagonists of the setting).

The Campaign Setting is vast, and Paizo has barely scratched the surface of the stories that can be found in the expansive world they have created. I hope to see many many more adventures in this fascinating fantasy world.

Today on Save Vs. Rant, we present five more considerations vital to the success of any DM, including a bit of advice on keeping your game portable. We call it DMing 102!

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Our DMing 101 podcast contained 10 points we felt were important to instill in the rookie DM. A number of the points were made based on pitfalls we ourselves had faced in our games, and, likewise, our 5 points today are the result of our efforts to improve our game.

1. Know Your Venue

This may sound obvious, and maybe even a little strange. It’s generally taken as given that the default venue for any game is the home of the person running the game. However, the more you run games, the more likely you are to run into the situation where you are playing in a place not completely under your control. If that means playing in someone else’s graciously provided space, know what responsibilities that entails. If that means playing in a public venue, know how to behave at your given venue. If it’s a space shared with the general public, make certain that your activities aren’t disturbing or confusing others. Don’t be that guy.

2. Prepare Your Space

If you are at your own home, you can make preparations of your space as elaborate as would improve the experience for your players. This can mean things like mood lighting and sound (Syrinscape provides awesome tools for auditory immersion), but more practically, it can mean simply being aware of your space constraints and being certain that every player has enough space for their needs and that space (always a precious and limited commodity) is used well.

3. Personalize the Game

Like many ambitious young roleplayers back in the bad old days before the massive internet supercommunities of gamers and the OGL, nearly all my first experiences with running a game were original material set in an original world. That made it easy for me to consider my players and their input when creating the ongoing story of the setting. Eventually, however, I began to see that there was a lot of brilliant material out there that I wanted to be able to, in a sense, enjoy alongside my players. Maybe I’ll examine this a bit more in a future episode – How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Published Module.

In any case, one thing I’ve learned, though, is that while a well-polished module can bring the flare of a professional writer to your gaming table, it is still the responsibility of the DM to breathe life into that module and to make the story conform to their group. There are many simple ways to do this, one of the simplest being to tie NPCs within the adventure to the backstories of the players. This can make them keystone characters whose destinies are tied to the PC, or simply mean that they’re part of the same club or share the same niche arcane interest. Anything that ties them into the backstory in a way that both feels like something that could happen within the setting and that, more importantly, make the PC feel like someone who could happen within the setting.

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Go Off the Rails

When we talk about stories in games, two terms that are thrown around frequently are “sandbox” and “railroad.” A sandbox, in gaming, is a setting where instead of giving the player characters discrete specific missions, they have more general goals and a large expansive setting in which to explore those. The polar opposite is the railroad game, where there is a prescribed series of events, each of which should and must happen in a sequence regardless of player character input. A sandbox setting can be daunting and, at worst, may leave the players with a sort of agoraphobic paralysis regarding what direction to go.

No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and, more to the point, no well written campaign can hope to anticipate the PC’s schemes and machinations. The most important thing you can do as a DM is be open to having your well-crafted plans scrapped in favor of taking things in a new direction.

Don’t mistake this advice for us telling you to let your players walk all over you, provided your players have at least some awareness of the overall direction when they set out to play – if you run an Adventure that’s about exploring a largely uncharted archipelago, it’s not unreasonable to nix players who suddenly want to return to the mainland to play a game of deep political intrigue. But, if the players suddenly start to show some interest in political intrigue as your exploration game unfolds, certainly consider letting them get enmeshed in the brutal politics of bickering exploration companies.

Being open to changes in your game isn’t the same as treating your material as disposable, which is the mental block that most DMs have to overcome when weighing being flexible against running the game they had envisioned. Consider the ancient art of palette swapping from the early days of console gaming: because of the limits to memory, the same characters would be remapped with different behavior and a different color scheme, allowing the same material to be reused. In a sense this works in tabletop gaming: your players don’t know that the enemy is a generic 3rd level rogue, they just know that it’s a sneaky enemy with a propensity for trying to flank them – it could just as easily be a dastardly pirate, a dashing rogue, a corrupt town guard or a mysterious stranger. Same stat block, minimal change, maximum usable material.

5. No Man Is an Island

Remember that there is an ENORMOUS gaming community out there! Back in the 80’s and 90’s, even finding people with interest in the hobby was a rarity requiring dedicated searching. Now there aren’t merely old webrings or remote forums discussing fan material, but literally thousands of websites, podcasts, forums, wikis, blogs, vlogs and social sites dedicated to tabletop games. There are libraries worth of printed material at shops all across America.

The internet has brought people with what were once niche hobbies into contact with millions of like-minded individuals. You have the collected experience of the entire gaming world at your fingertips. Don’t forsake those incredible resources! Don’t fall into the all too common trap of thinking that by looking to others for guidance and advice you are somehow less than them. We can all stand on the shoulders of giants and be all that much better off for it, learning hard lessons from others who have been there.