Nederlands Week

I've been in the Netherlands for ten years now, and I'm fluent in Dutch.  I can understand it, I can read it, I can write it, and I can speak it, certainly good enough that the government is willing to hand me my NT2 (Nederlands als Tweede Taal aka "Dutch as Second Language"), a certificate that shows I'm "good enough" in Dutch to go to school here and so on.

But there's a difference between being able to speak a language, and being able to speak a language well.  One issue I face, as an English speaker, is that everyone in the Netherlands speaks English, and so I never actually need to speak Dutch if I don't want to.  In fact, I could probably go the rest of my life without speaking Dutch, except to little old ladies or peculiar foreigners that live in the Netherlands, know Dutch, but never learned English.  However, when I applied for a job as a help desk guy, I was turned away because my Dutch wasn't good enough to explain complex things to Dutch people in their native language (and I agreed with their assessment).  At this point,  I decided I needed to do something.  I needed to learn to speak Dutch more fluently, more beautifully, more naturally.  The only way to truly master a language is simply to speak it, over and over again, as much as possible.

And so Nederlands Week (Dutch Week) was born.  The first week of the month, Monday through Friday, I speak nothing but Dutch.  I reasoned that if I had to speak Dutch for an hour a day, or one day a week, I simply wouldn't talk much during that time, but over a whole week, I'd have to speak, and so I'd have to learn.  I've been doing this since February, and you can already notice the difference.  Where I used to stammer a great deal, now I speak more fluidly, with a proper rhythm and a broader vocabulary.  I still struggle with verb tenses (Dutch has an annoying habit of sticking both secondary verbs at the end of a sentence ("Ik moet mijn boek meenemen") and some constructions simply stick all the verbs at the end, but they're the standard verbs, so they're not infinitives, and you still have to conjugate ("Omdat ik een student ben") and I'm forever mixing those two elements up), and constructing really large sentences (the equivalent of sentences like "I am studying Dutch not because I enjoy it, but because I need it." in Dutch would, for me, be a nightmare), but it's beginning to come together, bit by bit, piece by piece, until it becomes second nature to me.  I'll never speak Dutch beautifully, not as beautifully as I speak English, and I've accepted that, but it's still a worthy goal, I think.

The reaction from my Dutch friends has been interesting.  Nearly all of them have heard of Nederlands Week, and they really enjoy it when it comes around.  They'll even criticize one another for speaking English during Nederlands Week (even though it isn't about listening to Dutch, for me, but about letting me speak Dutch).  In some ways, it's sort of turned into a celebration of Dutch.  Several people have commented that they simply appreciate that I'm making an effort to speak their language.  One or two, I think, take this far, criticizing me for not having learned more Dutch more quickly or not speaking Dutch for 2 weeks out of the month, for all the time, but most people are very supportive and enjoy it.  That makes Dutch week something to look forward to, which is odd.

The hardest part, for me, is the transition.  Remembering that it's Nederlands Week is a bit difficult, and I often fall back into English on the first day.  Peculiarly, the opposite is true too: When Nederlands Week is done, I find I still tend to think in Dutch, I still want to try to translate what I'm going to say, and sometimes I forget to speak English.  I take that as a good sign.  Eventually, I won't need Dutch week, I think.  I'll just speak Dutch whenever I'm out with other Dutch people.  That'll be an experience...

I still have a long way to go.  Perhaps next time I discuss Nederlands Week, I'll do it in Dutch.  I'm sure my Dutch readers will enjoy that!  But for now, I'm just glad that my Nederlands Week is over (it can be exhausting, though it's getting less exhausting).

The Art of Storytelling Part 2: Rhetorical Techniques

We've already talked about what to say in our previous Art of Storytelling, but how you say it is as important as what you say.  The Art of Storytelling is essentially the same as other forms of public speaking, other forms of rhetoric.  An effective politician's speech uses the same techniques you should to capture your audience's attention, to hold their fascination, to carry them along with your words and bring them to a new world of your devising.  Proper storytelling is a form of physical performance.  Your players listen to you, like an audience listens to a musician, but they also watch you, the way an audience watches an actor.  Done properly, storytelling becomes a multimedia presentation that engages several of your audience's senses at once.

Allow me to illustrate.  At a recent Tea@Knight, we had a discussion of mysteries. The presenter sat in a far corner of the room, his shoulders hunched, his head low, and his tone rushed and mumbled.  The listeners in the room sat awkwardly, looking at one another, unengaged and even whispering among themselves about other topics.  When the presenter ran out of material, he essentially called out for help and I took over.  I already sat in the center of the room, and it didn't take much for my low, loud voice to capture the attention of the players.  Most people I know I have a lot of "presence" and "charisma," and those quickly turned the night into a productive one.  But "presence" and "charisma" are meaningless words that refer to a skill at speech and rhetoric, an understanding of how to capture an audience's attention.  I have no innate characteristics that help me in this regard (other than my height and the physical strength of my voice), just skill and understanding.  The fumbling presenter in question could perform just as well as I did, with practice.

Rule 1: Command Attention


You can't tell a story if nobody is listening to you, period.  Gamers are an unruly bunch at the best of times, quoting geeky films, chatting with one another, interrupting the game with jokes and so on.  Allowed to run its course, most of these well-intentioned interruptions will ruin the game, eventually.  However, if you learn to command attention properly, the distractions will fade away until you have a table of players who fixate their attention almost exclusively on you, and they'll become lost in your imaginary world space, which is exactly what you want.

