Here’s something I haven’t experienced much in-game: Player Characters dating either Non-Player Characters or other Player Characters.

About four years ago, on deployment, we briefly began to play Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and my Cleric almost ended up in a relationship with an NPC, but the game sort of fell apart before that ever came to fruition.

In my current online Star Wars game, my character is a simple mechanic, just wanting to get home to his family on Alderaan.

Other than that, I’ve never really experienced relationships in game, either as a DM or as a player.

So, how does one handle this? What happens when a husband and wife are at the table, and the husband’s character begins flirting with the barmaid? How about when the wife’s character begins dating one of the PCs? How would one handle that?

I think that you need to set some ground rules if you’re going to be introducing relationships into the game.

1. Ask your players. If you’ve got a great idea for a romance between your NPC and a PC, ask them if they’re cool with that. Ask the others at the table if they’re comfortable with romance being addressed in-game. Some players hate it. Check.
2. Establish ground rules. I understand it could get a bit uncomfortable to watch two heterosexual guys making eyes at each other across the table as the DM discribes the flirting between the barmaid and the PC. Find out what the players are comfortable with before going forward.
3. If anyone’s getting uncomfortable, back off. You’re RPing some great ineractions between the PC and the barmaid. You look up, and his wife is looking upset. Stop, make sure everything’s okay. It may spoil the mood of the scene, but it never hurts to make sure all of your players are having a good time.

Those are the three tips I have. Keep things mature and friendly, and everyone will enjoy themselves.

I just read an article over at How Not To Run A Game Business in which the author, Fugaros talks with John from Merlyn’s, the game store in my hometown. In a few months, I’ll be returning to my hometown, and will become a regular customer at Merlyn’s again. I’m very excited.

In the article, he talks about how there needs to be more introductory box sets for games, and says that there are only two in the store: the Pathfinder Beginner Box and the Dr. Who RPG. I can think of one more, the One Ring RPG, but that’s not the point I want to make today.

You often see things online sold as a bundle. On Amazon, you are often given the option of bundling the product you’re buying with another product at a small discount. Why can’t game stores do the same?

Say someone comes in and wants to try out RPGs. They aren’t really into fantasy, but like things like Indiana Jones and Barsoom. The game store owner hands them the Savage Worlds RPG bundle, which includes the Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition, a set of dice, some character sheets and cutouts of templates, all for $20. You’re ready to go! Head out the door with your new hobby!

Or, if they want to play 4e, give them a bundle of the Heroes of the Fallen Lands, The Rules Compendium, Dungeon Master’s Kit and Monster Vault, along with a set of dice, for, say, $60. You’d be offering this all together at less than you’d sell the products individually for, but it would provide the perfect starter, and would encourage the person to come back for more. Hell, when you sell it, you could give them a coupon for 20% off their next D&D purchase at the store, to encourage them to come back for more stuff.

“This is all well and good,” you say (since you apparently speak like someone in the 50′s), “but these bundles don’t teach you how to play like the Pathfinder Beginner Box does.” True enough. What if a game store offered a $5 “Learn to Play D&D” or “Learn to Play Savage Worlds” seminar? Three hours, for anyone who wants to show. They can sit down and learn how to play this new game they’ve gotten. A few weeks later, offer an Advanced class, that would delve deeper into how to play, offering expert D&D advice and the like. I think people would swarm to it.

Those are my ideas. Do you think they hold any weight? If you were a new player, would this interest you?

John, if you’re reading this, I’d be more than happy to run some seminars for you when I come back to Spokane in June.

At the end of the next session of the Godfell Stone, the players will find a letter on the body of one of the NPCs. This is that letter.

You can, of course, click to enbiggen.

The writing is draconic, while the actual language behind the writing is a combination of Common (English) and Draconic. I’ll have a copy for each player, so that they can work on translating it in sections between the five of them. I’ll have a two-page draconic dictionary, as well as a letter cypher so that they can translate.

There’s a lot of text there, and the players will have a lot of work on their hands to translate. I hope they’re up to the task. After they’ve translated it, I’ll provide the translation here.

