Geek on the Borderlands

Skill Challenges are probably one of my favorite parts of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons.  I love the framework it provides to an ongoing situation or story.  I love that skills are actually really useful in a tangible and noticeable way.  I use them quite frequently in my games and they’re a fantastic tool.  Unfortunately they’re also quite hard to run in a fun and dynamic way.  It’s taken me a good deal of time and effort, but I finally think I’ve hit upon the core problem of skill challenges and a rather easy to implement solution.

The core problem with a skill challenge is that it’s dead easy to fall into a very static “roll and repeat” cycle.  The DM names a skill and difficulty, the player with the best bonus rolls, and you repeat the process all over again.  It’s easy to understand why this happens, too – that’s how the rules are more or less represented.  The Dungeon Master’s Guide does go into some good detail on framing the scene, but precious little is said about actually moving the story forward – and that’s what you have to do when running a skill challenge.

In my mind you should only make a roll during a “breaking point” in each scene of the skill challenge.  This is the point where the PCs have to act or react, for good or ill.  Furthermore, this action should move the story and change the situation regardless of success or failure.  The fastest way to fall into a static skill challenge is by not changing the situation after every roll.  If Bob the Bard fails his Diplomacy roll when speaking with the Duke that’s going to have as many consequences as a successful check.  Either the Duke leans in and whispers about the assassination plot or he calls for his guards to oust the PCs – either way something happens and the story moves forward.

By changing the situation, even slightly, after every roll you bring in new skills and change how the players see the situation.  The situation should never stay static once you roll.  Something has to happen, for good or ill, and new skills should come into play.  Which is easy to talk about here but hard to actually put into practice.  The simple fact is that running skill challenges like this requires a good deal of improvisation and thinking on your feet.  It’s not something that everyone is good at and I think it’s the main reason that the skill challenges are presented as they are now.

Furthermore, I don’t like listing what skills are used in the challenge.  Instead I frame the situation and ask my players “how do you resolve this issue?”  Players are a crafty bunch and often times they’ll come up with a unique solution that you hadn’t thought about using.  Try to roll with it, assign a difficulty as best you can, and keep the action moving.  This invests the players further into the story and lets everyone try and use their favored skills, ensuring that the action moves along at a brisk pace.  If your players get stymied or stuck you can suggest a few actions, but by and large try and let the players think of solutions themselves.  You’ll be surprised at how creative they can get when given the opportunity.

All of this is great on paper, but I know some of you are going “how in the hell do I plan for all these options?”  The short answer is that you don’t: there’s no way to know everything your players are going to do.  Instead I’ve found it’s much more useful to sketch out the situation and area and the possible reactions of all the characters involved.  I don’t need to know that Fytor is going to try and leap across the chasm and try to beat up my lizard shaman – all I need to know is that the shaman has henchmen and a few traps littered around.  Fytor goes from rolling Athletics to bridge the gap to rolling Acrobatics to evade all those nasty traps.

Even if you want something more structured you still need to move things along briskly.  Try to map out where each successful and unsuccessful check will take the PCs.  You don’t need a ream of notes, but knowing which skills the PCs will be rolling after every success and failure is rather helpful.  Even a simple outline of the flow of events can be hugely helpful when it comes time to roll the dice.

In short, remember the following:

• Each skill check should change the situation and the skills available (even – or especially – on a failure).
• Try to let the PCs name what skills they want to use, if at all possible.
• If you know the situation and players involved you can wing everything else.
• Either say yes or roll the dice.

Here’s wishing you luck on your next skill challenge!  They don’t have to be boring and they can add a lot to your game if you’re willing to just wing things a little.

I’ve been running quite a few games lately and the one common theme between them all is outlandish actions.  We’ll be in the middle of a combat or negotiation and one of my players will invariably ask “can I blow up the car with a shot?” or “can I convince this villain that my spellbook is really just a book of Orcish mating rituals?”  They’re actions and suggestions so off the wall and awesome that I have to stop and sputter a bit.  And after thinking a bit I smile, say yes, and sometimes call for a roll.  Because some actions are just so awesome that they have to work.

These outlandish actions have only enhanced my games, but it’s taken me a long time and a lot of mistakes to get to the point where I can say yes.  When I was younger and less experienced I’d often just blurt out “No!”  The actions didn’t fit into the rules, or they seemed stupid, or I couldn’t think of how to make them work.  These days I’ve loosened up a lot and my games are far better for the change in attitude.

These moments now fall into my “rule of cool” philosophy (I know I’m cribbing this name from somewhere – probably an Evil Hat game – forgive me if I don’t cite the original source).  In essence this rule boils down to: if the action is outlandish and increases the fun at the table it’s going to work.  In some cases I might call for a roll, but if I do I always make sure that the rule is something that the PC is good at, because they should probably succeed at such a task.

