Musings on Gaming #5 - Mind

Photo of a GM removing agency from a player, 2019 (colourised)

As I mentioned in the last post in this series, I had a couple of realisations that changed the way I look at GMing around 2008. One of them came from the Dragon Age RPG, which had a section on character motivations and goals.

Now I always knew that players had motivations and goals: they wanted to gain experience, gold, cool magical items, and occasionally they wanted a custom-made character class, and they would come to me with these requests, and we would work something out. They may have different reasons for joining my game, but they all wanted to play and have fun, which was good.

What we didn't really pay a lot of attention to, however, was the motivation for their characters. Once in a while in a longer campaign a player would say: since my character is a noble/knight, I think he would like to go on a quest to win a tourney/slay a dragon. This was something which evolved in playing, and not something which we consciously tried to impose. The lack of motivation wasn't a problem when we were younger - we all had a lot of free time and we weren't really expecting the games to be anything other than a platform where we would live out our power fantasy, kill monsters and take their stuff, and just hang around and crack jokes. But as I got older and they way I viewed the world changed, I began to find that less satisfying.

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I like my game worlds to be real, and people in the real world have goals and motivations, so why shouldn't the PCs?

I now ask my players to think about their characters' short- and long-term goals when they create their characters. This not only makes them think about their characters and how they will interact with the central tension of the game world, but also allows me to plan the campaign in such a way that most if not all the characters will have a chance to fulfill both their short- and long-term goals.

Goals and motivations also of course apply to NPCs, from the throw-away peasant the PCs meet the road, to the main villain of the campaign, and every monster and minion in between. And here is where the difference between motivation and goals become important: motivation is what drives us, it is, ironically, the end; goals, on the other hand, are what we think will help us achieve the end, it is, again ironically, the means.

Goals are as varied as they come: the big bad wants to get his hands on the magical artifact so he can rule the world; the evil corporation wants to steal the data from their competitor so they can make big bucks; the cultists want to summon Cthulhu because... er...

And this is where I find the motivations of many classic villains as being unrealistic. What, for example, is Sauron's motivation? Or Emperor Palpatine's? It is perhaps OK for the villain of a fantasy novel or a sci-fi movie to have no other motivation other than being evil and wanting to rule the world, but in our own world, no villain works that way. No, not even real-life evil dictators who waged wars and murdered civilians. They may claim to do so based on some ideology or world view, but it is no coincidence that these villains also happened to live in luxury, protected by elite soldiers.

If watching The Godfather trilogy has taught me anything, it is that we all want the same things, but it is in how we try to achieve those things that make us good or evil.

Related to this is the idea of "evil races".

I can't remember when I stopped using the trope, but I did not stop because I believed that evil races in D&D represented real world races - I don't; rather, it was the realisation that any sentient race cannot be all good or evil. If they cannot choose between good or evil acts, then they cannot be considered truly sentient; and any creature that displays the level of intelligence demonstrated by the "demi-humans" in D&D must possess self-awareness and sentience.

Evil must be a choice, or else it has no meaning.

Certainly certain cultures may find certain practices acceptable which our own do not, but oftentimes whether we find something evil or not has more to do with how different they are from we do, and whether it hurts our interests. Some "villains" in my campaigns are not fully sentient beings, but forces of nature or manifestation/personification of the principle of destruction, like the Grens (*not-aliens*) in our sci-fi campaign, or the Darkspawn in the Dragon Age setting. Such beings may make it easier for players and GMs because they serve as a non-sentient enemy which is unambiguously a threat to our own existence, and can therefore be destroyed without qualms; but it is worth noting that in both the Alien/s franchise and the original Dragon Age computer game, while the "monsters" of the stories cause fear, it is the willingness of people to sacrifice others to these monsters for their own gains that causes revulsion in the viewers.

Musings on Gaming #4 - Soul

Although I have been GMing since around 1986, I didn't really give any thought to the themes of my campaigns until perhaps ten years ago. For the first twenty-five years of my "career" as a GM, I had largely let my players make whatever character they wanted, and then ran them through a string of unrelated module, never bothering much with the theme of the campaign, or the motivations of the PCs: I presented a villain/treasure map, and it was their jobs as PCs to defeat that villain/kill whatever was guarding that treasure and take it.

Granted, most of those years were my teenage years when my players and I were just content with exploring dungeons and killing stuff and gaining cool magical items. Gaming was rare during my university and working years, until around 2008, when the re-release of Dragon Warriors led to me meeting Adrian on an RPG forum, which led to a regular Saturday gaming sessions at his place.

