Here’s the deal…

This month’s been a complete disaster and I totally refuse to let it spread to next month.

No, you didn’t misread the title. This is an Ask Angry column, not Angry’s Log, Supplemental. I’m just explaining why it’s an Ask Angry and not an essay about open worlds, a follow-up lesson about scheduling, or more about scenario design. That shit’s all coming in July — along with a new fun podcast for everyone.

The problem’s that that six-thousand-word rant about scheduling that took three fucking rewrites absolutely killed me. So, today, you get a few thousand words of Ask Angry. I’ve pulled five questions from my mailbag and I’m gonna answer them all using as few words as I possibly can. But it’s me so that means three to four thousand. Whatever.

If you’d like to be a part of a future desperate, eleventh-hour columns o’ crap, e-mail your question to ask.angry@angry.games. Remember to keep it brief, get to the fucking point, and give me explicit permission to use whatever name or handle you supply. Unlike our first dumbass.

Our first dumbass asks…

… a question that’s too damned long and so got deleted. Half of it was just the dumbass reminding me of shit I’d said in previous articles. I didn’t even get to the actual question because I got so bored reading about things I’d written. I don’t know why people assume I don’t know what I said. I’m the one who said it. Just cut to your fucking question.

So that’s one question down and four to go. This is gonna be easy.

Some other dumbass asks…

… another question that is really close to being too damned long, but which I’m gonna allow because it’s, at least, succinct. Remember, brevity ain’t always about word count. Too bad I can’t call them anything other than dumbass. It’s no wonder all y’all need so much help running games. Roleplaying games are all about reading comprehension and y’all suck at it.

Anyway…

Some other dumbass asks…

I often have trouble predicting what little details players will ask for. E.g.: the height of a tower or the depth of a lake. I try to look things up in advance, but certain things don’t occur to me until they come up. How do you keep track of what details are important? Do you have a checklist?

Full disclosure: I did a little editing here for length and clarity.

No, I don’t have a checklist. That’d be impossible. I’m armed only with a keen understanding of my role as Game Master and years of experience at this. I can help you with one of those and I can help you fake the other until you get there. But first, I’ve got to point out that you don’t actually have to answer every question.

That, “How deep is the lake,” question caught my eye. I’ve never found myself able to discern by sight anything about the depth of a body of water beyond my ability to see the bottom. So, if the water’s gonna be over my head, the lake might as well be infinitely deep for all I know. Unless I’m swimming for the bottom. But even then, humans suck at estimating normal distances, let alone vertical distances while swimming. Yes, there are mechanical reasons to work this shit out, but if the players ask me how deep the lake is, I’m just gonna say, “Your character has no way to know or discern that. It’s deep enough to drown in; that’s all you know.”

Remember that your job is to describe what the characters see, hear, perceive, and know. It’s not to spout facts from the Faerunian World Almanac and Book of Facts. And that’s good because raw numbers are the suckiest way to describe anything. Most people can’t translate numbers to visualization. It’s much more useful to describe a building by the number of floors it’s got — which is discernable by the placement of windows and timbers and shit — than to point out its roofline is 35 feet above the ground. Comparisons are your best friend here. Even if they’re anachronistic. I’ve got no problem describing things in terms of the lengths of football fields — the American equivalent to quidditch pitches for you Europeans — or the width of suburban streets or the heights of modern two-story buildings or whatever. Anything to help the players see the world.

That’s what I mean when I say, “I understand my role as a Game Master.” I don’t have to tell the players anything their characters can’t see and I’ve only got to help the players imagine what their characters see.

Of course, there are game mechanical issues here. Falling damage is based on feet to the ground and swimming speed is swimming distance over swimming time. Thus, when it comes to resolving actions, you sometimes need such details. But you don’t need precise numbers, you need reasonable estimates. Unfortunately, most Game Masters suck at estimating things like size, scale, and distance. And your question seems particularly fixated on size, scale, and distance.

Game Masters often need to know shit like, how big a thing is and how far away it is and whether you can see it from where you are and so on. Or rather, they’ve got to be able to pull useful estimates from their asses. Building that skill involves two different homework assignments.

