[Old School Hack] Rules-driven Character Investment in B3
Daniel Davis:
We played our first game of Old School Hack tonight. I'm a mid-twenties GM who started out on D&D3.5 and moved from there to indie stuff (e.g., Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Wheel) with some D&D4e thrown in. My core gaming group is two of my best friends, Mpose and Tim. We've had mixed experience with indie stuff, although our last experience (a first session of Apocalypse World) went really, really well.
Anyway, I'd never played old school D&D and wanted to give it a shot. It seemed like it'd press my sim-buttons. When I look at the faces of the players, I want to see *terror*--not because I'm being a jerk and they're scared of me but because they're scared of *whatever* is beyond the door. Or maybe of the door itself.
So that's the background. I chose to run Palace of the Silver Princess (B3) because it's free on the WotC website. I read it over this morning, printed out the maps, came up with a few rules tweaks, and showed up to play.
Mpose was playing Glug, the Goblin with a Heart of Gold; Tim played Yosh (I can't remember the real name), the samurai-themed Fighter. Heart of Gold is a talent that says: every once in a while (i.e., between rests) you can break an adorable smile, and no NPC can believe you've done something bad. This is important.
And here's the interesting thing: at the start, I don't know if either player was really invested in his character. There's not much there, after all--no beliefs or instincts or anything like that. Mpose had decided his goblin Glub was the fighter Yosh's lackey. Maybe Yosh had saved his life. I asked Tim what he wanted Yosh's goal to be. Eventually he decided he was totally evil and just looking to score enough cash to do evil more expeditiously. I wasn't happy with that, but, hey I went along with it. They said they both were Chaotic.
THIS TOTALLY CHANGED THROUGH PLAY. And the change was natural and fiction-driven and not at all at my behest or guiding.
Heart of Gold got used right off. While the players were trying to build a lever from scrap metal and boulders (to lift the portcullis blocking the dungeon entrance), they were (via a wandering monster roll) accosted by four bandits. After some fast talking and single combat, they joined the bandits. After all, everyone's here to make money and do evil deeds, right?
But the crucial moment, I think, came when two of the bandits were trying to work the lever to open the gate, and, while the bandit leader was distracted, Glug sneaked up behind him to tear his throat out. I called for a stealthy check. Glug failed. So there he is, staring at the big hulking bandit captain, and the players are like "Well crap."
So Mpose says: "Oh, man, Glug just puts his hands behind his back and smiles at him. Heart of Gold."
It worked perfectly, and, from then on, I think all of us were sold on Glug and this whole situation. The bandit captain just thought he was adorable, and the portcullis-opening continued apace.
The next step in character- and situation-investment came when the PCs, separated for a moment from the three remaining bandits, searched a room and found a family of five kobolds. The kobolds had prepared an action and came out with slings firing. Yosh the fighter took a nasty hit in the face and almost went down straight off. But, after that initial volley, Glug (being a goblin and knowing their language) talked with the kobolds and got their story.
The module doesn't tell you why they're there, but they're clearly a family unit. And I thought "Maybe they're trapped. They're not strong enough to open these portcullises." So that seeps out into the fiction, and the players decide (after they team up with the kobolds to ambush the bandits) to open the portcullises so that kobold family can escape.
And it was this really sweet moment, the little scaly family walking out hand in hand to go do whatever kobold families do.
And then Tim says "Aw, I want to be good."
It fascinated me. Before the initial Heart of Gold use, I would have predicted total kobold slaughter. Even afterward, I thought that's how it was going to go down. But I think something in that moment triggered some kind of psychological response in the players that enabled them to invest in their characters, and Tim evidently didn't want to invest in being a big murderous douche.
That's the main point of my post. All kinds of other awesome stuff happened. It turned out to be one of my best RPG experiences ever.
Callan S.:
Hi Daniel,
This is just an estimate, but sometimes I think GM's don't believe a player character turn of character. They just treat it as min maxing the rules, some exploitation of the system or some meta game thingie, if not outright cheating. But here, possibly assited by some element of the heart of gold mechanic, I'm estimating you went along with the goblin being all good and cute looking and that was belief enough to support the player making a shift of character.
Or summit. Sounded fun! :)
Ron Edwards:
Wow, what a game. As a (very) older gamer, I'm also charmed by seeing The Palace of the Silver Princess through your eyes. The usual outcomes include massive butchery and slavery of kobolds, just as you predicted.
Three things.
