Fate Be Damned: a Wushu setting

I've run Wushu twice now, and our last session left off at a halfway point, so I assume I'll be running it again in the near future. I like Wushu for several reasons that I've already gone into, but one of them that I didn't mention was that it gave me an excuse to work on a setting I've been developing since high school. Here's a cliffnotes guide to the setting. I've been adding lots to it, and in the near future I might release a short pdf of it and Wushu packaged together.

Fate Be Damned.

Introduction

It's 2152. Much of the Midwest has turned into a vast desert of ghost towns inhabited by zombies, the rich retreat into their glamortech palace The Fantasy, while the rest of the world is either obsessed with trendsetting outlandish lifestyles or suffering in non-consumer (3rd world) regions.

You wanted to change this. You want a better future. That's why you became a Fatalist. Secret Agent, Terrorist, Techno-powered Vigilante, Assassin you're all of these now. The Oedipus Agency found you, enhanced you, trained you, and now you know what tomorrow will be by consulting The Certainty Machine. Rather, you know what tomorrow will be without your intervention.

No day is ever the same: Take down a legion of cyborgs, negotiate with the controllers of The Fantasy, save one of the stars of Teenage Wasteland from a horde of zombies, infiltrate one of the pocket universes of The Abandoned Amusement Park.

Be careful though. Libertines know of The Certainty Machine, and they want it destroyed. Cybernetics, and genetic modification have become staples of the underworld. Police forces are unwilling to continue the arms war with criminals to the point of altering their bodies. Fatalists are often all that can stop today's super-criminals.

Humanity without your intervention is doomed. Change the world. Fate Be Damned.

Basics

Premise: Player characters work for The Oedipus Agency. TOA uses a device called The Certainty Machine to track the most probable future and alter this towards a better world.
Agents: Fatalists are the primary force of TOA. They simultaneously alter small and large events (leaving a penny head's up on the ground, robbing a bank) for both immediate goals as well as creating butterfly effects.
Setting Description: A futuristic world that is fatalistically moving towards several paths of destruction. Nanotechnology, hover cars, robots, genetic altering, and cybernetic upgrades all exist, though some of these are rare, illegal, or not yet public.
Inspiration: Lacuna, MiB, James Bond, Minority Report, The Invisibles
Powers: The characters work for The Oedipus Agency. This secretive organization not only possesses The Certainty Machine but has made unbelievable advancements in nanotechnology which they put into their agents making them hardy, strong, and fast. Other advanced weaponry is available as well.
Chi is: Nano-enhanced vitality, luck.
Typical Tasks: Spilling a drink on a woman at a club, killing the vice-president, sneezing in a movie theatre, punching Scientologists in the face.
Suitable Traits: various martial arts, firearms, stealth, charm, lock picking, tech wizard
Mooks: Cops, gangs, cyborgs, robot assassins, human/animal genetic hybrids
Nemeses: Rogue Agents, Hackers of The Certainty Machine, Outliers (people The Certainty Machine cannot account for), Libertines (groups who actively work against TOA for various reasons).

More Details:

The Certainty Machine

In 2138 The Certainty Machine made its first significant prediction: China will go bankrupt due to a poor foreign investment, and this will lead to the assassination of China's prime minster, carried out by a Chinese army Lieutenant. This will lead to a civil war, and escalate over fifty years into a global war that will wipe out 97% of humanity. The Certainty Machine was then in possession of the CIA. After the prime minister's assassination by the lieutenant, the technology was dubbed a success, and agents were sent in to stop China's civil war.

In 2145 The Oedipus Agency was formed. This agency is independent of any government to stop any one nation from using The Certainty Machine for selfish gains. Andrew Marcus, inventor of the machine, is head of TOA, and believes strongly that his machine and agency will make the world better.

The Oedipus Agency keeps its missions secret from the world. This is due to a global variation of the observer effect. After China's prevented civil war, worldwide media outlets reported on the Certainty Machine's predictions, thus creating unintentional alterations, and making the predictions unreliable.

