The Black Campbell

I searched up quotes on distance with the emotion tag for week 5 and got 171 results on one webpage alone that mostly were some schmaltzy variant on “distance makes the heart grow fonder…” I’ve always found that only the case for those relatives whose absence makes them less onerous. Distance in relationships, from what I’ve seen, tends to diminish fondness. We’ve all heard the “Dear John” letter stories, and one of the guys in my unit in Bosnia received the a “Dear John” video — of her getting it on with her new boy toy. Possibly the most literal “f*** you” video you could get.

I’ve used distance as a theme in several games. I have a fondness for space opera, so the distance of light years is often one of the burdens that character face, if they have loved ones at home. It’s been a theme for one of the characters highlighted a few times in this year’s RPG a Day: the playboy Starfleet officer whose distance from his wife has led him to wander, creating more than a few problems for him in the course of the campaign.

Emotional distance is another factor that you sometimes see in a character — often an element of the player’s detachment (or lack of interest) in the game. During a Space: 1889 game in the ‘90s, I had a player who created a German inventor that was maximized for intelligence and strength. He either created stuff or beating things up. That was the extent of the character, such as it was. During the storylines, he was frequently “in his cabin” or room, inventing. Most of the time, he willingly sidelined himself until the fights happened. In his defense, he was an old school grognard for whom killing the monster and leveling was the extent of character development. He once ran a Shadowrun campaign where — as the GM, he would periodically go to grab and drink or hit the bathroom…then not show up for quite a while. He’s be found distracted by something and forgot he had people over. My understanding is he’s got dementia, now. That said, I’ve encountered this a few times, over the years.

A character with distance from each other is a good starting point or story arc. Maybe the character was traumatized by something in their past — or an adventure where something happened — and they are trying to come to grips with it by distancing themselves. We had an arc like this for a doctor character in an Alien campaign. He had gone full alcoholic over the loss of his wife, and over the course of the campaign, their android slowly coaxed him back to health until he was part of the crew, once more.

There is another aspect to distance — distance in an encounter. As a sergeant once told me, “Distance is time. Time is opportunity.” On the battlefield, distance to the enemy allows for the opportunity to maneuver, to hide and set up an ambush, to choose to close the gap if you are in strength, or withdraw if you are not. Many RPG scenarios eventually involve a fight. There are a few systems like Lex Arcana, that do a good job of showing this idea — that the ranged fighters get to go first, before the melee-ranged ones do. Even in D&D, unless you have a ranged weapon, the opposition at distance has the advantage. They can maneuver, they can more effectively withdraw, or if they have ranged weapons and you don’t…well, it’s gonna be an interesting day.

Taking away that opportunity is a center point of some martial arts forms. A trained boxer is a pretty effective opponent if they can utilize their strength; grappling forms stress getting in close and limiting that advantage. In a gross motor attack like a haymaker, getting inside the swing to block while delivering a shot to the jaw, neck, eyes can be very effective, as the aggressor is still engaged in their attack. 

Putting together a plan of attack in an RPG scenario isn’t much different — get the artillery out of range of the opposition and loosen them up from safety, while the powerhouses maneuver to contact. This has been a popular doctrine since the longbow won Agincourt. A good example of this was a recent D&D game where our magic user kept their distance with a decent melee type to guard, while our heavy hitter moved to engage the bad guys (orcs, in this case) at contact range. However, our trump card was our centaur, who would use maneuver as a hit & run tactic — charging the enemy, but not stopping to stay in the fight. Close, hit, disengage and get out of the way of the magic artillery. Let the other powerhouse keep the enemy busy, while the centaur swung around and did it again. It was stunningly effective because the enemy was armed solely with short range slings and hand weapons. Could the centaur, with its high hit points, have stayed in the fight? Yes, but every disengage gave the opportunity to see the battle and reengage where it was most effective. Distance is time. Time is opportunity.

A few years ago, I played in an Alien game at GenCon. The GM had run the same scenario four times. Two TPKs, and another with a sole survivor. I played the annoying corporal who was the rival to the sergeant. During play, we had to raid a secret base working with — what else? — the “xenomorph”. Instead of just rushing in, we used the doctrine we were taught when I was in the military. Soften up the long range defenses to open a hole to where we could get into the facility. Every time we saw a critter, we engaged from distance, if possible. As soon as we had a notion of what was going on, our plan was to retreat in good order and let the aliens come to us. However, using bounding overwatch and other techniques, we were able to identify and eliminate the bugs at the distance we chose. Distance was opportunity. In the end, only one of the characters died due to a series of crappy rolls — killed by probability, not mistake. We successfully completed the mission, killed all the opposition, and withdrew for evac. It was the only successful completion of the scenario he had for the entire con. (It was also an excellently run game with players who were totally invested by the end.)

So, distance…it’s a good thing. Unless it isn’t.

Sure, it can mean money or wealth, but here we’re talking about luck, fate, Fortuna. It’s part and parcel of roleplaying games everytime you roll dice. (Yeah, there’s Amber… hush.) Add ‘em, look for a certain number or symbol for “success”, look for matches — the dice giveth, and the dice taketh away. “Probability is like gravity,” says Crockett in Miami Vice (the meh movie, not the fantastic [first two seasons] television show.) Like gravity, it was inescapable. 

Dice aren’t the only way to add probability into the equation. Some LARPers use rock-paper-scissors. In Castle Falkenstein, they used playing cards as the randomizer, and having a hand meant having options and being able to plan your actions. (It was pretty innovative, and with some manhandling for combat, it worked very well.) You can use d6s like normal board games. You can use d20s, or other polyhedrals, or combinations, looking to create differing probability curves. Outside of the stats for a character, probability — fortune — is the life’s blood of an RPG.

Over the years, our gaming table has seen incredibly lucky rolls — the kind that waste your big bad in a shot or allow the characters to mess up all of your meticulous planning. (As with combat, no plan survives contact with your players.) We’ve also seen improbable die rolls where 32d6 led to not one single 6 (in this case, Alien — I think their fancy dice aren’t well balanced, folks.) We’ve also seen six — count ‘em, six 100s come up in a critical scene where a player’s highly-skilled fighter pilot was attempting to dodge a missile in James Bond: 007, only to have his plane lose an engine and go into a flat spin. At each altitude level, he had a roughly 60ish percent chance of recovery — that’s pretty good. Rolls 100 each time — six 100s in a row. Finally, he punches out of the craft — 100. He gets killed by the tail of his wildly spinning craft.

‘cause probability is like gravity — it’s inevitable.

What’s a good moment of fortune — good or bad for your games?

Heroes in roleplaying games come up against a number of seemingly insurmountable problems, dragons not the least of them. Central to most play is the idea of the character that doesn’t just fold like a lawn chair when the going gets tough. They don’t talk about their feelings while the universe is at stake (and we have to fill 5 more minutes of screen time) like some of the truly terrible movies and TV shows that hit the airwaves in the last decade or so. Save the galaxy, talk about your hopes and dreams after.

One of my current favorite game systems — Outgunned! and Outgunned Adventure — takes this literally with the use of grit as their damage rating for characters. Mental, physical, emotional — it all comes out of your grit stat. Every character has 12 points. At certain points, in addition to losing grit you also take conditions like “You Look Hurt” or “You Look Embarrassed”, etc. The conditions affect the number of die you roll in a pool (looking for matches, like Yahtzee.) At 12 points of grit, you are taken out, broken — but not necessarily dead.

There are several new systems that use a similar “hit point” plus “condition” sort of damage mechanic to cover not just physical, but emotional, psychic. or other kinds of damage. It makes these systems more flexible, but also tends to dilute the impact of “injury” in old school gamer minds. In Star Trek Adventures, stress is the mechanic — you have a certain amount to avoid being taken out/broken. Even at 0 stress, it doesn’t necessarily mean death; you’re just out of the action. However, injuries can be added as traits, with increase difficulty to actions taken.

In Dune: Adventures in the Imperium(another 2d20 system), the character takes damage equal to their most appropriate skill before they are taken out. For example, a duel is an extended task (basically a series of actions, as in any RPG fight…just badly explained.) The PC has, say, a Battle of 7 (pretty good!), so they will have to take 7 points of “battle” to be taken out. Even then, they can choose to take a complication and spend a momentum or threat point to stay in the fight. But another and they’re done. In social conflict, they might take the hit on their Discipline or Understanding to represent being embarrassed, or fooled by an opponent. 

Alien and Blade Runner split the baby with damage for physical or mental damage, with critical hits that do some form of disadvantage to their die tests. However, the need to model emotional or mental damage shows a more mature approach to the sorts of things that hurt a character — and which require grit.

This seemed a good day to step away from the RPGs for a moment and open this up to anyone reading. What is a good charity for people to give to and why?

Starting with one that is close to home — Operation Tabletop looks to help prevent suicide by giving vets “a sense of connection and community”.

Stop Soldier Suicide is the only national nonprofit organization devoted entirely to combating suicide among American Veterans and service personnel. Their team focuses on care and research that minimizes Veteran and service member suicide. Their ultimate goal is that by 2030, they can cut the rate of military suicide by 40%.The organization is by Army Veterans Brian Kinsella, Nick Black, and Craig Gridelli, who are creating a solution for their fellow Veterans. With their experience, they hope to be more proactive and really identify the underlying issues of this crisis and address them head-on.

The Lifeline for Vets helps Veterans with a range of needs, such as access to healthcare, counseling for PTSD, advocacy for VA benefits, food, housing, work, training, legal assistance, suicide prevention, and more.However, for these Veterans, the National Veterans Foundation offers a crucial service.

One of the few groups fighting for the economic as well as social freedoms of Americans is the Institute for Justice. They have been instrumental in fighting against government overreach over the years, and best of all — they tend to win.

Comment with your choices for good charities and I’ll add them to the list here.

Today’s prompt has been jamming me up a bit. How to address Promise /prŏm′ĭs/, which is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as a noun that is 1. A declaration assuring that one will or will not do something; a vow, 2. Indication of something favorable to come; expectation, “a promise of spring in the air.”, 3. Indication of future excellence or success, “a player of great promise.” I think I’m going to focus on the second definition.

One of the greatest feelings is that expectation, that excitement that comes with a new purchase or gift. Is it going to be awesome? Man, I hope this will be awesome! Then you open the wrapping and get into it. Every roleplaying game I’ve bought brings that same moment of antici…pation. There are a few that have seriously disappointed; some have been much better than I hoped. There are a few that the layout and artwork have really sold the promise of an experience. Others, it was the franchise they were modeling.

Back in the ‘80s, that antediluvian era of gaming, the disappointments were more frequent than the promise delivered. I remember being sold on the game Universe due to the tremendous star map that was included. The system..? Meh. After playing D&D, I was hopeful for Top Secret and Gangbusters — only to be disappointed that the mechanics couldn’t capture the flavor of spy-fi. James Bond’s art and presentation were decently professional for the era, with excellent graphics for the cars and guns, and the system caught the feel of the movies — it was a game so good, we used it for decades. Likewise, the rules-lite d6 system of Star Wars pushed the feel of the movies that the very pretty, but ultimately less effective d20 version of the 2000s — a disappointment.

So what recent games have promised a lot and delivered? 

