There’s something fundemental about assassination that doesn’t gel with games. In reality, assassination is just about the furthest thing from a game. It’s generally done quickly and without preamble of any sort. There’s no warning – you’re dead before you knew that there was any threat. Whereas the purpose of a game is to have fun in enacting a story, the purpose of assassination is to kill as effectively as possible. The combat rules of most RPGs with which I’m familiar don’t lend themselves well to handling the mechanics of an assassination.

Player Asassins

If you’re running a game wherein the players are the asssassins, their job can be separated into four phases, each of which can make for enjoyable gameplay.

1. Planning
This can vary depending on how well-guarded the mark is, but any good assassination should involve a lot of planning. This phase is the domain of the thinkers and the planners. Indeed, this phase of the mission will often take the majority of the characters’ time, if not the majority of the players’ time. Research must be done on where the target will be and when, and care should be taken to ensure that the target and his protectors have no warning of any threat. The location can be scouted, the protectors can be researched, confederates can be enlisted, props may be planted. The asssasins can envision possible points of failure and create contingency plans. And any points of failure that are not identified can be fuel for possible complications that the GM can introduce during subsequent phases.

2: Positioning
Whether it’s conning their way into a party, setting up camoflage at a good sniper position, or taking out the guards and stealing their uniforms, taking an appropriate position to prepare for the assassination is critical. This phase is the domain of the spies and the rogues. It’s espionage-heavy, and can involve a hefty amount of sneaking, bluffing, lock-picking, and mugging. It can also involve a lot of terrain negotiation, whether that’s climbing the exterior facade of a building, approaching a lake house underwater, or climbing through air ducts.

3: Execution
This is what is all comes down to: the kill-shot, poisoning the glass of wine, or ambushing the caravan. It may be quick and silent, or it may be explosively loud. This is the domain of the sniper and the brawler. What the players need to keep in mind here is that their goal is not to win a battle; their goal is to kill one individual and make their getaway. To that end, the situation should often be set up such that a traditional battle isn’t feasable. Perhaps there are a large number of innocent bystanders. Maybe the target’s protectors comprise overwhelming forces who can’t immediately be brought to bear, granting the characters time to escape if they’re quick. This brings us to…

4: Escape
This phase may not always exist. Escape may often be as simple as walking away. But it has the potential to be the most exciting phase of the assassination. It may be that in one instance the execution of an assassination is ridiculously easy and the escape is the truly hard part. Chase scenes are another thing that all RPG systems aren’t set up to run well. But whether you need to set up house rules, design a skill challenge, or play a mini-game, you as the GM have the potential to make the escape more harrowing and fun than players might ever expect.

Complications
Many RPG systems use complications as an actual game mechanic. Whether or not the system you’re playing has such a mechanic, you can make complications an integral part of the assassination game. After all, if everything always ran one hundred percent according to plan, the game wouldn’t be very interesting. As a GM, your job is to make the complications interesting and surprising.

For example, if during the positioning phase a player bluffs badly and a guard is onto him, you can let the players know that if the situation escalates into combat the target will be warned and the assassination plan is ruined. Thus it is to the players’ benefit to allow that PC to be taken captive – if the target’s group feels that they are still in control and have nothing to worry about, the players’ plan can proceed.

Player-as-assassin games aren’t common, but they can be done well. Involving assassins in your game as NPCs, however, can be more of a challenge.

NPC Assassins

Assassination generally happens quickly, often quietly, and if it’s done right there’s no warning and no chance for retaliation. In the immortal words of the late Pat Morita, If do right, no can defense.

This means that if a PC is a target, assassination is totally unfair, because it would amount to the GM simply telling a player that his character is dead. No die rolls, no narrative escape route. So instead, if the assassin is an antagonist, then the target must be an NPC.

Plots where the players must discover the assassin have been done plenty. The issue is that if the PCs are tracking down the assassin, it’s very possible that he may find out. If so, he’s going to deal with the players the same way that he deals with targets. He’s got no reason to expose himself in a toe-to-toe fight when it’s so much simpler to work from the shadows, as he’s accustomed to doing. And exposing the PCs to assassination is off the table for the reason mentioned above. If the players know that they’re never at risk of being unceremoniously picked off when they least expect it, it robs the assassin of his teeth. It removes what makes an assassin truly scary. The feeling that while you’re a target, you’re never ever safe – no matter where you are. Your dinner could be poisoned. There could be a bomb in your refrigerator or your toilet, or a tiny poisoned needle in your pillow. And if you ever plan on going to sleep, watch out.

The problem is that in most games, players won’t want their character killed off unfairly. It simply isn’t fun. But there are a number of ways you can make it work.

For one, you could decide upon a time period, and without telling the players exactly what that is, decide that (for example) once per 12 hours or once per 36 hours, there’s a certain chance (50%-100%) of an assassination attempt on the PCs. If an attempt occurs, you need to make sure that it has a good chance (more than 50%) of killing a player character. If you go this route, you need to make sure that your players understand and that they’re okay with having a character killed off this way if they take too long.

