GMing Advice: Your Game Should be What it says it is on the Tin

A friend of mine recently had a very amusing experience running Rogue Traders for his group. He presented his group with an assassination contract, meant to disrupt an upcoming vote on who would get to rule some lucrative mining planet.

He was completely floored when his players decided that instead of settling on just doing an assassination, they could rig the upcoming vote so that they would gain control of the lucrative mining planet.

Clearly my friend is blessed with ambitious players. Every single instance of players going off the rails to do something ballsy and epic is a gift that should be cherished by a wise GM.

He summed up the experience by stating:

"In my experience, players will create the type of sessions they want to play through their actions. You just need to follow through once they tell you what they want. Get out of the way."

It's excellent advice, assuming that the game your players have fun playing is a game you have fun running.

This post is largely geared towards readers who are recruiting players blind, and possibly people attempting to coax friends into forming a TTRPG playing group.

Incongruous Expectations

When a GM decides to start a campaign, they tend to have an idea what it will be like. Typically, just choosing a game system is a fairly binding choice right out of the gate. If you're playing in PARANOIA, or Exalted, or the World of Darkness, you have some pretty solid foundations that you can assume will hold true in most campaigns.

But even within the confines of game systems, there's plenty of variance on how each game can be approached. Saving the world quests, hack and slash combat, and political shenanigans are all three distinct campaign styles that you could run in each of the systems/settings above. (If Friend Computer says you saved the world, you saved the fucking world. Happiness is Mandatory.)

With all of that wiggle room and ambiguity, it's easy to see why horror stories abound of people joining new groups, only to discover that what the group considers (fun/acceptable/normal) is completely different than what the new player/gm expected. 

Even assuming some of those horror stories might be attributable to troglodytes and misanthropic assholes, I'm certain that a good portion of them are related to GMs/Groups failing to properly get on the same page about what everyone wants out of the game.

What the GM Wants

I certainly approach a new campaign by asking 'What do I want?'. After all, a GM who isn't interested in the type of game that they're supposed to run is in for a bad time. And so are their players.

Lately some family asked me to start a campaign for them so my goals were loosely:

• Introduce completely green players to GURPS and TTRPGs
• Not run a modern action game because I'm already running one
• Considering that the players are new, whatever I come up with should have some heavy structure to it- I ended up choosing a central heroic quest that they'll hopefully latch onto and enjoy undertaking
  

Usually a GM's goals will align with the system, setting, genre, and premise that they present to potential players. The better you can do this, the easier a time you will have finding players who mesh well with you and the group.

Know Thyself

The Exalted Guru I know is an expert at weaving storylines together and does an excellent job of balancing the spotlight for players who frequently have extremely different gameplay goals. That said, I can't picture him running a mega-dungeon, or staying interested in a hack-and-slash campaign for very long.

I have another friend whose GMing talents revolve around heavy systemic world-building, coupled with good skill at stringing together missions to form a campaign. Building that world and doing the ground-level prep necessary to set players loose in those settings as a sandbox without firm rails is not really within their GMing toolbox.

I myself mostly run skulky-action games set in the modern age. My attempt at running something closer to super-heroes and every single one of my attempts to run Blades in the Dark have been utter failures.

Clearly, it's beneficial to be honest and aware of what you do well, what you can handle, and what you should recuse from and let someone else helm if that's what the group wants to play.

If you set out to do X, tell players they should expect X, and then fail to do it well because you're actually better at Y and unintentionally running Y, you've set yourself up for problems.

Know Thy Players

Discussion of player motivations and how to categorize them into taxonomies have been going on for decades. Given just how much those motivations can affect the course of a game, it's clear why it's a topic that's always good for sparking long conversations with your local grognards.

When your game allows the players to do the things they find interesting to do in play, you're in for a good time as a GM. Especially if what they find interesting also happens to be fun for you to watch.

Which is why it is so vitally important that the way you talk about the campaign accurately represents what the campaign will be like. If players accurately know what they're getting into, the better the chances that they will self-select OUT if the game wouldn't be a good fit for them.

In Summary:

Games are a blend of both what the GM and the Players want. The closer the premise and style of a campaign matches with the temperaments and goals of the players, the less friction there will be.

The better a GM is able to understand their tendencies, and the more accurately they represent themselves and their games, the easier time they'll have gathering players of a similar mindset.

A GM's capability to execute on what they try to do, their skill at the craft, and their improvisational chops  will determine how well things go when expectations clash, or unanticipated situations happen.


To his credit, my Rogue Trader pal handled the curveball from his players with aplomb. If the players pull off what they're planning, it will be a story they retell for years.

Final Thought:

It's important that you've reached zen acceptance that allowing other people to do things in an imaginative space where decisions actually lead to logical consequences will inevitably lead to the game not looking like the color-by-numbers you had originally envisioned in your mind.

If the emergent dynamics of a campaign freak you out, might I suggest becoming a novelist?

Inescapable Logic

There will be times in your life where you are given a compliment that you will hold dear and cherish forever. For me, one of them was what one of my Agency 17 vets had to say while I was advertising for Prohibition Mobsters:

Mr. Insidious' games have lots of twisty plots, some great setpieces, and a certain inescapable logic to them. In the thick of things it's like "what the hell is going on, why is this happening", and then once you work things out it's like "oh, we did this, which led to the bad guys doing that, and then this happened and of course everything went to shit".

So let's talk about inescapable logic.

People tend to think with internally consistent logic. That is, that people don't act without reason. They might not understand or be able to communicate why they took an action, but people themselves are not random. Our brains do a great deal of work that we ourselves are not conscious of, much like background processes running on a computer.

This doesn't mean that people can't be wrong. An NPC might give a party terrible directions to a local landmark (and yet not lie to them) because he has the wrong information which he believes is accurate. Many GM's make a mistake of not attempting to play NPCs based on how much information that NPC should actually have.

I'll admit, it's fun to watch players try to deal with all-knowing illuminati types who have peeked behind the curtain, but generally most NPCs shouldn't know too much out of their sphere of influence.

Take security guards. Having dated one, and having had two family members and a few close friends work as one, I know the drill. It's mind-numbing boredom and tedium 95% of the time punctuated by crazy insanity and dealing with people being unreasonable. (Much like the army, actually, except with less firearms, explosions and mortar attacks.)

So if you're running an encounter where the party might encounter guards (largely talking in a modern context here), you should ask yourself:

• How well are these guys paid? Elite groups drawing top dollar because they have a reputation to maintain will be way more vigilant than a "I retire in four months" old timer getting $13/hr.
• To further establish morale and how much a guard might care about their job, how are the working conditions? Has it been boring and slow and the players are something interesting, or does the guard just want to go back to Candy Crush on their phone?
• Speaking of phones, boredom is one of the best penalties to PER skill checks ever, and you can sure as hell bet most NPCs (and let's be honest- PCs as well) don't have the Patience of Job perk.
• In addition to all of that, most people are very adverse to risk, particularly when the stakes involve death.

Logically, most security guards need a reason above and beyond the norm to ever willingly engage in combat with foes who they believe could reasonably bring lethal force to bear. Sure, you might have a hot-headed cowboy or two, or maybe an ex-vet at a post, but most security people are just regular Joes not even issued a gun. Faced with armed assailants, most are at best going to call 911 and GTFO of the area.

Never underestimate the power of 'Someone else's problem'.

Another good example of internal logic has to do with a failure my Prohibition Mobsters recently had.

A mob lawyer, Marco, has been putting pressure on the group after they drained the bank account of their recently-killed boss. Boss' wife is pissed that her inheritance is gone, Marco wants his cut of the money, so of course the group tried to intimidate him to get him to back down.

Due to some tactical blunders (splitting the party, not bringing the wheelman to shadow another car), bad luck (a crit PER roll by Marco while he was in the car of the Mayor of NYC), and good planning on the part of Marco (Most people don't get to become successful mob lawyers without some genre savviness), Marco and the Mayor are now aware that someone is out for Marco's life.

So, getting at Marco is going to be much more difficult in the future. His already decent paranoia is going to be on high alert, the Mayor has assigned him a police escort almost around the clock, and something tells me the players are going to get very annoyed by this problem. Unless they seriously escalate their level of planning and execution, the repercussions of this failure will continue to bite them in the ass.

A big part of gaming is consequences, with cause and effect being huge. My players haven't encountered much failure, with the examples of a few isolated fuck ups here and there. With smooth sailing generating a pretty fast rise through the ranks of their organization, I'm entirely fine making this failure sting.

