Romances are Badass, p3

Posted on November 7, 2008 by bioware_community

Part 3 of 3, by Patrick Weekes

As a simple rule of thumb, go with the comfort zone of the least comfortable person who has to be there at the time. If the fighter’s player isn’t comfortable even talking about romance, and the fighter’s character has to be present and active in this scene, then the romance should be glossed. (If the fighter’s character should be there but doesn’t have to be active, and everyone else in the group is comfortable, then you can tell the fighter’s player to go hunt down more chips in the other room while everyone else deals with the flirtation or romance or whatever, and promise him a chance to hit something later in the evening.)

In addition to comfort, an important aspect of fun is prioritizing your screen time. Unless I got the sense that people were going to enjoy the roleplaying aspect of purchasing 50 feet of rope and a light warhorse more than they’d enjoy fighting some wyverns, I tended to err on the side of wyvern-whacking. Same deal for romance. I got the feeling that my players enjoyed the goofy flirtation and the exchange of bad pickup lines. I got the feeling that they enjoyed the comfort of being in a relationship. I didn’t feel like they wanted the “So, uh, do you like me?” scenes. Even if they were comfortable, they didn’t feel fun, and if it wasn’t fun, it shouldn’t be something we spent time on.

In the end, I don’t really treat my game treatment of romance as any different from my game treatment of puzzles, negotiations, grappling, or the rules for Use Rope (Dex): like all of that stuff, the degree to which I use anything like that always depends on the interest and comfort levels of the people I’m playing with, and the introduction of that element should never dramatically change the tone of the game to something your pizza-and-chips buddies didn’t sign up for.

You thought I was going somewhere dirty with Use Rope and grapple, didn’t you? Shame on you.

Patrick Weekes has been gaming since he saw some cool kid flipping through the AD&D Monster Manual on the bus in fourth grade, and he is all about the d20s (with no disrespect intended to the White Wolf d10 or Steve Jackson d6 folks). He’s been working at BioWare since 2005 and was a writer on Mass Effect. Both of his sons have their own large and non-swallowable dice, so that they will stop trying to steal his pretty sparkly ones.

Romances are Badass, p2

Posted on November 6, 2008 by bioware_community

Part 2 of 3, by Patrick Weekes

I’ve been involved in romances in tabletop games, both from behind the GM screen and in front of it. The short version of what I’ve learned is that it varies from group to group and from person to person within any one group, but that doesn’t attract legions of commenters arguing that I’m full of it, so… here, yell at these:

Implication
In my longest-running campaign, I had a guy who was actively interested in an in-game relationship, a few players who liked the idea of their character having a significant other but weren’t comfortable with the idea of having to roleplay falling in love with a pasty bearded white guy (me), and others who were not only uninterested but actively thought that it was a stupid idea to waste time on someone else’s love scene when everyone was really here to eat pizza, roll dice, and hit monsters.

To balance these varying levels of interest and comfort, I kept most of the interested guy’s love story in e-mails exchanged between sessions. (This avoided the “two straight guys trying to roleplay a romance between a man and a woman” bit, and it also let us refer to those events in game without explicitly playing out the whole romance.) The camera moved in and out (or panned to the lamp) as was comfortable for us in those e-mails, and in-game, the two characters were an established couple talking with easy familiarity.

The players who thought that their character ought to be with somebody but didn’t want to roleplay it could just describe, in extremely vague detail, what was going on. Their characters got both the advantages and disadvantages of being in a relationship: the cleric in love with the captain of the guard could get classified information about the state of an important diplomatic matter, while the wizard had to watch as an attack aimed at her hit her boyfriend instead, killing him and leaving her grief stricken. Their relationships were just as valid in-game as the one with more detail – we just left the specifics up to implication and inference.

Utility
If you’ve got an NPC love interest, they’re probably going to be onscreen a fair amount of the time. For this NPC, as with anybody who’s onscreen a lot and doesn’t have a pizza-eating dice-rolling player behind them, it’s really really helpful to walk the line between “Great, another one to Protect” and “Why are We Even Here?”

