Which game do you hope to play again?

I have a lot of games on my shelf and on PDF that I hope to play, but I haven’t played them yet, so they don’t qualify. Likewise, there are games that I have played that I hope to play again, but I can’t imagine that I’ll have trouble getting some folks together to play FFG Star Wars or Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea.

Many of the games that I’m playing are being done slowly, when we can all find time and coordinate schedules. I hope to play these again, but I’m currently playing them, if you catch my drift.

So, I’ll give you two answers. One of these games has a very good chance of seeing play in October, which makes me happy. The other is technically on hold, but I’m not convinced that the players all want to return to it, so I’m counting it as not currently “active”.

Desolation is a wonderful RPG by Greymalkin Designs, and by wonderful I mean a dark post apocalyptic setting where a high fantasy world was ruined overnight by a cataclysm that none really understand. Powered by Ubiquity, it is not exactly pulp heroics, but it does have an awesome free form magic system. This has the drawback of being able to kill the caster if they are not careful. ~ Good Times.

Uncharted Worlds  by Sean Gomes is my other pick. A very atypical PBTA game, this space opera is an RPG that I would like to explore in more depth. It’s probably never going to be one of my favorite games, but I really find it compelling & I’d like to take it for a longer test drive with some players. Hopefully as a rotating GM experience.

Time will tell.

Which non-dice system appeals to you?

I’m going to cheat a bit & talk a bit more about dice. But, I promise that it will be a nice segue into the actual topic ~ & besides, it’s my blog, I can do what I want.

Checking out a lot of the responses for day 21, I was reminded of one of the preferences I have for dice mechanics that I didn’t mention. I like them to be simple & elegant. Not just for ease of learning or ease of use, but so that the dice can be a powerful symbol of the fiction with a minimum of interpretive steps needed to know what the outcome represents. ~ In other words, once the dice mechanic is internalized, it is a powerful experience to have a group of players all bent over the table waiting for the bones to stop rolling. The cries of elation or despair are as natural as they would be as if we were all present in the fiction & witnessing the events that the dice roll represents. Sure, some systems like FFG Star Wars or the Reaction Roll in B/X D&D require some creative interpretation of the particulars, but we can all look at the result and instantly know if it’s bad, very bad, good, or very good. ~ The more layers of procedure or lookup post roll, the less the dice act as an analogue of the events in the fiction, & the less captivating the roll becomes.

That said, there are many non-dice resolution mechanics out there which are fascinating, but the more complex the interpretation of what they actually mean becomes, the less they appeal to me. Some of the card based ones are fascinating, but many of them do involve those additional layers of lookup & interpretation, so they are less visceral than the quick clatter of the dice. (besides, I’m terrible at shuffling cards, as in really, really bad at it). ~ There are lots of non-dice systems or mechanics or procedures besides resolution based ones, but I’ve decided to stick to resolution based ones for RPGaDAY as it fit with the thoughts I had about the last three questions as a whole.

The one I’ll talk about that appeals to me a great deal is something that we have been doing forever in the RPG hobby, but which has been formalized in some games. ~ The technical term for this resolution mechanic is Karma. It’s not a term I would have chosen, but it has stuck & I have acquiesced to reality.

In short, Karma works by comparing the difficulty of a task or attempt to the competence or raw ability of the character. No roll needed. I’ve been doing this since 1981. ~ The player declares that his character tries to cross a slippery plank from one rooftop to the other. “What’s your Dexterity? 16? OK, no problem, you cross the plank.”

Just about any character has some list of numbers or words informing us about how competent they are in various areas, how strong they are, how lucky, how graceful, if they’ve been a cop on the beat, if they have the ability to sway a crowd, whatever. Usually there will be an indication of where on a spectrum they fall in a number of different skills or attributes. ~ Coincidentally, the game will generally have an indication of the relative difficulty of various tasks. In most case both the relative ability of the character & the relative difficulty of a task will be represented numerically. This makes them easy to compare at a glance. ~ Even in games that use signal words for competence & for how daunting an attempted action might be, a comparison of these values isn’t tough.