Probably the most delightful surprise was the Alien and Blade Runner games. The layout and artwork is beautiful — Free League excels at the game book as table art piece. I was surprised to find that the rule-lite approach worked well for the sci-fi horror genre, particularly the fear aspect that is hard for a lot of gamers to allow themselves to roll into. The improved die mechanic of Blade Runner (also used in Twilight: 2000) maintained the rule-lite flavor of Alien, but allowed the joy of rolling different types of math rocks. Another delight was the recent Legend in the Mist, which is getting accolades for a reason. In addition to being gorgeous, with high production values for the physical product, the system is rules-lite and dispensed with a lot of the math and rules limitations that Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder place on a GM or player. The sheer volume of rules is enough that I have avoided running D&D for a long time. LitM, on the other hand, spends a lot of its page count providing examples of adversaries, events, and challenges that make running a quick session a simple matter of finding something in the vein of what you wanted to run and stringing them together with only a few tweaks. I was running games off of the PDFs with no issues and very little prep time. There’s a wealth of player options that are never overwhelming, but provide guidance to making a character quickly and tailored well to what you want to play. The comic book style primer to playing is based on the create-your-own-story style of book and works well for getting the basics fast.

There have been a lot of games I’ve bought that have not disappointed, this is the first in a long time that genuinely felt like it was worth every penny. It was enough I bought their City in Mist — another game where the presentation is good, the system is loose enough to do what you want…but it’s not quite as pretty as LitM.

The Kickstarter for the Cowboy Bebop RPG was very promising. They had obviously leaned into the music as a theme for the game — too much, I think. The character attributes are based on different musical styles, and while they can be serviceable, there’s a heavy learning curve that was a turn off. When the base mechanic is something to overcome — promise not fulfilled. Similarly, the look of John Carter of Mars that Modiphius put out a few years back looked great. My game group was one of the playtesters on the early rules and the writing was so execrable as to make the base mechanics impenetrable. It was bad enough I avoided 2d20 for a long time. After a few sessions of my friend running Fallout, I gave 2d20 another chance for a Star Trek campaign. The layout and writing, again, worked against the player and the index was utterly useless; not good. The second edition has cleaned much of the issues, the artwork has improved, and the general presentation of the new products is excellent. 2e of the game has rehabilitated it for me.

Probably the most disappointing example of beautiful presentation brought down by the ruleset is Jovian Chronicles an anime-inspired hardish-science RPG by Dream Pod 9 that hit at the end of the ‘80s. The spaceship designs are gorgeous enough they did artbooks of them. The background material is plentiful and there is a lot of room for playing in their universe. The overarching meta-story I thought was potentially restrictive unless a GM ignored some of it, and the rules set was a hot mess. I’ve wanted to run JC for decades, but I haven’t made the jump to a more workable system.

Desire is a fantastic motivator for a character. Millennia of fights, wars, songs, inventions, most of human civilization was birthed by some guy wanting to impress a woman, or the desire to improve your station, bank account, or have your name sung for all of time. Desire, the Buddha tells us, is also a trap; wanting is what causes suffering, and it is only be letting go of those things that we hold dear that we can get off the wheel of reincarnation and suffering.

The ability to craft an excellent character around this idea, and to form good adventures that use this to challenge and reward the character, is central to a good story. Using the new Legend in the Mist mechanics, here’s a good example of a character with a lot of talent (perhaps overly optimized for his job), but with a ton of immediately accessible flaws and desires (quests in LitM terms). Trogdor Trollmorder is a young man (15-16 for the 800s Viking campaign we’re running) who was found by his adopted father Alfgeir during a raid years ago. There are all sorts of boastful stories that the young man tells about himself, mostly based on the limited story of how he was found at the base of a ruin stone in Saxon territory that mentioned a dragon. The boy grew up wanted to be accepted by his new tribe, and to be the strongest and best fighter who goes to become a hero, while still not really knowing who he is.

Trogdor’s desire to be the strongest has worked in his favor a few times, but also causes him to overestimate his abilities. (The character was nearly killed in the first fight.) While he has an adopted family that have cared for him, he still wants more. His origin story makes him think he might be something special, and I’ve dropped hint that might be true…but it could also be a lot of crap. These wants coupled with a few excellent flaws — his “might makes right” and “fist-shaped problems” frequently lead him to act rashly and violently where another approach might be in order. His boasting and need to prove himself show a highly insecure mind behind the very talented body.

