CULTIVATING FAIRNESS

Recently we switched gears from working on the more mechanically robust material for Sertorius to developing a rules light game called The Meddlers. We've made a lot of rules light games like Terror Network. We also made a game called Slayer published through Avalon Games that is quite rules light (highly recommend checking it out if you haven't). As a general rule, I think the lighter the game, the more fairness matters behind the screen. 

Fairness is always important. A GM needs to have a sense of fairness in his or her judgment at the table. But when there are fewer rules, when the resolution system for each possible scenario isn't painstakingly charted out prior to play, then it matters even more. 

Gamemasters are human, they are fallible and can't be fair 100% of the time. Fairness may even never truly be attainable in its purest sense, but that doesn't mean we should throw our hands up and say the only possible solution is for RPGs to have rules governing everything so there is no chance of the GM making a bad call. Fairness, like truth, is an ideal. It is something the GM should strive for. You cultivate it over it time by assessing your own biases and limitations, by examining things from the players' points of view and by serving the game, not your ego. 

If you watch sports you know that some referees are more fair than others. None will make the perfect call 100% of the time, but there is a world of difference between the referee who makes 60% good calls and 95% good calls. Fairness can be learned. 

Biases
I think the first step in becoming more fair as a GM is to assess your own biases. Do you reward the player who speaks the most eloquently over the player who stumbles over words, even when eloquence is not what is being judged? Do you use your powers to get what you want? Do you gloss over important details players mention, and fail to factor them adequately into your final decisions? Reflect on where you can improve and then do so.

One bias I think needs to be highlighted is when the GM favors outcomes that lead where he or she wants the adventure to go. At its worst this is railroading plain and simple. But there are grey areas as well. Sometimes you might not even realize you are doing it. When I know I am at a crucial moment, whether that is an NPC responding to a very important player question/request or deciding how the Grim Mage of Golhenna reacts to the player's net gambit, I ask myself internally whether my next move is being made to further my own agenda or to have the setting react as genuinely as possible to what is going on. Sometimes I find myself wanting things to go a particular way, so I remind myself that isn't the point, and put greater thought into my final decision. After a while, when you do this enough, you start caring about the outcomes less and less, and it becomes more intuitive (at least in my experience. 

The Players Points of View
Examining things from the other side of the screen really helps me be more fair. This comes in two forms. The first is taking a break from GMing and being a player once in a while. The second is to just stop and think about who things look from their perspective. 

If your a GM, chances are that is mostly what you do. I know some GMs who go back and between being a player and running a game, but most seem to live behind the screen. In some of my groups the GM position is rotational between campaigns, so this allows for me to dip in and out of either role. 

When we designed Sertorius, I was a game master for the first half of its development, then I switched to being a player for the second half (with Bill as the GM). This was incredibly informative. It absolutely showed me flaws in my thinking about the design when I was only running Sertorius. To be a good judge, you have to know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of questionable judgements. So take a break from GMing and try just being a player every once now and then. 

It's About the Game, Not About You
While there are always exceptions to any rule, I find the more a GM brags about his or her abilities behind the screen, the less awesome actual play with them tends to be. That isn't to say a GM shouldn't have confidence. I think confidence is very important, but when the game is just there to feed the GM's ego, that is a recipe for disaster because eventually players do things that will chip at that ego. I think to be a good and fair GM, you can't be too invested in the campaign/setting/adventure/etc as your creation and as a reflection of your capabilities. The more your ego rests on the campaign, the greater the danger here. A fair GM can accept constructive criticism and can also recognize when he or she has made a bad call or come up with a bad idea. 

So serve the game. Work to make the overall experience, not your experience, as good as possible. 

BEDROCK UPDATES

Just want to do a quick post to update people on what to expect from Bedrock Games in the near future. I know my blog posts have been few in the past couple of weeks but that is because we have been working on a number of different projects. Here is what we have in the pipeline: 

Book of the Archon: This is done and just in the final editing phase before going to layout. It will be available either for free or pay what you want on RPGnow. The Book of the Archon contains new spells for Sertorius. It is part of an ongoing series with each book being devoted to a particular theme or flavor. The first book strives to give spells with more varied power levels than those found in the core rulebook. 

Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate: This is quite close to done. Mainly now I am focused on gathering art and maps for the book. I am also refining the rules and setting. 

The Meddlers: This is our game about Brownies in the afterlife. We are ready to test the core rules and have most of the setting material complete. 

The Secret of Actium: This is an adventure for Servants of Gaius. I hope to have an interesting announcement about it in the coming months. 

