The Black Campbell

This week, one of our gamers informed me as we were packing up to leave that one of his LARPs was looking to reschedule…and they wanted the night we were gaming with said friend.  Ordinarily, we’ll shift nights if someone has a work, school, or travel commitment — it’s no big deal — but to be told “Hey, I want to play in this game…can all of your guy rearrange your scedules for me?” left me a bit miffed.  Still, we were able to work it out.

But for a day or two, I found myself slightly angry and depressed over the possibility of losing a good gamer due to the scheduling issue.  That got me thinking about an earlier posting about managing no shows.  In essence, I needed to heed my own advice:  Don’t take it personally, try to accommodate the most number of the group, and press on.

It also brought up an interesting issue for gamers:  all gaming groups break up.  you might not lose everyone, but sooner or later, someone moves away, has a new schedule, gets divorced, gets a job, has a kid…and you lose a gamer or more.  It’s especially traumatic if the one leaving is the GM — the guy/gal that has been telling your stories for months or years.  The story ends (often unfinished, in my experience…)

It shouldn’t be a big deal; after all, it’s just a game.  But it’s not always the case.  Like that movie or TV series you love to watch, or that book series that you buy every volume of, the storylines of your game can get into your psyche and become something you are viscerally connected to.  (Think of how many people were upset at the cancelling of Firefly, or were truly honked off because The Sopranos or Lost, or Battlestar Galactica didn’t end like they thought it should.)  Stories enrich your life and give you something to talk about other than politics or who’s doing what with whom, or what the weather is like —  especially as the characters and plot are something you are directly involved in, not a passive observer.

It hurts when a character you truly enjoyed is lost, but if you lost the whole universe, as well — right in the middle of the story — there can be a sense of loss, of things left undone.  Yes, it’s kind of stupid — it’s a game.  But it happens nonetheless.  Also, there’s the need to find another gaming group (or another hobby…), and that can be jarring if one particular day is set aside for a certain thing, be it a favorite show, a game, working out, girls’ night out.  A change can throw everything into a tailspin.

But as Solonon was told (or King Attar, if you buy into the saying being a Persian one): This too shall pass.

There’s nothing more iconic for a retro-future or pulp game than the addition of airships to the skies of your universe.  These elegant giants are romantic and nostalgic — a macro for setting the scene.  (Although I have seen some complain (fairly, I think) over on io9.com that they are a lazy means to set your movie/book/campaign apart from reality.)

A key to using airships is to realize the realities of dirigibles.  They are massive, yet very fragile.  Gunfire is unlikely to do a lot to them, but they don’t provide much cover from fire if you’re inside.  Incendiary bullets, if the ship is running hydrogen as lifting gas = bad f@#$ing day.  But a helium buoyant vessel is unlikely to be taken down by machinegun fire.  Bullet holes simply do not allow enough of the lifting gas to escape to disable the craft quickly.

Airships are somewhat susceptible to weather.  USS Shenandoah was destroyed when she ran into a double squall line over Ohio and was tossed up and down at  rates of climb much higher than her ability to valve gas and relieve pressure on her balonets (the bags holding the gas.)  She broke up, but most of the crew survived and free ballooned the two halves of the ship to the ground.  The year before, she had been torn off her mast by a hurricane and survived the experience with minimal damage.

The use of hydrogen was seen as a major issue for the airship, but most of the German commercial vessels saw no troubles due to the use of the explosive gas; they had extensive regulations for not running through storms that would create strain on the gas bas or create static on the hull (ignored in the case of Hindenburg), they did not allow smoking (save for a special room in the same airship.)  Hindenburg actually landed on the chimney of a house in Brazil in her first season of operation.  A lit one.  The ship didn’t explode.  Graf Zeppelin never had issues with fire.  Neither did R.100 –a British airship that ran flawlessly for several seasons.

Americans had no troubles with hydrogen.  They were a major manufacturer of helium, and US dirigibles floated on the noble gas.  (It was, however, expensive – $150/ cu ft. compared to $1/ cu. ft. of hydrogen…hence why the Navy got cheap and halved the number of values on Shenandoah, ultimately leading to her destruction.)   American airships were hampered  by other technologies.  These vessels were more practical, early on, than an airplane, and their development outpaced the instrumentation and design philosophies that would have made them safer.  Barometric altimeters gave incorrect altitude readings, and in the case of USS Akron accounted for the destruction of the ship when it flew into a storm — lower pressure gave a false higher altitude reading and the vessel, while trying to climb had no altimeter at her tail — at 900 or so feet long, the tail was much closer to the ocean and the ship foundered when she took on water at the tail.  Her sister, Macon, was destroyed because Goodyear hadn’t thought to run the tail through in a single cruciform, as the Zeppelin Company did.  In a high crosswind, the tail became a big airfoil and tore off.  The ship might have survived that, but the control lines to the rudder tore the lifting gas bags at the aft and the ship dropped like a stone.