For a lot of new GMs this sort of thing can really throw you for a loop.  It seems really cool (or really stupid) but you don’t know how to fit into the rules you’re using.  My personal suggestion is to just let it work outright or let it work with a common roll.  Now, this only applies if the action is going to make things more fun for everyone.  If the action really only serves to make one character better then it’s probably fine to say no, or yes, but…  To really qualify for the Rule of Cool your action has to really make things better for everyone at the table or at least make everyone at the table go “awesome!” or break up into laughter.

That’s the Rule of Cool in a nutshell.  It’s made my games a lot more fun and helped my players feel more empowered.  Hopefully it can do the same for yours.

I’ve been playing and thinking about superhero games quite often as of late and it got me to thinking about how different systems ensure that everyone at the table has something fun and unique to do in and out of play.  It’s not something most of us think about very often when rolling dice around the table, but I feel that solid niche protection between characters is nearly essential to ensuring that everyone at the table has a good time.

To my mind games break down into three broad categories of niche protection.  You have strict niche protection, also known as class based RPGs.  Then you have semi-rigid niche protection, common in a lot of White Wolf games (via the Clan/Auspice/Tradition style breakdown). Finally you have no niche protection, which is common in most point-based games and a lot of superhero games.

Now there’s a lot of wiggle room within these broad categories, but for the purpose of this little thought exercise I’m going to stick to generalities within the three categories and how they relate to game master and player enjoyment.  Over the next few days I’m going to examine each type of game and talk a bit about the common problems and benefits of each game style and how to use them to the fullest.

Strict Niche Protection (I.E. Class Systems)

It’s no surprise that class-based game systems offer the greatest degree of niche protection (to a certain extent).  In games like Dungeons & Dragons (of which I am a big fan) you have a narrowly defined area of expertise at which you excel and then a broad area of minimal competence or outright restriction.  To take a very obvious example fighters aren’t going to be tossing around fireballs and wizards aren’t going to be hewing through monsters with huge weapons (exceptions, of course, exist).  In a lot of respects this is actually a good thing: if you’re the only wizard in the party you pretty much know that you’re the boss when it comes to arcane magic.  They party is going to look to you when such problems occur and you’re always going to have something that you’re the best at doing.

The downsides are also just as obvious – sometimes there are going to be things that your character should be able to do that the rules don’t support.  If my fighter happened to be a member of the thieves guild chances are he should know how to pick locks – but some games won’t let you do this (though many others do allow for this sort of customization).  The cost of having a defined area of expertise is that exceptions and corner cases tend to very difficult or outright impossible to model sensibly.

There’s also the problem of class duplication – in class based games two members of the same class sometimes end up looking very similar.  Some systems are better at dealing with this than others but at the end of the day there is at least some degree of sameness between characters of the same class.  Ironically this actually leads to the very problem that class based systems are meant to prevent – characters that don’t have their own shtick.

Maximizing the Strengths

If you’re using a class-based system you obviously want to play to its strengths as much as possible.  You can do this by choosing a system with a broad spectrum of classes or niches to give your players a great deal of choice while still retaining a solid set of niches for your players to fill.  For me this system is D&D 4e, but it could be any other class based game with good deal of selection.  You want your players to point toward a class and say “that is my character exactly!” if at all possible, or at least offer enough selection that a class can be molded to fit with little work.

Beyond selecting an appropriate system you also want to make sure that everyone selects a class that compliments but does not overlap with an existing class (save for the generalist, which I’ll cover just a bit later).  This is best accomplished by setting aside a full session for character creation or using some other method to ensure that everyone knows what everyone else is playing.  This way you can avoid the “party full of thieves” problem that can crop up when you create characters in a vacuum.

Minimizing Weaknesses

As mentioned earlier, class based systems do have their weaknesses, but with a little work you can overcome nearly all of them pretty easily.  The biggest weakness is that of class and ability duplication.  In a perfect world everyone would choose a different class but we all know that the world isn’t perfect (even our game worlds).  When you do get duplicates you can either try to differentiate them with crunch or with fluff.

Differentiating duplicate classes with crunch is usually the more difficult proposition.  Yet it can be accomplished, especially if the system you’re using has rules for multiclassing (or something similar).   After all, a Fighter/Cleric and a Fighter/Wizard are going to feel pretty different from each other.  Obviously you’re not going to be able to use this all the time, but it can help quite a bit.

If multiclassing isn’t attractive or unavailable, start looking at hyper-specialization.  If you have duplicate classes chances are that the basic are covered, so go right ahead and encourage the players to really specialize in one very narrow spectrum of the class.  If you have two fighters encourage one to go sword and board and the other to go with a big two handed weapon.  That way the two characters still feel a bit different, even if they aren’t all that different mechanically.

