The Gaming Outpost

  I was getting close to the wire here.  The deadlines for several articles in this series had come upon me swiftly, and I was pulling together articles at the last minute.  I was starting to worry about whether I was going to fall behind, and not have an article ready.  It’s not that I don’t have ideas.  There are notes for twenty articles sitting here.  It’s just that they require time and effort and thought to shift them from being notes to being articles, and they were eluding me.  There are so many other demands on my time, getting these articles finished was becoming a problem.  What could I write next, within the time constraints I had?

  The oldest of the ideas, that is, the one that’s been on the list so long it now holds the number one position, is one about different types of intelligence.  Years ago when I wrote the article Sentience I said would eventually get back to a consideration of various types of intelligence, and shortly thereafter someone forwarded me the name of Howard Gardner, whose theories are fundamental in this area.  From then, about three and a half years ago, until now I have been putting that idea on the back burner, knowing that it would require me to do some research.

  This week, as I was chasing down e-mail and otherwise trying to keep up on the daily tasks, I came upon a link to an article specifically about Gardner’s ideas, a sort of analysis of intelligence for dummies which summarized more than I would need to know to write an article on the subject.  How fortuitous, I thought.  I can write that article.

  This is not that article. 

  Every once in a while that thing you needed just drops into your lap–like this article about Gardner’s theories on intelligence.  I knew I needed this information, but I kept putting off any effort to find it.  Something in the back of my mind said that if I entered Gardner and intelligence into a search engine, I would probably get a lot of interesting but not terribly useful returns connected to Scientific American’s mathematical games editor Martin Gardner.  I knew that references to Gardner’s theories themselves would be abundant, but not necessarily useful.  Finding something that gave me the basic information I needed in an easily digested format threatened to be a daunting task which I was not particularly eager to undertake.  Then abruptly there it was, just as I was feeling the pinch and thinking I would have to bite the bullet and do the (gasp) research, an article on point summarizing everything I needed in a very short space.

  My inclination is to acknowledge the grace of God in this, that He would provide what I need when I need it.  I am aware that people who do not believe that God intervenes on their behalf also have such fortuitous events in their lives, and attribute these serendipitous happenings to chance.  This doesn’t prove that God is not involved in such bright moments, but it does make it more difficult to prove that He is.

  More to the point, whether you believe God has a hand in the good things that happen or not, the fact remains that good things do happen, and sometimes they are surprisingly positive moments.  I have a friend who has on five separate occasions found a one hundred dollar bill lying on the ground in the middle of nowhere.  (He also managed to buy five mint condition original Dungeons & Dragons™ Deities & Demigods™ books for a couple bucks apiece at different yard sales, so apparently such fortune lands in his lap fairly regularly.)  It is possible that something fortunate might happen at any moment.

  The question then is how to make such things happen in games.  There are a number of techniques that work well.

  The one I prefer is the roll of the dice.  In Multiverser we call it a general effects (usually abbreviated GE) roll.  Referees toss the dice (or sometimes ask the players to do so) when they want to know how well (or ill) things are going.  On the extreme good side, all kinds of remarkable coincidences can happen.  What I like about the die method is that it can be inherently balanced, with a spectrum that has an extreme bad end also.  That way the player has the chance of fabulous good fortune balanced by the risk of terribly bad.  Among the advantages of this is that you don’t need any means of determining how many good things happen over what period of play.  Every time you roll the dice, it is self-balancing.  If you roll it once in a six hour game night, it might be something good or something bad.  If you roll it sixty times in an hour, you’re going to have a few wonderful outcomes and a few horrible ones.  You don’t need to regulate how often the player has the chance of something good happening, because it’s always equal to his chance of something bad happening.

  Another technique is a resource system.  With this, player characters are permitted to spend a point of whatever resource they have to make something positive happen.  Legends of Alyria uses a system of this sort, as players can accrue positive and negative virtue points, and can spend these to override the resolution mechanic, not exactly to make things go the way the character wants but rather to make things turn out for good or bad more generally.  A resource system must have balance built into it, such that the players replenish the resource at a rate appropriate to the course of play.  It remains to be seen just how well Alyria‘s subjective virtue points replenishment system will mesh with the power of these points in play.

