'Evil' in an urban setting and the ability to Detect

[swdevlin]

My group has decided that they would like to play a 'hunt the undead' game (fantasy). I am not sure if they have been seeing too many horror movies as of late, but I figured 'what the heck'.  One of the players has expressed interest in playing a cleric, specifically a cleric for a church with a particular hate of undead. Makes sense for the game. So, the player begins creating his character and gets to the point where he is looking over the invocations available to clerics of this church. And he notices that there are no 'Detect Undead' invocations. And he asks me why. He figures that such an invocation makes sense. And, my only response is "Well, if there was, then clerics of the church would just walk around town, performing the invocation, until they detected an undead. Then they would go kill it. That kind of puts an end to the 'vampire living amongst the population' stories." The player agreed with that and continued on with creating his character.

However, my response seems like a cop-out to me. Upon reflection, I would like to think that I had a reason for the lack of such an invocation other than 'I cannot make a good story if it is there.'

And, while my situation is a specific one, I think the problem is more general (and I hope the more general problem is not my ability at game mastering :-). How does one handle the ability for one organization (or individual) to detect, at range, an individual (or organization) which is counter to it, or to the society? It would seem to me that upon a whiff of suspicion of 'evil', the 'good guys' would use their ability to detect. Then, if their suspicions are confirmed, go off and battle the 'evil'. For me, such an approach seems to kill any suspense.

Has anyone encountered this problem before? If so, how did you deal with it?

[Lathan]

Well, purely off the cuff, I see two possible explanations for this specific case.

1 - a detect undead spell is, for whatever reason, very difficult/expensive in game terms.  Maybe (since this seems to be Dungeons and Dragons of some flavor, or a similar game) it requires a very specific material component which might once have been quite common, but now is in extraordinarily scarce supply.  Or, if the undead in this particular area have been around longer than the organization, they may have managed to set up wards against it so the spell has a very, very low chance of working.  This one's entirely a matter of setting.

2 - "detect undead" is itself a necromantic spell, and using it would violate the ethical strictures of this religion.  Which does make some sense -- after all, wouldn't undead know best how to detect each other?  The church may or may not know of its existence; if they've been operative for a while, they've probably tried to research such a spell but would (if they've got any pretense of being "good" themselves) have abandoned it once they discovered its actual nature.  This is both stronger and weaker than the first: for firmly moral characters, using it (if they've discovered it) isn't an option at all -- but the less upright might consider it merely means to an end.  (This could perhaps allow for an NPC undead-hunter antagonist to the players with, somehow, a much higher success-rate...)  This idea has more to do with the rules than the first, but is still somewhat dependent on the setting (would work in some, possibly not others).

I'm not sure extending these to a general case is really possible; I think it'd really be a matter of coming up with reasons in the setting for such-and-such not being "allowed".

So there're my ideas -- these aren't the only possibilities, by far, but they might help.  Hope they're useful!

Gordon

[hanschristianandersen]

For a very thorough example of "What happens when Established Faction A can automatically detect Covert Isolated Faction B", read George Orwell's 1984.

Seriously.

Of course, the undead are hardly Orwell's hapless protagonists; even if the Church could detect the Undead at will, what if those same undead are incredibly powerful and difficult to take down?  That shifts the focus away from "The Hunt" and towards "The Kill".

Or, what happens to the Church's anti-Evil hunting groups when the Evil groups learn a spell that thwarts their tried-and-true method of Evil-Detection?

[Vaxalon]

In DnD, at least, detect spells have one big limitation...

Any significant amount of soil, rock, or metal blocks the ability to detect anything... magic, alignment, whatever.

This is one of the reasons that things that want to stay hidden in DnD, do so underground.

This takes what appears to be a very simple operation, "Walk up and down the streets in daylight, using our magical undead detector" into a much more interesting situation... "Walk around in the dark places under the city, the sewers and basements and foundations, using our magical undead detector."

That second one is a fairly good premise for a "dungeon crawl" if you ask me...

