Why adventure at all?

[TonyLB]

My argument is that they address something that is hard to address in other ways.  Which is why, in fact, games without them usually don't function well.

I don't think kewl powerz and adventure are necessary.  But I think they are a reliable technique for addressing something that is necessary.  If I could just figure out what it is then I could address it in a different way in Misery Bubblegum, which would (I suspect) help the game tremendously.

[Andrew Norris]

...
I definitely agree that it's hard to have fun playing such a character [without power]  in an RPG, though.  So... why?  What is it that the power and meaning contribute to fun in RPGs that isn't necessary in (say) television?

Here's how I read it, based on the ideas we're bandying about:

Powers are an easy hook for the target audience. People will look at a game and say "Okay, what can I do?" The really easy way to answer this is to give a list of powers and weapons, or describe some places the characters can go off to and adventure in.

Whether the current audience for RPGs is big on adolescent wish fulfillment, or tuned to expect this because that's how every other RPG does it, or whatever, it's an easy answer to give.

You can say "Well, you can deal with human issues and triumph over your internal and external troubles". Lots of people will reply, "You could do that with existing games", or "You could do that in real life".

But you can't, not really. Or at least there's very little support for it. Typical mainstream RPGs have a clear split between the stuff that gets rules (powers, adventuring, combat) and the stuff that doesn't ("people stuff"). You can deal with a character trying to reconcile with his estranged father in D&D, but the rules don't give you squat to work with. You're freeforming it.

I think in order to test whether or not people would be interested in a roleplaying game about basic human issues, there has to be a game that actually deals with real human issues. I can't think of one.

Sure, some games give it a half-page or so. I'm thinking of two sources heralded as among the best traditional RPG advice on this kind of thing: Robin's Laws, and the old Champions supplement Strike Force. (It's telling to me that the latter is the most in-depth advice on dealing with human issues I can think of -- and it's from a game designed to simulate comic books, written in the '80s.)

Even that advice boils down to "Give them what they want." Player wants tragedy in their character's life? Make bad things happen to them! Huh? That's the best we can do? Thousands of pages written about swords and lasers in twenty years, and for drama we get "Do it"?

See, if I want to run a game with high fantasy magic, I get tons of information I can throw into the SIS, and mechanics legitimizing its use. I want to run a game with human drama, and apart from a couple of pages of GMing advice, I need to wing it. (Actually, there's tons of source material, it's just novels, TV, and film. But that goes back to "Do it".)

So what I think we need is a game that describes how to do "everything else" in as much detail as it does "powers and adventures". Give me mechanics that help me run a dramatic story arc of tragic love. Show me with examples a few different ways to actually model in play what I see on TV.

Whew. All those words, and I think I'm still saying it's history and laziness. :) Well, that, and the fact that most mainstream gamers who include human drama in their games are practically rabid about divorcing it from the rules, so that it can stay "serious" and "about roleplaying". It's in games, but it's freeform improv theater, unsupported by System.

I'm actually working on a game, working title Chick Flick, obviously inspired by Breaking the Ice. You watch a romantic comedy, and there's as many clear tropes, stock events, and character types as there are in fantasy fiction. It's obviously possible to construct a game using these elements.

It doesn't have powers and adventures, but one thing about romance: Everybody thinks their situation is unique. I certainly think it gives "the characters are special" enough credence to get around the Categorial Imperative. It seems to in real life.

[TonyLB]

Andrew:  Yeah, I do think that the powerz thing is a self-reinforcing cycle.  But also...

Okay, new thought.  As I've been contemplating this, I kept thinking about what Powers do for players, and what Adventure and challenge does for the GM.  But what about the reverse?  How do things look when we view the cool powers of the characters as GM resources provided by the players and the adventures as player resources provided by the GM?

It's already been mentioned that adventure and threat (and, generally, exceptional circumstances) empower players to have a broader freedom of action.  They feel justified in doing more things, because they are in the charged situation... they're "driven to it."

Mind you, their characters could go and (say) break into Fort Knox and rob the US of its gold reserves even if there were no external threat to motivate them.  But the players couldn't do that.  They need an external threat ("If you don't gather this gold to create the Stardust Glitter Beam then the alien armada will vaporize earth!") to justify taking such an extreme (and fun) action.

Conversely, an uncaring universe could go and have two thousand cybernetic monkeys bear down on a character with intent to kill, even if the character were powerless.  But the GM can't do that.  They need the character powers ("Vector has the strength of a thousand men!") to justify presenting such an extreme (and fun) threat.

This is clearly a virtuous cycle, with positive reinforcement:  If the characters are powerful enough the GM gives them a massive threat, which in turn justifies them taking extreme action, which will prove them capable of taking on yet greater threats, and so on.

