D&D with kickers

[Matt Wilson]

I'm running a D&D game for a group on alternate sundays. They're kind of a mixed bunch as far as GNS preference goes. Some of them have a resistance to trying different games, even though they seem aware of the limitations of the games they're familiar with.

I decided to try an experiment: D&D, with kickers. My hope is that it will add some story elements and give the players some authorship.

My observation so far is that the players have had trouble ignoring the numbers, which say the character is as yet unimportant, and writing kickers that say yes the character is already important.

Once they got the hang of it, a couple of the players took the kickers to an epic scope. One described encountering some evil presence in the woods that spoke of an eventual return and revenge toward that character's deity. Wow, I thought. Now I have a major villain to work on.

For the first adventure, I tried to use all the kickers to introduce all the characters to one another. That was a bit much, I think, and I wasn't entirely successful. But when it worked, it worked very well and made for a good story I think in the future I'll propose this to a group and ask for more help from them on it. That is, look at the other players' ideas for kickers and think of how yours might relate to it.

We've only made it through part of one adventure, so I don't have too much to report yet. My intention, once things get rolling, is to create conflicts of interest, and see how the players like them. Do they go North, to track a bad guy before he escapes, or South, to save a village from certain destruction. The kickers should hopefully give me some insight into the kinds of situations I should create.

[greyorm]

Matt,

Kickers are often a difficult concept to grasp -- as they aren't "what just happened to me," but present a morally ambiguous situation that must be resolved -- so I'm really interested in hearing what all the specific Kickers are for this game.

[Christopher Kubasik]

I too am looking forward to which D&D kickers you guys come up with.

I think the greatest challenge you face is the idea of the D&D "party" mixed with Kickers.

In Sorcerer, for example, or Questing Beast (or RoS when Kickers are used), most people report the PCs don't nescesarily hook up.  There are short scenes cutting from one PC to the next.  They might meet, they might not.  

D&D presume a mix party skills to handle the game's gamist challenges.  The problem with this assumption with Kickers is that to really go to town with Kickers, the player should be allowed to pursue whatever challenge seems most engaging to resolve his or her character's Kicker.  The "party" dimension demands that they all stick together or the challenges can't be met.  It's usually implied, as well, that if the PCs start "wandering off" the adventure is falling apart.

My question is, to anyone, are "group" Kickers possible?  Are the possible to start but doomed to fail in the long run?  Anyone have any examples of group Kickers working.

For example, I know the now famed RoS game at GenCon had a group of players with Kickers.  It was a one session game, yes, but still, it worked?  How was that set up?

Thanks,
Christopher

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Christopher,

I'm not sure whether it's the Gencon game or the Origins game from last year that you're referring to (easy to mix up if you weren't there, after all) ... at the Origins game,anyway, we came very close to the Alyria storymap method.

1. Established a place and general societal setup (equivalent to rural noble villa and associated town in Renaissance Italy)

2. Seized a bunch of fairly bland skill/proficiency templates Jake had prepared, and shaped them into characters in the situation by adding and subtracting skills, tossing in Gifts and Flaws, and writing the Spiritual Attributes. The latter in particular were generated through avid group discussion for each character, and most significantly, this produced a bevy of NPCs.

3. Associated a character or two together, deliberately left a couple on their own.

So abilities & numbers, personalities, goals, knowledge of one another (or lack thereof), and linking relationships were all set up at once. It was definitely an 80% done kind of story creation.

Best,
Ron

[Matt Wilson]

Kickers are often a difficult concept to grasp -- as they aren't "what just happened to me," but present a morally ambiguous situation that must be resolved -- so I'm really interested in hearing what all the specific Kickers are for this game.

I didn't actually ask for a morally ambiguous situation. I just asked for a situation that would absolutely require that the character take action.

Here's one example of what I got. If it's not glaringly obvious from the text, the character is a bard. It's interesting in that this, like most of the others, has a D&D-ish uber-epic feel to it.

One night, out under the moon working on a particularly difficult stanza, he chanced to barely hear, far off, music the likes of which he had never heard before. The rich complexity of the tones and composition was breathtaking, and increased even as he listened, finally becoming achromatic, chaotic sounds that even his trained ear could not comprehend.  Devin had a tendency towards such music himself, but this was far beyond anything he could perform or make sense of.

Shortly thereafter the music slowed, became sensible again, then faded.

Investigating, Devin walked the woods searching for the source.  Finally he came across a ring of metallic stones that caught light in an odd way, scintillating hypnotically and suggesting images that would never quite form.

The stones were warm, despite the lack of any evidence of a fire.  As he stood watching, the stones returned to normal, then cooled.  They were apparently simple quartz and granite rocks.  Davin pocketed a few but could find no other evidence or beings around.

Since then, Davin has dreamt of that night and that music many times.  He has come to realize that not only does he faintly recognize the music from early childhood, but he has occassionally, over his lifetime, heard bits and pieces of it here and there, in a song, or someone's voice, or the ringing of a church bell, or the scrape of a sword on armor.  In his dreams, he recalls that there was something special about each moment or person associated with the sound, but can't quite piece together what it is or what it means, and the connections fail him in his waking hours.

Two days ago, in Silverymoon, a small hooded figure walked by muttering something.  His words sounded like, "The Whistling Stag, your fate, the hag."

As Davin pondered the words, he realized that the little man, who continued to walk past, was whistling the melody he had heard in his dreams!  He turned in time to see the figure dissappear into the crowded market.  Davin searched but found nothing, and his inquiries of the market patrons turned up naught.

This, perhaps, suggests only a few choices at first, but I like it that it's a whopper of a mystery and presents plenty of fuel for both the player and me. It'll be easy for both of us to create complex situations later in the game.

