Seeking Ferret

As I mentioned, I wanted to write up some of my thought process and learned experience from writing a couple of RPG one-shot adventures for conventions that feel fairly unique in their structure.

The fundamental feature of both Zoo Adventure and Carting Wars is the Task List. In Zoo Adventure, there are two task lists, one a list of tasks to be performed at particular times, and one a list of tasks that can be performed at any time. In Carting Wars, there is a single task list, the Cargo Board that the party can bid on jobs from, but I have some flexibility to add additional jobs or even alternate job boards. In both cases, the task list is the first thing they're given once they've introduced their characters. It is the essential setup for the adventure.

The Task List is a counterintuitive move for a oneshot, I think, because the general imperative of a oneshot adventure is simplifying the storytelling, and for most people, that means simplifying the biggest choices. It's also, I think, a generally counterintuitive move, oneshots aside, because it puts more of the DM's cards on the table at the start than is typical. The expectation of a story is that as you go through it, you will learn more and make new decisions. The Task List telegraphs what's going to happen.

These two counterintuitive things cancel out! It turns out that the telegraphing what's going to happen part means that even though there are more upfront choices, they're clear choices the players don't have to spend time decoding, simplifying the narrative. And it turns out that the multitude of choices means that even when you telegraph the overall shape of the story, there's still a lot of space for surprises, both in the choices themselves and in the way they interact with each other.

The strategy definitely requires either a significant amount of preparation, or significantly good improvisational skills, because lots of choices means it's harder to predict what your players will do and focus your prep. But I tend to cheat towards the middle, and to me that is the true genius of the Task List- if you design really good story hooks into your Task List, it gives you a good idea of where and how you will need to improvise. I'll confess that when I look over the task list from Zoo Adventure, I only remember about half of the story ideas I originally used when I ran the adventure, but the prompts it presents for storytelling are rich enough that I can easily make up new story ideas for the same tasks. Fundamentally, I am a lazy DM and things that let me flesh ideas out from very small seeds are my favorite.

Here are some secrets of the Task List:

All the tasks are hiding something, except the tasks that are not.

For the mechanism to work right, it has to have some sense of fairness. If the task board simply said TASK A, TASK B, TASK C, and TASK D, pick one to do, that's not an interesting or meaningful choice in this context because without context there's no basis for making choices. The tasks need to communicate some information about the activities the players will be undertaking and what they will involve. What they do not necessarily communicate are the non-immediate consequences of success or failure. A given cargo might say that it's a simple grain shipment to a nearby city, and the players will be able to work out distances and weights and routes from the information provided and their knowledge, but it won't necessarily advertise that the grain shipment is contaminated with a bioweapon, or that the grain shipment is an attempt to break a monopoly, or resolve a food shortage. (Those things may or may not be deducible with a little work, Knowledge rolls or Lore rolls or Insight rolls, or conversation or investigation may provide the players with insights, but some of those answers may not be available until the players start down a path.) The consequences are what make the task interesting, they're what imbue it with story. But if all of the tasks are actually hidden story hooks, this is not a Task List game, it's a menu of different adventures for the players to choose. There's nothing wrong with that, but what makes a Task List game interesting to me is that sometimes a grain shipment is just a grain shipment. All the players need to do is pick up the cargo, deliver it to its destination, and get paid.

That doesn't mean there is no challenge to the straightforward tasks. I still make players describe what they're going to do to complete the task, and if they are doing something that could fail, I make them roll. In Carting Wars, I made them describe how they were loading the grain on the truck, and if they were just planning to lift it, that's a strength check. But it does mean that the failure only results in delays and loss of resources, not any direct impact on the overall story.

On the other hand, it means that instantly, before any investigation of those non-immediate story consequences, there are tactical consequences to evaluate, and tactical choices. If the players want to tackle more than one task, they need to evaluate which tasks they can accomplish and the best order in which to approach them. They need to evaluate if they need any additional equipment or labor or authorizations or maps to complete tasks. Having tasks that are 'just' filler tasks that don't have any story gives players a lot more knobs to work with, a lot more choices. This leads to the next secret of the Task List.

