The Wine List of The Welcome Wench

What follows is a reply to a thread at theRPGsite in which I put forth my idea of what's important in preparing a game-world that's meant to be played, as opposed to a game-world which is a referee's plaything. I've referenced this a few times in various online discussions.

Read the bill of fare for the Inn of the Welcome Wench in The Village of Hommlet. If I start my campaign with nothing but the village of Hommlet, I know that there's a place called Keoland which exports reasonably priced brandy and wine. That could mean the quality is merely middling, or it's simply closer and therefore less expensive to ship - most likely it's some combination of the two. I get a sense that the vintners of Urnst enjoy some natural advantages over the Keoish, and that the two are probably trade competitors. I'm also pretty sure that Veluna is someplace special, because their wine is in demand enough to be found in a small country inn at a price few locals could ever hope to pay.

I can build a region from a wine list, a wine list that is something with which the adventurers can interact from the first time we sit down to play.

I didn't need to detail Keoland, or how it came to be called Keoland, or what it was called a thousand years before it was called Keoland, or what the terrain of Keoland was like ten thousand years before that and then a hundred thousand years before that, in order to plant the seeds - grape vines, actually - of a place called Keoland in the minds of the players.

My bullshit detector works really well, and it tells me the difference between 'stuff that matters to the players' and 'stuff that's primarily written for me.' My first order of business as referee is create stuff that matters to the players, and that means understanding what they are likely to want to do.

You know why Traveller UWPs work so well? Because they answer the questions player want to know first: can I fuel my starship? will the air kill me? can I pack heat? what kinds of gear are available?

Crossposted at Promise City.

And Now For Something Completely Different . . .

I'm playing Boot Hill, and I decided to write about it.

Social Skills and Roleplaying

Okay, let's get this out of the way right from the giddyup: roleplaying is not 'talking in funny voices.' In-character dialog may be a component of roleplaying, but it is not roleplaying in-and-of-itself.

At its most basic, roleplaying answers the question, 'What will my character do now?' Referring to one's character in the third person all the time is no less roleplaying than speaking only in-character. The is no purity or superiority in the latter approach; I personally enjoy first-person, in-character dialog, both as a player and as a referee, but I don't think less of gamers who prefer the remove of, 'My guy says . . .'

With that in mind, we can dispense with the notion that social skills diminish roleplaying any more than any other skills do. The overwhelming majority of the roleplaying games out there include some sort of rules for social interaction, whether they are as basic as reaction and loyalty rolls in D&D or as involved as Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits. The notion of resolving social interaction through 'pure roleplay,' without some sort of recourse to the rules, is limited to a tiny handful of games, or to gamers who choose to ignore the rules in games which include them; in my experience, the latter are far more common than the former.

So why do some gamers have a nutty over social skills? In my experience, there are a couple of reasons for this. First, some gamers are of the opinion, 'I can't thrust a rapier or swing from a chandelier at the table, so I need rules and rolls for those, but I can just say what my character says, and I don't need rules for that!' That's certainly true: adjudication of non-player character reactions can be handled by the referee without recourse to a die roll or an attribute score, but once again, very few games actually leave social interaction solely to the referee's discretion. The norm is to include rules for resolution, whether those rules are rendered with a broad-brush or crafted in intricate detail.

Second, some games give social skills a bad name, though not always deservedly so. Tales of d20 'diplomancers' optimised to take advantage of the Diplomacy or Bluff or Intimidate skills, breaking entire campaigns by turning a social skill into a form of mind control, can be found in the many different corners where gamers gather, on- and off-line. Despite the fact that at least some of these stories come from misinterpreting the actual rules associated with the skills, they reinforce the predilections of those who prefer to remove or ignore most or all of the rules for social interactions, or more rarely to find those few games with no such rules at all.

Third, as noted right at the beginning, gamers conflating roleplaying with in-character dialog - the 'amateur thespians' - express the opinion that social skills 'inhibit roleplaying!' by 'reducing social interaction to the roll of a die.' I think that's bollocks. Consider the following.

Example 1: "Ahead of you, on a curve in the stream, is a stone bridge. A carriage is overturned at the far end of the bridge, creating a barricade blocking passage to the road beyond. Behind the carriage you see the tips of a dozen pikes above an equal number of gleaming morions. To the right, across the stream, just inside the tree line, is a hastily-built stone revetment, and behind it the light through the trees glints off the barrels of a half-dozen arquebuses. Because of the curve in the stream, the revetment is at right angles to the bridge, giving the arquebusiers a clear field of fire across the open ground approaching the span."

