On Social Skills for Characters in RPGs

I've seen a number of arguments for and against the presence of character social skills in tabletop RPGs, and further discussion on how they should operate in play if they're present at all. I'm personally in favor of social skills as a quantifiable advantage on one's character sheet. That is to say, I think a player should be able to buy skills and abilities for his or her character which make that character more capable through the game's mechanics of getting what he or she wants in social situations, be it through impassioned plea or conniving falsehood.

I understand the argument against letting modifiers to die rolls dictate the success or failure of social activities in play. After all, folks in this hobby tend to pride themselves on the "roleplaying" part of our hobby. We're dismissive sometimes of "those guys playing World of Warcraft" and their so-called RPG because there's no actual roleplaying required to get by in the game. Players of offline console or computer RPGs get a little closer to being able to roleplay a character and have a meaningful impact on the game's world, but they're still generally picking a canned response from a list of possibilities. A player can't have his character ask unscripted questions in the game, so the sophistication levels off at a point akin to a choose-your-own-adventure book with a dice roll happening behind the curtain. This is a sorry substitute for having the freedom to say whatever comes to mind when we roleplay at the table. Given that freedom in the tabletop medium of play, I can see why some would disdain relegating success or failure to a roll of dice.

Still, when push comes to shove, I can't let go of letting game mechanics help a PC out in social situations, and my argument in favor of this centers on escapism. One of the major reasons I play tabletop RPGs is to be able to get away from the ordinary life I live every day. For three or four hours a week, I'm not that chunky single guy with an under-utilized college degree. I'm a bold fighter or a cunning wizard with a world depending on my victory. I'm taking part in a legendary tale with the fate of the world resting on its outcome.

So we play, and we escape. We do it through a medium of words spoken around a table. We let die rolls alongside game mechanics substitute for the fact that I'm not a muscle-bound swordsman or a master of fearful arcane magic. Why should it be any different for a player who wants to escape by playing a silver-tongued seductress or charismatic general? Being socially competent is no less or more silly a thing to wish one could be than any other ability.

I think the medium is a big part of why people argue against the mechanical modifications to social activities. There's a freedom of will at stake for PCs and NPCs. If you, acting like your character, couldn't convince King Lockmoor to lend his troops to your cause, why should he illogically buckle once the player rolls the dice? I admit that it can threaten the believability of the fiction in some cases.

There are a few things I can think of that your group can do in play to limit the disconnectedness between what a player might narrate and the amount of impact the dice might claim he's had.

Let Uncomfortable Players Narrate Social Actions in 3rd Person - This is probably a less desirable solution for most games. The majority of players I've run into prefer to speak for their characters in 1st person. Still, if a less skilled player controls a face character, he or she may be more comfortable saying, "I ask him this," than he or she is stammering through the question in character. The more eloquent character's speech can be imagined as happening in the fiction.

Roll Before Speaking - This one may or may not work well depending on preferred styles of play. I think it mostly helps in situations in which the player is more charismatic than the character. If a player knows whether his or her roll has succeeded in advance, he or she can flub the execution or deliver smoothly in response. There's a degree to which this takes away free will that can grate on some players, but it does prevent the disconnect that happens when a really convincing argument goes nowhere because the dice said so. Alternately, the GM could fix the result on his or her end by making a reason for the NPC to take offense at or misunderstand something that the character said in response to a classy delivery. Basically, the GM canonizes a logical reason for the attempt to fail which likely didn't exist prior to the flubbed die roll.

Let the Die Roll Generate Hints - Couple this with rolling before speaking. If a socially-inept player with a smooth character makes a great successful roll, take a moment out-of-character as the GM to deliver some info about what would sway the NPC more. If a player is told, "The king is a known friend of the dwarven lord you defended earlier. If you can show some evidence that you're also that lord's friend, he'll be more likely to budge," that player will be primed to provide sensible narration.

There's a good reason that people are divided on the issue of using social skills in RPGs. The amount of reliance on die rolls and modifiers in social situations can have a great impact on how entertaining and immersive the resulting fiction is. While I understand that, I still think it's a greater shame to limit the breadth of escapism by forcing players to come to the table with a particular competency just to play a character archetype effectively. A little extra effort can help curb inconsistencies in narration, and I think it's worth the effort to let a player play his or her dream character.

Links! (Brought to you by writer's block)

I haven't been able to produce a quality blog post in the last few days, so in the interest of not just leaving everything hanging, I thought I'd leave a few links to RPG related sites.

