Framing the Problem: Rotating Leaders and Spotlights

We’ve been experimenting with a rotating leader system in my Wednesday game. It’s a simple method for ensuring every player’s interests are addressed during play. The whole idea could be communicated in about a paragraph, but like any idea it exists in the shadow of other ideas which preceded it. Ergo, to make its utility clear, I’ll need to show how it differs from existing methods of dividing the spotlight. That will beg the question “why does Nick hate the concept of ‘spotlight’ so much?”, which begs the further question “what is ‘spotlight?'”

Let’s begin at the beginning.

In some TTRPG circles, a player is said to be “in the spotlight” when their character is the primary focus of attention. It doesn’t mean they’re the only one saying or doing anything, merely that they’re saying and doing the most interesting things right now. To use a very D&D-ish example: in a tavern brawl, the thief and magic user may participate, but the fighter will probably have the spotlight. Ostensibly, this is what everyone at the table wants. Being in the spotlight is fun, being out is less fun.

The term was created so that attention could be discussed as a commodity; with the goal of parceling it out fairly amongst all participants. This is both a mechanical concern (“Do this class’s abilities offer an equivalent number of spotlight opportunities to other classes?”) and a social concern for the group to adjudicate at the table. (“Sue has been in the spotlight a lot tonight. We should give Anne some time in the spotlight soon.”) The platonic ideal would be for everyone at the table to spend an equal amount of time describing themselves doing awesome stuff while the rest of the group plays supporting roles as they wait their turn.

At first glance, spotlight may seem to be a useful concept. A game of D&D is basically a conversation with 4+ participants. Like any conversation, only one person can have the whole group’s attention at a time. Everyone wants a chance to play, thus it makes sense to think of the group’s attention as a resource that needs to be managed. So…what’s my fuckin’ problem?

The Spotlight methodology harms the game in at least two ways. First, it discourages a comfortable atmosphere by seeking to control the social aspect of the game. Second, it alters the game’s focus to the point where I would say you’re not even playing the same game anymore.

To expound on my first point first: D&D is a party. It’s a bunch of people getting together to socialize and have a good time. Presumably, the people involved mostly like one another. As with any party, it’s a mess of socialization with an ebb and flow all its own. It’s flexible, responsive. The natural movements of the game are a beautiful thing.

Sometimes people will step on one another’s toes, but if you’re not playing with assholes, folks will generally try to be respectful of one another. If you are playing with assholes, you have deeper problems than any rule can fix. This attempt to use rules to protect oneself from the scary variable of “other people” is a consistent feature of some TTRPG circles, and I find it baffling. My parents kept my locked in the house for most of my primary education and intentionally sabotaged my childhood friendships. How is it I developed better social skills than…anyone?

Worse yet, the form chosen for this regulated socialization is one of the worst types of conversation that exist: the “waiting my turn” conversation. Everyone half-listening to each other, searching for their chance to interject. On the scale of enjoyable human contact, it ranks just barely above “listening to someone who appears to be willfully oblivious to all the hints you’re dropping that you need to leave.”

None of this is to say that groups concerned about sharing the spotlight will be awkward by necessity. People don’t forget how to be people because of badly written game advice, but that’s not an excuse for accepting bad advice uncritically. Nor is it the real issue. The far more substantive problem with spotlight thinking is the second one: altering the game’s focus.

D&D is a game about solving problems. The referee puts obstacles in the players’ path, and the players attempt to overcome those obstacles. Problem solving isn’t the only source of fun, but it is the primary source.

Attempting to ensure every character gets an equal share of the spotlight is incompatible with with that focus. If Maria is on a hot streak and does a great job coming up with solutions for every problem, she ought to be congratulated for her clever thinking, not chastised for hogging the spotlight. That’s what I mean when I say it shifts the focus of the game. It becomes about the characters, rather than the problems those characters tackle. It becomes a story game.

Which isn’t wrong. I have no beef with thespian games or the people who play them, BUT using the concepts of those games to understand D&D will produce bad results. Like trying to drive a nail with a screwdriver: it’s the wrong tool for the job.

I also don’t mean to say the referee shouldn’t be concerned if someone is being left out of the game. We should trust the group to be accommodating of one another, but the referee is the last line of defense to ensure everyone gets heard. I often tell my louder players to shut up so I can hear what my softer spoken players are trying to tell me.

Which brings us, finally, to the rotating leader thing that prompted this whole post. I’ve discussed before that as a campaign matures, it changes. At low levels, the referee can say “there’s adventure to the West of here,” and the players will all respond “Let’s go west!” Once the players have settled into the world the decision of where to go next stops being so simple. They’ve been around the block a few times and developed their own interests in the world along the way. Lindsey wants to rid the world of slavery, Red wants to steal a giant robot, and Cathy wants to add a pool to the party’s stronghold.

As a rule, players are good about deciding what to do amongst themselves, but over time there’s a regression to the mean. Nobody ever gets to pursue the weird niche quest hooks that only they are interested in. After awhile that can really bum a person out.

A group of five people is never going to order a pizza covered in anchovies. The one person in the group who loves anchovies probably won’t even advocate for them, because they know it’s a weird niche thing that other people won’t like. At some point, though, that one person is going to think “Fuck, I haven’t had anchovies in like…five fuckin’ years. I’m just going to order a pizza and eat it all myself.” Except this is an analogy and it’s actually about D&D and you can’t play D&D all by yourself.

To combat this issue, I suggested to my group that anytime the question of what to do next arises, one player be designated to have the final say. Everyone is free to discuss and argue the issue as they normally would, but in the end that one player gets to decide what problem the party tackles next. The group then spends however many sessions it takes to reach a satisfactory conclusion to that pursuit, after which a new player becomes leader and decides on the party’s next goal.

It’s worth noting that aside from picking the group’s goal, the leader has no other explicit authority. They’re the final word on what the party does, not how the party does it. That said, they often serve as a kind of de facto party leader for the duration of the pursuit they chose, which is a nice side benefit. Also, would you believe this post took two agonizing days to sort together? I feel kinda pathetic about that.

How Do You Hexcrawl?

Note: This post, as well as the seven others which will follow it next week, were originally written about two years ago. They were intended to be nothing more than a short series, building on my then-popular Cool Stuff in the Wrong Direction posts. The idea quickly caught fire in my imagination, and I started to develop and expand it beyond the original 8-post run.

Before I knew it, I’d written an entire book. Literally. For over a year now, I’ve had 150+ pages sitting on my hard drive while I work on gathering art and saving money to pay for a proper layout. My plan was to hold these posts in reserve until it was time for a big marketing push. The thought was that I’d post all of these, then after the last one went up I’d say “Didja like that? Well guess what, it was just the first draft of a book that is on sale right now!”

I don’t think it was a terrible plan, but the further out I get from originally writing these posts, the rougher my rough draft starts to look. At this point I don’t think they’re very representative of the quality of the book. Which isn’t to say they’re bad posts–I wouldn’t post them if I thought they were bad–but I don’t want to hold them in reserve any longer. It’s time to get these out of my drafts folder, and out into the world.

Enjoy!

