Making Race Important to the Game

Over at Roleplaying Tips they're hosting a nice little blog carnival, centered on the concept of races. And… I must say that I don't normally play with race too much, or at the very least- not today. But it doesn't mean that I don't have anything to bring to the table. I did run a year or two of campaigns centered on races and our prejudices surrounding them, back in the day.

John asks for tips and ideas about making race an important factor in the game. For me, the number one trick, the first tip that I offer for GMs who come to me with the same question, is to lead by example.

Think about the GM-player relationship in most traditional games- the GM sets the stage, decides what is important and what not, and the players (at least to a certain extent) internalize those themes and ideas, and then bring their own versions of it. That's how we explore themes in RPGs.

But it also means that the GM has to set the stage. If the GM will make race an important factor in her games, like having some racist NPCs or handing a prejudices index (just like we can find in every WOD race book), sooner or later it will become a major factor in the game.

If, for the sake of example, I bring to the table a Dwarf NPC who hates Elves and think that they just stink, suddenly it is important to know if Lucy plays an Elf or if she plays a Halfling. If I'll continue this stage-setting and the next NPC will think that Halflings are not real men, Mr. Halfling will have to find a way to show his manliness.

In other words- making the concept of races important to you, as GM, and playing to this concept, will make it important for the whole group. Before you'll know it you'll have Dwarfs who don't like Gnomes and Orcs who want to be Elves.

And that's the whole truth, actually. Make it important to you, stress it through your portrayal of NPCs, through your descriptions ("you see an Elf. She…"), through handouts... If it is important enough for you to stress it, it will become important enough for them as well.

Or you can just go and play Vampire. I "heard" that they've done it right.

How about you? What tips and tricks do you have for making race an important factor in your games?

Cronos- Making the Curse Feel Like a Curse

There are those horror movies that you see and immediately forget, and there are those that you'll take with you onward and maybe even forever. Cronos is one of them. A debut feature film by Del Toro, yet you wouldn't feel that when watching it. It is made with so much thought, devotion and emotion that you can't find anything bad to say about it. It is one of those movies that one hardly could make any better.

It is a story of an old man, who owns an antique shop, and becomes a vampire. It is a story of the relationship between a young girl named Mercedes and her grandfather. It is a story of the fear of the death, of the price of eternity. It is a film about life and living. It is mostly sad, sometimes even a little bit terrifying. I can't find the words to describe this film, to do it justice, not in English nor in Hebrew. It is this good.

And to find something to learn from it is so hard and so easy, takes so much energy and so little an amount. Watch it because it is a good movie, and then watch it again to analyze it. I don't know what else to say.

Right… lesson! I think that the moment in which I understood that I was watching something unique was the bathroom scene, the scene in which our vampire drinks blood from the bathroom floor. It is so powerful, so sad, and so pitiful. From this scene I knew that I was in good hands.

And this scene can teach us something about our games. Quite a lot to teach, actually, but I'll focus on a single thing. In most personal horrors games, the characters are very powerful, very strong and tough, with a lot of magical power. They call this state of theirs a curse, but here it usually ends. This scene can remind us of what it means a cursed state. This vampiric state of his made him do so many heartbreaking things, from drinking the blood from the bathroom floor to almost drinking his granddaughter's blood. And this can happen in our games too.

It is not enough to describe the life taking moment, the enjoyment of the act. It is not enough to say "you bite him, his blood is drawn to your bloody, his heart starts to beat faster and faster, and then slowly picks down the pace. The blood starts to run day, but it doesn't matter, the feeling is wonderful, amazing, and good like you've never felt in your life, better than the feeling of seeing your first child born. And when he dies, and the feeling's gone, you know that you just want more." No, it is not enough, not even close to it. Because it doesn't feel like a sad thing, like a sad act. Maybe it's better to not do it both ways at the same time, but by reminding the players that this is a curse, we help to bring the horrors back. We help to make them want the pain away, the feeling gone, and the horror will use this moment to strike.

Because there's another type of personal horror, besides "oh, what have I done"? This other type of personal horror is so close to the known one, yet so different from it. It is the type of "oh, what did it make me do? To what state have I been drawn?" And by reminding the players that this state is a curse, we bring them closer to the second type's embrace.

How about you? Have you watched this movie? What did you think about it? And what have you learned from it?

"I Walked with a Zombie"- The Power of the Voice over

Sometimes I start to think that maybe, just maybe, this genre isn't for me, that all those horror movies that I really like- it is all an accident and nothing more. And then comes a movie like this. I Walked with a Zombie might have a really bad name, but truth is that this is a descent movie, a good movie, even outside of the horror scope. It is even respectful for the minorities, considering that it's a 1943 movie, but even today it is far more respectful to the Voodoo than most movies today.

