Getting started in the Vulcanverse

As with a lot of open-world gamebook series, you can begin your adventures in any of the Vulcanverse books. In each case you play through your childhood, your choices in those early flashback years shaping the kind of character you're going to start as -- your skills, deity, any starting gear, and so on. It's a little more involving than just rolling a bunch of dice.

In the first four books, whichever you pick, those childhood events are more or less the same. In Workshop of the Gods, though, it's a little different. Now you're not starting in a rural area; you grew up in the biggest city in the Vulcanverse and your family and home there provide a base you can return to.

Your early-life choices in the city are different from the other four books. Having defined your initial abilities, you're then presented with a couple of opportunities to acquire mentor characters. First, when watching your uncles play a board game, you notice a strange antique coin and if you ask about it you may end up meeting a veteran who will guide you through quests in Book 2: The Hammer of the Sun. Then later, shopping with your aunts, you can ask them about the land of Arcadia and thereby acquire a mentor who'll prompt you to undertake quests in Book 3: The Wild Woods.

In both cases you get the option to ignore the cue, thereby avoiding these mentors. Game designer Ernest W Adams has pointed out that when presented in a game with, say, an interesting inscription, there's no point in giving the player the choice of "look at the inscription" or "don't look". That's a non-choice, because why wouldn't the player look unless there's some other cost to doing so? (For example, unless they're being chased and stopping to study an inscription puts them at risk.)

But I still give players the choice of passing on the mentors for two reasons. First because your decisions at this stage of the book aren't only setting your starting stats; they're also shaping how you think about your character. Do you look after your younger brother with love, or through a sense of duty, or do you leave him to fend for himself? Making that choice will determine the character you're playing not only in game terms but in your own conception. Ignoring the cues from your uncles and aunts tells us the kind of self-sufficient person you might be.

Also, not all players are going to want mentoring. You can strike out into the other regions of the Vulcanverse and just discover quests at random. That's fine if you have the time for exploration and you don't need any hand-holding. Others will appreciate being given some hints -- and if so you can pick up more hints, though of a less structured sort, by talking to the Oracle at the temple of Apollo.

When out in the world you can find companions who will travel with you. They sometimes offer advice, but usually only after you've already embarked on a quest. They don't tend to nudge you towards any particular goal. If you like setting your own goals, forget the mentors but it's still worth picking up a companion. There are a couple you can find fairly easily if you look around the south-eastern part of Notus in The Hammer of the Sun.

Mentors differ from companions because they don't accompany you. They'll look at what you've achieved so far, suggest the next stage of a quest and give you some clues as to how to go about it, then with a pat on the back or a kick in the pants they'll send you off to try it. You can return to the city and seek them out if you're having trouble. The advantage of doing it that way is you get quests sliced up into readily achievable chunks, which a lot of players prefer to just playing on till they're tired. The mentor lets you know when you've hit a convenient episode break.

So, whether you're a self-starter or whether you like taking advice from a friend, either way you should find what you're looking for in Vulcanverse Book Five: Workshop of the Gods. Still, the books in the Vulcanverse series are not self-contained; they comprise one vast connected saga.

To give you an idea of the sweep and scope of that saga, think of the Sorcery! series by Steve Jackson. That's four big gamebooks to start off with. Now add the original six books of the Way of the Tiger series. Then pile on top of those the first four of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf books. All together that lot is as long as the Vulcanverse series. Vulcan City is a good place to begin, but you'll soon need to venture into the the other realms, so start off with a couple of books and bear in mind you'll need all five to complete the full adventure.

Like an egg stain on your chin

Recently I’ve been reminiscing about our roleplaying days of yore. Not in order to wallow in nostalgia, but for the sake of some interviews and podcasts I was doing. I talked about the saturnine loner who achieved enlightenment and saved the people he realized were not lackeys but friends. The civil war that split our party when each player-character came to different conclusions about the right and honorable course. The subtle ways that characters within a legion, even at different ranks, could push their disagreements as far as military rules allowed.

