The Gaming Outpost

  The examples in this article are drawn from the work of Christian musicians; for those who are unfamiliar with the contemporary Christian music scene, please don’t take offense or feel excluded.  The fact is, the examples here are all at least two decades old (hardly contemporary), likely unknown to the majority of those who are members of that rather narrow audience, and probably if I were more aware of what was happening in music I could find better ones.  These serve the purpose, and I trust the content will be self-explanatory.

  I recently acquired a two CD set containing many of Keith Green’s best-known songs.  Of course, if you’ve never heard of him, his best-known songs are probably not going to be familiar to you.  I tend to think that to be your misfortune, but I’m sure there are songs familiar to you which you think I should know.  No one can be familiar with all the good songs that ever were.

  One of the songs on the CD is called Stained Glass, and was quite obviously inspired by looking at stained glass windows and finding meaning in them–not in what they depict, but in the medium itself.  The core of the meaning Keith Green perceived here is captured in the first verse:

We are like windows
Stained with colors of the rainbow
Set in a darkened room
Till the bridegroom comes to shining through

Then the colors fall around our feet
Over those we meet
Covering all the gray that we see
Rainbow colors of assorted hues
Come exchange your blues
For his love that you see shining through me.

In short, the concept here is that stained glass windows get their beauty from the light shining through them, not so much from what they are in themselves; and that as light shines through them they make other things beautiful.  The song goes on to analogize this to Christians, saying that they are beautiful to the degree that the light of Christ shines through them, and that they make the world more beautiful in the process.

  No, this isn’t a sermon.  It’s an illustration.  The fact is that this song reminds me of another song, a very different song, by a band known as Petra which has been around since Keith was alive and is, I believe, still going strong.  They were inspired by stained glass windows to write a song also; but theirs presents a completely opposite idea, about Rose-colored Stained Glass Windows.  The chorus conveys the concept this time:

Looking through rose colored stained glass windows
Never allowing the world to come in
Seeing no evil and feeling no pain
Making the light as it comes from within so dim… so dim.

In this case, the lyricist noticed that as light passes through stained glass, it is dimmed and distorted; and as the church looks out on the world it sometimes does so through the equivalent of rose-colored glasses, windows that make the world look such a better place than it really is while simultaneously dimming and distorting the light that should be shining out of the church into the world.  Our view of the world and its view of us are distorted by seeing through the spiritual equivalent of stained glass.  This was the idea Petra derived from stained glass windows, a very different idea than the one Keith Green suggested.

  There is yet another example, though, from about the same time.  A group, a band who was just hitting its stride as its final album, Individually Wrapped, struggled to find distribution, included on their previous disk, Closer Than Ever, a piece entitled Stained Glass Window.  Found Free noticed that such windows frequently have little plaques beside them indicating who paid for them in memory of whom.  To this, they sang:

Don’t leave my name on a stained glass window,
Or lying in a big history book.
What I want to hear when my life is ended
Is for God Himself to say, “Look,
You knew My Son Jesus, and He wrote down your name
On page four billion six hundred one.
You served me so well, it mattered in time.
Welcome home, my child, welcome home.

The song seems lost to history; I found only two references to the band in my search for the album (although frankly the combination of “Found Free” and “Individually Wrapped” as search terms brought up quite a few pages, even with the inclusion of the word “lyrics” to cut it down, and “Closer than Ever” got me some sites I didn’t want to see).  Not everything worth knowing is out there, I guess.  Found Free is almost entirely lost.

  I feel a particular loss, because in the interval between the releases of these two albums they lost guitar player Wayne Farley (he joined Glad for their Beyond a Star LP, and then left to go into youth ministry in the Philadelphia area), and I auditioned for the spot in 1979.  They turned me away because they thought that another married member of the band would be a financial and logistical problem, particularly as part of their plan was to have the new guitar player share an apartment in the city with the lead vocalist.  I came to the debut concert for the new album representing the radio station where such music was played, and had great hopes for that album and the restructured band.  I can’t help wondering how different my life would have been had they signed me to the position; and now in retrospect I can’t help wondering whether my contribution might have been what they needed.  But such speculation leads nowhere worthwhile, except for Multiverser alternate universes, and I would not be who I am nor where I am today had the road taken that turning then.