It’s entirely possible that I’m just stupid. There have been many times when I felt certain that what I was looking for didn’t exist, only to be proven humiliatingly wrong the moment I opened my mouth about it. Having said that…

I’ve never seen a good explanation of how the nitty gritty of hex crawling is supposed to work. In the past when I’ve said this in a public space, I’ve been given links to some ostensible explanation. However interesting these links might be, they tend to focus on how a hex crawl ought to work in theory, and have never satisfied my curiosity about the practical, at-the-table mechanics of running one. I’m sure there are people out there who know exactly how a hex crawl should run in practice, but unless any of them want to explain it to me, I need to make the rules up myself. Just for the sake of being comprehensive, I’m going to start with the absurdly basic stuff.

Each hex is 6 miles across. The terrain type shown on the space accounts for the majority of the hex’s terrain. But just because a given hex shows plains doesn’t mean you can’t find a copse of trees there. Plains dominate the space, but the world’s environs aren’t actually broken down into hexes. The hexes are an abstraction. The straight lines between one environment and another actually represent a gradual, uneven transition. Saying “The trees become more spares, giving way to plains over the 6 hours you travel West” is fine. The map itself may be ugly, but since the players will be describing their movement in terms of how many hours they walk in a given direction, a more detailed map doesn’t really improve your ability to manage the campaign much. Though, there’s no harm in taking a prettier map and slapping a hex grid on top of it, that works just fine as well.

It has occasionally been pointed out that a 6 mile hex is ludicrously huge in size. Video games noted for their vast playing space, such as Oblivion or Skyrim, are small enough that the entirety of the game world would fit within a single hex. This vastness is actually beneficial in several ways:

It means that no matter how often the players travel through a given hex, you can always justify finding something new there. Barring significant effort, this ensures that a given wilderness environment never becomes safe and mundane.
The math for converting hexes into miles is very simple, if for some reason you ever need to do that.
It allows you to portray vastly different political situations, environments, and cultures, without forcing you to manage an unwieldy amount of game spaces.

Moving on: the most confusing thing about hex crawls for me has always been how to translate what the players say into what is happening on the hex map. In the past I’ve tried giving players a blank hex grid of their own so they could fill in spaces and tell me which edge of the hex they wanted to explore out of, but I don’t like how this feels. Players already have an idea of how to communicate movement in the wilderness using the cardinal directions. The hex map can be a great referee tool, but I’d prefer not to make the players think about the world in terms of hexes. Unfortunately, cardinal directions don’t always give you a good idea of what hex the players will move to.

If your map were drawn on this hex grid, it would be easy to know what to do if the players say “we go East,” or “we go West.” But what about the North/South axis? Do you choose to skew them slightly to the East, or slightly to the West of where they wanted to go? You could just determine it randomly, then remember to skew back in the other direction if they keep going. That would keep them moving in vaguely the right direction, and is probably the best choice for maximum simplicity. It’s not unreasonable to think they meander a bit as they travel.

If you’re more ambitious, you could try to keep an idea of where your players actually fall within their hex. This requires more granular tracking of how far your players move at a time, but it does have the benefit of making their time expenditure more meaningful, and of making it more clear what hex to move them into next. The geometric simplicity of a 6 mile hex, along with the fact that LotFP’s daily movement rates are all divisible by 6, should make this a feasible task. Though I can’t imagine doing it without constantly marking little travel lines on my hex map. I’d probably tend towards the simpler option myself, at least until I’m more confident running hex crawls than I currently am.

Which brings us to terrain difficulty. You can’t just have characters moving through mountains at the same speed they move along a road. Some hexes are more difficult to get through than others. There’s a whole range of methods, with varying degrees of complexity, that you could use to determine just how much travel is slowed on rough ground. For now, I’d like to keep it super simple. There are three types of terrain:

Normal. Players move at a normal rate through most terrains. If it doesn’t fit into either of the other categories, it’s normal.
Difficult. Players move at half speed. This is anything that would present a significant challenge to movement, like mountains or swamps.
Roads. Players move twice as fast so long as they’re walking along a road.

Hand in hand with terrain type is encounter checks. How do those work? How often do you check for them? Again, I say keep it simple. Check once per hex. Twice if the hex’s terrain is difficult, and once every second hex if the players are on a road. (That’s once every 6, 3, or 12 miles respectively). Commensurately, I’d probably place relatively uninteresting encounters along the roads. (After all, anything interesting will have been found), and more interesting encounters in difficult terrain. That creates a nice risk-reward dynamic between fast travel with no loot, and slow travel with tonsaloot.

So what are these encounters, and how are they determined? I’m a big proponent of Brendan’s overloaded encounter die. In ORWA, I use three different encounter die charts based on how frequently a check is required. This is what I use for my 4-hour checks, which I think should translate well to once-per-hex checks.

Encounter.
Location.
Spoor
Rations.
Lost
Safe

Encounters are stuff like wandering monsters or NPCs. They’re rolled on an overall list that covers multiple hexes, like an entire cluster of forest hexes, or maybe even just a whole hex map. There’s between 4 and 8 entries on this table, and nothing is too specific. I don’t want to have to restock it. The point of the encounter table is to provide a sense of cohesion. No matter where you go within the domain of the Goblin King, you might encounter a goblin war party.

Locations are the beating heart of the hex map. They’ll require some extended discussion, so I’ll do that below.

Spoors are hints. They’re footprints, eggs, nests, or a dropped note. They let you know that something exists nearby which you haven’t encountered. When you roll a spoor, you should flip a coin to determine whether it’s an encounter or a location, then roll on the appropriate table to find out what the spoor points to. Once you know that, you can tell the players what kind of spoor they find. Then it’s up to them to interpret it, and choose how to respond.

Rations means the players are tired and need to rest and eat. If they don’t, they’ll take whatever penalties tired and hungry characters suffer. (Personally, I call it a flat -1 to all rolls). This result can be dismissed if it comes up more than once in rapid succession, but having it attached to the encounter roll is a lot easier than tracking rations separately. A+++++ highly recommended.

Lost means that the players are lost. The referee doesn’t tell them that they’re lost, but you roll 1d6 to determine which direction they start moving in. Of course, if they’ve got some means to avoid getting lost, consider this a “safe” roll. Means do avoid getting lost would be following a road or river, having a guide who knows the area. or even just having a compass.

I’d actually be interested in exploring the idea of getting lost in greater depth, since it’s fairly easy to avoid it. Maybe compasses should be a lot more expensive than they usually are? A high level luxury, perhaps. But that discussion is for a different post.

Safe means nothing happens. Sometimes you move from one hex to the next hex without anything exciting happening.

Alright, so, Locations. Locations are tied to individual hexes. When the encounter die rolls a location, you have to check to see what hex the players are in, and then what locations exist in that hex. If a hex map were a dungeon map, the locations would be the room descriptions. But unlike a dungeon, the “rooms” are so vast that there’s only a small chance of seeing the description each time you pass through a hex.

Locations can really be anything. Of course they can be actual locations, such as villages, dungeons, altars, statues, magic trees, whatever. But they can also be something more transient. They can be wandering wizards, recently summoned demons, or a big scary monster. These are things you might normally think of as encounters, but they’re unique, so you don’t want to put them on the encounter list, which is meant to be more general.

How many locations should a hex have? From experience I can confirm that it’s easy to underestimate just how large an undertaking stocking a hex map really is. There’s no need to create a table of locations for each hex. It’s not like players are going to spend a ton of time exploring a single hex and run through all your work. Hexes are made for passing through. After a session of hex crawling, you can just go back through and restock all the hexes where the players discovered locations with new locations. That keeps the work a lot more manageable.

