The Gaming Outpost

  Back in June, Eric “Tadeusz” Ashley, whose World a Week column here at Gaming Outpost demonstrated his impressive versatility and prolificacy in setting creation (and, I hope, the wonderful versatility of the Multiverser game concept), and whose work will hopefully be featured in a forthcoming Book of Worlds for Multiverser, raised a challenging question in our forum.  “How,” he asked, “do you help people do better designs, especially but not limited to when you may disagree with some of their worldview?”

  We’ve done a number of articles on how to design good adventures, including last week’s piece on Scavenger Hunts.  This is different.  It has less to do with the design of the adventure and more with the design of the setting; it also is not so much about how to do it yourself as it is about how to help someone else do it.  On the other hand, the ideas which are likely to work here are equally likely to be useful in our own designs.

  I thought about this question for a long time, actually.  I clipped the quote and the link, and saved it with my ideas for future development.  I read it over at least once a week for several months, trying to think of what sort of advice I had on this.  The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous I felt.  After all, part of what I do is help people develop worlds for play.  How do I do that?  Since I don’t know anyone with whom I am in one hundred percent agreement about everything, I’m sure that there must have been at least a few worlds in there for which I didn’t agree with the creator’s worldview, but I found ways to help develop them all the same.  How did I do it?

  Then when the answer came to me, I realized that in one sense it was so simple that I would never be able to get an entire article from it.  What I do works well, and merely describing it may be enough to answer the question.

  In fact, the way I would help someone else improve his design very much reflects the way I would improve my own designs, except that when applied to myself I must be harsher because I lack objectivity, whereas when applying this to someone else I am the objectivity (or at least I am a fresh perspective), so it’s not necessary for me to work as hard at it.

  When someone gives me a world they’re developing, the first thing I do is imagine that I’m a referee reading this for use in a game.  This isn’t the backdrop for a novel, really (although I often use my game settings as novel settings, intact or altered); nor is it an exercise in creative description (although I recommend exercising creative description in your setting designs).  It is intended to be a very practical tool designed to enable referees, like me, to stimulate interesting adventures.  Thus I look at it with a critical eye toward what I can do with it, and how it will play.

  Interestingly, that is also a task that involves imagining.  When I am a referee reading a setting or scenario for use in a game, one of the critical parts of that process is in turn imagining that I’m a player inserted into this world, and pressing my mind in all the directions I think I would be likely to explore, to see what I would find.  Thus when I’m a designer, I imagine being a referee, and within that imagine being a player; and when I’m reading someone else’s design, I do the same thing.

  The process of imagining myself a player raises questions.  What would happen if I did this, or went there, or examined that?  If I were here, what would I do?  What would prompt me to do anything at all?  If there are obstacles to overcome, how would I approach them, and does the material provide sufficient answers to what happens if I do that?  If I did these things, what sort of satisfaction would I get–in a sense, how does the setting reward my interest?

  As a referee, my questions are whether the materials give me the answers to the questions my players are likely to ask, or at least give me some means of determining those answers consistent with what is given to me.  If there are intelligent adversaries or auxiliary characters given, am I able sufficiently to understand their motivations and thought processes that I can play out their choices when the players surprise me?  I also wonder whether I’m going to have to do something to get my players headed in some direction, and whether I’m going to have to constrain them, to prevent them from walking off the map, as it were, and whether the materials give me the tools to handle that.  Always in my scenarios, I provide either a fairly solid reason why the player characters can’t or won’t escape the bounds of the scenario, or a reasonably simple means of devising what is beyond those edges if they do.  I look for that, because I don’t want to be caught trying to figure out what happens when my characters walk out of my story.  At the same time, there’s a very fine line between trailblazing and railroading.  I prefer a setting in which many different adventures can happen based on player choice, but if there’s clearly a central adventure it raises the question of what I have to do as a referee to move them into it, and what happens to the scenario if the characters don’t or won’t go there.

  As a player, the questions are whether the answers I get from exploring the world will appeal to me.  In exploring this world, will I find things that hold my interest?  Will they be credible, or will I balk at them?  Will each discovery drive me to seek the next?  At some point, will I exhaust the setting such that there’s really nothing left for me to do within it?  Will I care about what I discover, such that I want to keep exploring, or will it fall flat because it makes no sense, or is too predictable, or forces me to work too hard to get anything I value?

  If it’s clear that the designer wants the players to do some specific thing, I look for the hooks.  Why will the players do this?  What happens if they don’t do it?  Does the designer expect me to railroad them somehow?  If he intends to draw them into the in-built adventure, do I think his lures will work?

  I also ask a lot of questions about the implications of that which is known.  I try to follow things out to their logical conclusions.  This often leads to me asking why certain things are the way they are.  For example, if there are two races who have been at war for generations, and one is clearly superior, how has the other survived so long?  If there’s some problem that’s never been solved, why haven’t they applied what appears the obvious solution, or if they have why didn’t it work?

