The Gaming Outpost

  One of the subjects to which we have returned periodically in this series is alignment, as it was presented in that venerable (in multiple senses of that word) game, original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™.  We opened the discussion forty-three weeks ago with the suggestion that alignment represented the true Beliefs of the characters, the real religions of the game which controlled their actions through its impact on their values and their view of reality.  Beneficence was our explication of that which the game calls good, the desire to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people.  The opposite value, evil, was described in the article Selfish, in which Adam Smith, originator of the concept of capitalism, was identified as the patron saint of this value, as he asserted that everyone will always act in his own perceived self-interest, and that any action which appears to be otherwise is actually based on the individual’s different perception of his own self-interest (truly altruistic actions do not exist).  Freedom was identified as the core value of chaos, the recognition that individuals were more important than governments, societies, or groups.  In contrast, we recognized that some people valued Societies above individuals, and that this lawful preference had been represented in the twentieth century most notably by the rise of socialism and, ironically, the belief that structured governments would be unnecessary once everyone placed the good of society above that of individuals.

  Having thus identified the four sides of our alignment grid, we examined the middle, neutrality, as a sort of Aristotelian concept of Moderation; we found several approaches to this internally conflicted values system, including the pragmatic, oblivious, druidic, and cross-principled, and considered how it fit with other values.  We returned to neutrality as it expressed itself in combination with those other values, and saw the Dedication inherent in the side alignments, beliefs that moved toward the fanatical as they focused on one value above all else.

  There remains still one more aspect of alignment to discuss.  It has taken all that we examined to this point to lay the foundation for it.  Perhaps this is why alignment proves so difficult for so many players:  the most commonly played alignments are the most complex in their structure.  I speak, of course, of the corners:  Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Chaotic Evil, and Lawful Evil.  These are the alignments in which the player through his character embraces two values, values which are not in opposition to each other but which can at times lead to different actions, different choices, in the same situation.

  If you remember Kelly Tessena’s wonderful vignette, Paladin, about a choice that had to be made by her character, it was an excellent example of this sort of situation.  Aelia, the paladin of the title, is entering an unfamiliar city, and becomes aware that possession of holy symbols within the city walls is against the law.  To part with the holy symbol Aelia carries is unthinkable; the good paladin would not be without it for a moment, and has never removed it since donning it three years before.  Much of the power this character could wield to help the wretched refuse within the city lay within that talisman, and giving it up would be to deny them the benefit of that aid.  There is a risk that surrendering this to the guard would result in its disappearance, as it is not at all clear how one recovers such property upon departure.  Yet to fail to surrender it would be to violate the laws of that city.

  These are the kinds of conflicts corner alignments create.  Let me recall to your mind another example.

  My character was that lawful good leader of that very mixed party which encountered on the road a slave caravan, headed by a hobgoblin.  Most of the slaves were of little concern to us–fifty goblins, two drow females, and a giant.  Yet as we came upon this entourage, I realized I had a problem.

  Part of my problem, as mentioned back when we discussed chaos, was that some of the members of my band were chaotic; one was chaotic neutral.  I knew that they would not willingly allow a slaver caravan to pass unchallenged if they had the opportunity to do otherwise.  Part of my problem, though, lay in my own alignment.  I was certain that these slaves were being mistreated.  The female drow were naked in an open cage, a mode of transport that apart from being humiliating was probably painful under the unfamiliar sunlight.  The goblins were in chains, dragged behind a horse-drawn wagon which undoubtedly forced them to march at a demanding pace for their short legs.  Perhaps it was my own in-game version of racial prejudice, but I could not imagine that a hobgoblin was treating his slaves well.  Yet slavery was legal in the city, and presumably in the surrounding countryside.  The slave trade was big business, a major feature of the economy.  To attack a slave trader conducting his lawful business would be a criminal act.  Members of my party would, I knew, be eager to stop this caravan; they had my sympathy, even my moral support, but ultimately they could not have my assistance.  I had to order they stand down and let the slavers pass, and then leave it to them whether to obey my orders or take matters on themselves.

  Both of those examples are situations in which law and good collide.  There are more extreme cases for these.  The Paladin article mentions places in which the laws themselves are evil, and the difficulties that poses to a person dedicated to supporting society while at the same time committed to doing good to all.  Yet there are equally difficult conflicts at each of the corners.  The chaotic good must at times choose between someone’s freedom and their safety and well-being.  Arguably, this is an issue in our world today:  do we permit our governments to take away our individual rights and independence in order to help defend us against terrorists and so protect the lives and well-being of the many?  Do we choose good over chaos, beneficence over freedom?

