Onward and Upward; or, Self-Improvement the RPG Way

(originally posted on "Live and Let Dice", Dec. 18, 2006)

“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”
--Émile Coué

I got an early Christmas present from my wacky brother Steeve when he and his wife visited us this Thanksgiving: the DVD of the first season of Stan Lee’s Who Wants to be a Superhero? We watched it while they were visiting and it was great fun.

There’s a scene in an early episode where Stan toasts the contestants with his trademark motto: “Excelsior!” When the hero wannabees return the toast, Stan asks them, “None of you knows what that means, do you?” They sheepishly shake their heads.

Stan explains: “It means, ‘Ever onward and upwards to greater glory.’”

There’s a Japanese business philosophy called “Kaisan”. It means “Continuous Improvement”. The idea is that in order to stay successful, a business needs to constantly work at improving itself.

Both “Kaisan” and Stan Lee’s “Excelsior” are familiar concepts for role-players, because improvement is what a lot of games are all about. Role-playing games don’t have “winners” and “losers” the way traditional games do; (something which boggled my brother-in-law the one and only time I invited his wife and him to game with us; “how do I win?” he asked). But most RPGs have some sort of mechanism to record and measure character advancement. Mike Pondsmith, in his classic wacky teens ‘n’ anime RPG Teenagers From Outer Space, puts it this way: “While we’re of the considered opinion that having a good time playing the game should be reward enough, we recognize the need for Pavlovian reinforcement in a well-run game.”

I suspect that the principle for most types of character advancement was based on video games. For every Blormian you shoot, you score so many points; if you reach a certain number of points, you get an extra life, or a new attack, or snazzy new graphics.

That’s roughly the way the granddaddy of all RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons works. In the old AD&D system, each monster was worth a set number of Experience Points (or XP). In addition, the Dungeon Master would arbitrarily award additional points to players for things like good role-playing, achieving quest goals and remembering to bring chips to the table. In one group I played in, the DM would have each player write down what they thought were the significant actions their character performed that game and then he would judge how many points each action was worth. In the newer editions of D&D, the set XP from the old Monster Manuals have been replaced by a Challenge Rating system, so that the points you gain from a given encounter depends on the difficulty that encounter presents for your party’s level.

Levels are another integral part of D&D. When a character gets so many Experience Points, he will Go Up a Level. This gives him extra Hit Points and, depending on his Character Class and what Level he’s at, could also give him attack bonuses, extra skills and abilities, or new spells.

In the old First Edition, each level had its own special name, so that a Thief would start out at the first level as a “Rogue.” At the next level he would become a “Footpad”, and then progress through “Cutpurse”, “Robber”, “Burglar”, and “Filcher”. In theory the idea seems cool and even makes a certain amount of sense. In actual practice, however, it just seemed silly. (“Filcher”???) Later editions eliminated the named levels.

One drawback with this system is that it tends to encourage Leveling Up Syndrome: “Dang! I’m only 100 points short of my next Level. I’m going off into the forest to kill a few kobolds so I can level up.” This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself; a clever Game Master can throw together a quickie encounter or two to make the kobold hunt more exciting; or better yet, devise some way for the kobold hunt to lead into the adventure he had planned out before his player decided he needed more XP. But every now and then you’ll come across a player who wonders aloud how much XP he’ll get for offing that peasant walking down the road. When that player is playing a Paladin, you know you’ve got problems.

Another problem is that since characters have the potential to become obscenely powerful as they advance in levels, the system makes them pitifully weak when they start out. This is particularly the case with the Magic-User class. In the old AD&D system, Wizards started out with the least number of Hit Points, were allowed to cast only one spell per day, and were prohibited from wearing armor. Not surprisingly, a lot of players just skipped over the first few levels and started off their characters at a point where they could actually do something.

Not all game systems stratify character advancement into levels. Point-buy systems, such as HERO or GURPS, allow players to use earned Experience Points to buy improvements to their characters; adding new skills or abilities, or bumping up stats, or even buying off disadvantages. These games typically recommend that the GM give out only a couple points per player per session, as opposed to D&D which can award hundreds or even thousands of points per encounter. But in GURPS you can make some significant improvements to your character with only a dozen or so extra points where it can take several thousand points to hit the next level in D&D.

I know of at least one game system where experience actually makes your character worse! In Chaosium’s classic Call of Cthulhu, each character has a certain amount of “Sanity Points.” Each time he encounters an Eldritch Horror or a Thing Man Was Not Meant to Know, he loses some of his sanity. Ultimately all the characters will go mad and become NPCs; their only hope is to stop the Horrors before it’s too late!

I have to admit, I’m usually kind of lax about passing out Experience in the games I run. Unless I’m running a D&D campaign, I often forget all about it. I picked up this habit from the Champions campaigns my friends Bryon and Cath used to run when I lived in Darkest Iowa.

They had a library of nearly a thousand character sheets, (that was when I first met them; they eventually surpassed the thousand mark), converting nearly every character from the DC and Marvel Universes into HERO stats. Each sheet was laminated, because it made them easier to file, because it protected them from soda and pizza stains, and because Bryon had access to his schools laminating machine. Being preserved for the ages in imperishable Mylar meant that the character sheets could not be changed, but that was okay. “Comic book superheroes rarely change,” Bryon explained to me. What changes a character might undergo in the comic, (when the Hulk became grey and smart, for example, or when Superman acquired his “electric look”) were usually significant enough to warrant a totally new character sheet.

(Note: this applies only to American super-heroes. Japanese comics are more likely to follow a character’s development from rookie to uber-hero. The heroines of Magical Knights Rayearth, for example, start out as ordinary schoolgirls who have to grow into the roles of defenders. Goku, from the popular Dragonball series, is a poster child for kaisan and takes the concept to ludicrous lengths).

So in their various Champions campaigns, Bryon and Cath never handed out XP at the end of gaming sessions. Instead, they’d reward players through the social interactions their characters would have with other characters and with NPCs. Cath in particular did her darndest to cultivate romantic sub-plots for characters. Not all players like this approach, but I think it gave a more organic, satisfying feel to character development than a mere shoveling on of hit points every thousand miles would.

Then there’s always the alternative experience system suggested in Teenagers From Outer Space: “Have you ever considered paying your players off in M and M’s? Instant gratification can work wonders.”

Hey, if it works, it works.

Excelsior! 

Live and Let Dice: Climbing the Rope

I sort of gave up on my project of re-archiving all my old "Live and Let Dice" columns here, mostly because there were very few columns left intact after the online siege of the site which originally hosted them.  But this column is relatively intact, and contains gaming wisdom which I think should be preserved for the ages.  So set the Wayback machine to June 21, 2005 and prepare to Climb the Rope:

Climbing the Rope

How to Get Your Players to Stand in Front of That Nice Big Target  (6/21/2005)

By Kurt Wilcken

The majestic steamship plowed through the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. Suddenly, out of the foggy darkness, an iceberg loomed. Unable to veer away in time, the ship struck the berg, rending its hull and flooding one of the forward hulls. As the crew worked frantically to save the ship and the stewards went from cabin to cabin assuring the passengers that all was well, but could they please proceed to the lifeboats in an orderly fashion, a strange droning noise was heard over the noise of creaking metal and panicked voices; a humming like a thousand giant hornets.

A mammoth airship appeared over the steamer, held aloft by a myriad propellers fixed on rows of vertical shafts. A hatch on the airship's underside opened, revealing a strange device emitting a magnetic ray which miraclulously checked the sinking of the steamship.

This was the point where our GM turned to us and said, "What do you do now?"

Cath, who with her husband Bryon were the usual Game Masters of the group I gamed with in Iowa, was starting a new adventure campaign set in Victorian times. (Cath, by the way, is an English teacher, and will probably kill me for the prose in that first paragraph. Sorry, Cath.) She wanted to use the Albatross as the campaign's base of operations; a fantastic flying machine, sort of the Victorian ancestor of the S.H.E.I.L.D. Helicarrier, from Jules Verne's Clipper of the Clouds by way of the Vincent Price movie Master of the World. Cath decided to start off by placing our characters on a steamship rescued by the Albatross. She wanted to keep things flexible, so she let us come up with why each of us was on the steamer and how we were to get onto the Albatross.

For Bryon, this wasn't a problem. He character was the captain of the Albatross. My Wacky Brother Steeve played a strong man and reformed jewel thief; he grabbed a rope, lassoed the understructure of the airship and climbed up to it. Bryon's buddy Doc was "A Surprising Old Indian" with magic powers; Doc transformed into an eagle and flew up to the airship. My character, a time-travelling inventor, was a little trickier, but he had an adventurous NPC daughter who climbed up the rope to investigate for herself and of course I had to follow.

That left Russ.

We turned to him expectantly, and he said, "There's no reason why my character would climb that rope."

Russ was one of the most genuinely nice people I've ever known; a jolly, cheubic little fellow with a squeaky voice and spindly legs too short for his roly-poly body. He was a Gilbert & Sullivan fan and a lover of P.G. Wodehouse. He also had a relentlessly logical mind; and when he role-played, he always ran his characters strictly in-character, sticking rigorously to the character's motivations and point of view. In this case, he played the Invisible Man and ran him as a fugitive, desperately trying to avoid notice, which would invaribaly lead to capture. It seemed like a cool character concept; except that it was a character who would not willingly risk attention by joining a group of adventurers.

This presented Cath with a problem. By trying to keep the plot flexible, she had wound up backing herself into a corner. The only way she could now get all the characters involved in the adventure was to have them climb the rope. "Russ," she said trying to keep her temper, "any minute now the crew will finish repairs on the ship. The airship will release it and it will sail away with you on board. If you don't climb the rope, you won't be a part of the adventure."

"I know," Russ said unhappily. "And I'll do it. I'm just telling you that there's no logical reason for my character to climb that rope."

"Just climb the rope, Russ."

Ever since, our group has referred to any action the characters have to perform to advance the game's plot as "Climbing The Rope".