[Eero Tuovinen]

However, my response seems like a cop-out to me. Upon reflection, I would like to think that I had a reason for the lack of such an invocation other than 'I cannot make a good story if it is there.'

Actually, I'm rather more interested in why you find your original insightful notion false. What better reason there could be than that?

Consider: if there were an undead-detection ritual, finding and slaying the undead would devolve from a moral imperative to an exercise in nazism. When the only way to differ between the vampire and the innocent is the cruel bestiality of the former, it's morally right to hunt the undead. While if the difference were in a ritual of a church.... where is your morality, if the only reason to attack that guy over there is "cos the priest guy said so"? What then, if the ritual indicates somebody who is clearly morally good? How is that different from religion-backed murder?

That's a different kind of story, right there. Alternatively, you could decide that the ritual never fails, the undead are always blackheartedly evil, and the game will never, ever cast suspicion on the moral basis of the church that backs the effort against the undead. But what have you then? That's right, it's a hackfest, a tactical exercise in finding and killing the undead. And note that actually you've already eliminated the "find" part; just follow the cleric, he knows where they are.

Of course, you could slide the game away from the undead-hunt: what if the clerics can find the undead, but they are so much mightier that it's no help at all? What if the undead don't care about humanity at all, but are quite able to destroy anyone who resists? What then? That's again a different kind of story.

What you have to understand, is that when your players want to play "hunt the undead", you have to give them the hunt. You know what the word means, right? It isn't "locate unerringly and destroy".

But the next question to ask is indeed, do you want a hunt, or do you want the kill? And if the hunt isn't really the point of the game, then what is? If it's the fights, then by all means let them have a location spell, and concentrate on giving them horrible enemies and inventive terrain. If it's really a social story about the undead slayers - like Buffy - then you should really concentrate on that, and just let the detection ritual ring when the undead approach.

Do you need the lack of the ritual to appreciate the hunt, the clash of will and wit between the hunter and prey? Or do you just need the hunting phase to pace a game session without point? Like, there's really nothing else happening anyway, so you can't let the fight begin before the characters have spent a couple of hours digging up "clues"?

There's all kinds of possibilities here, and unless you tell us more about what's what, nothing much can be said. How do you envision the "hunting phase" of play? What will be the ultimate point of a session? What role the hunting, as differentiated from down-time and fighting, has in the game?

And, while my situation is a specific one, I think the problem is more general (and I hope the more general problem is not my ability at game mastering :-). How does one handle the ability for one organization (or individual) to detect, at range, an individual (or organization) which is counter to it, or to the society? It would seem to me that upon a whiff of suspicion of 'evil', the 'good guys' would use their ability to detect. Then, if their suspicions are confirmed, go off and battle the 'evil'. For me, such an approach seems to kill any suspense.

That's not a problem, it's a feature of the world, and by that I mean the human psyche around which all stories and motivations are built. That kind of story doesn't work, because you first assume that the hunt is the point, but then trivialize the hunt by sidestepping it. Consider these analogical examples:
- The point of the game is to get laid; my character gets a "Charm women" spell.
- The point of the game is to climb the highest mountains, pushing human boundaries in a heroical manner; my character gets a "Fly" spell.
- The point of the game is to hunt undead; my character gets a "Locate undead" spell.

Note that all functional examples of the situation are predicated on moving the actual story-point one step back. Like, what if the priests have an undead-finding ritual, but they need someone to see the particular wight first? OK, then the story will be about finding the witness. Or they need a hair from the vampire for it to work? OK, the story will be about the hair, then... Nothing fundamental is changed, the ritual is just color as far as story structure is concerned. The principle is familiar from the detective story genre: ever notice that no murder is ever solved based on the finger prints? Either the murderer didn't leave them, or isn't around to be matched to the crime.

That's actually a pretty good analogue: would you give the player in a detective game a "detect criminal" spell? I didn't think so.

Interestingly, D&D has detect evil -type spells. It's the unthinking GM who whines about this, for clearly he's not ready for the sublime fighting game that D&D presents. Instead he's trying to use it for something it's not suited for. In D&D-type game detect evil works because the point of the game is to battle evil, not run around looking for it. What you delineate in your post as the consequense is exactly the point.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Let me just note that the boys all give good pointers about how to make it work. They also illustrate the theoretical principle: all ways to make the undead detection work in a game where you don't really want them to be detected work by hampering the detection to the point where it's a challenge to get to the range to use the detection. That's only a solution from a simulationist point of view. As far as story is concerned, nothing changes. And as far as simulation goes, I find it more heroic and pleasing to strive to find the undead rather than the magic stone / correct spot / powerful mage / whatever McGuffin that's needed to find the undead. The story is the same kind of "find this whatever", but the straight case is the purer form. WTF is it about, when instead of pitting your wit against the centuries old vampire you go hunt some black pearls somewhere else?

[Vaxalon]

This kind of thread makes me want to propose a new Forge policy:

"If you are asking for advice about how to structure a game, whether in rules that you're writing down, social contract, house rules, or GM policy, the first thing we'll need to know is what your game is about."

[swdevlin]

There's all kinds of possibilities here, and unless you tell us more about what's what, nothing much can be said. How do you envision the "hunting phase" of play? What will be the ultimate point of a session? What role the hunting, as differentiated from down-time and fighting, has in the game?

Sorry for being vague. I am not yet used to the level of game design/philosophy that Forge members operate at.

The game is, indeed, about the 'finding' of the enemy, not the vanquishing of the enemy. The final 'fight' with the bad guy will, in effect, be anti-climatic. It is the unknown enemy, the uncertainty of the player knowledge, that will drive the game, not the fighting of the foes.

Your examples about the 'point of the game' are right on. And I agree with your observations about detect spells and D&D. Both examples have shown me the generalization that I was looking for but could not find: What do you do when a device exists that circumvents, to a major degree, the point of the game?

The solution, I guess, for game reasons, is simply to not let the device exist. The game will be a different game if the device exists. Different either because the players have the device, or the game becomes about the players finding the device. Obvious in hindsight, but without understanding my real problem with the device, I could not accept the solution.

As to my 'cop-out' feeling, I guess the simulationist in me wants a 'world' reason why such a device does not exist. Maybe I am looking at things incorrectly, but I see the 'changes the point of the game' reason as a meta-gaming (for lack of a better term) reason. It helps me if there is a reason within the gaming world why the device does not exist. So I need to ponder the 'physics' of the world and justify, from that point of view, why the device does not exist. Now understanding my original problem (point of the game changes) should make that easier (or at least give me more motivation).

Thanks.

[MisterPoppet]

If this is actually D&D, then the church having a detect undead spell would not be odd nor against the rules of the church. There are three reasons for this.

1) In a role-playing sense, churches of the time-period of D&D didn't really have any obligation in following their own rules so long as it's being used to reach one of the main goals of the church. If the church is deadset against undead, then using a spell of the undead would not harbor any guilt or repercussions. This is very similar to our own medieval europe's crusades when the pope (a man who was supposed to be a pacifist) commanded troops to go kill the "infadel" muslims (that didn't work out too well though).

2) In a rules sense, D&D's clerics are categorized as divine necromancers. They can use all necromatic spells so long as it goes along with their alignment. Detect undead is a pretty neutral spell, so they could use it if needed. However, this brings me to...

3) In D&D, all "detect" spells are not necromatic spells, they're divination spells. O the cleric could use it. Of course, this kind of destroys my whole argument. Plus, it rules out the option of this game being D&D because all clerics get the spell "detect undead" at level 1.

heh heh... ^_^;; sorry

-MisterPoppet-

[jdagna]

As to my 'cop-out' feeling, I guess the simulationist in me wants a 'world' reason why such a device does not exist. Maybe I am looking at things incorrectly, but I see the 'changes the point of the game' reason as a meta-gaming (for lack of a better term) reason. It helps me if there is a reason within the gaming world why the device does not exist. So I need to ponder the 'physics' of the world and justify, from that point of view, why the device does not exist. Now understanding my original problem (point of the game changes) should make that easier (or at least give me more motivation).