Fatalists and The Oedipus Agency

Field Agents for TOA are nicknamed "Minutia Men" for their first few months/years of missions. Such missions involve fixing seemingly trivial details in the world, or performing simple tasks such as giving a grade schooler a pack of cigarettes, stealing a car and crashing it at a certain location, or responding to a specific person's online relationship ad. Though these tasks are often easily done, they lead to butterfly effects that will significantly impact the world weeks, months, or years later.

After a year of field work an agent is promoted to Fatalist. Fatalists' goals are often more immediate and violent as well as vague on how they ought to be carried out. For large scale disaster prevention the Certainty Machine can only work with probabilities and so less information is often known or given to Fatalists. The vagueness of objectiveness, and the brutality that almost certainly comes from these, leaves many Fatalists indistinguishable from any other terrorist organization.

Andrew Marcus has never released specific details (other than those on China's civil war) but he's gone on record with the UN and his own agents that TOA has prevented two end of humanity scenarios, stopped an African genocide, and the spread of a pandemic. Marcus refuses to share his personal politics, but cyborgs and genetically modified persons, as well as their supporters, have raised questions of bigotry against their subcultures. Some insist that the "pandemic" TOA prevented was in fact the global acceptance of these groups. Marcus has stated that this is not the case, but many Fatalists have reported that their missions involved taking down large groups of cyborgs/GMP's.

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There's a lot more to the setting, but I don't want to paste and edit it all into the body of a single blog post. I might post more later, or just finish the pdf and put that up. Hope you guys like it.

Using Moral Dilemmas In Games

Moral dilemma will be defined in three ways, each relevant for the purpose of this article, and each definition comes from The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd edition.

1. Any problem where morality is relevant. Ex: I have promised to pick up my best friend from the airport. A writer I admire happens to be at the cafe I'm at before I'm to go pick my friend up. I start a conversation with the writer, and then am in a dilemma of promise breaking/valuing my friendship less than talking to someone I admire.

2. Any topic area where it is not known whether something is morally good/right or not. Ex: When someone asks if abortion is immoral in anyway this refers to abortion as a moral dilemma.

3. A situation where an agent morally ought to do each of two acts but cannot do both. Sarte's classic example: a boy who ought to care for his sick mother but also ought to join the resistance to fight the Nazis.

I will now go over why moral dilemmas ought to be presented in roleplay games, and give some suggestions on how they ought to be handled.

If you are interested in having your characters, or your player's characters act out complex issues, to discuss the consequences of their decisions, then you ought to use moral dilemmas. By their very definition, moral dilemmas are ambiguous, or at least challenging to reach conclusions to. It therefore ought not be possible for a player to simply roll a skill check to have the GM tell them what the "correct" answer is. These dilemmas necessitate the characters think, discuss, and possibly grow or conflict with one another over these issues. This creates drama and adds extra detail to characters.

It should be suggested now though that you ought not to create a moral dilemma where you, the GM, believe there is only one correct answer, and then judge the player for disagreeing with you. Similarly for players, having moral dilemmas in games requires some maturity and ability to both think as the character while distancing oneself enough to not judge the other players when they think otherwise than you. Conflict is drama. If you want the characters in your group to be more than monster killers or stats on a sheet this can help, but decisions and arguments in character should never be taken personally.

Also, for players, in moral dilemmas such as example 1. a more dramatic version of this: you have the opportunity to find out who murdered your wife by meeting a stranger BUT at that same time the rest of your group is fighting for their lives, and if you don't show up to help it is likely one of them may die. Personally, I like scenarios where knowledge (or any kind of growth) has a price. If the other players in your group are actor-types or at least think of their characters from a first person standpoint, it can be fun and rewarding to have your character take a dark turn, abandon the group to pursue knowledge solely for vengeance. Players who are more tactical might get angry at such a decision because you hurt the group's chance of winning a fight, but otherwise when presented with a situation where you can aid the group or aid yourself, in the right group, doing the "selfish" thing would be a way of exploring your character and creating interesting conflict in the group. Or, if your character misses the opportunity to go see the stranger to save the group this can give your character cause for depression or some resentment to the group. This creates drama and depth but will not be appropriate for every game.

