[Heavy Gear 2nd. Ed. - Black Talon] The Plot Hole Problem

[IMAGinES]

Back in this thread, which I think I managed to close down with my own rudeness – I just re-read Clinton's posting rules which explained why line-by-line replies are rude, and I offer a belated apology – interest was expressed in my problem with what I called "plot holes", which I also managed to drift away from somehow. Still, it's been good to have a few weeks to think about the question and the campaign.

I was hoping to take a look at my various notes about the second-last session of the Black Talon campaign to help jog my memory of who did what and when, but unfortunately I didn't keep a great amount of notes of the later sessions or do in-character write-ups of them for the campaign website (an indicator of my declining interest, I think). So any questions that might help jog my memory are most welcome!

To the topic at hand: What do I mean when I talk about "plot holes?" To me, they're elements that I've tried to establish in the SIS but the players question because the elements don't make sense to them, either by their internal logic (or lack thereof) or because they contradict elements already establihed. Plot holes are a problem to me because I start scrambling for explanations and justifications; why it's a feature, not a bug, or why it's not really a big deal, you shouldn't be focusing on it, no, there's more interesting stuff over here that you ought to be paying attention to!

A plot hole reared its ugly head in the second-last session of the campaign. To recap: After one of my players decided to leave the game and a nearly year-long case of GM's block over how to handle it (see previous thread for more), I based a session around the delivery of his character, a caporal in the Southern Republic Army, to representatives of his government who would fly him home. Okay, I thought, we have potential for Something Interesting to happen on the way.

Now, the whole campaign thus far had its problems, which the huge length of GM's block is a good indicator of. Ron Edwards summed it up well, and I'll borrow his words:

... (T)he characters were these bad-asses at the bad-ass HQ, and yet they had to face danger. You felt the need never to violate the bad-assery, yet somehow there had to be conflict ... and yet no conflict suggested itself, not off the character sheets, not out of interpersonal dialogue, and not out of anything intrinsic to the game text (setting, etc).

Solution? Fight! Someone attacks! Ambush! (Why ambush? Because you figured that if the characters were surprised, the players would be surprised, the fun could happen now, and you could get some kind of explanation going later ... except that for that purpose, "later" was the same as "now," because the paradox waited for you in the "later" too.)

I decided, as the first session had involved the players' convoy being ambushed by a rover (the Heavy Gear term for bandit) gang, that I'd pull the same stunt with the same rover gang. In fact, as I set it up, the overall circumstances were nearly identical, barring the fact that the players managed to wangle themselves a couple of Heavy Gears.

My goals for the session were to have some "real", non-training action and to somehow introduce hints of the Main Villain for the next new sessions. This villain wasn't to be a Big In Your Face Villain, but a Sneaky, Behind The Scenes Villain whom I wanted the players to chase across the globe (said globe being the colony planet Terra Nova) and on to the enemy-held colony planet Caprice. I think I wanted the team to get a glimpse of him or maybe overhear discussion of him at the rovers' raiding encampment (I had the idea that their pursuit of the traveller would take the players to the rovers' main homestead at some point) before they escaped / were rescued or some such.

So, basically, I was taking the leaving of a player character and using it to throw an unrelated couple of fights that could be tied into my big plot, such as it was.

Now, you know that bit about the players wangling a pair of Heavy Gears as escorts? Well, right away they had a few objections to this whole "out into the deserts in naught but a Longrunner truck again" plan, and the game in general. I present them here, with what I remember of my internal reactions at the time (possibly exaggerated for effect):

• Why go on a convoy again if it's proven to be unsafe? Because I want you guys to be captured; it'll advance the plot, give you a tewaser of the good stuff to come once this training business is complete.
• Why don't we have some Gears as escorts? Because I want some of you to be captured without the possibility of your PCs getting squished by stray heavy ordnance.
• Weren't the convoy routes changed after they hit us the first time? If so, how did the same group of raiders find us again? Glorious coincidence! Who cares? I just want to set them up as In Your Face Villains for the campaign's Terranovan Arc so that you can go all righteous on them with your Black Talon Heavy Gears once training's done. Aren't recurring villains a good thing?

[Immunis]

I am assuming that you are looking for a few hints as to how to explain away the three end of post problems. These ideas came up pretty quickly to mind.

1 Why travel in convoy?
You have to move stuff about soldier, that's what we do and anyway we have changed the routes its perfectly safe.

2 Why no heavy gear support?
Do you known the running cost of one of these things, its huge and anyway they are all busy hunting down the raiders new camp.

3 How do the raiders know where we are?
These a mole in the camp feeding info to the sneaky villain, if you capture sneaky villain, you may be able to capture the mole or the other way round. Find the mole as a clue to the villain.

[Mike Holmes]

I, too, am tempted to approach the problem as Immunis does, and simply give you explanations. But that won't solve the problem.