It is a movie about a nurse, who comes from Canada to an island in order to try and help to cure a woman who is in a coma. She tries her best, mainly because she's in love with that woman's husband. But the woman is far from being sick- she's a zombie, made like this because of a combination of voodooist magic and a desperate mother-in-low.

Like most Lewton movies, though, we don't really remember the director. Lewton's movies had such a distinctive style, and they were that good, that they surpassed the campy names given to the movies by the RKO studio executives.

But enough general movie talks, let's look at the movie, and especially what we can learn from it, shall we? For me, the main magic of the movie is the voice-overs in the beginning. They have dreamlike vibe to them, they're as mesmerizing as can be and they present has the character of Nurse Betsy Connell quickly and effectively. And I think that it can be useful in RPGs too.

Think about it for a sec- a scene has just ended, and before moving to the next scene, we have a break and one of the players gives a monologue, in voice over, showing what goes in his/her character's mind. Wouldn't it be wonderful? This opens to us a new world of possibilities for reflection scenes.

But it can be driven further that this- a character is facing a moral dilemma. Instead of just choosing, the player can do a voice-over, detailing the way that the character thinks, showcasing the thinking-machinations in the character's head. It can be used to explain changes of thinking, growth of characters and so much more.

I don't know, maybe I'm just optimistic, but if there is one thing that this movie showed me, is that it can be made in any stage of the game, and it carries so many benefits as a way to present characters, to showcase them, to create identification with them, to understand them. Most films during those times used voice-over to present motives, not to convey feelings, after all…

How about you? Have you considered using voice-overs in your games? How did it go? And what else have you learned from this movie?

Conflict Is Not Mandatory

You don't need conflicts. You read that correctly, I really did say that you don't need conflicts. Conflicts are not mandatory, are not a must-have ingredient for a successful game or even for a successful story. Conflict is a nice and a very useful tool in order to create enjoyment, interest and to be one with the character, but it is not the only one, or the most important one, or a success guarantee.

Think for example about a nice in-character conversation between a PC and an NPC. Does it have to hold a conflict in order to be interesting? No, I'm serious, does it? I don't think so. I once GMed a game in which for three hours the characters were just gossiping about people not present. No conflict was there, just a conversation about what did this person and what did that one. When I wrote this game for my friends, I thought to myself: "If we have to have conflicts in order to create interest, why do our conversations seem so enjoyable, so interesting, so "worth-our-time?" It went a blast. I was asked to GM this game again.

But this is an extreme kind of game, not much similar, or even close, to what we refer to when we normally talk about RPGs. Things like Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire, PTA. But then I started to read the GENder theory, which is kinda interesting yet kinda flawed. Anyway, the E stands for exploration. It means that one plays in order to explore, in order to be, someone else. And that got me thinking: "In order to feel like [insert a name here], do I need to be in a conflict?" I don't think so, otherwise I wouldn't enjoy play SIMS.

And it all circulates back to what I've said in the beginning: Conflict is not mandatory. It is useful, but not mandatory.

Opinions?

The Players just roll the Dice…

One of the most common problems that I've seen in games is a lack of understanding about the distinction between what the players do and what their characters do. Let's explain this strange sentence with an example:

It is a D&D session, and a fight erupts. Fighter raises his axe and attacks Orc Number 1, while Wizard shoots Orc Number 2 with a magic missile.

Now, let's analyze this scene. What do the characters do? Wizard casts a spell, Fighter attacks with his spell. What do the players do? They roll the dice, and… that's about it. And that is the problem that I mentioned in the first sentence of this post. The fact that the characters are fighting, and have a certain chance to die, isn't relevant that much, because at the end all they do is to roll some dice.

Actually, if you look at it this way, looking for clues in Call of Cthulhu is not that much different: You enter a room, and you try to notice things. The character does that, I mean. You just roll the dice. Or in other words, if we want to differentiate between types of scenes, we should think in terms of what the players do and not in terms of what the characters do. Because if in both cases we just roll the dice, there is no difference. Or at the very least, not a real difference between the scenes.

And that's a distinction that I think one really has to make and hold to her heart. When one writes an adventure, or improvises one, you should always try to think in terms of what the players will do. Will the players just roll some dice? If so, maybe I should find another thing that they'll be able to do, like inventing the adversaries, or giving them as much roleplaying scenes as possible?

After all, we sit with the players, in the real world, and not with the characters in an imaginary one…

Background Is Not Mandatory

I don't ask my players to write a backstory anymore. It's not that they don't know how to write good ones because not only some of them write quite a lot of stories in their free and not so free time (and a pretty damn good fiction also), they do know how to write good backstories. It's also not because I don't love reading backstories, because I really do. I stopped asking them to write backstories because I think that there are better ways to create a connection and to get a feel for the character. I still welcome backstories, but it is not mandatory anymore.