Without freaking out about realism or medieval architecture or any other horseshit like that, let’s do a little activity here. Imagine there’s a two-story inn in the village. How tall is it? How might you guess the answer?

I’d start by noting that I am a normal human and, as such, I stand about six feet tall. I also note that my head doesn’t bonk off the ceilings when I’m inside buildings. There’s some clearance there, but there’s not enough clearance that I could climb up my own back and stand on my head. So there’s probably ten feet between the floor and the ceiling. Roughly. If there was another room above this room, that’d be ten more feet. I might add a foot or two for the thickness of the floors and ceilings, but, honestly, ten feet per story is a pretty good estimate. So a two-story inn is probably 20 to 25 feet tall. Easy.

That doesn’t just let me estimate the height of two-story inns though. What I’ve done is calibrate my sense of height. If there’s a simple round tower in my world I can just picture it next to the inn and ask myself how much taller is the tower than the inn? Twice as tall seems kinda short. Ten times as tall is way too big. Maybe it’s three times as tall. Or five times as tall. Either is a good answer. That means the tower is 60 to 100 feet tall.

Is that accurate? Who gives a shit. It’s reasonable. It’s useful. And it took me a few seconds to get there.

So your first homework assignment is to practice estimating things based on things you know.

Your second assignment is to calibrate your spatial senses. If you’re like most people — and statistically you are — you’ve got a sucky sense of size, scale, and distance. And Game Masters can’t have sucky senses of size, scale, and distance. They work with too many sizes and distances.

For example, do you have any idea how big the room you’re in right now is? Can you just blurt out the correct answer? I can. This room is 12 feet by 10 feet. Most residential room dimensions are on the order of eight to 12 feet. That’s a useful thing to know. It’s also funny to note how small that makes normal rooms in terms of D&D combat squares. A medieval village hovel would barely have a square and a half on a combat map. Try not to think too hard about that.

How wide is the street outside your residence? Find out. Look it up. You’ve got the Internet. Type, “How wide are residential streets” into Duck Duck Goose or whatever.

Here’s another question: how far is a quarter mile? I’m not asking you for a conversion to feet or centipedes or whatever. What does a quarter mile of distance look like? How much can you see of something that’s a quarter mile away? Do you know? Can you find out? Sure you can. Whenever you’re out and about, pay attention to any distance markers you see. If there’s a highway sign that reads, “Exit Right, ¼ Mile,” look ahead. Can you see the exit ramp? The sign? Whatever.

Most people drive around with navigational dealies constantly telling Skynet their every move. Pay attention to Skynet. When Skynet says, “In 500 feet, turn right at the stop sign,” look ahead and see how far that is. That’s what 500 feet looks like. Is there a person standing there? How big do they seem? How much detail can you spot? What can you tell about that person?

If you ever find yourself wandering around and you look across a field to a building or whatever, whip out your phone and check your map and see how far away it is. “Huh! So, that’s a mile. Good to know.”

The more you do this shit, the better your sense of scale and size and spacial awareness will be. And when you have to estimate distances and sizes in your games, they’ll come easier and easier. I know that means leaving your house and paying actual attention to the world beyond your phone when you do and I know that ain’t something gamers are into, but as a Game Master, your job’s to conjure an imaginary world from nothing. You kinda have to know what a world is like.

But my advice doesn’t end there, so it’s a good thing that first dumbass got his question disqualified. You get the extra word count.

My second piece of advice is to make it a habit to look up anything you drop in your world. Is that village on the shore of a lake? Do you know anything about lakes? Do you even know what there is to know about lakes? Even if you think you do, assume you don’t, because most people think they know shit they don’t. Read an online encyclopedia article about lakes. And don’t just skim it; read it like you’re actually curious. Game Masters must have an attitude of curiosity. When you read the deepest lake in the world is Lake Baikal in Russia — with a maximum depth of 1 mile — you should wonder, “Huh, I wonder how deep a normal lake is. I wonder how deep that big lake in my state is.”

Hell, if you really want to do this right, open up an online map and scan around until you find a lake that’s the right size for the lake you just dropped in your world, then put its name in a search field and learn about that lake.