Because the problem here is not plot holes. The players, themselves, could fill in such holes if they wanted them filled. But they don't want them filled, because they are using them as a wedge to get their way in play. And, no, this isn't some sophisticated sort of munchkinism I'm talking about here. What you have is a simple problem of conflicting priorities of play. That is, you want the players to follow your carefully crafted adventures, and they want to have some sort of creative control over the direction of the events of the game. The two simply cannot exist together.

In fact, I could get all philosophical about the fact that plot holes are actually standard for RPGs, and, because of RPG nature, not really at all problematic. But I don't have to do that here, because you've already said it all in itallics above. You want them to get from point A to point B, and all they're doing is saying "Hey, we want to decide where to go from point A!" That's what the protesting is about, the players are applying to their only court of appeals in terms of their character's control of things, that being in-game "realism." "Our characters wouldn't do that, it's not realistic" has always been code for, "Give us some control of the plot, and we won't nitpick your contributions any more."

Let's approach this another way. What, in your opinion, is it that your players like about playing? Is it simply "being the character?" Or exeriencing things that the character experiences somehow? Or getting to play out their "part?"

Is that their answer, or what you want to believe?

Have you considered trying methods of play that allow players more input into plot? Co-opting them into the role of having to close plot holes? "Why are we going on this crazy adventure? Well, that's just the sort of crazy guys our characters are!" That's the answer you'll get if you allow them to decide where to go.

Mike

[IMAGinES]

Hi, Mike, Immunis. Thanks for your replies.

Mike, you're right about the inidividual details not being the problem. They're symptoms of a broader issue I had at the time but didn't know how to resolve, which was that while my players seemed to be having fun playing, I wasn't really having much fun (if any) GMing. The "plot hole" problem was something that cropped up in a major way then and has also surfaced in a recent game of Dogs in the Vineyard. I'm hoping that discussion of the symptoms might suggest a way to prevent future relapses.

I'm not quite sure I get your question on what in my opinion my players liked about playing. the question itself seems clear, but the suggestions you make all seem similar. I'll take a stab at it, though. In my opinion - well, frankly, I'm not sure what it was my players liked about playing. I had a hard time seeing how what I was doing as a GM - which was making me frustrated, confused, nervous and bored - translated into fun for the players. I can say with some certainty that one of my players (specifically, my wife, Vickie) liked being her character and the international-ness of the whole group of PCs. Another player, Gav, I'm pretty sure liked the opportunity to kick ass and take names; he tends to make hard-drinking-warrior-type PCs, and his character "Tank" was no exception.

Maybe that's something I ought to ask them?

As to other methods of play - well, if it answers your question, right now I'm dying to try out some Primetime Adventures and The Shadow of Yesterday, because they're all about allowing the players to get their way in play. A few weeks ago I wrote something of a manifesto of what I want out of the next campaign I run, with the hope that it'll help avoid the lack-of-fun of my last campaign. Of course, there's a difference between wanting it and doing it, and I found myself "taking the GM reins" again in that DitV session I mentioned, so much so that there was a minor recurrence of the plot hole problem.

[IMAGinES]

Sorry for cherry-picking, Immunis, but one of your ideas reminded me of the mindset I had at the time, and I think it's worth mentioning:

3 How do the raiders know where we are?
These a mole in the camp feeding info to the sneaky villain, if you capture sneaky villain, you may be able to capture the mole or the other way round. Find the mole as a clue to the villain.

Yes! Wait: No! Nono! No, Talon Command is too cool for that, they've got some of the best people on Terra Nova keeping the locations of their facilities secret! What message does that send to the players? If they think Talon Command is riddled with infiltrators, they won't trust their superiors again! How not-cool is that? Or at least, how not-cool is that this early in the campaign?

It's a parallel to the train of thought I was on when Altin decided to leave the group; it's what had me paralysed for the better part of nine months and why I was never fond of the idea that an enemy agent killed his character in the Talon training base.

You know, I just realised that I was treating the Black Talon organisation like the GM's Pet PC. Sheesh. there I was, thinking "at least I didn't have any Pet PCs in that campaign..."

Anyway, I think this is sort of tangential to the plot hole problem, so I'll leave that revelation for separate ponderings.

[Immunis]

Couple of things.

Mike
Thanks for reminding me to look at the cause and not the symtoms of waviering campaigns. I have the fortune of being in a group that seems to appreciate both player and GM led plot lines. our most successful campaign was one with about 2/3 GM lead to 1/3 player lead and the player leads tended to come through from open ended GM clues. Steve would drop 4 or 5 strange happenings in the city and we would decide which to follow up, if he had a strong plot that he wanted to follow then some of those leads would join up, but (most of the time) we always felt as though we had a choice on where to go and what to do.
I now realise that some of those choices were blinds but who cares, smoke and mirriors is part of good GMing. Maybe our way is mainly GM led but player selected adventure lines.
I know that in my group, a complete player lead would result in splits as some of us will start leading in directions that the others would find unwanted. The player will not limit him or herself to the group good as much as a GM will.