It's advisable to not use moral dilemmas in games where the characters are meant to be the paragons of virtue. In such cases when they are GOOD then it is probably best their conflicts be with purely evil types. Putting these characters in moral dilemmas interferes with the player's ability to have the character the game is meant to have, and destroys the tone of the game. It's best when starting a new game to talk to players about the tone, themes of the game so everyone is in agreement about what kind of characters they should play and what kinds of situations they'd be dealing with.

Here's a link to some classic moral dilemmas that you can try to use in your stories.

How To Deal With Players When They Miss Clues Or Don't Infer What You Thought They Would

I don't think I've gamed with anyone I'd call stupid. In fact, I've been fortunate to game with people I regard as fairly intelligent. Yet somehow they, and I when I'm playing and someone else is running, have this weird habit of not seeing the obvious OR what appears to be obvious to the GM. This post will be on the subtle and desperate art of figuring out "How the hell did they get from A to B to arrive at Q?" 

On Clues

First an essential rule on clues: If you have a group of player characters in a sprawling mansion searching for some evidence of who killed Mr. Mansion Owner don't ever assume or ask players to describe each and every area that they search for clues in. This is a bad idea for multiple reasons. Pen and paper rpgs take place in our heads and only through explicit social agreement of location description do we share vaguely related images of the same imaginary places. Chances are you didn't describe the sprawling mansion so well that the players even imagine what you are, and so checking a specific place in the mansion that they're not picturing is out of the question. If you have described the mansion out fully, drawn a blueprint, et cetera don't assume these details will help. Say the mansion has 40 rooms (I have no idea how many rooms mansions have - I live in a studio) and it is only in the fourth parlor that the vital clue is in. Chances are players will just want to make a basic roll like "I investigate the mansion" or "I investigate the floor." For the love of speeding past redundant rolls just let them. Don't make them search through every single room unless each room has its own unique flavor, something interesting to discover, or something fun. If you make your players go through every room until they get to that one with the vital clue, they will never make it. They will disengage entirely by the time you get them there. By then they won't give a damn about the vital clue or who killed Mr. Mansion Owner (Answer: It was Mr. Wants-to-Own-a-Mansion). 

On Inferences

Hinted at in the above is that it is not the clues that are interesting, but the inferences that players make with them once they have them. If you are of this opinion then I recommend making the acquisition of clues comparatively easy to the inferences that players must make with them. Scavenger hunting for clues doesn't lend itself to rpgs because it would essentially come down to a player saying, "I look in the dresser. Anything in the dresser?" GM: "No". "The refrigerator?" "GM "ahhh... sure, but it's not really important." Player: "oh..." 

Inference, however, creates a logical puzzle for gamers to solve. Mr. Mansion Owner's corpse is found in his cellar, drained of blood. A half burnt circle is on the priceless rug in the library, and the maid says it was not there this morning. The study is filled with hundreds of lunar moths that are foreign to the region. Right away the mystery lover in me wants to know how these are related (or if any of them are red herrings). None of these would be hard to discover (or require a roll). The real challenge comes down not to the characters, but the players to find the connections. Which leads us to the next section: 

But My Character Would Know! 

If a player isn't great at logic puzzles but they're playing a character who is, or at least better than themselves, then to allow them to enjoy what their character is supposed to be good at let them roll, and if they succeed give them a hint. I believe that advice was in the DM guide for 4e. I thought it was a good compromise. 

They Have All The Clues, Why Don't They Know Who The Murderer Is? 

