Trappery, part seven: royal tomb example

This episode of Trappery brings you the second in a set of exploratory examples, working out the role (or lack of role) of traps in particular situations, and what those traps are likely to look like.

It's probably something like this.

Orphan Blog

So it looks like Librarians and Leviathans has become an orphan.

As I've mentioned before, this started out as a place to track progress of our D&D/Pathfinder campaign, a easier-maintenance version of the website I used for an earlier ill-fated 4E campaign. That campaign was substantially a way for a couple of friends to try out roleplaying, and for a couple of my 4E group to get another dose of it. They had a reasonable time with the first adventure (a basic dungeon exploration), and were keen enough to progress to a looser follow-up that I'd carefully set things up for just in case. This more free-form style of play seemed more popular, though it was still fairly rigid on the whole, as I wasn't keen to dive too far into improv with all of us so inexperienced.

After the second adventure, we slid into the deadly hiatus, largely due to some health issues on my part that, coupled with a completely mad few months at work, meant planning and running games was just not viable. More recently, I've talked to them about reviving the campaign as things are going better. However, one player has moved to another city, and another (one of the two veterans of the original L&L group) is now too busy to commit to a game. That leaves us with two players, both fairly busy, and both playing spellcasters. The players don't seem particularly interested in ambient gameplay, and would prefer having some kind of group objectives to work towards, but weren't that keen on dungeon-crawling.

It might be just about viable to run a sociopolitical, investigative, low-combat game. I was already looking along those lines when I considered reviving the campaign, as the party was already caster-heavy. The problem with that is, it places an awful lot of pressure on the GM. For one thing, pregen scenarios that aren't either dungeon crawls are few and far between, and most of those that I've seen are (naturally enough, perhaps) closely tied into a particular campaign world or set of events that wouldn't sit comfortably with what we've established. That means I'd have to come up with all the content myself - with suggestions and input from the players, certainly, but fundamentally coming up with mysteries or interesting situations is down to the GM. Tied into that is the problem that given D&D's proclivities, coming up with interesting low-combat scenarios is significantly more awkward than creating your own dungeons.

Barring extreme enthusiasm on the part of my players, the effort of creating entirely new scenarios suitable for a pair of career-minded spellcasters with zero combat ability seems like too much to deal with. At present, I don't know any other potential players who might round out the party a bit and make it easier to find or create suitable scenarios. So basically, I think we're stuck.

So sadly (although perhaps inevitably) this campaign blog for a specific group of players has more or less fully transformed into a purely theoretical blog about generic RPG matters, with little or no relevance to the Pathfinder campaign. So it goes.

Random RPG Generator

During a recent very silly conversation with (inevitably) Dan and Arthur, inspired by random character trait rolling in The Dying Earth, I brought up the idea of an RPG where everything was randomly generated. It's very simple. You just start from scratch, considering and randomly determining each element of the game.

This is a very, very simple version of that. There's plenty of scope for extension; one of the reasons it's still so simple is I got into philosophical quandaries about exactly what category of feature things fell into. Is "mystery" a game genre or sub-genre? Is "sci-fi" a genre or an aesthetic wrapper?

One thing I'd vaguely like to have - but which would be quite a lot of work - is to generate antagonists and approximate goals (or at least, activities) for the game, and have various fields linked so they couldn't produce logically contradictory results. But that would be more work, and maybe a completely random one is more entertaining (and more inspirational). Anyway, have a go and make suggestions. I might expand on it one day.

breakdown

Trappery, part six: modern office example

As I mentioned last time, I’d been working on some example situations where traps might conceivably form part of a security strategy. The point here is not to invent traps as such, but to look at where they actually fit in in various settings, with varying cultural and technological backgrounds.

The Security Chief

Let’s take a real-life example. Jen Erric is head of security at IncCorp, a cutting-edge Newcastle tech company. Life is pretty darned safe here. IncCorp is a substantial commercial organisation with a reasonable budget for security and easy access to guards and non-military tech. They have several security concerns: