It’s summer, so the group I DM for has reunited. They’re all college guys attending school in different places, so playing D&D during the school year is impractical. Instead, they use their huge swaths of free time over the summer to engage in all manner of gaming hedonism. Last year, we used our weekly gaming sessions to create a world and tight story arc that would begin and end in ten week’s time. We also experimented with co-DMing. Each player took a turn in the DM chair, adding their own unique bit to the larger story. It worked out wonderfully.

Since I had performed those experiments with the group last year, I knew they were open to trying new things. So in March I began a dialogue with them on our Facebook group to find out what they wanted out of our summer campaign. At first, my suggestion was to eschew a campaign structure, and just try out a bunch of different RPG systems with one-shots. Then, the discussion took this turn:

Well, now there’s an idea.

Could it be done? Could we maintain a single party and a single story thread through a campaign that dabbled in many different RPG systems? I wanted to find out.

We live in a golden age of RPGs. It seems like every week Kickstarter adds another book and another system to the world’s growing library of Role Playing Games. If you want to play it, chances are, there’s an RPG for that. So why would we sit down and play the same system every single week? Sure, there’s an argument to be made for system familiarity, and also one for nostalgia, but I can think of no good excuses to completely ignore all the other systems out there. We must at least dabble! Most systems have quickstart rules and level 1 one-shots to use. Most of them are free. In fact, we’ll be using the Shadowrun Quickstart Rules and encounter that I picked up at Free RPG Day this year. Yes. Yes, we will try this. So here’s the plan:

The Story

In my mind, I do have a very loose story planned out. I want to leave enough open for the players to change direction, but failing that, I need a cohesive and believable way to get from one RPG system to the next. I need a story reason that the characters would be engaging in the same themes that an RPG exhibits. For example, when we try out the Leverage system, we need to be at a place in the story where a heist is necessary. That’s what the Leverage RPG does. Complicating all this, of course, is the time constraint (deadline: end of August), so I may need to tighten up my sessions to hit all the games we want to play. As this series goes on, I will be slowly revealing the story as it unfolds.

The Systems

As of right now, the systems I have planned (and the order in which we will play them) are:

• D&D 4e
• Microscope
• Gamma World
• Shadowrun
• Leverage
• Call of Cthulhu
• Dread

Can We Do It?

I’m not sure. I would feel more confident if we were playing RPG systems that at least one person in the group was familiar with. As it stands right now, I need to have at least a tentative grasp on the rules of every RPG we play. I’m hoping that, much like learning a language, the more systems I learn, the more easily I can pick up a new one. Also, since we only get one session with each game, we will need to use pregenerated characters. The players may find it difficult to shoehorn an established PC personality and story into a pregenerated character. But there’s no way around it. Character creation would simply take too long to incorporate with a story into a single session of an RPG.

In the end, I have to be honest and express a bit of doubt as to whether or not we can pull it off. Lucky for you, you get to read about the fantastic success or failure of our little laboratory, right here, as the summer rolls on. Of course, in success or failure, we’ll be sure to have lots of fun, and there’s no doubt that we’ll be exposed to new systems. So in that regard, it’s a guaranteed success. Yeah, that’s what I’ll keep telling myself. Next time, we’ll explore the group’s transition from D&D 4e to Microscope, what we thought of the game, and how that will lead into our Gamma World session. Stay tuned!

In Part I of this series, I laid out my plan to play through a series of RPG systems – one a week – over the summer. On top of that, I wrote about my gaming groups’ desire to maintain a single set of characters and therefore a cohesive story for the duration of the campaign.

Last week saw our first transition between systems. This first transition is something of a “soft” transition to Microscope. I call it “soft” because there was very little in the way of cohesive story that we had to maintain between D&D and Microscope. But first, a small synopsis on how the campaign started with our D&D 4th edition sessions:

The Story

We revisited the world we created last summer (more on that in a minute) but 30 years into the future. The players all had new characters, although last summer’s characters all made reappearances as NPCs.

The D&D story hook was a missing fleet of ships that had been sent to a neighboring island nation. The PCs were tasked with finding out what happened to it.

In the course of their nautical journey, they were attacked by a species of fish men that was completely unknown in the world. They later found out that there seemed to be an invasion of these fish men, and the invaders were arriving from a generally eastward direction. This area was known as “the uncharted east.”

What happened next got mixed reviews from my players. In sailing towards the invading force to investigate their origins, the group of PCs discovered that they are living in a huge biome, not unlike The Truman Show‘s big reveal. This is where the D&D session ended.