The first breakthrough for me came during the Lone Wolf campaign I ran for the group. The players were all playing the good guys: Sommerlending Knight, Kai Lord, Brotherhood Mage. I told the players:"think Star Wars, and you are the Jedi", and we went through a series of unrelated modules from that I stringed together. A few sessions into the game, I felt that the PCs were getting too bloodthirsty, often killing bad guys even after they had incapacitated them - we are talking about humans here, not Giak or Drakkarim. I addressed this in-game by having their masters comment on that they were getting closer to the dark side and urging them to exercise mercy and restraint to redeem themselves.

The campaign then continued with me using a Conan module, where the villain, in the guise of a priest of a good order, used the death of his predecessor, a much loved champion of the poor, to foment social division and call for violence against the rich - a mysterious monster was murdering innocent people in the city, and the priest was claiming that it was divine retribution for the sins of the rich. As the days went by, tension began to build and threatened to boil over into mass violence. The PCs went about investigating the murders, and came into frequent contact with the priest and the city leaders. The Kai Lord became sympathetic to the position of the priest, while the Mage and the Knight were suspicious of him and tended to side with the city leaders. Much of the sessions were just RPing, and I often had to toggle between the two groups as the party split to interact with the two sides.

When the final confrontation came and it was revealed that the evil priest had raised his predecessor as an undead to murder on his behalf, the Kai Lord was so enraged at this betrayal that he killed the priest, even after he was left defenceless by the others. I then ruled that because of this act, Kai had stripped him of his Kai Discipline powers.

The player was of course unhappy about the whole thing: first being conned by the GM, and then being punished. Fortunately for me, he did not quit the campaign, but soldiered on, redeemed himself, and his powers were eventually restored to him.

I look back at this campaign fondly because it was the first of my campaigns where I felt there was a theme that ran through the sessions. Even though I had not planned it that way to start with, the mere idea that this was "Star Wars, and you are the Jedi" probably guided the way I, and later my players, viewed the actions of the PCs. And the theme of Star Wars - at least the first six movies - was about power, corruption, fall, and redemption.

I have employed the idea of a campaign theme in some of my other campaigns: the theme of "deception" in my Sorcery! campaign, and that of "price of peace" in my Space Opera Season 2. I find that having a theme helps me to plan the sessions, in creating situations where the players, through their PCs, are confronted with the theme of the campaign.

Of course, not all campaigns need a theme, or will benefit from one. Some of my mini-campaigns are just play-throughs of classic TSR modules, and I think that for a funhouse dungeon like White Plume Mountain it is perhaps the lack of a theme rather than the presence of one that makes it so memorable.

The employment of a theme, while useful for a more GM-directed campaign, may work less well in a more player-directed, or sandbox type of campaign, where the theme may instead emerge from the plans and actions of the PCs.

In such a campaign, in place of a predetermined theme, it is more suitable to employ what Matt Colville calls a "central tension" for the campaign setting.

The central tension is perhaps implied in the original D&D, with the duality in alignment: Law vs Chaos. It is hard-baked into the White Wolf RPGs, where the purported aim of the various "X; The Y" games is to explore the tension in our modern society through the lens of some non-human being, whose non-humanity forces us to examine our own humanity. Or something like that. I've only ever GM'd Mage: the Ascension, and I not not sure I did it correctly.

Regardless of whether you use a central tension that comes with the setting, or whether you create one of your own, central tension is what creates drama and invites the PCs to act. Two sides are in conflict, or will soon be in open conflict, and the PCs have the choice to make on which side they wish to see win in this conflict, and how they choose will decide that.

How your players choose, however, will be decided by their characters' motivations, which will be the topic of the next post in this series.

Musings on Gaming #3 - Space

All of the fantasy RPG worlds that I set my campaigns in - Terrinoth/Menara, Ferelden/Thedas, Magnamund, Dragon Warriors' Legend, and Fighting Fantasy's Titan - are large worlds, presumably Earth-sized planets.

While it is fun to read about the diverse regions in the world, it is improbably that a single adventuring party will travel to all or even most of the places described in a setting book. Nevertheless, there is a way for GMs to convey the size of the world to the players without having to take the PCs to all these places.

The first is of course to have the PCs come across and interact with people and things which come from these foreign, far-flung regions. Most fantasy medieval worlds have a functioning trade system, and often trade is the chief reason the movement of people and goods across vast distances; others that I can think of are pilgrimage and conquest (which in itself usually stems from a desire to move people and goods...). People and goods from foreign lands are distinguished by the fact that they are different from the local people and goods, and these differences can be expressed both culturally and materially.

One of the most obvious difference between peoples is of course language, and here is where I dislike the concept of the Common language (as conveniently as it makes the job of the GM), unless there is an in-world reason such as the existence of a continent-spanning empire. In settings where the region the game is set in is an analogue of our own Dark Ages or Middle Ages, this becomes even more glaring. In our own world, 'national' languages in the form which we understand them now did not exist in medieval Europe, and that is something that I like to reflect in my game worlds too.  

To a lesser extent this dislike also applies to the existence of "racial" languages like Dwarven or Elvish, unless again there are in-world reasons for why certain races should have a language that changes very little over a span of hundred of years, such as the people being very long-lived, or that the language is being guarded very zealously, such as with a liturgical language, or with a very closed community.

For these reasons I dislike spells that allow PCs to understand or speak foreign languages (I save that kind of thing for my sci-fi campaigns), as it takes away the uniqueness of the cultures. In fact, I lean further into the differences in language, and sometimes describe my NPCs as having an accent that is from a different part of the same nation that the PCs are from, or using a local expression not familiar to them. Where communities of "demi-humans" live among humans, I describe them as speaking the same local language as the humans, but with words from their own languages sprinkled here and there. Where an NPC is not a fluent speaker of the language the PCs are speaking, I describe them as speaking with a heavy accent, haltingly, and/or with a different grammar.

Another way to portray the vastness of the game world, and also its age, is to have indicators of migrations of ancient people in the setting. The fact that much of Europe now speak an Indo-European language and practise a Semitic religion is the result of movements of culture and peoples across a period of millennia, and something that at once speaks of how big our world is and how old human cultures are. GMs can allude the existence of such movements of cultures and peoples by having languages that are related, and having say the head church/temple of a religion or its pilgrimage site being far away from the PCs' native place.

Musings on Gaming #2 - Time

In this post I would like to talk about the role of time in world-building.

It is common for the typical medieval-fantasy RPG world to have a long history - a "lore" - and while I do not do any world-building of my own, I agree with that practice; in our own world, thousands of years of written history existed before the medieval period, and tens of thousands more are known through archaeology, and millions more known through other scientific fields.

When looking at fantasy worlds, I tend to view their histories through the lens of our own prehistory and history, and this for me is when the suspension of disbelief becomes difficult.

Many of the fantasy settings I have game in have histories that are both too long and too short: typically, the period of prehistory is too short, with species coming into existence and then reaching a medieval-level civilisations in the blink of an eye, and then remaining at that level for much longer than our own medieval period lasted.

One way of rationalising this is to look at the official lore or "fluff" as something which the peoples of the fantasy worlds viewed as their own history, and not necessarily as the truth. Just as in our own world people gave accounts of the origins of themselves and lists of kings which we today see as bearing some core of truth but over all inaccurate, so too can we see the fluff. Similarly, the peoples in these worlds also imagined their ancestors as having the same level of technology as they possessed, much as how our own medieval artists depicted supposedly ancient kings in contemporary armour and weapons.

Interpreting the official lore of the worlds this way makes it easier for me to accept them as real, and I try to bring this across to my players by mapping the historical periods in the game world to our own, such that when they explored ancient ruins or tombs they would come across artifacts and burial practices that mirrored those of our world: a period when material culture could be identified but there was no metal working, a period with copper alloy or bronze working, and finally an age with iron and steel artifacts. 

Setting the history of the game world against our own also allows me to determine the level of technology that is appropriate to the period. Our own "Middle Ages" spans a thousand years, and it will be wrong to imagine that the level of technology, or the prevailing system of government and law remained static during the entire span of time. So if a player asked me if a certain thing - say eyeglasses - existed in the game world, I can find out when they were invented in our own world, and decide if they would exist in the game world. On a more general scale, technologies that improved agricultural yields or trade would have enormous impact on the populations and material prosperity of the peoples and places our PCs existed among, so if the world had large cities with cosmopolitan populations and exotic goods, I would have to make sure that the technologies that allowed for such a world existed.

Going further back in time, I often think about the existence of several humanoid or "demi-human" races/species in fantasy worlds and how that might work in a "real" world.

Probably every culture in our world has their own creation myth and how they came into being. Whether these myths were viewed as literal truths by the people who told them, or whether they were understood to be an expression of the place they saw themselves in the scheme of things, I think we can safely say that they are all factually wrong.

Our own species is now believed to be an admixture of archaic humans and other hominid species. This, and the fact that there were several hominid species leads me to wonder if the various fantasy races could in fact be viewed in the same light: not as peoples created separately by their own gods and distinct from the other races, but as different branches on the evolutionary tree. Certainly it would be interesting to imagine a scenario where all the hominid species in our own world all existed in the same period and developed civilisation. None of this is likely to have an impact in gameplay, but it is again something which makes the game world more real to me.

Of course time is only one of the dimensions which give a sense of realism and depth to our game worlds - the other dimension is space, which we will discuss in the next post in the series.

Musings on Gaming #1 - Reality

This is hopefully the first of a series of posts where I pen down my thoughts about RPG and GMing.

I've been playing RPGs for something like 35 years now, being a GM almost exclusively during this whole time, but it is only really in the past ten years or so that I started thinking about GMing as a craft. I started GMing in school as a teenager with Dragon Warriors, and back then with no frame of reference, we just played the way we thought the game ought to be played. There was no session zero (beyond "we already have enough fighters but we need a healer"), no discussion of character motivation (beyond gaining XPs and leveling up), but the strange thing was, as we played on and the characters explored and interacted with more of the world around them, we started developing motivations for them, and my players started to ask for their characters to do this or that: they started to develop goals.

The reason for that, even though we did not consciously know at that time, was because we all believed that the game world was "real" in some way. That is to say, we believed that the game world operated within certain rules and moved due to certain forces, just like the real world does, and that our characters, much like our young selves, could interact with this world in a meaningful way if we understood how it worked. This was also the time when we were learning History and Geography (in particular Human Geography) in school, and the subjects reinforced the ideas that the physical world and people did not behave randomly, but were the way they were for specific reasons.

In that respect the rules that we were using - Dragon Warriors - played a big role. The world of Dragon Warriors, called Legend, is an unashamed Earth-analogue, and lovingly described in Book 6 of the book series. There was even a table showing the evolution of the languages on the world, which had a bearing on how easy it was for the speaker of one language to learn another. This was the kind of detail that the teenage mind craved and thrived on, and even though I didn't know it then, the game had a formative effect on how I look at RPG worlds even today. In a future post I hope to discuss why I think such details are important to a medieval fantasy setting.

To me, an RPG is about immersing yourself in the role of a character in a make-believe world, which you imbue with a personality, traits, and motivations. For a player to do so, the GM must provide a game world that is "real" and operate by known cause-and-effects. That is to say, we expect that the PCs need to breathe, and that the game world has an atmosphere that the PCs can breathe in; that gravity exists, and if you fall from height you will take damage; that people respond pretty much like people in our world, and if you are rude to someone he is likely to respond negatively to you; and that laws exist and breaking them will bring consequences. That is not to say that the game world has to be an exact replica of our world, or that only the mundane exist, but however the game world is different from ours, those differences must have consequences, and should be taken into consideration in the way the world works in such a way that they do not result in plot holes.

It is such a belief that makes me exclude powers like resurrection and long-distance teleport (or at least make them extremely rare), because I am not able to decide how a world where such powers exist will operate. Of course, your average low-level magic user can still become an effective burglar with spells like Mage Hand and Misty Step, but the effect of these spells have non-magical equivalents such as stealth and sleight-of-hand and lockpicking, so they are easier for our minds to accept that the world would not be significantly different from ours just because those spells existed. The further a power or an ability is from our real-world possibilities, the harder it is for our muggle minds to imagine how the world must change to account for them. This is also an argument for limiting the frequency and power of magic in a game world, or making magic dangerous to the caster, but that is probably the topic of another post.

Another effect of this belief is that I have an aversion to "narrative" RPGs where the players get to decide what happens as a result of their actions. This does not mean that I do not believe in player agency, but that I believe that player agency means they can decide their characters' actions, but not the result of those actions. In the real world we get to choose what we say or do, but we cannot control the outcome of our words or actions - so it should be in our game world.

That said, I have played in games where the players get to choose what happens (or rather 'happened') in the form of flashbacks, but that took place in the context of games where such flashbacks are an explicit and important part of gameplay; as enjoyable as those games were, I feel that the mechanic will not be sustainable in a long-term campaign.

In the instances where I played in "collaborative" games where the players get to decide what happens as a result of their die-rolls, the gameplay was typically stilted as the players pause to think about how to narrate an interesting and reasonable outcome to their actions.

Is my way of gaming the only correct way then? Certainly not; the fact that many games where flashbacks and "collaboration" are main features are very successful proves that many people enjoy that way of gaming. But for me, a campaign with longevity needs to be one that is grounded in a kind of reality that parallels that of our world.