Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Compromise and Conceit: New Nations of the Red Empire

    It is now spring in 1755, 6 months since the Indian rebellion and the collapse of the British at Albany. The Indians have overrun the forces of the British, capturing Albany and other key towns all the way South to the heavily settled areas of New York. Rebellious colonials maintain essential control over the major cities of the North – places like Albany and Boston – but their cities are essentially white outposts in the new red expanse. The British government holds a band of cities along the coast, from New York in the North to Richmond and Hampton in Virginia. They also have a sizeable community of Delaware Indians hostage South East of Washington, on the Delaware peninsula. They are moving troops into these cities to reinforce them, and it may be that they are going to be able to maintain some kind of status quo, provided that the French remaining threatening to the North.

    Things as they were...
    Things as they were…

    The most likely outcome of the endgame of this war will be that the colonials will establish an independent kingdom in the belt of cities from Albany through Boston to Maine, possibly constituting them as independent city states within a broader series of native American nations. The British will then retain the seaboard and its immediate surrounds, from New York to Hampton, and will repatriate the Delaware tribes they have captured as part of a peace settlement. Any attempt by the Indians to capture New York and Washington will lead to a brutal and devastating series of battles, and the massive loss of forces on both sides. The only way that the Indians will capture these cities easily is if something forces the British to withdraw, and it is looking likely that the only thing which would force this is a collapse of support for the colonial enterprise in England, or a catastrophic loss to the French in Europe forcing a withdrawal of forces from the colonies.

    Should the Indians overrun the British territories, the most likely outcome will be the slaughter of British forces and the civilians living there, especially now that the enigmatic Cherokee and Shanwee have moved into the campaign to the South West of Virginia. The colonials of the North Eastern territories will then be able to move into these cities and form them into additional city states, though there is some possibility that the South-Eastern Indian tribes – the Southern Delaware, Shawnee and Cherokee – will want to take over Hampton or Richmond in Virginia as a kind of Indian city-state, and the North-Eastern Indian tribes – the Northern Delaware, Iroquois, Mohawk and Mohican – will want to take over Ohio for the same purpose. This will involve displacement or destruction of white families, and in the latter case possibly some conflict with the French.

    The Iroquois, Mohawk and Mohican nations have now captured all the hinterlands North, Northwest and West of Albany and Shenechtady, which has been designated a joint Indian–colonial trading town on the edge of the “independent” city-state of Albany. In recognition of their efforts, the characters have been granted a huge slice of this land to rule as their own kingdom. This land consists of a triangle stretching from Fort William Henry through Sackets Harbour on Lake Ontario to the Canadian border, along this border (essentially the St Lawrence River) as far as the trapping town of Cornwall, then East to Rouses Point (the northernmost tip of non-French land at this time). Everything lying between this boundary and the western bank of the Lakes Champlain, George and Saratoga belongs to the characters.

    Map-making in this era is truly Infernal
    Map-making in this era is truly Infernal

    Negotiations are currently underway with the tribes and colonial towns of this land to arrange their transfer of allegiance to the PCs. This will be the only multi-ethnic land in North America, consisting as it does of mixed Mohawk, Mohican and settler country. It will be the PCs’ responsibility to make this land richer, and to defend it from the French…

    The PCs have to decide the answers to the following questions:

    1. Do they want this land?
    2. Do they want to see the victory of the Indians and Colonials in the New World?
    3. If they side with these people, can they think of a way to bring about the peaceful collapse of British forces in New York and Virginia?
    4. If not, will they aid in a war to destroy them, or press for peace?
    5. If they take the land, and knowing that they will be able to make money trading with the newly constituted city states, do they care what happens between the Indians and the British?
    6. Is there anything else they want to do?

