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UmbraLux
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 Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 12:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Jackhalfaprayer wrote: | What if through chance or lack of character attributes they don’t make it?
Do I just kill them? |
Depends on genre and how your group likes to play. IMO there should be consequences for failure, but it could be anything from knocked unconscious to broken legs or paralysis. Death is only one possible consequence, there are as many as you can imagine. Which fit the situation, genre, and your style of play best?
| Quote: | | Any ideas on what to use as the enemy? Alien style organic monsters are the genre convention. Perhaps there is no need to stray too far... |
The ship itself can be one (or several) opponent, there are several ideas pointing towards that above. But it's a derelict, pieces coming apart, computers attempting to complete some task, and machines going out of control could be relatively common. Add in a single alien or insane human to sneak around triggering these events and you have many of the classic elements of a horror game... |
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Jackhalfaprayer
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 12:44 pm Post subject: |
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Good to know there are more options than ista-death. Giving the players tools, or alowing them to improvise solutions will definetely help with them not simply rolling poorly and going squish.
Horror. Definitely horror. Survival Horror to be exact. Think zombie movie. Your in danger, but you can hold your own. The real threat is limited supplies and the overwealming force of the threat you are up against. You don't have enought bullets to kill them all...
As for the ship? Here things get hazy. Deep space mining vessel. Human.
Hmm... if the players are sent on a cargo ship to bring supplies, their cargo ship is somehow removed from the picture. They're trapped. They want off. Secondarily, as players and as characters, they want to know what happened here.
Escape pods are unavailable (broken, missing, on a part of the ship that is inaccessable). The ship is in decaying orbit (time limit. Doom.).
Something happened here. People are missing. Bodies are found in some places. Strange noises can be heard...
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Atomic Scotsman
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 12:55 pm Post subject: |
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I'm with UmbraLux on the issue of the Pit. Why would failure have to equal death? A bad roll means they don't make the jump -this is excellent! now they are handing onto a ledge or some cables a meter below the catwalk they were aiming for.
Now is when it gets exciting! Much more so than hopping over some silly gap in the floor. Give the PC an opportunity to climb back up or how will the rest of the group rescue them? So many possibilities.
As far as making the ship as detailed as possible: I'm not sure that really leads to a more "rich" environment. Detail doesn't equal richness by default, y'know? What it could easily lead to is GM burn-out before the game even begins.
I ran a game several years ago based on an old WEG Star Wars adventure where the PC's had to escape from a Victory class Star Destroyer that had been crippled and was going to be destroyed somehow -they had to escape before this happened.
It was a series of challenges wrapped around a game of cat and mouse with the surviving crew (because they were Rebels who had been in the brig). It only provided detailed maps for the bits where specific puzzles, obstacles, or fights were meant to happen. the rest was all hand waving and story-based.
Because we didn't have detailed deckplans the PCs though less about tactical movement through out the ship and more about creative solutions to getting off of it. I don't know if that makes sense. Rather than looking at a map and saying, "I move down this corridor, turn left, and then right at the third blast door." it was more a matter of "Would there be a maintenance shaft in this area? Okay lets see where that leads . . .oh a machine shop. What can we do with the stuff in here?" it didn't matter that the machine shop was technically on the other side of the ship.
It was basically a Plot Point adventure set inside a dying star ship -one of the best games I've ever run.
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Jackhalfaprayer
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 1:26 pm Post subject: |
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Hmm so you actualy just constructed the major locations, scenes that needed to happen, and then strung them together via the players choices and your instincts on how the story should flow?
That is similar to how I've run CoC in the past. Did that work? Your players didn't feel too rail-roaded?
Annother broad, and perhaps foolish, question: is it okay to constuct a problem (a flooded room, a locked door, a big monster) and not construct the soluition as well? How much rope do I throw them?
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The Angle
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 1:36 pm Post subject: |
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A lot of what's been suggested here is excellent, but much of it is also mechanical. If it's horror and suspense that you're after, then I suggest that you lean more heavily toward creating a mystery that the players must solve, not dangers that the characters must survive. Decide what happened to the ship. Sprinkle clues throughout that get the players partway to that conclusion but leave something unresolved ... a final question that can be answered only by entering a part of the ship that they've avoided until now, either because it was inaccessible or deemed too dangerous to enter (the engine room flooded with radiation, for example). Armed with the clues and info they've gathered, they're ready (or think they're ready) to face the 'big reveal' and the climactic encounter that lies beyond that long, cold, dark, airless corridor.