Here is the major issue of the zeppelin:  weight.  Like all aircraft, they have limitations in how much the can carry.  Granted, they carry tons of material, but rain on the hull can reduce her lifting capacity by a ton or two.  Hitting the ocean with your tail increases the weight of the ship dramatically.

The British had terrible luck with their airship program from a combination of government micromanagement of design and construction (R.101), but they also had a cadre of commanders that did not understand the airship was not a ship.  It wasn’t made of wood or steel and mishandling them could do catastrophic damage (sort of like the difference between your crumple zone enabled automobile and old steel cars…  One of their commanders had a propensity for running their airships up onto their moorings too quickly and damaging them…but he was aristocracy and his connections kept him at the conn.)

Here are some excellent resources for learning about airships, how they handle, their strengths and weaknesses:

Pretty much anything airship historian Douglass Robinson wrote, but specifically “Up Ship” for the US Naval airship project and Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg for the later German vessels, and The Zeppelin in Combat (which is concerned with WWI vessels, but gives an idea of the problems of airship combat.)

Smith’s The Airships Akron and Macon (US Naval Press) is excellent, as is Althoff’s USS Los Angeles.  Archbold’s Hindenburg: An Illustrated History is a lovely coffee table book that is good for allowing the players to get the feel for these craft.  Higham’s The British Rigid Airship is another excellent resource on the entirety of the UK Airship Scheme.

Online, The Airship Heritage Trust has a nice website on the British program, with some pages on the German and American ships.  The University of Colorado has a site here.  US Naval airships are discussed here and here.  The US Navy has more on them at their historical site (search airship.)

To play or not to play…music, that is.  Over the years, I’ve tried to incorporate music into the gaming experience.  For me, it started with having a bit of mood music on in the background while playing — appropriately bombastic classical for fantasy campaigns, James Bond themes for espionage or action games.  The ambient soundtrack could create a certain mood, but more often than not it didn’t really effect play.

With the airing of Miami Vice in the 1980s, I was influenced by the use of key musical numbers to enhance moments on the screen, and I attempted to emulate that with the use of “game soundtracks” — bringing in music for key scenes.  It kind of worked; it kind of didn’t.  One:  the use of music was a tip off to players that something was coming up — an emotionally important scene, a car chase, a shootout.  It lessened surprise.  Partly, I think it didn’t work well because of the nature of the delivery at the time:  cassettes.  They were slow to activate, with clunky devices to produce the soundtrack.  It also was just one more thing to tote around with you.

Eventually, I went back to the ambient mood music for a while, and while it didn’t necessarily distract (but could), it didn’t really add anything.  DVDs didn’t solve the problem of queuing up the soundtrack elements, but once I started to run games off of a laptop, the opportunity to use .mp3 files queued properly to create music for key moments was possible and much easier.

The problem remains that you have to stop what you’re doing — however briefly — to set up the appropriate clip, stop it when done.  And you still tip off the players that something is about to happen.  Now, I usually use a music clip as a “title sequence” — something to get people’s attention and let them know we’re starting play.

While I’m not against use of music to create a soundtrack for a game session, I’ve just never found it that effective.

Here’s a quote from an NPC in our Battlestar Galactica game describing the difference between the sea and space to an Aquarian rook…

“The sea is like Poseidon…by turns giving and kind,then angry and aggressive; at some point, it will try to kill you. Space is like Hades: cold, uncaring and terribly patient. It won’t hunt you, but it won’t help you. It just waits for you to screw up…then it quietly helps you on your way.”

It’s pretty simple:  players’ characters are the heroes.  They’re the ones that in a movie or a TV show would have their names in the credits.  But for a game, book, show, movie to be interesting, there have to be people outside of your few players to interact with.  The supporting cast…the NPCs.

Some beginning GMs are loathe to include NPCs in the party (assuming fantasy here) as it takes away from the players having to do things.  In fantasy, you can get away with this fairly easily — the advnetures are often rural or remote in nature and there aren’t a lot of people you have to deal with outside of the requisite monsters.  They are the busty girl that brings you your drinks at the obligatory “meet at the inn” sequence, or perhaps a villain monster.

Some games, however, have settings that necessitate more interaction with NPCs.  An urban setting with bring you up against merchants, thieves, drunks, other service and crafts people.  You can get by in “cut sequences” — where the action can be glossed over with some subtle description, “the barmaid provides you with a barely contained surly manner, slapping down dishes of food, nearly spilling your ale…but there’s a frazzled quality to her grumpiness that suggest fatigue.  She could be overworked, she might have been accosted by some adventure hungry tits like you guys…”  You haven’t done much, but it gives the players a sense of reality.  After all, how much interaction do you have with your waitresses at Denny’s?

