Bringing Culture to the Game

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    • Bringing Culture to the Game

      Much is said in the core book (and on these forums) about the usefulness of knowing the oft-forgotten knowledge/craft/performance/etc. skills in Shard. I appreciate this ideal, and have tried to encourage it in past games and other systems myself, but so far I've had little luck compelling my players to bother spending points on Artistry when they could instead gain an extra rank in Melee Combat. I'm seeing the PCs for my campaign take shape, and while a few have some token Background abilities, some have almost none at all, and most are restricted to whatever Profession the player took.

      Aside from the obvious, overt hooks ("Your aryah wants you to make him the most magnificent vase in all of Tishinia! GO!") and the promise of extra XP or money (which I've tried with only partial success), what kinds of techniques have you found successful in bringing these kind of skills into the game in a way that encourages players to bother? How do you get players interested in having these skills when they think that the right combination of brute force and occasional sleight of hand or bluffing can solve any problem? (Indeed, that last is the hard part - I can think of plenty of ways to employ Dancing in an otherwise standard RPG situation.)
    • RE: Bringing Culture to the Game

      Its a frustration I've been through as well. Its really nice to see a game that can emphasize incredible martial arts and culture. I think there are probably three reasons why many players go for power over subtly and culture.

      First, there's this strange notion of the professional adventurer. What do you do for a living, Bloodwing the Brave? Kill goblins and slay dragons, you say. Well, you're just the man we were looking for to save our town! Its an easy plot to run.

      Second, many people are used to how computer games handle the RPG. You travel, fight, have a cut scene, travel, fight, fight cut scene, fight and travel and fight. Computer games are good at the whole fight thing, not so great on the actual role play thing, though its been getting slowly better. If your players are used to computer based games, they're going to be focused on combat and the related stats.

      Third, the often generic cultures of many RPG's don't so much lend lend themselves to role-playing based on cultural achievements as well as combat. Shard has a very particular cultural set that's interesting and immersion in that culture is highly encouraged.

      In the past, I've encouraged players to spend time developing their character as a fully rounded person. I like to help people create rich and compelling identities for characters. Something I really like about the Shard character creation process is how it incorporates the notion of social class, occupaton and cultural identity into the creation of a character. In the past, with other games, I've offered discounts on skill costs during the characrter creation stage and tried to run games that immediately required the use of those non-combat skills.

      I think it might be helpful to let the players know that sometimes getting things done isn't going come down to just battle skills and combat and to show early in the campaign how valuable those skills are. How you run the game is going to make the biggest difference. It may take time for combat oriented players to do deeper roleplaying. You might, after the first campaign, perhaps give the characters a chance to revise their characters a little. And when in doubt, give skill cost discounts. :)
    • RE: Bringing Culture to the Game

      Yep, to put it bluntly, it ain't easy to force culture on folks.

      The difficult to achieve heart of roleplaying is to get away from the hack-and-slash "dungeon crawl" mentality most RPG gamers have cultivated over the years, and to focus more on the types of cultural interactions that can be found in scenarious related to mysteries, and court intrigue, and such. And whereas these types of scenarious aren't for everyone all the time, it's still possible to make sure that even during moments of "high adventure" a GM includes elements of necessary cultural and knowledge requirements that allow characters to make use of such obscure Skills.

      Examples might be; using some suthra lore to figure out what terrible beast you suddenly find yourself up against, and possibly how to defeat it, using one's pottery skills to create the special urn necessary to harvest and carry said beastie's poison safely so that it can be later processed, having the proper negotiation skills and knowledge of poisons necessary to fetch the highest price or favor when attempting to haggle with the merchant when selling it, and even potentially having the proper knowledge of intrigue to know which noble lord may decide to send their best assassin to buy that poison from the merchant, and whom they may use it on. That same lord might choose to use his one assassin who knows the most alluring dance skills to infiltrate the harem of his rival, and get close enough to him to make the lethal strike...

      These are just examples, of course, but hopefully they'll provide a bit of inspiration. In the end it will be up to the GM to suggest campaigns that might cater to cultural interactions and Skill use, take note of the prominent Skills the players' chosen occupations include, and make sure to create scenarios for their players that often cause them to need to use such Skills...

      It make take several attempts to get the hang of it, for you and your players, but on the end it will really help expand their roleplaying exprience!

      Scottie ^^
    • Well, I'll chime in. One thing I do before running any game is talk to the players to figure out what the game is about.