Occupy the physical center of attention.  If you sit on the edge of the room, out of eyeshot, then people won't know to look at you.  They'll naturally look elsewhere.  We've already talked about how powerful a human's sense of sight is.  As they say, out of mind.  Your players will find their train of thought wandering if you don't anchor it.  I personally prefer to either sit in a unique chair (if everyone else is on the couch, I sit on the recliner), or at the head of the table, and I as well as several other GMs I know, prefer to stand when we really want to occupy the players' attention.  Looking up at the one guy standing in the center of their field of view really holds their attention fast.  Some other GMs use alternate tricks, like flashy GM screens, artwork, or video, and these work too, but be careful that they don't distract from you or the story you're trying to tell.

Your posture matters.  Hunched shoulders, a stiff body and lowered head suggests that you don't want people looking at you, so they won't.  Sit upright or stand tall.  Lift your head and your chin slightly.  Tighten your belly and straighten your spine as though balancing a book on the top of your head.  In addition to improving your height, a tight belly and straight posture improves your breathing and the power of your voice. Also, such a stance suggests confidence, and a good GM must project a sense of leadership and confidence, because the players don't know what's going on and expect you to, and also because pretending to be elves in a forest is a little silly, but if the guy leading such a game doesn't blink once at the silliness, the other players will set aside their embarrassment and play more forthrightly.

Nothing grabs someone attention like eye-contact.  Someone looking into the eyes of someone else is intense, but even looking at someone grabs their attention.  Hiding behind your GM screen, reading off a description is basically the worst thing you can do because you're not looking at the players.  Lift your eyes, look directly at the player to whom the description is most pertinent, and you'll find his eyes fixate on you in return.  But don't let a few players dominate your attention (the danger of a pretty girl and a weakness of mine, I must admit).  Spread that attention around.  Every time a player realizes you're looking at him, he'll look back at you, and you'll recapture his attention.

So, you're standing tall, looking at your players, occupying their attention.  Well done!  But remember that running a game is a touch different than simply telling a story or giving a speech.  Here, your audience participates with you, so you must learn to pass that attention from yourself to other players.  Your actions bring the players into the game, setting the scene, and gathering all of their attention into a single place.  Ideally, every player should invest their attention in you.  Then, when it's someone else's turn, you have only to  gesture to them, passing the baton, and all the players, as one, will turn to this other player.  Your ability to gather attention becomes your ability to gather attention for someone else.  Eye contact is important here too, not just to gain the attention of another player, but to see who is bored, or (more importantly) who is particularly engaged and wants to say something.  If you're in the midst of a description when suddenly you notice one of the players squirming in your seat, you can stop and point to them and say "What do you want to do?"

Rule 2: Pace your speech appropriately


Once you have your player's attention, you can tell the story you want, but how you tell it shapes their perception of it.  A mumbling monotone loses your players not just because they cannot hear you properly, but because a monotone fails to engage them.  We must speak with vigor and emotion, and we must vary our tone.  Doing so will not only engage our players better, but the pace and style of our speech can give the players additional information and manipulate their mood to better suit the tone of the scene.  Music does something similar, and we'll use music as a metaphor for how one can tone and pace ones voice for best effect.

A normal pace, the one you'd use in everyday conversation, is generally informative and neutral in tone.  Such a conversational tone tells your players that the information you give them is casual and not particularly important, such as discussing the weather or what one ate yesterday.  This doesn't mean that it's a poor choice or that it shouldn't be used.  It serves as the baseline for your story and represents common situations. A description of a homey tavern or an unimportant character (or just about anything that isn't urgent or emotionally charged) might be done in a conversational tone.

Music often uses a slow, legato (a musical term meaning flowing and without breaks, like the sort of sound one might associate with a violin) pace to emphasize tragedy or sadness.  Very emotionally charged and depressing scenes should match that pacing.  Sit back, take on a serious expression and then slowly, flowing describe the terrible, tragic events.  The time you take to explain each painful detail resembles the slow, panning shots of a camera, lingering on each element.  This pace also works very well for romantic scenes, and you'll notice many love songs have a similar pacing and tone.

Music often uses a fast, staccato (a musical term meaning sharp and short, like the snap of a drum) pace to emphasize happiness and excitement.  The rapid patter suggests a bounciness.  It's fun, it's quick, la la la WHEE!  This pacing is ideal for comedy, and you'll notice many comedians have a rapid patter punctuated with awkward pauses.  It's also good for parties, flirtation, or anything that is enjoyably exciting without relaxing the players (as a normal, conversational tone would do).

A fast, legato pace is the bread and butter of rock-and-roll, with wailing guitars, howling singers and a very quick pace.  This is the tone of dramatic excitement, danger, epic drama.  You describe war and duels quickly and breathlessly, with few pauses and little time for the players to stop and think.  Every moment flows into the next.  This is a powerful rhetorical style, especially for role-playing games as combat tends to dominate RPGs, and the worst thing most novice GMs do for battle, in my opinion, is sitting back and letting players think.  Keeping up a rapid, fluid patter will enhance the sense of excitement, reminding the players that they battle for their lives.

