Pivots Please - An ACIII Post-game Exploration

Hmm... there seem to be quite a lot of them. Hope the devs
properly supported my predator-esque bouncings.

So back in June I was mulling over a puff piece that was generating hype for ACIII and looking at the gap between what the devs promised and what actually turned up. One of the promises I couldn't be sure about was the opportunity to emulate everyone's favourite killer of both humans and xenomorphs, the predator; but in an Assassin-y kind of a way.

I must admit that I had never tried this approach to guards on the frontier, opting instead, as Robocop would have put it to "stay out of trouble". This is due, in part, to the fact that I like to role play AC games a little, I go for what the character might have done in the situation, not for what might, possibly be the most amount of fun.

This is probably because I am invested in AC's ridiculous historical pot-boiler plots, I love them, a lot; to the extent that I am writing an AC fan fiction for Nano. So in-game I find it incongruous to run everywhere, upsetting citizens and getting in regular scrapes with the guards. I like to slink through the cities, admiring the view.

But now the story of ACIII is over, the game temporarily recasts you as a hacker running Connor's environments as a sandbox for something called "counter hacking" and trying to pick up little vector unicorns called pivots in order to open up Animus Hacks.

This is a part of the game that many people don't see, and of those who do see it many more just find it confusing. It's a triangulation game, essentially, where you plant the pivots you already have to find the pivots you haven't. Pivots create lines on the map and the location of the pivot you've discovered exists, but have not located, are filled in green.

Sacre Bleu! The only screenshot I could find was in French!
Still you get the idea.

As exploring games go, it's a winner. To the extent that when I had found the 12 pivots in the game I was unconscionably sad that the game was over and wished it would begin all over again. Not least because whilst you are tromping over the map to place your next pivot where you think it should go you are bound to run into opportunities for mischief and mayhem and, well, why the hell not? So as I counter-hacked around the frontier I got a big opportunity to see if I could totally predator up the wandering guards, with mixed results.

At first, strangely, I just couldn't find a damn patrol anywhere. Lame in the extreme. I did nobble a couple of guys who'd decided to go out for a stroll, but this hardly told me anything about the AI. I picked off the one at the back first and then ran up behind his companion and hidden bladed him in the back. It was fun but the second guy didn't even know I was there. What I wanted to see was how they reacted if they knew I was about, but couldn't see me.

So I went pivot hunting and eventually I did find a group. Twice on the bounce another predatory animal, once an elk, once a bobcat, did for one of the guards on patrol setting off the "fallen comrade" AI. This basically makes the guards stand around looking a bit thick, in a circle with their weapons drawn, looking outwards, classic predator.

Guess who's coming down your chimney... that's right
Assassanta Claus is coming to town and you've all been very naughty! 

Then the shortcomings of the environment started to come into play. Not having an invisibility cloak the assassin has to use the environment to stealth about. There aren't enough trees connected, or enough stalking zones to make "pop-up, kill, disappear" a viable tactic. Usually I would pick off one or two, then run into the centre of the rest, hurl down a smoke bomb, kill some more and then fight the one or two that were left. Which was fine, but not exactly as advertised.

The best experiment, which, honestly I could stand to do again with more practice, was when I decided to plant a trap in the form of a well placed trip mine. Unfortunately I chose to plant two of the available three where rabbits occasionally zipped across the path, so I got some badly charred rabbit meat for my troubles, but not much else.

Still I did manage to plant one and it remained as the guards approached, scaring off the rabbits, and I hid in a well placed thicket and said tee-hee. I also knew that the guard patrol in question would check the thicket on their way past, as I had observed them come that way once from a tree. Sure enough an officer came out with a sword to poke at the tree but... none of the others stood in the trigger zone of the mine! Bastards!

There were no good screenshots of trip mines, so here's a rabbit instead.

I popped out and killed the officer in time honoured tradition and the rest, obviously went nuts trying to kill me. I ran around a tree in a big circle trying to make the mine the shortest distance between me and them. It took a couple of tries but then, bingo. They charged me and killed four of them in one immensely satisfying explosion. After that I smoke bombed, to kill the remaining three... just in time for a second guard patrol to approach from the west.