I now use a different tool, a series of 10 questions that I devised over the last year and a half, which I find quite satisfying. It gives me and them roleplaying tools, creates a feel for the character, enriches the world and takes far less time than it would take to get all of that from a backstory.

The questions are presented in this order, in these groupings:

1) What is your character obsessed about?

2) What triggers your character's rage and anger?

3) What scares your character the most?

4) What makes your character be her best self?

5) Who is your character's best friend?

6) How would he/her describe your character?

7) Where would he/she be wrong?

8) What is your character's goal?

9) What tools does your character have in order to achieve them?

10) How is your character connected to the other characters in the group?

After presenting those questions, I wanna take a moment or two and go through each question, explaining why I used this questions and what do I get from them.

What is your character obsessed about?

This question gives me a simple tool- something that I can get to draw the character to the story with, if I'll ever need one. But it does more than that. A player can use the answer to signal to the GM what she wants to see in the game ("my character is obsessed about killing orcs"), or he can use the answer to breath more life into the character ("my character is obsessed about flowers").

What triggers your character's rage and anger?

This is again a question that gives a simple identification tool. But it also gives us more than that. It is usually used to describe what one's character will fight about ("whenever I see injustice"). I, though, prefer using this answer to shed some light about my character's uglier self ("losing in something that I'm good at", for example).

What scares your character the most?

Every one of us is afraid of something, it part of what makes us real persons. It is also true for our characters. For that we have this question coming to the rescue. While its immediate usage seems like only for horror games (and in those games, it is preferable to answer with something that the player is afraid of also), I think that it has much more uses than that. In most heroic stories, the heroes and heroines face their fears and overcome them in order to win. But for that to happen, we have to have those fears in the first place, right?

What makes your character be her best self?

But our characters also have a good side, and this question is used to showcase it. These are the times when the character will do everything that she can in order to help the persons around her. She will defeat the adversaries, help the wounded or whatever else that she can in order to achieve this goal or to solve this problem.

But one of my players used this question to show another ugly side of the character. She answered this question with this answer: "Only when my character feels better than someone else".

Who is your character's best friend?

Remember all those tip articles about mining the backgrounds of the characters for NPCs to add? Here is my answer (well, the first part of it anyway…). This answer gives all of us a major secondary character to add to the story. It can be used to hook the characters for something, to illustrate the PC or anything else. It populates the world with a character that the player already feels for.

How would he/her describe your character?

This gives us the primary characteristics of the character. How she presents herself and how she is seen by everyone in the world. Answers such as "dependable", "smart" or "honest" gives us easy gates into the character's psyche, while others such us "pretty", "strong" or "has a keen eye" showcase more physical characteristics that can't be ignored.

Where would he/she be wrong?

This question I like to nickname as the twist one, or the "thank-god-my-friend-doesn't-know-about-it question". This is a usually dark or ironic twist about the descriptors from before. "My character is not brave, but just too scared for being afraid"; "my character isn't smart, but just recites old sayings". One of my players decided that his character isn't playful because she's afraid to lose her playful friend.

Take into account, though, that it can be used to illustrate the friend also. If we'll look at my player's example, we get a friend who has a territory- "I'm the funny and playful one"- and will probably fight for it.

What is your character's goal?

This is the ultimate goal of the character. This is something that should be unachievable till the end of the campaign (or at the very least very hard to achieve). This is the character's dream, where she sees herself in 20 years' time or whatever.

In my MLP campaign I tweaked it a little bit, changing it to "what is your character's childish goal", because they are children and as such their dreams are prone to change all the time.

What tools does your character have in order to achieve them?

The answer here can give me a lot of tools. If the player answers with NPCs, then we have more characters the players care for in the world. But other answers can be given as well- one of my players gave answered this question "because I really want to", thus making the character a childish one. It can also be used to showcase the character's most famous moves or whatever, showcasing the way she behaves and/or acts in the world.

How is your character connected to the other characters in the group?

Now is the time to answer this question. After we have the personalities of the characters, and we know who they know, we can finally answer this question organically. I always ask the players to come with an answer together. This way, they both feel that they're part of it and they all care for it more because of that.

And an end

And that's it, my 10 questions with the logic behind them. I hope that you'll find them as useful as I've found.

How about you? Do you use a similar questionnaire? If so, in what way? And if not, why not?

5 Ways to Use the PCs' Families in the Game, and then 2 more...

You can use the characters' family, you know. Family is a wonderful thing for stories, as it can bring reasons to go adventuring, allies, villains, unique situations and scenes, and moments such as "I'm you father!" So, why don't we use it more in our games? I don't know, actually, but it's a thing that must be changed. Family means bonds and connections to the world, and as such should be created and encouraged. 

