My past self, receiving a copy of Transport Tycoon for his 14th birthday, would have his mind blown if he could see the kind of insanely-complex super-stations that are
possible in (the open-source successor to) the game 30 years on.
Of course, this kind of thing – multiple simultaneously shared in-and-out routes on a bidirectional station – wasn’t (sensibly) possible before the introduction of path-based signalling in OpenTTD 0.7.0. And modern path-based signals in the game are even smarter.
But still, 14-year-old me had a dream. And nowadays that dream is real.
Playing simultaneous games against both children might have been less challenging if they hadn’t both kept trying to start fights with one another at the same time! 😂
Dungeons & Dragons players spend a lot of time rolling 20-sided polyhedral dice, known as D20s.
In general, they’re looking to roll as high as possible to successfully stab a wyvern, jump a chasm, pick a lock, charm a Duke1,
or whatever.
Submerging your dice set in the blood of a halfling is a sure-fire way to get luckier rolls.
Roll with advantage
Sometimes, a player gets to roll with advantage. In this case, the player rolls two dice, and takes the higher roll. This really boosts their chances of not-getting a
low roll. Do you know by how much?
I dreamed about this very question last night. And then, still in my dream, I came up with the answer2.
I woke up thinking about it3
and checked my working.
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Table illustrating the different permutations of two D20 rolls and the “advantage” result (i.e. the higher of the two).
The chance of getting a “natural 1” result on a D20 is 1 in 20… but when you roll with advantage, that goes down to 1 in 400: a huge improvement! The chance of rolling a 10 or 11 (2 in
20 chance of one or the other) remains the same. And the chance of a “crit” – 20 – goes up from 1 in 20 when rolling a single D20 to 39 in 400 – almost 10% – when rolling with
advantage.
You can see that in the table above: the headers along the top and left are the natural rolls, the intersections are the resulting values – the higher of the two.
The nice thing about the table above (which again: was how I visualised the question in my dream!) is it really helps to visualise why these numbers are what they are. The
general formula for calculating the chance of a given number when rolling D20 with advantage is ( n2 – (n-1)2 ) / 400. That is, the square of the number
you’re looking for, minus the square of the number one less than that, over 400 (the total number of permutations)4.
Why roll two dice when one massive one will do?
Knowing the probability matrix, it’s theoretically possible to construct a “D20 with Advantage” die5. Such a tool would
have 400 sides (one 1, three 2s, five 3s… and thirty-nine 20s). Rolling-with-advantage would be a single roll.
I don’t think anybody’s ever built a real 400-sided die, but Numberwang! claimed to have one.
This is probably a totally academic exercise. The only conceivable reason I can think of would be if you were implementing a computer system on which generating random numbers
was computationally-expensive, but memory was cheap: under this circumstance, you could pre-generate a 400-item array of possible results and randomly select from it.
But if anybody’s got a 3D printer capable of making a large tetrahectogon (yes, that’s what you call a 400-sided polygon – you learned something today!), I’d love to see an “Advantage
D20” in the flesh. Or if you’d just like to implement a 3D model for Dice Box that’d be fine too!
Footnotes
1 Or throw a fireball, recall an anecdote, navigate a rainforest, survive a poisoning,
sneak past a troll, swim through a magical swamp, hold on to a speeding aurochs, disarm a tripwire, fire a crossbow, mix a potion, appeal to one among a pantheon of gods, beat the
inn’s landlord at an arm-wrestling match, seduce a duergar guard, persuade a talking squirrel to spy on some bandits, hold open a heavy door, determine the nature of a curse, follow a
trail of blood, find a long-lost tome, win a drinking competition, pickpocket a sleeping ogre, bury a magic sword so deep that nobody will ever find it, pilot a spacefaring rowboat,
interpret a forgotten language, notice an imminent ambush, telepathically commune with a distant friend, accurately copy-out an ancient manuscript, perform a religious ritual, find
the secret button under the wizard’s desk, survive the blistering cold, entertain a gang of street urchins, push through a force field, resist mind control, and then compose a ballad
celebrating your adventure.
2 I don’t know what it says about me as a human being that sometimes I dream in
mathematics, but it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given I’m nerdy enough to have previously recorded instances of dreaming in (a) Perl, and (b) Nethack (terminal mode).
3 When I woke up I also found that I had One Jump from Disney’s Aladdin stuck in my head, but I’m not sure
that’s relevant to the discussion of probability; however, it might still be a reasonable indicator of my mental state in general.
4 An alternative formula which is easier to read but harder to explain would be ( 2(n
– 1) + 1 ) / 400.
5 Or a “D20 with Disadvantage”: the table’s basically the inverse of the advantage one –
i.e. 1 in 400 chance of a 20 through to 39 in 400 chance of a 1.
My life affords me less time for videogames than it used to, and so my tastes have changed accordingly:
I appreciate games that I can drop at a moment’s notice and pick up again some other time, without losing lots of progress1.
And if the game can remind me what it was I was trying to achieve when I come back… perhaps weeks or months later… that’s a bonus!
I’ve a reduced tolerance for dynamically-generated content (oh, you want me to fetch you another five nirnroot do you? – hard pass2):
if I might only get to throw 20 hours total at a game, I’d much prefer to spend that time exploring content deliberately and thoughtfully authored by a human.
And, y’know, it has to be fun. I rarely buy games on impulse anymore, and usually wait weeks or months after release dates even for titles I’ve been anticipating, to see
what the reviewers make of it.
That said, I’ve played three excellent videogames this year that I’d like to recommend to you (no spoilers):
Horizon: Forbidden West
I loved Horizon: Zero Dawn. Even if this review persuades you that you should play its sequel, Forbidden
West, you really oughta play Zero Dawn first3.
There’s a direct continuation of plot going on there that you’ll appreciate better that way. Also: Zero Dawn stands alone as a great game in its own right.
Horizon gives a lot to love, from a rich world and story, immersive environments, near-seamless loading, excellent voice acting, and a rewarding difficulty curve. But perhaps
all are second-place to what a kickass character the protagonist is.