The players have seen Mr. Mansion Owner's corpse in the basement drained of blood. They've seen the half burnt circle, and the lunar moths. Shouldn't they instantly jump to the conclusion that Mr. Wants-to-Own-a-Mansion drained the blood to fool the player characters into thinking the local vampire killed Mr. Mansion Owner instead of Mr. Wants-to-Own-a-Mansion who used some obscure spell from a supplement text your players probably didn't read that involves burning half a circle into the victim's home, and the ritual, for some trivial reason, summons Lunar moths?

 Don't make assumptions about what out of game knowledge your players have OR do have (but won't remember). 

Don't rely on information from a gaming book and not share this information with your players if you want them to use it. 

Do use complex and odd clues to be inferred, but don't assume what you believe to be the inference to the best solution will necessarily be the same that they come to. Chances are when you thought up your mystery you thought of the ending first, or thought of a good hook, came up with the conclusion and filled in the middle details. What I'm getting at is that you didn't have to solve your mystery and so you can't objectively assess if the inferences required of the players both validly and easily warrant your conclusion.

Also, if player characters infer that they ought to go to Night Club X to talk to Drunk Y, but you thought they'd for sure go to Park B to talk to Homeless Park Guy C either tell them that the nightclub is irrelevant or better yet just turn Homeless Park Guy C into Drunk Y. It'll save time, trust me. 

One last thing on mysteries in general: Use common tropes like red herrings sparingly. They get old and predictable if used too often. Do use them on occasion. Just make sure to change up what tropes you're using: red herrings, player characters waking up with amnesia, et cetera (I don't want to give a comprehensive list because players I game with read this blog). 

Green Ronin, George RR Martin, and delays on A Song of Ice and Fire.

A few months back I made a post on how excited I was for the still upcoming Song of Ice and Fire game that Green Ronin is putting out. Judging from the design notes and free preview Green Ronin put out the game looks like an excellent adaptation that focuses on the family politics of the fantasy world, has brutal combat, and a simple conflict resolution system as to not get in the way of the war and behind-the-thrown intrigue. In short, this game looks amazing and I'm slightly pissed that it didn't come out this summer, that it didn't come out in October, and that when Green Ronin now says it will be out in early 2009, that I doubt them.

But why is the game not out yet? It was scheduled to be out months ago. Green Ronin says it's done. It's time for some super easy detective work:

From Green Ronin's website in an update before Gencon:

The game itself is finished and entered layout a couple of weeks back. However, we are revising the release date to October. We had really hoped to debut the game at GenCon, but things always get more complicated when licenses are involved. As fans of the series already know, George R.R. Martin has been hard at work on the next volume, A Dance with Dragons. Basically, there was no way we were going to get in the way of George finishing the book. That, of course, must be his priority. So, we're going to take a couple of extra months to polish the game and make it look truly spectacular. Then we'll launch it in grand style. We may release the PDF version of the game earlier, but the printed game will come out in October.

From this it's very clear that the good folks at Green Ronin have done their job. They made, what design notes and a free preview adventure indicate to me, a quality game. George RR Martin is ruining this. Let's not even talk about the delays with A Dance With Dragons. All Martin needs to do for Green Ronin is skim through the book, or hell read the damn thing over a few hours, and then tell them they have his seal of approval. Over several months he has not been able to do this. Yet the man can't stop updating us on his football teams. 

To completely contradict my rage at Martin for this, I am excited about the HBO series of A Song of Ice and Fire. I hope they at least get a whole first season of A Game of Thrones made. 

Wushu overview/review

I ran my first game of Wushu last night. If you're not familiar with Wushu, it's a wuxia emulating system that rewards description and over-the-top narrative accounts to resolve conflict. One of the important features of the system is called The Principle of Narrative Truth. What a player says happens, happens. If a player, or GM, says something happens that is out of sync in some way with the game - not thematically appropriate, logically impossible - then another player can veto this action, but otherwise the dice rolls do not tell you if you succeed, but how much further your actions advance the scene. 

