The Forge Archives

The heart of Hyphz's problem on the Demoralizing Day thread was stated very eloquently in the last few paragraphs of the initial post:

Quote from: hyphzBut the negative feeling I got afterwards wasn't about the munchkinism, or the violent solutions (hey, I *knew* the guy was playing Punisher, I *expected* that). It was about the fudging and shifting I had to do. I mean, basically, as I sat there running I had numerous occasions where I was saying "well, right now I either have to get them to roll a dice or come to some unqualified judgment about their roleplaying skill, and if they fail or aren't good enough, then the game's going to be over".

This happened several times. In the M&M, I had to have one of the villains cough up the location of their secret base even though the player blew the Intimidate roll because if they didn't, they wouldn't find it. In UA, I didn't really think it was reasonable to have Don admit that he had kidnapped the girl, but if he didn't, they'd never find out about that part (and Punisher would never have faced the Self check as he'd never know he'd done anything wrong).

And this seems to apply regardless of group, regardless of game, regardless of setting: "if they fail, then nothing happens and it's over". Even if there isn't a predefined plot, a dynamic developing plot can still be brought to a crashing halt by a failure at the wrong moment. Or look at the i-System games: if somebody manages to roll a 1, I get to narrate a negative consequence, but if I hose them enough to affect future actions seriously then the game is over, and if I don't they don't give a damn.

There must be a middle ground somewhere, but to be honest I really can't see it. Am I doing something wrong? Am I thinking about this all the wrong way? Any help would be appreciated, as right now I just feel really down on the whole RPG business.

The thread that followed basically diagnosed this as a consequence of planned plots and illusionism, and discussed alternatives to planned plots and illusionism. But is a radical illusionectomy really required? In other words, is this problem an inevitable consequence of planned plots and illusionism, or can it be solved within the context of illusionist play?

I wanted to step back and consider the problem in general terms. And it all comes down to This Idea:

Continuation of the plot is the players' reward for successful play.

This Idea is firmly entrenched in most styles of interactive storytelling. To a large extent, role playing games are a fortunate exception. But they don't escape its pervasive sway entirely, as hyphz's experiences attest.

Where did This Idea come from? For all the talk of role playing games inheriting undesirable characteristics of war games, This Idea clearly did not come from war games. If it came from any external source, it came from computer adventure games. This computer game genre started with the Infocom text adventure games (1), continued with the graphic adventure games best exemplified by LucasArts classics like Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island, and is now considered a fading genre. Computer adventure games embrace This Idea fully and unapologetically.

But in general, This Idea is problematic, to say the least. Its inevitable corollary is that non-continuation of the plot is the players' punishment for unsuccessful play. But what does non-continuation of the plot mean? In a computer adventure game (and in many other types of computer game too), it means the player tries again (possibly starting over from an earlier point of play, possibly not) and keeps trying until the hurdle is cleared. In a quest-module built into a massively multiplayer online fantasy world, it means the player abandons that quest for the time being and goes off and does something else. These are already arguably undesirable consequences. But in a tabletop role playing adventure, it's worse; it means the adventure comes to an abrupt end unless the GM intervenes farther in some (unfortunately probably obvious) way.

Too often, This Idea arises accidentally within the details of an adventure design. "Succeed in doing X, then get the clue to Y as a result" just seems so normal and so obvious and so straightforward that it's easy to overlook the fact that it doesn't work. So it sneaks its way into planned scenes.

What to do about it (without changing your whole play style):

The simplest fix is to take every incidence of "solve the problem, get a clue" and just reverse it. Suppose your plan is: player-characters are attacked by the villain's henchman, and if they beat him then he will reveal the location of the secret base. But what if they don't beat him? No good. So reverse it. The player-characters learn the location of the secret base, then the villain's henchman attacks them -- because they now know too much!

How do they learn it? Perhaps an escaped scientist reveals it to them, just before being shot in the back by the henchman. Perhaps the clue is immediately noticeable in the scene. (This happens to James Bond all the time. He walks into a suspicious location, immediately sees a clue to another suspicious location, and then gets jumped by an assassin.) Perhaps headquarters calls up on the phone and says, "we've been keeping an eye on your mysterious Mr. Lavlini, and we've noticed some unusual ship traffic around his North Sea oil drilling platform."

The downside: this means that they have perhaps not learned the location "through their own efforts." But so what? They still have to fight the henchman. They still have to plan an attack on the base. The information still "costs" them, they just pay that cost later rather than sooner. They're still playing the game they apparently want to play.

