The Artifact RPG

In various games I have had players complain that they should have been able to hit a target. This mostly happened years ago before three quarters of my group were hunters. I don’t get that argument much anymore because hunters know how hard it is to hit their target.

To clarify what I’m talking about, it’s not hard to hit  a paper target. Even messing around I can hit a target the size of a tea saucer at seventy yards all day with a shotgun, pistol or rifle. I used to be able to get really good grouping with a bow years ago. That’s not a big challenge.

I want to tell you about four deer in two days of hunting. Yes I hunt. I hunt for food and not for trophies but when I get the chance to shoot at a buck I have to take it because bucks are sneakier than does. Out of the thirty or more animals I’ve harvested I’ve only gotten three or four bucks. I get a buck tag every year but it usually goes unfilled which means wasted money.

Now the reason why I want to tell these stories is to give a GM that doesn’t have experience like this an idea of what it’s like to have someone who has a basic ability to try a somewhat complicated task.

The first deer was a doe, she and her herd came stomping in behind me and all I had to do was wait till I could get the lead doe in my sights. I had time to aim, I was calm. I have the meat in storage now.

The second deer was a buck, a six point if you’re curious. I was crouched on the ground at about 50 yards trying to get a shot between brush and trees. Even a tiny stick can deflect a shotgun slug, it sounds improbable but it’s true. The buck was headed away from me into a field of dense brush, past that, he would be too far for me to hit. I took a pot shot and missed. He turned around, running across my path again, I had enough time to pump and aim for where I knew he would cross. I can only say I have never been able to even graze a deer running through the woods, it’s a waste of bullets. I tried anyway and predictably failed. My wife got him a few minutes later.

The third deer was a spike buck surrounded by five doe. He wasn’t far away but there were a lot of trees in between me and him. There was one opening that I could see his shoulder. The kill zone was right next to one of the trees but I took the shot. I was standing and at the last millisecond before the gun went off, a slight wobble or muscle twitch brought the sights over the edge of the tree. He jumped a little, startled by the sound, I was out of bullets that day and he walked away.

Yesterday, the fourth deer, came traipsing through a field. A big buck, I didn’t count his tines because I thought I had him and I could count them later. I lined up a shot and took it. Now in my defense, this was a long shot, 80-90 yards and that’s a lot for a shotgun. I did hit him. Maybe the rest of this is a commentary on hit point more than skill. He ran for three hundred or more yards through the woods. I had ample signs that it was a good hit. A smaller deer would have dropped within feet of being hit. I tracked him and found where he lay down but he wasn’t dead. He jumped up and trotted off. There was no opportunity to fire again. I tried tracking him from 11 am to 2:30 pm with no sign of him. Then by sheer dumb chance I picked up his trail again five hundred yards away. Then the trail went cold again. I looked until nightfall I’m quite sure he lived through the night and maybe through today.

The point for the GM is that on paper, with dice rolls only, failure can seem unreasonable. It’s when you role play out why things happen as they do, you’re looking to explain to your players that it isn’t all random chance that cause them to fail a roll. The rolls are a simulation of seemingly small events that end up being significant. It isn’t the roll that made them fail, the roll is a simulation of things that made them fail. Either let the player role play out why they failed or you can fill in the blanks for them. If they players learn to role play out their failures the gaming table will be a much more enjoyable experience for everyone.

They just marched though his army of baddies, they broke into his stronghold and now they’re ready to fight the ringleader. You’ve prepared your intimidating bad guy speech and deliver it flawlessly with a scary voice and musical accompaniment.

Your players just snicker. One let’s out a “Yeah right.” In short they’re not impressed.

This should be the crescendo of the action but the players are confident enough that they aren’t even worried. What went wrong? You wanted them trembling in their boots but now they’re laughing and taunting.

Realistically it makes sense. I had one player ask me “Why would this guy need an army if he was really tough?” If you had just fought your way through the Nazi armies and came face to face with Hitler, who do you think would be scared, you or Hitler?

So how do you make the tension peak just as the players get to the end of the game? How do you make them afraid of the Big Bad?

For one, if the PCs aren’t limping up the stairs to the throne room, their’s no reason for them to be afraid. Why would they be if they’re at the top of their game?

Have the PCs ever been defeated by this big bad before? No? Well, again, why be afraid?

Have they been in fear of his diabolical traps? No? Well?

The PCs have to be in mortal peril with their backs up against the wall, their girlfriend being used as a hostage and their dog hanging over a pit of boiling lava before they’re going to feel the tension. They have to be experiencing the danger and not know how they will get out of it before the big bad can deliver his triumphant speech.

Get the timing wrong and they’ll be laughing and taunting again.

It’s bound to happen at one point or another. You have a group of players that take their characters off on grand adventures, gather power and fame and then. . . one dies.

How you deal with the heartbreak is one issue to deal with, but I’ll put the cart before the horse and not talk about that today. I want to talk about how you put the player group back together. The bereft player now must generate a new character. You now have several high power characters and one beginner. Who do you think is not going to be having fun for a while?

Going from a character that almost never fails to one that only sometimes succeeds is frustrating. If it had been a TPK and everyone had to go back to start, that would be one thing. Having to watch as everyone else is neck deep in danger and loving it while you’ve got to have floaties in the shallow end is no fun.

So what can the GM do? You’ll have to work with the player to find a character concept they like.

One option is to encourage Min/Maxing. I know that it’s usually bad form but in this case it could save a player from being left behind. In some systems this may not even be enough to balance things out.

Another option is to go story heavy on the character. Instead of worrying about what a character can do, emphasize who they are. They don’t have to all be the long lost heir to the throne. The character could be a local boy who has a lot of contacts in town. Everyone knows him and likes him. That can be really powerful if the GM leaves a place for it in the story.

One of the most natural options is to fill a need that the party has or didn’t know they had. Things like healers and mechanics may not always seem the most exciting but if the GM makes the job necessary in the story the character is now a functional member of the group even if they can’t hold their own in a fight.

Any other ways you’ve found that makes a new player character feel at home in a group?

In a good many RPGs, character history is left up to the player to imagine. By character history I mean a player character’s life before they started adventuring. The problem is that players tend to really overdo it or ignore character history. I’ve seen some games that give the players a hand in outlining what happened in their life before and the results can go from subtle to profound. I’d argue though that even a subtle effect is an important one.

Who Are You?

Think about it for a minute, when you start a new job, people are aware that you existed before you started on the job. It’s only when people get to learn who you were before the job that they get to know YOU. Really, how could it be any different with a character?

Your everyday actions are informed by what happened to you when you were little. Were you popular? Were you bullied? Did you have that one friend that stuck with you through the years? Even if you don’t think about them consciously, those kinds of things alter how we approach people and our outlook on the world.

The problem is that some players are afraid to set these things down as the character’s history because a blank slate is easier to play. You can do anything you want and it’s apparently the character’s personality because they just did it.

Other players will try to insert things into their story that they see as getting them more power in the story. Things like “really a prince raised by peasants”.

How To Fix It

None of us pick all the conditions of our past, so why not flash forward roleplay them? The GM starts off the situation by looking at the basic chargen for the character and starts out.

Looking at the character’s Beauty, “You weren’t a very good looking youth. It even got you picked on in school more often than not.”

Looking at their Strength, “But as you got older and bigger than the kids around you, they stopped picking on you as much but still didn’t respect you.”

Now it’s the players turn, “Well I didn’t want to be a bully but it was useful to occasionally throw my weight around, I did try to limit it though and was always nice to the other kids that weren’t accepted.”

And that could go back and fourth until the character has reached the point where they start adventuring. It’s just one more way to inform the player of how to role play.

There are a lot of complicated things about RPGs. There are complicated rules, sometimes complicated math, complicated worlds, etc. These all feed into a world that is not just a flat boring place. Some people thrive on complex challenges others won’t touch it with a ten foot pole. Complicated can easily be taken too far.

So how far is too far? As a GM how is it your job to manage complexity?

Sometimes recognizing complexity is easy. The player throws up their hands and says “This is too hard!” At other times complexity is more subtle. The player may be trying to keep up but is secretly struggling. Maybe the other players are more experienced or it just clicks with them for some reason and the player that’s struggling doesn’t want to admit it. If you watch their reaction time to a situation you’ll be able to identify a player that’s swamped. If they normally make reasonably quick decisions and are now taking longer and longer to decide on actions, they’re mentally taxed and it’s probably because they don’t know how to use the story or system to get out of the situation they’re in.

How to fix it

Sometimes taking a break can help. My players have often used even brief breaks to discuss the situation and develop a strategy. When the players that are comfortable start outlining how they want to resolve a situation, it often makes the rest of the situation clearer.

In some situations it’s the flood of rules to handle a situation that is too much for a player to memorize. In situations like this it’s generally the GM’s job to handle the rules and walk the players through. For some players this is a temporary thing, for others the handholding will continue as long as they play. Some people just don’t memorize these things (yeah I know it’s weird but you’ll have to get used to it).

What if everyone in the group is lost? Offer a short circuit solution. Give them the solution that has a piece missing that can be inserted by them handling a situation they can understand. Can’t figure out the clues to shut down the reactor? Hey look, there’s someone trapped by some rubble, he looks like he might work here. Can work wonders, the players are back in their element, they know how to solve their problem.