Exchange of Realities

Yes, I’m still riffing on failure.  In fact, I’m likely to be failing all week.

The first rule of a failure is that if at all possible, it should be more IC than OOC if at all possible, and as removed from the GM as is feasible. The former is, of course, for the sake of player enjoyment, while the latter is to avoid being chewed out by angry players more than is absolutely necessary; the appearance of GM malice tends to be a unifying characteristic of the most widely discussed bad failures.

Another important factor to keep in mind is that there are far more ways of having fun than “succeeding” in the game, and any one of them can be used to make an in-character failure as enjoyable as a success. This factor is also why most of what I’m about to say really isn’t going to be that useful for a game that revolves around an adversarial relationship between the GM and the players, as that part is half the fun for those groups right there.

Anyway!

As far as player impact goes, dice failure is usually neutral to good, since it is inherently free of GM malice due to being ruled by chance. Unless, of course, the dice are loaded, but who’d do that? Since odds are part of the game, most people would shrug and move on, or occasionally find humor in what karma’s dishing forth.

It gets a bit more annoying when it happens in anticlimactic situations, though in that case, the GM’s likely to be grousing just as much as the players. Permanent death in a random battle—really, who’s going to take pride in that? It’s not a credit to the GM’s skills, nor particularly deserved, nor anything but extra book-keeping and rationalization for no reason as a new character tries to work into the group.

Prevention is pretty much impossible; most of dealing with dice failure comes in mitigation. The prevention that exists mostly revolves around finding ways to ensure that bad dice rolls won’t completely destroy the session or the game. There is nothing more irritating than a point where succeeding at one roll is what will make the story advance, or ensure the group’s survival, and the dice say no. Avoiding situations like these is pretty straightforward outside of combat, as we use the Three Clue Rule. Within combat… I’m still looking for ideas.

Mitigation of dice failure usually doesn’t involve decreasing the impact—that defeats the purpose of having dice! Instead, it tries to find other ways to make the situation enjoyable. I think this may be one of the reasons why critical failures have become an art form in some groups, as they either add a certain humor to the situation or give a chance for the player to take a role in creating the failure. Often both. You’d be amazed at how much this helps; being able to claim intent or at least participation turns a massive botch from an annoyance into fodder for the next “Epic Fail Moments” thread.

So there goes our chaos. Tomorrow, player failure!

The thing about in-game failure is that you need to be able to figure out how to define it. Not all failures are created equal; most players will have stories of things going wrong where they wanted to throttle the GM, and stories of failures that they enjoyed every minute of.

So what constitutes a “good” or a “bad” failure?

A good failure, in general, is one that is irritating in-character, but overall improves the plot. Perhaps it pushes the story, or opens an opportunity that wasn’t there before. It might be a Pyrrhic victory, a technical win but an overall loss; or it might be a heroic loss, in which the characters technically lose, but their actions still pose a great inconvenience to those they were fighting. Or perhaps it’s something that, while technically a failure, allows the players a chance to engage in a kind of roleplaying they find satisfying. Either way, the end result is something that a majority of the group enjoys.

A neutral failure happens, and people move on. It might incorporate aspects of both and thus be balanced, not really fall into either category, or just be too minor for anyone to care about.

A bad failure is arbitrary and frustrating, both in and out of character. Sometimes, this is because of denial of agency; the characters may as well be sitting on the sidelines and the players reading a book, for all the effect they have on the world and the events around them. Maybe it’s plot-destroying, and even the GM is tempted to declare it not so. It might be completely anticlimactic (a legendary hero being triple-twentied by a mook, for instance). Either way, a majority is unhappy, and often they make their displeasure known, making it harder for anyone else to be satisfied.

Similarly, there are three categories of failure origin in the average game.

The first, and most intrinsic to many RPG systems, is failure by dice. This really can’t be attributed to anything but Lady Luck saying no. Maybe it’s rolling a one-digit number on a save, or botching that vital Investigation roll. Either way, it’s all in chance’s hands. Now, dice failure on its own tends not to be “bad” failure, since it is next to impossible to attribute to GM malice. However, in a noncombat situation, this can edge into bad failure by cutting off a chokepoint. For instance, there may be a vital clue that can only be reached through a very specific roll, and nobody can make that roll. If that’s the case, and dice failure occurs, there’s justification for people being angry; after all, if it’s that important to the storyline, why is it left up to chance and accessible only once?

The second is failure by player. As the name suggests, the root of this sort of failure is ostensibly within the players themselves. Sometimes it’s innocuous, like slightly misjudging the location of the dragon, or that the torch is on the left side of the hall. Other times it’s a bit less forgivable, like failure to make sure everyone who “knows the plan” actually understands what the plan is, or someone just not realizing that walking around with obvious weapons is an invitation to trouble, or misjudging the radius of a fireball. The stories you’re likeliest to hear about this kind, though, are out and out poor judgment and stupidity: Attempting to win the queen over with a demonstration of the character’s dazzling range of “Yo momma” jokes, or throwing an iron helmet down the hall of the prison they’re supposed to be escaping from quietly. Ordinarily, this one shouldn’t be grounds for complaint—after all, actions have consequences. But when the group just doesn’t realize how bad an idea that particular plan was, they’re less likely to listen to “What were you thinking?” and more likely to call shenanigans. Irritatingly enough, the kinds of people likeliest to make these mistakes are the least likely to admit that they are mistakes.

The last is failure by plot: This is what happens when, for the story to progress, someone has to be unable to fulfill one of their plans. Perhaps they need to lose a battle. Or can’t realize early that the traitor really is that charming politician they’ve been defending. This one is the likeliest to have both “good” and “bad” failure depending on how it’s played. On the one hand, these failures often enhance the plot, prevent the group from getting too cocky, open new opportunities or otherwise improve the game. On the other hand, here also lies railroading, the removal of agency, the ending satisfying to none but the GM, and other irritations. This one requires careful control.

(For added amusement, the failures can easily be mapped onto D&D alignments, with the player impacts on the moral axis and the categories on the ethical. So a “neutral” dice failure would come out as CN, and a generally disliked plot-failure, like a blatant railroad, would come out as LE. System-neutrality prevented me from making this a running theme.)

Got the terminology down? Good. We’ll get into how to make these things serve the plot rather than just serve as irritations starting tomorrow, type by type.

Before I get into a full-fledged rant on failure, success, and how to combine them, I’m going to begin with what I consider to be the most important part of a role-playing game, the part that sets it apart from many older video games and all books, movies, and similar media.

The word we are looking for, my friends, is agency. Webster’s defines it as “The faculty of acting or of exerting power; the state of being in action; action; instrumentality.” Essentially, what it boils down to is the ability to make a difference. To have one’s actions matter to the storyline.

I was once asked what made a role-playing game a role-playing game and not just a “bedtime story”. In my opinion, this is what makes the difference. It’s not the dice—and if you really want to try to argue a dice requirement to someone who favors freeforms, Amber Diceless, or various forms of LARPing, I will cheerfully be behind you all the way with a bag of popcorn to munch on while said player reads you your pedigree. It’s not the table, it’s not the system, it’s the agency. As long as the PCs can change things—as long as there are paths to choose and places to jump off the rails—that’s the important part, and that’s what separates it from a console RPG or a guided bedtime story.

What this means is that places in which there isn’t a divergence, or isn’t a choice, should probably be if not avoided than at least hidden very, very carefully. And used sparingly. This is very, very important. If you’ve got two cutscenes in one session, in my opinion, you have a problem. (If you have one, I strongly recommend you not have one next week.)

It leads to the question, though, of how much power is too much. Particularly in the more epically-prone games, it’s easy to get into a mindset of “Anything is possible”, and that can lead to its own set of conflicts. If the GM isn’t interested in running a game in which reasonable resistance is window dressing, and the players want to be forces of nature (though honestly, where’s the fun in that?), there will be problems.

One could say that what the group needs, above everything else, is to answer a short list of questions.

• What constitutes “impossible”?
• Where does the balance between GM power and player power lie?
• How important is plot?

For instance, I keep a pretty wide definition of impossible. I’ll keep to the world’s metaphysics for most of it, but if someone can give me a sufficiently good explanation of why something should be possible, I’ll give them a chance at it. Not a guarantee, mind you; just a chance. Similarly, I consider the balance to lie closer to the players than the GM, but only to a certain extent; I will not fiat, but I will not let them fiat at me either. And plot—well, that depends. I’m pretty permissive when it comes to things that would mess with my plans, since two of my best plots came from players doing something I didn’t see coming that completely wrecked my current plans. My core tenet is the idea that if I’m to fail, I want it to be on my own terms, not just Because the Script Said So. (After all, if it’s just my skills that are determining my success or failure, I can always go improve, or come up with new tactics and tricks, or in general feel like I’m trying to fix things for next time.)

So how do you handle the power balances? What does player agency mean for you? Where is enough enough?

Yesterday’s piece about failure got a lot of bad reactions from people who’d been on the wrong end of failure-plots. I was probably more surprised than I should have been; I’ve had decent luck with failing on both sides of the GM screen. (Including playing a woman who spent so much time falling into enemy hands that “Any plan that begins with me getting captured always works. Even if I haven’t come up with it at the time” became a campaign running joke.)

For me, failure as a plot element requires several defining characteristics—I will be going into more detail on these tomorrow, but the short version is that unless this is something the players brought on themselves, or just a case of very bad dice rolls, there should be some sort of way to rise from the ashes.

My campaign, particularly in the first arc, was actually riddled with failures. A few were deliberate. One, amusingly enough, wasn’t.

What set the main plot arc off was the latter. See, the group had this friend, one Kiara by name. And she had something that made her a bit of a target as far as their enemies were concerned. Particularly a rather amusing and very powerful akuma (for those not familiar with the system, imagine someone who should have been one of the heroes… and then sold out to Things That Were Kicked Out of the World) by name of Jalil. Now, I’d known he was going to go after her, probably several times over the course of the storyline. What nobody, least of all me, was expecting was for him to succeed. He’d had an effect that was supposed to target those with low Valor, getting them to freeze up or panic. I’d originally chosen it because I didn’t think it’d have too much of an effect on the group, but I forgot to take into account the effect it would have on the rather easily spooked Kiara. …and, well, being in a panic-freeze isn’t particularly conducive to things like running away. So he got away, with his prey, but in the process he took a more than decent amount of damage.

Seemed to work pretty well. The group certainly liked it.

Then again, within two sessions they ended up in a fight against an opponent they couldn’t possibly beat, and they knew it and had the sense to stand down. (This one was deliberate, and had been planned and set up even before their prior failure; I couldn’t exactly drop it at this point.) Much of what it set up was character development and plot-stuff.

The first arc actually involved a ratio of about one failure to every three successes. They’d manage a few things, then something would happen. One time it was sheer stupidity (or an excess of courage; both would have given the same result). One time it was nothing they really could have helped; the enemy slipped in and swiped three of their teammates, and they could only do something about one. (That one—remember Ruby, anyone?–was considerably less than amused by her own role in the situation, though it did lead to my realization that character development in NPCs could be interesting.) One time the entire group was captured, but they rectified it pretty quickly. In my opinion, that’s what a chain of failures on the way to a success should look like: spaced out, with plenty of opportunity to recover and come back stronger.

 After all, what fun is failure if it doesn’t set up success?

I’m not going to get into the Tyranny of Fun argument; it’s been done to death, undeath, redeath, and nonliving states we don’t even have concepts of. Instead, I’m looking at the idea of people—even protagonists—not always succeeding from a more dramatic standpoint.

First off, failure is generally better for characterization than success, particularly when the character is accustomed to succeeding more often than not. After all, without the expectation of failure, success just seems like more of the same. (Success against all odds is another story—I’ll get back to that later.) But when people fail, they usually react strongly to their failure. Perhaps they attempt to assign blame for it to something or someone; maybe they look at their own failings and try to figure out what weaknesses to shore up. They might respond with fury, or resignation, or just take it in stride. But whichever they do, that’s likelier to say something about them than just watching them win at everything they try. And then, isn’t it that much more rewarding for them to come back to the problem that bested them, with better skills or a new approach, and succeed?

By the same token, too much success in a row can lead to complacency and a sense of entitlement. People who make a habit of winning, particularly those whom the world seems to smile on, might take for granted their victories—in character, this is only interesting if it’s the prelude to a fall, and out of character it can ruin suspense or tension, as the outcome is rarely in doubt. (It’s even worse in games when they come into the game with this kind of attitude, particularly when that’s not the feel you’re looking for.) But if every now and then things don’t all go right, it doesn’t start feeling like they always will.

