Big Boss Friday: Going up Against the the King (… of the Mountain)

I told you I’d get it done.

King of the Mountain is a game we figured out as kids, and in the duel goal of tainting childhood memories and keeping things simple why not use it as a boss mechanic. Well I could lie and say that I haven't done exactly, but I'm proud of it.

King of the Mountain fights are actually pretty simple when it comes down to it. You need a few pieces: The target, The obstacle, and the mountain. Two of these are pretty obvious. It's King of the Mountain. If you have no king and no mountain you just have “of the” and that doesn't sound fun.

Where am I going with this? Well today we're going to have a case study. A specific boss encounter I've used, and why I liked it. It goes with my previous post and as such has a horror theme… cause I like horror games… boo.

Okay, here's the set up. The party is in the silent hill style hospital I described in the previous post, and the halls have sudden gone empty of even the most twisted humanoids. The main lobby has finally been unlocked, and they have access to it for the first time. They enter the lobby from an upper floor and look down. Naked patients and staff are piling on top of one another into a writhing mass of bodies. On top is a man the group hasn’t seen before, but he’s got a grin that splits his face in half and he’s staring up at the party. My players, in their infinite wisdom, try to talk to the man.

He describes to them a desire to turn the people into a throne for his god, and that his madness allowed him to weaken the hearts of the people below him until he could control them. My players also decided to simply… keep talking to him. Now, at this point we have the mountain, which btw is growing higher at a slow but steady rate, and the King. As my players continue shooting the breeze, I unleash the obstacle. I look at the first player to my left and ask them to roll a will saving throw. They fail, and they take 1 point of temporary wisdom damage.

Okay, here’s what confused me. I figured that point of wisdom damage would be enough for the players to go, “Oh shit.” And do something. Well they did. The wizard tried to buff his mental score… in a room filled with almost tangible insanity (cause that’s a great idea). He failed another saving throw and took another two points of wisdom damage. My scientist asked if she could blow up the pile, to which the entire party responded by debating taking away her bombs. And my damage dealing fired off a shot. She rolled a 19 and I told her the shot appeared to be deflected a few inches from the boss.

A quick aside here. I don’t usually like meta-gaming and try to discourage it, but my players know I don’t require insane checks to do most things. I assumed that the character would know that the shot was deflected and that a change of tactics was required. Well, here comes round two. More wisdom damage, the wizard now pulls out a gun and fires, missing, and the gunner tries again, still failing. Two more rounds of this, and my wizard looking at a negative save value, I brought out one of the most important tools of the GM’s arsenal. The “Common Sense Check” (echo echo echo). The gunner passed, and realized, “Oh wait, psychic shield that deflects projectiles. We don’t have a psychic friend that does things exactly like that oh no. .” So finally the party rushes the pile.

As the party reaches the pile, which is quite high now, the Wizard takes another point of wisdom damage. He’s low now, way below human standards, so I ask him to roll another will save, which he in turn falls. Smiling gleefully, I take his character sheet and move his token closer to the pile as he marches forward in a trance state. Oh yes, his character is jumping into the pile. Every round he gets to make another difficult will save to stop himself from joining the writhing mass, or in his case two rounds latter perform a strength check to keep from being crushed. Wizards and strength checks are hilarious. The Scientist attempts to keep the Wizard from jumping in, while the Gunning attempts to climb the pile, as she has the highest wisdom score.

Now, every once in awhile the random gods will reach down and save a player’s ass. For our scientist and wizard, it was not that day. With the scientist’s hand latched onto the wizard, she failed another will saved and decides to dive head first into the pile, injuring the wizard in the process. However, it was a glorious day for our gunner. Who rolled a natural 20 the second her hand touched the pile, and she moved up the pile like they were helping her. At this point 2/3rds of the party were being crushed, and one had two more rounds before being subject to control attempts. She proceeded to roll an 18 to climb the rest of the way up the pile, and in a glorious display crit for a close range attack. I broke out the drama, and she put the gun under the boss’ chin as she fired. The wide grin finally exploded off his face and the force of the shot sent him off the side of the pile. The boss required only one point of damage to kill, and the group had succeeded with one round of breathing room. It was the kind of finish you always want: tense and completely against the laws of probability. Which is mainly why I’m writing about it.

