refereeing – Roll to Doubt

The Day’s Advice: Run It

Be confident. If your prep or ideas feel incomplete or uninteresting, run it anyway and let play complete them.

Let them speculate, then use their speculations with your twist. If they catch you short of a name, ask them to name it.

Write down your new rule or system and immediately call for a session. Use the rule in play. Otherwise, wait until the campaign needs the rule to write it.

A short session is better than waiting for a longer session.

Never let a strong idea be diminished or bogged down by reasoning. Don’t kill a darling when you can share it and let it grow with others.

Tags: refereeing

This is directed to newbies who are interested in GMing an OSR game. I won’t assume previous experience with TTRPGs at large, although I can imagine that they’re GMs who come from play cultures and spaces connected to the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Due to varied reasons I could not include an example starting sandbox here, but the people of the wonderful OSR Discord are likely to share some, and I will update the post accordingly. I will make a future post on my personal way of building a game setting from start to finish; this post right here is meant to present the key features that the beginner needs to be aware of and how they relate.

TL;DR: get yourself a calendar, a dungeon and a settlement one day away from it.

“Against” On-Boarding

The only thing that teaches about TTRPGs is actual play. People don’t play enough, especially beginners, and while there’s many barriers for play that can’t simply be ignored (scheduling and commitment in the modern world), there’s many artificial barriers set up to prevent people from simply playing “bad” games and discovering themselves.

Running “Quirky” NPCs

Quirky people deserve a special place in whatever dimension of inescapable suffering one’s metaphysical leanings conjure. Their self-aware artificiality of spontaneous wonder disfigures them into deceiving automata who yearn for the mines. Fuck them.

Quirky NPCs can feel the same. I sometimes see recommendations of giving an NPC a “quirk” to make them memorable. It risks being insufferable. It’s a proposed solution to the fact that the referee can’t realistically, nor it would be helpful in play, detail a whole inner life for each NPC, so the solution would be short and quirky. In my experience, memorability comes from deciding what function the NPC perform in the game, following that, and whatever impact they have on the players will be created by the players themselves through their decisions.

Playable Setting Features

As I come back to nail down the setting of my next campaign, there’s a need for a consistent approach to create playable elements, instead of accumulating lore that is not actionable. Only that which influences player action, and can be recipient to player action, should be included. A bit of detail that isn’t so utilitarian can create a sense of depth and the lived-in, but “a bit” is key.

We can submit a series of specific questions around a feature that may predict its playability. Players are always surprising in approach and desires, but I believe there’s a small list of standard questions to consider as likely to be asked (either by yourself or by the players) when making choices in creating a setting and adventures:

What are the benefits of killing them/it?
What are the drawbacks of killing them/it?
What are the benefits of stealing/getting it?
What are the drawbacks of stealing/getting it?
What are the benefits of allying with them/it?
What are the drawbacks of allying with them/it?
What are the benefits of going there?
What are the drawbacks of going there?
Where basic information is acquired? Where one can expect to meet people?
What basic knowledge a player needs to roleplay their character?

These ten questions don’t apply to every campaign setting (outside the adventure campaign, half don’t apply or are reworded, for example), but they are in my experience how different kinds of player in different campaign still measure decisions. If it leans towards a destructive temperament, that’s because by understanding the consequences of destruction one can also imagine the whole. How pieces fall down also tells us how pieces were set there and what are they made of.

Tags: refereeing

Adventure Writing as Craft Practice

In my previous craft post, I included a paragraph about adventure writing. There’s posts about why writing adventures is more interesting than systems (here for example), but if someone’s joy is ruleset tinkering, they should do it. Today I just want to develop why I see adventure writing as an important part of the craft.

Consider, for a moment, you want to take fiction writing as a hobby.

RPGs as Craft

A craft is “a pastime (…) that requires particular skills and knowledge of practiced work”. The whole of craft also includes perceiving what the untrained observer wouldn’t, becoming yourself a trained observer of others, experiencing tools and materials to grasp their practical interrelationships, and engaging in collective understanding. Having enjoyed Jenx’s series on RPGs as hobby, I want to talk RPGs as craft.

Blackbox Gaming

Blackbox (AKA HUDless) gaming is when the players are unaware of any mechanical tool used to establish and provide resolution to situations and conflicts. They may roll dice but aren’t informed of what the roll means or its mathematical logic – besides obvious intuition like “rolling high is good” – and in some cases have a diceless experience as the referee rolls everything. They might be privy to a few. The player’s sheet includes information like name, backstory, noticeable traits (“good at climbing”) and inventory, but not references to any procedures. Players negotiate what they want to do and how they do it only through the fiction, and the referee narrates the result.

d20 Questions for Adventurers

Each player rolls twice for their class. Of course you may add tables for backgrounds, traits etc. I made the questions simultaneously generic and somewhat evocative to the best of my abilities, as I believe this works best when they are made for the campaign itself to set mood.

Some questions assume social class as well. My reading of the starting money roll compared to the equipment list is that it suggests PCs as minor nobles, rural gentry, petty bourgeois and similar depending on how the campaign setting is presented (faux-medieval, faux-Renaissance etc.) The Thief is reasonable to assume as peasantry and the starting money as their latest big score. It also assumes domain game as an objective (and Fighters can start the domain game from level one, so there’s that.)

Little Notes on Duet Gaming

I love duet gaming. At some point I realized it was my favorite play configuration. I enjoy a group – usually 3 total, 4 if really pushing – but duet games work on a different manner with their own challenges and advantages. Duets are not the little sibling of group play, or a desperate choice when you can’t find a group (although I predict long-running campaigns will become more and more duet oriented with the coming years due to social shifts), or something merely suitable to introduce your partner or someone else to RPGs. That means, however, that you need to mind their own issues, that arrive from their strengths:

Category: refereeing