The Black Campbell

Despite it’s image as a white male geek-only hobby, role playing has been pulling female players from the beginning. In the past, it was rare to see a woman at the gaming table, but I’ve been lucky enough to have females in my gaming groups since the mid-1980s. Back then, often they would  bystart off coming to a session with their spouse or boyfriend, find the experience enjoyable, and would stick with it. More recently groups of mine have either had gender parity, or have even been female heavy.

One of the reasons for this is the shift from barbarians smashing monsters for their stuff fantasy toward a multiplicity of genres and settings. Female players now often enter the hobby either through the popular White Wolf World of Darkness settings or through licensed universes like Supernatural or other TV shows-turned-RPG. I’ve noticed a lot of time they come in through LARPing, and tabletop gaming is an extension of the former.

Having women at the table can require the GM and other players to look at the role of women in the the game setting itself. There are some settings that make gender less of a concern — science fiction worlds are often egalitarian regarding the relationship of women and society, as do many modern settings. Women can (often) do the same jobs as men. Case in point: women are not allowed to join the special forces in the real world, but in the Stargate universe, women are going through the gate as often as men are; the explanation early on was that CPT Carter was a subject matter expert, hence was a benefit to the team. In sci-fi or even “spy-fi”, women are just as bad ass as men.

For settings in which the characters are superhuman or supernatural in quality, there is the same wiggle factor for ignoring gender inequality. A female vampire is just as deadly as a male one; they’re vampires. Superheroes and superheroines can match each other; they’re superheroes. And having powers that make you supra or supernormal mean never having to put up with crap from normals.

In games that are historically-based, this can become problematic. Women were often boxed into socially-acceptable roles of mother and homemaker, and those outside the home were often viewed with suspicion, or assumed to be of “loose morals.” There are still exceptions to the rule, even in true history. Female aviators were trailblazers in the 1920s and 1930s, loosing the bonds of society as they did the bonds of gravity. This sort of “new woman” was often reflected in pulp fiction — where women were often the damsel in distress or the femme fatale, but there were women of strength and competence. In the 1950s and ’60s, these pulp heroines and villains showed up in comics and cartoons like Wonder Woman and Johnny Quest, and in movies such as the James Bond series or television like The Avengers. The women in these serials were strong, competent, and even when they hid their activities behind more respectable facades, they were essential to the plotlines, not just the “girl of the week to be rescued.”

Prior to the 20th Century, however, females — if one were to keep the conventions of the period intact — were greatly constricted in their ability to adventure. There were, as always, exceptions: Lady Jane Digby was an adventuress of noble background that became a famed adventuress in Arabia in the late 1890s. The pirates of the Caribbean had Mary Reid and others. Lady Emma Hamilton might have not wielded a rapier or gun (that we know of), but she was instrumental in the politics and espionage of the Napoleonic period.

When playing in these settings, part of the fun is experiencing the society, the technology, the events of that historical period. So in steampunk settings in the Victorian Age, half the fun for a female character is flaunting the conventions of society. They might disguise themselves as a man, they might have a high-enough birth that a eccentric behavior like running about the world stopping madmen from [insert plot] with their steam-powered gadgets. Some women have simply never cared to let men govern their actions. they often were shunned by good society, but there are always men that admire and love strong women,and social circles that like to tweak the nose of the squares of their time. For Victorian settings, the player characters (and the femme fatales) are the exception to the rule. Most women can’t get away with running about the globe, or traveling to Mars, but Lady X has always been somewhat scandalous — which makes her popular in society, if only as a curiosity to some, and social punching bag for others.

There’s a saying, “Well behaved women never make history” and it’s true. Female players that want to play strong women in a setting where they might be constricted should be encouraged to do so. This is where the GM and other players need to pull together to make it work.

