Back when I lived in the same city as the people I played D&D with, I liked playing music off my laptop to set the mood.
Since we switched to Skype for our games, that dimension has been lacking.
I've seen other DMs go to all sorts of lengths to get audio in their online games, including playing it really loud off of other computers so their mics pick it up. This is easier and you'll get better sound.
I fixed it, and now I'm gonna fix it for you. You're welcome.
This tutorial will allow you broadcast audio playing through your computer, such as from iTunes, a video, a game, or what have you, without your players' voices getting mixed in.
NOTE: This only works on Windows, and my instructions are for Windows 7. So Mac users, sorry. People using other versions of Windows might need to poke around to find the settings they're looking for. EDIT: Mac users see below for info.
Step 1. Get voicemeeter.
Voicemeeter is a free software/plugin that lets you mix and redirect audio. You can download it here. Install that shit.
Step 2. Download and install the Virtual Audio Cable.
It's from the same site. It helps feed things from one audio source to another. They make it sound like you need to make a donation to use it but it's actually free. Download it here.
Step 3. Restart your computer.
Step 4. Open voicemeeter.
Before we continue let's have a quick look at voicemeeter's interface.
You've got three inputs: Two Hardware and one Virtual. The Hardware inputs detect sounds from mics and such. The Virtual Input detects sounds from your computer. There's also the Hardware Output, which will show you both what your speakers are hearing and what you're broadcasting.
Each Input has two little round "A" and "B" buttons. The "A" stands for "audit", which means you'll be able to listen to that input. The "B" stands for "Broadcast," meaning your players will be able to hear it.
Step 5. Set up voicemeeter.
First get your mic set up. Click on the first Hardware input and select "MME: [whatever your mic is called]." Turn off the "A" for Hardware Input 1 (meaning only the "B" button should be green). This is so you don't have to listen to your own mic all the time.
Click on the second Hardware Input and select "MME: Hi-Fi Cable: VB-Audio etc." This is the channel you're going to use to listen to your game, so turn off the "B" so your players don't get an echo.
Click on Hardware Out and select your speakers or headset.
Step 6. Change your system audio settings
Right-click the little speaker icon at the bottom-right corner of the screen and select "Playback devices." Right-click "Voicemeeter Input" and select "Set as Default Device". Your sound will start feeding into voicemeeter's Virtual Input. If you have it configured correctly, you should still be able to hear your audio, and you should see activity on the Virtual Input monitor. Play some music or something to make sure that's happening.
Step 7. Configure Skype or Hangouts
This step is to prevent feeding your players' voices back to them. Open Skype or a Hangout.
In Skype:
Select Call ---> Audio Settings. Click on the drop-down menu for Microphone and select "VoiceMeeter Output." This means Skype will hear what VoiceMeeter is broadcasting. Go to the drop-down menu for Speakers and select "Hi-Fi Cable Input (VB-Audio etc.)." This means the audio from Skype will be processed through VoiceMeeter's Hardware Input 2, which if configured correctly will allow you to hear it but won't broadcast it back to the other players.
In Hangouts:
Start a new Video Hangout. Click on the gear symbol at the top of the screen to access your settings. Click on the microphone menu and select "VoiceMeeter Output." Click on the Speaker menu and select "Hi-Fi Cable Input.(VB-Audio etc.)" This means the audio from Hangouts will be processed through VoiceMeeter's Hardware Input 2, which if configured correctly will allow you to hear it but won't broadcast it back to the other players.
Done. Congratulations. Run your game, play your music, it should all work from here.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Nothing will work at all once you close voicemeeter - you won't be able to hear any sound and your friends won't be able to hear you. To remedy this, you can either a) keep voicemeeter open at all times or b) when you close voicemeeter, right-click the little speaker icon at the bottom-right corner of the screen and select "Playback devices." Right-click your usual speakers or headset and select "Set as Default Device".
As an added bonus, here's a site I use to loop Youtube videos for their audio: infinitelooper.com
ADDENDUM:
Ben Harrison on G+ has this advice for mac users: "I used to do a lot of electronic music, and this reminded me of a utility I used to use on the Mac called Soundflower. I believe it is still out there and works, so for anyone attempting to do this on a Mac, consider that the tip of an iceberg to explore. You should be able to redirect the audio of any app to any other, etc. :)"
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Monday, December 15, 2014
I just ran Into the Odd and it was Fun
I just ran my first session of Chris McDowall's Into the Odd. Know what was cool? Everything. More specifically? A party managed to crawl 21 rooms worth of dungeon in under 3 hours. Now that's efficient.
Okay let's talk about it.
First of all I like the system. The machine ticks well. There aren't a whole lot of parts but the parts that are there carry a lot of weight. There were a few moments where we were like, "wait, how does that work again?" But the answers were always to be found in Into the Odd's 25-or-so pages of rules, usually somewhere you'd expect them to be, under a heading that made sense.
On with the session report.
One thing I wanted to do here was test out Chris's assertion that Into the Odd was a game you could just grab off the shelf and play, like any other tabletop game. I tried to play in that spirit. So I grabbed an adventure off his blog (this one, to be precise). I'd read it once before and not very attentively, but liked the creepy atmosphere and the encounter table. That was literally all the prep I'd done.
One thing that's really important to note here is the effectiveness and importance of the way Chris presents his adventures. If you plan to run this system, have a look at the link I posted, or read over the introductory module included with the free quickstart rules here. The room descriptions are pretty minimal and uncluttered. You can see a list of the most important features of a given room at a glance. This works and means you don't have to spend five minutes hemming and hawing your way through a room description with every new room, trying to distinguish what you should show from what you shouldn't. This isn't just good, efficient design - it's essential to the ethos of running with minimal prep. It means that the party can enter a room you've never read before, and you can go, "oh, there's, uh, a staircase in here, the one by which you came down, two iron trunks on the floor, a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and a painting of soldiers hung on the south wall." If someone asks what's in the trunks, you go to the heading that says "iron trunks" and tell the player what's inside.
All that to say that I was far from well-prepared but it worked.
Character creation was fast. Like, really fast. Faster than any game I've played before. We started the session five minutes ahead of schedule and everyone already had characters. One guy had rolled an Arcanum in his starting equipment but didn't know what it was. I told him there was a list of d20 Arcana he could roll on, so he did, and he got a Bone Magnet. That was literally the extent of the time we spent fiddling over chargen. That's a tiny fraction of the time it takes to set up a game of Settlers of Catan. Even if you take the time to read a like 4-page module you'll still be ready to play in half a Catan board.