  Evil characters don’t escape the problem, either.  It is fairly easy for most of us to see the inherent difficulties the lawful evil has:  how does he line his own pockets while working always to keep the law and maintain society?  What does he do if the king demands he do something to help the poor?  Yet the chaotic evil character has his own conflicts.  At what point does his own selfishness have to yield to the rights of others?  At what point do the rights of others give way to his own selfishness?  If we remember that the American combination of democracy and capitalism is ultimately an expression of the values of chaos and evil (chaos because democracy is ultimately about the rights, freedoms, and voices of individuals, evil because capitalism functions through individual self-interest), the conflict between rights and self-interest is in many ways the central theme of much of our legislation and jurisprudence.

  We speak of neutrality as a balancing act; but in truth, it is the corner alignments that provide the most interesting and challenging balancing problems in play.  Time and again the character must answer which of two values is more important to him in the present situation.  As no man can truly serve two masters, so too the character with a corner alignment must choose one over the other when they come to conflict.  Frequently a pattern emerges, in which one character is more lawful and another more good, one more chaotic and another more evil.  Before long the character is drifting toward the side alignment, beginning to look like he is dedicated to the one value, the other being little more than a statement of a theoretical preference to be discarded whenever the important value is at stake.  Rare is the character who is so centered on the balance of the two values that he is equally devoted to each.  Some of my lawful good characters are extremely lawful; others are more good.  They got that way primarily because they had to make choices during play which set their values against each other, and each time they chose that choice defined them a bit more clearly, identifying them the more closely with one value, the less with the other.

  Modern roleplaying theory makes much of the introduction of moral choices into play.  I would not minimize this concept in recent game design, as it is often done extremely well, incentivizing play that addresses moral and ethical dilemmas.  However, such conflicts of moral and ethical issues are at the heart of the old alignment system, and when it is allowed to function as intended it brings moral and ethical conflicts to the very core of the character’s definition.  It is not the only nor the best way to introduce such issues in play; but it is a workable system that can create dynamic conflicts and raise difficult questions over which characters and players will agonize and debate at great length.

  In my now classic defense of role playing games, Confessions of a Dungeons & Dragons™ Addict, I wrote,

In fact, the game gave us the opportunity to talk about moral, ethical, and spiritual questions with nonbelievers in a way we had never done before.  It is a strong point of Dungeons & Dragons(tm) that it contains “alignment”:  every player must decide whether his character is good or evil, lawful or chaotic.  The character must then abide by that decision, and face the consequences of his actions whether he chooses something required by his beliefs, or turns against those beliefs to act otherwise.  The player is also bound by that decision, but in a different way.  The player controls his character in exactly the same way as the author of a book.  Alignment is a major decision about a character, and the player must follow the alignment decision in other decisions he makes for the character in order to remain “in character”.

 Alignment brought moral dimensions into play in ways that highlighted the rarity of such aspects in most other games.  No one ever asked whether it was good to conquer all of Asia in Risk™, except if they were wondering about its strategic value.  No one wondered whether taking your opponent’s chess queen off the board said something about the human condition.  Few players of Monopoly™ ask whether their selfishness is in conflict with their belief in individual freedoms when they capture their fourth railroad and raise the rents on all those properties.  Yet when a player is challenged to consider whether in this situation he should follow his moral or his ethical beliefs, and to recognize that they are in conflict, pointing to different choices under these circumstances, values are laid bare and truths are uncovered in ways and to depths that baseball never touched.

  I do hope that these eight articles have opened new insights into the potential alignment holds in your games.  It has been poorly understood, badly maligned, and generally rejected by many gamers, but still has great potential to make for much more interesting play when well understood and applied.

  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.

  Not so long ago, one of our forum regulars raised the question of how you design good adventures.  It strikes me that how to design adventures is probably an entire series in itself.  I’ll return to the subject again, as I’ve already thought about several ways to build a decent adventure since the question was asked.  Indeed, we’ve already seen several articles which are very much about adventure design, and glancing at these briefly may at least help determine what has been covered.  An Amusing Dungeon, the second article in this series long ago, showed how the juxtaposition of two unrelated but familiar ideas can create very interesting areas for exploration.  We discussed the romantic element somewhat in Embraces.  Contingencies recommended having an alternate plan ready in case the players don’t want to do what you originally expected.  There have probably been others about scenario design; certainly many have been about parts of scenario design.  However, there is still much that could be said about creating the core of a scenario.  There is, of course, no one way, no right way, no magic formula to do this; yet there are a number of ways to approach it, each providing a different sort of adventure.  In creating worlds for Multiverser play I’ve used all of these, in several variations.  They work.

  This week we’ll look at the design of an adventure from the perspective of the antagonist.  That is, you can create the starting point for your players’ story by focusing your attention on their primary enemy.  This creates a rather focused linear game without the feeling that the players are locked into the referee’s plan; the villain will do what he’s going to do unless the player characters interfere, and there is reason for them to want to interfere, forcing him to adjust accordingly.

  There are three questions you should ask to start this type of design.  I say there are three, but I do not mean there is a first question, a second question, and a third question.  Rather, these three questions must be asked very much together, because the answers are so interconnected with each other, and so very necessary to each other, that they cannot be answered in isolation.  These three questions, together, define the starting point for your design; after you have answered these, you can begin the details of the adventure, creating the answers to the next questions that will arise.  Thus as we look at these three questions, remember that they are interlocked.

  First, you must ask who the antagonist is.  This includes what might be called categorical questions, such as whether he is a Drow elf or a Libyan terrorist or a Klingon renegade, those sorts of definitions that place a character within the scheme of the world; but it must be much more particular than that.  You must consider his personality, his motivations, his resources, his support and influence, his visibility.  In short, you must have a picture in your mind of this person, as if he were a genuine figure, a friend, or an enemy, of your own, whom you know well enough to have expectations about his actions and his attitudes.  He may be a shadowy figure to your players and within your game world, but whether he is the wizard Saruman or the Ayatolah Khomeni or Sybock son of Sarek, you must know exactly who he is, how he thinks, and what he can do.

  Knowing who the antagonist is connects him to the answer to the second question:  what is his objective?  Whether like The Brain he is trying to take over the world or like the James Gang merely trying to make himself wealthy by robbing banks and trains, you must know what he wants to do.  Further, what he wants to do must be realistic, given who he is and the nature of your setting.  No one has seriously managed to take over the world since the Caesars (and even that is a matter of definition), although several capable men have tried, and unless you count the conquests of thought accomplished first by Greek philosophy and then by Christianity, all those who even came close, from King Nebuchadnezzar to Adolph Hitler, were at the heads of great armies.  A believable antagonist must have a real chance of achieving his goal, and therefore must be such a person and in such a position that what he wishes to do might be within his grasp.  In some worlds, taking over the universe might be imaginable, even if it is not imaginable by those within it.  It was not conceivable to the Jedi that a Sith Lord could manage to seize control of the Republic and establish a galactic empire, but it was possible given who he was.  Yet there must be some reason to believe that the goals can be reached, or they simply are not credible, and they won’t make for interesting play.  No one is going to be terribly driven to prevent The Brain from conquering the world via subliminal advertising in commercials for children’s breakfast cereals unless there’s some basis in the game world to presume that’s something that might actually work.  This must be part of your scenario design.  Who the villain is, no matter how heinous or how interesting, does not really get you an adventure until you know what he’s going to attempt to do.  What he is going to attempt to do in turn must in part inform who he is.

  The third question in this trinity is of critical importance, and yet is often overlooked by game scenario designers and game referees.  Why do the player characters care?  Somehow we get it in our misguided minds that the player characters care because this is the adventure we’ve created for them.  Frankly, that’s not good enough.  If the Libyans are planning to bomb the Pentagon, why would the player characters do more than phone the army to report what they heard?  If Kray Phalaema is about to lead the Drow armies against the goblin kingdoms, consolidating his power in the underdark in preparation for the conquest of the world, why should our heroes risk their lives in this battle?  You can have a great villain with a truly terrifying yet attainable objective, but not have an adventure if there’s no reason for the player characters to get involved.  Somehow this situation has to impact on something which matters to them, and which matters in a manner and to a degree that makes it imperative that they act, because it falls to them to act, or because they are forced to act, or because they want to act, as opposed to letting the proper authorities deal with the matter.  Does he need something they have?  Does he perceive them as being obstacles to his ends?  Are they in fact the proper authorities in this situation?  Is there something in it for them, something they would find difficult to resist?  Is it just that they know something is wrong, and no one else will listen?  Whatever it is, it must be compelling, or you don’t have a story.

  Clearly, these three questions must be answered together.  In the end, you have your beginning:  you have a real villain with a clear objective whose actions are going to bring him in direct conflict with the player characters at the point at which the adventure is expected to begin.  Now you may start your design.