Beneath the Banshee Tree: We decided to release the Sertorius adventure, Beneath the Banshee, in print. I hope to have it on shelves early next year. 

In the meantime I will be resuming my wuxia reviews sometime in the next few days when I have a moment.

BRENDAN'S TOP FIVE IRON MAIDEN ALBUMS

Still feeling sick, starting to think this is a flu, so decided to do something a little different today rather than the normal game stuff. I've been a fan of Iron Maiden since first hearing them in 1989. Over the past couple of weeks I listened to each of their albums again in order (excluding the pre-Bruce Dickinson stuff and the Blaze Bayley era material) and it got me thinking about which ones are truly my favorite so I decided to compile this list. I had a few criteria. First, Live After Death is excluded because it is material from their earlier albums and might make this list too easy (it would allow me to include three Albums I feel very strongly about while leaving space for others). Second, the main thing I wanted to weigh was how much replay value I got out of each album from its release until now (that led to a couple of surprises actually). Third, I wanted to be completely honest and not worry about what albums are held in higher regard than others. Just going to list the stuff I like and why. 

5. Fear of the Dark
When this album came out, I hated it. It was a drastic change in the sound of Iron Maiden. The change started with the prior album, No Prayer For the Dying, but that still had some traces of their earlier vibe, this was quite different. However it has become one of the albums I put into the CD player most. Many of the songs are more radio friendly, less about fantasy and more about love and life, which isn't the kind of stuff they normally wrote about. In hindsight though this album is very well written and has a number of songs that work very well like Wasting Love, Be Quick or Be Dead, Fear of the Dark, Fear is the Key, Childhood's End and Judas My Guide. 

4. Powerslave
I really wanted number 4 to be Number of the Beast (and I am sure a lot of people would put it at number 1) but I have to choose Powerslave for a few reasons. One is personal. My cousin and I both learned to play guitar at the same time and he figured out a bunch of songs from Powerslave a day after he got his first guitar, so they are really burned in my memory as a result. The other reason is it has some of their greatest songs ever. Two Minutes to Midnight and Aces High are the two most memorable Iron Songs. The song Powerslave is excellent and Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a wonderful 13 minute epic. 

3. A Matter of Life and Death
This is one of their more recent albums (2006) and while I grew up mainly listening to their older stuff, I have to say the newer material is really good and it feels they've aged well as musicians. I probably wouldn't have been as fond of this album when I was younger, but I quite like the sound they achieve. There newer stuff is a bit more epic and melodic. I particularly like The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg, The Pilgrim, Lord of Light and The Legacy. If you are an older fan who has been hesitant to hear their newer material, I strongly suggest starting here (Brave New World is great as is The Final Frontier). 

2. Piece of Mind
I thought this would be my number one, but I don't think I have listened to it quite as much as the next album. This one has some of their greatest songs in my opinion: The Trooper, To Tame a Land, Revelations, and Still Life. Everybody loves the Trooper and Revelations is one of my personal favorites. To Tame a Land is an amazing song about the Dune series (Steve Harris writes  lot of songs about books he reads). 

1. Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
I love this album and think it deserves to be put at number one. It is from their later period of development in the 80s, when they arguably started sounding more Euro or progressive (beginning with Somewhere in Time) but I feel this sound really suits them and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son has a cohesive feel that is book-ended with a great guitar guitar and vocal section. The music sounds exactly the like the cover looks. It is a bit short, and it doesn't have quite as many individually great songs as some other albums I think, but overall its overall effect is strong. Still there are great songs including: The Prophecy, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Infinite Dreams, Moonchild and Only the Good Die Young. 

THE MEDDLERS: WHY D4s?

Sick today so going to do a very brief post. 

For our upcoming game The Meddlers, we opted for d4 dice pools as the core mechanic. Here is the basic rule: 

The core mechanic

The core mechanic of The Meddlers is quite simple, you roll a pool of four sided dice* against an opposing pool of four sided dice. Both sides take the single highest result and compare them. If the aggressor meets or exceeds the result of the opposing pool she succeeds. Sometimes this will be rolled against another character’s pool, sometimes the GM will roll a pool to reflect the difficulty of a task when it isn’t against a foe. The Aggressor is always the person taking action, attacking, etc.

The main reason we picked D4s was aesthetic. Four-sided dice feel diminutive seem appropriate to a game about Brownies. The other reason is I've long wanted to use d4 as the basis for a game because of the tighter range. Because the game favors the aggressor, the system leans toward success, which makes for fast play. 

