Quinn Conklin

Getting It Right: Setting the Stage

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Sep 212012

Sometimes tv really screws up and drops the ball. Other times they get it right. This is a column about when they get it right and how tv can teach us to be a better gamer.

Sometimes a pilot for a show comes along that leaves you wanting to know more, or perhaps it sets up interesting characters. These are good things and perhaps the show I am going to talk about today does a bit of those things, but that is not what it is doing right. Honestly, Revolution is hitting low marks on the interesting character scale and the core mystery it has set up – what happened to all the power? – is better left unexplained since anyway you come at an explanation will likely be silly.

What Revolution does do right is establish a world and establish the quest, both great skills for a GM to have. Before we go forward, a quick warning. From here on in there may be spoilers.

As you most likely already know from trailers, the premise in Revolution is that suddenly all the power goes out across the world and never comes back on. The show opens on a home where a mom, sister and little brother are hanging out. Mom talks on her cell, girl watches tv too into bugs bunny to talk to her grandma on the phone, and little brother, still in diapers mind you, is playing with some tablet or other. Then dad comes home worried, warning mom to save water, fill the bath tub. They give each other a hard look and she asks, “Is it happening?” Then we see the power start going out, and there is a bit of needless tension as dad tries to download something.

Let’s looks at what the show is doing right here. In under 10 minutes it sets up the premise of what is happening and introduces what will become a McGuffin as we get farther into the show. It does this by being heavy handed, showing us over-the-top examples of modern technology dependency. The show goes so far as to have the little brother cry when the tablet stops working.

As a GM we can use our party’s first encounter or perhaps run a cut scene to start the game, something that deals in equally broad strokes. Have the slavers beating the chattel in the streets with no one stopping them or sympathetic beggars asking for food to show a poor totalitarian world. Is magic common? Then hammer that home. The shop owner does not light a candle, but mumbles a magic word.

Paint the scene in bold colors, use stereotypes and symbols that the players will connect to. Moving forward you can tone all this down, but taking ten minutes to show the world rather than giving 30 pages of world background to read before the first session will go a long way to making it feel more like home.

So back to the show. We jump ahead 15 years and little brother and girl have mostly grown up. They are living in a village wearing clothing that looks off the rack from Ross rather than being handmade, but I digress. We get a bit of family life and then the militia shows up and demands dad come with them. No reason given, just some mucky-muck general wants to see him and his brother and the cranky commander of the militia does not want a hassle. Of course one little brother gets hot headed and pulls a crossbow on the militiaman and shit goes bang and dad gets dead and little brother gets arrested.

As dad is dying he tells girl to go find her uncle, you know, the other guy the militia was looking for, ‘cause he can help get her brother back. Boom, quest given. It is not subtle. It simply sets up what needs to be done and why. The show spells out the stakes – get a loved one back – and sets up a long journey to find the uncle which gives plenty of opportunity for sandboxy adventure.

Don’t get me wrong, subtlety has its place, but the beginning of an adventure is not always it. This is your chance as a GM to make the world feel real and the quest have meaning.

So while you may not be a perfect show, thanks for getting that much right, Revolution.

Doing it Right: Killing for Impact

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Sep 062012

Sometimes TV really screws up and drops the ball. Other times they get it right. This is a column about when they get it right and how that can teach us to be better gamers.

One of the most tired, over-done things a show can do is kill a cast member. It happens for many reasons. Often those reasons are to shock the audience, to up the stakes, or even just to get an actor off the show. Then there are the rare times when the story calls for it. Someone has to die. Usually when this happens it is fire and forget. Characters mope for a bit, you know, for one or maybe two episodes and then things are back to normal.

On very rare occasions you get something more. The death of a character becomes a pivot in the story and causes characters to grow and change. This is what has happened in Burn Notice this season.

Be warned: Beyond this point there be spoilers.

This season we saw the death of Michael’s brother Nate while he was helping Michael on a case. It was sudden, it was out of the blue, and the show had done nothing to warn you it was coming…except, of course, in the trailer for the episode at the end of last week’s episode. What has made this character’s death special is not how the main cast has reacted. They are doing what they always do, hunting down the people, but what has really shone is how the NPCs, I mean the supporting cast, handled it.

There is the obvious impact on Agent Pearce who was running the operation that got Nate killed. She does not grieve so much as feel enough guilt to help the main cast in ways she would not normally. The result? She too leaves the show for breaking the CIA’s rules.

The real impact, and the real lesson for GM’s in all this, is in the way Mike’s mom reacts to the news. The change in her character, and the isolation between her and Mike, has been amazing. We have seen her go from needing his attention and wanting to be part of his life for the first five seasons to shutting him out.