Out of trip mines I dived for the thicket and hid just in time for the new patrol to send a couple of scouts. One checked the bodies whilst the other came for the thicket. Disappeared inside and never came back again, muahahaha. This triggered a second set of investigators, and I got one of those too. This went for one more cycle before the rest decided to give it up as a bad job and leave their fallen behind. I wasn't having that. I charged the remaining five. Smoke bomb, stabby stabby, quick duel. All done.

That was fun. But it wasn't predator. So, the official verdict on that particular ambition is, nice try, but cigar-less. Also, when I was hopping about on rooftops looking for the New York pivot I saw nothing that resembled an upstairs chase breaker, so I still think that was a basic fail.

My final thought, however, remains that ACIII is unfairly maligned. The story's over complicated, Connor is a the most goonish of protagonists, sure. But I had a good deal of fun with the bits I did post story and I still have some privateer, delivery and assassination missions left to do. The game's main problems (now that the apparently awful launch glitches have mostly been patched away) are about balance and the gap between intention and result. The hero is too stoic and humourless, the intentions too poorly served, the ambitions too diluted. Even so, it's not impossible to have fun in there, just takes a little effort and imagination, oh, and pivots, lots and lots more pivots please.

Assassin's Creed III - Vision vs. Reality

Kotaku is, obviously, following the chequered alt-history of the Assassin’s Creed franchise as it stumbles from episode to episode trying to give the players what they want. It hasn’t always worked out, as the largely negative reaction to Assassin’s Creed III demonstrated.

There’s been some early speculation about the anticipated awesomeness of this year’s AC:Unity which I shall be commenting on anon. However the article telling us all the things that would be awesome in Unity made the mistake of linking to a previous article that told us all the things that would be awesome with ACIII.

Some of these features were there, but not really all that awesome either way; some were not there, but nearly there and this article just seems to highlight how not awesome the finished product is in comparison to the brash assurances of the pre-finish dev team; or just not even there at all in the end and hence a bit irrelevant, leading to the obvious question “why lie?”

Before we go any further I should point out that I ended up rather enjoying ACIII, although the story team had been given, maybe, way too loose a leash and ended up in a self-indulgent land called “The Land of Let’s Do Things In A Video Game Story That People Never Do In Video Game Stories”.

Unfortunately their excursion deep into this dark continent did not produce a clever, immersive story that thrilled its way to an epic conclusion. Instead it produced a lumpy, slightly pretentious, difficult but ambitious story that was lovable but, tragically, hard to love.

I provide this short list of gripes about promise versus reality as a counterpoint both to the giddy anticipatory tone of the linked article but also as a counterpoint to a similar article looking forward to the next major chapter in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, comments on which will follow shortly. In the end I just find it curious that a laundry list of broad general aims can have been missed in so many different ways. The first and most obvious misdirect in the linked article is a simple picture of Connor in a canoe.

*Canoes not included.

Connor never uses a canoe in ACIII. Aveline uses a canoe in Liberation but the code and whatnot never made the transition. I can kind of forgive this, the canoe stuff in the bayou wasn’t really all that fantastic and there was no real point to it honestly. Still, it seems strange that as they had an engine lying about for it that they didn’t just shove it in.

Except, of course, most memorable bodies of water in the game were rivers and maybe the physics of white-water canoeing just weren’t feasible. It is a great shame because being able to leave the reservation at the beginning by canoe instead of hoofing it across the unmapped frontier would have been pretty cool. Also it might have made more fast travel options possible.

In the rest of the article there are a few more things that are just plain wrong, many are trivial but then you get the odd one like:

There is some sort of system involving ice, possibly involving hiding below it to ambush troops, but the developers aren't getting specific about it yet.

Nor, indeed, do they ever, because I never once encountered ice. Snow, yes, loads of bloody terrible snow, but ice, I believe it is possible that ice maybe never made it into the game? Not sure. At the very least it would appear that if you wanted to use the ice mechanic, if such exists, you will need to seek it out. A quick google reveals that no-one particularly has.

Mmm... Connor loves snow. Press O to build a snowman in this
winter wonderland. Lies.

This is most probably because wading through snow was one of the most irritating frontier experiences of ACIII. Winter on the Eastern Seaboard was no fun at all. I get that I was supposed to be tarzanning my way through the trees but the environment did not always support that. Indeed that whole aspect existed and was pretty good fun but when it comes to statements like this:

"Our goal with the assassin was to make him as capable in the wilderness as Ezio and Altair were in cities, to do this for a forest," [the game's creative director, Alex] Hutchinson said. "For us, trees are 3D navigable space. You'll be able to go up trees, along that branch level, moving around. Some of the early fantasies we were talking about—it's fun to reference movies to get the team to paint a picture in their mind-if you think of the Predator, the original movie, not being [Arnold Schwarzenegger's soldier character] but being the Predator and the Redcoats being Arnie and [his] guys. This unseen force picking them off one-by-one from the trees? This is what we wanted. We want you to be a terrifying force of nature in that spot."

This points to a place where there was such fail, much desultory, terrible fail. I don’t know whether this was because of my mistrust of the enemy AI but I always assumed that if I picked off a guy in a column of redcoats from the trees the AI engine would have all the others see me, start shooting me etc. Maybe I’m wrong. Trees, though, are not stalking zones. You aren’t hard to spot up there, at all. Maybe if they had introuduced the idea of a tree-level stalking zone this would have worked a lot better.

(IMPORTANT NOTE: Of course, to date I have not actually tried to do this. I may pop the disc in over the weekend, head off to the frontier and see what happens... I will, of course, report back here.)

Yeah, that's right biznatches I am your hidden doom and...
NO! Don't look up! That's not fair *cries*

I can actually see the mechanics now. Tree level stalking zones, vantage points for clear visibility and swing/climb only zones, making a forest canopy fun zone from which you can take out the guys below.

Of course, then you’d have to tweak the enemy AI. You’d have to program these guys so when you took out the first one they huddled and grouped. Scanning the forest for signs of your approach. Then once you’d managed to pick off a couple more they would scatter. Many panicking running off through the trees, another couple trying to watch one another’s backs. What would be even better there would be if, in their panick, they got turned around, running in circles. Then you drop in or whatever and pick them off. Alternating high stalking zones with low, dividing, conquering, becoming one with the forest.

Needless to say, none of this is the case. You can clumsily slaughter a bunch of soldiers, you can run across pre-determined canopy obstacle courses and, as long as you don’t draw attention to yourself, you can stalk to a degree. But it’s nothing like the stated aim of the development team.

I had to loose a chuckle when I continued on to read:

Connor has a rope dart that he can use to hang people from trees with. It's more of a lure than a projectile weapon. An earlier, more aggressive version was more of tethered knife that was thrown from a standing position and then reeled in. "It felt too fantasy, " Hutchinson said. "It started to feel like Scorpion in Mortal Kombat."

But then the rope dart was pretty much just that in the finished product. You could lose them, and they made a mess of hunting kills, but they were pretty fantastic in their operation. They were a fun weapon, ruined partially by the unimaginative way the enemy AI reacted to them e.g. you could rope one sucker but then a sword fight was bound to follow.

Oh goodie... I've managed to provoke yet another
un-stealthy bloodbath...

The Batman: Arkham series did a much better job of this stuff, building in a panic aspect to enemies, so they changed their behaviour when they knew you were near. So I know such a thing is possible. It just seems like a lot of fluff in a game when it’s added with no real consequence.

Finally, there was this gem:

The highlight of the Boston section is what is called a chase-breaker. Connor has barged past some Redcoat guards, who give chase. What would be a standard run through an Assassin's Creed city's street changes radically when a woman in a second-story window opens some shutters to breath in the fresh air. Connor, clambering over a stall in the middle of the road, turns 90 degrees to his right and runs through the open window, shocking the woman. He zips through the interior of her house and out the window on other side, losing his predecessors in one of the coolest moments an Assassin's Creed development team has ever shown to the press.

Ahem, yeah, whatever. I never zipped through an upstairs room, I did see women in second story windows but in forty hours of game play I never got the impression that they, you know, did anything other than provide scenery. I did occasionally trigger a ground floor cut-through, but never in an actual chase. The mechanic was definitely there (at least on the ground floor) but ultimately not useful for much.

The problem here is the old “accidentally run up a wall” thing that has always been the unpleasant side effect of the parkour mechanics. As a seasoned AC player during a chase you attempt to do precisely nothing that will lead to your assassin accidentally running up a wall by accident, bouncing off an unclimbable arch and hastily drawn into combat that you really just wanted to avoid.

