Night Chalice and the Dragon Waiting Syndrome

Last week I promised to look at the Night Chalice game as an example of the Dragon Waiting Syndrome. If you're not familiar, the Dragon Waiting is John M Ford's World Fantasy Award-winning novel, where the central characters are: 

• Gregory, a German vampire mercenary skilled at siege engines; 
• Dimi, the exiled heir to the Byzantine throne; 
• Cynthia, a young physician forced to flee Florence; and 
• Hywel, a Welsh wizard, nephew of Owain Gly Dwr,

So naturally the action takes place in Wales, and the characters "wage an intrigue-filled campaign against the might of Byzantium, striving to secure the English throne for Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and make him Richard III." 

Ever since I finished the book, I've referred to the tendency of player groups to make PCs that are not necessarily opposed to the GM's plotline, but disconnected from it. 

This is subtly different from what we in Alarums & Excursions used to call "Special Snowflake Syndrome", before Snowflake took on it's current internet meaning. Back then it was "all snowflakes are unique, but I want my snowflake to be specially unique!" and referred to players who deliberately built characters at odds with the GMs instructions: the canonical example was my saying that the campaign was built around the PCs being officers of a Roman Legion (ala Turtledove's Misplaced Legion books) and one player deciding they wanted to play a camp follower. When quizzed as to why, it was "because I think Roman legionnaires are boring but I still want to play." There was a lot of discussion around this "I don't like the idea but I want to play so you as GM should deform your idea into something I do like" as a valid player response and the conversations that need to be had around it. 

Dragon Waiting Syndrome isn't that. All the players in a DWS want to play with the game premise. None of them are doing passive aggressive campaign rejection. They just waged way further afield in the GM's stated "alternate history Europe with mild magic" in their designs than the GM anticipated. 

This is sort of what I ran into for the Night Chalice. I told the players we were in Eversink, and that they were the last remnants of a thieves guild. I expected some con men, burglars, pickpockets, maybe a legbreaker, and I got. 

• A former inquisitor turned smuggler who can see ghosts (which is discussed here)
• A professional duelist who assassinates under the cover of quasi-legal challenges
• A street physician who patched the gang members up, and dabbled in magic
• The dead guild leader's pet sociopath, his Luca Brasi, but secret and a nebbish. 

Now, all of these are perfectly legal justifiable builds. Just none of them lend themselves to short or long cons, caper style robberies, or any of the other things that I thought the group might be doing. This has completely re-tooled the sorts of adventures they're getting into without changing the "Hey we're a thieves guild!" premise. I could have done a lot more work on my end creating, say, 8 templates the PCs had to choose from that would have resulted in things more like I expected. I'm not sure it would have led to the players being as engaged. 

We play to learn. 

Night Chalice, Swords of the Serpentine, and Default Settings

I am not, in general, a fan of the pre-made milieus (yay, it's fantasy, I can use milieu! The Gygax duck falls from the ceiling and I get a prize!) that come with most RPGs. That being said I have been doing more with them lately; for example, because the game at the library is for lots of random kids I wanted the game to mirror the source material the library had purchased for the kids to look at, so the Dragon Empire it is. That ones great because it's got lots of empty spaces in the campaign for you to fill in, and there's a nice detailed color map for the players to look at as they run hither and yon across the Empire. 

(It becomes problematic as 13th Age 2E comes out and they've, for reasons unfathomable to me, advanced the timeline of the "we are leaving lots of this unfilled for you to use and we won't add much to mess with it" specifically to remove the Icon who was the Big Bad of my ongoing campaign. So that's useless. But there's a lot in 2E that baffles me...)

Anyway, I'm also using Swords of the Serpentine more or less as written, which is something I didn't do in the playtest (which I ran in Ankh-Morpork). Again, it's because the players have very little time, I have a readily screen-shot-able PDF of the rulebook (and now after the Pelicon sale I think all the PCs own their own PDFs), and also because the players are huge fans of Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series, which is such an influence on the setting Lynch is name checked twice. Since I've long wanted to run a game where the PCs were a thieves guild, Eversink makes a good place for that. 

Still, this means the milieu has stuff it that I wouldn't have put there: the existence ghosts and Spirit Sight as a default PC ability, for example, is really changing what I originally had in mind for the game. The importance of True Names in the setting I could skip - and almost did because they don't work quite the way they do in the Gentleman Bastards so there's a little confusion we had to get over (though I understand why because players would loathe the loss of agency in that magic system) - but didn't because it felt linked to the ghosts and spirits. These things make Eversink unique, but directly tying one of the class skills to those mechanics, and that class skill to one of the city factions, makes it feel difficult to genercize the rules set for other places. 

Which generally irks me. Eversink is fine. It's clever, it's colorful, it's got a nice flavor, its internally consistent. But would I be happier running this in Lankhmar? Or Shankill, my own prime milieu? Maybe. I just wish the system made it a little easier to do so. 