Often, when a significant character dies in-game, it works like a TV show. It does nothing more than up the stakes. If we want to have greater impact when we kill a major NPC–or PC for that matter–we should not rely on the players to show that impact. Instead, we have to do it by making the other NPCs care, by making them angry with the people they hold responsible and the relationships between them and the person who’s changing because of the death.

Thanks for doing it right, Burn Notice, and thanks for the lesson.

Notes From The Idea Factory: Places That Inspire

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Jun 282012

The first exquisite beast courtesy of the exquisite beast on tumbler.

This weeks note from the idea factory is going to be a bit short. Things have gotten hectic with my production schedule for Toys for the Sandbox, Whackpack adventuers and editing a podcast that will debut here shortly.

I wanted to take a moment this week to point to a few sources for gaming inspiration.

First off over on Google+ a few folks are using the #gaminginspiration hash tag to make it easier to find posts that positively ooze possibilities. It is also a spot where I drop a lot of the tidbits I find from around the web.

Second is what I think of as my twice weekly fix of monster ideas. The Exquisite Beast is a project where artists Evan Dahm and Yoko Ota take turns morphing and evolving beast. Each post is accompanied by a bit text talking about how the creature has mutated and what sort of environment it lives in now.

These are just a couple of the place I go when I need a bit of a jumpstart for my thought process. How about you, any tried and true online source for inspiration?

Notes From The Idea Factory: Rants, Culture and Classes

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Jun 212012

Rant, rant, charge. It is sort of like claw, claw, bite but more damage from the mouth.

Original image from WordRidden via flicker photo editing by Quinn Conklin

This week I am putting on my rant hat (just so you know)

There is something that has been bugging the crap out of me lately in fantasy games. It is the issue of race. The poster child for my problem is the typical D&D elven racial bonus with long bows. Why do they have it? What part of elven genetics says, ‘hey I am good with a bow?’

I mean, come on, let’s try to rationalize it. They have great eye sight? Or perhaps they are really dexterous? Both may be true, but why just longbows? Why is it that the eagle eyed elf picks up a short bow and is no better at using it than a human?

When you think about it, the logical explanation is cultural. Elves get the bonus not because of some gift of genetics, but instead because it is such a common weapon that most children grow up doing at least a little shooting.

Now as things go that is all well and good for explaining why, but it leads to another problem, or perhaps to an opportunity. It gives us a place to create unexpected kinds of elves in simple ways. The easiest way to make this sort of tweak is to just swap out the bonus. For example, think of elves who have lived in a dense jungle for years. Rather than every one of them learning how to fire a bow, they get a bonus to short sword from learning how to hack their way through the jungle with a machete.

There are a lot of places this can go, but let’s take a step back from making alternate elves and think about what other sorts of impact culture could have on races in a fantasy game. It could affect attitudes towards other races. It can and should affect skills other than just knowing a weapon or two. For instance, a gnome who grew up in a theocracy with a large dwarven population will come away from that knowing something about religion, speaking at least a bit of dwarven and probably have some strong feelings about both dwarves and religion.

Creating a few cultural tweaks to our fantasy races can bring our worlds to life with only a bit of work.

Notes From The Idea Factory: Making the Kruplupis Work for You

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Jun 142012

There it sits, its long gray-green tentacles wrapped carefully under itself as the daizoowhoozle hunkers down on its nest. The creature, for those of you who do not know what you are looking at, is a mass of 12 to 16 ropy tentacles joined to a fat, rounded body which hangs in the center of them. These tentacles are covered with fine scales, but I would not get close enough to examine them. You see, this is a mother daizoowhoozle sitting on her clutch of eggs. They can be quite territorial when it comes to protecting their nests.

Along the top of the tentacles you will see the what looks like soft, flat green fur spotted here and there with little yellow and red flowerlets. This gives the daizoowhoozle excellent camouflage. As she settles you can see she seems almost to be just a small hillock covered with flowers. The yellow flowers, however, are sensory organs that let her see. The red ones are mouths filled with tiny, strong, sharp teeth that can gnaw through anything, even plate armor in just a few seconds.

You might be asking yourself right about now, What the hell is he going on about? The answer, strangely enough, is not the daizoowhoozle. Today’s topic is inspiration. Last week as I was sitting on Google+ catching up on the posts of the day, I saw that Quinn Murphy had posted an excerpt from his blog. The long and short of what he said was that it is easier to picture an elf then it is a daizoowhoozle. In that moment I had a clear picture in my head of a star-like, land-dwelling creature that could blend into the forest floor.

Inspiration is like that. It may be just a name or an image, but it can explode without notice across your brain. Inspiration, and to an extent, creativity is not about sitting down and saying I am going to think of something awesome. Instead it is about being prepared to recognize ideas when they happen, and learn how to trap them for later use.

The second part of the equation is easy. Just always be prepared with your favorite note taking tool. For me, my trap is my phone. I can capture a picture if I need it, or jot a quick note to myself for later. The hard part is training yourself to recognize the awesome ideas when they happen.