Chargen also produces fun characters. Gloomtrain's Mat Diaz rolled crap stats - his highest was a 9, and I guess his HP wasn't very high, because he started play with a Heat Ray and a whole bunch of weapons. The guys with better stats get less cool stuff. Character creation balances itself out and just about every character it produces is in some way interesting. This was awesome.
In the spirit of spontaneous play I also skipped any kind of introduction. I got straight to the dungeon. "You're outside a rusty trap door, it's creepy and no one knows what's in there. What do you do?" No lore dumping, minimal character introductions (just their names and equipment), let's go, let's play. Of course you can play D&D this way too. If anything Into the Odd's minimalism sheds light, and actually somewhat refines, the no-nonsense-let's-get-to-the-dungeon playstyle that OD&D was made for.
As for a play by play of the session, frankly, I find these boring to read and boring to write, so I'll stick to what was interesting.
The party managed to fight half of the dungeon's random encounter table in the second room. Many of the monsters on this particular were spooky and atmospheric, rather than outright dangerous. There was one monster which is generally nigh-impossible to kill, unless someone happens to have brought a Heat Ray (it's immune to damage caused by non-living material. I imagine heat isn't a material for these purposes). I think the dungeon is supposed to be a terror crawl where you're regularly fleeing from this bastard but, impressively enough, they managed to kill it. (It managed to knock two of them out first. It was quite tense.)
Here's one interesting rule we didn't quite use right, but damn is it cool. While fighting the nigh-invincible monster, Brian asked if he could "turn the heat ray all the way up." I figured, sure, why not, and told him he could Enhance the attack, but he'd have to succeed on a STR save to avoid being knocked back by the force and taking d6 damage. Just after he managed to kill it someone, I think it was Mat, dug up a thing in the rules that said that you can use an Arcanum in a slightly altered way by making a WIL save.
First of all, cool, there's a rule for bending your magic effects and it's goddamn simple.
Second, cool, it's intuitive enough that I nearly guessed it right.
The Heat Ray turned out to be the big hero of the day actually. Not only did it single-handedly take out the Big Bad, but Mat also realized he could use it to melt the locks off doors. I couldn't think of any reason to it shouldn't work and allowed them to eschew the usual roll to see if something bad notices you while you're picking the lock. Which was interesting, because there were a whole lot of locked doors.
So yeah, Arcana are cool. The asshole DM in me that wants to make everything difficult cringed a little watching them blow through every locked door, but it seemed to be fairest way to run the game. Also, Brian found a ring that lets you see in the dark but deals WIL damage when exposed to light. I remember Chris wrote a post suggesting that all D&D spells be unlimited-use, but dangerous to cast (eg. Sleep affects everyone within a certain radius, meaning the wizard either needs to risk running into a group of monsters alone or put their friends to sleep too. Nice.) That ethos evident in the ring and I would like to have found a way to apply it to the Heat Ray.
Anyway, because virtually all of the dungeon's combat encounters were on the wandering monsters table, and because most of them were unique, there was virtually no fighting after the second room. I felt a bit weird about this because I had to keep up the illusion that the players were in danger to keep the dungeon interesting, but they weren't, really. There was nothing left that could surprise them. Fortunately the dungeon itself was creepy and fucked up enough that they kept their guards up throughout. I'd like to put it out there that this particular module is peppered with a bunch of cool plot hooks. I could imagine turning the questions it raises into a brief campaign.
In closing:
The game stood up to the test of off-the-shelf play very well. I can imagine a group of brand new roleplayers grokking it within, what, 20 minutes. It doesn't ask for the nearly the same amount of buy-in as most systems in being used today, including any edition of D&D. You don't have to choose equipment. You don't even have to choose a class. More importantly you don't need to worry about character personality or backstory, which can be daunting to new players, and which tends work itself out in play as the need arises anyway. Four dice rolls, pick a name, and you're ready to go. The modules are well-presented, fun, and easy to run,
Things I'd like to see from Into the Odd:
- I'd like to run it with a group of people who have never played an RPG before. I can really see it going over well. It's also fairly easy to hack into whatever setting/aesthetic you prefer, and I could imagine it working really really well with kids. Its simplicity is a treasure.
- I'd be willing to pay for a big book of short modules - dungeons, hexcrawls, what have you - all no more than 6 pages long and written in Chris's format. I could imagine a dearth of ready-to-run materials impeding the possibility of playing off the shelf.
- I'd also pay for a book of Arcana. Although I'd be happiest of all if the book in that last bullet point also happened to have a chapters that's just like, d100 more Arcana at every tier. Tall order I know. But I'd be like a kid in a candy store.
So, what are you waiting for? Go get the damn book. Or if you can't afford it, get the Chris-approved free version, save your quarters, and then buy the damn book because it's like 15 dollars and this game deserves at least that. Did I mention all the rules you need to play fit on one page? Goddamn. And start writing those dungeons and Arcana and stuff so I can steal your ideas. I'll write some too, promise. Then we can all have a big fat folder full of stuff to run whenver someone's like, "hey, let's play that weird dungeon game."
P.S. Having some more thoughts I wanted to put out there.
The Death & Dying rules are clever. Basically unless the thing you're fighting is particularly nasty, being taken out in combat means you're unconscious and will die if no one helps you within an hour. The only reason for your party to let you die is because they're also out of commission. Once the danger has passed you can spend a few minutes resting up and get all your HP back. This means a character is unlikely to be taken out of the game unless they all do. So there's little chance of having to roll up a new dude mid-game. Nice.
P.P.S. ONE LAST THING SORRY. Noah Stevens is running Into the Odd games on G+. If you want to try this system, it looks like he's your man. I can't play because I'm in the wrong timezone, but I will be playing with him in a few weeks as part of his new podcast project. So you can look forward to that.
 |
| dat cover tho |
Okay let's talk about it.
First of all I like the system. The machine ticks well. There aren't a whole lot of parts but the parts that are there carry a lot of weight. There were a few moments where we were like, "wait, how does that work again?" But the answers were always to be found in Into the Odd's 25-or-so pages of rules, usually somewhere you'd expect them to be, under a heading that made sense.
On with the session report.