  Actually, there is only one more essential question in this approach to adventure design.  It is a major question, often requiring a very detailed answer, but it is just one question.  Once you know who the antagonist is, what he hopes to accomplish, and why the player characters care, it’s time to create his plan.  How will he accomplish that which he intends to achieve?  Start from where he is.  Of course, you got to invent where he is when you determined who he is, and you can adjust that at this point if it will make the plan work better.  You must do so from within the parameters of what is known about him and the game world, though.  The sudden announcement that one of the richest and most powerful men in the world lives in that sprawling fortified mansion overlooking the village on the north side that no one ever noticed before today is going to seem silly.  Maybe he has such a sprawling fortified mansion somewhere else, or maybe he has started building one here as he’s moving into the area; he can suddenly become known to the player characters because of new actions he has taken, but you can’t fairly alter the world to make things true which the players knew were otherwise to this point unless those changes happen within the game world on its own terms.  That still gives you a lot of leeway, as there will be many facts about the world unknown to the characters at any moment.  You’ve already got an idea who this villain is.  Start with that, and build his plan from there.

  You don’t necessarily need to have every detail plotted.  You do need to have as much of it in mind as the villain himself would have before he started.  As we considered in Resources a few weeks ago, some villains will improvise quite a bit as they move toward their goals.  However, this particular sort of scenario design is built around the villain’s plan; therefore, the villain must have a plan, and the plan must move forward reasonably successfully and on schedule at least until the player characters themselves interfere or the story reaches the moment of your planned disruption (the complication that requires the villain to make that patch which is his mistake, as discussed then).

  Planning the adventure entirely around the actions of the antagonist works extremely well.  The referee has complete control over the antagonist, after all; he doesn’t have to rely on the players making particular choices to make the plot fall into place.  If the players manage to cut you off at the pass, defeating the villain early in his plan, congratulate them for their excellent play and move to the next adventure.  If they never respond to the villain, the villain ultimately succeeds in completing his plan, perhaps reaching his objective, and you’ve got the start of an entirely different adventure based on that success.  If you’ve correctly answered your first three questions, though, they should become involved early enough in the plan that this becomes their adventure.

  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.

  Last week in Relocated I wrote of a dream, and said that there were several ideas that sprang from it.  This is another of those ideas.  There were people in the dream, as there usually are in my dreams.  The people in my dreams are peculiar, because most of my dreams are populated in the main with one specific sort of person, rarely another, and this dream thus stands out as having two kinds of people I don’t recall from other dreams.

  I’m getting ahead of myself, though.  Let me suggest that there are four sorts of people in dreams, or at least in my dreams.  Recognizing these four types and thinking about how they fit into our game worlds may help us introduce new characters into play.

  My father sometimes appears in my dreams; when I was younger, my mother did, as well.  There have been a handful of other people in my dreams whom I knew when awake.  Not all of them were people I knew well; in one dream long ago there was the father of a boy in our scout troop whom I had met on one camping trip, but since that campground was the site for the dream it made sense that he would be there (or at least as much sense as anything in that dream).  The first type of dream character is people we really do know, whom we recognize within the dream because they are who they are in real life.

  Yet in describing the dream, I mentioned hitching a ride with the person in boxers and bathrobe who looked a little like Drew Carey.  No, it wasn’t a nightmare, actually; it seemed quite ordinary for someone to rush out of the house so fast he was still in his night clothes.  Haven’t you done that yourself?  I have; but then, I wear a sweat suit to bed, so I often go outside in it.  (I started doing so when we got a dog, and it was evident that I was going to have to go outside with the dog in the middle of winter in the middle of the night, so I’d better be dressed for it.  That was the beginning of my understanding of why my parents never owned a dog.  Our fenced in yard now is a better solution, but I still wear the sweat suit.)  In the dream, I knew exactly who this guy was, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world that I would hitch a ride with someone I knew.  Obviously from my description of him he was no one I really knew at all; he wasn’t even Drew Carey, but only someone who looked something like him.  I find that most of the characters in my dreams are exactly of this sort:  people I don’t know, to whom I cannot put names, whom I have never seen, usually composites or alterations of real people (in that I can usually describe them by saying they look kind of like this person but different in specific ways, or like this person crossed with that person), but who within the context of the dream are well known to me.  Thus the second type is people we know only in the dream.

  Yet when the apartment door opened to my knock, I encountered a type of character I rarely notice in my dreams.  The young woman who opened the door was a complete stranger to me, not only to me when I awoke but to me in the dream.  Obviously, most of the people I pass in the world are strangers to me; we spoke long ago of those Encounters with people we know, but in the main we don’t know the people we pass on the street or see in the store, and usually we don’t think we know them, either.  It is unusual for me to have such unknown people in my dreams, save perhaps as faceless extras I never really see but know must be there.  This was unusual to me.  Yet it represents a third type, people we don’t know at all, even in the dream.

  You may deduce the fourth type of character from this, and you may wonder whether it actually exists.  The odd thing is that I’d have challenged it myself prior to this dream.  It was a detail I didn’t mention.  When the door to the apartment opened, there were people inside whom I could see beyond the woman with whom I spoke, most of them that sort of faceless extra just mentioned, present but completely devoid of detail, like the computer generated people waving from the rail in Titanic.  One of those people, however, was a boy who attends our church, with whom my wife was chatting just a few days before after the service.  I didn’t know more than his first name, which I only recently had learned.  I didn’t know how old he is, or anything about him, really; but he was a real person known to me, not a composite.  Yet in the dream I did not know him, even though something in the back of my head clicked when I saw him.  In a sense, I noticed his presence in the dream because he was someone I knew, even though my dream self did not know or recognize him.  Thus the fourth type of person in our dreams would be people we really do know but who are strangers to us in the dream.

  Role playing games are a bit like dreams in some ways; and the people in our games may be informed by these types.

  In running Multiverser, I have used real people as characters.  Of course, as it is usually played as an I-game, the player characters are realized versions of the players; but there may be other real people included.  As I suggested in Clones, you can use friends and family known to you as instant characters for your games.  That’s not necessarily the same thing, though, as these people are not necessarily known to your players.  Yet I have done the other at times, throwing in people who are friends of my players as characters in the story (in modern setting play), and even at times creating alternate versions of the players themselves with whom they may interact.  These are people known to the players and to their characters.  In some settings this can include famous people the player has never met but knows from afar, whether film stars or historic figures or world leaders or others who would be recognized and so in some sense known.  In my forthcoming spy scenario (Why Spy, in Multiverser:  The Third Book of Worlds), I recommend that the player character can be teamed up with characters from movies, such as Die Hard‘s John McClane, characters known to them even though not real people.

  Most games are filled with characters who are somewhere between the first and second types.  We don’t know them, but we meet them through our characters, and after that they are known to us.  This isn’t really the second type, and is much more the first type.  We meet them through play, and thereafter they are known both to us and to our characters.

  Yet I think there is room in our games for the second type of character, people who are known to our characters but not to us.  We probably don’t use these very often, in part because once they’ve been introduced they become known to us as well.  Yet it is often the case that we will include minor characters as knowns.  If the game is set near the place where the character grew up, it makes sense that he would know the butcher, the priest, the baker, the town drunk, and scores of others who would recognize him and know his name, and whom he would similarly know from the years he has been there.  Even if he is elsewhere, it is entirely reasonable that he could encounter someone he knows from before the game began, someone unknown to the player but known to the character.  In some games, it would be entirely appropriate for the player to create such a character.  In nearly all games, it makes sense for the referee to do so.  It also makes sense to do so at times when it is not intended to be a hook to the next adventure.  After all, if it means trouble every time the characters meet someone they once knew that the players don’t recognize, the players are going to start running extremely rude and unsociable characters.

  Obviously, our game worlds are full of the third type, people unknown to player or character.  Sometimes these become known, but the vast majority of them remain unknown.  They can be used in passing encounters, such as a conversation with a waitress or a shared moment with a shopkeeper, to be forgotten amidst the thousands one passes over time.  They remain in that sense unknown, and don’t need to be more than what was discovered in that moment.

  My suggestion of using real people as characters in play may well be the fourth type of person in the game world.  After all, if I decided that the driver of the car would be played by Drew Carey, you would recognize the driver of the car and know some things about him; yet it wouldn’t be Drew Carey, but someone who looked, talked, and acted very like him.

  Of course it wouldn’t be Drew Carey; that wasn’t well said.  Drew Carey isn’t going to come by to play himself in one of my games, or at least not this week.  What I mean is that Bruce Willis is not John McClane, and Steven Seagal is not Casey Ryback, but that each actor brings aspects to the role which are recognizably his own.  More precisely, I could create a character who was John McClane in everything but name; I could even include his name in most games, since just because you know who that is doesn’t mean your character knows.  If I knew your family, I could perhaps play a character as your brother the computer expert, or your sister the village matchmaker.  You would know him or her, and yet your character would not.  Similarly, I could inject characters into a game world who actually were real people known to you, but who were not known to your character.  This can lead to interesting possibilities in play.

  Creating good characters for your games can be challenging.  These ideas hopefully will provide some ways to overcome those challenges, or at least to look at the options from a different angle.

  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.

  It was a dream, and in many ways it was filled with those odd things that make dreams so dream-like:  people you don’t really know who seem like close friends, who are doing completely absurd things for no apparent reason which are never questioned or challenged by you or anyone else in the dream.  Yet it contained one of those moments that resounds as very realistic, even after awakening.

