This weekend I'm off to southern Indiana to see my friend Howard Andrew Jones (soon to be of Desert of Souls fame) for a Christmas visit. We'll get in a ton of gaming. I'm hoping to play:

-Avalon Hill's old boardgame Caesar (about Alesia).
-I'll gamemaster some Savage Worlds in my All Real Men's Action! WW2 Daring Adventure Epic campaign (think Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos with more tits). Howard enjoys a regular gaming group of seasoned pros. I wish I could visit more often.
-Heroscape

The Sprong will enjoy himself in their barn and with Howard's kids. Hopefully. Pup will be in a kennel and cats will relax with a weekend to themselves.

So, I've been thinking a lot lately about the whys and wherefores of the hobby. Specifically, what is it that drives us, largely grown-ass men and women with jobs and families and mortgages, to sit around a table on a regular basis and play pretend. What, for lack of a better term, is our motivation? I touched on this a little in last Friday's post when I talked about our characters as avatars of ourselves that portray us as we'd like to be. But why? Why do we pull on the cape or the body armor or the pointy hat? Why do we take up the plasma rifle or the staff with the knob on the end? That's the question that fascinates me, gentle readers. That's what I want to touch on today.



Role-playing is, at its heart, escapism, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. With the various stresses in our lives, it's good to have a way to unwind, to blow off some steam or work off some aggression in a controlled environment. Some people work out, some meditate, we pretend to be super heroes of one kind or another. We all have our reasons for it, some healthy, many not. Whatever the reasons, and there are as many reasons to play games as there are gamers, I think the escapism we have in the hobby falls largely into two types; Running to something and running from something.

Running to something is what I think most gamers do of a session. When my friends and I, and most likely you and your friends, sit down for a game, we're there to play pretend for a few hours. We whack some bad guys, get ourselves into and out of trouble, succeed brilliantly, fail miserably and generally have a bunch of fun and laughs. A player running to something is playing so that they can pretend to be someone else for a while. They're pretending to be another person who, while obviously a near super-powered distillation of all our inner wants and desires, is still a walking contradiction full of their own wants and needs and all the little, constant failings that make a person human. They think in terms of character motivation, and build their characters around concepts and ideas as opposed to building them around the right kind of numbers.

For example, I'm a pretty average guy, right? I've got a wife, a kid on the way, a house, pets, self-cleaning oven, the whole bit. I live a pretty average life in a pretty average town, and all in all I'm pretty happy with it. I certainly don't fight fishmen in dark warehouses or blow up heads of secret police forces for a living. My Shadowrun character Yuri, however, does all this and more on an average Tuesday. He gets to carry around an AK, thinks in kilos of explosives, can get through just about any kind of security system imaginable in the Sixth World, technological ones at least, and generally gets to do a whole bunch of awesome stuff that I don't. He's also a walking ball of personality disorders and self-destructive behaviors. He drinks too much, is barely in control of his emotions (which is only exacerbated by his drinking) and he tends to outsmart himself constantly. That's on a good day. That doesn't even get into the fact that due to being blown up by a Bratva counter-bomber he's at least half metal and myomer which has mostly unhinged him, and that he's starting to show signs of PTSD with hallucinations and anxiety attacks and everything else that goes along with it. I love playing him both because he's so awesome and because he is so flawed. I love his ability to succeed and his potential for catastrophic failure. Through him I can live out some fantasies, knock some heads together and do so in the aforementioned controlled environment, in our case Shade's basement.

Players running from something are playing a different game altogether. These are the guys who are the punchlines of our hobby, the min/maxers or munchkins or power gamers or whatever you want to call them. Their characters are nothing more than collections of stats, skill, feats, edges and flaws combined just so to achieve the unachievable, "winning" at role-playing. They have, or perceive that they have, something horribly wrong with their lives or themselves, and they play to not be themselves. It's an unhealthy kind of escapism where the character takes the place of whatever is missing in the player's life. These characters are invincible and infallible. Nothing bad ever happens to them and there are no consequences for their actions. They tend to be made so that they never fail, so that they make up for whatever frustrations or disappointments or perceived lack of control over their lives that the players may have. God help the gamemaster with one or two of these guys in his group. They want all the attention and they don't want the rules to apply to their characters (because maybe they feel that failing in character hits a little too close to home). They'll piss and moan and pout and throw fits when bad things happen to their characters or, heaven forfend, their characters should get killed. They will always, always be looking for that role-playing "cheat code", that loophole in the rules that will make them invincible, give them unlimited money and ammo, and allow them to do whatever they want.