In a fight, Trogdor is deadly — frequently gaining bonuses to his combat rolls that equal that of his ship captain, who has a crew he can call on for a sizable bump in power. His being a braggart often works because he’s been able to back it up — so far. It’s a character where the GM can drop carrots for the character to follow, then hit him with a bigger stick. Will his desires lead him to be a leader, perhaps a ruler? Or will his desires and “draconic ancestry” lead him to be avaricious and violent (perhaps to one day become a dragon his friends will have to destroy?)

It’s a fairly extreme version of desire. A less grandiose version of this problem, funnily, shows in another character by the same player. LT Stephen Archer started our Star Trek Adventures campaign as a fresh from the academy helmsman — the sort of seat of the pants flyer that’s common for the hot shot pilot theme. He was built with a few Values that defined him in the Kirk mould: adventurous, loyal, and a bit randy.

Some of those values have stuck and gotten strong over the campaign: this is Archer as of “season 6” — only six years into his career and already ops officer and on the cusp of a possible promotion to lieutenant commander. He’s showed himself to be an exemplary pilot, a brave officer and leader, but headstrong and driven by his family’s legacy to live up to the Archer name. He’s also shown a repeated ability to get himself into trouble with his philandering. By this time, he’s married to an Orion girl, but has still followed the “what happens in space, stays in space” mindset. He has a tendency to fall in love easily, and once the relationships are done, he blithely continues on. He had a crush on his captain, and through a series of emotionally charged missions, finally wore her down. then screwed it up with yet another fling with his best friend’s sister (and this is about to bite him in the butt, hard.) 

He’s a character that the womanizing and desire to be the best has frequently led him to make bad judgment calls, some of which have worked out, some — not so much. But he’s a fun character to build character beats for in our game. 

A trend we see in the entertainment industry – from books to TV to movies — is what I’ll call narrative bloat. It’s especially bad with writer/director/producers in movies, but equally bad in books that become serials — the Patrick O’Brians, Robert Jordans and George R.R. Martins. In TV, we see this strongly in series that have been going for decades — the Law & Order serials are a perfect example of this. I know, you love the world-building and the characters and you don’t want the journey to end, but that’s kind of the point to a story. The ending.

This ties into another staggeringly lazy, dated bit of writing: the mystery box. From the start with The X-Files, running through various shows and movies — usually the JJ Abrams crowd of writers — TV and movies have given us fantastic first acts with this trick. Introduce a mystery: who is the smoking man? What is this secret organization? What is happening on the island? Who is Rey? What’s in the trunk of the car in Repo Men (to get old school). It’s a great hook that pulls the viewer or reader in…but eventually, the box needs opened. If you haven’t planned for that — who are the Final Five Cylons in Battlestar Galactica — you will eventually have to wedge the answer into whatever corner you’ve painted yourself in, because you didn’t bother to answer the question for yourself. In other words — there’s no point.

A good example of making the mystery box work (while still having to dance around issues of production) was Babylon 5. Who was Morden? We find out. Who are the Vorlons (and by extension the Shadows)? What do the Shadows (and by extension the Vorlons) want? What happened to President Santiago? Who is Sinclair and why did the Mimbari end their war against the humans? All get answered and with a few hiccups (the three that are one, for instance), they get answered satisfactorily because the answer was, at least in broad strokes, known.