  For reasons that would only make sense in the dream, I had determined that a bunch of people I knew had just rushed off to the apartment of someone else I knew, named Tom.  (Since my father, an emergency medical technician, was driving the lead car, it was obviously an emergency, and they were taking someone to the hospital, but would of course stop at this apartment on the way.  No, I have no idea why; I don’t think my father has so much as met Tom.)  I hitched a ride with someone (who looked a lot like a diminutive version of Drew Carey but apparently was someone I knew, who had left the house in such a hurry that he was wearing boxer shorts under a sky blue thin cotton robe with royal blue piping on the lapels–yes, very like a dream) to get there.  I knocked on the door, and someone answered; yet it was the wrong person.  It was someone I did not know, even in the dream.  I knew at once that I’d made a mistake, as Tom hasn’t lived in that apartment for close to twenty years (really, it was nothing like his old apartment, being more like the apartments on campus at my college), and I don’t even know where he lives now.  I still rather foolishly asked–but then, when you’ve knocked on the wrong door, and you realize it’s the wrong door, what are you going to do but ask whether it might somehow actually be the right door, or they might know where you’re supposed to be?  Tom doesn’t live here anymore, does he?  You don’t know where they moved, do you?  If you think it’s awkward to have dialed the wrong phone number, you should try getting the wrong apartment sometime.

  As the sleep cleared from my brain, I realized I had several ideas for articles coming from that dream, and this was one of them.  I know where Tom used to live when I met him when he was assistant manager of the toy store, and later when he bought a house and was raising his children.  I know where his mother lived when he moved in with her after his father died.  I don’t know where he lives now, but I heard he left the state.

  The last time I saw him, he had taken a job as manager of a restaurant less than a mile from here.  The toy store where he had been so long ago is a hardware store, and he’s held a number of jobs since then.  He had his own business for a while, but sold it for personal reasons.  We spotted him at the restaurant on the corner, and had coffee with him a couple times before he left that.

  That restaurant didn’t last long after he left, although I gather from signs in the windows someone else is going to reopen it under new name and new management.  The building itself was once part of the local Richman’s™ chain that once dotted three or four counties in southern New Jersey, a smaller version of the Friendly™ Restaurants chain, specializing in ice cream in many flavors and selling food from a menu that was once small and inexpensive but over the years grew to overwhelm the original focus on ice cream and cheap family lunches.  (Howard Johnson’s™ is another example of this, but you’d have to be as old as my mother to remember when it was primarily an ice cream parlor, and at least older than my children to remember it as a major restaurant chain.)

  The Channel Lumber store where I used to buy most of my hardware is now a Best Buys electronics outlet.  The Hechinger’s to which I turned when Channel vanished is now an A. C. Moore craft store.  Hopewell Auto Repair and Custard still sells ice cream in the summer, but they don’t fix cars anymore.

  On the street where my parents have lived since I entered seventh grade most of the families have left and been replaced; the parents of most of my high school friends have left town by now.  My favorite high school teacher has been replaced by the guy who sang bass to my tenor (the Haberer brothers on lead and baritone between us) in the barbershop quartet which that teacher created and coached, and although the former teacher often had dinner with my parents even after I had moved away I have not been able to discover where he went.

  All her life, my wife came from her childhood home out Smith Lane to the light on the Black Horse Pike.  That traffic signal is no longer there.  The redesign of the ball fields and adjacent public parking areas and the addition of several new municipal buildings including a new library led to installing a new light a block away, and the removal of the one which had been access and landmark for several neighborhoods for a generation.  It is very confusing even to me when we visit, as I expect the light that is no longer there and often find myself looking for a break in the very busy traffic that formerly had to stop for the light, or missing the turn no longer so evident when coming up the pike to visit.

  Not everything has changed.  My parents have been in the same house for about thirty-five years, and my wife’s mother has been where she is for perhaps sixty.  The high school I attended is still across the street from the police station and emergency services, at least one more visible addition to the familiar Works Projects Administration design since I attended, but still recognizably one of those depression-era constructions.  Yet many things have changed.  Stores I frequented even a few years ago have closed; neighbors have moved and new ones arrived.  Roads have been built or rebuilt or closed, intersections redesigned, buildings torn down or rebuilt, names changed.

  I have an excellent sense of direction.  Generally, if I have been somewhere before, I can get there again, even years later.  Yet this dream has reminded me that just because I can find a place doesn’t mean the place is still there.  Even if it is, the landmark that told me where to turn in order to get there might be gone, or the people I expected to find may have left.  The world changes.