Intraparty conflict is the lifeblood of the game

Intraparty conflict doesn't need to mean Paranoia-style backstabbing. It just needs to mean the players disagree about what the best course of action is, and they need to work out those conflicts through the mechanisms of the game. In a traditional oneshot RPG session, the players are faced with a single narrative throughline. There are usually choices along the way, but those choices emerge as the players progress along their initial path and discover facts about the world. But in a Task List game, choices appear from the start, and they are real choices that can be evaluated with both objective and subjective metrics. So the players are forced to talk to each other and decide how they want to proceed, from the very first minute of the game. And that is a good thing, parties that disagree with each other are more engaged in the game when it's not their turn, because other players' actions affect them more.

I typically encourage this by, after providing the task list to the players, physically withdrawing to give them space to interact. I don't necessarily leave the table, as I want to hear their discussion and make use of it, but at minimum I lean back and cede the central position at the table in order to let them have the space to debate their options without pressure to make an immediate decision. I want it to be clear to them that this choice makes a difference to the game, it's not just a randomizer mechanic but that there are clues and tools they have to make better decisions. I periodically return to this posture throughout the game when I want to encourage the players to evaluate new information, and again, when I want to encourage them to disagree with each other.

If players are in my view following the lead of one player too much, I will sometimes step in and ask leading questions to other players. "And is your player also doing this?" "While he's doing that, what are you doing?" It's not about stirring shit, it's about giving everyone a stake in the choices. Some kinds of rpg work fine if a player leads the party, the other players can still feel like they're contributing to the story by doing cool things in combat or solving puzzles, but this is not that sort of game. Everyone needs to be involved in the decisions.

Making the wrong choice shouldn't ruin everything, unless it should

The signature of this style of game is lots of choices with stakes, but lots of relatively low-stakes choices. There shouldn't be an unmarked door that you walk through and everyone dies. That said, if there is a well-signposted door that everyone dies if they walk through, and players choose to walk through it, they die. In Zoo Adventure, there is a big scary rune-covered lock on the Demonarium, and the task list includes "Do not open the Demonarium". There were lots of indications that opening the Demonarium would be bad, so when players opened the Demonarium I didn't hesitate to whomp them with beyond their level monsters.

But otherwise, choices shouldn't lead to challenges that players can't survive if they make the wrong choice. If you're going to give lots of choices and hide consequences in the choices, the worst that should happen if the wrong choice is made is that the players are set back but can still progress. Maybe they've lost the chance to complete this task, but there are still lots of other tasks to complete. Maybe they can still complete this task, but with a penalty.

Along the same lines, the structure of the design means that you can include Over-Leveled encounters. It's okay to have a monster the party could never kill, because the players never have to encounter that monster if they choose not to. Or if they do have to encounter that monster, they don't need to fight it. Maybe instead they trade with it! The game opens itself up to lots of ways to navigate highly powered antagonists, and that also makes for a more realistic feeling adventure world where not everything is nicely level-balanced for the players.

The whole point is to emphasize social encounters and social problem solving

Being logistical adventures, combat is not at the forefront. Combat is a central part of D&D and players enjoy it, so I don't preclude it, but if players want to avoid it they usually can, and will likely be more successful at completing tasks if they do. In Zoo Adventure, combat pretty much only occurs if the players breach the Demonarium. In Carting Wars, there's a chance of bandit attacks or fights with the law depending on choices, but most of the time the challenges are social and logistical.

This requires an array of interesting NPCs, both as adversaries and as allies. And maybe most importantly, NPCs who are neither, whose agendas are orthogonal to those of the players. That can be a source of new tasks altogether, too. The guard who doesn't care if the party gets through or not, she just wants to make sure her checklist is completed so she can go home. The tourist who really, really wants to get a photo with the hydra. In a logistical adventure like this, the players' story still needs to be central to your storytelling, but it's perhaps better if that doesn't mean that they're at the center of the universe. The more other stuff is happening, the more the players' story has context, and the more interesting the obstacles to their success are.

I am a puzzle person and at some level, these games are puzzle games. The way to succeed is not necessarily to deploy the most power, it's to deploy the most cunning and calculation to figure out a way to work around the problems that the tasks present. What is the right order to tackle tasks, who are the best characters to approach a task, how can your get extra resources to devote to a problem, all of these are the central questions of a task list game.

Artwork Helps.

I like making the Task Lists have a certain aesthetic. In Zoo Adventure, I tried to make it look like it was written on a chalkboard. In Carting Wars, it's a big board with different handwritings on it. It's about immersion and creating a sense of the world, but it's also specifically about privileging the task list. I want players to feel attached to it, feel like it is a thing that has personality. I am bad at art, so I am limited in how far I can take this, but I think it's a powerful tool for building buy in to the concept. It also serves as a cheat to make the adventure feel more planned than it is... So much of the actual adventure is improvised in response to the players' choices, so presenting props that were clearly designed, with thought and care, before the adventure keeps the players from feeling like no effort went in.