If you want to be safe, you could push it and put two locations in each hex, but honestly I think it’s fine putting just one location in each. Though that’s not to say you should feel bound by whatever your standard is. If one of your hexes is special for some reason, put as many locations in that hex as you like. Overall, though, it’s best to keep the standard number of locations per hex as low as possible.

Finally, what other information should be included in a hex crawl? I’d probably throw an overview in the front with a brief description of the region, its history, and the forces that are at play there. Something to keep short and sweet, since most of the flavor should be communicated through hex content and encounters. This is also where I’d make note of any particularly important and well known locations, like a large city in Hex XXX. The sort of thing everyone the players meet would be aware of, and which the players themselves might be on their way to reach.

I’d also write about any notable environs, particularly if they span multiple hexes. If the cluster of 8 forest hexes in the south of the map is “The Forest of Doom,” where gremlins sneak about through a persistent chest-height pink mist, that’s something the referee should be warned of up-front so they know to mention it as soon as the PCs enter that hex, even if they don’t think to check the hex’s information.

That’s everything I can think of for now. I don’t know if this has been a useful document for anyone else, but I have to say the process of writing it has made me feel more confident about preparing and running hex crawls, which is something I’m in the middle of doing right now.

Next week will be the first in a 7 part series of posts where I stock a hex map. In point of fact, this post started its life as a footnote on the first entry of that series.

It got a little out of hand.

Central Problems vs. Central Mysteries

A few months back I wrote about how conspiracies fit into my game. Little mysteries sprinkled into the background, obfuscated to the point where they’re really just something I do for myself. Within a week or two of posting that, I found myself in a relevant conversation with John Bell. He argued that it was better to develop campaigns around a central problem, rather than a central mystery.

That dichotomy has been bouncing around in my head ever since. It feels true to me. It’s not necessarily in conflict with the way I run conspiracies, but when I look back over the many campaigns I’ve run in the past, mysteries are consistently more central than problems are. Dungeon Moon is the only exception to this, where the clearly stated central problem was “How do we get off of Dungeon Moon?”

Players understand how to engage with problems. Problem solving is what the game is built on. It only makes sense that the room-to-room or hex-to-hex problems they encounter while adventuring exist in the shadow of some great looming problem that lends a suggested direction to play.

In particular, what is great about problems compared to mysteries (this was John’s main point), is that they allow for a healthier flow of information. With a mystery, the referee has to be a little anxious about how much they give away. If the players get too much information, the mystery is ruined. Almost by necessity, the referee has to err on the side withholding too much, rather than revealing too much. Much as I enjoy weaving a mystery into the game here and there, this stifled information flow is anathema to my general principles. I’m the guy who got rid of the search roll because I don’t like withholding information from players that I feel they’ve earned.

A central problem allows for the opposite approach. The referee can err on the side of giving the players too much information, because understanding a problem is no guarantee of being able to solve that problem.

In pondering the relative merits of mysteries and problems, my thoughts keep drifting to John’s old Necrocarserous campaign. Playing in that campaign was pivotally educational for me, and directly inspired way more of my blog posts than I’ve ever openly admitted. That campaign had a number of big, ‘central’ problems, but the one that stands out to me the most is the issue of Nepenthe.

Without digressing into a full explanation of the campaign world, I’ll just say that it’s a well known fact that every person in that world has had their memories stolen from them. These stolen memories are distilled into a liquid, called Nepenthe. Finding and reclaiming your own Nepenthe would be a huge boost to any character. We decided this was something we wanted to pursue.

There was some initial mystery in discovering where our Nepenthe was, but we actually solved that pretty quick. We knew what Nepenthe was, and that ours existed somewhere in the world, so we knew what questions to ask. The larger problem was getting to each of our Nepenthes (they weren’t all in the same place), and recovering them from whatever barriers might protect them.

We never accomplished that goal, but the struggle is something I remember fondly, and I’m sincerely proud of the clever solutions we employed along the way. In contrast, I don’t know that any of my players have ever really been aware of the mysteries going on around them in my campaigns. They’re fun for me, certainly, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having them. But I do think that failing to include some central problem has been a major failing of mine, and it’s something I’d like to remedy.

As an exercise, here are 12 potential central problems. Some of them include a bit of initial mystery. But, like Nepenthe, those mysteries can be presented frankly to the player, and solving them does not in itself overcome the problem.

A powerful government spy agency is constantly ferreting out everybody’s secrets. Even private conversations in your own home may lead to finding one of their dreaded blue envelopes in your pocket the next day. Public shaming and fines for improper thoughts are common.
The undermen–creatures of the deep earth–have reclaimed all metals and ores stolen from their lands by human invaders. Humanity has been forced to fall back on tools of wood and stone. The undermen occasionally burrow up for “surprise inspections.”
A titanic beast wanders the campaign world, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Its feet are the size of castles. Fighting it in any conventional sense is an absurd notion. Its body is crawling with otherworldly parasites that are themselves massive and dangerous beasts. The most noble and revered vocation is as the creature’s herald. Brave men and women ride ahead of the creature, evacuating settlements with as much advance warning as they can manage. The world has no great cities, no settlements older than a few decades.
An army of conquest is sweeping forward through the land. Wherever they go is changed, permanently. They impost strict laws, and harsh punishments. They gradually transform lighthearted D&D adventure land into a grueling, grimdark police state.
A virulent disease passes over the world in waves. Most who contract it are killed, and those who survive are mutated into horrible creatures which ought to be killed. The disease has rampaged for so long that no one now living can remember a time without it. The population of the human race has been dangerously reduced by its ravages. Any NPC the players encounter has a 1-in-6 chance to have contracted it if the players wish to go back and see them again.
At birth, every child’s soul is extracted by the Priests of the Only God. These souls are carefully stored and catalogued by the Divine Bureaucracy, held hostage to ensure everyone’s continued faith, and obedience to the traditional interpretations of the Only God’s Law. A select caste of nobility are allowed to retain their souls, which in turn makes those nobles stronger and more capable than their subject peoples.
Humanity is dominated by an alien force from another world. They use their advanced technology to keep humanity trapped in a perpetual middle age.
The world is wracked by endless conflicts between rival wizards. No community–however remote–lasts long before half their population is drafted into some wizard’s army, or rounded up to serve as test subjects for some vile experiment.
The sea god never wanted humans anywhere near her domain. She tolerated swimming, that wasn’t too bad. But she views the invention of ships as an insult. Humans are exploiting an unintended loophole in physics to trespass where they are not wanted, and so she has put a stop to it. As of 1 year ago, nothing is buoyant. Anything of the land placed upon the water sinks instantaneously, as if it were falling through thin air. This has completely cut off the player’s society from the rest of the world.
The rapid advance of technology has made many traditional jobs obsolete, forcing people into ever more menial and demeaning professions. They work longer hours, for less pay than their parents did, while a small group of oligarchs profit off the surplus value created by their labor.
A drunk god has granted human level intelligence to every creature with a brain. Domestic animals have revolted against their enslavement, game animals have united to form mutual protection pacts, parasites and large predators employ advanced tactics to feed on humans. Society is breaking down from every side, and it seems almost certain that humanity will become extinct within a generation.
The orphan nation needs a new roof.

In closing, I’d like to say that I am intensely proud my topbanner choice for this post. Like, you get it, right? Goddamn I am such a clever lil’ boi.

Are You Loyal to the Party?

