[Feng Shui] Endless debate takes over (long)

[kalyptein]

I apologize if this is overly long.  Lots of Actual Play threads seem to receive "need more details" posts, so I dumped in everything I could think of.  Also, I'm just wordy...

This happened in a game a good while back, but I was just reading "Hey, that's -my- conflict!" and certain similarities between the circumstances described there and those from my game reminded me of it.  Always meant to ask what people think, because it was a troubling turn of events for me.

Situation:  I'm GM.  The system is Feng Shui, setting is a space opera universe.  The world isn't terribly complex, just something I banged together using things like Star Wars and Farscape as inspiration.  The characters are space privateers, bearing a letter of marque from a guild-nation of space traders.  The "guaranteed bad-guys" of the setting are the Slavers, everyone else I conceived of as shades of grey, neither wholly noble nor evil.  The players have mentioned a few times that they might enjoy going full on pirate, but they'll leave that choice for later and start with some legitimacy.  The game is meant to be fast and action-packed.  I frame them mercilessly into adventure openings that (I hope) were open ended in where they could go, but I gave them Plot Points usable to demand the inclusion of scenes, characters, settings, themes, etc.

The Players:

• Jason - long-time gamer, he and I have had some great experiences together.  We're roommates at the time.  He's playing a time/space manipulating gun-slinger.  He's played in one other Feng Shui game and loved it.
  
• Eric - another long-time gamer.  We're good friends, but I haven't played much with him before (Jason has).  Easily distractable, but enthusiastic.  He's been nominated captain of the pirates and is playing a psionic warrior-alien from an insular but highly advanced race (a Starcraft Protoss with the serial number filed off).
  
• Paul - long-time gamer and friend, but again not someone I've played with much.  Heather's husband.  Jason actively dislikes his style, which often tends toward silly/comedic characters.  I'm not a huge fan of this either, but as we outlined his character, I felt pretty good about it.  She's a felinoid ex-aristocrat, trying to rebuild her clan's fortunes after the Slavers destroyed their trade fleet.  He and J were both in the prior Feng Shui game together, as was Heather.
  
• Heather - relative newbie, but has played in a handful of games.  Paul's wife.  After our last game together, she thanked me and said she really felt like gaming was starting to click for her.  She is the token "human fallen through a wormhole".  Punk spacer-chick.  Pilot and engineer for the ship.
  
• Ashley - total newbie, Jason's girlfriend.  Still trying to sort out if she likes this whole gaming thing.  She's playing a thief from a race that can record and swap their memories.  She's lost her own memory and is trying to regain it.
  

All of us except Ashley had just finished up a Dnd game I ran.  It was decent, but the party suffered from periodic "why are we together again?" issues.  We voted for a lighter game and Space Pirate emerged as the consensus.  Paul, Jason, and Eric's character's start out as crew in an older pirate gang.

The Game:

Session 1: opens with them taking command of a captured smuggler ship and bidding their former crew fairwell.  They try to escape hostile space in their ship, and end up rescuing the stranded human explorer from her ship.  She patches their ship up, they repel boarders, storm the enemy destroyer and loot the fuel they need.  Everyone has fun.

Session 2.  The Whatzit Modulator on the ship blows out and they have to limp to a nearby planet.  It's a loosely allied port, but they arrive in time to find that its about to be overrun by raiders.  The military is commandeering all the resources and no one can sell them a spare modulator.  Looking at the sparse defenses, the characters know the locals can't really hope to win, so they redouble their efforts to get offworld as soon as possible.

Enter Ashley's character.  She's being blackmailed into working for a local official, who is looking to escape before the raiders arrive.  He's heard about the PCs and their ship.  He sends her to set up a meeting with them, wherein he offers them the part they need if they'll take him with them.  But he's not about to escape into a life of poverty, so he demands they break into the local treasury and secure him enough funds to live comfortably (plus anything for themselves).  After they leave, Ashley falls in with them, eager to get offworld too, and none too loyal to the official.

I figured this would give rise to some fun.  They can compromise their ethics (or just show me they don't have any, I really don't know their characters well yet, nor do they, I think).  In that case it'll turn into a heist plot.  They can try to get the part in some fashion (steal it, fool the official, etc).  They can even stay and fight.  Whatever they want.  The game comes to a crashing halt and an endless ethical debate starts.

