[Father & Son Fantasy] Looking for some help

[Calithena]

Hi folks -

I've now run 2 sessions of a fantasy game for a father and son in the neighborhood I like. We generated characters using a moderately homebrewed (mostly higher starting skills & hit points and modified tables with better backgrounds, courtesy of Calithena's Old School Chop Shop - I can't make a good modern game but I can convert your old beetle or impala into a mean dune buggy or lowrider) version of the Stormbringer 1e rules. The system for the first session was basically one-sided conflict resolution using the character sheet percentages as a benchmark: when a character wants to do something some other character in the game opposes there's a roll. For the second session I was that same c-rez plus some extreme shorthand combat rules so that we could focus on the cool minis (the son is like 9 and is crazy about the D&D minis and dwarven forge mastermaze stuff, so there you go).

I think we're going to keep playing at least once a month for the next six months or so. The world is the Young Kingdoms in the sense that I'm using that stuff for inspiration but I don't really give Xiombarg's teat what Moorcock wrote where, etc.: the map and broad history and racial caricatures are all it means, the rest is up to us.

The son's character: Dayan, Noble-Hunter of Ilmiora, some magical training (summons air elementals). The father's character is Asher, a wily first mate from a Vilmirian trading vessel.

The opening adventure saw Asher's ship wrecked by Pan Tangian invaders, so he makes his way to the castle, persuades the lord (Dayan's father) that he's in trouble, player input leads to an interesting set of skirmishes and inventory of kingdom, but they're still outnumbered even after the guerilla tactics. So, presto, there's a tomb nearby, with an ancient sword and amulet.

Dayan and Asher go to loot it, do so successfully. The sword agrees to help Dayan but is clearly evil and wants a boon in return: take me home. 'Home' will be R'lin K'ren A'a naturally. So the son saves his family (some cool fights with the seriously amped up demon sword here, Dayan's player was pumped) but now has to leave his sheltered home in the Ilmioran hinterlands, travel widely, and learn the consequences of his bargain. Meanwhile Asher, who was first mate on his old ship, can get his own command and vessel, in exchange for piloting Dayan where he needs to go.

So, this gives us a kind of open-ended, medium-length campaign arc.  It's Dayan's player's first time roleplaying and he really enjoys it though he gets embarassed by getting into character. He's a little bit of a shy kid and I think that one of the things his father and I would both kind of like to do is get him more comfortable expressing himself, which the 'cover' of his character can hopefully provide. (This is one thing that reflections or advice on would be helpful with.) I'm sort of interested (I think all of us are) in the Y-A growing up tale aspect of this series and having each adventure resolve around one sort of moral dilemma or another, plus the obligatory brutal fights and foreshadowing of the terrible home they have to take the demon sword too.

But I basically want this to be a 'nice' story with some scary parts. That is, I totally have no interest in killing Dayan, unless maybe his player wants to make a heroic sacrifice at some point. Basically we're collaborating on a coming-of-age story together. There can be surprises, but I don't want one of those surprises to be: "Natural 20, suckah, you dead," halfway through the series. I know, I'm a moral degenerate who doesn't respect the old ways, I don't want to inflict my own sadomasochistic training at the hands of my elders on the next generation. I'm sorry.

But anyway, maybe I can get some help with how to handle the conflicts if 'character dead' isn't at the center of them, or pretending to be. (I also don't really want to run the game just pretending that, gosh, another fight, you might get killed, but clatter clatter the dice just came out for you this time.)

These two totally don't care what rules set I use, I can put just about any into play.