The Horizon series tells the story of Aloy from her childhood onwards, growing up an outcast in a tribal society on a future Earth inhabited by robotic reimaginings of
creatures familiar to us today (albeit some of them extinct). Once relatively docile, a mysterious event known as the derangement, shortly before Aloy’s birth, made these
machines aggressive and dangerous, leading to a hostile world in which Aloy seeks to prove herself a worthy hunter to the tribe that cast her out.
All of which leads to a series of adventures that gradually explain the nature of the world and how it became that way, and provide a path by which Aloy can perhaps provide a brighter
future for humankind. It’s well-written and clever and you’ll fight and die over and over as you learn your way around the countless permutations of weapons, tools, traps, and
strategies that you’ll employ. But it’s the kind of learning curve that’s more rewarding than frustrating, and there are so many paths to victory that when I watch Ruth play she uses tactics that I’d never even conceived of.
Horizon: Forbidden West is like Zero Dawn but… more. More quests, more exploration, more machines, more characters, and more of the same story, answering questions
you might have found yourself thinking during the prequel. But it’s not just more-of-the-same.
Forbidden West is in some ways more-of-the-same, but it outgrows the mould of its predecessor, too. Faced with bigger challenges than she can take on by herself, Aloy comes to
assemble a team of trusted party members, and when you’re not out fighting giant robots or spelunking underwater caves or exploring the ruins of ancient San Francisco you’re working
alongside them, and that’s one of the places the game really shines. Your associates chatter to each other, grow and change, and each brings something special to the story that invites
you to care for each of them as individuals.
The musical score – cinematic in its scope – has been revamped too, and shows off its ability to adapt dynamically to different situations. Face off against one of the terrifying new
aquatic enemies and you’ll be treated to a nautical theme, for example. And the formulaic quests of the predecessor (get to the place, climb the thing…), which were already
fine, are riddled with new quirks and complexities to keep you thinking.
And finally: I love the game’s commitment to demonstrating the diversity of humanity: both speaking and background characters express a rarely-seen mixture of races, genders, and
sexualities, and the story sensitively and compassionately touches on issues of disability, neurodiversity, and transgender identity. It’s more presence than
representation (“Hey look, it’s Sappho and her friend!”), but it’s still much better than I’m used to seeing in major video game releases.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
If ever I need to explain to an American colleague why that one time they visited London does not give them an understanding of what life is like in the North of England… this is the
videogame I’ll point them at.
Among the many language options available for the game are “English”, as you’d probably expect, and “Dialect”, which imposes a South Yorkshire accent to everything, as illustrated
here by the main menu.
A short, somewhat minigame-driven, absurd to the point of Monty Python-ism, wildly British comedy game, Thank Goodness You’re
Here! is a gem. It’s not challenging by any stretch of the imagination, but that only serves to turn focus even more on the weird and wonderful game world of Barnsworth (itself
clearly inspired by real-world Barnsley).
Playing a salesman sent to the town to meet the lord mayor, the player ends up stuck with nothing to do4,
and takes on a couple of dozen odd-jobs for the inhabitants of the town, meeting a mixed bag of stereotypes and tropes as they go along.
Ahm gowin t’shop to gi’ sumof Big Ron’s Big Pies! Y’wanout, buggerlugs? Players without a grounding in Yorkshire English, and especially non-Brits, might benefit from turning
the subtitles on.
Presented in a hand-drawn style that’s as distinctive and bizarre as it is an expression of the effort that must’ve gone into it, this game’s clearly a project of passion for
Yorkshire-based developers Coal Supper (yes, that’s really what they call themselves). I particularly enjoyed a recurring joke in which the
player is performing some chore (mowing grass for the park keeper, chopping spuds at the chippy) when the scene cuts to some typically-inanimate objects having a conversation (flowers,
potatoes) while the player’s actions bring them closer and closer in the background. But it’s hard to pick out a very favourite part from this wonderful, crazy, self-aware slice of
Northern life in game form.
Tactical Breach Wizards
Finally, I’ve got to sing the praises of Tactical Breach Wizards by Suspicious
Developments (who for some reason don’t bother to list it on their website; the closest thing to an official page for the project other than its Steam entry might be this launch announcement!)5, the
team behind Gunpoint and Heat Signature.
The game feels like a cross between XCOM/Xenonauts‘ turn-based tactical combat and Rainbow Six‘s special ops theme. Except instead of a squad of gun-toting
body-armoured military/police types, your squad is a team of wizards in a world in which magical combat specialists work alongside conventionally-equipped soldiers on missions where
their powers make all the difference.
Jen the Storm Witch primarily uses large static shocks to fling targets around: relatively harmless, unless she and her teammates have arranged for/tricked enemies to be standing next
to something they can be thrown into… or near a window they can be flung out of!
By itself, that could be enough: there’s certainly sufficient differences between all of the powers that the magic users exploit that you’ll find all kinds of ways to combine them. How
about having your teleport-capable medic blink themselves to a corner so your witch’s multi-step lightning bolt can use them as a channel to get around a corner and zap a target there?
Or what about using the time-manipulation powers of your Navy Seer (yes, really) to give your siege cleric enough actions that they can shield-push your opponent within range of the
turret you hacked? And so on.
But Tactical Breach Wizards, which stands somewhere between a tactical squad-based shooter and a deterministic positional puzzle game, goes beyond that by virtue of its
storytelling. Despite the limitations of the format, the game manages to pack in a lot of background and personality for every one of your team and even many of the NPCs too (Steve Clark, Traffic Warlock is a riot). Oh, and much of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, to boot.
The dialogue between your teammates – most of it right as they’re about to breach a door – reads like lighthearted banter but exposes the underpinning backstory of the setting.
The writing’s great, to the extent that when I got to the epilogue – interactive segments during the credits where you can influence “what happens next” to each of the characters you’ve
come to know – I genuinely flip-flopped on a few of them to give some of them a greater opportunity to continue to feature in one another’s lives. Even though the game was clearly over.
It’s that compelling.
And puzzling out some of the tougher levels, especially if you’re going for the advanced (“Confidence”) challenges, too, is really fun. But with autosaves every turn, the opportunity to
skip and return to levels that are too challenging, and a within-turn “undo” feature that lets you explore different strategies before you commit to one, this is a great game for
someone who, like me, doesn’t have much time to dedicate to play.
So yeah: that’s what I’ve been up to in videogaming-time so far this year. Any suggestions for the autumn/winter?
Footnotes
1 If a game loads quickly that’s a bonus. I still play a little of my favourite variant of
the Sid Meier’s Civilization series – that is, Civilization V + Vox Populi (alongside a few quality-of-life mods) but I swear I’d play
more of it if it didn’t take so long to load. Even after hacking around it to dodge the launcher, logos, and introduction, my 8P+4E-core i7 processor takes ~80 seconds from clicking
to launch the game to having loaded my latest save, which if I’m only going to have time to play three turns is frustratingly long! Contrast Horizon: Forbidden West, which I
also mention in this post, a game 13 years younger and with much higher hardware requirements, which takes ~17 seconds to achieve the same. Possibly I’m overanalysing this…
2 This isn’t a criticism of the Elder Scrolls games specifically, but of the
relatively-lazy writing that goes into some videogames that feel like they’re using Perchance to come up with their quests, in order to stretch
the gameplay. I suppose a better example might have been the on-the-whole disappointment that was Starfield, but I figured an Elder Scrolls reference might be easier
to identify at-a-glance. Fetch-questing 100 tonnes of Beryllium just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
3 In fact, if you’re trying to consume the Horizon story as thoroughly as
possible and strictly in chronological order, you probably should read the graphic novel between one and the other, which covers some of the events that occur between the two.
4 Did you ever see the alternate ending to Far Cry 4, by the way? If you
did, you might appreciate that a similar trick can be used to shortcut Thank Goodness You’re Here! too…
5 They’re also missing a trick by using the domain they’ve registered,
wizards.cool, only to redirect to Steam.
In the late ’70s, a shadowy group of British technologists concluded that nuclear war was inevitable and secretly started work on a cutting-edge system designed to help
rebuild society. And thanks to Matt Round-and-friends at vole.wtf (who I might have
mentioned before), the system they created – ARCC – can now be emulated in your browser.
I’ve been playing with it on-and-off all year, and I’ve (finally) managed to finish exploring pretty-much everything the platform currently has to offer, which makes it pretty damn good
value for money for the £6.52 I paid for my ticket (the price started at £2.56 and increases by 2p for every ticket sold). But you can get it cheaper than I did if you score 25+ on one
of the emulated games.
It gives me more pride than it ought to that I hold the high score for a mostly-unheard-of game for an almost-as-unheard-of computer system.
Most of what I just told you is true. Everything… except the premise. There never was a secretive cabal of engineers who made this whackballs computer system. What vole.wtf emulates is
an imaginary system, and playing with that system is like stepping into a bizarre alternate timeline or a weird world. Over several separate days of visits you’ll explore more
and more of a beautifully-realised fiction that draws from retrocomputing, Cold War fearmongering, early multi-user networks with dumb terminal interfaces, and aesthetics that straddle
the tripoint between VHS, Teletext, and BBS systems. Oh yeah, and it’s also a lot like being in a cult.
Needless to say, therefore, it presses all the right buttons for me.
If you make it onto ARCC – or are already there! – drop me a message. My handle is DAN50.
If you enjoy any of those things, maybe you’d like this too. I can’t begin to explain the amount of work that’s gone into it. If you’re looking for anything more-specific in a
recommendation, suffice to say: this is a piece of art worth seeing.
FoundryVTT is a fantastic Web-based environment for tabletop roleplaying adventures1 and something I
particularly enjoy is the freedom for virtually-unlimited scripting. Following a demonstration to a fellow DM at work last week I
promised to throw together a quick tutorial into scripting simple multi-phase maps using Foundry.2
Allow the development and expansion of a siege camp outside the fortress where the heroes are holed-up.3
Rotate through day and night cycles or different times of day, perhaps with different things to interact with in each.4
Gradually flood a sewer with rising water… increasing the range of the monster that dwells within.5
Re-arrange parts of the dungeon when the characters flip certain switches, opening new paths… and closing others.
I’ll use the map above to create a simple linear flow, powered by a macro in the hotbar. Obviously, more-complex scenarios are available, and combining this approach with a plugin like
Monk’s Active Tile Triggers can even be used to make the map appear to dynamically change in response to the movement
or actions of player characters!
Setting the scene
Create a scene, using the final state of the map as the background. Then, in reverse-order, add the previous states as tiles above it.
Not shown, but highly-recommended: lock each tile when you’re done placing it, so that you don’t accidentally interact with it when you mean to e.g. drag-select multiple
actors.
Make a note of the X-position that your tiles are in when they’re where they supposed to be: we’ll “move” the tiles off to the side when they’re hidden, to prevent their ghostly
half-hidden forms getting in your way as game master. We’ll also use this X-position to detect which tiles have already been moved/hidden.
Also make note of each tile’s ID, so your script can reference them. It’s easiest to do this as you go along. When you’re ready to write your macro, reverse the list, because
we’ll be hiding each tile in the opposite order from the order you placed them.
Writing the script
Next, create a new script macro, e.g. by clicking an empty slot in the macro bar. When you activate this script, the map will move forward one phase (or, if it’s at the end, it’ll
reset).
I find Foundry’s built-in script editor a little… small? So I write my scripts in my favourite text editor and then copy-paste.
