Eclipse Phase - Wakeful, Part One

So, since it's coming up on Halloween, I figured I'd take a little bit and produce an adventure across the next few days for fans of the horror/conspiracy sci-fi game Eclipse Phase that people can enjoy. As a synopsis, the players are awakened to find themselves aboard a derelict spacecraft in Earth orbit, with the air on the thin and stale side but breathable and the temperature hovering on the cold side of survivable. None of them know why they're here; there's a significant chunk of continuity lost for each of them. They need to get out somehow, of course, and find their way to safety - but can they do it before something goes wrong, or before whoever - or whatever - put them here comes looking for them?

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The derelict in question is the Evening Star, a former cargo hauler that went missing during the events of the Fall; it was on record as accepting a sizable number of fully instantiated refugees from the space elevators before going completely silent and vanishing. The ship's life support system was designed to support a maximum of one hundred people, so it was assumed that the crowding from the refugees overwhelmed the ship's ability to cope and everyone aboard died of anoxia.

So when the players awaken in the ship's on-board backup facility with the lights on and the air cold but breathable, those aware of the circumstances of the ship's disappearance might be justifiably concerned. Also of concern is that the players' muses will report that, according to the still-functional shipboard mesh, they're missing about six months of personal time. Oh, and they're all sleeved in naked morphs they're unfamiliar with - a mix of splicers and furies, with nothing particularly exotic about them.

Checking the ship's mesh will show that public access allows for checking the time, sending and receiving messages, and access to video from the hallways and cargo holds. At the time of waking, nothing shows on any of the video feeds, and each player has one or more messages waiting for them with no subject or sender information available. There's no gravity, leaving the resleeving room full of floating bubbles of nutrient gel as players emerge from the storage tubes.

The primary goal of the adventure is for the players to find a way to escape the ship and make their way back to some hub of civilization; anything they can salvage to bring back as proof of where they were will be of immense value in the old-style economy of cislunar space. Of course, salvaging things from a derelict vessel in cislunar space has risks in and of itself.

The messages for the players depend on the skills of their characters.

Anyone with skills relevant to the TITANs, AI research, or the Singularity has this message waiting for them, apparently an random excerpt from a longer message: "ry has the chips; meet her in forward hold C at the midpoint to make the swap. Be careful, she might be packing an organic-hunting decon swarm and be aiming to scrub you to get the box and keep the chips. Don't let her know about Mic"
Attached to this message is an XP file; if the player accesses it, they need to make a Will x3 check to avoid taking 1d10/2 Stress as they experience roughly 30 seconds of intensely burning pain and the sound of speaker-distorted screaming.

Those with skills relevant to biotech, genetics, or medical skills past first aid have another message waiting: "Something's gotten in the nutrient system for the morph storage. Not sure what, but the system's filtration is barely keeping up with cleaning it up. Next layover, I recommend we do a full purge on the system. Even if it's harmless, who wants to instantiate in a tub full of blood-colored goo?" Attached is what appears to be an image file, but it's heavily distorted and filled with pixel noise. Running it through image-processing software will clean it up, and will a MoS of 10 or better wil any relevant skills; either reveals it to be a snap of the medical bay the group is in, with half a dozen ragged corpses floating in null-G and surrounded by floating globules of blood. Failing a Will x3 check causes 1d10/2 Stress and the realization that all the nutrient gel globs look bloody.

Anyone with hardware skills has a message that reads "Can whoever has the next rotation check the after solars? The system's bugging out pretty bad and keeps insisting they're oriented at a weird angle to incoming, even  after I punch in corrections. They're either at 65 or 190 to the solar instead of the 90." Attached is a short video from an external camera, which shows an extension with solar panels along it quiver slowly for nearly a minute before it suddenly and impossibly curls toward the camera and the feed goes dark. Witnessing this is enough to prompt a Will x3 check, with failure causing 1d10/5 Stress.

Those with conspiracy theory or topics related to the Fall as interests have the following "lling you, something;s shadowing the ship. I know the radar and lidar haven't returned anything, but I keep seeing stars get eclipsed by whatever it is. Probably some milspec stealth thing, but what do they want with us? Look, I'm sending the vid with highlights on when the stars get eclipsed. Whatever it is, it's huge." Attached is the described video; it seems to suggest a large object at some distance from the hull camera following the same trajectory as the ship. Viewing it causes no Stress.

Media skills and journalism/investigation skills results in the following message: "ow what the hell Burns thinks she's doing but there's no way we can send that footage to the rest of the system, they'll think we're insane conspiracy theorists cooking up faked XPs. I don't care what she and Mort have recorded, if we have to we'll blow the fuses on the comm mast and tell them their bug must've done it. No reason to panic anyone off-ship if it's something we picked up on the last run. Tell her that sh" Attached is a short XP clip from a person in a somewhat clumsy vacsuit working their way along the hull of the ship, stopping every few meters to take samples of something that resembles a metallic mold on the ship's hull. The clip cuts out when the person gets to the airlock. Have those who watch it roll Will x3; no Stress results from viewing the XP, but failing the Will check has repercussions elsewhere.

Piloting, astrophysics, and alien technology skills get a message that simply contain a video clip of a panicky-looking splicer with a weird blue mottling across her face. She seems to be hiding in a closet somewhere, and she's whispering to the camera. "My name is Mari Burns. I don't know if this will ever get out, but I have to try. The ship is infected with some kind of nanite plague, I've got no idea where it came from. The metal's infested, we're bleeding air, most of the rest of the crew is either dead, insane, or turned into something not even close to human. I'm pretty sure I'm infected - I keep hallucinating sights and sounds. Please, if you see this, stay off the Evening Star. Burn us with plasma if you can. We're a plague ship and for the sake of transhumanity we can't let this land anywhere." Her eyes unfocus at this point, and those watching get treated to several seconds of her screaming hysterically before the video cuts out. Viewing it calls for a Will x3 check, with 1 point of Stress lost if successful and 1d10/2 lost if unsuccessful, plus later repercussions.

Next time when I come back to this, I'll see about digging up a map of the ship and explaining some of what's aboard. (Yes, it involves exsurgents.)

On Trial

There are times when one player is going to hog most of a session, simply because they're the 'face' character who talks and negotiates with others. Most GMs try to hurry through these to keep the other players from getting bored and wandering off, either in-game or out-of-game, but there's another way to go about it. Today, we'll look at turning the players into the minds behind some of your NPCs for a session.

You know the character type already; the smooth-talking elven bard, the charming fixer on the streets of cyberpunk Seattle, the queen of a fledgling nation addressing a council. They're the charismatic deal-makers who want nothing quite so much as the chance to show off their gift with language and their ability to charm and dazzle others. The problem, usually, is that the other players are terrified the person will say something to traumatically disrupt the game, and so the chance is often stifled. The GM can't exactly build a scene with a dozen NPCs simply to let the character monologue, because that kind of scene can take hours while the other players have to either sit by quietly or disrupt the negotiation with their own adventuring. (The latter can make a wonderfully intense game if the talkative character is trying to keep those they're talking to occupied while the others accomplish some goal unnoticed, however.)

