The last bit of work tonight was to draw a map to go with the article.  I modelled it as a terrain in Vue and rendered it from a high angle.  I took the render into Expression and used it as the basis for the map…

Earlier this week a thread on the Fraternity of Shadows website started about city fires on the Domain of Dread. It reminded me of the 7th Sea article and I’ve begun converting it, where appropriate, to Ravenloft. The Ravenloft version isn’t all ready yet but I thought I’d post the 7th Sea original tonight with the first part of the Ravenloft adaptation with d20 crunch following as I find time.

Why are fantasy ideas of settings based on the 19th century always so unoriginal? Steampunk blah blah blah goggles blah blah blah.

I didn’t have time for a long answer then (too busy watching Sherlock) but I think Brian has touched on a more fundamental question.  A question that is important for writers, world builders and setting designers.  Why are so many settings unoriginal? A good answer to that will also answer the question How do you avoid your setting being unoriginal? Or why are so many settings unoriginal?

There are quite a few possibilities.  One of the main ones being settings that are simply rip offs of someone else’s work with the serial numbers filed off.  There is a fine line between parodying a work, producing something in the same genre and simply ripping off the market leader in the hope of making some cash.  Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek and lots of things with Vampires in them rip offs I’m looking at you.  This isn’t the problem I’m interested in tonight.

The problem I’m interested in tonight is the And the Kitchen Sink setting.  There is a real art to knowing not just what to put into a setting but what to leave out.  There is a temptation when building a steampunk setting to include every trope that can be thrown in: flying ships, anachronistic machines, steam mechs, ninja, steam cars, zeppelins, difference engines, mad scientists, clockwork, magic, polished brass, psychic powers, corsets,  gears slapped on everything, monsters, steam powered potato peelers and inevitably goggles.  Of course this isn’t just a problem for steampunk; there are plenty of settings in other genres that have suffered the same fate.

I hate to pick out just one culprit when there are so many around but the game Waste World (Manticore 1997) sticks in my mind for trying to shoehorn as many science fiction ideas into one setting as was possible.

Its very easy with this approach to creating a setting to cram lots of cool stuff in without working out what its impact on the world really would be.  It can become a thick layer of makeup caked over the setting’s pretty face.

Personally I think a sounder approach is to build a setting up in small steps.  Heinlein’s Future History stories are a good example of this approach most add a few changes to the world with each step forward.  To pick four of the stories:

• The Roads Must Roll – Rolling Roads
• The Man Who Sold the Moon – Space Travel
• Delilah and the Space Rigger – Women in an all male environment
• The Long Watch – Moon based nuclear weapons

There are some that do add more.  If_This_Goes_On— has a post religious revolutions America, scram jets, social engineering and other stuff.  However it  was a novella so had more space to play with the ideas and there were three unwritten stories between it and its predecessor in the series The Menace from Earth.

My personal experience is that its easier to avoid adding stuff than it is to take it out.  Its also easier to take stuff out earlier in the development process than to do it later.  Avoiding adding something in also avoids wasting time on research and writing unnecessary material.

Plus if you’ve left something out and you wind up with a success on your hands you can follow Heinlein’s path and add each new thing in as you go along.

The short answer: Because it helps me think about my own writing.

The long answer:

I used to write what I’ll call proper reviews, they’d appear in Valkyrie and Ragnarok.  My review of 7th Sea produced at short notice got me the writing gig with Valkyrie so even though reviewing wasn’t what I’d set out to do I thought it was important to carry on and do the best job at it I could.  I’d think long and hard about them.  I’d spend hours carefully reading a product (and if possible playing it).  I’d consider the presentation, the content, the quality of the writing, the cost, its originality, production issues and a hundred and one other factors.  I’d try and give a balanced and fair assessment.

Then I had a run of what I will call issue reviews.  A publisher wasn’t happy with a review because I wasn’t their target market so I couldn’t apparently understand their product.  A book I reviewed that was ok but not exceptional and had a flaw won an award after sending high value goodie bags to the voting panel.  Having been asked to review a product for a magazine I’d not written for before I was told the review wouldn’t be used as they’d just signed a big advertising deal with the publisher and they didn’t think it was favorable enough.  Which was funny because I’d really worked hard to find good things in a product that I know retailers couldn’t sell.  It stank and it sat on game shop shelves.

So I stopped writing serious reviews.

I’ve been asked to occasionally for magazines and websites.  It might be good self promotion and get me some writing opportunities but I’m just not interested in running into the political side of  it again.

Now what I label as reviews here are more after action reports.  I try not to spend too long on them (although some still take a couple of hours to write).  I try to keep them personal – they are after all just my personal opinion.  I use the review label as a convenient way of lumping them all together to make them easier to find.  Maybe someone will be saved from wasting a turkey or will enjoy my insight.  I hope so because they do get a reasonable number of visits and visitors seem to spend time reading them.

Still that doesn’t explain why I write them.  I don’t see them as a great self promotion tool.  I write them to help me think about my own writing and game design.  By thinking about a Doctor Who episode or a film sometimes I see how to improve my own work.  I wrote about Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire and I knew where the script I’d written had gone wrong (using silly names and anachronism).  I’ve still not worked out what to put in their place but I think the script is tighter and funnier now without them (although one character is still called Snot because it just fits).