Here is an example from a playtest I was running. This is from a combat between a Brownie Thick-Hide and a Red Cap. The Brownie is attacking this round. Because the Brownie has a Brawn of 1 and a Melee Skill of 2 he rolls 3d4. The Red Cap has a Parry of 1 and Brawn of 1, giving her a Defense of 2d4. Both roll and take their single highest result. The Brownie's highest result is 3, while the Red Cap's highest result is 1, meaning the Brownie succeeded and now gets to roll damage. 

THE BACKYARD WORLDS OF THE MEDDLERS

Working on a regional map for The Meddlers. Because the characters are Brownies everything is at a different scale. I am finding that you can build a whole area to explore in just a single city block. The map on the right is not finished and it is just for a playtest scenario but it gives you an idea of how the Brownie scale is overlaid on the human dwellings. The game has a large number of small folk (Brownies, Pecklings, Sprites, Red Caps, etc) giving GMs a nice mix of tools for populating local maps. I placed one burgeoning Red Cap kingdom in the courtyard of the Winter Court Apartments and positioned a rival Red Cap "Empire" nearby that is spreading from the Tulip Towers Apartments across an unkept yard called the Wastes of Gartes. There are several other settlements including Peckling Tunnel Cities, Pargle Stone Complexes and even a range of land roamed by Boggart Nomads. This is proving to be quite a bit of fun putting together. We will see how this works for an actual campaign. 

THE MEDDLERS AND WANDERING HEROES OF OGRE GATE

Once again we have been quite busy which has left little time for the blog. Here is a quick update of two key projects we are developing. 

THE MEDDLERS
This is a new project about Brownies. This time we are designing entirely around a rules light-rulings-over-rules approach to play. While we only started on it over the weekend it progressed much more rapidly than other projects. Hopefully we will be ready for our first play tests soon. 

For now here is the basic premise from our current introduction: 

This is a game about Brownies, little people who help humanity in ways that often go unnoticed. Set in the world of Tol-Shenda, a place of twilight and walled cities, where people exist in a fog and feel vaguely out of place. Something isn’t quite right in Tol-Shenda. Things that should not be, are, and things that ought to be are not. There is technology in Tol-Shenda, sometimes advanced technology, but the people have forgotten their past and so rather than advance things tend to rust. Humans go about their lives, afraid to venture beyond the cities, unaware they are the center of a cosmic struggle.
 The Goddess Naura stands on the side of light striving to redeem humanity. You are her people, her Brownies, and you are tasked with gently guiding this fallen race to greatness. Brownies are small but brave, and have just a touch of magic in their soul that enables them to do extraordinary things. Brownies also come in great variety from heroic Thick-Hides to singing wizards. They live in the nooks and spaces of human cities, their surnames are often the streets where they were born. They trade in gossip and food and have a love for life that is nearly boundless. But they are bound by a strict law: do not interfere with the free-will of man. Those who violate this code risk falling into disfavor with their goddess.
Because of their size the simplest things can be an enormous adventure for a Brownie. Sneaking into a home to eavesdrop for some gossip can mean facing a maze of crawlspaces, venomous insects, cruel rats and deadly traps (sadly humanity regards Brownies as pests). Brownies go on countless adventures helping the humans they feel drawn to. They may work to aid a single human over an entire lifetime or move from one person to the next each week.

WANDERING HEROES OF OGRE GATE

This project is moving along very nicely. We are getting close to completion and art is coming in (giving us a sense of what the final book will look like). Overall it has been a very rewarding experience to make Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. I expect it will be ready sometime early next year. 

BENEATH THE BANSHEE TREE TO BE RELEASED IN PRINT

We don't have a specific date yet but Beneath the Banshee Tree will be released in print sometime next year. Right now we are looking at a cover price of 14.99. The PDF is still free  (and will remain so) and this is for folks who like having the book in their hands. 

From the Back of the Book: 

Beneath the Banshee Tree is an investigative city adventure for the Sertorius roleplaying game.

Powerful spellcasters called Sertori come from every corner of Gamandria to the mountain city of Talyr, answering the king’s call for new talent to fill important offices. However his invitation attracts someone with sinister motives who exploits the abundance of magic to enact an unthinkable scheme. After a series of mysterious events the players are recruited to solve the puzzle and weed out the evil presence in Talyr. But it is a race against time as they hunt for clues and try to piece them together before something terrible unfolds.

This 69-page investigative module comes with an adventure, several detailed NPCs, a city map, a full description of the city of Talyr, and a unique investigative structure that makes for a different experience each time you play.