The Gaming Outpost

  Years ago we had a dog, a thoroughbred mutt we dubbed a North American Cat Herd.  She grew up with cats, and her natural shepherding instincts led her to take care of them as she grew up.  The two cats who had lived with us when she was a puppy had expanded to three, Cocoa, Vanilla, and Cotton, and Casey the dog watched them all.  Then she brought home a couple more kittens herself.  This story is about one of those kittens, and the story of her arrival will help understand who she was.

  It was rather early, and Casey wanted to go outside rather urgently.  I opened the front door, and she ran directly to the abandoned house next door, and stuck her nose through the broken front step.  Fearing that she might have cornered a skunk, I approached cautiously.  What I found was a kitten, apparently lost or abandoned, looking up at the dog, too young to have any concept that it should fear this animal.  I brought the new kitten inside and we began the fruitless neighborhood search for its owner, and then gave her a name, based on the look and feel of her gray and white fur, Velvet.

  To Velvet, courage was a virtue.  She would not be seen as anything less than the bravest cat in the house.  She probably got stepped on and tripped over a bit in the early days, but gradually she came to understand how to stay out of the way without fleeing.

  One day my wife was vacuuming the rug in the living room.  Cotton, Vanilla, and Velvet were settled on the floor near where she was working, and she worked toward and around them.  The two white cats, one long-haired and one short, both with one blue eye and one green, watched the powerful upright floor-beating vacuum with detached disinterest.  Velvet watched it with evident concern, but kept glancing at the two white cats who were unmoved by this thundering monstrosity.  Several times Velvet twitched, as if about to stand, but then saw the other two resting nonchalantly on the carpet as if nothing in the world could disturb them.  You could almost read her mind, as she swithered between wanting to run away and wanting to be at least as brave as any other cat in the house.  She was not going to be the first one to flee, and so she tried to hint to the others that it was time to go.  They remained oblivious to her suggestion that this was a dangerous situation.  Finally, Velvet rose and scampered out of the living room.  Those two white cats must be crazy, she apparently decided, and it was time to let discretion rule.

  There is a genetic link between deafness, white fur, and blue eyes in cats, and something near thirty percent of all odd-eyed (one blue, one green) white cats have the deafness trait.  Vanilla and Cotton were both deaf.  They could hear nothing.  We developed a number of hand signals that they understood, and kept them inside so they would be safe.  Thus the thundering monster that the vacuum cleaner was to Velvet was to them only an odd vibrating rolling device that was being pushed around on the carpet.  They were not afraid because they could not perceive that which Velvet recognized as serious danger.

  Certainly deafness is a handicap.  Cotton and Vanilla were vulnerable because they could not hear, and as a result we kept them inside where they would not face the dangers of cars, dogs, and other hazards to which normal hearing would have alerted them.  At the same time, they were ideally suited to living around loud noises.  Just as the vacuum cleaner never disturbed them, so too they did not jump and run when things fell or other loud noises jarred the house.  Because they were handicapped in regard to sound, they were simultaneously protected against it.

  It is not difficult to imagine that there might be things in the world around us that we cannot perceive yet which pose great danger to us.  We know this to be true.  Radiation from radioactive elements or fallout causes cancers, mutations, and rapid physical deterioration in higher doses, and yet is completely undetectable by our senses.  Quite a few gases are colorless and odorless, but deadly nonetheless.  Carbon monoxide is an excellent example, as its effect is to make its victims drowsy until they fall asleep and never awaken; its etiology is that it binds with hemoglobin far more readily than oxygen, and so ties up the body’s ability to deliver oxygen to the brain and other vital organs, slowly suffocating all systems.  We don’t have to imagine that there are things which might harm us or kill us that we cannot sense; we know that such things exist, and that they kill people every year.

  From this, there are several interesting possible directions to explore.

