Last night was Star Wars, or a sad mockery thereof. After hours of doing very little, my character attempts to disarm a bomb he's discovered on his ship.
The GM says, "you notice a peculiar pattern of blinking lights-"
"Oh, fuck that," I say, interrupting him. "I don't do the puzzle solving stuff. What do I need to roll?"
So I roll and get a 1. And everyone else is like, "the bomb goes off! You're dead." The GM panics, worried that his story is going to be fucked, so he pulls a total Deus Ex Machina, having the force-sensitivek character sense a potential disturbance and bail my guy out.
So today it got me thinking about the interpretation of failure in d20 and how fucking annoying it is, especially the common house rule of "a 1 means you REALLY fucked up." So I posted something along the lines of wouldn't it be cooler if a 1 just added more complications to the story, like the ship is really damaged now, and we have to get involved with a crime lord and stuff?
But I get two responses that challenge it. I'll quote them here...
I would have killed you. I guess that makes Sean a better DM. I do agree with your thoughts. I mean wouldn't it be a great world if nothing bad ever happened? Think about it... we would never have to learn from our mistakes or try new ideas to resolve issues like death. Hell, we would never have to hire anyone to do anything for us like remove a bomb.
and...
I would have killed you too. Sean gave you a method to disarm the bomb and you didn't want to "solve the puzzle" that's fine that you don't like puzzles, I don't either, but he's the DM and you opted to "just roll it" well you did and you failed miserably. If you're going to take a chance like that with something like a bomb, then you should have been prepared to die.
My response, which seems so ridiculously unnecessary, especially for the crowd that reads this blog...
I don't even know where to begin with that one. The whole notion that as a player I have to be in a subservient role to some other person at the table is just absurd. I have to deal with that at work, and I get paid for it. I don't want to spend my leisure time holding my breath, quietly hoping that the GM makes a decision that I actually like. That's just nuts, especially in a game where character death completely removes the tiny bit of story input I had in the first place.
Somehow we've ended up with this traditional divide of game power where the GM has massive amounts of input and control, and the other players have hardly any. The GM ought to be just another person at the table, collaborating with me and the other players to come up with a kickass story. Our story, not the GM's.
And I'm not saying I wanted a fictional world where nothing bad ever happened. It would be the most boring game ever. I want my character to be totally fucked and in over his head and desperate for a way out. But I also don't want my choices or die rolls to sever my ability to participate in what happens next. That's equally boring for me.
edit (post-John comment): I mean for every post here to be related to one of my designs in progress, and this one, though it's not overtly stated, has a lot to do with my goals for galactic, including stakes, conflict res, and my idea for director dice.
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I feel your pain, brother. I'm not in that kind of group now (may I never be again) but I've been doing my own ranting for the past few days and man... it DOES feel good.
Good for you for sticking to your guns, saying what you mean and meaning what you say. You rock.
Wow. I mean two dudes actually brought up the whole bad shit argument. You are a better man than I gunga din. I wouldn't stand for that bullshit and gone into a rant that would have involved words like fucktards, mutherfuckers, and swallow skull fuckers. I guess that is why I only play in one game now.
Just to offer a "traditional role-playing" response to the problem posed here, many games have a mechanism that gives players campaign points of some sort that can be spent to turn a death into a mere catastrophic disaster. I've never thought about that mechanic before, but it does give some control to the players. It's a way of saying "whoah, Mr. GM, you're outta line. Tell it again different" which is a good thing I think.
Anyway, nice rant! Keep 'em coming!
The term that I use far too much now when I consider communicating to the average gamer- "Crazy moon talk".
That's what I talk about. Crazy moon talk. I bypass "realism", "balance", "GM is God" and "mechanics" and I'm talking all about what would be fun for the whole group and how the hell we get there.
And everyone looks at me like I was speaking backward Latin through a vox box.
See, you & me, we're like, what's the fun in the bomb? The bomb is supposed to add pressure, supposed to make things exciting*. Ok- so we got a bomb. And if it was a movie, we'd be like- the bomb either will or will not go off, but we know the main characters aren't going to die, because that would be no fun.
We already know that characters dying is no fun- so we already know that isn't what's at stake. We know whatever is at stake has to be something else that will raise the tension and, most importantly, be fun.
But the standard gamer doesn't ask that. The question is "Does the bomb go off (and what are the 'physical' effects of it doing so?" while we're asking, "What fun things can happen if it does or doesn't go off?"
The problem for your GM- is that somewhere, deep down, he knows characters dying isn't fun. But he hasn't figured out what IS fun. OR how to get to it. Which is totally reasonable, considering that he's using a wargame-come-rpg where units die as an expected feature of play. So he cheats- but it's never occurred to him that the high likelihood of your character dying over something stupid like a non-emotionally loaded plot device means the rules aren't giving you guys the kind of fun you want...
So for your design, and any other- I'd heartily recommend reviewing each rule or idea and explaination with that question in mind: "What is fun, how do we get to it?"
Chris
*-We also know that puzzles, 9 times out of 10, aren't fun in rpgs either. Usually because there's some kind of obscure logic to them that only the GM "gets"...
Well said, Chris.
Chris said
"We also know that puzzles, 9 times out of 10, aren't fun"
So the logical next question is - when are they fun?
I'm on this question right now because this conversation came up in my game last night, where I very annoying hit the PC's with two logic puzzles in one session.
Aw hang it, I'm going to post this connundrum as a question on Attack of Opportunity, since it's OT here.
er... thats:
http://attacksofopportunity.blogspot.com/2005/07/when-are-puzzles-fun.html
For those of you who don't visit attacks every day.