  The evident thing is that all three lyricists were looking at the same object, or at least the same sort of object, and each noticed something different about it.  To Green, it was the way the windows are made beautiful and spread that beauty by the light.  To Petra, it was the way the light is distorted by the windows.  To Found Free, it wasn’t the window at all, but the nameplate beside it.  Each found something different from the same inspiration.

  We could imagine other songs based on the same inspiration.  One could write a song that combines the idea of Green’s with that of Petra’s, about how the light passing through us is distorted some, dimmed some, as it reaches others.  We could riff off Found Free’s idea, and sing about why it is that people want to be remembered for something beautiful, not something useful (you rarely see dedication plates on the bathroom fixtures, but the church would be in a lot more trouble without these than it would if the windows were ordinary glass, as the myriad of churches equipped with bathrooms but with plain glass windows attests).  There are a lot of song ideas that could be inspired by stained glass windows; and I’m sure that if I knew how to look for them, I could find many more out there.

  We’re not trying to write songs in this column (although I suppose at times it must seem so).  We’re trying to create game settings and situations.  Our inspirations come from places other than stained glass windows (or at least I’ve yet to encounter a game world or situation in which this was an apparent inspiration).  Yet there is a temptation to look at something and think that we’ve already been inspired by that.  Even as I write, I look across the room at My North Wall facing me and remember pulling inspiration from it in the fourth article of this series three years ago.  The leprechaun is still hiding in the flowers in the painting, although at the moment he’s also hidden by a file card file box.  The mugs have moved, and my current hat, an Indiana Jones type fedora, sits amidst some other junk atop that cabinet.  It has changed, and I could return to it for more ideas; yet I think I could find ideas in it I didn’t see before, even in the parts that have remained the same.  An inspiration isn’t used up just because we got an idea from it.  It may be that inspirations cannot be exhausted, that they are always able to stimulate new ideas, no matter how bland they seem at first glance to be.  Even if that’s not so, even if there is a limit to what can be drawn from any particular inspiration, I doubt anyone has ever discovered the limit.

  I was tempted to save this for a quarterly article; after all, it is very much about looking back, and that’s what we do each quarter.  Lately, though, I’ve had several good ideas for quarterly articles.  I see three others that have potential in that regard.  We’ll get to those eventually.  Meanwhile, don’t be afraid to look at those things that have inspired you in the past for new ways to see them, new inspirations for the future; and don’t think that just because someone else has done something wonderful based on a particular idea that you can’t do something equally wonderful yet entirely different based on the same idea.  You may be surprised just how many different ideas can spring from something so simple as a window.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  Our family physician is almost a friend of ours.  Perhaps it’s because my wife has been a nurse known to the medical community for near two decades, and has worked with him much during that time, and I was known to the local doctors before that as co-host of a medical radio talk show.  Perhaps it’s because we’re highly educated and can converse on his level.  Perhaps it’s only because he’s an excellent doctor and makes his patients feel comfortable with him.  Whatever the reason, we often feel that our lives are connected to his.

  Not so long ago, he was chatting with my wife, and told of a recent encounter with someone he had not seen in many years.  The man was a patient he was called to treat.  What struck the doctor was how very poor the man’s condition was generally.  I won’t recount details, as I might have them wrong, but this patient was falling apart physically, and probably also emotionally, and from his appearance he did not seem to have been successful in material things.

  This hardly seems unlikely.  Surely we all knew people in the past who have not done well for themselves over the years.  This patient was someone the doctor had known in high school.  He almost didn’t recognize the boy he knew in the man he saw.  Yet he did recognize him.  This was one of the cool kids, an athlete, a popular guy, respected by the student body.  He was also one of those who picked on those who didn’t measure up to the standards that made someone worthwhile in high school–the nerds, geeks, or whatever we were called then.  That is, people like the doctor.

  “Remember me?”  That was about all the doctor could think to say to the patient before treating him.