  In short, I don’t have to tell the designer what he should do.  What I have to do is point his attention to the problems, the holes in his scenario, the things that don’t seem to fit.  I do this by asking questions, getting him to ask the questions I would ask.  Who are the characters, and what are they supposed to do in this world?  Why do the players or their characters care about these things?  How do you handle a character whose player doesn’t want to go there?  What motivates the antagonists, and why do they do things the way they do?  Hopefully in asking questions he will find answers that fit.  They might not be my answers.  I might still have a lot of trouble accepting some of his assumptions about the way the world works.  If he wants to know how I would answer those questions, I’ll be glad to offer my ideas; I understand that my offer places him under no obligation to go my way.  What matters is that the questions are raised and answered to his satisfaction, and ultimately that I can understand his answers even if I remain skeptical of them.  If he has provided a complete and coherent vision for his world, I can run it, even if it doesn’t fit anything I know.  It’s only when there are gaping holes or internal conflicts in the materials that the setting fails, and these are the things that are found by asking the right questions.

  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.

  In our series of adventure design approaches which began with Antagonists some time back, we’ve been looking at models for quest-based adventures.  Flag Captures were the first of these, in which the destination was clear but the path to take was open to player choice, with different obstacles along each potential route.  Treasure Hunts took an opposite approach, in which a significant part of the quest was the task of finding the path that would lead to the end, moving from clue to clue toward the uncertain destination.  There is one more children’s game which provides a viable model for quest design, and that is the Scavenger Hunt.

  If you’ve never been on a scavenger hunt, it is less like a single quest and more like many mini quests pursued simultaneously.  In the typical scavenger hunt, each team is given a list of items needed, and sent through the building or the neighborhood or the campground or wherever the game is placed looking for the objects–a paper clip, a ball point pen, a box top from any brand of corn flakes; or in a different setting, a pine cone, an acorn, a smooth rock, a birch leaf.  The winning team is the first to gather all the objects, or the team that has the most objects at the end of the allotted time.

  Thus the secret to the scavenger hunt approach is that the team doesn’t know where to find what they need, and usually they need more than one object.

  There’s a reasonable variant of this similar to Huckle Buckle Beanstalk, in which there is only one McGuffin, one object of the search, but the players must scour an extensive area to find it.  This can work well for a variety of objects, including missing persons, hidden bombs, and secret treasures.  The single object variant is less predictable in some ways, as the characters might find it immediately or might in the end give up in despair.  It is otherwise the same as the multiple object quest.  As compared with the other models, it’s rather more frustrating.  A single object quest as a Huckle Buckle Beanstalk variant lacks the direction of a treasure hunt approach, in that there are no clues leading to the location of the McGuffin beyond merely process of elimination of possibilities.  At the same time, without knowing the destination as in flag capture models, the players can’t create their own focus, and are limited to the systematic elimination of options as the best “plan” they can devise.  Thus, although the single object quest can work this way, other models are better for single objects, scavenger hunts being particularly suited to multiple object quests.

  I have recently been made aware of another scavenger hunt variant sometimes called Purse and Pockets, in which the next object to be sought is named as the prior one is found.  This is more like a series of quests and not as useful a model for role playing game adventures.  Players are apt to note that they could have gotten item five at the same place they got item two, if they’d been aware then that they needed it, and so find the sequential revelation of the needs frustrating.  Thus for this approach to work, you would need a good reason why the need for item five wasn’t mentioned before.  Of course, recently in the installation of a hot water heater I had to make four or five separate trips to a hardware or plumbing outlet as we discovered that there was something else we had not recognized we were going to need or something we had wasn’t what we thought it was.  That, however, was not much fun, and if it happened in a game I’d have thought the referee was giving us more grief than we deserved.

  When would you have a scavenger hunt type quest?  The gathering of potion ingredients is an excellent example.  If you need a coatl feather to concoct this potion, you might have to find a coatl, or at least a coatl’s nest, or you might be able to get the feather from a local apothecary or even a milliner, if you’re lucky.  You might find the coatl feather while you’re in the mountains looking for an eagle’s egg, and save yourself the trouble of making another trip for the feather.  Similarly, a search for parts to make repairs to a space ship when you’re stranded on a planet with a pre-interstellar technology could work this way.  So could preparations to withstand a coming assault that require reinforced fortifications and improved defenses, or efforts to concoct one of those A-Team/Magyver-like improvisational devices.  In all these situations, the player characters must gather objects, some of which will be harder to locate than others.

  The scavenger hunt quest has the advantage that the players can decide in what order to hunt down their needed objects.  Some will immediately collect all those they believe will be easy, such as items commonly available through local merchants, and then tackle the tougher ones after they’ve asked some questions about whether these might be commercially available as well.  Others will decide that they’ll save the easy ones for the end and go for the hard ones first, knowing that a bottle of olive oil can be picked up any time and doesn’t need much attention, or that they can grab it when they happen to pass the supplier on their way back into town.