That being said, the rules for Laws and Traditions, or Forgotten Lore, where spending a point lets you define things about the setting and the setting being built to withstand that, is a wonderful thing. So there are plusses and minuses. Everyone's having fun! Next week, it's the Dragon Waiting Syndrome!

Night Chalice: Planning for the Future in Experience Spend Systems

Something interesting to me came up in my writing up of the current state of the characters for the Night Chalice Swords of the Serpentine game. As I wrote up the actual meaning of the PCs Alliance and Enemy ranks in play - to help ground the players and characters more in the fiction and because we had done a Smallville style R-map to get player buy in on their most important NPCs and location theoretically under the Night Chalice's control - I found myself writing out what the effects would be in play if they exercised their option to buy more ranks of allies or by off ranks of enemies. 

This is unusual for me, and I suspect for some of the players. The mechanics of it are clear: you spend 3 advancement points, you can get/lose a point of allies/enemies. This isn't uncommon across a lot of games but I know for at least one of the player she hasn't played in things where that's part of the players metacurrency. And that got me thinking about how much this is a very strong tool for player control of the story arc if they choose to use it. 

It's obviously a very old one - players have had the ability to buy off enemies they got points for back to Champions (1981) - but I seldom play point build or experience spend to improve games. The last time I ran Gumshoe was for Mutant City Blues, which doesn't have the Allies/Enemies structure. So writing out for Rebecca that if she opts to buy another point of Allies: Church of Denari then her faction in the church will gain ground in the internal political struggle that got her kicked out of the Inquisitors. If she buys off the Enemy: Church of Denari her main rival on the other faction will be discredited and removed (even if that doesn't get her back in the Church) and if I know in advance we can work that into a session; but it might just happen! offscreen! Because life happens when she's not there! She's part of a whole faction that is moving on their own about larger politics. Or her enemy might just get kacked by a demon and Adele might feel moved to look into that threat. 

So one one level this isn't really a completely GM controlled game. Players can direct, with their changing ranks of Alliances and Enemies, the direction of the politics and plots. This is more mechanical than players actively pursuing or asking the GM if such things are possible for them to angle for. By deciding to spend 9 advancement points to buy off her enemy and improve her alliance from 1 to 3 Adele can become a major player in church politics, radically altering the power structure of the Night Chalice game. 

A big limiter on this behavior is that with bimonthly games we will likely manage six 4-5 hour sessions a year, and 3 Advancement Points annually. It would take 3 years of Play for Adele to do that if she dedicated her time to it. I'm limiting my 'bonus' awards to the players to Wealth earned (of which they still have sizable costs to keep the guild running) and Favors (and Grudges). There's no way to just get a rank in an Ally through in game action. If the point economy of play is built like this than as a game I don't feel the need to meddle with I'm sticking with it.

Still, I find it fascinating as a thought experiment to see if anyone decides to play with this concept. 

The Night Chalice: Wealth and Network

Sharp Eyed readers will have seen the new page up on the blog holding the write ups of my Swords of the Serpentine game, the Annals of the Night Chalice. The rough concept is the PCs are the last surviving members of a moderately successful thieves guild in the default city of Eversink who, after an encounter with a sorcerer has slaughtered the rest of their guild, are trying to keep the Night Chalice a going concern. There's only one issue with the rules/concept meshing, and that's with trying to run a continuing business in a system where the default is don't stress the money. 

My current solution is that while play started with the Night Chalice being dead broke in liquid assets (the sorcerer stripped all of their accounts), they are still technically collecting money from the funeral statuary shop, brothel, smuggling shipbuilder, bar, gambling establishment , and smuggling warehouse that the players defined as places under their protection. (The warehouse full of smuggled goods which they never looked into because that's also where all the guild was slaughtered... Of course I also just thought of it so that's part of today's plot.) The sorcerer who was trying to destroy the Night Chalice also promised a smaller up and coming guild control of the Chalice's rackets as prepayment for future services, so if they didn't move quickly the PCs would lose those too. 

Fortunately for our heroes, the Night Chalice just broke the Hanged Men in a devastating raid, and are claiming their meager treasury (15 wealth), which is enough to keep them Comfortable with a bit left if they still have all of it at the end of the adventure. 

It also keeps them their profit making businesses: as long as they can defend their 6 sites each generates 3 wealth per adventure, giving them Comfortable lifestyles with 6 extra wealth. Of course they have also just stolen the recruits that the Hanged Men were bringing on board. Normally spending Wealth gives you 3 general ability point pool for when wealth might be useful, but if they prepay wealth per month they have a 3 point Network (stolen from from Night's Black Agents) per Wealth spent - They can assign Network points to a newly named member of the raw recruit gang and then use those points to have the member do stuff. But once the named member's network drops to 0, they get killed, burned, turn traitor, or what have you. So once someone is created, you need to keep unused general ability points in their pool to keep them loyal, and keep spending Wealth into the gang to keep it active. 

We'll see how this works.