Everyone agreed the official was scum and they would cheerfully screw him over.  They regarded the locals as friends and didn't want to rob them, except Eric argued they might as well, since it would deny the raiders some booty (his character's race held a deep hatred of the raiders).  They go around in circles for a long time.  Eventually, Paul decides that his character is going to split with the crew and leave the ship.  He says OOC that he's perfectly amenable to being persuaded back.  The others do so, but Jason tells me afterward that he's very annoyed at having this "plot" foisted on him, against his will.  We had agreed in the beginning that anyone could leave any time they wanted and start a new character, but the game would follow the largest clump of remaining characters, so if you write yourself out, you should recognize what'll happen.  Of course Paul never intended to leave in this instance.

Eventually everyone gets tired of ethics.  The others half-heartedly agree to Eric's plan to plant an explosive trap at the bank for the raiders (in lieu of robbing it), assuming they can get in without harming the guards.  It sputters out without success.  They fool the official into preping for departure, get the part, fight his bodyguards who try to hijack the ship and blast off.  Things really pulled back together at the end, with some group congrats to Paul for a very cool means to stop the official from using the local space defense to stop them.

Session 3 goes fairly well.  Paul's character helps a conspiracy murder a visiting noble in return for bringing his clan in on their rising fortunes.  Eric and Heather end up standing around, feeling kind of helpless as the conspiracy's goons cart off the noble they had just rescued from a crashed ship.  I think they felt OOC that it was Paul's plot, and IC that this was alien business they didn't want to get involved with.  But they seemed out of sorts, kind of like they felt they should have done something but weren't sure what (at least that's my reading).

Session 4: runs beautifully.  They raid a Slaver asteroid fort, free slaves, loot valuable ore and soar to freedom.

Session 5: crash and burn.  They dock at a mafia-run spaceport and get involved in some various entertainment.  Ashley's character runs into someone who mistakes her for someone else (actually, a clone-sister she didn't know about) and approaches her to see if she still wants to buy a certain memory chip for 10 million credits (an absurd sum).  She pretends to know what's up, agrees, and resolves to steal it.  She finds out the sale will be on a certain arms-dealer's yacht.  She goes to the group and asks for their help.  At first things are going well.  They discuss how to steal it.  Then they decide to wait for the real buyer (who they find out is on the way) and grab the money as well.  Then they decide to hijack the ship to boot.  It looks like things are headed for a grand blowout, just the kind of thing the game's all about.  Then the ethics discussion begins again.

Paul and Heather want to be absolutely certain that the buyer, seller, and host (the arms dealer) are legit targets for the privateer.  They start asking if their Guild has a hit-list of legit targets and such, which I felt was kind of absurd (didn't really have a chance to express this).  I didn't want to start labeling everyone good or bad in some easy to check fashion.  People, particularly Paul kept talking about how they might go over the edge into true piracy, perhaps even by accident, so I thought these choices would be fun.  Eric and Jason argue that its a single chip being sold for a huge price on an arm-dealer's ship at a station run by the Mob...*of course they're bad* (pretty much what I had intended to convey).  The discussion wanders around, and new plans are proposed, including selling the chip, which Ashley objects to, since its part of her personal plot arc and it was on the advise of the player group that she even brought it to the crew's attention.  We end with a half-assed agreement to hire a hacker to pry into things and find out if they are "bad" enough to rob.  At this point, I'm more than willing to stamp smiley or frowny faces on every NPC just so long as this sort of thing never happens again.

The End:

Due to schedules and holidays and such, we never get back together.  I personally made no great efforts to remedy this, since the game had just become so painful.  But it alternated with wonderful moments of swashbuckling fun.  In fact most of it was fun.  Just the parts that weren't, really weren't.

It seemed strange that for all the efforts to create a group with a unified concept, skipping the whole "getting the party together" thing, and shooting for a breezy action-movie feel resulted in far more catastrophe that anything that happened in the regularly argumentative but smooth-playing DnD game.  Maybe my efforts at moral quandaries were misplaced, but people kept talking about how they might "go bad" or the like, so I figured they would have fun making the choices.  They were not going to have horrible consequences regardless; no exploring the dark depths of the soul if they chose to be bad.  Perhaps the action movie atmosphere contributed to Paul and Heather feeling that morality should be more black and white?