The best way to encourage this, at least to my belief, is by using these bonds in the game to advance the plot and to create drama... Anyway, here are 5 ways to use the PCs' families in the game:

1. A family member has been kidnapped. The most dreaded and cliche way to use it, but it's still a useful way to get the PCs on the adventure, once in a while. The characters have to rescue the fighter's brother from the dragon cave is a sure way to get the PCs on their way.
2. A family member has useful information. Maybe the mother of one of the characters is the most famous researcher of ancient dark medicine? Maybe the wizard's brother is a commando fighter? Maybe the cousin of the general is the prime minister of Great Britain?
3. An important family event. The sister is getting married, the cousin is celebrating his first child's birth, the uncle is receiving a grand prize, or even the mother is getting a nobility title... A scene like that can be the basis for an entire session or even as the starting point for a murder mystery (the groom was murdered a few minutes ago, for example).
4. A family member is the villain. Robert is the vampire lord, Mellisa is the head of an organised crime family, Cousin Mordechay is the genius who created the grand Vaporizer and Sister Beatrix is the new Darth Vader. A family member that is the main villain can bring both a dramatic peak to the game and a huge conflict. It also enables you to bring the infamous line "[insert name of a character here], I'm your father..."
5. A mentor for the character. A family member who is also a mentor for the characters can make things even closer and more emotional. A 2 for one deal...

And what do we do if the family members are all dead? 2 ways to deal with it:

• The body of one of the family members is being controlled by the villain and it draws chaos and havoc in the city...
• Let the character deal with the loss.

Either way, huge amounts of drama can be created by this.

How about you? How do you use the PCs' families in the games?

Rounding Characters

You're not perfect, you know. Not even one of us was born complete, with nothing to learn or change, without any kind of a flaw. Not even one of us leaves without something that makes him/her mad. We're imperfect human beings, and it makes us better persons, much more like able. A famous writer once said: "All perfect families are similar, all flawed families are flawed each family in its own unique way..." We all want to create like able characters, characters that are both easy to play and deep. The easiest way to do this is by giving the characters flaws and internal conflicts.

A flawed character is much more alive than a perfect one. When a character has to deal with a situation that confronts her flaws, she gets empathy from us. More than that, she is immediately reminds us of living people who had to confront with the same things. A character that has colour blindness gets our empathy when she attacks the wrong side, in the middle of a battle, because of colour confusion. A character that is afraid of dark places will remind us of Uncle Albert who used to scream for help whenever there was an electricity failure.

But flaws are only one of the ways. A much more interesting and deep way to make deeper rounder characters is by inserting internal conflicts into them. The judge who is haunted by his memories of sending an innocent man into his death, the pacifist who has to fight for her country to prevent her kids death, the champion who came to an age when the army doesn't need her anymore but who doesn't know how to do anything else... Suddenly, it's a richer character. We get a personality, a snippet of a life story, and a conflict that can help the character seems unique every time.

How about you? How do you make your characters richer?

Eleanor Opens a New Campaign...

Eleanor continued to look in her memories, searching for another tricks, for another ways that her old GM used to open campaigns with. She looked at the players, a little bit nervous, a little bit sad, but it soon changed. She decided to continue no matter what.

She was sitting there, her GM starts the adventure, and the picture emerged back. Her old GM knew when to read from the papers and when to improvise scenery. What was so wonderful, was that she did both of this things overly dramatic, and it was way too hard to discern when she did which.

The session started, her old GM stops before an important message, before terrifying scenery, before...

Eleanor always felt that she sees the world, but more than that, she smelled the world, she touched it, she heard it, she tasted it, the world was around her and within her and... Beatrix smelled the roses in the fields. She went to the bar, leading her group. Although she knew what was there, although she was in the bar a moment before she was in the roses garden, she didn't feel cheated. She felt it was justified. It was a flashback, this scene, and she led the group to where they begun...

Eleanor came back to the present, her group looking at her, waiting to see and to hear what she's gonna do. Less than a minute has passed, and she knew right away what to do. She described the surroundings, the world, the where and what and when of the game. She continued to a little bit of the whom of the story, those that were at the bar anyway, and she laid the ground to the PCs. 

The PCs were there, her changing voice, volume and tone, drew them near, drew them in, her descriptions created the living picture that she tried to create...

The group sat in the bar, looking at the commoners and at the few nobles who were there. They suddenly were asked about their history by the barman, who looked interested to hear how they have met, and what have they done in the past few months, and if they are adventurers. 

The group started to describe, telling about coincidental meetings and about first-look loves and about family-bonds and about event-bonds. The barman listened quietly, asking one question there, another one then, suggesting ideas when they were stuck.

It wasn't a clean way, she knew, but it was useful, and it was in character. "Get this thing in the beginning and it will continue 'till the end", her old GM used to say, and she was right, of course... Before she knew it, she had a group with history, with a background and a few deeds, and with a goal. She was happy with what she had. It was a great beginning...