* * * * *

Just about any role-playing game will have The Rope is some form or another. It could be the stranger you meet in the tavern with a map to the Lost Temple of Ahsh-Khash B'Ghash; it could be the robbery-in-progress you witness while patrolling the city in your Ferret-mobile; it could be the brunette knockout with the legs that won't quit, wanting to hire you to find her uncle who disappeared in the Amazon; it could be the old man and the kid who want you to take them and their droids to Aldebaran, no questions asked.

The old gaming magazine SHADIS had a regular feature printing capsule plot ideas called "Hook, Line and Sinker". The "Hook" was a brief, one-sentence description of the plot. The "Sinker" was a set of complications not immediately apparent to the characters. Between the two was the "Line", the information the players are given that brings them into the plot; in other words, the Rope. It's what Joseph Campbell referred to as "The Call to Adventure."

Of course, Unca Joe also pointed out that it's possible for the Hero to Refuse The Call, in which case events conspire to force the Hero on the Path To Adventure anyway. (Either that or it's going to be a very short Adventure).

I often refer to the prep work for my own games as "plotting" and think of myself as a storyteller, but the secret of gaming is that GM's don't create stories as much as they create opportunities; opportunities for adventure. It's up to the players to decide what to do with these opportunities. A role-playing game does tell a story, to be sure, but it's a collaborative, and somtimes a competitive, process; less like sitting around the campfire listening to the Old Storyteller and more like narrative volleyball.

Usually, getting the players to Climb the Rope is not a problem. After all, the reason they're playing the game in the first place is to have an adventure. In fact, when I was running my Teenagers From Outer Space campaign, frequently my group would sieze on the little pieces of business I'd throw out to mark time while I was setting up the real plot and they'd start building their own plot out of it. Then I'd have to scramble to keep ahead of them, like the scene from "The Wrong Trousers" where Grommit the dog is riding on the front of a toy locomotive and frantically laying down track in front of it as it goes along.

Other times, the players need encouragement. Like the stereotypical method actor, they'll ask "What's my motivation?" This is actually a good thing, because it means the players are getting into character and ideally will result in a better game. It can also be annoying, especially when it messes up all your beautiful plans.

There are three methods to get your players involved with the plot: The Carrot, The Stick and The Pool of Piranhas.

The Carrot is pretty obvious; offer the players some sort of benefit or reward for their action. "I'll give you each a thousand gold pieces if you'll rid the town of those bandits." The reward doesn't have to be monentary; it could be an appeal to honor or responsibility; or it could be as simple as the classic line from "A Fistful of Yen": "Ah, but you'll have the chance to kill 50, maybe 60 people."

The Stick provides some unpleasant consequences if the players don't act, and works well in conjunction with the Carrot "Jabba the Hutt wants the money you owe him and he wants it now!" "Nah, the cops aren't going to catch the real killers, the cops think YOU did it!" "The German Army will be here within a week unless we can blow up this bridge!"

The Pool of Piranhas gives the players no alternative. "Suddenly you are attacked by a band of orcs. What do you do?" If your players absolutely refuse to bite on any of the plot hooks you dangle in front of them, have the plot bite back. This method can get annoying, but used judiciously might teach the players to be less indecisive.  As Raymond Chandler once said, when in doubt have a velociraptor come through the door with a gun in its hand.

That oughta make them climb the rope.

A Conversation with Phil Foglio

One thing that Alex, the Primary Pop Thinker at Pop Thought, tried to encourage me to do with my "Live and Let Dice" column was interviews. I think this is probably because he did a lot of interviews and was pretty good at it. The first interview I did for "Live and Let Dice" was with one of my favorite cartoonists, the legendary Phil Fogilo; and actually it was one of those pieces that got partially eaten by the Great Chinese Siege. Fortunately, some far-sighted benefactor had the sense to archive the lost half of it. So here is my reconstructed conversation with the boy genius behind GIRL GENIUS:

A Conversation With Phil Foglio

January 3, 2005

When I belonged to a science fiction club in college, back in the antediluvian '80s, each month someone would bring the new issue of DRAGON Magazine to the meeting. We'd all take turns pawing through it, and invariably, we'd start by turning to the back where the cartoons were. The first thing I'd always read in DRAGON was Phil Foglio's "What's New" strip. Well, I'd also try to figure out if there was a point to "Wormy", but I gave "What's New" priority. In his strip, Phil and his semi-fictitious partner Dixie Null, would explore the weird world of Fantasy Role-Playing Games.

Since then, Phil Foglio, (the "g" is silent, like in "polygnostic") has had a long and varied career, touching upon just about every aspect of fandom imaginable. Currently, he is drawing a comic book entitled GIRL GENIUS, about a brilliant young inventor in a Victorian-Era world of steam-powered uber-tech, (as seen in our last thrilling episode).

We meet Phil on board his palatial airship fortress, hovering somewhere above the Carpathian Mountains.

You started out doing fan art. What were some of the other things you did before and during your DRAGON days?

Phil: A little bit of this, a little bit of that. During this period I was illustrating the Mythadventure novels for Donning/Starblaze, doing monthly cartoons for Swank Magazine, and various freelance illustrations. Enough to keep my rent paid and my cats fed.

What kind of art background did you have?

Phil: I always liked to draw, and was actively encouraged by my mom, who had wanted to be an artist herself, but didn't get the chance. I didn't really think about becoming a professional artist until high school, when I realized that everything else required too much math. Once that was decided, I went to the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where I got my BFA in cartooning, with a minor in animation.

How did your association with Robert Asprin come about? And the MYTHADVENTURES comic you did for WARP Graphics?

Phil: During college I was very active in science-fiction fandom. I went to a lot of conventions. Another person who went to a lot of cons was Bob Asprin. You see the same people week after week, you start to hang around with each other. When they needed a new illustrator for the MythAdventure book series after Kelley Freas quit, Bob said, "Hey, I know this guy who'll work cheap." When he sold the comic rights to WARP Graphics, they asked him if he could recommend someone as artist, and again, he thought of me. It's true, kids, it's not what you know, it's who you know.

I'm sure a lot of people associate you with fantasy because of your work in DRAGON, but one of your early, and long-running characters was pure space opera. Tell me about BUCK GODOT, Zap Gun For Hire. How did he come to be?

Phil: I was between projects, and wanted to write and draw SOMETHING, but I didn't really like anything I was producing. Then I read a short underground comic story by Rich Larson featuring the crew of the BUN-E. I had an epiphany. You could write perfectly good stories about about perfectly dreadful people (what can I say, I was young and impressionable) and they could still be good stories. As it happened, I had a friend who was a good person who liked to present himself as a dreadful one. Using him as a role model, I created the first Buck Godot strip. My only requirement for that first story was that there had to be a fight or an explosion on every page. Naturally, no one wanted to publish it, but I liked the character, did a few stories to keep my hand in. I was thrilled when he actually saw print, and even happier when people liked him.

You've always shown, let's say, a healthy appreciation for biology; most notably in your adult anthology series XXXENOPHILE. I've drawn the occasional adult story myself, and I've always tried to follow your example. There seems to be a joy in these stories; a sense that sex and fun go together and if both parties aren't enjoying themselves then they're doing it wrong. Do you have a philosophy behind these kinds of stories, or am I over-thinking this?

Phil: Not at all. XXXenophile started because while I am fond of the IDEA of adult comics, there were very few that I could stomach. Most creators seem unable to keep "taboo" subjects properly compartmentalized, so when they try to do a sexually explicit story, they feel they can throw in some excessive violence, or dismal "real life" consequences or some political satire or whatever, and seem to be unable to understand why this can make it unappetizing. I was bitching about this and said bitching ran along these lines; "Why the hell can't people just write nice happy stories about people having happy sex? That's what I want, and I bet a whole bunch of other people want it too. There's a real market for this. Why doesn't some fool realize this? Hey..wait a minute...I could be that fool!" The rest is history.

You also co-authored a novel with Nick Pollotta: ILLEGAL ALIENS, a science fiction comedy about a First Contact gone wrong. Can you tell me about that? Have you done any other non-illustrated writing?

Phil: I was hanging around with Nick at the time, and one day he said, "I had a weird dream last night, where this street gang was fighting a giant robot armed with a mop." A discussion ensued as to why such a thing might have happened, and the result was 'Illegal Aliens' now available from Wildside Press. Buy two. I've done other prose writing, some articles, a couple of short stories in Amazing Stories, and my wife and I are in the process of novelizing Girl Genius. The big news however, is about a book called 'Dealer's Choice' by James Ernest, Mike Selinker, and myself, that is coming out this spring. It's a book about poker. Not casino style high stakes Texas-Hold-'Em like you see on TV poker, but a book about running a game in your own home, and instructions on how to play the hundreds of stupid, wild card games that people like to play at two in the morning, like Night Baseball, Frankenstein, and Hamlet Meets the Three Stooges. And yes, we have the definitive rules for Strip Poker in there as well.

One of the most unexpected places I've ever seen your work turn up was in DC Comics. You did three limited series for them: ANGEL AND THE APE, STANLEY AND HIS MONSTER and I believe PLASTIC MAN. So, who did you blackmail to get them to let you do this?

Phil: Mike Gold. He had just moved to DC comics from First Comics, and pretty much was allowed to do whatever he wanted. I went in and pitched a few ideas about, and he liked them. I have to say I found working for DC unsatisfying; of course, this was back in the eighties and nineties. I'm assurerd that things have changed. The Plastic Man gig I got through Hilary Barta, who was ramrodding that through DC. He wanted me to help with the writing and scripting, and it was a lot of fun.

The Heterodyne Boys, the legendary heroes from the backstory of GIRL GENIUS, have popped up in your works before; I remember references to them in your STANLEY AND HIS MONSTER miniseries. Were they inspired by any specific literary works?

Phil: The Heterodyne Boys started out as a joke. I was visiting some friends in Kalamazoo and in a used book shop I saw some old 'Boy's Adventure' type stuff, like the original 'Tom Swift' and the 'Radio Boys'. I was reading some of the titles out loud, because they were so delightfully stupid, (Tom Swift and His House on Wheels! [today we call them 'trailers'.]) and when I ran out of real ones, I made up 'The Heterodyne Boys and their Anthracite Burning Earth Orbiter'. One of the characteristics I cherish in my friends is their childlike gullibility, and several excited minutes were spent trying to actually find this book. That night, we played Charades (This party was Rockin') and it was my contribution to the book titles list. Everyone liked it so much that I drew up some pictures of them, basing them on two more friends of mine. They got a radical overhaul when we built Girl Genius, the only part remaining is their names, and the titles of their adventures.