Another thing to keep in mind is that people who realize that failure is a possibility are likelier to know when to run away. This is more of a gamer’s issue than an author’s, but can be applied to both. Imagine a group being sent up against something they can’t possibly handle. There’s a chance they’ll realize that, but it’s just as likely, if they’re used to nothing but winning, that they’ll figure it’s just another fight they’re “supposed” to win—perhaps we just haven’t found the right gimmick yet!—and thus keep going even when the only way to live is to cut and run. (It’s hard to tell what’s worse: how insufferable they get if they win anyway, or how much they kvetch if they lose.)

A side bonus to creating situations in which failure is probable is that those who succeed anyway are going to be that much more excited by it. To what might they ascribe their success? If it’s not in one of their normal strengths, might they try to pursue that as a new emphasis? How do they react to the world around them being equally surprised that they made it through? (One of my best characters was almost entirely a result of processes like these.)

A last note on why the main characters shouldn’t always just succeed—in my opinion, winning all the time gets boring.

Up until now, I’d never really understood the need of webcomic artists to celebrate their hundredth strip. It’s what, a little over three months? Only significance is that it’s a three-digit number. Now, half a year, that’s impressive.

And then I actually started blogging, and I began to understand it a bit better. Keeping to a tight schedule is blasted difficult, particularly when real life is being real life. So three digits is a lot more exciting, and definitely a lot more daunting, when you’re doing it yourself.

As a result, I’m going to break one of my unwritten rules and talk about how I relate to the real world on a day other than Sunday. Not a problem, right? I promise, you won’t get this again around 200 unless you ask for it, and this time I mean ask.

Anyway, a hundred days ago, after a couple weeks of dithering around, I got up the nerve to apply for a blog with the Today network. I was surprised by how quickly they said yes, but even more surprised by what happened afterwards. Here I was, surrounded by all these people with really successful blogs about mainstream topics, and they found my maundering on a topic that practically defined “niche” interesting. It was flattering, what can I say?

Since then, I’ve acquired a full time job with an absurd commute, discovered many of the “joys” of the Real World, had to run up to Oregon for a week for a funeral (oddly enough, the night of the event was the night I wrote one of my better posts), and discovered a meaning of time crunch I didn’t understand even when I was working on my undergrad thesis. Through it all, this blog has been something of a stabilizing point for me: It’s the one constant, or at least the one I actually enjoy.

I’ve had a lot of fun here. The surprise at coming home to discover things like being featured or Stumble pile-ups, for instance. And some of the topics! The Generic Villain, for example, was an accident, resulting from me going into an “I’d turn to evil, only I know exactly what would happen” rant after an incident involving the local disposal services and some bad timing. The riff on nonbinary combat was a result of my trying to articulate just that inconsistent something I was finding in some of the games I was playing in. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite as flattering as Ishmayl proposing to write a blog responding to my posts.

I’d like to thank the RPG Bloggers’ Network. Not just for bringing me many of my most articulate commenters, and not just for being patient while I sorted out my wonky RSS feed, but also for some more inadvertent things. Featuring two of my blog posts on days when I really needed a pick-me-up, for instance; coming home to discover you’ve just had your work featured for the first time can’t take the sting out of losing a family member, but it can definitely help.

Thanks also to my household, for putting up with 10 pm “My deadline’s coming and I still don’t have a topic!” and my game group for giving me things to write about. And both groups for occasionally filling the other’s role. You guys are amazing!

And thanks to everyone who reads this, for coming back so regularly and having such interesting things to say.  Looking forward to the next few months!

The Generic Villain writes again!

I’ve already given you the word on choosing your own companion creature(s). Wouldn’t it be nice if the privilege were limited to us?

Unfortunately, the protagonists are at least as likely as we are to have picked up such companions, and those companions have disproportionate odds of throwing wrenches in our plans when we think we’ve won. So we need to know who they are and how to deal with them.

The one we’re likeliest to think of is the Loyal Mount, a blasted impressive-looking horse that blends the loyalty of a Designated Love Interest, the strength of at least three normal horses, and the stamina of—forget that, I’m not sure even gods have that kind of stamina. Note that normal anti-horse measures won’t work on these creatures; they’re automatons from the Powers of Light, not flesh and blood equines. They won’t shy when hit with slingstones, won’t tire, and you can’t distract even the stallions (and there are a LOT of those) with a mare in heat. Just kill them.

Some protagonists get bigger Loyal Mounts, usually carnivores. Gryphons, giant eagles… and dragons. Dear Dark Powers, the dragons. You don’t want to send minions against those directly; they tend to come out crunchy. However, unlike the horses, the dragons are living creatures. (Even Good doesn’t cheat THAT outrageously.) Most importantly, they eat. A lot. This is where peasants who consider you a tolerable evil come in; if you make a point of paying them for your food despite being Their Overlord, they will expect the people trying to liberate them to do the same. So the hero loses income, the dragon gets underfed, or the hero pushes the issue and makes an enemy of the populace. You might also be able to lull dragons into quiescence with large quantities of milk, but that’s a point of dragonlore not everyone agreed on when the multiverse was fashioned, so it might not work.

And don’t think the combat-ready creatures are all you have to deal with. The really dangerous ones are the shoulder-sized companions. They’re small, usually cute, very puntable, good at hiding and even better at bailing their owners out of sticky situations. You have to remember this, or it’ll come around and bite you, guaranteed. I should know. See, I’ve got a bit of a professional relationship going with the Gratuitous Enchantress on the other side of the mountains—nice girl. Good long-reaching plans. Finally got to the point where she gets dressed when we meet up. Anyway, so about a month ago, I get this letter from her by swallow, saying she’s successfully captured the protagonists du jour, plans are going perfectly, we should celebrate once she’s finished. A day later, I see smoke rising over the mountains, and that evening I get another swallow, bearing a note with a single sentence: “It really was a ferret in his pocket.”

Don’t follow that path. When you see a puntable shoulder-sized animal companion, or you have reason to believe one might be present, locate it and kill it. (Punting it afterwards is optional.)

With sufficient preparation, you can ensure that if the Laws of Drama are going to mess you up, it won’t be at the paws of an animal companion. Stay smart!

Up for more Generic Villainy?  Look here.

Today’s post is a guest post by the illustrious UrbaneZombie from the Girl-Wonder forums. We’ve been discussing game theory for a while now, and after I thought about his explanation of stories and implied setting (see yesterday’s third reason to write details), I couldn’t help but ask to share it.

The thing that I’ve found in the past is something very strange - implied setting. When I create a setting and know all about it, even when the players don’t, I find that the more familiar I are with that setting, the better my writing is - even if most of the details never make it into the story. (The drawback is that I tend to make jack-in-the-box plots, but that’s not an unusual flaw in plotting.)

This is as opposed to exposited unrelated details, where you specifically let them slip in some way that makes people want to know more about them, and they provide background atmosphere by actually being exposited.

This can work well, and - once a setting has been established and I find out what the players actually like, I find it can be a lot of fun to have what amounts to “storytime” even within the game (assuming there’s an NPC whose “voice” they are fond of).

Certainly it would be a lot of fun if everyone kept bothering the creepy, spiky astrologer guy to tell them stories.

Sasha: Dinner is finished, it’s too dark to travel with no moons, and I’m not tired in the least. This symphony of stars puts me in a mood… Come Armillarius! Tell us a story!
Armillarius: No. I am brooding darkly right now.
Everyone: Pleeeeeeeze!
Armillarius: Oh very well.
[Everyone settles in to listen. Armillarius points with his staff, a black line against the stars.]
Arm: In the southern sky there is a great line of stars, trailing across from east to west. Here they are called Luria’s Road and people see them as a path across the firmament as might be walked by that august and terrible lady.
[The staff wheels in his hand, pointing in the opposite direction.]
Arm: But there are people who live far to the north, so far that Luria’s Road is a line on the horizon. In early fall, as the cold weather comes, they rise up, just above the edge of the world, to glow there in the sky. In early spring, when the ice is still heavy on the trees, they fall again, and are not seen for half of the year.
[He returns to a resting position.]
Arm: On the Rimal islands in the Northern Sea, they call that constellation Lufu, or the Tide… for them, those stars are the peaks of the calm, even waves of the cosmos that lap at the shores of the world. The fall of ocean waves on the shore is slower than a heartbeat, slower than breathing, but the rise and fall of the Tide, to them, is the rhythm of the universe, long as years. As the sea is music to them, so the movement of the stars is music, but so long and slow and old that they cannot hear it.
[Everyone is absolutely silent.]
Arm: The Rimal Islanders have a different notion of the afterlife… they believe that when you die, your vision, your experience is slowed. First day and night seem to pass in hours, and then in minutes, and then in seconds, so that finally they can watch the Tide rise and fall, the way they watch the waves of the ocean, and finally they can listen to the music of the stars, just as they would fall asleep to the quiet rush of the waves in life.
[There is a pause. Someone yawns as quietly as possible so as not to interrupt.]
Arm: Rimal Islanders do not bury their dead. They place them in cliffside catacombs, seated comfortably with their heads raised, so that they can always watch the rise and fall of the stars. And if the dead should slump forward or their head should fall to one side after many years, they only say that one is taking a rest, or that the Tide has lulled them to sleep. One day they will awaken again and resume their peaceful contemplation of the stars, but when a year passes in a few short seconds, they will sleep for aeons. The universe will still be there when they wake.
[Quiet breathing all around indicates that everyone has fallen asleep.]
Arm: Good night mighty warriors… the world will still be here when you wake tomorrow.
[He looks up at the stars.]