The Ubiquity System used in Hollow Earth Expedition, All for One, Desolation, & many other nifty games has taken this long used method of diceless task resolution & formalized it in the ability to “take the average”. ~ Unless the GM or the fiction dictates that a roll of the dice is appropriate, the player has the option to “take the average” result of rolling their die pool, which is equal to half the size of the pool. This means that a character with an 8 die pool in a particular skill can automatically succeed in tasks related to that skill that require 4 or less successes on a roll of the dice. They’re just that good. (Remember how we talked about how dice pools model operating at your level of competence yesterday?)

I like that the system allows & encourages the GM to take the average for NPCs, so often as a GM you don’t roll dice. ~ A lot of the game can go much faster that way, & when the dice come out it’s special. Another cool thing about Ubiquity is that the style points resource can be spent to add more dice to a pool in order to represent the character pushing themselves above & beyond their normal capacity. This can be done in a manner that requires a roll, but just as often that character with the 8 die pool can spend a couple of style points to be able to succeed at a task requiring 5 success via Karma/Taking the Average as well.

Rolling the dice is fun and can be exhilarating, but do it too much and it becomes commonplace & stale. Whether it’s part of the rules as in Ubiquity, or used informally as a bit of common sense, the use of Karma to resolve less dramatic moments can help make the really dramatic ones come alive as the dice hit the table & we all bend over them in anticipation.

Which dice mechanic appeals to you?

They all do really. ~ I like dice. I find the mechanics that we use in RPGs fascinating. What are we trying to model? Why? What sort of outcomes are the dice called upon to determine? How many different fictional prompts are possible from one roll? How do we decide when to roll them and when not to? ~ The list or questions is seemingly endless.

Which dice mechanic appeals to me really depends upon the effect that it is being used to produce. Different mechanics produce radically different feels, and we’re not just talking about how often you succeed or fail. Creative game designers can have dice mechanics that represent a myriad of elements of the fiction. ~ Some do a fantastic job of emulating a genre or tone, and that always appeals to me on an aesthetic sense. However, I might not like the final feel of the game, but you might. Different strokes.

Percentile dice have always appealed to me. Math is funny. All dice mechanics boil down to percentage chances of various results. I don’t care if you’re rolling a rainbow fistfull of FFG Star Wars narrative dice, there’s a percentage chance of each possible combination of symbols coming up. Get enough d10s together and assign them to tens, units, tenths, hundredths, thousandths, etc & you can model anything. ~ But then again, you could just use the other dice you’re trying to model.

Silly examples aside, I still like percentile dice an awful lot. A game doesn’t have to be complex in order to use them to good effect. ~ It’s also very easy to wrap your head around your chances when dealing with percentages.

I’ve become quite enamored with dice pools as of late. Now, the criticism that single dice mechanics like a d20 or d% are “too swingy” compared to dice pools doesn’t exactly hold water, depending upon what the dice are supposed to be determining. If the roll is for a simple success or failure, then the final number you end up with really doesn’t matter. Don’t believe me? ~ Read on.

The chance of rolling at least 4 successes on a pool of 8 “yes/no” ubiquity dice is approximately 65%. (63.67) The chance of rolling at least an “8” on a d20 is 65%. ~ If both of those conditions indicate success, then they are pretty much equal. The fact that the results tend to cluster around 4 successes on the dice pool while they are all over the place on the d20 doesn’t matter. Unless…..the roll also determines the degree of success or failure.

It just so happens that Ubiquity die pools can determine a degree of success or failure, which is cool. That clustering around the middle means that on average, a character of a given competence level will perform at or around that level of competence on most attempts. Minor failures and somewhat better successes are also rather likely, which also represent performing just below or above the character’s level of competence. Abysmal failures & remarkable successes are rarities, just as they tend to be in real life. This is one of the strengths of dice pools like the ones used by Ubiquity, Fate/Fudge, and a host of others. ~ Even a small dice pool like the 2d6 PBTA mechanic is designed to have “partial success” occur most of the time. That might not be the most “realistic” result, but that is a hallmark of that system.