    Discuss in comments…

  • Strange Doings in Strange Junctures

    Schoolgirls in space...
    Schoolgirls in space…

    So we were all doing fine in the 2009 juncture, but we hadn’t found my Shrine’s God so we went to 2056 where the Architects Of the Flesh had taken It, and when we got there we met these flying apes and they helped us to find the secret research lab where my god was being held only we had help from the Dragons and while the apes were fighting the Flying Iron Men from the Buro I had to try and rescue my mummy who was trapped in a sarcophaga-[whatever] and like I said we had help from the Dragons but Kar Fai is old and Useless so mummy had to stay unconscious

    [gasp]

    only then we all had to go raid the flying ship-thingy, and Kitsune’s mummy was there but she was a hostage of the Architects of the Flesh and I disintegrated the bomb belt she was wearing because it didn’t suit her and I did it through my phone and then Kitsune and Grandma Noodles flew down to earth on a parachute of noodles and I rescued Echo who smells and has a robot arm and where has that ghost-girl gone? Doesn’t matter anyway because we all went back down to save my God from under the floor of the lab but Kar Fai and the Dragons had gone and taken the God with them AND my mummy even though she was brainwashed

    [gasp]

    so then anyway we chased them in a big tanky-thing but it was slow and Echo thinks she is so good at driving but she is completely like heta yo, so I jumped on my moped and I caught the Dragons in their car but they didn’t want to talk to me and my mummy was angry and then kitsune had to protect her mummy because my mummy tried to kill kitsune’s mummy and when she did kitsune had to defend her mummy but she must have cut her by mistake or something because when my mummy’s magic cleared and all the flashing dots were gone from my eyes Kitsune’s mummy was gone and there was a big soldier with a robot arm who Echo called omega and then we had a fight but I threw my moped at omega and he ran away but we couldn’t catch him

    [gasp]

    so then my mummy died and she didn’t even say thanks but she said something about 1868 and I thought she meant that new CK perfume I can’t afford but Grandma Noodles said that was her birthday – I mean like when she was born, not like the last time she was pretty and someone gave her a present on her birthday, which was probably 1898 – and Kitsune said we were both stupid and that was the Meiji restoration and I really don’t think you should speak to Grandma Noodles like that especially when she’s drunk but Kitsune’s a ninja so I suppose she’s okay

    [gasp]

    so anyway then we had an argument with Kar Fai and the Dragons and then these big monkeys arrived and they got angry with me too because they say an ape is different to a monkey and then they tried to tell me that whales are not fish and I was confused but I took a photo anyway and the Dragons told us that the Architects of the Flesh had this plan to take my shrine’s God and brainwash it and then they would go back in time to like 9 AD or something and bury my God somewhere so it would grow old and then when they dug it up in 2056 it would be 2000 years old and super powerful and really dirty, and then they would use it to take over the world in 2009 which I suppose they have to do because the food and fashion in 2056 is like completely saiyaku yo so I suppose they want to steal our cool

    [gasp]

    which they could like soooooooo do if they used my God’s power to take over the Feng Shui sites in 2009 like they own them all in 2056

    [gasp]

    but they could only brainwash my God because it was young because it was born in 1868 which is like…

    …

    …

    so then we were all like let’s go back to 1868 when the God was born and convince the previous God to come with us to the future to fight the new god when it becomes the extra-old god. So we went back to 1868 and walked all the way across Hyogo in those funny wooden geta they had then and my feet hurt but we pretended to be travelling musicians and everything was all like tale of genji except for the steam trains  and it’s weird because when we went back to before I was born I wasn’t any thinner but I suppose that’s why they call it baby fat and so the God said like YEAH let’s go and kill the new god and then we went forward in time again and put our old God into a suit of Iron Armour like hagane renkinjitsu shi only bigger and I made sure I didn’t paint the little symbol in blood so it can’t be washed off with a water pistol why does no-one else ever think of these things but I suppose I didn’t try to resurrect my mummy either maybe I’m growing up

    [gasp]

    and in forward time which is like the future only you can’t do things there if they might stop what happened in the past which is called linear time we were all like, what are we gonna do and this big monkey called BattleChimp Potemkin said we should kill everything and Kitsune agreed (of course) and The Dragons said that they had heard that the Buro were planning on putting my Shrine’s new God that was now a super old god into a satellite called Sheba so that they could beam its Godlike powers through a space portal into the past and take over the world so we would have to stop it by going into space on a rocketship and taking the god out of the satellite and throwing it away like rubbish and it would burn up in space even though space is like really cold and then we could put our old god which is now the younger god but isn’t brainwashed into the satellite and beam its Godlike power down to earth and take over all the Feng Shui sites in 2056 and then we would be like the most powerful magicians on the planet and then we could find that omega guy and completely kill him