Game Masters don’t just lack a sense of spatial awareness, they also exhibit a distressing-to-the-point-of-heartbreaking lack of curiosity about completely normal, mundane things. And they’re all egomaniacs who think they don’t have to look shit up because they’re already so smart and they already know so much. Don’t be that asshole. Assume your brain is empty and instill in yourself a desire to fill it up. Gaming is the vehicle by which you teach yourself everything there is to know about everything.

My third — and last — piece of advice is: whenever your players blindside you with a question you can’t answer, write the question down. Even if you pull an estimate from your ass or tell the players that’s not information they could ever know, write it down anyway. After the game, find out the answer. You don’t have to tell the players the answer — you shouldn’t, actually — but you must never leave a question you couldn’t answer forgotten and unanswered. Why? First, it’ll help you calibrate your ability to come up with estimates. Every piece of actual, factual information improves your ability to guess things you don’t know. Second, it’ll help you learn what sorts of questions you should prepare answers for. When you pay careful attention to the questions you’re asked, it trains you to anticipate the questions you’re gonna be asked next time.

And that’s what I meant when I said, “I’ve got years of experience.” I paid attention to the questions people have asked me and, as a result, I know what questions to anticipate and I’ve got a lot of calibrating facts that let me come up with reasonable estimates.

Forehead asks…

Why do players get bored with their characters? If I kill a 3rd-level PC, they reminisce about their fallen idol for years, but by the time they reach 8th level, they’re like, “Hey, can you kill off Clarence so I can make a new character?” What gives?

Full disclosure: I cleaned this question up a tiny bit for readability. Otherwise, thanks, Forehead for following my basic-ass instructions. And may I say it’s good to see you on your feet and doing well after the incident at Chairface Chippendale’s birthday party.

Let me reassure you, Forehead, that this ain’t just a you thing. This lament is actually growing increasingly common in the roleplaying gaming space. There have always been a few players floating around the space with what we used to call Alt-itis — the endless need to start new characters — but that’s a personality thing. Some people are just like that. But, lately? Yeah, there’s been a drastic increase in Game Masters reporting players requesting assisted character suicides so they can play something new.

Incidentally, why the motherloving crap do players think their characters have to die before they can have a new one. Back in my day, we just retired the characters we were done with. They’d just settle down or wander off into the sunset or go live with the martial arts master in his cave or whatever.

This problem’s especially prevalent in modern Dungeons & Dragons. I assume there’s a similar problem in the Pathfinder 2 community, but it’s for different reasons and I’m only saying that because the original Pathfinder already had that problem. I don’t actually follow PF2 and I don’t care to.

I think — personally — there are two forces at play here and I’m not sure there’s much you can do to fight either one that won’t result in a lot of players kicking and screaming and biting. So I’m not gonna spend too much time on this. Especially because I’ve written about all this shit before in various places for different reasons.

First, the modern understanding of D&D is that it’s about creating a character and then taking that character on adventures. You build an in-game avatar all your own, dress it up, customize it to your liking, then slip it on like a skin and go play. That approach emphasizes the creativity inherent in character creation over any other aspect of play. That’s not only trained a lot of players to see the game that way but it’s also attracted a lot of players to D&D who might otherwise never have tried it but who are drawn to that sort of creative expression.

I ain’t saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing — though I know the comment section’s gonna have a lot to say about that and I know someone’s going to scream about Mike Mercer and the Critical Rollers — I’m just acknowledging it’s a thing.

The issue is that you only make your character one time and then you play it forever. So if you’re really into the creative character creation thing as a primary intrinsic motivation for play, you’re gonna start chomping at the bit to make a new one after a while. In fact, I’m willing to bet that if you got a grant and did the science, you’d find that the players who get bored the quickest are the ones who either make the weirdest-ass furry half-tortle feylock raised by awakened wolves characters or the ones draw their own anime character portraits or the ones who write the longest backstories and keep in-character journals by way of recaps.