  Given that imperceptible hazards exist, are any of these malevolent entities?  That is, might there be something like ghosts out there, intent on our harm and capable of causing it, yet completely undetectable to us?  It may be that like Egon and the Ghostbusters we can find supernatural Geiger counters, some means of detecting what our senses will not reveal.  It may be that we must infer their existence from secondary information, seeing the effects in the world and so identifying the cause.  Carrying canaries into caves and mines is an example of a means of identifying an invisible danger by its effects.

  It may be that there are other creatures in our world who can perceive what we cannot.  Many people think that animals can sense the presence of ghosts, even when people cannot.  Some people are thought to be sensitives, aware of supernatural presences unknown to the rest of us.  It has been suggested by some that young children are aware of such beings as fairies, pixies, and angels, but that as they grow we persuade them they were imagining these.  These are all fanciful ideas, but then a fantasy game is made of fanciful ideas.  We know that we are able to see colors unrecognized by most other animals, and so can discriminate between objects more easily by sight.  We also know that some animals, particularly insects and birds, which are able to see color do not see the colors we see.  They perceive some light that is invisible to us, and at the same time cannot see all of the light we see.  We have mentioned that some animals have superior olfaction, or hearing, and so know much in those realms which we miss.

  My recent article for the Chaplain’s Corner of the Christian Gamers Guild, Faith and Gaming:  Animals, addressed the possibility that animals could perceive supernatural entities which were imperceptible to us.  For evident reasons, they would not understand that we cannot see what to them is obvious.  It took us many years to recognize that dogs cannot see color as we do; it is fairly clear that dogs do not understand our failure to hear what they hear and smell what they smell, and when they bark viciously at those who would threaten to invade our territories, they do not understand why we complain to them instead of joining in the defense of the pack.

  Thus not only is it entirely possible that other creatures can perceive what we cannot, it is known that this is correct.  It should be recognized in this regard that an animal whose perception of the world differed from ours might not be aware of it.  It is, after all, the natural assumption that whatever you perceive is what everyone else perceives.  You don’t see that? is the familiar statement of someone who is able to see something others cannot.  It is always said with surprise, and sometimes concern as to whose perception is the reality and whether the other is losing his mind.

  To say that deafness is a handicap is a viewpoint centered on human ability.  There are animals that do not hear, and from their perspective hearing may be an extraordinary ability, or it may be an unnecessary annoyance.  Would we benefit from the ability to see infrared light, or would it tend rather to confuse our view of the world?  Is there anything in the ultrasonic or subsonic audio ranges that is worth hearing for us?  Should we consider ourselves handicapped because we cannot perceive these things?

  Perhaps if we could perceive the supernatural realm about us we would always be in fear; perhaps to the contrary we would fail to recognize it as supernatural or to give it the respect it may properly deserve.  There is always a disconnect between the reality as it exists and the reality as it is perceived, and the perceptions of the character may often be at odds with existence.

  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 was surprised to find myself quoted recently.  It was not that I don’t get quoted, particularly on forums where I participate, but rather that I had been quoted almost entirely to express approval for something I had written, and that I did not remember having written it.  Particular merit was found with this statement I had made:  There is a degree to which what we call character generation is not the creation of the character; it is the creation of the character sheet.

  I did not track down the context of the quote, and nothing was offered to suggest it.  I suspect, though, that it may have been in connection with Multiverser’s “On-the-Fly” Character Creation system, an idea we should have realized much sooner than we did, and which we disseminate through our web presence and our convention appearances.

  For anyone not familiar with the game or this character creation system, in Multiverser the player plays himself, or perhaps a game recreation of himself that is as accurate and complete as can be managed in transposing a real person to a fictional character.  In the earliest tests of the idea, people just started by playing themselves and put scores on paper as they needed them.  From this process we worked out what scores we were going to need.  Real people are far more complicated than anyone imagines, though, and we worked our way to the point that a starting character paper was a major project.  Of course, there are many games in which a starting character is a major project–my character creation web site for original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons consists of over two hundred web pages of materials–so we didn’t worry too much about this.  Eventually, though, we realized that we were doing too much work up front.  Game play was better facilitated if we began by putting a very few important scores on paper and filling in the rest as game progressed.  Which scores are the important ones very much depends on the character.  Star athletes need to have physical scores and athletic skills on the paper, while academic scholars would require their intellects and their areas of knowledge covered.  The trick is to identify which are the outstanding and important qualities of this character and get those on paper, allowing the more mundane and insignificant aspects to be added at such time as the game calls for them.