  Player characters may decide that the best approach to scavenging is to divide their efforts.  This is how the Star Trek crew dealt with their quest in Star Trek IV:  The Voyage Home.  Scotty and McCoy undertook the task of tracking down the materials to build a whale tank.  Checkov and Uhura gathered the radioactive particles to regenerate the dilithium crystals.  Kirk and Spock went in search of the whales.  This is an excellent example of the advantages–and hazards–of a scavenger hunt quest.

  This also underscores one of the pitfalls of this approach to quest design.  The referee must have a tremendous amount of information about the game world at his fingertips, so that he has answers to the questions of where the objects might be found–not merely where he wants them to be found, but what are the chances that they might be located another way.  Is there an a priori reason why the local alchemist would not have a spare pint of manticore blood, saving the characters the trouble of visiting the distant ruins in search of a manticore, or that the local aquarium would not have a mated pair of whales so they don’t have to search the seas?  Does the referee have a fair method of answering that question if the players try that–or will the players conclude that of course the alchemist doesn’t have it because the referee wants them to go to the ruins?  Is there any other place where a manticore might be caught, and if it happens that the players don’t know there’s one at the ruins and go instead to the dungeons, have they wasted their time or might they find what they seek anyway?  I find the best way to handle these kinds of questions is to assess the likelihood that the sought object would be in the searched location, and roll the dice; but in some cases, there will be sufficiently complete information that such a roll is not necessary.  Of course, if this is a quest designed by the referee, all of the objects should exist somewhere even if some are extremely rare and difficult to locate.  On the other hand, if a player decides to create his own quest, such as collecting a full set of high-value gemstones or scavenging all the parts to build a Mark VII Blaster, that can make an interesting quest, but the referee doesn’t have to guarantee that whatever the player character wants is going to be available.

  There is also the last item problem.  It may happen that the characters are able to gather all the needed objects but one, and they can’t figure out where to get that one.  This may be the more complicated if they have been where it is, but weren’t looking for it at that time and so didn’t notice it.  They may think they’ve eliminated possibilities which they haven’t actually properly considered.  There aren’t too many good solutions for this, other than to increase the probability that the missing object can be found in the next place they search.  Alternatively, if the object is unique or nearly so, it may be that it becomes the McGuffin for a new treasure hunt quest, in which the referee lays out clues to carry them to their needed item.

  Those are the variants for quest type adventures that occur to me.  There are more adventure design models still ahead, and we’ll get to them eventually.

  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.

  Just over a month back we discussed the creation of Hordes, suggesting some referee tricks for generating large numbers of creatures or characters for that desperate battle against incredible odds.  We said then that we would come back to discuss ways of managing those massed enemies and allies on the field, examining how to run a battle of grand proportion without having to consider the actions of each individual involved.  This is that discussion, presenting ideas for handling wars and the mass combat that often arises within them.

  To give some credit, some of these ideas are drawn from war games and from systems derived from war games for the support of role playing games.  It is certainly a viable option when faced with a war to set up a war game and use it to manage your battles, or even better to find a role playing game supplement designed for mass combat and use it as is or adapt it to your own purposes.  I had good luck with TSR’s BattleSystem™ for Basic Dungeons & Dragons™ years ago (I have no experience with the later 1991 version designed for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons), and it has influenced some of my thoughts here.

  The problem with most wars in games is the matter of what we will call scale:  how do you handle combat between one hero or one monster and a unit of fifty regular fighters?  This was the problem that Chainmail™ and original Dungeons & Dragons™ attempted to address.  It is complicated further by the fact that units will fight units within the grand scheme of armies fighting armies, and the interaction at these three levels, at least, will determine both what happens to the characters and what happens within the battle generally.

  To solve these problems, it is usually best to begin by understanding the concepts of scale and of what we will call focus.  Focus is merely that which is being resolved at any given moment.  Scale is the level of detail being used in determining outcomes.  The two interact, in that all scales always exist and must be considered at all times, but play will focus on one scale at any moment.

  As suggested, there are at least three scales that are pertinent in most mass combats.  The smallest is the individual scale, fighter against fighter, and is usually very important in role playing games because the player characters are among those individuals.  Above that is unit scale, the consideration of squads or companies or divisions as they move and interact on the field.  This all occurs within the level of the totality of the battle, whether that would be army scale or battle scale, the give and take of all that is happening on the field at once.  In some cases there may be a level above this, as for example when a battle is part of a war, and these armies are part of a larger collection of armies which may be doing battle in different combinations in different fields at the same time as part of a grand campaign or great war.  In the battles I’ve run this has rarely been a significant factor; however, if it is present in the background it may impact the present fight through such factors as supply lines for resources and reinforcements anticipated for either side.  It is usually necessary to resolve events at both the individual and the battle scales; it is often useful to do so at the unit scale, and sometimes at the campaign scale.  More significantly, you need to consider how actions on these scales interact.  How does the sum of unit interaction affect the flow of the battle generally?  What happens when one hero charges into a unit of soldiers?