The mystery doesn't need to be complex, especially since you're talking a one-night-stand. If the place looks dangerous, players will move slowly and cautiously and explore a lot of dead ends. You probably need just three key clues to find (the ruined lab, the engineer's log, and the barricaded galley where the crew made its last stand), a few things that reinforce the clues to spice up otherwise empty compartments (claw marks, blood, shell casings, audio recordings of screams), two physical hurdles/puzzles to solve or bypass (sealed bulkhead that must be cut through or bypassed with EVA, compartment flooded with radiation or coolant that must be cleared), and a climax (breaking into the monsters' nest and discovering that the situation is much, much worse than they thought).
Steve
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The Angle
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 1:42 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Annother broad, and perhaps foolish, question: is it okay to constuct a problem (a flooded room, a locked door, a big monster) and not construct the soluition as well? How much rope do I throw them? |
Not every problem needs a solution, but every adventure needs a resolution. Here's the sticking point: when you present players with an unsolvable problem, they don't know it's unsolvable until they've wasted an hour and a half of real time trying to solve it and become thoroughly frustrated in the process. Players are trained to expect obstacles they can overcome. Unless your players are unusually resourceful and you know that they will seek a way around a wall rather than bash their heads against it, I'd avoid that sort of thing.
Steve
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77IM
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 2:04 pm Post subject: |
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Dylan S, thanks for the props! All of that advice is stuff I read various places, and which I now pass on to Jackhalfaprayer.
| Jackhalfaprayer wrote: | This may seem odd but environmental hazards (traps) sorta confuse me. In a video game they're based on dexterity. In a RPG... you roll a dice? Say the players are thrown into hard vacuum and need to maneuver zero g before their limited air supply runs out. In a video game this would be handled through the player’s ability to examine their surroundings and react under pressure. Player skill drives the action. If they fail it's because they didn't have the reaction time/failed to analyze the situation properly. In a tabletop it's because their dice came up 1's
Does that...work? I've never been in a "trap" in an RPG before. Most of the game's I've played have been character and story driven affairs.
If you're faced with a door, and it's locked, you roll lock picking (or hacking, or pry it open, or whatever)... But if you fail or succeed... how do you make that... meaningful for the players. |
You got me thinking about this last night while I couldn't sleep. I have had many bad experiences with traps and hazards in RPGs because they often seem like a speedbump. At one point I was ready to give up on traps altogether. But once I discovered the idea that "a game is a series of interesting decisions" it made sense, that a good trap is one where the players get to decide some stuff.
So, in traditional RPGs, there are three steps to a trap/hazard.
1. Detection: Usually this is a Notice check, maybe with a penalty. But sometimes the players can see the hazard a mile away (like a chasm that needs to be crossed) or they find out about it when it hits them (like an avalanche). Often it's better to make the trap easy to detect (although between 5 PCs, Notice at -2 is actually pretty likely to get spotted).
2. Avoidance: If the trap is triggered, usually the players get an Agility check to jump out of the way, although sometimes a different check might be called for (a Vigor check against poison gas, a Strength check to not be swept by a strong current, a Spirit check to resist a magical glyph). Of course if they fail there is some consequence.
3. Coping: How the party deals with the trap or hazard varies based on whether the trap was set off or not, and what the consequences were, and whether the party wants to disarm the trap, or just get around it. This is the interesting part, so when you design the trap, think about how the PCs might cope with it.
Steps 1 and 2 are usually reactions -- the GM calls for the checks, and the players make them, and the GM announces the result. Boooooring! If a game is a series of interesting decisions, hearing that your guy just walked into a tripwire and got blown up is going to leave most players sitting there and saying, "Uh, OK... I guess I'm hurt now..."
Avoid such "fire-and-forget" traps. Instead, make each one like a mini-puzzle or part of a combat encounter.
Here is an example of a bad trap, the classic spiked-pit-trap:
PIT TRAP
A false dungeon floor obscures a pit, the bottom lined with spikes.
Detection: Notice -4 for anyone who can see that stretch of floor.
Avoidance: Agility -4 to hop to safety when the floor collapses.
Consequence: 2d6 falling damage + 2d6 spikes damage.
Coping: Climbing -2 to climb up or down the pit, or Strength to jump across, or Agility -2 to balance on a plank laid across the pit.
It's bad because the action all happens before the Coping phase. Once the players fall in the pit (or not), it's a few trivial checks and cooperative rolls to get past it. It's a game-play speed bump.