I can't stress enough how much more consistent a game is when you get into the head of the NPCs you are controlling as a GM and attempt to base their actions off their perspective:

• What is the NPC's main goal?
• What's their current, immediate motivation?
• How is the NPC feeling?
• What external factors might be in play?  (A county clerked mobbed by the press after a scandal will be feeling overwhelmed and likely won't like being asked questions.)
• What does the NPC actually know?

Once you have those answers, it should be pretty clear how to proceed. Characters will typically act in line with their emotions and goals, and characters forced to put the two at odds will be undergoing stress. 

I should mention that establishing a precedent that NPCs aren't always completely right even when being completely honest makes hand-waving plot holes and sudden name-switch flubs MUCH easier for players to accept. Nothing like blaming a NPC for your brain fart when that one-off merchant becomes important later and 'Sergio the Spice Vendor' accidentally becomes 'Simon the Spice Vendor". 

Dissecting a Problematic PC/Player Issue: Tobias

So, I'll start with Tobias' character sheet.

Note: Due to how the character sheet program renders, two of his Electronics Repair skills aren't showing their specialties- Electronic Warfare, Computers,  and Sensors.

For a 300 point character, Tobias has a decent chunk (123 points) slotted into skills. This is great, however I'm sure all of you noticed that he has five different types of Electronics Operation somewhere between skill level 14 and 17. This goes along with also have almost every specialty of Electronics Repair as well. That's 11 skills, 35 points, all with significant overlap. Even with the harsh default of -4 between specialties, Tobias would be rolling at IQ (13) for most Electronics Operation checks (before familiarity penalties and similar circumstantial factors that are largely mitigated by being Cross-Trained).

So there's some hyper specialization going on, and it gets worse when you consider his computer skills. Between Computer Operation, Programming, Cryptography, and Mathematics, he's got another 24 points spent.

59 points in Tech related skills, over half of his budget. Now don't get me wrong, this is a very kick-ass suite of skills for a character, but it has issues:

• With Cyrptography 17, there's almost nothing Tobias can't crack given enough time. Babysitting a laptop for three weeks while it chugs through encryption keys isn't glamorous or fun. A lot of the information gained isn't immediately relevant or is attainable through social prowess.
• Tobias' other capabilities with technology are also frightening, approaching skill levels nobody else will conceivably hit as a complete package, ever.
• That said, with few exceptions, most places don't have tech people savvy enough to deal with a character like Tobias. His real problem is gaining physical access to most machines- past that having him roll is almost a waste of time.
• Opposed rolls would be great- except I can't justify too many people being as exceptionally skilled as Tobias is at such a small segment of skills.
• Things become very binary- either he breaks into a system or doesn't. The information is immediately relevant or not- and if it is immediately relevant it's like the players acquired it too easily.
• An unimaginative player might have difficulty knowing how best to use the character

A character like this is awesome, but only in the hands of a player who brings the right cards to the table:

• A team player who is okay working out of the lime light in a supportive role
• It's well suited for someone who frequently has issues playing due to scheduling conflicts. It's very easy to hand-wave their PCs actions compared to somebody, say, trying to schmooze with an oil executive.
• Even with the above point in mind, this skillset requires a lot of awareness of what is going on.
• Being able to improvise and think of tactics to achieve a goal is definitely a must.
• It's well suited to a player who wants to be good at something who doesn't feel compelled to constantly roll dice

This really first came to my attention when Tobias' player was blatantly rolling just too well to actually be rolling. Too many crits, not enough failures, even on tasks rolled at default or against relatively low skill levels in the 10-12 range.

I've spoken with him and offered him the chance to respec things around to something that might fit his preferred play style better, although it would not be campaign ending to lose a player given that the other three are excellent in all regards.

I'm interested in feedback, as I'm definitely not doing a full analysis, mostly focusing on the character's primary niche.

Online Gaming with Mr. Insidious

Douglas Cole, author of Gaming Ballistic, has been trying to get the GURPS blogging community to talk about Virtual Table Top (VTT) roleplaying, and I figured I could at least share my $0.02.

My primary experience with VTT is the excellent Maptools by the folks over at RPGTools.net. It's a strong program with the capability to let you program in game mechanics to do nifty stuff. At the time, I was running D&D (4th Ed.), but if I were to go back, I'd gladly use Maptools if I could get my routing situation figured out. As it is currently, port forwarding doesn't work particularly well on my home network, which makes Maptools unusable.

I'm going to talk about gaming with a battlemat, map, VTT, board, or other media to help show positioning first, then talk about gaming over Skype, and then maybe get into VTT's specifically.