  Some of the newer games use resolution interpretation systems, in which the player is given the power to narrate an outcome which fits the resolution system’s determination of whether it is a success or a failure but at the same time may seriously color the situation in the player’s favor.  Such systems are most effective in games in which the object is to create a story, and no character or player interests in winning or losing are at stake.  They require that the players understand and embrace the notion that they must create their own complications.  However, there is something appealing about a system in which the two possible outcomes of a die roll are, one, that the character succeeded categorically and, two, that the character’s success is marred by some problem that arose from it.

  In the film version of The Phantom, at one point the narrator comments to the effect that every movie is permitted one incredible coincidence, and that this highly improbable event that was about to happen in the story was to be excused on that basis.  I don’t know that the film did not have several other remarkable coincidences, but it seems that great stories often do, and enabling such events in play can enhance the game greatly, particularly if the players have some influence over what happens and when.

  It is clear that life often affords us these positive moments, these quirks of circumstance in which something quite necessary drops into our laps.  Having some way for this to be realized in play adds much to the fun.

  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.

  Many years ago when I still had no doubts about my future as a musician, my band The Last Psalm was playing at a local coffeehouse.  I counted off the first song, Love’s the Only Command, and the instruments started perfectly.  Vocalists were stepping up to the mikes getting ready for the first words when something went wrong.

  Thanks to the fact that in those days I taped all our concerts, I was able to confirm what I at that moment suspected.  The bass guitarist had started the pickup riff for the verse a measure early, but the guitars didn’t follow his lead, and the vocalists sort of fell apart when the background was out of sync with itself.  Before the first line of the song had been finished, we had fallen apart completely.

  It comes to me now because tonight I’m in a different band.  Now I am the bass guitarist, but we’re a lot less formal than most bands in which I’ve played.  The pastor’s grown son Tyler leads the singing and plays an acoustic guitar with a built-in pickup, a high school kid named Travis does some phenomenal drumming, sometimes his father whom I know as Jim plays keyboards and electric lead with us, and we’ve got a girl named Becky to sing a third vocal.  Each Wednesday night we open with a song by the band (usually one we’ve written), lead about an hour of songs and prayers, and close with another song by the band.  One night sometime before Wednesday we get together and practice the songs we’re going to do, but we rarely get them completely right at the service, and we don’t really worry about it either.  Tonight we were closing with a song Tyler wrote, and opening with one Becky sings, a D. C. Talk number called What If I Stumble?  What if I fall?  What if I lose my step and I make fools of us all?

  Indeed, we all felt like fools that night, so many years ago, when our bass guitarist jumped the marker and no one followed him.

  I’ve lost count of the number of game players I’ve known who won’t run a game because of exactly that fear:  what if I’m not any good?  What if I make a mistake, and make a fool of myself?  What if I stumble?  It seems that for some it is better never to prove you can do it than to risk the embarrassment of the mistake.  Someone else can run the game; I don’t want to mess up.

  Obviously, those of us who do run games have somehow managed to get past that fear.  If you think, though, that we never make those embarrassing mistakes, you’re embarrassingly mistaken.  No one who has run his share of games has failed to fail at some point.  Mistakes are made.  What is worse, we don’t always learn from them, making the same mistakes multiple times before discovering how to avoid them.

  What we have learned is how to deal with those embarrassing moments; we can make the mistake and go on.  More to the point, we have learned what to do when we do make those mistakes.  Perhaps then there is something that can be taught about what to do when you make an embarrassing mistake, so that when you run games, or even when you play bass guitar before an audience, you aren’t left floundering at that moment.

  That is the point, in fact.  What is most embarrassing about the embarrassing moment is that you don’t know what to do next.  If you knew that, you would do it, and while your cheeks might redden a bit at the knowledge that you messed up, it would quickly pass while you went forward with the next step.

  The first thing you should consider is that your incredibly embarrassing mistakes are not always recognized as such.  I sometimes tell the story of the crock pot full of meatballs my wife made when my parents were coming.  They fell apart, crumbling down from two inch spheres to half inch chunks.  My father complimented her on the clever idea of making meatballs that would stay on the roll.  When she admitted that it was a mistake, he gave her the advice that you should always take credit for the good idea when someone likes the outcome of your mistakes.  There’s a good chance that your players don’t know this isn’t what you had intended, and if so you can probably roll with it and develop it into something better.