And so, Eleanor continued with her GMing. A few things that were pointed here:

• Descriptions: All five senses.
• Voice: Changing all the time. Not monotonous or anything, but a changing vibrant voice in both volume and tone.
• If there's a contradiction to a thing that was said, it's better to give a quick convincing explanation. Flashback was great in this example- it used the contradiction to explain how they arrived at the bar, but it can also be solved in another ways (dreams are a favourite of many...).
• It's best to ask the group how they met. Not how their characters met, but how they as the characters met ("Beatrix, how did you and Robert met?" As opposed to "Eleanor, how did you and Bobby met?").
• If the group is stuck, suggest ways to continue. It doesn't have to be crystal clear, as with the example of the barman, but a little leading question there, another small one a short time afterwards and you've got something...

The Story of Eleanor

This moment comes, when you open a new game, with new characters and all, and you all sit across the round table and wait for the ordinary world to disappear and for the imaginary world to fill the space. You, like every person wants to get into the mind of your character, you want to be him/her and not yourself anymore, at least for a few hours.

The GM starts to speak. She describes the setting, going over all the details of the bar that you're within, of the tired barkeeper and of the stinking man with the purple roses who's supposed to be some kind of a magician. Then he asks you: "What are you playing?"

And in a moment, everything that she built is lost. In a moment, you're not Beatrix anymore but only play her. The shift is too quick, too strange, too out of its place. You look at your wonderful GM with your eyes and she suddenly understands what mistake she made. She quickly corrects herself: "Can you please describe yourself?" And the change is far too great. Suddenly, you're not Eleanor anymore, but Beatrix. 

She then continues to one of her old tricks, and she asks you (just like she asks everyone else) a question about Beatrix. Not a familiar question, but a strange one. "What does Beatrix do every Sunday morning?" Last story opener she asked you about Lisa's marriage life, and she asked Bob's character about what he liked best in his wife. She didn't ask Bob, as she didn't ask you, she asked the characters. Suddenly, you were in the characters' minds, thinking like them. The shift was well familiar, and it felt great.

Today, it's the time to start a new session, and you begin in the same way your old GM opened the game. The players respond well, and you can see that they begin to be their characters, to come into their skin, to sit into their brains, just like the way it happened to you.

I don't know if I succeeded with what I tried to pass here. I hope I did. It's not magic, and Eleanor didn't lose touch with reality (although she wasn't real in the first place...). It just helped this Eleanor to be her character for a few hours, and to leave the troubles behind when she met her friends...

How about you? How do you help the players to be their characters?

5 Thoughts on Mystery Planning

In one of the bigger RPG forums in Israel, there's a discussion about investigative games: Possible, or not? And if possible, how can it be achieved? As a person who GMs quite a lot of investigative games, I started to think about how one should plan a game like that and how it should be GMed. My thoughts about the subject follow:

1. The most important thing to consider is what place clues should take in your mystery. In some investigative books, the investigators like Sherlock or Poirot, finding the clues is not the challenge, and both Sherlock and Poirot find them quite easily. In other stories, we can go for quite a lot of time before a single clue is found. For me, I think that the real challenge shouldn't be to find the clues, but to use them together to find the real criminal.
2. Red herrings. This is another important thing to consider, as this concept is used in almost the entire investigative canon of books. For me, I always thought that red herrings are one of the more unique qualities of the genre, and one of the hardest to pass to RPGs. While in other mediums, you can decide when the investigator will throw the red herring, in RPGs you cannot. If I want to use it (and boy, I sure want), I tend to use it as a comeback in a later investigation, or more likely as a small level. You solved the mystery, but there's still a hidden layer that you might need to find, someone who activated the criminal that you caught.
3. Types of crimes. We have to face it, solving mysteries can become as tedious as dungeon crawling (and far more frustrating, of course). Because of that, we have to rewind the mysteries. One crime will be a murder mystery; another will be a kidnapping mystery... But we can go to even farer places: One mystery will contain a moral dilemma; another will confront one of the characters with his/her deepest fears...
4. Complexity levels. I've written about it once, but it worth repeating: Not all mysteries were born the same, some are harder than the others, some are more complex than the others, and some have a bigger scope than the others.
5. Team work. In the canon, the investigator never was alone. Sure, s/he did almost all of the work, but there was another one. In RPGs, we can't have one player who will be the mastermind and the others to be the sidekicks. One way to solve it is with having one person to play the computer genius of the group, another to play the interrogator of the group and so on... A little better approach (to my belief) is to have this allocation of experts, but to have skills that are known to more than one expert. The computer expert might be better at using the Internet, but she will also be good with sneaking past cops. The sneaky might be better at sneaking past cops, but he'll also be good with using the computer. This way, there's a greater feeling of teamwork, as the characters can help each other...