The Microscope Session

Last week we played Microscope. It is something of a quasi-RPG (or perhaps “non-traditional RPG”) in that players do not pick a single character and play in a game world at a fixed point in time. Instead, the players are designing the timeline for a world, zooming in and out throughout the whole world’s history, placing events, epochs, and even zooming in close enough to observe individual characters for a brief moment.

It’s a great game to stretch your creative muscles, and can also be a fun way to build a world before you start a campaign.

And it backfired spectacularly.

As a group, we opted to take one of the pregenerated “starting seeds” to set our history in. “Machines discover their organic origins.” Then, we began laying out the history, including the departure of humans from the world, the arrival of aliens, and the accidental epidemic of manufactured bacteria. At the end of the session, we lamented some of our palette choices (whose bright idea was “no metal” and “no political powers”?), but I think we were overall satisfied with the game and would play it again.

So when I say it backfired, I should clarify that the actual playing of the game did not backfire. It was more the discussion at the end of the session where I asked, “And where do we think [the Islands World] we set up last year fits into this timeline?”

You see, with Microscope, we had designed a world of technology. Our campaign last year was one of fantasy and magic. For some of the players, this was an irreconcilable difference. Suggesting that last year’s fantasy world existed inside of another more technological world caused some bad feelings within the group, even though using that plot device facilitated bridging RPG systems (particularly D&D and more modern systems). They did not want to conceive of last summer’s world as something other than what we assumed it was last year – a strictly fantasy world. Anything else would ruin the memory of that campaign.

We reconciled the bad feelings by simply saying that the fantasy islands biome/Truman Show world was simply one possible reality that collapsed during Gamma World’s “Big Mistake” and it is not the same reality that we played in last summer. It wasn’t a perfect explanation, but it was good enough.

What I learned

It was a huge mistake on my part to bring back last summer’s campaign world. Because the players had such an investment in the world as it existed in their imagination last summer, when I shook up those preconceived notions, I got some kickback. I would have been better off either:

1. Starting the campaign with Microscope, and using the new world we created
2. Doing it the way I did it (including the Truman Show plot device), but with a new world of my own design.

I would lean towards #2 because it would let the players get a little invested into the world with their characters, then back out and take a larger view of the entire history. In other words, I think that starting out in a fantasy world, then saying, “Hey, somewhere in this world’s history, there were machines” is not only perfectly valid, but can also be a great storytelling opportunity. It also bends the player’s brains a little. I just wouldn’t do it with something that is already well loved and that the players have an emotional stake in.

I should have also laid out expectations at the outset of this summer more clearly. We all agreed that we would try to play through a bunch of different systems, and that we would try to maintain the same character throughout. That was the extent of the discussion. There was no detailed talk of the how, or that perhaps I might smash some preconceived notions about last year’s world, and is that ok, or should we start fresh? Part of that was me wanting to keep “the big Truman Show reveal” secret, and part of that was simply me not thinking ahead. If there is a next time for such an experiment, I will have an intentional group discussion so that there is an agreed upon set of expectations at the outset. If that means some of the story is spoiled or revealed, so be it. It’s better that everyone be on the same page.

In the end, the backfire was mostly laziness on my part. I was leaning back on something established so I wouldn’t have to make something new. I guess being a lazy DM isn’t always a good thing.

Going Forward

Next week, we will be playing Gamma World as the PCs move through the “Door in the sky” into the real world outside their manufactured biome. Most of the players will be rolling their PCs randomly using the super easy WotC Gamma World character generator. Onward!

In Part I of this series, I laid out my plan to play through a series of RPG systems – one a week – over the summer. On top of that, I wrote about my gaming groups’ desire to maintain a single set of characters and therefore a cohesive story for the duration of the campaign.

Last week, we played our session of Gamma World. I used the “Truman Show“ trope to move the PCs from a high fantasy D&D world into the chaotic post-apocalypse of Gamma World. The players already had some idea of the “real world’s” background because of our Microscope session. So even as the PCs stepped into the complete unknown, the players began making reference jokes to the Microscope timeline we had created.

The PCs stepped into a research/control station attached to the D&D world’s “bubble,” and had to explore and fight their way through it.

Because I didn’t have a lot of prep time for the session, I used the LUCAS lab section of the Legion of Gold adventure, modifying the map very slightly to include an entrance from the biome, as well as changing the station’s research objective to the D&D world instead of “the moon.”