A slow, staccato pace is very powerful, pronounced and majestic.  You often hear it in national anthems or other regal songs or, in a minor key, in horror movie soundtracks. Rhetorically, slow, pronounced words punctuated with pauses emphasize every word, like the Simpson's Comic Book Guy ("Best. Example. Ever.").  You can use it to simply emphasize what you're saying, to suddenly grab the player's attention, to show them something in startling clarity, but it also builds tension.  Use it when you want something to be stately or horrifying.

Real mastery comes not just from understanding these five paces, but using them in conjunction with one another to create a narrative not just with words, but with the pace of your voice.  A scene begins in a conversational tone as you describe the circumstances, casually and at a normal pace, when suddenly! Enemies attack, a battle described in a a faster, legato manner that keeps the players on their tone, words flowing together as you rapidly string them together.  But the players are winning!  You describe their victory in short bursts!  They're happy!  They're going to survive!  Then... horror... of... horrors!  A valued NPC... struck down... and your words slow, punctuate each moment, in a staccato manner, as though the battle itself slows... as though the players... gain clarity.  And then... you slowly blend your words together as the players bow their head to respectfully send their ally off to the great beyond, a terrible loss for everyone involved.

Likewise, using the wrong pacing for the scene can be interesting too.  An NPC who uses a clinical, conversational tone to describe a murder instantly implies to the players that he's crazy and that he doesn't see murder the same way he does.  Describing something utterly mudane (like button collecting) in a slow and stately manner to exaggerate its importance can suggest that someone takes something a little too seriously, and so on.

Rule 3: Gesture for emphasis

People don't sit around, arms at their side, face rigidly forward telling their story.  Even if you do all of the above, unless you move, unless you prove to your players that you're alive, your story will come across as stiff and unreal, just like you do.  People like motion.  We're conditioned to react to it. It attracts our attention.  Moreover, people naturally move when they speak.  They nod, they smile, they wave their hands around.  You need to do the same.

Gestures, by and large, break down into two broad categories.  First, you have the descriptive gesture.  A descriptive gesture shows the audience what you mean.  When a guy crudely describes a shapely woman, his hands outline her figure, for example, or when someone is describing a friend's tendency to drink too much, he might mime a drinking motion with his hand.  Of the two forms of gestures, this is the most important for role-playing.  You need to show your players how things look, or where they lie in respect to their characters by pointing our outlining.  You can also show characters how the NPCs react by imitating their expressions and actions.  A shy girl would huddle up and bring her hands to her face, so you can do the same.  A big, dumb barbarian would sprawl out with a big sloppy grin on his face, so you can do the same.  Show the players your world through your hands.

The second kind of gestures emphasizes what you say.  These are abstract gestures not meant to show the players something, but to attract their attention and add a little something to what you're saying.  When you're using a legato pace, keep your hands low and roll them, like you're unspooling your speech.  When you're using a staccato pace, point and jab to emphasize your points and drive them home.  You don't need to constantly do this, only at the moments that matter the most, since the motion attracts your audiences attention.

Be careful that you don't distract from what you're saying.  If you point in a direction, players will tend to look in that direction... which might mean they're not looking at you anymore.  You might want that if you want to emphasize the beauty of a grand scene, or if you want to draw the player's attention away from you and towards another player.  Likewise, being excessively animated might make players wonder if you're nervous, and they'll begin to notice the gestures rather than focus on the words they're meant to emphasize.  Use gestures when you need them. Don't be afraid to neglect them during scenes or moments that demand emphasis.

Gestures should come naturally.  People use gestures when speaking with their friends.  People tend to lose them when giving speeches because they are nervous.  Stagefright is a natural response to being put on the spot, which a GM is, but you have to set it aside.  I often suggest that people plan extensively not because they need to plan, but because I know such planning tends to relieve nerves, and a relaxed GM is one that uses gestures effectively.  More than anything, focus on relaxing and growing comfortable at the front of the table, so your gestures come naturally.

If you watch me when I run a game or when I give a talk, you'll note I use these three rules, often without noticing it.  Most skilled GMs do.  Practice them, and you'll have the same "charisma" or "presence" that I do: the ability to keep your players' attention and draw them into a world, not just with what you're saying, but how you're saying it.

The Art of Storytelling Part 1: Dynamic Description and Active Voice

Some of my fans (I have fans!) have prodded me because, after my initial burst of posting, I haven't said anything, so perhaps its time to take some of the thoughts floating around in my head and put them to paper.  So to speak.

Different people run games differently, and I won't complain about that fact.  Role-playing is a craft, not a science, and so multiple approaches can certainly lead to success.  However, I do think role-playing does contain within it certain, immutable gospels, certain approaches that are inherently superior to others, and proper storytelling is one of them.  When I use the term "storytelling," I'm not using it in some pretentious manner that suggests such noxious memes as "role-play, not roll-play."  Nor am I discussing the art of storycraft, though the art of putting together a proper plot is certainly a worthy topic. No, I mean the actual art of exposition, the art of telling the tale, communicating the scene and the world to your players.  Role-playing games lie at the nexus of social activity, wargame, and storytelling, and you need all three to succeed... but I want to note that while a good system can cover your weaknesses as a referee and wargamer, no system will cover a lack of skill in communication, in painting a picture.  So, that's what I'd like to talk about today.