So what's a GM to do to keep the others interested? Simple: make them part of the scene. Rather than their usual characters, who are busy elsewhere, give them character sheets for the session for one of the NPCs the face character is dealing with. Let them pick the one they find the most interesting, and have a small packet of information for the player to peruse during the session that tell them the goals and desires of that NPC, to help them get into the character's head.

Make all the NPCs have a reason to get involved in the conversation, so that there's a chance that the players will get a conversation going where the GM only needs to occasionally interject as the other NPCs present, or to describe the events of the world around them. All the players are likely going to want the face to succeed, but most won't want to simply handwave through the scenario; some things may emerge from it that you, as the GM, never considered, giving you extra fodder for building out the rest of the game.

Make the session a mix of roleplaying and dice-rolling; let the players face off in contested rolls, with bonuses and penalties based on their arguments. If possible, have there be a small crowd of observers to be swayed by the rhetoric of those speaking, and let the player currently doing the best get cheers and whistles from that group. By making it a competition without the players themselves being involved, you can inspire borderline roleplayers to give it a stronger showing, and push the already extravagant to new levels of characterization.

Wind the session down as if closing out an actual meeting of the type; if it's something official, having someone with a gavel or similar tool banging on the table can signal the end of things for the time being, and the players can get a bit to switch to their original characters and find out in-character how things went from the face. Finally, tell them what they've won (or lost) from the exchange, as if finishing up a regular session where combat or exploration went on, and go through your usual post-game routine. (And yes, expect this kind of session to eat up the entire game session, once people get going.)

Gie it a try; you might be surprised by the results!

Bounty Hunter Campaigns

It's Bounty Hunter Week over on SWTOR again, the MMOG that my wife and I have been playing to scratch our itch for Star Wars in the months leading up to the new movie coming out. As a result, today we're going to look at the idea of a campaign where the players all have characters that are a crew of bounty hunters.

At first glance, it might not seem like that great of an idea - there's no immediate clear story or plot to the idea of being a gang of bounty hunters, and the only thing that seems to hold them together at first glance is the love of money. That said, there are plenty of ways to tie a group together and give them a plot to chase.

First and foremost, a crew of bounty hunters should all share some common goal, decided upon by the group as a whole before you start the campaign. Perhaps they're noble-minded and only take bounties in the name of justice. Maybe there's a notorious criminal that they all have it in for, and that criminal's resources make them too hard to go after alone. Maybe bounty hunting is illegal, and they're criminals who stick together for safety in numbers.

After that, the seeds of a plot are easy; every bounty captured or killed leaves behind people who will want vengeance. Every person who puts out a bounty has their reasons, and a plot can emerge from those reasons - if the group didn't have a single foe they want to take down, the GM can easily provide them with one as more and more bounties taken in turn out to be part of an organization that works for a single figure or council.

Bounty hunters have excuses to be odd and eclectic, giving players more freedom than usual in what they might want to play; being constantly thrust into life-threatening dangers with people can form a bond strong enough to deal with the fact that one characters is a jerk who hates the culture that another one hails from, as long as he does his part of the job. Bickering and tense moments are both common for this kind of game, and it'll work best for players mature enough to distinguish between in-game tension and out-of-game tension (a tall order sometimes, I know.)

Most bounty hunts will likely take 2-3 sessions, depending on how RP-heavy your group prefers to be; the first segment will generally consist of getting the bounty contract, researching the mark, leaning on informants and greasing contacts, and getting together any special equipment the characters think they might need. In groups willing to have people run multiple characters, each player may have 2-3 characters, each one a specialist in a particular role, rotating them in based on the bounty in question.

The second segment consists of the actual action - the players close in on the mark, have to get through whatever defenses and allies they have, and then have to take them down; bounties where the mark is wanted alive are harder (and should pay better) than ones where the goal is to simply kill the mark and bring proof back. The lead-up to the fight should be tense, with attempts to circumvent security and pull Mission Impossible tasks interspersed with high-action moments as the characters are forced to blaze through defenders weapons-first, hoping their mark doesn't catch on and flee. Most marks will fight back to the best of their ability, with an eye toward trying to escape and flee. Some may surrender after a brief fight (perhaps ones where the bounty says, in no uncertain terms, that the objective is to kill them, putting the players in an uncomfortable situation).

Some might simply surrender at the start, with a smug attitude as if they know that they'll be free again soon enough. These, of course, should be ones with ties to any overarching nemesis organizations; the second time players run into one of them, there should be a moment of shocked recognition and demands to know why this person is on the loose and recovered so fast, leading to hints of the background group.

The last section of a hunt is the wind-down - the mark is captured or killed, the players have brought the captive or evidence back, and now they get to actually get their prize. Most contractors will simply pay up, understanding that angering a group of well-armed individuals with a penchant for planning and violence isn't the best plan for a long and fulfilling life. Occasionally some will try to renege, though, which leads to the question of how players handle it. Dealing with a low-life who thinks they can simply refuse to pay will turn out quite differently from a high-ranking judge or a politician's aide who refuse to turn over payment, and may lead to further hooks. After all, when someone offers them a bounty that hurts the person who stiffed them, the PCs might find a reason to say "This one's on the house."

Lastly, if the group is in a grey area of the law or operating illegally, there comes the sections in parts two and three where they have to handle legal intervention. Rarely is shooting it out with law enforcement going to be a good plan, and sometimes the marks they take alive or the heirs of the ones they kill may come after them with lawyers or their own bounty hunters seeking to take the group down; these other bounty hunters may be one-off, or they may be recurrent adversaries, perhaps angling for the same bounties as the PCs and occasionally interfering with their plans while executing an attack.

So there, then, are some reasons and ideas for a bounty hunter campaign; give it a thought, and if it seems interesting try sounding out your player group to see if it appeals to them.

Game Lessons #4 - Taking a Break

It's as unfortunate as it is inevitable - at some point, you group is going to need to take a break in the middle of the campaign, and it'll be more than a single missed week. For many groups, a break of more than 1-2 weeks can spell the end of the campaign, as people get distracted by other things to do and lose the rhythm that kept the game thumping along. Others manage to weather disruptions and come back together for years on end. While some of this can be chalked up to the differences in the players, some of it can be designed around.

First and foremost, if you know the break is coming, make sure everyone knows as soon as possible so that people can get used to the idea before it happens. If you're the GM, try to arrange things so that the game ends with a major plot event or cliffhanger at the end of the last session before the hiatus ends; given that we're a storytelling species, we crave closure, so the game will be there, unfinished and on something big, in the background for everyone until the hiatus ends.

If the hiatus isn't planned, however - a major illness or a sudden rush of life events, as examples - it can be trickier. This is one of the times where having a campaign log helps more than anything; having the log there to refer to prevents the kind of guttered-out campaigns where a break means everyone forgets the details of what's been happening. Yes, it can and does happen, no matter how much everyone is enjoying the game; the simple nature of human memory ensures it, just like it ensures that players will forget huge plot-foreshadowing tidbits the GM hands them.

Have as much of the group as possible get together on those regular meeting nights, if possible, to keep everyone in the habit of meeting to game.  Pick a different game - preferably not a RPG, because you don't want New Shiny syndrome to kick in and distract people from the game. If you can't meet in person, pick a MMOG or multiplayer game that can host multiplayer and play that. The idea is to keep gaming at the usual intervals and keep the enjoyment flowing without getting distracted from the goal of eventually resuming the original game.