[Matt Wilson]

One more thing: It's probably going to come back and bite me that the example and my use aren't exactly in sync with Ron's definition of Kicker. Part of that is because my Sorcerer book has been - and still is - in Portland, waiting to be returned to me by a friend. The other part is pure laziness. So my apologies for any definition infringement, and I'll pay whatever fine there is.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Matt, that's a pretty damn good Kicker for the Bard. There's no infringement that I can see.

Explaining Kickers is very hard because the explanation has to be tailored to the individual. For some, the very idea of creating the character's starting situation is so novel, that "A black cat looked at me significantly as I came home. I think I'll do something about that," is sufficient. That was as far as that person could stretch - and if I were to push harder, or offer criticism of any kind at all, the person's comfort-zone would snap and they'd turtle up.

For others, the potential is just the beginning. For them, moral quandary, Humanity challenge, hard-core Sorcerer, and rocking crisis are the bare minimum for an adequate Kicker. By the time I read over three of these, I've thrown out half my notes because this stuff is way better.

So this makes it hard on-line when everyone can talk to everyone. Raven says, "So what about Kickers," and I give him the hard-line high-potential thing because we're talking about Sorcerer and, well, because that's Raven. Then you're talking about these D&D folks kind of stretching their habits a little, and the explanation or standards for Raven are, in my view, maybe not so necessary.

Best,
Ron

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Ron,

Yes, Origins.

There might be a new thread here ("The Group Kicker") or not.  But let me ask a few more questions first.

1) Did the PCs have a Kicker?  Sounds like they did not.  Did the SA's serves as the Kickers?

2) Was the group a "party" or did they only gather on camera for the final scenes?

Thanks,
Christopher

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Christopher,

The SAs functioned as Kickers mainly because they included a lot of NPCs, including my character's sister and a sheriff whom everyone pretty much disliked. However, the whole concept of the Alyria-style storymap can bypass the Sorcerer Kicker in some ways, potentially making Big Situation more or less outweigh Character Situations.

We did only all get in one another's faces in the last scene or two, although with multiple crossovers until that point.

Best,
Ron

[Christopher Kubasik]

Thanks.

And now I will go check out Alyria.

Christopher

[Valamir]

In a sense Kickers were automatically generated by the crossing of powerfully felt SAs with a starting situation designed to throw oppposition to SAs right from the first scene masterfully handled by Jake (who did an amazing job of creating situations based on player cues for just this purpose).

I forget now the precise SAs my character had, but in concept he was a woodsman / poacher.  He was also an athiest / anarchist come populist agitator with a powerful hatred for authority especially as represented by individual of the main antagonist (who Ron refers to as the Sherrif, although he actually had a Roman title in play).  Those last were SAs.

The first scene involving my character (returning home with a poached deer) was to have him confronted by the sherriff and his guards and challenged regarding the deer.

If this had been a Sorcerer game those two pieces would have been combined into the character's Kicker...

[Matt Wilson]

Explaining Kickers is very hard because the explanation has to be tailored to the individual. For some, the very idea of creating the character's starting situation is so novel, that "A black cat looked at me significantly as I came home. I think I'll do something about that," is sufficient. That was as far as that person could stretch - and if I were to push harder, or offer criticism of any kind at all, the person's comfort-zone would snap and they'd turtle up.

Considering a few of the players, I had that suspicion as well. And I got a kicker that wasn't much more than that from one player. My thought was that the players get a taste of the idea that you can have story and choices at the same time. Where in a typical D&D-like environment you usually have one or the other.

D&D presume a mix party skills to handle the game's gamist challenges. The problem with this assumption with Kickers is that to really go to town with Kickers, the player should be allowed to pursue whatever challenge seems most engaging to resolve his or her character's Kicker. The "party" dimension demands that they all stick together or the challenges can't be met. It's usually implied, as well, that if the PCs start "wandering off" the adventure is falling apart.

Well, I think all that takes is to state up front that there's a group goal at stake, on the player level, and for the game to work, the party shouldn't split up. So as a player, it's your job to find a reason for your character to stay with everyone else.

The trouble I've found is when the player challenges that idea and tries to force the GM to come up with a reason for the character to stay. As if the player doesn't want to accept any responsibility for the story and just wants to be in Actor stance.

[talysman]

since D&D has a slightly different focus than Sorcerer (the concept of the party of adventurers,) you might need a different kind of kicker for it to work. Christopher mentioned the idea of a "Group Kicker"... I was contemplating that at first, thinking about a single kicker for the party as a whole -- which might work pretty good in conjuction with character kickers; it eliminates the need to put the "moral quandry" in the character kicker itself, but instead make the quandry a conflict between the party kicker and the character kicker. (didn't Raven describe a moral conflict of an elf who wanted to follow the woman he loves but also wanted to stay with the party and keep it together?)

but another idea occurred to me as well: you can ask that kickers for a D&D game be related to the party. just ask during character design "what drove you to join this party, or to seek out an adventuring party at all?" this sets up conflicts between characters with different agendas, but sets up internal conflicts as well: they need the party to address their personal agendas, so they can't just quit when their issues move to the backburner.

[Matt Wilson]

but another idea occurred to me as well: you can ask that kickers for a D&D game be related to the party. just ask during character design "what drove you to join this party, or to seek out an adventuring party at all?"

That's kind of what I did. Most of the kickers involved unknown bad guys, which gives me the opportunity to make them the same bad guy in at least a few places. D&D lends itself well to the approach of "you defeated that villain, but he/she was just a servant of..." So some kickers will get resolved after a few adventures, to be replaced by new ones, while others will take longer.