Case in point: even though Shadowrun is a sci-fi/fantasy setting, one group had players that tended to run roughshod over the women playing. In bar scenes where the boys were throwing about the usual uber-macho quips and beating on each other for fun, the girl character was a distraction, at best. As a player, I made that character my “partner in crime”, and by doing so got her more screen time and gave her the chance to show what she could do without the misogynists playing ruining it for the female player. (And yes…the players in question were misogynists in that classic “chivalric” mode — they treat women as madonna or whore; there’s not real room in their mindset for much outside that.)

When I was running a Victorian-period steampunk campaign, I made the social constructions part of the fun, part of the challenge for the characters to overcome. For the wealthy, well-connected lady she had to be careful with her love affairs and her behavior in public…her class was one that catted about frequently with each other, often knew of the intricate affairs that were on going, and while gossip might fly, in public everyone upheld the same social conventions: so long as no one was embarrassed, so long as there was no legal entanglements, you could get away with being eccentric…as long as the family image was maintained. It provided an interesting and unique challenge for 20/21st Century women that were used to being able to do as they pleased.

For female characters of the middle class, keeping up appearances was even more important, as it could effect the chances for marriage. One solution around this was to have them already married, either to an absent or indulgent husband, or to have them be young and in the company of either a friend or relative. Another means is the “masked heroine” idea — that female Zorro that fights crime or whathaveyou without revealing her identity. Nuns, wives of colonial officials often were dragged out into the bush and jungles of the third World in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Danger might cometo them and rising to the occasion could lead to a memoir that might make them a celebrity…and celebrity often gives people a certain flexibility in their behavior.

Poor female characters are often considered to be “loose” when they aren’t at home having babies, is the popular view of the Victorian period today, but the fact was that poor women didn’t have much in the way of expectation because of this image…for that reason, poor women, more than the middle class, had the freedom to work, to eat and drink in the pubs with men, to act much more independently than their betters. Going on an adventure in the darkest wilds of Africa with men might earn her a reputation, but often that would be outside the concern of the proletarian women (unless they were looking to climb the ladder.)  Even then actresses (often equated in the period to prostitutes) could find ways to leverage their looks and outrageous behavior to get invited to social events to entertain. Lola Montez was able to work her way up from actress/whore to lover of kings. And when you’re a king’s mistress, your betters have to put up with you in the drawning room and dance floor.

Some cultures also are more permissive. Scottish and Irish history is full of women who are hard to control, and who made history in the medieval and Renaissance period. Indian princesses sometimes lead armies (google the Rani of Jhansi, for one.) Find something that works for the character’s background and run with it.

Ultimately, it will depend on the maturity of the players and the type of characters players want to engage with, and how open they are keeping the elements of the period being played in (this goes for sexual preference and race, as well.)

(Apologies for the short ending. I’m between projects and trying to punch out a blog post before getting onto the next one. Feel free to comment and discuss the subject in the comments section. I’m sure there’s a multiplicity of opinions out there.)

There’s got to be scads of these genus of gamer posts on the web, but I’m going to add to it because…well, it what struck me to write about this morning and because I was discussing various gamers we’ve had in groups with a friend over drinks the other night. Here we go:

Rules Lawyer: Probably the most annoying to me, this is the guy that memorizes the rulebook so that s/he might use it to batter the GM during the game sessions, either to save their ass during play, or simply to be a nuisance and snag a bit of attention from the group.

There’s a couple of ways to handle this type without a confrontation: I usually have a caveat that the story comes first, and that occasionally the rules get in the way of this. I used to have a 3×5″ card that had “IT’S IN THE SCRIPT” on it for these times when the bad guy has to get away, or they have to fall into the trap of the villain so that we can have our heroes get to the big reveal of the plot or what have you. If you run house rules, this is another way to tamp down on this guy/girl (it nearly always seems to be a guy.)

The Mechanic or Min/Maxer: There’s a couple versins of this player type. The mechanic is the guy/girl that is more interested in the mechanics of the game and the way it simulates the play environment. They love to build characters…lots of them. They never play half of them; they just want to manipulate the rules set to find quirks, holes, and probability issues. The main issue with the Mechanic is getting them to focus on the story and play (in an RPG); a lot of these guys started as wargamers and are more happy doing that (I’ve found.)