  Focus, then, is understanding the scale at which you are working at any given moment.  Because each scale has its own complications, it is frequently the case that different techniques work best when the focus changes.  In general, it is most helpful to increase the level of abstraction as you move toward the larger scale.  This can be done in any of several ways, according to circumstances and preferences.

  Any role playing game which is likely to lead to a war in which the player characters are going to be involved in individual combat probably has sufficient rules for running individual combat, and in many cases it will make the most sense for the focus to move to individual combat whenever player characters are fighting.

  When a character engages a unit, it is often easy enough to break the unit into individuals, particularly if you’re using one of the methods of generating those individuals suggested when we discussed creating them.  If you’re using one each combatants or mooks, they’re all functionally the same such that you need only consider how many are in the unit and how many can engage the character simultaneously.  Many combat games have rules for this.  In fighting foes of the same size as the character, four to six are generally plausible, recognizing that even if they surge around the character it will take a moment for a new opponent to step into the breach left by a felled one, even if stepping on the body of his fellow doesn’t penalize his footing.  If you’re looking for fairness, the character should not be able to engage more adversaries in a given space of time than can engage him in that same time, even if he is cutting a swath through them like Moses parting the Red Sea.  This is not the only way to handle combat between an individual and a unit, but it will often prove best particularly when the individual is a player character.

  When units face units, the most effective approach is to devise unit values.  A unit is weakened by having its members disabled.  Thus in a hit point based system, it makes sense to let the average number of hit points of a unit’s members represent the loss of one member’s effectiveness.  At the same time, the unit should have an attack rating that is linked to the damage taken in a manner which makes sense given its attack mode.  In a unit of swordsmen, only those on the front edge of the unit will be able to engage the enemy, but as they fall they are more quickly replaced, and thus damage to the unit does not impact its ability to deal damage until it is near the end of its defensive rating.  A unit of missile weapons, whether bows or rifles, has a considerably greater ability to bring its full force to bear against the enemy, but at the same time it is more immediately impacted by injury to its members.  There are some types of weapons that fall between these extremes, such as spear or pike units in which two or possibly three ranks of men can engage the enemy to some degree, and so these do more damage initially than the sword units but lose strength sooner, while doing less initial damage than the missile units but not being as quickly affected by losses.

  In this connection, it is simple enough to dispense with dice by recognizing the role averages play in dice-based games.  If, for example, members of unit A need to roll 16 or better on a 20 sided die to hit members of unit B, then one in four will make successful rolls (because there are five successful rolls in twenty).  Similarly, if a sword does one eight-sided die of damage, on a typical hit it will do four and a half points of damage, which can be rounded to five (or four, if you prefer–just be consistent).  Now we multiply it by the number of combatants who are able to attack–we’ll suggest that this is a sword unit with eight in the front rank–and we find that of the eight attackers, two hit for a total of ten points.  Compare that to per character ratings of the defending unit, and learn from this how much that unit has been weakened.

  In this, it is not necessary to assume that any particular individual is dead.  All that is determined is that the unit is less able to fight, until it is dispersed and rendered useless on the field.  If there are particular individuals whose lives might matter later, another means can be used to determine whether they are found alive after the battle.

  It may sometimes be that a character attacking a unit will use this approach, particularly if he is using an area attack such as a grenade or a fireball.  If the game allows individuals to roll a defensive roll against such attacks, rather than have the entire unit roll individually, assume that that percentage of the unit that represents the probability of success made the roll successfully, and the rest failed.

  Unit combat and army scale combat can also be resolved by using the skill of the commanders.  In this approach, each unit or army is regarded a weapon, and its quality as a weapon is evaluated.  The skill of the commander is then rolled, modified by the quality of the unit, and each roll taken as representing an attack.  This works particularly well if the commanders are player characters, or if they are known non-player characters; it brings the abilities of the commanders sharply into focus, suggesting that victory depends in a very significant degree on whether the commanders make sound decisions and provide good leadership.  It also takes some of the tactical questions out of the hands of those players.  Rather than have the battle depend on whether the players or the referee make better use of their armies, it assumes that good successful rolls on behalf of the commanders indicate that whatever they did worked to their advantage.  You could thus reduce a Civil War battle to an individual combat between Lee and Grant, in which Lee has significantly greater skill but Grant has a significantly better weapon.  Rolls are made as they fight each other, and all the troop movements are color describing their successes and failures.