If at all possible, task the most enthusiastic player with coming up with a "The Story So Far" for when the game resumes. Their enthusiasm coupled with access to the campaign log can help refresh everyone's memory of the situation to date and re-energize the group once the game resumes. If not possible, the GM should be ready to take this job on along with the rest of making sure the game continues. This can, on occasion, be useful for a GM looking for an excuse to drop in some foreshadowing that the players may have previously missed.

The ultimate goal is to tide the group over until things settle out and the campaign can resume. Some groups will never make it this far, and this must be acknowledged - the enthusiasm for the story might just not be there, people may decide they prefer to spend their time some other way, a New Shiny may bite, or any number of other things. If so, the group should at least have a wrap-up session where the GM lays out the rest of what was plotted, and any surprises they had in store for the PCs so that the players can at least have the satisfaction of knowing how things might have played out.

Returning from a hiatus has, thus far, not been a problem for my group, largely because of the steps detailed above; twice this year things have disrupted the game, the first time for over two months due to a massive and unexpected illness, and we have successfully recovered the game from the paused state. Previous games weren't so lucky, and at least part of it stems from a failure to keep the group together during the hiatus. That alone can save or destroy your game during the interlude.

Next time, I'll talk about how to deal with players leaving the group.

Magical Musing: Offensive Healing

The idea behind this post comes from a guy I know, David, who messaged me yesterday wondering about why healing spells only ever put things back, and why there weren't offensive healing spells.

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Healing magic - and indeed healing in pretty much any game - is the kind of thing that generally gets seen as a tool that puts things back to order the way they should be. This is, generally, perfectly fine; these things exist as a way for players to quickly get back into action. Sometimes, in fantastic games, they can be used offensively under the right circumstances - undead are notorious for being weak to healing spells in most systems.

The thing is, as David so aptly observed, there is literally no reason that some entity couldn't have created healing-style spells to make the body go haywire. A spell that causes a massive immune system reaction could be horrific to encounter, and it's just the kind of thing that a malevolent student of healing magic might come up with.

Likewise, in sci-fi settings with advanced medicine that involves things like nano-bandages, medical nanites embedded in the body, healing vats full of highly advanced medical goo, and the like, there's nothing to stop a person from programming something to infest amid the other nanites or reprogramming the healing vat to rebuild the person wrong.

Depending on the specific effect and the design of the spell or contaminated technology, the effects could either be rapid, painful, and outright damaging, or they could be subtle, long-lasting, and insidious. A spell that causes your bones to rapidly grow jagged segments that pull and tear at your internal structure or a nanite payload in a dart gun that triggers anaphylactic shock in the victim are both rapid and brutal examples of this kind of healing-gone-bad.

More subtle ones might function like a curse, in a magical setting - a long-term curse that causes all the cartilage in the body to slowly ossify, gradually crippling them as their skeleton fuses into an immobile mass, or one that infests them with virulent and painful forms of cancer. Science-fiction can be even worse - encoding the nanites to transform a kidney into a factory for some debilitating drug, effectively turning their body into a weapon against themselves, or inducing very specific and selective cancers or genetic diseases by reprogramming a healing vat.

Imagine the horror of a player group that encounters what first seem like zombies in a fantasy setting, only to find that their opponents scream, bleed, and rapidly heal, with regular healing magic simply making them recover faster? The poor victims of some mad alchemist-chiurgeon, rendered into cancerous masses of obedient tissue, defending him as he works on unlocking the secrets of true immortality - even as he prepares deadly weapons developed from healing potions.

Or the nightmare of a ship coated with an unsettling layer of organic gunk in space, the interior still heated and oxygenated, only to discover that the layer is the malformed and overgrown mass of flesh that was once the crew of the ship, after a trojan in the medical systems rewrote them into this horrible cancerous mass?

Surely the sort of things that nightmares are made of, that. Something to think about, the next time the GM needs an unsettling and unusual adversary for a group.

Game Lessons #3 - Party Building

The most critical part of setting up any long-term campaign is making sure the players are all on the same page, both with each other and with the GM. If the GM's campaign is using a pre-built Adventure Path, it becomes important for the players to have characters that will work for the ideas involved. You don't want to bring a paladin to a pirate campaign, and you don't want to bring a rogue who thinks poison on their knives is just fine to something like a Holy Crusade.

Likewise, as the GM, if you're building your own campaign from scratch, you don't want to have to figure out adventures in Eclipse Phase for a murderous exhuman, a singularity seeker, a biochauvanist, and an AGI Rights crusader. Even with the help of Firewall as a unifying factor, this group is going to spend more time fighting each other than any X-threats. So where does this really leave us?

It leaves us with the wonders of the group template and a character creation night. The people behind the Fear The Boot podcast made a nice example of such a thing, and even provided this lovely filled-in example of how it works. The shorthand of it is that you figure out, before anything else, what your group is going to be, to give players and GM alike a framework. This won't always work - a GM with new players or a totally new group will have to shoulder more of the burden here, and veteran players with a first-time or out-of-practice GM should be willing to put in extra effort to shore up the group.

With a pre-built campaign, the GM should either acquire or assemble a short Player's Guide for it; the idea here is to give the players a framework to provide context when they make their characters, so they know and understand the flavor of the situation. The best ones give little perks and offerings specific to the campaign, which tie in later on so that the players have a reason to take the offerings and build around them.

Without something pre-made, the GM should tell the players roughly what kind of story they're going for - "I want to run a war campaign" or "I want to make this a Mythic campaign" will work as a starting point. From there, pitch some more coherent ideas while inviting the players to pitch their own into the mix. At this point the group is just sorting raw ingredients, seeing what they have available and what they might want to make from it. "I want to play a kobold" and "I want to explore this part of this game world" are both good things to hear at this point.

This is where something more coherent should be forming; GMs, encourage your players to bounce ideas off each other. Does one player really want to be a valiant warrior? Does someone else want to play the kind of person who might have a reason to be around such a person, like a fragile spellcaster who might have grown up with the warrior, the quiet and insightful thinker to the bold heroism of the warrior? Maybe the warrior was the one who kept the town bully from picking on the spellcaster as a kid, and now they're inseparable as adults. The one who wants to play a character with a rich backstory - encourage the others to find a way to weave their backgrounds with that, to give them all a solid history together.

The GM should, at this point, be tossing ideas to the players that tie them to the specifics of the setting and the future events of the campaign. Give them options to the them to the history of the location - NPCs they may have known growing up and reasons they may like or dislike them, businesses they'd be familiar with, events they may have heard of, been inspired by, or taken part in.

By the time all is said and done, the group should already have a history together, a reason to stick together, and some ties to the setting they're in. Whether the adventure is prebuilt or home-grown, at this point the group should be knit together and embedded in the world, giving the players a sense of investment and a desire to get the ball rolling.

Game Lessons #2 - Characters and the first adventure

All GMs see this moment, most of us repeatedly - you have a group of players who are excited to get going, you've settled on a game night and time, and they've started coming up with characters. It's a great thing! Everyone's excited and ready to get going, and the adventure has yet to begin. And now, the GM realizes that the idea in their head isn't going to mesh well with the characters being assembled, or that they've stolen enough of their plot from books, TV shows, and/or movies that the players will recognize that it'll be problematic.