To recognize the good ideas we have to first realize that not everything that comes out of our brain is a good idea even if it sounds awesome. The cattle glom looked great on paper, but turned out to be a bad enough idea to drive players away from the table for a few years. That, however, is another story.

So we accept that a bunch of our ideas are going to be crap. Are you feeling bummed out now? The next step is to realize that we are bad asses, and will come up with some cool ideas. Creating cool stuff means you have to kick your insecurities out of the car, and leave them on the side of the road. If you are not ready to do that, just tie them up, shove a gauge in their mouth, and throw them in the trunk for a while.

Now we are bad asses who make awesome things some of the time, but mostly we make a lot of crap. The problem is that all our ideas sound awesome inside our own heads. To train ourselves to pick the awesome from the crap we need a sounding board. A friend of mine and I will often invoke what we call “GM’s privilege,” which amounts to saying, “I know you are playing in my game so I need you to forget about this by next Monday, but what do you think of this idea?”

When you start talking, and you see the other person’s eyes light up, and they start riffing off what you are telling them, that is when you know you have a winner. Given time and practice, you will be able to spot these gems on your own.

But, I hear you saying, what if I can’t just come up with ideas all the time? That is where this week’s homework comes in. We know what a daizoowhoozle looks like now. But how about a kruplupis? Don’t read the comments yet. First write a kruplupis of your own. Tell me about your kruplupis.

Notes From The Idea Factory: Red Herrings

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Jun 062012

Last week, we talked about mysteries and keeping them organic. I also mentioned that using red herrings can be a fun way to distract the party, but they should be used appropriately. This week we are going to look at red herrings and other ways to complicate a mystery.

First, let’s talk a bit out the red herring. It is a plot device used to create a false lead that the investigation could follow. From a plot perspective, it is a distraction that can make a simple investigation last longer. However, from a thematic level, a red herring should not be there just to distract, but serve some sort of purpose for the story. Let me share an example.

One of the most memorable red herrings I have ever used was in a mystery I call The Steeple Chase Murders. It deals with a series of thefts and murders in churches in one medium sized town. The first time I ran Steeple Chase was in a game of Heroes Unlimited, in a modern superhero setting. As I was laying out things, I happened to mention a guy who moved to town recently, and did not really interact with the rest of the town at first. Of course the party had to investigate. One hero busts into the guy’s house looking for the murderer’s lair, and found instead a sick old woman who needed 24-hour care, and her son who was trying to provided it by himself.

While this was a fun bit of distraction, and it gave my killer time to strike again, it also acted as a flag to the player, saying, This is not going to be easy; you need to look beyond the obvious. It worked on another level as well. It dealt with a theme common to superhero stories: the responsibility of power. Breaking into the house without doing all the research needed was irresponsible, and scaring the old woman made the hero think a bit more about his actions for a while.

Another way to complicate a mystery is the divided loyalty tactic. Perhaps a member of the party has a connection to one of the suspects or the victim. A desire to protect someone they care about or persecute someone they hate can be a great way to get the players to create their own complications.

This works best when we take the time to establish the NPC in earlier adventures, and letting relationships develop naturally. Say a party of adventurers has been butting heads with the local city guard and believe some of them to be on the thieves guild’s bribe list. A young officer the party trusts is killed, and it looks like his partner who the fighter does not get along with did it. The party will run with that, trying to prove that their friend was killed by a fellow guard.

There is one way you should not try to complicate matters. It is what I call the unnecessary investigation. This happens when you lay down the railroad tracks creating a path from your victim to the killer, but leave a teleportation device lying around.

When the game Brave New Worlds first came out, my gaming group was into it. Heck, we were all big Pinnacle Entertainment Group fanboys. I was a big enough fanboy that I broke with tradition and decided to run one of the published adventures for BNW. The set-up was that someone was killing weak superpowered kids. The adventure set up a path to finding the killer by investigating who the kids were, and what connected them. That was how it was supposed to go. What wound up happening was me throwing the adventure over my shoulder about a half-hour into the game.

You see, the problem was the players just jumped right to the end. They said, ”Hey, look, this guy is attacking young people with superpowers in this part of town at night. We are young people with superpowers. Let’s go hang out in that part of town at night, and jump him when he starts shit.”

If we create a mystery where the investigation is not necessary, then the story we want to tell will not get told. Some distraction and obfuscation is good, but it should be there to drive the story, not just make the game longer. Too much is just as bad as too little. Either way you will not wind up with a nice tapestry that tells a story, but instead just a bunch of loose ends.

Notes From The Idea Factory: Mysteries

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May 312012

I love running mysteries. I am not talking about the big, overarching, hey look at me I am trying to be Lost type of mystery, but rather the good old gumshoe-style story. The nice thing is that a story like this can slip easily into any genre, from the tux-and-tie of a spy story, to the crown-and-sword of a fantasy campaign. It just takes a bit of costuming, and you can dress a mystery up pretty much any way you like.