Pros of Using a Combat Map:

• There's little question if you're one, two, or three yards away from someone. People's positions are less ambiguous and it saves a great deal of time clarifying positioning with people. How many enemies left can be answered without asking the GM.
• Maps can be outright beautiful
• Lots of chances for player expression depending on the media (be it minis, pogs, avatars, whatever)
•  Maps can aid combat mechanics. Reach is the kind of thing that can be easily missed in GURPS by those not using a map of some kind.
• It can reduce the workload on the GM to describe rooms, layouts, strangely twisting passages and the like

Cons of Using a Combat Map:

• Can wreck immersion. This was my brother's primary complaint going from 2ed AD&D to D&D 4th Ed.
• Can be distracting to players with short attention spans. I've encountered this GMing for a group that ranges from 10-14 years of age. Fidgeting with minis, moving pieces around when waiting for their turn in combat, fighting over who gets which generic miniature to portray their character...
• Can serve as a crutch for newer players. I've also encountered this with the younger crowd, who don't want to hear "There's a guy five yards ahead of you and another guy 3 yards to the left of him." and would rather see it visually displayed.
• It can detract from storytelling. Having the board sitting there with the remnants of the last battle strewn about while talking about a jaunt back into town certainly distracts me.
• I absolutely suck at mapping. Anything hand-drawn is crappy, I end up using MS Paint for almost anything my players need a map for in Agency 17 (the most recent one is shown below with the name I saved it under after its creation).

"TownHallShittySketchIHateYouAllForMakingMeDrawYouAssholes.jpeg" - Yes I'm serious, that's its name

•  To compensate for my terrible mapping, I've ended up relying a lot on either image libraries (especially back when I was using Maptools), or a paid program called Tiamat. Tiamat is pretty cool, but paying for tiles sucks.
• Mapping takes time. Time I could be using to flesh out NPCs, organizations, plot, plans, or researching things like what the hell the National Intelligence Agency of Turkey is called. (I still have no clue, and I ran a 3-5 session long mission there.)
• Maps are even worse in person, because it's much harder to prepare them ahead of time, especially if you're a fan of wet-erase markers on a vinyl mat like I am.
• I also despise doing geological maps, cartography, and basically anything else associated with taking a layout of objects and putting them into visual form. I may just have Incompetence (Maps).

For Agency 17, I game online using Skype and nothing else. All in-character action takes place in the chat through text. We host a call so that me and the players can ask questions, chat, and generally enjoy each others' company during the session.
Pros of a Real-time Text Approach:

•  Players don't have to suffer my horrible voice acting
• Bad connections, audio, microphone issues and other technical malfunctions don't tend to mess with core interaction- the chat
• Text is usually clear and unambiguous.
• Strikes a middle ground between Play-By-Post/Play-By-Email (too slow for my tastes), and live tabletop (where I can't cop a bathroom break to look up blog posts about my preparations).
• Continual log helps aid both GM and Players to remember events, names, and details.
• You can grep a chatlog.

Cons of a Real-time Text Approach:

• Players don't get to suffer my horrible voice acting
• Can be slower than some players like (Agency 17 sessions frequently run between 3 and 6 hours.)
• Bad for those with slow typing speeds (They tend to end up becoming wallflowers as their replies get buried under faster responses), or those who dislike lots of typing
• Less chance for acting
• Cheapens note-taking to a degree, makes the Eidetic Memory advantage slightly weaker (anyone can just check the chat log).
• Anyone can grep the chatlog.
• Makes hiding things more difficult
• Makes hiding mistakes more difficult
• Often leads to more retcons by me

My group doesn't game using video. The group dynamics aren't the kind of deal where I know everyone's full name and living location.

Last but not least, Pros and Cons of Online Gaming:
Pros:

• Play with people not limited to your geographical area (great for those living in say, Maine)
• Much wider pool of available players
• Digital revolution has greased the wheels of making sure everyone has the source materials (Buy GURPS products. They deserve your monetary compensation for awesomeness. Seriously)
• Often easier to find players specifically interested in the game you want to run
• Easy to find fresh blood
• Finding an area to play isn't an issue (Although the Library I used during highschool missed our presence when we graduated and stopped going weekly)
• Various VTTs are present and present nice tools to do stuff.
• VTTs can aid in automation which is the biggest + to using them specifically.
• NO GM screen needed.
• Usually easier to look at source material or books as needed
• Play naked or in your boxers/undies, if you want