The RPG Bloggers Network - A great consolidated feed of RPG blogs. I'll be applying to join the network in a month or two when I feel I have a reasonable backlog of content. Not a day goes by that I don't find an interesting read on the network.

Yaruki Zero Games - Yaruki Zero's Ewen Cluney makes RPGs with inspiration from anime, manga, and video games. As a big fan of Japanese entertainment, and a game design hobbyist trying to figure out how to make RPGs feel more like anime, I look to his work for ideas now and then. I'm also looking forward to playtesting a few of his games over Skype with him soon.

Fear the Boot - The fine folks at Fear the Boot produce a great podcast about RPGs. They also have a blog, message board, and yearly gaming convention in my area which I'll be attending for the first time this March. The podcast is the main attraction, and though it will take you a while to pick up on all of the inside jokes if you're new, it's a great listen every week.

I aim to have a more substantial post up on Saturday. See you then!

New Dice!

I went to my local game store on Tuesday to pick up some new dice. The Fantasy Shop is a St. Louis game and comic chain with four locations scattered throughout the greater metro area, and all of my experiences with their stores and staff have been wonderful. The St. Charles location in particular is a solid place to meet gamers since it has a great deal of in-store play space, but it's also the furthest from where I live, so I dropped in on their South St. Louis location for this particular errand.

So why new dice? I mostly picked them up because I'm obsessing over a few random systems these days and want to be able to play them at a moment's notice should the craving arise. The new set of assorted polyhedrals is my sixth set to be added to my "regular service" dice bag, and provides me enough dice to provide a pool of every variety needed to play the free RPG Risus using the game's "Funky Dice" advanced option. I wanted to be able to have all of the dice needed to play in the center of the table so that players could grab and return them as needed. I'm not going to go out and get enough sets that people could roll all of the dice needed to double-pump a rank (6) cliche though. That would just be ridiculous. Do yourself a favor though and nab the free PDF of Risus at the link above. If you're ever in the mood to, "Just play something already!" it will likely do the trick.

The purple and black swirled d6 set will join my green and silver swirled set to supply more than enough dice for a group to play Starblazer Adventures. The game is a modified version of Evil Hat's Fate system that uses a d6 minus d6 mechanic. Now that I have two sets of standard-sized d6s in different colors, I can easily supply the table for play.

Speaking of dice, consider leaving a polyhedral set in a conspicuous location in your home or on your desk at work. People who have never played RPGs before will wonder what in the world they're for, giving you an opportunity to introduce them to your hobby, and people who have played before will likely excitedly come out of the woodwork to strike up a chat with you. It's a win-win situation!

The Merits of the Short Campaign

Nearly every RPG campaign I've played in started with no prearranged endpoint. I'm not referring to a prearranged ending for the story regardless of character actions mind you, but rather a limit to the number of sessions or maybe a conditional ending such as, "This campaign will end when the outcome of the Nightmare War is decided." In my experience, most GMs tend to start a game with the intention of playing off into the distant future, telling grand tale after grand tale perhaps for years with the same characters in the same world.

And why shouldn't people play RPGs that way? Playing the same characters week after week is fun after all, and getting to play around in an ever-growing continuous story is one of the major selling points of a lot of different games. A D&D 4e campaign that goes from level 1 to 30 is structured by design to play for about 75 to 90 sessions lasting three to four hours each. (That comes to a minimum of 225 hours of play. Chew on that for a minute...) After you accommodate for missed sessions, holidays, and the like that's a campaign that will last for over two years even if played weekly. There are a lot of monsters to slay and treasures to find in that span. The game and its supplements have scads of content just waiting to be experienced.

Unfortunately, the real downer is that often it seems that waiting is the only thing that much of the content gets to do. The fact of the matter is that life gets in the way of the grand tales we want to tell, and before you know it a player has to move away or develops a scheduling conflict with the game. Next thing you know, either you can't find a time that everyone can meet, or you find yourself rushing your tale to a dissatisfying close full of loose ends just to ensure that the players all got to see it through.

I've personally grown tired of the sprawling campaign, both as a GM and a player. It's a structure that fails to fulfill its promises more often than not. I encourage you to consider the benefits of shorter campaigns. Until further notice, I've pledged to cap all of my future campaigns at 13 sessions. That's a span that, if played weekly without interruption, will last approximately one season. The most obvious benefit for this in my opinion is that it's a realistic length for people with lives and jobs to commit to, but it has other benefits too.

