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October 23rd, 2007
02:15 pm - Hârn Campaign Status
I haven't talked about my Hârn group in a while. This is a group that I've played with for several years, roughly biweekly. When I joined the group in July 2002 it was four guys: Jim, Dennis, David, and me. Daniel joined about two years ago, and Mark joined this year for the current campaign. We've played a bunch of Hârnmaster, mixed with various other campaigns -- Lord of the Rings, a little Dogs in the Vineyard, James Bond 007. Prior to our current campaign, we had wrapped up a 9-month Call of Cthulhu campaign in March (cf. "End of the Golden Dawn Campaign"). We all agreed that we were going to play a Hârn campaign using the Burning Wheel rules game-mastered by Jim, but it would take some time for both him and us to prepare. We had a boardgame session or two, then played through three Burning Wheel one-shots to try out the system. We then started in June, and had eight sessions thus far (including the character creation session).
The Campaign
Our campaign is about a group of Ilviran missionaries, come to the biggest city on the island of Hârn to found a temple there. For non-Hârn fans, Ilvir is an odd Earth god known as the creator of monsters, whose worship was founded by the earliest settlers of the island of Hârn, the Celt-analogue Jarin. We've had to deal with things like anonymous threats from rival Ilvirans, offers of help from a more violent cult, trying to buy the land for our temple from an owner hostile to our religion, and dealing with the holy creatures of our order being fought as monsters in the city's gladiatorial arena. (Well, really they are dangerous monsters, but they are still sacred to us.)
The player characters are: - Bowdyn of Ressa, played by Mark our newcomer, a stone-mason who is fighting with his wife over his decision to come to the new city.
- Jaroud the Hound-Master, played by Dennis, an enterprising dog trainer who has now struck a deal with a shady boss in the city.
- Judyn of Denach, played by myself, a formidable older merchantwoman full of schemes to advance the order and herself.
- Kalrun the Veteran, played by Daniel, a retired soldier who has forsworn killing and adopted a teenage girl orphaned by war.
- Maban the Soothsayer, a young woman first raised by a monstrous Nolah not knowing who her parents were, then by Ilvirans in awe of her. She is developing a reputation as a crazy witch and prophetess.
Thus far, most of the action has still been exploratory. In seven sessions, we have only had one armed fight, and three one-on-one fistfights. We also don't often have a conflict that we see going to Duel of Wits over, and so DoW is roughly as common. You can read session logs on Jim's campaign website.
Last Session
Just to give an idea of how things go, I'll give a picture of a session. The Saturday before last, we met at 4:00 at Jim's apartment for session seven. Everyone was roughly on time. We played for a few hours, then we had a late dinner that Jim had cooked. It started with a salad with olives and orange slices, dressed with a mix of cinnamon, lemon and oranges juices, and orange blossom water. The main course was lamb with apricots, honey, and cinnamon served over couscous. The wine with this was a Domenico 2003 Aglianico from Amador County. I'm not much of a wine connoisseur, but I liked it. Then we played for another two hours or so.
A summary of the events is posted on the site at here. Roughly, we dodged an investigation of us, found out a little more (including that we were being charged with crimes by an enemy), and as the main action successfully concluded a deal to buy the land for our temple.
Status
The next game session will be this coming Sunday. We did have a bunch of email discussion after the last session, about the way the game was headed. One of the great things about the group is that nearly everyone is interested in discussing and analyzing how the game is going.
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January 26th, 2006
04:22 pm - Improving Harn Play
So there has been a huge amount of discussion recently among the players of our HârnMaster campaign, "The Glooming Isle". This includes a long thread on HârnForum, over a dozen emails, and several phone calls. Really, I'm amazed at the amount of discussion and interest everyone has shown, and the willingness to talk in detail.
In general, we've been a fairly casual group, with only occaisional discussion. I joined David, Jim, and Dennis in 2002 when Jim was GMing a HârnMaster campaign ("Cuthren Village"). Since then, David ran his Lord of the Rings RPG campaign ("The Northern Shadow") and then I ran my James Bond 007 campaign ("The Replacement Killers"). We played Dogs in the Vineyard briefly, then we had a hiccup for a time because Jim originally was going to gamemaster HârnMaster again (a campaign entitled "The City of Red Domes"). He did a lot of initial preparation, but then backed out. So we had a lull for weeks, and then David took over GMing, starting the new HârnMaster game early this year. We've had ten sessions, and along the way we picked up a new player, Daniel -- a Swedish student who moved to the area.