1. In all the old-school adventure packs, the various NPCs and monsters are clearly doing something, room by room, and it's never explained at the local level. Or even if it's explained in a neutral sense, "two orc guards sit and wait," et cetera, one can almost always find some nuance to a more emotional context for those characters at a second glance. The nuances range from utterly comedic to sociopolitical to heart-wrenching. Dungeon design in my own tribute to old-school play, Elfs, is almost entirely based on this idea; well, the low comedy end anyway. My cursory investigation of the game website doesn't turn up much discussion of it, but I suspect that the author, or at least members of his discussion community, are so familiar with this point that they hardly give it a second thought.
2. I want to know more about Heart of Gold. What exactly is the fictional component? Can it be used hypocritically? If so, then it's doubly interesting that the player, and secondarily all three of you, decided that the initial use of the ability was, in retrospect, not hypocritical, or at least if I'm reading your post correctly. But I don't want to speculate more without knowing how the thing's mechanics and required fictional components actually work.
3. There was some built-in thematic tension in the character Yosh from the start - did you see that? On the one hand he's saved this goblin's life and somehow accepted him as a buddy (OK, lackey, but he didn't skin him, stuff the skin, and mount it, so OK); on the other, he's apparently all-evil, all-the-time. What's fun to me is that all this was clearly off-the-cuff, casual talk that didn't even need to be included, and yet it was, and then in the end, became a sort of setup for a profound character development.
It's also sort of neat that the transformation took place across the two characters, rather than just in one of them. And oh yeah! We might actually have a genuine opportunity to discuss alignments here in a rational fashion, a rare thing on-line.
Best, Ron
Gregor Hutton:
I'm very intrigued by Old Box Hack. I gave my print out of it to Joe Prince the other week (I got pointed in its direction by John Harper highlighting it).
The exact wording of the talent is as follows (and it's unique to Goblins -- I told Joe how happy I was that Goblin was a character choice, I'd play one every time).
Quote
HEART OF GOLD non-combat talent, usable only once after a rest
Every now and then, your normally sinister nature is completely subverted by random acts of adorability. By breaking into a huge innocent smile, no non-player-character will possibly be able to believe that you've done something bad. Your fellow party members may know better, however.
(It reminds me of the Merit "Sanctity" from The Player's Guide to the Sabbat, but with better definition of usage -- once a day, use after resting, and you can recharge it with some role-playing and spending 2 Awesome Points.)
Daniel Davis:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 06, 2011, 08:58:36 AM
It's also sort of neat that the transformation took place across the two characters, rather than just in one of them. And oh yeah! We might actually have a genuine opportunity to discuss alignments here in a rational fashion, a rare thing on-line.
More on that: during my prep, I read that the Tower Level of the palace is guarded by "the Protectors," translucent guys who are all about some Law. The way the module describes it, they've got this club going on the tower: no monsters, no "treasure," but tons of rest, weapon racks, and safety--and a killer view to boot. Lawful characters are automatically granted entry, while non-lawful characters get bum-rushed as soon as they try to get past the doorman, so to speak.
That consideration is what prompted me to ask the alignment question in the first place. They said "chaotic," and I said "interesting." So, at this moment, the alignment choice for the players was this--predictive label? I think they answered chaotic thinking "Yeah, we'll probably be doing lots of crazy junk."
But then play proper started, and Yosh (the fighter) was ordering around Glug (the goblin) back and forth, and Glug was always smiles and nods and "Yes, Yosh." I didn't realize it at the time, but, even though Yosh was ordering Glug around, he was never doing so in an evil overlord fashion--more like a chain of command.
At one point before the "revelation" I'll talk about in a second, Tim (Yosh's player) had to leave the room to put his kids to bed, and Mpose (Glug's player) and I start chatting about how the game's going. He tells me that his original plan was to have Glug play nicey-nice until he got a chance to kill Yosh to death. I don't think he explained why he changed his mind, but I assume it had something to do with the kind of interaction the characters developed.
And here's the "revelation": later on, while I was reading up on whatever insta-kill trap/creature waited in the next room, Mpose says "You know what? I think Glug's lawful. He does whatever Yosh tells him. That's his principle."
And, after that, we get this interaction where Glug is wanting to sneak after these skeleton sentries to see where they're going, and Yosh holds him back because he's concerned for his safety. And the character vocalizes this, something as explicit as "I care about you, Glug." And the thing is, it's totally believable. It's the second or third emotionally touching moment of the night, and this was supposed to be about killing things and taking their stuff.
I honestly don't know what to make of this. There doesn't seem to be any mechanical force producing these effects in the fiction. I wonder if it's an expression of the jazz metaphor I've run across around these parts: the players and I were just grooving on the same page.
But how did that even happen? It was completely non-explicit. All explicit talk ran counter to this. So we weren't even intending to be on this page.
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