    [gasp]

    so Echo put pop-up pornographic virusses in all the world’s computers because she’s weird and then we went to Tunguska and stole a rubbish truck and drove it into a spacebase and I had to disintegrate some people that Kitsune and Grandma Noodles killed because she was drunk again and then we went downstairs into a like command centre thing and then Kitsune killed some other people who were in the way but it looked like  a kind of disco or a noh play or something only the actors don’t die in Noh plays at least that’s what mummy used to tell me when I was scared and then I disintegrated the wrong half of the door and all these guys got angry and tried to shoot us so Kitsune and Grandma Noodles killed them and then we talked to some other soldiers who were scared of us and one of them agreed to call his boss if I didn’t disintegrate his special treasures and then the boss came over but Grandma Noodles was still drunk so the boss died too and then Echo broke everything except the remote control rocket ship and we drove over there and hopped on

    [gasp]

    but there was this creature made of leaves that chased us and even though I poured a potion on the sand it still tried to kill us the stupid thing and Echo told us that its really bad if vines grow on a rocket just when it’s taking off ’cause it’s going really slowly and it can tip over and kill everyone like in a movie so Kitsune and I went onto the outside of the rocket ship and I had a rope and I disintegrated the vines and then the plant monster died and it was like surfing only really hot and kind of high up so I went back inside and Echo told me to make sure I locked the door properly because we were going into space and it’s really cold and now we’re on our way to the satellite and it’s boring…

  • Antagonism, Nerds and our Idols

    Writing about Torchwood made me think of a conversation I had with a colleague about the show. She is your classic role-playing nerd, computer geek and all round otaku. When I mentioned – somewhat breathlessly – to her that I had watched 5 episodes of amazing Torchwoody goodness, she immediately launched into a tirade on how the first 3 episodes were great and then it turned shit[1].  She then revealed that she had watched all 3 seasons, and gave a blistering critique of the homophobia in the show. I checked with a friend, and it turns out the show’s writer is gay. So homophobia, probably not so much[2]. Now, I didn’t get a hint of this and aside from one small section of episode 4 which I thought was a bit kooky, I thought the last 2 episodes of this arc held together very well and, even if not satisfying everyone’s definition of perfect, could hardly be called shit.

    I also recently had a big argument with a friend about the Lord of the Rings Movies[3], and was reminded (just coincidentally) of an old role-player in Australia who was so hell-bent on believing that these movies wrecked the books that he was 100% sure that Gandalf said “Run you fools!” in the movie, i.e. that his famous phrase had been corrupted “for the sheeple”. I had to force him to watch the movie to point out to him that he was wrong.

    And I realised – I think nerds have a quite antagonistic relationship with their cinematic and literary idols, in which we are happy to lap up their good work but are really critical of  even the smallest failings, failings of course which occur in a very complex and difficult medium beset by forces beyond the creator’s control [i.e. producers]. I think nerds go out of their way to find fault with their idols, with the creators of new work, and with re-imaginings of old work. I think this is part of the grognard movement – which seems to hold that, the more people D&D tries to attract, the worse it must become – and is also linked to a strong tendency to reject any work which attempts to popularise any aspect of our sub-culture, and any creative figure who wants to be approved of by the mainstream.