I guess what I'd like is something that has pretty strong character protection while still allowing a certain amount of tactical crunch and graininess in fights (because we're all having fun with that, the kid and his dad do minis battles and stuff, this is one case where the RPing is growing out of a kind of wargaming context despite this being 2006). This can be patch rules or a new system, it's really wide open, the last session was pretty much a hybrid of Stormbringer, the new D&D minis rules, and my own system hacks anyway. They're open to what I pick on this. One thought I had was that I might just tack a patch rule on to some older system sort of like Trollbabe's: first loss (of hit points, whatever, through the normal mechanics) discommodes you, you can restart your character again on the same conflict but then you're risking long-term consequences (imprisonment, maiming,  etc.), if you're still not happy losing after the second time you can get up like van Damme in Lionheart one last time but then if you lose that you're dead. Another thought I had was using Burning Wheel Revised and going easy on awarding the kind of Artha that you can use to preserve your character. Or patching some kind of hero point rules onto what we've been using so far. But anyway, you'll just have to take my word for it that despite the two sessions the rules we've used so far are not part of the social contract.

This isn't a 'sell me' thread, those aren't allowed here anyway. I'm interested in techniques people have used to run this kind of story and what system/rules/prep stuff might help me do it. Thanks in advance for whatever you can provide. I'll be happy to fill people in on some more details if it helps you help me, or just for general interest.

[Calithena]

Well, so hmmm, I forgot to mention the best part of that second session.

I had set up a talking pillar which asked a riddle en route to the aforementioned tomb. I had it ask the one where there's an angel that always tells the truth and a devil that always lies. You don't know which is which, but you get to ask one question to either one that will reveal which is which.

Asher's player (the father) started dutifully figuring it out, combining negatives and double negatives, when Dayan's player piped up: "Wait a minute! All we have to do is ask one of them whose tomb this is, or any other question we already know the answer to. If it tells the truth it's the angel, and if it lies it's the devil."

I had screwed up and not provided proper question closure conditions...it's supposed to be something like "If I ask your companion whether you're the angel, what will he say?" But if you can ask about anything then, well, there's nothing to it.

The pillar uttered a rueful chuckle and the face within went quiescent; Dayan and Asher passed one step closer to their goal.

[Paul T]

Calithena,

Well... isn't the point of the whole "one lies, one tells the truth" riddle not to find out which is which, but to get the information you want ("which way do I need to go")?

That's neither here not there. I'm not going to give you any advice on a specific system to use; there are many others here who are more knowledgeable in that respect.

However, I do have two comments:

1) You can have "non-lethal" combat even in a task resolution, hit points-type system. You just need to change the meaning of "0 hit points" (or whatever your system describes as death) to "defeat". You fight until you run out of hit points or whatever game resource you're using, and when you reach that point, your character suffers "defeat" and can no longer continue fighting. The character is knocked out, wounded, their desire overcome--for whatever reason, they're taken out of the fight. It's still just as dramatic. You just need to make sure your opponents have goals other than the death of the hero. That's if you want to keep using your D&D minis rules or something similar--of course, there are lots of other systems that'll get you the same effect in much more elegant ways.

2) In my experience, sometimes you can get a shy player to open up by giving them authority in a situation they feel strongly about, as long as they don't feel too much pressure. In my last game, I had a player (an adult) who didn't feel comfortable speaking in character. A scene came up where two of the other character needed someone to mediate their dispute. We put the shy player's character into a position of authority by having them come to him to resolve their quarrel. The player really "came alive" in that scene.

Best,


Paul

[Callan S.]

I was recently thinking of how to fit some nar like stuff in world of warcraft play (where if you die, you just come back as a ghost and run back to your body from a graveyard)

In it you do dungeons and stuff. The idea was that you were doing the dungeon for a cause*. If you give up on completing the dungeon, the cause is lost. BUT you also had a greater cause (defined by each player for their PC), something larger in scope. Now if you die twice in the dungeon, that second BIG cause is lost!! So it's a balance off, between the two causes, with the combat in the dungeon thinking you might be able to forfil both causes.

Why two deaths and not on the first death? I'd get into it, but it's complicated. But I think it adds to conviction.

* For my idea, the cause was determined by the players just adding causes and the character arguing for each. If no cause is determined after ten minutes, the GM/someone takes the most popular cause and the least talked about cause and flips a coin to see which becomes the cause of the day!

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Sean,

I think Paul has offered a viable option. "Defeat" is one thing, and death is another, especially since death as constructed in traditional play carries a remarkable degree of punishment at the personal level - lost investment, devaluation of input, exclusion from participation ... it's no surprise that RPG-inspired video games and their descendants ensure that characters can always get rebooted or return in some way.

But rather than go that route, which I think we can all see is a matter of patch-rules, hit points can still be important but just not be about character death (and player-exclusion). What they mean, well, that's something to consider, because it shouldn't be something like "just another GM plot twist" or stuff you already do anyway for positive-hit-point characters. You might have to come up with some kind of new creative concept in which "defeat" is really a defeat - but not a punishment for playing in the first place.

The question toward that end is to consider how much you, personally, are willing to let go of various baseline assumptions of old-school play for purposes of this game.

As a completely different counter-example, you probably recall that I did include character death in my D&D 3.X game with my neighbors (similar play-situation, obviously), and that we'd discussed it a bit beforehand, in that they knew their characters could die. It helped a little that we were playing 3rd-level characters to start and the rules seem to be more generous with hit points than the older versions; also, each player had two characters. Nonetheless, I threw some nasty critters at them and played them to win fights, not to give the players a good fright with a "GM-out" to keep them from dying; that ties in with our thematic unity in that game to focus on death as a price and as an ethical consideration.

Best, Ron

[Calithena]

Well, these are all good thoughts. The suggestion in my OP about loss conditions mirrors those of Ron and Paul and is something I'll probably implement, but I'm intrigued by the possibility of different conceptions of 'defeat'. This is a hard thing to quantify. Success and failure in traditional games is measured by modifications to your playing piece/character, which makes sense given the parameters of those games. A game like Dogs say alters this somewhat in that your character modifies over time but whether those changes are success or failure are really more or less up to the player to decide (along with what the changes are in descriptive terms, for the most part).

What other kinds of measure of success and failure would be appropriate here? There's the generalized success of having had a 'good adventure' or whatever, which is CA-vague. You could measure success in terms of modification to the playing board/game world - I've often longed for a game in which your character's adventures changed the game world. And then there's the kind of 'success' that comes from a confrontation with yourself, a learning/growing experience.

In the context of this game, success and failure might mean moving closer to or farther away from the eventual goal of returning the sword to its home. That's a plausible thing.

(Ron - it's interesting what you say about death - you're absolutely right - and yet Raise Dead was right there in the very early books, with fairly easy access, the preferred video game solution - and yet the early groups I played in used it sparingly or not at all, I house ruled it out at the tender age of nine I think - it seemed 'wrong' somehow in an RPG back then to a lot of people even though at the game level it's the most functional and obvious solution to the extreme lethality and social consequences thereof. I think this connects to a sense that getting killed and resurrected over and over can undermine a certain sense of character-integrity that I'd connect with Narrativism - also to people's sadomasochistic tendencies of course.)

I don't really want PC death on the table as an option unless the player pretty much says "this is important enough to me to risk my character's life". The kid is crazy into minis, he sits around telling himself stories with the minis, which is cool in my book. So I'm thinking of whipping up a simple leveling system that ties into the D&D minis game and more or less using the skirmish rules there to resolve combats, etc. But anyway, I can do that sort of thing in my sleep. I'm more interested in (a) the possibilities for reward/success as above and

(b) what I totally failed to express in the original post, and what's most important to me.

The kid's playing a game with his father. The kid's character is a lonely kid with a useless father; the father's character is a sort of older never-do-well rogue type who's now likely to serve as sort of a surrogate father as the kid's character has to transport this terrible black blade across the world.

I'm interested in exploring that dynamic and helping challenge, provoke, and reinforce their father-son bond through the game. This is really meaty stuff, but it's not the kind of thing we're normally challenging around here.  How can I - really concretely, particular suggestions for situations and adventures are welcome - do this? How can I make the game about and interesting to and helpful to the real life relationship between my players?