Here are two improvements. In the first, the trap is easier to spot and avoid -- but harder to cope with. It may seem familiar.
LATIN ALPHABET PIT TRAP
Sections of brittle dungeon floor obscure a deep chasm. Tiles are bearing letters of the Latin alphabet line the floor.
Detection: The letters are clearly visible to anyone who can see that stretch of floor. The floor's brittleness can only be detected with careful probing and a Notice check.
Avoidance: Agility to grab on to a ledge when a tile collapses.
Consequence: Certain death in the black depths of the abyss.
Coping: Certain letters don't collapse -- the characters can jump from letter to letter to cross the chasm. A Smarts check hints at this, and hints that the sequence of letters is probably a word or name, and may be near by.
Here, the idea of the trap is to provide motivation to solve the puzzle. Jumping to random tiles will likely result in a flat character or two. It's a better trap because the players see it coming and can start Coping right away.
In this next version, the trap is hard to spot, but the consequences are light -- and interesting.
PIT TRAP WITH ZOMBIES
A false dungeon floor obscures a pit, the bottom lined with zombies -- animated remains of the trap's former victims.
Detection: Notice -4 for anyone who can see that stretch of floor.
Avoidance: Agility -4 to hop to safety when the floor collapses.
Consequence: 2d6 falling damage + 2d4 zombies.
Coping: Climbing -2 to climb up or down the pit, or Strength to jump across, or Agility -2 to balance on a plank laid across the pit. However, the zombies can reach anyone climbing the pit wall. A climbing character who becomes Shakes must make another Climbing check at -2 or fall back down.
Here, the trap is likely to be sprung. But it's not the end of the world -- it's the start of an encounter! It's a better trap because once sprung, the Coping phase is exciting.
So there is all my advice on how to do traps and environmental hazards. There are lots of good examples out there for traps. Try this generator: http://www.chaoticshiny.com/trapgen2.php (although I would ignore the "detection" advice and use whatever makes for a more interesting trap).
-- 77IM |
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77IM
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 2:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Jackhalfaprayer wrote: | | Annother broad, and perhaps foolish, question: is it okay to constuct a problem (a flooded room, a locked door, a big monster) and not construct the soluition as well? How much rope do I throw them? |
I think that's totally fair game. As long as the problem seems "doable," then it is an open-ended problem. A good example in a dungeon is a 20' wide, 300' deep chasm. There are plenty of ways to get across -- you as the GM don't need to come up with every one, ahead of time -- just be open to your player's ideas and have them make checks for things that seem tricky or risky.
-- 77IM |
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77IM
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 2:23 pm Post subject: |
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| Atomic Scotsman wrote: | | Because we didn't have detailed deckplans the PCs though less about tactical movement through out the ship and more about creative solutions to getting off of it. I don't know if that makes sense. Rather than looking at a map and saying, "I move down this corridor, turn left, and then right at the third blast door." it was more a matter of "Would there be a maintenance shaft in this area? Okay lets see where that leads . . .oh a machine shop. What can we do with the stuff in here?" |
This is awesome. My favorite thing in location-based games is to just throw in a lot of "elements" which the players can interact with. Person-sized air ducts? Absolutely. Guard barracks where the guys are playing poker? Sure. Fire-suppression systems? OK! A garage full of snowmobiles? Why not! A big red button labelled "Reactor Core Safety Override"? Definitely.
How the players utilize those elements (or are stymied by them -- some of the elements should be obstacles) is a big part part of the fun for me. The key is come up with way more elements than could ever possibly be relevant, so you need to not spend a lot of time on any one element. Quantity over quality -- you should know enough about each element (room, item, NPC) to improvise the rest. Obviously spend more time on anything essential to the story, like the final room where the big boss fight will be.
-- 77IM |
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Jackhalfaprayer
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 2:54 pm Post subject: |
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77IM
You've hit the nail on the head for why I never bothered with those kinds of traps! Though I never realized it consciously my aversion came from the fact that the action all happens out of the players hands, before the coping phase. This is a good perspective to approach a trap from! How can you make an environment in which the coping is exciting? Put the action in the player’s hands, not in the arbitrary result of pass/fail checks.
Also I’m seeing a growing trend of people saying that constructing each and every nook and cranny in advance is not necessary. I just need to construct locations, events, challenges, & characters and let the players string them together.
Alright… now the work begins
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Poor Wandering One
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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| 77IM wrote: |
PIT TRAP
...
LATIN ALPHABET PIT TRAP
...