  As I muse on that story, it reminds me of another.  Archie told this story.  He was a fat little kid in seventh grade, and the cool kids regularly beat him up.  He did not remain a little fat kid forever though.  The person I knew as Big Brother Archie gained a good deal of his eventual six and a half foot height and great hulking build in the summer between seventh and eighth grade.  Those same cool kids were coming up to him in September saying, “Hey, Arch, remember me?  Your old buddy?”

  “I remember you,” he would say.  His memory was not so bad as they had hoped.

  I don’t know how it was half a century ago, but in our generations it is not the athletes who are the success stories, in the main.  Someone has said to be nice to the nerds, because one day you’re going to work for them.

  There is a bumper sticker which reads, Never hit a man when he’s down; he may get up.  It’s something to take to heart.

  In the movie A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More skillfully keeps a young man at arm’s length who is clearly trying to advance his career by any means he can manage.  More sees through this, and refuses to be the means for this power seeker to reach his goals.  In the end, though, the young man testifies against him, lying in court to secure the conviction the King wants, and so ingratiating himself to the powers that be to advance his career ultimately to great heights.  He would not be snubbed.

  In Finding Forester, it is the hero who uses his power to step on someone, an English teacher whose book is never published because the respected author blackballs it.  The teacher never knows that this happened; he only knows that his manuscript was rejected.  The author found it, a book analyzing his own work, personally offensive, and would not be snubbed; he would snub instead.

  Another example came to my attention after I had drafted this article.  George Frederick Handel was offered a position as court composer for someone, I believe a German nobleman.  He accepted on condition that he be permitted to have an immediate leave of absence, as he had a chance for a commission to write something in England.  The sabbatical was granted, and he spent a year in England before returning to court.  He was not there long before he realized he was in great demand in England, and he asked for another sabbatical to write some operas there.  His generous patron granted his request, with the rather vague suggestion that he should not be gone too long.  However, Handel’s music was quite popular, not only with the people.  Queen Ann herself became an ardent fan.  He was well off in England, focused much effort on learning the language, and rather unilaterally decided to stay there.  Not surprisingly, he was fired from his position back on the continent; but it hardly mattered, since he was writing operas for the Queen’s Theatre regularly.

  That is, it hardly mattered until Her Majesty died.  It is not always clear who is next in succession to the British crown, particularly when the current monarch has no children.  In this case, the throne was assumed by a certain German nobleman who had previously hired, and fired, the Queen’s favorite composer.  Handel was able to make amends; however, it must have been a tense moment.

  Even those of us who are the downtrodden, the sat-upon, spat-upon, ratted on, have in turn snubbed or offended others who fell below our radar.  They didn’t matter to us; but they mattered to themselves, and they felt the offense our ignorance caused.

  It is difficult to bring such ideas into play.  Seldom if ever do characters play out their youth, such that we could create the sorts of complex interactions of growing up.  Even were we to play that out (as in Multiverser’s unusual setting, The Zygote Experience), getting the complexity of life at a level that allows such characters to be snubbed along the way is extremely difficult.  Players have far more time to deal with far less action in the game than people face in high school.  Setting up the snubbed character is very difficult to do directly.

  Even less promising is doing it in current play.  You can set up the brother of a defeated villain, as John MacLaine faced in Die Hard II:  Die Harder; that’s almost personal, but for the fact that the player characters never knew the brother existed until he suddenly hits them full force as an enemy, and can’t regret having mistreated him before.  Similarly, in the Oriental Adventures for the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™ there were among the family history options the possibility that you have an ancient family feud with another family.  Suddenly it is your great great grandfather who snubbed someone who wants to take revenge on you.  Again, this hardly seems like your fault.  The characters with whom you’re dealing on a regular basis probably are going to be afforded the degree of respect expected.  You’re not going to make an enemy of the farrier or the cabbie, and even if you do it probably isn’t going to mean much in the scheme of things.  The odds of accidentally offending someone who rises to power and holds in his hands something you need is, in a game world, negligible.  It would almost have to be a set-up.

  So, how do you set it up?

  It helps to create a character who is annoying and persistent.  If this kid who obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing and is too young to be risking his life keeps nagging your player characters for a chance to prove he does and he isn’t, it will wear their patience thin.  Of course, they might take him along, and he might get killed, or severely wounded, in the process.  If you can keep him alive, you’ve got a lose-lose situation.  If they never take him out, he will always feel that they didn’t give him the chance to prove his greatness.  If he is seriously injured on that first outing and never goes out again, he can blame them for not giving him a fair chance after that accident that wasn’t really his fault.  If they take him out several times but try to keep him safe, he can blame them for treating him like a kid the whole time.  If they let him risk his life, he can back off, and then blame them for not providing the support he needed at that critical point in his development.  Now you’ve got a character who holds a grudge against them.

  All that remains is to find another calling for his life, one that takes him into places of power.  He could become a clerk for a nobleman, serving the function of adjutant, such that anyone who wants to see his lordship has to pass through the nerd–er, the offended young man–to get there.  Similarly, judges have clerks who handle a lot of their cases and take notes regarding the facts and the testimony, so there’s a definite possibility for trouble there.  Given a few years, such a snubbed dork could become captain of the city guard, particularly if he knows someone who will get him such an appointment so he’ll stop nagging him.  There are dozens of possible posts for an ambitious young man with the ability to nag successful and important people.

  Once your snubbed man is in place, how do you assure a meeting?  One thing is, don’t let your players know where the man landed.  It’s always a surprise in this sort of story.  I recall that in Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang the hero met a young woman named Truly who having complained to him about the way he was raising his children proceeded to advise him on why his candy-making machine wasn’t working right.  He immediately dismissed her as a busy-body, and took no note of her advice.  Then he was trying to show his interesting treat to Mister Scrumptious of the Scrumptious Candy Manufacturing Company and again encountered Truly–who turned out to be Miss Truly Scrumptious, daughter of the man he is trying to see.  (Can you tell that the story was written by Bond creator Ian Flemming?)  Protagonists are always blindsided by the relationships the people they snub have to the people who matter.  It is so completely unrealistic, and at the same time so very like a story.

  Take it one step further, and employ a bit of an illusionist technique.  Put the character away until you need him.  Suddenly when the player characters face charges before a local judge, who should emerge but the annoying kid with the grudge, His Honor’s clerk.  Later, when they’re seeking the favor of a local nobleman, the kid shows up again, now working for the baron thanks to a recommendation from his former employer.  Some time later they have a run-in with the local guard, and there’s the kid, appointed to this position by the baron.  Who knows?  After that he might actually be the next judge they meet.  Every time they meet him, it’s clear he doesn’t like them, because he still holds this against them.  He can show up anywhere, as long as there’s no reason he can’t.

  There’s something so enjoyable about the groans that emanate from players when they realize that the annoying kid who resents them once again has landed in exactly the right place to make their lives difficult once more.  It’s a bit like having a Nemesis for them, but that they really can’t kill this guy, because he hasn’t done anything to justify it, and he seems to have a lot of friends in high places now.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  The cat caught a mouse last night.  (I won’t go into which cat; one of the cats caught a mouse.)  I saw it carrying the pitiable vermin around in its maw.  I learned years ago not to take a mouse from a cat.  One of our cats had a mouse in its mouth, and I, thinking the prey was dead, coaxed the animal to release it.  The mouse was not dead then, and immediately escaped my hand and slipped out of sight.  The cat looked at me like I was a complete imbecile, and I’ll admit I did not feel so clever at that moment.

  This mouse, too, was still alive.  The cat would periodically release it and snatch it up again, in a grand game of, well, cat and mouse–not the variety of hide and seek where the one is always chasing the other, but the real version of the game in which the cat constantly catches the mouse and releases it so it can catch it again.  The cat wants the mouse to entertain it.  I’ve never know a cat to eat a mouse; eventually the carcass will be found somewhere, when the mouse can no longer withstand the cat’s sadistic interest.