One thing I wanted to do here was test out Chris's assertion that Into the Odd was a game you could just grab off the shelf and play, like any other tabletop game. I tried to play in that spirit. So I grabbed an adventure off his blog (this one, to be precise). I'd read it once before and not very attentively, but liked the creepy atmosphere and the encounter table. That was literally all the prep I'd done.
One thing that's really important to note here is the effectiveness and importance of the way Chris presents his adventures. If you plan to run this system, have a look at the link I posted, or read over the introductory module included with the free quickstart rules here. The room descriptions are pretty minimal and uncluttered. You can see a list of the most important features of a given room at a glance. This works and means you don't have to spend five minutes hemming and hawing your way through a room description with every new room, trying to distinguish what you should show from what you shouldn't. This isn't just good, efficient design - it's essential to the ethos of running with minimal prep. It means that the party can enter a room you've never read before, and you can go, "oh, there's, uh, a staircase in here, the one by which you came down, two iron trunks on the floor, a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and a painting of soldiers hung on the south wall." If someone asks what's in the trunks, you go to the heading that says "iron trunks" and tell the player what's inside.
All that to say that I was far from well-prepared but it worked.
Character creation was fast. Like, really fast. Faster than any game I've played before. We started the session five minutes ahead of schedule and everyone already had characters. One guy had rolled an Arcanum in his starting equipment but didn't know what it was. I told him there was a list of d20 Arcana he could roll on, so he did, and he got a Bone Magnet. That was literally the extent of the time we spent fiddling over chargen. That's a tiny fraction of the time it takes to set up a game of Settlers of Catan. Even if you take the time to read a like 4-page module you'll still be ready to play in half a Catan board.
Chargen also produces fun characters. Gloomtrain's Mat Diaz rolled crap stats - his highest was a 9, and I guess his HP wasn't very high, because he started play with a Heat Ray and a whole bunch of weapons. The guys with better stats get less cool stuff. Character creation balances itself out and just about every character it produces is in some way interesting. This was awesome.
In the spirit of spontaneous play I also skipped any kind of introduction. I got straight to the dungeon. "You're outside a rusty trap door, it's creepy and no one knows what's in there. What do you do?" No lore dumping, minimal character introductions (just their names and equipment), let's go, let's play. Of course you can play D&D this way too. If anything Into the Odd's minimalism sheds light, and actually somewhat refines, the no-nonsense-let's-get-to-the-dungeon playstyle that OD&D was made for.
As for a play by play of the session, frankly, I find these boring to read and boring to write, so I'll stick to what was interesting.
The party managed to fight half of the dungeon's random encounter table in the second room. Many of the monsters on this particular were spooky and atmospheric, rather than outright dangerous. There was one monster which is generally nigh-impossible to kill, unless someone happens to have brought a Heat Ray (it's immune to damage caused by non-living material. I imagine heat isn't a material for these purposes). I think the dungeon is supposed to be a terror crawl where you're regularly fleeing from this bastard but, impressively enough, they managed to kill it. (It managed to knock two of them out first. It was quite tense.)
Here's one interesting rule we didn't quite use right, but damn is it cool. While fighting the nigh-invincible monster, Brian asked if he could "turn the heat ray all the way up." I figured, sure, why not, and told him he could Enhance the attack, but he'd have to succeed on a STR save to avoid being knocked back by the force and taking d6 damage. Just after he managed to kill it someone, I think it was Mat, dug up a thing in the rules that said that you can use an Arcanum in a slightly altered way by making a WIL save.
First of all, cool, there's a rule for bending your magic effects and it's goddamn simple.
Second, cool, it's intuitive enough that I nearly guessed it right.
The Heat Ray turned out to be the big hero of the day actually. Not only did it single-handedly take out the Big Bad, but Mat also realized he could use it to melt the locks off doors. I couldn't think of any reason to it shouldn't work and allowed them to eschew the usual roll to see if something bad notices you while you're picking the lock. Which was interesting, because there were a whole lot of locked doors.
So yeah, Arcana are cool. The asshole DM in me that wants to make everything difficult cringed a little watching them blow through every locked door, but it seemed to be fairest way to run the game. Also, Brian found a ring that lets you see in the dark but deals WIL damage when exposed to light. I remember Chris wrote a post suggesting that all D&D spells be unlimited-use, but dangerous to cast (eg. Sleep affects everyone within a certain radius, meaning the wizard either needs to risk running into a group of monsters alone or put their friends to sleep too. Nice.) That ethos evident in the ring and I would like to have found a way to apply it to the Heat Ray.
Anyway, because virtually all of the dungeon's combat encounters were on the wandering monsters table, and because most of them were unique, there was virtually no fighting after the second room. I felt a bit weird about this because I had to keep up the illusion that the players were in danger to keep the dungeon interesting, but they weren't, really. There was nothing left that could surprise them. Fortunately the dungeon itself was creepy and fucked up enough that they kept their guards up throughout. I'd like to put it out there that this particular module is peppered with a bunch of cool plot hooks. I could imagine turning the questions it raises into a brief campaign.
In closing:
The game stood up to the test of off-the-shelf play very well. I can imagine a group of brand new roleplayers grokking it within, what, 20 minutes. It doesn't ask for the nearly the same amount of buy-in as most systems in being used today, including any edition of D&D. You don't have to choose equipment. You don't even have to choose a class. More importantly you don't need to worry about character personality or backstory, which can be daunting to new players, and which tends work itself out in play as the need arises anyway. Four dice rolls, pick a name, and you're ready to go. The modules are well-presented, fun, and easy to run,
Things I'd like to see from Into the Odd:
- I'd like to run it with a group of people who have never played an RPG before. I can really see it going over well. It's also fairly easy to hack into whatever setting/aesthetic you prefer, and I could imagine it working really really well with kids. Its simplicity is a treasure.
- I'd be willing to pay for a big book of short modules - dungeons, hexcrawls, what have you - all no more than 6 pages long and written in Chris's format. I could imagine a dearth of ready-to-run materials impeding the possibility of playing off the shelf.
- I'd also pay for a book of Arcana. Although I'd be happiest of all if the book in that last bullet point also happened to have a chapters that's just like, d100 more Arcana at every tier. Tall order I know. But I'd be like a kid in a candy store.