This is not the problem one might think. If you're a new GM, take heart, because you can get the players to do the work for you on that front - even ones completely new to RPGs, if they're sold on the role-playing and story-telling aspects. What you need to do is to get your group together with their characters as mechanically fleshed out as need be and have an introduction session. This has two purposes - one, it gives them a good reason to work together, and two, it gives you material to work with to craft the story and work them into the world.

Once you've got them together and all the pre-game silliness out of the way - it will happen, even in groups that are meeting for the first time ever - your goal is to get them to identify who they are, in-character, describe themselves, and then tell you how they know each other. Ask them flat-out to tell you this, and then start tossing suggestions into the mix. If two characters are the same race and close in age, ask if they're related or if they grew up together. If one is significantly older, ask if they helped mentor anyone else in the party.

Ask if there's anyone their characters might share in their history - one person's childhood rival might be the disciple-gone-bad of an older character (and might give you hooks to put them in as an enemy during the game). The black sheep uncle of one might have caused trouble for the family of another, giving them history that can put them at odds, if the one wants to redeem their uncle and the other wants to see justice done, or bring them together, if the relative wants to cleanse the stain on their family name instead by seeing their uncle brought in to be tried for his crimes.

Asking them this will not only tie their histories together and give them reasons to stay in a group together, it avoids the cliche of everyone meeting for the first time in a tavern and then sticking together for no clear reason. It also lets them feel out the personalities of their characters, letting them get used to their character and to one another.

This also lets you lay the seeds for the first actual adventure - if you've picked a place to start your game, ask them what they're doing in town when the campaign starts. Drop them tidbits of information - this caravan or trader just arrived, this festival is due to happen, these holy days are going to happen soon, and so on. Tell them about the town and give hints of adventure hooks - the locals are talking about strange things at night around the old keep on top of the hill that's been abandoned for years, and the town's merchants are complaining about a rash of thieves stealing things right out of their basement storage rooms.

See what catches their interest, and then build the actual adventure around that; if the mention of the old fort catches them, go look for a map of a fort and a small dungeon or crypt, and build an adventure with some restless dead. Perhaps the uncle or the rival was here and took something that disturbed the dead, or unleashed a curse on the place. If the merchants complaining and offering a reward for the thieves gets their interest, find a map of some sewers or a cave network - the thieves are actually a small tribe of goblins with trained giant rats that creep in through the underground and make off with goods, and the merchants don't know because the tribe's leader is an alchemist who glues the drainage grates back down after each theft. Maybe the goblins work for the rival, who works for the uncle, and then that leads to the fort - or vice-versa, clues in the fort lead to the goblin tribe under the town.

Decide on the rewards for each of these, as well - the town's mayor, when the players put the restless dead down and drive out the goblins, might well offer to let them have what's left of the fort and the land on it as a display of gratitude. After all, it certainly can't hurt to have some people willing to play hero have a reason to stick around and look after the town, right? The merchants, grateful when the source of theft is stopped, might offer them a discount on all their non-magical goods, offer them a direct cash reward, or even find an old piece of equipment that's been gathering dust and give it to them, unaware that it's masterwork or has a legacy.

Wrap things up by giving them an excuse to use all those mechanical bits they spent their time on, and let them get their hands dirty with a fight - a couple of lost goblins stumble across them in the middle of the town while trying to figure out how to get back under the town, panic, and try to kill them, or a few skeletons come lurching down from the fort with rusty weapons, hunting for the person who stole whatever was taken - and they fix on the character with the black sheep uncle, sensing the blood ties.

Wrap it up with their first dose of treasure and experience, set the time and date of the next game, and congratulate them on their victory over their first enemies.

Then get to work on that first real adventure, because they'll probably be looking forward to it.

Game Lessons #1

I have a mostly-weekly Pathfinder campaign that's been going on for a couple of years now; the players have made it to level 14, with a mythic tier of 7, plus some things that aren't entirely in the rules of the game. They've gone from a group that was a pair of orphans, a runaway kobold slave, and an exiled tengu to a trio of demigods who've set themselves in opposition to the Last Mother, a goddess who was supposed to birth the next world when the current one dies, only to be corrupted by the Outer Darkness when she tried to go back and see how the current world was made by walking in the timeless void. The player of the tengu left the party, and the group voted to finish the campaign before we try to add a new player.

In the Game Lessons set of posts, I'll mostly talk about the weekly sessions and how things went, although without spoiling anything. I can usually keep ahead of my players, but sometimes they throw me for a loop. There's usually something that can help other GMs - and other players - in their own game prep and design, I think, so that's what we'll focus on; some of the questions may be prompted by one of my players, who is aiming to start his own campaign soon.

This time, I'm just going to illustrate the importance of getting someone to do a campaign log, something that can be highlighted simply by including the campaign log done by one of my players for the current game. Logs done by players are pure gold for GMs - they tell you what players have figured out, what they're getting wrong, and what hints you've dropped that they've either picked up on or missed entirely.

More importantly, they serve to remind you about things you're going to forget. It doesn't matter how good your memory is, unless you're one of the unfortunate people who suffer from eidetic memory, you will forget things - names, plot hooks you threw out that people seemed to ignore until they decide to pursue them a year of real time later, when you've let the hint drop off your radar, all sorts of things that you'll want to look back at and refresh your memory about later.

Best of all, if you have someone who gets into it and provides the log in an in-character fashion, you get a window into how the game is being seen through the eyes of at least one player. If they're expressing boredom or confusion, you can take steps to fix the problem. If another player is being a problem, the stresses will show up in the journal and give you a warning that you might need to quietly take steps to mitigate it. It'll also give you a feel for whether or not you seem to be neglecting any players, which can lead to boredom and people falling out of a group.

When you're GMing, even if you take notes (I am notoriously guilty for only rarely logging things that happen in the game), it can be easy to forget to write something down if you're busy with an intense scene or while running a combat. Getting a player to log things will do wonders for your own ability to recover and recall things; even if they're completely off-target, their recounting will help trigger your memory.

So, Game Lesson #1: Logs are your friend. Players who do logs are your friend. Bribing a player to keep a log is worth the trouble. You won't regret having it available, and the odds are you can find a would-be author in your group willing to take the task on.

Campaign Mode: Supers!

There are several games on the market that can emulate the genre of superheroes and supervillains; they range from the crunch-heavy HERO System where building a character may potentially involved advanced mathematics (but you can build a character to do exactly what you want) to the relative freeform of Mutants and Masterminds or the looseness of a superhero-modified Cypher System. Why would you want to play such a game?

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Emulating comic books can be fun

Let's face it, most of us at some point wanted to be Batman, Spiderman, Black Widow, Wonder Woman, or the like when we were growing up. People in the modern world with powers well beyond the normal are just cool - and these games give us the chance to emulate that and build our own stories that can match the drama and glory of the comic books - only without the certainty that everything will work out in the end, because the story gets written as we play it.

For some, the thrill will come from rebuilding the heroes they love from comics - building Hulk or Supergirl in the system's format and enacting their adventures with familiar foes and friends. Others will want to make it completely their own, building characters that let them do what they always wished they could growing up.

The power dial has a much finer value

In most fantasy games, the power dials starts low and gets cranked up hard as a game progresses; you go from essentially a farm boy to a demigod if you follow the full progression. It can be drawn out, amped up, or adjusted, but the baseline value always goes the same way. Sci-fi tends to either be over-the-top all the way through (space opera) or solidly realistic and low-power, without too much flux between the two. Either way, the dial tends to stay put in that genre most of the time.

Superhero games can be set anywhere from street-level, where you're essentially a skilled normal person out fighting (or causing) crimes with your wits and maybe one or two low-grade special tricks, all the way up to cosmic-level superpowers where the the fate of entire star systems hinges on the outcome of phenomenal struggles between near-gods - and it has settings at every point between the two, from wise-cracking experts with a limited power set to Superman and his equally outrageously powerful foes.

It comes in a wide range of flavors, all with ample source material

Want to play a bunch of over-the-top heroes having wacky misadventures? You can pick up any Silver Age comic book and see adventure and character seeds strewn through the pages. Grim vigilantes fighting crime because the cops are corrupt and the nights are blacker than black? Iron Age comics with plenty of black leather and chains to inspire you. Mature themes rich in nuance but still able to face the world with a grin? Most modern-day comics will give you a good source to work from.

You can go from being as silly and outrageous as you like to the darkest and most grim of plots, all within the same system and sometimes even with the same characters, just tweaked by the progress of time. Compare the Adam West Batman and the Nolan Batman to see just how far apart the exact same character can be without ever changing the functional concept of the character.

From beer and pretzels to deep intrigue on a dime

Just like you can dial the power level and the flavor of the game much more handily in this genre than in most others, it also lends itself to everything from light-hearted beer-and-pretzels gameplay (I don't recommend HERO for this) to the most intrigue-laden roleplay-heavy campaign you can cook up. Superhero stories thrive on mixing up the intense action that most people think of when they hear about comics with light-hearted comedy and well-built emotional scenes, often within a single monthly issue.

Built to be modular

Most game systems make it tricky to tell stories that are either episodic, since most characters require a lot of forethought and work to build and don't really change quickly, or truly long-term, since really long-term plots require a commitment from players and GM alike that they might not be able to sustain. The superhero genre works well for either of these extremes, though, with episodic games matching up well with the frantic pacing of a comic, and the long-term able to be handled even as players drop out due to life or new people join. The original heroes retire, new ones join the team, and if someone comes back then the retired hero makes a comeback or has a protege who steps in to fill their place.

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This  post was originally slated to come out on Friday.

Campaign Mode: Colonization

The recent release of a Colonization update to the game Starbound, plus having been playing some of the Civilization games, prompted me to think about reasons why you might want to play a game about founding a colony. This was followed up by someone complaining that Starbound had dared to use the word 'colonization' for the update, and the rest followed from my bafflement.

So here's my take on why you might want to try playing a colonization or nation-building campaign.

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It's a new kind of challenge

Even stepping away from the standard adventure model where a group of would-be heroes undertake quests and looking at the wider spectrum of game types, this kind of game is unusual. You're not dealing with a villain or villain group. You're not interacting with an existing civilization (well, you might be, but more about that later) or relying on the support of a pre-existing industrial base. The player group is going into a wilderness area - possibly just untamed wilderness, in a fantasy game, but with a sci-fi game we might be talking the colonization of an entire new world. They won't have anything more than limited and infrequent support from 'back home' in the best of circumstances.

The GM should allow a larger-than-usual starting budget for players in this kind of game, with the exception of exile-style games (more on that below). This allows everyone to feel satisfied that they've prepared for things as best they can, and can let the GM see what kind of challenges they're expecting to face. For most games, groups should have at least a rough idea of what's in wait for them - climate and terrain, possibly a map of some level of detail. A fantasy game is more likely to just have a rough lay of the land than a sci-fi game, since with sci-fi the settlers can dispatch probes that travel just a little faster across the interstellar distances and get to collect years of information on climate, large-scale maps, and so on.

Everyone should get to have a hand in creating the colonists; players get to have a tie to at least some of the NPCs, linking them together with the PCs and other NPCs and giving themselves a sense of investment in the game from the get-go. At the same time, this is where the biggest challenges are going to come from. There will be unforeseen personality conflicts, challenges to authority, illnesses, and more. What will the PCs do when the settlement's only blacksmith or medic cracks under the stress and runs off into the wilderness? What about when two of the most charismatic members of the colony break off their relationship and try to rally everyone against the other, threatening to tear the settlement apart?

The land is unknown and dangerous

Even in a far-future setting, there's a limit to how much information can be gathered and how detailed it can be. Short of seeding the world with nanotechnology that effectively builds a civilization before the colonists arrive, there are going to be threats and risks from the environment of the new land. Everything from unfamiliar terrain to aggressive wildlife that doesn't fear humans can threaten people. Even if the PCs enact curfews and defensive perimeters, people will get drunk or bored and decide to go sneaking out, leaving the characters with a choice of risking the wilderness to save the missing or being accused of abandoning them to the wilds.

Even just attempting to explore and settle the area right around the initial base camp has the risk of numerous dangers - discovering that the woods that were going to be a source of raw materials for building have a cave entrance that's home to some big, hungry predator demands a quick response. The discovery that the base camp is right in the middle of a migration route for a species of large herd animals that think 'walls' are just things to be pushed through can make it necessary to quickly pack up and move, or else make an effort to drive the creatures to the side of the settlement.

Native plants can wreak havoc among attempts at farming crops. A rash of weeds with a foul odor and oil that causes an itching rash at the slightest touch can make life hell for everyone, requiring characters to think creatively to come up with solutions, and the insects that feed on those weeds may carry some unknown and nasty illness that healing magic or modern medicine doesn't have the ability to treat without spending a lot of time and effort on research - time and effort that has to be diverted away from other tasks.

Every player can find something to do

People on the Method Actor end of the scale can indulge in the interactions and politics of the settlement, from simply settling disputes and arguments to running campaigns about issues to handling setting up a government and running an election campaign. Those on the Tactician end of things can enjoy planning the layout of the settlement, arranging the defenses, organizing scouting parties, and handling the more violent disputes that crop up. Explorers have everything from an isolated wilderness to an entire planet or star system to dig into the mysteries of.

Combat hounds can find themselves in the role of law enforcement, dealing with everything from belligerent drunks to hostile wildlife - or possibly even hostile locals or later colonization efforts. The roguish types can put their inclinations to use scouting, hunting wild animals to feed everyone, and keeping tabs on malcontents around the settlement. Those who prefer to delve into lore can dig into their surroundings, either via magic or science, assembling information to help the colony out - and giving the player a chance to help build some of the lore of the area, if the GM asks them beforehand what they're looking to find, and building the answer on what their skill checks produce.

Potential conflicts on a new level

There's the chance that the colony might not be the first into an area - or not the last to arrive. If there are others there ahead of them, there's a question of whether they're natives to the area, or perhaps an earlier colony that might be better developed. There's a chance that peaceful contact might be established, arranging trade and aid between the groups, but also the distinct chance - particularly if the cultures differ - for hostilities to commence.