However, the other side of the coin is that while dice pools do an excellent job of modelling competence in a “realistic” manner, the likelihood of “Hail Marys” and “I can’t believe you tripped over your own shoelaces” becomes vanishingly small. ~ If you want those effects to show up on a somewhat regular basis, then a linear mechanic like d20 or percentile dice where the number rolled actually matters beyond simple success or failure is your best bet. ~ Which one appeals to me depends upon what feel I want for a given game.

Then again, sometimes the old standards are the most appealing to me, especially when I need a quick resolution for an unexpected situation. “You want to what? ~ Roll a d6, try for low.” ~ It’s easy to discount such a simple and ancient mechanic, but it has its charm, and it can model a range of chances fairly well. ~  Is it a Hail Mary? 1 in 6. Hard? 2 in 6. 50/50? 3 in 6. Easy? 4 in 6. Almost a sure thing? 5 in 6.

D6 roll low isn’t for everything, but it does have its place.

 

 

Which game mechanic inspires your play the most?

The questions for the next three days are pretty interesting. I’m afraid that a certain part of my answer for each day will include a bit of “it depends”. However this isn’t being indecisive. Far from it. Rather, the intention or desired effect has a lot to do with which mechanic to use. Game design intrigues me, & I keep toying with the idea of designing a couple of simple ones just to try out some ideas. Stretch goals on my kickstarter will be autographed pictures of yours truly ~ because who could possibly be more fascinating?

It really didn’t take me long to realize what my answer for today would be. It’s not really a specific mechanic, but a family or type of mechanics. They model what we have done by feel in RPGs for a long time, but they formalize the process and remove most of the potential for cries of “unfair GM fiat” while at the same time reminding us to utilize a powerful method of making the fiction far more interesting.

The mechanics in question insert the possibility of effects that are in addition to, tangential, or orthogonal to the intent of the characters when they make an attempt to do something. These are the “ANDs” and the “BUTs”. They include the idea of a degree of success or failure ~ (“YES you succeeded at hacking the computer AND you were able to hide your intrusion entirely” or “NO you were unable to pick the lock AND you just triggered an alarm”) ~ however these mechanics go beyond that idea and take it a step further.

Perhaps the best example of this type of mechanic is found in the narrative dice system of Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars & the spin off Genesys “generic system”. Dice are rolled during skill attempts to determine success or failure, but they also can indicate advantages, threats, triumphs, & despairs. This second axis of fortunate & unfortunate events can sometimes represent a degree of success or failure over and above the simple yes/no paradigm, but more often it indicates positive or negative effects caused by or related to the attempts or actions of the characters, but that occur independently of success or failure. This introduces the “BUTs” into the narration. ~ (“YES, you succeed at talking your way past the guard, BUT once inside the convention hall a rival smuggler recognizes you and looks as though he suspects something’s up” or (“NO you don’t hit the stormtrooper with your blaster shot, BUT you do hit the comm panel next to him & he is unable to call for reinforcements”). ~ The combinations of successes, failures, advantages, threats, triumphs, & despairs are practically unlimited, (outside of not being able to succeed and fail at the same time), so many outcomes are possible from a single event.

Other games such as those powered by the Apocalypse World engine (PBTA) include a “partial success” or “success at cost” possibility in the dice mechanic. While the partial success is an interesting outcome, I find the success with a cost or failure with an opportunity for advantage type of results to be much more inspiring. ~ In many cases I find the spirit of that mechanic to be more inspiring than the actual numbers that a given mechanic produces, but that is a topic for another day.

To me, this type of mechanic opens up many possibilities. The various systems often formalize player narration or choice of positive outcomes, which took some getting used to at first, but really seems to foster engagement in the fiction. Other mechanics invite this participation as well, but these seem to excel at it, & the formalization of the collaborative narrative effort removes a lot of uncertainty.