The intention was for the players to use the teleport pad in the adventure to teleport to a large city in which we would start our Shadowrun story. Which is exactly what they did. Sometimes things work out the way you want them to…

And other times they don’t.

The session itself went fine. We’re all familiar with the Gamma World system, and using the pre-published encounters made everything simple. However, at the very start of the session, the players expressed a desire to abandon their D&D characters, and pick up new Gamma World characters. Which kind of defeated the purpose of the whole “Your D&D world was actually a huge biome” trope. Their reasons were twofold, and they were both legitimate.

First, they had trouble porting their D&D characters to the Gamma World system. This is an interesting commentary on player’s identification with their characters. To a player, their character is generally identified not by personality traits and memories (though that is a small part of the character), but rather by the character’s abilities. When the abilities that define your character are stripped away, it becomes difficult to retain the character’s identity. This makes sense. Character creation is all about defining what a character can do. When we help a new player create a character, we ask questions like, “Do you want your character to be a sneaky thief who fights with daggers, or a devout knight fighting for a higher cause?” Sure, there’s an allusion to personality (sneaky, devout) but the images that come to mind are the types of things such a character might do.

Second, the players simply wanted to try out new character concepts. If something looked interesting in Gamma World, but didn’t necessarily line up with their D&D character, they wanted the freedom to go with it. This, I realized, is a very important aspect of trying out a new system. It’s not just about learning a new set of rules, and what those rules do well, but also being who you want to be within the system. If I had put my foot down and made the players stick to one character concept across systems, I think the summer’s fun factor would have gone down considerably.

So we’re no longer trying to use the same characters all summer. To preserve some sort of continuity, what we decided to do was use a “once removed” story device in which the party from one system crosses paths with the party from the new system – and we make a handoff. So in this example, the Gamma World characters also happened to be in the LUCAS facility, and were present when the D&D characters showed up. They pointed the D&D characters to the exit, and then the players started playing Gamma World.

What I learned

In planning our Gamma World session, I should have looked ahead to Shadowrun and limited the Gamma World origins that the players could use. Since I didn’t, some players made “Shadowrun un-playable” PCs. For example, a Saurian (dinosaur) character fits into Gamma World just fine, but there’s no way to move one into a Shadowrun campaign. There are plenty of Gamma World human-ish or human compatible origins that would move very nicely to Shadowrun without a bump. As a matter of fact, I would estimate a good half of the 50-ish Gamma World origins do not specify physical form (eg, Mind Breaker, Magnetic, Temporal). Unfortunately, since I didn’t put any restrictions into place, some of my players may have to abandon their characters. On the other hand, we also could have reskinned (see below).

I also learned that players identify most strongly with their character’s abilities and skills. To that end, everyone should be liberal with reskinning things. In my campaign, a player should be able to take their D&D paladin, and turn it into a Gamma World Mythic Yeti because the abilities of that combo most closely line up with the Paladin’s D&D abilities. But here’s the catch – the player should feel free to describe the character’s physical appearance as not a Yeti, but still in terms of what their D&D character looked like. In this way, we’re playing a new system, but the player can still retain a strong attachment to the character through (roughly) what it can do. Reskinning is a beautiful thing.

These lessons are all theoretical, of course, to someone who is trying to maintain a party of the same characters across a variety of systems.

Going Forward

I’m still going to link each of the sessions together so that there is an uninterrupted narrative crossing the summer. I’m doing this mostly because I think it’s a cool idea, and the players are on board with it. We’re using the “once removed” idea to allow players the freedom to create characters that are interesting to them in each system. Next week, we’ll be playing Shadowrun, so as the Gamma World party appears in a teleport transportation depot, they will see the Shadowrun group walking across the depot’s plaza. I will also note that, if we had decided to maintain the same characters, the story could have still followed the same path – instead of seeing a group of Shadowrunners crossing the plaza, the Gamma World characters could have crossed it themselves, and into the Shadowrun story. So next up: Shadowrun!

In Part I of this series, I laid out my plan to play through a series of RPG systems – one a week – over the summer. On top of that, I wrote about my gaming groups’ desire to maintain a single set of characters and therefore a cohesive story for the duration of the campaign.

This week (well, two weeks) we played Shadowrun. The group as a whole was pretty excited, as they’d heard good things about the game. It was new to everyone, myself included. I started the story with the new Shadowrun characters passing their Gamma World characters in a huge teleportation transportation hub, in keeping with our decision to change characters with RPG systems and hang the one-shot stories together more loosely.

