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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.

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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Mouse Guard is a lot of things, and isn’t a lot of things…one thing for sure is that it has taught me how to appreciate RPGs in ways I didn’t notice. I always was worried about in-character presentations and the ‘mood’ of the game, yet Mouse Guard points out one thing. Part of the experience is the table chatter, and there’s whole lot of fun in that too.

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When it comes to physical conflicts, scaling them upward is a no-brainer. We have tests of speed and strength, then followed by a duel between two combatants. Scale that upwards and we have mass combat, and move it up by another notch, we have mass battles and wars. Less said in RPGs are how social conflicts can be scaled upwards. When we think of social conflicts, we think of haggling, persuasion and seduction. However, those belongs to the scale of one-shot physical tests, handled akin to some form of social arm-wrestling. Perhaps to add more nuances to social conflicts, we have to scale it upwards. So here are some suggestions.

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I finally picked up D&D 4th Edition (just the Player’s Handbook) and as I flipped through it, an interesting thought comes my mind. Every class has a well-defined role during combat, be it healing, blostering others, crowd controls (through shifting and pulling), debuffing (marks, combat advantages), area of effect damages and a scissor-paper-rock system (the types of Defenses – Armour, Will and Reflex). It looks like the designers took a page or two out from Game Design Patterns.

This got me wondering though. Who is responsible for building effective characters. This question, however, can be broken down. What do you mean by effective? And in what situation?

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When is the last time you have a 100% in character role-playing session? Is that a myth, like the unicorns or the GM who makes profit from doing professional GameMastering? In more than a decade of game-mastering, I can count with one hand the number of sessions which can be described as “immersive and in-character”. It’s not just the out-of-character jokes; it’s more than that. I always find that most of my friends are usually playing caricatures of the archetype they have chosen or an extreme on the spectrum.

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Back in the time of yore, when one must colour his own D20 and Elf is a class in D&D, the assumed motivation for entering a dungeon is gold, treasure and magical power. More than 20 years later, this assumption has changed slightly, but it is still mostly centred on gold, magical items and experience points. Why not add something to this mix? Social status and recognition.

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It is one of the greatest volcano ever seemed. Its eruption, which took place about five hundred years ago, wiped out an entire chain of islands and countless ports and settlements. In the wake of the storm of ashes and lava, is a large volcano towering above the pale blue sea. Over years, its crater collected water and became a lake. As the volcano extends high beyond the clouds, the water is numbingly cold.

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Another 10 more ideas for dungeons, and this bring us up to a total of 70.

1. Garbage Dump. A place where the city dwellers deposit all their wastes, unwanted items and unwanted people as well.
2. Giant Roaches Nest. I don’t think this one needs further elaboration. Home of giant cockroaches!
3. Stacked Standing Stones. Think Stonehenge. Think of those stones stacked like a house of cards.
4. Old Canal Systems. This city used to rely on canals for transportation, but the city has fallen into ruins, but the canal remains, and now acts as roads to reach one part of the ruins to another.
5. Timestopped Crumbling Castle. This is a castle in the process of falling apart, as if an earthquake has struck it, but all its falling pieces have been frozen in time. Let’s hope the adventurers don’t do anything to deactivate the timestop
6. Inside a giant plant where insects have taken up residence and small gnome-like creatures are harvesting ‘seeds’ from within
7. A deserted army camp, filled with zombies soldiers who still believe that they are alive
8. Mangrove with crocodile-infested water, islands which move the currents and the threat of diseases.
9. In an alternate reality where wizards become better fighters and fighters become better wizards
10. A ruined castle with invisible floors and walls. It looks partially ruined but actually it is whole; but would the adventurers care to walk on invisible floors?