[WFRP 3E] Under The Chaos Moon
contracycle:
Nyaargh. Yes, but then again, no. I'm talking about "just letting things play out". Because if what you have already done is statted up these villains in such away that they are "suitable opponents for 20th level characters" or something, then giving the players the come on to have a go at them is pretty irresponsible. They're likely to take you at your (implied) word and get smashed, in which case you may well find yourself just fudging the other way, to let the characters off the hook.
The illusionism things is, well, complicated. I don't think there's anything wrong with in principle, although I will agree that many of the practices by which it has been conducted, and many of the ends to which it has been directed, are rightly criticised as destructive and deprotagonising. But my take on it has always been at odds with most everyone because I take the term quite literally, in a stage magic sense. I think you can do a hell of a lot with perception and expectation that don't require such crudities as fudging dice and whatnot. But I also don't hold with the whole "just see what happens" school of thought because IME that produces dull, predictable, and often over-rational outcomes that are just boring and unfun.
Hence my suggestion was quite serious. If you don't want to be forced into the corner of either saving the villains from the characters or the characters from the villains, you have to explicitly take them off the board right now. You do have to think about the perceptions that you have created or encouraged, and at the moment it is likely that your presentation has advertised these villains to the players as their proper target. I.E. that they will solve the problem of the warherd by dealing with these villains. But according to your setup, that was never actually intended to be the case. If you now openly take them out of the immediate frame, then the players will interpret their appearance as foreshadowing or something, which it more or less is, and concentrate on the problem that is still in front of them.
What worries me when say that these villains should be a serious challenge, combined with letting things play out, is that it sounds dangerously like it's heading the sort of thinking that causes major problems, i.e. "the players should realise they are out of their league". Because unfortunately it's likely that the players will be thinking "the GM wouldn't send us up against enemies that are out of our league". And when you both end up thinking in terms of should's and would's, nobody is thinking about what is actually there. And what's actually there, at the moment, is a setup which by every trope and convention of the genre suggests that the heroes should storm in, put the villains to the sword, and the minions will disperse. It is only if you allow that happen that you will find yourself having to fudge outcomes one way or the other.
Renee:
@ Callan
The good thing about this particular group is that we're pretty up front when we're not having fun. And there's not really a problem with someone saying "okay, this isn't my thing" and then bowing out. It doesn't impact whether we get together for the next game of whatever it is someone wants to run, or any of the other social stuff we sometimes do together.
But I'm also not overly worried about that happening now if I or the players suddenly decide to make explicit a "win condition" (or conditions). I mean, from the very beginning everyone knew certain things: There was a beastman shaman, he could sometimes make meteors fall out of the sky, and he was heading to a tiny village outside of Nuln. There was never a mystery about any of that, but still, there are a number of ways this could end depending on how the players want to approach things , and this is where I think it's my job to understand what would be fun for them. Is saving the villagers good enough, even if it means the village itself is destroyed? How about saving the villagers and preventing the village from being destroyed? Maybe their priority is killing the shaman, even if it means sacrificing the village and/or the innocent lives of the townsfolk? These are all things easily identifiable at this point in the game, and the only thing that would really not be fun is if I make the thing the players *want* to do impossible for them to do.
And, of course, we're talking about the overarching "plot", without consideration for other things that might be just as much (or more) fun for the players. Player-driven things like Jon's desire to see Ceric succeed in his political ambitions (and so on). Or things that are not so much related to in-game content, but to the social act of roleplaying itself...like having one's creativity acknowledged and rewarded. I guess this is a sort of long-winded way of saying I agree, but it's not a simple thing.
(and also that in all this time I haven't mentioned anything about what Warhammer is most famous for: It's career advancement system. If there's an implicit "objective" to the game, it probably lies there.)
@ Contracycle
That's a pretty fair articulation of my concerns, up to this point. I don't necessarily operate with the expectation that because a given villain makes an in-the-flesh appearance that they're fair game, or operating at the same scale of power as the heroes, or any of the rest of that...but I also realize many players do, and that there's not much reason for them to think otherwise.
At any rate, I'm disinclined to fix that by removing my baddies to some far away locale. Given what's gone before, I think that would be pretty unsatisfying for all of us. And I'm not going to fudge die rolls (I actually think that would be pretty hard to do with this game, and in general, I loath such behavior. Doing so would be a fundamental slide away from what I've said I wanted to do with WFRP, and a slide towards what I said I didn't want to do). So yeah, I'll let it play out and see what happens. Maybe with some stat adjustments (although I still have the issue of not knowing what represents an adequate challenge for three starter characters in this game).
Switching gears a little bit, one thing that occurs to me as I write is that good games leave you feeling satisfied even if you lose. You might not like losing, but it shouldn't feel stupid, boring, or like a waste of time. That was always my problem with games like D&D, where "losing" pretty much always was unsatisfying. In those times I didn't kick back in my chair shaking my head with a smile and think, "that was close, if only I'd dodged instead of pressing the attack" or "if only I'd used cleave instead of whirlwind attack"...rather, it was more like "well there was no way I could have beat that" or "the dice fucked me today", or whatever. And I'm trying to decide if WFRP is any different. Maybe...the nuance of the die rolls allow for more than just "succeed" and "fail", the way action cards get used (particularly in combat) seems nicely strategic, and combat withdrawals are made easy enough that I think we'll see a lot of beat-up characters but not a lot of dead ones (which is kind of a big deal to me). But still I wonder, if the villains survive and the village gets crushed under a meteor, will the players still have had a good time? Maybe I'll ask them (or maybe by writing this, I already have).
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