So, what are you waiting for? Go get the damn book. Or if you can't afford it, get the Chris-approved free version, save your quarters, and then buy the damn book because it's like 15 dollars and this game deserves at least that. Did I mention all the rules you need to play fit on one page? Goddamn. And start writing those dungeons and Arcana and stuff so I can steal your ideas. I'll write some too, promise. Then we can all have a big fat folder full of stuff to run whenver someone's like, "hey, let's play that weird dungeon game."
P.S. Having some more thoughts I wanted to put out there.
The Death & Dying rules are clever. Basically unless the thing you're fighting is particularly nasty, being taken out in combat means you're unconscious and will die if no one helps you within an hour. The only reason for your party to let you die is because they're also out of commission. Once the danger has passed you can spend a few minutes resting up and get all your HP back. This means a character is unlikely to be taken out of the game unless they all do. So there's little chance of having to roll up a new dude mid-game. Nice.
P.P.S. ONE LAST THING SORRY. Noah Stevens is running Into the Odd games on G+. If you want to try this system, it looks like he's your man. I can't play because I'm in the wrong timezone, but I will be playing with him in a few weeks as part of his new podcast project. So you can look forward to that.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
One Thousand Players
This post is, by nature, not gamable. It's pure thoughtsturbation. But I'm having fun so sue me.
What if any NPC, or vaguely personifiable non-player element, in an RPG, could be represented by a player?
Like, you press a button on your phone and a dude scurries in ready to play the role you need filled.
So the PCs are slogging through the mud fields outside Mudville. They're looking for information about the evil wizard Katazang. They see a mud farmer, farming mud. They approach him. You push your button. A random guy runs into the room. You hand him a piece of paper. It says your name is Dirtsly. You are a mud farmer. Most of your livestock is dead because harvests have been bad the last few years. You spend most of your time dreaming of making love to a princess you saw a semi-incompetent etching of that one time you got to look at a book. How you feel about adventurers and just about anything else is your call.
You tell him, "four of heavily armed adventurers come up to you. What do you guys look like?"
WIZARD: "Well, we're mostly caked in mud."
THIEF: "I'm hiding in the mud. Do I have to roll?"
DM: "No, you don't. Okay, you only see three adventurers."
MUD FARMER: "I'm pretty good with mud."
YOU: "Okay, fair. Thief, roll Hide in Shadows."
THIEF: "I make it."
DM: "Three adventurers."
FIGHTER: "I have three swords and I'm holding two of them. I have huge battlescars everywhere. My sword occasionally screams profanity. It's gnarly and reddish brown."
WIZARD: "I'm missing both my eyes but one of them is on a necklace I'm wearing. There are four ioun stones circling my head. Parts of my robes are missing and sometimes you can see my dong."
CLERIC: "I'm holding a holy symbol of the Sky Lord. My armour is dented."
MUD FARMER: "What are you doing hanging out with these guys? The Sky Lord is supposed to be righteous and orderly and they seem terrible."
CLERIC: "Frankly I'm not sure. I think I'm having a crisis of faith."
The fighter starts talking in that fucking tone of voice he uses when he's getting bored and wants to keep the game moving.
FIGHTER: "Er, hail mud farmer! We are adventurers seeking to purge this land of the foul influence of the wizard Katazang! Do you know of his whereabouts?"
MUD FARMER: "Do I?"
DM: [Hands him a paper saying northish, you're not really sure. He's not nearly as troublesome as these recent crop failures.]
MUD FARMER: "You schmucks! Jerks like you once stayed at my farm! Fucking adventurers! They drank the place dry, and when I woke up they were gone, my nephew was unconscious and bleeding everywhere, and two of my chickens were gone!"
FIGHTER: "That wasn't us."
WIZARD: "Could have been us. Don't pretend that doesn't sound like something we've done."
FIGHTER: "We've never done it here, though."
THIEF: "I'm still hiding in the mud, right?"
MUD FARMER: "Get a job!"
Not sure why I'm dragging out this example besides that I'm having fun. Point being instead of making a reaction roll you bring in another player, tell them their motivation, and let them figure out the rest.
Does this work well in actual play? No, it's pretty much impossible.
I'm gonna keep going anyway,
So say the fighter later fails his save vs. disease. Instead of figuring out what fucking interval to ask for saving throws to determine how the disease progresses, you bring in someone to roleplay the disease. You give them a goddamn stat sheet and tell them they wind if they kill the fighter. The fighter's trying to attack a three-headed ogre, the disease rolls to give him a coughing fit at the worst possible time. You could also personify like a wizard's spells to determine what happens when he misfires. Like, "you are an ethereal being of Pure Sleep who was pulled out of his native plane to be trapped for the past four hours in a Wizard's brain. He just messed up the words to release you in a controlled fashion and now you have about ten seconds in the Material Plane in which to do what you want before you zap back to your place of origin. What do you do?"
Or. The old cleric dies but that player is one of those players and rolls up a new cleric. This one worships Great Grandmother Winter. So you bring in someone to play Great Grandmother Winter, and you tell her what level of existence she operates at and what kind of cosmic struggle she's embroiled in this millenium and ask her how she's dealing with it. And then you interrupt her answer mid-sentence to tell her some asshole she's barely heard of (he's 1st level. There are so many of those...) is praying at the top of his lungs at her.
GREAT GRANDMOTHER WINTER: "What do you want?"
NEW CLERIC: "Oh Great Grandmother Winter, Eternal Queen of the Wailing Winds, Mistress of the-"
GREAT GRANDMOTHER WINTER: "Can you make it quick? Cthulhu's in the middle of pulling some shit."
NEW CLERIC: "Can you heal the thief?"
GREAT GRANDMOTHER WINTER: "Heal the thief? What is he stealing Loki's amulet of universal mischief?"
NEW CLERIC: "No, we pissed off the town guards when he hit them because the Fighter doesn't want to pay his tab at the inn and so he tried to sleep with the innkeeper's wife and she called the guards."
GREAT GRANDMOTHER WINTER: "Are you fucking kidding? I send an ice storm after him."
DM: "For how long?"
GREAT GRANDMOTHER WINTER: "Forever."
What if any NPC, or vaguely personifiable non-player element, in an RPG, could be represented by a player?
Like, you press a button on your phone and a dude scurries in ready to play the role you need filled.
So the PCs are slogging through the mud fields outside Mudville. They're looking for information about the evil wizard Katazang. They see a mud farmer, farming mud. They approach him. You push your button. A random guy runs into the room. You hand him a piece of paper. It says your name is Dirtsly. You are a mud farmer. Most of your livestock is dead because harvests have been bad the last few years. You spend most of your time dreaming of making love to a princess you saw a semi-incompetent etching of that one time you got to look at a book. How you feel about adventurers and just about anything else is your call.