Now see how, even if you never tell this story, knowing it makes the world seem calmer? The cosmos is a gentle, rhythmic, peaceful thing, like an ocean of stillness all around the world, and even when there is turmoil and strangeness, people there can still look up and know that there is calm among the stars.

Contrast this with the Edge of the World, where outer space is an alien thing, not horrible but different and unknown and wondrous, and there is a place in the world where you can reach out and touch that wonder, a place where normal laws mean little and your wide eyes can see things that are seen nowhere else.

It doesn’t matter whether you tell the players about these places - it doesn’t matter if they never visit them. What happens is that the stories you tell yourself about the world change the way you think about it, the way you write about it. That’s the implied setting.

More on detail in the world, this time from the creator’s side.

While the world is almost invariably for the audience, the details themselves often serve purposes that are more creator-oriented. I’ve seen three major reasons why people come up with these sorts of details. One is to demonstrate our artistry with said little details. Another is creating details to reward the players’ curiosity, in a sort of Easter egg hunt game-within-a-game. A third is to give the creator herself a better idea what the world is like, whether it’s things that might change how a character reacts or overall thematics that influence the field of the world itself.

The first way is, in my opinion, a bit of a trap. After all, if the point of creating details is to show them off, what happens when there’s never a good opportunity to do so? Or in a game, the players just plain don’t want to see them? Say you’ve got a sequence that you’ve been planning forever that will give you a chance to give further insight into a high-profile side character with an as-yet-unrevealed backstory, and the group chooses a path that makes it a lot more difficult for them to be present at such a scene. Isn’t it tempting to shove them back in that direction, to make sure that they see this piece that you worked so hard on so they can marvel at the “Ah, now that makes sense!”ness of it?

Bad GM. No cookie.

You do realize where this is going, right? That way lie Mary Sues, and paragraphs of unnecessary exposition that cause readers of novels to throw them against the wall in frustration (do you really think this is any less off-putting in a game?), and worst of all from the GM’s standpoint railroading. If you’re going to do details just for the artistry, remember that knowing when to use them and when not to use them is artistic in and of itself, and that for some people, there is such thing as too much. (Tolerances vary; this is one of the reasons why Lord of the Rings, despite being generally considered a fantasy classic, is not for everyone.) If you really want to show off, find someone who’s interested in all the little details and regale them; everyone will be a lot happier that way.

The second is my personal favorite, and the style I usually work in. Since the details are in and of themselves a meta-story reward, the audience tends to seek them out once they know they’re out there: readers by going over the story again with a fine-tooth comb looking for allusions and teasing hints, gamers by asking questions and prying into things. That’s the good news: you know the audience is going to want to hit up the little details, because why else are they looking for them? The bad news is that it can be frustrating when people aren’t seeking out the details, or can’t find your favorites. There are a lot of reasons for this: Some don’t know the details are out there to find, some just can’t think of new directions in which to look for said directions, some are interested in the kinds of details you hadn’t thought of because you work better with a different kind or you just haven’t gotten there yet. All of them can lead to frustration, though. “Why aren’t they looking into this? I worked so hard on it.”

For someone who works in this style, it’s important to know the audience; know if they’re likely to look for details and if so what sorts of details they’re going to look into, figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are in the hunt (this, unfortunately, requires experimentation), and plan the detail-sprinkling from there. Most importantly, remember that what’s dead obvious to someone who knows the world isn’t going to be near as easy to pick up for someone who doesn’t. Their minds are not yours. (Yes, I have trouble with this. A lot.)

The third reason to create seemingly extraneous detail is for a better personal understanding of the world. This might be how a given character will react to a given event—particularly useful for the GM with the interaction-obsessed PC. Or it could be local traditions and their reasons, or odd habits of nearby creatures; an antagonist’s motivation, an ally’s talents, even what (if anything) that predator on the other side of the hill had for lunch. The idea behind it is just to understand how the detail shapes the world, and to be able to have the environment work with these details in as convincing a manner as possible. It doesn’t, however, have to revolve entirely around trivialities; it can lead to the entire world-feel.

Tomorrow, an example of this effect from a surprise author. Stay tuned!

After last week’s run on ways to come up with animals and sample ways in which they might relate to humanity and to the world, I got a lot of responses to the level of detail I was putting in, some more positive than others.

This got me to thinking about the role of fine detail in worldbuilding and how it pertains to both the creator and the audience. Most of us, particularly in the gaming world, tend to think of it from the audience’s side; we worry about what our players are going to care about and what detail the piece serves within the narrative, and particularly worry about whether we’re putting too much effort in or forcing our players and characters too much in certain directions for the sake of the details. Now, these concerns aren’t unfounded: Limyaael writes about the writer falling into that trap here, while Questing GM discusses how the GM might fall prey to it here.

So let’s start by looking at it from the audience’s side. Some people just plain don’t care about these details, and that’s their prerogative. (I personally think they’re missing out.) Many are rather neutral towards them. Some welcome them; some of those will even go out of their way to seek them out. (As a player, I fall into the latter category.)

The advantage to details is that anything that is known can be used. Consider the murder mystery; isn’t the whole point of such things stringing together a bunch of random details to create a coherent picture of whodunit and why? But that’s not the only question that such details can answer. Little details can do a lot to inform a PC’s relationship with an NPC; sometimes just one can be the difference between friendship and enmity.

You know the best player-side use for little details, though? Combat evasion. Against intelligent or speech-capable opponents, this can includes figuring out why they’re fighting, what could convince them to stop, or how to scare the living daylights out of them so they don’t start. When dealing with animals or magical beasts, there are other factors; including, scarily enough, mating habits and biology. I’m reminded of our basilisk example of a few days ago; if you see it coming before it’s on top of you, and you know what it eats, or what might attract it, you might be able to lure or at least divert it away from you. As an added bonus for people with metagaming-prone groups, this gives you ways to answer a high Knowledge or equivalent thereof check without just pointing the players to the official stat-block for the creature in question.

The difficulty, of course, is figuring out which details are which, and how to get across the ones that are relevant or useful as opposed to the ones that are just interesting. In a book, this can be done by repetition, or occasionally by internal monologue, or just by making sure it’s treated as being somewhat important when it’s first presented. Not too important, though; that tends to give the plot away. In a game, on the other hand, we have a trick we can use. We all know that people value what they work for. So if we want a detail to be considered particularly important or relevant, and we’re the type who like that sort of thing, we attach it to a dice roll. (This doesn’t mean we can’t bring it up beforehand, of course, but that the roll drills the point home. It also has the added bonus of making knowledge botches that much more amusing, particularly when only the one who made the botch knows that that’s what he did. (My record for longest time between a botch and the realization that that was what it was was six months. I honestly expected the group to ask the right questions earlier.)

Then there’s the issue of presenting what they need to know in a way that doesn’t bore them to tears. For pre-campaign information, I recommend figuring out their reading styles. Some people are going to prefer a more academic tone, carefully organized so they know what’s what. Others would prefer more of a travelogue; something with a clear and possibly slightly biased narrator, preferably with a little extra humor to go with it. Yet others are going to want to absorb things by observing the cultures at work, and would prefer a story that just happens to cover most of the important details. But do be concise; you don’t need to give them a full in-depth sociological evaluation of each culture (unless they’re all either soc majors or really interested in the nitty-gritty) when a couple pages of important general information and a page or so of narrative actually set in the culture in question (to highlight the little details in context where they make more sense) will do so much better.

So that’s what they’re getting out of it. Next time, I’ll look at what we’re getting out of it.