Who are some of your favorite writers?

Phil: I'm very fond of the classical fantasists. Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell. I like mysteries by Dashell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, William Marshall and Robert van Gulik . Nowadays I'm fond of Terry Pratchett, J.K. Rowling, Greg Bear, John Barnes and George MacDonald Frasier. As far as comics go, I like Neil Gaiman, Aaron Williams, Stan Sakai and Pete Abrams.

What artists do you most admire?

Phil: Alphonse Mucha, Charles Dana Gibson, Hayao Miyazaki, Sergio Aragones, J.C. Leyndecker.

What are your favorite books, whether novels or comics?

Phil: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, and for comics, the series 'Roxanna and the Time Bird' by Letendre and Loisel.

Do you do a lot of research for visual references in GIRL GENIUS, or does it all come out of your own fevered imagination?

Phil: A little of both, as I have tons of reference material for machines, and castles and towns, and folk costumes and eastern European landscapes, which I pour through every now and then, and then I take those elements and draw what I think these things SHOULD be like.

My wife, Lute, and I have collaborated on a few of my own stories. (And on occasion, people just seeing her name on our byline have also mistaken her for my brother). How did you and Kaja meet?

Phil: Very traditionally. We had mutual friends who knew I was looking for a girlfriend, and thought Kaja would fit the bill. These clever girls were the bridesmaids at our wedding.

How do you work together writing GIRL GENIUS?

Phil: Pretty well. We start out talking about the story, trying to figure out who is who and what should happen, taking notes the whole time. Then I do a rough layout of the issue, showing what happens on each page. Then we discuss that some more. When we're happy with it, I rough out the issue, getting a rough idea about page layout and dialog pacing. When we're happy with that, I pencil it. It gets scanned into the computer and those files are sent to the colorist. Meanwhile Kaja adds the dialog. I look it over and we discuss whether we need any changes. She also lays out the cover and interiors, and does all the graphic design. When the colors come back Kaja assembles it all for the printer, and off it goes.

In addition to your comics, you've done a lot of game illustration. In fact, Agatha Heterodyne, the heroine of GIRL GENIUS, originally appeared in GURPS: IOU, an anime-inspired RPG from Steve Jackson. What other games have you worked on?

Phil: Yeah, we'd been working on Girl Genius for a couple of years when the GURPS IOU job came along, so we thought it would be a hoot to stick her in. I've worked on a slew of games. The biggest of course was Magic: the Gathering. Both Kaja and I did a lot of art for that. I put out the XXXenophile Trading Card Game, which lost a pot of money, and with James Ernest, a Girl Genius Game called The Works, which is doing well. I've done a lot of work for Cheapass Games', James' company, and we had two big games from new publishers come out this last year, 'Sucession' and 'Emperion'. I've also been busy doing stuff for Steve Jackson Games. Besides IOU, I did the art for Strange Synergy, Greedquest, I just finished up a card game called S.P.A.N.C.(Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls) and along with the Girl Genius GURPS, he's also interested in reviving a version of the XXXenophile Card Game.

What can you tell us about the upcoming GURPS: Girl Genius suppliment?

Phil: It'll have a lot of background information we haven't revealed in the book itself.

Okay, time for a Total Geek Question: GIRL GENIUS: THE MOTION PICTURE: Who would you cast?

Phil: Hayao Miyazaki. We would so like this to be animated. If we had to go live action, I'd hold out for Tim Burton to direct. As for actors? Sorry, I don't really follow actors, though a few years from now, when he's been aged a bit by politics, I could see Schwartzenegger playing Klaus Wulfenbach.

Thank you for time. As I said before, I've enjoyed and admired your work for many years, and I appreciate the chance to talk with you.

Phil: Sure. Thanks for the interest.

Follow the Bouncing d20

From November 29, 2004, one of my "Live and Let Dice" columns exploring the intersection between gaming and filk. What is filk, you may ask? Read on, if you dare!

Follow the Bouncing d20

According to legend, the name came from a typo. A science fiction convention scheduled a time slot for folk singing, but when the program book was printed, it said FILK singing. Fans being what they are, they embraced the flub as something special; a term to signify folk songs that have been mutated to reflect the Fannish Experience.

Most filk songs are inspired by science fiction or fantasy novels, or on Movies or TV shows. There are some gaming filks, like "There Were Orcses, Orcses" and "You Kill the Balrog and I'll Climb the Tree", but not a lot of them. Or perhaps I just have not been hanging around the right filkers.

Of course everyone acknowledges that music has an important part in the Role-Playing Experience. Gaming books will often suggest playing background music while playing in order to provide a suitable atmosphere. Soundtrack albums for action movies make good choices for this.

My wacky brother Steeve once took this to the ultimate: He made his own musical. He was running a game called It Came From the Late Late Show, a silly beer & pretzels game in which you play an actor in a cheesy B-grade horror movie. Not a character, an actor. You get to do things like call for stunt doubles and sulk in your trailer and argue with the director over motivation as well as hack, slash and get killed by the Monster. Anyway, once for a convention he worked up a Musical for his "Late Late Show" game. He compiled a CD with an eclectic mix of songs and from time to time the action of the game would stop for a musical number, to which the players would have to lip synch. The title of the musical was "Nature Trail to Hell", from the "Weird Al" song. Another show-stopper in the musical was the Village People's "YMCA". As I said, it was an eclectic mix.

Granted, that was an extreme case for a special occasion. but I have never done anything like that myself. I don't set up candles and atmospheric lighting in my gaming area too, or make campaign maps on simulated parchment. These are all fun things to do, but me, I'm lucky if I can get the dining room table cleared off in time for company. An organized GM I am not.

But I have written RPG-based filk from time to time, and sometimes I inflict it upon my players. The first filk I ever wrote was based on a phrase in my head and the mental image of a hobbit playing a string bass. Unlike most filk, this one is not based on an existing tune, so just try humming a basic 12-bar blues line.

HALFLING BLUES

I'm a halfling, and my woes are as big as I'm not;
I live in a long, lost place, what most folks forgot;
And I'm tryin' so hard to lose --
-- I got them Halfling Blues.

Wizards and elves assume that I'm not wise;
And even the dwarves make jokes about my size.
No one shares your views --
-- You got them Halfling Blues.

Halfling Blues
Are buggin' me;
I'm just about as low as low can be.
I walk aroun'
Wearin' funny clothes;
An' I got hair on all of my toes

I mean my present state has got me so confuse';
I have paid my dues --
-- Singin' them Halfling Blues.

I'm sick and tired of tryin' to talk to people while starin' them in the knee;
And it's hard playing basketball, when you stand three foot three!
Nothing can excuse;
Your feet hurt 'cause you don't wear shoes,
How I long to lose --
-- Them crummy li'l Halfling Blu-uuuuuues...

(J.R.R. Tolkein, come on give me a break!!!)

Years later, when I was playing in a CHAMPIONS group in Iowa, I decided that our campaigns needed their own theme songs. We were rotating between three or four games at the time and I came up with a filk for each. Probably the best one was for a game based on the Marvel super-team THE AVENGERS:

THE THEME FROM THE AVENGERS

(sung to the tune of "Ride of the Valkyries")

They're the Avengers,
They're the Avengers,
Vanquishing Evil,
That's what they do;

Yes They're the Avengers,
Mighty Avengers,
Stouthearted members,
Noble and true!

When danger is near
They always appear;
So let's give a cheer,
Avengers are here!!!

I have to admit, the tunes I pick for my filk are not always sittin' 'round the campfire with your guitar material, but I try to choose melodies that fit the subject matter; and what better composer for a team which includes the Mighty Thor is there than Richard Wagner?

Sometimes the tunes get a bit obscure. For our Victorian Era Monster Stompers campaign, I chose a song from the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Ruddigore. That's one of the problem with the world, there's not enough Gilbert & Sullivan.

THEME FROM FEARLESS MONSTER HUNTERS

(sung to the tune of "The Ghost's High Noon")

When the night comes down,
On London Town
And the streets are dark with dread;
Creatures of fright
Lurk in the night
Where footpads fear to tread.
When the werewolves walk
And the undead stalk,
We'll send 'em right back to their tombs;
For we are the Fearless Monster Hunters,
Demon and vampire's doom!

Of course, not all my songs were obscure. I wrote a theme for the JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL campaign I was running at the time based on "It's A Small World After All." I only got a couple bars into singing it when the other players started throwing things.

I have had games where songs became a part of the plot. I had a long running TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE campaign, an insanely silly game inspired by anime series like URUSEI YATSURA and RANMA 1/2. My TFOS campaign suffered in a way from social darwinism in that I had a couple of really good players who would take plot bits and run with them and often I, as GM, had to scramble to keep ahead of them. My good friend Russ was also in that game; a good and creative gamer, but not quite as aggressive. While the craziness was running rampant, he would often sit back, apparently overlooked, and quietly devise his own craziness -- eminently logical, but no less crazy -- and then spring it on the rest of the group.

In one TFOS game I had the group starting a garage band to enter a contest; your basic zany teen plot, right out of ARCHIE. Russ decided that his character, (An amoeboid alien name Dwerl), would write songs for the group; so while the other characters and I were chasing the plot, he was sitting by himself composing atrocious lyrics for the band.

NINJA LOVE

by Dwerl Abzolveric (Russ Collins)

Ba-ba-LOOOOO,
Itchi-KOOOO!
Don't be BLUUUUUE!
Ba-ba-LOOOOO!!!

...And so on.

Dwerl's songwriting became a running joke in the campaign and he kept coming up with new ones; almost all of which contained the word "Babaloo". Another running gag was Lynn Minmei, the bubble-headed pop singer from ROBOTECH; (or SUPER DIMENSIONAL FORTRESS MACROSS, for you purists), possibly the first anime series to combine cute girl idol singers with mecha-blasting space battles. Anyway, one of the players was a ROBOTECH fan, so whenever the plot required a celebrity to come to town for a concert, or for there to be a song on the radio, I had the performer be Lynn Minmei. I also wrote a song to be her signature piece. I like to imagine it as the ulitmate bad karaoke song. I also wanted to write a romantic ballad that includes the phrase "deploy electronic countermeasures".