So, these are my thoughts on the subject. How about you? How do you plan/GM investigative games?

"My Character Wouldn't Do That!"

Yesterday, inspiration struck me. I was reading a post over at Stargazer's and I understood right away that he's right. Sure, I had a few posts that were directed to my players (or to other GM's readers...), but it can't hurt to have another tips' post directed to them, can it?

Anyway, I wanted to talk about something that I've heard a lot, from myself and from many others: "My character wouldn't do something like that!" This dreadful answer is something that we hear or make in order to save ourselves from doing something that we don't like. "The mayor wants you to leave those cops alone. -My character hates cops, Holilo Lombrete won't do a thing like that!" 

Before we go for what I want to say today, I want first to examine why it's so problematic. There are many reasons and many problems that a statement like that carries with it. The first that I want to discuss is that a statement like that means that the player doesn't trust the GM. In other words, we have here a trust issue. If the player says something like that, he's like saying "I know what you want me to do, but I don't like this idea, so fuck off!" This is a sure way to make the next idea by the GM even worse or late or even make the GM have trust issues with himself/herself and no new and/or interesting ideas will come. Sure, I'm a little bit going for an over the top thing, but this is the way to get there (well, one of the ways...).

Secondly, it prevents the player(s) from getting to new and interesting places. Genesis had a song called "I know what I like (and I like what I know)", and this is the point of the song: I know what I like and don't like, and I like what I know, resulting in an anti to try new things.

Thirdly, it makes the characters stereotypes. I'm sure that almost any person that we'll see, even if s/he will say "I won't do that", if they'll have no other choice, they'll do that. More than that, even in less dreadful situations, people do things that they don't want to do.

So, what did I want to say after all of this long long exposition? That any character can do any action that she wants or doesn't want to do. That's the whole point, that's what I wanted to say, and that's probably one of the most shocking (at least to myself) revelations I've reached for this year.

Think about it for a moment. I can justify according to my background almost everything that I can do. I can justify a helping and caring hand, and I can justify in the same way the opposite of it. A pacifist might justify carrying a sword in order to intimidate as a way to prevent wars, and a womaniser might stop chasing a woman by saying that she probably has a good reason for not wanting him (Skins, anyone?). Justification is not that hard to achieve, and if it's not strong enough, a few "yes, and"s and the problem is solved.

One more thing to consider is that this choice, whether to chase the goal while doing something that is against all of the character's morals or to leave the goal, is the highest point of drama. The sudden understanding that my morals stand in the way of my goal, or vice verse, is the whole point of drama. After all, if there's no real conflict there, there's no real interest...

So, this concludes this post. What do you think? Do you also agree that everything can be justified according to the character's background? Why, or why not?

Normality Became the New Originality

You don't have to be original by force. You don't have to be this uber half elf/ half orc/ half monkey/ half dragon hybrid, who is also 5 levels of wizard, 4 levels of warrior and 12 levels of rouge. You don't have to be Superman in a CoC game and don't have to be a coward in a D&D game. You don't have to be that special and original, you know.

Have you tried to be the normal once? Have you just tried to be this dwarf fighter or half elf diplomat? Have you? Was it that boring that you had to try to be that special for the sake of being special? Isn't being a half elf in an elfish society hard enough that you have to be half orc also, just in case?

Please, for god's sake, try to be normal for once. Normality became the new originality, retro is back as the new kid in the block.

Oh, and just in case, try to look in the net for this hybrid that you so wanted to be. Probably, someone has made it already, and the maker had a little bit more experience so it's probably even better than what you did try to achieve...

Sitting like My Favourite Character...

A little thing for today: A quick and dirty way to connect with a character is by sitting (or walking, or talking, etc...) like the character. If, for example, I'm playing a character that is shy and quiet, sitting with my shoulders hunched will help it. It will make me look always up when talking to other players or the GM, It will make talking harder and much more tiring, and I'll talk less.

It's a simple thing, that just changes everything in the way that you talk or sit or walk or whatever when you game. It helps you, especially when improvising, to switch between characters quickly and effectively. It can help you to switch standings in society, genders, and fantasy races and so on...

I, personally, use this technique whenever I get to play an NPC, and for every scene when playing as a player (like lying down when my character does it, or putting my hands aside without moving them when I'm tied).

How about you? If you had to choose such a technique, what would have been yours?

No More XP for You

There's something that I wanted to try for a very long time; a thought that ran through my brain for months, maybe even years; an idea for a game that I'm still waiting to try. The idea itself is pretty simple: No mechanical advancement for the PCs.

Too much of the games that I ran saw the players focusing on the mechanics, and how are they gonna be better and cooler. This resulted with them making the characters incomplete, always saying that when they'll achieve this and this, they'll be better, fuller, richer...

