The Shard of Mirabilis

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: share one of your best Worst Luck stories.

After joining the gaming group I had stumbled upon in university, I rolled up my very first PC. He was a monk named Den, made using some options from Oriental Adventures and trying to use 3rd ed tripping rules effectively. Essentially Den could quickly move around the battlefield, tripping multiple enemies to give bonuses to the other PCs and occupying the big bad while still easily avoiding wizard AOEs with lovely monk reflexes.

Or at least, that's what he was intended to do. See, I have this transparent purple d20 that must be cursed. Whenever the roll mattered, I don't think it ever got above 13, and I swear it was weighted towards a critical fail. Den would often trip himself instead of the enemies, and most of his multiple attacks were wasted by rotten luck. This happened often enough that the DM and I came up with plot to explain it. Den's parents were killed when he was young (shut up he was my first PC) by shapeshifting beings who live on the other side of mirrors. His father's final attack before death shattered the mirror-man Mirabilis, who cursed Den and his father's whole family line. Breaking a mirror gives you bad luck; breaking a mirror-man is far worse. Den carried a shard of Mirabilis on a cord around his neck, which once per day let him re-reroll a d20--so long as it landed on 13 or under. The rest of the time, he just had to live with bad luck.

To Be Quite Frank, I Don't Like Elevators

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: supposedly random game events that keep occurring.

I rely on random generators to add variety to my games now, but I didn't used to. This question has a clarification on the BrigadeCon site: "Tense outcomes are resolved using dice or other randomizers in the majority of our hobby's games, and devices such as charts, or lists are popular in some types of games. What random series of events or outcomes in your game ended up feeling not at all random?"

One of the bizarrely regular "random" events I remember is actually the result of -not- using random generation. Whenever the PC's met an otherwise unimportant NPC and wanted to know their name, I would just make something up. And it turns out that the most random name I can think of is "Frank". Once my players had met about five or six Franks, across several different games, they started to just assume any NPC would be named Frank. Often I'd just roll with it, and the cheeky bastards would make a big deal of how many jobs this one Frank must have, given that he's a cab driver, security guard, shopkeeper AND arms dealer.

Another recurring element in pretty much all of my modern games was established as the result of a random roll in the first adventure I ever ran (barring an aborted one-shot which ended in about 20 minutes after a single skeleton TPK'd my roommates). To introduce the setting and tone of my d20 Modern dark urban campaign The City, I ran a prequel one-shot where the PCs were agents of Department 7 investigating power outages at an underground research facility. As they took the elevator down into the sub-basements, I rolled percentile dice to see if anything went wrong. And it did, spectacularly. The power outage and an electrical storm combined to short out the brake system, sending it plummeting all the way down and dealing significant damage to the PCs who didn't make their reflex saves. Purely by accident, it was a pretty awesome way to get them down into the basement with no turning back.

That would have been the end of it, but once The City campaign actually started, the PCs would often end up in elevators. I rolled every time, and -every time- something went wrong, from simply getting stuck to getting attacked by monsters during a blackout as the elevator screeches downwards. My players eventually just stopped taking elevators. I should have some horrible things happen on the stairs...

My random event check was mostly based on intuition: I'd roll d% and vaguely intuit that something really bad would happen 15% of the time, and negative up to 30%-50% depending on the situation. But given that I enjoy making an "elevator check", let's have a table! (and because I've been messing around with normal distributions for random generation lately, let's do that too)

2d6	Elevator Mishap
2	roll twice and combine
3	CABLES SNAP—the elevator plummets!
4	a ghostly elevator attendant manifests and will only take you to the non-existent 13th floor
5	odourless red mist begins seeping in through the vents
6	a Cheeky Urchin has pressed all the buttons before the PCs got in
7	the elevator arrives at the expected floor
8	men in black suits have suddenly always been in the elevator
9	bad wiring—the buttons electrify and deal 1d6 shock damage
10	emergency brake activates, the elevator screeches to a halt between floors
11	the elevator becomes sentient and is attempting to eat the PCs
12	roll twice and combine

There's Only One Old Faithful

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: what was your group's funniest rule misinterpretation?

I don't know if this says more about my memory or my gaming group, but I'm struggling to think of any rules misinterpretations that we didn't just correct or handwave.