Here’s the code you’ll need – the 👈 emoji identifies the places you’ll need to modify the code, specifically:
const revealed_tiles_default_x = 250 should refer to the X-position of your tiles when they’re in the correct position.
const revealed_tiles_modified_x = 2825 should refer to the X-position they’ll appear at “off to the right” of your scene. To determine this, just move one tile right
until it’s sufficiently out of the way of the battlemap and then check what it’s X-position is! Or just take the default X-position, add the width of your map in pixels, and then add
a tiny bit more.
const revealed_tiles = [ ... ] is a list of the tile IDs of each tile what will be hidden, in turn. In my example there are five of them (the sixth and final image being
the scene background).
const revealed_tiles_default_x =250; // 👈 X-position of tiles when displayedconst revealed_tiles_modified_x =2825; // 👈 X-position of tiles when not displayedconst revealed_tiles = [
'2xG7S8Yqk4x1eAdr', // 👈 list of tile IDs in order that they should be hidden'SjNQDBImHvrjAHWX', // (top to bottom)'tuYg4FvLgIla1l21',
'auX4sj64PWmkAteR',
'yAL4YP0I4Cv4Sevt',
].map(t=>canvas.tiles.get(t));
/*************************************************************************************************/// Get the topmost tile that is still visible:const next_revealed_tile_to_move = revealed_tiles.find(t=>
t.position.x == revealed_tiles_default_x
);
// If there are NO still-visible tiles, we must need to reset the map:if( ! next_revealed_tile_to_move ) {
// To reset the map, we go through each tile and put it back where it belongs -for(tile of revealed_tiles){
canvas.scene.updateEmbeddedDocuments("Tile", [ {
_id: tile.id,
x: revealed_tiles_default_x,
hidden:false
} ]);
}
} else {
// Otherwise, hide the topmost visible tile (and move it off to the side to help the GM) -
canvas.scene.updateEmbeddedDocuments("Tile", [ {
_id: next_revealed_tile_to_move.id,
x: revealed_tiles_modified_x,
hidden:true
} ]);
}
I hope that the rest of the code is moderately self-explanatory for anybody with a little JavaScript experience, but if you’re just following this kind of simple, linear case then you
don’t need to modify it anyway. But to summarise, what it does is:
Finds the first listed tile that isn’t yet hidden (by comparing its X-position to the pre-set X-position).
If there aren’t any such tiles, we must have hidden them all already, so perform a reset: to do this – iterate through each tile and set its X-position to the pre-set X-position,
and un-hide it.
Otherwise, move the first not-hidden tile to the alternative X-position and hide it.
4 If you’re using Dungeon
Alchemist as part of your mapmaking process you can just export orthographic or perspective outputs with different times of day and your party’s regular inn can be
appropriately lit for any time of day, even if the party decides to just “wait at this table until nightfall”.
I’ve been GMing/DMing/facilitating1 roleplaying games for nearby 30 years, but I only
recently began to feel like I was getting to be good at it.
The secret skill that was hardest for me to learn? A willingness to surrender control to the players.
I’m a big fan of the Karma/Drama/Fortune (K/D/F) model for understanding resolution. My relationship with K/D/F is a story for another blog post, but I’ll use it as as a framework here.
Karma, Drama, Fortune
I could write a lot about the way I interpret the K/D/F model, but for today here’s a quick primer:
The K/D/F model describes the relationship between three forces: Karma (player choices), Drama
(story needs) and Fortune (luck, e.g. dice rolls). For example,
When the lich king comes to the region to provide a villainous plot hook, that’s Drama. Nobody had to do anything and no dice were rolled. The story demanded a “big
bad” and so – within the limitations of the setting – one turned up.
When his lucky critical hit kills an ally of the adventurers, that’s Fortune. That battle could have gone a different way, but the dice were on the villain’s side and
he was able to harm the players. When we don’t know which way something will go, and it matters, we hit the dice.
When one of the heroes comes up with a clever way to use a magical artefact from a previous quest to defeat him, that’s Karma. It was a clever plan, and the players
were rewarded for their smart choices by being able to vanquish the evil thing.
And elsewhere on their quest they probably saw many other resolutions. Each of those may have leaned more-heavily on one or another of the three pillars, or balanced between them
equally.
The balance point varies by group and can change over time, but crucially it doesn’t neglect any one of the three aspects.
Disbalancing drama
For most of my many years of gamemastering, I saw my role as being the sole provider the “drama” part of the K/D/F model. The story
comes from me, the choices and dice rolls come from the players, right?
Nope, I was wrong. That approach creates an inevitable trend, whether large or small, towards railroading: “forcing” players down a particular path.
A gamemaster with an inflexible and excessively concrete idea of the direction that a story must go will find that they become unable to see the narrative through any other lens. In
extreme examples, the players are deprotagonised and the adventure just becomes a series of set pieces, connected by the gamemaster’s idea of how things should play out. I’ve seen this
happen. I’ve even caused it to happen, sometimes.2
What if Bilbo and his party escaped from the wood elves by land, heading directly East to Erebor instead of via Esgaroth? What if he failed to determine Smaug’s weakness, or chose not
to steal from him? What if the dwarves successfully fought off the goblins and didn’t need rescue? The difference between an adventure story and an adventure game
should be that in a game, nobody – not even the author – can be certain ahead of time of the answers to all the questions.
A catalogue of failures
I’ve railroaded players to some degree or another on an embarrassing number of occasions.
In the spirit of learning from my mistakes, here are three examples of me being a Bad GM.
Quantum Ogre
Scenario: In a short-lived high fantasy GURPS
campaign, I wanted the party to meet a band of gypsies and have their fortune told, in order to foreshadow other parts of the story yet to come.
What I did: I pulled a quantum ogre (magician’s choice) on them: whether
they travelled by road, or water, or hacked their way through the forest, they were always going to meet the gypsies: their choice of route didn’t really matter.
Why that was wrong: I’d elevated the value of the encounter I’d planned higher than the importance of player agency. The more effort it took to write something, the
more I felt the need to ensure it happened!
Two things I could’ve done: Reassessed the importance of the encounter. Found other ways to foreshadow the plot that didn’t undermine player choices, and been
more-flexible about my set pieces.
Fudging
Scenario: In a Spirit of the Century one-shot an antagonist needed to kidnap a NPC from aboard an oceanbound ship. To my surprise – with some very lucky rolls – the players foiled the plot!
What I did: I used a fudge – an exploit based on the fact
that in most games the gamemaster controls both the plot and the hidden variables of the game mechanics – to facilitate the antagonist kidnapping a different
NPC, and adapted the story to this new reality.
Why that was wrong: It made the players feel like their choices didn’t matter. I justified it to myself by it being a one-shot, but that undermines the lesson: I
could’ve done better.
Two things I could’ve done: Used the failed attack as a precursor to a later renewed offensive by a villain who’s now got a personal interest in seeing the party
fail. Moved towards a different story, perhaps to a different element of the antagonist’s plan.
