The case of the bar-owners son, or How to make things matter

Imagine the following. You are playing an adventure, where it is crucial that you enter a mansion to get hold of a document containing secrets about a spy from an enemy empire. Your first obstacle is entering the mansion in itself. There are some windows locked from inside, a big wooden door on the front (locked) and a smaller servants entrance in the back, also locked.

So, the thief of the party walks up, and tries to pick the lock on the servants entrance. Problem is.. he FAILS. Same thing happens when he tries the lock on the front door.

This is where the bard of the party tries to be clever, and heads to the nearest bar, uses his social skills to find out if one of the servants of the mansion sometimes hangs there. The GM thinks this is a clever idea, and says that one of the maids of the household dates the son of the bar-owner, and sometimes comes here. The son has an extra key to be able to sneak into her room at night. The bard persuades the son to help them, and he lets them in via the back door.

So, that's that, right? The party got into the mansion alright, through cleverness and good thinking. Also extra credit to the GM who was creative enough to let this happen.

There is, to me, however a small issue with all this (at least if not handled well). If the characters couldn't enter the mansion in the first place, the adventure would come to a grinding halt. So, any solution that would let the characters in would work after a while. If this is so, why don't just let the players in the mansion in the first place? Why not just say that "the thief picks the locks" and be done with it, let the adventure continue? I mean, now all that happened was that the adventure took a quick detour, and then ended up right back on track again.

Overall, I've seen that happen a bit to often. There is an obstacle in the way, and if that is not solved, the adventure can't continue. Or, if that is not solved, another way must be found, but the end result is still the same.

However, what if you make each roll make the story take a slightly different way, each solution branches of in a different direction. The bartendes son above could be captured.. or bribed... or maybe try to save his love from the house later on.

The important thing for me is to create something new with the rolls. Don't let a roll result in the stop of the adventure. In that case, just skip it. However, if the roll can add something interesting to the adventure, do it. Maybe a failed roll just means that nothing interesting happens, but a success makes the adventure more interesting. Perhaps the lock-picker not only picks the lock, but also realises that this particular lock isn't made localy, but imported from the faraway, hostile country. A fight is NOT just about defeating some enemy and then continuing down the path, but it's also about getting to know someone better, or pushing someone else to hate you. (Then again, all combats can't be pivotal encounters where the future is at stake.. some battles are just random battles).

So, to sum up: Make things matter! Don't just demand a skill check for the sake of it, put it there to make the adventure more interesting.

Rock - Paper - Scissors! A method for War?

Nope, it's not about solving the wars of the world with a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors (even though it would be nice if that was possible). Rather it's about me thinking more about what kind of conflict resolution system I want for my game War: The RPG (which I have written about in a couple of previous posts).

One trick that some games use is a variant of the old game Rock-Papers-Scissors. It has been used in roleplaying games before in one way or another (some Larps use it, and the game Dying Earth use a version of it). Now, in the original game, Rock always beats Scissors etc, but in an rpg one could for instance have different modifiers depending on the choices. Let's say you've got three types of attacks and three types of defences. If you are lucky and choose "Rock"-attack vs. "Scissors"-defence, you will get a bonus to your attack roll.

In addition to this you could plan your attacks (I think this is how they do it in Burning Wheels, and it's also how duels are played out in Castle Falkenstein), and for instance play out 3 (or something) cards at the same time, and then compare them step by step.

I think this would work well with a combat/ skirmish oriented roleplaying game for two reasons. First: It is quite common for a particular tactic to be more effeicient against some defences, while not as efficient against other.
Second: When the players have do several choices in advance, it simulates tactics and planning in a combat situation.

Dungeon Delves - the perfect format?

One of the problems often mentioned with RPG's in general is the time investment. First you have to spend one or several (often the latter) evenings, and on top of that, the GM have to prepare the adventures, something that shouldn't be taken for granted.

Dear Wizards have tried to solve that with what they call the Dungeon Delves. They are short adventures for DnD 4th of three encounters each, and each encounter is designed to take about an hour. There's also a book with a collection of Delves, meant to take you from lvl1 to lvl 30.

That means that if you have an hour to spare, you can play a short session. We are a couple of gamers that is trying this out on the lunch hour of the university we are all attending.

The impression so far is that it works. The modules are nice enough, and so far the encounters do stay within the time slot. So, what are our impressions so far?

• As said, the timing works quite nice. The GM has to setup the place a couple of minutes before, but other than that one encounter is roughly one hour (and sometimes less)
• The delves are VERY combat oriented. If you prefer other types of roleplaying, they may not be for you.
• The encounters are nicely balanced so that they provide a challenge, without being to lethal. You have to be careful with your resources (like Daily Powers) so that you have some oomph left for the final encounter. There are also guidelines for how to balance the encounters if you have to many or to few characters.
• The encounters use the environment quite nicely. For instance, in one of the encounters, some kobolds pushed over a large statue on one of the characters (who got stuck under it for 3 or 4 rounds).
  

Of course, while playing through the encounters, I've been toying with the idea of spreading the idea to other games and settings. Even to other types of encounters within DnD 4th, like an interesting skill challenge.

I think that "bite-sized" roleplaying has a place and is possible. Maybe we just have to think a little different and modulize our adventures a little more.