      Generally, our first session of any new game is having drinks, maybe dinner, and hashing out what themes the players want in the game, what way the characters are realted, and what they generally do. If we agree that we want a game full of fighting, then we do that. If we all want an intrigue game, then we do that. Let me give you some examples of my last three games:

      We all decided to play Scion. THere's a lot of stuff you can do with that game, but we decided to build the PCs as a heavy metal band that tours around the US and destroys monsters. We also eneded up ending a nefarious plot, but all of it was done with combat. It was a lot of fun.

      Then we decided we wanted to play Castles and Crusades. I wanted to run a game this time, and we all decided we wanted something bizarre...so I ran Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and Old D&D module that taskes place inside a space ship.

      After this game, we have decided on Geist...over my vociferous nomination for Shard. Gesit is a pretty neat game if you like ghost stories, and we decided to set the game in Las Vegas, and make it a game about exploration and protection. It will not be a combat oriented game, since our last two were.

      The reason for these examples is to illustrate that you, as the GM, probably can't "force" or even positively reward PCs having forgotten (I love this label!) skills. It is imperitive that you and your players collaborate on the creation of characters and setting. If everyone agrees that the game will make extensive use of the forgotten skills, then it becomes the GM's job to make sure they are included, and the players' job to suggest uses for them.
      -JFC Wolz
      HISTORIAN
    • Collaborative Gaming

      Well said, folks! I couldn't agree more.

      The best campaigns are collaborations. Think of yourself as the showrunner of a popular TV series and the players are both your staff of writers and the actors/stars of the show. Joss Whedon and his staff of writers will create a very different show from Aaron Sorkin and his staff writers or Rick Berman and his. Everyone knows the rules and the genre, however. So vampires are not likely to show up on The West Wing and a court drama is unlikely to feature on Voyager (although anything is possible).

      The point of course is that the players should be collaborators and co-creators of the show not just observers.
    • RE: Collaborative Gaming

      I've certainly directed my efforts in the past to trying to make games more than just a hastily slapped together conglomeration of what I want to run and the individual characters the party wants to play, but alas, when confronted with the "what kind of game do you want?" question, my group (to this day) mostly shrugs and waits for someone else to answer.

      That being said, though, I think I'm beginning to develop ideas for how I can try to incorporate aspects I'd normally overlook. Having played our second session (the first with the players' own characters) last night, I can see how some things are shaping up, and needless to say I have my work cut out for me when it comes to keeping everyone engaged. About half the party can ONLY fight and the other half BARELY can. (I claim some blame for this, communication not being what it could have been, but I know several players discussed details but wouldn't quite budge on what they decided to play.)

      Apologies if I'm griping. I actually feel the game has gone well so far - it's just been one of those weeks. Thank you all for your suggestions!
    • First, I don't try to encourage 'culture', that is, skills of limited use in game play. I do, however, put the players in situations where such skills would have been useful. (I know exactly what the OP is talking about: most of my GMing has been for Basic Roleplaying, most defiinitely a skill based system). I don't try to enforce a certain play style, though. Ever.

      Second, I have been known to pass a little questionnaire around the first session with a series of questions like 'rate your most to least favorite genre' with the usual suspects of fantasy, horror etc, and 'rate the importance of combat in the game on a 1 to 5 scale, 5 being most and 1 least', and bear all this in mind while designing scenarios. If you have a group who wants a combat mostly game I would just go with the flow or fire them.

      Third, some games actively encourage the use of 'culture' skills by making them necessary in some way. A very good example is Earthdawn, in which you do sketching or needlepoint or some such to prove you are not the pawn of some Horror....

      My thirty cents.
    • From a players point of view:

      I've found that, what's best to get me to grab some "cultural skills," is for the GM to decide to throw culture at us... Not make it so that it's a breaking point of the game, but one where an NPC "It would probably be best to hide the message in a secret compartment in a finely crafted box, and give it as a gift to the princess to know where and when you'll be, so she knows how to get out ahead of time." AFTER THAT, most of the players sit and go "wait... do any of us HAVE a woodcrafting skill?" And start sifting through their combat skills to realize that it's not going to be that easy... And then realize that this is a stealth mission and that none of them are really stealthy either. Throw enough hints on how things'll be easier with other skills, and they eventually get to the point where they start taking some of the social skills.

      Take my first game of 7th sea, for example. I was completely lost in the story, I had no real ambition to do anything, I basically waited around for things to happen, or followed someone. I was fairly combat oriented, with no real social skills. So, when everyone went off to do their own thing, I hung back at base because I wasn't rightly needed. I had some skill in art, or poetry or something, so I basically just sat in a tree, arting... Then I saw one of our villains walkin' by, we knew he wasn't up to good, but he was still a citizen of the town, so he could walk around and stuff, as was his right. I catch this guy walk by while I'm up in the tree, and I follow him, at a good distance, I didn't want to be caught.