"Uh . . . I roll for Tactics."

Example 2: "The king's minister, Enfou, pulls you aside as dancers swirl to the musicians huddled in one corner of the ballroom. 'The king is desperate,' he says. 'The baron de Bauchery can raise enough mercenaries to defend the frontier, but he refuses to do so unless he the king promises him Princess Pinkflower's hand in marriage. Meanwhile the conte di Grognardo is the best commander we have, but he refuses to serve under de Bauchery, and he wants the princess' hand for his son.'"

"Uh . . . I roll for Diplomacy."

Here's the thing: social skills are used to resolve your attempts to accomplish a task. They don't do your roleplaying for you.

In the first example, you, the player, need to decide how the adventurers are going to get past the soldiers holding the bridge, and in the second you need to figure out how you're going to resolve the conflict between the courtiers in time to get the soldiers to the front. Your character's social skills resolve how well you accomplish what you set out to do.

Moreover, social skills are not charm spells. A non-player character made Helpful through the Diplomacy skill in d20 may be willing to take considerable risks on behalf of your highly persuasive character, but that doesn't make the npc a thrall. The npc will still look after his interests and pursue his agenda while offering assistance to the adventurers.

I've used rolls for social interactions in every game I've ever played, from the aforementioned Charisma-adjusted reaction rolls and loyalty scores for henchmen and hirelings in AD&D to the Contact rules in Top Secret to the social skills of d20 and now Flashing Blades, and in my experience they neither inhibit in-character dialog nor do they result in the players substituting skill rolls for actually having to figure out how to best use those skills to get what they want.

Now, if a game's social skills are being called into play, it follows that the stats of both player and non-player characters come into play. Next up, a quick look at stats for non-player characters.

I Didn't Spend All Those Years Playing Boot Hill and Not Learn a Little Something About Bravery

A 2e Boot Hill character's attributes are Speed, Gun Accuracy, Throwing Accuracy, Bravery, Strength, and Experience. Five of the six affect how well your character fights; the sixth, Strength, determines how much damage the character can take.

The five attributes, including Bravery, which affect combat include modifiers to a character's speed and/or accuracy with various weapons. The Bravery attribute score increases or decreases a character's Speed and Accuracy, for example, providing a discrete, quantifiable impact on the character's performance in the game: a character with a high Bravery score is cool under fire, faster and more accurate than his counterpart with a low Bravery attribute value.

Consider a character who is a town marshal with a Coward Bravery rating and no Experience; maybe he got the job through a political connection, or maybe the townsfolk stuck the badge on him because no one else wanted it and he didn't have the guts to say no. Now a gang of bank robbers come to town, and it's the marshal's job to confront them.

Now here's the thing: there's nothing about the attribute itself rules-wise which determines if or how the marshal will confront the robbers; the attribute modifiers only speak to what happens if he tries to fire his gun at them. The attribute and the modifiers influence how successful the character is in a particular task; they say nothing about when or how the character decides to attempt the task.

So the marshal checks his six-shooters, grabs a double-barrel from the rack, and walks into the dusty Main Street to face-down the robbers. His hands shake like he has the palsy, sweat drips off his brow making his eyes sting, and his mouth is as dry as an arroyo in August so that when he shouts, "Throw up yer hands!" it comes out as little more than a hoarse whisper, and that is what is represented by the Bravery attribute modifiers, not the decision to confront the gang - that decision is solely the province of the player.

In thinking this through, I realised that the character's stats are reflected not in what the character does, but in how well he does it. By treating character attributes as a nothing more than a rules interface and not a determinant of personality, roleplaying and character stats exist independently of one another. Put another way, roleplay your character as you like, and let the stats take care of themselves.

Consider another example, this time the loquacious player who uses a 'social stat' like Charisma or Charm as his character's dump stat; whether you're using something as simple as a reaction roll-plus-modifier or something as complex as Duel of Wits, let the player be as charming and as eloquent as he likes, and let the dice handle the actual result. The player of a would-be warlord may deliver a stirring in-character speech, but if his Charisma modifier is in the negatives, however inspiring the player may believe it to be, the warlord isn't persuasive, for this is the limitation imposed by the character's actual ability, in the same way that his Strength or Dexterity may affect his effectiveness at fighting.