Most of the funny misinterpretations I can recall are like the Dread Gazebo; where there's a miscommunication or lack of understanding between GM and players. Sometimes it's just a simple slip-up that we latch onto and use to mess with the person making the error. We tried playing Rifts once, and the GM had pre-written character sheets for us rather than make us go through the agony of generating Rifts characters ourselves. His hasty writing was difficult to read, and amongst our belongings were a "snipper rifle" and a "geiser counter". Obviously these became a running gag, and items that showed up in other games. All part of the rich tapestry of shared references for nerd social cohesion.

Fragile Crystalline Structure

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: Which gamer most affected the way you play?

This is kind of a tricky one. When I'm a player, I tend to hang back and just enjoy the gaming ambience. I like to explore the world the GM creates and see what crazy stuff the other PCs do. As far as I know I didn't pick this up from any specific gamer. I suspect I'm hardly alone; most players figure out how to play as they go, picking up cues and behaviours from their formative gaming groups.

This is -weird-. There's a staggering amount of information on good GMing, and there's a fairly regular interest in classifying types of players and researching gamer personalities. But I've seen little on what we can learn from specific players, or on how to be a good player in general. In fact the only thing I can think of offhand is Grant Howitt's piece. And somehow, roleplayers cobble together a feel for how gaming works.

So if we don't learn how to play by modelling good behaviour, how do we learn? Well, maybe we all learn from -bad- play. As a gaming group coheres socially, part of that process is figuring out what doesn't work and what isn't acceptable, gradually and intuitively, from each others' mistakes.

I played in a game once that lasted maybe three sessions. The three players had strong and divisive personalities, and the GM was not yet practiced at maintaining the peace. The game world was a detailed homebrew fantasy setting, with kingdoms and economies and a unique pantheon and such. One player spent gaming time poking holes and criticising the world building. We managed to play through an adventure fine, but the atmosphere was less fun than it could have been, as we would often argue about some setting detail.

It came to a head when the GM explained that the currency in this kingdom was crystals. The nit-picking player started criticising this, and then explained how he was going to use low-level spells to destroy as much crystal as possible, with the specific intention of destabilizing the economy to prove how stupid crystal currency is. The argument between him and the GM raged to the point where the third player and I had our characters commit suicide. Total game meltdown.

I'm not sure I -learned- it from that game, but it solidified for me that buy-in to the setting is up to the player. It is -more fun- to accept the world on its own terms and explore, rather than try to destroy it from within with some kind of reductio ad absurdum apocalypse.

The behaviour of that player also influenced my thoughts on GMing--I have an intuition that making too many setting details is dangerous, either because of inconsistency or more likely because they misdirect players away from stuff that actually matters. Today I really like to give players input into the setting so that they can actively contribute rather than simply discover what I've come up with. It's possibly contradictory, but I think the same intuition drives the way I play, of just taking the GM's setting on board as-is, for better or worse. The play experience at that table, how one player just not giving a shit destroyed the game, shows how important buy-in can be.

Better Late than Never

RPGaDay 2016 has been going on for more than a week already, but I'll jump on the bandwagon. This year it's being hosted by BrigadeCon, so check their site for more details and the full list of questions.

Today's #RPGaDay question: Largest in-game surprise you have experienced?

About a decade ago I was GMing an urban campaign using d20 Modern, with dark fantasy, near-future sci-fi, conspiracy and horror themes. It's not as grimdark-serious as it sounds--often I'd twist up genre conventions to mess with the tone. Also, my players knew when to open the release valve, so often we had moments of genuine comic relief.

During one session, the PCs headed to the laboratory of a mad scientist NPC who was one of the few people they could trust. He was nowhere to be found, and was possibly in danger. During this moment of tension, the PCs started searching--investigating other rooms, looking for notes or other clues, checking in the supply closet. A player cracked: "and then he jumps out and yells "SUPPLIES!"

We laughed pretty hard. I'm pretty sure someone did a spit-take. It was spontaneous and unexpected, and worked a lot better than the joke originally did in UHF. Thank goodness for players that are that switched-on! The City campaign lasted for about three years, and taught me a lot about GMing and engaging with players.