  If that bothers you terribly, I beg your indulgence.  I’m going somewhere with this; and the next place I’m going is a children’s television show that some of you just might have watched as children.  I had the joy of watching it only because I had children.  It would be Jim Henson’s television masterpiece, Fraggle Rock.  If you’re not familiar with the concept, somewhere, possibly underground but probably in some alternate dimension that happens to be entered through an oversized crack in a wall of some guy’s workshop, there are a bunch of little creatures who look like very colorful leprechauns, perhaps, whose entire lives consist of dancing, singing, and having adventures.  When they have real problems, they have to go ask the great all-knowing oracle, the Trash Heap.  Unfortunately, to get to Madame Trash Heap, they have to pass through the Gorgs’ garden.  There are three Gorgs, The King of the Universe, The Queen of the Universe, and their son, Junior Gorg, who calls them Ma and Pa.  Ma hates and fears Fraggles, as stereotypical women fear mice, and she generally wants them destroyed.  Junior, however, is always trying to catch them alive.  On one occasion he manages to do so, caging several of the five starring Fraggles we follow from week to week, and leaving the others to try to find a way to free them.

  Why does Junior Gorg catch the Fraggles?  He eventually explains it to them.  He doesn’t have any friends, and he wants someone to play with, so he figured if he caught the Fraggles and put them in a cage he could play with them.  O.K., so being the only Gorg Junior has ever known besides his parents, he wasn’t terribly well socialized, and didn’t understand that you don’t make friends with people, or even with Fraggles, by catching them and locking them in a cage.

  It reminded me of a scenario I designed once but never ran.  No one ever got that far in that particular dungeon (I ran it twice from the beginning, but the first group only just reached that area when it dissolved for social reasons, and the second group barely scratched the surface when it, too, fell apart).  The expectation was that the character party would travel through a very large room into a more confined area, where they would probably encounter a seemingly weak contingent of kobolds who were nevertheless numerous and smart enough to recognize when they were overmatched.  These could send a messenger out the back door, which would bring large numbers of considerably more potent creatures in behind the character party, putting them in a box.  Duergar, Ogre Magi, and Fire Giants were among the reinforcements slated to arrive.  The expectation and hope was that the party would be captured alive.

  If the monsters succeeded in capturing the player characters, they would immediately take them to a large hole in the floor and throw them down sixty feet to a lower level, where there were a few dragons wandering around.  What made this particularly interesting was that I was fairly certain when I designed it (and more so as I watched the character party grow and approach that moment) that the players would have enough tricks up their sleeves that they could keep everyone alive as they were thrown down, and that the dragons which were there, fierce and threatening though they were, were no match for our heroes.  In essence, I had designed a situation in which an overwhelming and deadly enemy would take them alive to give them over to a considerably less deadly enemy that the first enemy happened to fear greatly.

  The one uncertainty about that scenario was whether the player characters would in fact surrender.  That game system didn’t have too many ways for the player characters to be taken prisoner without their consent; there weren’t options for subduing damage, and most techniques for catching people were unusual.  There are some players who inherently believe that the referee would never face them against an enemy or obstacle that they could not overcome, and so would plow into these with full assurance that they could win if they did everything right and the dice weren’t too unfavorable.  I have read horror stories from referees who designed overwhelming scenarios expecting player characters to retreat, only to see them go down in flames trying to beat the odds.  It is rather difficult to communicate to players that the best option is to surrender.  You can face them with a hundred aimed crossbows and shout, Lower your weapons and surrender, and we won’t kill you, only to hear a rallying cry from a captain ready to go down with the ship.

  Yet there are ways to take them alive, and very interesting possibilities for what to do from there.

  Most player groups assume that if they are in an inn or other civilized sleeping area, they are safe.  If the inn is taken in the night, and the occupants rousted from their beds and gathered in the common room in their night clothes, there’s not much that can be done about that.

  I’ve read of lidded pit traps in modules; these usually only catch the people in front, however, so they’re not much use for grabbing an entire party.  Dead ends with dropping portcullises or sliding walls make for a better trap, although there had better be something to reinforce the capture if the party is likely to be able to bend the bars or shift the weights.

  The characters could be lured into some place that is itself the trap.  I envision a floating casino or other traveling entertainment facility which they believe will remain docked for the night, but actually sets sail for a secluded pirate island, the crew perhaps drugging their drinks on the way.

