One of the best things I’ve learned in GMing is that it’s important to share the focus among the players – some players are naturally more likely to dominate a group – not necessarily in a bad way, or at least not in one that is intended to be bad, but just because of their personalities. The GM needs to make sure they share the focus among the players and among their characters – it doesn’t need to be totally even and equal (some players want less than others) but you need to give everybody a chance to shine. And when designing adventures, if a character has a cool feature – make sure you give their player the chance to use it – there’s little worse than having put all your skill points (or whatever mechanism is used in a game) into something that never comes up – although this one is also on the player. If it’s happening to you, speak up and tell the GM about the unused skill – you know your character better than them.
And when you are levelling up your character (again, depends on the mechanisms of the game) consider if what you’re doing is taking away opportunities from another player – I’ve played in some games over the year where somebody else takes skills or talents that basically render my character less effective or useless. This is often a problem with the balance of a particular ruleset – but it helps if players are aware. Being the Healer in a game where the psionic character can suddenly heal much more effectively than you as well as do everything else they could already do… it’s not fun.
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bookmark_border#RPGaDay 2019 Day 9 – Critical
The prompt is ‘Critical’.
I’ve been playing a fair bit of Savage Worlds in various forms in recent times, and the critical failure mechanic in that is interesting. If you’re character is a ‘Wildcard’ and I believe player characters virtually always are, whenever you have to make a skill check you get to roll a six sided ‘wild die’ alongside whichever die you have for the skill (from four sided to twelve sided), and you take the better of the two results.
But if you get a one on both dice – that’s a critical failure. And my GM has fun with critical failures. To the point that I have actually had difficulty rolling the dice sometimes from fear of a ‘One One’.
It’s an interesting mechanic to me because it makes critical failures significantly rarer as you get better at a skill, unlike most games I’ve played where the chance tends to remain similar.
I like the push mechanic in Call of Cthulhu for the same reason – but that game also incorporates straight rolling critical failures 🙂
bookmark_border#RPGaDay Day 8 – Obscure
Not really sure how obscure these are, but I only found out about this gaming magazine (which only lasted two issues) recently and only because it contained some material relating to the Dragon Warriors game. I did track down and purchase copies though this photo is off the web.
The name is very obviously an inversion of White Dwarf, and it was published in connection with a war game (Fantasy Warlord) that was seeking to compete with Games Workshops Warhammer, and the magazine has to me the flavour of White Dwarf before it just turned into a house organ -with material for a wide range of games from other companies.
bookmark_border#RPGaDay Day 7 – Familiar
I may be going against the flow here, but I like familiarity in my games, particularly in my fantasy worlds. My favourite RPG is Dragon Warriors and its world of Legend certainly has a claim to being one of my favourite fantasy worlds and part of the reason for that is unambiguously that that world is very obviously based on ours to a great extent.
Not absolutely, but Albion is clearly based on England. Chaubrette pretty clearly based on France. Algandy on Spain. Kurland on Germany (or what passed for Germany in the middle ages). Ferromaine is Venice. Emphidor has a Greek flavour.
The strength of this for me, is the players come into the game with a lot more knowledge of this ‘fantasy’ world than they do of many others. It’s not all right, by any means, sometimes it’s very wrong – but that would be very much be true of people at the time. And from a GM’s perspective… well, it gives you so much real world material to draw on – or ignore as you wish. Because at the same time, it isn’t our world.
bookmark_border#RPGaDay Day 6 – Ancient
I’ve been ruminating on this one all day. My gaming career goes back to the first decade of the wider hobby (if we take the publication of D&D as that point) but while I’m proud to claim Grognard status, I think the Ancient Days of gaming ended a few years before that, so there’s no personal anecdotes or items I feel I can share… or are there?
I picked these up at a Sunday market when I was 10 (1985). My father extorted six hours of yard cleanup work out of me to advance me the 60 cents I needed (the question “What did you do with the pocket money I gave you yesterday?” and the answer “Spent it on lollies” did not impress him. I wanted these so much because they seemed like ancient artifacts to me at the time, even though they were younger than I was. I would have wanted any D&D stuff, any roleplaying stuff, but these seemed very special.
I guess they still do.
bookmark_borderExpanding boundaries
The next step in my mapping project is to significantly enlarge the map.
When I first decided to map Ongus, I had no real intention of printing the final map and for that reason I didn’t give all that much thought to its final dimensions. What I wound up going with was a height and width for the map which fitted relatively nicely into the CC3+ drawing window on my computer.
I did wind up printing the original version, and to make it fit into the dimensions I wanted I wound up adding a band to the bottom of the map that included a heading, but was mostly white space.
With this map, I know I am going to get it printed at either A2 or A1 size – fortunately a feature of the ISO 216 paper sizes which most of the world outside North America uses is that whatever paper size you use in the A1-A10 series, the same height/width ratio remains – √ 2/1 or approximately 1.414 – so I have to enlarge my map – increase its height – to change its height/width ratio to the desired value – or in this case, it’s width (x-axis)/height (y-axis) given my maps landscape orientation as opposed to portrait.