Shadowrun is only the second new RPG that I’ve run this summer, even though it’s the fourth system we’re using. I am very familiar with D&D 4e and Gamma World (our first and third weeks), though our second RPG – Microscope – was also new to me. Of course, Microscope is a GM-less game, so it’s safe to say that Shadowrun was my first real trial in learning and running a brand new game in the span of a week.

So, a quick lowdown on mechanics for those of you unfamiliar. Shadowrun uses dice pools of d6’s to manage action resolution. Your character has a number “rating” in each attribute (like strength or intelligence) as well as a number rating in a handful of skills (like hacking or small arms). And I will say there are a lot of skills in this game. When you try to do something, the GM will ask for a roll like this – “That’s intelligence plus hacking” – so you add together the number you have for intelligence and the number you have for hacking, then roll that many d6’s. Let’s say you have a 6 in intelligence and a 4 in hacking – you roll 10d6. Yup, rolling a fistful of d6’s is pretty common. Out of all those d6’s you just rolled, any 5’s or 6’s are successes (or “hits”), and you’re trying to meet a “threshold” of “hits,” which is basically the DC of the action.

Combat is a bit more complicated, and also a bit more complicated than D&D combat, but it still uses the “roll a fistful of d6’s and count up your 5’s and 6’s” mechanic.

Our Shadowrun session ran two weeks – the first week we ran through the Quickstart scenario, which saw the characters in a Stuffer Shack brawl, and the second week we used the adventure Ping Time, which I found for free online. It was easy to modify the quickstart scenario to lead into Ping Time – I simply changed the “target” that the PCs rescue in the Quickstart into the fixer that employs them in Ping Time. Easy peasy.

The Quickstart was great to get a feel for the game – both thematically and mechanically. The majority of it is combat, which is essential because combat is the most complicated part of the game (as far as I could tell). The players got to go through several rounds of opposed rolls and counting net successes and comparing armor to damage, and… well, you get the picture. It gave them a handle on the game.

Ping Time kind of flipped that on them because there’s only one combat, and it occurs at the very end of the adventure. There is the possibility of combat at other points in the adventure, but it is assumed that the characters use other means to achieve their ends most of the time.

Overall, we really liked Shadowrun. As a matter of fact, I liked it enough to preorder the 5th edition rules which coincidentally went up for sale around the time we played. It’s possible we’ll be playing at least a few sessions of it next summer. Even if we don’t, I’m very intrigued to read about the myriad skills present in this system.

What I Learned

Quickstart rules are fine if all you’re running is the quickstart scenario, but if you’re going to dip into other free adventures (for any system), you’re probably going to want the actual rules. In Ping Time, I was able to muddle through some things, but I was completely unable to improvise anything on the spot. And I said so to the players.

On the other hand, Quickstart rules are awesome if you’re playing a bunch of new RPGs serially. They’re the single most important resource for a group looking to learn a new system. Everything is laid out as if you’re a beginner (because you are), and what is presented is only what you need. It’s also whatever the designers think you need to get a good feel for the system. And that’s pretty important.

I also learned to not be afraid of Theatre of the Mind. While I have had a foray or two into mapless combat in the past, the majority of my RPG experience has used maps for combat. But we were able to slide pretty easily into Shadowrun’s assumption that you don’t need a piece of wet erase vinyl to kill stuff. And that’s good, because we’re headed into Leverage and Dread in a few weeks, and both of those systems rely on TotM alone. But first, we’re taking an unscheduled detour into Pathfinder next week. And I’m not the DM!

I’ve been chronicling an experiment I ran over the summer with my gaming group to play a different RPG every week, and try to keep a contiguous story line going. While the experiment itself is over, I’m a little behind on the articles. If you want to read from the beginning, the first article is here.

This week, we made an unscheduled detour into a Pathfinder one-shot. At the end of our Shadowrun adventure, one of the players requested we play it, as he had a friend who wanted to find out what RPGs were all about. I was more than happy to go along with this, especially since it meant I got to play instead of DM, but how to fit this into the overarching story that we’d been loosely holding together over the summer?

