The Year is 1806…

The Battle of Austerlitz, by François Pascal Simon Gérard. In December 1805, France decisively defeated Austria and Russia.

Fantasy roleplaying games, as a rule, are set in fictional medieval or early-Renaissance Europe.  There’s certainly nothing limiting them to that setting, though; Dungeons & Dragons alone has featured settings derived from the ancient Middle East, China and Japan, and South and Central America.  The ancient world, the medieval, and the modern era have all been covered.

What hasn’t been considered so well is the span of time between the early Renaissance and the 20th century.  Aside from a few stabs at Victoriana (either gothic or steampunk-style) and a handful of Wild West-themed games, the pickings are fairly slim.

That’s a shame, because there are any number of potential settings in that span that would make for a gripping game.  For instance… consider the year 1806.

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Launching a Campaign: Realism vs. Ease

As I prepare to launch a new campaign, I’m running into the early decisions that help shape one.  They seem like useful candidates for blog posts, so today I’m going to consider one of those early decisions:  How much should I emphasize realism (or verisimilitude, if you want to get semantic) in the game?

Most games will feature some degree of realism — their unreal elements will behave in a realistic manner.  Magic will follow a reliable set of rules; super-science will mostly behave according to the laws of physics, and will break them consistently when it doesn’t.  Even many humor games, like Paranoia, will build on a basic level of realism.  (Toon, on the other hand, is one of the exceptions — it’s designed to favor cartoon illogic.)  That’s not really what I’m talking about here, though.

The question is, rather, how much bookkeeping I, as a gamemaster, am willing to put up with in exchange for a greater sense of realism in various player activities.  Do I track food and water, for instance, or do I just have the players deduct some cash from their characters now and then and assume they’re restocking when they can?  Do I track ammunition?  Encumbrance?  Do I track supply and demand of given materials and change prices in various regions accordingly?  Do I place craftsmen and other NPCs specifically across my map, or do I use the “say yes or roll the dice” method when a character goes looking for, say, a glassblower or a priest?  Do I place all of my monsters, or do I rely partially on random tables?  What about treasure?  Do I map out all of my dungeons ahead of time, or do I just wing it if the characters go somewhere unexpected and stumble across one I hadn’t fully prepared yet?  To what extent do I track weather?  Do I draw up a timeline of events as they will happen unless the PCs intervene, or do I react on the fly?

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Cool Alone Isn’t Enough

So, it’s been a while.  In the midst of that real-life stuff that I’m not going to get into, my games more or less evaporated, and lack of gaming leads to lack of inspiration to write about gaming.  Things seem to be picking up on both fronts, though.  Fingers crossed for the gradual relaunch of A Butterfly Dreaming.  But on to the post…

I went to see Sucker Punch today.  (No spoilers in this post, if you’re thinking of seeing it.)  I was skeptical about it for a number of reasons, but I went anyway, because it looked like mindless, stylish fun, and I could use a little of that.

If you’re a gamemaster or aspire to be one, I’d recommend seeing it, but not exactly for the reasons you might think.  It was not a good movie.  Oh, it was stylish, and there were good moments in it, but in the end, as was said of Oakland, “when you get there, there’s no there there.”  The reasons to see it?  One, to steal the cool ideas for your games.  But more importantly, two, to see firsthand why the movie isn’t good.

Cool ideas?  Oh, yes.  There’s a well-choreographed fight scene between a heroine and three samurai wielding, respectively, a naginata, a katana, and a chaingun.  There’s a steampunk World War I pastiche that’s as good as anything I’ve seen since Inception.  There’s an assault by armored knights and a bomber against a castle full of orcs and a dragon, which feels rushed but is still pretty cool.  Tropes and genre blending: this movie has them.

What it lacks is substance.  The underlying plot of the movie is obscured, but not in a way that’s interesting.  The resolution, such as it is, is unsatisfying.  The characters are not well-developed.  There’s a twist, but it’s not surprising or affecting.  The movie is over-the-top, stylish, and hilarious at points, but there’s no human element to it.  (Aside from the early introduction, where the backstory is set up in pantomime prior to the title screen.  That’s quite well done, but afterward the movie loses what connection to its characters it had begun to establish and never gets it back.)  The dialogue is overwrought yet shallow.

I came out of that movie impressed by the execution of some of the ideas… and yet disappointed, and that disappointment is because there’s no emotional core there.  Not even to the extent you’d get in better action movies like Terminator or Aliens.  Sucker Punch is a movie with competent production values and imaginative ideas, but it has no soul, because its script and its characters are lacking.

The lesson applies to gaming.  Cool stuff is good, and the active pursuit of cool is a worthy goal for a GM.  But cool alone isn’t enough.  Cool will get you memorable moments.  A story and characters with heart will get you a memorable game.

Adding Fear to Your Game

…Okay, obviously, my last plan didn’t quite work out.  So, rather than tempt fate again, I’ll just say I’ll post when and as I’m able, and leave it at that.  Moving on…

Happy Halloween.  In keeping with the spirit of the holiday, I thought I’d say a little about fear in your game.  Maybe you’re playing a dedicated horror game like Call of Cthulhu.  Maybe you just want to visit the theme for a plotline or two in a game like D&D or HERO.  Either way, if you want to inspire some fear in your players, there are a couple of things to consider.

Description Matters

As with evoking any other emotion, your description of the characters’ surroundings and the NPCs will have a large impact on the amount of fear the players feel.  Sensory detail is your friend.  Perhaps most important are the non-visual details.  Does the old windmill creak and groan as it turns?  Does the wind howl?  Is there no sound at all in the abandoned manor except for the characters’ own muffled footfalls across the carpeted floor?  And while aural cues are very effective, the sense of smell or touch is often even more evocative.  Is the tomb dry and dusty, or damp and musty?  Are the characters having to brush cobwebs off their exposed skin?  Is the air cold and clammy?  Or is it uncomfortably, and unaccountably, warm?

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Pathfinder Sells Out

Is it just me, or does that wizard look like the same one who's on the 4e PHB cover, aside from the hair color?

According to Paizo, as of Monday, their Pathfinder game’s core rulebook has sold out its first printing.  Now, this is mostly distributor orders — not actual sales — and there’s no indication of how large the first print run is.  Still, it’s a pretty impressive accomplishment.  I suspected that the initial sales would be very strong, and I hope it’ll bring people to the hobby, and not be confined to the existing 3.5 audience.

I have my doubts, though.

I haven’t seen the final revision of the rules, obviously, but the beta was not promising.  While the stated intent of the developers was to address some of the problems of 3.5e, and in particular to make melee characters a more viable choice, I found that the beta did the exact opposite — spellcasters were given a variety of bonuses.  Some problem spells were addressed, like Glitterdust and death spells, but there remained a wide variety of “I remove the enemy from combat” spells — including some new ones added by Paizo.  Fighters, on the other hand, were given more bonus feats… but they also need to spend more feats in order to achieve the same effect they used to get from a single one.  For instance, the +4 from Improved Disarm?  That takes two feats in Pathfinder.

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