There are two things about hirelings that I hate.

I hate seeing them treated as props. As things that can be safely ignored until a player wants them to make an attack, or use an ability. I understand that during play, everyone is focused on the events of the game rather than characterizing the background NPCs. This is good and proper. But while I am not interested in forcing my game into cul de sacs of “rich role playing experiences,” it none the less feels lame when hirelings are only ever brought up for their utility. Players should have to do more maintenance to keep them around.*

I also hate determining a hireling’s loyalty when they are first hired, and having that number remain static throughout their tenure with the party. A person’s loyalty to their employer should be a function of their working experiences, not an innate attribute of their character. Loyalty should be a thing that goes up and down constantly, depending on how valued the retainer feels, and how much of a future they see for themselves in this work.

(Loyalty, for any non-OSR folks in the audience, is a number between 2 and 12. Any time the hirelings are presented with a situation that tests their loyalty, the referee rolls 2d6. If the result is greater than the hireling’s loyalty score, then they are not loyal enough to endure whatever the current situation is. They might flee the scene, betray the party, or simply refuse to follow an order they’ve been given.

In attempting to solve the latter issue, I spent about a year rolling loyalty checks for hirelings after every session. If something traumatic had happened, a failed check caused the hireling’s loyalty to go down by 1. Otherwise, a failed check caused it to go up by 1. The idea was that, over time, the hireling’s loyalty would grow, but that its growth had diminishing returns. It’s easy to go from being an acquaintance to being a friend, it’s more difficult to go from being a friend to being the most important person in someone’s life.

In practice, this wound up just being busywork for me. Loyalty trended upwards over time, until the party had a half dozen hirelings with 11 loyalty. At that point, they basically are a prop, since they’ll almost never go against their employer’s wishes. The only part of the system I think anybody enjoyed were the little notes I wrote into the session reports, explaining why the hireling’s loyalty did whatever it did. “Albert was offended by Don’s joke. His loyalty goes down by 1.” “Sheniqua is proud of having incinerated all those guards. Her loyalty goes up by 1.” Stuff like that.

I quietly stopped bothering to use that system a few months back, and nobody seems to have missed it. I’ve been glumly pondering what I could do to make it work ever since. Then, as I was recording “Romantic Fantasy and OSR D&D” for Blogs on Tape, a good possibility occurred to me:

Periodically, the referee should go down the list of the party’s hirelings. For each one, the the referee decides whether their recent experiences should cause their loyalty to go up by 1, down by 1, or remain the same.

Let me break that down:

“Periodically” could mean at the end of every session, at the end of every adventure, during every haven turn, or even at the end of each in-game year. It depends on how swingy you want the system to be, and how much effort you want to put in. Personally, I think I’ll do it every Haven turn.

When I say “the referee decides,” I mean exactly that. This should be done by fiat, without any dice. Dice are a great way to resolve an infinity of choices, where a referee might unwittingly show their biases. But if a question can be resolved by common sense, dice just muddy the issue. When it comes to hirelings, the referee should already have some sense of who they are as a person, just as they do for all the game’s NPCs. And the referee will certainly know what the hireling’s recent experiences were. It’s not as though NPCs do anything when the referee isn’t around.

It should be easy to infer, given what the referee knows, how each hireling feels about their job right now.

Their loyalty might go down if they suffered serious injury, or if the players made reckless decisions, causing them to lose confidence in the party’s leadership. It might also go down if the hireling is just annoyed, bored, or feels like they’re not a respected member of the crew.

A lowered loyalty isn’t necessarily a punishment. It’s not always about the Hireling hating or fearing their employer. They’re just fractionally less interested in continuing to adventure, and if their loyalty gets low enough, a failed check might mean they strike out on their own.

On the other hand, their Loyalty might go up if they feel valued. It could be as simple as a good conversation with the PCs, being deferred to on some minor decision, or being celebrated for some success. Making sure your employee had a good day at work will help ensure they don’t betray you to the next goblin who looks at them funny.

Loyalty remaining unchanged should be an uncommon choice. Used only if the referee is really torn between the two other options.

I’m really enamored with this idea, because it seems to elegantly resolve both of the things I hate, with a single mechanic. Hireling morale will be anything but static. It’ll be going up and down all the time, and hopefully it’ll be going down a lot more than it did with my previous method. Moreover, those fluctuations provide a direct incentive for the players to interact with their hirelings to keep up morale. It’s rare, in my experience, to find any opportunity to offload some of the referee’s mental burden onto the players.

This method also seems to have the tertiary benefit of creating a natural cap on the number of hirelings a player can take on. The more people you try to bring with you, the more time and energy you’ll have to spend to keep them happy.

I’m excited to spring this on my players after their next haven turn.

*I realize this problem would be solved if I required hirelings to earn a half-share of treasure. It’s a good method, and one I might use again in the future. But it doesn’t _really_ solve either of the two gripes presented in this post.

Fuck the King of Space: Players Guide v0.2

After the first couple months of play, I’ve updated and revised the player’s guide for FKOS. I’m actually kinda surprised by just how top-to-bottom the revision is. Pretty much every page has had some kind of significant tweak to the rules. Fundamentally it’s mostly the same stuff, but I’ve added a lot of little refinements that I think will improve play quite a bit.

Fuck the King of Space: Player’s Guide v0.2

20 Architectural Features for Memorable Dungeons

There’s more to crafting a memorable dungeon than the room descriptions. To be really great, it should be an interesting space to move through on its own merits. The way the rooms connect to one another, and to the outside world, is a fundamental part of any dungeon’s character, which I have too often ignored in the past.

I’m no Dyson Logos or Stonewerks. My maps are best described as “serviceable.” And while I doubt I’ll ever share their artistic acumen, I’m trying to do better for the sake of of giving my (amazing) room keys nicer homes to live in. To that end, I’ve set myself the goal of having 3 architecturally interesting elements in every dungeon I put together. Things that give the dungeon space an inherent complexity for the players to struggle with, or manipulate.

It is essential to note, that complex room shapes are not interesting dungeon design. They are a lazy way to make a map look interesting, without actually being interesting. Unless the shape of the room has some particular impact on play, more-or-less squarish spaces are all you need.

1. The entrance to the dungeon is in the center, with rooms radiating out around it. Rooms might interconnect freely, or form distinct “wings,” with only occasional connections between them. The player’s options are maximized from the start, and if they are stymied in one direction, they can easily try another.

2. The entrance is perilous, preventing quick egress. Perhaps getting in and out requires climbing 100′ of rope, or slowly wiggling your way through a narrow crevice in the wall. The players are thus limited in what they can bring in or out, and will not be able to flee to the safety of the outside world if they are being pursued.

3. The main flow of the rooms form a ‘figure 8’ pattern; meeting in the center, and forming two distinct loops. This is a nice simple way of making the player’s path through the dungeon nonlinear, without making the rooms overly interconnected. Each loop, of course, could and should have little offshoots.

4. A river of water, lava, or just about anything else flows through the dungeon, intersecting with multiple rooms. Not only does it serve as a point of reference, and as a way to make the individual rooms it passes through more interesting; it could also be an alternate way of moving through the dungeon.

5. A space from which another space is visible, but not obviously accessible. When keying, this latter space would have some interesting feature the players would want to interact with, but be barred from doing so until later. This could be accomplished with bars, with a sharp change in elevation, through unbreakable windows, walls of force, large uncrossable lava pits, etc.