  One can similarly ignore the specific tactics involved and rely on a device designed to track the ebb and flow of the battle.  Multiverser’s General Effects Rolls have worked well for this.  The dice are rolled, the result read as favoring or opposing the player’s hopes, modified by the referee’s assessment of the balance of the situation at the moment, and on a favorable roll the player character’s side advances.  Such techniques can also take into account tactics brought in by the players through their characters.  For example, according to the chart for the Multiverser game, a 21 (on a 3d10 roll) is “Bad Enough”.  If the battle has already been going badly, this could indicate a breach in the defenses and a growing desperation among the troops.  If instead the player has just launched a promising foray against the enemy lines, this may indicate that the enemy lines are holding but falling back a little bit.

  These approaches to unit and army levels of combat can still be mixed with the individual level of combat in meaningful ways.  If the player is leading a unit to assault the enemy artillery position, he can fight the unit leader of an opposing unit while his unit takes on theirs, and meanwhile a shift in the fortunes of the army may indicate that enemy troops are being driven from the path so that he will have less resistance once he gets past the current fight.  If he defeats the unit leader, he can begin attacking the unit in individual combat based on how many are still fighting, or the referee can handle his contribution as a bonus to the abilities of his unit in the offensive.  The rolls that determine the general flow of battle are interpreted with consideration given to the successes of the characters individually, and at the same time the circumstances facing the individual characters are adjusted according to how the battle is going more generally.

  There are certainly other techniques that make for simplified battles while retaining the impact individual characters may have on the outcomes.  These have worked in my experience, making the few wars I’ve run work smoothly and credibly to the enjoyment of all the participants.  It may take a bit of work to adapt these to your game, and even to determine which techniques are most likely to support the sort of play you envision, but overall the war should play more smoothly with the assistance of some of these ideas.

  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.

  Man may look upon the outward appearance, but the Lord looks upon the heart.

  These words of the prophet Samuel, reported in First Samuel 16:7b, are often quoted to remind us that God doesn’t so much care how things look, or what we pretend, as He does about who we are.  In the context, Samuel had been sent to choose a king from among the many sons of a certain man named Jesse, and he had seen strong and capable men among the older brothers, but somehow knew that these were not God’s choice for the next King of Israel.  Rather, God pointed him to the youngest, a lad of such little promise that his father had left him to tend the sheep when given the opportunity to present his sons to the greatest living prophet of the Lord.  That lad, of course, was to be David, in some ways the greatest king Israel ever had.  God could see what was in the boy long before anyone else could; God’s interests were not so much in his talents or his abilities as in his character.  Thus we have this maxim, reminding us that we can only look at how people look and what they do, but God is only interested in who people really are, how they think and feel and what they believe.

  My interest, though, is in that part about the outward appearance.  That is where man looks, all of us, to some degree, whether we want to admit it or not.  We judge a person by what we see first, the way a person presents himself to us.  Like Samuel, we are impressed by people who look strong, or capable, or confident, or well-appointed.  We also find ourselves rejecting or discounting those who convey the opposite impression, those whom we perceive as weak, incompetent, uncertain, and slovenly.  For some people, we will never get past that first impression; for others, it will be a slow road to discovering that our attitudes are tainted by things that don’t matter.  We look at the outside, because we cannot see the inside, and so we make our decisions based on what we can see.

  Personally, I find that annoying in the extreme.  I find the idea of people judging me by my appearance so egregious that I specifically do nothing to make myself presentable beyond the bare minimum.  I wear clothes in which I am comfortable, without much regard for how they look to others beyond the basics that I’ll try to wear shirts without obvious rips or holes if I’m expecting to go somewhere.  I comb my hair and trim my beard to the degree required for my personal comfort, only rarely for the sake of appearance.  I am willing to bet that anyone who is so shallow as to determine that I’m not worth their time based on my appearance is not worth my time.  I’ll go to church in jeans and an open denim shirt over a pocket T-shirt; if I’m going to be up front, I’ll wear a dress shirt over the T-shirt instead of the denim, and button a few of the buttons.

  I find, though, that I am not immune; I, too, judge people by their appearances at times.  Some of the friends of one of my sons insist on wearing their jeans in that sliding off position that shows more underwear than a Hanes commercial.  I keep wanting to tell them to pull up their pants before they trip over the waist band.  They talk in that ghetto slang cadence laced with vulgarity (vulgarity is, to me, a clear mark of a limited mind–another of my personal appearance-based judgments).  I conclude based on first impressions that these people don’t have much left in their heads, however they managed to destroy whatever they may once have had.  It turns out that this is not always true (although the jury is still out on a few of them).  Some are decent human beings of above average intelligence.  Thus it seems that the very flaw I condemn in others I find in myself:  the tendency to draw conclusions about people based on appearances.

