The Too Deep Simulation

Remember when people complained about The Phantom Menace describing Darth Vader's origins? How people said that you don't need to know how he was a bratty slave kid on Tattoine then a misanthropic youth? Well, you don't and you didn't, but that doesn't mean those movies couldn't be interesting if done better. Enough words and video has been wasted on this topic, enough to fill a million volumes. Bad things make more content and contention than good, that's obvious.

No, I want to talk about tabletop gaming, at the table character stuff, preparatory stuff, and my favorite buzz word ever, VERISIMILITUDE.

1. Why are you doing this?

So this is the classic question that story game masters want answered, why are you out on the road bashing gobbos in the head with a mace or slicing wolves up instead of safe in bed with a spouse and a turnip farm? This is a good question, it sets up a good answer and is vaguely accusatory. 

It also makes your character not a murder hobo. I'm unfairly biased against that type of game and character because I've never run that type of game and I don't find it appealing. Just line up the dominoes, or dungeons, and watch the characters knock them down. That's not fun for me, as a GM I have to like your character. I have to, in some way, cheer for them.

But as a GM I can give you that answer. I can put the characters in a situation that thrusts them together but separates them from the mundane. Like everyone is locked in a dungeon together, or everyone wakes up on a slaver's ship. 

But that's not what I want. I want to know why your fucking wizard only knows spells that shoot stuff or save his own ass. I want to know who taught your fighter how to swing a sword so it cleaves a goblin in two. Why does you god love you so much he's letting you toss around miracles like they're hard candies. Why does your rogue know better how to pick a lock than to talk to people? 

So we get to sub header 2

2. Where the hell did you come from anyway?

This is the money shot right here. If you're lucky you can mine a players answer to this for some choice world building, or if you did your homework they can mine your setting for a good sense of place in the world. Plus this leads to a buzz word I made up to describe well built FPS levels, or RPG towns that feel convincing.

PLACEYNESS

Placeness is just a measure of how much like a real place your setting feels. It's why the capital city is surrounded by farmland, it's why you put your capital city near a water source. It's why you drew an outhouse on the map. It's verisimilitude but for places and destinations. Can a dungeon have placeyness? Yes, but should it? Sometimes. What was the dungeon? A temple, a laboratory, a prison? Does it even have a real world analog? These are things to consider, but aren't strictly necessary. Dungeons have special rules, because they're there to make your players uncomfortable. It's a dungeons job to put the player off guard. Maybe you're in a natural cavern but the back opens to a long forgotten and buried temple to a malign god. We can up the ante probably. Maybe instead the cavern opens to starlight, though you know it's day. Now you're exploring a pocket universe that escaped a wizards bottle. Or you're in the bowels of the castle and suddenly, turning a blind corner, you're in a forest, a lost portal to the feywild. 

Those sort of twists though have to happen after considerable set up. You can't go "ok you walk into a cave and it's totally different, there's a forest here." That's confusing. I say that though like I haven't done it. (Note: revisit the forest's wisdom concept and then put a link here)

3. What the hell do you even want?

The point of all this rambling musing was to get here, to get to the point where I start asking the weirdest questions at the table. "What did Bloodhorn the barbarian reaver have for breakfast this morning?" or "The kitchens closed at the Tavern because you came in after midnight, what do you order?" 

There's a part of me that thinks that if you don't know that Bloodhorn actually had oatmeal for breakfast, because it's cheap and has lots of fiber, you won't be as invested when he is running head long at a platoon of hobgoblins. Probably wrong?

But this is bigger than that. Because as a game master you need a hook to dangle in front of the player. But where do you lose the thread, and are instead asking weird questions your player doesn't have answers for, doesn't want answers for. You guy just wants to run around swinging a battle axe and screaming about blood and thunder, I don't care if his parents are still alive. 

And do you keep time day by day? What if your game is much more mundane? How often can you fudge it and say "fuck it, that concert that was a week away, it's tomorrow now and by the way demons attack"?

There's that Gygax quote about how a campaign cannot be run without strict time keeping. I think that's more about the GM being the master of time. The players can not and should not be able to say "yeah we wait till next week when the open air market happens so we can sell our magic items to that shady drow who shows up" without repercussions. But what? What happens to fuck up their plans? Does the town get attacked? Do they get attacked by spiders? What happens? I guess this is largely my problem, and where I could slot some downtime activities.

Sometimes these posts are just me yelling into the ether about my own damn problems. 

sorry?