We've all have long experience with tabletop RPGs, and are also avid boardgamers. We tend to use miniatures, and Jim obsessively collects and paints them. We enjoy the super-detailed background as an environment. The game sessions themselves are not competitive, but we're all up on the rules. Our standard end for a session is to play a round of Liar's Dice.
The Tuesday before last, two days after our last game session, the GM David started a HârnForum thread entitled "Reining In the Players". (You'll need to register to view the thread.) Basically, he was having a bad day, and he complained about how we had (essentially) bullied a group of gypsies and picked a fight with them. He felt it was unrealistic, and asked other Hârn GMs about how to deal with the problem. Actually, the first responder quite sensibly said to review the (group/social) contract -- but then there were a bunch more who talked about how to punish the players to teach them a lesson. The next day, Jim posted to the thread to respond to them, and a little while later me and Dennis also posted. This set off a firestorm between the player-bashing critics and us.
Mind you, David was quick to distance himself from the player-bashing. We hashed out a bunch of things over this. Jim suggested that this broke into three potential issues: - Lack of realism. I'm pretty sure that this is a smokescreen for underlying issues. Medieval mores are fairly violent, and this was tame as far as Hârn goes in general.
- Conflict of morality. I've noted that David's PCs are always relatively peaceful, moral types. To some degree, I think he was uncomfortable by our bullying the gypsies. However, I don't think this was the primary problem.
- Conflict over control of the storyline. David explained that he had intended for the gypsies to be the "lead-in" to the adventure. By confronting the gypsies, we threw him for a loop and apparently invalidated a lot of his planning. (I'm not sure of the details here.)
The last one is the trickiest, and I think the primary root of the problem. In the HârnForum thread, David said: For some reason, I seem to be in a storytelling mode the past several years. Before that, my campaigns tended to be much more free form and character driven. I used to show up for sessions with only a page of notes hastily scribbled that morning. Now I feel woefully unprepared if I don't have ten pages of carefully thought out adventure. This lead to talk about styles. David has browsed the Forge, but specifically mentioned finding useful stuff in my "Threefold Simulationism Explained" article. He said he'd try moving to a more character-based style.
So at yesterday's session, we spent around an hour at the start hashing through options at this point. A lot of possibilities were suggested, including a complete reboot of the campaign and/or switching off GMing more. I suggested a less drastic change, seeing how things go and changing more as needed. We also agreed for Jim to game-master a short adventure. After that, we played and then had a nice dinner together that Jim cooked. The latest session summary is up on the campaign journal. The short form is that we spend ten days down, then poked around the city. Jim's PC Zarisa trolled for the woman who looks like her, and had a letter slipped into her pocket on the street. Reading it magically blinded her and her bodyguard Gerik, though with some effort we managed to decipher it. It's not clear how long the blindness will last.
There isn't really a simple lesson here, except the obvious one of that if you're having a problem with your game, talk civilly with your friends (although not necessarily with other commenters), and work out what to do.
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December 16th, 2005
04:54 pm - More on Hârn and Stakes
So the long adventure which I'd been playing in my Hârn game concluded yesterday. In a comment on my last post on stakes, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) badgerbag noted:But the issue seems to be that he wanted/figured/was steering you to fail and therefore discover the hook to the story, or the clue in the pits or whatever.
It is so annoying when the GM wants to give you information and can't figure out how and goes "make a notice roll" and then tells the group anyway what it is.
I think it has to do with a basic discomfort with non-linear plotting (i.e. not railroading) and not with the mechanics of rolling, which in this particular GM's case are just a symptom of something else. I'm not sure how to fix that! I think this is a good point, and I think the issue of setting stakes is connected to the larger picture of how the flow of action works. I should fill in a bit more on the adventure. The GM, David, has put up nice session summaries in a Campaign Journal. We've also had a lot of email discussion following the conclusion. There is also a Hârn Forum Thread about the campaign.