Now, I'm probably alone in this kind of thinking, or at least in the minority. It's true that I tend to sometimes over-analyze things or look for meaning where there isn't one. I guess what I'm trying to say here is, that along with being fun and hilarious escapism, role-playing can also be a good way to take a look at yourself and your thoughts and feelings. What does your character, and his actions, say about you the player? Does your character expose some personal need or desire? Do you play a character to get into character development and some personal exploration, or are you in it solely to win, to fill some hole you have within yourself? Next time you sit down to throw some dice, do me a favor. Ask yourself which way you're running, the answer may surprise you.

In the summer of 2009, during her Mags the Axe School of Gamemastering series on All Games Considered, the titular Mags mentioned an adventure outline she found useful in devising adventures that she picked up from a seminar course conducted by Guy McLimore and Poehlein at Gen Con in the early...

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I know that we have all done it before. As gamemasters, we have constructed a great adventure for our gaming group, which is normally four to six people. We have setup up the session and we find that only a few people can actually make it. Or we actually can only find a few people to play or maybe we can only find one person.

In the former case, we typically decide to reschedule the adventure. After all, we want to get as many people as possible to enjoy what we have created. However, what if those few people really want to play, should you really be penalizing them? I personally say no, so maybe you are going to have run a small group adventure. In the later case, you only have a few people. So basically, you are already going to be running what I'm going to call a small group adventure.

Running only a few people required some extra care usually. There are many pitfalls that as a gamemaster, you need to look out for. So lets take a look at them.

The first one that comes up, is a general lack of skills or abilities. Many games have skills that the players can have or they have some sort of special abilities for player characters. With only one or two people, there is not going to the spread of skills or abilities that you would normally have. This means the players are going to generally have to be more inventive with the skills and abilities that they have. For the gamemaster, you need to make sure that there are more than one way to handle an obstacle. Actually in general, you always want to do that. Here, you need to take special care. If your game of choice has skills are abilities that only a certain class or race can have, don't make that the only way to handle that obstacle. For example, let's take the classic find trap skill. In many games, this is the skill set of the thief or rouge character. In a small group, you may not have someone with that skill set, what can you do as a gamemaster without diluting the rouge/thief's skill set? Personally, I'm all for allowing them to notice that something in the area is off. Basically, you would allow the party to know that something is the area might be trapped, but they may not know what exactly. Heck, it may be something as simple as saying they have an uneasy feeling. Now sometimes, you are not going to be to do something like that. If that is the case, you may need to provide some sort of substitute. If this is in the form of an NPC, remember that the NPC should not steal the thunder from PCs. If you find that NPC is handling all the situations, then you have done something wrong. You provided the players too much of a crutch. Using NPCs to help a party is always going to tricky thing. In General, I like to think NPC should be a source of sage advice, but should never dictate player actions. At the very least, the players should always handle the die rolls for the NPC. If the players are handling the actions, they will feel bored and fell like they have been railroaded.

The second thing to remember is encounter balance. This is slightly related to the first one in that you should never have encounters that required only certain skills unless you know that your smaller party has them. Also remember that you have a smaller party. If your using something you made for your larger party, remember you may have cut down on the number of monsters. I know that sort of goes without saying, but it something to try to remember. You may even need to swap out entire monsters. If your adventure requires a certain monster, you may need to tweak the abilities and statistics for it. You have to claim that is either very young or very old to account for it's lower statistics or it inability to use some of the it's normal abilities or powers. Unless, it's suppose to be a surprise for later, you will need to drop clues that something is not normal with the encounter in question.

I should note that there is a positive side to having fewer players. You can actually more easily put the spotlight on adventurers without the other adventurers feeling left out. Hell, you may find that you want to run a smaller party or solo adventure to purposely provide the spotlight to certain character. Just remember that it should be something that they can brag or share with the rest of the party. After all, most gamers I know love to tell stories about what happen to their characters.

I think that's all I can say on the subject for now. My question to all of you out there is, have you every run small parties? And if so, what issues have you had to handle?

It's winter time and those poor kolbolds have been busy putting together issue 12 of Kobold Quarterly (KB). If you haven't heard of KQ and play DnD, then I assume your a troll been living under bridge waiting for the goats. If that's not the case and you still don't know what KQ is then in a nut shell, it fills the niche left behind when Dragon Magazine ceased to be printed. Unlike the former product, KQ is released only four times a year, hence the Quarterly part. While some may find that a detraction, I think it has the advantage that they can really get some good stuff packed within the pages.

That good stuff is all within issue 12 of KQ, I'm pleased that I was asked to do a review of this product. What will follow is simple review of the some choice articles and my thoughts on them. For full disclosure, I'm not a bit follower of DnD 4ed, but I will try not to let my bias affect this review. I glad that KQ does include coverage of DnD 4ed, even if I myself don't play it.

I'll start an article written by someone that may be known to those of the RPG Bloggers Network. That person is Phillipe Menard, or ChattyDM for those who know him only by his Blog Handle. He talks about spicing up combat encounters in DnD 4ed with skill challenges. Even though I'm not fan of DnD 4ed, I do concede that using skills to affect the outcome of combat is a good idea. I found the article to be a good and intriguing read.

One of my favorite parts of the old Dragon was the “The Ecology of..” series. KQ continues this tradition with the Ecology of the Froghemoth. Even thought it says the article is for Pathfinder, I'm not sure I've ever used or run across a Froghemoth before. Besides the usual information, it also provides stats for the various growth stages of the Froghemoth. Which could be very useful to a gamemaster if they were planning to use the Froghemoth and wanted to introduce elements of the Froghemoth when the players were less powerful. Overall a good article, but since I've never used this monster, I'm not sure what to do with it.

One of the more interesting articles is another on for Pathfinder. In an article by Scott Gable, he discusses and lays out several specialty priests. What make these unique is how he takes a current base class adds,removes, and modifies features to come up with a specialty priest. Depending on the slant, the starting class for these modifications are not always clerics. For example, the Sohei is based off the monk, loses some of the combat abilities of the monk, but gains the spell casting capabilities of the cleric. In general, I find that this article got me to thinking if a standard system to mix and match abilities wouldn't be forthcoming at some point. There is of course the danger of everyone one is too unique. Like all things new, use with caution.

The last article, I'd like to do a full comment on, is Monte Cook's “The Myths and Realities of Game Balance”. I will not spoil what he has to say, but I think that this article alone is worth the price of the magazine. It is one of the things that as gamers, we seems to discuss to no end. While you may or may not agree with Monte Cook's opinion on the matter, I'm sure it will provide you with endless hours of debate material.

This of course only scratches the surface of this magazine. Other articles include new plagues and disease,a review of the Burnt Offerings stage play, and some notes on the Shadow Fey's Winter Court.

My overall opinion is that yes, you should buy this. Even if it's only in PDF form, it seems well worth it to both get great material and to support a company that is gathering up and printing great material.

Useful links
• Kobold Quarterly Website

An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers. We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can't write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child.

Enabling computers to understand language remains one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence. The goal of a search engine is to return the best results for your search, and understanding language is crucial to returning the best results. A key part of this is our system for understanding synonyms.

What is a synonym? An obvious example is that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing in most circumstances. If you search for [pictures developed with coffee] to see how to develop photographs using coffee grinds as a developing agent, Google must understand that even if a page says "photos" and not "pictures," it's still relevant to the search. While even a small child can identify synonyms like pictures/photos, getting a computer program to understand synonyms is enormously difficult, and we're very proud of the system we've developed at Google.

Our synonyms system is the result of more than five years of research within our web search ranking team. We constantly monitor the quality of the system, but recently we made a special effort to analyze synonyms impact and quality. Most of the time, you probably don't notice when your search involves synonyms, because it happens behind the scenes. However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

An example of a bad synonym from this analysis is in the search [dell system speaker driver precision 360], where Google thinks "pc" is a synonym for precision. Note that you can still see that on Google today, because while we know it's a bad synonym, we don't typically fix bad synonyms by hand. Instead, we try to discover general improvements to our algorithms to fix the problems. We hope it will be fixed automatically in some future changes.

We also recently made a change to how our synonyms are displayed. In our search result snippets, we bold the terms of your search. Historically, we have bolded synonyms such as stemming variants — like the word "picture" for a search with the word "pictures." Now, we've extended this to words that our algorithms very confidently think mean the same thing, even if they are spelled nothing like the original term. This helps you to understand why that result is shown, especially if it doesn't contain your original search term. In our [pictures developed with coffee] example, you can see that the first result has the word "photos" bolded in the title:


(Note that because our synonyms depend on the other words in your search and use many signals, you won't necessarily always see the word "photos" bolded for "pictures", only when our algorithms think it is useful and important to bold.)

We use many techniques to extract synonyms, that we've blogged about before. Our systems analyze petabytes of web documents and historical search data to build an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts. In the above example "photos" was an obvious synonym for "pictures," but it's not always a good synonym. For example, it's important for us to recognize that in a search like [history of motion pictures], "motion pictures" means something special (movies), and "motion photos" doesn't make any sense. Another example is the term "GM." Most people know the most prominent meaning: "General Motors." For the search [gm cars], you can see that Google bolds the phrase "General Motors" in the search results. This is an indication that for that search we thought "General Motors" meant the same thing as "GM." Are there any other meanings? Many people can think of the second meaning, "genetically modified," which is bolded when GM is used in queries about crops and food, like in the search results for [gm wheat]. It turns out that there are more than 20 other possible meanings of the term "GM" that our synonyms system knows something about. GM can mean George Mason in [gm university], gamemaster in [gm screen star wars], Gangadhar Meher in [gm college], general manager in [nba gm] and even gunners mate in [navy gm].

Here are screenshots of those disambiguations of GM in action: