Adrift: Shared Worlds

Going in to today's post, I expected to talk about an idea for a Deadlands sandbox that I have been kicking around, and I may still throw that out there as another post because it is a darned ambitious plan that may not happen for quite a while due to its scope versus my time.  The interesting bit was that, in thinking about the idea, I realized that it had its roots in the fantasy boom town idea that I wrote about previously in an Adrift post.  I also had a third idea based around a new game I picked up this past weekend called Monster of the Week that included a certain aspect of the previous two.  In that instance, I realized I had the potential to do something cool: create shared worlds.  How, you ask?  And why would you want to?  Let's take a look.

The core of the idea revolves around a common point of interest in each world:  a cave.  In the Fantasy Boomtown idea, that cave is part of a fluctuating, magical dungeon that suddenly appears, a source of treasure and magic previously unknown to the land.  A town catering to those willing to take on the dangers of the dungeon for wealth and power grows up, creating the game setting.  In Deadlands, a similar idea would be in effect: a mine in some remote place suddenly produces a strange new mineral that creates a boom town around the mine to cater to those delving into the mine, a place that is in constant flux, opening portals to random places and spewing strange dangers as a result of the powerful and unknown mineral.  The final idea I had is of a modern-day town in a world steeped in the urban fantasy tradition of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, or Harry Dresden where an abandoned mine or cave system suddenly erupts in magic and chaos, spewing dangers into the local town, but also providing strange and wonderful items never seen before. 

Each setting is a mirror of the other, with the connection being the cave system that suddenly erupts into a mysterious, chaotic flux.  This common connection creates the possibility of shared worlds.  In each world, the cave would randomly open portals to strange new lands, out of which come both dangers and treasures.  What if the portals connect not only to other places, but also randomly connect each of these three worlds?  What if the three worlds are actually the same exact place in three different possible universes (here we get into the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, interesting stuff in and of itself).  The dangers are magically or otherwise twisted versions of creatures from each world, as are the treasures?  What if these unstable portals could act as temporary gateways to each world, allowing those from one to enter the other, at least for a time?  There is so much game potential here that it boggles the mind.  

Juggling each of these worlds, let alone a shared universe could be quite daunting to the game master, though it could be introduced gradually so as to build each world separately then connect them when the game is mature enough to open up new chapters in the games.  Drop hints and nods to each world as the games progress to see how long it takes the players to  figure out the connection.  Of course, this lends itself to the dangers of metagaming, another good topic for a later post, so some groups may be able to handle this idea better than others.  But I know personally I am a fan of dropping easter eggs in my games, nods to past games or pop culture references.  In this idea, I could freely do that, knowing that they aren't just head nods, but hints to something larger.  

Another possible way to handle this would be to partner with another game master, or game masters.  Each running their own games and worlds, but dropping some common element in each world to start the connection, allowing for each to borrow from the other games as sparsley or liberally as they wanted.  At some point, this could even lead to crossovers, players from one game suddenly playing in the world of another.  Game masters could even move with the players, allowing them to run games in each other's settings for fun and entertainment.  If you were feeling particularly saucy and had a good amount of time and energy, you could create an overarching campaign dealing with why these caves and portals are appearing, what they are actually doing to the worlds (probably nothing good) and how the players from each world need to help in order to end the danger.  

The idea of shared worlds is nothing new, not by a long shot.  But I wanted to share my version and how it could potentially be used in my (and potentially your) games.  I am categorizing this as an adrift idea right now due to the time and planning involved in really making this work on a macro level, but it is something I will no doubt work towards.  If you are a player in my games, my apologies for the potential spoilers, but you never know when, where, or how I might final realize this.  Hopefully this gives you something new to chew on for your games.  Happy many-worlds building!

The unspoken campaign

The game is running as smoothly as can be expected. Everyone is having fun, every week you get together, catch up with your friends, possibly eat some kind of meat-splosion. You play the game, push the story along, roll some dice, have some victories, catch a few defeats, you laugh and play a little bit too late and go home to get too little sleep. The next week the game is mostly forgotten, but here and there you think about what you are going to do with your character, how you are going to tackle the next challenge. Maybe you shoot a few emails back and forth before you pack up your dice and do it all again the next week. The game keeps on going like this for weeks and weeks, and eventually years and years, building up into one of those epic games you talk about for the rest of your life.