My first thought was to create a situation where the PCs would need to go back into the “Island World Biodome,” where the setting was fantasy. However, if you read Ping Time (the Shadowrun adventure I ran), you’d know that the clients were a group of high school students. One of the players conjectured that, when they returned the victim to his friends, perhaps they were all in the basement playing an RPG. And maybe the PCs were invited to play along with the high school students. Super meta, I know, but it was a cool idea, and we went along with it. So the Pathfinder one-shot was what the Shadowrun PCs played with the high school kids; when the one-shot was over, we “zoomed back out” into the Shadowrun world for a little Leverage action. But that’s next week’s post.

Of course, we all know that Pathfinder is the “spiritual successor” to D&D 3.5, or maybe “built on the 3.5 engine” – however you want to say it. I’m going to assume you’ve played it. No need to rehash the mechanics here.

The session started with each of the players coming up with a reason to dodge the king’s mandatory draft, as there was an army camped outside the gates. After that, we were thrown into the secret basement of a church with other draft dodgers. When some soldiers showed up to search the chapel for fugitives, we escaped out the back door into the city.

From there (I felt) there was no other story hook to help us choose a course of action. Instead of just fumbling around, I decided to take the bull by the horns and act. The cause of the war was a fugitive that the city was harboring, and my character conjectured that if the fugitive was turned over to the invading army, the war would be called off. I know for a fact that the DM had entirely something else planned (though I still can’t figure out what), but he did an excellent job of rolling with our choices and improvising something very fun. The rest of the adventure was us devising a caper, and failing miserably. Only half of us survived (the half of us that were smart enough to retreat when the dice started going south).

What I Learned

I learned a couple of things from this session. First, I learned that if I were to do this “one RPG a week” experiment again, I would mandate that the DM duties be divided up among the group. While some of the players don’t feel comfortable DMing a system they know, let alone one they don’t, I realized that learning and running a new system every week is stressful. Even with lots of tools at your fingertips like free premade adventures and quickstart rules. I would have been a lot more relaxed over the summer if I had had more chances to be a player.

Second, I learned that I’m not actually a fan of 3.5, and that 4.0 was a vast improvement on the D&D system. And this is coming from someone whose first edition was D&D 3.5. I was the party’s cleric, and it struck me as boring that I had to choose whether to heal or do something else on my turn. I remembered why players used to bemoan the fact that they were just a “heal monkey.” And the problems weren’t just with cleric … however, I’m not here to start an edition war, so I’ll leave it at that. I realized that it isn’t my cup of tea.

Finally, it’s great to help new players learn the game. Regardless of your favorite RPG or edition, bringing new players into the fold is fun. Showing them that anything is possible is fun. And watching them finally catch on and jump into the action is the most fun of all.

Next week, I’ll be writing about my first foray into Leverage, the heist RPG based on the TV show by the same name. Stay tuned!

I’ve been chronicling an experiment I ran over the summer with my gaming group to play a different RPG every week, and try to keep a contiguous storyline going. While the experiment itself is over, I’m a little behind on the articles. If you want to read from the beginning, the first article is here.

Last time, I talked about our unscheduled foray into Pathfinder, and how we incorporated that into the summer’s story. (TL;DR The Shadowrun PCs played an RPG. Very meta.) This week, the PCs got a message that another job needed to be done, and this time it required more finesse. More planning. More subterfuge and a less direct approach. In short, it required a heist.

Leverage

Leverage is an RPG based on a TV show. The show follows a group of ex-thieves who help the disenfranchised using “unconventional” (read: illegal) means (but for the greater good, of course). I believe one would categorize it in the “heist” genre. Mechanically, the Leverage RPG is built on the Cortex+ system, which is shared by other RPGs like Smallville and (the now out of print) Marvel RPG. It works like this: Every character has an array of abilities and an array of “job descriptions” known as Roles. The abilities are what you would expect (Strength, Agility, Willpower, et al.) and the Roles are niches that members of a heist team fill – thief, grifter, hitter, etc. To each of these abilities and roles, there is a die assigned – d4 through d10. When the GM calls for a check, the player rolls a prescribed combination of ability and job. So, to pick a lock, the player might have to roll Agility (or Intelligence) and Thief. If the PC’s main role in the group is thief, they probably have a d10 in each, and will roll 2d10 to determine level of success. On the other hand, the group’s Hitter might only have a d8 and a d4, respectively, and is therefore worse at picking locks. So, the player rolls and adds up the result. They are either aiming to beat a “DC” or rolling against an NPC.