If the player wants the character to be better at something, then it's on the player to choose that for the character, by whatever means the system supports, whether that's adding skill points, raising an attribute, or whatever - a would-be Cassanova with a 5 Charisma needs to invest skill points in Bluff or Diplomacy or whatever, or accept that he's only going to get play when he's really, really lucky.)

I've floated this argument on different roleplaying gaming forums over the years, and I found it's one which reliably brings out the self-anointed real roleplayers to tell me I'm doing it oh-so-profoundly wrong, to accuse me of advocating 'roll-play over roleplay,' and on, and on, and on. Perhaps their most compelling - though by no means persuasive - argument is, 'But that's what the books say!' And pretty often they're right. There's a sort of schizophrenia between what some rule books say about attribute scores, and what they mean in actual play. One of the rules-rebuttals offered is the 2e AD&D PHB, in a section subheaded, "What the Numbers Man," which offers examples of interpreting character personality from the attribute scores.

I have two specific issues with this. First, in the case of many roleplaying games but AD&D in particular, the implications of the attribute scores don't relate well to other parts of the game. Take this, frex, from the page above: "His Dexterity is 3? Why? Is he naturally clumsy or blind as a bat?" Well, if he's blind as a bat, is his chance of detecting secret doors lower? Is his outdoor encounter detection range reduced? Or if he's clumsy, is his movement reduced when he runs? Does it affect his melee attacks? Interpreting the stats this way has knock-on effects through other parts of the game with which Dex 3 simply doesn't interact. In 1e AD&D, Dex 3 means the character must be a cleric, that she cannot be a half-elf, elf or halfling, and that she suffers penalties to her reaction time, missle attacks, armor class, and certain saves. And that's it. Neither "blind as a bat" nor "naturally clumsy" fit because of the way attribute scores relate to the rest of the rules.

Second, insisting that attribute scores define personality may limit the range of potential characterisations to 'playing to type.' For example, maybe Rath, again from the 2e example, is a thief who really wants to be the leader of a gang, so he's forever trying to recruit cutpurses and bandits. But of course he's not a natural leader at all, no matter how hard he tries - I know this because his reaction rolls and loyalty scores suck when he tries to lead. The fun thing is, his rare successes simply reinforce his perception of himself, or offer him hope, so he keeps trying.

Playing against type can make for memorable characters. I have a great example of this from my Flashing Blades campaign, Riordan O'Neill, King's Musketeer, would-be Casanova with (originally) Charm 11. Most of his attempts at courtship and seduction are an uphill struggle, and luck is a huge factor in his successes. It's his repeated attempts at being the great lover in spite of lacking the natural acuity reflected by his Charm score that make him so much fun in actual play.

Or how 'bout the lily-livered Boot Hill town marshal I wrote about earlier? Maybe he took the job of marshal out of a sense of responsibility to his community, and he's determined to overcome his shakes when faced with the bank robbers. Or maybe he's a braggart and a bully who likes lording the position of marshal over the rest of the townsfolk, but like most bullies, deep-down he's gutless - he goes to face the bank robbers because he knows if he doesn't, he'll be exposed as yellow.

There's nothing wrong with playing to type, of course, but by unhooking personality from ability, a broader range of characterisations becomes available to the players.

'But what about immersion?' the real-roleplayers complain. 'An Int 6 barbarian shouldn't solve puzzles as well as an Int 18 magic-user!' There are a couple of weaknesses to this rebuttal as well. I don't mean to keep picking on D&D here, but since this argument comes up so often with respect to The World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game™, D&D examples provide a convenient gamer lingua franca. First, let's look again at what the rules say Intelligence actually provides to the character. In 1e AD&D, frex, Intelligence covers the number of possible languages spoken, the minimum and maximum number of spells a magic-user may know by level, the chance to learn a given spell, and the minimum score required to learn spells of a particular level; in 3e, Intelligence covers languages again, skill points, and the modifier for a number of skills. There is no mention of puzzle solving in there at all, and referees who 'slip clues' to players running characters with a high Intelligence score are adding something to the game that simply doesn't exist to compensate for this.