The other option is using background, characterization, and other “fluff” to make the characters distinct.  If both your fighters want to play guys in plate armor, a heavy shield, and a longsword you’re obviously going to have to do something to avoid the “we’re twins!” problem.  Perhaps one fighter is a noble knight all hung up on chivalry and honor while the other is a mercenary who works for the highest bidder.  Now you have a situation where two contrasting personalities share largely the same abilities, which can lead to a fun sort of “friendly rivalry” as each character attempts to show the other the error of his ways.

The other problem that is likely to arise is that of the “special snowflake” character.  Some players just have a very specific idea in mind for their character and sometimes the classes don’t cater very well to that idea.  If this happens you don’t really have a whole lot of solutions.  Either the player needs to adjust his character so that it fits within a certain class or you have to find a mechanical representation that works.

About the only other option is to take an existing class and “reskin” it enough so that it works for the character concept.  This obviously works better in some systems than in others.  Mostly this is a thematic change, where you take the raw mechanics and graft on new “special effects” to the existing class.  You can also take a class and make minor tweaks if you know the system well enough, such as changing a fire caster to a cold caster by changing a few damage types.  It’s not always recommended and it’s definitely a more advanced option, but it can work.

Attack of the Clones

So what happens when you have an entire party of adventurers all filled with one character class?  Obviously this isn’t going to happen very often but when it does simple reskinning and different personality types aren’t really going to give you enough differentiation between the characters.  This is the time where you have to start looking at your campaign itself and where you might have to bring in a few optional rules to make things interesting.

The first step is going to be working heavily with hyper-specialization.  Hopefully you have a robust enough system that each class has at least a few different options within the system itself.  If you have an entire team of priests perhaps each one of them worships a different god with a different set of divine abilities.  If you have that group of thieves perhaps each one of them specializations in a certain area of crime.  Break out all the extras for that class that you can and encourage the players to use as many optional extras as practically possible.

Then figure out why this group is together and form a story around their similarities.  The easiest example is that of a thieves guild, but anything will work.  The key here is to focus the game entirely around problems that can be solved by the class features of everyone present and then overwhelm them with so many problems that no one character can possibly solve them all.  Going back to the thieves, perhaps they have to break into a house covered in traps, with dozens of locked doors, and very alert guards.  Some of them are going to have to sneak in, some are going to have to disable the traps, and some are going to be unlocking doors.  Instead of giving everyone something different to do give them so many of the same thing to do that they all have to work together.

The Generalist

When discussing class based games there is one final exception that needs specific mention: the generalist.  This is the character who’s shtick is actually being the “jack of all trades, master of none.”  This is a class based upon being the second best at everything and they’re generally thrown in as a “fifth wheel” character.  How do you cater to a character that is by definition a lesser copy of everyone else?

The answer lies in how you design your games and encounters.  If you have a generalist try to set up situations where one character class isn’t quite enough to get the job done.  Perhaps the door is both locked and trapped and they have to get through it quickly.  Normally the thief could do both jobs but when time is of the essence the bard can step in and help out, effectively doubling their manpower for a short time.  Generalists also shine when the skills of an absent party member are needed, as they can step into that role for a short time and perform admirably.  Sometimes you can manufacture this yourself by splitting the party but at other times this will arise naturally – which is all the better if you have a generalist character in your party.

But playing second fiddle the entire time isn’t very satisfying, so you’ll want to come up with situations that require a broad area of skill to accomplish.  This is far easier said than done and I’ve never really mastered the art of doing this beyond a few specific circumstances.  The one saving grace is that even generalist style characters generally have one narrow area of expertise not covered by everyone else in the party, so you can sometimes play to this when you want to shine the spotlight on a generalist character.

Final Thoughts

The most important thing to remember when using a class based system is that communication is the key.  Players have to communicate with one another when creating their characters and the GM and players have to communicate with one another to ensure that everyone is getting equal spotlight time.  After all, classes are only unique if they’re the only ones at the table at any given time.

As a final point I would like to state that not all game systems work for all players.  If you’ve tried a class based game and found it too rigid or unappealing, there are many other systems out there to try.  Perhaps class based games aren’t for you and all you need to do is go looking for a system that does work for you.  There’s no reason to keep using the same system if it doesn’t work for you.

All right, I don’t drop into personal mode here very often, but this one really gets to me. A fine gentleman had a very piece of artwork stolen at Dragon*Con.  As an artist I find this utterly reprehensible and beyond contempt.  I want to see this bastard caught and this artworked returned to the artist.

So, took a look at the piece again. If you see someone wearing this, report it to the artist.  I’m personally offering free print design work to anyone who helps track this piece of artwork down.  Have that RPG sitting around you want to get produced?  I’ll do it free of charge at the professional level.  If that doesn’t float your boat, I’ll do your entire campaign map instead.

I want this bastard found and I want this artist to get his work back.  As an artist myself I can find nothing lower than stealing the work of an artist.  In fact, mere words cannot describe my anger at this.  Keep an eye out – this kind of shit can’t go unanswered.