The Minmaxer is a pain in the ass for many GMs. This is the variant of the Mechanic that looks for ways to push character creation to the limit so that their character is the best at what they do — be that the indestructible tank, the super-magician, or the irresistible face (girl minmaxers seem to like this last one, particularly.) There’s some use to having sharply specialized characters, and I’m finding people that come out of early RPG and online computer gaems tend to think in terms of “package” character. (It’s one of the reasons that 4e D&D looks to me like an attempt to emulate online computer games…which strangely were emulating tabletop gaming.)

The minmaxer can wreck havoc on the GMs plans, but there are ways to handle them. The easiest: put them in a situation where their strengths are a problem. Say your character is stunningly strong, aggressive, and good in a fight — set a trap that leverages strength against the character. (The force field you’re in draws it’s power from kinetic energy…) Put them in situations where their weakness is exactly what they need — beating the pulp out of the ruler of the duchy that is your patron because he’s not budging on payment for whatever quest you’re being tasked with could be what they called in the military, “non-career enhancing.

The mechanic is a strange problem . The few I’ve gamed with have a tendency not to be so much interested in interaction with the other characters as in the act of throwing the bones. We’ll deal with this under Rollplayer.

The Actor: These are the players that really throw themselves into the part, giving long speeches, engaging with the other players, and really getting into their characters. They are both a blessing and curse. Blessing-wise, they really get the game moving, and often they are central to the action. They’ll be the guys that interact with your NPCs and will make you have to on-the-fly flesh out that dude in the pub you thought was just going to be the guy that in a movie would have the credit “Guy in Pub”. I love having the actor types in the group…so long as they realize they aren’t the only person there, because they can also suck all the air out of the room for the other players and annoy the crap out of them. They also can be a pain in the ass, when their character’s motivations don’t quite dovetail with the adventure you’ve crafted. “I don’t think my character would aid in this sort of thing…”

The actor usually just needs reigned in a bit. The best way I’ve found to do this without stepping on their toes is making certain that the adventure is designed to break the group up for the action. that way the actor and whoever they usually interact with can have their own scenes, and the other players can get “screen time” doing something else more important to the task at hand.

The Table Troll: You’ve had this guy at the table, I’m sure. He’s the guy that has to stomp over the other player’s interaction, plays practical jokes on the other characters, and otherwise tries to monopolize the time, or worse, sabotage things just to cause trouble.

I use a lot of the same techniques for the actor for dealing with these guys, as there’s a similar personality issue: they want attention. They dont care if it’s positive or not. I find they usually don’t last long, before the group ousts them. It’s one of the reasons I try to meet new gamers prior to play; there’s certain personality quirks to the Table Troll that show up in a quick talk over coffee — they usually think they’re funny as hell (and aren’t), they’ll talk over you or argue just to do it, they’re often aggressive in their interaction. I meet them and they don’t get invited to the game.

The Social Player: I’ll admit…I’m one of these guys, and I tend to like having them in my group. These are players that like to play, but never really fully immerse themselves into character. They are often interested in the meta-qualities of the game, enjoying how the game adventure is put together — looking for familiar tropes, cliches of the genre being played. But mostly, they’re there to have fun with friends.

These guys do a lot of out-of-character quips, have a tendency to pull the game into non sequiteur chatting, and the like. I’ve noted on a lot of the GM and player boards that players can really have a problem with this particular type of gamers, but personally…I like it because I game to tell stories and hang out with friends.

How to handle them: set up rules for in and out-of-character interaction. The hand up for OOC observations, or  move from the table with the other player to make plans or talk about something not related to the game. Have the “on air” light or candle on the table to let people know its time to game. (I personally don’t like this tactic — I find it restrictive and not fun…but we’ve established that I’m one of these problem types.)

