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Friday 10 July 2020

Go with the flow


The referee of our latest campaign shared this (from Shamus Young's DM of the Rings on his TwentySided site) after I scored a series of critical successes that stopped the Big Bad dead in his tracks -- to the slack-jawed astonishment of everybody around the table.

The comic gave us all a good laugh, but like all good comedy it makes a serious point too. "We need to adjourn for a bit of re-writing." Not a bit of it! If something like Gollum getting shot happened in a game I was running my first thought would be, "Wow, didn't see that coming! I wonder where this will go now..?"

Roleplaying at its best is jazz, not an orchestra and conductor working from sheet music. The referee is one of the band, leading but not dictating -- which is the reason I don't like terms like GM. There need never be any pause for re-writing because there shouldn't be a prescripted storyline you're trying to shepherd the players through. Play to find out what happens, as they say. The story that emerges will always be more involving than a plot you wrote in advance because the players will be right there in the moment, not watching to see which clue or trope has been planted there for them to pick up on.

And consider too the campfire mythology of the game, the stories players tell each other afterwards. Occasionally I've seen players make astonishing dice rolls that allowed them to overcome a threat that looked almost insurmountable. Years later they'll talk about that kind of victory with much more passion than one where they found the magic whatsit that was the only way to defeat the evil whosis and they used it at the exact time the scenario said to.

The pre-planned finale is not roleplaying, it's the kind of story you get in a movie or novel. There you can't have million-to-one shots come off (much as writers strive to convince you they have) because there's no element of chance. Every outcome in a scripted story is (by definition) contrived. The USP of roleplaying is that genuinely unforeseen and unlikely outcomes do happen, and immediately get folded into the action. Celebrate that and use it, is my advice; don't try to shoehorn roleplaying games into the same genres and tropes that linear fiction is bound by.


I've been thinking about this because our group is about to try the Yellow King RPG mini-campaign The Wars. I get that it's all about playing in a genre, and I'm always willing to experiment, so I set out intending to embrace that. But what is the genre? (Genuine question, for anyone who's played the campaign.)

I started out looking at All Quiet On The Western Front and Charley's War -- and, yes, I know The Wars is not WW1, but the flavour is what I'm looking for. The trouble is, I can easily see the action moving from the very specific mystery-on-the-battlefield to other settings: home leave, quiet moments back at HQ, and so forth. Do I have to prepare injury and shock cards for every eventuality? The Yellow King system looks like it's intended for games where you've carefully set the rails beforehand, but what do you do in a game like that when the players do the unexpected? I could use a less prescriptive set of rules, obviously. One option is just to have generic -1, -2 and -3 injury cards and hand them to the players saying, "OK, that's the game effect; you tell me what the injury actually is." But the point of the exercise is to see what the YK system is like. If you've tried it out and can offer some tips, I'd love to hear your comments below.

There's a little bit more about themes like this in the latest episode of the always-excellent Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice. Mike and Roger cover some of the same ground as I have, only more winningly and in stereo. (If you enjoy their discussion, don't ignore the tip jar.) But before you scoot off to listen to them, I must make a very important point:

16 comments:

  1. Has Roz taken over Mirabilis, Dave?!

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    1. To be honest, Andy, she'd look down her nose at anything to do with comics. Especially something as nerdy as whether or not to put serifs on i in the middle of a word!

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  2. If I'm not mistaken, Dave, you never read "The Lord of the Rings"; Gollum is not the "Big Bad" but a mixed figure (i.e. a schizophrenic figure corrupted by the Ring). An alternative "Lord of the Rings" where Gollum would be killed this way would be interesting since the Hobbits would never manage to get into Mordor and destroy the Ring in the volcano, but would rather be killed by Orks (and Sauron would win when he'd get back his Ring), or would take refuge at Minas Tirith where the sick steward would confiscate the Ring and try to use it for himself.
    I have read game reports where the MERP System (based on Rolemaster) allowed for such "dice miracles" (on both sides...)

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    1. Lol -- it's true I still haven't read LotR, Olivier (one day, maybe), but I'd have had to be living in a nuclear bunker for the last few decades not to be aware that Gollum isn't the baddie. What you're describing is the perfect example of inflexible refereeing where, having planned out the whole plot of the adventure and deciding that Gollum is integral to victory, the referee won't allow any deviation from that. A good referee should stay loose and see if his or her players could come up with another way to achieve their goal.