The short form is this: The adventure was loosely based on "Forbidden Planet" -- a powerful light/air mage with a young female apprentice (and lover) were doing research at a remote place of great magical power -- the Earthmaster site, Telumar. Others of their expedition had been killed over the past year by a mysterious whirlwind, save for a somewhat insane local barbarian. The PCs arrived there knowing of one one person almost killed at the site.
We investigated and had some theories about what was happening. After some initial digging, we had a theory that the mage was responsible for the whirlwind attacks -- which always occurred while he was sleeping. However, we had no proof nor any clear means to get it, and further had no means of fighting the whirlwind if we encountered it. We set up a plan to wait until the whirlwind appeared and then wake him up -- however, when we tried it, rather than approaching us the whirlwind appeared elsewhere and killed the local barbarian, then disappeared. We then confronted the mage, and then knocked him out in a brief fight when he resisted being held for questioning. We brought him unconscious out of the site, but then outside a PC mage inexplicably fell unconscious, and another PC (Embran) promptly killed him.
On a social level, we have four players. Both Dennis and Daniel are playing non-mage characters, and they had very little to do during this adventure. Jim and I, playing mages, were interested in the investigation of the site and the strange phenomena -- but still felt awkward. We had the theory about the mage in Session 7, but by the time we enacted the plan we were in Session 9. In short, Dennis and Daniel were both a bit chomping at the bit. Personally, I think Dennis' character Embran killing the mage Lepridis was reasonable -- but then Daniel wanted to have his PC mutilate the body in a gory hypothesized Ivinian death ritual, the "blood eagle". He was talked down from this on a player (i.e. metagame) level.
We are discussing this in the Hârn Forum Thread, but since I've got this blog here I thought I'd expose it out of general interest. The short form is that I think Liz is right -- the stakes problem stems from a larger problem with plot and pacing. I don't have an immediate answer to this. I know it doesn't usually come up in other games of mine, but I don't have a definite answer as to why it appears here and how to fix it.
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December 9th, 2005
12:06 pm - Avoiding Trivial Stakes
So there's been some more talk on stakes and resolution mechanics on Actual Play. Nathan Paoletta had an interesting post, Never Going Back. "It throws into clear relief one of the greatest things about recent, indie, conflict-resolution based RPGs. When clear intent and stakes are determined, it excises boring play."
Now, they're talking about a particular issue in play -- where the GM calls for a roll, and if it fails then the GM gives a dull token penalty and then the PC can try again. So basically the player can keep trying until he succeeds, and play is stalled until that happens. I am certainly familiar with this -- and I think in particular of the last session of the HârnMaster campaign that I played in.
In that session, I observed a classic case of the phenomenon. We were exploring a set of ruins, and there were a four halls, each of which ended with a series of five pits, eighty or so feet deep, which had a one-foot ledge around them. Not wanting to fall, we went and got rope and then got enough people so we could cross them while secured by rope. The GM insisted that we roll Agility for each crossing -- even though the most that could happen was that if we fell, we'd be tied and had to climb back up. To make it worse, when we got past the first set we discovered it was a dead end, but saw some clues that there was something at the bottom of the pits. We didn't have enough rope (only 50 feet), so we had to go and improvise more rope, test it, and then make climbing rolls to be lowered and pulled up.
Now, if I was game-mastering this, I would generally just say "OK, you explore the twenty pits and here's what you find..." To me, that's not a strange new concept. I mean, no system suggests making rolls for driving around town, or making a hundred hit rolls if you spend a few hours at target practice. Better systems asssume diceless resolution for simple tasks, like D20's "Take 10" rule, or automatic success in systems like CORPS or the Unisystem. However, I realize it's not a universal practice. In a fast-resolving game like Buffy I will often ask for a quick roll for small but still significant things, but never more than one roll on the same skill.
What I'm trying to figure out is what situations and mechanics this practice is associated with. On The Forge, many people associate non-trivial rolls with explicit negotiation of stakes before the resolution roll -- notably Primetime Adventures and Dogs in the Vineyard as examples of this. The principle is that if you negotiate the stakes clearly, then trivial stakes become even more obvious and are thus avoided. This makes sense in principle, but as GM I've never felt that it was necessary. My problem with this is that negotation seems slow -- you have to determine in advance by committee what each result should mean. The traditional solution for me is for the GM simply to not call for rolls which are too easy or which have trivial stakes.