  In that sense, it’s pretty obvious that there’s a big difference between creating the character and creating the character sheet.  In Multiverser the character already exists, and has existed for years before anyone thought to bring him into the game.  He is a highly complex and multi-faceted multi-talented individual not fully known or understood by anyone at the table, not even the player who plays him.  The character sheet, on the other hand, is a bare bones sketch of a few important aspects of this character.  It gives a few fragments of character abilities in terms that permit them to integrate with the game mechanics.  It cannot be more than that, really.  Were it a hundred pages in small print, it would barely scratch the surface of all that this character is and does, his abilities, his drives, his beliefs.  All it is is a quick reference document to keep a few fundamental character facts as matters of record, should they be needed in play.

  The surprising thing, though, is that this is true of all character creation processes in all role playing games.  The character is something rich and diverse, filled with motivations and history, relationships and anecdotes.  The character paper is nothing more than a reference sheet for a few relevant statistics that are likely to be needed for resolving important moments in play, possibly with some color added to assist the player in getting into the mindset of this character.

  We make the mistake of equating the two.  Pass me my character, we say, as if there could possibly be adequate information in a file folder to fully define the persona we bring into the game world.  Give me an eraser so I can change my character.  As was suggested when we discussed Credibility, that piece of paper is an authority to which players can appeal for support in their proposed actions and results.  The character exists in the shared imagined space, that is, in the minds of the participants in the game.

  For some of us, this is an essential restructuring of the understanding of the character.  The words and numbers on the sheet are not the character.  They could not possibly be that, and so they never were.  The character is that entity that lives and breathes in our imaginations; this piece of paper is a page from the hall of records, a birth certificate, a school transcript, an employee evaluation.  Just as those documents, even collectively, cannot say who you are, so too the character sheet cannot tell us who the character is.  It can only tell us a few important statistics about the character, which is not at all the same thing.

  Of course, this becomes evident in a game like Multiverser, where the entire character creation process (whether played as an I-game or playing a not-I character) involves imagining the character and putting the details on paper.  This applies in many other games as well.  Seth Ben-Ezra’s Legends of Alyria (about which he wrote extensively on the development of that game in his Dreaming Out Loud series here at Gaming Outpost) does much the same thing, having the players define who the character is and then create the stats on paper that describe that character.  If you’ve created a character in your mind and then reduced it to notes on paper, it’s blatantly evident that the notes on paper are a pale reflection of the character that has been created.  These are only the chart at the foot of the bed; the patient is much more than what the chart reports.

  Yet it is equally true of those games in which the statistics are developed through mechanical means, such as dice, and the character fleshed out by player choices and additional rolls.  In this case, the real character creation occurs after the sheet has been constructed, as the player defines who this person is in revealing him in the shared imagined space.  Just because we rolled up the scores doesn’t mean we rolled up the character.  We only defined a few key points, and left the rest up to our collective imaginations to devise.  The character sheet in this case is the starting point; the character is about to be created from it.

  Either way, the character sheet is not the character, but only a synopsis of the character.  It is like the one paragraph biography of the author that appears on the flyleaf and tells you everything and nothing.  Stop looking at that as if it were the character, and realize it’s only the framework, the few critical points to which everyone has agreed.  Start the game and watch the character create himself on the stage of the mind as play progresses.

  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 have mentioned my brother Roy and my good friend David quite a few times in this series; I have probably at one time or another even told this story about them. It came back to me recently as I was reading posts on a game designers forum, so I’ll tell it again now.