The Writer or Storyteller: These guys/girls are usually your GM, which is a good thing. I fall into this category, as well, so — as always — I might be totally full of $#!t. They are interested, like the social gamer in the construction of the plot, the characters, how the game session comes together. They’re often likely to go along with your story, even if their characters might not normally be tempted to it, because they want to see what’s going to happen. They’ll trigger the trap, they’ll confront the villain, they’ll make the GM’s job super-easy and most likely honk off players who think of themselves as in opposition to the GM (or more likely, vice-versa.)

The other downside to this is the Know It All … the guy that happens to be a subject matter expert and has a tendency to want to bring that information into the play. “In reality, Nazis would be hunting the Ark in Egypt as it was a sovereign nation with strong British military presence…” “That’s not how Enterprise‘s engines work!” “Trebuchet’s actually require…” They are full of information, but sometimes you really don’t have to know the fuel mileage of your Ferrari Daytona during a chase sequence….because it’s in the f@#$ing script.

The know-it-all can be a great GM. No matter what you throw at them, they know what’s going on in the setting and they don’t screw it up. The downside is you get the GMs that think they need to provide you with a 45 page “abridged” synopsis of the politics, history, and geography of their world, plus a treatise on magic, etc. (I just don’t read it. If the GM asks why, my barbarian hasn’t had any schooling.)

How to handle them: “In the last episode, you stated that the FTL drive worked this way…” Response: “Yup, but the writer of this episode wasn’t paying attention in the writing room last week.” “Nukes don’t work that way.” Response: “And neither the audience nor the writer knows that or cares…cut the friggin’ red wire!” I suppose you could also hear them out. Or pelt them with dice. I find they normally respond well to “It’s in the script.”

The Guy That Takes This Way Too Seriously: You’ve definitely had this guy. The one that’s haunted by his character in a dream because the players derided the character for that truly-stupid move that got him killed. The guy that fall to his knees screaming “My dice are f@#king me!” (Yes, I’ve had both in a game.) The one that throws a tantrum or sulks if things don’t go their way.

How to handle: Lose ’em. No, seriously…they need another hobby. Preferably one that doesn’t involve weaponry.

The Planner: You’ll normally get a couple of these in a group. These are the guys that not only overthink everything, but have to have every planned out to the nines before they do anything. “But if we go into the pub, will we order ale or wine?” (Okay…they’re not that bad.) For the GM, they’re a pain in the ass because you waste a night on a simple “knock the guard out, already!” scene. My favorite was a two hour planning session to get past a guard that wound up with one player getting so frustrated he tossed a rock at said guard to get the fight over with.

How to handle: Simple — time limit to the planning. They’ve only got finve minutes until the next roving guard comes by. They don’t have eyes on all the bad guys and once you’ve gotten bored, just have them discovered mid-planning session. Put a timer on the table, if need be. If they’re already in an action sequence, give them quick ideas of what might be possible and give them as little time as their character would have to think about it. “The bomb is close to going off and mook #2 is advancing on you with a knife. What do you do…three, two, one…”

The Rollplayer: This is a strange one. They game. Supposedly they enjoy gaming. Getting them to do anything without a prompt is near impossible. Even when they’re doing things in game, they seem less than enthusiastic. Really, they’re just waiting for you to tell them to roll some dice.

I’ve had a bunch of these over the years. One was also a “Mechanic” type — he gamed to see the games in action. He was either “following the captain” or “working on my invention until the fight.” It was about rolling the bones. Others were simply not engaging personality types. One had fibromyalgia and was not particularly interested in doing much at all, but was along for the ride with her spouse; one did the minimal amount of interaction until it was time to “kill something”; another was simply unhappy about their life and it showed in everything they did…

How to handle: you can give them the leading roles, try to push them up front. Sometimes this works well — the first example really lit up when she could play the conniving, bossy leader. The last had a character made that allowed him to act out — a misogynistic, drunken pilot…he turned into a great, very funny character, but gave me some serious pause about the guy’s stability.

This type tends to hang around only if they’ve nothing else to do.