Ex Machina
Scenario: In a long-running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st edition!) campaign, a series of bad choices and terrible luck left the party trapped and unable
to survive the onslaught of a literal army of bloodthirsty orcs.
What I did: I whipped out a deus spiritus ex machina, having a friendly ghost NPC
basically solve for them a useful puzzle they’d been struggling with, allowing them to escape alive (albeit with the quest truly failed).
Why that was wrong: It deprotagonised the adventurers, making them unimportant in their own stories. At the time, I felt that by saving the party I was “saving” the
game, but instead I was undermining its value.
Two things I could’ve done: TPK: sometimes it’s the right thing to allow everybody to die! Pivot the plot to
facilitate their capture (e.g. the arch-nemesis can’t solve the puzzle either and wants to coerce them into helping), leading to new challenges and interesting moral choices.
Those examples are perhaps extreme, but I’m pretty sure I’ve set up my fair share of lesser sins too. Like chokepoints that strongly encourage a particular direction: do that
enough and you train your players to wait until they identify the chokepoint before they take action! Or being less invested in players’ plans if those plans deviate from what
I anticipated, and having a convenient in-party NPC prompting players with what they ought to do next. Ugh.3
The good news is, of course, that we’ve all always got the opportunity for growth and self-improvement.
In my defence, many professionally published adventures are a series of scenes connected by the assumption that the author knows exactly how the players will proceed from
each. These don’t teach gamemasters how to handle any deviation: no wonder we don’t learn not to railroad!
The self-improvement path
I’ve gotten better at this in general over the years, but when I took over from Simon at DMing for The Levellers in July, I decided that I was going to try to push myself harder than ever to avoid railroading. Simon was always especially good at
promoting player freedom and autonomy, and I wanted to use this inspiration as a vehicle to improve my own gamemastering.
What does that look like within the framework of an established campaign?
Some days, a critical hit is just enough. Other days, you should’ve just stayed at the inn and got drunk. This third-party photo is copyrighted with all rights reserved; not under
my usual license.
Well: I ensure there are clues (usually three of them!) to
point the players in the “right” direction. And I’ll be on hand to give “nudges” if they’re truly stuck for what to do next, typically by providing a “recap” of the things
they’ve previously identified as hooks that are worth following-up (including both the primary plotline and any other avenues they’ve openly discussed investigating).
But that’s the limit to how I allow Drama to control the direction of the story. Almost everything else lies in the hands of Karma and Fortune.
Let all gamemasters strive to be as prepared as Abed.
Needless to say, opening up the possibility space for my players makes gamemastering harder4!
But… not by as much as I expected. Extra prep-work was necessary, especially at the outset, in order to make sure that the world I was inheriting/building upon was believable and
internally-consistent (while ensuring that if a player decided to “just keep walking East” they wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world). But mostly, the work did itself.
Because here’s the thing I learned: so long as you’re willing to take what your players come up with and run with it, they’ll help make the story more
compelling. Possibly without even realising it.5
This tip brought to you from the Department of Splitting The Party Before They Think To Do It Themselves.
The Levellers are a pretty special group. No matter what the situation, they can always be relied upon to come up with a plan that wasn’t anywhere on their DM‘s radar. When they needed to cross a chasm over their choice of one of two bridges, each guarded by
a different variety of enemy, I anticipated a few of the obvious options on each (fighting, magic, persuasion and intimidation, bribery…) but a moment later they were talking
about having their druid wildshape into something easy-to-carry while everybody else did a group-spider climb expedition down the chasm edge and along the underside of a bridge. That’s thinking outside the box!
But the real magic has come when the party, through their explorations, have unlocked entirely new elements of the story.
Player-driven content
In our campaign, virtually all of the inhabitants of a city have inadvertently sold their immortal souls to a Archduchess of Hell by allowing, over generations, their declaration of
loyalty to their city to become twisted away from their gods and towards their mortal leader, who sold them on in exchange for a sweet afterlife deal. The knights of the city were
especially-impacted, as the oath they swore upon promised their unending loyalty in this life as well. When the fiendish pact was made, these knights were immediately possessed
by evil forces, transforming into horrendous creatures (who served to harass the party for some time).
Every party’s got a character who pores over the textual detail of every prop6, right? Or
is it just every party that includes JTA as a player?
But there’s a hole in this plot7.
As-written, at least one knight avoided fiendish possession and lived to tell the tale! The player characters noticed this and latched on, so I ran with it. Why might the survivor knights
be different from those who became part of the armies of darkness? Was there something different about their swearing-in ceremony? Maybe the reasons are different for different survivors?
I didn’t have answers to these questions to begin with, but the players were moving towards investigating, so I provided some. This also opened up an entire new possible “soft” quest
hook related to the reason for the discrepancy. So just like that, a plothole is discovered and investigated by a player, and that results in further opportunities
for adventure.
As it happens, the party didn’t even go down that route at all and instead pushed-on in their existing primary direction, but the option remains. All thanks to player
curiosity, there’s a possible small quest that’s never been written down or published, and is unique to our group and the party’s interests. And that’s awesome.
“The spell takes effect, and with whoosh of air you find yourself whisked to the bottom of the page, ready to finish reading the post.”
In Conclusion
I’m not the best GM in the world. I’m not even the best GM I know. But I’m getting
better all the time; learning lessons like how to release the reins a little bit and see where my players can take our adventures.
And for those lessons, I’m grateful to those same players.
Footnotes
1 I’m using the terms GM, DM, and facilitator interchangeably, and damned if I’m writing them all out every single time.
2 A gamemaster giving all of the narrative power to any one of the three elements
of K/D/F breaks the game, but in different ways. 100% karma and what you’ve got is a storytelling game, not a roleplaying game:
which is fine if that’s what everybody at the table thinks they’re playing: otherwise not. 100% drama gives you a recital, not a jam session: the gamemaster might as well just be
writing a book. 100% fortune leads to unrealistic chaos: with no rules to the world (either from the plot or from the consequences of actions) you’re just imagining all possible
outcomes in your universe and picking one at random. There’s a balance, and where it sits might vary from group to group, but 100% commitment to a single element almost always breaks
things.