Looking more closely at the rules, what Intelligence, Wit, &c often provide in roleplaying games are resources, not abilities. Perhaps the player of the Int 6 barbarian solves sudokus in his sleep, but he's not solving a puzzle in a language his character doesn't understand until or unless someone translates it for him. Skills may also be gatekeepers, in that a character must learn a certain skill simply to be able to perform a given task. A player who's a master at pike-and-shot wargames is still limited to making brilliant maneuvers in Flashing Blades by first taking the Strategy skill and then rolling under one-third of his character's Wit. In each case, the player's ability is constrained by the character's resources.

In truth, I admit I couldn't care less if a player isn't roleplaying her character's Wit 6. Maybe it comes from starting with D&D way back when, but honestly, I expect players to metagame, to rely on their resourcefulness and experience, and I design my challenges accordingly. I never expected players to pretend their characters didn't know, say, that fire kills trolls; if I wanted them to face an unexpected challenge, then I would simply change things up on them, like trolls which are killed with salt instead of fire. One of the characters in my Flashing Blades campaign nearly died because his player ignored a clue - a case of Anjou wine - which came straight out of The Three Musketeers novel. Easter eggs from books or movies aren't there out of laziness or to try to be clever - they're there because they're fun for the players, and I fully expect them to take advantage of them, or I wouldn't include them in the first place. We're playing a game, and the experience should reward smart play.

Second, because attribute scores are often disconnected from other rules, what tends to snap my suspenders of disbelief isn't an Int 6 barbarian is solving puzzles, but rather roleplaying him as the same stupid lunk at 10th level as he is a 1st level. The barbarian's explored ancient ruins, fought men and monsters, survived poisoning, travelled across trackless wastes, seen priests drive off and destroy undead with a word, felt the power of magic, raised a horde and sacked an evil temple, maybe even been turned to stone and restored to flesh, and yet a few gamers would have that Int 6 trump all of the actual play experiences of the character - and no, that's not hyperbole.

There are roleplaying games out there which integrate both who a character is and how that does what she does - Pendragon is one of my favorite examples of 'personality mechanics' in a roleplaying game. Ability scores, however, are not personality rules, in my experience, and unfortunately even the rule books themselves sometimes confuse this.

Lumpers and Splitters

There are two kinds of people in the world . . . [insert joke here].

Simulating real-world activities in a game often requires some measure of abstraction - a die roll to see if you can stab your foe with a sword, or to climb a trellis to a balcony. Just how abstract is necessary and desirable is a source of near constant debate among gamers. One element of creating an abstraction of a real-world process or action is deciding how complex the abstraction needs to be, balancing the want of detail for the need of playability. Each abstraction, then, involves trade-offs, and many of these trade-offs come from lumping or splitting like things into a single unifying rule or many separate rules.

On the one hand, you have a game designer like Gary Gygax, who in OD&D wrote that all weapons did 1d6 damage, lumping together everything from a crossbow to a dagger to a sword to a polearm. On the other hand, you have a game designer like . . . Gary Gygax, who in 1e AD&D famously included twenty different polearms in the core rules of the game, each with its own rules for determining how effective it is against different types of armor, how fast it is to use in combat, and the different ranges of damage done.

Another old school example of splitting and lumping is the difference between firearms in Top Secret and Boot Hill. The core rules for Top Secret include thirty-one distinct firearms, from the Colt M1911 and Browning Hi-Power to the AKM and M-16; the Top Secret Companion added another thirty, while articles in Dragon lavished attention on Uzi variants and the weapons of Heckler & Koch. Each gun has its own projectile weapon value based on a variety of characteristics. Contrast TS's approach with that of Boot Hill, which has thirteen basic firearm types - single-action revolver, double-action revolver, fast-draw revolver, rifle, carbine, &c. In BH, a SAR6 - a six-shot single-action revolver - can represent everything from a Colt Peacemaker to a Smith & Wesson Schofield to a Remington Model 1875.

There's utility in both approaches, of course, but as much as I enjoy comparing the effectiveness of various polearms versus plate armor on the weapon versus armor type table or deciding which is more my agent's style, the Walther PPK or the Beretta Bantam, I find myself leaning more toward lumping when it comes to weaponry in roleplaying games. Once I was comfortable with describing a CBR - cap-and-ball revolver - as 'a greasy Colt Single Action Army' or a R15 as 'a gleaming brass-plated Henry rifle' when I was running Boot Hill, I grew to appreciate the versatility and relative simplicity of the approach. For me, when it comes to the rules of the game, ease of play trumps evocative flavor - the latter I will add to the mix myself.