Deliberate Story Pacing - When you as a GM know that you have a certain number of sessions to tell the characters' stories, you'll have a pretty good idea of when to stop introducing new plot elements and start tying up loose ends.

A Taste of Advancement - Advancement intervals for PCs vary from game to game, but if we use the D&D 4e assumption of character advancement every two to three sessions, a 13 session campaign will certainly have space for at least four advancements. It's nowhere near the total breadth of the advancement available in most games, but it lets you tell a story across a pretty constant power level while still allowing for character growth. A span of 13 sessions also works well for games that have no growth at all like Spirit of the Century, for example.

Excuse to Rotate Games and GMs - Ever wanted to try out a new system, but found your gaming group smack in the middle of a sprawling campaign? If you stick to shorter campaign intervals, you can try new products and GMs more often. It will help keep the games fresh and will curb GM burnout.

The greatest campaign I've ever run (and the only one that I've ever GMed to the story's completion without something falling apart) lasted exactly eight sessions. It was a d20 Modern campaign in which all of the players played themselves on our college's campus overrun with zombies and other undead. At the end, all of the players were excited to have conquered the undead hordes, and they celebrated their victory by playing out a reel of "blooper footage" that they pictured playing during the credits of the imagined movie of their successful campaign. As I sat back and watched them celebrate the end of play, I considered that moment to be the finest "thank you" I've ever received for GMing. Don't rob yourself of the joy of a well-finished story, because there's more to RPGs than the journey.

Reiterate This!

One mistake I see from a lot of GMs (and one that I've been guilty of before) is failing to reuse NPCs and places from previous adventures. This is a very easy mistake to make in the epic fantasy genre, which sees a lot of play. When you imagine an epic fantasy journey, it might sprawl over several continents, down into underground passages, and across multiple planes of reality. That said, it seems natural to leave behind the people you know from one place as you go to the next. After all, most of them are likely not adventurers and would be ill-suited to life on the road or in the abyss.

Fight the urge to leave people and places that the PCs know behind! Even in the limitations of a fantastic and sprawling journey there are still ways to keep the familiar around. Make sure to include an NPC now and then that's as capable or mobile as the PCs. A traveling merchant can reappear anywhere halfway reasonable (and if your group appreciates occasional silliness, the occasional unreasonable extra-planar location as well), and a lone wolf bounty hunter, while generally unwelcome in a cooperative party structure, has an excuse to show anywhere adventuring types might go as well.

Revisiting old locales is a snap as well. Hostile locations can be repopulated and modified by their new stronger inhabitants. Peaceful places can invite heroic adventurers back for a celebration on the anniversary of the region's liberation from the grip of a tyrannical warlord, which provides opportunities to revisit NPCs that aren't filled with wanderlust.

Revisiting past content has a number of benefits for both the GM and the players.

PCs can form relational identities - Whether players have come to the table with pages of history for their characters or just a sheet of numbers and gear, relationships with NPCs can provide opportunities to flesh out PC personalities. If a rescued orphan grows attached to a PC, for example, revisiting that NPC can be a tool for exploring the character's identity. What does the PC advise when the kid says he has a crush on the baker's daughter? How does the PC respond when he hears that the orphaned kid has been caught stealing twice since his last visit? Scenes like this forge a character's identity by revealing his opinions to the audience (the other players and GM).

Familiar context increases immersion - How many times has a player asked a GM at the beginning of a campaign, "Would my dude know this?" about one thing or another? Well, when you revisit old content, players know exactly what their "dude" would know about a place or person, because they built their familiarity with the content through the experience of play. It becomes easier for the PCs to stay in-character when they don't have to get context for their existence every few minutes.

GMs get more mileage out of great content - If you've taken the time to craft an intriguing locale or memorable NPC, shouldn't you get as much out of that effort as you can? It's easy to get wrapped up in showing the players the next new thing, but if you have any sort of life outside of the game, revisiting past content is a shortcut you shouldn't pass up. Any time you see the players have a strong emotional reaction to a piece of content, make a note that it would be worth revisiting.

Increased impact from the unfamiliar - If everything the PCs run into is always new, the impact of newness will slowly drift away. New becomes par for the course, and that's definitely not a good place for your game to be. Let your players take a break from the new now and then. It can get exhausting to craft new images in your imagination constantly for several hours straight. After some time spent with classic content, newness will recover the freshness and excitement that it should carry.