For the player in my campaign who was comfortable with an onscreen girlfriend, the girlfriend in question was a fairly standard Third Edition D&D Rogue. Since the party lacked a straight-class rogue, this let her show up and occasionally help with lockpicking or device-disabling, making her useful without letting her overshadow an actual player. She was also an information gatherer by trade (okay, assassin, but information-gathering was often involved), so whenever I’d gotten the players halfway through the plot, leading up to the betrayal by the Ironkeep only to realize that I’d forgotten to actually foreshadow said betrayal, I could have her toss in a bit of information she’d picked up on a job.

On the flip side, I screwed up by making her too useful in combat. (She was originally an antagonist who then fell in like with the party bard. I thought that they’d gained enough levels that she wouldn’t outshine anyone. Sadly, I forgot to take away her overpowered loot, which is understandable since all the PCs had overpowered loot as well, because I’m horrible about that kind of thing, and wow this is not the point of this blog post.) When it became clear that she was out-damage-dishing the party ranger, she lost her overpowered combat items in a hurry.

I also found that the character worked better when used sparingly. When I tried to turn her into an effective party member, with the default assumption being that she’d be along for any mission, she got less fun, and was instead one more thing I had to plan for.

Game Effect
This one was minor for me, since I tended to run games with a completely ahistoric assumption of gender equality. As a rule, if it comes down to historical accuracy of gender roles or people having fun, fun wins. Speaking of which…

Fun
Again, as a GM/DM/Storyteller/Narrator, it’s always important to observe the moods of your players and get the tone that matches what they want from a game. Romance is no different. Some groups are going to want overwrought emo-angst. Some groups are going to want goofy flirtation and then a “The next morning, you roll out of bed, kiss the barmaid goodbye, and head for the hills” lighthearted segue. Some groups will want to roleplay the first kiss, while others will want to fast-forward from flirtation in one session to “these two are established as a couple” in the next.

Part 3 wraps it up with Patrick’s thoughts on ‘screen time’ and player comfort

Romances are Badass, p1

Posted on November 5, 2008 by bioware_community

Part 1 of 3, by Patrick Weekes

I should note, as we get going, that I’m uncertain as I write this how much of this is supposed to be words of wisdom, and how much of this is supposed to be an actual blog, which would look less like what I’m going to write and more like:

“Got into work late OMGPARKING!!! Horrible programmer took last cinnamon bagel I NEED BAGELZ 2 WORK 4 SRS!@!
MOOD: WTF?
MUSIC: Faunts”

That said:

Some gamers hate romances. Some gamers love them. They are an enormous and complicated bunch of conversation files that a lot of gamers will never bother to see. They are a true attempt to create a real emotional connection with the player. They are cutscenes that cost a ton of money and create public relations hassles. They are a chance to see side-boob on a blue cutie. They are an annoying distraction from the main game and a breath of fresh air between long combat sections.

Personally, I think romances are badass. As a gamer, I’d love to see a game whose main story was a love story (and which did not involve a tentacle-based minigame). The argument for awhile was that not enough gamers cared about these simulated relationships to have that be the main focus of the game, and that it would largely be a long bunch of conversations instead of a game. On the other hand, the new influx of story-focused gamers, combined with new advances in digital acting, make it entirely possible that a love story could succeed with modern fans.

(And as every gamer who has never picked up Nora Roberts gives me the look of death, imagine this done with some level of choice in the matter. You decide whether you want the story of your love to be The Princess Bride, Shakespeare in Love, or House of Flying Daggers. Do you want to live happily ever, watch them leave while knowing that it was the right decision, or die in each other’s arms? Tell me that wouldn’t be sweet.

Also, I could be all alone on this. I’m at peace with that.)

Part 2 takes a look at diffeent facets of what romance adds to the game mix such as the implications, utility, game effect and the fun-factor

Scare Tactics, p2

Posted on October 31, 2008 by bioware_community

Part 2 of 2: by Ferret Baudoin

Your verbal presentation as a story-teller matters a lot for horror. I try to play it very level – almost Blair Witch style. I’m a scientist describing the scene to you. I speak softly and I never go for the cheap laugh. I try to get a little frightened myself. Some of the best horror moments come from GM improv, I find, in the moment I’ll think of something and throw it in. But some GMs work better being fully prepared.