Roy and David must have been in high school; I may already have been in college, but I’m only two years ahead of them. The three of us were in the yard at my parents’ home talking about something, when suddenly I said to them, “One of you two is the smartest person I know.”

David commented that it was very odd I said that at that moment, as he had just been thinking that one of the two of us was the smartest person he knew. Roy indicated that he had been thinking much the same thing of David and me.

Roy commented later that he also decided that David and I must not be quite so smart as he thought, if we really thought he might as smart as we were.

There’s a point in Roy’s comment that’s worth pursuing. It came clear to me recently when someone on a particular game designers’ forum made a passing comment about the “distinguished company” present there. I have no idea whether that comment was including me in its reference, and I certainly have a great amount of respect for a number of the participants on that forum. It just struck me as surpassingly odd that there could be something so exalted as distinguished company on a forum of role playing game designers. We’re hardly that well known even among role playing game players, and in the world at large we probably don’t appear on the radar of the average radio talk show potential guest list. I’ve been interviewed by a couple of newspaper people, but it was always in relation to my work in time travel, not role playing games, that I was contacted. The idea that a couple of high school or college kids could really be the smartest people a couple of high school or college kids knew is quite silly when you think about it. We probably did know people smarter than that (and I mean intelligence, not education level), we just didn’t know them well enough to realize how very smart they really were. It’s almost as silly to think that role playing game designers could possibly constitute distinguished company by almost any standard. I’m embarrassed to think that the reference might have included me.

Yet there are awards for role playing game design, and some of us are featured in hobby magazines and made guests at conventions. In our own sphere we have some sort of fame. There are award-winning designers on that forum. Perhaps I should be embarrassed that I even imagined I was included in that comment. I certainly didn’t ask.

The point that came to the front of my mind in this was the idea of the big fish in the small pond. I trust it’s a familiar aphorism. It suggests that you don’t have to be that special to be important in a smaller place, or perhaps that the most important or powerful person in small group would not be all that significant in a larger one. There aren’t that many role playing game designers, so it doesn’t take much to be one of the best of these. I don’t mean to denigrate those who are among the best, as I have tremendous respect for them. I only mean that the competition is not so great.

There are many examples of this concept in our ordinary lives. The brightest high school graduates go to colleges where they are suddenly surrounded not by the dummies against whom they were so outstanding mere months ago but by other kids equally notable in their academic abilities. It happens again when the brighter college graduates find themselves in graduate school. It’s not just in intellectual pursuits that this happens. Every high school has its star athletes who think they’re pro material. Some of them learn the hard facts in college, where they barely make the team. Some have their hopes dashed when the professional teams pass over them, not interested in them despite their distinguished college careers. The best musician in the high school band finds competition stiff for Region Band, stiffer yet for All State, and incredibly difficult for All Eastern. No matter what it is you pride yourself in doing, the competition to be good at this increases as the size of the group against which you are compared grows.

So lets suppose for the moment that one of your player characters really is one of the best in his world. Let’s imagine that he’s that one person in ten thousand who is as good as he is. In his home town no one even comes close to being that good. He can beat everyone in the county, if it’s a small county. But if there are a hundred thousand people in the county, suddenly there are nine others who are at the same level of ability he is. If you reach a population of a million, he’s one of a hundred this good. Then you have to wonder whether merely being this good at this will get him a job doing it. Do these million people need a hundred who can do this so well? How does he compare to the other ninety-nine? One of them is probably that one in a million best, and it’s not him. Suddenly this character who was all that and more back in his home town is another of those nationally.

There are two directions this can take us.

The character who is driven to excel will push forward. He knows that he isn’t the best, but he could be if he worked at it. As he moves away from his own home, the competition gets tougher, not because others are so much better than he is but because so many more are just as good, and it becomes the more difficult to stand out in the crowd. This character must do more, push the limits of his ability, find ways to sell himself, rely on other skills which can make him more valuable, to keep rising to the top. He might not make it, but at least he’ll prove how good he really is.