So next time you're strapped for game ideas as a GM, go back to your notes (or memories if you don't keep notes) and play your "Greatest Hits" album to your players. They'll enjoy the blast from the past and they'll remember how far their characters have come.

Now Playing: Savage Worlds

The only game I'm participating in right now is a Savage Worlds game in the D&D campaign setting of Eberron. The group is playing over Skype and without any miniatures or maps, so perhaps I'm not getting the as-it-was-intended SW, but so far, I'm not finding it to be the incredible system that many on the internet claimed it to be. I'm not saying that people who dig the system are having bad/wrong fun, but rather that my personal quirks and tastes aren't leaving me with a net-positive opinion. I'm reluctant to call this post a review even though I'll be judging the game in some capacity. Think of this more as a description of the system through my eyes and expectations from the player perspective.

PROS

Simple, Frequent Advancement - When you advance in SW, you do so in a discrete chunk of capability. Characters earn about two experience points per session, and gain one advance for every five points. An advance is usually a boost to a skill or two or a new ability (called an edge), and you're free to shop the whole system for anything that your character meets the prerequisites to get. I'm leaving out a few additional nuances to it, but that's it for the most part. There's no going over your entire sheet to adjust all of the math upward at once. You just pick and go.

Meaningful Character Features - Every widget you can stick on your character is a big thing. This is a nice change from D&D and similar games where you might pick a feat that gives a +1 to a die roll in a specific circumstance. In SW, an advance you pick up might let you do something like attack all adjacent foes at once, or cast a new spell.

Accessible Price Point - Not enough good can be said for having a printed, full-color core rulebook available at a $10 price point. Even the most casual players can afford to have the rules on-hand.

CONS

Spell Points - I'm playing a bard in the game, and finding the spell point system to be a downer. Spell point systems in general leave a bad taste in my mouth because when they're done like they are in SW, they come off as saying, "You may have this much fun before you lose potency."

Lethality - I've heard people say that the lethality of SW depends a lot on the GM, but for what I've played, it seems like characters can be driven from not-a-scratch to death's door in the space of one rotten round. I tend to prefer a game where the characters have more time to intervene over the course of their downward plunge when they're ganged up on.

Death Spiral - The death spiral in SW feels harsh. It takes four wounds to drop a character, and each wound along the way applies a -1 to all die rolls. This seems to have the power to really tip the momentum of the fight quickly, particularly if one side makes a solid alpha strike on the other.

Low Default Starting Power Level - The game isn't kidding when it calls starting characters "Novices." Before you take disadvantages, all of your five primary attributes balance to the human average and you only have an edge if you're a human. (So for every above average one you have, you need a below average attribute.) Now this could easily be remedied by starting at Seasoned (four advances in) or Veteran (eight advances in) ranks, but because the game pitches starting at Novice as the default, I'd speculate that's where most GMs start their games. It's where my GM started ours, and I'm finding a disconnect between the starting power level of a D&D character that I'm expecting to emulate and the SW power level that I actually have.

Disadvantage System Feels Weak - Players can take disadvantages for their characters to gain more resources for character creation, but they're inconsistent in their potency. Some are strictly qualitative while others affect the game math. For example, Heroic (your character can't say no to people in need) has the same value as One Arm (You're missing an arm. -4 to all checks normally requiring two hands). The game advises giving bennies (re-roll tokens) to characters who play their hindrances well, but if your character changes legitimately through play, he might still be stuck with a personality based hindrance until he buys it off somehow (which, to my knowledge, isn't an option in the core rules). Furthermore, the impact of personality hindrances depends on the GM regularly forcing the character into a situation where his quirk causes trouble to make the hindrance actually function as intended.

All of the above said, I reiterate that I play over the internet and without miniatures for combat, which may improve the experience, but the bulk of my distaste for the system is seated factors seemingly not dependent on those missing pieces.

D&D 4e: The Problem with Powers

I'd like to start this post by saying that I really like D&D 4e. It is, without a doubt, a fun game to play, and I regularly dream up characters for it that never see the table because its flavor inspires me with more ideas than I ever have time to play.

That said, after thinking about powers for a while, I can finally put my finger on what bothers me about them. Powers turn characters into broken records.

When I watch a martial arts movie, one thing I hope for is a great deal of variety in fight scenes. I want to see the heroes and villains mixing it up in creative ways throughout the film. High attacks, low attacks, kicks, punches, thrown props, and terrain exploitation all sensitive to the context of the environment and the opponent generate excitement and maintain audience attention.

