Forget the thumbscrews

A trope you often see in TV shows and movies these days is the hero torturing a suspect to get information. It cropped up in Watchmen and Daredevil among many others. Sgt Sam Provance, who exposed abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, points out in this BBC interview (25m25s in) that many of the real-life torturers in the US Army grew up thinking that's what the good guys do. An audience’s desire for a “strongman” (or in Watchmen’s case a "strong" woman) to brutalize the bad guys usually comes at times when people feel powerless and frightened, a sure sign of a civilization at a low ebb.

A truly strong hero in a confident democratic society doesn’t need to behave like a sadistic bully. I’m thinking of the Allied officer after the liberation of a POW camp in Burma. The Imperial Japanese commanding officer came to see him and asked why the Allied troops weren’t starving and beating the Japanese prisoners, given the way the Japanese had maltreated their own POWs. The Allied officer replied, “Because we’re better than you are.”

Torture is also usually ineffective at getting reliable information, though admittedly the states that employ it don’t usually care much about the truth. But we’re not here to discuss the effectiveness of torture, nor the libertarian psychology that stokes fantasies of it. (Hollywood writers have been embedding libertarian ideology into their scripts for decades, after all. I'm sure if you asked the President of the United States he'd yap, 'Torture? Big fan, big fan.') I'm not even going to talk about the moral arguments, which you'd hope wouldn't have to be explained to any civilized person. My gripe about torture in story terms is that it’s just plain boring.

Real interrogation, whether in fiction or roleplaying, gives you an opportunity for an interesting scene. One character has information they don’t want to reveal. The other character needs to gull them into telling the truth. Like so:

In GURPS, Interrogation is a skill quite separate from Intimidation, though the GURPS designers make the classic mistake of giving a huge Interrogation bonus for the use of torture. Players therefore tend to get the pliers out and make like Beria’s thugs, which is a pity because role-playing the scene in which the interrogator tries to outwit their adversary is potentially way more interesting than any combat could ever be. (To get information in the field, use elicitation.)

The examples of torture in Daredevil are particularly uninspired because DD has special abilities that help him to tell when somebody is lying. But come to that the writers also gave him a gruelling concussive battle with a dozen or more mobsters where he could just have pulled the fusebox off the wall and beaten them easily in the dark. So it’s not too surprising that the writing of other scenes was sloppy and ill thought-out.

There are writers who do it well. Try the novels of John le Carré, whose interrogators employ the gamut of psychological tricks -- cajoling, bullying, charming, flattering, coaxing, probing and misleading until their subjects reveal the information, often without realizing how much they've given away. Le Carré's interrogators never need to dangle somebody off a roof or pull out their fingernails, and those scenes are so much more gripping because of that. (For example Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or A Perfect Spy.) Or consider Geoffrey Household's classic thriller Rogue Male, where the antagonist extracts a confession from the narrator who has not previously admitted the truth even to himself -- and that's under duress but without the use of physical torture, which is used by the bad guys right at the start of the novel with no useful results whatsoever.

Then take a look at this video in which a real-life expert interrogator analyses movie writers’ ideas of how it works. And next time you have an interrogation scene in a roleplaying game, consider how much more interesting it is to have it play out sans the waterboard and the big-dick posturing.

How a surfeit of skills in an RPG stifles interesting stories

This is going to look like another Gripe About GURPS, but the fact is that I’ve been thinking (for the millionth time) of writing a new edition of Dragon Warriors, and so I’ve been taking a look at what I’ve liked and disliked about various roleplaying systems over the last forty years.

Early on we hardly had skills. Lots of people started out dungeon bashing, a form of tabletop skirmish wargame on rails. So, apart from hiding in shadows, opening chests and hitting things, they didn’t think about skills much. The more roleplaying broke out of the dungeon and became about the whole scope of a fantasy life, the greater the demand for rules that covered all the things a character might do.

My 1979 edition of Runequest lists about twenty skills. That felt like a great liberating leap forward. My 2010 edition of GURPS has more than twenty skills that begin with the letter A alone. There's maybe two hundred and fifty skills in all. And that doesn’t feel liberating, it feels like being tied in knots.

Having too many skills limits the narratives that will emerge, because not having a specific skill tends to block potentially interesting developments.

‘In the back room there’s a guy who’s tied up. “Thank God you came! They kidnapped me.”’
‘I free him. But as I do I’m taking a look at those ropes. Is it possible he could have tied himself up?’
‘Suspicious, huh? Have you got Knots skill?’
‘Er… no.’
‘Too bad. Nice idea, though.’

OK, Knot Tying defaults to Dexterity -4, so the player could still try to make the roll. But in practice DX-4 pretty much scotches it. With DX of 12, that nice idea gets squashed down to a 26% chance.