Another approach might be to reverse the planning phase as described above. Instead of researching and planning an assassination, players need to set up defenses, gather information about the assassin, and overall stay paranoid. This kind of game can be tense and thrilling. If you’re running a game of this sort, I encourage you to throw in red herrings and jack-in-the-box type false alarms. Insert evil laugh here.

I’m a huge fan of games that have tactical combat. I’ve been playing these types of games since Ultima III, Ogre, and Pool of Radiance. But other than Dragon Age: Origins, I haven’t seen a game with good strategic combat in years.

Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics was released four years ago, in 2007. But having only recently picked up a PSP, I’m just coming around to it. The reviews weren’t great – the game has a metacritic score of 58% – but having now played the game for a bit, I’ve found that I enjoy it. The game is similar in many ways to the PC game Temple of Elemental Evil. Both are based on the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 ruleset, and both allow you to control a group of characters in turn-based combat.

When creating my first party, I immediately went to my favorite two synergies. Firstly, a dual-classed sorcerer/monk. This would allow me to create a sorcerer who could cast shield and mage armor, and then dual class him into a monk, which would allow for a monk with an insanely high armor class. But as it turns out, there is no multiclassing in D&D Tactics. So I went for my other favorite: a fighter with a spiked chain and the whirlwind attack feat. The spiked chain is the only reach weapon in the game that can attack adjacent enemies. If you’re totally surrounded and make a whirlwind attack, you can theoretically attack 24 enemies in one turn. That has probably never happened in the history of the game – more realistic is attacking 4-5 enemies – but it’s a cool advantage to have. But as it turns out, neither the spiked chain nor the whirlwind attack feat exist in this game either. The ruleset in this PSP game is far more divergent from actual D&D 3.5 rules than was Temple of Elemental Evil. Nevertheless, I’m having fun with it.

After starting with a paladin-led party and getting stuck in the game’s fourth scenario, I restarted the game with a new party, taking care to have more toe-to-toe warriors and more characters with the heal skill. My new party consists of a high-dexterity dual-wielding fighter, a polearm-wielding orc barbarian, a monk, a cleric, a gnome sorcerer, and a dwarven psionic warrior with an insanely high armor class.

Creating these custom characters and micromanaging their inventories might be annoying for some people, but I enjoy it. It hearkens back to the old infinity engine games: Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. Good stuff.

Moving the party around environments between fights is sometimes annoying – I can completely understand the UI complaints of the game reviewers who bashed the game’s interface. Yes, it could have been better. But all-in-all, this is the kind of game I enjoy playing, and I foresee myself playing it to completion.

The article asks blog authors to look at a real-life person, living or dead, and re-imagine him or her as a character in an RPG. I’d briefly considered George Plimpton, and a friend had suggested Pat Morita as a good candidate, but in the end I chose Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla and made them into villains.

In reality, their “The War of the Currents” is well known, deciding whether alternating current or direct current would prevail as the dominant means of electrical delivery. Tesla was a brilliant scientific mind with poor business sense, and Edison was a brute force inventor with many unscrupulous practices. Whereas their main scientific forays in reality were electricity, in a fantasy setting they can be made into magical innovators.

Edison the Villain

To make Thomas Edison a true villain, he has to be guilty of more than simply burdening his rivals with expensive lawsuits and monopolizing the fledgeling movie industry. So my version of Edison is more akin to a mob boss – a classical Lawful Evil villain. My Thomas Edison is a vampire.

Edison has been infected with the vampire’s curse for only twelve years, but in that time, he’s accomplished quite a lot. Before being infected, he’d already made a name for himself as a wizard of no small power. He devised rituals that gained him the attention of archmages throughout the realm and pioneered the first permanent teleportation chamber, although it was rumored that many of his assistants were killed in the chamber’s earliest tests. Today, he’s used a combination of charm magic, vampiric domination, and vampire spawn minions to take control of the city of Menlo Park.

Edison keeps slaves largely for magical experimentation, and although slavery is not technically legal, Edison has never been called to answer for his crimes. This is partially due to his secrecy, and partially due to his influence in Menlo Park. The slaves double as a discreet means for Edison to feed. Unlike many vampires, Edison is not discriminating in his victims, and is careful not to create vampire spawn that would betray his true nature.

Menlo Park is a marvel of magical progress. An intricate underground sewer system excavated by enslaved earth elementals and powered by enslaved water elementals channels away the city’s waste, and solid waste is collected at a central point where enslaved fire elementals burn it away. Travelers visit frequently to purchase the strange and wonderful magical goods for sale here, but only the wealthy can afford them. Competitors who would create the items at a lower price have suffered strange disasters, and some have mysteriously disappeared.

Edison has been careful to conceal his nature and the fact that he holds as much power as he does in Menlo Park. Many of the citizens regard him as a great man who has turned the once mediocre city into a wonder of modern magic. But there are those who suspect, and there are some few who know.