(I'm a Raven at the Knights of the Kitchen Table, one of the "mentor" gamemasters who guides other novice gamemasters and improves them.  This blog post will likely turn into a future Tea@Knight topic, so don't be surprised if you these words later).

I know some people treat RPGs as an extension of a board-game.  They focus exclusively on mechanics in the abstract, and they roleplay by outlining basic scenarios and then stating their response.  I cannot countenance this approach.  I can understand it as a way of understanding how the mechanics work or when playtesting, but for actually playing a game, I believe a certain level of immersion is necessary.  As proof, I point to the enormous success of multi-media games over their text-based counterparts, or the success of movies and comic books over literature (and the success of vividly written literature over beige prose).  People are sensual creatures, and we can only enjoy abstract discussions so deeply before they lose their power to compel our hearts and minds.  If you disagree, then the rest of his post will do nothing for you.

I find that, in fact, most people agree with me.  When a GM lacks vivid description, it is typically not a question of philosophy, but a question of skill.  How does one go about describing things?  How does one translate the visions in one's head into poetic words at the tabletop?

First, one must have a vision to translate.  Your output can only be as good as your input.  You must feed your creativity.  Step outside of your role-playing books for a moment and feast on the world around you.  Have you ever walked in a forest, felt the mossy texture of the ground beneath you or spelled that earthy scent, or scene the way the shadows of the canopy shifts on the forest floor?  Do you know that smell that comes in autumn, that chilly, sharp scent of coming snow?  Have you ever listened to the click of a woman's heels, or the murmur of conversation in a bar?  Many authors spend time just sitting in public places, scribbling notes on the people they see in passing, on the sights and smells around them.  I personally recommend watching movies, anime, TV shows, and hunting for art on the internet.  I include pictures in my NPC gallery precisely to inspire people with different looks than they might normally consider.  By absorbing all this detail, all this sensual beauty, when it comes time to conjure a scene, your well-fed imagination will be up to the task.  And you'll need to repeat this again and again.  Most writers say that if you want to write, you must read a great deal. I say that the same applies, in principle, to GMs.

So, you have an image in your mind.  You can see the character or the scene that you want to describe, but how do you translate that into something you can explain to the players in a way that will fascinate them, bring them on board with your inner fantasy world?  Let's break a scene down, a serving girl at a tavern (a common sight in most fantasy games).

The strongest human sense is sight.  We think in color and images, and even when we tell others to imagine a scene, we say things like "Can you picture it?"  So, what sights do we see?  What colors might a tavern girl have?  Perhaps a spray of red hair, or her soft green dress, or her equally green eyes, the tan of her skin with a hint of freckles, the blush of her cheeks and the cherry-red of her lips.  What about shapes?  Perhaps she is tall, rounded in the right places, with her long skirt obscuring the outline of her legs, but her corset bring her rounded cleavage into view, and her hair curls and bounces.  What about light and shadow?  Perhaps her eyes sparkle, her lips gleam, and the perspiration on her brow glistens.  Does she cast a shadow over the players, or does her skin glow?  Remember, by the way, that light comes from someplace.  Perhaps her eyes glint in the light of the fireplaces.  Perhaps her eyes reflect the candlelight of the room.

So we have sight, but humans have four other senses, often neglected by novice game masters.  What about sound?  What does her voice sound like?  Perhaps she laughs like the tinkling of bells.  Maybe her skirt swishes around her long legs and a small set of bells jangle around her bare feet as they whisper across the sawdust floor.  What about touch?  Touch is a highly erotic sense, so most people neglect it out of fear of sounding a little dirty, but texture and temperature matter and can be dealt with delicately.  Perhaps her dress is coarse but her skin soft.  Perhaps she is warm when she brushes past a player.  Finally, we have smell and taste, which I bundle together for simplicity.  Everyone forgets these, but they matter a great deal, for smell strongly affects our sense of memory.  If you can remind someone of a scent, you bring them there more strongly than any other sense.  Thus, how might she smell?  Perhaps she has the scent of clean, feminine sweat from a hard-days work, with a hint of the kitchen's scents clinging to her clothes, and her hair smells of soap and flowers.

Finally, importantly, we must remember that this girl is alive.  She moves, she interacts with people, and we must present the illusion of her existence convincingly.  Perhaps she wrinkles her nose as she laughs, or steps lightly and delicately as she flits across the floor, carrying a too-wide tray of drinks and dodging the grasp of lonely, drunk men.  We already know her skirts swish and that her hair bounces, but what expression might she have, or how might she cock her hips as she stands there, waiting for your order?

Once we have those details, it's not enough to simply stitch them together into a paragraph.  You'd get something like this:

There is a tavern wench.  She has curly red hair, a green dress, green eyes, dusky skin,freckles, and she's barefoot.  She has a corset that emphasizes her cleavage.  Her skirts make this swishing sound when she walks, and there's this ringing sound from the bells on her ankle.  She looks warm and soft, except for her clothes, which are coarse.She move delicately, and her hair bounces and she wrinkles she nose as she laughs, which sounds like the tinkling of bells.  She's graceful, which you can see from

how she carries the tray of drinks and avoids the unwanted touch of the drunk men.  She's come to your table and she's waiting for your order.