You tell him, "four of heavily armed adventurers come up to you. What do you guys look like?"
WIZARD: "Well, we're mostly caked in mud."
THIEF: "I'm hiding in the mud. Do I have to roll?"
DM: "No, you don't. Okay, you only see three adventurers."
MUD FARMER: "I'm pretty good with mud."
YOU: "Okay, fair. Thief, roll Hide in Shadows."
THIEF: "I make it."
DM: "Three adventurers."
FIGHTER: "I have three swords and I'm holding two of them. I have huge battlescars everywhere. My sword occasionally screams profanity. It's gnarly and reddish brown."
WIZARD: "I'm missing both my eyes but one of them is on a necklace I'm wearing. There are four ioun stones circling my head. Parts of my robes are missing and sometimes you can see my dong."
CLERIC: "I'm holding a holy symbol of the Sky Lord. My armour is dented."
MUD FARMER: "What are you doing hanging out with these guys? The Sky Lord is supposed to be righteous and orderly and they seem terrible."
CLERIC: "Frankly I'm not sure. I think I'm having a crisis of faith."
The fighter starts talking in that fucking tone of voice he uses when he's getting bored and wants to keep the game moving.
FIGHTER: "Er, hail mud farmer! We are adventurers seeking to purge this land of the foul influence of the wizard Katazang! Do you know of his whereabouts?"
MUD FARMER: "Do I?"
DM: [Hands him a paper saying northish, you're not really sure. He's not nearly as troublesome as these recent crop failures.]
MUD FARMER: "You schmucks! Jerks like you once stayed at my farm! Fucking adventurers! They drank the place dry, and when I woke up they were gone, my nephew was unconscious and bleeding everywhere, and two of my chickens were gone!"
FIGHTER: "That wasn't us."
WIZARD: "Could have been us. Don't pretend that doesn't sound like something we've done."
FIGHTER: "We've never done it here, though."
THIEF: "I'm still hiding in the mud, right?"
MUD FARMER: "Get a job!"
Not sure why I'm dragging out this example besides that I'm having fun. Point being instead of making a reaction roll you bring in another player, tell them their motivation, and let them figure out the rest.
Does this work well in actual play? No, it's pretty much impossible.
I'm gonna keep going anyway,
So say the fighter later fails his save vs. disease. Instead of figuring out what fucking interval to ask for saving throws to determine how the disease progresses, you bring in someone to roleplay the disease. You give them a goddamn stat sheet and tell them they wind if they kill the fighter. The fighter's trying to attack a three-headed ogre, the disease rolls to give him a coughing fit at the worst possible time. You could also personify like a wizard's spells to determine what happens when he misfires. Like, "you are an ethereal being of Pure Sleep who was pulled out of his native plane to be trapped for the past four hours in a Wizard's brain. He just messed up the words to release you in a controlled fashion and now you have about ten seconds in the Material Plane in which to do what you want before you zap back to your place of origin. What do you do?"
Or. The old cleric dies but that player is one of those players and rolls up a new cleric. This one worships Great Grandmother Winter. So you bring in someone to play Great Grandmother Winter, and you tell her what level of existence she operates at and what kind of cosmic struggle she's embroiled in this millenium and ask her how she's dealing with it. And then you interrupt her answer mid-sentence to tell her some asshole she's barely heard of (he's 1st level. There are so many of those...) is praying at the top of his lungs at her.
GREAT GRANDMOTHER WINTER: "What do you want?"
NEW CLERIC: "Oh Great Grandmother Winter, Eternal Queen of the Wailing Winds, Mistress of the-"
GREAT GRANDMOTHER WINTER: "Can you make it quick? Cthulhu's in the middle of pulling some shit."
NEW CLERIC: "Can you heal the thief?"
GREAT GRANDMOTHER WINTER: "Heal the thief? What is he stealing Loki's amulet of universal mischief?"
NEW CLERIC: "No, we pissed off the town guards when he hit them because the Fighter doesn't want to pay his tab at the inn and so he tried to sleep with the innkeeper's wife and she called the guards."
GREAT GRANDMOTHER WINTER: "Are you fucking kidding? I send an ice storm after him."
DM: "For how long?"
GREAT GRANDMOTHER WINTER: "Forever."
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Rejiggered City Questions, with added focus
I was looking over my City Questions after I made yesterday's post and looking at ways to give the City Questions a little more oomph. I like their openness to interpretation but I myself stalled on a few while running them. When you're already trying to handle a hundred questions from your players and trying to discretely cobble together an encounter while not breaking the flow of play, reading something like "what kind of influence do celebrities have?" can be kind of jarring and you're like "I don't know, I guess there's, uhhhh, an actor, and- sorry? Is your Blink Dog still calm? It's been about an hour so you'll probably have to drug it again to keep it docile. What was I just thinking about?"
So, anyway, I figured it might be helpful to focus the questions a little more and give specific examples of things to address when answering them. That way when I roll a 19, I'm like "Oh, describe a famous person. A cultural figure, how about. Oh, well there's the comedian Edna Greubel, she does street shows that are starting to draw large crowds. But they're quite subversive, really derisive of some of the major families. There she is now, in clown makeup doing an impression of Lady Von Hook. The people are eating it up, she's putting on an old lady voice and miming using a greatsword as a cane. Using her middle finger to mimic the Lady's eye patch. There are thuggish guards in Von Hook livery looking on, they don't look pleased." See, I just came up with that now, in like 10 seconds, from looking at the new entry. That worked much better.
Anyway without further ado, here's the new thing:
When you answer a city question, show or tell about an entry from the list below (roll 1d20 or choose).