3 A the “lesser sins” I mention show, the edges of what construes railroading and what’s
merely “a linear quest” is a grey area, and where the line should be drawn varies from group to group. When I’m running a roleplaying session for my primary-school-aged kids, for
example, I’m much more-tolerant of giving heavy-handed nudges at a high-level to help them stay focussed on what their next major objective was… but I try harder than ever to
encourage diverse and flexible problem-solving ideas within individual scenes, where childish imagination can really make for memorable moments. One time, a tabaxi warrior,
on fire, was falling down the outside of a tower… but his player insisted that he could shout a warning through the windows he passed before landing in flawless catlike
fashion (albeit mildly singed). My adult players would be rolling athletics checks to avoid injury, but my kids? They can get away with adding details like that by fiat. Different
audience, see?
4 A recent session took place after a hiatus, and I wasn’t confident that – with the
benefit of a few months’ thinking-time – the party would continue with the plan they were executing before the break. And they didn’t! I’d tried to prep for a few other
eventualities in the anticipation of what they might do and… I guessed wrong. So, for the first time in recorded history, our session ended early. Is that the end of
the world? Nope.
5 Want a really radical approach to player-driven plot development? Take a look at
this video by Zee Bashew, which I’m totally borrowing from next time I start running a new campaign.
6 You know what I miss? Feelies. That’s probably why I try to provide so many “props”, whether physical or digital, in my
adventures.
7 The plothole isn’t even my fault, for once: it’s functionally broken as-delivered in the
source book, although that matters little because we’ve gone so-far outside the original source material now we’re on a whole different adventure, possibly to reconvene later on.
As you can see, a lot of serious work has been taking place.
When we’ve not been out tackling escape rooms, finding geocaches, and eating curry, we’ve been doing a variety of
activities to help solidify our new team’s goals, priorities, and expertise: y’know, the normal things you might expect on a company away week.
I volunteered to lead the initial session on our first day with a couple of icebreaker games, which went well enough that I’m inclined to share them here in case they’re of any use to
you. The games we played are called Heraldry and Compairs. Let’s take a look:
One of my teammates was unable to get his visa cleared and had to attend remotely1, which resulted in me making a late change to my planned
icebreaker activities to ensure they were presence-agnostic.
Heraldry
I was looking at the coat of arms of Noord Holland, the province in which Amsterdam lies, and thinking about all the symbolism and propaganda that’s encoded into traditional heraldry,
and how much effort it takes to decode it… unless you just, y’know, guess!
Per pale or and azure; I a lion rampant gules, armed and langued azure, II seme of horizontally placed billets or, two lions passant guardant in pale of the same. The shield is
crested by a coronet of five leaves or.
2
I asked each participant to divide a shield into five quadrants and draw their own coats of arms, featuring aspects of (a) their work life, (b) their personal life, (c) something they
value, (d) something they’re good at, and (e) something surprising or unusual. I really wanted to keep the time pressure on and not allow anybody to overthink things, so I set a
5-minute timer from the moment everybody had finished drawing their shield outline.
Then, everybody passed their drawing to the right, and each person in turn tried, as best they could, to introduce the person to their left by attempting to interpret their
neighbour’s drawing. The known categories helped to make it easier by helping people latch onto something to start talking about, but also more-challenging as people second-guessed
themselves (“no, wait, maybe it’s sailing you’re good at and guitar you play in your personal life?”).
This wasn’t about artistic skills; it was about getting people to talk to one another. Which is for the best, given my (lack of) artistic skills.
After each introduction is made, the person being introduced gets to explain their heraldry for themselves, congratulating their introducer on the things they got right and their
close-guesses along the way.
It’s sort-of halfway between “introduce your neighbour” and “pictionary”. And it worked well to get us warmed-up, feeling a little silly, knowing one another slightly better, and in a
space in which everybody had been expected to have spoken and to have made a harmless mistake (everybody managed to partially-interpret a shield correctly). A
useful place to be at the end of an icebreaker exercise is left with the reminder that we are, after all, only human.
Compairs
Next up, we played a game only slightly inspired by witnessing a game of Mr and Mrs the other week3.
I threw together a Perchance (which, in the nature of such things, is entirely open-source and you’re welcome to adapt it for
your own use) that generated a series of randomly-selected pairs of teammates and asked a question to differentiate the two of them.
Some of the questions were gentle, but solicited a reasonable amount of guesswork alongside a modest amount of deduction.
Participants other than the two shown on the screen were challenged to guess the answer to the question. Sometimes the questions would have a definitive answer, and sometimes
not: the joy was in the speculation! “Hmm, I know that Dan’s done quite a bit of globetrotting… but could he actually have travelled further East than a colleague who lives much
further East than him?”
After a few seconds to a minute, once their colleagues had settled on an answer, the people listed on the question were encouraged to make their own guesses. Usually they’ll have a
better idea as they are one of the data points, but that’s not always true!
A handful of questions were even tangentially work-related. Who is the accessibility Web expert in our team, anyway?
There’s no points, and you can play for as long as you like so long as it’s long enough that everybody gets at least one turn, so it’s a good “fill the rest of the time slot” game. It
follows Heraldry moderately well as an icebreaker double-feature because the former is firstly about learning things about one another (and to a lesser extent guessing), and
the latter is about the opposite.
I came out of both games knowing more about the humans behind the screens in my new team, and it seemed to open up the room for some good discussions afterwards, so the social lubricant
effect was clearly effective too. If you give them a go or adapt them into anything else, let me know!
Footnotes
1 Our absent colleague instead had to tower over us on an enormous projector screen.
2 The red (“gules”) upright (“rampant”) lion in the coat of arms possibly comes from the
heraldry of the city of Gelderen in Germany, but once part of the Dutch Republic. The lions striding (“passant”) to the left (“to dexter”) but turning to face you (“guardant”) come
from the arms of Fryslân (Friesland), and its rectangles represent the districts of Fryslân. Aren’t you glad you asked.