I don't like it, this aspect of gaming, and if we'll look at Lord of the Rings, or James Bond, Hamlet or Casablanca, the characters don't get any better physically, or any better magically or the like. Even in comics they don't get better (except for Spider-man, but it always turns bad...), so why do we see it there? Isn't story and character advancement is enough? Must we go for the mechanics to feel the advancement? I'm not too sure.

So the idea is really simple, and the possibility of running a game like this might be even positive, might even be plausible to run a game like this. I don't know when, or how; I don't know if it will be fantasy or sci-fi; I don't even know if I'll enable advancement by getting better tools; there's too much to think about in a game like this, but the PCs... I think they and their story will be much fuller, richer, and overall all the way better.

"This Femme Is Fatale!"

After I've watched today the movie Double Indemnity, I came to notice something: The greatest Femme Fatale is not the one that makes men do bad things, but the one who makes them want to do bad things. What the heck do I mean with that?

Femme Fatale is a kind of a character who uses her sexual "prowess" to control men and make them do really bad things, usually for her, usually for a promise from her, that she "forgets" to fulfil  She tosses them aside, using the newer ones to eliminate the old ones among other more terrible things. Although this character originated in the French literature, she's more famous in the Film Noire genre.

Anyway, after explaining what it is, let's go to what she does in the movie, won't we? From the first moment we see her, she catches our hero's eye (can't say protagonist about a murderer) and starts to seduce him. She's all present, teasing him with canny answers to his questions. 

The next time we see her, she becomes more of a "to the point" kind of girl. She asks about this accidents insurance policy. Neff immediately realises that she wants to kill her husband, to murder him, and says it won't work. He leaves, and later that evening there's a knock on his door. When he opens it, there's Phyllis again, and a short time afterwards is not only agreeing to sell her the policy, but he leads the way and plans how to kill, using every possible way to get more money.

Neff here is passionate about killing the husband, passionate about planning it, and most of all, doing it to get Phyllis (who has plans of her own). This last thing makes Phyllis the perfect Femme Fatale, she makes them want to do the bad stuff, and not just making them do it.

Applying it to RPGs is a little bit problematic, though. If one of the PCs is a Femme Fatale, going for this way of using it is not a problem at all, 'cause one can control the NPCs without making the others feel useless. On the other hand, Femme Fatale controlled by the GM can be an entirely different beast. Holding secrets from the players and their characters is the first step to making it easy. Making the character seem like a good person and her enemies like bad ones is the second stage. I like to play on my players thoughts about women and power, women and obedient and so forth against them. In this manner, it helps a lot when the players think that woman can't be nothing but the victims till it's too late.

Do you use Femme Fatales in your games? How do you use them?

Morality or A-Morality, that's the Question

Last week, we talked about the Overreacher Plot. Today, we're going to talk about the place of morality in the horror genre. It's no surprise that horror has such a connection with morality. Some of the most used horror stories have a connection to the religion, and many of them serve as a new and modern morality story. One of the leading examples for this can be found in Slasher Movies like Halloween.

In Halloween for example, our masked killer preys on a very special kind of prey, on the teenagers who aren't modest. He usually catches them while they do it, and kills them immediately. Then, when he's confronted with the modest, pure girl he's defeated and has to run away. The amorality is his enemy, his prey, and against the moral persons he can't stand his ground and has to flea defeated.

At the beginning of the movie, he catches his sister doing it, and kills her after her boyfriend is out. In the continuation of the movie, he doesn't pull his knife out, at least till the teenager he's about to kill does a bad thing. The moment s/he does it, he starts to act, separating them and then kills them.

 Laurie, on the other hand, remains pure and defeats him. It's of course to her credit that she defends the kids that she babysit, while risking her life. This is another highly moral thing, and as such she's even in higher regard, ready to stay alive at the end of the movie.

But 18 years earlier we had a different movie. Apart from all of its originality and influence on the Slasher sub-genre, it had a huge frightening power that derives from the morals of its main character. In Psycho, Marion steals 40 grand at the beginning of the movie, and runs away with it. She's being followed by the policeman, but runs away from him and arrives to the Bates Motel.

She talks with Norman, the owner, about his mother, and after a not too long conversation, she goes to her room. In there, she decides to hand the money back to the rightful owner. Then she decides to take a shower, symbolising her new identity and cleaning herself from her bad way, and that's when she's murdered.  Not when she's done the crime, but after she reforms, when we the least expect it. "Once a rogue always a rogue." 

In Psycho, the characters die after trying to do the right thing, and as such their death comes much more frightening: No one looks for the noble moral human beings over the bad ones; they both die in the end.