Or

The game is running smoothly, you meet, you eat, you play, you clatter dice and everything is great. Then at the end of the night someone says, “Hey I just picked up Whaling Red Seas, the game about steampunk space whaling on mars. I'm thinking about running it when this campaign ends.” Now you go home tired, get too little sleep and go about your week. Only now instead of thinking about what your character is going to do in the upcoming game, you are considering what character you are going to play, Martian dolphin shaman, Chunkor the one armed harpoonsman, Cogmartial Goodman hunting down a rogue difference engine? You might think of the minor quibbles you have with the current game and how Red Seas would fix them. You might email character concepts around, then someone might email you back, and soon there is a growing snowball of enthusiasm. You miss a few weeks of your current game due to the holidays or vacations, and next thing you know, the epic campaign is dead, and you are on to the next thing. Soon space whales are replaced by supers in the dustbowl which is replaced by cavity creeps the rpg... and you are a serial next big thing gamer.

Now I can't help it, I love trying new games and systems, I have long since accepted my fate as a next big thing gamer. However I hate that feeling when a game isn't working quite right and the game dies before its time, it never feels good to have a game die early. Perhaps it is unfair to the games that I'm playing to be constantly playing the next game in my head. It almost certainly is bad for the current game to talk about future games.

The long open ended game is great. I love the long term building of a character, the chance to build a bigger story, the freedom to wander down random little corners of the world. The short term game is great too, the chance to tell a focused story, to try new things, to maybe play a character who is a little reckless. We are telling a story together, and that includes the time not at the table. So we need to keep focused on keeping our current games going strong rather than looking into the future. Next time I'll try to keep the extra games in my head, or somehow find more time for gaming!

Failure week pt 2: Adding the fail painlessly

So how to we add the ever present risk of failure to our games? Without frustrating the players too much. The following suggestions can be stuffed into basically any game.


The first thing to do is bring up the topic of failure with the players. Let them know that failure is an option and that it isn't the end of the world. See if the players are even interested in upping the difficulty of the game, or if they think the campaign is doing just fine as it is. Odds are the players have never considered if they think the game is too easy or too hard. They may think that things are already too dangerous.

One thing that you can do is explicitly take player death off the table. If the characters can die or not should probably be discussed at the start of any game. For some players this will take all the tension out of the game, for others it can provide a sense of safety that will allow them to act more freely. Player death is probably a full topic in its own right.

Run a game where it is explicitly clear that the players are weaker than their foes and likely to fail. This works better in a sandbox world where the players are allowed to tackle challenges at their own pace. Aftermath. Cthulu. This solution isn't a good fit for everyone. It requires players to be ok with banging their head against the wall accepting failure, but getting the much bigger reward of defeating a truly superior foe. While I personally like that style of game I don't feel like most people would.

Make being defeated not the end of the world and especially not the end of the game. Enemies take the players prisoner, or leave them stuck in a death trap. Or even just win and leave the players unconscious. The one technique I would be careful about is having the bad guys steal the players special gear, players can become very invested in loot. Imagine instead the players are defeated by goblins in the big bads army. They take one of the pcs leaving the rest. The captured pc is taken to the big bad, who interrogate s the pc, and then throws her off a, cliff where she barely survives and is nursed back to health by blink dogs. Now the players have met the bad guy, have more reason to hate him, have learned stuff about his lair etc. Some players might consider this scenario a kind of rail roading, I consider it a natural consequence of player choices. Different players have differing tolerances for this kind of thing, so know your players. And if you are a player in this situation, roll with it and embrace it as an opportunity to have something interesting happen to your character.
Make negative consequences last as short as possible. Prison break movies are fun to watch, but in the context of most games spending every third session escaping from being taken prisoner would be really tedious. Escaping the goblin camp doesn't have to be a whole session. You can do it with just a few dice rolls for escape and stealth. Ten minutes is good enough. The quicker the players bounce back and get into the fun stuff the less they will hate taking a loss.