6. Connections which are spatially impossible. Doors that lead to the other side of the map, or hallways that loop back on themselves without ever turning. This need not be presented as a “gotcha,” where the players explore for a long time before realizing what is happening. Reference points set early in the dungeon could clue them in very quickly, and give them an opportunity to use the dungeon’s geometry to their own advantage.

7. A room which vertically intersects multiple dungeon levels. Perhaps with bridges spanning back and forth across it, allowing players to reach other parts of the dungeon by finding some way to get up to a higher bridge, or down to a lower one. Or perhaps the room is filled with water, and players have to swim through it. Or any number of other possibilities.

8. Areas on one level, which only connect to one another through a different level. So, for example, the first floor might have 10 rooms, but only 5 are immediately accessible. To reach the other 5, you’ve got to go up to the 2nd floor, adventure through those rooms, and discover stairs back down to the other half of the first floor. Vertical movement is often unexplored in dungeons. Usually, there’s only a single stairway between one floor and the next. Rather than the players making interesting decisions about their movement in vertical space, this method basically creates multiple dungeons strung together end-to-end.

9. Combining natural and crafted spaces. This is already done with a lot of maps, where the dungeon is built on top of caverns. This particular arrangement, though, has become a little cliche. It’s more interesting to have a walled garden, open to the sky; or have a crafted corridor that opens out into a natural cave, where the players can choose between a few natural and crafted exits.

10. Secret doors which do not lead to secret areas, but rather, lead to other areas of the dungeon that could be easily accessed conventionally. This was actually much more common with dungeon cartography in the ’70s and ’80s, but is not as common anymore. Which is a shame! Yes, rewarding players with secret treasure is good, but it’s also good to reward them with secret connections they can use to move about the dungeon more sneakily.

11. The dungeon lacks any foundation. Perhaps it is flying, or suspended over a chasm by chains, or floating on a fantastically buoyant sea. The floor of the various dungeon spaces have frequent openings, which serve as hazards for navigation, a means to dispose of any foes the party encounters, and perhaps even as a secondary form of navigation if the party is bold enough to try and cling to the underside of the dungeon.

12. The dungeon is moving. Getting in is a challenge, as you either need to find some way to catch up to it, or you need to predict its route and jump on with perfect timing. And, once it’s time to leave, you have no idea where you’ll be. Such a dungeon could take the form of a castle-on-wheels, a giant walking robot, a structure carried on the back of a titanic beast, or carried in the talons of a massive ancient bird.

13. That a dungeon should have multiple and varied entrances is advice I remember hearing years ago. But it’s still good advice, and I so rarely see it followed. Multiple ways in and out of a dungeon offers a lot of interesting gameplay. For example, if multiple entrances are known, players can investigate both, and make a choice about which they want to explore further. If the extra entrances are hidden, players may discover them from the inside, creating a natural sort of “save point,” now that they can return to town, and re-enter the dungeon further along than they started. Dungeons may also exit out into new areas: vast caverns beneath the earth, mysterious forest groves, surface temples, or deserted islands.

14. The players cannot get out the same way they got in. Perhaps the door seals behind them, or perhaps the entrance to the dungeon is a trap door down a slippery shaft. The crawl takes on a sense of urgency when it’s no longer possible to leave at your own choosing; and resources normally taken for granted–food, water, light–are transformed into timers, counting down how long the players have until their work becomes exponentially more difficult.

15. The dungeon has some internal means of rapid conveyance. Perhaps there is a train, or a set of color-coded teleportation pads in the first room, or a pipe which–when touched–causes a person to merge with it and flow forward until they will themselves to separate.

16. The rooms, when mapped together, form some kind of shape. This shape is a clue to solving one of the dungeon’s mysteries. As a simple example, perhaps there is a set of buttons in the shape of a circle, square, and triangle. Pressing the right one opens the door to the treasure room, pressing the wrong one kills you. The correct one is the triangle, which the players can guess based on the fact that the dungeon is a triangle.

17. The dungeon has an open-air layout, with sections of it being completely physically separated from one another, despite having internal continuity. Players can enter any room of the dungeon they wish, but some rooms can’t be fully realized until other rooms are investigated.

18. A specific calamity which has changed the dungeon’s layout. Many dungeons have bits of crumbled wall creating openings here, and collapsed corridors creating walls there. More interesting, I think, is to determine an event which caused structural damage to the dungeon, and allow that event to alter the whole layout, rather than just a corridor or two.

19. Puzzlebox dungeons, with big moving parts, where whole wings are locked off until some challenge is resolved. Something like a big cog or water wheel, which the players must discover how to turn; or a button they must weigh down. These, in turn, cause a statue’s mouth to open, and more rooms to become accessible. This is the sort of thing commonly found in video games, which would be all the more interesting for being presented in a situation where the players have real agency.

20. A dungeon which serves as the habitat for large groups of some benign creature. Preferably, one with some notable effect that will have an impact on how the players navigate. Perhaps the creatures can be ridden, or perhaps they screech loudly when they see light, or maybe they create an anti-magic field around themselves, or they cause magic to be amplified, or they produce weird results when eaten.

On a Red World Alone: Active & Reactive Worlds, and Keeping a Mature Campaign Alive

This bonus post is coming to you courtesy of my Patrons! If you’d like to join them in supporting quality games content like this, I’d really appreciate it! Even $1 helps me to build a more stable, sustainable patreon campaign.

Around the time the first year of ORWA was wrapping up, I wrote a bunch of tools for myself. Stuff that would help me run the game more easily, like tables of encounters, tables of locations locations, a timeline of big events, etc. By then the tone and content of the campaign were firmly established in my mind. Enough so that by using these tools, I’ve been able to run the game for a little over a year with remarkably little week-to-week prep work. A map here, an encounter there, simple stuff.

Now the game is over two years old. It doesn’t seem set to end anytime soon, but it has started to feel a bit stale. It’s time to evaluate, update, and rewrite my tools. One of my goals in this process is to make the world feel more active, rather than reactive.

At low levels, it’s easy to have an active world. The players are weak and poor, the world is dangerous, and they’ve got to do whatever they can to get by. That experience of being the underdog is a big part of why low levels are so popular, and why so many campaigns start to falter once the player characters are more well established.

When the party reaches mid-levels, there is novelty in being the ones directing the action. They’ve been living in the shadow of big scary monsters for so long, it’s edifying to be a bit of a monster themselves. Plus, you can never be so high level that a savvy referee can’t scare you.

But as the players reach higher levels, the world gets less and less scary, and the novelty of being scary themselves starts to wear off. If a level 15 characters wants to do something, there’s not much that can stop them. The world bends to their will and, as a consequence, the world reacts to the players, rather than the players reacting to the world.

Part of the solution is a shallower power scale, which is what I’m already doing with Fuck the King of Space. But it’s too late to change ORWA in such a fundamental way, even if I wanted to.

Another part of the solution is the “always a bigger fish” school of thought. Your party may be level 15, but the level 30 wizard who lives up on the hill is not impressed. This is a valid tactic, and I employ it myself, but alone it’s insufficient. This isn’t just about creating a challenge for the players. That’s easy. This is about making the world feel alive, the way it did when any mook the party met on the street could potentially be a real danger to them.

