A player-friend of mine once asked, “What is the difference between Fast Talk and Persuasion?”, when we were rolling characters for a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 2nd edition game. I shrugged and just said that Fast Talk is babbling and pulling wool over someone’s eyes, and Persuasion is attempting to get what you want through logic and rational arguments.

Recently I was listening to Ellen J. Langer’s book Mindfulness,  when right in the introduction she talked about a condition called mindlessness. Briefly put, it’s the “the lights are on but nobody’s home” syndrome, where we aren’t paying attention to what is going on around us and respond to stimulus is in an unthinking manner.

For example, the author described an experiment which involved a subject requesting the use of a Photocopier machine at the library. The subject would go up to someone using the machine and tried to persuade that person to let him use the machine to zap one copy. For one test, the subject asked, “Excuse me, may I use the photocopier machine I am in a hurry”. For test B, the request was phrased as “Excuse me, may I use the photocopier because I want to zap something”.

Interestingly, the experiment showed that (in a nutshell), people respond to both requests, without noticing that in test B, the explanation is rather nonsensical – the subject didn’t give a good reason why he would need to use the photocopier now. The author suggests that unless we are paying attention, our mind would “auto-complete” sentences if its structure is correct.

Another experiment involved a memo that was passed about in an office. It was written, “Please return this memo to room #02-02″. If you think about it, this is  rather strange memo – why would you write a memo, put it on someone desk only to request him to pass it back to you? Despite this, almost everyone who got the memo comply with the instruction.

Futility Closet has this story where a man managed to take over an entire city hall just by appearing up in a captain’s uniform.

These examples fit well into what the skill Fast Talk seems to be. You hinge on that people would not pay attention to your full sentence and make assumptions about your motives and credibility base on how you answer or talk to them. If you want to role-play as fast-talking, devious rogue, those are the examples you should follow!

A friend told me that role-playing in-character for a pen and paper RPG was a foreign concept to him, but he did it all the time while playing an online text-based game. I was bewildered.

That happened some time ago I ran a game after a long break. The system was Dragon Warriors, and the scenario ran was the first adventure from the Sleeping Gods book “The King Under the Forest.” The group was new, and I was having a hard time getting them to play in-character.

(It doesn’t help that one of the players was a longtime D&D player and he was looking at the bestiary while playing. None of my usual players would bother looking up any references while gaming.)

Something bothered about me about the whole experience. To cut the long story short, in the end I figure that the players were using their abilities score and skills to determine their course of actions. Not that it is a bad thing, and not that they did it all the time. Here’s an example to put it in perspective. One of the players tried to pick a fight with an inn-keeper. Before the fight broke out, some of the villagers brought the militia back. The players’ final decision to back off? They discuss stats, the probabilities of them winning the fight and how many villagers and village guards they could take on.

Now I guess there’s a lot of reasons why things went this way and how I could handle it. I just put the incident one side, and went on with the game, trying to take it easy. After all, there was a long hiatus after my last game, and this was my first time with a whole new group.

The game ended, and I discussed with one of the players over dinner, asking why he did the things he do. It turned out that he understood in-character playing (he does it while playing on an online text-based game), but not while in a pen and paper role-playing game. His reason was that it took him a longer time to think how to describe his actions in “real life”, while online he could edit his input.

That never occurred to me, honestly.

He went on to explain when in a RPG, he see it as a game. His next action is based on what will improve his character, and whether his stats could support that action. He compared it to Oblivion – your next action is what give your character the most improvement.

Our discussion went on for a while, with me explaining how I see the game as a way to presenting stories, using the game mechanics to “cooperatively tell the story” and him explaining his tactical point of view.

At the end of dinner, I summarized my long-winded explanation in one sentence as this “I guess what I am trying to say is I rather my players to make their decisions in context of the story, not in the game mechanics.”

Usually playing in-character (at a pen and paper session, at least) is to think as your character would, act as your character would, in reaction to the situation. This is all well and good, but it is taxing, and some players, like my friend, find it hard to do at a table-top setting. Instead of that, maybe I could try to encourage the player to act “in-style” with the story. I am not suggesting railroading, but rather that the players’ actions fit the mood, theme, atmosphere and the situation.

