Maps and Legends

This month, A Character for Every Game is hosting the RPG Blog Carnival. The topic is cartography.

Maps are obviously pretty vital to most campaigns. You’ve got maps of fantasy worlds, of dungeons, of the city your superheroes are based in, of the star systems (or galaxies!) your space-opera heroes are flying between, of the haunted mansion your horror heroes are about to get killed in. And there are plenty of tools to help you generate these maps, including random map generators such as Gozzy’s and full-fledged map-creation utilities such as RP Tools’ MapTool or DungeonForge (both of which are free).

What I don’t see as much of these days is the map within the game. In older editions of D&D, it was fairly common for a treasure map to be included as part of a treasure horde. This fell by the wayside in third edition, and fourth didn’t bring it back. Maps could, of course, still be placed by hand, but without a presence on the random treasure tables, I find many gamemasters tend to overlook them. And that’s a shame.

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Launching a Campaign: The Ground Rules Sheet

As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s important to inform your players about some of your assumptions before you begin your campaign. I find the easiest way of doing so is to provide a handout that summarizes some of the basic information about the campaign. A cheat sheet, if you will.

The sheet should cover the basic ground rules of the campaign in a reasonably compact form. The idea is to create something easily readable that conveys the basic information your players need in order to create their characters. You don’t want to rehash the character generation rules from the rulebook — just point out the specific variations you’re using, along with the general theme of the campaign.

The sheet can include anything you feel is important. Mine covers the following areas:

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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.

The Humble Indie Bundle

Soooo… six months later.  I guess this sort of fell by the wayside.  And I make my return with a brief post.  Ah, well, so it goes.

I just wanted to direct any gamers out there who haven’t already heard of it to wolfire.com’s Humble Indie Bundle.  This is a “pay whatever you want” sale of a bundle of five indie games to benefit Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The games in question are World of Goo, Gish, Aquarius, Lugaru, and Penumbra Overture.  They work on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and there’s no DRM.  No catches.  Just a chance to get a couple of great indie games while also supporting some deserving charities.  Which reminds me, there’s no “overhead” on the donations (aside from credit card charges), and you can choose how much of your money goes where, if you’d like.

As I write this, there’s about 4 days 15 hours left in the drive, and they’ve collected just over $430,000.  Check them out.