  I can’t help recalling the two young woman teachers my mother knew when I was in high school who took a house together around the corner from us to save expenses.  According to my mother, one of them dearly hoped to marry one day; it’s just that any time an eligible bachelor showed up at their place, she was trying to fix the car, or the furnace, or some other piece of equipment that left her dirty and disheveled, so she was always hampered by bad first impressions.  It’s too bad I wasn’t a decade or so older.  There’s something to be said for a wife who knows a bit about auto repair and home maintenance, even if she does at times look like a grease monkey.  But then, had I been older, how would I have reacted to an otherwise attractive blonde covered in soot or grease?  I guess it would tend to discourage at least some suitors.

  Relationships are helped or hampered by first impressions; and relationships are often critical to our lives.  Everyone kept telling Martin Luther what a wonderful girl Katherine was, but the few times he’d met her had not gone well.  It seems in his presence she was often tongue-tied and so said either inane things or nothing at all.  He thus thought she was haughty and not very bright.  Friends encouraged him to consider her for a bride, and he wouldn’t even consider her for a luncheon guest.  Thus it was many years before he finally married her, and realized that she really was the perfect girl for him.

  I may very much wish that no one judged me by appearances, and may very much intend not to do so to others, but this will not be true as long as we are limited to outward appearances.  People will form impressions from what they see, of our clothes and hair and jewelry, of our mannerisms and speech patterns, of our conduct and demeanor.  Smokers will lose respect in the eyes of non-smokers.  People who drive pickup trucks may think people who drive luxury cars are snobs, and people who drive luxury cars may think those who drive pickup trucks are boors.  Once those impressions are formed, they are difficult to overcome.

  In trying to create and run hundreds of believable characters in our settings, we often tend to build them rather simply.  That is often necessary.  The bartender generally is either nice to everyone or nasty to everyone.  If we’re really creative, we’ll come up with something discriminatory, such as a bartender who doesn’t like elves or flirts with women.  What, though, of a character who doesn’t like one of the player characters because of some initial bad impression, and whose dislike of that one taints his relationship with his companions, although he’s generally a nice guy to strangers?  Perhaps he had trouble with some guy, and now he doesn’t like men with red hair, or priests of Odin, or gnomes, or whatever unusual characteristic he associates with that guy who gave him all that trouble.  Perhaps he thinks right-minded people should drink ale, and is annoyed by the guy who passes up his excellent well-made house ale in favor of mead.

  Or perhaps the mayor noticed the characters entering town when they were coming from some venture, wounded, dirty, tired, and generally looking like riff-raff.  When they appear before him later to ask for assistance in their current noble mission, does he remember them as the bedraggled mess he saw on the road, and so take them for scoundrels trying to deceive him now?  Did someone see the heroes doing something he didn’t understand, and draw the wrong conclusion from it?  In the old film White Christmas, the housekeeper listens to part of Bob Wallace’s telephone conversation, enough to hear the person with whom he is speaking suggest a course of action she finds horrifying, but not enough to hear him reject that option.  She then repeats that offensive idea to Betty Hanes, with the result that Betty’s opinion of Bob (recently heading toward a major romance) falls dramatically and she will hear no explanations.  Even his desperate “If I said anything, I didn’t mean it” solves nothing.  Gossip spreads like wildfire, and if the characters have been observed doing something that might have been misunderstood, they might find the locals disenchanted with them before they’ve found a room or ordered a drink.  Impressions make or break relationships, and relationships are so important to so much of life.

  I am unlikely to change my ways.  I’ve had too many people react poorly to me when I was making an effort to make a good impression, so now I’m just going to stick with being comfortable with my own appearance.  I am going to have to work harder at accepting the fact that some people aren’t going to like me merely because of how I look; this is the price I pay for ignoring their expectations.  I am also going to have to remind myself more often not to draw conclusions from first impressions.  After all, the people who don’t much care how they look are most likely to be those who don’t much care how I look either, or at least one can always hope.

  My non-player characters, however, are going to be a lot more attentive to first impressions.  For most people, outward appearances are all they have on which to make their judgments, and they’re quite satisfied with the judgments they make on that basis.  I’m going to have to work harder at playing most people with the attitudes most people have, and give more thought to the first impressions my players’ characters are creating.

  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.

  We recently began giving sporadic consideration to adventure design.  After considering how to build an adventure around the actions of the Antagonists, we focused on models for quest-based adventures.  We looked at the Flag Captures model of telling the players where they need to go and letting them choose the path, and the Treasure Hunt approach of leading them from one clue to the next toward some ultimate known or possibly unknown goal.  We’re not finished with quest models yet; but there is an important aspect of quest design not yet considered, which is commonly if opaquely called The McGuffin.