I’m forced to the conclusion that the roleplaying was better back then – more immersive, more nuanced, more surprising – when we just took a Tirikelu character and developed them by playing. Now we mostly use GURPS, which encourages you to plot out every preposterous detail of the character before you start playing. It’s not a springboard for the imagination. More often it’s just a straitjacket.

And by the way, I'm just singling out GURPS because it's the game I've played most in the last ten years. Plenty of so-called narrative systems are just as bad, with their nannying insistence on each player writing down which other character they like, which one they have a grudge against, and so on. It's like being at infant school and being made to write about your weekend. The point of playing is to discover these things, not scribble the backstory to a bad novel.

I much prefer the approach taken by Stephen Dove for his Jewelspider Chronicles campaign. There you begin with a short "mission statement" for the character, clarifying some background details but leaving plenty of room for future development. As an example, here's my initial description of the character I played in Tim Harford's Company of Bronze campaign.

I already talked about why GURPS’s mental disadvantages don’t work but there’s a problem with character disadvantages in general. Say you cap disadvantages at -20 points. All the players will immediately take the maximum allowed. What's wrong with this picture? Simply that if the disadvantages were properly priced, you'd expect to see some players not bother with them at all.

“Ah, but character diamonds.” No, giving extra points for disadvantages is the junk food version of interesting characterisation. A lame epileptic drug-addicted albino with the regulation five quirks is not the slightest bit interesting. What makes a character compelling is in the gap between desire and duty, wants and needs, feelings and experience. And better by far if those internal conflicts are drawn with a subtle brush, not the cartoonish personality traits offered by the GURPS rules.

So I'd allow players one disadvantage. Just one. That's it. Not a mental one, either, because they're all anathema to good roleplaying. If you take the disadvantage, you can spend the points on an advantage. Again, just the one.

How are you going to get that interesting characterization? Do what good roleplayers manage without any of the personality-by-numbers stuff. As Laurence Olivier said: dear boy, just try acting.

Bundles of neuroses

The other night I got a close-up view of a massacre.

Not in real life, thankfully. It was the finale of a Victorian-era campaign I’d been running for over a year. The player-characters caught up with some people who were responsible for a series of horrible deaths in the name of mad science.

The PCs found the scientists unarmed at an Arctic base and they blew them away in cold blood. An old man, a woman, and a child who happened to be in the way. One of them shot in the back, too.

So they saved the world, but in hunting monsters they had indeed become monsters themselves.

Now, I’m not complaining. I love that the heroes of the piece might turn out to be stone killers. Afterwards I mentioned to the players that refereeing a session like that like is having a front row seat at a really gripping movie, but actually it’s much better. Movies these days, impressive though they may be with their CGI-candy, too often lay themselves down in the well-worn story patterns taught in screenwriting classes, like old dogs with a favourite spot before the fire. I want to be surprised, even shocked. I want characters who act in unexpected, complex, and non-trope-driven ways. For that you need a roleplaying game.

There’s a but. We use GURPS for most of our games these days. The reason is that 4th edition is well-designed (at the core anyway; all the special cases slightly break it) and has the breadth to cover everything. The characters go to buy hunting rifles for their trip to Norway, or need to check fatigue for trekking through a marsh in a thunderstorm. Fine, there are rules already written for that, so I can just focus on the game.

The trouble is that GURPS doesn’t easily make provision for the character who develops in an unexpected direction. You have to set out everything about the character before you start playing them. In the case of my campaign, one of the characters had Honesty, which in GURPS 4e doesn’t just mean an inability to lie but indicates that you are rigidly law-abiding and, says the rulebook, “you may never commit murder”. Yet that PC did commit murder in a form that should appall any Victorian gentleman. And so did others of the PCs who had traits like Code of Honour (Gentleman’s), which in GURPS are classed as mental disadvantages and are worth extra character points.

I wouldn’t want to straitjacket the players by forcing them to stick to the stereotypes encouraged by the GURPS rules. Enforcing that would be barely any advance on D&D's boneheaded alignment system. As I said, the fun is in seeing the surprising yet inevitable way players respond to their experiences. Bloody and brutal murder seems inconceivable in the lounge of the Reform Club, but out on the rim of the Empire Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen had their own Mỹ Lais. How dull if a player had to say, “My character sheet has Law-Abiding for -10 points so I stop before committing the murder.” Might as well just let the sheet turn up and play the game, in that case.

