ToC - Drives. Free will, again?

I just thought of something.

You know that Dirve your character has in Trail of Cthulhu? It's there to give the Keeper something to point to and prod you with to go head first into danger. Right? According to the rules you take a penalty to enforce your free will as a player, and not act in line with the character psychology you have on your sheet.

That sounds a lot like things I was pondering in my posts about free will. Sure, it does not involve NPCs or other PCs influencing your PC, but the Keeper. Interesting territory, indeed.

I don't think I have seen anyone comment upon them in that light. In my CoC games I have not yet remembered to use them! Interesting.

A Traveller rule for general empowerment and player satisfaction

Even though I hate the idea of a "balanced" party, there are some value to having game system support for everyone getting involved. Today I noticed, reading my new shiny rulebook from Mongoose, that the latest incarnation of Traveller have a solution for that as well.

I guess everyone have heard it said, or something to that effect, the dread question of who wants to play that class nobody else wants. Usually the cleric. If we leave the question aside if the cleric is a bad/boring class or not, I think the phenomenon is till interesting. Apparently many think a party "needs" a thief/cleric/whatnot to be "balanced" or competitive.

So, why? What can be done about it? Should something be done?

Well. There have been many arguments about the folly of trying to balance the rpg experience for maximum "fun", and I think we are all kind of tired of that. So, just let us assume that the idea is here to stay and maybe there are something to be learned from it.

In Trail of Cthulhu the idea is that since it is a game about investigation, all the skills that can be used for investigation should be covered by the party. The way it is done is basically that the number of points available to by skills for is dependent on the amount of players. You will have enough points to cover all the skills, by design. That is one way of doing it, and it might make sense for a skill based system.

In Traveller, the Mongoose incarnation thereof, they have something that I feel might be of slightly greater utility. After character generation, you get a "skill package", which is a set of skills bundled by the kind of campaign you'll play. Everyone gets to pick a skill, then everyone gets a second one, and so on until all are picked. That way, if you are going to do a trader campaign the basic foundation is there.

Some might say that in a sandbox, no such thing should be allowed. Everything should be shaped by the players, and having a skill package thrust upon the players by a campaign theme is hearing the steam whistle in the distance. Personally I think one reason why I have not managed to get any of my Traveller games off the ground is that we have not been explicit enough about what kind of campaign we have wanted, and thus we have gotten mismatched expectations and player characters. Bringing it out into the open like that, maybe the players can pick a campaign theme? Maybe the referee does not have a say in it at all, if you are that adverse to GM led story gaming? I think that is stupid, but what the heck.

Apart from that idea of having everyone on the same page, can it be used for something else? Well, I know one reason many people hate random character generation is that they want to be competent. They will feel bored or lost if their character does not have a guaranteed time in the spot light. Maybe having such a Skill Package is a way to soften the harsh experience of a pure random generation of characters? Whatever happens, those weird stats you got wont handicap you that much, since you are sure to have at least one or two picks of "good" skills? I think it is an interesting option.

Now let's tackle the cleric issue.

If the reason it is felt that there has to be a cleric in the party, maybe that can be alleviated by something like Skill Packages? Maybe it will even stack with previously picked skills, making sure that the party not only have the skills needed, but also emphasize the abilities of those who already picked the "party support" skills. That way those would be sure to shine. In the case of a class based instead of a skill based system, it might be tougher to jam in additional abilities. If you don't want to soften up the walls between classes and just and the "needed" abilities outright, consider making the Skill Package be mundane and magical items to choose from! If they have charges, and limited charges to boot, the "pure" game will reassert itself when those charges have run out, and hopefully the players have adapted to their character abilities and can use those to best effect.

Maybe I'm kicking in open doors, but I felt there was a tool to be used in general in that little paragraph in the latest incarnation of the rpg workhorse, Traveller. New uses for old tools, eh?

What's your attitude toward your character?

Having just read, and chuckled a bit about, the latest post on Grognardia about silly names, I think back on my attitude towards my own characters. How do you approach the creation of a new being in the imaginary worlds? Do you toss some dice and tack on a jokey name and then rush head first unto glory and death? An experience with one of the CD based products from the late TSR illustrates my attitude well.

Our local game club had started regular gatherings, and someone had just purchased some kind of introductory set of D&D. He wanted to test it on us who were familiar with the hobby before using it to introduce others to the hobby. This was back in those days during the nineties when TSR experimented wildly with new package formats and loosing money on all of them. The idea with a CD with examples of player interaction and sound effects to play when entering specific rooms is an intriguing one. Done well it could show how a typical session sound like, and add an extra element to build atmosphere around the table. Starting our test run of this product we listened through the initial explanations of our character cards and the the set up of the game. That part was ok but the next part was where it broke down. In the example session the voice actors were sounding like total dorks, which was unfortunately but something which we could endure. What we couldn't endure without giggling, or even breaking out the big guffaw, was that these people were referring to the other players by their role in the party! Hearing someone without any acting ability yell "Thief, help me out over here!" just sounded too silly to us.

Silly, yes. That's the connection to James post I mentioned in the beginning. Anything that makes you and your fellow players take the game seriously, i.e. a serious intent to have fun an no one else's expense, works fine. But, something that signals to everyone else around the table that they don't care and might as well be playing a video game or watch tv, that's not fine. Hearing people talk about their character as a game piece, "Fighter, you have a higher STR score than my hobbit. Help us lift this thing!", grates in my ears. Among most players I've met, talking in the first person and referring to your character as "me" and the other characters by their name, is the way to roleplay. Once there was a poll on one of the forums where old schoolers lurk, and it became clear the most of the crowd there didn't play the game that way. I have no idea of why the majority of gamers in Sweden, where I grew up and learned to play, seem to do the immersion thing. Is it more common among gamers in North America to not do the immersion method of roleplaying? Is it just old school or is that just the habit of generally conservative gamers? I don't know.

In the end we decided that the introductory box of D&D was not to be recommended. We felt it taught bad habits and wasn't all that great as a tutorial anyway. Now, many years later I realize that I think that even though I like it better when the player make some effort to name their character "seriously", the deal breaker for me is if they treat the character as a real person. If they try to make those numbers come alive by at least refer to them as "me" when doing actions, I can live with some silliness.

I'll end with a personal memory of a silly name, and a hint. One time when we where playing WHFRP, our game master had to invent a name on the fly for a bouncer. He became Bruno (he might have based it on a relative or picked it off a list, for all I know). This is not a silly name as such, but his way of portraying this brute was nothing but. After that, every time we encountered a bouncer or a city guard, we asked "Is it a Bruno"? Needless to say, that name was never used for anything serious in that group again. The hint? When running a game, always have a list of names beside you. If you can rattle of a name without hesitating, and without resorting to blurting out something less than inspired, your players might treat that NPC as someone real. Having a name does a lot to make that encounter feel like you meet someone real.