As I mentioned in the beginning, a wonderful thing is that it reduces the potential for adversarial relationships between the players and the GM. (Actually, it reduces the potential to suspect an adversarial relationship). As Game Masters, many of us have been inserting and narrating these tangential effects (positive & negative) for many years. But it was entirely upon our discretion. With this sort of mechanic, the dice decide when these unexpected events happen. The plastic gods speak, and the onus of responsibility is off the GM who can sit back and be transparently impartial.

Finally, as I also alluded to, the cool thing about these mechanics (of which there are several), is that they prompt us to insert interesting and unexpected elements into the fiction. Let’s face it ~ it’s really easy to get into the groove and think of everything in terms of success or failure. RPGs are wonderful because the creation of the fiction is collaborative between several people, however, even that can get stale & predictable. These mechanics, with their sideways and sudden insertion of boons & banes seemingly from left field, force us out of established patterns and demand that we enrich the fiction with the narration of events that no one could predict. ~ We play to find out & the mechanics guide us, but we get to create the details & nuances of those unforeseen effects.

What’s not to like about that?

What music enhances your game?

This is an interesting question, especially since I’m a musician & love music in general.

I have vivid memories of reading my old AD&D books & coming up with ideas for campaigns & such while the headphones were blaring Rush. Iron Maiden, Sabbath, and other bands also made the cut, but it was always Rush. Caress of Steel, 2112, Hemispheres, A Farewell to kings, All the World’s a Stage ~ great stuff.

Somehow RPGs and Rush got paired up in my head like chocolate & peanut butter.

The funny thing is, I don’t know a lot of the words to a good deal of my favorite music. I’ve just never internalized most of them. For me music is more of a feeling. Tone and dynamics move me far more than lyrics ever will. I couldn’t tell you why, it’s just how it is. That said, there are some great songs which inspire the desire to play or which suggest certain themes or moods. ~ Sometimes it’s the lyrics, but often its the emotions that the music stirs up. Every once in a while I read an RPG while listening to music & the two get connected in my head. Circle of Hands & ‘On my way to the cage” by Rollins are stuck that way now. ~ Go figure.

But we’re not talking about inspiration ~ that was yesterday’s question about art. Today’s question asks us what music enhances our game.

For me, the simple answer is ~ it doesn’t.

I have friends that love theme music and soundtracks for game sessions. Those just don’t appeal to me. Often they simply prove to be distracting. ~ This doens’t mean that I don’t enjoy listening to some favorite music prior to a game, but during the game itself I don’t want any outside distractions if I can help it. ~ If a song is suggested by the events of the game, trust me, it will start playing in my head. (Yes, I admit, I totally had fun playing Star Trek TOS fight music during a combat in our Star Trek Adventures game, but I was goofing around & us old guys were bonding over the way things used to be before the Federation got so stuffy & proper).

A favorite moment of mine concerning theme music and other plans gone awry can be found in my video The Sword is Mine!. I can still picture that music from Conan in the background, but things didn’t go as planned.

So, oddly enough, despite the fact that I love music and find it to be incredibly evocative and moving, I don’t find that it enhances my RPG experience. ~ It could be that when I pay attention to something that I really pay attention to it, & having two strong contenders for my attention can be overwhelming. It could also be that at any given moment the song that my internal jukebox decides to cue up doesn’t match what someone else has decided that the “theme music” should be.

Pre or post game is a different story. ~ Sometimes I’ll think about Phillipe’s Journey in All For One and “Naveed” from Our Lady Peace will cue up. ~ Strange….

What art inspires your game?

RPGaDAY is all about being positive, but it’s also about being honest & exposing ourselves a little bit. ~ So, I can honestly say “it depends”, and sometimes “it doesn’t”.

But let me explain….

I’m interpreting this question to mean “art” in the visual sense. Cool pictures, paintings, illustrations, etc. Stuff you would find in RPGs and other places like book covers or that great source of truth & beauty ~ the internet.