The Ninja: this is that truly strange dude that you know you shouldn’t have made eye contact with in the game store, but were so desperate to get another player that you said “What the Hell?” then got to experience that hot place first hand. I named this type for a guy in Philadelphia that my roommate and I invited to play, then found out he was into ninjutsu, could make himself invisible and absolutely silent (not a bad trick for a 300 lbs. bespectacled guy that could barely move without running into something or setting off seismometers.) He loved weaponry. I suspect pedophilia was a hobby he’d have gotten into, but the kids couldn’t see him for his clouding of their minds with his mental powers, and they didn’t response to his enticements. He was, in a word, nuts.

How to handle: It’s not worth it. Don’t invite him in the first place. If you do, change you phone number, move to another state, get a new identity. He’ll keep turning up. Our ninja stealthed his way into our building (in other words, he was stuck at the frond door, uninvited that day, trying to get us to buzz him in.) We managed, despite his heightened sense of awareness (perhaps the parallax on his glasses was too high and it obscured his awe-inspiring peripheral vision), we managed to walk out of the building right next to him! He hung around for a few days, trying to contact us before he slipped away into the night, ninja-like, to probably terrorize another lonely person with his awesomeness.

Really, avoid this type even if it means throwing yourself out of a tall building.

This is a simple selection of gamer phylum I’ve dealt with over the years, and sure, there’s more. Feel free to comment with other types and how you’ve handled them.

The last big thing to help sell an RPG campaign to your players is the story. You’ve got the characters — be it the buddy comedy team of your lawful evil fighter and lawful good paladin, the pulp-era absent minded scientist and the rough-and-ready pilot/adventurer, or your sex bot and her interstellar spy master; you’ve got the basic broad strokes of the universe — be it the sparkly vampire goth romance, the giant space empire versus the rebels, or the MTV cops fighting this weeks drug runner/spy/comedic vice peddler…

Now you need a kick ass first episode.

Unless you are doing a mystery series, use the KISS method: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Your interstellar spy master is trying to intercept the McGuffin from the bad guy, who is a notorious lecher…enter his sex bot (so to speak.) Find McGuffin, overcome an obstacle or two, the win or lose, but in the end the universe is sort of set up and maybe even a recurring bad guy.

Your post-apocalyptic world requires the characters to pull together against the zombies or robots of doom to try and get home/rescue their families/escape the contagion or war zone so that they can live to fight another day. You don’t need to know all the particulars of the zombie menace, or why the robots have turned on you. Shoot them in the head! Run for your life! But finish up with either a really good cliffhanger or a flight to (apparent) safety. Quick, straight-forward, all the flash comes from the actions of the characters.

Your lawful evil fighter and lawful good paladin come together (maybe with a few secondary characters for comic relief and magic firepower) to rescue a town from an evil goblin horde looking to steal food for the winter, or to save an important personage from capture, or to establish the will of the local lord over a rebellious band…their bad vs. good quips, but essential respect for the rule of the king/lord/law means they can work together (just this once!) in common cause. then conveniently, they’re needed again…and again. Maybe they lean to respect each others’ cultural differences and become friends.

But beside that — the story should be simple: get together, overcome obstacle, meet bad guy or privileged henchman, overcome obstacle to gain the McGuffin, overcome bad guys to escape/conquer/whatever. Keep the pace up and don’t let it bog down into an overplanning session. When in doubt, throw a chase, fight, or explosion into the mix. It works on the screen, it’ll work in the game.

Don’t be afraid to toss out any hints, subplots, or cool NPCs you created. The players will inevitably be drawn to the NPCs you thought were going to take off, or they’ll go in a direction in which your nifty characters are not going to be of use.

…for those gaming groups that have problems with getting started, here’s a neat little idea for GM’s that want to signal the session has started.

The second element to selling a game campaign to your players is setting. Sometimes this can be as simple as everyone likes the show Supernatural…let’s play something like that. you know what flavor you’re going for — monster of the week, humor mixed with horror. No problem.