IMAGinES
If you can, have a look at the Cyberpunk V3 rules, they have a nice section on treating organisations as Meta NPCs with a head (the leadership) a heart (the group goals) a body (the bulk of personnel) and the limbs (the interesting sub-organisations that make it unique).  Organisations should have weaknesses (maybe Black Talon believes it's own intellegence to the detriment of outside sources) as well as strength (massive firepower is availible when needed)
Maybe creating the trust between the players and the organisation by rooting out that orgainsation's weaknesses makes for a good stage of the campaign. The orgainisation will then give the players more freedom to act and more support as a reward.
If you want the players to care about BlackTalon, make Black Talon care about the players. Like a person, an organisation doesn't have to be perfect to be loved, it needs character.

Hope your campaign goes well

[Mike Holmes]

I now realise that some of those choices were blinds but who cares, smoke and mirriors is part of good GMing. Maybe our way is mainly GM led but player selected adventure lines.
I know that in my group, a complete player lead would result in splits as some of us will start leading in directions that the others would find unwanted. The player will not limit him or herself to the group good as much as a GM will.

If you're interested in challenging these assumptions, we can show you how to play without the tricks, and get more from everyone than you might imagine possible.

Mike

[contracycle]

And MAYBE get more IF it so happens that the players do in fact want more control.

Which is neither a given nor shown.

[IMAGinES]

Thanks for coming in again, Immunis.You've made some interesting comments about organisations and how to use them. I downloaded CPv3 from DriveThruRPG a while back, and I like its new take on corps-as-characters too.

Looking at the Black Talon campaign, though, the core PC concept for the campaign, the one that (as far as I'm aware) sold everyone on getting involved, was the opportunity to play bad-ass interstellar commandos with cool toys. Beyond the whole "Black Talon is too cool to be infiltrated" rat-maze I was running myself through, getting the players stuck into Spy vs. Spy stuff, especially that early in the campaign, seemed like a bait-and-switch. "Kick-ass Gear pilots? Oh, that'll come later."

Of course, at the time, I was mainly doing "training" missions to get the players used to the fairly-PC-lethal combat system before I threw live combat at them, and I was wondering what the point was even then. Well, I knew what the immediate point was: "I want to allow the players to kick ass! But if they make a mistake, the system will kill their characters! So let's train them in the system so they won't make mistakes! But this training stuff is boring! So let's throw in some competition with another team! But why compete if there's nothing to lose? Maybe the top-of-the-line Gears? But if they lose them that's another bait-and-switch!" So, yes, I was feeling stuck in doing what it looked like I was meant to be doing, but not enjoying it one bit.

I think I would have liked to have tried something else, but I had no real idea what any kind of alternative play style would look like or work. I keep thinking of the whole "backstory / situation now as fodder for narrative" idea that texts like Primetime Adventures and Sorcerer have been introducing me to lately, but at the time I wasn't keen on this whole "flawed characters" schtick. I'm not sure whether it was because my idea of a Black Talon recruit was someone who was mentally stable, or because those PCs that did get written up with flaws were too close to "utterly unstable wrecks". Or was that just my perception? I know it's going back and forth between "they sucked" and "no, they were okay, I sucked", but nigh-on two years of distance makes things a little hazy.

Besides, I was pretty much locked into using the rules for the Heavy Gear books; after all, they were Heavy Gear's rules. The only alternative ever suggested to me was the HERO System, and I had pretty much zero interest in using that.

[Ricky Donato]

Hi, Rob,

Let me try to assist. I think I see where the problem lies. A good game must satisfy what the players want. (Before you jump to any conclusions, keep reading so you understand that sentence.)

Of course, at the time, I was mainly doing "training" missions to get the players used to the fairly-PC-lethal combat system before I threw live combat at them, and I was wondering what the point was even then. Well, I knew what the immediate point was: "I want to allow the players to kick ass! But if they make a mistake, the system will kill their characters! So let's train them in the system so they won't make mistakes! But this training stuff is boring! So let's throw in some competition with another team! But why compete if there's nothing to lose? Maybe the top-of-the-line Gears? But if they lose them that's another bait-and-switch!" So, yes, I was feeling stuck in doing what it looked like I was meant to be doing, but not enjoying it one bit.

The problem you describe here is you haven't decided on what you want. You ask, "I want to allow the players to kick ass", which translates into "I want to challenge the players with difficult tactical decisions." But then you say, "But the system will kill their characters if they make a mistake" which translates into "But I don't want to challenge the players". (Please correct me if I misunderstood you here.)

As you might imagine, there is NO WAY these two priorities can ever co-exist in the same game, because they say exactly opposite things. That's why you're going in circles here. If you decide that the players should be challenged, then by definition there must be the possibility that they lose that challenge, otherwise there is no challenge. By contrast, if instead you decide that the players should not be challenged (which is also a perfectly reasonable choice), then the game should be about depicting the characters as bad-asses and playing with cool toys, so the players can experience what all that is like, without actually putting challenges in front of them.

As I said above, a good game satisfies what the players you want. You don't know what you want and you need to figure that out. Otherwise, you will never enjoy the game.

But all that's only part of the problem.

I'm not quite sure I get your question on what in my opinion my players liked about playing. the question itself seems clear, but the suggestions you make all seem similar. I'll take a stab at it, though. In my opinion - well, frankly, I'm not sure what it was my players liked about playing. I had a hard time seeing how what I was doing as a GM - which was making me frustrated, confused, nervous and bored - translated into fun for the players. I can say with some certainty that one of my players (specifically, my wife, Vickie) liked being her character and the international-ness of the whole group of PCs. Another player, Gav, I'm pretty sure liked the opportunity to kick ass and take names; he tends to make hard-drinking-warrior-type PCs, and his character "Tank" was no exception.

Maybe that's something I ought to ask them?

This is the rest of the problem. Above, we talked about figuring our what you want. Now, you also need to know what the players want. The best way to find out is by asking them, and remind them that you do this so that the whole group can have a better, more enjoyable game.

* How does each player feel about being challenged?
* How would each player feel if he loses a challenge?
* What if that loss did not kill his character?
* What if that loss DID kill his character?

I hope that helps, and please keep us posted.

[IMAGinES]

Ricky, thank you for reading and responding. I'm still cogitating on your post, but in the meantime, based on elements of your and Immunis' responses I think it's worth highlighting that the Black Talon campaign ended in late October 2004 and my wife and I moved from Sydney, where we were living at the time, to Cairns, over sixteen hundred miles away. Although I might be able to get my former players' input on how they found the campaign, my main goal is to identify techniques I can use toward having fun as as GM of future campaigns.

Cheers,

Rob

[IMAGinES]

Thanks again for posting, Ricky. Time I gave your post the attention it deserves.

In practice, yeah, I hadn't really decided on what I wanted. In theory - by which I mean, what was going on in my head at the time - I'm not sure I even realised that I needed to make a decision, or that choices were available. I wanted to GM Heavy Gear, setting and system, the whole kit. That's what Heavy Gear is, right? If I changed the system, it wouldn't really be Heavy Gear, right?

At the very least, I'd made a personal investment in the rules-as-written, as well as investments in the ideas of "one-player-one-character" and, as illustrated previously, "Black-Talon-is-too-cool-to-make-mistakes". On reflection, the nature of the investment seems silly, but at the time, the decisions I made based on those investments seemed correct, or at least in keeping with GM conventional wisdom.

Ultiamtely, I wanted the players to have fun. Given the setup I had - players, rules, campaign concept - the way to fun seemed to be through presenting the players tactical challenges to overcome. The problem was that the combat aspects of the Silhouette 2.0 rules Heavy Gear 2nd. Ed. used were "realistic" - which is to say, unforgiving and lethal. So presenting players with tactical challenges meant that (a) if the dice didn't go their way, (b) if they made tactical blunders or (c) I forgot an important rule (see the death of the Dark), Blam! dead player character; way not fun.

So, your suggestion that -

... the game should be about depicting the characters as bad-asses and playing with cool toys, so the players can experience what all that is like, without actually putting challenges in front of them.

- seems sensible. Still, how can you play with the cool toys without challenges? Why else do they have all those numbers? And if all they're doing is just playing with the cool toys, then that's not really doing anything - is it?

At the time, I might've tried looking for a more forgiving rule set. The problems with that idea were having to shop around for a rule set that was more forgiving and catered to a couple of new-to-RPing players on the team, one of whom isn't fond of complicated rules sets (Silhouette 2.0 isn't as complicated as some). I also had a couple of semi-experienced Silhouette players (at least, they owned Heavy Gear 2nd. Ed.) on board, so I thought they'd be okay. Plus, there was the aforementioned personal investment keeping me with Silhouette.

With hindsight, I think that that would've been more avoidance of sitting down with my group and asking basic questions like the ones you suggested. It probably would have worked wonders - just asking them "Is there anything you don't like or I can improve?" without any context certainly didn't help much.

I feel as though I've got as much as I can out of dissecting the year-and-a-half-old campaign; I need to GM some more and try applying what I've been learning here.

Thank you for your assistance, Ricky and everyone. I'll post some more Actual Play once I've actually done some.