SMALL WHITE DRAGON

My love is like a small white dragon;
Exploding mecha fills my heart.
When your arms reach out like corkscrew missiles,
I know we'll never part.

My love is like a small white dragon;
Romantic shrapnel fills the air;
When your eyes pierce mine like mega-lasers,
It goes to show the love we share.

When you deploy electronic countermeasures
To jam my signal of desire,
What more can I do? My target's locked on you:
Ready,
Aim,
Fire!

My love is like a small white dragon'
And in my heart, you'll always be,
When cluster bombs ignite our true love's fire-fight,
A small white dragon of love for me.

I don't know if there's any moral to all this, other than that some people want to fill the world with silly orc songs.

What's wrong with that?

RPG Resources: The Once and Future RPG

And here we have another chapter in my ongoing project to salvage what I can of the "Live and Let Dice" column I used to write for Pop Thought. This piece originally ran September 9, 2004

The Once and Future RPG

"RPG Resources" is an occasional feature of this column where I talk about books and such which might not necessarily be directly related to role-playing games, but which provide useful backround and source material for games.

It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time before Gary Gygax, before J.R.R. Tolkein, before even the Science Fiction Book Club. In that antediluvian era, the beginning and end of Fantasy Adventure was the Legend of King Arthur. Oh sure, you had your Robin Hood and your Arabian Nights too, but for real heroic fantasy nothing beat King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

I did some dipping into Arthurianallia this Summer as research for Alex's Review Club and decided to re-read one of the classic retellings of the Arthur Myth: T.H. White's The Once And Future King. I read it in high school and enjoyed the first part, but found much of it rather thick. In the name of deepening my understanding of Chivarly, however, I gave it another try.

I'm glad I did. The book is still depressing; as White observes, Thomas Mallory didn't call his version "The Death of Arthur" for nothing; but mixed in with the tragic tale of three lovers is a splendid tapestry of medieval life, or at least how medieval life should have been.

The Once and Future King is divided into four books. (Actually, White wrote a fifth one, "The Book of Merlyn", but it was not published until after his death). The first book is probably the most familiar because of the Disney film based on it: "The Sword in the Stone". It tells about the boy Arthur, (or "the Wart" as he is called by his adopted family), and his marvelous education by the wizard Merlyn and of the miraculous sign which revealed him as Rightful King of England. The second book, "The Queen of Air and Darkness", shows Arthur early in his reign, trying to put down rebellion and find a way to end the cycle of wars which have plagued the island. It also introduces Morgause, Arthur's half-sister, a beautiful but self-centered sorceress whose children become poisoned by her family's hatred of the House of Pendragon. The third book, "The Ill-Made Knight", brings us to the heart of the Arthur legend: the Knights of the Round Table and the tragic affair of Lancelot and Guenivere. It also tells about the greatest of the knightly deeds, the Quest for the Holy Grail. The final book, "The Candle in the Wind", tells of Arthur's twilight; of the treachery of his son Mordred and the war which turned the Round Table against itself.

Until I re-read Once and Future King, I never thought about how much of D&D is really taken from Arthurian lore. Everyone knows that the game swipes Tolkien; I shouldn't be surprised if a lot of people outside the hobby think that The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons are the same thing. People who are more fantasy-savvy recognize elements of Conan the Barbarian and Elric of Melnibone; but a lot of the game's setting and structure can be found in the Arthurian romances.

For the role-playing Game Master, The Once and Future King provides a wealth of background detail. White's version of Arthurian Britain is a romanticized version of the Middle Ages, as is the world of D&D.

"The Sword in the Stone" gives us life in a small country castle. The descriptions of life as a squire-in-training, of a Yule-time boar's hunt, and of the Great Forest Sauvage can give the GM ideas for flavoring his campaign. There's even a neat little 1st-Level Adventure in which Wart and his adopted brother Kay venture into the buttery castle of Morgan le Fay to rescue some captives. (Yes, I said buttery. Long story).

As we go further, we get other views of the period; the dreadful state of pre-Arthurian Britain, when autocratic barons waged war for sport and committed atrocities simply by virtue of their power to do so; Arthur's revolutionary approach to warfare; the splendor of his court and daily life in Camelot; the adventures of his knights and the quest for the Grail.

More importantly, we see Arthur grappling with the problem every GM has to deal with: how do you channel the warrior's aggressive impulses into something constructive that benefits society? Arthur is not only inventing the Knights of the Round Table, from a D&D perspective he is inventing the Lawful Good Alignment and the character class of Paladin.

Anyone who wants to understand the Paladin class could do worse than read "The Ill-Made Knight", the third book of the volume. Galahad fits the popular conception of the Paladin; noble, pure and insufferable. White only shows us Galahad through the eyes of other knights and they, on the whole, can't stand him. (Although Arthur does reflect that it is his most worldly knights who dislike him most). But Lancelot, for all his sins, is a Paladin too, and White spends a lot of time opening his heart to us so that we can understand why he is what he is, the good and the bad.

The Once And Future King is a thick book and not always an easy read. The lightness and whimsey of the early section can be a little off-putting and give the erroneous impression that the book is a child's story. "The Sword in the Stone" is indeed an excellent children's story of the best kind. As C.S. Lewis observed, no book is worth reading at the age of eight which is not also worth reading at the age of eighty. This is such a book. The lightness of tone continues into the later section, but darker, more adult themes emerge which, by the books end, threaten to swallow the optimism and hope of the beginning. But the hope remains. Arthur is defeated, but not forever.

Arthur's dream lives on. He will return.

"Do you know what is going to be written on your tombstone?" Merlyn tells him early in his reign, "Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quandum Rexque futurus. Do you remember your Latin? It means, the once and future king."

RPG Resources: The X-Men

I haven't updated this blog for nearly a year now. It's high time I fixed that. For a while I was using it to archive some of the "Live and Let Dice" pieces I wrote for a site called Pop Thought. Unfortunately, most of the material I posted there were corrupted when the site was besieged by Chinese spammers back in 2008 and I lost a lot of data, including some of my best pieces. Ah well. Some of them are still intact. Including this one, which is a review of sorts.

From June 23, 2004:

RPG Resources: The X-Men

I don't normally do a whole lot of research for the role-playing games I run. This is mostly because of laziness, but also because most of my RPG's either are based in worlds I am already pretty familiar with or have a GURPS supplement for, or which are complete fantasy so I can pretty much run it on the fly. Every once in a while, though, I need to do some actual research.

That was the case with the 'Uncanonical X-Pals' game I began running with my wife some months ago. Now I've never really been a Marvel Zombie. My wife read Uncanny X-Men back in the '80s during the Chris Claremont era, but most of my knowledge of the Marvel Mutantverse came second hand or from the movies and the two Saturday morning animated series. I know who the characters are, what their powers and personalities are like, but that's about it.

Now this isn't necessarily a problem. I wasn't planning of closely following the comic book's continuity any more than the movies or the cartoons did. My philosophy of RPGs is rather similar to what the Muppets said in their version of Alice in Wonderland: "Don't be surprised if you see Captain Hook / 'Cause our version won't always follow the book!" But still, I thought running this game would make a good excuse to delve into Mutant Minutiae.

As any serious scholar will tell you, the most important source for a project like this is Primary Research: the original material itself. My wife has a few dozen Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants from the 1980s and a couple of the early graphic novels. Her treasure, though, is a graphic novel reprinting the Dark Phoenix storyline from Uncanny X-Men including the first appearances of Dazzler and Kitty Pryde, the first battle with the Hellfire Club, ladies in lingerie, and the Tragic End of the Carrot People which led in turn to the Trial of the Phoenix and the (First) Death of Jean Grey!

The edition we have is out of print, but the "Dark Phoenix" Saga has been again reprinted as part of the black and white Marvel Essentials series and is well worth reading.

Another obvious source for running an X-Men RPG, strangely enough, is the X-Men RPG. Last year Marvel published a new Marvel Universe Role-Playing Game and so I picked up the MURPG's Guide to the X-Men game supplement. The book covers a lot of material in a slim 94-page volume and I have found it very useful. It gave me helpful information on the nation of Genosha and a lot of material on the Morlocks, (the supplement includes an RPG adventure set in the Morlock tunnels). Each character it covers gets a full column write-up.

It's a very slick-looking book. These days hard covers and snazzy graphic design are essential to role-playing games. The layout of this book is sharp but not so splashy that it competes with the content as some more artsy books do.

The down side is that this is a supplement. The Guide to the X-Men has no listings for Magneto, Beast, Jean Grey or even Cyclops. That's because they've already been listed in the MURPG's core rulebook. They assume, rightly, that you wouldn't be buying the Guide to the X-Men unless you already had the MURPG and wanted additional information not included in the main rules. That's what the word Supplement means.

Another disappointment is that the book is very brief. As I said, they pack a lot of information into it, but there's a lot of material which is only skimmed over. Each character gets an illustration, usually the most recent appearance available. Which means that Iceman for example, instead of his classic "body-of-ice" look, is portrayed looking like a thug in a leather duster. A fan more familiar with the X-Men of the '70s and '80s, or even of the '90s, is likely to look through this book and say "What the hey? What did they do to Banshee? And why is he wearing the same costume as Avalanche?"

They also give a lot of space to characters from X-Statix, an X-Men title I was completely unfamiliar with. It looks very interesting and surreal but the characters are drawn in a thick-line cartoonish style that, while appealing in itself, clashes horribly with the artwork for the rest of the characters. I suppose for completion's sake X-Statix needed to be included, but I could not convince myself that the characters existed in the same universe.

What I've seen of the MURPG's rule system looks interesting. It's a diceless system. Instead of rolling randomly against an Ability score, each character has so many points called "Stones" which may be allocated to different Abilities each turn. Oh, and it also refers to each unit of time as a "Panel", which is cute and I'd be happy to give the games points (or Stones, or whatever) just for that conceit alone. I was tempted to hunt down the core rulebook, but by the time I picked up the X-Men supplement I had already started running my own game using GURPS rules. Still, if I come across a copy of it, I just might pick it up.