This works, and no doubt, you can picture her, but we've used what us Writer-types call passive voice.  She HAS red hair.  She HAS a corset, which EMPHASIZES her cleavage.  Her skirts MAKE a sound.  She LOOKS warm and soft.  She IS graceful.  While accurate, it sounds like a list, and doesn't engage us.  This is because passive voice tells us what things ARE, not what they DO.

To grab your players, you must use active voice.  You must replace those verbs above with verbs that do something, verbs that leap off the page, grab the reader and say "Look at what's going on."  Remember how I said that we need to remember that the girl is alive, that she moves and lives and breathes?  Active voice does that.  It tells what she DOES, not what she IS.  Her hair BOUNCES.  Her skirts SWISH.  Her nose WRINKLES.  Her soft skin GLOWS in the firelight.

I understand: Most people don't think this way.  Normal people do not speak this way.  Nevertheless, this lesson is vital.  Active voice separates the novice from the master.  Mastery of active voice for a storyteller is akin to mastery of salt for a chef or timing for a musician: Under appreciated, but vital.  Practice it.  Write it.  Speak it.  Excise "is" from your vocabulary as much as you can.  When you do, you get paragraphs like this:

The tavern wench sweeps into the room carrying a large tray of drinks.  Her long, green skirts swish around her bare feet as she deftly dodges the unwatched touch of drunk men, all without spilling a drop of precious beer.  Her bright green eyes sparkle in the firelight, and her curling red hair bounces around her dusky, freckled face.  She pauses for a moment by your table, her warm hip accidentally brushing your shoulder, her rounded, soft cleavage rising and falling in the confines of her corset.  With a flash of a smile, she stops and asks if anyone would like anything.

Can you see the difference?  Do you see how the latter grips the reader far better than the former?  Active voice: Live it.

But we're still not done.  You'll notice I left out many of the details we came up with before (How many you include in a given description is up to you.  I suggest you base it on how important the character is and the pacing of your story).  I did this on purpose.  You see, a role-playing game isn't like a book or a movie, where you simply present details to your audience.  No, in a role-playing game, people respond to you, interact with you, and interact with the scene.  They don't want to wait forever just to hear about this girl, however pretty she is, but more importantly, they need to be reminded constantly of who she is, what she looks like.  Books, incidentally, do this all the time.  Read any book and you'll note that you get an info dump the first time you meet a character, but that the author also dribbles details throughout the text, constantly reminding you about the color of a girl's hair, or the dark glower of a hero's eyes.  We have to do that in an RPG as well, constantly reminding our players of the scene and the characters within it.

We must do this in a dynamic manner.  I have seen too many GMs simply read off a paragraph of text.  Perhaps you like my tavern wench and find yourself tempted to simply read off the paragraph above.  Don't.  While a skilled reader might still bring it to life, the paragraph above is static and won't address ongoing interaction with her.  Nowhere does it mention that she wrinkles her nose when she laughs, or what that laugh sounds like, or how she smells.  We might need to sprinkle these into our session, depending on what players do, or to remind them of the character.

Nowadays, I can simply hold these details in my head, but when I was younger, I wrote lists that included luscious adjectives and notes sorted by sense-type.  Our tavern wench might look like this:

• Sights: Red, curly hair; Sparkling green eyes; Green dress; Rounded cleavage; Gleaming, cherry-red lips; Dusky, freckled skin; Glistening persiperation on her brow.
• Sounds: Bright, tinkling laughter (Wrinkled nose); The swish of her skirt; The jangle of the bells at her ankle; The whisper of her bare feet on the floor.
• Touch: Warm, soft skin; Coarse dress;
• Smells/Taste: Hair smells like flowers and soap; Clothes smell like the food in the kitchen; She smells clean and feminine;

When you have a detailed list like this (which might be too much for every NPC, of course, but is certainly worth your time for a setting, such as the bar itself: Remembers, places "live" too.  Give them plenty of details), and we need to describe the character, we only need to glance at it to come up with some elements:  Her nose wrinkles as she laughs -- bright, tinkling laughter -- at your suggestion, or Her sparkling green eyes widen as you draw her close, her clean, feminine scent wrapping around her, mixing with the flowery scent of the curling, red hair that brushes your shoulder as she shakes her head.  At a moment's notice, we can draw up some vivid, descriptive one-liner at the drop of  hat.  This matters.  We must create a living, constant world, with a continuous sense of sensory input, just like the real world has.  A computer game doesn't show you a graphic of the enemy you fight once, and then turns the screen to vector depictions of spatial positioning.  Now, it constantly feeds you sound and sights.  You must do the same for your players.

I know this lesson is a great deal to take in.  It may seem simple on the outset, but, believe me, it took me some years to master.  Consider it a goal to achieve, an ideal to pursue, or a path to walk.  Hopefully, at least, I've given you some food for thought.  Try to make your session more vivid, try to make your world come alive.  Just remember that you're playing with people, not telling a story AT them, and use your descriptions like spices: Enough to make things interesting, but not so much that you dominate the dish.