    I think this is the product of years of being abused by the cool kids, and in many of us it has led to a “Nerdier than thou” attitude which refuses to allow for the kind of compromises which any artist or creative person has to make to get their work liked by more than 3 guys in a room (who aren’t going to pay anyway, because they can use bittorrent). We’re like the Metallica fans who didn’t like the Black album because we found this band first, don’t you know, and who are all these middle class 14 year old girls who like that song and how dare Metallica try to become popular? It’s okay for us to sell out and get a windows certification so we can keep working [4], but how dare Joss Whedon consider doing the same!!? He’s the standard bearer for our paaaaiiin…[5]

    … and as a consequence I think quite often nerds criticise otherwise good works, which may not have been perfect but deserve some respect anyway. And this leads to an attitude of refusing to share our life’s interests with people who don’t “get” something as plainly “obvious” as rolling 4d6 for strength, keep the best 3. Which just keeps us separated from the rest of the world, wondering why they don’t want to understand the fat kids who’re sneering at them…

    —

    fn1: Which, can I mention, is a really common English thing – you mention to your interlocutor that you like something and, even though they may never have even met you before, they immediately launch in with “what you like is shit”. I have had this sooooo many times since I came to London and it is sooooo thoroughly offensive.

    fn2: yes yes, I know, gay people can be latent homophobes, but I prefer to have solid evidence of this before I make such accusations, because they’re really mean-spirited.

    fn3: I will be coming back to this, because the claim they spoilt the books really gives me the shits

    fn4: I haven’t done this, btw, but I would if I had to

    fn5: which, incidentally, shows pretty clearly how our relationship with our idols is coloured by this history of social rejection – why should we even care if our feelings and worldview have a standard bearer? Except that when we were kids our weird and somewhat off-kilter interests were sneered at…

  • Current viewing: Torchwood, Children of Earth

    On the recommendation of a friend I watched this 5 episode arc of Torchwood, and I was stunned by its brilliance. Torchwood is some kind of Dr. Who spin-off, which means that by rights I should hate it (I’m not a big fan of the good Doctor). It is about a UFO investigation unit based in Cardiff – yes, Cardiff – consisting of 2 humans and some kind of god straight out of the UFO universe, Dr. Jack Harkness, who wears a really badly clashing and naff combination of military overcoats and chinos, and can’t be killed by any means. This is a weird combination of people. Also Jack is in some kind of gay relationship with another investigator of undisclosed name (which could be Yantov but is impossible to understand in the show). So I suppose it’s an X-Files/Dr. Who/6′ Under kind of crossover show, made in England.

    Hardly an auspicious beginning.

    However, the series was brilliant in the best tradition of brilliant British TV – that is, dialogue, acting and tense pace sufficient to kill any costuming or special effects flaws. The premise is contact with an alien race who do some very bad things to kiddies, and a subsequently increasingly nasty series of increasingly immoral decisions that various people have to make, mostly in the best interests of everyone but themselves. It takes the kind of parlour-room, drunken moral debates we all had when we were 12 – would you kill 1 to save a thousand? and other assorted blandness – to a stunning and brilliant conclusion, in which you can’t fault anyone for putting aside their conscience, but everyone comes out looking very very bad. The final scenes involve breaking so many of the kind of taboo images that TV thrives on that one has to be satisfied. And best of all, the whole thing is carried off without even the slightest hint of a skerrick of a whiff of even the smallest implication that the taboos are being broken just in order to shock, or that the moral decisions involved are just university debating school stuff. By the beginning of the 4th episode I really felt like I was caught up in a life-and-death, future-of-the-race kind of moral decision, not a cheap university debate about whether I would rather kill the dog or the baby.

    This of course is the essence of good science fiction, and so rarely done on tv or film – to try and use the speculative elements of the genre to create the kind of moral and intellectual positions which are not believable in normal fiction. And Torchwood does it at its best.

    The plot is also blessedly free of inconsistencies or mistakes. There were a few things I thought could maybe have been done faintly better (I won’t list them here due to their intense spoileriness), but in discussion with others who have viewed the show I haven’t been able to conclude that they were very crucial or very obvious mistakes, so they’re probably just a matter of personal preference. And it is a rare series of tv episodes where everything just slots together in a complex and multi-layered story. Well done, Torchwood.

    Also, finally, I thought the gay lead was done very well. It wasn’t until the show was over that I really even stopped to think about whether or not it had been done well, because it just fitted in. Sure, the gay thing was presented as unusual and surprising by family members who didn’t know, but it was presented to the viewer – treated like a privileged friend and ally of the lead characters, of course – it was presented as completely normal. This also is very rare in television.

