Meta Gaming Support Blog

Question: Hey Dungeon Monkey!  My party and I are playing in a space campaign and we are currently penniless and stuck in a space port, the GM wants us to figure out a hustle or a trick to help us get off this rock (literally) and back into the space lanes, however we are flummoxed on ways we can creatively trick or convince a space freighter captain to let us get berths on his, her or its ship.  Any suggestions on ways we can do this that will get out GM laughing rather than frowning and shaking his head at us?

Answer: Well there is nothing quite as frustrating as being stuck in a space port, one of the universes probably most dingy points of existence, with no outlet off and out to a new location, sorry to hear that you and your fellow players are cooling your heels and lacking cash.  However hope is at hand, there are a few tricks you can use to get yourself off the rock you landed on and back hoping around the stars, the key trick though is you will need to be creative and able to make a few…selective misdirections in presenting yourself to the captain of your perspective ride off planet.  Now I am assuming that you and your fellow party-mates lack skills that will allow you to simply book passage as working crew on a ship, skills such as piloting, navigation, or engineering, because if you have these skills you might be able to actually get a berth just by offering to work for passage.  However most space ships usually don’t actually leave a safe port without a full crew on board and you probably don’t want to fly with a captain who is that “seat of the pants” when departing a safe port of call.  However the first trick, assuming you are unskilled, is the easiest, find the nastiest most labor intensive ship docking and offer to work for passage doing any nasty jobs the captain has trouble filling.  Ideally you want to work on a ship that is so dirty and nasty no other creature is willing to do the job, trust me you will know the kind of ship I am talking about by the fact it ends up with a berth all to itself.

Assuming though you get a normal level of generic traffic in your space port, things get a bit more tricky but are still quite doable.  If any of your characters are able to act at all set up a performance that you are a rich noble/important official and you need to get off this rock but have a bit of a cash flow problem.  A bit hard to pull off but with the right acting skills you and your group might be able to trick a gullible or greedy star ship captain into getting you off planet.  Please note though if you have no resources to actually back this up when you get to your destination you might find yourself in a serious bit of trouble.  Indeed, if your captain turns out to be really wicked at heart you might end up having to use that “survive in vacuum” skill that you thought was a joke at character generation.  But leaving that aside if you can work this particular routine it might not only get you off planet but get you off planet in style.  Another trick you can also attempt to use is to find a smuggling ship or pirate ship and attempt to sign up, the key being that you will first need to find this crew and also need to convince them you and your fellow players are tough hardened criminals and possibly a bit crazy.  The first part is easy, find the seediest bar in the space port and hang out there, look for shifty eyed people/creatures and get near them, try to listen in on their conversation, if you are able to do so without being noticed listen for ones talking about nefarious crimes in quiet voices.  Crimes with words like “smuggle” or “raid” or “piracy” are good, crimes with words like “frilly” or “carnivorous slugs” or “giggles” should probably be avoided.  Once you find such a group, then you have to convince them you are a hardened bunch.  To do this, pick a fight with the toughest (and hopefully dumbest) tough in the bar, fight hard, you will take a beating but if you keep at it enough you will look like a hardened and semi-crazy individual.

Then you have one of your confederates talk, generally but in the direction of your nefarious crew, about how your (now knocked out and probably badly hurt) character is going “stir crazy” and needs to get some “action.”  Most criminal individuals will understand the code you are using and will probably offer to hire you onto their crew if your Game Master (GM) is even semi-savvy.  If your GM acts obstinate then turn in their boat to the local authorities and try again in a week or so with a new nefarious crew that has replaced the one arrested.  (However be sure the first crew is not paying off the local cops, if so, doing this might get you killed or hauled off planet to an even worse fate.)  Finally if all else fails, threaten to enlist your characters in the military, it will get you off planet, derail any non-military campaign hopelessly, and might get your GM to relent and offer you a chance off the rock you are stuck on.

- Dungeon Monkey

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Question: Dear Dungeon Monkey, I’m playing in a fantasy campaign in which dead heroes can come back from the grave, normally I don’t raise questions about the balancing nature of the mechanics of a game but I have noticed that the capacity to raise heroes from the dead seems directly proportional to how much money the characters have amassed.  Each spell requires some sort of massive gem or precious object to bring back a dead hero, so in a low-level point in a campaign it is very hard to come back from the dead but as you amass treasure as a character the expense becomes almost pointless.  If it was designed to balance the game, or the campaign world, why punish low-level characters who need resurrections more often instead of high level characters who have, in theory, more treasure but also more goodies to keep them alive?

Answer: Honestly it is moments like this when in a fantasy world you have to wonder about either the true morality of the gods or the morality of the clergy who serve them, death is supposed to be the barrier between two worlds, the line which is only crossed with the greatest of dread, something which should cause great surprise and shock if a person returns from the dead.  Ideally you would imagine that a hero raised who had fallen in battle, or from eating bad clams, would be a point of shock to the local villagers when they returned.  Instead most fantasy campaigns reach a point where returning from the dead becomes almost common place, to the point that some temples might do well to often a “frequent raises” discount program.  Some games do make a bit of an effort to make it seem more uncommon or put a restriction or two in the way of death, such as making it so that heroes who come back from the dead need to complete a quest or prove themselves worthy to return, others put actual game penalties on returning from the dead to discourage heroes from relying upon it too much.  Honestly though a true resurrection is there for the simple reason that players who have invested in a character often want to keep playing that character and become very unhappy if they are forced to start over with a new character from scratch.  Which, honestly, is why coming back from the dead should be easier for a higher level character then a lower level character, from a wealth perspective.

Think of it this way, let us say the price of coming back from the dead fluctuated based on how experienced your character was and it got more expensive to return a more powerful character from the dead.  As a Game Master (GM) this would put a market pressure on your players to keep their higher level characters safer from danger, because the death of a higher level character would cost more resources to raise then a lower level character.  As well it would also create probably one of the greatest nightmares for a GM to handle in a campaign, the grossly imbalanced player party.  Nothing screams of external intervention more then a group of high level characters running around with a low level starting character who cannot remotely take care of him or herself at the challenge level the rest of the group is following.  Think about it, if you are attempting to run a campaign and you have a group of powerful heroes adventuring together, able to face minor demon lords and small dragons, what are you going to toss at Bob, the starting out warrior who is about able to deal with a pixie on his or her own and little more?  Give the demons an annoying pet that latches onto the low level hero while the rest of the more advanced warriors due great battle with the demon lords?

If that sounds like a viable solution for you as a player or a GM by the way, I suggest you give it a whirl, you will find out fairly quickly that the more advanced players will often show a disturbing penchant for focusing in on killing the annoying pet before dealing with the demon lord threat.  Many players seem to take a perverse pleasure in stomping the living tar out of something they are really over-matched against, just for the sheer joy of watching it explode.  Often a low level hero in a more powerful group is relegated to the task of holding weapons and carrying loot while the more powerful heroes face off against the great threat of the week.  So honestly the fixed expense of raising the dead is actually a good tool for avoiding this problem, for allowing more powerful heroes to stay in play longer, and for more powerful heroes to be increasingly willing to put themselves on the line for whatever foolish quest their noble patron has sent them on this time.  Plus any sort of system that modified the cost of raising from the dead based on your ability to pay would smack of socialism and most fantasy worlds are distinctly capitalistic in their political outlook you know.

- Dungeon Monkey

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Question: Yo Dungeon Monkey!  Our DM has a penchant for making really complicated plots for us, our group tries to keep up with the plots and the complications our DM tosses at us but it is really hard and our DM keeps changing aspects of the plot on us as the game develops.  Some of the changes are retroactive to keep the story intact, which I understand, but others just seem to be wholesale shifts in the plots on the fly.  We’ve called him on it but the DM simply explains that “things are more complicated then they first appear” and then carries on.  Sometimes story-wise it feels like we are playing in a world made of gelatin, any suggestions on how to firm up the game world or our DMs campaign plots?

Answer: Sorry to hear that you are having two problems with your Game Master (GM) that are actually feeding each other in this circumstance, first you have the problem of plots that are highly elastic and keep getting redefined, but you also have the concurrent problem of highly complicated parts to begin with.  These two elements come together in some campaigns to create a storm of instability in plots and in any campaign with an ongoing storyline that sort of instability might hurt game play.  Players, to some degree, enjoy plots that they can understand and that follow a structure in which more and more information is revealed and then eventually you reach a sort of ‘core moment’ in the plot when it all comes together.  Now some games are built on continual intrigue and deeper layers, cyberpunk is a genre that commonly reflects this sort of twisting interlinked plotting, but even in cyberpunk you eventually find elements that are reliable forces you and your fellow players need/get to oppose and feel good about it.

The first, and most obvious solution, is that you and your fellow players need to start keeping notes on the plots as your GM reveals them to you.  Just short notes detailing the clues you uncover as you proceed through the campaign, the notable non-player characters (NPCs) that you bump into, and probably some diagrams to show how those various NPC figures link together.  Now notes will not actually stop your GM from playing around with the plots but they will give you a foundation which you can use to ask the GM what the heck is going on in the campaign world.  The cornerstone of this request for further information is not to confront the GM with your notes held aloft as a bastion against randomness, instead when the GM announces something that conflicts with what has happened in the past simply ask the GM to confirm that is really the case.  Let us say two NPC figures have been friends for several adventures and suddenly they are mortal enemies with no explanation, when the GM reveals this fact to the group point out how in the past these two NPC figures have been friends.  Either the GM will retract the story point or reply with some bit of wit such as “well now they are enemies, I wonder what happened to them.”