The same applies to maps. I'll have a special version of the map for myself marked up with secrets, but I like a nice clean map to give to the players so that the world is not just a thing in my head, it's a thing they all have knowledge of and can make logistical plans from a position of awareness. They don't need to ask me "How far is A from B?", they can just see it themselves. And the more the map feels of a piece with the adventure, the more the players will make it theirs and interact with the map the way I want them to.

I've used other props as well. In Carting Wars, I borrowed a key feature of Shipping Wars- the rival truckers making fun of a trucker when they screw up a shipment. I printed"Only an Idiot" tokens to give to players when they made a mistake or had a failure, useable like a Bardic Inspiration, and roleplayed an NPC rival trucker making fun of them whenever I gave them a token. The tokens were a big hit, players who failed a task would ask me if they'd earned one.

These are good practices in any game, but I think they're especially important when you're asking players for work with you something like this. To the extent that a Task List game introduces players to more worldbuilding or potential worldbuilding than a typical one-shot game, and asks the players to make knowledgeable choices with respect to their awareness of the world setting, visuals and physical objects make the worldbuilding feel tangible.

I've been thinking, as I wrote in my last D&D post, about how to do the more natural settings in my new campaign in a way that both explores the economic questions and maintains the sense of whimsy and adventure you want in a fantasy adventure and it struck me that the obvious approach is to use Fey. The very nature of Fey adventures is tied up in questions of contracts and obligations, it's inherently economic in nature. Players want to exploit a mine, but in order to gain access they need to make deals with the local fey, whose goals may be orthogonal to predictable economic aims, but whose practices are definitely economic in nature.

This creates a really interesting potential scenario: Beneficial contracts that players make with fey accrue immediate guild merits (XP) toward levelling, but if a deal with a fey is ever breached, players lose those guild merits and potentially can de-level. I really like this effect, it makes breaking fey contracts have real, meaningful teeth to the players on a metaphysical level.

Larger contracts between Auction Houses and fey kingdoms are also a wonderful source of adventure hooks, as such deals no doubt require periodic acts of maintenance. I'm imagining a scenario like where the Deal is that in order to ensure safe passage across a river in fey territory, all the Carter's Guild needs to present the local fey lord with a small, somewhat obscure but not valuable gem every year- the kind of payment where the players might wonder what the hell the faeries want with it. The players try to cross the river and the fey lord, wearing an outfit beautifully adorned with hundreds of identical gems showing that this Deal has been in force for centuries and revealing the intricate way that this ageless lord executes plans over long time scales, denies them passage until they present him this year's gem. And he doesn't deny them passage by force, but with a simple but immensely powerful teleport spell. Any time they try to cross the river, they end up back where they started. I can do so much with this kind of story element.


So I'm going to need to think up the details of the organization, such as it is, of the fey in the Mannheim Vale. I definitely want multiple kingdoms/courts of fey, but I probably also want individual loner fey creatures.

At the last minute on Saturday night, I popped into a pickup G+ Hangout game of Tears of a Machine, a new rpg about giant robots being kickstarted right now: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robotclaw/tears-of-a-machine

Premise is loosely based on the anime Evangelion, which I know nothing about except that apparently it was one of the inspirations for Pacific Rim. You play as teenagers who are jacked into giant killer robots stolen from the evil aliens. Essentially they ripped the robot brains out of the things and shoved a teenager in its place, so the only thing keeping the mechs from going crazy and rampaging is a teenager's ability to keep control of their emotions. The game's most important mechanic in combat isn't your technical ability to do damage or outmaneuver the enemies, it's balancing your pilot's emotional control against the mech's lust for violence.

The result is very character driven. A character's choices out of combat have a direct influence on how combat plays out.

I played one of the older characters, a child of privilege from a family with defense contractor connections. She was stuck between her desire to lead and her disconnection from the other characters' lives- both of the other players were playing orphans. When the latter impulse took hold, she acted selfishly, putting her own needs first and assuming that her fellow pilots would be fine. When the former impulse took hold, though, she rallied her team despite adversity and moved everybody past obstacles together.

Then in battle, it all fell apart when her mother's car was threatened by one of the enemy robots. She lost control of her emotions, lost control of her giant robot, and nearly lost the battle when she sacrificed the mission for her personal needs. It was a fascinating version of the many vs. one dilemma because there were so many other confounding factors in the choice.