So, that’s more or less how to work out a King of the Mountain fight. One King, One Mountain, and one really horrible obstacle.

Add Horror To Taste

Before I get into this post I’m going to give two warnings, both of which should be heeded.

One: Horror Games are hard, and you’re not going to see the same reactions that you’d get in a movie. At best you’re going to get an interactive ghost story if you’re hunting for that kind of reaction. A horror game is going to focus on lack of information, suspense, and complete player uncertainty. Your players are going to be unnerved, uncomfortable, and potentially disgusted, but if done right, they’ll like it, and not be able to tell you why.

Two: Okay, you know how I said your players will like it? Some won’t. Horror games just aren’t for some players and you should make sure your players are up for a horror game. You’re going to be unleashing the stuff of nightmares, and some players don’t like nightmares. Seriously, take caution.

Running a horror game is rather context dependant, and a game can vary wildly based on your campaign. However, there are a number of tricks and tools you should keep in mind, and that’s mainly what this post is about.

Gore

Gore is the bread and butter of the horror genre now a day, and as such you should view it as a two sided sword that cuts through players resolve just as easily as through the atmosphere. Unnecessary gore is your big danger here. Just think about it for a moment, your players might spend most of their time running around cutting down enemies left and right. Increasing the gore for a horror game might just be a matter of describing in greater detail things your players see all the time. As a rule horror needs to be about putting your players off balance.

On the other hand, the proper use of gore can greatly enhance a game. Gore works well as a horror seasoning. It’ll probably be present to some degree throughout, but it shouldn’t be over powering, it’s really about presentation. For example, say you have zombies in your game. Zombies are a big part of popular culture, and if you say “Rotting Zombies” your players know what you’re talking about, and further exposition is at best redundant, but gore isn’t just about sight. Instead of explaining what the zombies look like try describing their smell. And try to work with smells the players know.

You burst through the door and reel back against the smell of rot. The room is filled with a small horde of zombies all deep in stages of decay. Their smell clings to you like garbage left in blistering heat leaving you gagging, and wishing for untainted air. The horde stands still, except for one. The zombie turns its head in a series of short jerks. Each jerk makes a bone cracking noise that echoes around the room. His empty eye sockets focus on you, and he emits a low moan. At the sound the others turn their heads…

Also notice the addition of sounds with the smells. The basic idea here is that your player’s imagination is your best friend here. Let it to most of the visual work while you add in sounds and smell. The only time you need to put any great detail into gore is when the specific injury means something, and that gets us into the next tool…

Psychological Horror

Here’s where the big fun comes in. You’re playing a Role Player Game, so if you want to scare your players you’ve got to get into their head and knock them off balance. This is more or less the first rule of psychological horror. Your first goal is to break an established rule of the game. Are you players used to gritty dark settings, put them in a normal or bright setting, and make sure they don’t expect to be there. In a recent game I decided to go with a Silent Hill style hospital setting. The Hospital had been “dimension locked” as I called it and the players had to force their way in. The windows were blacked out and they had no knowledge of what they were getting into. When they finally got into the locked wing they were met with a perfectly functioning hospital with doctors and nurses running around treating patients. My players actually paused me and asked me to repeat the set up.

Once you’ve knocked them down, never let them get back to their feet, and in this case I say, “Start Small.” While you can try something big, frankly doing that too early without a good enough set up basically amounts to going, “Boo.” Work with details.

In the hospital game the players were sitting uneasy with set up, but began walking around to question the staff. They walked up to the nursing station and noticed that each document on the table held only the same word repeated again and again. Something the nurses were blissfully unaware of.

You can actually find a good use for gore from a psychological standpoint if use it carefully. The focus of gore should not be on its presence, but on how it was created or what it stands for. In my game the attending had visible injuries which represented their regrets. My particular favorite was the pediatrician. While he beamed at the group he was weighed down by babies and children clinging on to him. Many were injured or malnourished. The group was visible shaken by the scene simply because they were forced confront someone else’s past. Gory? Yes, but not simply for the sake of it.

So where am I going with this section? Well, you may have noticed a pattern. They faced insanity when they realized they were the only ones seeing the horror. They faced lethal regrets and people trying to cover them with a smile, and through every door the party had no knowledge one what lay on the other side beyond little more than a name plate. Psychological horror relies on its atmosphere and details. Don’t force your players into fear, let them sink into it. Play with more fundamental ideas. Things we all fear, even if we don’t realize it.