Maybe you have one person that likes Star Trek, and it just so happens you like the rules set for the setting enough to want to run a short campaign. But most of the players find Trek kind of bland (as utopias should be), and the shows ruled by technobabble-inspired deus ex machina (literally.) So you sell the universe as an RPG campaign to your other players by changing the flavor of the universe. I changed the way technology worked. you couldn’t rewire the deflector dish into a microwave oven or a spiraling quantum whatsinator. Complex machines don’t “reconfigure” too easily. And it didn’t always work. And while the core worlds of the Federation were utopian, it got a bit more gritty and morally ambiguous on the frontier. What you did mattered — there was none of this reset button-style storytelling, where interstellar politics was static, save for 42 minutes a week. I also added the idea of accelerating returns on technology — that all the cool stuff they discovered didn’t go away. How many android races were discovered in the old show and the movie series? And Data’s the best (and only) working android they had? Nope!

Tailoring the setting flavor to your group means getting to know your group. Maybe you’re lucky enough to have played together before and have an idea of what would inspire play in them. I know all my players like sci-fi, two are big into post-apocalyptic settings, and our sense of humor is such that no matter how serious the setting, it’s rarely going to get too heavy. I know the tenor of the game setting I’ll need to make it fun.

But if you’re just getting together for the first time, this will be more difficult. It’s one of the reasons I like to meet gamers outside of the gaming venue first and chat about other things. Get to know them, what their interests RPG and otherwise are. Maybe they all like the Firefly setting, but a few were interested in more anime/manga-style sci-fi. I had this happen…my Serenity game, as a result, had a lot of focus on gangs in the docks, kawaii girl thieves and killers, and a more cyberpunk than Western flavor to the game.

The setting should be be just roughed out enough to give the players areas of interest, hints of bad guys and allies, and maybe an overarching story arc. But really, you should plan the pilot session as a one-off. the background should be enough to entice, but not overwhelm. In other words, don’t create a game world with a 28-page history document for the players to read before they play, so that they can experience the depth of your Tolkein-esque genius. (This particular GM made me want to force feed him his head!)

Think about movies and TV shows — don’t explain the tech, the monsters, the setting too much…just keep it consistent enough to make sense, create a bit of verisimilitude, and most of all give spectacle. Case in point: Blade Runner didn’t answer many questions about why the world looked like it did; you inferred it. But the “description” of the setting was rich. Similarly, Star Trek: The Next Generation was stunningly bland…here we’re on a ship that’s almost 2/3rds of a kilometer long with 30+ decks. But Enterprise D never felt BIG. The new Galactica and the Cylon basestars felt BIG. Babylon 5‘s ships, the events were BIG! Star Wars‘ prequels exist solely on spectacle — BIG, FAST, GLOSSY visual effects. (Enough spectacle moving quickly enough, you might miss the big plot holes that you missed while putting together your pilot!) Even something like Miami Vice had a certain spectacle — flashy cars and clothes set in a sexy locale where big money is moving. It’s very much the style of James Bond movies.

Find the “look”, the description, that your players will enjoy.

And, as with the character created for the game, don’t be afraid to change it up if it doesn’t work. Look at CSI: New York — the gritty, rather dour color palate and cinema verite –style died off pretty quickly. It just wasn’t drawing the viewers. If your medieval world is just a bit too dirty, ugly, and real for the players, Tolkein it up a bit for the main campaign. If your cop game is a bit too down and dirty, with the players blocked in by the law, go a bit more Miami Vice…or The Shield, if they’re into moral ambiguity. Maybe your galactic-spanning sci-fi campaign needs a kick in the pants…maybe it’s time to blown up a planet. It worked for George Lucas. Or make the Borg actually dangerous.

Next up: That First Storyline…

For readers of this blog, it’s no surprise that I borrow heavily from TV and movie storytelling techniques, rather than literature. While gaming is a media of words, really — the player and GM describe, the characters talk — I’ve found that most modern people are programmed from years of visual media to think in terms of the three or four act set-up, that they response instinctively to descriptions like “open on our heroes…” or “wipe to” or “smash cut! to.”