PIT TRAP WITH ZOMBIES
...
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Pit trap with cake?
Sorry. Things have been orange at my place lately.
~will |
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Atomic Scotsman
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 5:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Jackhalfaprayer wrote: | Hmm so you actualy just constructed the major locations, scenes that needed to happen, and then strung them together via the players choices and your instincts on how the story should flow?
That is similar to how I've run CoC in the past. Did that work? Your players didn't feel too rail-roaded? |
Yeah, you've got it. As long as they ended up in the hangar bays where their transport was impounded at the end, it was all open-ended.
And so no, to answer the last part, I don't think they felt railroaded.
| Jackhalfaprayer wrote: | | Annother broad, and perhaps foolish, question: is it okay to constuct a problem (a flooded room, a locked door, a big monster) and not construct the soluition as well? How much rope do I throw them? |
Absolutely, but if that's not something they are used to make sure you give them a little GM guidance. I've had groups attack giant monsters that they could never defeat, because that's what adventurers do, and all I wanted was to create an obstacle to make them go around. 
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BluSponge
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 6:49 pm Post subject: |
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How soon are you looking to do this? Can you sneak in a screening of Event Horizon before hand? While I won't say it's a good movie, it does ooze atmosphere and is dead on what you are looking to do.
Tom
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77IM
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 7:01 pm Post subject: |
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| Poor Wandering One wrote: | Pit trap with cake?
Sorry. Things have been orange at my place lately.
~will |
The cake is a lie!
-- 77IM |
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Atomic Scotsman
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 7:03 pm Post subject: |
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| 77IM wrote: |
The cake is a lie!
-- 77IM |
Awesome.
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BluSponge
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 7:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Jackhalfaprayer wrote: | As for the ship? Here things get hazy. Deep space mining vessel. Human.
Hmm... if the players are sent on a cargo ship to bring supplies, their cargo ship is somehow removed from the picture. They're trapped. They want off. Secondarily, as players and as characters, they want to know what happened here. |
Hmmm...if I can borrow a page from Night of the Comet (and who doesn't want to, right?), how about an exploration vessel that was sent to witness some astronomical event. A dying star, perhaps, or a supernova. This wouldn't be noteworthy were it not for a few of the passengers: a rock star with more money than sense, a school teacher from a wealthy influential family, and perhaps a political who was a former space pilot. Once the event occurred, mission control lost all contact with the crew. Then, three days after words, they received a garbled, encrypted message. They've managed to translate part of it, and dispatched a rescue op (the players) to find out what happened. The mission is being partially financed by the family of one of the above.
In addition to this, take one of the players aside. His character has been given a secret mission: to recover a particular object aboard the ship (a macguffin that isn't supposed to exist measuring something that doesn't exist that would get the government in a lot of trouble if word got out they were developing it – please avoid the Alien(s) tie in and make it non-biological.) No one can know, and he is to make damn sure no one knows – or else. The rest of the mission is expendable.
One of the other characters is the son of the politician, and himself an up and coming pilot.
During the course of the adventure, mission control is translating more and more of the coded message, dispensed for dramatic effect.
Be careful with the critter(s). If you want to go Lovecraftian in this adventure, it should probably be just one creature in some unexpected form that only shows up twice: the first time to ruin all the players plans and give them a lot more to worry about, and at the very end when they think they have everything under control. (Maybe it's just because I've read At The Mountains of Madness recently, but something in the neighborhood of a Shoggoth would work.)
Worry about the atmosphere. Read over the haunted house adventure in CoC again. The creature won't scare the players. It's everything else. Like 77IM said, "do you want to go down the hatch to the engine room, or follow the trail of slime down the corridor." If you manage the atmosphere, the players will scare themselves.
If you aren't above cheap gimmicks (Lord knows, I'm not), when the players go to explore the ship, turn off all the lights and make them work by flashlight. I recommend a book light for yourself. Some evocative background music would work here too. Try the soundtracks for any of the Alien movies, Event Horizon, Pandorum, Pitch Black, and maybe Sunshine.
As to what the macguffin is, just make it small and weird. You don't have to go much into what it can do other than that its dangerous, illegal, and scandalous. Think chemical warfare meets dark matter.
Are there any survivors? Perhaps. But they should be broken somehow – emotionally or physically. Who sent the message? Great question. You don't need to answer everything, though. In the end, the message should amount to "Stay Away – Do Not Come Here" or somesuch.