Boo

Finally, all this build up has to go somewhere. Each detail should be worse than the last, each sight has to be more horrible, and because of this the climax really has to be something. Don’t disappoint your players; a bad ending can shatter the atmosphere. Because of this your ending needs some careful designing. If you use some kind of encounter, make sure the turns are short. Long terms always stall the game, but in this particular instance they can kill a game. Have some way to force your players into action. In the hospital game a psychic field constantly chipped away at the group’s wisdom scores, and while it was in essence based on round counts it would have been used it they were taking too long to act. While I will go over the specifics of my own choices for this fight in another post, it shouldn’t be a normal encounter. It should focus on skill checks or social encounters, potentially a ritual if banishment is involved, but you want the end to be something the players simple don’t want to face. Make sure they must, but at the same time ensure that the situation is one that if given any choice they would leave. Give them some of the information, the reasoning for what they’ve faced, but don’t give them all of it. Leave your players with some uncertainty. Remember, if you’ve done your job right, your players are already shaken and suspicious, your climax could very well involve a situation or character that at any other time could seem normal, but is tainted by… something.

Also, while this is personal preference, in the case of a horror game I think it’s important that your players actually feel a “win.” It’s easy to have an action game where players are forced into a sadistic choice, but in the case of a horror game I suggest an ending where your players feel they have accomplished their goal. It’s your resolution, and in this type of game a resolution can be important to return the game to its normal tone. In the case of the hospital game the players wanted greatly to just blow the whole thing up and run, but they managed to kill the source of the psychological energy tainting the place, and as such were rewarded with a hospital full of confused, but safe innocents. Remember, a game is not about the ending, it’s about the game, having a happy ending doesn’t spoil a twisted middle, it just makes it easy to swallow. Now… if you’re playing a Lovecraftian game, feel free to ignore everything I said and just mind fuck your players into the deepest abyss.

Big Boss Friday: The Time Traveling Post

Okay... I didn't fall asleep after work today or anything. The post isn't finished and I refuse to rush it. So, the post will jump out of the vortex tomorrow, and as apology I'll try to have a double post tomorrow. Double Horror Saturday. Yeah!

When to Finagle

I love that word, “Finagle.” It’s such a fun euphemism, and so versatile too. I finagled the results. I finagled the set up. I finagled your girlfriend. See… versatile. For DMs it is an especially important word, because sometimes we’ve got to finagle the dice, but the ever important question is exactly when?

The thing about dice is that they hate us. You’ll have this encounter planned where a little old lady will attack a player with a cane. Really just for comedic value, when suddenly your players start rolling dud dice. 1. 2. 1. 1. 3. While the granny is rolling criticals like some wrinkly demi-god. Now, if you can let your players rest after a little old lady beats them within an inch of their lives, you might as well let it happen. However, if your players have to actually *do* anything after the little old lady it might be time to play around with numbers.

There is a flip side to this coin, and much like the dice it tends to land in our favor. Never let an encounter you actually want to be difficult flounder just because you can’t seem to roll anything worth a damn. This is really the reason we don’t let players see our dice rolls. It’s not so they don’t know the actual results, it’s just so they don’t know when we’re lying through our teeth. Remember, at the end of the day you’re still god.

Finagling our own dice is easy, but you may have to employ a trick or two when it’s the players roll, and the method you use really depends on your players. I’m rather lucky and my weekly group has been pruned of its rule shark. Which is a good thing, because if it’s not obvious by now I should admit I take some pretty hefty liberties with the rules sets, and frankly for most systems you should too. For me the easiest method is to look at the die, look at the player, and tell them to their face, “Stop failing and roll again.” If they continue to roll poorly I go with one of two options depending on the specifics.

I’ll say a slight prayer to the random gods, and tell the player, “Eh, good enough.”

Or more likely submit to the will of the random gods, and let things go with the dice.

If you do have a rules lawyer or if anyone causes a fuss simply remind them that you are the GM and whatever you say goes. If they still want to cause a bother remind them that you are the GM *and* you are a wrathful god. At this point you might as well give their character scurvy. (Cause why not?)