Like Boot Hill and firearms, Flashing Blades takes a spare approach to swords. There are six basic types of swords in FB: longswords, rapiers, foils, sabers, cutlasses, and two-handed swords. "Longsword" and "foil" can be a bit confusing, as both are anachronisms as used in the rules - longswords, which are closer to two-handed swords in FB, for the most part fell out of use in the 16th century, while foils are the 18th century descendants of the smallsword.

Adding flavor to the swords of Flashing Blades begins with identifying some of the different swords that each of the five represent.

FB Weapon	Real-world Examples
Longsword	Basket-hilted broadsword, side-sword, pallasch, schiavona, Walloon sword, mortuary sword
Rapier	Rapier, Pappelheimer rapier, cup-hilt rapier
Foil	Smallsword
Saber	Sabre, szlaba, kilij, Schnäpf
Cutlass	Cutlass, hanger
Two-handed Sword	Doppelhänder, estoc, claymore

'Basket-hilted broadsword' is the correct name for what FB labels a "longsword." The side-sword is an Italian blade, later called spada da lato, developed from the Spanish espada ropera in the late 16th century but still popular among soldiers. The pallasch is the Hungarian broadsword, popular in the Empire, while the schiavona is its Italian counterpart, taking its name from the Dalmatian guards - Schiavoni - who served the doges of Venice. The Walloon sword is a Dutch weapon while the mortuary sword is the English Civil War-ear name for the broadsword - the style of sword used to execute Charles I, many royalists would have an image of the late king on the pommel or hilt.

The Pappelheimer rapier has a distinctive guard from the more-or-less standard swept-hilt rapier, developed in Germany; the cup-hilt rapier is popular among the Spanish.

The smallsword is a mid- to late-seventeenth century development - in my own campaign, set in the 1620s, this would be more properly considered simply a small rapier - but for simplicity's sake, I go ahead and call it a smallsword anyway, replacing Mark Pettigrew's anachronism with my own.

The szlaba, kilij, and Schnäpf are Polish, Turkish, and Swiss sabers, respectively.

The hanger is a hunting sword, with a heavy, slightly curved blade, used for performing the coup de grâce on a wounded animal.

The Swiss and German Doppelhänder, later known as the Zweihänder, descended from the medieval longsword. The French estoc, is a proper longsword, and may be used one- or two-handed. The claymore is the Scottish two-handed sword, which is not to be confused with the basket-hilted broadsword also called a claymore.

I actually had a gamer tell me once that his group was too busy playing for fluff. Fortunately, I've never experienced anyone like that across the table from me - most players seem to prefer, 'the Spaniard with the cup-hilt rapier of shining Toledo steel' to 'the guy with the sword,' so I make the effort to build out from the rules to a more evocative description. That said, I don't really need the rulebook to do it for me - 'no flowers, by request.'

Random Encounters That Don't Suck

. . . or, How a Long-Forgotten Adventure Module Called Mad Mesa Made Me the Referee I Am Today.

I'm not going to waste time and space on the rationales for including random encounters in a roleplaying game - it's already been done better by someone else, and at this point, most gamers either get it or they don't.

One of the reasons random encounters get shat upon is, to paraphrase, 'wandering monsters are boring and distract from the adventure.' Now, bearing in mind that one of the roles of the referee is to make encounters interesting and integrate them with the setting, if you look only at the tables in, say, a published adventure like In Search of the Unknown - "Orcs (1-4)," "Giant Rats (2-5)," "Berserkers (1-2)" - and applied them uncritically - unthinkingly - by rote - then it's kinda-sort understandable why they might seem boring. However, the random encounter tables in most early sources were far more engaged and integrated with the setting, like the echoing footsteps and settling ruins, the hunting tick and the bandit reinforcements, of The Village of Hommlet. Other games and products ramped this up tremendously, from the fairly sparse on detail but gonzo and evocative Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy to the myriad slice-of-life-in-Sanctuary encounter tables in Chaosium's wonderful Thieves World box set to the gold standard of published sandbox settings, Chaosium's Griffin Mountain for RuneQuest. When I've described my approach to running a roleplaying game campaign on different intreweb forums over the years, I've been told many times that it sounds a lot like Griffin Mountain, which was interesting in that I'd never actually seen Griffin Mountain before finding a copy this past year - now that I have seen it, then I can say, yeah, my campaigns are a lot like that.