I'm not sure I understand the principle here. From what you say, the GM deus ex machina was in saving your character. However, when posters say that your character should have died, you seem to be reacting badly to them -- implying that they are favoring GM dominance.
My instincts are the same as the other responders. That is, if I were GM, I think I would have gone with the group consensus and had your character blow up rather than pulling a deus ex machina to preserve the story I had previously pictured. Now, it's not like I would kick you out of the campaign for that. With group agreement, you could probably play a former NPC for the rest of the session -- and come in with a new PC the next session.
Admittedly, I know very little about the campaign here, but it seems to me that the bomb blowing up is one heck of a complication. It's major, shocking, and plot-altering. The alternative of throwing in some minor complications sounds kind of dull by comparison. Can you explain more why you reject it as an option?
Because character death from something like a bomb is a) boring and trivial and lame, and b) so not in the vein of Star Wars. Note that we've never learned who planted that bomb, and it never really served any purpose other than a thing for me to notice and make a roll for. I probably could have just ignored it and done nothing.
Also c) failure in disarming a bomb doesn't have to mean "it blows up and you die." And that was the idea they found so utterly preposterous: that there are other options besides death.
And that was the idea they found so utterly preposterous: that there are other options besides death.
Unfortunately, there is not a single mainstream game that solidly lays out the idea of framing conflict outside of physics (even cinematic, anime, cartoon physics).
We have zero mainstream examples to point people to in terms of reconsidering that resolution, and more importantly, conflicts, might be about something other than who can hit who, move faster, or carry more.
We're drawing off a wealth of games and personal play experience outside that small, small sandbox, but these folks can't even begin to fathom it. It's like the elephant who's been conditioned not to struggle against the chain as a baby, now grown, all they use is a thin rope- the conditioning is the real chain.
This also is the reason I've become a very big fan of games with explicit, formal instructions for setting up conflict outside of that, and providing examples to drive the idea home.
Great post, Chris. You sum up a topic that I have been ranting about a lot lately. Namely that weird notion that we can sit and roll dice to see if our characters can or cannot perform their actions, and somehow -- by some magic that is almost never explicit in the rulebook -- the resulting experience will resemble Star Wars.
Sure, it can be done. We've all done it for years. But wouldn't it be great if all those varied things we do to make it work were written down and shared in a way that people could easily understand and reproduce themselves? I'm glad we get to see this start to happen. It's an exciting time to be a designer.
Hi John,
In this way, I think games like Theatrix were very ahead of their time- it was the shift from game as "physics" to game as pacing, escalation, setbacks, climax, and other issues of storytelling. Aside from the brief idea mentioned in Feng Shui, no other mainstream games have really touched on those issues.
It's both astounding and sad that none of the games licensed on movies, tv shows, comics, or books considered pacing to be worth emulating, but instead decided it was useful to stat up endless weapons, vehicles, and monsters. There is no other form of entertainment that doesn't acknowledge the value of pacing, including even graphic design... which simply goes to show how embryonic roleplaying still is at this point.
All the pacing tricks that you, I, or countless others have subconsciously instituted were normally chalked up to "GM'ing style" and no further thought was put to it- a bit of magic or talent and no way to really analyze it.
Regardless of how people in general feel about the various bits of the Big Model, its most useful function is pointing out the differences and connections between system, people at the table, and imagined events- which is totally necessary for the purposes of understanding how to emulate something other than physics. It's utterly vital to break the myth that the imagined events "are real" or even need to be "realistic" in any sense. Once people recognize that it is the people at the table who create, and control the rules of creation- then it becomes open as any other art form.
Chris
Surely this is a classic CA clash, up to and including the swearing. That means neither side is right.
"I want my character to be totally fucked and in over his head and desperate for a way out. But I also don't want my choices or die rolls to sever my ability to participate in what happens next."
Has anyone figured out how to do this in such a way that you, the player, can experience the desperation of the character? Comparisons to movies don't cut it because the audience doesn't come up with the solution, it only decides if the escape-from-death was good enough--or dumb enough to ask for their money back.
Hero points are just hit points by another name. The best I've been able to come up with is something like smashing your hand with a hammer or burning a $20 bill every time your character "dies".
A hammer? Dude.
Best troll I've seen in a while.
Sorry, but I have to decline the compliment. I wish I did have the disposition for trolling, but I've never gotten it down.
Ignore the last sentence if you like. The question is genuine. Is there a way to get the player to feel the character's desperation without threatening something the player cares about? I've seen it in videogames where, if you die, you yell and curse even though you can return to a save point, because it means that all the effort since that save point has to be redone. (And yet in a good game, redoing the effort is still enjoyable, at least for a few iterations.) If there's a game that really does this, I want to know about it so I can buy it.
Another near-miss that I can think of is the card game Dahimi (aka Dalmuti) which, at least among the friends I play with, only penalizes "losing" by putting you in a position where it's much harder to do anything (including win), but not impossible. Not really sure it qualifies because being in that position means you have to work hard to get out of it.
Hey Eliot:
I'm with you on that. I'm glad I get emails when people comment, or I'd never have seen what you wrote. Lemme start a new thread, howsabout? It's an awesome topic for discussion.
And how'd you find my little corner of the blogosphere?
I think I found your blog through The Mighty Atom blog, which I think is John Harper's, and I think I found that from John Kim's, and John's from...somewhere else.
(Parenthetically, I'm lukewarm at best about this whole blog thing. It seems to me that everyone wants to talk to each other but everyone wants to reserve the right not to be moderated. Result: fragmented discussions scattered across hyperspace. Anyway...)
Will check out your new topic.
My bad, Elliott. I misjudged you. I retract the troll comment.
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