I like art, I really do. Quite a bit actually. Some pictures are quite evocative of a mood or a setting. Very often they fire the imagination. I tend to find those not actually connected to any game or other media to be the most inspiring, as I can make up what they are about. This can come from anywhere, but I suppose the common denominator is the ability to determine for myself what it is. My imagination isn’t constrained by what it’s supposed to represent or what it’s connected to.

The actual art in RPGs is hit or miss for me. Some of the art from my youth is so iconic that it never fails to make me smile. There are games that have art that matches up so perfectly with the images that I get in my head that it inspires me to want to play the game. Masks has art that just jives with how the game makes me feel when I read it. ~ Vigilante City by Eric Bloat is another one that has art that just lines up perfectly with the images that I get in my head. The fact that when you look at the art in those games it might not match the images in your head is kind of irrelevant. Art is funny like that, and so are human imaginations.

There are plenty of other RPG books where the art ranges from annoying to distracting. Very often this is nothing more than a conflict between how I imagine the scenarios & characters that the game describes & how the artist conceives of them.

When it comes right down to it, art is a crap shoot for me. Sometimes it is extremely evocative & inspirational, & other times it conflicts so strongly with my own imagination that it gets in the way & I have to do my best to ignore it.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then sometimes the guy with the mic has your undivided attention, & other times you just wish that he would stop talking.

Describe your plans for your next game/How do you prepare for an extended campaign?

So, as you can see, day 16 is brought to you by the prompt for the day & an alternate question. ~ I’m involved in a lot of games right now. Most are slow movers. The Play by Email Mythos Mythras & play by private Facebook group Masks that I play in are slow movers by default. I’m also a player in a bunch of games that are on again off again via hangouts. I could be missing some, but there are at least Untold Adventures/Harn, HEX, B/X in Greyhawk, Edge of theEmpire, & Star Trek Adventures all ready to be picked up again. Rotating GM games on the books are All For One & The Veil. Games where I am the solo GM would be HEX & Lamentations of the Martian Princess. ~ The final one is going to be our example.

My “shelves of hope” contain a bunch of games that I “plan” to play or run at some time. I just don’t have any grand ideas at the moment.

I already talked about what I’m having to plan for my next session due to an alteration in the timeline. Here I really want to talk about how I plan or prep for an ongoing campaign.

I’m aware that I tend to run games that I would like to be a player in. ~ Not just what game or what system, but how it’s run. As I discussed earlier, I have found that the game has the most meaningful and authentic “stakes” when it becomes about what the player characters find important. I find it hard to have that same level of buy-in as a player when the GM tells me what the agenda for my character is. Plots or stories or adventure paths fall flat for me. Mission based gaming becomes tedious, & often I find myself going through the motions, & if I am honest with myself I realize that unless something has “clicked”, my character simply doesn’t care, (neither do I) ~ I’m simply having them participate because that’s what I’m “supposed” to do.

I tend to prefer run (or be a player in) more of a demented science experiment. ~ Take a theme, a scenario, some NPCs and factions, a set of upcoming events & a few wild card elements. Throw it all in a blender with the the PCs. See what happens. ~ It’s a bit like letting a bunch of mice (the PCs) loose in a cheese factory full of cats, mousetraps & maybe some friendly critters of some variety.

I give some things a fair amount of detail right away. What’s the scenario in the world right now? Who are these alien races? What events are coming down the road? Who is in charge of the city the PCs are in? What do the various factions want? Who is one important member of each faction? What are they like and what do they want? What friendly connections do the PCs have? ~ I don’t fill in all of the details any more than I fill in all of the details of a character when I create them. This emerges naturally during play. ~ As long as I have a good idea of the agendas and motivations of NPCs & organizations, this will inform my in game improvisation and we will discover more about them.