Sometimes the best thing happens.  I’ll get a good idea.  Not a simple rip off of someone else’s concept but a genuine tangential idea.  That moment when you’re watching something and you think you know what’s going to happen and then something else happens.  Sometimes those original ideas can take on a life of their own.  For example recently I had watched a Doctor Who episode and was writing up my thoughts.  That’s when I had a Good Idea^TM.   I’ve had a bad guy (originally a Darklord for a Ravenloft domain) floating around for a long time that I could never find a way to spin a story around and while I’ve been writing that review I now know how to make them work.  The only problem I have is they’d be fun for a Ravenloft adventure but they also fit in with a Dirk Dangerous story I’d got floating around.  I don’t suppose I can get away with using the same idea twice

To quickly recap the linear difficulty encounter adventure is an adventure where a series of encounters occur starting with an easy one and building up to a harder one.  The difficulty of each encounter is roughly similar.

Capability and Linear Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

A common variation on this is the Swooping difficulty adventure where the difficulty starts out at a level, drops down and then rises for the climax.  My notes included a mention of the “extreme” swoops favoured by one of the DMs we played with who used a lot of very easy encounters and then towards the end things got really tough.

Swooping Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Extreme Swooping Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Another type of progression happens in dungeons built of areas (which may be levels) where several encounters of similar difficulty are grouped together followed by an area with harder difficulty and so on till the final, climactic encounter.

Stepped Dungeon Style Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Last time I said I’d talk about one of the worst games I ever played in.  I’d played in games run by the DM responsible before and he was usually pretty good.  Then came his experimental phase.  First a game where he let two of us generate nominally evil (really just not good) characters and then decided he wanted only the cleanest of clean characters.

Then came what I think can be best described as his attempt at a game combining psychedelic elements from 60s TV shows, American film musicals and Dungeons and Dragons.  He topped that strange combination off with difficulty so varied that I think it can be best described by this graph…

If you've read this far already you shouldn't need any explanation for this graph

It was just as frustrating for the players as the linear progression of difficulty.  Here the frustration came from the feeling that the world didn’t make sense.  It might be “realistic” but it lacked drama.  Players never knew when to heal and when to use their limited use abilities until it was too late.  We suspected there was a lot of dice fudging by the Dungeon Master going on so we didn’t get wiped out.  We stuck with the game for about five sessions and then, to our relief, it came to an (unsatisfying) end.

Ragnarok Issue 57 (The Magazine of the Society of Fantasy and Science Fiction Wargaming) landed through my letter box today.  My article for BTRC’s SLAG! appears along with a variety of fantasy and science fiction wargaming goodness.

Ask anyone and they will tell you Goblins are mad, bad braggers, they have an anger in their eyes and can’t hold their drink. What most won’t tell you is they’ve good reason. When chroniclers write out the ages of the world somehow the age of
goblins gets misplaced. Yet there was a time (as any drunk goblin will tell you at length) when the little green folk ruled all the world and everyone in it for over a thousand years. Of course no one pays any attention because who believes a drunk goblin?

Yet it did exist for a thousand years. Eventually, as happens to all empires, the great goblin empire lost its grasp on the land.  In its last days the goblins retreated to the floating isles protecting their most valuable asset: the magical metal goblinic
famed for its ability to lift many times its own weight off the ground. They were fortunate that the islands also produced some iron, flax cloth, vast mounds of guano and some natural gasses. There they fell back into ancient tribal feuds and so the
goblin empire fell. Soon after that they turned to the bottle.

In most table top RPGs experience, and character development happens between adventures characters’ capability develop something like this:

Character Capability against time (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

A game with linear encounter difficulty is one where as the characters abilities increase so does the difficulty of the encounters they face. The characters may gain some advantage; they may hit their enemies harder or more often and may have more hit points. Unfortunately their opponents also now hit harder, more often and have more hit points. In its purest form every encounter has the same chance of their succeeding, as the last for characters. In fact, apart from a little colour in their encounters, they might as well have not improved at all and their opponents could have remained at the same power too.

Linear Difficulty over time (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

So difficulty and capability always keep step with each other…

Capability and Linear Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Some games virtually encourage this style of adventure design by including charts or advice to allow referees to work out the ideal encounter for a group of X players of level Y to face. Charts and tables like that serve a useful purpose in helping new referees and those unfamiliar with a game to find their feet when designing encounters. The risk of building an encounter that will obliterate a group or underwhelm them is significantly reduced without having to resort to dice fudging or deus ex machina. There is a real risk of boredom if this type of difficulty progression is slavishly applied.

Others virtually rule out easy adversaries – I read one rulebook recently (forgive me I can’t remember which one) that said all “easy” encounters where the characters were guaranteed success should be role played rather than roll played. While I agree with that generally (although I hate the phrase roll play and its derivatives) doing this all the time means the players can never feel how powerful they are in a crunchy way.

I’m going to leave this here for now but I’ll be back soon with some other kinds of difficulty progression and some thoughts on one of the worst game I ever played in.

Update: Part 2 is now available Variations on the Difficulty Theme.