We were well into the campaign when we came across the Marvel Encyclopedia: X-Men in a bookstore. This is the second volume of the Marvel Encyclopedia and in many ways is a superior source of information than the MURPG book. At 240 pages it is longer and lacking the need to include game mechanics it has the elbow room to do the Mutant Universe more justice. We get the complete team and detailed descriptions of all the major characters in the X-Men books and a good number of minor characters as well.

If I have one complaint about the Marvel Encyclopedia, it's in terms of its organization. The characters are categorized by group affiliation. Within each group, first the major characters recieve a page, or in the case of really important characters two pages. Then the secondary characters get a half page each. Then the tertiary characters are listed three to a page and the minor characters four to a page. Each grouping is arranged alphabetically. The arrangement is logical, but makes it difficult to find anyone in particular. Is Mastermind listed under the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or under the Hellfire Club? Is Sabertooth listed with the Marauders or with Weapon X? In order to find a particular character you need to use the index, and the index does not differentiate between primary and secondary entries. The index entry for the mutant-hating rabble-rouser Senator Kelly cites pages 80, 81, 196 and 201. You'll have to check them all to find his main entry, unless you're lucky enough to guess checking the last one first.

A lesser complaint is the same as my complaint about the MURPG's illustrations. In fact, the Marvel Encyclopedia uses the exact same ones. It does however take advantage of the greater room to show the illustrations off to their best advantage and most of them are very good. The minor characters, however, don't get the star treatment and their pictures are down to near-postage-stamp size.

One aspect of the Encyclopedia that I did really like was that each super-powered character, even the minor ones, gets a capsule listing of powers and weapons and a chart rating them on a one-to-seven scale in terms of intelligence, strength, speed, durability, energy projection and fighting skills. Another chart in the back of the book explains what each ranking means.

The Encyclopedia easily beats the MURPG in terms of breadth, and also in terms of depth for the major characters. The lesser characters, however, are only mentioned in passing with little more than a thumbnail illo and a sentence or two of description. When I needed info recently on the villain Omega Red, I actually found much more in the MURPG than in the Encyclopedia. The MURPG also has more maps and diagrams, as you would expect from a RPG supplement.

Using both books to cover each other's lacunae actually went pretty well and I didn't really need any additional reference to run my game. But I got one anyway. I just couldn't resist.

X-Men: The Ultimate Guide from DK Publishing originally came out in 2000. The more recent Updated Edition which I picked up incorporates some new material including photos from the movies and material on the Morrison run on the series. It's a big coffee-table book with gobs of illustrations.

This is the book I really wanted, because it presents a historical overview of the X-Men from the very beginning. The book is arranged chronologically, starting with the team's first appearance in 1961. Most of the characters get whole double-page spreads and multiple illustrations showing how they looked in various eras. We get to see the Beast, not just in his current puddy-tat incarnation, but also his original, "big feet" neanderthal look and his classic more ape-like appearance.

It's a big, beautiful book. Once again, it is not quite as broad as the Encyclopedia; it won't list all the members of the Shi'ar Imperial Guard, for example, but what it covers it does with a wealth of detail both in terms of background and illustration. I heartily recommend it.

Oh, and now I've started buying Astonishing X-Men too. This game is turning out to be the most expensive campaign I've ever run!

* * * * *
"The Uncannonical X-Pals" turned out to be a fairly successful campaign. It ran for a good long time and my wife, Lute, enjoyed it a lot. Her character started out as a normal reporter working the mutant beat and getting involved with the X-Men. For a time her character developed a romance with Hank McCoy, the Beast. Ultimately, it was revealed that she herself was a mutant (not something we originally planned, but that's how it worked out), and that brought her to the attention of Magneto. Lute has always been a fan of Magneto -- she has a thing for charismatic megalomaniacs -- and her character and Magneto eventually married. It was a wild, roller-coaster of a campaign.

Jumping the Orc

Remember that episode of Happy Days where Fonzie jumped over the horde of Uruk-Hai? Me too. It was never the same after that, was it? And as long as we're waxing nostalgic, here's another blast from my "Live and Let Dice" column. This one is from November of 2004 and it's called....

JUMPING THE ORC

November 3, 2004

A friend of mine was telling me about his D&D campaign. "Yeah, we're up to the 33rd level now," he said.

I boggled. The thirty third level???

"Well, we did start the campaign at 10th level."

I still boggled. I don't think I've ever been in a game of Dungeons & Dragons where we got past ninth level, mainly because I've never been in a game which lasted that long.

This got me to thinking. When do you end a game? When do you know that the campaign has long enough? When has your role-playing game jumped the orc?

Probably the biggest terminator of campaigns is TURNOVER. A couple players leave the group, either from internal friction or scheduling conflicts or discovering girls or whatever and suddenly you have a big hole in your party. With a big enough group, this might not be a problem. "During the night, the Paladin received a vision from his deity telling him he's been transferred to third shift, so he's gone off on a separate quest." Or: "Torgil unexpectedly got turned to stone, so he's going to be a statue until his girlfriend lets him game with us again." Or more subtly, "Suddenly, in the middle of the forest, Gunther got hit by a truck."

Sometimes the hole is difficult to fill. "Okay, we lost our paladin, our half-ogre ranger and our our drow ninja. We still have the halfling and the gnomish cleric. So, who's ready to tackle the Elder Wyrm?" Even the loss of a single player can doom a game, if it's the right player. If, for example, you've built your campaign around a specific character and his quest, you kind of need that character. I once joined a group where, after my second or third game, the GM hosting it left her husband and ran off to another state. That sort of killed the game.

An empty seat in the dining room is pretty easy to spot, but some game-killers are less obvious. The most insidious is BURNOUT; when the GM or the group gets tired of the campaign or the GM just runs out of ideas. Hack & slash games rarely have this problem because the GM can always dig out the Monster Manual and throw more critters at his group; but a more plot-based campaign requires a little more skull work in setting up story and creating interesting NPCs. Even the old reliable dungeon crawl will come to the point where the players say "Awww... not the legion of undead berserker beholders AGAIN!!!"

Related to Burnout, but in a more positive way, we have ATTAINMENT. With Burnout, the GM has run out of ideas. With Attainment, the players have Gone About as Fer as They Kin Go. Characters often have goals, and how they strive to attain these goals provide the GM with a good source of plot material. They could be as simple as "I want go gain enough XP to advance to the next level", or as dramatic as "I want to avenge the death of my brother", or "I want to clear my name of the crime I did not commit", or, as is often the case with my wife's characters, "I want to marry that cute megalomaniac who wants to rule the world!"

Once the players achieve their goals, the GM can try to create new goals to pursue. After all, a half-elf barbarian/druid's reach must exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for? But the attainment of an important goal can also be used as a good excuse to retire the character or even the game. If you think of the game as a novel, plot your storyline will be the most important event in the characters' lives. That's why sequels so rarely work; it's hard to top a satisfying conclusion to a story.

I once played in a campaign where our group had been duped by an evil NPC named Lord Raldigan Cheese, (actually it was Raldigan Monterey, but we really disliked him so we called him "Lord Cheese"), into unleashing Ultimate Evil into the world. The campaign became a long quest to once again imprison the Evil. Okay. So we did it. We hunted down Lord Cheese, killed him and stuffed the Evil back into its box. Yippee. Then Lord Cheese came back. And we did it again. Then he got better again. By this time the players were about ready to dip the GM himself in fondue.

Looking back on that campaign, I can see that the GM wanted to continue it, but he couldn't think of any threat to top Ultimate Evil. So he had to keep bringing Ultimate Evil back. He would have done better to simply end the campaign the first time we beat the Big Baddie.

When I get to a point where I'm ready to close off a game, I try to steer it towards a big CLIMAX, in which the individual characters meet their goals and the overall goal of the campaign is attained. That way the game has a good bang at the end so you know when to clap. Sometimes this takes some steering. The "Uncanonical X-Pals" campaign I ran recently with my wife Lute navigated at least three major plot climaxes which could have made good stopping points for the game but either it was too soon, or there were too many loose end in the plot to be addressed or something. Then, when I was ready to wrap things up, it took me several more sessions to set up a climactic conflict that would top what had gone on before. It took some doing, but it was a memorable and satisfying conclusion to a fun campaign.

Ideally, when one campaign ends, you like to have ANOTHER IDEA for a game ready to take it's place. This could be a matter of another player wanting to run something, or the GM wants to try a different genre or system as a change of pace, or someone bought a new suppliment or system that he's just dying to try out. If your group has more than one GM, very often you will wind up with more than one campaign running at the same time, with the GM's taking turns whose game the group will play each session. (In one group I used to game with, the first couple hours of each session was spent voting on what game we would play).

Often in a situation like this, the newer, fresher idea will supplant the older campaign. There is nothing wrong with this; Role-playing games grow, mature and fade, to be replaced by new campaigns. It's all part of the Circle of Life.

But on the other hand, there's no rule that says a campaign has to end at a certain point. As long as the GM and the players are enjoying a game, let it ride. Even up to the Thirty-third Level and Beyond.

And if you have any thoughts or remarks about gaming, cartoons or the Fonz, please leave a comment! I live for feedback!

Nil Desparandum!

"Hey, Babe, What's Your Alignment?"

More stuff from my "Live and Let Dice" archives. This piece, from July 16 2004, discusses one of the most distinctive features of D&D, the alignment system.

"Hey, Babe! What's Your Alignment?"

July, 16, 2004

By Kurt Wilcken

It had been several months since I had last played my halfling thief, Frisco Flagons, in Fredd's AD&D campaign, and he warned me that some interesting things had developed during my absence. The party's cleric, an excruciatingly cutesey halfling druid named Caerduin Bando and played by Fredd's then-girlfriend, was telling everyone that she and Frisco were engaged. So when Frisco came back into town, everyone kept congratulating him and he had no idea why until he met Caerduin's father passing out invitations in the local tavern.

Now when Frisco finally confronted Caerduin (at the honeymoon cottage her father had built for them), the logical thing to do would have been to come out and tell her, he didn't want to marry her; but instead of telling her how he really felt, he tried talking his way out of the situation. Big mistake.