I try to establish connections between the NPCs and other players up front as well and have some rough timelines of events. Who is Javed the merchant that wants to hire them? What is his connection to Elim (rival)? Who is pressuring him (Grath)? What does Grath want? Who can help get more of what Grath wants (Syrus, but he’s nuts)? ~ Likewise I try to have some events happen early that let the players know that they are free to explore other aspects of this dynamic world (the Antha have a dispute with the leadership of the city, there are preparations for possible war, without their help there fear of being defenseless against Thark attacks, look at that strange Taelon magic ~ how do i get access to that?).

However, the real fun planning and prep happens once the game gets going. After each session I get to regroup & re-assess what’s going on. I don’t change what I’ve already established, but I bring it into sharper focus based upon what we improvised, what the player characters did, where they seem to be headed, what connections got established or became more nuanced, and upon what I have learned about the NPCs by playing them. ~ I spend a lot of time thinking about what the NPCs and groups might do. How their motivations have become more detailed. Who they are becoming. I think about what makes the most sense based upon what we have learned. I come up with ideas, play them out, discard some & build on others.

I bring a more refined and focused version of the game world to the table next session, much of which is becoming detailed because that’s where the player characters are choosing to spend their efforts. At the same time, I don’t ignore the elements of the world that they are ignoring or spending less time on. That army everyone in the city is afraid of? It’s still on the way.

The consequences and ripple effects of what the player characters have done guides a lot of my prep. They threw Elim to the Sleestack but left his aide Torvath alive? (I had to make Torvath up on the spot, they left him alive so he needed a name and a motivation). Well, it stands to reason that this guy would describe them to the authorities and also blame them for the Sleestack invasion. ~ The more that the players interact with the world, the more consequences (for good or ill) of their actions keep rolling down the track.

So I’m always planning for the next session. Prep before the game ever starts can be a bit of a drag for me. I can get excited about an idea, but until the players get involved with the world, it can seem a little lifeless and like a facade. However, once the sessions start, thinking about the game and preparing for next session by filling in the details and considering what would logically happen next based upon events and the motivations of all involved becomes very fun indeed.

Describe a tricky RPG experience that you enjoyed.

Now that’s a tricky question…

This is one of the questions in RPGaDAY that I had been dreading a bit as I was unsure how to answer it. “Tricky” implies intention. Something is challenging or difficult, and what that “something” is would be ensuring a desired outcome, (or avoiding an undesirable one). ~ There a lot to choose from.

We could interpret tricky to apply to in game events. It really doesn’t matter if you’re coming from the viewpoint of the character or the player, or some amalgam of both. ~ The tricky situation could be a challenge or encounter. It could be the logistical challenge of pulling off a heist or caper. It might be planning and executing an ambush, or an investigation, or a negotiation. It could be any number of puzzles to solve or goals to accomplish.

However, the tricky situation could be completely out of game. Whether we live in the same town, or across the globe, the logistics of getting 3 to 6 adults together for a game ca be quite daunting. As I’ve discussed recently, it can be just as tricky to manage that many people with differences in preference, bias, intentions, & expectations. Session Zero and a social contract can be harder than one would think. ~ Sometimes the in game challenges are a cakewalk compared to the real world ones.

As a Game Master it can certainly be challenging to provide a certain experience. Maybe you’re focusing on ensuring a specific outcome, or perhaps you’re working hard to make sure that you don’t force one. Maybe you’re focused on managing the story. Perhaps you’re focused on creating and maintaining a certain tone, or feel or genre. Or maybe you’re working on meeting the needs of a diverse group of people, each of whom want a different thing.

Just learning a new game and learning how to play it well can be tricky. Especially when you want to let it stand on it’s own without infecting or poisoning it with the desire to have it be like other games you have enjoyed in the past. Learning to implement this new system & role play in character at the same time can be daunting. ~ Likewise, when things need tweaking, it can be uncomfortable to have discussions where you are willing to give and to accept feedback.

Realistically, learning & mastering any technique can be tricky. In fact, I’m a member of a group that  focuses on that. (Well, we talk about other stuff, but I digress) 😉

But what about my answer? ~ Glad you asked.