Tonight I had the final and epic battle of a short 3 adventure campaign I ran for my regular group and a long lost gaming buddy who returned to us for a limited 3 month run.  I’m happy to say that things went smoothly, everyone had a lot of fun, and the good guys won out in the end.  Yet when I think back over tonight I’ve come to realize that the most memorable battle for me wasn’t the final encounter with the nasty evil menace, it was one of the previous encounters.  The reason it sticks out in my mind, at least to me, has to do with the fight environment.

The more interesting battle took place in a temple that was built deep underneath a lake.  It was filled with air, but the bottom level had the corners open out into the lake and channels of water that flowed around the room.  Every round one of the channels would fill with water and try to wash away whoever was foolish enough to stand in them.  It featured enemies who could swim and who understood the terrain.

This area forced the players and characters to think about where they moved and opened up some interesting tactical considerations and roleplaying moments.  The poor swordmage got pushed into a channel of flowing water by the tail slap of a lizard man, but she managed to escape thanks to the quick thinking of her friends.  That was interesting.  It was dynamic.  It was memorable!

The final battle, in contrast, took place in the village where the nasty monster from beyond the stars crawled out of the well.  Sure, it had a lot of interesting things in the environment to use, but none of the players were forced to interact with them, or even encouraged.  The fight was tougher, sure, but it was less interesting because the environment was so darn passive.

These days I think that an environment that changes the field of battle and provides interesting ways to use it is far preferrable to stagnant and passive environments.  Especially in a game so tactically crunchy as 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons.  I’ve stopped thinking about the battlefield as a passive place and started treating it more like a monster or active participant in a fight.  The terrain should move, or provide new options in a fight, or even just provide some really interesting set dressing.

Sure, this concept isn’t new to roleplaying and I’m sure that a lot of you out there have done this for years.  I’ve done it myself once in a while, but this is the first time since I started running games where it’s in the front of my mind.  And let me tell you right now, that’s a really good thing!  It’s made my fights more interesting and memorable and really forced me to think about how the players might actually move about a space.  It makes things seem more real.

So, the next time you’re planning that epic battle for your group, sit down and really thinkg about where it’s going to take place.  See what you can do to make the battle more interesting by spicing up the environment.  You might be surprised what a difference it makes!

So, you all might have noticed not only a new look for the site but some new and old posters chiming in here.  That’s because I realized that I just don’t write often enough to really make this site worth visiting very often.  So I’ve asked my friends to join in (and some have been posting here for while now).  I find that it’s a lot better to offer a variety of viewpoints beyond my own and I’ve been blessed with a great many friends that have taken up the challenge of writing random things here.  I figured that I should take a moment to talk about them a bit.

Runequester has been posting here for a long while, and thanks to the new look you can actually pick his posts out from mine now.  He’s been a good friend and it’s probably pretty safe to say that at times we’re on opposite ends of the gaming spectrum.  I’ve had the pleasure of playing in a few of his games and his style is a lot different from mine.  I tend to love new systems while he might be what you’d call a Grognard.  Which is good for me as a gamer, as he keeps pointing out things that I might have forgotten as a embrace the shiny new systems of tommorrow.

The one place where we really meet and have fun is with wargaming.  Runequester is the author of the fabulous Fast and Dirty (http://fad.savevsdm.com/) rules.  We have a lot of fun pushing some lead around a table and drinking beers.  A solid friend all around and a credit to his country and gamers everywhere.

I have known Plain Simple Garak even longer than Runequester, and she’s been a wonderful friend to both me and my wife.  She’s the one who broke me out of my power gaming and hack and slash ways that I had for so long.  She ran the finest Vampire game that I’ve played in and her Changeling games are very, very good.  She’s the one who showed me that I didn’t have to always follow the rules, that games could be more about killing things and taking their stuff, and that sometimes it’s better to ignore the rules.

She tends to run games that are very story and background based, and I’ve learned a lot playing in her games and talking with her.  She showed me that the Forgotten Realms could be interesting and that maybe I could find something better in the older editions.  I think that she’s done more to change the way I think and run about games than just about anyone else I’ve had the pleasure of gaming with.  Which is a good thing, trust me.

Javier is a good friend who happens to hail from Spain, which means that he’s a dashing and handsome young man with a dialect that my wife tends to call “sexy.”  That and he’s got a really good head on his shoulders and a keen mind for crunch in a game.  In some respects he’s the one that thinks the closest to me, save that we tend to like different editions of D&D.  That and he actually got me interested in running a Star Wars game, which is a credit to his silver tongue.

Javier is also quite up on Warhammer and a lot of other systems that I don’t know a lot about.  Which is great, because he’s filling in a niche here that none of the rest of us can really fill.  Sadly I’ve never had the pleasure of actually gaming with him for any length of time, given that we live in different countries.  But I think that I’d really like the games he’d run and that we have talked at length about our various games, giving each other encouragement and ideas.