Make running away very effective. Let the players escape bad situations easily. Rather than having the bad guys shoot then in the back or ruthlessly hunt them, just let the players make a reasonable escape. It makes retreating a real option, so encounters can be more dangerous. The PCs shouldn't necessarily be in a good position when they do escape. The bad guys can still be hunting them, or they might be forced to retreat into a disease infested swamp, retreating shouldn't be fun, but it is nice to have it on the table. The big flaw with this idea is that players hate running away. It feels like the gm stacked the odds against them, and makes things feel adversarial.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I am curious what people think. Would you want an increased failure rate in your games?

Friday we will take a look at games that mechanically encourage failure.

Failure Week Pt 1: Why you always win at D&D

Welcome to Failure week at Fezflip. How is that different than any other week here? Well this time I intend to fail. Or talk about failure anyway. So put on your chainfail, harpoon a humpback fail, get on the failboat, listen to some nine inch fails, visit your criminal friend in the failhouse, endure the failforce winds, get pelted by the failstorm, and enjoy some blogposts delivered by the failman.

Failure in Table top RPGS

Roleplaying games are designed strangely from a narrative standpoint.

Good stories tend to have victories and set backs for the main characters. Roleplaying games from their dungeons and dragons dna tend to run on design of players win an increasingly difficult series of challenges, until beating the boss in an epic battle. Players start out strong, and get whittled down to win by the skin of their teeth, but they never really take a loss along the way.

The back story of most rpgs is that the players are a small band of heroes, going up against a powerful enemy with vast resources or power. The players are underdogs up against impossible odds. But mechanically games encounters are designed with the conceit that the players will come out triumphant. So the real narrative of rpgs is the players are a small band of super powerful people, up against a giant army of crappy guys who will fight them one at a time until they are all dead.
This design is awesome, it perfectly fulfills player fantasy, they feel like underdogs the whole time, but they get to win win win as well. At the end of the night the players get to feel awesome. This style of story works excellently in the fantasy dungeon crawler. Videogames grabbed onto that model as well, so it feels comfortable to most players.

But, when you listen to people's favorite game stories, they are rarely about the time they coasted through a dungeon and defeated a Dragon with 5 hit points left. Favorite gaming stories are about epic deaths, terrible rolls, hilarious mistakes, and I will add in clever ways of defeating genuinely superior enemies. So apparently people enjoy failing! Or at least enjoy telling stories about failure.
But let's say I designed a d&d dungeon with the typical five to eight encounters, but instead of having a 95 percent chance of winning, the players only had a 50 percent chance of winning each encounter. Players would get frustrated at the constant failure, and the game likely wouldn't progress very far. They game would just feel wrong if the main villain showed up and murdered the players in the second encounter as well.

In books and movies the main villain is often directly intertwined in a story, interacting with characters. In rpgs often exposing a big bad to the party early on just results in a final battle early on. So villains tend to hide behind waves of minions. Role playing games work in a wide variety of genres and tell all kinds of stories. Many of them don't fit into the win win win paradigm. Super hero stories are normally a series of defeats, leading to a victory, the same goes with sports stories. Detective stories all all about dead ends, close calls, back alley goon beating and the like. Action movies often have the protagonists getting abused and chased for the majority of the movie. There are tons of rpgs in these genres but they still often are built on the win win win engine.


Next time we will look at things that GM's and players can do to add the sweet taste of bitter defeat to their games.

Adrift: Fantasy Boomtown

Coinflip introduced you to the idea of our Adrift posts recently: game ideas that we have in endless supply but for one reason or another may never get around to actually using.  If the piles of papers and notebooks filled with mad scribbling and idea fragments are any indication, I may have a few of these to share.  Ok, more than few.  Frankly, I could probably fill a book or two.  I'll start by sharing on this blog, though, and see how that goes.  If anyone out there actually uses one of these adrift ideas, let us know.  I would love to actually hear about one of these little orphan ideas finding life in someone's stories.

Fantasy Boomtown Sandbox

So that idea title sounds a bit like I grabbed three words out of a hat and threw them together.  Sorry about that, but one thing I am not is good at titles.  So bear with me on this one.  I promise it isn't quite as bad as it sounds.

This idea stems from a couple of places, but the biggest comes from a problem that I am encountering at this phase of my life:  lack of time.  My gaming groups are spread out in different locations, many folks are working odd shifts, or have families that make setting up a regular, meaty segment of game time almost impossible.  The result is that running any sort of continuous campaign with the same group of people in a time frame that keeps up momentum is extremely difficult at best.  Instead, we end up board gaming or playing the odd one shot RPG game (a game that only lasts one session, often with new characters designed for that game and rarely used again).  Though I enjoy both one-shots and board games, I am left with that desire to create a story and see it grow.  So how do I accomplish both accommodating schedules and shortened attention spans while still allowing for a more complex story to develop?

My thought was, instead of having a game centering around a particular group of heroes, traveling from place to place, solving mysteries and acting like the quintessential murder hobos, why not focus on a particular place?  How do you make players care about a place and not just themselves?  How do you build a story based on a place rather than a group of characters?  And why would that be better for an erratic gaming schedule?  The idea kept nagging me.  And then I began putting it together.  What if a particularly interesting dungeon showed up, so interesting that a town suddenly grew up around it?  What if groups arrived in this town, intent on making a name for themselves and in the process helped shape the town through their decisions and actions?  Thus the fantasy boomtown idea was born.

The meta idea for this town and dungeon is to have a central place that the players call home.  This is not a temporary location that the players inhabit only as long as they have an adventure to complete.  This is where they live and work.  This is a place that they can influence.  As a game master, you can set up a number of quests that the players can choose from, perhaps on a job board.  Success or failure can cause businesses to rise or fall, people to show up or leave, or any number of effects on the town and area.  This can create a living, breathing world around the characters, making them invested in not only their characters, but the world around them. 

The Dungeon

Everything in this idea hinges on the a reason for a town to suddenly appear, a reason to spur a spike in population.  The basic idea is that, for some mysterious reason a dungeon entrance appears in some relatively mundane and out-of-the-way place.  Initial exploration quickly turned up a potential wealth of treasure, be it precious metals and jewels, esoteric magics, or other items of value.  Of course, with great wealth comes great danger.  The truly interesting part of the dungeon, though, is that every set amount of time, the dungeon randomly resets in completely new and different ways, also resetting both the dangers and the rewards.  This potentially creates a never-ending supply of wealth in the eyes of many, so they flock to the dungeon in hopes of grabbing a piece for themselves.

In game terms, this essentially creates the space for procedurally generated dungeons.  An enterprising game master might sprinkle in clues as to the nature of the dungeon and what may be causing the randomization.  There is even space here to throw in wild ideas like portals to other dimensions or planes, giving you almost limitless options for dungeons to throw at the players

The Town

The town itself can be as big or small as you want.  Did people just discover the dungeon?  Then the town may be a collection of ramshackle tents and shelters, with one or two buildings on their way to completion.  Maybe the dungeon town has been around for a little while, but changes in the dungeon have caused renewed interest and an influx into the town.

Key ideas to build into the town could include:

• A loose set of laws and agreements on how to take turns delving into the dungeon.  Perhaps some sort of daily lottery (of course the "random" selection could be influenced by interested parties) to choose which groups can enter that day.
• A portion of wealth uncovered goes to the town for upkeep, policing, etc. Perhaps groups need to have an official charter to enter the lottery for the delve.
• Groups of adventurers formed into official groups, which can be hired not just to delve, but to take care of tasks for the town or interested parties.  A job board in town could offer these alternate ideas if the lottery doesn't favor a group.

The Players

The players arrive to join one of the official groups in the town.  Perhaps the group is newly formed, and the players get to help increase the wealth and fame of the group.  Maybe they are joining a group that has fallen on hard times and have to help pull it out of the muck before they can make a name for themselves.  Whatever the reason, they are part of an official group, so that they can delve or be hired, thus creating opportunities for the players to decide their fate.

In this method of partying, you could essentially rotate players and characters.  You explain it as other members of the group since the party is most likely not the only members of the official group.  That way you can set a game time and take anyone that shows up, form the party for the evening, and game.  In this scenario, game sessions would be best set at one to two per adventure so that keeping a cohesive party is not a must.  Despite the rotating cast, you would still have a common narrative as players influence each other, their group, and the town around them.