3 Also known as The Newlyweds Game after the US game show of that name and basically the same format, Mr and Mrs is a game in which a (typically newly) married couple are asked questions about one
another and their lives together which they answer separately and then those answers are compared. This induces a reaction of compersion when they’re “right” and in-sync and when the
couple disagree it results in amusement. Or possibly divorce.
If you lack the imagination to understand how a game like this could have dozens of possible endings, you desperately need to play it. My favourite path so far through the game was to
add a teabag, then hot water, then remove the teabag, then add some milk, then add a second teabag, then drink it.
Genuinely can’t stop laughing at this masterpiece.
My favourite video game Easter egg is found in Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds1.
Released early in 1993 after missing a target of Christmas 19922,
it undersold despite being almost universally well-received by reviewers3.
I don’t know how print magazine video game reviews read today, but back in the early 90s they seemed to be frivolous and flippant approximately 100% of the time.
Developed by Looking Glass Technologies, it used an enhanced version of the engine they’d used for the game’s prequel a year earlier4.
The engine is particularly cool for it’s time; it’s sometimes compared to Wolfenstein5, but
that’s not entirely fair… on Wolfenstein! The original version of Underworld‘s 3D engine predated Wolfenstein… and yet supported several features that
Wolfenstein lacked, like the ability for the player to look up and down and jump over chasms, for example.
Move around and you’ll see the 3D walls shift to your new perspective, but you’ll always see the same side of the 2D objects on the floor. Turn as you might, you’ll never see the back
of that skull!
The team’s expertise and code would eventually be used to produce System Shock in 1994. The team’s producer, Warren Spector,
would eventually draw from his experience of the Ultima Underworld games when he went on to make Thief: The Dark Project and Deus Ex.
But the technology of Ultima Underworld II and its prequel aren’t as interesting as its approach to storytelling and gameplay. They’re:
Underworld II encourages lateral thinking and provides multiple solutions to many challenges, perhaps best-described by this section in the Designers’ Notes page at the back
of the manual.
What’s being described there is what we’d now call emergent gameplay, and while it wasn’t completely new in 19937 it was still uncommon enough to be
noteworthy.
The Easter Egg
The Ultima series are riddled with Easter eggs, but my favourite is one that I feel is well-hidden, beautiful… and heavily laden
with both fan service and foreshadowing!
The third of the interdimensional planes the Avatar visits in the game contains a city frozen solid by the Guardian’s magic.
To find the Easter egg, you must first travel to Anodunos. This city was once the capital of a tropical city-state which had become allied to the Guardian, the the principal antagonist
of Ultima VII through IX.
After the city’s major, Beatrice, attempted to put an end to the red titan’s growing demands, the Guardian cursed the city fountain to radiate out a magical cold that eventually froze
the entire settlement under a cave of ice.
Mayor Beatrice lives on here, as a ghost. While she’s a great source of information about the ice caverns as a whole and has information highly useful to the primary quest, that’s not
the thing we’re interested in right now.
On the Eastern bank of the city’s river we find the remnants of the workshop of the magician Alorik, and in it – if we look in the right place8
– a secret door. We can’t open it though: unusually for a secret door in this game, it’s locked.
In the original, unpatched release of the game, you couldn’t even cast the “open” spell on it to unlock it: the only way through was to use a powerful late-game spell like “portal” to
teleport to the other side.
I didn’t even find this chamber on my first playthrough of the game. It was only on my second, while using the Map Area spell to help me to draw accurate maps of the entire game world,
that I found the room… and even then I spent some time hunting for a switch on the “outside” before eventually giving up and teleporting into the secret room.
Once you’re on the other side, there’s a switch. I guess it’s a Alorik’s panic room?
There’s valuable treasure here including a sceptre of mana restoration, a “grav” runestone (probably still easier to get than the one at the Scintillus Academy), but what’s most
interesting is the crystal ball, which the player can look into to see a vision of another place and, in the case of this orb, another time.
The first time you look into it, you’re told:
You see yourself striving against the forces of Mondain and Minax in the lands of ancient Sosaria.9
Mondain and Minax are the antagonists in Ultima I and Ultima II. We’re seeing the earliest parts of the player character’s adventures.
It’s long been argued that the “Stranger” – the protagonist of Ultima I through Ultima III – is a different person to the Avatar of Ultima IV but I feel
like this vision is canonical proof that they’re supposed to be interpreted as being the same person…
If we look into the crystal ball a second time:
You see yourself climbing to the peak of Olympus Mons on the planet Mars.
This is a reference to the plot of Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams… which is a… weird choice of game to reference.
In my mind, a more logical leap forward in time might have been to jump to Ultima IV10, in which the protagonist
first becomes the Avatar of the Eight Virtues and the Hero of Britannia. Martian Dreams is… a sequel to a spinoff of Ultima VI. So why pick that?
Little-known and oft-forgotten, Martian Dreams is apparently nonetheless a source of pride for the real Spector.
Martian Dreams starts with a friend of the Avatar’s from Earth facilitating the Avatar and their companions to set out on an adventure to the planet Mars. That friend is called
Dr. Spector, obviously named for Warren Spector, who helped develop Ultima VI and, of
course, this game. This usual choice of vision of the past is a cryptic nod to the producer of Underworld II.
Let’s look again:
You see yourself in the Deep Forest, speaking with the peace-loving simian race of Emps.
This one’s a reference to Ultima VII, the game whose story immediately precedes this one. The Deep Forest seems an strange part of the adventure to choose, though. The Avatar
goes to the Deep Forest where, via some emps and then a wisp are eventually lead to the Time Lord11.
The Time Lord provides a whole heap of exposition and clues that the Avatar needs to eventually close the Black Gate and win the game.
Tardis noises intensify.
Do these references serve to hint that this crystal ball, too, is a source of exposition and guidance? Let’s see what it says next.
You see yourself peering into a crystal ball.
I remember the moment I first saw this happen in the game: serious chills! You’ve just found a long-lost, centuries-buried secret chamber, in which there’s a crystal ball. You peer into
it and observe a series of moments from throughout your life. You continue to watch, and eventually you see yourself, staring into the crystal ball: you’re seeing the present. So what’s
next?
Alorik’s crystal ball from Ultima Underworld II and the mural of G’mork from The NeverEnding Story totally have the same energy.
