What does the Protagonist Want? Because I usually have no idea.

(title of the blog post stolen from the incredibly awesome What Does the Protagonist Want? which is well worth a read)


     Thinking about Numenera character creation, my frustration with D&D 5E backgrounds (and Dungeon World bonds and alignments to a lesser extent) and consider several GM advice books which suggest using sentence pitches for campaign planning and adventure design, I've been thinking about how to apply sentence summaries to more things, like PC motivation.
     Toying around with the idea of running a Numenera one shot sometime in December/January and realized that the Sentence Character creation could be extended ever so slightly to add a character goal or motivation to the current structure.
     As a reminder, Numenera character creation boils down to " I am a [adjective] [noun] who [verbs]." So a former commando turned mercenary who recently discovered that she has a supernatural or technological knack with animals might be "I am a Stealthy Glaive who Controls Beasts". Why not add a want clause, like "Who wants to [motivation/goal]." So then if the former commando woke up as the only survivor of a battle and that's when she had this new connection with animals, perhaps her character summary sentence would be "I am a Stealthy Glaive who Controls Beasts and wants to Discover Why She Has this new Power." Hopefully a compelling character and it certainly gives the GM a few ideas of what the PC can do and what the player would like to do. It also provides an easy reminder to the player for their motivation, ie, their PC should be working to understand or uncover why she has this new affinity with beasts. One advantage of this, is that it forces the player to distill down a few things that they know they are interested in exploring in the game.
Let's try this out with my other PCs, adapting the Numenera character sentence structure to other systems.

Alignment Woes - Neutral, Unaligned and Mechanical Difficulty

What is this guy?  He's a Rilmani.  Why don't you know about him? Because Rilmani are dumb.

Go read Thomas' thoughts about Alignment in 5th Edition over at The Tower of Infinite Evil first before you read this post because originally this was just going to be a comment on that post before it got really long.

In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode 4 - Planescape Making You Jelly

(Art of Winfred as a never-nude by the talented Heidi Blunt, former player of Kit Clovertail)

In this Podcast the Ginger Giant and I discuss our various current and future games briefly and then the last 2/3rds or 3/4s of the podcast features two of my Planescape players making Ben jealous that he cannot play in my Planescape game.  Featuring tales of Succubus towers, Halflings fighting to the death on giant platters of mutton grease, magical masterwork hoes and an elderly Bariaur's decline into senility.

In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode 3 - Rocket Sled to Failure

Long time no podcast... but I finally returned to the lair of the Ginger Giant.

Discussed herein: The depressing end of my Apocalypse World game, things I'm stealing for my Fading Suns game, my online Vampire the Dark Ages influence game and a long tangent on player assumptions leading to wild conclusions.  Oh, we also touch on my blog post about Failure.  Also, other things, but I forget.

Episode Three: Rocket Sled to Failure

We also recorded a second secret podcast that may never see the light of day or the ears of listeners.

PS.  Thomas, who is taking over GM duties on future Online Influence Games, started a new blog: A Game of Influence  If you want to read all about our continuing adventures in attempting to improve influence style games, which I touched on tangentially in my "LARP's Lessons Lost" post, then you'll enjoy his new blog.  I expect to be a regular commentator.

In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode Two: Game Prep

Back in the Lair of the Ginger Giant, Ben and I discuss game prep and crafting encounters.

Listen and download here: In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode Two: Game Prep

Let us know if you have comments, feedback or are interested in being a guest to talk about running or playing in RPGs.

Five Type V Lessons for Running Type IV Combat

I had been thinking about writing a post about how running Apocalypse World has inspired me to run all of my games with as little preparation before the game and as much prep done during the game as possible, but that hasn't quite come together in my head.  What I did realize, while thinking about some of it and the D&D Type IV game that I played in last Saturday, is that running Type V D&D aka D&D Next aka 5th Edition has given me some ideas about running combat in Type IV D&D aka 4E aka 4th Edition.

Type V, Fool!

In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode One: Roll Initative

The inaugural episode of the new podcast I'm doing with Ben of Because In a Blog No One Can Here You Scream.

We discuss:

• Games we've played, run and want to play in the future.
• Ben's thoughts on D&D Next after playing in the weekend-long session I ran of White Plume Mountain in celebration of my 30th birthday.
• The Player Principles I outlined in my recent blog post: Principled Playing
• And answered some listener questions to "Dear Dungeon Master"

Listen and download here: In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode One: Roll Initiative

Let us know if you have comments, feedback or are interested in being a guest to talk about running or playing in RPGs.

Principled Playing

I got Apocalypse World and Dungeon World through the Bundle of Holding back in November and since then I have been in love with them, especially the advice they provide for GM'ing games. Setting aside the idea of Fronts, which are excellent (see Sly Flourish for a nice concise article about how they could be hacked into D&D) what I'm most excited about working into the games I run are the Principles. Now for both Apocalypse World and Dungeon World, the Principles are there to tell the GM explicitly how to run the game. The game designers are pretty explicit that they think the game's other rules will run best and after running Apocalypse World on Sunday, I think in their original games they do just that. But if you take them out of their original games, they work fantastically as well focused general GM advice. Let's take the Principles of Dungeon World that I'm trying to incorporate, more or less intact, into both of my D&D Next campaigns.