Lady Blackbird Extended

So, with Cherry Blossom Rain out of the way, what is my next big project?  Well, some time ago, I discovered Lady Blackbird and handed it to Bee (Go ahead and look at it.  I'll wait.  Done?  Great!).  In my experience, Bee doesn't want to plan a session.  She hates that!  She just wants action and adventure and awesomeness now.  She comes to a game with vague ideas of what she'd like to see happen, and then she simply lets the pieces fall where they may, improvising with her players to guide them to her scenes, but if something else awesome comes along, she plays with that too.  She doesn't like to play systemless, though.  She enjoys throwing the dice and seeing how pretty they are, relying on unusual results to feed her story and, in a habit she picked up from 7th Sea, she loves to hand out drama dice or action points.

Lady Blackbird is perfect for this.  All of its rules are literally printed on every character sheet, and Bee, as GM, needs to know none of them.  All she needs to know are these three rules:

• The difficulty of the roll is between 1 and 5 "successes."
• If players fail, she has the option of hitting them with one of the 7 problems listed on their sheet (Hurt, tired, lost, etc)
• She can hand out drama dice in the form of a pool of dice players can use to boost their rolls (actually, that's not a rule, but Bee does it anyway, and it works well with the game).

That's all she needs to know.  The players take care of everything else on their own.  Even better, the game is, in fact, a standard adventure that she can play through, complete with suggested difficulties for various problems the players might encounter.

However, if you want to do anything but run the game with those 5 pre-generated PCs, or do an adventure other than that listed in the book, then you're basically on your own.  Thus, while Bee loves the system because it suits her so well, she has no interest in tearing apart the mechanics to make her own characters or to create her own adventures (she's refined the art of the lazy GM, and lazy GMs do not redesign systems from the ground up).  So, I'm going to do it for her.  I promised this as her birthday present, which coming from a published writer, is worth quite a lot ^_^

You know, presuming I actually finish.

Now, I'm not the first one to try to expand Lady Blackbird.  The writer himself took a stab at it, and other people have done their own work, but I think most of them are going about it in the wrong way.  Lady Blackbird has a few key features that appeal a great deal to its audience.  

First, it's very simple.  You don't have to shuffle through a giant skill list to figure out how to make your character.  This is the first place I think the Lady Blackbird Companion goes wrong: It lists every Trait its writer could come up with alphabetically.  How are you going to build a character like that?  Will you sort through the entire book, looking for something to build your character?  

Second, Lady Blackbird doesn't really describe its setting.  John Harper very cleverly gave us some common tropes, and then implied the rest of the setting.  He tells us in a few paragraphs that the world is shards of land orbiting a pale star, and instead of space, we have sky, plied by steam sky-ships.  Beyond that, we only know there are imperial nobles because Lady Blackbird is one.  We only know there are slaves because Naomi is an ex-slave, and we only know about goblins because of Snargle, and we only know about Flamebloods and Sky-Squid because they are mentioned in the potential challenges.  The Lady Blackbird Companion tries to fill in the blanks for you, but the whole point of Lady Blackbird are those blanks.  Do we really need to know, say, the culture of the goblins?  We can guess well enough on our own, thanks.

Finally, the real beauty of Lady Blackbird is the fact that it already includes all the challenges you need to run your adventure, and these challenges double as scene-seeds.  Because it includes the challenge rating for a fight against a flameblooded sorceror, you find yourself pondering how you might get the players to a point where they would battle a flameblooded sorceror, for example.  None of the works I've looked at (which, granted, hasn't been exhaustive) do this.  Instead, they expect the GM to come up with all of that on their own because most people who are writing Lady Blackbird material, other than the original author, come at this from a work-intensive, traditional GM perspective.

So, we're going to take a two pronged approach to our task.  First, we're going to research the traits, tags, keys and secrets, cobble together our own, and create a list.  Unlike in the Companion, though, we're going to sort them by categories: Professions, Qualities, Backgrounds, Magic and Races.  That way the player can look through, for example, the profession list to find what his character's job might be, the backgrounds to explore what his history is, and round him out with a few Qualities.

Then, we're going to make challenges for everything I can think of: Different regions mentioned in passing in the book, The various houses, the different kinds of sky-ships, the different races I come up with (including Goblins), the various conditions the book lists on the character sheet.  These challenges will be sorted together in themes.  For example, I'll find a large, beautiful picture that might represent Nightport, then create a list of challenges that one might find in Nightport, with possibly a few keys, secrets and traits that might be unique to Nightport.  In this manner, I'll offer the reader not only the potential skeleton of a story, but I'll also tell him a great deal about Nightport implicitly, rather than explicitly.  That is, by reading the challenges associated with Nightport, he'll get an idea of what Nightport might be like.

In this way, players should be able to construct their own characters quickly, and Bee should be able to simply flip the book open to some interesting part of the world or some interesting concept, start grabbing challenges, and just run the story.  If I play my cards right, it should be the great book of pick-up games.

GURPS Horror

Holy shit, it's out.  GURPS Horror was the best GURPS Supplement of 3e, and possibly the best treatment of horror I've ever read (by the inestimable Kenneth Hite).  This is the same work, updated to 4e, expanded upon to contain even more material, even more advice, even more monster templates, and a treatment of horrific powers on par with GURPS Powers.

If you're a GURPS Fan OR a horror fan, you owe it to yourself to check this out.  Seriously.

GURPS Martial Arts

(Cross posted from the SJGames forum)

Ages ago, I posted a thread asking questions about how to run a successful and dynamic martial arts game.  I doubt anyone remembers it, but I found many of the suggestions useful.  I've finally finished my playtesting and actually run the damn game, and I thought I would share my experience.