I could go on at length about this particular idea, but I have kept you long enough.  This is definitely one of my more fleshed out ideas.  I will try to make future adrift posts a little shorter.  Thanks for indulging me.  Again, if anyone takes this idea and runs with it let me know how it goes. 

Adrift: Games that will never happen

It being a holiday weekend, and my evil friends made me play Atlas Reactor last night, I am a bit late getting this Monday post up. One thing Fezzypug and I talk about is the lost campaign, that game that you get the idea for and just never gets off the ground for whatever reason. Maybe you played one or two sessions and it just wasn't working. Maybe you just never found time to run the game. So we are using Adrift to highlight some of these campaign ideas that will never be.

Poking god in the eye

I had this idea when the first Avengers movie came out. Shield has this awesome floating base, all kinds of tech and gadjits, a world wide network of surveillance, government support without government oversight. The coolest thing about Shield is that basically everyone in it is a normal person. No powers to speak of, just highly trained dedicated professionals. This got me thinking about the role of normal people in a super powered world. There are a lot of comics about this. There are characters like the Punisher, or even supposedly Batman who are normals playing with the big boys who have powers that can destroy the world. These characters are still super heroes, they have plot immunity, and take superhuman levels of bodily punishment.

What if the charcters were actual normal humans? They may be the best in their field or whatever, but still just normal people. If a normal decided to fight even a B list super villain they would be killed in one attack. This game would be about the players coming up with a plan, an organization, some way of taking out a heavy hitter supervillain.

The backstory would be that a group of super villains banded together and pulled off the ultimate plan. They would get rid of all the major super heroes, either by fighting and killing them, blackmail, imprisoning them somewhere, or whatever means necessary. At the same time one of the villains takes control of all the people in Canada, turning them into his personal mindless Canadian slave army. He claims that he can reproduce this wherever he wants, so if the world governments don't give in to the villians demands, he will mind control everyone. The governments give in, and chop up north America into super villain fiefdoms with the villains each running their own tiny empires.

The actual villians were never worked out, just some archetypes that would be fleshed out in the zero session probably. A hulk type indestructible, infinitely strong guy. A super powerful mentalist, obviously, professor X gone bad kind of thing. A super scientist, probably hiding in a powerful suit of armor with killer robots patrolling his lands. They could be anything, basically as long as they were powerful enough that defeating normal humans was trivial for them.

The players would take the role of the resistance. Just a handful of motivated individuals looking to take down the super evil. At the time I was into radical sandbox style games. So the players could take literally any path to victory they wanted. I was going to suggest that they work on one villain at a time.

They could build up a crazy organization like shield, with adventures focused on acquiring tech, bases, an army. They could build a terrorist organization, decentralized, harder to destroy but also harder to mobilize for a plan. They could just keep the group small and remain just the player characters, and work on setting clever traps and schemes. So there could possibly be a base/org management part of the game.

The adventures would be very espionage based, gathering information, finding weaknesses, recruiting assets. With the players finding ammunition against their target until they are ready to fire the plan, in some climactic showdown probably.

In my head it was a short term game, maybe 8 to 10 sessions, limited to the buildup and take down of one of the villains, with the option of extending it if the game seemed to be running well. Character death would be on the table, and the stakes would be high. Player progress could easily be destroyed if things didn't go well.

There are some issues with this game. The big hurdle I hit was player buy in. The idea of a game where you are a mouse trying to kill a tiger doesn't appeal to everyone. Some players thrive on these kinds of hard mode rpgs but they aren't for everyone. Another problem is keeping the characters involved in the fun parts of adventures, the actiony bits. It would be easy for the players to put themselves in a position where they would just stay back in the base and send minions to do things. As part of the zero session I think you have to suggest that the players build characters that want to be in the mix of things, that believe if something is worth doing, it's worth doing yourself. Using minions to do side missions would be an thing for sure. But the players need to be present for the big plot things. I feel like this kind of game doesn't fit well with my current rpg group, we tend to have shorter sessions with one fight per night as a rule. I think this game needs some room to breath so longer sessions that are potentially more boring from an action and combat perspective.

Hope you enjoyed a little insight into some of the thinking that takes place before a campaign launches. There are many more games that will never see play,