It was incredibly frustrating, and I devoutly hope it never happens again.  Some of it could have been cured if players would have stepped up and committed their characters to choices, instead of wrangling about it endlessly, but I believe this would have resulted in a lot discontent in the group, and probably the fragmentation of the crew (unfortunately right down the middle).

Alex

[Halzebier]

Maybe my efforts at moral quandaries were misplaced, but people kept talking about how they might "go bad" or the like, so I figured they would have fun making the choices.  They were not going to have horrible consequences regardless; no exploring the dark depths of the soul if they chose to be bad.  Perhaps the action movie atmosphere contributed to Paul and Heather feeling that morality should be more black and white?

When you're really exploring moral quandaries, you have to allow individual answers.

And that means scrapping party unity. The PCs will have to be allowed to go their separate ways or even attack and betray each other etc (which doesn't have to lead to unfun play at all, mind you). Even if you're willing to do it this way, there's still the problem of communicating it (i.e., it's probably a good idea to demonstrate early on that splitting up and PC-PC conflicts are perfectly okay).

Regards,

Hal

[kalyptein]

Well, the thing is, we weren't really exploring moral quandries.  That wasn't the point of the game.  They were there to allow the players to make a choice and shape the course of their events.  Are you good pirates or bad pirates?  Both are going to lead to gun-fights, plunder, and adventure, but who you fight, plunder, and venture forth against will vary.  Are you beloved of the people, or do you twirl your mustache and make people walk the plank.

We had settled up front the issue of backstabbing and crew-splitting.  You could do so freely, but you would essentially be narrating your character's departure from the crew (they might return later if the group saw fit).  So long as you understood the camera was going to keep following the bulk of the crew around, this was a perfectly legit choice.  Maybe you get tired of your character, or find a situation that looks like a perfect way for them to go out with a bang.  Write em out, and in with the new.

The moral quandries just kind of took over.  In fact, I didn't even think of the Session 5 situation as a quandry at all when I set it out.  Shady people were up to something secretive in no-man's-land.  It seemed straight forward to me.  I never guessed that half of the party would demand such exacting proof of villainy.  The fact that this kind of thing kept happening makes me suspect that there was some kind of disconnect in the group's view of the game, but I don't know how it arose.  The concept was so simple, and the social contract was the most formal we'd ever had.  It seemed like everyone was onboard.

Alex

[Brand_Robins]

A couple of thoughts:

1. You didn't want the game to be about moral choices. However, some of the players may have wanted it to be. Some players also just love to argue about crap that doesn't really matter because it keeps them from having to actually get in and take risks. Sounds like you had a combination of these going on.

2. There is a contradiction that I can see players falling right into between the "no big consequences" and the "we stay with the biggest clump of PCs." What this really means is "there are no big consequences so long as you end up agreeing with the majority. Otherwise you lose your beloved character for an indeterminate amount of time (which could be forever) because you didn't follow the group will well enough."

In that situation I can see people freaking out about what decisions mean, because they need to make sure that they 1) do what is fun for them but without 2) effectively removing their character from the game by making a decision the rest of the group will disagree with and leave them over. So you get people OOCly arguing to support the decision they want to make IC, in order to change people's OOC minds so that they will stick with them IC.

So there are possible consequences for moral decisions – if the other players judge you, or your character, as Bad Wrong Fun, you lose your character. Lots of reason to worry about the fine details of that, especially if you aren't able to specifically identify the point of discomfort and are just thrashing about in the dark over it. (Which it sounds like some of your players were.)

3. If the game isn't about moral choices, then don't put moral choices front and center. If they're mostly there for color, then let them be color. When the PCs want to know who is good and who is bad so they can be good or bad without worry about what it means, let it happen. If the PCs are gonna make the group decision to stay or go, let them make their decision obvious and easy – and then those that want to dissent can do so with full knowledge of what they are choosing. It mostly gets bad when you know you're supposed to make a choice but have no idea, and no way of getting an idea, about what the choice will mean.