Cons:

• Time zones. Seriously, fuck timezones.
• Bribing the GM with food becomes problematic. Thankfully GURPS books and Steam Games can be sent and purchased online!
• Internet issues can affect attendance and quality of play. This is especially true if using a VTT.
• VTTs don't always play well with aging hardware, strange network setups, or parental settings (for the teens out there trying to game).
• Hard or impossible to verify player rolls, making 'fudging' much easier
• Players and GM are easily distracted (Hey, let's just open Reddit real quick while he's typing out that response...)
• As easy as it is to lure in new players, many will fall through immediately, some will be crazy, and some won't be up to your standards.
• No physical interaction is possible

 This has prompted a discussion among some of my players:

"Me: The fact that I got Egeman past you guys is my crowning achievement thus far"
"Virgil's Player: Only works once."
"Johnny's Player: Sly Bastard. Yeah, double checking ids from now on."
"Virgil's Player: Also, everyone knows IC that Virgil saw through that from the start"
"Johnny's Player: I saw that. Is that legit or was it just a joke?"

Hah. Only works once. Right. 

Decieving Your Players

My players have been lied to pretty much from the start of the campaign.

Dastardly, I know.

See, I told them that their characters were joining some shadowy government agency (Agency 17) that's so deep under wraps that barely anyone knows it exists. In reality, the player characters are all part of a shadowy criminal counterintelligence organization that has been raising all kinds of hell, all while convincing their operatives that they are legitimate.

Now, just to be clear, Agency 17 is the criminal counterintelligence agency.

Section 17 is the legitimate government organization that Agency 17 is mimicking.


Every mission the players go on will have a twist somewhere that turns what they're doing from doing good to doing bad. It's about making sure that they perceive in game events one way, while something else entirely is going on.

The first mission involved someone who was actually a legitimate NSA agent, who the players were mislead into believing was simply a journalist. They never did figure out he was NSA, instead believing that he had a source within the NSA who he used to feed info to his uncle.

This current mission, the drug hijacking, has the twist further down the line. There may be legitimate reasons for attempting to steal twenty tons of cocaine from the Los Zetas cartel, but Agency 17's motives are definitely not pure. The players really have no way of knowing this except for the effects of Agency 17's use of the drugs. Possibilities include selling it for profit, planting it on individuals to frame them, and possibly even increasing Zeta/Sinaloa violence in Mexico.

Other times, I hope to hide what the players are actually doing. An example would be having them retrieve black boxes from a downed Agency 17 craft to prevent legitimate investigative crews from being able to access them. Another could be planting devices that don't do what the Agency tells them they do- a 'keylogger' could really be something more insidious (stuxnet comes to mind), while "medical supplies" could be crates full of guns and 'oxygen tanks' hold deadly sarin gas.

Now, there are some important things to consider when a major facet of your campaign involves lying to your players consistently:

1. Especially in a system like GURPS where characters made for one campaign will suck if dropped into another campaign/genre, it's important to ensure that people's characters will be useful throughout even after the reveal. For Agency 17, learning that their employers are evil won't serve to change the fundamental understanding of the universe (no magic, no time travel, no aliens), it's just a large betrayal of trust.
2. If your players begin to see the cracks, let them! How they decide to handle the small inconsistencies will help force how and when the reveal happens. There's also the fringe benefit that things that don't make sense to players due to fridge logic can later be explained as a consequence of their characters constantly being mislead.
3. Controlling information becomes hugely important. Giving out too much information will blow the surprise early. Giving too little means that the players will be entirely clueless. I've tried to make them work for the really juicy bits, and I've accepted that they won't always learn everything.
4. A lot of this rides on the players accepting things at face value and not digging. If their handler says that those crates are medical supplies, hopefully they believe him and don't try to smuggle in a few pistols on the top themselves.
5. It helps that Delusions exist in GURPS which can help explain why their handler never caught on that their employers were scum.

 Future Ideas:

• Recovering the black box of a downed Agency 17 plane to prevent other organizations from using it
• Moving something (Food, Medical Supplies, Building Schematics) that is really something else (Drugs, Sarin, Weapon Schematics)
• Protecting wanted terrorists, fugitives, assassins, etc
• 'Enemy agents' are really legitimate CIA/SAS/DEA/Mossad
• Framing CEO/Dignitary for Child Porn Possession