But if the characters are too mundane, too much exactly like (or weaker than) those around them then it's hard to justify starting the cycle.  Which limits everybody:  the players because their characters aren't threatened enough, and the GM because the characters aren't powerful enough.

Thoughts?

[John Kim]

So the notion that almost every RPG ever written has kewl powerz and adventure, and that's just because it's "fun" is sort of like saying "Well, pretending to be an elf or a dwarf is fun... so it's no surprise that every RPG ever created is in a tolkien fantasy setting."

See, if I want to run a game with high fantasy magic, I get tons of information I can throw into the SIS, and mechanics legitimizing its use. I want to run a game with human drama, and apart from a couple of pages of GMing advice, I need to wing it. (Actually, there's tons of source material, it's just novels, TV, and film. But that goes back to "Do it".)

So what I think we need is a game that describes how to do "everything else" in as much detail as it does "powers and adventures". Give me mechanics that help me run a dramatic story arc of tragic love. Show me with examples a few different ways to actually model in play what I see on TV.

I think this is a major reason for the fantasy focus.  Supernatural or superscience powers can have crunchy rules without causing problems for believability.  By comparison, it is difficult to have crunchy RPG rules for lawsuits, emergency room medicine, or tragic love (for example) that are both playable and believable.  There have been numerous efforts -- for example, first edition Vampire had more space to non-combat activities than to combat (11 pages to 5 pages).  But I suspect the non-combat mechanics were not very successful in play.  

The action/adventure focus (i.e. extraordinary PCs in extraordinary circumstances) is more general.  Given the split of GM and players, I think it is natural for RPGs to externalize.  And if players act primarily through individual characters, then empowering the player means empower that character.  So I think it's natural that the PCs are extraordinary compared to their immediate surroundings.  (In principle, this allows for extraordinary children in Oz or extraordinary bunnies compared to their their warren, but this isn't an avenue often explored.)

I think there are ways around these tendencies, but they aren't purely arbitrary adherence to tradition.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I don't think kewl powerz and adventure are necessary.  But I think they are a reliable technique for addressing something that is necessary.  If I could just figure out what it is then I could address it in a different way in Misery Bubblegum, which would (I suspect) help the game tremendously.

What do you know, I can answer this one. Could be perhaps because I don't do kewl powerz in my own design anymore, at least in the sense mainstream games do it.

The something necessary addressed by kewl powerz is characterization. Being a <insert character type> obliviates the necessity of indentity. You can shoot lightning out of your butt? Good for you, that makes you a superhero. As you can see, the kewl powerz are just a justification for the identity, not the identity itself. Both D&D and WW games demonstrate this principle very clearly, although the kewl powerz tend to overshadow the original purpose. Look at D&D, for example: it's definite history that the original purpose of character classes and class powers was niche protection and tactical variety. Actual kewl powerz came to the picture with the third edition. Same with Vampire: the Masquerade, where the primary point definitely was that you're a vampire, and powers were there just because, you know, you have to model vampire powers somehow.

Similarly, adventure makes a good frame for demonstrating color and theme and whatever in a story. It's a rather common and popular story framework, but by no means the only possible: the important thing is that the players (author) know how to pace, what comes next, and so on. These things are much easier in an adventure story than any story that doesn't comform to a framework. What's more, adventure is a simple framework to apply in a game: it's just a matter of goal:means:resistance-juxtaposition, and rather trivial to model.

As you can see, I'm pretty cynical about these things. What players expect and designers offer is simple, uncomplicated play. Letting the player play "elf" or "vampire" gives the character an off-the-shelf identity. Letting the GM control pacing and situation with a mission (adventure) structure is an easy way to keep the game going without the players having to exert themselves.

So, my take is that you don't need kewl powerz or adventure stuff IF you can offer
1) character identity, including niche protection or any other accompanying issues the game you design needs
2) purpose for action, including tools of decisionmaking
without also giving out kewl powerz and adventures. Take MLwM, for example: the game manages without adventures (and kewl powerz, if you ask me), because it offers another model of story and tools for keeping the game on track. The players still know what happens next and what they're supposed to do, so there's no need for adventure particularly.

I've not followed Misery Bubblegum with more than a sideways glance, but it seems to be about teenage school drama. I think that you can manage without kewl powerz if you put in cliques or something to define characters, and give tools for story structuring. Both are pretty achievable goals.