In my Lamentations of the Martian Princess game, I got thrown a curve ball. in the most recent episode, two elements converged that I had not anticipated. ~ The PCs were seeking relics from before “the great war” that they could sell for a quick profit. Led to an old ruin by a half insane NPC, the group happened upon a machine which opened gates to other places & times. Being astute players, they quickly realized that the vision of their city they could see on the other side was most likely from the past before the war that devastated the planet. In my mind it was just a dangling carrot. Would they be tempted to travel back in time to a world where technology was commonplace, but humans were mostly enslaved?

However, another element of the ruin was the random encounter table. One NPC they might encounter was a member of a former expedition who had been there about a month, even though all other members were dead. Why was he still alive? Without giving away too much, there was something different about this NPC, & it would have been interesting had they decided to hang out with him…

What I hadn’t considered was what would happen if this NPC was confronted with what looked like a way to go home to his city. It only seemed logical that he would try, & I made up a chance on the spot that he would try to “go home”. The roll dictated that’s what he would do, & no one tried to stop him.

The tricky part? ~ Realizing and expanding upon what would happen if that rather special NPC were to go back in time to before the war.

The long & short of it was that I had to drastically change the makeup and reality of the world to account for a rather large butterfly effect. (a Mothra Effect in this case). This has been both tricky & enjoyable. How well I pull it off remains to be seen, but essentially I had to scrap a large part of the scenario because the history that lead up to it didn’t happen. ~ The neat part is that we have an opportunity to make the world a little more “sword & planet”, which is cool as we realized it was a little too “fantasy”.

Time paradoxes ~ Tricky.

Describe a failure that became amazing

Looking at this question at the beginning of the month i saw that it might cause me some trouble. ~ Amazing? As in “I can’t believe he screwed that up! What are the odds?” Or maybe “amazing” as in the really epic spell failure where Lee’s character Hans managed to open a rift in between worlds & let out an unspeakable horror in session six of Lamentations in Prussia.

For some gamers failure seems to be anathema. Personally, I love it. Not that I go looking to fail, far from it. However, I love to “play to find out” what happens. While there are many things that contribute to this discovery, having the intention to do something & having things not go as you planned certainly lets you “find out” what really happens in a hurry. However it looks, a failure to achieve a specific outcome may close that door, (metaphorically or otherwise), but it always opens another door of possibility (or two or three).

My runner up is a silly failure, but a fun one. In an Iron Falcon Game that Jason Ran last year, I had a double failure that became amazing. Rolling up my first character gave me a 3 Wisdom. This is not good in that game. This is the guy that tries to pet the skunks because they’re cute. (I feed the skunks near my house and go out to watch them, so it’s possible I rolled myself). I rolled up a more suitable character named Sir Vantes (remember my thing for stupid names?), & Jason let me keep “Dim” as the torchbearer. Opening the dungeon door we were set upon by goblins, & my second failure was losing initiative. Sir Vantes was run through and died on the spot. I took over the torchbearer with the 3 wisdom & the rest of the game was about this normal man with no common sense avenging the death of his master. ~ It was silly & stupid, but none of us will ever forget it.

However, my real answer is from All for One ~ Nights to Remember where we experienced several failures. The most crucial one was during an encounter with “Alice”, a vampire we had thought we defeated many sessions ago. Phillipe found himself having to defend a nearly helpless Brisecouer & a quite helpless Eugenie. Phillipe gallantly attempted to wrest the damsel in distress from the vampire as Alice levitated Brisecouer’s former lackey to her certain doom, but alas! I failed.

At this point I became willing to negotiate with the Nosferatu, and this seemed to intrigue her. The end result is that my musketeer has promised to eliminate her rival and usurper, one Oliver Durand, who is about as dangerous of a human foe as you might encounter, (not to mention that he would be surrounded by a multitude of capable guards & minions). This is only slightly less disagreeable than working for an instrument of the devil himself.

None of us could have predicted this turn of events, but failure made it possible.

What will happen? ~ We must play to find out.