4. Some of the players were not playing the same story. Some of them wanted to be noble privateers, some wanted to be Pirates! This doesn't seem to have ever been fully resolved, possibly because resolution could have led to some players losing their characters (as above). If you have two groups playing two different kinds of Sim story, you're gonna have clashes.

5. I believe you when you say you didn't have laid out "where this should go" ideas. However, I think the players did. And I think some of the players may have subconsciously thought that you did. There seems to be a lot of "what should we do in order to get the RIGHT answer" thought going on behind the scenes on the player's side. The "right" was probably, in this case, a mushy and unexamined amalgam of "right for the GM's story" with "right in the eyes of the group so they won't leave me" and a bit of "right for the Pirate! story I'm telling" vs. "right for the noble privateer fighting bad slavers story that I'm telling, unlike the Pirate story that he is telling."

As a result: confusion, fear, disruption, paralysis.

[Bill Cook]

It sounds like a fun campaign, overall. Losing your character for being the minority is pretty stiff. Resolving player disputes with unstructured OOC discussion has great potential for dissatisfaction. Two ideas come to mind: give a big, fat reward for dissent and dismissal. That player's next character will enter with leverage. The other is to split the stage. So Paul and Heather want to take the high road. Where does it take them? Run that answer in parallel with Eric and Jason's decision to don the eyepatch, even if you have to keep two cameras working.

I don't know Feng Shui, but if there isn't rules support for resolving player (not character) adversity, you could flip a coin. The losing player might chafe at being dragged along, but compare that with how much it sucks to resolve arguments through OOC social tactics (i.e. whine, complain, bully, criticise, exhaust, give in, resent, etc).

P.S. That thing about the guild's kill list keeps tickling my brain. As GM, if I overheard that concern, I would interpret it as confusion over the setup and make a god's right declaration. e.g. "Oh, they're bad guys. All of them. That's what I intend you to infer. Or to put it another way, you pull the list up on your monitor and mugshots of every party appears, with the words 'KILL ON SIGHT' in blinking red letters."

[Joe J Prince]

I like Bill's PS suggestion!
This thread reminds me of several campaigns I've played.

...Then the ethics discussion begins again.

Paul and Heather want to be absolutely certain that the buyer, seller, and host (the arms dealer) are legit targets for the privateer...

I'm really interested to know how much of this was in-character and how much was out-of-character - you say Paul and Heather which suggests OOC. From personal experience I've found that in areas of group-splitting the discussion tends to spill over which then becomes unhealthy by its impact on group cohesion - a social contract issue.

I think that by stating that the majority of  the group would always be followed has put a big GM fiat issue right out into play.  Although I think personally this was a good thing to outline at the start of the game.

In Feng-Shui character creation is fast and pretty painless -if the story moves away from your PC then so be it. I reckon players should decide for themselves whether they will accept that their PC would no longer associate with the group and generate a new character who would - or they find some justification for staying with the group - even if it's slaughter them all later.
Then ideally a later campaign should determine the fate of those rogue PCs and their new companions.
I've lost more PCs to narrative divergence than mechanical death, and I'm pleased with that.

Cheers,
Joe

PS blood drain AV bonus is SO the best schtick in FS!

[kalyptein]

...Then the ethics discussion begins again.

Paul and Heather want to be absolutely certain that the buyer, seller, and host (the arms dealer) are legit targets for the privateer...

I'm really interested to know how much of this was in-character and how much was out-of-character - you say Paul and Heather which suggests OOC.

I don't remember exactly.  These debates tended to roam between IC and OOC.  Most of what what was discussed could be said IC, but could also be OOC table-talk.  These would be laced with definite OOC "asides".  I think the level of OOC tended to increase the longer we went on as people started overtly looking for ways to satisfy the other players and end discussion.

. If the game isn't about moral choices, then don't put moral choices front and center. If they're mostly there for color, then let them be color. When the PCs want to know who is good and who is bad so they can be good or bad without worry about what it means, let it happen.

4. Some of the players were not playing the same story. Some of them wanted to be noble privateers, some wanted to be Pirates!