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    2. To be honest, while the character "Gollum" is genious from a literary point of view (freely inspired by the Golem and deeply influenced by Tolkien's Catholic faith : Bilbo/Aragorn should have killed him but they didn't because they still believe in redemption and know he's a victim) it would be hardly manageable in a RpG since he's both a deus-ex-machina and a devil-from-the-box (OK, there can be random dice for deciding whether he turns evil or good at that time, but that would not describe his precise actions).
      One of the best gamifications of the Lord of the Rings, the first edition of the Middle-Earth collectible card game, listed Gollum as... a "resource", and there was an event card according to which, if Gollum and the One Ring were present at Mount Doom, you automatically won the game ! :-)

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    3. It's just as well that Bilbo and Aragorn didn't behave like superheroes in modern TV shows, where torturing and killing bad guys is shown as something the good guys are expected to do. I saw one episode of Daredevil where Matt Murdock goes to confession to ask if it's justifiable to murder somebody who he thinks is going to murder others. (It's very different from the comics, where Matt is a Columbia law graduate, summa cum laude, and in the later comics had a Catholic upbringing grafted onto his backstory.) The TV Daredevil would just throw Gollum off a roof to be carted off with tomorrow's trash!

      In an RPG, if Gollum can potentially have such a critical effect on the outcome then he would probably have to be a player-character. Otherwise there's the risk that the players will just end up watching the referee tell himself or herself a story, with no possibility of player agency. But I speak in partial ignorance of the LotR plot so should really follow Wittgenstein's advice: "Worüber man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen."

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    4. Probably most GMs would fall back on having another NPC show up that can take Gollum's place, maybe Faramir has been exploring secret ways into Mordor and can guide them. Maybe Sam becomes corrupted by the ring, tries to take it from Frodo and falls into the volcano, or perhaps it's an Orc deserter they pick up as a guide along the way.

      Of course this is till all railroading towards a pre-plotted finale, so it's not solving the actual problem.

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    5. I have noticed that some players like to figure out what the referee/GM wants, do it, then get a pat on the head for it. Maybe it's to do with parenting (full disclosure: my mum and dad went with the Spock method) but I don't get any kick out of that kind of bedtime story approach. I want freedom, even if that means the freedom to mess things up.

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  3. I think the problem with published scenarios or linked adventures is that it is inherent in their very nature that they progress in a certain way or at least broadly towards the “end” so to speak. Much easier when you’re just working from notes, know the setting and NPCs who reside there very well and are playing with a bunch of very experienced players. Then you can really be running a sandbox where the PCs can largely go where they choose and the GM wings it from there. Perhaps a middle road u see in the best published material is a series of alternative paths and helpful “what ifs” for the GM. But as long as everyone has fun I guess who cares if it all goes pear shaped? A good argument for GMs to under prepare I guess!

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    1. All the most memorable games I've played in have erred on the side of under-preparation, for sure. Our Christmas specials, for example, are unmissable but the referee (usually Tim Harford) comes with just an idea and a page of notes scribbled on the train.

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  4. Yes but Tim’s a truly extraordinary mind...for the rest of us mere mortal time poor GMs some well developed material can make life easier...

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    1. To a degree, but I think it's possible to over-prepare (I've done it myself) and published scenarios have led people to think that you can't get going without 20 pages and half a dozen maps. But you're right, Nigel, that not many referees could wing it from the back on an envelope as brilliantly as Tim does.

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  5. Ahh but Dave you’re ignoring the whole “rpg as literature” issue (which I think you’ve covered in this blog before). Many people, or maybe it’s just me, read published scenarios for pleasure...nothing like a good map!

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    1. I think that's the only explanation for some of the top-performing RPGs on Kickstarter, Nigel. They're not really useful (or even comprehensible) as a set of playable rules, but they're not actually intended to be used that way. I've no objection to them being both a great read *and* a useful scenario, mind you. And glancing at my bookshelves I see quite a number of map books of places I'll never go -- or in many cases that don't even exist -- so point taken!

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  6. Yes there’s art and entertainment. Fell into the trap many times of buying supplements and gazetteers etc just because they looked cool or the other trap of wanting to have a more complete “collection” but have never and am unlikely to ever actually use them to play a game...

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    1. We tried one highly-lauded adventure (I'd better not mention the name) which would have made a great fantasy novel, and I soon realized that's what the writer really wanted to do, not an RPG at all. There were loads of bits where the text would say things like, "If the players go back to the scene of the murder and look in the fridge they'll find a pickled human heart in a jar" -- but that would be twenty pages later, and the players would of course have looked in that fridge at the time and found nothing of interest. The writer simply put in ideas as they occurred to him (or was it her..?) and never mind whether that broke the scenario.

      It was a nice read, though. I'd have bought the novel.

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