Diehard GURPS players will say this is already catered for by the rules. You can spend future character points to buy off those mental disadvantages that no longer apply. But… ugh. That’s spreadsheeting, not roleplaying.

This is of course the old debate about how PCs should be created, which was discussed in some detail by Tim Harford in a guest post on this very blog.

“This discussion has been called ‘DAS vs DIP,’ or ‘Design At Start’ versus ‘Develop In Play’. GURPS is both the archetypal design system, and the classic method of producing full formed characters. I turned my mind to the problem of Develop In Play with GURPS characters and it turns out to be almost impossible to do this without chucking out the whole character system. Many other systems turn out to be strange hybrids in which—for instance—attributes are rolled, but skills are chosen within some kind of budget. This is less logical, but fits much better with a Develop in Play approach.”

The sensible answer is simply not to allow mental disadvantages in the game. As Tim said in his referee notes at the start of the Redemption campaign:

“GURPS mental disadvantages are all caricatures, so I want to avoid using them. This will save us all the hassle of dealing with the inevitable string of stubborn, overconfident, impulsive characters with pirate codes of honour. Another reason to avoid the official mental disadvantages is that characters tend to settle in over time, and the original set of disadvantages tend to be inappropriate.”

To which I would add that mental disadvantages, because they are slapped down on a sheet before you begin to inhabit your character, usually get forgotten anyway. I’ve lost track of the number of times players have said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you I have Claustrophobia. I probably should have mentioned that in the mines back there,” or, “Would my PTSD flashbacks have had any effect when we had that desperate gunfight three sessions ago?”

So my ruling from now on is that nobody will get points for mental disadvantages. Bad traits are part of the fun of playing the character. They’re their own reward; you shouldn’t get points for them. And in any case, characters need to be free to change, otherwise we’re allowing the gaming side of the hobby to smother the roleplaying.

Start by forgetting

We're starting a new roleplaying campaign tonight. It's being run by Oliver Johnson, co-creator of Dragon Warriors and Blood Sword, and he always brings a unique blend of innovative story background and palpable atmosphere to his games, so excitement among the players is high.

The player-characters will begin with no memory of who they are. That in itself isn't going to win any prizes for originality. I think I'll be playing in at least one other amnesia-driven game this year alone, and that's even if I can't get my hands on a copy of Alas Vegas, but when added to the GURPS character generation system, amnesia should make for a particularly interesting cocktail.

GURPS encourages you to flesh out the details of your character's backstory -- too much, in my view. I've seen much better (more interesting, more subtle, more convincing) characterization from players developing their characters from the inside, once the game begins. The design-at-start approach is a little too much of an authorial straitjacket. But how about if you begin knowing nothing about your past?

With Oliver's upcoming campaign, which is set in New Mexico in 1862, I originally had it in mind to play a gambler. But then I thought, well, how would I know I was a gambler? I'm dressed like a gambler, maybe. Perhaps I found a deck of cards in my pocket. But what does that prove? What if another player-character is wearing a tin star. He might be a sheriff, but there are other explanations.

Here's how Oliver himself put it:

"The more I sit here reading through the rules, the more I'm convinced that GURPS is the enemy of roleplaying, and only when handled in the lightest way can it aid rather than overwhelm the game. That was why I decided to start everyone as amnesiacs. I want people to interact and make up their stories on the spot and have some good roleplaying, rather than prescribe their characters through these arbitrary skills and advantages and disadvantages and overthought back stories -- which, instead of expanding the character, merely justify the aforesaid self-award of skills, advantages, etc."

If GURPS allowed for a little more uncertainty, there might be some of those discoveries Oliver is talking about. As it is, I still have to know a little bit too much about my character -- those pesky GURPS disadvantages force you to join the authorial dots and end up with the usual cartoonish characterization. But in a different rules system with a little more leeway the amnesia could become a wellspring of creative improvisation.