Another thing I want out of fight scenes is growing tension as the fight goes on. The fighters start by throwing basic kicks, punches, or weapon swings. Finding themselves evenly matched, they start to get creative by taking advantage of high ground or causing distractions to gain the upper hand. Perhaps they also drive the fight toward a balcony or ledge, each hoping for an opportunity to knock the other off of it in a high-stakes gamble for a quick victory. These things help to keep an audience invested in the scene as the tension grows.

The player-logic that drives the use of powers in D&D 4e sabotages both of these goals during in-game fights. Encounter powers don't look clever or creative when they're used in every single fight. Take the Rogue encounter power "Sand in the Eyes." When you use it, you cast sand into your enemy's eyes, blinding him. You see this happen in movie fight scenes often enough that it's easy to imagine, but you don't see it again and again and again in every fight scene of a single movie. You see it once, and it's clever. You see it repeatedly and the audience says, "That's nice. What's new?" This wouldn't be too problematic if there were any kind of incentive to not use every one of your encounter powers in every encounter, but players understand that when they have a resource usable once per encounter, for any encounter in which they don't use that resource, they've been inefficient with their power.

This leads into sabotage of the second good fight scene rule. Since players don't want to waste a resource that they've cared to put on their sheets, they tend to front load the fight with per encounter resources to ensure that they're spent in a fight. It's worse in fights that get recognized as "boss fights," because then they front load the fight with daily powers only to end up feeling like lumberjacks in the second half of a fight as they chip away at remaining hit points.

I'm not running a D&D 4e campaign right now, but I've considered testing out a house rule to remedy this in the future. This rule comes in two pretty simple parts, and would apply to both PCs and NPCs.

(For NPCs, encounter powers are powers that have any sort of conditional recharge. Daily powers would be those that can never be used more than once per fight.)

-Any round in which you expend neither encounter nor daily resources, you gain a +1 to attack rolls. This accumulates on itself in consecutive rounds if you continue to fulfill the condition.

-Any round in which you expend at least one daily resource, the bonus to attack rolls from this mechanic decays by 1 (to a minimum of 0).

In my experience, players love bonuses to attack rolls, and absolutely hate missing with limited powers. I think this would provide enough incentive to change behavior and create more exciting and tense fights as players have to weigh the benefits of cutting loose early with the drawbacks of missing out on increased accuracy.

Like Button: Talent Trees

There was a period of time before D&D 4e came out during which it was rumored that WotC's Star Wars: Saga Edition RPG could be considered a preview of the design philosophy for D&D 4e. Upon hearing that news, I drove out to my local book store to page through the game and ended up purchasing it instead of perusing. One of the things that I really liked as I read the SW:SE rules were the talent trees. I remembered being pleased with how talent trees worked in d20 Modern, and the ones in SW:SE were clever and evocative.

I see several benefits in the use of talent trees for character building and progression in RPGs.

They're great for organization - Want your character to be a master of deception? Page over to the Con-Man talent tree and take a look. Odds are the talents that you need are all in one tree. Where a character class in an RPG tends to be broad and general, a talent tree (which might be a component of a character class) tends to contain all of the qualitative character widgets needed to make a character perform in a particular fashion. It's one-stop shopping!

Prerequisites create a sense of progression in play - Imagine an "Airborne" talent tree consisting of spells that get the caster or target into the sky. Maybe the first talent is Great Leap, letting the caster enhance natural jumping abilities. That could be a prerequisite for Levitate, which could in turn be a prerequisite for Flight, which could be a prerequisite for Flight Mastery. A structure like this produces a history of increasing mastery over flight in play, and the player can look back on his or her character's achievement with a satisfying sense of knowing where current abilities came from. Contrast this with choosing a Flight spell at level X. Suddenly, the character can fly in play. It adds little to nothing to the continuing story.

They give players benchmarks for power in the setting - This point assumes that antagonists are constructed using a system at least a bit similar to the one for PCs, but even if that isn't the case, when a four-armed sword-wielding horror shows up to mince the characters, the fact that it's making four attacks each round gives the players something to compare their characters' power levels to. They can glance at a Dual Wielding talent tree for example and see when a PC would have a comparable level of power, and be impressed or relieved accordingly.

I've thought from time to time about writing my own RPG. If I were aiming for a moderate to high level of rules complexity, I would likely end up using talent trees as a basis for PC progression.