The game was a lot of fun, and people who like giant robots and rpgs should check out the Kickstarter.

I did a bit of a kickstarter binge this summer, as basically every gamer I know seems to have, and premiums are starting to roll in.

I've seen a PDF rough draft of the first Appendix N adventure, which looks like a lot of fun, and also looks cheap and hasty. I don't think it's a company I'd buy from again, but I think the adventure looks well-suited to running on G+, so it's not a loss. And their mapmaker really is brilliant.

When I saw that the Stonehaven Miniatures Kickstarter had a Dwarven Bard mini, I had to buy in. Dwarven bards are the best. The minis came in this past week, and they look great. Unfortunately I don't actually know how to paint minis, so I guess I'm going to have to learn. I ordered a mini-painting starter kit from Amazon.

I've been getting regular updates from Dwimmermount, but... I have no interest in them. I'm waiting for the book. I don't ever plan to actually run Dwimmermount, but it seems clear that the book is going to be a fountain of great DMing ideas and advice. I'm looking forward to flipping through it and brainstorming. Dwimmermount, for the uninitiated, is a 1E-inspired Megadungeon designed by James Maliszewski. It is inspired by 1920s/30s pulp SF and fantasy, with the massive dungeon being among other things a potential jumping off point for portals to other worlds, as well as an ancient and fascinating and dynamic location in its own regard.

And the new Tabletop Forge beta is out, but I haven't had a chance to run anything with it. I guess the moral of this post is: Guys, I have a new low-level adventure and the D&D Next playtest rules have a new edition and I have a neat new toy to play with to run maps in Google Plus. Who wants to explore the Ruins of Ramat with me?



Unrelatedly, Nate Silver briefly turns his attention back to baseball, his original statistical home. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/the-statistical-case-against-cabrera-for-m-v-p/

I think he is wrong to argue that these statistical indicators tell us that Trout was more valuable than Cabrera. I think the measures we have to evaluate defensive contributions to a team are improved immeasurably compared to even five years ago, and certainly let us make better comparisons between players than we used to be able to with simply fielding percentages, but there is still a lot of handwaviness in the analysis. I don't believe that simply because a Win Share analysis credits Trout with saving thirty runs, he actually saved thirty runs and that value can be naively added to Trout's offensive run creation.

I've been on-board the sabermetric revolution since the mid-90s, well ahead of Moneyball, but the best statistical analysts have always understood that statistics were an inadequate measure of value that needed to be supplemented with intuition and subjectivity. If a statistic tells us that ARod is a better defensive shortstop than Jeter, that means one of two things. Either ARod is a better shortstop than Jeter, or the statistic is wrong. Shortly after the Moneyball revolution, the Wall Street Journal began a regular sports statistics column written by Allen St. John, and every week I would read it and rage because St. John never took the time and thought to parse out which of the two choices were the right one.

Now I would never accuse Nate Silver of that particular mistake. Silver obviously knows to validate his statistics. I just think he's overestimating their fit. Defense is full of intangibles and unmeasurables, and the work-arounds that modern statisticians use to create usable defensive statistics are powerful, but not all-powerful, and they're still workarounds borne of our inability to directly measure precisely what Defense is.

The point is, statistics are good, but they're not yet perfect at measuring what makes a baseball player great, and they're limited by all the usual GIGO that haunts a mathematical model. If statistics give us a result that is counter to our intuition, sometimes we need to put a human check on them to make sure it's not the math that's at fault.




Also, unrelatedly, I got to the issue of Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos where we get a racist squad member. It is so unintentionally hilarious. And pretty awful, too. The racist squad member tries to ally himself with Reb and Fury against Izzy, Dino, and Gabe, except that Reb and Fury are all "What the fuck are you talking about? We don't take bigots in our squad," which is hilarious when your name is Reb and you're a walking talking Southern stereotype. And then at the end, the racist gets injured by not listening to Izzy the Jew, and Gabe donates blood because they match on blood type, and then the racist freaks out because he has negro blood in him now. Except then Nick Fury gives him a talking to and he gets kicked out the Howlers, but the very last panel suggests that he has learned his lesson and wants to apologize to Gabe and Izzy.

I think I need more Howler/Isaiah Bradley stories, is what I'm saying.