If the group is indigenous, there's the question of how they measure up technologically and resource-wise against the new arrivals - and which side has the deadlier diseases in their systems against the others. A sudden illness seizing the PC settlement after first contact, threatening the death of many unless the players can either devise a treatment or make peaceful contact with the natives and get a treatment from them to help minimize the impact and damage.

If they're earlier arrivals, there's a chance that they might be wildcat colonists - people who went to settle their own land illicitly, without any support or writ from the original civilization. They might even be settlers from a nation hostile to the one that the PC colony comes from - so what do the players do when disaster strikes in the form of a massive earthquake, torrential downpour that causes flooding, or even something like a meteor impact or volcanic eruption, leaving both colonies in shambles and likely to die unless they work together?

And what do they do when a later colony effort shows up, outraged to discover someone here ahead of them and more than willing to initiate hostilities with the PC colony over what they see as 'their' rightful land? Do they try to make peace and relocate, fight to the last to defend their new homes, or resort to more nefarious means to secure their safety?

A reason to be central without being heroes

If the PCs are the organizers or the chosen authority of the colony, they have a reason to be at the center of the action without the story needing to revolve directly around them. The individual stories of the other colonists can be woven around the PCs, making them central to everything that happens without any of it actually being about them.

Two families come to them to ask them to settle who has a claim to a particularly fertile stretch of land. A child goes missing, run off into the woods, and someone has to organize the search effort and go looking for them. A pack of hungry predators show up and menace outlying farms, and someone needs to go drive them off or kill them. The list goes on - once things are settled, those who relied on the PCs early on start to agitate to displace them, or talk a portion of the other colonists into abandoning the settlement and going into the wilds to make their own encampment where they can enact rules that the PCs have been denying.

Mysterious mysteries

Perhaps there are secrets hidden beneath the pristine wilderness. Someone exploring finds a crevice in a hill that leads to a building buried completely underground, the interior suggesting a whole new civilization that no one has ever heard of before. A scout finds an ancient machine of unknown purpose, which has been laying still for so long a tree has grown up through it. A lake turns out to have unnaturally regular lines, and one side turns out to be an artificially crafted dam.

Or perhaps the PCs decide to create things themselves that will one day be the mysteries of the past - a temple to the gods they left civilization to be free to worship, hidden in the deep forest, or a statue in their own honor raised in the middle of their town. The colonists who split off to do their own thing are found - or the ruins of their attempted settlement is, with no trace of the colonists who founded it.

Building a new campaign world

Finally, after a colonization campaign comes to a close, the group has created a new place to play in during later games, seeing how things play out in the future. The small town they painstakingly built becomes a metropolis, the quarry they set up becomes a lake when it runs out, or the temple they built becomes the center of a kingdom's faith. The wilderness falls back, and they can come back to the other, more familiar game types, but now they find streets named after their old characters, monuments they built still standing - or standing in neglect, in need of a new generation to revitalize them.

All of the familiar pieces of gameplay, but now every bit has had their hands involved shaping it, making the world that much more real for them as they build their next character to fit into it.

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So consider giving a colonization game a try; it might just be worth the effort!

Deus ex Machina, TPKs, and what to do when Things Go Bad

There's a certain school of GM thought that says you're not doing it 'right' if you've never had a Total Party Kill; at one point this was a dead serious and far-ranging school of thought in the hobby, and there was a certain feel that the GM and the PCs were adversarial. The GM, of course, has to self-limit, because GMs have absolute power over the game world. There's nothing stopping one from pulling the eternal joke of 'rocks fall, everyone dies' save that such a GM will quickly have no players left.

On the other extreme, there's the Monty Haul style of GMing, where players are rarely challenged by anything, treasure and experience and other rewards flow like water, and if anything really threatens the players they've probably got a god waiting in the wings to save them from doom. While it might be fun once in a while, this pretty quickly gets as boring as most of the adversarial games where the GM seriously thinks he's the foe of the players.

Neither TPKs nor Monty Haul games are much fun for extended periods; the GM generally walks a fairly narrow line balanced between mild forms of the two extremes. What's fairly easy at low levels - if a challenge is too easy, the enemies get some unexpected backup, if it's too hard the creature turns out to already have been wounded - becomes harder as characters gain in power and groups develop and refine their tactics. What was a case of a front-line fighter charging back and forth to keep opponents focused on them while the wizard lobs plinking spells from the back gives way to combats opening with earth-shattering explosions of magic and the charging warrior plowing through entire squads of enemies as they try to pile onto the character.

The GM's job becomes increasingly tricky, as most groups become finely tuned to the point that anything they're expecting will get torn apart, but things coming at them from the side will take them down like a cat pushing glass jars off a shelf. With luck, the players can recognize a situation gone bad and retreat when they need to do so, retooling their approach as needed, but sometimes that won't be the case and the GM is faced with the choice between a ridiculous Deus ex Machina event or a TPK.

I tend to lean toward permitting the TPK, on the grounds that a party being wiped out doesn't mean the story - or even the party - is actually done for. Many methods exist for letting players keep going with a few tweaks even when it seems like they've been wiped out. Enemies might stabilize them and drag them back to be tried according to the laws of their people. They might arise as the living dead, a hunger for revenge burning in their otherwise still hearts. Less cautious foes might loot them and leave, assuming that they'll bleed out, only to have the characters awaken, stripped of their gear and miles from any kind of safety, their only hope being to hunt down those who nearly killed them and reclaim their belongings.

Or you might give the players themselves an option; if there's some great conflict between good and evil, light and dark, law and chaos, or whatever, the godlike beings involved might be championing the characters and turn up after they've died to offer them a choice - remain dead and continue on to their reward, or go back to all the strife and pain of life to keep fighting. What you shouldn't do is force the choice one way or the other, in this case - and not to make a habit of it. Gods only intervene for the greatest heroes and villains, and anything less than that cheapens dramatic moments that can make stories that get told for years.

As always, GMs should err on the side of the best story; sometimes that means finding a way to save the characters, sometimes that means rolling up new characters to go get revenge for the lost, and sometimes it means recognizing that a game is done and moving on to the next campaign.

Villainous Intent: Motivations Past The Twirling Mustache

There's a certain trend in many games to have an absolutely bombastic and over the top villain in charge of the adversaries in quite a few RPGs, and it's honestly understandable. Having an outrageously evil person behind all the trouble the group faces makes the task of fighting them something everyone can get behind; it removes troublesome shades of grey and moral quandaries that most people don't want to have to deal with when they just want to escape reality for a few hours during the session.

There's nothing wrong with such an outrageously evil mastermind, either, but 'evil for the sake of evil' gets kind of silly if you take any time to step back. Even the most vile mustache-twirling caricature of villainy is going to have some greater motivation than "I will be evil to be evil!"  It might be something as simple as having been raised in a particularly ugly, brutal, and malignant faith that taught them that devotion to their god comes before all else and that acts of xenophobic hate please that god, leading them to raise armies of similar believers and unthinking horrors to march on others as an act of devotion. Or they might be convinced that the secret to immortality requires an immense sacrifice of living creatures, and perhaps they figure they can atone later once they've got eternity to do so.