I find this kind of game refreshing. When playing pen and paper rpg's I want to do things with these games that I can't do in a video game. This is because I believe video games do certain things very well, and that pen and paper games that try to emulate the video game experience or those that have been replaced by the video game are simply slow and dull competitors. The use of imagination to resolve conflict, or do anything, is something that a video game cannot capture, and so the more that this is done in a pen and paper game, the more I like that game. 

The only things that didn't go well with the session were my own fault: I didn't plan out "Nemesis" fights well enough. Fighting in this system is divided between Nemesis fights and fights with "mooks". Mooks do not roll against player characters, they simply come at them in droves to provide the opportunity to perform crazy actions against many enemies at once. This is especially fun because there is no initiative, or division of time to resolve combat. It simply happens as the player says it does, unless vetoed, and dice rolls happen after this (dice pools are based on the amount of description a player gives about their character's action), and the amount of successes determines not IF the players succeed, but if their actions advanced their ultimate goals (knocking all the mooks out, disarming a bomb, evading security, et cetera). For nemesis fights, the nemeses are treated like players and can make rolls, describe their attacks and defensive maneuvers, and have "chi" which counts as health when attacks are not properly defended against. My nemesis fights were pretty standard fair (I thought more about the setting I wanted to run the game in than the story itself), but afterwards I did find this great list of nemesis tactics to use in the future.

I'll write on the setting we used for this game later (I'm currently refining it to try and use again), but overall I found Wushu to be a great system for quick flowing, action intensive games. I downloaded Wirefu and there are several other pdf books for it if you want greater detail on specific settings/play styles for $5 bucks a pop. Or just download the free open rules from the creator (Daniel Bayn)'s website. 

Killing Your Character For The Greater Good

One of my last posts was a write up of a Hunter story I ran. I'm currently running another story in our Hunter group. It's been a fun game, and it's interesting shifting ST's around every story giving us widely different types of problems to deal with, but one thing thats been bothering me is that on the back of the Hunter book is it mentions many hunters die or go mad. 

The way that our group has run in the past, and this is likely my own fault, is that there was this implicit rule: unless you wanted your character to, or unless you fucked up somehow, you didn't die - despite what the dice may say. In hunter this has led to many adventures where our characters get by just fine, and where the threat of death seems unrealistic so long as we take the time to plan our actions and go into any situation as prepared as we can be. 

This kind of play has kept us, at least slightly, at odds with the darker themes that hunter wants the player to experience. Last night during the story I ran I don't think I changed that, but I did the next best thing: I killed my own character. I really liked playing him, and I thought he contributed well enough to the group, but I felt it was long overdue for someone to die; to drive home the brutality inherent in maintaining The Vigil. The players' group was helping another hunter who's cell had just been killed by a pack of werewolves. They hunted those same werewolves down. This happened quickly so maybe no one had time to think about it, but no one mentioned the possibility of death or the danger involved in fighting three werewolves that just took down the bulk of a strongly armed hunter cell. 

I tried to make the death savage and fast. One of the werewolves took a huge chunk of my character's torso out, and another bit him in the neck (while still in human form). The loss of blood came on so fast that he didn't even get the chance to speak any last words. I get the impression that the reality of this didn't hit the player's until after much damage had already been done. This was somewhat intentional though: I had my character act as comic relief twice earlier in the session - once even as the fight began - to try and catch everyone off guard. I think this worked, and the fight itself - I'm guessing - at first probably came across as just another fight. But that's what I wanted it to be. There's no reason why a hunter wouldn't die in any fight with supernatural beings. These werewolves weren't big antagonists or especially gifted, but they were still something that ought to be terrifying and able to rip apart mortals. 

Thematically, I believe this is appropriate for Hunter, and probably the World of Darkness in general. For other games, Exalted, realism is less required, and it's probably only a "boss" fight that a character death would be thematically appropriate. Overall, I believe I killed my character off for the greater good of our episodic hunter chronicle.