  On the other hand, when our bass guitarist missed that line and we fell apart, there was no pretending that this was supposed to happen.  Already the lead guitarist had moaned what happened? into the mike in search of some explanation for the disaster.  I, however, was not going to let the night collapse because one player made one mistake at the beginning.  I quickly said who I thought had thrown us off, and counted out the opening again.  This time we played the song through right, and when the night was over several people commented that they were impressed with our ability to pick up from the mistake and keep going.  The mistake, no matter how serious it appears, no matter how completely it derails what you’re doing, is not fatal, and it need not be embarrassing.  As my brother Roy says about such moments, they can’t take away your birthday, so it’s not that important.  Simply recognize that you made a mistake and pick up from there to keep going.

  Becky didn’t make it tonight.  She was sick.  Travis was playing in a high school concert, and his father wasn’t around.  Tyler and I wound up alone in front, and we couldn’t sing the opener without Becky.  That was all right, though.  Tyler played another one of his songs that we’d been through before, and I managed to follow his lead to fake it.  Such mistakes as I made were easily covered, transformed into passing lines to the right notes.  More importantly, we weren’t really afraid of making mistakes.  If we got it wrong, we would pick up and keep going.  There was no reason to be embarrassed about it.  Everyone does make mistakes, and everyone knows it, so very few people will ever hold it against you.

  Sure, stepping up and running the game is a risk, and you are certain to make a few mistakes.  Get over it; it’s not that bad.

  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.

  Yesterday one of my teenaged sons cleaned the bedroom he shares with one of his brothers.  He removed from the nine by twelve room two lawn and leaf bags full not of trash but of dirty laundry, including sheets and blankets he had conveniently lost in the mess under his bed.  This morning, one of the cats was in the room, looking entirely confused.

  I know how she feels.  Things are constantly changing in our world.  I hear that one of the web sites I frequent (not Gaming Outpost) is considering closing down, as the site operators believe that the future of Internet discussion will be in weblogs and wikis, not in the forums and articles which constitute its format.  Personally, I find weblogs inconvenient and wikis suspicious, and I don’t visit either more than once a month combined, so if that’s where discussion is going it is going to have to go without me.

  I’m terribly resistant to change.  I don’t like it.  I particularly don’t like it because most change is introduced as being good merely for being different.  That’s an error.  What is new and different is not thereby better.  It might be better, but that remains to be seen.  What is gained from the new must be weighed against what is lost of the old.  So few people do this, as they embrace the latest trends without giving true consideration to the costs.

  You might think I’m rigid because I’m old.  It’s not true.  First, I’ll always be Young; apart from that, I was somewhat rigid a long time before anyone would have thought me particularly aged.  I was still in college when I recognized an inherent value in being conservative.  The world is changing; it changes rapidly, too rapidly for many to keep pace, and certainly too rapidly for anyone to assess intelligently.  By the time we understand the advantages and disadvantages of that which is new, it has been relabeled as old and so has been displaced by the next wave.  The old is lost, the new floods over and destroys it.  Then the new becomes the old, and is in turn washed away by that which comes after it.  There is no hope to stop this, no chance to preserve what is as it rapidly becomes what was.  Progress must progress, it seems.  All for which a conservative can hope is to stem the tide, to slow the flood enough that we can see where the waves are carrying us before we are swept forward on them.

  You might as easily think I’m against change itself.  I am not.  I have embraced change many times, even as I have grown older.  As time is the medium of change, so, too, change is the driver of time.  Were there no change, it is doubtful whether there could be time, or it could be measured.  I recognize that change is valuable.  Indeed, I am quite aware that I would not like to have lived in an earlier time, any age which although simpler from many viewpoints was in terms of physical work much harder.  Change is good; without it, things would not be as they now are.  What I oppose is the pressure to change merely because something new is possible.  I want to be sold on the future before I go there.  I want someone to have done a cost-benefit analysis on the changes, and I want at least to be assured that these changes are worth that cost.

  I am not going to get that.  No one is going to examine the future and provide me with a reliable cost-benefit analysis.  I am going to have to rely on my own hastily-formed judgments to make sense of what is good and what is of dubious value, and sometimes these are going to be wrong.  However, the choice still remains as to how I will be wrong.  There is one error in failing to embrace that which would have been good while holding that which is good enough; there is another in giving up the good for something potentially dreadful.  Thus if the cost-benefit analysis has not been done, there is wisdom in staying with what demonstrably works rather than moving to the untested.

  Alvin Toffler was right.  In his book Future Shock he asserted that change is coming too fast for most people, and that the rate of change will continue to accelerate.  He likens this experience to moving to a new culture, but that as we move to the future we are unable to return to the past.  Each day there are advances in technology, and old, in technological terms, is becoming chronologically younger every day.  Already it is said that your new cutting-edge computer will be obsolete by the time you get it out of the carton.  The advanced cellular phones we use in America have none of the features that have become available and even common on their Japanese counterparts, such as real-time television, Internet access, and global satellite positioning.  By the time those have reached us, what will the Japanese have?  It is difficult to imagine, but you can be sure that engineers in Japan are already imagining.

  Our science fiction worlds need to take a lesson from this.  Our aversion to change and resistance to future shock causes us to see our world and all worlds as static entities.  We know in theory that the world is changing, but at any given moment we expect that tomorrow will be much the same as today.  It won’t.  As day leads on to day, each will be less like the day before.  The day may come when each morning we rise to find that technology has once again outstripped us, and we must catch up with the new systems before we can be effective in our daily tasks.  Too often science fiction tells us how it will be, that is, how it is at a specific point in the future, and fails to consider that it will not stay this way very long.

  On the other hand, predicting change is a challenge beyond the ken of most of us.  Half a decade ago someone asked an Internet business list whether it was important to prepare for the next millennium.  My answer was republished at Paul Siegel’s Learning Fountain site under the title The Future.  A quick scan of the latter half of the twentieth century demonstrates that our expectations for the beginning of the twenty-first century were not met–no space colonies or flying cars or fully computerized robotic homes–and yet most of the defining technologies of our age were not expected–the Internet, cellular phones, personal computers.  The world will change, but always in unexpected ways and at an unanticipated rate.  The things we want today will not be defining of the things we have tomorrow.  Accidental discoveries combine with changing values to produce the unexpected.  Preparing for the long-term future is if not impossible at least counter-productive.  We know it will be different, and not merely in terms of advanced technology.  We know it will be in flux, even more so than our present.  We know that it will have its own problems which we have not yet recognized, and that solutions will have to emerge out of the values and options available then.

  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.

A very long time ago as a Boy Scout I had exactly one lesson on the specific subject of wilderness survival, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico one afternoon. Yet in addition to providing some practical ideas and pulling together a lot of training I’d had in what could be called survival techniques (edible plants, primitive constructions), this one lesson taught me the most essential elements of survival. It broke down in clear terms what it was that had to be done to survive.

I remember that there were five things that had to be secured to survive; I remember what those five things were. The odd thing is that I also remember that they were called the “Five S’s” as a mnemonic, but I can’t figure out how to begin some of them with the letter S. Still, it’s useful information, and I can present to you those five basic necessities of survival. If you’re ever lost in the wilderness and you remember this article, this knowledge might keep you alive long enough to be found. For the moment, though, it has a game application that will appear later in the article.

The first survival necessity that must be provided is water. Obviously you are in danger of dehydration, and potable drinking water is necessary to counter that. However, water has several other survival benefits. It is important for cleaning wounds. Hands must be washed to deter infection. Water is used in food preparation, if only to rinse the things eaten. It may be useful in the event of a fire, and for the treatment of burns. Water is usually listed first.

Fire is also important. It is relatively easy to die of exposure even in moderate climes. Having a way to keep warm is a life and death matter in more survival situations than people realize. Additionally, fire provides the means to sterilize water, to kill germs in food and on utensils, and to cook. The ashes of a fire are also the most practical available treatment against ingested plant toxins and other life-threatening medical conditions that commonly kill lost campers. A fire will also discourage most predatory animals.

You can go some time without food, but the longer you do that the more you will need your fire to fight body heat loss and the less strength you will have to maintain it. Reliably providing food in one form or another is going to matter within days, as merely surviving is a very demanding activity.

Shelter is one need most people would recognize soon enough. Since one of the killers of people in the wilderness is exposure to the elements, anything done to mitigate this improves your chance of survival. A good shelter should keep you dry in the rain, at least. In some areas, it needs to keep you shaded from the sun. The more threatening the elements are, the more protective the shelter must be.

Few people would guess the fifth survival need. I remember at the time of the class being struck with its oddity. In terms of the five S’s, this one is socks, specifically warm dry ones. Facing the threat of exposure, wet feet can cost more body heat than a wealth of other problems. Keeping your feet warm, dry, and protected is a serious part of survival. In particularly cold conditions, frostbitten toes can cripple, making it impossible to maintain the other necessities. Even in warmer situations, cold feet seriously reduce the chance of survival against exposure, and injured feet can spell disaster.