More later - gotta go.

[W. Don]

Hello:

The kid's playing a game with his father. The kid's character is a lonely kid with a useless father; the father's character is a sort of older never-do-well rogue type who's now likely to serve as sort of a surrogate father as the kid's character has to transport this terrible black blade across the world.

I'm interested in exploring that dynamic and helping challenge, provoke, and reinforce their father-son bond through the game. This is really meaty stuff, but it's not the kind of thing we're normally challenging around here.  How can I - really concretely, particular suggestions for situations and adventures are welcome - do this? How can I make the game about and interesting to and helpful to the real life relationship between my players?

At certain points throughout the adventure, have a letter delivered to Dayan and Asher (via magic). It's a message from the Dayan character's father (the Lord). Have the Dayan player decide what's in it (maybe even write it out?), but give him a format, like:

Dear Son:

I'm writing to tell you that: _____ (Stuff that happened while the pair was gone).

Word has come to us that you and Asher: _____ (Stuff the pair just did).

I hope that the two of you: _____ (The father character's hopes for the pair.)

-- signed, Father

You might also add: PS, Enclosed is a _____ to help you in your journey.

Maybe each player gets a chance, at certain points in the game (like while resting and so on), to raise his hand declaring the arrival of a letter, then that player decides what's in it.


— W.

[David Artman]

[questions about meaning of defeat, presence of death, etc]

The previous posters are correct in that you can always move the bar of "defeat" away from death to any number of other aims: alternate outcome of the conflict, capture, setbacks, etc. That softens the risks of conflict--in that it removes permanent penalties--but it works.

You could also consider a method I have stolen--err, appropriated with permission--from Walt Freitag, for GLASS: the Commit rule. Basically, as Callan and you suggest, it's a rule that states that a PC can ONLY die if it has Committed. To Commit, the PC must be at or below 0 HP, and must state that it Commits. At that moment, the PC is restored to full HP, but if it goes below 1 HP again in that conflict, it dies. (Insert Raise Dead here, if you like; but that waters down Commitment.)

The point is that this mechanic puts all protagonization into the players' hands: when they care about something enough, they can elect to risk death, but otherwise their characters can never die.

I'm interested in exploring that dynamic and helping challenge, provoke, and reinforce their father-son bond through the game. ...  How can I - really concretely, particular suggestions for situations and adventures are welcome - do this? How can I make the game about and interesting to and helpful to the real life relationship between my players?

Geez... want ice cream to go with that? ;-)

Seriously, though, this is a pretty tough thing: you want to bridge fictional situations into real life explorations of their relationship. Techniques, scenarios, and plot lines aside, are you sure this is a good call? It's almost like what a psychologist would do in his or her "role playing" during therapy, and it can really open up scary places in the mind or leave long-lasting impacts. Done right, it's a means to help (again, for the psychologist). Done wrong (i.e. the likely outcome for an amateur) it could be a frightening thing, driving a wedge between them or making for uncomfortable or painful conversations and memories down the road.

In short, before we even start, are you *really* sure this is a good idea? Would you want to be the one to bring up a Cinderella story, only to learn the boy's stepmother is actually an abusive parent? (An off-the-cuff and ponderous example, but I think it shows the quicksand lying in wait on your chosen path.) And beyond the "shouldness" of it, wouldn't the father be best suited to at least frame the themes of conflict and decisions and moral tension, then you could come to us for Idea Brainstorms about how to engage that? At least we won't inadvertently lead you into an awkward situation.

With concern;
David

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Regarding the points David addresses in the second half of his posts, my concern is not deep psychology or anything "dangerous," but basic courtesy. The kid and the dad are role-playing together. If any aspect of the bond between them is revealed, heightened, stressed, strengthened, or whatever, that's their business, in my view. I also think you'll find that if they are positively inclined in that direction, it'll happen even if you prep a scenario about a green lizard who breathes fire, who lives in a cave and guards a pile of coins. My call is that basic courtesy dictates that you prep fun adventures and leave all the hoo-ra bonding and mentoring to them.