While the wily halfling was talking himself deeper and deeper, the village priest who was supposed to perform the ceremony showed up. Before Frisco could bolt out the window, Caerduin said in her cutesey-sweet lilt: "I cast Word of Command... MARRY!"

Now this raised an interesting dilemma for Fredd. Could the "Word of Command" spell be used in such a fashion? Bryon and Cath, the other players that day, were more concerned with the ethical question. "You can't do that!" Cath said. "You're Lawful Good! That goes against your alignment!"

"No I'm not," Caerduin smiled sweetly and held up her character sheet. "See? Druids are Neutral!!!"

* * * * *

The Dungeons & Dragons alignment system is one of the most distinctive aspects of the game; an attempt to provide a moral framework for a game which, when you come right down to it, is mainly about killing things and stealing treasure. It does so by classifying a character's behavior according to nine distinctive alignments based on two scales: Good vs. Evil, and Law vs. Chaos.

Law and Chaos are familiar enough concepts to anyone who's read the Elric of Melnibone stories by Michael Moorcock, or any of the more mystic DC Comics characters during the 1980s. A Lawful character believes in Following The Rules, adhering to strict moral codes and social mores. A chaotic character rejects the rules of society. He may have his own moral code, but it is a personal one which he will be willing to bend if circumstances warret it.

Good and Evil seem easier to understand, but can be a bit tougher to define, except in an "I-know-it-when-I-see-it" way. Good characters generally treat others with respect, are kind to children and small animals and strive to make the world a better place. Evil characters like to kick puppies, burn down places of worship and turn your favorite books and TV shows into Will Smith movies.

In between the extremes of both scales lies Neutral. A character can be Neutral in regards to Good and Evil, or regarding Law and Chaos, or both (although this last alignment is discouraged). By some interpretations, Neutral characters are concerned with "balance" between the two extremes.

So, putting it all together, we have nine separate alignments: Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, "True" Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil.

One thing this alignment system stresses is that Lawful does not always equal Good and Chaotic does not always equal Evil. Superman or Captain America could be considered Lawful Good characters; they devote themselves to helping people and they respect and obey the law. Dirty Harry from the Clint Eastwood movies is a definite Chaotic Good; he likes to bend the rules in order to pursue justice; but he still would be considered a "Good" alignment.

Going on the other side, an arch villain with a strict code of honor, like Cardinal Richelieu from The Three Musketeers or the Master from Doctor Who would be considered Lawful Evil. Then again, Richleiu is more of a Lawful Neutral type, because does not serve either Good or Evil as much as he does the Interests of the State.

Which brings us to one problem with AD&D alignments: they are open to interpretation and often the players will argue with the Dungeon Master over whether or not a given action really violates the players alignment or not. Actually, some players will argue with the DM no matter what, but that's besides the point.

Ideally, a character's alignment serves as guidelines to keep the player "in-character". If a player acts outside of his alignment, he can face divine consequences. If character goes around killing random peasants for the experience points, the DM has a right to question the guy's "Good" alignment, and an obligation to give the guy some consequences for his actions. In a previous column, I mentioned the game my buddy Fredd ran in which a guy was playing a vampire. Fredd decided that the player was performing too many good deeds to keep his Lawful Evil alignment, and so he had the guy "rewarded" by the gods by losing his vampirism.

It still comes down to interpretation. Some players, for example, would argue that it's okay for a Lawful Good character to torture a prisoner as long as that prisoner was of an Evil alignment. The Players Handbook gives examples of how characters of different alignments would behave, but by neccessity it becomes a judgement call on the part of the players and the DM. "I'm the only person who really plays Lawful Neutral correctly," one rules-lawyer I know likes to boast.

The AD&D rules assumed that players would naturally take Good characters of whatever degree. This is not always the case. "Lawful Good is boring," my wife likes to sniff, and many players agree with her; "It's too limiting." I suspect this was why the character class of Paladin, which is only open to Lawful Good characters, was created; to make that alignment more attractive.

Other players insist that "Playing an Evil alignment gives you an edge!"; that the moral constraints of the Good alignment are a liability in the ruthless orc-eat-orc world of the Dungeon. Running that type of player in the same game with the players who insist "Good characters are morally bound to attack Evil characters on sight!" is an interesting experience, and not for the weak of stomach. Personally, when a player in one of my games shouts "I am EVIL!!!" and begins cackling maniacally, I start preparing consequences to go with their evil acts. That's because, well, I guess I'm evil too.

The whole matter of character alignment brings up serious questions of Geek Philosophy. I find it difficult to define Absolute Good and Evil without resorting to moral codes, and a code by it's very existence implies Law, which defeats the whole purpose of having two axes on the Alignment Chart.

And then there's the whole "Neutral" thing. The system gets kind of mushy in the center of the chart. A person might well devote his life to doing good. A villain might devote his life to the pursuit of evil, although he probably wouldn't think of it that way. But apart from Karla the Grey Witch from Record of Lodoss War, who the heck devotes his life to "Balance"?

Kevin Siembieda came up with an alternative alignment system for his Palladium System, the basis for the ROBOTECH RPG's and the popular RIFTS game of the '90s. The Palladium alignment system is divided into categories of Good and Evil, like AD&D's system, but instead of Neutral alignment, Palladium has "Selfish," for characters who are not exactly out to harm others; but who are just "looking out for Number One."

Each category is then subdivided further. Good into Principled and Scrupulous: Selfish into Unprincipled and Anarchist; and Evil into Miscreant, Aberrant and Diabolic. In the system, each category is given a list of qualities to help define it; how the character regards things like lying, violence, and situational ethics. The list allows the GM and the player to compare the different alignments and get a better feel for them.

For example, a Principled character will always keep his word, avoid lies and never kill or attack an unarmed foe. An Unprincipled character would keep his word of honor, but would lie and cheat if necessary, especially to those of anarchist and evil alignments. He would not kill an unarmed foe, but would take advantage of one. A Miscreant character will not necessarily keep his word to anyone, will lie and cheat indiscriminately, and would kill an unarmed foe as readily as he would a potential threat or competitor

The Palladium alignment system isn't as elegant or symmetrical as the AD&D system, but it's a bit more realistic and easier to apply.

Most game systems dispense with alignment altogether and find other ways to define a character's morals. In point-based games where you buy abilities, players assemble their eithics piece by piece. In the CHAMPIONS / HERO System, you buy your attributes, abilities and skills with Character Points. You get points back for each Limitation you take. These can by physical limitations, such as "Vulnerable to Red McGuffinite", but they are often psychological.and express the character's moral outlook. "Code Against Killing" is a common limitation in a comic book superhero game.

The GURPS system works in a similar fashion, but they have a huge glorious shopping list of neuroses, abberations and hang-ups to choose from as Disadvantages. They include not only negative disadvantages such as Phobias and Odious Personal Habits, but also positive ones like Honesty and Truthfulness. The reason why these are classified as "Disads" is because they limit a character's behavior. A hero with Pacifism will have to come up with some other way to take out Doctor Entropy besides blowing his head off..

Of course you'll always get players who say: "What if I just kill the villain and feel bad about it later?" The wise Game Master will always make sure that consequences follow the players actions, whether they are true to the alignment or not. My friend Cath, who with her husband ran several CHAMPIONS campaigns when I lived in Iowa, regarded "Lack of Code vs. Killing" just as big a limitation as "Code vs. Killing." A hero who indiscriminately kills his enemies is going to face problems. The authorities will not look kindly on him. Depending on whom he kills, the public might support him but they'll probably consider him a menace. And what if he kills an innocent, or even someone whose guilt is questionable?

In the classic realms of Sword & Sorcery things are a little easier. You're expected to kill orcs; that's what they're there for. Here the AD&D Alignment System provides a helpful guide to Who It's Okay To Slay. Still, it never hurts to throw in a surprise now and then. The death of that necromancer you just fought freed all his zombie minions to wreak havok on the countryside. The brigand whose band of outlaws you just exterminated was the Duke's brother-in-law and now you have a price on your head. Sometimes doing the right thing, even if you're acting in accordance with your allignment, has unintended consequences.

Perhaps the most useful application of the Alignment System is as a tool for running the NPCs. A monster or a non-player character's alignment gives the DM a capsule summary of how to play him. Is the goblin liable to help the players or try to kill them? Is this a friendly dragon or a hungry one?

In the end, Character Alignment is a tool. It's a handy label to classify a character. Whether it's good or bad depends on how well it serves the need of the game, and upon the Game Master who is using it. Personally I tend toward Lawful Silly, but that's just me.

* * * * *

But what of Frisco Flagons? How did he escape Caerduin's marital trap? Find the answer here. And please, feel free to leave a comment. I live for feedback!

Nil Desparandum

Dice Capades

Another trip down memory lane. This piece ran in my "Live and Let Dice" column on March 29, 2004 and is about a rite of passage of sorts in my family. The day we took our daughter to buy her very first set of polydice. Ah yes. The family that games together, goes to Perdition's flames together. Or something like that. And some musing on dice in general:

Dice Capades

March 2004

By Kurt Wilcken

We performed a rite of passage of sorts this week. My wife Lute and I bought our daughter her first set of polydice.

Gamera Rose has been playing Dungeons & Dragons with us for about half a year now and I figured it was high time she got some dice of her own. Hitherto she's been borrowing my dice and we invariably wind up having to pass the good d20, (the gold sparkly one with the legible numbers), back and forth across the table. This is complicated by the fact that, like many children, Gamera suffers from the instinctive assumption that the further a die rolls the better the result, and so sharing dice with her invariably means chasing rogue dice all over the world.

So when we were out doing our Saturday afternoon shopping, we stopped at Victory Games, the local gaming shop here in Sheboygan, to peruse their selection. Lute took her straight to the counter where the dice sets were kept and began drooling. They didn't look twice at the garish rainbow-colored dice or the ebony 6-siders with skulls in place of the "1's". Lute knew exactly what she wanted.