Here’s the question: Do I have them work on it at the table? With only two hours of game time a week, this will take up a good portion of the time, and it’s going to be after a big fight. Perhaps I should make them wait a week, kick off the translation at the beginning of the next session…

What do you all advise?

What is it about D&D that turns ordinary people into the gaming equivalent of Insanity Wolf:

One minute you’ll be running a perfectly normal adventure, the next, the players will want to kill the princess they’ve been sent to rescue, “Just in case she has Stockholm Syndrome and hates us for rescuing her.”

What.

Usually it’s just one player, but what about when it’s ALL OF THEM?!

Here’s what I think is the problem: Too much choice. You usually see Insanity Wolf Player as a new player. I think when a new player is told “You can do anything you want,” they think “Anything?!” and want to test that theory. I can’t say I blame them for that. People are so used to playing a video game, when given the chance to do anything their heart desires, they want to see how far that stretches.

I think I’ve fixed it.

One of my players, Larry, was the epitome of the Insanity Wolf Player. He stole horses, tried to kill villagers, and in a ballsy and unnecessary move, attempted to kill the elf warriors sent to spring the heroes from prison two sessions ago. One of the players stepped in, stopping him with an arrow. When he and the other player who wanted to kill the elves woke up, they found themselves tied to a tree, the elves around them not happy with them. Begging, pleading, they barely escaped with their lives.

In friday’s session, he was the most reserved I’ve seen him. He was horrified when one of the other players attempted to attack a barracks on their own. Whaaa?! The previous session, he would have joined in the fray. What happened?

He learned that actions have consequences.

This is something not enough DMs emphasize. Yes, you can do whatever you want, but at the same time, everything you do has a consequence to it.

I’ve been trying to hammer this into my players (the new ones) since the beginning of the game. In session 3, when they stole some horses, the stablemaster came after them. When they picked a fight at a bar, the entire bar rose up to fight them. Finally, as I said above, when they tried to kill an elf, the other elves almost killed them.

That player, who wanted to kill everyone in the barracks? It was suggested that if he tried to do so, the bad guys might blame the villagers and make them pay for it, so he backed down.

Your players need to realize that everything they do ripples forward, just like in real life. If they begin to realize that, they’ll be more likely to think twice about becoming Insanity Wolf.

Why haven't my 3rd level PCs fought this yet?

I’m thinking I need to be a bit harsher on my players. I need to be a more evil DM.

Why? These players became complacent. I think it’s why the game began falling apart. They grew bored. They knew they could plunk down in their seats every week and I would serve them up a big old helping of adventure.

With no danger.

None of the players have died yet. Perhaps I should fix that…

Did that title confuse you?

Mouse Guard is one of the best RPGs out there, hands down. The unique method of combat, the Player vs. GM turns; all of it works together to create a unique and enjoyable experience.

One of my favorite aspects is the idea that you can find interesting story in your failure. A lot of players have trouble wrapping their heads around that, but it’s a core concept to the game. The way a session is set up is that with 100% success by all players during a session, the game will last all of 15 minutes. No one wants that, so the most fun is found in failure. When the players fail their Pathfinding, they stumble upon a snake’s nest. It’s time for combat!

Or alterately, they fail a Weatherwatcher check, and arrive in the town they were on their way to, just cold, wet and sick.

The game doesn’t grind to a halt due to failure, it makes things interesting.

I’m in the middle of a 4e campaign right now. In 4e, the general idea is that a failure is just that. A failure. “You want to pick that lock? Roll a d20. Oh, you got a 1? Well, you didn’t pick it. The door’s still locked.”

Boring.

What if, instead, everything the players ever did was successful in some way, but introduced more complications. You use Wall of Iron against a monster, pushing it back over a cliff, but miss the roll? “Sure, you push the monster off the cliff, but he’s grabbed onto the shield as he’s pushed back. Make an Athletics check to grab onto the root attached to the side of the cliff.” Now you’ve got an orc hanging from one arm, and you’re hanging onto the cliffside with the other.

As you may recall,  I have a complete list of travel times around the Nentir Vale. If you want your players to travel from Winterhaven to Fallcrest, but don’t want to spend a lot of time, why not have the Ranger of the party make a Nature check? On a failure, he failed to navigate the path very well, and the players find themselves arriving in Fallcrest cold, wet, and missing a few Healing Surges. Ouch.