There are certainly other important aspects to surviving in a hostile environment. I once before cited my son Ryan’s comment that the most important thing in life is oxygen. We don’t usually worry about obtaining that in the wilderness, because, as a character on a sci fi show said when a human said he was going to go out to get some air, “We have air in here.” However, air is a potential problem in caves, people can drown in floods or suffocate buried in snow, and there are other imaginable situations in which air could be a problem. Finding specific answers to the peculiar hazards of any particular environment is part of survival, certainly, and should not be discounted. Protective clothes may be important in some circumstances. Sleep is a need the deprivation of which can have serious consequences. In the main, however, those five items are the essentials of wilderness survival.

Surprisingly, they convert fairly easily to survival in other settings. In urban survival, it is still necessary to find water, warmth and cooking facilities, food, shelter, and protection from the elements. How these needs are met will vary significantly within so different an environment, but they are still the same basic survival needs.

I bring this up as another entry in our series on adventure design. Previous entries in the series include Antagonists, Flag Captures, Treasure Hunt, McGuffin, Scavenger Hunts, Spelunking, and Escape. Survival is the design of life and death man against nature stories. They are a different kind of challenge, requiring human resourcefulness and a consideration of how to adapt the environment to meet needs. Whether chosen as an intended scenario or stumbled into by chance events in the ongoing campaign, a survival adventure provides a different sort of game experience.

To design such an adventure, there are several points to consider.

The first is to recognize what might be termed the hazard level in each of the survival needs. Failure to build a fire or a shelter in a tropical island paradise probably won’t result in serious complications for a long time, although failure to find fresh drinking water near the saline oceans and lagoons may be critical. In an arctic setting such as Multiverser’s The New Ice Age shelter and fire must be established within hours if the character is to live, while water is rather abundant and dehydration can be forestalled with minor effort. Thus in examining the climate, the referee needs to work out how rapidly the various environmental problems will wear down the character.

It is important in this connection as a second point to establish clear parameters of how these deleterious effects work. If there is no food, or water, or shelter, what impact does this have on the character mechanically? Does he have to make saving throws, or take damage? Presumably starvation will kill a character. It will do much to him before that. How do the mechanics conspire to cause the death of a character? What does the player know along the way? What impact does it have on the character while still alive?

The third point is to identify resources. The referee should not provide solutions to the needs, either in terms of creating unlikely options within the scenario or in terms of determining the one way the need can be met. Instead, the referee should ensure that there is water, fire, shelter, food, and socks available in some form, most of these preferably in several forms. It is not up to the referee to decide how the problem will be solved. It is essential to this kind of adventure design that there be at least one way to solve it.

In most games, some sort of end point is required. The characters will be rescued, or they will find a way of escape, or the condition will end. A survival story has to come to the point in which survival moves from the present to the past tense: We survived. That inherently means the referee has to know how long it will last, or at least what actions or events will bring it to its end. Merely ending it before the characters die is removing the challenge from it, playing a scenario with no potential consequences. Extending it indefinitely will mean either that the players solve all the problems and turn survival into the routine of living, or that it becomes clear this will kill them eventually. Having somewhere they can reach, or someone who will reach them, or some other way of resolving it is important to the design to avoid these complications.

It is also important to address how the characters would get into this situation. Shipwrecks and crashes are almost cliche for these stories, but they usually work smoothly. Cave-ins or landslides which create major detours and so lead to being lost can be effective also. The survival aspect may be incident to a quest or escape or other adventure design, as the characters find it necessary to travel to or through some environmentally hostile area.

Handicapping the characters can add drama to the circumstances, and even create them. A party traveling through the mountains which suffers an accident in which one or more of its members is injured and cannot negotiate the journey may lead to several staying behind to brave the elements while a small group presses on to alert rescue operations. Even without using the injury to create the situation, an injured leg or other temporary handicap can limit the options available to the characters and force them to think about their situation in more detail.

Of course, characters may die in such a scenario. That’s par for the course, really, as characters might die and do die in all kinds of adventures. It may be more difficult for some to accept, though, that they died because they couldn’t survive, rather than having some glorious death in battle or rescue or other dramatic moment. The very nature of a survival adventure announces that the stakes are high: the character will survive if he succeeds, and thus we know that his failure is serious. Players and referee must be ready for that.

Overall, the survival scenario provides a very different gaming experience, if it can be run smoothly.

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.