On the other hand, there will be those who don’t want to face that challenge. Rather than move into the great sea, they’ll find a nice small pond in which to settle, somewhere where they can be admired, feared, obeyed, or otherwise important, because they are the best at what they do, at least as far as anyone around here has seen. Whether they express this as the local bully or the local hero, the decision to remain local may be based on the recognition that they can remain great as long as they are local. They can be the big fish only so long as they are in the small pond.

In some cases, player characters will have to make that choice. Will they be the big fish in the small pond, or will they take their chances in the greater waterways of the world?

However, player characters are often travelers, people who have already made the decision to move into the greater world. That means sometimes they will come into these small ponds, and sometimes they will upset these big fish. That leads to confrontations. Try not to actually say, This town ain’t big enough for the both of us when you play the antagonist trying to drive the player character away; but keep that attitude in mind. The big fish is in the small pond precisely because no one challenges him. The challenger is not welcome here. Even if he puts a good face on it, the local hero does not wish to be overshadowed by the visiting legend. The confrontation may take a different form, such as casting aspersions on a reputation or providing insufficient or incorrect information about local people and customs to create the maximum embarrassment from mistakes. The local big fish is going to be uncomfortable if his superiority is questioned, and he’s not going to forgive that if he can’t resolve it in his favor.

Being one in a hundred is an impressive level of ability, and as long as there are only a hundred against whom to compare yourself you’re probably the best. In ten thousand, there are one hundred people that good. If you’re only one in a hundred, you either have to accept that you’re not the best, or you have to find a place where you are.

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.

  For as long as my wife knew her father, he was always melancholy in November.  Sometimes just looking at the world would bring a tear to his eye.  She never knew why; all she knew was that there was something about November that touched him emotionally, rather deeply.

  I know–I’m getting esoteric again, after only just pulling out of an esoteric streak last week.  I should write something more practical, to keep the series fresh.  It’s just that I wanted to get this published before November was too far behind us, and I only just realized it as November was drawing to a close.  You see, my father-in-law died in the month of November, the month in which he had always seemed a bit sad.  It only just struck me how oddly significant that was.

  Of course, it’s probably not significant.  Those of you with scientific minds will note that it need not be entirely coincidental and still not have any special meaning.  After all, if indeed he was always depressed at a particular time of year, once he was near ninety years old (my wife was the child of his old age) it was entirely likely that such depression would contribute to his health problems and bring the long-delayed end of his life.  His melancholy at that time of year could have stemmed from events in the past of which he never spoke, or even which he no longer recalled.  In our modern practical terms, it means nothing.  Yet the realization that he died in that month which for long years had touched him deeply for no known reason has feeling of wonder to it, as if there were something magical there.

  Samuel Clemens was born the year Haley’s Comet passed through the center of the Solar System.  He once said that he had come in with the comet and he expected to go out with it.  Indeed, sometime around his seventy-fifth birthday as the famed comet made its return he died.  Was it just coincidence, or did he will it–or was his death foreshadowed by the comet in some way that he recognized but could not articulate?

  Character deaths, particularly player character deaths, are rather tricky events in traditional role playing games.  We don’t plan them; they take us rather by surprise, sometimes shock us entirely.  We’re on an adventure, and something goes wrong, and we do everything we can but it’s not enough, and that’s the end.  On the other hand, there are new approaches to play on the market now in which players have control over the deaths of their characters, and in which this control is given to them specifically so that they can create great stories around those characters.  Such games lend themselves potentially to foreshadowing, to creating impressions, connecting to times and places, anticipating events.  Whether it is November or the Comet or Dunsinane Castle, moods and facts can be brought together to provide a glimpse of the future, or the potential future, enhancing the story in an almost magical way.

  Even when such prediction of character death is inconsistent with the play techniques of a particular game, foreshadowing of events can still be used effectively, and can set a mood of mystery or of anticipation.  Something is going to happen, it says.  Of course something is going to happen.  After all, this is an adventure game, and things happen.  Yet by foreshadowing something, not too specifically, you can set the players on edge awaiting the thud of the other shoe.

  Some referees use heavy-handed illusionist techniques to bring about desired events.  This enables them to foreshadow and even prophesy those events, because it’s not that difficult for a player with the credibility ordinarily granted referees in traditional games to predetermine a few events.  The difficulty here is that heavy foreshadowing of predetermined events that will be brought to pass by illusionist techniques alerts players to their own limited credibility in play–that is, they realize that their choices aren’t going to matter if they see that the referee has already decided what is going to happen.  The more clearly this appears, the more it becomes apparent that the referee is going to run roughshod over his players, and the less likely they are to enjoy it.  It takes unusual skill to tell the players what is going to happen, then cause it to happen, while making them feel that it was entirely due to their own choices.  It also becomes more difficult to do without tipping your hand the more times you do it with the same players, as eventually they see the man behind the curtain and throw in their cards, take their football and go home, to badly mix several metaphors.

  A more interesting approach is taken by some who project an impression that something significant is about to happen.  This is a referee who really has no idea nor expectation of events ahead, but knows that if he acts like he expects something important to occur the players will latch onto that and attach importance to whatever does happen, leading them to think he planned it and they walked right into it.  Foreshadowing in this case remains vague, undirected, like spooky music in a movie which tells us that something is going to happen but without any particulars.  This requires considerably more flexibility after the fact, as once the foreshadowed event is identified the referee must adjust the world such that this event is significant in whatever way fits the foreshadowing.

  Non-specific foreshadowing can be used in less flexible situations as well.  For example, it can be foretold that if the explorers enter this area, someone will die, and the referee can guarantee the fulfillment of that prediction without forcing anything.  It would be a bit silly if the outcome was that the enemies they encounter therein died (that, after all, is probably what they want, and hardly feels like what was foreshadowed).  However, if the enemies hold prisoners, some of the prisoners may be killed, making the prediction true and meaningful to the players without involving the deaths of their characters.

  In talking about an Anniversary a couple weeks back, we suggested that a player could create for his character a significant date, and state why it was significant.  Perhaps it could also be so that the character has a significant time of year for which he has no explanation, something that is foreshadowing his future in ways he does not understand.  It’s a tricky notion to manage in play, but there are ways to do it, and it might be worth exploring.

  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 strikes me that several of the recent columns have been a bit, qu’est c’on dit, esoteric, perhaps.  In any event, talking about homes and anniversaries and such provides some interesting ideas for color in our games, but it isn’t terribly practical.  It’s time to get back to something more generally useful.  Thus I am picking up the thoughts on how to design an adventure.

  In the last quarter, we had several articles specifically aimed at quest adventures, adventures focused on a goal.  Flag Captures, Treasure Hunt, and Scavenger Hunts were all models of this concept, and we gave consideration to how to craft a practical McGuffin to motivate the characters in their quests.  We’ve finished with quests.  They are a useful approach to adventure design, but as is apparent from the fact that our first adventure design column focused on the Antagonists, it should not be surprising that there are quite a few ways to design good adventures that are not quests.

  The quest model assumes that characters need an objective to seek and a motivation for seeking it.  Some characters do require this, just as some people do.  However, the classic answer George Mallory gave as his reason for attempting to climb Mount Everest, “Because it’s there”, is a motivation for exploration that deserves consideration.  Many have scaled mountains, entered caves, blazed paths in the wilderness, and otherwise moved forward for no better reason than that there was something to discover.  Confronted with the unknown, man responds by advancing into it.  It is a drive that carried us to heights of the moon and the depths of the Marianas Trench, that encouraged feet to trudge to the poles and robotic spacecraft to land on Mars.  It drives scientific inquiry, from Newton’s Laws of Motion to Watson and Crick’s Double Helix.  Inquiring minds want to know.

  Thus spelunking, that is, cave exploration, is a model for adventure design that contains its own motivation.  Characters want to explore the unknown because they want to know; players want to explore the unknown because they want to discover.  It can be the reason for entering a cavern complex or a dungeon compound, or for visiting ruins or graveyards, opening pyramids and other ancient crypts, advancing beyond the frontier into the unknown, landing on an uncharted island or unexplored planet.

  If you find it difficult to fathom the motivation for such an adventure, you are not alone.  My first complaint concerning the recent remake of the movie The Time Machine centered on the fact that the film’s creators could not understand the central character of the book, and so destroyed him and the point of the original story in an effort to provide something the modern viewer could grasp.  Alexander Hartdeggen, in H. G. Wells’ famed book, was modeled on the great nineteenth century independent scientist inventors as they were perceived in the popular mind.  Working alone in his rooms he created a time machine for no better reason than that he wanted to learn, to learn about time itself and to learn about the future.  That was all the motivation he needed.  Believing that modern audiences would be unable to grasp this as a motivation, the filmmakers invented a fiance named Emma, then killed her (twice, in fact), to motivate Hartdeggen so he would have a reason to invent the time machine to try to save her, and then to travel to the future looking for the answer which would explain why he could not do so.  Setting aside the utter nonsense of that proposition (he in fact did change the past, and the answer he ultimately gains makes no sense), it is striking that the pure quest for knowledge was disregarded by the filmmakers as an incredible motivation for a character.  Some people don’t get it.  That’s all right.  Spelunking is a model of adventure design for those who understand Hartdeggen and the quest for knowledge for its own sake.

  There are a number of challenges with this type of design.  Nearly all of them revolve around the central challenge of offering something that is worth exploring.  It must be interesting, because by the very nature of the concept, failure to be interesting is to be boring, and boredom is failure in exploration.

  To make it interesting, you must have many ideas for things that are worth imagining.  This is a challenge in itself, as the things that might be interesting in the real world are difficult to convey as interesting within the game.

  I have visited a number of caves and caverns over the years, now tourist attractions but not entirely spoiled for that and in some ways benefited by it.  For one thing, extensive electric lighting made it possible to see the cavernous interiors which flashlights or even Coleman® lanterns would not have illumined.  For another, were they not tourist attractions, it is extremely doubtful whether a young teenage boy, his parents, and three younger siblings would have been given an opportunity to enter and experience these caves in a single day’s visit.  I can recall to mind memories of waterfalls of solid rock, formed on the walls by the deposits carried by dripping water.  One cave highlighted some odd features that had the look of fried eggs about them, bulbous in the center.  Cavernous ceilings and tall columns were at times breathtaking.  There was much that was fascinating to the eye, and visiting a cavern such as Luray or Skyline is an experience I recommend.  Similarly, although I have never been to Yellowstone or to the Grand Canyon, I am given to understand that just seeing these sights is worth the trip.

  However, descriptions of such wonders do not make for superb role playing adventures.  Those who have seen them take the descriptions as recalling the images they know, and those who have not seen them gain less from the descriptions than they would from a picture postcard, which is to say nothing at all of the true feeling of such alien places.  To make such places interesting in the shared imagined space of a role playing game, you have to be inventive.  Things must be happening, or must have happened, that are unexpected or at least suggestive of the unusual.  This is why so many imagined caves in our games have creatures living in them (something that is rare in real caves, apart from bats whose presence tends to make such places less than hospitable to humans, and blind fish trapped for generations in underground waterways).  They also have writing on the walls, ancient carvings and statues and other decorations (again rare, although found in some caves, mostly near the entrances), because these are easily imagined but not easily fathomed, and so create interest.  If you expect your players to enjoy exploring your caves, or any other locale, purely for the interest of the place, you must create an interesting place.