These both make a lot of sense to me, and in fact after the first problem in session 2, I decided to back off the whole moral quandry thing.  I never expected the set up in session 5 to be a problem.  But the really confusing thing was that Paul, who was one of the ones pushing for really clear cut good and bad, was the one who on several occasions would raise the possibility of turning freebooter, either intentionally or by accidentally raiding a friendly cargo.  He's also the one who willingly allied himself with a murderous conspiracy, after they had assassinated an aquaintance and then asked his help in arranging another killing.  So I don't see quite how he was imagining he was playing the noble privateer.  In Heather's case, I think you're right.  Jason and Eric weren't really agitating for outright evil-doing, but they were certainly more willing to be shady.  I doubt they would have minded going fully piratic, but I don't believe they ever actually pushed for it, explicitly.

Just in case there is any confusion about my "camera follows the majority" rule, it did not come into play during an adventure, only between them.  The crew was free to split up, argue, etc on camera.  They could even set aside their characters temporarily ("hey, I'm going to stay on this commerce planet, pick me up on your way back") if they wanted to play someone new for a session.  However, if they declared they were leaving the crew, or the rest of the crew decided to jettison them, we weren't going to follow the departing member beyond that point.  My intention was for everyone to make characters who could more or less get along, and if dramatic tensions arose, for them to use a bit of author stance to invent a reason why they stick around (assuming they want to).  I really didn't expect group cohesion to be an issue.

Also, no, Feng Shui really has no rules for settling arguments between players.

Alex

[Callan S.]

Well, the thing is, we weren't really exploring moral quandries.

Well, you might not have intended to emphasise the morality. But the players themselves might not have been able to avoid morally judging their own actions. The players are probably very open to enjoying to narrativism. So much so, when they want to play under another agenda they have to have precautions, like ensuring the bad guys are so bad one doesn't have to bring concience into it.

BTW, why not stamp NPC's with good or evil marks? What feels wrong about that?

[Brand_Robins]

I never expected the set up in session 5 to be a problem.  But the really confusing thing was that Paul, who was one of the ones pushing for really clear cut good and bad, was the one who on several occasions would raise the possibility of turning freebooter, either intentionally or by accidentally raiding a friendly cargo. 

There are two ways I can read Paul in this situation. One is that he wanted clear good and bad so he could chose to be on the bad side, but also have enough dubiousness to be brought back from the dark side. It's a fairly common thing among RPGers, thanks to Star Wars. I mean we'd already seen something like this from Paul when he went rogue with the "but you guys can argue me back onto your side" digression.

Which brings me right into the other point: Paul may have been being an obstructionist, ICly and OOCly. He was primadonnaing his way into the limelight both IC (by leaving and rejoining the group) and OOCly (by arguing the morality of everything when it wasn't important). It seems like it could fairly easily have been a form of spotlight hogging. The leave and get argued back often falls into that category, as in most "group agenda" RPGs there is this underlying assumption that we do everything to keep everyone in the group safe and IN the group. So when he walked off and made a point that he could be brought back its seems to have been tantamount in the eyes of the other PCs to him hijacking the whole plot with a "haha, by the rules of social contract you must now make my character the center of all attention and justification by showing me how important I am by breaking you game to come and get me on my terms."

So, Paul could have been going for something possibly functional and just wasn't able to get it because neither he nor the others were able to identify it, or he could have just been on a dysfunctional journey the whole way through.

However, if they declared they were leaving the crew, or the rest of the crew decided to jettison them, we weren't going to follow the departing member beyond that point.  My intention was for everyone to make characters who could more or less get along, and if dramatic tensions arose, for them to use a bit of author stance to invent a reason why they stick around (assuming they want to).  I really didn't expect group cohesion to be an issue.

Yea, I can see that. Honestly, I've done the same myself many, many a time. And if everyone sticks to the "we all must stay together and it is all of our social responsibility to stay together" all the time then it can work. But if there is a "you can get voted off the island" rider to the "we all stick together" bill, then you can get issues. I've had whole campaigns fucked by it in the past, let me tell you.

Also, no, Feng Shui really has no rules for settling arguments between players.

Pretty much because Feng Shui rides on the whole idea of "you are a group of people with a common mission, and you will stick together to make that mission happen." If everyone wants that, it works. As soon as someone starts wanting to go all maverick, however, things can get hairy.