There are also Assets and Complications that can add dice to the player’s roll or the GM’s roll. These are usually d6’s, and are dictated by what may be happening (or has happened) in the story. And here’s where readers will begin to see similarities to Fate (and for good reason, since some of the same minds worked on both). Also, characters, on top of their abilities and roles, have traits that they can play off of for an advantage in a situation. Finally, players are given “Plot Points” that they can spend to either activate special abilities or affect the story in some other way. Unlike Fate Points however, a player can never “pay a point” to refuse a story complication. Instead, complications occur (and Plot Points are earned) when a player rolls a 1 on any of their dice.

Of course, there are other nuances, but you’ll have to buy the book if you want more.

In our session, we played The Quickstart Job which is exactly what it sounds like. This set of quickstart rules introduced the mechanics of Leverage beautifully, but failed to help players learn what it was like to play Leverage. How is that possible? Well, one of my players said it best: “The whole fun of a heist is planning it!” But the Quickstart Job throws the players into the heist after it is planned and sets them on rails from which there is little room for deviation for the rest of the session.

I can see why the quickstart rules would do that. In order to present all the major rules and types of scenarios that a group will encounter, the quickstart rules need to force the players into the scenarios that use those rules. However, forcing players into situations kind of goes against the grain of what a story RPG is supposed to be about. For example, the Leverage quickstart forces the characters into a combat so that (I’m guessing) the players can see how combat is supposed to work in the system. (Also, so that the Hitter has something to do). However, it’s conceivable that the players could have avoided the combat altogether, had they been given more agency within the game.

Unfortunately, we all walked away from the session with very little sense of what it is like to play Leverage – beyond a mechanical knowledge of “when you want to do this or that, you need to roll these dice or spend plot points.” There was very little room for the group to improvise or go off script. And, as my player said, they didn’t even get to plan the heist.

Problems with the quickstart aside, the system seems to be very fun. It has inherent triggers that force complications on the story, while at the same time giving players the resources (Plot Points) to (hopefully) overcome those complications. The full rule book, which I subsequently read, has plenty of tools for both the players and GM, including a synopsis of all the TV show plots, in case a GM needs some story ideas. I would definitely run this one again, but I may need to play a session or two myself under an experienced GM in order to get a better feel for the game.

If you like Fate, other Cortex+ games, or the heist genre (I know I do), then Leverage is worth picking up.

Next time, I will be discussing Dread, which was our last RPG of the experiment. Be sure to check back!

Leverage is available through Amazon.

I’ve been chronicling an experiment I ran over the summer with my gaming group to play a different RPG every week, and try to keep a contiguous storyline going. While the experiment itself is over, I’m a little behind on the articles. If you want to read from the beginning, the first article is here.

And so we come to the end. I decided to end the summer with a session of Dread, which I had never played before, and neither had my players. If you know anything about the system, you know that we wanted to go out with a bang (or at least we were all ok with the high likelihood of dying…)

This session saw the players’ Shadowrun characters returning to their home base after a successful heist, and passing a spaceport on their way. As they were driving by, a salvage craft was lifting off, lighting up the early morning sky. Their Dread characters were the ones on the craft…

Dread

For this session, I selected the “Beneath a Metal Sky” scenario that is included in the Dread rulebook. According to the author, it is the “middle” scenario in terms of difficulty to run, but in reading through the other two, it was the one I felt most comfortable with. Bonus points for it being a space scenario, which fit nicely with our sci-fi heavy summer.

There will be no spoilers here, except to say that the scenario takes place on a spaceship. That, I believe, is the reason I was most comfortable with the scenario – like a dungeon, it is a confined space. The characters could not move beyond those bounds, so it made the environment something manageable for me. As a result, I was able to focus more of my attention on the story (and the rules) as it took place within that confined space. And there is the reason *most* beginning DMs are comfortable with the dungeon as an adventuring locale. But I suppose that’s another post for another time.

Dread is a unique RPG in many respects, but to the casual observer, its most defining feature is the use of a Jenga tower for action resolution. If your character wants to do something difficult or otherwise story-impacting, the player must draw one or more blocks out of the tower. If it topples, the character dies or is otherwise removed from the game.

As gameplay begins, two other aspects of the game immediately stand out – the lack of a character sheet (as it is traditionally understood) and, to a lesser extent, the Theatre of the Mind (ToTM) gameplay. Since there are many other RPGs that embrace ToTM, I will not rehash the pros and cons here, and instead focus on the unique “character sheet” that is used in Dread.

In Dread, the character sheet is called the Character Questionnaire. It does not contain a single number, skill name, or stat. It is, as the name suggests, merely a list of questions about the character that the player must answer. Most questions do two things – they tell the player a little something about the character while asking a question about motivations, personality, or past events. As an example: “Who was there when you killed your sister?” defines a piece of the character’s past while still leaving motivations, events surrounding the act, and a myriad of other details up to the player.

Needless to say, the beginning of the session was consumed with players filling out their questionnaires. But at the end of 45 minutes, I think my players had a better idea of who their characters were than most players of other RPGs have after years of playing.

Once the questions are answered, that’s the character. Period. If something in a player’s answers suggests that the character might be good at something, then the character is good at it. The elegance of this approach (especially for a story heavy game) cannot be overstated. Every RPG aims to define the character under the player’s control. Most use numbers as the primary indicators. Numbers are concrete. You can compare them to other numbers. I can understand their popularity. But while numbers are good at defining what a character does or can do, they’re really crappy at defining who a character is. Ironically, although most systems focus more on the former, the latter is what really drives a good story. And RPGs are all about the story.

In the end, only 2 of the 5 characters survived, but everyone had a blast. This is one that I’m sure we’ll be coming back to. I just wish there was more support out there for it. Where do you find Dread playsets? (I had the same problem with Leverage…)

What I Learned

I think the biggest lesson I learned from running Dread was the power of questions to help players define their character’s background. The questions in the Character Questionnaires were not vague – they were oddly specific in fact – but still left plenty of room for the players to play the sort of character they wanted. For example, the question “Who else was there when you killed your sister?” is at once oddly specific and completely open ended. Yes, the question is telling you that the character killed his sister, but why? Was it an accident? Premeditated? What were the events surrounding the act? And was anyone witness to it? Is the character aware of the witness? I should note that the Dread questionnaire asks for more than names when answering such a question. It asks for the motivations and events that would drive a person or persons to end up at the death of your sister. There are many directions that the answer could take, and in the process of musing upon and writing down the answer to such questions the player begins to really flesh out a personality for the character under her control.

One bit of advice from the book that I also passed along to my players bears repeating here:

When filling out a character questionnaire, you should always assume the presence of a silent “and why?” at the end of each question. It will create a better understanding of the character. The answer will cover more ground, and there will be less room for misunderstanding during the game itself. The more times you ask yourself “and why?” about any of the questions, the further and further you fall into the depths of the character, To take a seemingly innocuous question and apply an exaggerated example: “What’ll you have to drink?” Whiskey, on the rocks. “Why?” Because I’m a weary man with little use for frivolous and fruity drinks. “Why?” Because I have seen things that have made me question my own sanity. “Why?” It is the nature of my occupation to scour the world for things we were not meant to know. And so forth.

This, more than anything else in Dread, is applicable to character creation in RPGs at large. Delving deeper into the why’s of a character’s past (or even current) actions will always help players create a richer, three dimensional character.

That’s right – while the Questionnaire is the entirety of the character sheet in Dread, there is no reason why you cannot create one for the characters in your RPG of choice, as a supplement to the character sheet. At first, players may balk at you vaguely defining pieces of their past, but in the end I think all involved will find it to be an enriching experience. (Especially those players for whom the entirety of their character’s background is “My character is an orphan.” I mean really, whose character isn’t?)

You can buy Dread here. (ps – The book comes with 100 or so generic questionnaire questions. If you want to create background questionnaires for your players, it’s worth the price of admission alone.)

Also, you can follow Dread designer Epidiah Ravachol on Twitter.

Next time: The Big Wrapup ™

So, here’s the obligatory wrapup post. How did it go versus my expectations, what did I learn, yadda yadda. But first, here’s a list of the RPGs we played over the summer, in the order that we played them. I’ve even linked the articles I did on each for you. How convenient!

• D&D 4e
• Microscope
• Gamma World
• Shadowrun
• Pathfinder
• Leverage
• Dread

So, first off, that’s not 10 RPGs, which is how many weeks we technically had to play games over the summer. D&D took two weeks, as did Shadowrun… so now that I do the math, I guess we had more than 10 weeks because we did a few sessions of board games at the beginning of the summer. I tell ya, college summer break is pretty cushy.

Anyway, we got 7 RPG systems in. I GM’d all but Pathfinder, and the only systems that were familiar to me were D&D 4e and Gamma World. So what I’m saying is, over this summer, I had to have some sort of a handle on 4 new RPG systems. Only four? No big deal, right?

Well, yes and no. I mean, yes, it was a good bit of reading and work, but there are plenty of resources for new players of pretty much any RPG. Which leads me to my first lesson learned:

When doing an experiment of this type, pregenerated characters and quickstart rules are your best friend

I used the Quickstart rules and included adventure for Shadowrun and Leverage. Some of my players used free Shadowrun character generators. We used a “pregen timeline seed” from the Microscope book for that session. I used one of the 3 scenarios included in the Dread book for our Dread session. If it had been necessary for me to not only grasp the rules and mechanics of each of these systems and come up with a full length one-shot, I would have been swamped, and probably couldn’t have pulled it all off. So make liberal use of the free resources out there, from whatever source. This all leads nicely into the next lesson I learned which is…

If I were to do this again, I’d insist on division of GM duties

The fact that (almost) all of the GMing, and all of the “learn the new system” fell to me was kind of stressful. It was a lot of reading, and a lot of making stuff up that I didn’t remember or know from the rules on the fly. It isn’t too much to ask of your group that they share some of this responsibility, especially if everyone is on board with the idea of trying out multiple RPGs.

We abandoned the whole “maintain a single character through all the systems” trope pretty early on

Not because it couldn’t have worked – or at least, I still believe it could have worked. However, there’s something about trying a bunch of different RPG systems that makes you also want to try out a bunch of different character concepts. Which is interesting. If we had played a single campaign all summer, using D&D or Pathfinder or whatever, the players would have been more than happy to maintain a single character. I’m sure your group plays the same characters, month after month, in your long-term campaign. But, switch up the system, and people want to try out new stuff. That was the sticking point for the players – not that they couldn’t fit their original character concept into a new RPG if they didn’t want to, but more that they had other things they wanted to try. Which is fine. I totally support that.

We also abandoned the “unified storyline across systems,” sort of

The “story thread” that followed through the summer was kind of thin, and it was more a series of one shots with segues in between each that helped preserve continuity. This worked fine for us, and really wasn’t necessary. By the end, I was narrating a 2 minute segue scene at the beginning of Dread not out of necessity, but more out of dedication to the concept of the experiment. I guess what I’m saying is, the concept of a cohesive storyline across systems is cool in theory, but in practice it turned out to be unnecessary. We enjoyed playing with new systems for its own sake, and preserving a unified story arc didn’t add to the experience greatly. I would recommend that, if you want to try something like this, have a good reason to do so. For example: your PCs want to try a heist to accomplish something. Great! Maybe it’s time to try Leverage, but only for a session, and then switch back to your normal RPG. Are the PCs traveling through a wasteland with toxic elements that could warp and mutate them? Maybe play a couple of sessions in Gamma World. In other words, let the story drive what RPGs you choose to incorporate, not the other way around.

Always Look For Things To Steal

There is goodness in every RPG system, if you remember to look for it. And while a particular RPG might not turn out to be your cup of tea, that does not prevent you from co-opting the parts that you do like for your “regular” game. The best example I have from this summer is the Character Questionnaire from the game Dread. Will I play Dread every month? No, I’ll maybe play it once or twice a year. But I found the Questionnaire to be so useful, I plan on creating some for the characters in my next D&D campaign, to help the players create a useable backstory.

Need another example? Shadowrun’s initiative system lets really “fast” characters not only have a better chance of “going first,” but also lets them act more than once a round.

And so on…

Communicate. A lot.

One of the reasons that the whole “keep a single story and set of characters going” thing didn’t work was my vague expectations up front. We didn’t really have a discussion of how things would work, so we all kind of drifted away from the concept. I suspect also that some people weren’t on board with the idea from the get go, so that may have sabotaged things as well.

In the end, I’m not at all upset with how things turned out. We didn’t really do what we set out to do, but that’s ok. I think the fact that we were able to try out 7 different RPG systems over the course of a couple of months is a pretty big achievement on its own.

And I think that that’s what the experiment was all about. We all get stuck in our “favorite RPG” ruts, and that’s an ok thing I suppose. They’re comfortable, everyone knows the ins and outs, and gameplay runs smoothly as a result. But as I stated in the first article of this series:

“We live in a golden age of RPGs. It seems like every week Kickstarter adds another book and another system to the world’s growing library of Role Playing Games. If you want to play it, chances are, there’s an RPG for that. So why would we sit down and play the same system every single week? …I can think of no good excuses to completely ignore all the other systems out there. We must at least dabble!”

Indeed.

[Editor’s addition: An old favorite cross-genre goodie!]