She's the same way in jewelry shops. My wife likes colored stones with personality. "Diamonds are dull," she likes to say. (She doesn't care for Carol Channing either). She prefers stones like opals and iolites that are enigmatic rather than aristocratic; colored stones with fire and unique iridescences. She carries these same preferences over to the dice that she uses, and while she was helping Gamera choose, she saw a set that caught her own eye: a set of crystal clear dice with black numerals and iridescent centers that sparkle with color when held to the light.

Everybody has their own preferences with dice. Lute and I both prefer six-siders with numerals rather than pips. When rolling 3d6 in Champions or GURPS, I like the dice to match for purely aesthetic reasons. (When rolling fistfuls of damage dice, naturally I don't have that luxury!) Lute has a set of "good dice" that she uses for GURPS and a set of "evil dice" for AD&D. Another friend of ours used to boast that he had his D&D dice trained to always roll high numbers, and indeed, he used to roll critical successes with alarming frequency.

We all know players who believe that some dice are lucky and always roll high; others roll low. I suspect part of the reason why classic AD&D has such a peculiar system where sometimes high is good and sometimes bad, was to neutralize the effects of "lucky" dice. Of course all a player has to do is keep one set of dice for his THAC0 Rolls and another for Saving Throws, but then there's always a loophole somewhere.

Some players don't like it when other people handle their dice. This goes beyond the reasonable fear that the dice become accidentally or intentionally lost, to a sense, whether conscious or not, that the dice might become "polluted"; that somehow their karma might be shifted from rolling successes to rolling failures.

Like everybody else, I've seen dice confound the bell curve. Just last Sunday in a GURPS game I ran, a group of NPC thugs my players were fighting rolled critical failures, natural 18's on a roll of three d6's, twice within a span of ten minutes, followed by a near-critical failure after that. But I don't worry too much about lucky or unlucky dice in my game. I shrug, with the simple faith in the Law of Averages that These Things Even Out. The whole point of using a random element like dice in a game is that you never know what will happen.

Back in my youth, I kept my gaming dice in a small leather pouch that I could tie to my belt. Yeah, it was a cheesy D&D-type thing, to pretend I had a bag of jewels just like an adventurer; but it looked cool. The leather thongs tying up the pouch also had a tendency to come untied and I lost the pouch once at a convention. After Lute and I married we pooled our dice into a large velvet bag. Once she bought a dice pouch and embroidered a dragon on it; (Lute specializes in dragons). Currently we each keep our dice in small wooden hinged boxes that we bought cheap at Wally World. She painted a dragon on hers; I painted mine blue with gold stars.

Unfortunately, her set only came with one d6. So when she plays GURPS with us, she still has to borrow my dice.

Well then, she gets the dice with the pips.

The Care and Feeding of Mary Sues

Here's another blast from the past: my "Live and Let Dice" column from 12/27/2003. It's all about a type of player I refer to as a "Mary Sue" but which is also sometimes called a "Munchkin". Incredibly, I was unfamiliar with the latter term when I wrote the piece; or perhaps I was more used to the former because I was doing online gaming with people more familiar with fanfics.

In any case, here is my take on a perennial problem:

The Care and Feeding of Mary Sues

December, 2003

By Kurt Wilcken

The term comes from fan fiction. A "Mary Sue" is a story in which the main character is an idealized fantasy version of the author. Veteren fan-ficcers tend to look down upon "Mary Sues" as hopelessly amateurish, which isn't exactly fair. All authors project themselves into their works and base characters on aspects of themselves. Charles Dickens did this with David Copperfield. Mark Twain did it with Tom Sawyer. Of course neither David Copperfield nor Tom Sawyer ever got to date Mister Spock.

(Some pedants have attempted to create a male equivalent for the term, such as "Harry Lou" or "Larry Q." I feel this is unnecessary. A "Mary Sue" is a "Mary Sue" no matter what the gender.)

Classic "Mary Sue" characters tend to be talented, intelligent, and charismatic. They were top of their class at Starfleet Academy. They are natural Quidditch players. They have a telepathic bond with their pet Rigellian Octo-kitty. Their breath is naturally fresh and their teeth glint when they smile.

Some RPG players I know who are also fan fic writers have borrowed the term for a gaming character who is all-powerful and uber-competent. You know the kind I mean: the Barbarian with a Dex of 18, a Strength of 27 and a Magical Sword +3 vs. Anyone Who Annoys Me; the Wizard who has every spell in the book inscribed in a Ring of Memorex; the Ninja who doesn't actually have to go on adventures because he has an army of animated shadows to do his bidding for him. Usually we call them Power Gamers.

So why didn't I say so in the first place? I suppose because Power Gamers have a certain innate coolness. Nobody likes someone else who is a Power Gamer, but when you're the Power Gamer, why that's something else entirely. Try this experiment: Stand in front of a mirror, look yourself in the eye, and say in a loud, clear voice: "I am a POWER GAMER!!! Fear my dice! Bwa-ha-hah!!!"

Felt good, didn't it?

Now try standing in front of the mirror and shouting, "I am a MARY SUE!!! Fear my dice! Bwa-ha-hah!!!"

It just isn't the same.

(Oh, and don't try this experiment unless you're sure your parents, significant other or non-gaming friends can't observe you doing it. They Won't Understand.)

(Too late? Oo. Hard cheese, old man.)

So, what should GM do who finds himself dealing with a Mary Sue? There are several options. The most obvious option is to DRAW BATTLE LINES.

I briefly played in one group where the GM had a sign in her gaming room reading "The DM's Word is Law." She declared that her games would be run strictly by the book and that she would put up with no attempts to bend the rules. The end result, of course, was that her players became consummate rules lawyers and would get into arguments with her over said rules.

My wife Lute and I entered her D&D game with first-level characters. All the other players were 8th Level or higher, and we often found ourselves standing to the side while the tougher characters fought the monsters. One of her players, a friend of mine who brought us into the group, was playing a 10th Level Assassin with a small entourage of followers. This was the kind of player who justified everything he did by saying "I'm just playing my alignment" and if questioned would claim that he was the only one who truly played the D&D alignment system correctly.

The higher-level members of the party encountered a big-time boss monster. In the ensuing fight, the monster struck the Assassin with a +4 Hammer of Irresistable Force or some such thing. The GM rolled a Critical Success, which under normal circumstances should do the target some serious ouch. The Assassin, however, announced that he was wearing his Helm of Utter Invulnerability and therefore took no damage.

"You took a Critical Hit!" the GM argued, "Of course you took damage!"

"The Helm of Utter Invulnerability protects the wearer from all damage. It says so in the book. I have it on my character sheet."

The two of them argued back and forth for a good fifteen minutes. It might not have harmed the Assassin, but it sure killed the game.

So direct confrontation is not always the answer. A better approach might be to CHANGE THE RULES.

My buddy Fredd tells the story of the first D&D game he ran. His brother and his friends had developed a system for dealing with dragons. First the magic-user of the group would send an illusion of the party into the dragon's lair. After the dragon had wasted it's breath attack on the illusion, the party would rush in and attack.

So Fredd had the party come across a red dragon snoozing in a dungeon. As usual they sent an illusion ahead of them. The dragon opened one eye and said, "Do you think I'm so stupid that I don't know an illusion when I see it?"

The party had to think for a change. After some discussion, they tried a direct attack. The dragon breathed his firey breath on them and the party managed to dodge the worst of the attack. Now, they thought, they could attack the dragon safely.

"Goodness me! The dragon said, "I've used up my breath attack! The only thing I can do now is... use my OTHER breath attack!!! RARRRR!!!"

"That's no fair!" the players complained. "That dragon only gets one breath attack per day!"

"I'm special!!!" the dragon roared.

The party wound up running out of the dragon's lair, but to their surprise the dragon followed them. He couldn't squeeze through the dungeon passages very well, and the party could easily out-run him, but he kept after them. Every time the party paused to rest, they could hear the dragon down the hall yelling, "Come back here ya little gits!" (Or he might have called them something that rhymes with gits. It was something like that). In any case, the encounter challenged their expectations and resulted in a game more enjoyable to everyone.

Fredd had one cardinal rule for dealing with Mary Sues: when a player asks for something you think is unreasonable, LET THEM HAVE IT. And then let them deal with the consequences.

In one of his games, a player wanted to be Elric of Melnibone, the classic Michael Moorcock character. Fredd temporized. "You can be someone like Elric." "Can I have a sword that sucks the souls of it's victims?" "Okay, okay."

So "Elric" got a magic sentient sword that could devour souls. And it talked to him. "Feed me, Elric," the sword would say in the voice of the plant from "Little Shop of Horrors", and it would tell him who to kill: the minotaur around the corner; the band of orcs waiting in ambush; the harmless NPC peasant he met in the road. With a good role-player, this could have led to some interesting character conflict as he struggled between his conscience and the demands of his bloodthirsty blade. As it was, our Elric just did what the sword told him to. Before long, half the party was ready to kill him.

In another game, one of his players thought it would be cool to play a vampire. "I'm gonna be one of the Lords of Ravenloft!" he boasted. "But I thought under Ravenloft rules once you become a Lord you're automatically an NPC," I said. "Oh, Fredd said it's okay." I caught a glimpse of Fredd's evil smirk and knew he had things well in hand.

So the guy got to be a vampire. He got his cool vampire powers. He got to enslave a hot vampire babe to his will, (woo-hoo!). He got a castle and hunchbacked minion named Igor. And after a couple months worth of games adventuring with the party, Fredd decided to give him some consequences too.

The gods appeared to the vampire and informed him that because of all the Good Actions he had been performing with the other adventurers, they decided to reward him by removing his curse. All of a sudden, his cool vampire powers were gone, Igor was planting flowers around the castle and worst of all, his sexy vampire babe had become modest and virtuous! "Nooooo!!!!!"

The game Teenagers From Outer Space has a special rule for Power Gamers. "Like real life we reward mediocrity by grading on the curve." Anyone who tries to overload his character's attributes and abilities risk invoking the Too Much rule. At the start of play, the GM arbitrarily chooses a number. If anyone succeeds in a roll by that amount or more, he is deemed to have succeeded by Too Much. He gets what he wants, and then some. He succeeds in impressing the cute girl from Vega Epsilon, but now she's so enraptured by him that she won't leave him alone. He succeeds in beating that rich kid in a thumb-wrestling tournament, but now the kid is sending his ninja minions for vengence. He succeeds in training his Arcturian Mega-puppy for the dog show, but now the dog is more famous than he is. Success brings its own problems.