So, how does this apply to running a game campaign? If you’re going to have a mystery box (and it’s an excellent way to get buy-in), you have to broadly know what the endpoint is. You should have a few waypoints that give hints and clues, and be ready for the characters to figure it out before the big reveal. There’s nothing wrong with them figuring it out early. This is where “red herrings” are useful — let them press forward to discovering the location of the treasure, or the identity of the person they’re chasing, or uncover the secret cult that’s been committing unspeakable horrors — then throw a plausible alternative to throw them off course for a session or two. But don’t suddenly change “what’s in the box”, because they got there before you wanted them to. If they get there early, let them find the treasure, perpetrator, secret early…when they’re probably not ready for the big bad guy. Hit them harder than you intended, but give them room to escape, succeed with some major consequence (the hostage dies, the bomb goes off, whatever…), or let them win. The cheap shot is always “yes, but who was pulling their strings” in the case of discovering the identity of the big bad.

There’s a great line in Clerks 2, where the ever-assholish Randall Graves says, “Those hobbit movies were boring. Three movies about walking to a fucking volcano…” Again, yes — colossal and rich worldbuilding, great characters and battle scenes — and while I enjoyed them…three movies about walking to a fucking volcano.

What you don’t want in your game is to lose sight of the point. Maybe you have several side quests and red herrings because it stretches out the fun and the player, inevitably wander off course because the simple barmaid character caught their eye and they are convinced there’s something more there than there is, or they get the plot wrong. But unless you want to scrap your big reveal, big bad, whateveter (and there’s nothing wrong with this), you may have to come up with another denouement for your players. Alternately, much like the writers of shows with a mystery box, you retcon the hell out of your original plans to fit with where the players decided to wander. 

From the Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness, we get the following advice: “Intensity: Give 100% 110% is impossible. Only idiots recommend that.” or as a motorcycle buddy of mine likes to say, “Twist the throttle and send it…” (Of course, I don’t think he has a single joint that isn’t mechanical now.) Certain types of people don’t just do; they do with abandon, with our day’s word: intensity.

There are a bunch of these characters in fiction, people who feel too much, who are constantly restless or reckless, perfectionists, who have trouble setting boundaries or dangerously self-sacrificing. They are the extreme opposite of yesterday’s “composure.” We tend to see a lot of the adrenaline junkies in the movies and a bunch of them are played by Tom Cruise. Be it CPT Pete “Maverick” Mitchel, who pushes himself and his aircraft to the edge; or Ethan Hunt, who’s idea of relaxation is free climbing mesas in Arizona and can’t move from place to place except at a full-out sprint — these are characters that typify on-screen intensity. There’s Pitch Black’s Riddick, where Vin Diesel managed to combine intensity and composure (intensely), at the time. Kinda like Batman — a barrage of violence wrapped in quiet, growly menace.

There’s the ones looking for the “big life” — Jay Gatsby looking to live life to the fullest, no matter the cost; James Bond’s caviar and fine wines, martinis and beautiful women for dinner and death for breakfast.

There’s the intense empaths — the people who can’t help but empathize with even the worst life has to offer, in the case of Will Graham — the FBI profiler from Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon. The same book that gave us another extreme personality, Hannibal Lektor, the cannibal psychologist and killer who preyed on victims that offended his highly honed sense of aesthetics. He is the antithesis to Graham — intellectual but unempathetic. Like the android David in Prometheus, he understands human emotions, although he does not feel them himself. (Lektor becomes much more nuanced over the course of Harris’ works and the movies based on him.)

The actress Gene Tierney once quipped, “I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.” A good example of what this looks like is a character from our Star Trek Adventures game: LT Stephen Archer is a descendent of the famed Starfleet captain and former Federation president. (We posited he married late.) His uncles, father, grandfather, aunt, brother — all of them were Starfleet, and Archer feels a real weight of this legacy. He was also brought up by his mother who indulged him in a lot. As a result, he is a big personality in almost every way. He takes to people quickly, wins them over with his enthusiasm, and takes ridiculous chance not just to prove he’s the best at whatever — but for the sheer thrill of living. He’s got the Han Solo/Maverick reckless pilot thing down pat. He volunteers for missions that he’s not really suited to. He has intense romances with women, but when they’re over — they’re done. Everything on the boy is turned up to 110%.