    I heartily recommend this show – 5 hours of gripping tv from beginning to end.

  • Internet oddities

    A question for my reader(s): what is stranger? That my blog gets the top hit on a google search for china mieville “curvaceous women” or that yesterday two people did that search? Strange.

  • Life imitates role-playing

    I read an article in the guardian on Saturday morning about the fall of Ceacescu’s Romania in 1989. The article is  a bit rambly, and like most attempts at opinion by journalists it fails to reach a proper conclusion. But it has this excellent passage in the middle, which struck me as a classic moment of life being stranger than role-playing:

    One day, as we walked the gallery floors, the view across the cobbled square through a large opening blown in the elegant wall by an artillery shell was of tanks grinding over charred debris, nervous young soldiers – with flowers placed in their helmets by the people – returning the occasional crack of sniper fire, and crowds come to gawp at the fallen fortresses of the Ceausescu regime. It looked like war from another time, on black and white newsreel; a week had passed since Ceausescu’s execution, but it had taken days to subdue the stench of gunsmoke, shellfire and scorched masonry.

    Beneath our feet as we walked were the incinerated remains of the museum’s inventory – paintings were pitted with bullet holes, the canvases strewn like corpses in a morgue. “As you can see, there was heavy fighting here, the Byzantine room,” Cruceanu said. “And a lot of shots were fired in the 19th-century national school, where we think our army had come in. But the Securitate [Ceausescu’s secret police] must have come through the forbidden corridors from the palace, or a skylight”… and we ascended to the third storey… “so that most of the shooting was here among the European paintings, of which I’m the curator.”

    My notebook recorded that there was damage to Boccaccini’s Samson Breaking the Pillars of the Temple, Gentilleschi’s Mother and Child and Rembrandt’s A Man Begging the Forgiveness of Esther. At the end of the gallery was a piano, lightly coated in snow which had drifted in through the holes punched by shellfire and the top of a dome that had been blown off. Cruceanu raised the lid and played a few notes of, I think, Bach. “It works!” she said. “So you see, there is hope.”

    It reminds me of Iain M Banks’s work, or something you would see in a Cyberpunk adventure.

  • Current viewing: Ichi

    Its okay! She cant see you...
    It's okay! She can't see you…

    Ichi is a remake of the now-famous Japanese story Zatoichi, about a blind swordsman who wanders about slaughtering people. The last  version of this that I saw was by Beat Takeshi (whose Dolls I quite recommend), and it was okay until it went completely weird at the end. I also saw an excellent version with Rutger Hauer (Blind Fury – I don’t know if it’s actually the same story, but all blind swordsmen are the same aren’t they?)

    This one recreates the story with a woman, who is a blind itinerant musician, who is a victim of various hard circumstances, and who is wandering the land seeking the man who taught her to kill. In the process she gets entangled in a small matter of two warring yakuza families, which doesn’t actually concern her, but she seems to have a soft spot for a chap. So she is obliged to do a lot of killing and looking sad and then, as in many such movies, everything goes  pear-shaped.

    The movie is good for the first half but degenerates a little later on when the bad guys get involved. This is because the bad guys seem to be pursuing some kind of weird kabuki style of acting which makes them look rather silly, particularly in their slightly outlandish outfits. Maybe there’s an impression that they’re meant to actually be devils (they’re tattooed with a devil symbol and speak very strangely) but this implication was wasted on me and it just looked like bad acting. The story gets a little fanciful at times but it’s nothing that can’t be handled.

    Also, the single-slash sword-fighting style of the lead woman gets kind of boring after a  while. All she does is step out of the way and cut. It’s graceful and impressive but after the 88th kill you want her to do something interesting. Oh, my poor jaded tastes!

    The love interest, a wandering ronin, also gets a little silly near the end and seems generally useless. Also, is it only me or were his mummy issues just a little too blatant? He blinded his mother by accident and now he wants to redeem himself by saving a blind swordswoman – what’s that about? Sometimes people just really lead with the chin when they right these things, don’t they?