One option would be to give each player say 80 points to spend on basic attributes, advantages, and disadvantages. Arguably you would know those pretty much right away, memory loss or not. But you don't buy any skills at the start of the game. When called on to use a skill, you roll 3d to set a brevet value X for that one roll only. You then roll in the usual way using X as your skill level for that one roll only. If you succeed, that sets a minimum value for your (still unknown) level in that skill. If you fail, that sets a maximum value.

For example, you attempt a Stealth roll. First you roll 3d to get your brevet value. Let's say you get a 12. So now you attempt the skill roll as if you had a Stealth of 12. Say you roll 9 - okay, that means you know your actual Stealth value cannot be lower than 9. Or say you roll a 14 - that's a failure, which means your Stealth cannot be higher than 13. Over time you'll nest in on values for all the skills you use.

This brevet system for discovering your unknown skill levels is not greatly different from the way James Wallis's Fugue system generates characters' skills in the course of play, as astute readers will have spotted, but I'm looking for something that's compatible with GURPS -- and, because we want to keep playing an open-ended campaign that could last years, we'll need a bit more detail than just having a skill or not having it. Also I confess a slight allergy to RPG systems that co-opt the tarot, simply because so many of them these days do that.

Starting a GURPS game with no memory naturally rules out giving character design points for Allies, Enemies, Reputation, etc. Those are things you'll discover or acquire in play. But that's a much better way to handle them anyway, just as in stories it's better to show than to tell.

Creating a character who can surprise you

As a lead-in to a run of Empire of the Petal Throne scenarios and features we have coming up, here is an abridged version of an article by Tim Harford that originally appeared in the Oxford University RPG Society newsletter. The subject under discussion is the choice between Design At Start or Develop in Play for player-characters. The prelude game that Tim refers to, based on my Falesa island campaign setting, was achieved by having the players actually run through their own experiences during the 25 years of recent history described in the campaign notes. You can read Tim's whole article here.

The Generation Game
by Tim Harford

After years as a referee, I’m getting involved as a player in two major campaigns. The tortuous births of Baron Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin and, on the other hand, the Energetic and Modest Kotáru hiShathirin have been with me throughout the writing of this article. The experience has highlighted the choice between character generation (largely random) and character design.

Generation - Kotáru hiShathirin

Kotaru was "rolled up" for the world of Tekumel. A central plank of the character generation system is a D&D-like process of simply rolling attributes.

It’s easy to knock holes in the random design system. It’s not "fair". It’s not "logical". In defense of randomization, a few throws of the dice by Lady Fate do a lot to thwart the forces of cliché. Kotáru has Cleverness* 20 and Reasoning 3 - an absolute academic failure with a brilliant scheming mind! We lack literary models for this, and a good thing too. In Kotáru’s case, this is a stimulating challenge for me.

Another advantage of the generation system is that I was able to produce Kotáru from scratch in about ten minutes, knowing nothing about the Tirikelu system.

Design - Alexei Karenin

The Baron Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin was designed for a game of Traveler using GURPS. GURPS has a full-on design system: attributes, training, status, appearance and contacts all have a price, with a budget set by the referee.

Now, it’s all very well putting detailed design rules in, but one of the reasons it had been so long since I’d designed a character in GURPS was that I simply didn’t have the energy - I’d let whoever was refereeing do it for me. Now, with both a campaign and a character I could really get excited about, I’d been looking forward to designing Karenin.

Karenin took me eight hours to design - and this given ten years’ familiarity with the system and a very clear character conception to work from. But that wasn’t the only problem.

In fact, the firm preconception I had was itself a real obstacle. The aim of character design systems is to allow you to design exactly the character you want, within reason. But this only works if the character fits the system. Superficially, GURPS allows anything. In fact, there’s an envelope of efficient designs which, while broad, excludes many perfectly reasonable character concepts.

The GURPS point system pretty much requires that you choose particular complementary abilities. We see a lot of sneaky, acrobatic warrior types, because if you buy high Dexterity to boost your combat skills, you might as well spend a few coppers to become an all round Olympic gymnast. You can get a similarly fearsome bruiser by making him strong and tough, but the fringe benefits of being able to shadow people, escape from handcuffs, cheat at cards and ride horses just don’t come packaged in. Shame.