  Enemies that use capture weapons can be effective, if there are enough of them.  Lassos can be cut, perhaps; man catchers are more difficult to escape.  Creatures with tentacles, or sticking threads; sleep magic and knockout gas; non-fatal poison and stunning attacks; all these things can be used to create a high chance that the player characters will be taken alive.

  Once you have them, what do you do with them?

  In some games, they can be questioned.  Even when there would be no reason to expect this, it can be possible.  The heroes may have come out to investigate claims that there are orcs in the caves; the orcs may be planning to attack the local villages, and may take this opportunity to attempt to gain information about the defenses.

  Of course, in the original James Bond film, Goldfinger, there is a moment when Bond is strapped to a table about to be cut to cube steak by a laser, and he says to the villain, “I suppose you expect me to talk.”  The answer that comes with a laugh is, “No, Mister Bond.  I expect you to die.”  But of course the hero is left unattended, and is able to escape the device.  Thus we have the possibility of the player characters being captured and then ordered to be executed, but having the opportunity to play through an escape and a turning of the tables against the foe.

  My cat and Junior Gorg have something in common that has possibilities.  Neither of them intend any harm to their captives, really.  They are curious; they want to be entertained.  Player characters could be imprisoned by some being that is lonely, that wants company.  The captor could be of a scientific bent, studying strange creatures in captivity.

  It has even happened in fiction that some group has captured a hero because they needed help, and this was the only way they knew to get it.  I remember a Superman story years ago (so long ago it may have been the weekly strip in the Sunday New York Times I read in grade school) in which Clark Kent was covering the discovery of a rock of an unidentified composition and structure, and he became aware that there were tiny people with very high technological abilities inside this stone.  Before he could react to this knowledge, though, they fired some sort of ray at him.  Over the next few days, he shrank until he was their size, and so went to confront them, to find out why they had attacked him.  It was not their intent to attack him.  They needed his help to fix their spaceship (the rock) so they could leave Earth and continue their journey home.  Easily repairing the breach in their hull, he watched them leave as they fired the ray to reverse the process and restore him to normal size.  (O.K., the story is full of holes; but the idea is there.)  This could be particularly useful if the person in need of help is a villain of a sort the player characters would normally kill or capture, but his cause in this case is something quite reasonable which should put them on his side.  Even villains are sometimes in the right, but they don’t expect heroes to listen to them if they don’t have some way to force the conversation.

  You can’t do this all the time.  There’s a good chance that if you’ve taken the party prisoner once by luring them onto a boat, they’ll stay off boats from then on; and if you’ve captured the inn while they’re asleep, they’ll keep a watch even when they’re home thereafter.  Player characters have reason to be paranoid in some games, because if something can go wrong, it will.  But if you don’t overdo it, capturing your player characters can be the beginning of some very interesting adventures.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  Several years ago, Eric “Tadeusz” “World-a-Week” Ashley posted some comments in the “Official” Multiverser forum here at Gaming Outpost about how villains must be able to adapt on the fly.  His contention then was that villains were in the main opportunistic, taking advantage of situations that could work in their favor.  His own villains never planned in a more than cursory manner, and it seemed to him that it was implausible to expect a villain to work from a plan.

  I agreed, in the main, at the time.  There are, of course, crimes and schemes that require enormous planning.  If you watch documentaries about famous crimes, there are always elements of careful planning–watching to learn the routines of the security, identifying each step that would have to be taken and what would be needed to make it successful, preparing contingencies for those points most likely to go wrong or most necessary to go right.  These are the exceptions, though, not descriptive of the majority of crimes.  Some of the absurd mistakes criminals make, often caught on camera, can be entertaining, the stuff of television shows and Internet gossip.  Most criminals think that “rob the store” is a plan.  To go beyond that, to put together the sorts of capers about which stories are built, requires what we tend to call a criminal mastermind, a villain of intelligence.  Such a master has already thought through each step of the plan, carefully laid out what each person must do, and provided backup plans to cover anything that goes wrong.