    The lead character is good though, suitably tragic and well acted (I thought) as a little point of calm in an otherwise hectic and chaotic set of circumstances. Some of the things she says too are very very sad. I like sad heroes. Especially if they’re pretty and they can kill you. But her sad, calm and serious figure didn’t quite work against a semi-comedic backdrop of silly ronin and crazy bandits. It was as if the movie couldn’t decide whether to be a comedy or a drama, and didn’t find a way to combine the too.

    In the end I mainly enjoyed this movie for the Japanese things – the language, the boys-being-boys style of the bandits, Ichi’s calm and polite kindness, the scenery, and the feel. If you aren’t sitting out your last 6 months in a dreary criminal town full of people you can’t trust, waiting to rejoin your partner in Japan, it probably won’t have such a powerful appeal…

  • Game diversity, object-oriented programming and consistent mechanics: Are they related?

    This is a topic which has bothered me consistently since I first played Neverwinter Nights, and I was reminded of it today when reading the debate about unified game mechanics at Jeff’s Gameblog. I have been a fan of the development of unified game mechanics for many reasons for quite a while (that is what my own modifications of the d20 system are aimed at), but I was recently reminded by a friend, who is playing OD&D, of the richness and diversity of gaming experience in some of the early games, where every aspect of the system had a slightly (or wildly) different mechanic, and different rules and outcomes. I can still almost smell my Dungeon Master’s Guide and see the dense text describing what were in essence separate game sub-systems for every character and every spell. I wonder sometimes if unified game mechanics – even those with spells – can sometimes spoil this diversity.

    What does this have to do with Neverwinter Nights? Well, I played Neverwinter Nights (NWN) purely and simply because it was by the crew who brought me Baldur’s Gate. Baldur’s Gate was a rich and diverse playing experience, with every scene, room and adventure section unique. Even game backgrounds differed from room to room. But NWN was, by contrast, disappointingly arid. Every room looked the same, every outdoor setting had the same sound and scenery, and although the mechanics were much simplified over BG, there was no sense of challenge or fantastic setting in it. The world was empty. I think this came down to the different design methods for the games. By the time NWN was released there was a rich library of graphics-cards programming methods, which I think were based on modern Object Oriented methods, which made it easy to produce scenery at a high level of interaction (visually in fact) using the editor – this sort of thing is facilitated very well by object oriented programming. These methods also enabled the consistent mechanics of action resolution. But in BG, the scenes and the monsters were built up piece-by-piece, using a more old-fashioned and time-consuming method (I think BG was from a previous generation of games which still used large amounts of specialised programming for each section). The result was art. For all the messiness of action resolution through toolbars and pausing so you could click and point and click again, there was a diversity of play and experience not present in NWN (or NWN2, IMHO).

    Unified mechanics have, I think, something in common with Object Oriented programming. They essentially define a set of classes of objects, methods and properties for interacting with them, and provide the DM a toolkit for resolving actions smoothly and consistently at every stage of gaming. I think DnD 4e shows this, with every character having an “attack” method which is essentially resolved exactly the same way – only the look of it is different. Cutting out the diversity in favour of simplicity of resolution has removed some of the flavour, too. I think you can get this back through personal effort (I think the spells in my Compromise and Conceit world have a lot of flavour even though they use a common mechanic for resolution), and it is true that ultimately a lot of what happens in the gaming realm can be divided into attacks, buffs, effects or non-combat moves which simply beg for a unified resolution method. But I think it is subject to the same flaw as NWN experienced – it’s easier to bash out a very same-same set of rules, with no powerful descriptive properties or diversity, by favouring ease of game construction and task resolution over detail and the pleasure of developing a diverse and interesting system. Certainly I think D&D4e did this, and even 3.5e to some extent.