Or perhaps they're more nuanced than that. Every day in the real world there are news stories of people who are convinced they're doing the right thing for the right reasons when everyone else is horrified by their acts; a man bombs a medical clinic that offers abortion services, and despite now being a murderer, arsonist, and terrorist he believes he's a hero. A priest chokes a young woman to death on a mix of water and salt in an attempt to drive out demons. A man whose racist beliefs lead him to go on a killing spree is convinced that he's defending his way of life from corruption. All these are acts of evil, with only the excuse that the perpetrator sincerely believes that they are doing the good and righteous thing to defend them.

They're still evil. They're still monsters. But you can see what motivates them and that turns them from a two-dimensional cardboard cutout with a looped recording of diabolical laughter into a realized character with motivations and drives. You can still set the players up to fight them with no regrets, but now those motivations drive what they're doing. A villain who marches on enemy nations and their own civilization with an army, intent on genocide in the name of racial purity, sees themself as a hero, even as the behave like a horrible and merciless monster. They're unalloyed evil, but their motivation makes them more complex. They may unexpectedly spare some groups or individuals, leading the players to question what's going on.

Then there's the impersonal evil - things put in place by people who just don't understand or care about the damage they're causing. The lord of a city who passes laws into effect that make life hell for people is a good villain for low-power campaigns. You can't just barge into their home, behead them, and saunter off with your job done in a case like that; such a campaign may end in an attempt to hunt the lord down to face a trial, but only after establishing things to make the aftermath better. A king might need to be deposed by a cadet branch of the royal line, more amenable to the plight of the common folk for having grown up closer to them. A priest, raised by the temple, might declare horrific edicts and need to be kidnapped and taken to live among the people their decrees hurt simply because they don't know any better.

All of these people are evil by accident, attempting to do what their job is and harming others horribly by simple fact of ignorance; given that they've never learned any different. Players can fight this kind of evil in numerous ways, all the way from organizing a rebellion down to orchestrating a kidnapping and forcing them to see the harm done by their actions, giving them a chance to correct their own actions without going straight to homicide.

While a far cry from the kind of hack-and-slash superheroic style of fighting an overpowering epic evil who is evil because evil, it allows for more complex and potentially satisfying campaigns, when, rather than simply putting down a rabid beast, players have the chance to see themselves triumph over an ultimately human kind of evil, one that they may recognize and be frustrated by in the real world - and really, that alone may provide more satisfaction and elation than any number of victories over cosmic forces of darkness.

I don't recommend it for brand-new groups with brand-new players, but it's definitely something for more experienced groups to consider for the next campaign.

Convention games, and how they can help your home game

While I missed it this year due to a confluence of events - new ownership at work, my wife suffering near-fatal illness, and the resulting financial issues of both - for several years I've attended Paizocon in Seattle and run games at it each year. I learned some useful lessons from those games that have some serious merit with home games, and I encourage everyone who goes to conventions with tabletop games to try their hand at it - either as a player or a GM, because both sides have lessons to teach. I'll be speaking solely to the GM side here.

Make sure you're rested.
This may seem like a no-brainer, but it's surprising how often we GMs will try to run games when we're in no state to do so. At Paizocon, I had one year where I tried running an adventure for Kobold Press with something of a hangover because I'd been incautious and not gotten enough rest or water. The players still had a good time, but it wasn't anywhere near my best, and I knew it the whole way through; I was lucky that I had a couple players who were on the ball and kept things going when I stumbled.

Likewise, you need your rest if you're going to run a home game. If you're not rested and healthy, your ability to run the game will suffer and your regular players will feel it. If it's a regular game, missing a session won't kill it; if it isn't, ask if anyone else has something in their pocket to run instead so that you won't feel the night was wasted.

Keep an eye on the attention level of the players.
At the 2014 Paizocon, I ran the Eclipse Phase adventure Continuity and wound up with a table of around ten people; this is pretty near my maximum limit, but it did a wonderful job of underscoring exactly how important it is to keep the players engaged with the story. The ten of them naturally split up into pairs and trios as they investigated the mystery of their environment and why things were so wrong from what they last remembered, and I had to keep jumping from group to group - sometimes even as the groups shifted in size and composition.

I got each group moving along until they hit a spot where they needed to do something among themselves, and then jumped to the group that had been idle the longest, who were almost always ready to act on what they'd worked out. At my home game, this lessons applies to each individual player - don't let anyone go too long without throwing them a line to draw them back into the action. Some players take to this more readily than others - the oratory-happy near-thespian is going to delight in the chance to give a speech and show off, while the somewhat shy person may take some regular hooking to keep active.

Don't overdo it, and don't do it if it interrupts the flow of a particular section. Use notes, text messages, and the like if you need to; letting the quiet person spot something while the others are discussing something intensely lets you keep them in the action and interested without disrupting the scene with the hand of GM Fiat.

Let the players tell part of the story.
This ties back to the last entry, on how your plot won't survive contact with the players. When a player is particularly interested in some side-line of the scenery or bit of stage-dressing fluff, run with it. A con game where the players were simply supposed to enjoy the sights of a gnomish city and then save their employer from a devil-worshiping chocolate-maker took a lengthy side route when they decided to go rescue some other people from the city's diabolists; I could easily have told them that it just wasn't covered in the plot and glossed over it, but I had a warehouse map handy and they all seemed keen on the idea, so off they went to be heroes.

In my home game, the entire story is wrapped around their characters outside of the rough original framework. One character started off with no one but another PC as a friend; over the last couple years he's discovered he has an actual family, that his memory of his childhood wasn't quite accurate, and that people aren't always either fearful or hateful of him, but respectful. Another has rejected the course fated for him, setting aside his role as a god-touched champion to fight for the people rather than the warlords. Each of them have, through their decisions, shaped the story and become woven into it. Generally, when each week rolls around, they're eager to get going, even as menace keeps stacking higher and higher as the months of game time roll past.

Play styles differ, and they differ hugely.
At a con, you can get people with wildly different play styles lumped together at a table. A method actor, a roll-playing tactician, and a rules lawyer will end up sitting together at the table, and it becomes your job as the GM to engage all three of them - and everyone else at the table, too. You'll get everyone if you run convention games often enough. You need to give the method actor some moments to engage in their character's persona, provide moments for the tactician to shine in combat or during other intense situations, and engage the rules lawyer somehow (try including a situation that requires precision knowledge of something, and ask the rules lawyer to lend a hand adjudicating it, perhaps).

The take-away here is to give you an appreciation for each style of play, to learn which ones mesh and which don't, and so help you better judge what players will work well in a given group and who you should politely ask to not come back the next time. A group that's happy to not have a map half the time will frustrate a map-happy tactician to no end, a method actor will be bored to tears in a group of gung-ho tacticians, and the rules lawyer will tear their hair out in a group that relies on the Rule of Cool.

Making sure your group is personalities and play styles that mesh well is the most important thing you can work toward as a GM before the game even begins. They'll work together, bounce ideas off each other, and manage the GM Nirvana where they're busy discussing and role-playing without you needing to intervene far more often when the group is compatible.

When they do, enjoy it.