  One of the great advantages of the dungeon or cave complex model for spelunking type adventures is that it can be very much contained or controlled.  There can be one entrance; passages branching off from the starting point can be limited.  This permits the world designer to begin with a few ideas positioned near the entrance, and to expand gradually on those initial ideas as the complex is built outward, staying ahead of the player characters so they don’t come to the part that is still under construction.  That illustrates one of the challenges of spelunking design.  You must either have a means of containing your players within that part of the world that is ready for them, or you must have a wealth of good ideas spread across a very large area so that wherever they go they will encounter something else interesting.

  One means of making it seem as if everything everywhere is interesting is to so order the game that the player characters are told where to go.  If stories of the ruins to the east are played in their direction, they are likely to head due east to find the ruins, and so be blissfully unaware that a mere few miles to either side of their course nothing has been created.  If on the return journey there proves to be a lake which they had not seen on the outward trek, this is not necessarily a surprise–after all, they were focused on their destination before, and something a mile or two off the road could easily have escaped notice.

  Another potential shortcut for this sort of play is to create spare points of interest.  There may be a hundred inns in the city, but if you create five it is unlikely that the player characters will visit all of them before you have a chance to create five more.  Interesting sights and encounters can similarly be completely mobile from the referee’s perspective but absolutely fixed within the world whenever it is decided exactly where they would be.  Thus if the characters head south, and nothing has been planned to the south, you can pull out four or five modular points of interest and place them along the road.

  Such points of interest can be quite varied.  An old adventurer living in a run down house along the road who sits on his porch and greets travelers would go unreported by traveling merchants, but might be of great interest to young adventurers looking to know what is out there.  Geographical features such as hidden ponds or unusual rock formations can color the journey favorably if not overused.  Players frequently take interest in archaeological points.  Even so little as a cryptic tombstone marking an ancient grave can fascinate, and can be used as information in the present adventure or as the basis for a future direction.  The ruins of an old castle, fort, or town; a graveyard complete with crypts; and an ancient boundary marker all have possibilities.  Even a modern trading center, that is, a genre and period appropriate place to buy and sell goods, can be a point of interest in the explorations undertaken by the adventurers, if it’s made interesting.

  Related to this are the sorts of encounters used for Stalling.  An interesting and involving delay can let the night play out well and give the referee an extra week to build the world in front of the characters.  To this end, our previously discussed Encounters with people the characters already know can be effective here.  It could be fun, at least once in a while, to regale the players with tales of adventures had by others, invented at this moment by you, and to invite them to recount stories of what they’ve been doing in response.  As suggested when we considered having characters write Reports on their characters’ behalves, the retelling of such stories by the players often reveals much to the referee about what the players are enjoying and remembering.

  There is much debate among gamers and gaming theorists concerning the proper meaning of the word story, and it would not be worth the space in this column to attempt to clarify that.  Yet it is appropriate to mention that in this approach to design, there is nothing of what is traditionally considered a story.  We are not building toward a climax.  There are no issues of human tragedy or comedy at stake at any point.  There will be no sense that the story is ending.  Any character development, any plot points, anything that resembles a storyline, will be both accidental and incidental.  This is not an effort to create a story, but an effort to create and explore a setting, a place where stories might occur but need not.

  At the same time, exploration may have its own dangers, and its own rewards.  Even without the usual trappings of a story, players whose characters have been trapped by a collapsed roof yet managed to survive and escape will tell the tale with excitement initially and nostalgia eventually.  These are adventures, as the characters take risks to unearth the secrets of the world around them.

  It is also reasonable for there to be rewards for the characters beyond that discovery.  Not every explorer becomes fabulously wealthy for it.  Many die impoverished.  Yet those archaeologists who unsealed the ancient Egyptian tombs brought out much of value, and divers exploring for the lost Spanish Silver Train recovered a significant amount of wealth.  In life these are the exceptions; in play, they become more the expectations, but they need not be rewarded at every turn.  Discovery is its own reward; other rewards are bonuses.

  Don’t become too concerned about where the player characters will find their motivation for every adventure.  Discovery is its own reward, and players can be driven to learn about a world by the bare fact that, as Mallory said, it’s 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.