Plattforms for character generators

If you want to make a character generator for a game, there are a number of tools to use. Each of these have advantages and disadvantages, and I'll try to make a short summary here. I'll try to look at aspects like easy of use (as a developer), cross-plattform compability and what is required of the user.

Microsoft Excell

This is one of the major spreadsheet tools on the market. It's cell-like strukture and built in functions make self calculating character sheets easy to build. It's also fairly easy to deal with more advanced stuff (like turning a cell into a drop-down menu). However, after a while you run out of "out-of-the-box"-solutions, and that's when you have to come up with your own solutions. These can sometimes be both big and counterintuitive (time permitting, I'll see if I can write a post with some examples).

If you are into scripting, Excell so far has scripting possibilities (as long as you are using the Windows version. However, from what I've heard, that might change in the future).

Of course, for the user to use the Excell sheet, they need a copy of Excell. While MS Office is a rather widespread tool, it's not something to take for granted, and getting a copy isn't exactly sheep.

Google Spreadsheet

In it's suite Google Docs, Google also added a Spreadsheet tool, similar to Excell. Most of what I wrote above also applies to Google Spreadsheets. There are, however, some differences. The main one is of course that the latter is an online application. You can invite others to your application directly, and they can make a personal copy of the spreadsheet.

Google Spreadsheet is also slightly smaller than Excell. While it still has a whole heap of tools and functions, it's not as powerful as Excell. Also, it of course requires internet connecion to use.

As a side comment: There's also other alternatives when it comes to spreadsheets, like Open Office (free, both win, osx and linux), Numbers (a nifty little spreadsheet tool for osx) and Star Office. These are all usable, and have similar pros and cons as what I've written above.

Flash/ Flex/ Air

These three are basically different implementations of the same core technology (to the extent that Flex Builder changed name to Flash Builder in the latest edition).

When we think about Flash, we mostly think about annoying banners and ads on webb pages. However, Flash is so much more than that, and if you are fairly profficient in Actionscript, you can build advanced applications in a fairly short time.

Flex and Air are technologies that build on the Flash framework, but while Flash in itself (the software, that is) is aimed at multimedia and presentations, Flex and Air are more focused on Application Development.

The startup is a bit tougher in these tools, since you have to learn at least a little Actionscripting before you start. But if you master that, I'd say that Flash (etc) is a fairly good way to go, because you can develop applications for it rather quickly, it's compatibale with both Windows and osX, and as long as the user has Flash Player installed (most have, and it's free) anyone can use it.

Java and/or C#

If you have some programming experience, it might be worth looking into a more full fledged programming language like Java or C#. The advantage here is that many programming languages have pre-made functions and classes for dealing with lists and collections, something that is very usable when you are creating characters. Both Java and C# (and others) have graphical tools for laying out the GUI, which saves you a whole lot of typing (if you are not like me, and like writing the code for the GUI as well... ).

With Java, you can distribute your application to anyone with the Java Runtime Environment installed (which is fairly common), and it's cross-plattform compatible. Other languages, for instance C# is limited to one OS (Windows, in the case of C#).

Other scripting languages

There are a number of powerful scripting languages like Python or Ruby, and these can be downloaded free. However, they still require some programming knowledge (unless, of course, you are ready to learn a little coding). On the other hand, they are often very poweful, and you can achieve quite a lot with just a few lines of code. Unfortunately they are hard to make completely stand alone, and often the end user has to download the language package as well to run it. They also can be lacking in the GUI-area slightly.

Databases

One way to make a character build is to use a database enging like MS-Sql, MySql or Oracle. Some of these tools are free to download and use (Ms-SQL Express, various MySql tools) and there are a number of nifty little features and advantages you get from using a database.

However, relational database design can be quite tricky if you are not used to it, and a complex thing as a character generator can easy turn into 50-100 different tables to keep track of everything (speaking from experience. I once did a database-based character builder for Mutants and Masterminds).

Also, there is no easy way to distribute "just" a database, but instead you have to build a front end using something like Java, a scripting language or Flash.

Web-based

Using a database as above, and combine it with a scripting language like php is also a way to go. This, as well as the other tools, does require some knowledge of the following areas:

HTML+CSS
Database Design/ SQL
php (or similar)

However, as long as you got somewhere to put it (that is, a web-server), you can find all the tools for free, and distributing is easy (it's a webpage).

Summary

Creating a character generator does require some hard work (of course a bit depending on what game system you are using) and I wouldn't recommend anyone to do that as a starting project if they have no experience in a given tool. However, as long as you got the initial parts understood, a chargen is a great (if hard) way to increase your skill.

One of the main areas to look at in any given environment is how it deals with lists, because character generation is a whole lot about building lists by picking items from other lists.

Excel tip #2 - Drop down menus

Making a drop-down-menu in Excel is fairly easy (and with drop-down-menu I mean in this case a cell with a number of preset options that you can choose from).

Let's say you hae a game with 10 classes you can choose from. Create a new sheet (I usually create separate sheets for look-up-tables etc). Enter the names of the classes in a column, one class/ cell. Then select the cells and give them a name (as described in the previous tip).

Then go back to the first sheet and select the cell where you want the drop-down menu to be, and then go to Data - Data Verification. Choose "List" from the combo-box, and then enter the name you gave your list in the previous step. Finish with clicking OK.

If all went well, you should now be able to click on the cell and then get a nice drop-down-menu with all the classes.