Which brings us to perhaps the most satisfying way to deal with a Mary Sue, which is to MOCK HIM. Power Gamers tend to take themselves very seriously. Sometime a little embarrassment is just the thing to teach them to behave. If nothing else, it will entertain the other players who probably have been just dying to see the jerk get his comeuppance.

My wife, Lute, was in an online game once with a particularly annoying Mary Sue. Online games tend to be a blending of RPs and fanfics; they generally lack hard and fast rules and often lack GMs to moderate them and so they tend to be fertile grounds for Mary Sue-ism. In this case the fellow had a bad habit of jumping in and commenting or acting on everybody else's posts, even if his character was supposedly someplace else. In annoyance, Lute changed him into a platypus. It was weeks before she got around to changing him back. Ever since then, every time that player has gotten out of line, she threatens him with becoming a platypus. Incredibly enough, the guy has become resigned to the fact and even puts it in his online sigfile.

If I had been the GM in the situation with my friend the Invulnerable Assassin, I probably would have conceded that his helm did protect him from all harm... but that the Critical blow from his opponent had driven him into the floor like a tent peg. Then I'd let him figure out how to get out. But then it's always easy to be the Monday Morning GM.

But having said all this, the GM has to keep in mind that the most important thing is to have fun. We all game to enjoy a bit of wish-fulfillment and so to a certain extent all RPG characters are Mary Sues. The only time Mary Sues absolutely have to be dealt with at all is when they wreck the GM's plot and interfere with the enjoyment of others and even then, the latter event is more serious than the former. With proper care and tending, even a Mary Sue can be a constructive part of an entertaining game.

Fear my dice.

Nil Desparandum.

Live and Let Dice: Creative Plagiarism

Another piece from my "Live and Let Dice" column. This one originally appeared November 30, 2003:

Creative Plagiarism

November 2003

By Kurt Wilcken

Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work Evade your eyes!
Remember why the Good Lord Made your eyes!
So don't shade your eyes,
But Plagiarize! Plagiarize!
--But always remember to be calling it RESEARCH!

Tom Lerher, Lobachevsky

True, there are some instances where you do not want to commit plagarism. If you are a journalist or a respected historian, people tend to look at you askance when you forget to credit your sources; and if you want to sell your first novel, it would be best not to name your boy magician hero "Larry Potter." And don't even get me started on Russian mathematicians.

But to role-playing gamers, imitation is more than the sincerest form of flattery; it's our very life blood. Long before E. Gary Gygax put J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Howard and Fritz Lieber into a blender and poured out Dungeons & Dragons, or the first kid uttered the words "How come I always have to be Tonto?" kids have been stip mining popular culture to use in their games. It's as American as Tom Sawyer and his friends into playing Robin Hood and King Arthur.

This is not always acceptable, as Gygax found out when the Tolkien estate objected to some of his borrowings. That's why D&D has orcs and halflings, words found in old english literature, but not hobbits, a name invented by Tolkien. For that matter, references to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu Mythos and Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar stories that were in the original Dungeons & Dragons were also cut out or modified so that the serial numbers no longer showed.

(Phil Foglio did a funny comment on this in one of his old "What's New" cartoons in Dragon Magazine. He visits TSR's Legal Department and overhears one person say "My boyfriend gave me a engagement circular-metal-band!" Another person says, "Look at the children outside playing Circular-metal-band-Around-the-Rosie". Yet another guy yells, "Someone answer the phone! It's circular-metal-banding!" Phil comments: "Still having trouble with the Tolkien estate, I see.")

Although copying will get you a frenzy of salivating lawyers snarling "trademark infringement" if you publish, it can be safely done in the privacy of your home. With a little imagination, it can even be done creatively.

RPG Plagarism (or homage, to use the Politically Correct term) can be divided into two categories: generally speaking, players do it for their characters and GM's do it for their plots

A lot of gamers base their characters off existing ones. If you're going to make your character a feral berserker with rapid healing powers, keen senses and unbreakable metal claws, you might as well just call him "Wolverine" and be done with it. My friend Bryon, who with his wife has run several comic book-based Champions games, likes to say that some actors have an ambition to play Hamlet and that RPG's give him the opportunity to play Captain America.

Apart from the fun of playing your favorite hero, pre-existing characters also have another advantage: they have a ready-made backstory. Not all players care for this. Many prefer to create an original character. Most of the time I do too, but having the character's history and personality already established saves a lot of effort. It gives both the player and the Game Master a feeling for the character from the very beginning and presents the GM with ready-made NPC's and plot possibilities.

Granted, this works better in some games that in others. Game systems designed around choosing abilities and attributes, such as GURPS or HERO, lend themselves well to building characters to match an existing one; games based on archetypes or character classes, such as Dungeons & Dragons don't. The Third Edition D&D rules have a greater emphasis on skills, which gives it a little more flexibility than the classic AD&D, but the system is still designed around character classes. This isn't to say that character borrowing in D&D is impossible, just somewhat limited compared to more flexible systems and gameworlds.

Game Masters can also swipe characters. This is obvious; if a GM is running a game based on X-MEN, his players shouldn't be surprised to encounter Magneto; in fact, they should demand it. But the GM doesn't have to limit himself to opponents. If a player is running Batman, then Alfred is probably lurking nearby as a Non-Player Character; likewise, Spider-Man has Aunt May and Ranma Saotome has his father Genma. (Yes, I once had a player actually volunteer to play Ranma in a Teenagers From Outer Space campaign! You have to admire a guy who's willing to take a bucket of water in the face for the plot).

The GM can also build plots and sub-plots off elements in the character's background. In a WWII-era game I ran once, my brother Steeve was playing Doc Savage. I built a nice wicked plot around his "Crime College" where he rehabilitated criminals by surgically removing their criminal tendencies. (Some of my players were rather startled by Doc's rehabilitation techniques: "You do what???" "I remove their Crime Gland," Steeve replied with a perfectly straight face.)

One of my role models in the practice of Creative Plagarism is comics writer Roy Thomas, who for decades has fought the good fight keeping Golden Age comics alive in the present day. Roy was one of the first wave of comic book creators who had been a comics fan himself and he made a career out of taking characters and plots from the books he loved as a kid and incorporating them in to current stories. He didn't just limit himself to old comic book characters either. He once wrote a storyline in THOR based of Wagner's Ring of the Niebelung and in YOUNG ALL-STARS paid homage to material as disparate as Philip Wylie's Gladiator, (the pulp novel which inspired Superman), and H.P. Blavatsky's The Book of Dyzan with a cameo by Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.

A good example of Roy's technique can be found in an issue of YOUNG ALL-STARS where the heroes visit a secret government laboratory hidden beneath the Statue of Liberty. Apart from the main plot, (which involved the Ultra-Humanite trying to steal a new terrifying body), the story gave us connections to other bits and pieces of the DC Universe circa WWII. We learn that a scientist at this lab built Robotman, a member of the All-Star Squadron; this lab also created the "Creature Commandos", a group of DC's weird war heroes based on classic monsters. Over there sleeping in a coma is an obscure hero named Miss America, and in the big hanger we have a live T-rex captured by American troops on a strange Pacific island that was the setting for the "War That Time Forgot" tales; and next to that, an unnamed gigantic ape who fell off the Empire State Building back in the '30s.

Now of those elements, only the dinosaur and Miss America became relevant to the plot, but the other references gave the lab more believability (well, as believable as a secret government laboratory under the Statue of Liberty can be) by adding what Pooh-Bah called Corroborative Detail. (And yes, I swiped that secret lab for the first Justice League International game I ran. King Kong came back to life and battled the JLI!)

I developed a reputation for strange crossovers in our group. I had the JLI fight everybody from Dr. Loveless from The Wild Wild West to the Misfits of Science. (Hey, I liked Misfits of Science!).

The downside of character lifting is that you have to know when to stop. If every PC in your game is an existing character with his own supporting cast, you'll find yourself up to your eyebrows in NPC buddies. When my brother played Doc Savage in my WWII game, I left his five assistants out of the game except for occasional cameos. (If I'm running too many NPC's, I start arguing with myself. My wife finds this amusing, but I try to avoid it because I never know how to stop).

Sometimes, the crossover characters just don't work. In one of Bryon's super hero games I thought it would be fun to play Jonny Quest as an adult. I drew him with a dapper mustache like his dad's and gave him a robotic version of Bandit. For laughs, I wrote down that he was dating Penny, the niece from Inspector Gadget. So Bryon introduced her into one game along with her bumbling uncle. That was the dreaded Dr. Zin / Dr. Claw Team-up, which provoked another friend of mine to say "If Popeye the Sailor shows up, I'm walking!"

A less obvious practice than lifting characters from other sources is borrowing plots. On a few occasions I've taken favorite mystery stories and altered them to fit my campaign. The only problem is that you have to choose a plot your players are unfamiliar with, but even then you can still get away with it if you modify the plot enough to confound their expectations.

That is where we get to the Creative part of Creative Plagiarism. I once worked as an artguy for a small weekly newspaper. We used a lot of clip art for advertisements and spot illustrations there and our art director gave me a useful piece of advice: Never use clip art straight; always modify it in some way to make it different, to make it your own. I use the same philosophy when I'm stealing... that is, when I'm borrowing material in my games. I always try to tweak, warp or otherwise mutate the source material to make special. I figure if Hollywood can give Spider-Man organic web-shooters, then I can give replace Bucky with Rex the Wonder Dog as Captain America's sidekick.

The most satisfying use of stealing plots is fixing them. I think everybody has read a story that bugged them. Bryon's wife Cath really hated the X-Men storyline from the late '80s where the team faked their own death and went into hiding; so she ran a game which explored what the ramifications of that would be. Likewise, I once ran a JLI game that attempted to explain the mess with Monarch from the DC's ARMAGEDDON 2001 crossover. Swiping a plot and reworking it to your liking is the best revenge against a bad story.

Properly used, plagiarism can be the Game Master's best friend; as long as he remembers to use it creatively.

Nil desparandum!