You can learn a lot about pacing, characterization, what combinations of characters work and what doesn’t (how many times have we seen Hollywood try to recreate the antagonistic mismatched pair that fall in love trope, only to miss the fact that they need to have chemistry or a reason for being together…), how spectacle works. When things bog down, it’s time for a car chase, explosion, or some other action sequence.

That brings me to the toughest moment in a new GMs “career”…that first adventure. I’ve been at this for coming up on 30 years, and I’m about to start a new campaign, and I’m having some trouble with how I want to start. There’s the simple standby — get a module, run it. The characters usually meet in a tavern in the fantasy campaigns, a bar in other genres….it’s forced, and it’s horribly cliched. So how to have a good start?

Let’s turn to a similar problem that TV producers have: the series pilot. This is the first episode made for a show that producers use to try and sell it to the networks. Usually they’re a bit rough, the characters aren’t quite fleshed out, and the story simple. The point is to sell the characters, atmosphere, and setting.

That’s your first adventure. You’re selling the game to the players. They’re selling their characters to the other players. When it works well, it’s magic; when it doesn’t it means the campaign doesn’t get off the ground.

Think on it: how many times have you been psyched to start playing in a new game, only to have the players and their characters not mesh right, the introduction is forced, the pacing is off, and if there’s a new system involved, the mechanics of the game itself could get in the way. This was my first experience with Call of Chthulu…I’ve never played in that genre again. The pacing was laborious, the rules a nightmare, and in the end — you died or went mad. Not fun. That’s the equivalent of the new Knight Rider -suckage from the outset. The players aren’t going to buy.

Another example: I recently was really keyed up to play in a Doctor Who campaign, but the obvious lack of interest in the GM (who has gone of a minimalist rules kick “Sigh…Why do we have to learn all these rules?” Answer: you don’t. The plot was leaden, we didn’t get anywhere (hint: when play slows, throw them a friggin’ bone), and in the end it nearly did in the interest in gaming of one of my new players. Fortunately, that hadn’t been her first experience — I had run her through a short solo, to-the-point, “pilot” in which her 1930s adventuress had to steal a parcel of secrets from the Nazis during the Olympics and escape Germany.

Dr. Who…players not sold on the campaign, but not necessarily opposed to trying the setting with a new GM. Hollow Earth Expedition? Quite the opposite. It sold her on gaming in general.

So how to put together a good game pilot? The same way you put together TV pilot: good characters, interesting atmosphere, and a simple first adventure that can be played quickly (one or two sessions at most.) It’s easier to do with smaller groups than larger ones, where the reason for characters to work together can get contrived.

The meat of any story — contrary to high modernist and post-modernist authors’ opinions — it character and plot. First, characters: There are a few ways to streamline the first session and cut down on having characters that will not mesh with others, and that are interesting not just to the player, but the rest of the group.

The first method is the traditional everybody brings a character to the table and they get thrust together on an adventure…the characters haven’t been designed to interface together beyond “I want a fighter” or “I want a sorcerer” or “I want to be the Vulcan science officer.” This will work adequately in genres where the characters are military, or law enforcement, or have been press-ganged into working together. This is also the method where you are most likely to have at least one character that does not fit with the others — that half-goblin thief that has his own agenda, and it doesn’t mesh at all with the others. So why is he here? Because Jimmy wants to play tonight and that’s what he done brought to the table.

This isn’t necessarily a lost cause. For instance, a lawful evil fighter and a lawful good paladin walk into a bar…why would these guys not kill each other? Why would they work together? Because they are, ultimately, lawful — governed by rules, and while their approaches might be sharply different, they both want to rescue the damsel and punish the wicked that kidnaped her…it’s a good character mesh for a pilot. It’s a buddy cop movie with swords and magic.