Eyes front, avoid the walls... avoid the walls...
OOOH Pretty wall! (attempts to scale, gets shot, desync)

Over the franchise’s development time the notion of running away almost seems to have become more and more shameful to the development team. In ACI the whoosh of the successful escape signal was as much of a victory as slaughtering a dogpile of city guards. Over time it’s come to feel more and more like a sort of grudging shrug as the game puts away its fighting mechanics and slopes off into the background again.

Overall the reasons one might eventually end up liking ACIII are nothing to do with these supposed innovations many of which were half-baked or simply non-existent. As to why, despite these misdirects, I did like ACIII is a topic for another day.

All images are (c) Ubisoft of course and are used for illustrative purposes.

Back In The Saddle

So yes.

Been a while. A good while. Those of you who have been following the continuing saga of No Dice will know that I've been putting all my effort into what I shall now dub "No Dice Phase I". No Dice Phase I consists of: The Core Book, Random Encounters, Levercastle, Shadow Cities and PULP RP and represents a full cycle of work.

If No Dice has any BIG IDEAS trust me most of them are in this Phase I. Sure there are plenty more ideas in Dreamtime Stories and Marauders and so on. But these are all derived from the BIG IDEAS in Phase I.

No ideas are bigger in this phase than the ideas behind PULP RP, the last publication in the series which is what I am getting down to now.

So that's what I've been up to. The other main piece of news is that I have acquired an eBook, which has swiftly become a great boon. I have been able to catch up on my reading as I prefer PDFs to regular published books. It's been great. I shall soon be returning to my duties as a POD book reviewer as I've chewed through so many books in the last fortnight that I shall no longer feel horrendously guilty for not reviewing things people send me in a reasonable amount of time.

Currently submissions are closed. But when they are open, be assured, you will know.

I think that's all for now. I'd better go and see if Sue's Sim 3 is now working as it was having memory issues.

...And Let That Be The End Of The Matter!

 This Dice vs. Cards thing is now irritating me. Not because everyone keeps saying how much they wuv their dice and would marry them if they were not polyhedral lumps of plastic; although that is slightly creepy.

No, what's getting me is that people say that Cards = Dice and therefore Cards !> Dice. In the Core Book we went into some detail about why this was not the case but now I think about it we probably didn't get to the heart of the matter. All the things we say are true, cards are more versatile and excellent mnemonically to keep system in people's heads instead of forcing them to bookmark rules and charts or refer to their super secret GM Screen to remember what numeric value on what chart means what.

But this doesn't cut to the very greatest thing about cards, i.e. they save you time.

I have not run a session that ran longer than three and a half hours in at least a year. At the same time, no one leaves these sessions feeling short changed. This is not a usual state of affairs in the hobby of RP. Of course I did my hahasoamusing little experiment write up in yesterday's entry. Although intended to be sarcastic it does have a serious point behind it. My session plans have gone from being good for two to three weeks worth of play, doing four and a half hour's worth at a time, coming away from every session feeling we should have done more, to cramming a good deal of plot and action into three to four hours with space for a tea break in the middle. Where did all this time come from?

Some might reason that I had simply become a more efficient Host. Well, possibly, but I know some cracking Hosts who have been in the game far longer than I have who still have a problem keeping in the limits of a good six hour run.

Maybe it is a combination of elements, fair enough. But here's one thing I know for a fact. Rolling a dice isn't just more time-consuming compared to drawing a card, it has the potential to introduce a finger-pause in the action that threatens to deep-six your session. Now, I have noticed that this is certainly not the case when properly playing your game of choice on a tabletop. Board games and the like seem to take a throw of the dice in their stride, it's part of the fun, and I have enjoyed exactly that fun on more than one occasion myself.

No, where dice are the kiss of death is in the sofa-lounge scenario. There's something quite luxurious about loafing about on a sofa engaged in RP something that gets players into a rhythm and even seems to put them in something of a trance. Nothing shatters that concentration like everyone craning forward to see a dice roll. Now, if you were to display dice rolls on a television screen or similar so they were big enough to be read without people craning forward to see them then that might mitigate the problem; but why employ technology when a playing card is usually clear enough to be seen by someone just holding it aloft?

This is where I think the time gains are made. There is some time at the beginning of a session where people are settling into the game. In a way the game takes a while for everyone involved to become fully engaged in it. I believe that in the past when people have rolled a dice it almost jogs them out of the game. Having a tea break also has a similar effect but that happens maybe once in a session, dice rolling is supposed to be a more frequent event.

Now I come to think about it I remember when I used to run Over The Edge by the book, with dice pools and what have you, we used to swerve rolls wherever possible. In fact the habit of being a dice dodger was one that infected all the games I played (not necessarily Hosted, just partook of) before starting in on No Dice. Now I come to think about it I can remember a lot of times the Host of the game, and sometimes that was me, made a Host Fiat decision before allowing the rhythm to be upset by a randomiser check. Randomiser checks which were supposed to be common became a last resort.

Some gamers still wear the "we hardly ever roll dice" thing as a narrative badge of honour. I always felt it made the whole thing less fun if you were afraid of trusting the vagaries of chance. If you stick to the unforgiving mistress that is chance the story is likely to be a lot more dramatic for the players than it is if you are the Host who enforces most of the rules but is basically on the player's side. Choices become important. In a fudged game choices are not really choices, they're just scenery on the mystery tour which really only has one destination and outcome.

Host Fiat in such cases is evil. It should be used to decide whether a proposed player plan even has a chance of succeeding; it's not intended to replace the element of chance altogether. The problem is that when your arbitration mechanism is destructively intrusive it encourages destructively simple Host arbitration. The most effective arbitrary Hosts are the ones who sustain a healthy distance between themselves and the players, although I always find this overcooks the player experience, the game becomes one of [Insert Host Name Here]'s games which are unique and untouchable.

Unless it can be systemised and is approachable it needs work. At least, in my world it does. For these reasons:

• discourages "fluffy Host syndrome"
• encourages randomiser use
• preserves fictive state
• shortens game length
• while increasing game quality

I say cards are indeed > dice. And that's all I have to say on the topic ever.

The Bloody End (of my NSHO).

No Let Up

So now tipped from writing Levercastle into editing Levercastle and writing up Shadow Cities. Not due to slave driving, just taking an opportunity to stay on a roll...

I realises this means that blogging time has been severely curtailed but I will be back when I'm done on these tasks.

In the meantime I was corresponding with Matt about a game he was writing and the problems of algorithmic thinking. That in game design Matt proceeds from A to B to C to D and then the players come along and immediately understand C from where they go to B loop back round to D and then finally pay lip service to A whilst really thinking the root of the problem is E through G.

Infuriating to a Host with a linear mindset they regard as logical.

I posted back to him:

The problem you face is not one of logic, it's one of algorithmic thinking.

In algorithmic thinking you have a problem e.g. fierce guard dog between you and open back window.

And a bottom line outcome: Make it through window unmolested.

As long as your algorithm produces the bottom line then you cannot be said to have proceeded in an illogical fashion. All that can be argued is that you reached your bottom line in an innefficient way. To return to the tea example getting someone else to make the tea in exchange for some kind of payment is efficient in the short term as you can do something else while person x makes the tea but inefficient in that it burns up resources you could have used to pay for something more useful.

In the end all players are trying to do is get the most efficiency out of their algorithmic thinking. You as Host may disagree as you see fit but players are entitled to their own reasoning if their solution gets to the bottom line in a way they can live with...

And that's all he wrote. Feel free to agree/disagree whatever in the notes.

Crawling Toward The Finish Line

Back from Belper and keen to relay gory details but for now suffice to say that my favourite session of the weekend for general hilarity and mirth filled darkness has to have been OTE. Least favourite for running smoothly but certainly no slouch in the "fresh ideas" camp was Dreamtime which was intellectually stimulating whilst being a bit slow to play. Work is ongoing.

Other than that I am pounding the keys frantically on the home stretch with Levercastle which nearly has a magic system and does, in fact, have an Alchemy system which all the failed alchemists in my campaign may be pleased, or nervous, to hear.

For now though, arrivederci.

Missing By A Mile

Recovering from a system bork I found this in my unpublished drafts. It's an article by a much more old-skool games designer than anyone I hang out with.

What I found amusing was the referencing of games designers pandering to rules lawyers. It has to be said that hitherto most successful games companies have made money by doing precisely this. It makes me wonder if we're going about this the right way or if we should be producing another 200 page rules supplement every week like some other games companies.

Oh well, guess we'll never be rich and we'll be considered wrong and foolish; at least we're happy not wasting our lives looking for a definitive decision on that rules quibble.

Of Monsters And Magnets

Quick one today. I'm going to reclaim my lunch hour to get some Dreamtime Stories stuff done for this weekend's session. After all the harping on about how difficult magic is in RP this magic system seems to have sprung, unbidden, from my mind and is looking like making pretty cool RP.

The only thing I have a slight issue with is that each type of magic needs an associated circular geometric design. That's a lot of geometry.

Anyhow. It occurs to me that yesterday I said nothing about the Monster Magnet gig that I went to on Saturday. Quite by chance RP Matt got in touch and asked if anything was happening and news of a Monster Magnet gig piqued his interest. Sue graciously handed her +1 status over to Matt so Matt and I got in on the guest list.

The opening act was an instrumental metal group. They weren't bad but they weren't sufficiently beyond riffing to make their prog metal designs work. Monster Magnet were chuffing excellent. All you could imagine a psychedleic metal band confident in their abilities to be.

Mrs has an issue with the fact that they're mostly old enough to be her dad but hey, what I say is if you can raise hell then whyever not?

Just a mini-blast today because the allure of the dreamtime is calling. Enjoy Tuesday!

The Joker In The Pack

No sooner do I lament the complete lack of anything that makes for a substantial post than KA-BLAM! something amazing socks me in the face; almost literally in this case.

When I was compiling the Core Book I tried to include everything I could think of at the time to make a sourcebook for the budding No Dicer. It is inevitable that things should be missed. Almost everything that's coming in the Random Encounters series is intended to be filled with examples of powerful things that you can do with No Dice principles. So in each adventure we're kind of expanding the toolkit of the prospective Host and also giving a concrete example of potential play.

Last night we play tested the Monster Action Thriller "The Creature of Black Lake" and got off to a rocky start. Basically an incident mentioned in the notes that's supposed to just happen resulted in the death of a player's character before the adventure had even started.

This was notable for several reasons but not least because that's really not supposed to happen. I know that people have been keen to discuss the idea of abitrary character death recently but this basically put someone out of the game in the first forty minutes.

Not only that but I experienced an incident of Host meltdown, a brief autopsy of the situation lead to the conclusion that the wires of communication were badly crossed and for a while there it all looked grim. You see, the whole point of No Dice is that it's supposed to help you sidestep these issues and keep going. If an adventure has a serious hole that relies on a certain series of incidents not happening then it's just not working.

A workable suggestion was put forward by Justin who suggested that when you hit the blind alley you as Host rewind the action to just before everything went pear and then re-explained the situation giving the player an out.

Like I say, this is workable but it's not really all that neat. It means that a player could take a one way trip up diarrhea drive and then like the Prince of Persia just rewind and do it again.

It was Sue who hit on the real answer. Which in a discussion that followed broadened out from a specific instance in that adventure to become a general principle that Core Book is sorely missing. Oh well, for the second edition I suppose.

But for those of you who don't want to wait n years for the 2nd ed here's the idea right now. Treasure this one, it's golden:

Creating NPCs is always a problem. 95% of NPCs are just cyphers of course. They are barkeeps, random wandering citizens and other reasonably easy to scope functionaries.

That other 5% are the important ones. Many of these, probably just over half, are villains and again there isn't really a problem with them. It's that last 2% that can leave the Host scratching their head.

These are the "major friendly NPCs". Don't be fooled, just because they're marked "friendly" doesn't mean they're always happy to see the players, it more or less just means they won't just try to kill the players on sight.

In the Core Book I got as far as advising people to avoid "infoblaster" NPCs who just know everything. And I also advised against making NPCs as powerful or more powerful than the player characters who were supposedly their allies.

Aside from that I just recommended a Host create "real" characters using the Player's Guide notes to make a fully rounded and realised character.

In some cases this might be fine. But in reality players don't really spend all that much time talking to NPCs just for fun. So a lot of the Host's fine character creation work goes by the wall.

Besides, once you've stopped the NPCs being more powerful when they're too friendly you've kind of left yourself in a bit of a bind.

The problem is sometimes you want characters to move the plot on. They are supposed to arrive, do something dramatic and then leave the players to deal with the fall out.

So how does one do this without making them villainous or too powerful? After all a constant parade of utter villainy keeps things busking along but really in a story based RP you want other types of encounter.

This was exactly the problem in Creature. I had an NPC who needed to rather aggressively insert himself into the party and provide useful plot information, in a guarded manner, for the remainder of the adventure (or at least until he died). I had written up notes for this character which were pretty light. I wanted to introduce him and then, in the playtest, develop him in some way into a fully realised character.

So when he came in to the action I kept him neutral. The only problem with this is that he was neutrally holding up the party's boat with AK47s. As I quickly discovered this kind of thing can be misinterpreted as open aggression. Funnily enough, had he gone in with open aggression the accidental adventure ruining bloodbath that resulted from my weak characterisation would have been averted. Then, of course, the players would have had to just follow along on rails.

On rails is not a good place for adventures to be.

So I needed to, rather than render the character neutral and hence weak, render him a little bit charming and crazy and hence allow characters to interact with him even though he was, technically, a bad dude.

This is a really exciting dramatic position, the guy's holding you hostage but he's quite willing to have a conversation with you about begonias (or whatever). As a player you feel you might be able to negotiate or something.

At the same time the Host has someone who can nudge the characters back on task if they look like they're about to commit suicide or whatever.

This guy's a great NPC, not too overpowering but not too floppy either. He's not going to interfere unless you need him too. He's a joy to have involved.

And hence was born the Joker.

You see Creature is not alone in needing a character like this. Every role play session could do with having a Joker to interact with the players, nudging, testing, exploring their characters.

The situation where the Joker is a guy who has technically taken the Players as hostages, but in a polite way, is just one possible scenario. Characters who have vast reserves of information they are unwilling to share, characters who offer money, or professional services desired by the players all of these are ideal Joker characters.

The secret is to always lay on the unthreatening manner on thick. This was my vital mistake last night. Neutrality won't cut it if an NPC has some power over the players. The character has to maintain their power over the character while entertaining the player.

I'm not saying that making them will be easy but there is a way to make it easier. Sue loves poker and she quickly put me on to the old poker trope of trying to find the sucker at the table. Essentially when you come up with an adventure design your job is to try to identify the Joker(s) at the table and then make them around their role in the story.

Some stories, Con of the Dead, Revelation Point, don't really need a Joker character. Then we return to the poker trope: if after ten minutes searching for the Joker in the scenario you still can't find them, it's you.

Yes, in some adventures it is the Host himself who takes this gently tormentative role for the players. Horror splatter scenarios are the most likely to feature these.

So from now on when I'm dealing up a new scenario I will be sure to use a deck comprised of 53 cards. The joker's going to become one of the most powerful tools in my arsenal.

NB: That last sentence was a dramatic article closer. You don't need to actually draw a card to know when to make the Joker NPC, you just kind of look for them after you've finished your notes.

Mixed Bag

First off let me just point you in the direction of The No Dice Node which is the official No Dice forum. I've always loved a good forum ever since I was first on teh intarwebnet and it's always been a sad little ambition of mine to run one. So sad little ambition now realised.

I'm really pleased that we've got 5 real members (and the Google AdSense bot) on the roster. Admittedly Admins still outnumber real community members but, hey, everyone's got to start somewhere. We've already proven to be a lively bunch and once I've finished writing this I'm sloping off to reply to threads and maybe start a few of my own.

I've always wanted to have the exploits of myself and my colleagues be fully interactive and I always find people more able to witter away and keep in touch in a forum than commenting on blogs or podcast posts. So I hope some of you will join us in the node and see all that's super live in the Node.

Before I disappear one brief thought I felt it was worth setting down regards how I'm finding the transition between thinking of myself as a writer and thinking of myself as a game designer. When I was a writer it all seemed very lonely. Writers aren't supposed to be particularly interactive and writer's circles are seen as places of ego battering misery for the ascetic journeyman. Basically writers aren't really seen as "chatty".

I remember when I was trying to promote the cause of POD back in the day people generally regarded it as a station of hopeless but valiant calling. Nobody in POD circles sees themselves as a "joiner", well, except me.

I love people, I love seeing what lies within someone's imagination. I love to tell stories with people and being the designer of No Dice and its associated systems is already an awesome thing. I've met possibly 15-20 new gamers as a result of No Dice and all of them have been awesome human beings, every game that finished I was sad to see them go and hoped we'd hang out for a session again.

That's what I think the absolute difference between being in the gaming world and the pure writing world is. I am all about enabling the stories of others, writers feel they have story to tell that is theirs.

I am glad I've found my side of that fence.