And to be clear, this isn’t about fixing something that is broken, it’s about adapting to an altered circumstance. There’s a lot of potential fun in having the players be hyper-capable relative to the rest of the world, and they’ve earned the chance to explore that. We just need to find some new ways for the world to push back.

Before each new adventure, roll a d6 on the table below, and use the result to develop a suitable event. Once you’ve determined your event you should also deduce some reasonable consequence that might be avoided by player intervention.

Exactly what the consequence will be should usually follow pretty obviously from the details of the event. For example, if a PC’s favorite hireling has been kidnapped, failing to rescue said hireling will result in them being hurt or killed. The important thing is that the consequence exists, and will definitely occur without player intervention.

Players are free to attempt to resolve, or to ignore these events as they see fit. Many will not be quite so pressing as a kidnapped hireling. Likewise, events will vary in terms of the time investment they require to resolve. Some may be sessions-long adventures, while others might be small detours that only take part of a single session, and still others may require no time at all. Perhaps the players can resolve some events merely by throwing part of their vast fortunes at it.

In a way, it doesn’t matter how much of an impact the events have on gameplay. The important thing is that they perceive the world as being less passive, less predictable, less under their control.

Roll 1d6

1. An Agent Becomes Active

I’ve discussed before how I record interesting NPCs my players meet onto a table; and that anytime they roll a 7 while determining the result of an encounter, they bump in to one of these “Recurring Characters.” It’s one of my better ideas. But, after playing with it for 18 months, I’ve got too many characters, and not enough 7s to go around.

From here on, recurring characters will be divided into two lists. The first, “Encounter Characters” will be treated the same as they always have been. When the players roll a 7, I’ll randomly determine one of these for them to bump into while out and about in the world.

More ambitious characters, on the other hand, will be added to the list of Agents. These are the NPCs with distinct long-term goals. People who want to take vengeance on the party, or fellow adventurers who view the party as friends. In other words: people who might actively seek the party out at some point in the future.

Anytime this result is rolled, the referee should randomly select one of the game’s active Agents. The time has come for the PCs to become relevant in that agent’s plans.

2. A Questgiver has Work for the PCs

Anyone can offer the players a quest. In most games, though, there are one or two NPCs who make a regular habit of it. It’s all-around helpful for everyone when the players attach themselves to someone who can reliably give them paying work. It gives the referee a simple way of introducing adventures, and it gives the party a simple way of getting paid.

As the game develops, questgivers usually become less relevant. But it never hurts to keep them around, so they can toss a little straightforward adventuring in the player’s direction now and again.

If your players are so inclined, this result could also include petitioners. People who have heard of the party’s mighty deeds, and have come to plead for aid.

3. Conspiracy Event

Very recently, I wrote about how every game I run has conspiracies going on in the background. Secret goals pursued by hidden persons, which the players may or may not uncover before the conspiracy reaches its ultimate culmination.

When this is rolled, the referee should randomly determine one of game’s conspiracies (assuming there are more than one). Something happens that is relevant both to it, and to the players. Perhaps the plot takes a big step forward, with some public consequence that seems simple at first, but might reveal more upon careful investigation. Alternately, some small corner of the conspiracy could be uncovered, becoming public knowledge.

It is less important for these to have a direct consequence, since they are building towards a large consequence later down the line.

4. Something Happens to a Player’s Resources

Randomly determine a player. No doubt, that player has accrued some resources over time: they have a hireling, a personal citadel, a magic laboratory, a vault of treasures, and a sterling reputation.

When this is rolled, the player’s friends are assaulted, their possessions burgled, their fortresses attacked, or their good names slandered. Some resource of theirs is diminished.

Be very cautious in how this particular result is applied. It is not interesting for players to describe in detail the many security precautions they take to avoid being robbed. It is best, I think, to stick to attacking resources which might reasonably be outside the player’s ability to control.

“All your gold is stolen from your private vault!” is going to cause a lot of frustration, and probably lead the players to bore you with endless descriptions of the many traps and spells they use to protect their coin.

“One of your servants was mugged, and the entire month’s food budget stolen!” is a much more reasonable option.

5. Something Happens with a Player’s Goals

Randomly determine a player. Most likely, that player has expressed some kind of personal goal they want their character to pursue. A religion they want to discredit, a territory they want to establish, a device they want to build, etc.

Pick one thing that you know the player wants, then flip a coin. There is a 50/50 chance that this event is a setback, or an opportunity.

Setbacks are a threat to the player’s ability to accomplish their goal. If they want to discredit a religion, perhaps a miracle occurs which draws in hordes of new converts. If they want to establish a territory, perhaps the land they were looking at is seized by someone else. If they want to build a device, perhaps the government bans such devices.

Opportunities are a chance for the player to advance their goal more rapidly than they would normally be able. Using the same examples as above, this might be a religious sex scandal, a group of settlers asking the PC to help them find a new home, or some useful materials falling off the back of a truck.

6. World Event

World events are not directly related the the players. However, their results have enough impact on the environment that the players should be interested none the less. When a world event occurs, roll on the following table:

A natural disaster strikes. Randomly determine, or choose a disaster as appropriate: Fire, Earthquake, Tornado, Flood, Landslide, Sinkhole, Volcano, Blizzard, Tsunami, Hurricane, Meteor.
A famine or drought begins. Food becomes very scarce, and people begin to starve. Each haven turn, roll a d6. The condition persists until a 1 is rolled.
A plague breaks out, the particulars of which are left to the referee. Each haven turn, roll a d6. The condition persists until a 1 is rolled.
A major figure in the Dome, such as a faction leader, is assassinated.
War breaks out between a faction, and one of its neighbors. Each month until an alleviation is rolled, both sides roll a d6. Whichever side rolls higher took some of their neighbor’s territory, commensurate with the difference in the size of the rolls. (So if a 1 and a 6 are rolled, the gains would be large. If a 1 and a 2 are rolled, the gains would be small).
An insurrection erupts, making a territory unstable, and threatening to overthrow the existing power structure. Each haven turn, roll a d6. The condition persists until a 1 is rolled. If it is not rolled within 7 months, the insurrection will be successful.
Two factions announce an alliance with one another.
News of a major scandal breaks.
A major religious event occurs for a randomly determined religion.
A new faction emerges, and carves out a small space for itself on the map. It may be a group the players have interacted with before, something entirely new, or even something which has technically existed for awhile but which was secret up until now.
A major discovery is made, and becomes widely known: perhaps a new technology is developed, perhaps a new race is encountered.
A prophecy begins making its way around around. Nobody is quite sure how to interpret it, but everyone is certain that it’s important.

The Haven Turn

You may have noticed that there’s a lot of overlap between the system outlined above, and Haven Turn complications. Most notably, the list of World Events are literally copy/pasted from that post, and edited to reflect some differences in the rules.

Complications have become my favorite part of the game, and I want to bring them more to the fore. In my game, this system will replace the standard Haven Turn encounter check. But even if you don’t use the Haven Turn system, I think this method could be helpful to others running high level games.

Fuck the King of Space: Player's Guide

Have I ever mentioned that I wrote a miniature RPG book to help me run On a Red World Alone? It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it’s a good 25 pages of setting information and rules that I’ve slowly patched together over the two years that I’ve been running the campaign. I’ve kept it private, because it was never meant to be anything other than a personal reference document. Who would be interested in that?

Well, based on the number of people who read ORWA’s play reports, far more people are interested than I might have suspected. And now that I’m starting up a new campaign, it seems like a good time to also start being more open about some of this behind-the-scenes stuff.