So, those are the new (and old) faces around here, each of them with a different perspective and voice to add to this little site.  I hope that you all enjoy reading their stuff as much as I do.  Posts and articles are probably going to remain on an erratic schedule for the time being, and I’ve long since given up on promising any sort of regular schedule.  But with more of us here new stuff should be going up a lot more frequently.  Which is good.

So, I can’t just let my friends get all up in my blog and throw around their own opinions without adding my own, can I?  I figure that it’s high time that I throw down and explain just why I love 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons to itty bitty little pieces.

My friends and those that know me through various message boards generally know that I’ve always been a big supporter of the latest edition of just about any game (Changeling: the Lost notwithstanding).  Generally I feel that most new editions are actual improvements over the old ones, at least when it comes to my own preferences when it comes to roleplaying games.  Now, in the past I’ve been a bit of an edition elitist when it came to my favorite, but thankfully my friends disabused me of my superiority and I’m now what you’ll call a positive champion.  Yes, I like 4th edition over any other editions, but I realize know that it’s because the rules adhere to what I want in a game and not because it’s flat out superior.  I’ll never say that one game is strictly better than another game or edition, but I will state that I think it works better for me.

So, why do I love 4th edition so very much?  There are a variety of reasons, but the biggest is because I really love crunchy bits in a game, so long as those crunchy bits aren’t too complex.  I love 4th edition, and Mutants and Masterminds, but I also like games like Spirit of the Century or Savage Worlds.  I like my crunch on the medium to moderate level, not super complex like Hero or as fiddly as GURPs.

For me, 4th edition hits that perfect level of crunchy and “rules light.”  Yes, there are a lot of powers and fiddly bits, but by and large they all follow one generic framework that’s easy for me to understand.  I like combing through all the books looking for that perfect feat or power, I gather a great deal of enjoyment finding things like this.  For me character creation is just as much a fun part of the game as playing itself.  I love finding that combination of feats, powers, and skills that can be combined in an awesome way.

Some of my friends call me a power gamer, and I suppose that I have to cop to that to a certain extent.  I don’t like breaking the game or coming up with stupidly powerful combinations of things, but I do like my characters to be really effective.  System mastery and rules mastery are fun and enjoyable to me, and 4th edition definitely scratches that itch.  And best of all once I know all those rules I can tweak or ignore them to my hearts content when I run a game.

I also like class base systems, and after running at least two or three games for groups of newbies I can tell you that classes are actually really valuable when introducing new players to the hobby.  They’re a wonderful package of “cool things you can do” that are a nice shorthand for a new player to wrap their head around.  If I have a new player who wants to help his buddies I can point him right at any leader class and then let them go from there.

I also love running games, and for me 4th edition has been a vast improvement over the earlier editions.  I have all the tools, digital and otherwise, to create fun and dynamic encounters that are both flavorable and tactically interesting enough to make running them very enjoyable.  There is just something about how 4th edition monsters work that I can so easily understand that it’s been pretty trivial to prepare an adventure.  Compared to the previous edition my prep time is about 1/10th of what it used to be, which means I can concentrate more on creating interesting areas and plots than on what magic items an NPC might be carrying.

That and 4th edition is also interesting in that it’s kind of two games in one.  On one hand you have your classic “kill them and take their stuff” challenge of a traditional D&D game (not to say that my games are that simple).  On the other hand you have this wonderful tactical miniature style battle game when you start rolling initiative.  I have so much fun figuring out how my group of monsters is going to beat up the PCs, running each combat like a little miniatures skirmish game.  I live for this kind of stuff and 4th edition is pretty unique in that I can sort of get two games in one.

Finally, the rest of my regularly weekday group has always been a D&D group.  It’s the game they like far mroe than any other and we generally use the newest edition.  I’m lucky in the fact that my players actually enjoy the same system that I do, and that my good friend and fellow GM upstairs is just as enthusiastic as I am.  We talk for hours about how to do various things and what we’re going to spring on each other the next time we run.

All that said, I still enjoy a lot of other systems too.  The weekend group I have (I’m fortunate enough to have not one, not two, but three different groups) tends to dabble in a lot of different systems, and I have to say that it’s been really good for me over all to try out so many different things.  Learning how other systems work just reinforces my love of 4th edition and all the other games, because each one brings something different to the table.  And in this day and age all us gamers have no excuse not to use the perfect tool for the job.  Or the right system for our preferences.  And when it comes to a fantasy game, that right system is 4th edition for me.

The following are simply my thoughts on running a shadowrun game; they may or may not work for you. Always remember to play to your strengths as a game master and deviate or ignore my advice when it suits you. While these tips have worked for me in the past, they may not work for you or your group.

Shadowrun is Fantasy Cyberpunk
The one thing that sets Shadowrun apart from other cyberpunk games is that it incorporates a lot of fantasy into the world. Shadowrun is filled with shamans, mages, elves, dwarves, trolls, and even dragons. Don’t forget to include these fantastic elements in your game where appropriate – they will lend a lot of flavor and interest to your game.