A better way to go is to get the players together and discuss the character archetype they’d like to play, and come up with relationships between the characters ahead of time. This works very well with experienced gamers who don’t mind the first night of a new game being a character creation session. To those who came to play, it’s not so fun. For games like Smallville, or Primetime Adventures, half the fun is being in the production meeting, putting together characters and relationship webs (if your fantasy is to work in a TV writers’ room, you’ll love it!)

The big benefit to this method is the other players see what you’re working with and can tailor their characters to complement or mesh well. Maybe they’re already friends or relatives, have similar interests… With input from the GM, who knows the type of missions he’s going to run you through, you can get a sense of the type of characters that will work. For instance, maybe you’re running a Call of Chthulu game and want a darker, scarier setting. The characters should probably not be cool under fire, wise-cracking hipsters. It would work well for Ghostbusters though. However the one “comic relief” character that would inject some relief into the game sessions might be the way to go; it depends on the group.

Less player input in character creation is not always good, but for the pilot, can be a game-saver. Get an idea of what the players want, build the characters for them with their input, and fashion the connections you need to make the plot flow. My upcoming Battlestar Galactica campaign is using this technique. Player A wants to be the main character, the commander; Player B doesn’t care but wants to be more “blue collar” — I made him the chief of the boat; Player C wants to keep aspects of other characters he’s played — he’s the hot-shot pilot that’s a lot like his last favorite character; Player D doesn’t really know what they want to play — I need a groud pouner type, but someone who can interface with all the other players…an enlisted guy isn’t going to work. Marine commander. A and B are friends and brothers-in-law. They’ve worked with C in the past and trust him and his judgment. D is the new comer  but the subject matter expert they’ll need for a few of the missions planned. And lastly, they’re all there at the needs of the Fleet; they have to work together, but the way they are set up, they’ll most likely want to, as well….

I don’t recommend the last method, although I use it a lot due to scheduling issues that make kicking character ideas around hard to do. Some players don’t like to feel left out of the creative loop on the character creation but that brings us to another important aspect in which your pilot mirrors TV…sometimes the pilot has characters that don’t work. Dump ’em. Or let the players change their characters dramatically between the pilot and series. Hill Street Blues killed two of the major characters that would be in the series. Captain Pike was replaced by Captain Kirk. Commander Sinclair was a great character (and very Pike-like) in Babylon 5, but after a while, he just didn’t work. Dump ’em. Maybe an NPC that got left behind was somebody all the players liked. Maybe one would have rather played that guy. Think Helo from Galactica, left behind on Caprica…and who later provided excellent material for the show.

Another thing to keep in mind — your game is going to run like an ensemble cast show. As in Galactica, all of the characters have their own stories, but in the end it’s likely only two or three are going to be the main characters. Think Castle: the leads are Richard Castle and Kate Becket, but the second string, Esposito and Ryan are still just as important to the investigations and still get plenty of screen time. So long as all the players get their screen time, it doesn’t matter if one character is calling the shots (often Becket, with Castle — the one guy without any authority — providing the oddbal insights that lead to solving the crimes.)

Next time: Setting…

Well, it all came together well — the Chinese Hollow Earth Expediiton game finished the first “serial” tonight. The characters located the monastery of the mysterious White Lotus group who had captured the body of the mellified man, Prince Yinreng of the Qing Dynasty, in 1799. The final night was a stealthy infiltration of the monastery by the characters, archeologist/grave robber Dr. Hannibal Drake, adventurer Jack McMahon, Chinese gangster Roland Kessik, and street urchin Shanghai Sally, an 11-yer old girl.

They found their mellified men, four of them, but were unable to move the coffin-size confections from the place. They were captured, threatened with mellification, escaped, and were chased by dozens of killer monks.

Some of the better lines of the night: the inimitable (and often idiotic) Jack McMahon, cornered by killer monks with Shanghai Sally, “Hold it right there! I’ve got a pre-teen and I know how to use her…not the way your thinking…”

Shanghai Sally on their new mellification, “They wanted to make you delicious.”

Jack McMahon, following his being beaten unconscious in a single round by a 12 year old monk, “How many were there?” They point to the tied-up monklet. “We never speak of this…”