As a side note, if you’re a Pathfinder goblin rather than a D&D goon, replace everything I said about creative expression with something that rhymes with mechanical build optimization. If you’re a build-optimizer, you make your build once, wait for it to level up to its signature powers, and then you’re done. You won the game. Because Pathfinder emphasizes that kind of thing, you see a lot of PFers — it’s pronounced Piffer — with Alt-itis too.

At least you did back in PF1. I assume that’s only gotten worse with PF2.

Second, there’s a serious lack of any kind of dynamical character growth in modern roleplaying games. There’s this joke that character creation is about building the character you intend to play at 10th level and then leveling them down to 1st. And whether you’re in this shit for mechanical growth or narrative growth or both, that’s definitely how it be. Characters don’t grow, change, or evolve through play. They just become more of what they already are. Their personal journeys are done before the game even starts. And I’ve written at length about how character dynamics are vital to build a sense of emotional investment. If someone’s traveling a straight-line path — mechanically or narratively or both — it’s hard to stay invested for long.

The real culprit is that modern roleplaying games are way more focused on the characters and their builds and their antics than they are on the characters’ quests and the worlds they quest in while, at the same time, lacking any real opportunities for growth or evolution. Paradoxically, that shit leads to players being less invested in their own characters. You can mitigate the problem by restricting character choices, forcing random character generation systems, and inhibiting players from writing backstories by forcing them to generate their characters and start playing in the same session. That’ll actually increase the players’ attachments to their characters, even though it seems like it should have the opposite effect. The problem is, you’ll have to endure a lot of pissing and moaning and grumbling and fighting to get there. If you can even get there at all.

So, you’re probably just stuck letting your players constantly swap out their dumb anime furry fanfic avatars every five levels. Or you can kill them off every three levels. Which does have its charms I must admit.

James and Martin ask…

Action economy… initiative systems… etc.

Yes, I’m cheating again. I’m doing a twofer because James and Martin asked kinda similar questions and, by answering them, I can also stop one or two other people from nagging me about this shit in the comments and in my supporter Discord community.

I remarked a few weeks ago that the Action Economies of modern roleplaying games are borked to hell and back and then refused to explain any further. Partly because I’ve explained it before and partly because, every time I bring up action economies, a dozen assholes message me to remind me that Pathfinder has fixed this and every other problem in roleplaying games ever.

It hasn’t. Shut up.

What’s Action Economy? It’s one of those annoying, broad, badly defined terms gamers love to throw around. And everyone’s got their own definition which makes conversing about it an absolute freaking delight. Really, it’s just down to, “How much can a given in-game creature — player or non — do in a given interval of game time” and how that affects the play experience.

In D&D, the Action Economy is basically down to this: every creature gets one turn per combat round during which they may move and take one action. Additionally, creatures with available bonus actions may take one on each turn. Additionally additionally, between turns, each character can make a reaction if any are available, including opportunity attacks. I’m generalizing here. Don’t nitpick me.

In Pathfinder it’s similar, but everyone gets what amounts to three Action Points to take actions with and movement is a kind of action. But I’m not getting into the nuances here and I don’t care to hear about them and I don’t want to join your PF2 game so I can see how it fixes everything. Sorry. I prefer games people actually want to play.

I know I’m being a bit mean about this, but, seriously, PF2ers are like vegans and cross-fitters these days. Do you know how you can tell whether someone plays Pathfinder? You don’t have to; they’ll tell you. Are y’all bitter because WotC took their market share back and Pathfinder 2 wasn’t the turnaround y’all hoped it would be?

Seriously, stop @-ing me.

Anyway…

I said that modern, tactical roleplaying games universally have shit Action Economies. They’re balanced based purely on damage output. And that seems okay. Hypothetically, if everyone gets one attack per round, all it takes to balance a fight between five heroes and one monster is to give the monster five times as many hit points and a five-times greater damage per round and everything’s mathemagically fine.

From a purely math standpoint, that works. But the minute you take it to the table, you discover there are some issues. What happens is the five heroes pin down the monster and then everyone just swings back and forth. That’s called a Tank-n-Spank: you pin down the monster and trade hits until the monster’s dead.

There’s more to combat than just damage-per-round. Positioning is a big part of tactical roleplaying game combat. If you’re a melee bruiser, you’ve got to position yourself to attack, but you’re automatically vulnerable to attack. If you’re a ranged combatant, you need to get a clear line of fire, but you’ve got to stay the hell away from attackers. If a monster comes at you, you need to flee or else count on one of your melee bruiser buddies to intercept. And, if you’re a spellcaster, you just fuck up the balance because you can do anything. Seriously, nerf plz.

In a five-on-five fight — or anything close to it — the fact that you’ve got heroes operating at different ranges and people joining and withdrawing from engagements and dropping foes and intercepting to close holes means the fights are pretty dynamic. But in a five-on-one fight — or even a five-on-two or five-on-three fight — the outnumbered force can’t react dynamically to the actions taken against it. It can’t help but get pinned down. An extra action at the end of its turn or a Lair Action once per round doesn’t mitigate the problem nearly enough. Neither does Multiattack.

But positional dynamism ain’t the only kind of dynamism at play. In fact, it’s just a symptom of a bigger dynamical problem. A good fight needs some dynamics in the turn order. It needs a sense of going back and forth, not round and round.

When the fight’s five-on-one, the one baddie gets a turn and then every hero gets a turn. And even in a five-on-five fight, because most Game Masters combine the actions of identical creatures into one turn and don’t often use mixed forces, even group-on-group battles devolve into situations wherein all the monsters go and then all the heroes go. There’s no sense of dynamic interplay between the forces’ actions. It’d be far better if one of the heroes goes, then a monster goes, then another hero, then two monsters, then the three remaining heroes, then the last monster. Or something like that.

Have you ever heard people complain about static battles in tabletop roleplaying games? They’re usually complaining that, after a round or two of jockeying for position, everyone ends up standing still and trading blows. But that’s actually totally normal and not static at all. In fact, it’s part of a good three-phase fight. First, the fighters establish their battlelines and engagements, then they trade blows, then they do either firefighting or cleanup depending on how shit’s going. The middle third of a good fight is usually pretty static, but it doesn’t have to feel static.

The shit I’m describing about the flow of turns? That’s what really makes fights feel static. It leads to a feeling like no one’s reacting or responding; everyone’s just acting. Especially the players. A good Action Economy should create a more dynamic turn order than letting all the heroes go and then all the monsters go. It’s about more than just balancing the outputs or the number of actions.

Lots of tabletop wargames use a mechanic called Activations. In those games — and these are games wherein each of the two players controls a small army fighting the other — in those games, each player gets to activate just one or two of their creatures before they’ve got to let their opponent’s creatures go. After I take a turn with one of my creatures, I have to let you take a turn with one of yours before I can take a turn with my second creature. Thus there’s always a back-and-forth in the turn order.

That helps keep five-on-five fights dynamic, but it doesn’t fix the five-on-one problem. What does fix five-on-one fights is letting creatures that are meant to fight on their own have more turns. Dragons should get four complete, separate turns every round with four reactions between them. But those turns should be interspersed with the player-characters’ turns.

I’m not saying this is a perfect solution. I’m not saying it’s a complete solution either. You can definitely layer other mechanics over top of it. And I am certainly not saying it’s the only solution. I’m just offering it as an example of what a better approach might look like. And I’m definitely not previewing any mechanics from anything I might or might not have in the kiln.

I will say this, though: it’s unforgivable that tabletop roleplaying games haven’t addressed this. I actually wrote this same, exact spiel sixteen years ago. I even offered up the same solution. I don’t understand why major roleplaying game publishers are still refusing to recognize my genius and send me a standard boilerplate Rich and Famous contract. Worse yet, Monte and crew recognized this issue back in 1999 or whatever when they were building D&D v.3. They were struggling to find a balance system that worked for both five-on-five fights and five-on-one fights. Because D&D’s got to support both the heroes fighting gangs of orc savages and lone dragons.

On the plus side, as long as tabletop roleplaying games keep making the same mistakes, I can just keep publishing the same crap over and over again. That’s way easier than writing anything new. But man, it really is hard watching the stupids run the world when you’re as smart as I am. You have no idea how tough it is being me.