I think it's very important to have a solid reason other than "it makes the game work" and I think it's true regardless of GNS mode.  After all, nothing reveals the railroad faster than a GM saying "Ummm... that doesn't work because it would ruin the story."  In essence, you've admitted two things if you say that:
1) You already know what the story is
2) You're willing to use whatever Force is necessary to preserve the story.

Sometimes people can nod and buy that (Participationism is a functional form of play and good players recognize that GMs are not perfect), but you may be creating other problems down the line.

By the way, in a D&D sense, clerics could not just walk around town casting spells all day long.  They might only get a handful of uses each day and the general priesthood certainly has need for other spells too.  It's like answering why cops don't catch every speeding car - there just aren't enough cops to watch everyone.  This also has implications for your game - it implies that undead who move around are probably the most successful, but sewer systems or catacombs make that fairly plausible (and a standard fantasy trope).

Additionally... perhaps the church is not friends with everyone, and citizens have legitimate reasons to block priests from coming within range for their spells?  Civil rights in the US have certainly helped the Mafia, for example, but very few people would tolerate a significant loosening of them.  The church could be held in check by other religions, the city government, or just powerful families with a grudge.

[M. J. Young]

I guess the simulationist in me wants a 'world' reason why such a device does not exist. Maybe I am looking at things incorrectly, but I see the 'changes the point of the game' reason as a meta-gaming (for lack of a better term) reason. It helps me if there is a reason within the gaming world why the device does not exist. So I need to ponder the 'physics' of the world and justify, from that point of view, why the device does not exist. Now understanding my original problem (point of the game changes) should make that easier (or at least give me more motivation).

In Multiverser, such a spell would have to be theoretically possible, because everything you can imagine is real in the game. Thus if I were running such a scenario in that game, I would have to anticipate the possibility that someone would come up with such a skill.

So I would need a reason why it doesn't work perfectly.

Of course, I've got one reason right up front: the game mechanics are such that all spells are skills, and subject to skill resolution rolls just like any other skill. You can create the spell and use it, but it's not going to work all the time, and sometimes it's going to botch, and you might not know when it botches. So you might get a false reading on it, or you might detect nothing when there was something to detect. That's inherent to the game.

But I still think this may be a more difficult spell than you realize, and the difficulty of the spell may be the answer to your problem. To illumine this, let me ask this: what does the spell actually detect? Here are some possible answers:

[*]The spell detects the presence of demons. This then would give a positive whenever there is a demon present. That would mean we can detect any undead whose animation is due to being occupied by a demon, but that we would also detect people who are demon possessed, places that are haunts of disembodied demons, possibly even demons who surround and harrass specific individuals. Also, there may be types of undead who are not animated by demons and types who are. It also might be questioned whether detecting demons as opposed to other types of spirits such as angels or even human spirits is at all possible.[*]The spell detects animating magic. This, too, has problems. We can suggest that skeletons and zombies, at least of the D&D varieties, are what they are because someone cast some sort of animating magic on them; but intelligent undead don't seem to function that way. Also, if there are wizards about able to animate undead, they may be able to animate a wealth of other object, included furniture, books, jewelry--again, you're going to get a lot of false positives and miss a lot of undead in the process.[*]The spell detects the presence of decay. This would work on the principle that an undead, no matter how human he looks, is really partly rotten inside. You could in theory even have devices that pick up the scent of such decay in the air, or train dogs to recognize it. However, this might be triggered by anyone afflicted with an illness that causes significant necrosis somewhere in their body--a dying liver, a gangrenous wound, even perhaps a tumor being destroyed by chemotherapy.[*]The spell works in a negative fashion, detecting the presence of human physiological responses (heartbeat, respiration, circulation) and alarming if these are absent. This has an odd second-stage nature--it's as if you're detecting whether the subject is human, and then using a second spell to detect whether the result of the first spell was negative to create a positive. If the first spell fails and the second succeeds, you get a false positive--you just confirmed someone is undead because you failed to detect that they were alive.[*]The spell works similarly in a negative fashion by detecting the presence of a human spirit and then reporting if such a spirit is not there. This has the same hazards as the last one mentioned, but also requires you to consider the various types of undead about. Are ghosts disembodied human spirits, and if so does that mean they detect as alive to this spell? If ghosts are able to possess bodies, do they detect as alive? Do vampires, liches, revenants (The Crow) still have human spirits?[/list:u]In short, I think it's quite reasonable to suggest that there is a great variety of "undead" out there that really are very different from each other, and no one spell could clearly detect them all, and none of them would be completely reliable. You could then permit a great variety of such spells to be created and employed in the game, with the recognition that such spells can only really be used as a means of gathering evidence concerning whether a specific suspect is in fact undead. Merely sweeping the city waiting for the alarm to ring would be a fruitless exercise, as there would be too many false positives on any of these detections.