1. GURPS actually runs a really great martial arts game.

When I posted my questions, I was concerned about how well GURPS would actually handle the cut and thrust of a martial arts fight.  It's true that GURPS has lots of options, but in my experience (up to that point), most of them boil down to configuring your attack and defense into optimal values and then using those again and again.  A few maneuvers have lasting consequences, like feints or AoAs, but those tend to last no longer than a single turn, and then everything resets to its original point.

What I actually found is that those one-second consequences tend to last, and once you understand how they work, you end up with a game of chess.  For example, if I attack you with Karate and you successfully parry with Judo, then you might lock me into an arm lock or judo throw me, and thereafter start kicking me in the head.  So, I need to make sure that if I attack you, I do so in a way that you can't defend properly against, which means that I should feint against you, but knowing that I'll feint, you might evaluate and, if so, I might be better off evaluating first as well.  And so on.

GURPS also has other tricks, as it turns out. Targeted Attacks and Combos, when used too often, become predictable and your opponent gains a bonus to defense, which means you should use them sparingly, when circumstances warrant it.  It's a subtle mechanic, but I found it made quite a difference.

2. Use Techniques Sparingly

I honestly find 4e's treatment of techniques slightly frustrating.  For one thing, I'm not sure why they need to have an Average/Hard split.  If you want to charge 1 point more for a trick, make it -1 more difficult.  What you currently have is that Hard techniques are easier to pull off by default than Average techniques (That is, both a Hard technique at -2 and an Average technique at -3 cost 3 points to max out, but the Hard Technique is paradoxically easier to pull off by default, and less worth your time to study).

Moreover, in 3e, you were required to take every technique in a martial art to "know" that martial art.  Now, this caused problems, but it meant that two different styles that both had Judo and Karate were distinct, because one had X and Y, and the other had A and B.  Moreover, having all those techiques listed on one's sheet encouraged players to try those moves out.  If you know you're good at spin kicks, jump kicks, feints and hammer-fists, you're not going to bother with exotic hand-strikes or head-butts, and you have a distinct fighter that encourages the player to do more than just "Attack/Attack/Attack!"

In 4e, it makes little sense to have more than a couple of techniques, and so you have to pick and focus on what you want your character to be good at.  If you have a Judo of 18 and that's "enough" for Arm Lock, you don't take the Arm Lock technique, while another fighter might focus almost exclusively on Arm Lock.  You get distinct fighters within a given style, which means you can get a lot of mileage out of a single style, and that's great.  It's just that techniques aren't where you go to write out how your character fights...

3. Use Signature Moves

... you use Signature Moves instead.  I took Toadkiller Dog's advice about writing down the more complex moves that a fighter might use and giving them swell names.  Made all the difference in the world.  Take my example above about the Judo 18 guy who doesn't bother with Arm Lock because his Judo is more than high enough.  He can and should still use Arm Lock, and if you want to remind a player to do that, you simply note down a special armlock "signature move."

You can even construct very complex moves that take advantage of several unique mechanics to make a killer move.  For example, one samurai had a signature move that involved shifting to a defensive grip for a parry, while side-slipping (this being Chambara, was worth +2), and then spending 1 fatigue for a total of +5 to parry, which he turned directly into a riposte, followed up with a Counter Attack (for a total of -7 to his opponent's defense) as a thrust (since defensive grips are terrible at swings) to the vitals.  Nobody's going to think of that move in the middle of a fight, and there are numerous things that you need to calculate (can you take a -5 to your defense with a riposte?  What's your effective skill between Counter Attack and going after the Vitals?).  By working it out in advance, you only have to glance at a piece of paper to pull of this off.  The extreme potential complexity of GURPS martial arts becomes a feature, not a bug, and people begin fighting in a very complex way.

(And this isn't entirely unrealistic. The whole point of things like kata is that they teach you to use very complex tactics that you'd never think of in the middle of a harried fight.)

By giving the player's signature moves and including signature moves with the NPCs, I found that my fights exploded with details and rich tactical depth.  Nobody made straight attacks, because they had customized their fighting styles to support far better tactics, and clever opponents would exploit the weaknesses of a given move with their own tactics, which would lead to rapid exchanges of constantly flowing and evolving tactics.

4. Perks are where it's at!

As I said before, Techniques aren't the best way to add lots of character to your fighter, because you can only really take so many and eventually you're better off simply making him a better, all-around fighter.  That's where Perks come in.  Perks are almost always worth it (unlike Techniques), and they tend to encourage specialized tactics.  Secret Styles, Trademark Moves and Finishing Moves all encourage and expand upon the Signature Moves above.  Tricks like Iron (Body Part), Teamwork, Resistant to (Chi Power), Schticks, Drunken Fighting, Sexy Feints, and so on, all shift and change the nature of the character in neat little ways or provide him powerful advantages that, if he's clever, he can really exploit.  A good martial arts game is about turning every character into a "fighter," and still seeing plenty of diversity.  Perks really provide that.  I'd never try to run GURPS Martial Arts without perks.