1. The variety of races, demographics, social classes, professions, etc. that exist here - how do they coexist?
2. The daily lives of this place's inhabitants - political and economic conditions, activities, social dynamics
3. Local culture, such as food, entertainment, social codes and taboos, superstition
4. The layout of the city - architecture, topology, zoning, public spaces, green spaces, institutional spaces, etc.
5. The local government - institutions, families, armed forces
6. The day-to-day presence of the law and law-enforcement
7. The city's quirks and unique characteristics
8. The place of magic and magicians in public life, business, institutions, government, etc.
9. The presence and character of local crime - its organizations, perpetrators, modes of operation
10. The city's strange and special goods, merchandise, crafts
11. Tensions social, political, economic, etc. that threaten the city from within
12. The place of physical violence, or lack thereof, in daily life
13. Threats to the city from without - wars, trade, the weather, nature, starvation, etc.
14. The city's secrets - places, societies, cults, etc.
15. The structure of power, official and/or otherwise - how power is established, maintained, enforced, subverted
16. Religious authority - clergy, processions, rituals, holidays, sacred spaces, competing cults
17. The local religions - beliefs, codes, practices, personal worship, cults popular, secret and/or new
18. Local history - historic buildings, famous events, local legends
19. Celebrities, local and distant - warriors, rulers, figures political, religious, intellectual, cultural, etc.
20. Popular culture - who and what is fashionable, trends, styles, books, plays
So, anyway, I figured it might be helpful to focus the questions a little more and give specific examples of things to address when answering them. That way when I roll a 19, I'm like "Oh, describe a famous person. A cultural figure, how about. Oh, well there's the comedian Edna Greubel, she does street shows that are starting to draw large crowds. But they're quite subversive, really derisive of some of the major families. There she is now, in clown makeup doing an impression of Lady Von Hook. The people are eating it up, she's putting on an old lady voice and miming using a greatsword as a cane. Using her middle finger to mimic the Lady's eye patch. There are thuggish guards in Von Hook livery looking on, they don't look pleased." See, I just came up with that now, in like 10 seconds, from looking at the new entry. That worked much better.
Anyway without further ado, here's the new thing:
When you answer a city question, show or tell about an entry from the list below (roll 1d20 or choose).
1. The variety of races, demographics, social classes, professions, etc. that exist here - how do they coexist?
2. The daily lives of this place's inhabitants - political and economic conditions, activities, social dynamics
3. Local culture, such as food, entertainment, social codes and taboos, superstition
4. The layout of the city - architecture, topology, zoning, public spaces, green spaces, institutional spaces, etc.
5. The local government - institutions, families, armed forces
6. The day-to-day presence of the law and law-enforcement
7. The city's quirks and unique characteristics
8. The place of magic and magicians in public life, business, institutions, government, etc.
9. The presence and character of local crime - its organizations, perpetrators, modes of operation
10. The city's strange and special goods, merchandise, crafts
11. Tensions social, political, economic, etc. that threaten the city from within
12. The place of physical violence, or lack thereof, in daily life
13. Threats to the city from without - wars, trade, the weather, nature, starvation, etc.
14. The city's secrets - places, societies, cults, etc.
15. The structure of power, official and/or otherwise - how power is established, maintained, enforced, subverted
16. Religious authority - clergy, processions, rituals, holidays, sacred spaces, competing cults
17. The local religions - beliefs, codes, practices, personal worship, cults popular, secret and/or new
18. Local history - historic buildings, famous events, local legends
19. Celebrities, local and distant - warriors, rulers, figures political, religious, intellectual, cultural, etc.
20. Popular culture - who and what is fashionable, trends, styles, books, plays
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
An all-purpose city encounter method
First of all, this whole thing is pretty much a slight variation on this.
I'm running a city and my first thought was to adapt Vornheim's encounter table to the setting and go from there.
The thing is I don't always know what to do with the Vornheim encounters. I'm not going to call it a flaw so much as a certain capacity I lack to resolve the specificity of those situations with the bigger picture of my game. When I try to run those encounters it tends to feel like a non-sequitur. Too many of those in a session and my player's eyes begin to glaze over as I urgently try to make this thing I just rolled on a d100 seem interesting to them, rather than a weird intervention in whatever it was they were already trying to do.
So instead, I came up with this:
Whenever the PCs are travelling from one neighbourhood, or at whatever interval seems appropriate, roll 1d6:
1-2. Answer a city question
3. Dangle a hook
4. Pull a string
5. Interruption
6. Draw attention to a PC.
Answer a City Question
This usually just means describing the scenery as the PCs pass through. You can make it interesting but it doesn't always have to be. This can also be a short (like, 3 sentence) lore dump. It's meant to make the city feel more alive.
Roll 1d20 and describe a situation that addresses the question.
1. What kind of people live here?
2. Under what conditions do they live?
3. What is the local food like?
4. What is the city's topology like?
5. What kind of government is in place?
6. What role does the law/state play in daily life?
7. What is bizarre or unique about this city?
8. What roll does magic play here?
9. How does crime figure into daily life?
10. What strange goods can you purchase here?
11. What kind of tensions are in play?
12. Is violence common?
13. What threats does the city face from without?
14. What lies just beneath the surface?
15. Who really has power?
16. What role does religion play here?
17. What is the local religion like?
18. What is this place's history?
19. What kind of influence do celebrities have?
20. Who or what is popular, famous, or fashionable?
You can prepare answers to these but the idea is you don't have to. If you're stuck on a question, make a note of it and roll again. Make sure to come up with an answer by the beginning of the next session.
In a city with a variety of different neighbourhoods, this also tells the players more about this particular area.
Dangle a Hook
Try to have a short list of 3 or 4 adventure hooks on hand. A hook is evidence pointing to a source of adventure, treasure, XP, etc. The ones I have ready are a magical circus coming into town, an elvish dandy who's seducing people and robbing them in front of their faces, but has enchanted his identity so as to be unrememberable; a duelist with a magical sword seeking challengers; and a rad circus/light show coming into town soon.
Hooks should be prepared enough that your players can start pursuing them instantly if they're interested enough, but distant enough that they don't have to. In other words, they don't feel forced to bite.
In game terms, a hook is often presented as overheard gossip or an event witnessed from afar.
Pull a String
Strings are situations in which PCs get involved but don't necessarily see through all the way. They tend to just happen as a consequence of the way players act. For example, last session my players lost control of their Blink Dog and it killed a member of some new cult. Any situation where you think, "there could be more to this," creates a string. Also, a hook that players show an interest in, pursue, or investigate partially, might become a string.
When you pull a string, you remind the players, directly or otherwise, that the string is still in play. So in the cult's case it could just be murmurs that they're growing in number, a run-in with angry cultists who witnessed the attack, or full-scale retribution from the cult. Generally, it's a good idea to let things escalate gradually. When in doubt, I make a reaction roll for the interested parties and/or the Universe.