Or put it this way, if you pick a fight with an innkeeper, it would be because he has insulted your honor or you want to mug someone up to end up in the jail (for whatever purposes) or you want to be evil. Not because you find to kill him, gain some XP and loot his body…and because your fighting abilities way outclass his.

I think there is more payoff in this than flowery languages, props or dramatic gestures.

One of the best things about Mass Effect is the numerous plot hooks available, without needing you to delve too deeply into the lore of the game. Bioware did such a good job of presenting the world that the issues facing a mercenary or gun for hire are clear enough. Not just that, if you log into the Cerebus network, you are often fed interesting nuggets of short story that makes the game deeper and richer. A president who got her life extended – is she still eligible for office?  Corporations with their mercenaries fighting for control of worlds, plus a terrorism incident when space-crafts are crashed into habitats. There’s a lot of stuff to do be done in the Mass Effect world.

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When I first played Mass Effect, I wasn’t expecting much. I got it at a bargain from Steam, and heard that it is more of a shooter than a RPG. However, when I start the game up, and was wandering throughout the Normandy, I observe that the game was designed to be cinematic. Further on, I realized one thing: Shephard, be him/her a paragon or renegade, kicks ass, commands respect and in a whole, makes it feel great to be a galaxy-saving hero. Nope, it doesn’t feel great all the time to be saving the galaxy, which is why the effect of Mass Effect is so different.

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Recently I have been captivated with Mass Effect II. The world is rich and vibrant, the alien races familiar but different in their own way, and the whole storyline has fantastic set-up. So how can one run a game of Mass Effect using the Dragon Age RPG rules? Here’s what I get when I put my grey matter to some work.

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Apologies for the long break; I had to take some time off to recharge my brain and hopefully come up with new ideas for 101 Forms of a Dungeon. Right, now for number 71 to 80.

1. A forest of executioner’s crosses, where the local law authority leaves criminals to die and to serve a somber warning to others.
2. A prison high atop a mountain cliff, only accessible by a crude ‘elevator’.
3. Wreck of a ship used as a prison. Where have all the prisoners gone to?
4. The ruins of arena designed for trial by combat
5. A half-built pyramid
6. A quarry where half-built statues form of rocks protruding from the hillside are everywhere. Those statues are colossal, from 4 metres tall and 2 metres in width
7. A goblin’s (or insert evil demi-human race of choice here) version of a slaughterhouse…intended for humans.
8. Ruins of a bath-house with technology comparable to what the Romans has…for use by giants.
9. Sites used for judgments by rituals
10. A gigantic “well” (really a deep shaft) which goes deep downward, with wooden platforms and side excavations (think the Money Pit)

Preparing for my second Dragon Age game, I have decided to add in some tactics for NPCs, and allowing the players to discern those with a few Cunning rolls. The reason? To personalize and to add color to what otherwise would be just block-stats and to keep the players on their toes.

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I recall chatting with a fellow GM who was running D&D 3.5. “My magic-using PCs keep dying like flies,” he was musing. “It could be because I always target them first with all available ranged attacks”. What followed was a discussion where I suggested maybe he should have tipped off his players to cast Entropic Shield, Mage Armor and so on before wading into a combat. Yet during the course of the conversation, a thought nagged at me at the back of mind. Should NPCs in combats act as though they belong to some hive mind?

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Enchanted items can easily make characters too powerful; one way to give players cool toys to play with, but still challenge them is to have one-use magical items, such as potions, wands with charges, and for Dragon Age cases, bombs and special arrows. Those arrows cannot be found in stores (unlike the CRPG!) and the bombs must be specially made. Since there is scant rules on crafting, I will just list the effects of those items and leave the methods of making those special items till later.

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Last time we have the swords, this time round we have the bows! As my characters for my first game The Dalish Curse do not use crossbows, I will convert the shortbows and longbows first, and then move on to their mechanical counter-part.

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