The Artifact RPG

When I was writing the Are Your Games Too Long? post I wanted to dive into this subject as part of it. I didn’t because it would muddy the waters a bit. So if you’re thinking of running shorter games or you just want to keep the players thinking about playing, here’s a way to keep the game going after you get up from the table.

First let’s acknowledge what sitting everyone down at the table is good for. Table time is the best place to handle rules heavy content. Normally this would be combat. My thinking is, keep the rules heavy parts of your game there. Don’t mess with it.

Now, there are also parts of the game that don’t really use a lot of rules but take up a lot of time. The biggest example of this is social interaction. There may be some bluffing rolls or intimidation rolls but they’re not used all the time. There’s also less of a turn structure when in a social situation. Players planning is also an example of a low rule part of the game.

In these situations with the right framing by the GM, the game could keep going even after everyone has got up and left. For instance, the PCs are in the town resupplying and healing up, they also know that the townsfolk know little bits about what’s been going on so they really want find out what each one of them know. At the table, as a GM, I would normally summarize what a group of the townsfolk know because role playing a large number of encounters with people who don’t really know much would be frustrating. If you take away the pressure to get the game going because the interviews are taking too long and spread it over a week, the role playing situation changes. Now you can hand the players small obscure clues, they can think about them and discuss them. The time consuming becomes intriguing.

So how can you implement this? After a game session, we all go our separate ways. Maybe you see people from your game group, maybe you don’t. How can you keep it going? One, people have to live their lives too so keeping it going can’t interfere with everyday life. Second you don’t want someone to have an idea about the game and have to sit on it for too long. You want them to think of the idea, carry it out and then keep going.

My solution for this is the humble text message. When a player wants to tell the GM or other players something, they pull out their phone and send a quick message. The GM gets the message and play moves along, slowly, but it’s moving. Having the right social contract for this kind of play is also important. Most groups will probably want to enforce the understanding that you don’t have to reply right away to a game text. This is where interfering with real life comes into play. Replies will come when the recipient has time to respond, expect it to take a while.

Some people may want to use twitter as a similar tool but that would need everyone in the game to have access to twitter. Most players will have access to a phone that can text.

A few shorthand rules can be useful. Putting a simple “g” at the beginning of the text will also help the recipient to process this text is about the game. They then can read it or store it for later. Agree on shorthands that will work for your game and the options for what the players can do in these away sessions will open up considerably.

The format will be different. There are new challenges to playing like this but when used in the right scenes, it can also open up possibilities that are hard to carry out around the table. For one, players might have more patience for little details. They have more time to mull over puzzles. They may also think more laterally about problems because the pressure to keep moving isn’t there.

GMs will have to think about who they’re not hearing from. Some players could easily dominate play this way and other will be lost. If the GM sends a clue to a player that they haven’t heard from, it may get them involved.

Playing over text message will take adjusting how you structure you games. It may take some thinking to get used to the idea. Try it out and let me know how it went in the comments.

“We don’t have enough time to play a game. Lets just watch a movie.”

Have you ever heard that? At least something similar? If you started playing RPGs when you were a teen you may be like me, expecting games to take 4-8 hours to finish. Then real life started and your games started to get harder and harder to get together.

Now let me ask you this, would you actually get to play more if you played less? Instead of a four hour session once in two months, would you be able to play six one hour sessions?

There is a problem with this if you have a low show up rate. If people are not showing up for 50% of the sessions then they’re back down to 3 hours and they’re still getting less time playing. Not to mention the problem of trying to keep everyone in the loop if they don’t show. So be wary of that and be prepared to discuss it with your players.

How To Play A 1 Hour Game

Playing a one hour game is mostly psychological. The first thing you need to do is set your sights lower. Instead of a story arc completed in one session, only play one scene. This can be really hard to do, especially if everyone is having fun. I know that I want to keep on going. Our last game was 6 hours long, we were having fun and didn’t want it to stop.

You may need to do more planning also. When I GM I have some fuzzy idea of how the game will go, we traditionally play until the PCs meet their goal. To be able to stop mid-story, I need to have intermediate goals planned out. Something concrete that will be a satisfying end point.

If you have players that are used to long sessions, be ready to defend the idea of short games when you say “That’s it for tonight.” Remind them of the last time you played and the time before that. Explain how much momentum is lost when you have to remember what was going on weeks ago.

What about experience?

One of the things that can be thrown off course by having short games is experience. Unless you are awarding according to monsters killed or treasure found (shudder) the normal rate of awarding experience could be thrown off. There are several ways of handling this. One is to allow for a high rate of progression to sweeten the pot for these shorter games. Another is to give a few experience each session and then at the end of the story arc award the balance of what would have been earned. If the players are willing, they may be fine with no experience until the end of the story arc but I’d ask the players if that’s okay with them first. If they are at all reluctant, do something to give some experience in between.

My wife and I often joke that I never do the same job twice. I just pick up a job that I’ve never done before and they keep employing me. So what about planning a campaign like that? Pick, or even better randomly roll for a skill, then build a game based on that skill. If you want to let the players in on the concept, that’s up to you. I’d keep it a secret and see how long it takes them to figure it out. There will be some frustration because it’s likely you’ll hit some skills that the players don’t have. If skills can be used untrained, then let the players struggle through. If not, include some way of them employing someone who does have that skill. Don’t have an NPC steal the spotlight, have the game be about finding the expert and getting them to the place they need to ply their trade. Then just gloss over them doing their job. I’d only roll for their success if there’s a time restraint or other pressure the players have to deal with while the NPC is doing what they do.

In a system with a lot of skills, some are really going to challenge your ability to make a game about it. I’d say try not to skip the really odd ones because you’ll probably come up with a strange game to match. Pull it off well and you may just end up with a really memorable game.

Just a fun idea if you’re out of them for your next campaign. Have you ever done anything similar? Let us know in the comments.

Over at Intwischa they’ve come up with a really cool idea for tracking consumables. I’ve talked about this before with tracking food saying the players can carry either 4, 8 or 12 days of food depending on how much of their pack the characters use for other things. This is a cool system for food, ammo, water, whatever you don’t want to bother tracking but know it would make your game more interesting if you did.

Their system consists of rolling a die each time you use the consumable. If you roll a one on that die, you drop down a die size. For example a d20 represents about 61 of the consumable, a d10 is about 29. If I roll a d20 and get a 1 then I’d go down to a d12, if I got a one after that I drop to a d10. For a more complete description, check out their post and the playtest post they did.

The players mark their character sheet with the die they have left, not the actual number. This makes tracking simple with almost no math while playing. Very nice! I can’t say how amazing an idea this is!

What About Big Numbers?

In The Artifact there are some big numbers for consumables like ammo. An ASO Footsoldier starts with 300 rounds for the G-82. Fortunately there’s a simple solution to this. Those 300 rounds are broken up into 10 clips of 30. Now there’s something interesting about clips, I’ve never had a hard time getting players to track what’s in their clips, just how many clips they have. So this is where this gets really useful, the character has d6 for clips. When they use up a clip, they roll. If they roll a 1 it goes down to a d4. The idea here is that when the character uses groups of a consumable, track the groups.

EDIT: Oops, looks like they already had tracking clips in the optional rules. Sorry, got too excited.

Now the Scimrahn Laser Gun is a different story. It starts out with 100 shots in a clip, so many that we’ve never bothered to count them off. It’s functionally inexhaustible. Even worse, the backpack power supply gives the laser 500 shots. So how can the Die Roll Ammo Tracking system work here? I have two thoughts on how to do this.

Each d20 adds about 20 to the number of shots the character gets so for the energy clip the character gets a 3x1d20 meaning they get to roll a one on a d20 three times before they move to a d12 etcetera.

For the 500 rounds we don’t want to write down 23x1d20. Thats just going back to tracking ammo again. Instead 4x1d100 should work as long as we remember that the last d100 drops to 3x1d20. I readily admit, even this is a little silly. The numbers are so big that it’s effectively infinite. I doubt that any character we’ve ever played fired a laser 500 times. Still, I like having an answer to how to handle that.

Is there a more elegant way of handling larger numbers with Die Roll Ammo Tracking? Is there a better way than writing 3x1d20? I thought that 3d20 would be confusing, making people think you would roll 3 d20s at a time. It’s possible to have the players record 100 of something as a d20 and a d12. Once the d20 is used up (as in dropping all the way to a d4 and then rolling a 1) then you go to a d12. That almost sounds more complicated for some reason. The only other option would be to break out the exotic d30 and d40s. If you’ve got a better idea, let me know in the comments.

How many times have you heard that? The PCs are going to stay up for a portion of the night to keep watch. If you’ve been GMing for a while, I’d say any time the player characters are not sleeping in a fortress (and even then. . .).

It’s a good strategy but let me ask you, when was the last time you tried it in real life? If you stayed up for a quarter of the night, just 2 hours, how would it effect you the next day at work? Sure you could do it, but you’d probably feel lousy. If you’re a teen then you’d at least feel sub-par (whether you want to admit it or not). For some reason there might be a day or two that you could actually pull it off but I’m looking at the majority of the time.

I’m always looking at the effects of inadequate sleep in psychology studies. They seem like they’re minor, that the person can handle it but sleep debit has real and lasting effects on people. Anything from decreased alertness to weight gain. Put it simply, when you don’t sleep your brain and body suffers.

What about it?

Should a game really pay attention to that? Yes, but not a lot. I wouldn’t start an epidemic of obesity because you’re characters are staying up through the night but it should have some effect. Think about it. Why is night time dangerous? Okay there is the lack of light but it’s also because we’re afraid of something happening while we’re not fully aware of our surroundings (aka sleeping). Remove that danger and you’ve removed a powerful pressure on the characters.

Think about it. Isn’t the whole “We’ll sleep in shifts and keep watch” idea to disarm the GM? Why would a PC ever sleep a normal night in their lives? If the players want to take away a valuable tool from me, they need to pay something for it, even if it’s just a little bit. The first time they miss that INT roll by one because they stayed up on watches, they’ll be thinking of how to get a full night’s sleep.

A Minor Inconvenience 

Skipping a small amount of sleep or even disrupting sleep should only be a minor problem at first. If it’s continued, it gets worse. For every night a character doesn’t sleep 8 hours uninterrupted they get a -1 CDF to REF, INT and IQ for every two hours missed or interrupted. It can only be payed back by sleeping the missed hours. The first time they fail a roll because of that CDF they’ll be hitting the sack early.