I've got a player who has an interesting spell we call Detect Discontinuity. If it works, it leads him to something that doesn't belong. He can attempt to influence exactly what kind of discontinuity it will detect, but his control is rather limited in that sense. Lately he has been using it to try to track down ancient magical artifacts which are housed in modern museums by curators who don't believe in magic; his most recent attempt to use it took him to an undiscovered archaeological site just outside the city. It has led him to magic objects before, but on one occasion it showed him the location of a fault line moments before an earthquake. If someone devises a detect spell, you really need to pay attention to exactly what it is they are detecting, because that is what they will find, and it may not be what they expect.

I hope this is helpful. I'm pretty good at pseudo-rational explanations of things in games, and this one is tried and true.

--M. J. Young

[Eero Tuovinen]

I think it's very important to have a solid reason other than "it makes the game work" and I think it's true regardless of GNS mode.  After all, nothing reveals the railroad faster than a GM saying "Ummm... that doesn't work because it would ruin the story."  In essence, you've admitted two things if you say that:
1) You already know what the story is
2) You're willing to use whatever Force is necessary to preserve the story.

Ahhah, but it's not railroading if the player has himself decided that he wants this kind of story. The story premise entails the limitations thereof. It's the same situation as if you'd create a character who has to choose between life and honor, and another player makes one who has a magic spell that makes the choice moot. The other player has just destroyed the reason you play.

Limitations do not mean railroading, especially when the player limits himself. They only become railroading when there's disagreement on goals. I'm pretty sure you knew that.

Thus I suggest that what is needed is not story reason and meta reason separately, hoping that the two meet. That's ouia board play, or whatever equivalent for the creative agenda in question. Likewise it's simply impossible to try to figure out the story facts first and then just hope that they result in some pleasing play. Rather, once the meta reason is clear, one can choose whatever suitable in-game reason he wants to, that supports the metagoals.

I for one see it utterly simple and totally trivial to find in-game reasons for this kind of magic stuff. It's the technobable principle, after all: the reason itself is not anyway convincing in any visceral way, the convinction comes from authority of the players participating. So when the GM says that this spell here can't be used because of "cosmic rays" bombarding the city, the players just go hmmm and try something else. This is because the GM also explains the metareason: that particular solution wouldn't work for the kind of game they're trying for. On the other hand, if the only reason for the cosmic rays was that the GM himself didn't want that spell, then that would be railroading.

Possible in-game reasons for not using such a spell range from expense to rarity to limitations in the spell to the simple fact that the spell does not exist. Who says that there has to be spells for everything? What rule is broken if there's no particular spell in this particular game? Is it a physical law? Last time I woke up magic was still a phenomenon of imagination, to be defined however the imaginaut wanted to. Perhaps the priests have tried to device such a spell for a millenia, but have consistently failed because that just happens to be a limitation of their magic. Railing against that is like railing against gravity: "Waah, I'll go home because my toys won't fly!"

So, if the players all want to see the hunt, I find it totally reasonable to limit all imaginable means that cut the hunt short. The player doesn't even want those means, as he wants to see the hunt, the same as others. This has nothing to do with in-game reasoning, and everything to do with agreeing about what kind of game to play. If another player wanted his character to have this conceivably natural knowledge of each and every undead hideout in the city, the fact of it being a "natural" ability is no kind of defense at all. The fact stands that stuff that sidesteps the point (the fun) shouldn't be allowed, and if GM is needed to do the denying, so much the worse for the play group.

[swdevlin]

But I still think this may be a more difficult spell than you realize, and the difficulty of the spell may be the answer to your problem. To illumine this, let me ask this: what does the spell actually detect?

Having the possibility that such an invocation could exist may have the players chase after the invocation rather than chase after the undead. To me that changes the point of the game from 'hunt the undead' to 'research the invocation'. Now, personally, I would like to run such a game, but I know the players are not interested in that game.

Delving into game mechanics - an invocation is not a spell. Spells are cast by people. They are like skills in that a spell is not guaranteed to work. Invocations are requests by an adherent to a deity to perform some action. The invocations available to an adherent are dependant on the church/religion associated with the deity. For example, a deity that has healing as an aspect would have a healing invocation. Using the healing invocation as an example, when an adherent performs the invocation, she is asking the deity to heal someone. It is the deity that does the healing, not the adherent. The adherent simply acts as a conduit for the deity's energy.

There are restrictions on performing invocations. The biggest one is that the deity can simply decide not to do anything. The deity is not forced to reply to every invocation. In addition, an adherent needs to have curried favour with the deity, say by performing services for the deity/church, in order to be able to make the request. Given the amount of effort involved in collecting blessings, adherents do not perform invocations with abandon.

Making the blessing cost of a 'Detect X' invocation expensive does not solve my problem, nor does making the deity unlikely to respond to such an invocation. Both of those solutions still give the players the opportunity of getting such an invocation to work. The key, for me, is to not have the invocation exist. That way, the only avenue for finding undead is a mundane one.

I do have a reason, based on the physics of the world, why the invocation does not exist. Deities have a limitation in that they cannot take direct action on the world. This is one of the reasons for churches and adherents. The restriction of any direct action extends too not being able to issue direct commands to an adherent. A deity could not say, for example, 'Hey, go smite Joe over there.' Hence clergy receive strange visions and omens from their deity. It is hoped, by both the deity and the clergy, that the visions are properly interpreted. A 'The undead is over there' invocation is, effectively, a direct command and hence not possible given the rules that bind a deity.

The players, or rather the player playing the cleric, could perform an omen invocation, asking for guidance. That's ok. The hidden message in the omen may have nothing to do with the current quest. The players may want to hunt undead but the deity might want the cleric to head off and address some other issue in some other part of the world. The players know that omens are leads to possible adventures, and that an omen may not apply to their current situation.

Having Eero explain the 'point of the game' really helped me figure out why a 'detect' invocation bothered me. Once I understood what my problem was, finding a solution to it was easy.

[Vaxalon]

Delving into game mechanics - an invocation is not a spell. Spells are cast by people. They are like skills in that a spell is not guaranteed to work. Invocations are requests by an adherent to a deity to perform some action.

It can be, but it doesn't have to be.  Under some game mechanics, there's no difference between an invocation of the divine (or infernal) and a "magic spell".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the fundamental magic system of Sorceror set up so that the ONLY thing a sorceror can do is summon and bind demons?  That would make every magical effect in Sorceror a kind of invocation.

[swdevlin]

It can be, but it doesn't have to be.  Under some game mechanics, there's no difference between an invocation of the divine (or infernal) and a "magic spell".

Yes, that is true. But, in this instance, the rule set operates as I have described.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the fundamental magic system of Sorceror set up so that the ONLY thing a sorceror can do is summon and bind demons?  That would make every magical effect in Sorceror a kind of invocation.

I don't know. I don't possess a copy of Sorceror.