My original inspiration for random encounter design wasn't Griffin Mountain, however - it was TSR's Mad Mesa for Boot Hill.

Mad Mesa is something of an odd bird. It's a solo module, written in a 'choose-your-own-adventure' format - "6. You are standing on Broadway opposite the north window of building 21. You may go west 62 or east 5." - set in a town on the verge of a range war between rival ranchers. There're intrigues and mishaps, and depending on the player's choices and the luck of the dice, the adventurer can either make a tidy fortune or or be gunned down by one of the factions, or the law. The format makes solo play a bit stilted - 'But I wanna peek in the window of building 21, and then I wanna climb on the roof!' - but it's an entertaining setting full of fun Western clichés. The module includes notes for running it for a group of player characters as well.

But it's the "Chance Encounters" table that left a lasting impression on me.

First, every chance encounter is with a named individual - no "Orcs (1-4)" - with a distinctive motivation and a brief but revealing backstory - the brash kid out to make a name for himself, the snake oil salesman, the drunk and his temperance-preaching wife. This is, in my experience, what "Orcs (1-4)" should bring to the table, and in the hands if a capable referee, it does, but for some gamers this was a conceptual hurdle they apparently never managed to cross - generic 'wandering monsters' appeared at random and disappeared the same way, with no real connection to anything in the setting. There were certainly many more examples of random encounter tables that were woven into their locations - before I played Mad Mesa, I typically tied random encounters to locations with the adventure site - patrolling guards from the gatehouse, rats from the warren on level 1, Imperial Marines from the Dagger-class cruiser in docking bay 93, a pair of enemy agents conducting surveillance from a panel van. But a big part of what I took away from Mad Mesa's chance encounters was a sense of random encounters as strands in space leading off into the undiscovered portions of the game-world, of implications reaching beyond the immediate circumstances of the locale where the encounter takes place - Irving "the Mad" has nothing to do with the events taking place in Mad Mesa - rather, he is a part of the larger game-world.

Second, several of the chance encounters are integrated into the backstory of Mad Mesa's range war. The player character may run across members of the Russell and Kane factions, and depending on the locations visited in the course of the adventure, the encounter could prove inconsequential or deadly. This created a continuous feedback loop between the chance encounters and the keyed adventure locations - if your character kills Skins McGregory in a chance encounter after being warned to leave town by the Russell faction, then ol' Skins isn't available for the climactic gunfight of the module should your character take part. There's also lil' Joey Black, paperboy for the Mad Mesa Gazette, who for the price of a buffalo nickel can fill you in on the the range war backstory - random encounter as game-world exposition.

What impressed me at age fifteen - and still impresses me today - was how the different pieces fit together in a non-linear way. The chance encounters - and can I add that "chance encounters" as a term of art kicks the everlovin' crap out of 'random encounters' or 'wandering monsters?' - were part of the events of the town, past and present, but they could be presented in a way that didn't require a pre-fabricated plot to unfold for them to make sense. The nature of a chance encounter with Skins McGregory and his Winchester is determined by when the encounter takes place and by the circumstances of the meeting, rather than by a particular order of events necessary to advance 'the story.' What story there is arises from the interplay of encounters.

Random encounters in my campaigns are an important part of the game-world delivery system. They represent the 'living world' which the adventurers inhabit, serving up a variety of unfolding events and chance meetings. When I sat down with the idea of running a cape-and-sword campaign, I compiled a short list of genre tropes appropriate to the campaign. "Coincidences abound" was the second one on my list: in swashbuckling tales, characters run into each other at opportune - and inopportune - moments, so I wanted that to be part of the campaign. The non-linear interaction between site-based encounters and random encounters provides a mechanism for introducing real, dice-driven coincidences into actual play, without the need for dropping a plot-hammer on the players. One such encounter already took place - a chance encounter with a duelist was followed up by another chance encounter with the same duelist at the horse-market. A visit to the Temple enclosure, the Black Cross club, the Louvre, or the Knights of Saint John commandery in Marseilles all include the possibility of meeting this same character as well. Absent other factors, such as player choices or consequences arising out of a chance meeting, the character's appearance is governed by the roll of the dice, and his story in the actual play is a record of his interactions with the adventurers.

