Man vs. Nature

[Chris Barrett]

I'm new here so forgive me if this has been discussed before. I didn't find it with a search.

The conflict in RPGs is primarily man vs. man/supernatural.

Does anyone feel that man vs. nature or man vs. environment, done well, could be strong enough on its own to carry a game?

Can anyone think of examples where nature/environment was a central focus?

TIA.
Chris

[jdagna]

I think certain systems are more suitable for man/nature conflicts than others.  For example, I'd rather use Trollbabe than D&D.

However, there are a few suggestions I can think of for any system.  

The most important is to allow a progression of results to the final success or failure.  If characters are running from a volcano's lava flow, don't just give them one life or death roll, make it a sequence of rolls with partial outcomes (just like combat is, with hit points used to figure the final result).  This is why Trollbabe works well for something like this - all resolutions have a progression of results.  You don't have to do any work as a GM to figure out what the progression represents or how to handle it.

The second is to give meaningful choices.  While a few people stay interested in combat if they simply stand there and exchange blows until someone dies, most people want to have choices of attacks, weapons, position, etc.  The same holds true for natural conflicts.  So, when running from the lava, don't just ask for 5 running rolls and the PC dies if he fails more than 2.  Give him some specific obstacles or a choice of paths.  Again, a system like Trollbabe builds the choices in because if the player doesn't succeed at first, he has to decide how far he wants to push the situation and how much he wants to risk on a success.

The final note, however, is that I can't think of any movie or book where the biggest conflict is man vs. nature.  In almost all cases, especially stereotypical disaster movies, the real conflict is man vs. man (disagreements between the characters) or man vs. self (such as whether he can push himself to continue running).  Natural disasters just provide a catalyst for these conflicts.  Thus, players will probably find escaping from a volcano much more exciting if they also have to deal with in-fighting among NPCs (such as the classic "police escorting a convict when the passenger plane crashes" scenario or conflict with a superior who doesn't believe the disaster will happen).  

So, to answer your question more specifically, I think man vs nature can be strong enough, but that it will always be stronger with a man vs man element.  I don't really have any examples from published RPGs, just movies, books and a few of my own experiences trying to run these things.

[Ian Charvill]

Can anyone think of examples where nature/environment was a central focus?

A lot of old Traveller stuff had tendencies in this direction.  Blue Planet could also be run in this vein.  I'm sure there are others outside of sci-fi.

[Mike Holmes]

Superheroic games have these sorts of things as interludes between fighting villains. OTOH, sometimes they're cause by the villains, and thus are really MvM.

Mike

[b_bankhead]

Can anyone think of examples where nature/environment was a central focus?

A lot of old Traveller stuff had tendencies in this direction.  Blue Planet could also be run in this vein.  I'm sure there are others outside of sci-fi.

Yes I used a few Traveler adventures of this type back in the day, such as 'Across the Bright Face'.

 The problem with man vs. environment is that in simulationist rpgs it devolves to an accounting exercise and a dice-off; roll under endurance every so many hours at such a temperature to avoid frostbite, tick off so many iron rations consumed, most people find this uninteresting which is why rules for this sort of thing tend to be ignored in play. Whats needed is an approach that can bring out the drama of this sort of struggle. (The most suspensful part of the last Mission Impossible movie was just Tom Cruise and a mountain....). Part of the problems is that in an rpg the enviromnent isn't really a character. It's depersonalized and faceless, just a bunch of numbers whittling away your hit points abritrarily.

One subgenre of man vs environment that is popular is the post-apocalypse campaign. In games like this the environment is made more interesting by injection of lots of color. (sometimes LOTS of color as in Gamma world)  Radiation,pollution,starvation are popular adversaries in these games, but it's the color that keeps them coming back.

[M. J. Young]

There's a lot of good stuff here; the idea that post-apocalyptics are strong in man versus environment conflicts is important, because that does show up quite a bit in those games.

I've done some of this in Multiverser; the most notable example is The New Ice Age (Second Book of Worlds). This is flat out a survival game from the moment the character enters it.

Keeping this from devolving into a resource depletion scenario can be a bit tricky; but the answer to that comes largely from the player--what ideas can he bring forward that will preserve and even rebuild his resources? Multiverser does provide survival skills concepts in its core rules, so the referee knows what has to be watched. A character who applies himself to shelter, fire, food, water, and dry socks can in a sense beat the survival aspect of the scenario and move forward to the explorative aspects--finding the people, the creatures, seeing how others survive and how to improve his own life and theirs in that world. There's always this precipice over which he can plummet at any moment to death by exposure, but there's more to it than that.

So yes, it can be done, but I think in the main it has to be in limited doses--either you beat the environment, or it beats you, or the competition just keeps going. If it beats you, it's game over. If you beat it, you're now in a world in which you're safe and warm and looking for something else to do. If it's still going, well--eventually you expect to reach one or the other outcome, because you can only play this for so long without falling into a somewhat boring routine.

Also, you forgot man against himself. I've seen that done, too, quite well.

--M. J. Young

[John Kim]

The most important is to allow a progression of results to the final success or failure.  If characters are running from a volcano's lava flow, don't just give them one life or death roll, make it a sequence of rolls with partial outcomes (just like combat is, with hit points used to figure the final result).  This is why Trollbabe works well for something like this - all resolutions have a progression of results.  You don't have to do any work as a GM to figure out what the progression represents or how to handle it.

The second is to give meaningful choices.  

I completely agree about the latter.  I'm ambiguous on the former, though.  Personally, I often feel that these sort of extended contests drag out and emphasize the dice-rolling.  My rule of thumb is that unless there is a meaningful decision between rolls, then it should just be made into a single roll.  So opinions differ on this.  But meaningful decisions are definitely vital.  

In principle, I don't think that there is any reason for natural forces to be any less faceless than NPCs/monsters.  At the game level, an NPC or monster is just a collection of stats -- just like a natural obstacle.  The key is finding meaningful game choices that map to appropriate character choices.  One could just have jungle survival be resolved in exactly the same way as combat (i.e. "OK, roll for initiative against the 6HD Jungle") -- but that isn't very satisfying or believable.  But if different environments are detailed (both mechanically and narratively) as well as monsters, I think they could provide continuing interest.  

I can't think of any RPG examples about this specifically.  However, in general you can look at different attempts at sub-games.  For example, you can look at how Ars Magica made magical research a sub-game of continuing interest.  

The final note, however, is that I can't think of any movie or book where the biggest conflict is man vs. nature.  In almost all cases, especially stereotypical disaster movies, the real conflict is man vs. man (disagreements between the characters) or man vs. self (such as whether he can push himself to continue running).  Natural disasters just provide a catalyst for these conflicts.  

I would agree about disaster movies, though nature stories like Never Cry Wolf or My Side of the Mountain can reasonably be analyzed as primarily Man vs Nature.  In any case, even if a story is only 40% Man vs Nature, you still need methods to make those sub-conflicts interesting.

[Walt Freitag]

I believe the discussion in this thread:

Protagonizing Setting (or Situation)

is directly relevant to this topic. It's all about treating elements of setting (which would include "hostile" forces of nature) more like characters. Including some references to game systems that already handle that kind of situation well, making them good starting points for Man vs. Nature play techniques.

- Walt

[Gordon C. Landis]

And there's a bit of discussion on how Man vs. Nature works (or doesn't work) in a Nar-prioritized game here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6163

Gordon

[Chris Barrett]

I suppose a heavy focus on wilderness survival would be better suited for a simulationist type game.

At least, that's what I hope. It's what I'm going for anyway. Well, gamism but in the context of heavy sim.

Anyway, this discussion has been very helpful. Thanks.