[Joel P. Shempert]

That's a good point, about identity. For example, Over the Edge tries to dispense with the clear-cut categories for easy identification, offering instead a generous philosophy of "Play whoever you want." It makes "wierd powers" available, but suggests that more mundane characters, particularly deeply fleshed-out ones, can be more rewarding (The Player's Survival Guide even has extended advice on this topic). But in practice, players seem (in my experience) to gravitate toward the special powers, or equivalent qualities like "Uber-leet superspy." Partly this could be power fantasy, but I think it has at least as much to do with identity: presented with a menu of "Anything," they blank out and grab the nearest available "hook" to hang a character concept on. And, tragically in a game like OTE where your Traits are as much about WHo You Are as about WHat You Can Do, I've found it's like tooth-pulling to get new players invested in personality traits and what-not. It's all "Fighting Ability," "Cool Powerz," and "Uh, what should my third trait be?" There have been exceptions, but my experience has largely been an uphill battle.

Peace,

[Callan S.]

I don't think kewl powerz and adventure are necessary.  But I think they are a reliable technique for addressing something that is necessary.  If I could just figure out what it is then I could address it in a different way in Misery Bubblegum, which would (I suspect) help the game tremendously.

It's the impulsive question asking, the 'what happens next!?' you want there. Remember that post where I described a woman running up to your PC and ripping off her clothes?

It's a SIS proposal that hardly lets your mind sit there, being calm. That's what kewl powers do as well...pour lightening bolts, M-16's, lions, tigers and bears, oh my, into a situation, and the mind really starts to stir at what will happen next.

I think you'll need to look into including mind stirring concepts for the highschool genre. Having blackmail over the biggest bully in the school? Hottest girl has a crush on you. And...man, this is really hard! High school was so bland...screw it, put psionics in, everybody else does for modern settings! J/K!

[TonyLB]

Wow... so we've got "plausibility", "characterization", "inspiration to action"... plus all the other things entered earlier in the thread, and they're all somehow connected to the powers and adventures.  That's COOL!

I don't know how to say this that it couldn't be misinterpreted, because you can't hear my voice tone.  So know that the emotional content here is that I am pleased, and impressed by all of you, and frustrated and excited all at the same time.  And now, let me say:  I don't think any of us know what this stuff does for a game.  I think that we think we know because we have a lot of experience, and our native comfort with the form is so strong that it creates a huge blind spot where we have great difficulty creating any strong theoretical framework.

That's exciting to me.  That's unexplored territory right smack in the middle of the way we game.  But I now think that it's well beyond the scope of one thread to deal with.  So I'm going to use this to spawn further threads, and some PM discussions, and I certainly encourage other people to do the same.

[Vaxalon]

great holy wisdom in religion

Coincidentally, I'm currently creating an RPG that focuses on faith and doubt...

Of course, there's Kewl Powerz too.

[M. J. Young]

Adventure

Everyone has a some "thrill seeker" desire in them. In everyone it's set against some amount of risk aversion. People who are high on thrill seeking and low on risk aversion go rock climbing, white water rafting, skydiving, bungee jumping, and other active dangerous activities, if they're physically able to do so. People who tip the scale the other way don't.

Adventure stories provide surrogate thrills. We watch Indiana Jones or Spiderman or James Bond because the risks are over the top, so we experience the thrill of identification with the hero. Role playing games let us do the same thing with our own heroes.

Also, as compared with other kinds of stories, adventures more easily support multiple protagonists. You can do a game like Matchmaker, but the focus of the romance is the couple. Multiple detectives are very difficult to manage in mysteries. An adventure creates the possibility that you can have several players each individually be heroes.

Powers

In one of the first reviews of Multiverser, the writer said he would never play it as an I game because he knew himself too well ever to believe that he, personally, would make a good adventurer. I think that missed a great deal of the point of Multiverser, where no matter who you are you can become a great adventurer; but it underscores an aspect of why we have kewl powerz in games. We don't always really believe in ourselves, that ordinary people like us could ever do anything really remarkable.

Of course, you don't have to have kewl powerz to do something remarkable; but most people who do something truly remarkable do so maybe once or twice in their entire lives--any more than that, and it starts to redefine remarkable, that is, it becomes mundane. Further, doing something remarkable often involves having one's peculiar talent match up with an opportunity.

What kewl powerz do is make it considerably easier to do something remarkable, and to do so again and again in new situations. Superman comics remain interesting over the long haul because the writers find new ways to use the established powers. If you can do something no one else can do, not only does that make you special (and that's something which appeals to more than just adolescents--everyone wants to perceive himself as special), it also makes it possible for you to apply that ability to solve new problems. Even if there isn't an obvious match between the problem and the ability, if the ability is remarkable enough you can find a way to use it so that you can solve the problem no one else could solve.

I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young

[Itse]

Edited out, wrong thread.