Use the metahuman races, mages, and other fantastical creatures and threats when appropriate to the situation. This is the one thing that really makes Shadowrun unique from other cyberpunk games and it should be used when possible and appropriate. But remember that these fantastic things reside alongside technology, not separate from it.

Shadowrun is a Caper Game at Heart
A caper game is simply a game focused around a group of thieves or criminals who commit illegal acts, using cons or theft, for their own ends. Remembering this can give you a great many ideas for runs and help to focus a game around a particular type of caper. Generally a shadowrun team will develop a type of caper or run that they excel at performing, so if this happens it’s likely that they’ll be hired by Johnson’s who want them for this type of job.

Being a caper game at heart, its easy to find inspiration for runs. Simply think about what the Johnson and his corporation wants and then set up a few obstacles to obtaining that object or person. For example, if Ares wants the plans for a new laser pistol from their competitor, you have the caper: steal the plans. Now you just need to figure out who has it now, what protection that object has, and a few ways for the team to find out what these protections might be. Don’t worry about providing the team a way to get around them: most players are more than creative enough to figure this out and all you have to do is react.

Simply put, figure out what their employer wants, figure out who has the object of desire currently, and then place protection and obstacles to obtaining that object. Almost all runs boil down to either stealing something, kidnapping someone (for good or ill), or killing someone who knows too much (or not enough).

Technology is Ubiquitous
Being set in 2070, Shadowrun is filled with all sorts of technology, which you shouldn’t forget about for a moment. This doesn’t just mean high tech digital security and hacking. It also means that the store you walk into has an Augmented Reality display for everyone, that everyone and their dog has a commlink, and that very little is done on paper these days.

When the characters walk down the street be sure to describe what they see in Augmented Reality. Also remember that this Augmented Reality doesn’t have to conform to real world physics or ideals, either. Many businesses will use AR to really spruce up a plain building, creating objects that fly out at you, that flash, and that try to spam your Commlink.

Also remember that nearly everything is wireless now, even down to cyberlimbs and simple objects. Information is never more than a thought and an eye blink away, and you have to be very careful to make sure that someone else isn’t stealing your data. Corporations know this, too, and will often protect sensitive data behind shielded walls or even servers that can only be accessed manually (which makes a good goal for a team – get to the secured server undetected).

Combat is Brutish, Deadly, and Short
Smart shadowrunners know that running away is the smart thing to do. Shadowrun combat is often fairly deadly and most threats are entirely capable of taking down entire runner teams in just a few short rounds. Add to this that most healing isn’t nearly as instant as in most games and you have a recipe for dead runners.

By no means should you avoid adding in combat encounters, but generally the focus of a shadowrun game is not getting into a fight in the first place. It’s also important to remember that most opposition are just working for a paycheck, so when things go south they aren’t afraid to retreat and try again later (if at all).

Mostly I like to use combat to add some excitement to a run, not as a the main event. If the characters are clever enough to avoid combat, by no means force it on them. If they successfully sneak around roll with it and don’t just make up “random encounters” for them to fight.

Megacorps are Businesses: Threat Them as Such
Megacorps are businesses first and foremost, and as any business they are ultimately concerned only with the bottom line. They hire shadowrunners to do dirty work that they don’t want to be caught doing themselves. Be this sabotaging a competitors operations, stealing secret plans for a new product, or even forcefully “hiring” a rival worker, they do what it takes to make money.

This also means that they prefer to distance themselves from shadowrunners as much as possible: this is where the Johnson comes in. He’s a middle man between the runners and the corp, and most often they don’t know everything about the run. In fact, shadowrunners rarely have the whole story about why they’re doing something. Most good teams try to check this out ahead of time, but when they don’t bad things can happen.

Just remember that the folks hiring the runners are more concerned about making money than anything else. But they also want to do things quietly – runners who make a habit of doing things loudly and without much finesse often don’t get hired for anything other than brutal sabotage. If the runners keep doing things sloppy and carelessly then jobs just might dry up.

Avoid Over-Use of Screw Jobs
Shadowrun has a reputation as a game that encourages a “screw job,” where the runners are generally treated like dirt and betrayed by their employers at the first opportunity. This is neither fun for the players or all that realistic. Most Johnsons and Corporations want to groom a decent working relationship with runners and so try to avoid screwing them over all the time. Else the word gets around and pretty soon they can’t get any but the most desperate of shadowrunners to work for them.

So only use a screw job when it really is in the best interest of the corp to do so. And even then, try to set it up so that the runners will either die or have no way to trace back the screw job to its source. At the same time, make sure that the players have some way to figure this out ahead of time: if they do their homework.

Sources of Inspiration
Finally, there’s nothing like stealing ideas from other sources when running a game. The RPG.net forums actual play section has several very good actual play reports from good GMs. Lost Demiurge ran a brilliant game entitled the Sorrow of Elves that you can find here: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=319569. I helped to start a 101 Instant Scenarios thread that can be found here: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=321504.