Occasionally, this kind of thumbnail character catches some players’ interest.  a few jocular lines from a mechanic have them chuckling, and suddenly, he’s their go to guy on all things mechanical…  Now you need a name and a very basic outline of the guy’s personality.  This is that fellow you don’t know really well, but you talk cars, or guns, or politics with when he’s around…but you don’t know the name of his wife, or daughter, or where (or if) he goes to church.

Some genres will bring you into more contact with NPCs, but some will necessitate that NPCs act not as scene dressing or your villain, but as your support, as well.  In campaigns centering on the military, or intelligence work, or even criminal work (and, let’s face it, what is most dungeon crawling..?), you’re characters aren’t always going to have the requisite skills.  Or they’re part of a group where they might have backup coming to save their asses in a pinch.  They build or supply your equipment.  They do the stuff you can’t.

These NPCs might not need to be fleshed out beyond a basic personality and background — as with the mechanic aforementioned.  All you might know is SGT Biggs likes his scotch expensive, smokes a lot, and bitches about having to carry the Beretta 9mm (“We should go back to the .45, man!)  He drives a truck and has a girlfriend no one has met.  He’s good as a field medic.  That’s all you might really need to know.  Hell, most of the people in the military I knew, this was about the extent of who they were to me.  Extras.

You hold these guys in reserve.  Your team is tasked with an extraction of bad guy #1 from his base of operations in Colombia.  SGT Biggs is tasked as your backup, his guys holding open your egress route and providing cover for your escape.  However, in a pinch, he and his guys can swoop in to aid you, should you need.  Some basic stats might be needed, if you want to roll for these guys.  They’re still the bit players…but even the bit players occasionally get to save the day.

The commandos in black rollneck sweaters with camo on their faces do fastrope into the volcano to save James Bond’s bac0n.  they don’t get to capture/kill the bad guy, per se…but they play a role.  The geeky hacker might be the only thing that gets you out of the building you’re ripping off (but no one played geeky hacker boy).  Don’t be ashamed to have NPCs do stuff that is needed:  help bail out the characters if they get in too deep, provide vital bits of information, provide the skills your characters are lacking (that native guide leading your intrepid explorers up the Amazon and who is the only one that can talk to the natives…)

Even having an NPC command your ship in Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica is a good idea.  the characters have a certain latitude of behavior when they aren’t the big shot that can get everyone killed.  It allows them to do their shtick, and allows the GM to keep the game on track through fiat…Captain Pike is giving the orders, knows the mission parameters, keeps you guys from wandering too far afield.  But you get to find out how the monster works.  (Just remember the phrase, “Captain! AAAAAH!!!!)

When I started running a Galactica campaign, I realized that key to giving the players the right jolt — which the series never really gave you — was what the characters had lost.  Everything — sure; that explains the stress, the bad decisions, and the drama.  People don’t function well under intense stress and they make stupid mistakes and decisions.  To give the players that same sense of loss their characters felt, it was necessary to set the scene properly — give them wives, and husbands, and lovers, children and friends.  Pet dogs.  Favorite diners, cars, people they knew just as “that guy I chat with at the news stand on Fridays…”

Things that define your life and things people miss when a bunch of pissed-off robots scatter their ashes over a wide area.

The trick here is to decide exactly how much focus you need on the NPCs.  Can you get away with a cardboard cutout?  Do they need a name or are they “Dude #1” in the end credits?  Give them a simple quirk or thing to stand out — a tic, an accent (works quickly and well), a type of sword/gun/whatever, the asshole that wants to drag you in their Camaro/fast spaceship.  Build on that if the NPC catches the players’ attention.  (Think of how many bit players grab fans’ imaginations, and they get promoted into minor or major characters? [SGT Harriman in Stargate SG-1 and Helo in Battlestar Galactica, for instance.])

You don’t have to have the name and a detailed background on everyone in your hamlet, town, ship…but you should be ready to roll with it when some NPC suddenly outshines the others.

Important to note:  you (the GM) are going to have your favorites, as well.  Some will rise to the position of major characters in their own right.  We had a starship commander in a Star Trek game that just snagged my imagination and I loved bring the character back frequently as a foil or friend.  She was often the person in charge…but the characters were the ones doing the work.  Generals, captains…they tend to be too busy to research this, build that widget, command the small away mission.

Resist the urge to have your favorite NPC be the hero all the time.  But occasionally, you can give them their moment in the sun, and the players — if they like the character — won’t mind; if they don’t, you can use it to create some dramatic tension and give them a shot to take said NPC down a peg or two.