  Not everything does, obviously.  Farms and castles are often in the same family for generations or even centuries, even as the members of the families come and go.  Major corporations can dominate an industry or an area through many lives; and governments, although they constantly change in some ways, can have the same essential form long enough to define an era, or even to span several eras.  Yet one cannot know what will remain after even a few years.  The old mill that everyone expected would be a mainstay of the local economy as long as there was a town may have burned to the ground, or gone out of business as farmers shifted from wheat to soy or found other markets for their crops.  The White House almost burned down once, and Europe is dotted with piles of stone which were once castles.  I once stood on the rubble of the ancient home of Vlad the Impaler; it was very different from the way Bram Stoker had described it.

  I don’t think I capture this well in my games.  If I create a city, or a countryside, or a village, I somehow think my job is done in that regard; I know where everything is.  Yet such a map is a mere snapshot, a record of an instant in time.  There will be new houses next year, and some of the buildings on my map will have decayed and been condemned.  The shortcut will be a corn field, the meadow a bog, the south wood a charred remnant with some early regrowth.  The little-used road to another town will have deteriorated, whether overgrown by the forest, or sunken deeper into the mire of the swamp, or having its bridges collapse into streams and gorges.  Even modern roads begin to vanish once they are no longer maintained, lost to gaping potholes, cracked pavements, opportunistic plant life, and other forces and evidences of erosion.  Meanwhile, men are always attempting to make that which was barely satisfactory into something better.  The first time I rode on the New Jersey Turnpike, it was a four lane highway with New Jersey dividers separating northbound from southbound traffic.  (I think it was their use on the Turnpike that gave those frightening concrete structures, designed to push an errant vehicle back into traffic, their name.)  The last time I was on it there were twelve lanes divided into sets of three by wide grassy medians.  As one of the characters in my favorite movie says, “Things change.  Always do.”  I need to let the world change more, for change is what the world does.

  I’ve said before not to be locked into your story as a referee.  Now let me say don’t be locked into your maps.  Accept that what you put on paper was the world as it existed at a particular moment, but that very little in the world is writ in stone, and even that which is writ in stone is passing and may be replaced by new stone and new writ given enough time.

  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.

  I used to design mazes; that is, I still do from time to time when I need them for a world design, but I used to do it frequently, just as mazes, just for fun.  I recall while working at the radio station in the early eighties more than once spending half an hour drawing out a maze on a bit of paper so that some guy on the A.M. side whose name was John (who once drew a cute cartoon of a dragon trying to eat the studio) could solve it in a few minutes.  I had already by then devised a means of creating a three-dimensional maze of sorts, one drawn on paper but requiring the solver to think in levels to solve it.  I once thought to offer designs of that sort to Games Magazine, but never actually had one to offer after I had that thought.

  I did carry the three-dimensional maze concept over to my games, once in a while devising a genuine maze in which to confound the characters, and sometimes doing so in a multi-level format such as the interior of a building.  Such a maze will appear in The Playground in Multiverser:  The Third Book of Worlds, assuming the lost data can be rebuilt (following a devastating hard drive crash) in a timely fashion so that book can go to print.  I’ll point in hope to that as an example (of a maze in three dimensions–it is not of the sort intended to be solved on paper, but from within), and talk about mazes a bit–how to design them, how to use them, how to break them.

  A genuine maze has only one solution; that is, there is only one path through it that does not backtrack on itself, and only one way to reach any specific point within it.  It is a type of puzzle.  Some people are particularly good at solving them; however, it is often the case that such solutions are easily made on paper, from above, as it were, and not so easily derived from within the maze.  That is, draw the maze on a sheet of paper and show it to someone, and if they are good at mazes their eyes will quickly trace the escape.  Put the same person in a high hedge maze, and they have no clue which way to move.  Finding your way through a maze is a very different skill from drawing a path through one on paper.

  Thus creating a maze for your characters to follow can present a challenge to the players of a sort they wouldn’t expect.  How do you find your way through a maze, when you can’t see it except from within, when your view is limited to the path before and behind, the walls to either side, and the short distances down diverging paths?  Obviously, you can map it; but until you’ve found the exit, your map won’t tell you much of anything about the maze except where you have and have not been–and once you’ve found the exit, you don’t really need the map anymore unless you’re planning to return.  The players whose characters are in a maze very much need to devise new skills.  Unless they are extremely connected to their characters, their senses of direction probably won’t help much; unless they can extrapolate a great deal from a little data, their maps won’t help much, either.