Further inspiration can be found from various caper movies (Oceans 11+ and others) and the film Smoking Aces is a brilliant movie that shows just how badly a run can go. Finally, the new TNT show Leverage is more or less Shadowun – Magic: the Television Series. If you want to run a game about a bunch of hooders then this show is tailor made for inspiration, both for players and GMs.

Synopsis

Dungeons & Dragons has long been a game about exploring new places and fighting dangerous monsters. Usually these adventures are set either in an established campaign setting or a home brew world devised by the dungeon master. This variant outlines a method in which both the players and the dungeon master can create a world together, creating a new method for world creation.

Basic Rules

This method of world creation is quite simple; the dungeon master and the characters each take turns naming facts about the world, its geography, its people, its customs, and its legends. Both the dungeon master and the players are encouraged to think creatively and to place locations and legends that they’re interested in exploring and examining. This is a simple process that has only a few basic rules.

• Everything Exists: Any information found in the core rules supplements exists in the world in some fashion. No participant in this process can state a fact or legend that invalidates a choice found in the rules books. The dungeon master and the players should be able to select any rules option in the books in this campaign setting.
• The Basic Premise is True: The basic premise of dungeons & dragons is still intact in this world. Tieflings once hailed from Bael Turath, all of the core deities exist in some fashion, and adventurers still explore dark dungeons and buy magical treasures. While individual facts about the common legends might change, the basic premise cannot be altered with stated facts (though legends can offer different options).
• No Contradictions: Once a participant in the world building process states a fact or legend, nothing can contradict this statement. If a player states that the village of Green Hills exists in the Flowering Valley another player cannot then state that the village doesn’t exist. Once someone states a fact it becomes just that: a fact. You can, however, append additional information to a stated fact. In the above example a player could state that the village of Green Hills is linked to the Feywild and that it only actually appears during the daytime, disappearing at night.
• Beware the Monkey’s Paw: While this is a cooperative world, the GM does hold ultimate power over the setting, mostly in order to ensure that the game is actually a challenge. If you state that the town well holds powerful magical items the DM can alter this fact to ensure that 1st level characters don’t start off with holy avengers. Be careful what you wish for, as the DM can alter facts if they’re clearly placed only to give an unfair advantage to the players.
• Be Cooperative: This is a group exercise and as such try not to rain on someone else’s parade. Work with everyone else at the table to make an enjoyable setting. If someone raises a big objection to one of your facts ask them why they object and consider meeting them halfway. While you have ultimate power on your turn you can and should talk to the other players if there’s some question about your fact or legend.

Building the World

Filling in the map is an easy and enjoyable process. Simply gather your group together, grab a piece of paper, and place a dot somewhere near the middle of the paper. This is the starting village where the characters will begin their adventuring career. You can name it now or leave the name as the first stated fact of the world building process. Then elect one player as the scribe (this is usually the GM). The scribe writes down all the stated facts so that there’s a written record of the world.

There are two smaller parts to the entire world building process. The first part is the phase, which is a broad category of the world building process. The phase determines what kinds of facts and legends each player can state during each round. Each round every player can name one fact or legend for that phase. Most phases consist of two to five rounds before the next phase begins.

Each round every player gets a chance to name a fact or legend appropriate to the phase subject. These statements can either be a simple word or phrase that other players can elaborate on or a one or two sentence statement. Players can make two types of statements.

A fact is something that is completely true (so long as it follows the general rules above). Examples of a fact would be the location of some terrain feature, a general truth about a race, or the name of a place or culture.

A legend is like a fact, save that the details of it can change to fit the story or the needs of the world. Legends can also simply be keywords, adventure ideas, or common beliefs of the world. Unlike facts, legends can be changed by the GM in secret to surprise the players. Examples of legends would be a story that a dungeon exists in the Sunlight Plains, that dragons cannot see people who wear their own color or that when a wizard casts a spell his eyes glow.

The Phases

While there are no hard and fast rules for how many phases are used before play begins or for how many rounds each phase contains, the general outline below will produce a vibrant and adequately detailed region suitable for adventuring.

Phase One: World Myths [2-3 Rounds]
World myths are almost universally legends rather than facts. World Myths tend to include legends about how each race was created, vast world spanning legends, and facts that everyone should know. This phase is intended to get everyone thinking about the broad theme of the world.

Phase Two: The Races [2-4 Rounds]
This phase can contain both facts and legends about equally. This phase allows the players to detail the races and how they might deviate from the core books. This phase is most useful for players who want to come from a unique culture or for players who want to ensure that a race is either common or uncommon.

Phase Three: Local Geography [3-5 Rounds]
In this phase the players begin to fill in the blank map with details about the local geography. Everyone takes turns drawing in terrain features such as mountain ranges, rivers, plains, and other such things. Players can either leave the places unnamed or given them a name that might suggest further facts.