      I follow him to a point where he met up with another person. Asking the GM, at the distance I couldn't actually hear what they were saying. Now, again, I was fairly combat heavy, and so stealth wasn't my thing, that's why I was so far back, but I was able to follow him because I was pretty good at seeing things... Didn't help me much in this situation though...

      Well... That's a lie... One of the specialty things that I chose (At character creation I had some spare points, and didn't know what to do with them) was to read lips... I had COMPLETELY forgotten that I had taken that though. So, looking down at my character sheet, wondering "Ok, what am I do, I'm missing vital inf~ Wait a tick... I HAVE READ LIPS!" And proceeded to read the lips and got some info out of it. Again, at character creation, I just looked for something to dump a little points into because they were spare, and surprised both the me AND the GM when I actually used it! Now Lip Reading is one of those skills that I wonder if I should go without it or not.

      It's just one of those things where you gotta show your players that these skills aren't completely useless. Encourage some creative uses out of them "I'm going to converse with the mayor, try to be a bit seductive, get in close, and then stab him dead, quick and quiet." Or "I'm going to use my whip to try to latch on to one of the rails above me, and swing Indiana Jones style onto it." And don't GET me started on how many times I'll use acrobatics.
    • Nobody took social skills in 7th Sea? That was kind of a waste, what with the specifically social mechanics I seem to remember.

      When I get to play, which is rarely, my favorite type of character is the educated soldier/mercenary. Like Andrea Orsini in 'Prince of Foxes' or Peter Blood in 'Captain Blood'. I love Rafael Sabatini.

      So I agree, the best way to handle the problem (if so percieved) is to make sure there are situations where those 'useless' skills are very useful indeed. I just don't like to force people to do what I think they should. If they wind up on the gibbet due to a lack of social graces that's the way the cookie crumbles.

      Ever play Tekumel? A Byzantine culture like Dardunah, and the default set up was that the players were immigrants, unfamiliar with local customs. One guy, not wanting to 'play the culture' or not able to, lost 15 characters to duels and the impaling stake before he caught on. He must have been having fun, wierdly enough, because he kept coming to the game.
    • I never said that no-one had no social skills, did I? I'm just sayin' that I didn't... well, not many anyway. Still, it's a good to encorperate things that'll require skills that, at least to me, might make your players miss something.

      I'm a completionist in any game. i tend to complete the entire game first, so when it comes to missing something, I get annoyed. So the best way to get me to grab some different, cultural skills, is to make me miss something.

      I've also been tooling around with the idea of making a character that doesn't use any fighting... Always thought it would be interesting. But I know my group, and they're a heavy fighting group, so it's hard to get out of that mind set.
    • Check. My last group was a bit combat oriented too. Didn't like 7th Sea largely because they thought parts of the combat system were nerfed (the armor rules, as I remember...'whaddya mean only the German like guys get plate' and so on).

      I was studying the character sheets in the welcome booklet, looks like Shard has a healthy skill system. Points for it, IMO.
    • I finding that shard offers so much world and development issues that trying to come up with a plot is a bit mystifing. My job as the GM is both to arbitrate but also provide a compelling plot arc for the characters, part of which is giving them a push out the door like Gandalf does to Bilbo.

      My first thought is to barrow ideas from other games for an adventure. The characters will come on their own ideas.
      Examples that I can think of are Dark Heresy style encounters with the darker side of the super natural, and demon worshiping sects that are spreading over the land consuming villages and turning them against the Holy Caste, possibly causing them to revert to more primitive and primal ways, and cannibalism.

      Iron Kingdoms/Heavy Gear - Several cultures are clashing and in the midst of it all a group of people are trying to reclaim their lives before the flames of war consume everything they hold dear.

      Anyone have any input?
      If it comes down to the rules or the story; sorry but the rule book just became a paper-weight.
    • Originally posted by HereticalGM
      I finding that shard offers so much world and development issues that trying to come up with a plot is a bit mystifying. My job as the GM is both to arbitrate but also provide a compelling plot arc for the characters, part of which is giving them a push out the door like Gandalf does to Bilbo.

      My first thought is to barrow ideas from other games for an adventure. The characters will come on their own ideas.
      Examples that I can think of are Dark Heresy style encounters with the darker side of the super natural, and demon worshiping sects that are spreading over the land consuming villages and turning them against the Holy Caste, possibly causing them to revert to more primitive and primal ways, and cannibalism.

      Iron Kingdoms/Heavy Gear - Several cultures are clashing and in the midst of it all a group of people are trying to reclaim their lives before the flames of war consume everything they hold dear.

      Anyone have any input?


      Borrowing adventure plots from other games is a fine idea! As is borrowing plot-lines from a variety of movies, books, and TV series!

      There are really only so many basic plot/story concepts out there, and hundreds of different ways to tell them... It seems I recall Aaron mentioning in another area the fact that many of our own "westerns" here in the US had drawn their plots from older Japanese films and stories...

      Feel free to borrow ideas for your campaigns from a number of different sources, and, in fact, use this "research" as an excuse to check out a variety of books and films (let's say, about ancient India and Persia) that you might not otherwise normally experience!

      Scottie ^^
    • I think it's just logical that players often want to spend points on skills that make their characters mighty combatants. After all if they suck at making vases it's not as bad if they get stabbed to death by a measly hobo because they suck at fighting. Or is it?

      They think they are wasting points with these potentially pointless skills.
      Your job as GM is to make them realize that they are immensly useful.

      For instance, in the round I GM I often sit around with the player (Serpentus, but I will two players now :D) after a session, we'll discuss the game in length. And while trying not to spoil anything, I point out his characters weaknesses, missed opportunities and skills that might have helped him out in a few situations (and might later), but also things he really did well and trouble he avoided by using skills.

      For instance, during a dreamwalk he encountered ghostly memories of an ancient city, altogether with a sepulcher that he explored. But he didn't know what any of this was (and missed the opportunity to delve deeper into that story arc). So my suggestion was that while he was bedridden after he was incapacitated during a fight, he could accidently find a book on history and read up on the subject (buy a knowledge skill via story points).

      Or after purging a malicious ghost that controlled a slightly inbred ferret family (a funny story I shall tell later), of course no one of them remembered anything. So it was up to him to explain the situation to them, why he stood there with a bloody mace midst this beaten and tied up family. He made a marvellous persuasion roll and thus everyone believed him completely, thanked him, offered him lots of gifts and spread out the news to the nearby city where everyone then was much more eager to help him. Had he not purchased this skill and thus gotten something like 3 measly dice, he might have easily failed and drawn the grudge of the locals onto him... plus he might have earned less story points! ;3

      The post was edited 2 times, last by Sherbie ().

    • I have also now taken up to encourage players to offer their skills and crafts as payment.

      For instance, my players had just given up a lot of money due to unforeseen consequences, and a shopkeeper one player wanted to trade with was not really interested in the things he was carrying with him...
      Since the player was sirhibasi, the shopkeeper reasoned he must know a lot about dreams. He humbly suggested that he could interprete a strange dream that haunts him at night (simple Wit Check).
    • Originally posted by Scott Jones
      Ohhhh! That's a great idea!

      Gets the players interacting on a more personal basis with the locals too!

      Scottie ^^


      After I read the snippet about barter you posted a while ago, I figured actual money transactions must be rare. Instead, everyone mostly does what they can do in exchange for goods, or give what they produce and it all kind-of works out.

      So in effect. I think some people might be a little reluctant to take Dalan if they could be receiving something that has immediate worth to them.
      Especially the areas my players travelled so far don't really put a big emphasis on money.

      Honestly I did kinda overdo it with the payment-side quests in my last sessions, so that drew out the game a little. I think the ideal thing would be to mix & match.

      Other "payment quests" we had so far:

      • A leatherworker begged an especially witty player to solve some riddles and brain teasers for him that his braggard scholar brother keeps sending him to mock his low intellect. Sadly I kinda made that up on the spot so the riddles weren't really cool and mostly just a barrage of WIT/PER checks... D:
      • A player offered his sensei to cook for him! :D
      • One time, a player suggested to enchant her lute teacher's instrument as payment.


      Originally posted by Aaron de Orive
      You make us proud, Sherbie. Keep up the great work. :)


      You guys are really supportive and awesome. :D ~ <3
    • I think the idea of barter is very important to the world of Dardunah. It offers a change of how many gold pieces is that or that.

      In my first session I had a Lawyer, A mercenary, and a Monk. While they were all decent combatants persuasion and wit worked better for most of the things they had to do.

      After the party was soundly beaten by an equal sized enemy force the leader of the enemies walked off and left the good guys alive. He wasn't being paid to kill them and they weren't able to interfere in what he was doing anymore.
      "One without crystal is without life"