Our last example comes from the wonderful comic called Watchmen. Although not horror, it does express well one of more frightening aspects of morality: The villain who does the most horrible thing to keep the world from falling apart, because s/he is a moral person, even though not in the way to talk about. At the end of Watchmen, it is revealed that the masked vigilantes' disappearance was caused by Ozymandias. It's also revealed that all was part of his plan to finish the Cold War and to create a new era of peace and prosperity, by sending a machine that looks like an alien who will kill half of New York. Although it does create peace, and does finish the war, it's still a terrible thing and half of the New Yorkers die in one of the most famous scenes from the comic.

It's much more frightening when a bad thing is done from all the right reasons. It is much more frightening (at least to my belief) than just killing the bad persons. 

How can we use all of this in RPGs? Morality takes a great place in Psychological horror, as well as in Personal Horror games. These are the kind of games where the characters try to cope with their problems, and where they try to remain humane and moral in the face of danger.

There are a couple of ways to use this:

1. The first one is to decide what place the morality of the different characters will take. Are they all going to be pure against the evil, or something in between? Will the monster/villain kill all types of persons? Only the sinners? Only the nobles? For what cause?
2. The other should be done mid games: Every time there is a death, you need to connect between it and the morals of the game. It creates believability, and it also helps to express the moral themes of the game. 

No Wolf Survives Alone

You probably know them; they live between us, hiding in their closets only to come out of the shadows when it's too late to stop them. Yeah, I'm talking about the lone wolves.

Maybe you call them in other names, maybe you don't call them at all, but they are always there: those characters that just don't get along with their groups, those characters who think only about themselves, that feel alien to the group.

 Those characters, whose players defend them with saying: "That's what my character will do", and you don't have anything to say to them, against it, just because you know it is true, because you know you made a mistake.

And that's one of the purposes of the background: to identify these things and to stop it before it can happen, to cure the disease before it rages on. Because no wolf survives alone, for that they are in group, to survive and to prosper before they'll all die, because "together we stand- divided we fall".

   There is no real tip in here, just 2 things to consider: The first is to look for these things in the background. Characters that have nothing in the world, or characters who have problems connecting with people should be left out already in this stage.

The second is to remind those players that it is a social activity, to remind them that they're not alone in the world, and to remind them that no wolf survives alone, that living without anyone in exile is a more moral way to sentence someone to death.

A Fairy Tale Feel

In his commentary to the movie "Pan's Labyrinth", Del Toro expresses a key concept for making movies that feel fairy-tale like: the fairy tale is a simple story with simple characters. you can change one of the elements, but not both of them.

If we'll look at Pan's Labyrinth, the plot is complicated, with intervals of fantasy in the middle of reality, and with these 2 worlds colliding to each other. But the characters? They are really not that complicated. The Capitan an egocentric person whose love for control and order is unquestioned (as can be seen by his work on his clock). Ophelia's mother is a pregnant woman, who is in love with the Capitan, and who surrenders to whatever he says. The Dr. and the maid are double agents, who are not brave enough to join the rebels, but that's as far as they are complicated. The illusion of complexity is broken once one looks into the film.

At the other end of the spectrum, is the movie Spirited Away, a movie that although I didn't like it, I truly appreciate. The plot is pretty straight forward, with a girl trying to save her parents, but the characters are full of eternal conflicts, of metaphors, of allegories. All the characters in this movie are not as simple as seen at first sight, and even the evil ones are not as evil as they seemed.

In both movies, there is a strong feel of a fairy tale story. True, there are other elements there that make and/or help to enhance the theme, but this concept is one of the stronger and more important ones.

In RPGs like Changeling, this little thing can do magic. The stories in Changeling (or in Grimm, or the like) resemble and are closely related to fairy tales. While Changeling goes back to the original uncensored ones, and Grimm to the twists on them, keeping the idea and the feel of the fairy tale is a need in this kind of games.

Because usually, one gets to these games when they are more advanced as players and GMs, the characters will be much more rounded and much less flat usually. That means that the GM has to shift the focus from the plot to the characters, and that his/hers NPCs must be more developed and also, must resemble the concepts that the players want to explore in their characters.

Connotations of Movements

During my long time of watching lots of movies, I saw something that returned in most of the movies. It's actually a simple thing, and a really cool and useful one. The thing is that the place from where the characters come is closely related to their role in the movie. Role as in good or evil, that is.
When characters enter from the left of the screen, they are usually the good guys. When they enter from the right, they are usually the bad guys.
I think that this simple fact can be really useful, in two ways. Firstly, creating this pattern, or another one, can be really useful in making connotations and thus make the players feel differently for things, maybe even without knowing it.
Secondly, is the ability to break this pattern, thus making things that seemed certain much less certain and much more frightening. "What will s/he bring next? What pattern s/he will break next?" The surprise and shock of a pattern well built being broken can be really useful, and breaking that of characters? well...