Update your notes and then dig into the change if you can, you want to pin down an explanation from the GM as to what has happened, dig into this newly revealed inconsistency until it is smoothed into the general fabric of what has come before in the campaign.  If the GM attempts to hand-wave away the change, do not let him or her off the hook, insist on figuring out why things have changed and insist there be a story reason for it.  The reason for this is not to be a difficult player but instead to make the GM evaluate the impact and meaning of changes like this to the campaign world created, are they part of a larger plot or simply the GM indulging in a novelty that caught his or her fancy at a random moment?  If said changes are part of a larger plot then you should be able, through dint of investigation, to figure out what is going on behind this sudden change to the world in which you have been playing.  Investigation should reveal reasons for the change.

However if all your digging merely turns up commentary about how “this is just something that happened” then you probably have a whim change and harping on its needing to make sense will discourage your GM from such random shifts in the campaign world.  But at the same time do not try to make your GM run a world that is static, a campaign, at its center, is a story and stories require change for them to have meaning.

- Dungeon Monkey

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Question: Hey Dungeon Monkey!  So I had a question for you, one of the greatest tricks I have is coming up with a reason on the fly for a random dungeon “adventure of the week” and also, more often, in finding time to design a dungeon that makes sense internally.  Any suggestions on how to come up with something in a few hours rather then several days that will grip my group’s interest?

Answer: Well the dungeon, such as it is, represents a particularly specific form of story-telling engine when running an adventure, usually a dungeon is either a linear path experience in which the players are forced to follow a specific course or something in which their choices are highly limited.  The problem, of course, is most players actually resist this sort of direction or require a lot of careful preparation to actually make a dungeon avoid appearing as just that, a random structure with no form or purpose that appears suddenly in front of the group to challenge them.  A few simple techniques though will help you create dungeons that are memorable, generally easy to construct, and also will allow you to generate a story line that links all these seemingly random encounters together.

First you need to put your dungeons in far-away locations, the key goal here is something remote, so remote in fact that no one visits it regularly.  The reason for this is quite often players are sent into a dungeon which is either in the middle of a high-traffic region (near a major settlement or, goodness help you, a major city is a particularly poor setting choice in most cases) can be the kiss of death for attempting to connect people to a dungeon.  Granted exploring the massive sewer system and catacombs under the city of Crystal Might can be fascinating but if it is taken over by some sort of rat-people working with giant spiders your players might start to rightly wonder why this sort of thing is not reported by the local sewer workers.  For that matter, if you mention that the sewer workers don’t live to tell the tale, that is another thing that might raise attention.  Finally city sewers should be avoided, along with other functional infrastructure, because failures in such systems are noticed by people and provoke reactions.  Trust me if you want simplicity then you should go for remote locations.  Generally research stations on remote islands, hermitages on remote mountain tops, wizards towers in the deep mountains are all excellent places for your adventure.

Second, contain the scope of your imagination by remembering that in any functional structure much of the space will be taken up with boring, functional utility spaces.  These do not really require much description on your part and in a good design should take up between thirty percent to sixty percent of the total structure.  A fortress in the remote frontier is going to have places for soldiers to sleep, storage for supplies, an armory, and support buildings.  A research station is going to have areas for storage of supplies, dormitories, and spaces for recreation as well as defense.  Even a wizards tower is going to have areas in which garbage is tossed, supplies are kept, and horses are stabled.  The point is for these spaces you need only include a line or two of description, unless there is a clue or something interesting in the location.  However utilitarian does not necessarily mean dull, if you have ever seen a horror movie then you know creatures hide or nest in such locations all the time.  Spring one or two nasty beasts on the group while they are checking out a store room or a dormitory to keep them on their toes.  Even if the creatures have nothing to do with what caused your dungeon to be abandoned or harmed (see below) creatures move into empty spaces.

Third, whatever your location is it has been lost/abandoned/contact has failed and the group is being sent in to figure out what happened.  You can have survivors in the location if you like but keep the number of non-player characters (NPCs) to a minimum.  Each NPC needs dialogue, a story, and a reason for being there, if you have to work fast keep the number to a minimum.  Usually someone in shock or hiding, only able to give a few key clues before fainting or dying, is a great if over-used means of conveying information without requiring a huge investment of planning time.

Fourth, have a smaller percentage of the structure be interesting, this is the part the group will find while exploring and will need to do more to figure it out.  A few rooms is usually enough, they should house something or someone interesting.  Make whatever it is mysterious and unexpected and your players will be drawn in to figure out what is going on.  Ideally make it only mildly threatening at first and then have its true danger revealed after some time has passed.

Finally, don’t let the players figure out the whole story in one dungeon.  Leave a mystery that comes back when they return and find something else in the same region has also gone off the beaten track.  Then your dungeon-of-the-week turns into a campaign arc of solving a problem.

- Dungeon Monkey

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Question: Dear Dungeon Monkey, I read last weeks column about super heroes and noticed the name you gave the super villain at the end of your column, it seemed, honestly, a bit lame but most super villain names seem to be either weak or pretty entertaining.  Can you give me any suggestions on good naming schemes/tricks to generate more memorable bad guy names for my campaigns.  I don’t need anything that specific but some general tips would be pretty useful.