My existing map has a width of 8890 and a height of 5080 units (in this case, those units are feet – while for most things I prefer the metric system, for a medieval based map, I chose to go with older imperial units (even though those also differ from the ones used in the middle ages). That is a 1.75 ratio. To get the desired 1.414 ratio or close to it, it’s simply a matter of dividing my maps width by 1.414 to find out the desired height – this yields a height of 6287 to the nearest foot – for convenience (because at many points in my mapping I am using a 10 foot grid), I want to round that to a nearby multiple of 10 and I chose to go with 6280, because that means increasing dimensions and moving certain objects by a convenient 1200 units – the fact that my final ratio is 1.415 rather than 1.414 is negligible.
I have also noticed that when I use a blur effect to blend together the background of my map I am winding up with areas on the edges of the map where the background is not solid, but paler than I like. While there are probably more elegant ways of addressing this, I’ve decided the simple solution is to simply add an increased border to the map of 250 units on each side.
By moving the area at the bottom of the river, 1200 pixels downwards, I enlarge the river as well, which will mean remapping the Bridge of the City, but I’ve been wanting to improve that – one thing I have always liked about the medieval city of London (on which this city is somewhat based) is the existence of the buildings that lined London Bridge during the Middle Ages, and its drawbridge – making the bridge a more significant part of Ongus seems thematically desirable.
After making these changes, here is the result. The Bridge will need to be made anew.
bookmark_border#RPGaDay Day 5 – Space
The prompt is ‘Space’. I’ve played a few games set in space – I’m playing two right now, a Savage Worlds High Space game, and a Star Wars (d6 version) game, and I thought about writing about that, but instead have decided to consider one of the biggest changes I’ve seen in the gaming hobby over the last three and a half decades. I have the impression this is a pretty wide spread change, seen in a lot of places, but I can only directly speak to my local context – and that’s the number of games stores and stores with looser connections to the hobby – that now provides space for people to game in. The game stores I remember in my childhood and my youth were wonderful in their own way, but they were places crammed with books and dice and minis, and not a lot of free space – I’m sure there were exceptions in some places, but they basically places to buy your games, not play your games. Now, we have a lot of game stores that provide space and tables for gaming and I think that’s wonderful in helping to build a gaming community. There were periods, quite a long time ago for me now, when I couldn’t find a regular gaming group and it would have been great back then to roll up to a local games shop and find something like Adventurers League running, or other games – and I’m not the biggest fan of D&D, nor of the Adventurers League style of play, but when you haven’t got a group, or if you’re trying to break into the hobby – this change is wonderful. Space for gamers to be gamers.
(Note – nothing in the above is intended to disparage AL or any of the other organised play formats that are around – I think these things are a wonderful boon for the hobby in general and if that is your preferred style, all power to your dice).
bookmark_borderOngar-On-High
Again, very little has changed in Ongar-On-High which is the domain of the King’s Palace (the Tower) and other assorted royal buildings. I’ve enlarged the school at Z1 to match the schools within the city better, but beyond that little has changed.
I have made the shadows different on this layer – the largest building, the Tower is much taller than the others, so I’ve given it a larger shadow. I may do this with a couple of the larger buildings in the city as well.
I’ve now done all the districts outside the walls bar one, but something else needs to be done before I move onto that one.
bookmark_borderFreemarket
I’ve made virtually no changes to Freemarket, which is a small, unofficial and only tolerated market just outside of the city walls across the river. But simply adding the shadowing effects makes a difference in appearance.
You may notice trees are missing – they are still sitting there on a hidden layer, but I’m considering what I want to do with trees as something near the end.
A lot of my markers – the circles with numbers in them that indicate what a location is according to my city key – are larger than the underlying buildings. I am experimenting at the moment with making those smaller but still having them large enough to be readable on the maps I am going to be printing at the end. Again, changing all of these is a project for later.
bookmark_border#RPGaDay Day 4 – Share
RPGaDay Day 4 – Prompt is ‘Share’. This one is easy. I mentioned in the ‘First’ post of this years RPGaDay that for the first six years or so of my gaming career I was always the GamesMaster, never the player. And while I did get to play occasionally after that for many more years I was nearly always the GM. And while I don’t mind that role, I like to play as well. And my gaming group today – what I’d call my main group – is great because it includes a number of people who can GM and so we share that responsibility around. It’s great – to me, it seems like the ideal way to run a group – multiple GMs running different games at different times. Not everybody in the group necessarily has to be a GM but even if you’ve got a few it creates a different dynamic from those times when I’ve been the sole GM. As well as given people a chance to sit on the other side of the table, I think sharing the GMing responsibility means the people playing have a better understanding of just how much work GMing involves, that I think sometimes some – certainly not all – people who only play take for granted.