Also: it means that the location of the base is no longer the reward for having beaten the henchman. But so what? Isn't that what experience points are for? And if that's not good enough, there are other kinds of rewards you can use; more on that later.

Finally, it means that the secret of the base's location is revealed to the players one combat-scene sooner. Again, so what?

All that pales compared to the upside: the plot never reaches the point where the players must make a roll or declare the right action or achieve a certain combat result (other than surviving) in order for the plot to continue. If the players kill the henchman? No problem, they already know where the base is. (But if they can take him alive, which is more difficult, they have as a reward the chance to get helpful non-plot-essential information from him, such as the layout of the base.) If the players blow a bunch of rolls and let the henchman escape? No problem, they already know where the base is. (But there's some non-fatal "punishment" for their failure; the henchman will probably warn the villain, so the PCs will have less time or more opposition to infiltrating the base, and/or he'll be there to fight on the villain's side later.)

Plots run on information, and in illusionist play, information is the GM's exclusive province. Tying information to successful play is making the GM's most important tool a hostage of the contingencies of play. It's never necessary. Don't do it.

What rewards to use instead?

If you're running one-shots, it becomes more likely that continuation of the plot is, or appears to be, the players' only reward. If advancement in the story isn't the reward for successful play, then what is?

One solution lies in the inverse of the "failure causes complication" principle, which is that "success avoids complication." In well-designed modules, you usually see two ways to do every important task: an "easy-to-find hard way" and a "hard-to-find easy way." So, for instance, if the player-characters don't find the hidden tunnel to the top of the cliff, they have to climb the cliff without them, which is more dangerous, especially because they'll have to fend off the cliff-eagles. The benefit of the "easy way" can even be illusory! The tunnel might have hazards in it every bit as dangerous as climbing the cliff. Finding the tunnel still looks like a reward, even though it's not. This way, you don't have to worry that the adventure will be too easy if the players get lucky or make good choices.

This works just fine, as long as the players (a) know that the top of the cliff is worth getting to, and (b) are willing to try to get there if that's where the plot appears to lead. All the advice in the other thread about flexible approaches and no-myth play is important if your (or your players') problem is with (b). But if the problem is with (a) instead, you don't have to go that far. If your players are willing to do what's expected of them, but (a) isn't true, then if they don't find the hidden tunnel they can't know what's expected of them. That's a failure of information, and it's easy to fix. Just tell them they see something interesting at the top of the cliff before they get there.

Their reward for finding the tunnel is an easier path to the cliff top. Their reward for finding the tunnel should not be knowing that getting to the cliff top is desirable. They should know that already. To hide that information and make it the reward for finding the tunnel would be buying into This Idea and giving it the chance to cross you.

Knowing about the interesting thing at the cliff top is separate from knowing about the secret tunnel. There's a difference between having a secret, and having the existence of the secret be a secret. If the player-characters know where a kidnapped girl is being held, they'll go rescue her. If they don't know where the kidnapped girl is being held, they'll try as hard as they can to find out They'll follow any lead that even looks like it might be a clue. Even though there's some mystery and uncertainty, there's still plot and it's still ongoing. But if the players don't even know that there is a kidnapped girl, they're stuck.

When the players are faced with an open-ended problem, like knowing there's a kidnapped girl but not where she is, they're likely to go outside the predicted bounds of the pre-planned scenario. They might go running off to the police station to steal missing persons case files, or go looking for a psychic, or start bashing down random apartment doors. They'll likely come up with options that force the GM to improvise. Because of that, you might be tempted to design things so that if they don't find the clue to the kidnapped girl's location, they don't know about the kidnapped girl at all. That avoids having open-ended problem-solving going on. But that option goes nowhere.

Your choices are to spill the beans on the girl's location automatically (that is, without any correct player choices or successful rolls required) and add complications later; or reveal the girl's existence automatically, let play determine whether or not the characters find the location the easy (pre-planned) way, and be prepared for them to try to deal with it some other (possibly improvised) way if necessary.

This has barely scratched the surface of the implications of This Idea. The bottom line is, in this kind of play, the GM, not the players or the dice, must control the information that drives the story. This means that This Idea:

Continuation of the plot is the players' reward for successful play.

...must be rejected.

- Walt

(1) Interestingly, the first text adventure games, Colossal Cave (aka Advent) and Zork (aka Adventure), did not embrace This Idea. These games have only one successful path to completion, but that path is not really a "plot" in any conventional sense of the word. Plot linearity arose later, in games like the Sorcerer trilogy (no relation to the RPG). This more or less parallels, and is more or less simultaneous with, the change in RPG modules from populated maps suitable for Open Sim play, to plot-driven "adventures."