But back to the adventure…

So the mood is there and it’s time for the monster or “object of horror” to start making his/her/its presence felt. I prefer to keep the monster under wraps until I absolutely can’t any more. So mess with the players indirectly. Maybe it throws a severed head. Maybe it kills the lights. Maybe it hits somebody with something virulent. Lots of possibilities. It can be all right for the monster to interact directly – but no one should get a clear look. If you have NPCs along with the PCs, maybe mess with them more drastically – disappear one of them. If there are red shirt NPCs with you, then feel free to kill one of them horribly. I highly recommend having at least some NPCs with the PC for horror segments because they can lend human voice to the mood, and allow you to participate.

After building the horror, then you need the release. The big bad monster comes out. It should have a couple of ghastly tricks up its sleeve. Also, in those sorts of segments I feel all right with not playing entirely fair. Creepy monsters should have abilities that aren’t in any book. Sometimes on the fly I’ll nudge it’s abilities to provide more drama. As long as it’s consistent with previously established evidence, it my not be Queensbury Rules – but it’s fair game.

At the end of the day the heroes are triumphant, and perhaps still a little scared. Sometimes it’s all right to throw in another beat. A surprise. It comes back. But that is clichéd. I occasionally go with it, but it works best after establishing a track record of really killing monsters the first time. So that when this time it lunges back out, people are in for a shock.

I like horror in pen and paper, and I find every now and then I throw in some tiny elements of it on the fly. It makes the world feel more uncertain, that scary things could happen if the players drift off the beaten path. That not everything is explained in the Monster Manual. Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t go as planned. After an embarrassing number of years GMing I’d say I get a 50% batting average for actually pulling horror off. But even the failures break up the standard session. If your players are willing to work with you a bit, I bet you’ll find it rewarding regardless.

Oh, and boo.

Ferret Baudoin is a lead designer at BioWare. He’s worked as a designer at Cyberlore, Black Isle, and Obsidian. His plan is not to take over the world. So don’t pay attention to the silently encroaching mustelid army. Bwahaha.

Scare Tactics, p1

Posted on October 31, 2008 by bioware_community

Part 1 of 2: by Ferret Baudoin

Horror in pen and paper games is hard. It’s like math. But both are worth mastering. Especially mathematical horror. Some systems are centered firmly on horror, but this meandering blog is more for the gamemaster out there that wants to add some scary spice to his traditional fantasy campaign. The techniques outlined below aren’t the only way, but they are a way and it seems to have worked for me. On with the blog.

The number one key ingredient to running a good horror session is the same ingredient necessary for running any good session in my book: the players. Really good players can have an entertaining evening fighting their way out of a paper bag. But sadly, even a good gaming group may have troubles with horror. Why? Because horror requires mood and patience. Combat-focused players might very well find a well-executed horror segment to be boring. Or players that are more focused on rules. Role-players like horror the best. And even if your play group is up for the challenge a stray Monty Python reference can derail everything.

So all those caveats aside, how do you do it? I’m a great believer in Alfred Hitchcock’s style of horror. A monster is much scarier when you never see it. So if you hear the monster’s ominous heavy breathing, when you see the torn apart remains of a once valiant hero, or when the monster skitters around out of sight (a la Aliens) that’s scary. That philosophy flavors everything below.

So step one for me is setting the stage. It helps me when beginning to visit the dark spooky places in my own head – how I felt at 10 watching Poltergeist late at night, the boogeyman that lived under the stairs, or other stuff that unnerved me. Then I try and think of way to steal those techniques or ways to invoke fear and bring it into a game. Ideally, your own idea is something that you could get a little frightened of, too, when playing – fear is contagious, after all. So an eerie old town. Or trapped in some confined space. I ran a recent session where the PCs were locked inside a dwarvish tunnel – because every dwarven warparty that went in to investigate the mineshaft hadn’t returned, and they didn’t want whatever was in there getting out.

So you have the physical locale, great. The next stage is planning on how you’ll build up tension. It’s best to start small and build. Economy of words in your description can really help, because you’re really judo-ing your players into making them scare themselves. So give enough description to carry the mood and make sure everyone is roughly on the same page and then stop. Briefly describe the bloody trail ending up with a severed hand. Intone the words written with a bloody shaky hand on the wall, “Lord protect me, Lord protect me…” written over and over. Just find creepy things.

Be careful about throwing in enemies to fight at this stage, because a good battle will really change the emotional mood of the session. It’ll feel comfortable and normal. So you’ll have to build up the tension again afterwards. That being said, for a long stretch of horror a good fight or two is critical to give the players an emotional break. For the timing on that it works best to have a fight during or right after a big spooky reveal.