If your players can handle it, turn their characters against one another. Paranoia and claustrophobia are trademarks of the kind of horror you are trying to create. Give the characters intersecting backgrounds: one of them slept with another's wife, one is an affirmative action case who know one else believes can do the job, that sort of thing.
As for the ship itself, see if you can get deck plans for a passenger ship and start there. That should give you an idea of all the key rooms that need to be represented. Add a science lab and a few other sci-fi hallmarks and you should be good to go. You don't need a map so much as to know what rooms are on each deck and how to move between decks.
Lastly, you want there to be a deadline. The players have to get off the ship in X hours. How and why this is is completely up to you. Perhaps the atmosphere scurbbers have been damaged and the ship is running out of air, something triggered the self destruct, or perhaps a contagion is lose within the ship. Whatever you decide to do, make sure the players keep track of time.
Tom
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Aramus Daimorgul
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 7:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Atomic Scotsman wrote: | | 77IM wrote: |
The cake is a lie!
-- 77IM |
Awesome. |
Doubled!
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GranFalloon
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| Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2010 1:35 am Post subject: |
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| Jackhalfaprayer wrote: | | Any ideas on what to use as the enemy? Alien style organic monsters are the genre convention. Perhaps there is no need to stray too far... |
The ship. Much like HAL from 2001. For whatever reason the AI went haywire, and it now regards humans as enemies. The previous inhabitants were able to shut down a lot of the ship's capabilities, which means it can't just automatically slaughter everyone on board, but it's also very difficult to get anything working again.
Perhaps some of the previous inhabitants are still alive, most of them insane and prowling through the crawlspaces, scavenging food where they can and avoiding the security cameras spread throughout the ship. Their reactions to the PCs should be... unpredictable.
This works well with the suggestion that the PCs are stranded on the derelict. If they want to get home they'll have to repair and reboot a lot of the systems that were shut down. What happens if they do this before realizing the ship's nature and killing its AI?
In my head, this would require a rather large ship to pull off. Not quite Enterprise or Star Destroyer, but big. Perhaps the ship is actually a space station that disappeared, so the PCs were sent to find it. It had managed to knock itself out of its proper orbit (maybe hit by something, maybe it has small thrusters for orbit correction), and they're supposed to track it down and send a distress signal. |
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GranFalloon
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| Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2010 1:50 am Post subject: |
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Oh, as for making the ship an antagonist (duh)...
For the most part, it should seem like weird, dangerous things happen. Try to make it seem like the ship is haunted. Airlocks open. Blast doors shut as people cross through. If the characters are unable to bypass a locked door, they can crawl though an air vent... which activates while they're in it, trying to draw them into the fan.
Security and maintenance robots could target them. Make them seem also insane, they're just everyday droids who have modified themselves for violence.
When the PCs access computer terminals, it's the ship's AI they're talking to. It wants them to reactivate all of its systems, and it also wants to kill them, and due to its damaged state, it can't prioritize these goals. It can, however, pretend to be just a dumb computer, only dropping occasional hints of its intelligence. So it gives them information on what's broken and how to fix it, then it tries to kill them when they make the effort (like I said, it can't prioritize, it's insane). Let them attempt a few of these, then when they access another terminal, maybe it makes references to things it saw through the security cameras.
And of course, have them get attacked by crazy ex-crewmen, perhaps trying to sabotage the ship even further.
Hell, have the AI hack into the PCs comlinks, so they start hearing things, or not hearing things. It could try to duplicate voices. Take one player aside and have him "overhear" a whispered conversation between two PCs plotting against him. Let him assume they forgot to turn "allspeak" off.
By the end, you might have an insane ship filled with insane crew and insane PCs, all trying to kill each other. |
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marshaljohn
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| Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2010 3:00 am Post subject: |
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| 77IM wrote: | | Jackhalfaprayer wrote: | | Annother broad, and perhaps foolish, question: is it okay to constuct a problem (a flooded room, a locked door, a big monster) and not construct the soluition as well? How much rope do I throw them? |
I think that's totally fair game. As long as the problem seems "doable," then it is an open-ended problem. A good example in a dungeon is a 20' wide, 300' deep chasm. There are plenty of ways to get across -- you as the GM don't need to come up with every one, ahead of time -- just be open to your player's ideas and have them make checks for things that seem tricky or risky.
-- 77IM |
In this situation you can make good use of inverted Schrödinger's Questions.
Player: Is there like, some loose cabling around on this side I could make a lasso out of to throw at something on the other side and make a rope bridge?
GM: Sure.. |
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