Phase Four: The Village [2-4 Rounds]
In this phase the players begin to name facts and legends about the starting village. These can include the absence or presence of services or people, the local religion, the general feeling of the town, and other such things. This phase can be expanded if the players expect to spend a great deal of time there.

Phase Five: Local Threats & Factions [1-3 Rounds]
Once the world has been filled with a few terrain features and a local village, the players now need to place a few threats and monsters in the area. Threats are generally found in the surrounding terrain while factions are generally reserved for the starting village or for neighboring nations. Players can be quite vague here, leaving a lot of wiggle room for the GM to plan adventure around.

Phase Six: Local Legends [1-3 Rounds]
This phase is entirely limited to legends, not facts. Players should start listing common legends about places, people, and races. These are intended to give the DM ideas for story seeds and adventures, so the more evocative and vague you are the better.

Phase Seven: The World Beyond [2-4 Rounds]
During this phase the players all take turns filling out facts and details about the large world. This can be where the roads lead to, neighboring towns or villages, facts about the local nation, or even the presence of another continent. This is intended to provide locations for further adventures once the local area has been explored.

Phase Eight: Final Details [3-8 Rounds]
This final phase is intended for a catch-all where players can name a few last details about the world. No subject for facts or legends is forbidden and this phase is generally used to flesh out existing facts a bit further.

Bringing it All Together

Once all of the phases have been brought together, the DM should compile all of the information into one easy to read format. This is now the beginning of the campaign world. As play begins the DM and the players can further define the facts during play. Should the characters find themselves lost for something to do they can simple start naming more facts that the DM can use to create further adventures.

When the players finally progress beyond their home region you can go through this process once again to create a new region ripe for exploration. Simply start at phase three for the new area, keeping in mind that previous facts cannot be invalidated. In this way you create the world a little bit at a time.

Final Word

This process is far from the final word on cooperative world building, and indeed it is not even that unique. These are simply my suggestions for the process and you should change them to better suit your own group and play style. Above all remember that building the world should be fun for everyone.

And by good design, I mean graphic and print design, not game design itself. I’ve been a practicing print designer in the RPG industry for a few years now, and if I’ve learned anything it’s that too few people pay attention to print design as it relates to an RPG. Sure, the big houses generally do a very good job, but I feel that the smaller press companies often don’t pay enough attention to the subject and art of designing a visual look for a product.

At its core, print design works to enhance the rules and feel of a product.  It should take the rules, present them in a clear and legible manner, and then give you a visual short hand for the theme and subject of the game.  When someone opens up your book they should immediately be able to grasp the theme of the game from the look of the product without actually reading the rules.  And when they do start reading the rules, they should be able to do so easily, with a minimum of effort.

I’m certain that part of this is that some developers do all of the layout and print design themselves, both out of necessity and lack of available help.  Yet even this isn’t a huge excuse, as it doesn’t take much effort to learn the very basics of good design.  There are dozens of wonderful publications and websites that explain the basics in a clear and concise manner.  Even if you’re not visually talented or skilled you can still at least create a product that’s legible and easy to read.

I’ve seen too many books that try to cram as much text as possibel into a set amount of pages, resulting in a muddied wall of text that’s intimidating to read.  I think that it’s better to either spring for the extra pages or cut some material in order to bring the text size up to something readable.  I’d much rather be able to easily access and read the rules than get a few more pages of content.

I think that this is where 4th edition really shines.  Sure, Wizards of the Coast has a lot of money to throw around on things like design, but for once they spent it wisely.  The text is airy, easy to read, and very distinct.  The visual design space is open but filled with a very neat visual shorthand and theme.  The artwork is wonderful and used correctly.  Some people complain that the large text size means less content for the money, but in my book this is an example of very good design.

Ultimately the goal of a print designer is to present the game text in as concise, readable, and beautiful manner as possible.  It’s not some job you can just pawn off on anyone if you want to produce something that’s going to be a truly memorable project.  If you’re working on your own game rules, try to find someone who knows what they’re doing.  It’s time that we give print designers their due and recognition in bringing an RPG to life.  Don’t settle for something that merely works when you could get a book that truly sings.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that this might be somewhat self serving.  I’m talking about my own role in the industry, but I’d like to think that I know what I’m talking about.  Print design is important, especially in a book filled with rules and ideas!  But I’ll end this with saying that I’ve always tried to help fellow designers, both rules and print, in this industry.  I’m willing to work cheaply (sometimes for beer) if it means showing the rest of the world how important this is.  Especially in this digital age, where you can hire anyone from the world over to work with you.

I mean, what would you rather have?  A book of rules that’s presented like a college textbook or a nice tome that looks like it was ripped right out of a wizard’s hand, a wizard who had very good penmanship?  I think that almost all of us would much rather have the latter.  And that’s the power of good design.