So, if you’re interested, here is the 21 page player’s guide for Fuck the King of Space. I’m taking this new campaign as an opportunity to implement a lot of shit I’ve been thinking about, much of which I’ve talked about on the blog before. The document is less interesting for its novelty than it is for taking a lot of my ideas, and putting them together into a (hopefully) coherent whole. Though, there is some new stuff in there, and almost all of the old stuff has been streamlined or revised.

There’s also a lot missing, and that’s another reason I never shared the ORWA Player’s Guide. These are living documents, updated and changed as the game evolves. If this sparks any interest at all, I’ll be sure to keep the blog updated with newer versions as I write them. (Though, future updates will be announced as bonus posts, instead of serving as the main weekly post.)

Enjoy!

Fuck The King of Space Player’s Guide v0.1

The Value of Conspiracy

When I was first coming into my own as a Game Master (back when I called it that), I developed a lot of bad habits. I made plans about how my game would develop, and was frustrated when my players didn’t fall in line. I was obsessed with over-preparing, and frustrated with myself when I couldn’t produce a polished adventure module every month. I knew which encounters I wanted my players to succeed at, and which I wanted them to fail at. I fudged dice, and hit points, and the fabric of the shared reality itself in order to bring about my desired results. Consequently, I didn’t have any groups that lasted for very long.

Eventually, I got better at running games within this fundamentally flawed style.I learned how to develop a Big Bad Evil Guy, how to create invisible walls that weren’t very obvious to my players, how to weave a narrative into a game while still giving the players enough freedom that they didn’t feel like they were being railroaded too much, even when they were. I was good enough to have run several long, enjoyable campaigns before meeting Courtney Campbell, and being shamed into developing some better habits.

Even as far as I’ve come, though; despite all my pretty talk of ‘agency,’ and the fact that I now use the correct term “referee,” I still secretly hold to one of the worst habits imaginable. My campaigns still have a BBEG, and I still keep an idea in my head of what the player’s eventual final encounter with that BBEG will be like.

Already I can hear people banging on my door, and it sounds like they have pitchforks. I suppose I’d better qualify that statement before I get kicked out of the OSR. Without a saving throw, if you know what I mean.

When I say my campaigns still have a BBEG, what I mean is that I usually have an NPC who is very powerful, and has a goal which the players will probably oppose. And when I say I keep an idea in my head of what the final encounter will be like, what I mean is that once the players have caught the attention of this powerful NPC, that NPC will begin to make plans for some eventual confrontation.

So, that’s not so bad, yeah? Can ya’ll take this noose off from around my neck now, and let my climb down off of this horse? Please?

I’ve taken to calling this element of my games “The Conspiracy.” An inscrutable plot, controlled by hidden actors, in the pursuit of unknown goals. It’s something that exists more for my amusement than for any practical reason, but they do serve a useful role in pushing the game forward, and giving disassociated game elements something to cohere around.

For example, I’ll use the conspiracy from my long-defunct ToKiMo campaign. From the player’s perspective, the world was in crisis because an ancient evil dragon had awakened, and was flying around causing havoc wherever it went. In truth, the dragon was a pawn. It had been enchanted by the kingdom’s princess, who also happened to be a naturally talented sorceress.

Her father, the King, had 20 years of life left in him. And even when he did die, male primogeniture meant one of her younger brothers would inherit the crown. She wanted to be rid of anyone with a clear claim ahead of hers, and to become so revered and powerful that convention would be forgotten in favor of her rule. Step one of that plan was putting the nation into a crisis that established power structures couldn’t handle, thus, the dragon. Step two was something about tricking a general into thinking that he was the one plotting a coup, I dunno, I’ve mostly forgotten the details. It was 6+ years ago.

Now, let’s assume I want to send the players into a dungeon to get a weird object. A wizard offers to pay them 500 silver coins if they retrieve a sack of Razorsilk from the great worms beneath The Forgotten Keep. Simple, timeless, classic adventure hook. It doesn’t need any further explanation, because Wizards be Wizards, ya’ll. But in my head, I connect it to the conspiracy. In my head, I know the Wizard wants these silks, because an agent of the Princess has hired them to perform a particular ritual.

More than likely, this will not come up in play. But, if the players get curious, I have the conspiracy to fall back on as a reason for just about anything that anybody wants. I can even drop a few clues if I feel like it. When the wizard receives the Razorsilk, they mutter something about how “this’ll finally get that pushy cigarette smoking man off my back.” The kind of thing that will be taken as fluff dialogue, and probably ignored. 10 sessions later, when another NPC mentions the cigarette smoking man, maybe they’ll connect the dots, or maybe they won’t.

In another example, let’s say the players have slain one of the big dragon’s children, and they’re looting its lair. They come across a luxurious suite of rooms meant to accommodate humans. It’s a weird detail. Maybe they investigate it, or maybe they don’t. The truth is that I never expected them to kill this dragon. I threw the lair together in 10 minutes while I was pretending to be pooping. Having this weird background detail of the conspiracy gave me something to riff of of: maybe the princess visits this dragon sometimes? And if she does, part of the lair would be suited for her comfort.

I think I’d be lying, though, if I claimed my conspiracies exist because they serve as a convenient backdrop to the campaign. They exist because I enjoy concocting evil plots, and imagining climactic showdowns that never come to pass. I get giddy when I think about how shocked the players will be when all is revealed.

But, of course, agency must be preserved. So, I drop hints, which is perhaps the most thrilling part of all. It’s like playing a game of chicken. How far can I go before everything is obvious? Was the thing that NPC said, or the title I gave that session report too obvious of a clue? Is everything about to unravel, and if it does, what exciting new developments will that mean for the campaign?

Players may never catch on to the conspiracy. My players never really pursued the dragon thing very much at all, preferring to push out into the wilderness. Nobody ever realized that The Motherless Warlock had created Dungeon Moon so he could watch over it like a mix between God, and Reality Television. The Ascendant Crusade group never knew that their favorite NPC was evil.

And what happens if they do figure it out? That has only ever happened to me once, when some first level scrubs decided they wanted to know why anyone in a post apocalypse would want a computer chip. When it did happen, I did my best to roll with the punches, and it wound up spawning the most successful campaign I’ve ever run in my life. (Complete with a second conspiracy layered on top, to replace the first one).

I’m curious to know if this is a common thing for referees to do. I suppose, if it is, they probably never mention it. Shit, am I revealing secrets?

What’s that pounding on my door?

Sex in D&D

I’m comfortable with sex as a subject matter. I would imagine that’s fairly obvious to anyone who has been reading my work here for any length of time. If you keep up with my play reports, session titles like “In Which My Ex Kills My Penis Monster,” “Have Your Cake and Fuck It Too,” or “Passing Through the BDSM district.” may have clued you in. Heck, I wrote a sex worker class at one point, and have never made any secret of the fact that I write pornography under a pseudonym. Sex is something I find very artistically engaging, and I’m not shy about pursuing that interest.

Until recently, it never occurred to me that I was unusual for feeling this way. After all, how many dungeons have you delved that included a harem? How many monster books include some creature inspired by psychosexual horror? In 2017, the ENNIE award for best adventure went to a book that includes a gangbang. That same publisher, LotFP, recently released a book called “Vaginas are Magic.” To me, it seems like sex is pretty well represented in the OSR scene.