Tesla the Villain

Nikola Tesla is a githzerai born in the elemental chaos. His parents fled some unknown power, settling in the secluded mountains west of Menlo Park. Young Nikola spent his youth studying and learning magic.

Tesla was already creating his own magic items when well-established wizard Thomas Edison invited him to Menlo Park. Tesla would be one of the wizards working directly under Edison, creating magic items in Edison’s laboratory. Tesla’s work ethic was second only to his magical ingenuity. He’d spent many years curating new magical concepts that he finally now had the resources to develop. After his first month of employment, Tesla had created a number of items whose power and creativity startled Edison himself. An argument about payment ensued, and quickly escalated to a magic duel. The workers took the side of their employer, and Tesla found himself outnumbered and forced to flee the city.

Following Tesla’s departure, Edison co-opted his ideas and began reproducing Tesla’s inventions. A bitter Nikola Tesla cloistered himself away in the mountains of his youth, conducting his own research into greater, more powerful, and more dangerous forms of magic. He began summoning demons regularly, and experimenting with infernal energy and psychic enslavement. He later aquired two illithid slaves, using them to carry out his plots.

His research has culminated in an artifact of his own creation: The Tesla Teleportation Coil. This massive device is based on Edison’s teleportation chamber, but does not require source and destination chambers. Located in his remote mountain lair, Tesla’s Teleportation Coil can transport many creatures from itself to any location within hundreds of miles instantly. Those teleported arrive on a bolt of lightning which strikes from the sky, laying waste to anything in the immediate area. This makes it the perfect tool for a surprise attack.

But research of this scope does not come inexpensively. Tesla has long been using his teleportation coil to transport his demonic servants and illithid slaves all over the realm to obtain the materials he needs for his research, often leaving towns and villages devastated. Recently, Tesla has taken to singling out Edison’s supply trains and Menlo Park’s magical exports. This has led to a proxy duel between the two powerful wizards, with Edison’s well-supplied guard forces fighting off ambushes by Tesla’s demons. More than once, these battles have taken place in populated areas, and have had terrible collateral damage.

Encounters

Caught in the Crossfire
After repeated attacks on his supply trains, Edison is eager to find out where Tesla’s base of operations is located. To this end, he’s having Tesla’s demonic raiders trailed. Players happen across a seemingly random encounter with demons in the wilderness. Oddly, the demons all seem to be carrying chests and sacks. Midway through the battle, a group of wizards join the fight. They’ve been following the demons and are upset that the players attacked, because now they can’t follow the demons back to Tesla’s base. A three-way battle is always pleasantly hectic.

Caravan Ambush
Players travelling between towns as part of a small wagon caravan are suprised when the wagons in front of them are destroyed by a giant bolt of lightning which leaves behind attacking demons! The larger demons target the people on the wagons, while smaller imps focus on stealing supplies and fleeing. Players’ reward varies on how many people and supplies they’re able to save. If they bother to dig, PCs can find that the supply wagons were carrying magical items produced in Menlo Park.

A Daring Rescue
While visiting Menlo Park, a child falls into an open gutter down into the city’s deep sewer system. The dirty waterslide quickly turns into a swift current propelled by water elementals. PCs who choose to save the child must navigate a skill challenge in which they navigate the waterways and save the child before he’s swept into the city center to be incinerated by fire elementals. Failure at this skill challenge leads to the child’s death and a battle with fire elementals. Should PCs kill the fire elementals, they’ll have an angry township to contend with.

Unraveling Edison’s Mystery
PCs are hired to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy merchant’s daughter. Oddly, they find that her location has been magically obfuscated and scrying will not work. Only old-fashioned sleuthing can do the trick. Clues eventually lead to an old warehouse which is unusually well-guarded by wizards and vampire spawn. Within are dozens of slaves, including the merchant’s daughter.

I’ve just had a thought. An idea. I have an idea. This site has been langushing for some time. My own writings have been entirely uninspired over the past year, and I’ve often considered shutting this site down. The main reason I haven’t is because I really like the site’s design, the random header and footer images, and the custom gamercard and upcoming games list plugins I wrote. I’m proud of the design and of the code in the plugins.

But the most important thing about any site is the content. Sadly, this site’s content has been atrophying. And while my idea may do little to alleviate that condition, it can’t hurt.

So I guess I should get on with it and share the idea, eh? Well, here goes. I’d thought about starting up a blog at which I could write about tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons, but given the number of blogs I have, I dismissed the idea. I seem to average one or two posts per month at most of my blogs. But what if I just expanded the scope of this site to include not only video games, but also roleplaying games and board games? I’ve recently found some amazing board games, and I’d love to write about how damned cool they are.

Okay, so this isn’t going to magically give me more time to write stuff for Lungfishopolis. But maybe expanding the scope of this site will be a good thing. It can’t hurt.