Interruption
Alright, this is a non-sequitur. Here's where I'd probably roll on Vornheim's encounter table, or on one of my own making. It presents a situation that usually demands some kind of intervention from the PCs, but that they probably weren't expecting and that isn't necessarily related to other things going on. This might generate new strings.
Draw Attention to a PC
This presents a situation that addresses a PC in particular. You can choose one at random, but my approach would be to turn to either a) a newer player of b) on that hasn't spoken much this session.
The idea is to present some kind of situation that will bring one character in particular to the fore. If there appears to be some kind of tension between a few PCs, this could also serve as an opportunity to exploit that tension by bringing in something relevant to both of them.
If you can't think of anything to do with this, roll a d10 on the Character Questions table below. If the result doesn't give you anything to work with, ask it to the player directly. If you've asked it before, put a new spin on it or ask for more detail. Present a situation that makes the given answer relevant.
CHARACTER QUESTIONS
1. What is your family like?
2. What are your friends like?
3. What was your greatest achievement?
4. What do you believe in?
5. To what do you aspire?
6. What are your flaws?
7. What are your virtues?
8. Who are your enemies?
9. What was your home town/neighbourhood like?
10. What has been your greatest failure?
The outcome might be as mundane as the player describing an old friend, and you tell them that, despite not having seen them in years, that person is right there across the street. If the character is a recovering alcoholic, there's a bar doing an all-day happy hour promo and glasses clinking loudly. That can be enough.
I'm running a city and my first thought was to adapt Vornheim's encounter table to the setting and go from there.
The thing is I don't always know what to do with the Vornheim encounters. I'm not going to call it a flaw so much as a certain capacity I lack to resolve the specificity of those situations with the bigger picture of my game. When I try to run those encounters it tends to feel like a non-sequitur. Too many of those in a session and my player's eyes begin to glaze over as I urgently try to make this thing I just rolled on a d100 seem interesting to them, rather than a weird intervention in whatever it was they were already trying to do.
So instead, I came up with this:
Whenever the PCs are travelling from one neighbourhood, or at whatever interval seems appropriate, roll 1d6:
1-2. Answer a city question
3. Dangle a hook
4. Pull a string
5. Interruption
6. Draw attention to a PC.
Answer a City Question
This usually just means describing the scenery as the PCs pass through. You can make it interesting but it doesn't always have to be. This can also be a short (like, 3 sentence) lore dump. It's meant to make the city feel more alive.
Roll 1d20 and describe a situation that addresses the question.
1. What kind of people live here?
2. Under what conditions do they live?
3. What is the local food like?
4. What is the city's topology like?
5. What kind of government is in place?
6. What role does the law/state play in daily life?
7. What is bizarre or unique about this city?
8. What roll does magic play here?
9. How does crime figure into daily life?
10. What strange goods can you purchase here?
11. What kind of tensions are in play?
12. Is violence common?
13. What threats does the city face from without?
14. What lies just beneath the surface?
15. Who really has power?
16. What role does religion play here?
17. What is the local religion like?
18. What is this place's history?
19. What kind of influence do celebrities have?
20. Who or what is popular, famous, or fashionable?
You can prepare answers to these but the idea is you don't have to. If you're stuck on a question, make a note of it and roll again. Make sure to come up with an answer by the beginning of the next session.
In a city with a variety of different neighbourhoods, this also tells the players more about this particular area.
Dangle a Hook
Try to have a short list of 3 or 4 adventure hooks on hand. A hook is evidence pointing to a source of adventure, treasure, XP, etc. The ones I have ready are a magical circus coming into town, an elvish dandy who's seducing people and robbing them in front of their faces, but has enchanted his identity so as to be unrememberable; a duelist with a magical sword seeking challengers; and a rad circus/light show coming into town soon.
Hooks should be prepared enough that your players can start pursuing them instantly if they're interested enough, but distant enough that they don't have to. In other words, they don't feel forced to bite.
In game terms, a hook is often presented as overheard gossip or an event witnessed from afar.
Pull a String
Strings are situations in which PCs get involved but don't necessarily see through all the way. They tend to just happen as a consequence of the way players act. For example, last session my players lost control of their Blink Dog and it killed a member of some new cult. Any situation where you think, "there could be more to this," creates a string. Also, a hook that players show an interest in, pursue, or investigate partially, might become a string.
When you pull a string, you remind the players, directly or otherwise, that the string is still in play. So in the cult's case it could just be murmurs that they're growing in number, a run-in with angry cultists who witnessed the attack, or full-scale retribution from the cult. Generally, it's a good idea to let things escalate gradually. When in doubt, I make a reaction roll for the interested parties and/or the Universe.
Interruption
Alright, this is a non-sequitur. Here's where I'd probably roll on Vornheim's encounter table, or on one of my own making. It presents a situation that usually demands some kind of intervention from the PCs, but that they probably weren't expecting and that isn't necessarily related to other things going on. This might generate new strings.
Draw Attention to a PC
This presents a situation that addresses a PC in particular. You can choose one at random, but my approach would be to turn to either a) a newer player of b) on that hasn't spoken much this session.
The idea is to present some kind of situation that will bring one character in particular to the fore. If there appears to be some kind of tension between a few PCs, this could also serve as an opportunity to exploit that tension by bringing in something relevant to both of them.
If you can't think of anything to do with this, roll a d10 on the Character Questions table below. If the result doesn't give you anything to work with, ask it to the player directly. If you've asked it before, put a new spin on it or ask for more detail. Present a situation that makes the given answer relevant.
CHARACTER QUESTIONS
1. What is your family like?
2. What are your friends like?
3. What was your greatest achievement?
4. What do you believe in?
5. To what do you aspire?
6. What are your flaws?
7. What are your virtues?
8. Who are your enemies?
9. What was your home town/neighbourhood like?
10. What has been your greatest failure?
The outcome might be as mundane as the player describing an old friend, and you tell them that, despite not having seen them in years, that person is right there across the street. If the character is a recovering alcoholic, there's a bar doing an all-day happy hour promo and glasses clinking loudly. That can be enough.
Monday, November 3, 2014
A Tinkered, All-Purpose Reaction Roll
Hello. It's been a while.
So I'm reading Unframed: The Art of Improvisation for Game Masters, since I've just started up an improv-heavy campaign. In the first chapter Robin D. Laws presents a method for resolving dialogue based on a character's intentions.