5. GURPS, as always, exceeds expectations...

I mentioned already that GURPS ran a great martial arts game.  I didn't mention how often I thought a rule needed to be changed, when it didn't.  For example, many people argue that Evaluate is a poor tactical choice, so few people use it.  However, I found that there are so many consequences to attacking a capable foe (Counterattacks, ripostes, judo throws, arm locks, exposing the trick to your secret Combo awesomeness) that people often fell into Evaluate when it became obvious that their opponent was more powerful than expected.

Likewise, I worried that GURPS would overwhelm some of my players (we had one player who generally hates system and fears any game with any level of complexity much beyond free-form), and yet, I found that between the Signature Moves and how GURPS normally handles, the game was surprisingly intuitive, people could do what they wanted, the fights played out swiftly, and even the system-phobe had a great experience.

6. ...but change is good.

Even so, I did make some changes.  I used Icelander's Beat rules (that is, beats apply their penalty to both the user's attack and defense and at 5+, there's a chance that it'll unready the weapon entirely), though I allowed people to defend against Beats with DX-based weapon skill, in addition to ST-based weapon skill (I found that forcing players to always defend with ST-based weapon skill unfairly punished weak fighters, especially since ST-heavy fighters tend to spend lots of points in their skills to compensate for their low DX, and so when they beat, they REALLY beat).  I highly recommend them, as they make Beats useful for everyone, and it means that you're taking a calculating risk every time you parry or let someone parry your blade, especially if they're stronger than you are.

I did eventually modify Evaluate some.  I find it odd that one can make a Defensive Attack (inflicting damage) and gain a +1 defense bonus, but Evaluating gives you no defensive bonus, and so I made a little "cautious fighter trinity" of moves: In my version of the rules, Evaluate grants a +1 to your defenses, you can choose to forgo the +1 defense from a Defensive attack to instead gain a +1 evaluate bonus, and you gain an +1 evaluate bonus if you Wait and nothing happens.  I also allowed players who were evaluating to make rolls against certain skills or IQ to understand something about their opponent.  I found this made all three moves more interesting, but didn't unbalance anything in particular.

NPC Gallery: Deformity

"All dwarves are bastards in their father's eyes."

-Tyrion Lannister

Game of Thrones made its rounds here in my part of the world ages ago, reshaping the way several of my friends run games (and leaving a few utterly obsessed with historical political intrigues).  I didn't take the time to read the books, my life focused on other things but, of course, when the television series came out, I had to give it a look, and I immediately fell in love with the character of Tyrion Lannister, who is a perfect candidate for the NPC Gallery.

When's the last time you saw a midget as the star of a series?  When's the last time you saw a midget treated as a human (as opposed to a member of "another race") or as something other than comic relief?  I've read discussions of Tyrion that express frustration with trying to express who and what he is, because if you discuss "dwarf" in the context of fantasy, so often people assume you mean a guy sitting under a mountain, drinking beer and hammering our magic swords, and most people wouldn't assume that such an admirable and crafty character would be a midget.

If you think about it, however, Tyrion's character makes perfect sense given his stature. In his words, he's terrible at physical activity because of his size, so he sharpens his mind to defeat his foes.  He holds everyone at arms length because, naturally, people treat him differently. He's no Casanova, so he sates his desire for company with whores.  He'll never be the tall, noble, handsome knight that one expects in fantasy literature, but by god, he's going to make his impact on the world.  He's no stereotype based on his condition.  He's a political chess-master, canny and cunning, and a more competent noble than many of the characters in the series (certainly more competent than Joffrey).  Such a character is entirely in place for a series like Game of Thrones, and such a character is reasonable as a dwarf, but most people wouldn't expect the two elements to combine into such an evocative character.

I used the word "deformity" above not derisively, but because I can't find another, simple word to express what I really want to describe: People who physically deviate from "the norm," but who are not so handicapped that they are incapable of acting as competent or interesting characters. I'm not talking about the sad paraplegic girl that the players have to protect, here, or the hunchback worthy of your pity (though perhaps competent hunchbacks are a good example of what I'm talking about...).  Those characters are rife throughout literature and RPGs.  Dwarfs, albinos, people afflicted with gigantism and other individuals whose bodies don't conform to the human physiological mainstream suffer from their condition, to be sure: a dwarf has a harder time getting proper clothes and reaching things on the highest shelves, or interacting with a world built for people with different proportions, but unlike a truly handicapped person, these are minor issues and, by and large, they can live life normally.  Their condition shapes them, but it doesn't dominate them.

Many characters in RPGs deviate from the physical norm, but most of them fall into certain stereotypes.  Consider defying those stereotypes and treating them as something other than a freak or a joke.  I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with wildly deformed comic-book mutants running around in your campaigns, but I'm pointing out that few people have included, for example, a dwarf as a dangerous and powerful warlock, or as the wise sage who guides the player, or the faithful servant secretly in love with the beauty he serves.  Just imagine the players' reaction when this unusual character gets so much play time, when he's treated as a complete and full character with depth, reason and a background.  Imagine how they would feel, for example, when the enemy that threatens to topple their nation is barely over four feet tall and is no laughing matter.  They'll remember that character forever, if you treat him properly.  

There is, after all, a reason Game of Thrones is legendary in the circles its travels: George R. R. Martin is skillful enough to treat a character like Tyrion properly and turn a dwarf from a stereotypical joke into a character that one would admire.