Play different things.
No, really. Conventions are your chance to give games you like the idea of a test drie to see if they'll mesh with your gameplay style. Most players are, understandably, happy to stick with systems that they know, so that they don't waste the time making characters when the game is going to turn out to be bogged down and die an early death because the rules don't work to fit your style of game. When you find something new and exciting that you want to pitch to them, it helps to be able to present them with an after-action report from a con game to reassure them that you know the system won't turn out to be a disaster.

Different systems and their mechanics are good for producing ways of thinking that are out of the box that you can then apply to your home game, adding in the exciting and fun parts while discarding the baggage that weighed it down. It has the added advantage that if a game system sucks for you, you'll have found out without committing more than the prep time and a single slot of game time to it. Finding new favorites and discarding lemons before they get to your group outweighs almost any other benefit that con games offer.

So get out to your nearest convention and play some games. It's worth the trouble.

No Plot Survives Contact With The Players

There's a saying that generally gets recognized as a truism that says no plan survives contact with the enemy. This is equally true in RPGs, both for players (because the situation is never exactly what you expect and plan for) and for the GM, whose modified version is that no plot ever survives contact with the players. Inevitably, the presence of a few other clever and creative minds will disrupt whatever plan the GM had in mind. You get some GMs who lament this fact, complaining about how their carefully crafted masterpiece is wrecked by the players who don't respect their brilliant plans.

This is, frankly, so much bullshit. If a GM's plot is so inflexible that it can't bend to accommodate players being living, breathing people, that isn't a plot for use in RPGs; it's the plot of a novel, and the GM should go write it. Any plot should be able to bend to some degree, at least enough that if players go west instead of north, the plot turns out to be on the west road instead of the north road. Unless there's some deep metagame reason for it, the Wicked Wizard of the Northern Wastes can easily be the Wicked Wizard of the Western Marshes or whatever.

Of course, this is just the basic level of flexibility a plot needs to survive contact with players, and it's still easy for players to break it. Your plot calls for them to fight the Wicked Wizards minions to the death, but they take the first patrol captive and want to use social skills to convert them to allies, or they decide the Wicked Wizard sounds like a decent employer who might be willing to pay adventurers to adventure for him, or some similar thing that hares off at an angle from the expected course of action.

Quite a few GMs will knee-jerk respond with, "You can't do that!" Why not? Because they didn't prepare for it. Honestly, those GMs have my sympathies, but that's it. There's no reason they can't respond instead with, "Okay. I wasn't expecting that. Let's take a ten minute break while I figure out what to do." Then take those ten minutes and figure out, quickly, a rough idea of what will happen from that course of action. It doesn't have to be anything complex or deep, just solid enough to let you keep moving things forward. Maybe swap the motivations and desires of the original good guy faction over to the Wicked Wizard, or have the minions be press-ganged into service and all too willing to defect - or at least crafty enough to seem willing to defect.

Then there are those players. The ones who hear about the Wicked Wizard and decide they want their character to be the estranged child of the Wizard, when part of what you had planned was for the Wizard to be seeking a partner so as to have an heir; or they're a former minion of the Wizard turned against them, despite the fanatical loyalty of the Wizard's minions. Or the character is a former slave determined to free all of their people from any bondage to anyone other than their own species including simple loyalty.

At first glance these ideas seem like they completely wreck your plot, but they're an opportunity to make it stronger and to make it personal for the players. Why is the child of the Wizard not the heir? Does the Wizard know they exist? Were they born under the auspices of some mystical sign that makes them ill-suited to be the heir? Did the former minion turn before the Wizard perfected whatever ensures the loyalty of the remaining minions? Are they still partly hampered by an incomplete loyalty spell? Do they have family who do serve the Wizard loyally, and how will that family deal with the renegade coming home this way? What about the former slave? What if the minions don't want freed from their service? What if they try to convert the escaped slave to their cause? What if the Wizard is one of the ex-slave's race, disguised by magic?

Draw the players in like this and your story gets stronger, and gives the players a measure of authorship in it that will have them looking forward to seeing how they'll get to impact the world next. Let them write the legends of their characters and build them into your plot - not as decorations, but as the underlying structure of it.

You won't regret it.

System Design: Motivations

Alignment is a common system in many games, thanks to the design of the first RPGs; the idea of codifying a handful of concepts into a matrix to codify your actions and present an objective moral-ethical framework for the purposes of the game works well enough, as long as no one pushes on it too hard. Naturally, there's usually someone who wants to push on it too hard - most often the person trying to claim a Chaotic Neutral alignment while following any whim in their head, but sometimes the person who tries to claim a Good alignment and pass it off with subjective morality to justify whatever functionally evil act they perpetrate. Most of us are familiar with arguments about things like the question of whether or not paladins can be assassins, I think, and how ridiculous those arguments get.

Later systems either tried to simplify things - distilling alignment down to a single continuum of a character's humanity, for example, or just getting rid of the concept entirely - or tried replacing alignment with the idea of allegiances. Rather than being a Lawful Good paladin or a corrupt Lawful Evil customs official or whatever, characters were devoted to specific things. A paladin had an allegiance to his faith, a corrupt official to wealth, a vigilante to justice. The more complex versions usually had players pick one to three of these allegiances, ranked in order of importance in case of conflicts. It's a fairly good system for the most part, but it tends to remain ultimately simplistic.

Then there's my favorite system answer to the question of how to show what drives a character's ethics and morals while providing hooks for game mechanics, the Motivations from Eclipse Phase. In it, players choose three motivations that drive their character - but those motivations come in positive and negative formats. A character who has a positive motivation toward Personal Freedom is going to see their interactions with a controlling corporate organization in the light of what advances those freedoms best, while one who has a negative motivation toward Authority will interact with them with an eye toward harming the organization without worrying if it hurts others.

It works perfectly well for any game genre and provides a significant level of complexity, where players who agree one one motivation - like a positive toward a shared faith - being at odds on some other concept. One might be positive toward wealth, another positive toward asceticism, and a third negative toward the wealthy, creating a case where all of them have strong and opposed views on a single subject without any of them being able to claim that they're being 'good' or 'evil'.

This system works fairly well in almost any framework - in traditional D20-derived fantasy games, references to good, evil, law, and/or chaos simplify down to 'detect aligned/opposed motivation' - a group of goblin warriors who have a negative motivation against humans and other typical allied races would show up as 'evil' in the context of a human priest or holy warrior to detect it - but the same would be true for a goblin priest casting it in respect to humans. Holy weapons would work equally well for either side - or you could treat the weapons as having a special purpose, as per intelligent weapons, dedicated to specific motivations.

Even outside of that framework, the motivation system works magnificently, as you can hook any in-game rewards you want to players striving to fulfill their character's motivations; Eclipse Phase rewards players by letting them regain Moxie, which essentially serves as a kind of luck, and there's no reason similar ideas can't be tied elsewhere. In games with Hero Points or Action Points or the like, fulfilling a Motivation can award one or more points; in games that simply have XP, the motivations can be worth XP if actively pursued.

Combined with the depth the system encourages players to give their characters, the benefits of using motivations instead of alignment or allegiance is fairly significant. I encourage you to give it a try the next time you have a downtime game between longer campaigns to see how it works and decide if it works for you and your group.