If you look again, you’re asking to see… the unwritten future:
You see yourself winding a great war horn in the throne room of Castle British.
To save Britannia in Ultima Underworld II, the Avatar needs to exploit symmetries implicit in The Guardian’s spellcasting to travel to eight different parallel worlds, find a
place from which His power stems, dispel it, encase themselves in a shell of basilisk oil-infused magic mud, immerse themselves in lava to bake it on, find a magic sigil, consume a
djinn… it’s a whole thing. But ultimately it all leads to a climactic end scene in which the Avatar raises a horn retrieved from the Tomb of Praecor Loth and blows it to shatter a dome
of blackrock.
If you happen to find this clue on your first playthrough, it’s helpful exposition.
But that’s the end of this game, right? How can we possibly peer into the orb again?
You see yourself sailing through majestic pillars cropping up out of the sea, on a voyage of discovery.
What’s being described there is the opening scene from the next game in the series, the as-yet-unreleased Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle!
Serpent Isle begins with the Avatar and their companions sailing out to some special pillars in pursuit of a bad guy.
This vision is a teaser of what’s to come. That’s just… magical, for both the character and the player.
The character uses fortune-telling magic to see their future, but the player is also seeing their future: if they’re playing Ultima Underworld II at or close to its
release date, or they’re playing through the games in chronological order, they’re in a literal sense being shown what comes next in their life. That’s really cool.12
Let’s look again:
You see the obscure form of an old and dear friend, as he sacrifices his life for the good of all.
Some time after the party arrives on Serpent Isle, the Avatar’s companions are possessed by the Banes of Chaos and go on a murderous rampage. Later, there’s a ritual that will save the
world, but at the cost of the death of one of the heroes. The Avatar is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, but in the end Sir Dupre takes his place, unwilling to live within
himself after seeing the carnage he has wrought.
The death of Sir Dupre, who first appeared way back in Ultima II, is somewhat undercut by his resurrection in Ultima IX. But perhaps you’ll let me pretend for a
paragraph longer that Ultima IX doesn’t exist, okay?
At the end of Serpent Isle, the Avatar is plucked out of space and time and deposited into Pagan, The Guardian’s home base. The plot of Ultima VIII and Ultima
IX revolve around the Avatar working to return to a radically-changed Britannia, attempting to fight The Guardian and bring to an end the Age of Armageddon, and ultimately
merging and become one with Him before vanishing completely from the world.
I don’t disagree with how Ultima IX got to where it was going, but I don’t like the route it took to get there. Or the hilariously-terrible bugs.
Which is why it’s perhaps quite fitting that if the Avatar in Underworld II looks into the orb one final time, they’re told…
You see nothing.
That’s it. That’s the end.
The end of the vision, certainly, but also: a vision of the end.
Depending on how you count the Ultima games13, this is the 13th of 17 in the series. We’re approaching the
final chapter, and this Easter egg foreshadows that finale.
I feel hugely privileged that I got to experience it “organically”, by accident, as its authors presumably intended, back in 1993. But it also makes me happy to be able to share the
story of it with you14.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you might enjoy watching the vlog version of this post, through which my enthusiasm for the topic might be more-palpable.
Footnotes
1 I’ve doubtless mentioned Ultima Underworld II before: for example both it and
Ultima VII, as well as NetHack (mentioned elsewhere in this post) made it into my 2007 list of top 10 computer games that stole my life.
3 It suffered perhaps for the time of year it was released, but perhaps also for the fact
that 1993 was a big year for video games and it was competing with The 7th Guest, Star Wars: Rebel Assault, Return to Zork , Myst, Disney’s
Aladdin and, of course – later in the year – Doom.
4 Director/designer Paul Neurath apparently sang the praises of his team for improving
texture mapping and viewport size constraints, and he’s right: they’re a huge improvement on Underworld I‘s. Neurath would later go on create the crowdfunded “spiritual
successor” Underworld Ascendant, which was critically panned, which just goes to show that sometimes it’s better to get a tight
team together and make it “until it’s done” than to put your half-baked idea on Kickstarter and hope you can work it out what you’re making before the money runs out.
5 Like Wolfenstein, the engine uses a mixture of software-rendered 3D (for walls
and furniture) overlaid with traditionally-produced sprites (for characters and items).
6 All executed over a year before the release of the very first Elder Scrolls
game. Just sayin’.
7 That king of emergent gameplay NetHack was showcasing emergent gameplay in
a fantasy roleplaying game way back in the 1980s!
8 An interesting quirk of the game was that if you turned the graphics settings down to
their lowest, secret doors would become just as visible as regular doors. If you’re sure there is one but you can’t quite find it, tweaking your graphics settings is much easier than
casting a spell!
9 Do you like the “in the style of Underworld II” scrolls I’ve used in this post?
I’ve made available the source code you need
if you want to use them yourself.
10Ultima IV is my personal favourite Ultima game, but I see the
argument of people who claim that Ultima VII is the best of the series.
11 The Time Lord turns up throughout the game series. Way back in Ultima III,
he appears in the Dungeon of Time where he provides a clue essential to defeating Exodus, and he appears or is referenced in most games from Ultima VII onwards. He doesn’t
seem to appear in Ultima IV through Ultima VI, except… in Ultima IX, which wouldn’t be released until six years after Underworld II, it’s revealed
that the Time Lord is the true identity of the seer Hawkwind… who provided the same kind of exposition and guidance in Ultima IV!
12 How did the Underworld II team know with such certainty what was being
planned for Serpent Isle? At some point in 1992 project director Jeff George left Origin Studios and was replaced by lead designer Bill Armintrout, and the role of producer was assigned to… Warren Spector again! For some time, Spector was involved with both
projects, providing an easy conduit for inter-team leaks.
13 How you count Ultima games and what specifically should be counted is a
source of controversy in fan circles.
14 I’m sure many people reading this will have heard me talk about this particular
Easter egg in-person before, over the last couple of decades. Some of you might even have heard me threaten to write a blog post about it, someday. Well: now I have. Tada! It only
took me thirty years after experiencing it to write about it here, which is still faster than some things I’ve blogged about!
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