The point of this post is pretty basic: You are the GM, and it’s up to you to make sure everyone has fun. Dice are random and don’t care who is having fun or not, so really it’s up to you to act as a fail-safe against probability. If you and your players aren’t enjoying yourself what’s the point? A secondary point is that if a player pisses you off you should destroy them and drink their tears, but mainly I’m talking about the having fun part.

Big Boss Friday: So… how many hit points does it have?

Woo barely on time.

Okay, first off I’m going to apologize for not having a non-boss post this week. I have a few half finished posts that just don’t feel ready yet.

Anyway, boss encounters are tricky for a lot of reasons. If you’re not careful you can drop your party pretty quickly, and while boss encounters should be difficult they shouldn’t be impossible. (Well… they can be, but that’s another Friday.)

Here’s the thing: it’s damn hard to balance a boss battle. They have cooler abilities and tend to last longer. The longer a fight goes on the higher the chance of a string of bad dice completely destroying one of your players. Depending on the tone of your game that could be… kinda the point, but unless your strategy focuses on hiding behind a mound of dead bards the deaths are often frustrating for your players. Don’t get me wrong. A boss battle isn’t a bad time to go, but a good story requires some degree of a stable cast list, and you’ll find a long term campaign is much easier if players don’t switch out there characters too often. This requires even boss battles being well balanced.

While you could start out by planning out your boss’ abilities, or maybe his damage output or defense I find a good place to start is actually your boss’ hit point pool. This works because a boss’ health can be heavily tied to his concept:

High Hit Points: Your standard tank/brawler. These bosses tend to be big, mean, or at the very least durable as hell. However, they also tend to have lower damage output. Odd as it may seem conceptually you probably want to make this boss relatively easy to hit. While your players may feel like they’re fighting the titanic with fire balls at least they can hit it. If your boss has high hit points and high defense you’re going to be there all day.

Mid-Range Hit Points: A little more damage, a little more crafty. This boss will either put out a little more damage, or be a little harder to pin down.

Low Hit Points: The only response to this kind of boss is, “Oh Shit.” Which your players should utter immediately after the boss attacks or after they attack him.

No or Dynamic Hit Points: These are special fights, and frankly the method I usually apply.

While a static hit point value is fine, although a bit harder to balance, I’m willing to admit I rarely give my bosses an actually hit point value and more a hit point concept, which I might potentially break at any time. So, what does it mean for a boss to have a dynamic hit point total?

Well, what I mean by dynamic really is dramatic. Let you bosses drop when it seems coolest for them to do so, or if it just happens to be easier for you. A pretty standard situation for me is when one of my players is on the ground with others going down, and one of them gives a final heave to try and drop the boss before somebody dies. If your players haven’t failed completely up to this point whatever your HP total may be it’s not a bad idea to pump up the drama and let the boss drop.

In a recent game one of my players had been dragged by the boss into a fire with enough burns on him jump his fire weakness up to 15. On the next round he was going to burn to carbon. Another player lunged forward and plunged a blade into the boss’ gut who had already taken a beating. The boss died, and my players dragged their ally out of the fire and threw water on him. They had fun, still felt some panic, but weren’t stuck coming up with a new character concept.

On top of this is the fact that a dynamic health pool really shouldn’t confuse your players. If a boss’ defense or damage output changes without reason it can be hard for the players to keep up. Sure that could be the point, but you can’t do that every fight.

My favorite and I mean absolute favorite bosses almost always have no hit points. These are your gimmick fights. The players have to do something else before the boss can be defeated.

In a recent side quest a few of my players were missing and the party consisted of a utility mage, infiltrator/gunner, and a scientist. With this in mind I switched gears and turned the session into a horror game. The players spent their time running around a Silent Hill style hospital and their final encounter involved climbing a tower of writhing bodies while the boss chewed away at the party’s wisdom scores. After performing all of this the boss himself required a single attack at close range to disable or kill him. Now due to their decreasing wisdom scores and defense against psychic attacks the encounter ended with two members buried in the pile and their last active member quickly succumbing to psychic attack. The party was failing quickly and not a single bit of that relied on their damage output or defense, only their ability to work together and quickly perform a goal.

So, what’s the point here? In reality you could just pull out a book and throw down some monsters from the pages, but if you wanted to do that why are you reading this post?

Big Boss Friday: He didn't seem that bad a second ago.