New D&D playtest packet is out and I'm kind of ridiculously excited for the adventure I have planned. I have a great party coming- Alai, Jon, teal_dear, Nathaniel, and maybe a few others. I found a really neat little One Page Dungeon to use as the centerpiece for the adventure, and I sketched out a region around the dungeon (tentatively calling it the Mannheim Vale) that's interesting enough that I want to run more adventures in the area.

There are still things I'm dubious about with the system. I prefer a more robust skill system- Alai and I have argued for years about whether it's better to open up the skill system and allow freedom and imagination to guide what is possible to try, or to have a codified skill system with clearly assigned skill ranks. My general feeling is that there are many things you do so many times in a dungeon adventure game that to have on-the-fly adjudication for them is silly and inefficient, and to have arbitrary tables is pointless and unwieldy. The great advantage of 'modern' rpgs is their consistency of system. I think the 3E skill system is its best feature, though I've played enough 4E to have reached peace with its frustrations. In any case, 5E by the book specifically encodes a lot of on-the-fly adjudication in its skill system, so I have taken in my planning notes to referring to the equivalent 3.5 skill roll alongside the attribute roll so that I can better conceptualize what's going to happen. I'll see how I like it in game.

I also don't like that the playtest leaves it to the DMs to design the adventure this time (no pre-rolled adventure in this playtest packet), but didn't provide monster generation rules. I like that I get to test the system on my own adventures, but the sample of monsters in the bestiary is inadequate for my needs. (Maybe we're actually supposed to just keep running Caves of Chaos with the rules updates? I'm not sure) I'm going to be doing a mixture of reskinning and number-fudging to get the creatures I want, which is fine, but it's not what I ought to be doing in a playtest. And the way monsters are designed in this system actually seems nice, clear, and easy- once we get monster-generation rules I think I'm going to like building monsters in this system.

I'm glad they added opportunity attack rules to this revision, and I like the rule. I think I like turning the five foot step into a ten foot step but sacrificing an action for that. I think that lets you balance the opportunity attack rules without bogging combat down in minutiae of tactical movement the way constantly five-foot-stepping in melee does in 4E. On the other hand, tactical movement can lead to dynamic, exciting combat, so I'm looking to see if the fighter's new maneuver abilities make up for the loss of detailed tactical movement.

I think I'm also going to move toward one of the optional slow-heal rules. Especially in a one-shot, I don't want players doing the camp in the middle of the dungeon after every combat maneuver and I think slow-heal ought to make players more careful and conscious about managing hit points. And if not, they'll die. :)

But yeah, this should be fun. Will report back after the playtest on Monday.

I saw a slashvertisement for the Legend rpg system being offered as a pay what you want download with all proceeds going to Child's Play, so I grabbed a copy and kicked in a few dollars. I'd never heard of it before, but having read through much of the book in the past few days, I'm impressed.

Legend is a D20 mod that takes some of what I think are the good innovations of 4E and works them into something that is mostly 3.5ish. The class progression system is a really elegant compromise between customizability and simplicity- you pretty much have to multiclass to do anything interesting, but multiclassing is always designed to be close to balanced and it's always designed to be incredibly easy to apply. If I wanted to run Dorfin Maltby, my mercenary fighter-mage that took me a couple hours of tweaking to design in 4E because of the annoyance that is the hybrid rules, I'd just say "I'm playing a barbarian with the rage track swapped out for the tactician spellcasting track" and I'd just about instantly have a character close to my character concept.

Legend is... I'm not sure I'd say it's purely gamist, I think it's a hybrid of gamist/narrativist (there's a lot of things that would make a simulationist cringe, like increasing melee range with level), but the writing is purely gamist. It's written in the voice of game designers who have spent a lot of time thinking about the trade-offs of rpg design and are trying to justify their design decisions to the reader. A lot of the rulebook is spent discussing game philosophy. This is not a sourcebook for newbie gamers, though I think the game itself probably is. But I really enjoyed it because if you discuss your first principles you make it easier for someone with different preferences to deviate from the rules without breaking the game. If I'm more narrativist in my impulses, I can see where I can fudge the magic rules safely because I understand what motivated their design decisions.

I'm not as convinced by their gimmicky social interaction rules, but it's a gimmick that's worth a try at least once, and it's not essential to the system that you use their social interaction system.

In any case, if I end up at Eve's for New Year's I'm going to try to run a crawl using the system. It looks like it's fun and lightweight in the right places despite taking advantage of the D20 system's ample capacity for complexity and customization.