Yet increasingly, I feel like I’ve been developing a bit of a reputation as a guy who “gets” how sex in RPGs works. I keep getting tagged into google+ threads where people are talking about it, because “Nick will have something to say about this.” And the other day, on Reddit, someone asked me point-blank to explain to them how I get away with including sex in my games without it turning into a shitshow.

So, alright, lets talk about sex.

First, why is sex interesting? Like, obviously we all enjoy a good orgasm now and again, but why include sex outside of a sexual situation? Why include in D&D?

Because sex is an elemental force. Beyond our individual lusts and experiences, it is a basic, primal thing that we all think about. And whether or not a particular flavor of fuck piques our interest, each new idea gets mixed in with the complex morass of our own sexuality. Sex is interesting because it’s universal.

But sex is also something that is deeply personal. People don’t tend to talk about it as much as they probably want to. We rarely have the opportunity to sit down with someone and intellectually engage with what sex is and what it means to us. It’s an emotional state, not so different from anger, joy, disgust, fear, or sorrow, and yet its exploration in life and art is comparatively shallow.

That’s why I feel compelled to put sex in my art. And, yeah, to some extent I do consider the D&D games I run to be my art. I know it sounds pretentious, and (even worse), story-gamey, but there it is. And I don’t mean to say that I’m rocking people’s world with how fuckin’ eye-opening my games are or anything. But, if your world has a BDSM town where everybody wears rubber and half the citizenry is on leashes, then that’s probably not something your players will have encountered before. It’s probably something they will remember, and that is a pretty decent accomplishment on its own.

Which I guess brings us to the question of how to do it right. The honest, but lazy, answer is “I don’t fuckin’ know.” You and yours are going to have different comfort levels than me and mine. I can’t write you a guide for how to make your friends comfortable with something they’re not comfortable with. But even ignoring that, even just writing about my own experiences, I can’t claim to be any kind of expert. Sex, in my games, is more of an ongoing experiment than anything else. That being said, I do have quite a bit of sex in my games, and I more or less make it work, so, what’s involved in that?

I never let sex be about anyone’s personal gratification. That’s what people are afraid of when they think about sex in a D&D game. They remember every horror story they’ve ever heard about some greasy basement dweller describing the contours and proportions of an NPC’s tits, while he fumbles and fails to hide his erection. That’s less about having sex in your game, and more about one person foisting their exhibitionism fetish onto the group.

Fortunately, if you play with decent human adults, that’s not going to be a problem.

You could probably chart a scary-accurate map of the sorts of weird sex stuff I’m into by paying attention to everything that doesn’t show up in my game world. I don’t think that sort of avoidance is really necessary to make sex work in a game, but it does help me stay honest. I know I’ll never get gross and linger over-long on the cake farting NPC, because cake farting isn’t my thing.

I also don’t make my game about sex, (most of the time). I just make sex part of the world. Players randomly encounter a dildo salesperson, but they don’t generally go on a quest to retrieve a magical sex toy. Sometimes the players are amused or interested, and they spend time role playing with the weird sex thing they bumped into, other times they ignore it and get right to the point. It depends on their mood.

When it comes to players actually having sex in the game, I want to share two examples I feel are usefully illustrative. One is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like sex was becoming a problem, and the other is just a good example of how sex should normally work in a D&D game.

To tackle the latter case first, the players were in the middle of traveling, and had a random encounter with a succubus. She openly flirted with the party, and made it pretty clear that she would be happy to have sex with any one of them. One player decided to take her up on that offer.

The player mentioned that his character was a fairly modest guy, and would prefer to do the deed out of sight of his companions. The succubus agreed, and so the PC and the demon disappeared into a nearby bush. I then briefly described how sex with a succubus is weird, and terrifying, but so intensely good that it kinda ruins sex with anybody else. (After all, what mortal could measure up to a literal embodiment of the act? ) I tell the player what the experience is like, without lingering on sordid logistics.

In-game, the act took 30 minutes, so I ask the rest of the party if there’s anything they want to do with their 3 exploration turns. When that’s resolved, the PC was kicked out of the bushes, and the succubus left without another word. (At least, not until 13 game-months later when she showed up and handed off their infant child).

In this situation, the player self-censored by taking things into the bushes. But, even if he hadn’t, I would have described things almost exactly the same way. I might have included a few other notes for the observers, like “You see things you’d never considered, and new fetishes take root in your mind.” Given that it was a sex demon, I may even have required some kind of saving throw against the desire to join in. But one way or the other, the whole thing lasted a handful of seconds, and the game moved on.

I don’t “fade to black,” but neither do I obsess. I describe sex with the same level of detail I would use if my players said “Lets stop in this town and find something to eat.” I don’t describe the firmness of the vegetables, or the way the meat’s juice dribbles down their chin. BUT, I do make a point to come up with some interesting local cuisine, I tell the players how it tasted, and maybe throw in a tidbit about some strange local dining custom they encountered.

If those same players then wanted to have sex with the bartender, and he agreed to it, I’d say something like “He leads you back to the store room. He’s surprisingly gentle, and at one point does this weird thing with his feet that you really didn’t like at first, but was actually workin’ pretty well for you by the end. When you finish, he quickly excuses himself to get back to work, lest he get in trouble.”

Easy.

My second example involves an NPC named The Hangman. She’s a towering bodybuilder of a woman, and a high level wizard to boot. Her role in the game is a long story, but the short version is that she is the party’s patron. She gives them access to some cool stuff, and in exchange they do jobs for her.

At one point, one of my players announced his intention to seduce The Hangman. His attitude about it made me a little uncomfortable, because it felt like he was only interested in seducing her because he found her annoying. She’s an imperious and demanding NPC, and it felt like he wanted to sexually “conquer” her as a means of bringing her down a peg or two.

(I don’t want to unfairly malign this player. He’s a decent guy, and was never anything but respectful. This is more about how I felt, how I reacted, and how the game world was affected as a result).

I waffled for awhile about how I wanted to deal with this situation. On the one hand, The Hangman is an NPC, and the player just wanted to build a stronger relationship with that NPC. It’s a completely reasonable thing for a player to want to do in an RPG. On the other, the situation was bumping up on my internal barometer of grossness. I didn’t want to let this powerful character be reduced to her sexuality. I could have easily just said “She’s not into you,” but honestly, I didn’t want to fiat an NPC’s feelings like that. I try to let the dice handle that sort of thing.

It took me awhile to come up with a solution that, in retrospect, is painfully obvious. I just played to her character. The Hangman is immensely powerful, physically, magically, and socially. Just because she’s been seduced by a player, does not mean she will become any less powerful or imperious.

So after a few game-months of (honestly pretty charming) flirtatious role play between the player and the NPC, the Hangman decided to take what she wanted. The PC had sex with The Hangman, yes, but like everything The Hangman does, she did it completely on her terms, and afterwords expected him to be ready for a booty call at any hour of the day.

Which is, again, precisely why sex is so interesting to include. Dealing with that situation forced me to understand this NPC better, and created a lot of fun role playing opportunities, and character moments, for everyone involved.

Lots of folks will read this, and think I’m some kind of deviant whack-job for including all of this in my games. And of course, there are plenty of actual deviant whack jobs out there who go even further than I do. Like anything, it’s all about your level of comfort, and what you and your group enjoy. But, if nothing else, I hope I’ve demonstrated that games with sex in them aren’t necessarily doomed to fail.