The Black Campbell

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…