This has endless possibilities. Dragonborn breathes fire on the enemy, but rolls badly? Well, he lit part of the building on fire. Rogue performs a Sly Flourish and misses? He deals half damage and falls prone, tripping up on his boots. Note how the character still deals damage there? If you’re going to add additional screw-over-the-player moments, you really should give them a little something for their trouble.

And that’s how my games are going to go from here on out, I think. Failure is so much more fun than success, don’t you think?

Here’s another set of Star Wars templates.

I’ve gotten a system for them now, in that I can usually knock one out in about a half hour. The changing art for different genders is nice and quick, so when I have two genders, it takes about 45 minutes.

I’m continuing to work my way through. I’ve realized that the Force-using classes take a little more work, as they need room for their Force powers, as evidenced in the Alien Student of the Force.

I had a comment yesterday from Wayne, who wondered my reason for including so few skills.

It was a design decision I made, for a few reasons. One, it saves space to not have all those blank spaces. Two, similar to how many D&Ders are switching over to the Essentials, I wanted to keep the core concepts of each of the Templates as core. In other words, your character can improve as much as he wants, just within those skills. Want to have other skills? Play another template. There are plenty of them to choose from. It makes the Templates similar in concept to the Classes of other RPGs.

You can, of course, always right new skills on the back of the sheet.

In any case, here are some more sheets!

The Liturgy of Nerath posts I was going to work on are going to have to wait for a few days, as I’ve got something to show you.

Last Saturday, I tried to get a group onto Google+ Hangouts to play the Star Wars d6 Roleplaying Game. This was the first RPG I ever played, and I was looking forward to getting some friends together, including Gary Sarli, who used to work for WotC on their Star Wars line.

The game, however, fell through. Gary was the only guy who was going to be able to attend, so I decided to reschedule. I don’t have a new date, but I’m looking at the calendar to set it up.

In the meantime…

I was looking over the templates in the back of the book. For those who don’t know, Star Wars had the option for full character creation, but had a great system for playing almost out the gate: Templates. You would take a template, which was basically a half-completed character sheet, and fill in some last details, such as your skills. If I’m remembering correctly, you have 7 points to spend on your skills. Each Template featured the skills you could choose from.

While this seems like it limits creativity, in reality, it allows for some great diversity. Two Smugglers or Bounty Hunters will never be alike.

The templates are simple-looking enough, but I wanted to make them look really good for anyone playing in my upcoming game. I really like the D&D Encounters character sheets in their compactness, so I decided to mimic those. What began as a simple project has now ballooned into something huge.

 I took the Encounters sheet, put it into Photoshop, then covered the sheet so I couldn’t see it anymore. I would occasionally make it visible again so that I could use it for reference. I went on to the Star Wars Artists Guild and grabbed art (you can see the name of the artists at the bottom of the sheet) but by no means is the art authorized.

I started with the Bounty Hunter, then decided to make my own, creating the Clone Trooper in case anyone wanted to run a game in the Clone Wars. Initially I was only going to do the ones in the Star Wars 2nd Edition rulebook, but there are some great ones in the 2nd Edition (Revised and Expanded) rulebook, so I’ll be utilizing them as well (as evidenced by the Young Senatorial below). Also, when I have art for both genders, I’ll include versions for men and women. In the case I can only find art for one gender, we’ll stay with that.

The sheets can be printed off either full-page, or half-page, whichever you prefer.

Please let me know what you think, or if there’s anything to be added. I’m still early in the project, so changing stuff is much easier now than 2o sheets from now.

The next Template on my docket is the Quixotic Jedi.

Click to enlarge all the images.

Last night on Twitter, Lizzy B., also known as d20Blonde, hosted her weekly #RPGChat. Basically, it’s a ton of people following the same hash tag, and discussing certain topics. There had to have been 50-100 people on there all discussing last night’s topic: rules-light and rules-heavy games.

I had some interesting discussions, which I’d like to talk about here.

To begin with, I stated: “I can just as easily RP in #4e as any other system.” Which got a quick response. 

Martinralya: “I disagree. Many other systems make it easier to roleplay than D&D 4e. Nothing stopping you, but precious little helping you.”

Me: “You don’t NEED rules to RP. If you need rules to RP, you’re doing it wrong.”

Martinralya: “Well, sure — but rules that reward and dovetail with RP definitely help and can make it more fun.”

Me: “Rules can certainly help storytelling, but they aren’t the be-all and end all.”

Now, I don’t disagree with Martinralya. Like I said above, rules may certainly help. But I really can roleplay just as easily in 4e as any other system. There is absolutely nothing stopping you.

What it comes down to is that 4e is a combat simulator, with some non-combat elements garnishing the edges. As such, they leave roleplaying up to the players. I’ve discussed this multiple times in the past, so I won’t get into it. If you’re a die-hard who believes that 4e is just a board game, I can’t convince you otherwise.

Back to the #RPGChat, later on I said, “I make monster stat-blocks only because I feel like I’m supposed to. I don’t have any need to. My advantage has always been that I know the rules much better than my players. Often, they’ve never seen the book.I can fake it all I want. They won’t know. I can’t tell you how often I’ve simply not used a Star Wars RPG book AT ALL to run a whole session.  Once you know a system well enough, you don’t need to touch a book. I know 4e, 3e and every Star Wars system backwards and forward. If there’s something I REALLY need someone to look up, I turn to my wife. She doesn’t mind letting the game roll on around her. My rule of thumb? Always fake it. Look it up later.”

I forgot to add Savage Worlds to that list. The thing is, once you know the difficulty numbers of a system, there’s no need for you to crack a book ever again. Any rules that are needed exist only in your mind. Anything else is unnecessary. Now, this doesn’t work in a group with a Rules Lawyer, but then why would you play in a game with one? Rules lawyering is the antithesis of fun, unless your entire group is into rules lawyering.

"Swing away, Merrill, swing away."

The last thing I discussed on the chat was this: “Always rule in the PC’s favor if you can’t remember a rule. If you CAN remember it, kill them.” This is something I’m realizing more and more. Players should never be killed by DM fiat. If you can’t remember a rule, and a PC’s life is on the line, rule in their favor. If you do remember a rule, feel free to swing away.

Seriously. I don’t have any problem with a player dying due to some dice rolls, as long as the monster I’m presenting them with isn’t just something I’m coming up with off the top of my head, or I’ve forced the players into a situation where they have to fight something far more powerful than themselves.

If they find themselves at 2nd level against an Elder Red Dragon, I’m going to give them the opportunity to run away. If they choose not to take it, far be it from me to let them keep their lives.

And that’s about all I talked about last night. I did make this statement: “If any of you don’t think that RISUS is the VERY BEST rules-light rpg, I will punch you in the mouth. #notreally,” but that’s a discussion for a different day.

My players like to be placed in mortal peril.

It’s the only way I can explain it. Last Thursday, at the game, I only planned on having them go around the table once, rolling on the random table. Instead, they kept going, and kept going. Before I knew it, they had a 33% chance of rolling a Save vs. Death. Did they ever have to? No. But the risk was there.

I warned them beforehand: “If you roll on this table, you could die.” And they did it. They even mentioned at one point during the laps around the table that “It’s like Russian Roulette!” Still, they rolled.

When one player would hesitate, the others would goad him (I say him, because Bridget never hesitated to roll) into rolling. And he did.

So why? Why did they take such a risk? I had to think about it for a few days.

Players love risk.

They love the idea of losing their life to a simple dice roll, putting it all on the line, and coming out the other end alive.

However… However…

They like to know the risk. If I dropped that table on them without ever informing them of the consequences, and one of them did die, I’d have a mutiny. I warned them ahead of time that the risks would be great, but so would the rewards. As such, they were willing to take the risk.

Some players got some ritual scrolls. Some players recieved the weakened condition by the events. One player saw the manner of his death, and became shaken to his soul. When he asked “How long am I shaken for?” I told him: “Forever.”

And they love it.

Next week, when we get together again, there will be more random tables. More risks, more rewards.

I think we’re going Old School…