We also see wizards, engineers or net-runners who also happen to be splendid tacticians, diplomats or doctors. As I say, it’s a broad envelope but there are plenty of perfectly fair designs that just don’t fit.

The GURPS points costs, then, aren’t well conceived. But is there a more fundamental problem? Alexei faced a tremendous expense in acquiring the fencing and motorcycle skills he wanted, more as an affectation as anything else. In a fantasy campaign, being able to fight and ride as well as the Baron would be formidable: in a science fiction campaign, it was mere color, unlikely to be more than chrome. GURPS aspires to price up characters for any background, and the project seems doomed to fail on those terms**.

Certainly, any system which prices abilities based on how difficult it is to acquire them, rather than on how useful they will be, will fail to create "fair" characters – which presumably was part of the aim. One wonders whether we wouldn’t be better off using Paul Mason’s Outlaws Light system*** :

"Write down what your character is like. Then go through and write a bonus number for each area in which they differ from the average. The number can be positive or negative to indicate aptitude or ineptitude, and can range from 1 to 5 (although most areas should be 1 or 2)."

Design and authoriality

Depending on one’s view of the nature of role-playing, character design has a serious flaw, or great benefit. In the Black Corner, we have White Wolf and the Storytellers. Boo! In the Corner of Iridescent Holiness, we have me, Paul, Dave and all right-thinking folk.

The bout is to decide whether the players and referee are combining to tell a story - the Black Corner’s viewpoint - or whether plot is something which only exists in retrospect, having arisen from the interaction of fictional personalities.

The Black Corner holds that the character is a storytelling tool. The player should wield this tool to help the other players and the referee produce a good story. We might call this an authorial approach.

The good guys suggest that the pursuit of a good story is self-defeating. The best way to play, we suggest, is to treat your character as a person and think yourself into the role. You may skew what the referee had in mind, but perhaps she should have been more flexible - with a good referee and a mature bunch of players, the outcome will usually be a great story which surprises everyone.

Anyone who has encountered this old chestnut will have their own opinion. Suffice it to say that a self-conscious process of character design is highly authorial and so it plays into the hands of the Storytellers.

In creating Alexandrovich Karenin, I could have been a storyteller and designed a character with a view to helping the referee. I’m glad I didn’t, because I am sure the result would have been insipid. Instead I turned myself into the referee for a while. I thought about how he should be played, the kind of political interests he would have, his contacts, his allies, his old lovers and his mortal enemies. This has certainly provided the referee with some material to go on, but at the same time gives him a real headache. This kind of conflict is inevitable in a character design system.

Kotáru grows up

Let’s return to Kotáru. I said that Kotáru took about ten minutes to generate, but this was disingenuous of me. Kotáru’s character actually took eight hours, just the same as the Baron Karenin.

As I’ve said, while creating Karenin, I was effectively referee for the day. The result was good. The eight hours spent generating Kotáru hiShathirin was better. Having taken a few minutes to put together the basics about Kotáru, and to think a little bit about what he was like, I joined the other players and the referee in a joint prelude, spanning many events in our lives rather than focusing on a single epiphany. That prelude turned out to be a fantastic session.

As Kotáru grew up we found out about life on Falesa Island, the Hlüss under the pile of stones on the rock, my unexpected enemy, when Kotáru’s betrothed Kala turned the air blue with her curses and whether she was justified, how Kotáru’s strange younger cousin Kishonu hiLanaka is insatiably curious, and what the friendship between Kishonu and Kotáru is really based on.

When the game itself started, we understood how weird the Nom was, and how great the sacrifice of Chondrek hiLanaka, and why we owed the Stranger great honor.

Much as I love Alexei, I wonder which was the better use of eight hours.

A modest proposal

In his White Dwarf article**** “Origin of the PCs”, Pete Tamlyn set the industry a challenge to produce a game with many ways of producing a character, from a full-fledged design system to a method which would allow fairly detailed characters to be generated with a few quick rolls of the dice - either to allow play to commence quickly, or to allow the referee to produce NPCs.

We haven’t seen too many examples of that, but here are a few suggestions. From the anti-authorial viewpoint, a full-fledged design system is not what is required. Instead, we need to think more about the process which produced the person represented on our creased and coffee-stained character sheets. What is her history? Where did he grow up? How did she spend her time when she was young? Who trained him to hold a sword like that? Why is he so nervous of left-handed men? Why won’t she go to confession? And what does all this mean for the numbers on the piece of paper the player holds in his hand?

The player needs a framework to think about these questions. This could be anything from a simple list of points to consider to a programmed prelude along the lines of a gamebook - make choices about your character’s youth, and note down the skill bonuses along the way. An example:

1 When you were very young, did people say about you:
"He’ll be a great warrior, like his father." (2)
"Such a sickly thing! A miracle he survived." (3)
"He’s got such a sparkle in his eyes." (4)
"Always getting into trouble, that child." (5)

Each answer will affect skills and attribute modifiers, and some may spin the character down unforeseen paths. Later on, the questions may be a little less mystical. These would be questions about how you spent your adolescence:

78 Now that you are a squire, what do you do with your spare time?
Flirt with the ladies of court (+1 Bard, +1 Etiquette)
Run errands for a castle craftsman (+2 to a Craft skill)
Spend time around the stables (+1 Riding, +1 Animal handling)
Keep training (+2 Sword, -1 Charisma)
Get up to mischief (+1 Stealth, +1 Pickpocket)

It’s possible to go into a lot more detail, but that is probably not appropriate. It may well be appropriate to elaborate, but that is probably best left to the player’s imagination - or even better, some prelude time with the referee present. The thing that appeals to me about the gamebook format is that it can be made fractal - you can zoom in or out depending on the level of detail you require. To speed the process up, sections of decision-making can be bypassed and given summary statistics:

Train as a squire: +2 Sword, +1 Etiquette, +1 Riding, +1 Strength.

Or, at any point, a one-line summary can be made into a play session lasting anything from a couple of minutes to a whole afternoon. Just how successful was that flirtation with the court ladies? You picked up some skill points, perhaps, but what else: A jealous rival? A reputation? A social disease? A bouncing baby boy? An adoring new friend?

To allow for these fractal possibilities, the generation system needs to be modular. For example, character development could consist of:

• Potential at birth: attributes, rolled randomly perhaps, or chosen using a point system;
• Childhood: roll on a table, play it out, or use a programmed scenario;
• Adolescence: as above;
• Apprenticeship: as above. Childhood, adolescence and apprenticeship could all be combined in a summary template to save time, if that’s what required - back to the old "character class" system;
• Careers. Traveler pioneered the idea of describing the training a character had received in terms of one or more careers. Each career, again, can be described by summary statistics or the highlights can be played out.

This process builds a tremendous amount of background detail. It also allows for a significant degree of player choice while avoiding the absurd mathematical trade-offs inherent in a point-based design system.

It has its disadvantages, too. It’s a lot of work for the referee and for the designers - but they love that. It’s also quite incompatible with the "generic" vision of GURPS: character generation is inextricably bound up with the details of the game world. Some people will find that an objection, but for me it’s a tremendous way to introduce a game world and a type of campaign.

I’m struck by how little has changed in the hobby since Pete Tamlyn’s article. I think that a prelude-heavy form of character generation is a step forward, despite the practical objections. Perhaps these ideas are most likely to be carried forward with electronic resources. Until then, the young heroes Alexandrovich Karenin and Kotáru hiShathirin march forward into a bright future.

* The best explanation I have seen is "Kirk has cleverness, Spock has reasoning."
** There are patches for this, of course. Frazer Payne suggested a simple multiplier. The referee spends a few minutes - or hours, more likely - going through the book and applying multipliers to each advantage and skill. There’s a point break: Primary (x 1), Secondary (x 2/3) and Peripheral (x 1/10). Alexei’s strength is secondary, as is his Baronial status. His theological studies and his fencing are peripheral. On the other hand, his ability to pilot a starfighter is fairly central to the game...
*** You can find Outlaws Light in Imazine #33 
****White Dwarf #72 (Dec 1985).