Answer: Actually one of the most important uses of the name for any major Non-Player Character (NPC) villain is to make it memorable above all else, honestly there is nothing quite as frustrating for players as a named villain that either cannot be pronounced or actually is a name that they will have trouble remembering later on in the campaign.  Part of the reason comic books and cheesy movies go for such horrible names is it makes the villains more recognizable later on to the audience and, honestly, it fits certain genres better then others.  But in any case you wanted some generic naming tips and I will be happy to provide:

Distinctive short name – if you are going for something realistic in setting or something in which you want the players to have a feel it could be real, go with a short name that is easy to pronounce and sounds a bit malevolent in tone.  Hard sounds are your friend here, you want a name that has letters with a strong tone.  Be an adult and actually use a name in the primary language spoken by your group, foreign names sound good in theory but if one player speaks Spanish they might realize that El Sustantivo does not imply an NPC villain with great staying power but instead means “the diarrhea.”  More critically most foreign language names have meanings like those of any other names, they may sound sinister but they might mean something innocent or bland.  So accept this and simply pick a name that has a negative sound to it, if you have to, make something up.  If you do that though be sure it has vowels in it at roughly the proportion of real words – Xymjhkg’thlua does not make a name that roles of the tongue easily.

Give the NPC villain a title as a first name – a classic of comic books and poor fiction it is a trick that works wonders, a title provides players with an immediate shorthand clue as to what the villain does and what they are famous for.  Some classic good ones to consider, based on setting, are “Lord” or “Doctor” or “Professor” because they immediately imply a professional association.  For more fantastical settings something like “Magus” or “Wizard” could work well, for martial NPC villains something implying their ability in battle such as a rank or distinctive combat branch of service.  “Knight” or “General” or “Colonel” works well in this regard and also can often imply rank.  For a more advanced name you might want to use a term that does not imply their real trade but is a comment on their evil nature, “Butcher” or “Bloody” or “Fiend” works well in this regard.  You can also combine them in some cases, such as “Bloody General” or “Butcher King” but that is getting a bit complicated.

Give the NPC villain a distinctive nickname that is part of their name – it can also be something that replaces a last name in some cases, but make it something distinctive.  “Professor Doom” has a great ring to it and implies evil and a profession in one easy to remember package, “General Slaughter” makes a memorable name and implies what this person does and their abilities.  “Sparkles the Tea Master” on the other hand leaves players with a distinctive enough name but it does not really imply what the villain does per say, which may or may not be good.  Notice thought that it does follow the format, it provides a nickname and also provides a clue t the profession or area of expertise, somehow this villain is sparkly and also does something with tea.  To be sure the players realize in the latter case that it is really a villain you might want to throw the word “evil” in there.  That, by the way, should be taken as a general rule of thumb, if your players are not sure it is a villain they are dealing with, toss in the word “evil” somewhere in the name to make sure they get the feel.  If, on the other hand, you want the players to feel sorry for the individual use the word “cursed” instead, which implies they are suffering from something outside their own fate.  But in any case a nickname is a key attribute for a NPC villain name and it should be a nickname that does what a nickname does in real life, commemorates something distinctive about the person being so named.

- Dungeon Monkey

Have a question for the Dungeon Monkey?  Want to seek out some gaming suggestions?  Email Dungeon Monkey at dungeonmonkey@umich.edu and get your answers!

Question: Hey Dungeon Monkey!  I’m currently trying my hand at running a superheroes game and I’m running into a bit of a problem, the players in my campaign are doing well and having fun, but I am running into problems making plots and villains that can challenge them without turning to “over-powered monster of the week” themed adventures.  Granted a lot can happen in a large city but it quickly begins to feel unrealistic when you have super-criminals appearing every week or their new and even more horrible creations.  Do you have any suggestions for ways to make a campaign that can challenge super-powered players without becoming a challenge of who can come up with a more horridly broken creation, the players or me?

Answer: Honestly from my own experience and from reading comic books I can safely say that as a Game Master (GM) you are facing probably one of the hardest challenges plot and story wise that you can face in running any role playing game.  If you actually take a page from comic book traditions you will notice that, in the interest of telling a compelling story, many comic books will modify the powers a superhero has, modify their background, create new villains that change the ground rules to force the superhero to confront new challenges never before seen, and sometimes even reboot their worlds to simply escape a point in a story when the superhero has become so powerful that it has become difficult for the writers to challenge the character.  As a GM you rarely have the luxury of being able to flip your player’s characters powers on and off at whim or modify them to allow you to run a compelling story, players are often highly territorial about their characters and will become quite unhappy if you begin to modify their creations on them.  However as a GM you should not despair because no matter how terribly overpowered your players superheroes are, no matter how badly they maul your super villains, no matter how challenging it is to make a plot they cannot simply overpower, you can create stories that challenge your players.  A few ideas that, although hackneyed, can get you through in a pinch:

Evil versions – a staple of comic books and movies throughout time, simply take your players superheroes and make evil versions of them, exactly the same in every respect except alignment. With this method you have two means of approach, first you can go with the classic “villain versions” in which the players doppelgangers politely wear differently hued, often contrasting, outfits to mark themselves out as the evil versions of your heroes.  This prevents mistaken identity and allows the players superheroes to maintain their good reputations in the public eye, except perhaps among the colorblind.  To offset this it is often recommended to make the doppelgangers slightly better then the player character versions of themselves and then allow the players to discover a weakness or disabling factor in their evil twins that allows them to level the playing field.  The other version of this standard troupe is to have the players evil twins actually appear identical to them, be sure to have many hijinks ensue as the evil versions are mistaken for the heroic versions.  Of course it should end with a classic unmasking/revealing of the situation.  Be sure to have a reason that these evil twins suddenly appeared, preferably a reason that can be instructed of the error of its ways in a future adventure through the fists of justice.

Insubstantial – hit the superheroes with some sort of amazing wonder weapon that immediately drops them to nearly dead, their physical forms are in a coma and the players must play themselves as insubstantial, with their powers temporarily limited to that realm, to find a way to get their bodies functional again and also deal with problems “on the other side.”  If you have a player who can already blink between the two states that is fine, allow him or her to do so and add an element of real world activities this player needs to complete.  If the player can bring others with them between the two states, flip that power off for the adventure.  If the player whines and points to the rules simply inform them that this is not “precisely the same as what the power outlines and is a unique situation.”  If the players still rebel allow them to reappear in physical form but now they have bodies in a coma and new identical bodies.  If the players refuse to deal with this, run the evil twins adventure outlined above.

Mundane Tasks – remember comic books are story driven and often skip vast chunks of regular time and duties for heroes, but ever superhero does “patrols” in which they look around for crime and bad things to thwart.  Your key goal as a GM is to occasionally run an entire adventure dealing with just mundane crime, the players will beat it up without trouble but you still get to make them jump through the hoops.  Add challenges that cannot be solved with “fists of justice” solutions to twist it up a bit on the players.  Imagine the players having to rescue a valuable lion that has escaped from the zoo, they can beat it up but if they harm it the zoo will be damaged because the lion is delicate.  Another classic is to have the lion play a “cat up a tree” scenario, with claws.  This will also prevent the “super villain of the week” feel because these occasional “days in the life of” moments will set a normal feel to the campaign and make the super criminals more apparent.  They also give you fodder for sources for future super villains, remember, a common criminal thwarted today and humiliated can tomorrow be the new Doctor Seltzer, sprayer of carbonation of doom!

- Dungeon Monkey

Have a question for the Dungeon Monkey?  Want to seek out some gaming suggestions?  Email Dungeon Monkey at dungeonmonkey@umich.edu and get your answers!

Question: So I’m currently running a fantasy campaign as a regular DM and my group and I enjoy the challenge of regular contests in a “dungeon of the week” type of setting, I like to map them out and plan the challenges the group faces, they enjoy actually trying to work their way through the dungeon and break into new rooms, beat the monsters assigned to guard certain areas, collect treasure, and face fiendish traps of my own design.  It is that last part though that is becoming a bit of a challenge, I find myself often reusing traps from guides or other sources, or simply recycling traps that I’ve used before.  After you faced a hallway of swinging blades several times in a row it begins to feel kind of stale.  Any suggestions for how to put some extra vim in my traps?

Answer: One of the challenges of any campaign in which you feature a “dungeon of the week” sort of theme is keeping the dungeons fresh and interesting, I actually consider designing interesting dungeons to be one of the most challenging aspects of running a fantasy campaign.  Getting players interested in a hidden maze of twisty passages and secret rooms is never easy unless there is a gripping story behind the location and a series of interesting challenges to keep the players entertained.  Traps are actually one of the most interesting and powerful tools for a Game Master (GM) to actually spice up the experience for the group.  Unlike undead guardians or living creatures guarding a dungeon space traps require no motivation to stay in place, no support structures to keep the guards alive, and are not vulnerable to player tricks such as smoke, poison gas, or flooding.  Traps also provide an amoral force in a dungeon, they are mechanical or magical in nature and simply complete their function, regardless of the target.  But to make a trap truly memorable you have to twist peoples anticipations of how to actually solve the trap or beat it.

First off the trap should require an interesting or unique method to get through it, something that cannot simply be defeated by a roll of the dice by a skilled party member.  What I recommend is following a dual reward approach, allow the players the opportunity, if they wish to use it, to defeat a trap by whatever normal rules are actually in place in your game.  However let the players know that if they attempt to complete a puzzle or a task there is a larger reward for them, in other words if they interact with the trap they can defeat it and gain a larger benefit, if they just attempt to disarm it they will avoid injury but miss the larger reward.  Interesting traps are almost always magical in nature, magic is a lovely means of having a trap that can do anything and require any sort of interaction to defeat the trap.  Magical traps are also lovely because they open up other possibilities for the traps negative effects beyond just violent personal injury.  A trap that turns a player into a being a tiny fraction of their normal size is far more interesting then one that impales them with spikes coming up from the floor.

Second put traps only in locations where they stand out in memory, for example if you want to have a trap involving water spirits have them come out of a fireplace rather then out of well.  If you want to have a trap built around blades that explode out of walls mechanically or magically put them in a room filled with silk draperies and other fine delicate items, the blades follow paths that avoid the valuable items.  Designing traps with unique mechanical devices is another means of achieving the same end in a campaign with less magic, although mechanical traps often limit your capacity to provide rewards for further cooperation by the players.  If you are going with mechanical traps I recommend going with multiple layers for the traps and making them epically horrifying in their level of damage inflicted and mechanical design, a room filled with swinging blades on pendulums is boring, a room that turns into some sort of massive food processing unit of nothing but blades flying from everywhere is quite memorable.  If you go with mechanical traps I often recommend putting them on automatic timing mechanisms that require the players to dance around or through the trap to reach the means of deactivating it, if you follow this procedure add trigger effects as well that go off as the players attempt to work their way through the trap.

Finally if all else fails or you want traps that are single use, defeat after activation items, at least make the decorations interesting.  A falling rock crushing a player is conventional, a falling statue of a much hated and deposed Dwarf king know as The Hammer on the other hand mechanically achieves the same effect and is quite a bit more memorable.

- Dungeon Monkey

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Question: ‘Allo Dungeon Simian, I’m currently about to start playing in a steam-punk era campaign and I’m not sure what I should be considering as a career choice for my character.  Our GM says that we should each come up with something interesting that also fits the “feel” of the period but I’m not sure what sort of options might be reasonable in this case.  It is a Victorian-era setting but with the usual clockwork and steam powered wonders of steam punk, complete with regular lighter-than-air traffic between major cities but no space travel.  Any suggestions as to what might make for some interesting background career choices that helped pave the way towards a life of adventure?

Answer: Steam-punk is one of those settings that you either love or hate as a role-player, personally I have always had an incredible soft-spot for the genre and I am glad to see that it continues to survive even into the 21st century as a viable setting for players and Game Masters (GMs) to actually set up interesting and unique campaigns.  Sadly though it often requires knowing a bit of history to either properly enjoy it or to properly play it, but as your GM sounds like a rather flexible sort of person you are in luck, there are many options which are fitting in a near Victorian-era that might or might not allow you to have a dashing character background that will provide any number of skills necessary to provide the backbone for future adventures.

Military Background – probably one of the classic reasons to actually get into an adventuring lifestyle in the Victorian period, your character served in one of the branches of the armed forces of a major power and did a turn of service in some god-awful corner of the world fighting  a difficult war.  Your goal in this case is to have fought in a war in which you were able to stand out and undertake Great Deeds but also a war that carries minimal political or long-term ramifications.  Stay out of anything between rival Great Powers directly fighting, as this might build you future enemies you’ll actually meet, and instead focus on wars in far off corners of vast Imperial holdings.  Try to have served in a branch where you got to use a pistol or a sword or, even better, where you got to serve as an officer promoted from the ranks.  This will allow you the most flexibility in your background covering useful skills.  Be sure to have gotten talented in the use of small firearms, nothing is more irritating then to do all the work on a military background and find out your incredible talent with rifles is useless because you can’t carry one into the palace of the Duke of Fluffy Pants.

Reformed Sky Privateer – if you are more inclined to play a character with piloting skills and who has combat experience then you might want to seek out someone who has either fought on airships against the shipping of major powers in the world or who has attacked the shipping of evil powers at some point in their past career.  To avoid charges of illegality you, of course, had the proper letters of approval from some major government for your actions and only attacked targets allowed under the “Rules of War” that your GM might consider reasonable for the period.  Utterly un-historic, of course, but certainly a fun background and one that will allow you to play a ruffian type of figure, a rogue in society, with considerable knowledge of the lower parts of the world but also with a certain dark nobleness.  You most certainly will want to have given up such a lifestyle by the time the campaign has actually started and, instead, you are seeking out new challenges in whatever enterprise the GM has set up as the thrust of his/her campaign.  This sort of background though should leave you with the aviators skill set, piloting, navigating, as well as a good “dirty fighting” set of combat abilities.

Scientist/Inventor/Tinkerer Extraordinaire – If you are inclined towards building some of the great machines of the age or you just like the idea of a utility sort of character, then you want to play someone who is educated, with skills in the mechanical arts, who is capable of fixing or assembling anything from anything.  An utterly critical aspect of this character is your capacity to work with mechanical items, steam-punk is a genre of giant clanking mechanical wonders and you want to be part of that wonder.  Avoid the temptation of taking “conventional” scientific fields such as physics, chemistry, or biology unless they allow you to build vast hulking bits of machinery or equipment that can undertake horribly wonderful brain-twisting projects.  Ideally you want a character able to fix anything that breaks but also able to make a GM weep openly with frustration, or joy, as your character is able to concoct something amazing out of nothing but spare parts, a bit of iron, and some squeaky things you took from an overly friendly fellow at a carnival.

Rich Adventuring Lord or Lady – if you want social pull and money, this is the route to go, you are bored with conventional life and you want to seek out high adventure.  You are insulated though from social ramifications by a simple fact, money, lots and lots of money.  Focus on building up connections, social standing, raw charisma, and pools of money to play with.

- Dungeon Monkey

Have a question for the Dungeon Monkey?  Want to seek out some gaming suggestions?  Email Dungeon Monkey at dungeonmonkey@umich.edu and get your answers!

Question: Dungeon Monkey!  I need some help, I’m a rotating DM for my regular gaming group and I’m expected to run in rotation when we get together.  I am feeling uninspired to write anything, I could do a string of crappy combats put together but I’d like to do something with at least a thread of a plot, I’ve got pretty much a clean slate to do what I want.  It’s a fantasy campaign, any ideas for how to get an interesting plot put together out of nothing when you are not feeling motivated?

Answer: Probably one of the most challenging things for a Game Master (GM) to have to do is to actually write material for an on-going group or campaign when they are not feeling particularly inspired.  Almost every role-playing game (RPG) has a section on “How To Be A Game Master” and they devote many pages to the subject of how to create a campaign world, how to run an adventure, and usually they offer some advice for finding inspiration.  I will help you though and boil that information down for you to the most commonly cited central point: “Hey you know a whole bunch of professional writers and creative types have already come up with ideas, why don’t you borrow some of theirs and, you know, mix and match?”  This actually is a formula I don’t personally recommend be used by anyone, ever, if done correctly it is useful but to be done correctly you need to take someone’s already completed idea and use it as a seed for creating your own idea.  More often a GM in your situation will take a movie or book and do a close to complete theft of the idea, tossing some new dressing onto the setting and plot, and then attempt to parade it as their own pony.  Unfortunately almost every movie, book, or video game you might borrow from one or more of your players is going to be familiar with it.  Gamers usually draw on a wide pool of information and nothing will ruin your attempt at “borrowing” some material to inspire you faster then a player saying “Hey I know this story, you just used vampires rather then zombies, cool concept but it was done better in Revenge of the Monkey Lords Part VII!”  Instead I suggest that if you need to use a preheated story treatment you dispense with using a movie or book as the central point and cut directly to the core, use the classic role-playing game formula for a fun adventure.

First, create a mental sandbox, the environment in which the group will be undertaking their adventure, it doesn’t really matter what the sandbox is, just make sure that it is a sandbox that does not have any complicated buildings, structures, or other locations in it.  Now many GMs are tempted to do some sort of dungeon themed adventure in your situation, avoid this temptation, although walls make for comforting barriers they also require that you, as a GM, plan out the walls in advance and think on the fly when dealing with what players choose to do.  Instead make your sandbox some sort of exterior location, a dark forest, a desert, a series of small villages, a generic city, something that will allow the players to move around but does not require you to describe a trap in painfully intricate detail.

Second, create a really funky bad-ass villain for the players to fight in the end, a villain you don’t mind them killing off horrifically but one that will be a challenge.  Don’t worry too much about the details of motivation or back-story for this villain, his/her role is to die horribly in the final reel.  Third, come up with a reason for the villain to either hate the group and/or some sort of motivating factor to make the group care to intervene in the nefarious plot by the villain.  Some simple tags to use are: freeing slaves, preventing innocents from being hurt, preventing some sort of evil ritual, thwarting the plans of an evil wizard, or overturning a local bad leader.  The group needs to learn about this wrong quickly and be able to grasp it utterly in a few moments, so make it really twisted, depraved, and with no redeeming qualities.  Redeeming qualities confuse players, we are talking a villain that plans to murder all the babies in an orphanage to then bath in their blood, collected in a vat, so they can open the Moon Gate and become a demon prince.  An important point about this villain, to defeat him or her the group, at the start, is not equipped properly to do the job.  I don’t mean they need motivation and good heart, I mean they need to assemble the Spear of Destiny from scattered parts in the sandbox or their weapons will prove useless against the villain and by useless I mean “Does not even annoy him or her.”

Finally the most critical element, the crisis has happened to just reach a time-limited crescendo when the group arrives, to use the above example, the time for the sacrifice is right in six hours or some other tight time-table.  This forces the players to interact with the plot quickly and trims down on their time to be clever, forcing them to improvise is an excellent plan.  If you have a group that is often less then inclined to get involved, force involvement, nothing like an evil villain needing the still beating heart of an elf and, low and behold, your party happens to have two of them with them in player characters to get a group moving in the right direction.  The last thing you need is filler, this takes the form of side people who need to be rescued, generic tough minions that the players need to beat to reach the main villain, normally a good handful of conflicts will do the trick for you in this case.  If your group is really building oriented give them a small dungeon or two to have to work their way through to find key items to halt the villain.  When the group finally manages to get everything they need together and face the villain, have the villain fight them and do considerable damage until they manage to hit him or her a few times with the item of power, at which point have the villain explode in a pyrotechnic burst of happiness.