  At the same time, the criminal mastermind has to be able to react and adjust the plan, because something else will go wrong; there will be some glitch that was not anticipated.  At that point, the villain must find a solution quickly.  That is where most master criminals make their mistakes.  Columbo made a career out of catching fictional villains whose plans were perfect but for one little thing they had failed to anticipate, possibly even failed to notice or recognize.  Intuitive improvisation that works is the hallmark of the successful criminal.  Good planning is useful, but the ability to get the fly out of the ointment without leaving fingerprints all over the jar is a difficult and necessary skill for the villain.  He must be able to use what he has at hand to solve the unanticipated complications, or his successes will be short lived.

  The player characters can be those flies, those complications; if the game is well played, they may be.  In this context, of course, we’re looking at the villain not so much as a criminal (although he might be that) as an antagonist, the character or characters aligned against the interests of the player characters.  In creating and running these antagonists, the referee will sometimes want one who is superior, able to construct and follow a plan.  If the player characters manage to become complications, that’s good; in some cases, those complications must be provided by the referee.  In many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the complication for the villain was merely that someone, either his intended victim or an unwitting pawn in the venture, came to the detective for advice or assistance.  In most Columbo mysteries, the complication occurred before the hero appeared, and became the chink in the armor which pointed the detective to the solution.  Sometimes the referee has to provide not only the villain, but the complication.

  In addressing these unexpected problems, the villain must work within his resources.  Realistically, he cannot have unlimited resources.  A villain with unlimited resources can fix all of his problems easily enough; if there are limits to what he has available, the villain is forced to adjust when the plan goes awry, to shift his assets from one place to another.  This is a particular challenge to the referee in a role playing game, because the referee has very few limits on his resources, and the temptation is to see the villain as similarly unfettered.  Yet if the villain does not have limitations within which he must work, he ultimately is defeated not because the player has played well, but because the referee has finished toying with him.

  In a forum game of Multiverser, Shawn Kelley was playing Prisoner of Zenda.  The villain, the Duke “Black” Michael, has six henchmen each of whom is extraordinary in his abilities.  One of them is a killing machine, an assassin of sorts who has little fear and less cause for it.  Michael frequently sends them in groups or singly to work for him.  Having six of them gives him the ability to be doing several things at once, while the player character can only be one place at a time.  In the forum game, however, when three of them–including the assassin–came for Shawn’s character, he surprised them and, with surprise on his side and some help from the formidable Colonel Sapt, killed all three.  This seriously curtailed the Duke’s ability to prosecute his plans.  He had but three men left, of those whom he could trust with his dishonorable and underhanded efforts who had the skill to accomplish them.

  It would not have been impossible to introduce another character or two, whose abilities were something less than the infamous six but whose loyalty to Michael made them dangerous nonetheless.  There is a degree to which it would have been unfair, however.  The player characters do not have unlimited resources; the villains cannot be given such.  If the player has succeeded in crippling the villain’s support structure, the villain cannot rebuild a new support structure without significant time, effort, and expense.  Whether it is by careful consideration of the problem or by pulling a rabbit out of a hat unexpectedly, once the player has won and the villain has lost, tampering with this outcome is rarely a good idea.

  To some degree, this is a return to our consideration some time back of Opportunity Costs.  There we were thinking about forcing the players to make character choices based on limited resources.  Here we’ve returned to the idea, recognizing that villains have limited resources as well.  The referee must remember that his ability to introduce anything into play as long as the player character does not know as a fact that it is not so, does not give him license to raise the challenge merely because the player is winning.  Although the referee may not be limited, his puppets must always be so.  How limited they are may be an issue of practicality and plausibility.  S.P.E.C.T.O.R. (whatever it stood for) had tremendous assets, sometimes seeming to be wealthier and better equipped than the British secret service; but they didn’t have James Bond, or anyone who could match him, and there were limits they could not overcome.  Moriarty’s fingers were running crimes all over England, but when Holmes interfered he could not easily eliminate the detective or fix the problems he caused.  Most villains do not compare to this, coming short on ideas or ability sooner rather than later.  You can’t do everything, you can’t think of everything; neither can your villain.  He might be smarter than you, and you might have to use a few tricks of the trade to make him seem so, but ultimately he must be limited, no matter how clever, wealthy, intelligent, or resourceful he is intended to be.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.