The Black Campbell

While I despise the rest rules in Dungeons & Dragons that allow characters to power through a major, life-threatening fight and slough off the damage with a wee nap, the concept of giving the players a break in the action is a well-advised one. Much like in a movie, keeping the tension and action ramped up often doesn’t have the effect you might think. When the action doesn’t break for a moment of levity, character development, or to give the audience a rest from the sturm und drang of noise and fancy visual effects people aren’t pumped up…they tend to get tired or bored. A classic example is Quantum of Solace, in which the action scenes were not punctuated with moments of quiet and character development…the movie wound up being dreadfully dull despite a fusillade of action.

Similarly, when running a game, there’s something to be said for amping up the danger and action; sending them from one threat to the next. However, that can leave the characters unable to regroup, heal, or get their bearings. A good example was a recent Alien game a ran where the characters had reached the denouement, finding a secret lab working on the Engineers’ black goo. Things went predictably wrong as the big bad released some of the results of their work to prevent word of the lab from getting out. In the ensuing fight anf flight that took two sessions, the characters didn’t get a chance to stop or heal — bad guys and critters were everywhere, and there was the threat of the lab’s experiements reaching a nearby mining settlement. Their ship was lining up one of the company transports with an eye to blowing it’s reactor and destroying everything in nuclear fire.

Great set-up. But the characters were failing stress tests left and right and were no longer in control of their characters — they lost agency because I didn’t give them that necessary breather in the action. They couldn’t heal up, they couldn’t relieve stress, and what should have been exciting became a bit of a slog.

Rest — even a break from the action to “talk about their feelings” or get their wits about them is important.

Well, that’s another day I missed trying to push out RPGaDay posts. Which brings me to the prompt: Stack.

One thing you can count on is life not stopping. Sometimes, it doesn’t even slow down. Occasionally, it accelerates. August is usually a bad month for me. School and college start up and I’m prepping classes and teaching. Often, Black Campbell Entertainment is in the final stretch of prepping a book for publication (in this case, The Marvelous City — our guide to 1930s Rio de Janeiro), and there’s the attendant kid raising issues. Fun, or even some side project like knocking out a few hundred words on the blog, can get lost.

Thrown in the stack, as it were.

None of us like to comb through the stack — being it the overflowing Inbox of email (or actual mail), the to do list at the house, shopping, errands, kicking out a plan for the week’s adventure(s) with your game group. Currently, I have two groups: the “nerd night” crew of 6 overgrown adolescents; and the mom & daughter group. That’s two D&D games to plan for, not to mention the not as regularly played Star Wars game for the girls and a guy from the nerd night crew.

But fun is necessary. It’s not just gaming — it’s relaxing, it’s fun, it’s social, and especially with the the plethora of kung flu madness circling the globe in news-fueled fear and idiocy, it’s a needed distraction from the adult world.

Make time for it.

Today’s prompt is an interesting one. Let’s start with a definition for Tribute:

Four post in one morning — Caught up!

Today’s prompt is Vision. When you first start up a new game campaign, everyone has a vision for what the game is going to be like. Maybe it’s just the character you want to play — what is he/she/it going to be like? Maybe you have an idea of how the universe is going to look, or how the system is going to play. In a game based on a property, like Star Trek, or Altered Carbon, or even one of the canned universes for Dungeons & Dragons like Greyhawk or Theros — there’s some expectation you have for the game world, the mechanics, and the characters.

Often, those visions are very different between the players, and the players vis-a-vis the game master. Occasionally, those visions can work together and bring real uniqueness; sometimes they are in conflict and can sour a new (or even existing) game.

Usually, I write these things from the standpoint of a GM. It’s the role I’m usually given for gaming. I love, so I don’t mind. But vision is something that players should have when creating a character. It’s fine if you want to limit your character building to “he’s a bad ass half-orc barbarian who likes to macrame” or “I’m the hot shot pilot that’s so good the commander puts up with my screwball antics.” But to give them more — where are they at in their life? What do they want? Where do you see them going?

We’ve got an excellent example of both sides in a current character in our D&D game. Artun is a oread — a rare male nymph paladin who is the son of Ishtar, the goddess of war and love. He’s a raging bundle of hormones and need to prove himself. He can’t get through a sentence without invoking his mom’s name. He’s setting up shrines and trying to get her worshippers everywhere he goes. He’s rolling hard into the new Path of Glory that the Mythic Odysseys of Theros. The basic game idea has been woven with (and is heavily improved by) the player’s vision for the character. What is the vision — fame, fortune, and glory. He is hoping to one day be worthy of standing by his mother’s side (or sharing her bed — yes, I know, but it is Greco-Roman myth time, so roll with it.) The vision is both very direct. “I want to be Ishtar’s number one fan” and open enough that earning glory to get there doesn’t interfere with other characters’ arcs.

I can use another of this particular player’s characters from Hollow Earth Expedition to show how a vision of a character might start off okay, then warp, or even fall out of sync with the vision of the game storylines. Le Renard or the Fox is a cat burglar in Shanghai by night, but during the day he’s the elegant B-movie (for China) bad guy in popular films. He’s looking to be a big box office draw, but is also a man of action who just wants to have fun. He gots wrapped up in the adventures of other characters and the gentleman thief side of him just didn’t get play. He started getting into tantric magic that was being used by the villainess and the vision of the character changed. He started to get very powerful, and was steadily being drawn in to the villain’s orbit. He was mostly staying with the good guys because he was hoping to get closer to the big bad. When the campaign went on hiatus, the character had not run his course, rather he had run off the rails. He was not what the player had envisioned; he had been changed by the storylines — the vision of the GM and other players — and was no longer really the character he had saw for himself.

You see this from the GM perspective, as well. You have an idea for a campaign. You have an idea of the story waypoints — the parts of the story that “have to happen”, but can fit inside the direction the characters take so as not to railroad them. you might have a very specific endpoint. When I ran a Battlestar Galactica campaign over five years and multiple changes of players, I had certain events that “had to happen” but could be done with variations on a theme (mostly riffing off of events from the “new” show.) There had to be a successful Cylon attack, a finding Kobol moment, the discovery of Pegasus, something to possibly bring the enemies together (or really fire up comflict), and I had hoped to end on Earth with a discovery that pulled together the whole universe. Events in the game were driven by the players and took us way off track from time to time, but ultimately, the main points happened and the end was what i’d hoped for. The vision of the game world and the point of the story were clear in my mind, so that i could roll with the punches as players came in or left, requiring me to change or drop plot threads. This campaign, as a result, was hugely successful.

My Hollow Earth Expedition campaign did not have a solid vision. I had a few ideas about what I wanted to see happen, but mostly I followed the characters’ leads…which lead to the game not having a solid through line, no real “point” to the stories, and ultimately, it got a bit boring for me.

Not every universe you play in needs to have a goal, and not every character needs to have some kind of destiny. But if you have those visions in mind and you can get them to work together, it can make for a truly special game.

What visions have or do you have for a game setting, a character, an adventure?