  Alfred Hitchcock coined the term while working on a film set in Scotland.  He explained that this is the thing everyone in the story wants, that motivates their actions.  It didn’t much matter what it was, as long as the viewer could be persuaded that it mattered to the characters.  In designing quest-type adventures, you need a McGuffin, something that the characters badly enough want to reach that they will work to overcome the obstacles.  Given that the characters can only reflect their players, it is important that the motivation make sufficient sense that the players want this, too.

  Of course, it’s not always vital in every gaming group for there to be rhyme or reason to the McGuffin.  Some will be quite content with adventures in which their characters are off on some quest for no better reason than that it gives them something to do, some reason to go on this adventure.  As long as we are satisfied that this is what the character wants to do, we’ll do it.  Even so, understanding why the character wants to do this goes a long way to establishing the firmness of his resolve, and taking the step beyond that to identifying with his motivation makes the roleplaying more credible, the successes more joyful, and the failures more poignant.  Thus a well-crafted McGuffin can be a major factor in making a quest more fun.

  It turns out, though, that Hitchcock is right.  It doesn’t matter at all what the McGuffin actually is.  It can be a slip of paper, an ancient golden idol, a missing person, a scrap of information, an infectious organism–practically, anything can be the object of the quest.  What matters is not what the McGuffin is, but that the characters want it.  To design that, you have to consider why the characters want anything, and find a reason credible and compelling enough to carry them through the obstacles posed along the way.

  There are a number of good motivational drivers for characters on quests, and this article will miss some.  However, five main types of generally strong motivators will be described, and McGuffins may be designed to appeal to one or more of these.

  The most common sort of motivator in the earliest role playing adventures usually involved wealth or power; these two sorts are the same, the profit motive:  success will benefit the character in direct, tangible ways.  This is the basest and most crass sort of motivation that can be attached to a McGuffin; it’s also frequently very effective.  Treasure hunters abound even in our modern world, whether they dig or dive, for buried treasure on Oak Island or for the sunken Spanish Silver Train.  The Goonies kept pushing forward because they believed they would find pirate treasure at the end.  The drive to rule the world has been a key motivation of many cruel villains and of some characters who were perhaps more benign.  The desire to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice has led many to take great risks.  Even good characters can be pushed forward by the idea, just think of the good you could do with all that wealth and power.

  This motivation, though, can be fickle.  An old song says, I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.  There may be a that, a risk that is too great to take for the promised reward.  It’s not worth losing your life, one says; another, What good is all that gold if you can’t enjoy it?.  Power may appeal to some, but others aren’t interested in ruling the world, merely in avoiding it.  At some level, the players are going to do the sort of cost-benefit analysis we discussed in Opportunity Costs, setting the cost against the profit, discounted by the risk of failure.  If they decide that the return on their investment isn’t going to make it worth their while, the adventure is over.  Profit motives must always appear profitable, or they cease to motivate.

  Honor and reputation for many characters hold a much more powerful motivation.  The noble knight will rescue a maiden in distress because that’s his job, and should he not attempt this he would be disgraced, unable to show his face in public.  Many noble and honorable characters have undertaken quests for no better reason than that they feel it to be their duty as decent human beings.  The motive is not limited to decent human beings, either.  Many a thief has been coerced into doing something he’d rather not, because his reputation was at stake.  In FX, the special effects wizard is prodded to overcome his reservations about the job by the suggestion that perhaps his chief rival in the business would be able to do it if he couldn’t.  The search for Nessie is driven in part by the desire of the searchers to be known as the ones who proved she was there.  This, then, could be called the pride motive.  People will go to extraordinary lengths to prove themselves when that which they perceive as their greatest virtues or abilities are questioned, or even when success will prove their own greatness, and this can drive a character into an adventure.

  Again, though, there are limits to how far this will carry a character, and those limits are very individual to the character.  Many a thief has admitted himself a coward without embarrassment, if there’s more risk involved than he likes.  Pushed to the extreme, even the noblest samurai may reach the point at which he questions whether bushido is so noble and correct a thing as he had believed, or whether perhaps that which he felt honor-bound to do has brought him to a place where completing it would mar his honor.  Pride may be a stronger motive than profit, and it may be a more reliable one, but it is also an uncertain target which may carry the character in surprising directions once it is unleashed.  The knight may feel honor-bound to escort the princess back to her homeland; he may also feel honor-bound to challenge her wicked father to mortal combat when he gets there.

  Some stability is achieved by combining the profit motive and the pride motive.  It is unfortunately a tired cliché, but has become so largely because it is effective.  Characters may pursue the McGuffin because they have agreed to do so.  A contract or a personal obligation may drive the character to undertake the quest for someone else, someone to whom the character owes a debt, or who has agreed to compensate the character for the successful completion of the task.

  The evident advantage of this motivation is that the two parts reinforce each other.  It may be that at some point I question whether this job is worth the money, or whether it is unreasonable to expect this of me, but at that moment I also have the fact that I promised to do it, and am honor bound by my promise.  It may be that I’m willing to bear the disgrace of the breach of the obligation, but then I’ve probably already come so far that it would be a shame not to be paid because at the last minute I reneged on the deal.  The characters are encouraged to finish the quest because there are two reasons to do so.