Best, Ron

[Calithena]

I got to the commit rule by myself this afternoon, but thanks for the thought.

Appreciate the concern as well, but I really am interested in open-ended situations with some moral weight that might be interesting for them to explore together. Like, you know, maybe seeing a slave girl on the blocks, she's on the R-map somewhere, but they don't have to do anything one way or the other, it's just a chance to explore that stuff.

I'll look forwards to any suggestions along these lines.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Sean,

I got to the commit rule by myself this afternoon, but thanks for the thought.

I don't know what this means. At face value, you're being extremely ungracious. Please clarify what you mean.

Regarding the defeat-issue, I think that role-playing, early role-playing in particular, is awfully fractured and screwy about it, so in considering it, we enter a strange world ...

1. Success/failure of play itself should not be at stake. So being defeated at some juncture or another should not mean that play sucked and was a waste of time. This is certainly partly an attitudinal thing, but not entirely - character death as constructed in early role-playing often did mean that play sucked and was a waste of time.

2. Defeat should be significant and potentially undesirable. So being defeated shouldn't just knock the character out and send a flag to the GM to "frame a neat scene," or anything of this sort. That renders it meaningless, as the GM should always be framing a neat scene anyway. I also think that imposing limitations like "loses a leg" and whatever are bad ideas; that's punitive rather than potentially undesirable. I'm using that "potentially" very carefully, because I think it's key that at point A (now) the player sees the character as X and is committed to that, but if defeat turns the character into Y, well, at point B that might not be so bad.

I'm not entirely certain, or rather, I don't want to do all the work for it, but it's looking as if the issues raised in Reward System idea: asking questions, and my suggestion there, might be a solution. If the characters have "Can I ...?" questions on their sheets, and if going to 0 hit points means a solid "no," and if the question can also be answered through other means (i.e. basic resolution) during regular play ... h'mmm, I'd like to play that, actually. It sounds relevant and fun, and yet I'd still struggle to keep my hit points from going to zero.

Best, Ron

[Calithena]

Hi Ron,

That reward system idea is very interesting and potentially useful for the play we're doing - I'll mull it over. Thank you. It also occurred to me that there's a kind of neat potential patch rule for Burning Wheel lurking there involving sacrificing beliefs.

David, I didn't mean to be ungracious, and I apologize if I was. I do appreciate your and everyone's suggestions.

I thought of a way of clarifying the other thing David was concerned about. I'm not, like, trying to push on their relationship. But they're clearly involved pretty heavily with what I've presented already and the character choices are what they are - the father/son thing is in effect both in the shared imagined space and in the real world. What I'd like is for the game to provide some content they can think and talk about, if they want to, that's different from "hey, it's cool how we killed those goblins", or whatever. Now that I know that I want that I can start prepping meaningfully. I didn't know that I was looking for morally significant content when I started the thread.

Thanks for your help, everyone. I'll post further ideas in this thread or a new one when I have some clearer questions.

[David Artman]

Hey, no sweat to me: I just tossed out someone else's idea, which was just a formalization of your general idea in your first post. You were 90% of the way there already, and I though a handy word and one-sentence rule would get you the last 10%. No blood, no foul.

As for my concerns about risk, and your recognition that "morally weighty" subjects will give them the option to explore their RL relationship, I think all you need to do now is clarify what's out of bounds. I mean, surely, the father isn't going to dig you presenting a swarm of whores, all diddling each other and just waiting for a strapping man (and his boy!) to come finish them off, right? That's gonna be well out of bounds, yes? Well, so might a subject about stepmothers: it would certainly trip a few awkward triggers if you used a wicked stepmother in a game you ran for MY father (in third marriage) and me!

So, fine, you might not cause permanent scarring or drive them apart forever. That's extreme and, as such, I concede that it is not all that likely. But I still think you'd do well to talk with the father alone, before the next game, and get some lines and veils established.
David