Changing Mindsets
November 19th, 2009 Zen Posted in Game Concepts, News, Pen and Paper |
This is a post about pen and paper roleplaying games. Turn back now if you’re not interested.
I have often struggled over the years to create a different flavour to my campaign experience. I freely admit that most of my games have thematic tones of evil and conquest, where I could quite easily exploit themes of corruption, intrigue, mystery, horror and so on. Somehow I always seem to return to my generic fantasy roots, wherein evil is trying to take over by spewing forth an army from the deep dark depths of hell or its fantasy setting equivalent. Even in my most original campaign plots, there has been an army of some description bent on invading where the players are currently located.
So too do my players get stuck in their own mindsets. I largely attribute it to the fact that, in GURPS, you are invincible. While many options for evisceration are available to players and enemies alike, somehow all my opponents end up as unrecognisable piles of meat on the floor. Most of my players, myself included, began on this system. There is a mindset at my table that the player characters can overcome, which is inspiring in books and movies, but usually leads to rampantly stupid acts of heroism that get people killed in roleplaying games.
When running a game of 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, I do like to appreciate that my players occasionally feel overwhelmed. I like them in the final few encounters of an adventure to discuss the possibility of high tailing it and have ‘maybe those villagers can defend from what’s left of the hobgoblins anyway’ conversations.That is of course before they inevitably fell a few foes and everything seems alright again. I’ve fallen into the trap of making things too easy and become a sucker for the good ending. I’d like to kill a player character, but the long surviving GURPS characters haven’t given me the taste for blood I needed in my early DMing days to help me become the cold heartless bastard at the head of the table that I should be.
Similarly, I can’t get my table sessions to have the right feel to them. I’m not talking about game content, but rather what happens in the course of playing the game. I’d like to start calling my players by their character names when their initiative comes up, but I just can’t. I always slip back into player names which I’m sure facilitates the table talk and meta-gaming that floods our sessions. Not that I mind it all terribly, we all have fun in the end - it’s just something that I’d appreciate.
I guess to conclude I should declare that “COOL STORY BRO” is not an appropriate comment or response to this article. I am aware that this post is entirely contentless, but these things have been swirling in my head for some time now. It’s good to put them down, and I hope I can’t find this article one day and reflect on how my campaigns have improved.
November 19th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
There’s a fine, fine line between being an arsehole DM and putting in some challenge so that the players actually have to work not to die.
In the campaign I play, if anything the DM errs on the friendly side. Yet the other week a player activated a trap which ended up doing 15 CON damage. One resurrection later he’s a level lower and so we continue. Fortunately the player is a good sport about it (though not necessarily happy). I suppose if your players are going to ragequit your options are more limited.
The more subtle enemies like traps, magical effects, poisons and difficult terrain make for a more interesting type of difficulty than simply being crushed to death by brute force by a dragon or something. I think it helps the character participation too when they are forced to engage with the bits of the world which don’t move. Hmm. *end musings*
November 24th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Heh, yeah I used to do the same thing, until I discovered the Dark Heresy system (Based on Warhammer 40k).
In that system, each player is lucky to survive more than one session, and yet because there is such a ridiculous sense of mortality, it goes the other way. Because you find yourself dying so often, you start thinking “Oh, there’s no real point to trying to survive, I may as well take myself out in a blaze of glory.” (Somehow this is still fun…).
Since playing that, I’ve been, in my campaigns, working on finding a middle ground between the “Hero shall prevail” and the “Oh god, oh god, we’re all doomed!” styles.
Every single fight, if the players don’t play intelligently, they have a very good chance of dying. If they play smart, they all have a very good chance of surviving. It doesn’t mean that I go out of my way to try to kill them, it just means that they have a very real chance of dying, keeping that sense of urgency, and mortality there. You want the PC’s to become attached to their characters, but not entirely sure that they will survive, as it not only increases the roleplaying value, but it also keeps the players on their toes, and not assured of their victory.
Also, it doesn’t hurt to utilise the deus Ex Machina every so often, by throwing them into situations that they truly cannot hope to overcome, just to show how weak they really are, and then bringing in something to rescue them… There’s nothing quite like the look of fear on a players face when they realise there’s absolutely nothing they can do… Although don’t rescue them too often, otherwise they’ll come to expect the Deus Ex Machina - you need to learn to relish the TPK!
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