Walt, as usual, has turned on the bright spotlight of reason and clarified the issue immensely.  I'd just like to complicate matters a wee tad.  But please bear in mind that what I have to say presumes what Walt just said; it's not a disagreement but an extension.

The Idea is:

Continuation of the plot is the players' reward for successful play.

Okay, so whose Idea is this?  I mean, is this a GM problem or a player problem?  I maintain it's both, but that the two really ought to be distinguished carefully, as they don't lead to quite the same problems.

The GM's Silly Idea

If the GM thinks this way, then she in effect holds out having a game as a reward.  I'd go a lot farther than Walt here: if you make having a game contingent on successful play, then what you're really saying is, "Play my way or don't play at all."  There goes the social contract, not to mention personal maturity and everything else.

This, I think, is the main thrust of Walt's post, so I'm not going to rehash it all in less clear language than Walt already gave.

The Players' Silly Idea

What happens if the players think this way?  My own experience is that most players have tried to run a game at least once, and if the Idea is as pervasive as Walt and I think it is, then most players must have it embedded in their minds.  This makes them presume the Idea on the part of the GM, and thus act somewhat peculiarly.

You get a given situation, in which the players feel stuck for the moment.  They presume that if they can't continue, it's because they are not being rewarded, i.e. they are being punished.  They immediately want to know why they're being punished: what have we done wrong?  Notice that as soon as they feel stuck, they (1) shift to meta-analysis, (2) begin to look backwards rather than forwards, and (3) think negatively rather than positively.  I have no problem with meta-analysis per se, although it can turn into a Death Spiral, but this is a situation where what you want is everyone focused on what's next.  Instead, because they think the GM has the Idea, they pull up short at the very worst time.

Notice that this situation can happen when the GM doesn't understand why.  In fact, I think this is one of the Top 10 Big Problems GMs Have: my players just stopped dead in front of a nice big unlocked door with a red carpet and a big sign saying "open me," and they won't move and they just whine; what do I do?  By Freitagian analysis, what's happened is that the players have decided that they cannot go on (for whatever reasons), and they would rather brood over their failures and their frustrations than open the damn door.

So what do you do about it?

Again, this is a double problem.  The "easy" one, which Walt has significantly tackled (as have so many other threads lately) is when you're the GM with the Idea.  Burn the idea, have an idiectomy, etc.  Lots of cool things to do.

Let me ask y'all.  Suppose you're a player, and the rest of the gang are like this.  What do you do?  Suppose you're a player and your GM is like this.  What do you do?

My guess is that the thing to do is leap wildly into the dark.  It's like Indy in the holy grail movie: he's got to make a leap of faith.  Unlike Indy, you won't actually die.  So what the hell?

If it works, you get rewarded for being fun and cool and making things happen, and pretty soon everyone else wants to be cool too.  Peer pressure makes the game work.

If it doesn't work, you need to keep doing it and making the group back you up.  Eventually you want to overpower the GM's "scruples" so that you can continue no matter what.  You want excitingly cool failure and devastation to move the story forward.

Now, as a really hard question, what do you do if you're the GM and your players have the Idea?  How do you provoke them to leap wildly and make things up, without regard for serious consequences?  You can't reward them for doing so until they do so, if you see what I mean.

Okay, 'nuff said.

My thoughts concerning being a GM where your players have the problem idea "Success=Continuation" is to just keep giving them the information as Walt has described.
If they have really bought into the success=continuation idea, then they will, at worst, think you're railroading them...or, at best, they will think that their previous success or failure has directed them on this path to the cliff, or failing to capture the henchman means 'we have to invade the base' instead of bypassing it, or whatever.

I think the players will find this all not too big a stretch from 'expectations'. Especially, if you give even better information about the same 'next step' for having a successful encounter with the henchman etc (like Walt says, capturing alive him means plans and info...even killing him might be a key card to the front gate)

Yes, just posting to say that I've always maintained that one good solution to problems with Illusionist play is better Illusionist play. Not easy as people often point out, but definitely a possibility. Illusionism isn't dead, people are just realizing the difficulties inherent and figuring out ways around it.

So, while a move to Narrativism or No Myth play are options, so is just improving your technique.

Or, IOW, what Walt said.

Mike

My silence should be taken as agreement.

Fang Langford

p. s. Or illness, your call.