On the other hand, given that these sorts of trivial rolls do happen, what should be done about them? More specifically, should I push for change in the HârnMaster game, and if so how? I've played Dogs in the Vineyard with that group, which might be seen as a first step. But I don't think that explicit stake negotiation is the only correlation, and I think there are other things to do. In a recent Forge thread, "Setting Stakes", judd_sonofbert wrote: I was GMing on auto-pilot and just couldn't put a coherent thought together. I felt like I had been punched (more on how that happened in another post, that situation of Social Contract breach isn't what this is about) but a player got into a Duel of Wits with this Balrog-inspired bad-ass.
And I was still punched, dazed, reeling. I couldn't put coherent stakes together.
The Duel of Wits was flat and lame. This was a violent Orc having a Duel of Wits with a Balrog. It was flat. It was just that the stakes were...dull.
So what else can be done? Some genres seem less susceptible. For example, superhero games are not the same as fantasy games scaled up. In a superhero game, you'll generally be fighting a flashy supervillain rather than spending time over mega-pits. I also think there is task system pacing -- i.e. does combat, for example, tend to resolve in twenty rounds or three? I also think that the larger picture helps: having a driving motivation pushes PCs to more risks, and it's important to make sure that they can take risks without risking the game. (Specifically, finding ways to dodge PC death.) In the HârnMaster campaign, we could use more active enemies, I think.
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June 17th, 2005
10:11 am - Random-roll Character Creation
So I am going to be starting a HarnMaster campaign soon, GMed by David Johnson and entitled The Glooming Isle. For this, I went with the by-the-book HarnMaster character creation (using 3rd edition). As one of the influences of the Forge, these days I am much more interested in playing out systems by-the-book to look at them critically. I used to hate random-roll character creation, but HarnMaster has worked pretty well for me. This time, the result of my initial random rolls were as follows:
Human Male, born Azura 11 (under the Sunsign of Hirin, the Eagle) .
5th Child and Orphan of a Feudal Serf (Parent Occupation Farmer)
Average Estrangement from current family, while the clanhead is a Distant Relation .
Height: 64 inches, Frame: Medium, Weight: 137 pounds
Comliness: 11 (Average), Strength: 10, Stamina: 12, Dexterity: 12, Agility: 15
Eyesight: 14, Hearing: 6, Smell: 9, Voice: 12 (Pleasant)
Intelligence: 13, Aura: 16, Will: 16, Morality: 11 (Law-Abiding)
Medical Traits: (one roll) birthmark : may reduce Comliness by 1d3 = -1
Psyche Traits: (one roll) no mental disorders
Sexuality: Heterosexual
So from this, I am in the process of putting together a picture of the character. The setting for the campaign is Melderyn, which is a small island off the southeastern corner of Harn which is famous (or infamous) as the home of wizards. Given that he has a 16 Aura and 16 Will, I decided to make him a wizard, or "Shek Pvar" as they are known. The traits rolls meant that I had 5 points to add to attributes, so I boosted his Aura even higher along with his Eyesight (which adds to his preferred convocation by sunsign, Lyahvi). One of my other inspirations is the work of the Harn Religion Team which has worked at making the Harnic religions into interesting points of view.
I rolled for his getting into chantries for training, and I got terrible rolls: 93, 92, and 80. This would reflect reasonably his lack of connections and poor birth, but it suggested to me that he didn't get any breaks in his life.
I am thinking of him as someone who is ambitious and driven (given his willpower and talent). He is a patriot of his home country, Melderyn. As a bit of contrast, I decided to make him a dedicated Peonian. Peona is traditionally the goddess of peasants and is seen as a non-violent goddess of healing and mercy. It is a contrast to have an ambitious wizard be of that religion, but it would be what he grew up with and it seemed more interesting to me for him to keep his peasant roots.
His magical abilities are pretty awesome, and I opted to give him some very high-level spells. I see him as someone who has if anything overreached. Given his summoning spell, I could picture something similar to what happened in "A Wizard of Earthsea" happening. However, I think he has not been caught and forcibly humbled yet -- rather he is struggling between the humility of his religion and his experience of having talent far above his birth and opportunities.
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