Let’s take a quick look at how a mystery is different from a dungeon crawl. The main difference for me is that one is active and the other is reactive. In a dungeon crawl, the party arriving in the dungeon is the thing that is happening. Sure, they may be there as a response to some action a villain has taken. You would think this would put the party in control of the story, but instead it really puts the narrative in the hands of the GM.

Why? Because no matter how big the dungeon is at any point along the road, the only real choice the party has is which door to open next. A mystery, on the other hand, makes the players react. Something bad–or perhaps something that seems to be bad–has happened, and the party needs to figure out who did it, and often why.

This puts them in the driver’s seat. They can latch on to any little bit of information you have given them and try to use that to get some answers. One of the advantages of a mystery is that the story stops being a set of railroad tracks that guide the party to where you want them to be. Instead, the story becomes part of the reward system.

You can hand out information about what is going on when players do something right, whether it is something you planned or not. If they think of an interesting and effective way to get information that is outside of what you had planned, give them a clue. They get an ah ha moment, then they have to figure out what to do with it.

So what do you need to know to run a good murder mystery adventure?

What makes a mystery fun is the obfuscation, but that is not where we want to start. We need to start at the center of thing. Who did What to Whom and Why. Before we can place the red herrings, choose the McGuffins, and hide the murder weapon, we need to know the basics.

From here we start the process of obfuscation. This usually introduces one or more new who’s to the equation: the suspects. These are the people who have a reason to want the victim gone, or, at least appear to have a reason. These suspects don’t take much to flesh out, either: a name, a motive, a few phrases that describe them, and an alibi.

The other thing you will need for a good mystery is the clues. Here is a place where it is easy to make a mistake. If you leave too few clues, you force the players to move along a path you have built for them. A mystery adventure should feel like the players are building their own roads. On the other hand, too many clues, and the case is too easy.

I usually solve this by coming up with a few clues that the players can investigate to start things off, and working organically from there. I know what happened and I know who did it, so I know what evidence to plant as things progress. Now, not every clue you plant needs to pan out to be a red herring that gets the party looking the wrong way at the right moment, but it can be great fun.

There is a lot more to say about mysteries and how to craft them, but this is a lot to take in. For now, let’s take a moment to recap. A mystery is a great way to let the players off the tracks for a bit to do their own thing. This means there must be more than one way to solve the mystery. We can do this by keeping things organic and keeping our notes simple: Who did What to Whom, and why are the other suspects innocent?

Notes From The Idea Factory: Welcome

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May 242012

Here we are going to sit back and chat about how to create original content for your games. From world building to creating adventures, from crafting magic items to improvisation; it all takes creativity. Here at the idea factory, I do not plan to just give you ideas for your game. I am sure there will be plenty of that, but I also want to show you tricks for creating your own bits of awesome.

Before we really get into all of that, you may be asking yourself what qualifies me to talk about creativity. That is fair.

If you read my introduction post here you know that I have been gaming for decades, and that I have dice older then some of the players in my gaming group. But my real qualifications for running the idea factory is what I have been up to since the start of the year.

As last year began to fade, I started talking with Michael Garcia at Occult Moon Games about writing for him. We came up with the idea of putting together a fantasy campaign aid that would present a location that could be dropped into any system or setting. Thus was born Toys for the Sandbox.

If you have not checked it out yet, we put out a free zero issue awhile back. Go give it a try. I will wait.

Okay, welcome back. As I write this, we are in the process of cranking out issue number 21. This means that in the last few months I have cranked out 414 plot hooks and 104 npcs. So I do know something about being consistently creative.

Creativity is a muscle, and like any other muscle, we need to use the crap out of it if we want it to get stronger. It comes from inspiration and the exploration of that inspiration.

Let me share an example with you. A while back, in the earlyish days of 3^rd edition, I was running a D&D game in a world I had built from scratch. I had built everything from the books that were out at the time, and the game was going good. Then the wizards had to come along and screw up my world and release the Psionic Handbook.

There was no place in my world for psionics as things stood. Then I had an idea. There was a hole in my world that had not been explored. No one was playing a dwarf, and up until then no dwarven npcs had shown up. The need for psychics and the unexplored dwarves came together in a moment of inspiration.

From there I began to explore. What would it mean for a race to be psychic? As I explored, I had the idea that they grew more psychic as they grew older. That progressed to immortal dwarves that turned to stone as they aged. Eventually, this led me to create a chamber where all the ancient dwarves lived on as psychic statues running the dwarven government.

I have told you about myself and some of my creations; now it is your turn. I want to hear about the cool things you have created in your games. This week, tell me about a world-building problem you had and how you solved it. And, no, A wizard did it does not count.

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