  However, the two reasons together, in this context, are rarely as potent as either reason alone.  If I’m being paid to perform this, odds are there’s a profit to be made by my employer, and that profit covers my wages and then some; thus unless this is something that has value only to him or someone like him, it probably means I’m being underpaid.  If this is in response to an obligation, that certainly does mean I’m bound by my honor; but I am more likely to question whether my honor truly binds me to this task if it does not relate directly to the source of my debt.  Meanwhile, if the risk is too great I will come to the point at which it would be better to pay damages on breach of contract than to continue attempting to do that which is too difficult for me.  Thus a contract motive is strengthened by the combination of pride and profit, but at the same time weakened by it.

  Where the profit motive is the basest and most crass, the highest and most noble motivations are truth and justice.  Here we hope and expect that success in the quest would make the world a better place.  The only benefit sought by the character through such a quest is the knowledge that he made a difference, that something is better because of his efforts.

  One is tempted to point to the signers of the Declaration of Independence, many of whom lost everything they owned because of their support for the war.  Regrettably, it is doubtful they anticipated that outcome.  Perhaps it is superheroes to whom we should look for this motive.  Superman always does the right thing because it is the right thing, as he fights for truth and justice.  Spiderman constantly remembers that with great power comes great responsibility.  The desire to make the world a better place is a worthy motivation for a hero.  We could in fact call it the hero motive.

  That may be its weakness, as well.  One has to be a hero, or at least want to be a hero and perceive oneself as a hero, for this to be that potent.  This quest may have to be done by someone, but does it have to be done by us?  Certainly the motive is present in the lives of lesser heroes; but it’s usually adulterated by other motives.  Police detectives are on a quest to uncover the truth for its own sake; but they are usually also being paid to do this, and there is often some admixture of fear motive (up next).  It is wonderful to have characters who will do the right thing solely because it is the right thing, and be so driven by this that they will see it through to the end over all obstacles or die trying.  It is more normal for this to be the icing on the cake:  they are going to hire us to go on this quest which will make us incredibly wealthy and famous, and it’s the right thing to do.

  The fear motive just mentioned is in some ways the mirror image of the profit motive.  There is some danger or fear that arises from failure of the quest.  The weapon may fall into the wrong hands, or the bomb will explode killing millions of innocents, or the virus will spread beyond this quarantined town into the major population centers of the world, or the killer will strike again.  The profit motive was about making our own lives better, and the hero motive about making the world better for everyone.  The fear motive is merely about preventing things from becoming much, much worse.

  Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage, steeped in the Cold War Balance of Terror mentality of its time, uses the fear motive as the impetus for its incredible quest.  The life of the recently defected scientist is on the line.  That in itself is not sufficient to try to save him.  What does matter is that he may have developed something now in the hands of the enemy that will tip the balance of power to them resulting in our destruction, and saving his life may be the only way we can maintain parity.  The quest must proceed to save us from them.  The most famous quest in fantasy has a very strong fear motive in it:  the One Ring must be destroyed to prevent it from falling into Sauron’s hands, for should it return to him there would not be enough strength left in Middle Earth to stop him.  Indiana Jones pursued the Ark of the Covenant for several reasons, but one of them was to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis.

  Fear motive may be the most effective; but it may be overused.  It once was said of Doctor Who that he wandered around all space and time saving worlds, occasionally rising above it to save the entire universe.  James Bond is always attempting to foil some plot related to world conquest or international chaos, and it keeps us on the edge of our seats.  The constantly impending disaster makes a wonderful driver for story after story.  What, though, happens the first time the player characters fail to save the world?  If the world is destroyed, the game is pretty much over.  If the world is saved anyway, it makes all previous character victories seem at least a bit hollow in retrospect.  Ultimately if you use the fear motive as the driver for your McGuffin, you have to be willing to accept the consequences of failure, the realization of those fears.

  There are other motivations for quests, other drivers for McGuffins.  Many readers will have wondered about the revenge motive.  Guilt has driven many people to action.  We would not want to forget love as a reason to climb the highest mountain, swim the deepest ocean, and cross the widest desert.  These, though, are much more difficult to build into an adventure; they rely too much on the emotions of the characters, and not enough on the nature of the McGuffin itself.  If there is a way to make them work with a particular group, by all means use them.  Recognize however that informing a player that a girl on whom he had a childhood crush which he has never outgrown has been kidnapped by pirates, and that his undying love for her is forcing him to rush to her rescue is one step worse than simply having some god manifest, tell him what to do, and then enspell him so he cannot refuse.  It is far better to build your McGuffin around something on which the player and the character are already agreed, and let things take their course from there.

  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.