  However, it is in the nature of a true maze that it can be solved.  The apparently secret technique with which I solve mazes (apparently secret because so many players are surprised when I use it effectively) is known to me as “left walling”.  In essence, you put your (real or imaginary) left hand on the wall next to you, and you follow that wall wherever it goes.  Because the maze has only one path through, eventually you will come to the other exit, even without a map; the wall to the left must connect the entrance to the exit, no matter how convoluted it is between them.  (The wall to the right works just as well; but do you want to have your right hand committed to touching the wall when you’re lost in a maze that might be inhabited by hostile creatures, particularly if they know the paths and you do not?)  If the maze is three-dimensional, you must remember that “up” and “down” are also part of the direction the wall takes, and you must follow them as well, in a consistent pattern.  That’s really all there is to it.  No matter how complex the maze, by eliminating all the dead ends to one side in an orderly fashion this will get you through it.

  Now that I’ve told you how to solve absolutely any maze out there, what can you do to prevent people from solving your mazes so quickly?  Certainly you can make the maze more complicated; but that only delays the inevitable.  It is unfortunate that, as with my objections to scrambled words back in Aptrusis so long ago, this technique reduces the solving of a maze to busy work, and making the maze more complex only increases the amount of busy work.  It becomes boring after the player has proved his ability to crack one.  The situation is somewhat improved if the maze is an integral part of what becomes the character’s territory, as in that case the player’s intimate knowledge of its paths may become the character’s advantage against his own adversaries; but predicting what parts of your world player characters will claim as their own can get you a job on the Psychic Hotline.  You want to make solving the maze interesting in itself.

  One answer is not to design a maze, but a labyrinth.  Labyrinths may have multiple pathways through them; it is precisely because of this that they are easier to solve from above, but more difficult to solve from within, as passages can wrap back around to their starting points, breaking the left wall and the right wall continuities in ways that mazes cannot.  This is particularly effective if at least one of the two end points–entrance or exit–is not on the outside edge of the complex.  If your characters enter from above or below, you can easily have the left wall break off in a long convoluted set of passages that ultimately circle around the stairs and become the right wall.  Do the same with the facing wall, and you force the players to abandon the walls entirely and look for more effective means of unraveling the riddle.

  You can also incorporate mazes within labyrinths, having sections that can only be transited by a single path.  One reason I’m not worried about the players becoming bored with the maze within The Playground is that it will not be immediately apparent when they are in the maze, as opposed to similar labyrinthine sections of the complex.  Also in that case, since the maze repeats, once they have mastered it once they can use their knowledge of it in numerous ways.

  We offered another potential solution long ago in Screen Wrap:  cheat.  No, I don’t really mean that you should actually cheat.  Rather, I mean that you should devise a labyrinthine section that uses techniques not immediately apparent to the players or their characters which violate the ordinary expectations and the rules and conventions of true mazes.  Have the walls move when the characters aren’t looking (as I now recall they do in Labyrinth at times).  Have magic or technology installed within the corridors that will move the characters without their being aware of it.  Render their maps useless by reorienting everything regularly.  Some techniques for doing so are in that article.

  I had a much simpler solution in one dungeon.  One entire level was a maze; corridors meandered into dead ends in all directions, and characters could spend hours trying to find a way through.  It was a genuine maze; there was only one path that led through it from one end to the other.  Using maze-solving techniques you were guaranteed to get through it.  The complication for the players was that through was not where they wanted to get.  Both ends of the maze connected to the level above, whence the characters came.  The route to the level below, whither they wished to go, was not so apparent.  I had hidden a secret door somewhere in the maze, and they had to locate that door to be able to move deeper into the dungeon.

  I was not entirely cruel and heartless about it.  I put the door on a main corridor, right on the route that had to be followed to get from one end to the other.  I put it on the logical center point of the maze–the place that could be said to be the dividing line between corridors that wandered off the north door and those that wandered off the south door.  (The maze was designed to be challenging from either entrance; I find it best to do this even with pencil mazes, as otherwise players will solve them backwards by beginning at the end.)  Also, the hidden door led to a complex of rooms on the same level.  Thus if the maze were mapped it would be evident that there was an inaccessible space in one section, a clue to the location of the door which must be along one of the adjacent corridors.  In short, the problem facing the players was that it was simple enough (if time consuming) to get through the maze, but that wasn’t a useful outcome.

  I have a design for a board game that creates new maze-like labyrinths each time it is played; the design actually predates my awareness of role playing games, being the first board game I designed, when I was in college.  Part of what makes that game work is the necessity placed on the players to remember information–they can’t map the maze, and they don’t want to reveal it to their opponents.  Mazes and labyrinths have a lot of potential to enhance play, once you know how to use them.  There’s probably a lot more that should be offered in this regard, but these are the basics, and with a bit of practice the rest should come.

  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.