Finally allow the players to depart the sandbox reassured by some trusted local Non-Player Characters that everything is right with the world and they can move on fearing that they leave nothing behind that could be a problem.  This is vital so they don’t stick around, hunting for new plot and meaning, and requiring you to actually come up with a more solid reason for what happened.

- Dungeon Monkey

Have a question for the Dungeon Monkey?  Want to seek out some gaming suggestions?  Email Dungeon Monkey at dungeonmonkey@umich.edu and get your answers!

Question: Dungeon Monkey!  I’m working on building a character for a new science fiction campaign our local game master is putting together, but I’ve got a problem, most of the other players have taken the cool roles in a crew for a space ship and I feel left out.  I usually play characters who are pilots, or good at fighting, or technical people but we seem to have all of those roles filled, we even have a sexy alien to talk with other people.  I’d rather not be a fifth wheel in the campaign but I also want to be somebody who might actually appear on the bridge of a ship.  Do you have any suggestions for vital roles I could fill that aren’t already covered in our spaceship’s crew?

Answer: One of the major problems with any science-fiction campaign is that many science-fiction settings only seem to allow a limited number of interesting roles in a space opera or space exploration setting, if your Game Master (GM) is aiming for a small crew on a ship then often a crew seems to be focused on a few select roles that are quickly filled, larger groups then have the problem of what do the “extra” players do?  Honestly no player wants to be the person who makes a character who is “just like player A’s character only mine can shoot a bit better and run a bit slower!”  However there are a few things you can do to carve yourself an individual niche that will ensure you not only stand out as a unique individual on the ship but might also provide you with a character that is actually useful to the party.  At the very least these roles will provide you with some fun to play with troupes that your group might otherwise be missing.

Expendable Extra Crew Guy – a.k.a. “the Red Shirt” of Star Trek fame, only you want to find a way to ensure that your character is good at one thing and one thing only, surviving against the odds or catching a lucky break.  Ideally you want to make this character nearly immune to any sort of harm that might actually come his or her way but also make them so horribly poorly skilled that they inevitably fall into trouble.  The fun of this sort of role is that it will allow you to be in the heart of almost every adventure and you can actually ham your role up to the point that you, and other players, look forward to the sort of madness your GM can toss your character into in any one of several bizarre settings.  In fact if you play your cards right you might even end up with the GM offering you some adventures where your character gets to be a major figure and actually have a heroic moment or two, as a contrast to your normal role of buffoon and/or party whipping boy.  At the very least you should find an immeasurable number of ways to come within a hair’s breadth of death, space settings are wonderful for high death counts.

Historian or other Esoteric Knowledge Expert – most GMs when running through the bag of space themed plots will eventually dig up the old but fun standard of introducing some sort of ancient alien race into the game setting, either an alien race discovered through relics and long-lost remains or one quite powerful compared to your level of technology, and still active, but in diminished numbers or having accepted a “detached” view of the local scrap of space your characters are campaigning within.  This is a standard trick for the GM to avoid answering the question “If the aliens were so powerful why are they gone/vanished/failed/not conquering everything in sight?”  You, however, have anticipated this in advance and have tucked away vast amounts of skills and abilities in ancient languages, historic technologies, mysteries of the universe, and raw linguistic talent.  When this plot unleashes itself upon the group and the GM explains that “No one here, sadly, knows the ancient language or its text but if you undertake a trip to…” followed by some system name that rhymes with “hurt and mangle” you can pipe up “Or you can all give me a couple of days on the spa planet with this stuff and I think I can crack it.”  That is your moment, just let the GM know you are happy when your findings indicate the group will still need to go to the Planet of Painful Bowel Extraction by Pincer to actually use the technology in question.  Be sure to leave yourself flexible enough that if it turns out the aliens are not ancient you are able to understand the bizarre cultural experiences your group will encounter when you inevitably end up on Western Planet, Nazi Planet, and Space Nymphomaniac Planet.

Be The Backup – It seems to defeat your initial goal but actually being the backup in this case is not a bad thing, really it is not, because your group has all the main troupes covered but lacks an additional person who is less talented, but still good, in many areas.  Your goal in this case is to achieve two things, first you want to be able to give every other character a hand when they are attempting to do something.  Most games reward helping someone with a bonus to that players roll and you want to make it so that no matter what roll is needed, you can be there to give an edge.  Second, and more critically, eventually a GM realizes that skilled players and technology make many normal plots fail when set in space.  Inevitably this leads to a GM attempting some sort of “Oh no, your engineer/pilot/gun master is down for a while, what are you going to do to solve this engineering/piloting/shooting like crazy situation?”  At which point your character saunters up, makes a roll that is good enough but not spectacular, and your party is on their way.

If all else fails, be the annoying robot that understands millions of languages and whines all the time.  It worked for a famous science fiction franchise or two, so it should work for you as well.

- Dungeon Monkey

Have a question for the Dungeon Monkey?  Want to seek out some gaming suggestions?  Email Dungeon Monkey at dungeonmonkey@umich.edu and get your answers!