Some random encounters in the campaign are pretty straightforward; like Chris Miller, Mad Mesa's would-be gunslinger, they draw first and ask questions later, if at all. An encounter with a band of highwaymen on a King's Road, or a brawler in a tavern, doesn't need to be loaded down with deep connections - they are slices of life in the swashbucklers' world of the 17th century. There are no recurring characters, no additional chance meetings - once you've met Irving the Mad, Wild West homicidal maniac, you're unlikely to meet him twice . . . one way or the other. But some of these encounters also get slightly more involved backstories. An encounter with a drunken nobleman in a tavern may have a strand that connects him through his brother, a parish priest, back to Cardinal Richelieu - imagine Chris Miller's brothers coming to avenge his death. By giving even simple encounters a small backstory which reaches out into the setting, everything the adventurers do may carry unexpected, far-reaching consequences, for better or worse.

This week I'm going to look at the ways and means by which I create random encounters for Le Ballet de l'Acier, my Flashing Blades campaign. Tomorrow I'll begin by putting together a random encounter using the tables provided by Flashing Blades itself.

LoS

Wargame rules often spend a fair number of paragraphs on who can see whom. Line of sight - usually abbreviated LoS - can be a part of everything from firing weapons to charging to a commander changing a unit's orders, so wargames treat it with some care. Fans of the original Squad Leader will remember the dot in the center of each hex used for determining whether a particular hex could be seen from another hex, or the determination of "hull down" for AFVs on ridgelines.

After wargames birthed roleplaying games, the need to determine when something was in view to the characters remained. OD&D, for instance, says that monsters are detected at a distance of 20-80 feet underground or 40-240 yards outdoors unless the party is surprised. It's interesting there's no consideration for individual character proficiency, and when such a differentiation appears, it's associated with classes and skills, not ability scores. Frex, the 1e AD&D Ranger, as a class ability, is more likely to surprise an opponent and less likely to be surprised in turn, while in Traveller, the Tactics and Leader skills and military experience favorably modify surprise for the adventurers.

Boot Hill retains a facing system more like that of the tabletop miniature skirmish game from which it was derived, with characters able to observe a 90-degree arc ahead of them and the ability to observe someone in concealment wholly at referee discretion. I soon added a house rule that a character could spend one movement point to 'look around,' which allowed the character to extend the observation axis by another 90-degrees to the left or right; in this way, a character could run but would be slowed by taking his attention off the direction in which he was moving, which seemed a fair trade-off. Again, the character's attributes played no particular role in determining what could be seen, and in BH, even the dice were removed as a factor, as opposed to D&D or Traveller.

It wasn't too many years before roleplaying games introduced rules for alertness, perception or observation, often associated with a character attribute and/or skill, and this soon became the norm; with some games, such as d20-based systems, a combination of attribute scores, skill points, and feats could produce 'Spot-monkeys' with superhuman powers of observation.

Though I think that later roleplaying games tend to make too big a deal out of things like Spot, Alertness, and so forth, treating all characters as equally perceptive is perhaps a bit too coarse-grained as well, appropriate to small units but not distinct individuals. Accordingly, for my Flashing Blades campaign, I use a blending of the two methods. The core rules make no mention of surprise or observation, but examples in the published adventures point to both the Wit and Luck attributes; in fact, it was this usage of Luck that led me to spell out that in my campaign, Luck is, "rather than a metaphysical force or quality, the insightfulness of the character: it's the ability to notice subtle clues or behaviors, to be in tune with one's surroundings" - a gambler, for which Luck is the associated attribute, isn't so much smiled upon by Fortune as he is able to pick up tells from his fellow gamblers, for example. As such, Luck is often used to represent the power of observation or perception in actual play.

As a modifier to an individual's Luck attribute, I also use the combined surprise and initiative rules for original, 'classic' Traveller - the skills Captaincy and Strategy replace Traveller's Leader and Tactics respectively, and service on a campaign gives the benefit of military experience. If the adventurers are surprised as a group, then individual Luck checks are made at a penalty of Luck/2 or Luck/3 at my discretion. For me this achieves the best of both worlds.