Obviously a good GM is going to find a workaround, maybe make it an IQ roll with a bonus if the character had had Knot Tying. But now we’re falling back on off-the-cuff rules, often a sign that the system isn’t fit for purpose.

In a much simpler system, with no rules for knots or ropes, you might just ask for an IQ roll. Some early RPGs didn’t drill down to the level of skills, but they did allow for character background, so you’d often hear an exchange like this:

‘…I free him. As I do I’m taking a look at those ropes. Is it possible he could have tied himself up?’
‘That’s going to be an IQ roll.’
‘I’m a sailor, too, so I’m familiar with knots.’
‘OK, I’ll give you a +1.’

That’s also making a ruling on the fly, but the difference in the second example is that the rulebook was probably 50 pages rather than 500. In a very granular system like GURPS 4e, skills are differentiated down to the level of Shadowing (following a person in a crowd, which could just as easily have been dealt with using Stealth and Observation rather than inventing a new skill) or Forced Entry (kicking a door in – yep, there really is a skill for that and it has no default).

The problem with all these skills is that PCs are unlikely to have most of them (Knot Tying, for instance), which will often block a course of action that would keep the game moving and be fun. Often they overlap, and inconsistently to boot, so the game degenerates into sophistry as players argue the case for why their obscure skill has a bearing on this situation. And of course, when you do decide to take a character with Forced Entry, the entire world starts looking like it’s made up of doors to kick in. These are all factors that straitjacket the kind of fluid improvisation that powers the best game sessions.

Instead of all that, you could design a system that lets players unpack the level of detail they want. So say I have Melee skill of 10. I can just roll that in any fight, whatever weapon I’m using. But if I prefer there's an option to specialize in one weapon – sabre, say. So now I get a +2 in my specialized weapon but -1 in everything else. Meleeing with a sabre, I now use a skill of 12, but with a club or spear I’m at 9.

And I can unpack further. Specialising in parry, I can now parry with a sabre at 14, but if I attack or dodge I’m at 11 – and at 8 with other weapons.

That’s not necessarily the way I’ll go with Dragon Warriors 2e. I’d like something that moves away from the kind of abstract number-crunching that accompanies character creation in something like GURPS and is instead based around the character’s life up to the time the game starts. Traveller began that trend back in the dawn of roleplaying, I used it in Tirikelu, and it’s in games like Warhammer too. The advantage is that you end up with a character with a history, a context in which his or her skills make sense, rather than just the best numbers you could wrangle using Excel.

Butt me no butts

My gaming group recently got a rules mailout from our current referee:

“If you have Brawling, it includes punching, kicking and headbutt, but as with kick, there is a minus for this last. As with grappling rules, we apply half the penalty on specific hit location, the skull, -7. So rounding down -3 and you need to be in the same hex. Both skulls get DR2 as in the rules. Headbutt damage is like Punch Thrust -2 crushing. Critical Head Blow Table applies (p 556).”

This is the kind of special case rule that makes me want to rip off my clothes and run gibbering into the sea. But I’m not about to launch into another of my Gripes About GURPS TM. It’s just that it highlights the two approaches to handling combat in roleplaying games.

In highly simulationist games, you decide precisely what manoeuvre you’re trying to implement. In the case of GURPS, you then refer to the two core books (a total of 570 pages), the ridiculous Martial Arts supplement (another 250 pages), and possibly the Power-Ups books too (a mere 72 pages there). You’ll spend a few minutes adding up a stack of modifiers that you’ll find scattered in multiple different sections (be sure to get PDFs of all the books so you can search them) so that finally you can make what purports to be an accurate assessment of the chance to hit and do damage. That's for one round.

And as we know with systems like that, ten minutes after the fight somebody will say, “We forgot to allow for rough terrain modifiers,” with the result that the whole outcome of the fight should really be retconned, but as nobody wants to do that you just let it go.

The other approach, which you may very well sense I am slightly biased towards, is to abstractify the brawling rules, make the roll, and then let the player interpret the result. Something along the lines of:

Referee: “You made your Brawling skill. Roll hit location.”

Player: “The head, and I do 4 damage.”

Referee: “He fails his knockdown roll. He’s stunned.”

Player: "What happened there is I nutted him."

That’s the approach I advocate in the Tirikelu RPG. It’s also how all the best games of GURPS I’ve played in have actually run it. I’m not convinced that it’s good game design to have 900 pages of rules that you mostly disregard in play – that’s almost as arbitrary as having no rules whatsoever. But I said I wasn’t going to turn this into a GURPS gripe, and in any case I’ve lately been more interested in Powered by the Apocalypse. More on that in tomorrow’s post.