I've also had a tendency to appreciate reaction rolls but struggle with the "neutral" 6-8 range. Plugging Laws's approach into a reaction table makes for something immediately more gameable. I made some tweaks and here's what I've got.
(Before going on, I need to give credit to Courtney Campbell for On the Non-Player Character, which is also a big influence here.)
The Reaction Roll
Roll NPCs want...
2 Conflict (Armed or otherwise)
3-5 To establish their superiority (manoeuvre to their advantage, intimidate the party, etc.)
6-8 To advance their interests
9-11 To cooperate to mutual benefit (this might be a temporary alliance, a ceasefire, etc.)
12 To help (this could also mean surrender)
For unintelligent creatures, results above 8 should probably tend towards a deescalation of violence rather than cooperation.
Interests
All of the results above can be interpreted in relation to a character's interests - especially 6-8, where these are the determining factor in their behaviour. Every NPC and/or monster can be given a short list (say, 1-3) "interests" to pursue. (This is obviously inspired by Dungeon World's instincts.)
A giant spider might have: Protect its nest, trap prey, survive
Or a thief: Go unseen, steal valuables, survive
An orc: Eat ravenously, enslave the meek, fight to the death
A mercenary: Follow orders, gain riches, survive
A guard: Keep out interlopers, increase in rank, survive
A wolf: Hunt prey, follow the pack, survive
(Obviously "survive" comes up a lot.)
Disposition
Apply a disposition modifier to reaction rolls based on an NPC's interests, where interests favouring cooperation grant a +1, and interests favouring conflict give a -1.
So if a party wanders into a thief's darkened stomping ground, the thief is going unseen, in a position to steal, and not in immediate danger. Therefore they have a disposition of -3.
If, however, the party catches the thief off guard and their treasure is well secured, the situation is stacked against the thief and their disposition is +3.
Some creatures that tend towards violence or cooperation may have a stacking natural modifier to disposition. An orc, for example, might have a disposition modifier of -2, making cooperation virtually impossible. Even if it's well-fed, and facing might enemies (+2), it still wants to fight to death and is naturally violent (-3), bringing its total to -1.
This can double as a loyalty/morale check
Rather than checking morale, you can keep nudging these modifiers and reroll reaction. In addition to the usual reasons to check morale, you might call for a reaction roll whenever the state of an NPC's interest has obviously changed. So if a thief has been attacking from the darkness until the players get a Light spell going, the thief can no longer go unseen and makes a reaction roll. You might end up with the surprising result that they offer to give directions at that point in order to get away safely.
Hirelings can make these checks too. Assume that "follow orders" or "get paid" are usually among their interests, but so too is "survive." When a situation presents a threat to their survival, you make one of these rolls to determine just how helpful they're willing to be. A hireling's loyalty can be represented by their natural disposition modifier.
The difference between a reaction roll and a loyalty or morale check is that the latter have binary "fight/flight" outcomes where as the latter allows for more nuance and dynamism without too much ambiguity.
Finally, it doesn't ask for much extra prep, beyond writing down a list of three things a particular NPC or monsters wants, one of which is usually "survival" anyway.
So I'm reading Unframed: The Art of Improvisation for Game Masters, since I've just started up an improv-heavy campaign. In the first chapter Robin D. Laws presents a method for resolving dialogue based on a character's intentions.
I've also had a tendency to appreciate reaction rolls but struggle with the "neutral" 6-8 range. Plugging Laws's approach into a reaction table makes for something immediately more gameable. I made some tweaks and here's what I've got.
(Before going on, I need to give credit to Courtney Campbell for On the Non-Player Character, which is also a big influence here.)
 |
| The hell do these moose-guys want? |
The Reaction Roll
Roll NPCs want...
2 Conflict (Armed or otherwise)
3-5 To establish their superiority (manoeuvre to their advantage, intimidate the party, etc.)
6-8 To advance their interests
9-11 To cooperate to mutual benefit (this might be a temporary alliance, a ceasefire, etc.)
12 To help (this could also mean surrender)
For unintelligent creatures, results above 8 should probably tend towards a deescalation of violence rather than cooperation.
Interests
All of the results above can be interpreted in relation to a character's interests - especially 6-8, where these are the determining factor in their behaviour. Every NPC and/or monster can be given a short list (say, 1-3) "interests" to pursue. (This is obviously inspired by Dungeon World's instincts.)
A giant spider might have: Protect its nest, trap prey, survive
Or a thief: Go unseen, steal valuables, survive
An orc: Eat ravenously, enslave the meek, fight to the death
A mercenary: Follow orders, gain riches, survive
A guard: Keep out interlopers, increase in rank, survive
A wolf: Hunt prey, follow the pack, survive
(Obviously "survive" comes up a lot.)
Disposition
Apply a disposition modifier to reaction rolls based on an NPC's interests, where interests favouring cooperation grant a +1, and interests favouring conflict give a -1.
So if a party wanders into a thief's darkened stomping ground, the thief is going unseen, in a position to steal, and not in immediate danger. Therefore they have a disposition of -3.
If, however, the party catches the thief off guard and their treasure is well secured, the situation is stacked against the thief and their disposition is +3.
Some creatures that tend towards violence or cooperation may have a stacking natural modifier to disposition. An orc, for example, might have a disposition modifier of -2, making cooperation virtually impossible. Even if it's well-fed, and facing might enemies (+2), it still wants to fight to death and is naturally violent (-3), bringing its total to -1.
This can double as a loyalty/morale check
Rather than checking morale, you can keep nudging these modifiers and reroll reaction. In addition to the usual reasons to check morale, you might call for a reaction roll whenever the state of an NPC's interest has obviously changed. So if a thief has been attacking from the darkness until the players get a Light spell going, the thief can no longer go unseen and makes a reaction roll. You might end up with the surprising result that they offer to give directions at that point in order to get away safely.
Hirelings can make these checks too. Assume that "follow orders" or "get paid" are usually among their interests, but so too is "survive." When a situation presents a threat to their survival, you make one of these rolls to determine just how helpful they're willing to be. A hireling's loyalty can be represented by their natural disposition modifier.
The difference between a reaction roll and a loyalty or morale check is that the latter have binary "fight/flight" outcomes where as the latter allows for more nuance and dynamism without too much ambiguity.
Finally, it doesn't ask for much extra prep, beyond writing down a list of three things a particular NPC or monsters wants, one of which is usually "survival" anyway.
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