    So, I think the trick with a unified mechanic is to use the simplicity it presents to enable smooth resolution of the detail of conflict which can be missing or difficult to rule on in systems which rely on sub-systems and exceptions to function. For example, I have some ideas for balancing large and small weapons in combat which would make combat a much richer and more tactical experience, but which I think wouldn’t work well in D&D pre- third edition, a system in which differences in weapons really weren’t used even if they were in the rules. The idea I have in mind uses the unified mechanic naturally to enable users of light weapons to take risks in order to close range on, and gain an advantage over, users of longer weapons. The unified skill-check system I use makes this easy to resolve without needing any special mechanics, just perhaps a sentence or two of advice. In general DMs should be using unified mechanics in order to broaden the range of circumstances in which PCs can act, and to diversify play. But I think in reality most unified mechanics are too clumsy or not well-enough explained (or not really sufficiently unitary) for people to do this easily. So they end up feeling arid, like NWN2.

    Maybe this is food for thought in game design – don’t privilege unity of mechanical resolution over house-ruling fun stuff. Or, don’t assume that the unified mechanic will be sufficient for every DM in every circumstance, and don’t be afraid to tinker with it for the key parts of the system (i.e. combat). Or maybe it just means that those of us who think unified mechanics offer improvements need to explain how we use them and how they can work better. I might work on some examples of this from my system over the next few weeks…

  • Cyberpunk role-playing and nihilism

    I’ve played a few sci-fi and cyberpunk campaigns in my time, and DM’d some too, and I certainly enjoyed them, but I think there are some aspects of sci-fi as a genre – and Cyberpunk particularly – that encourage[1] a kind of criminal nihilistic campaigning which I don’t generally find enjoyable[2], particularly when I’m DMing. Other recent commentators on cyberpunk probably think this is because I am a bleeding-heart liberal, but this is not the reason at all. I don’t like it when I’m DMing because

    • Nihilistic campaigns tend to deviate significantly from the plot, and DMing without preparation is a much more varied practice – with greater rewards sometimes but also a lot of the time it falls flat
    • It’s really hard to set a challenge for the PCs when they can just arm up to face it, they don’t care about dying or the solution would inevitably put them into conflict with the law
    • It’s really hard to interfere with PCs actions coherently, because in any sci-fi future the power of the state is so overwhelming that the one consistent thing criminal PCs can expect is that they will die horribly and probably before they even know what happened; but there’s no reward in doing this, so you have to contort your story to enable them to escape and still be challenged

    Here are 2 examples of the type of nihilism I mean, from my DMing experience:

    1. The PCs were meant to bust a drug deal, and I set up a complex trap for them which would put them into a seriously challenging combat. This was a low law-level world in Traveller, so they simply scraped up all their money and bought a suit of combat armour.  The battle ended when the main fighter just stepped into the middle of the room, in full view of all the gang, and gunned them all down while their bullets bounced off.
    2. The PCs wanted to negotiate with a local crime boss, and his goons were hanging out the front of the disused apartment complex waiting to cause trouble. The characters, unafraid of dying, just marched up and demanded admittance. Of course I should have just denied them, but then the adventure was killed dead; so I tried to engage them in some kind of diplomacy-style intimidation effort. The players ignored it and just started a firefight in the middle of the street.

    This kind of stuff is fun when it happens occasionally[3] but when the players start to do this too much, not only does DMing become a bit boring but one gets the felling that the main pleasure the players are deriving is from bucking the DM’s plans (which they must consistently be, since the main way they wouldn’t buck your plans in most sci-fi worlds is by being eviscerated from orbit). So why do I think this nihilism-drift happens?

    • Guns and money. There is a mechanic in sci-fi gaming – and particularly in cyberpunk, but also quite blatantly in Traveller – in which guns are easy to come by, and so is capital advantage. In fantasy role-playing you have to work long and hard up a chain of increasingly powerful bad guys[4] to get your +3 vorpal sword; in a lot of sci-fi games, you just need a PC in your group who has a rich mummy, and a jaunt to the bad side of town/Mexico/low law-level planet. And when players rock up to their law level 3 planet and you won’t sell them Battle Dress they always seem to get pissy. This is because they, like you, expect consistency in the game, and a consistent feature of much of the sci-fi genre is dirty guns done dirt cheap
    • Crime as necessity: Fantasy role-playing games have a much more odious property than this, because they have genocide as a good outcome. But this isn’t nihilistic because the people you slaughter are chaotic evil, right, which is the definition of anarchic badness. On the other hand, in sci-fi games committing criminal acts is either part of the genre (Cyberpunk) or a necessity in some places. It’s just like the problem of illegal dope – you just want a small high, but to get it you have to associate with shady people. In time the criminality sticks, or the players spend a lot of time pushing the grey line. This is fine – it’s nice that we can play criminals in our fantasy worlds and don’t have to in real life – but I have noticed that it tends to lead to a kind of fatalism about the necessity of crime. Once you’ve committed a few frauds, gang-banged some lowly perps, and hacked someone’s computer, why not mug a passer-by?  And, especially, once you’ve run into trouble with the law, all bets are off. A lot of cop-killing and gratuitous stuff happens as the law enforcement pressure increases. Morally not an issue, I suppose, since it’s only a game, but it’s at this point – the “hung for a sheep not a lamb” part where players realise there’s no going back – that force starts to rise up the list of solutions to common problems, and the main solution to this – killing them as chastisement – falls into my definition of bad DMing. [5]
    • Isolation and neo-piracy: There’s a strong sense of cultural and social isolation in the underbelly of cyberpunk, and a strong sense of physical isolation in Space Opera campaigns, which encourages people to think of their PCs as a law unto themselves. Space Opera often has a strong feeling of semi-legal privateering about it, kind of the 17th Century in space. Again, this is fun to play and offers lots of opportunities for adventure; but it also encourages people to go native/ go AWOL/ go psycho/ go pirate. And this can spoil the fun. Fantasy role-playing tends to remove this sense of isolation by setting the characters as heroes in a religious and cultural context, or giving them an alignment they pay dearly for straying outside of. No such luck with sci-fi.

    I am a big fan of morally grey settings – this blog is named after one – but I think they are easier with constraints on them in order to keep some basic structure in the role-playing. Fantasy role-playing has a lot, built in through levelling and monster power and alignment and scarcity; but, short of constantly chastising the PCs through the use of heavy weaponry (which is no fun) it’s much more difficult to maintain these constraints in a lot of sci-fi settings, and especially in cyberpunk. And unless your idea of fun DMing is “this week will be a bigger battle than last week”, the relentless pursuit of heavier firepower and more money begins to look a bit boring after a while[6]. Which is why I am leery of DMing cyberpunk campaigns.

    —
    fn1: Note the use of the word encourage here, as opposed to other words like require or support or valorise.

    fn2: Although recently I played in a Traveller campaign where I was the one encouraging the nihilistic criminal enterprise. Oh look! A kettle!

    fn3: I still maintain that my nihilistic criminal suggestion from footnote 2 would have been more interesting – and have delivered a lot more virgins – than the campaign written in the book

    fn4: Quite improbably, obviously, but because it’s part of the genre style no-one really cares

    fn5: Serenity is an example of a story in which this happens, but it’s an adventure or a short campaign only, and there are quite a few moments in Serenity where Mal has a brilliant idea that 99% of players would completely fail to think of. Instead, they would decide to arm up and face down the next fleet to come their way, which gets really difficult to DM in a way that’s fun. This makes it hard to have the kind of over-arching mystery-story campaigns – like Serenity – in reality, because the PCs spend too much time finding blunt, brutal “solutions” to the elegant problems you set them. Though if you can carry this off, the feeling at the end of the campaign is truly awesome.

    fn6: Actually, this sounds quite a bit like a lot of peoples’ fantasy RPG campaigns, doesn’t it? Especially, dare I say it, old-school campaigns…

  • Munchhausen by Internet

    I stumbled on this story at a blog I’ve never read before, and – though not surprised – was profoundly horrified at the content of the deception it involved. Truly, the possibilities for nastiness on the internet are endless, and the ingenuity of people in ferreting them out to be admired and pitied simultaneously.

    Also, is it not interesting that Lord of the Rings Online uses terms like “kin”, and is it not interesting how that blog post, written using the language of the game, sound strangely insular and, well, nordic-folkish? It’s as if it reflects something I’ve been commenting on recently…