What’s this? What’s going on?! Oh, the humanity! Okay calm down, it’s only Big Boss Friday. Every Friday I plan to write something about everyone’s favorite encounter… the boss encounter. To start the first week off, I’m going to talk about one of the most deadly mechanics: The stacking weakness.

The basic idea is that through some means the big boss manages to make the party weaker to attacks. And by “some means” I really do mean anything, but the most effective use of the stacking weakness isn’t damage. The best use is giving your party a panic attack. Say your players are fighting someone who specializes in electricity attacks. Start by mentioning how the room feels damp at the start of one of the rounds. You don’t have to do anything at this point, just mention it. Wait for them to feel secure that you were just messing with them. Then start flooding the room. This one works particularly well if you let water flow from above as well. Periodically let a new leak hit a player at the same moment as an electrical attack. They’ll love you for it, and by love I mean they’re probably going to leap forward and choke you with your own dice bag, but I always take that as a sign I’m doing my job correctly. If you really want to have fun just put your players against a lightning mage in a submarine. Actually, just put your players against anyone in a submarine. A playful cat could cause total structural failure with the right die roll.

Another important lesson is that the GM never gets called for metagaming. If you want to use an actual stacking debuff life is much easier if you get tokens to keep track of the number of stacks. Now, you could keep the tokens behind a screen next to each player’s name, or you can tell a player they have minor burns and hand them a token. Not only does it let you let players keep track of their own status, but it insures the player (and in turn the character) has a pretty good idea of exactly how much trouble they’re in. Now I may sound evil, but boss encounters are supposed to induce panic. Don’t force your players to role play fear and panic; try to make them feel it. When a player can actually sit there and count their 10 stacks of minor burns (again and again hoping the number will go down) they react much differently to their situation. Have you ever had a player bolt out of a room because someone lit a match? It’s basically like that.

So you're in a bar... that's on fire.

You recoil at the smell of rot and decay, moments before hearing a piercing scream come from the alleyway. A woman, still wailing, bolts out of the ally with an army of zombie squirrels nibbling at her heels. A mass of the horde breaks from the pack and heads in your direction. What do you do?

Listening? Good. Whenever you start a table top game your first goal should be to grab the player's attention. The best way to go about this is by starting with some kind of explosion. Take a moment to think over your favorite (or namely my favorite) sci-fi and fantasy stories.

• Lord of the Rings: Okay. We've got some intro, blah b-... WAR. You get maybe 15 seconds of introduction before you're presented with a full blown massive CGI orgy of a war. And it serves a purpose too. The intro said Sauron was a bad guy, but that doesn't really mean anything, but humans and elves were fighting against him-- together. You have to be one evil bastard before humans and elves start having weird dreams about talking to each other. Getting them to fight side by side? Damn man.

• Star Wars: Words... words... aaaaaand massive space ship shooting lasers.
  

• Sleepless: (Charlie Huston book. Go read it) First three pages were an introduction to the current happenings, then someone exploded and things went from there.

Catching onto the pattern? Short introduction, followed by a very big story hook. Now here's the difference between a table top game and a normal narrative. Your players have likely spent time making their characters. Most rule sets have flavor text to help players understand not only the world their characters will be in, but the tone of the game. That's your introduction! The scrolling text in Star Wars? Well there it is. Your players are introduced to the basic ideas of the game before you even start. So you really don't need to spend more time going over things. Get right into it. Now, exceptions can occur if you have a particularly customized world, but even then you'll want to give most of that information at character creation.

You might be concerned about some of the gaming logistics. How do you introduce characters to each other? Why should they even interact? Or more generally, why are we sitting here? Well that's fine, but in my experience if you just put characters together they're unlikely to do the work for you. You'll end up with a good deal of awkward “Hi”'s being passed across the table. The thing is it's not easy for people to switch from Anna the Check-Out Girl to Ilzara the Crimson Knight at the snap of your fingers. Especially at the beginning of a new game. When people make a character they usually think about the cool things their character can do, so help your players out by giving them something cool to do right off the bat. If the game starts with Ilzara smashing some zombie squirrels Anna might be more comfortable with the concept, and when a lull does occur not only will your players be more comfortable in their skin, but they'll have something more to talk about than, “Isn't that a pretty bar wench?”