the preservation of antagonism

[Paul Czege]

I was thinking over the weekend about various ways that games preserve antagonism (in the form of significant antagonist NPCs) from untimely ruin. Of course not all games are concerned with the kind of story arc that husbands its antagonists for a thematically satisfying conclusion. I've played trad games that let the chips fall where they may; if someone manages to soak the evil wizard in burning oil, well, he's dead, regardless of what the GM had planned for him. And I've played nar games that simply whip up a thematically satisfying climax and conclusion from whatever's still standing at that point in the game. But when a game concerns itself with the preservation of antagonism it seems to me it does it in one of four ways:

1. It makes the antagonists really tough, in hopes they endure until the end. (And maybe there's some tacit support for the GM fudging results so they do.)
2. The mechanics have a threshold that must be crossed before the game can have a climax involving the main antagonist. My Life with Master and Extreme Vengeance do this. And I think With Great Power as well. Though I could maybe be convinced that With Great Power is actually type #1: the antagonist just starts with an overwhelming advantage.
3. The game mechanics enlist the players in appreciation of the value of the antagonist as a force that protagonizes their characters, and so there's player investment in the preservation and usage of the antagonist. Often, but not always, this is done by giving players some control over NPCs, including the antagonist.
4. The game has some sort of genre convention, or in fiction constraint. Most superhero games fall into this category.

Am I missing some other major way that games do this? Also, I'm particularly intersted in type #2 and type #4 games. What are our other type #2 and type #4 games?

Paul

[agony]

Interesting topic.

Other #2 games include:

-Geiger Counter: The Menace cannot lose dice until has reached its maximum threshold
-Dust Devils: You must enter the End before you can be removed

I think it could possibly be worthwhile to discuss whether the preservation of antagonism is in fact necessary, but that's not really suitable to this thread. 

[Moreno R.]

Hi Paul!

The way The Shadows of Yesterday do it (to kill a major antagonist, you have to enter BDTP and risk the death of your character) could be seen as a different category, or as a particular case of #2...

In the 4th category, as "fiction constraint", you would consider even setting constraint? (as for example, in Ars Magica, the Order of Hermes law that prohibit enemy covenants to destroy each other). Often they were rather crude and force-based ("don't destroy the GM's toys or he will have the entire setting come after you, HARD!) and difficult to use with players who didn't care to learn anything about the setting.

In Jonas Ferry's "One Can have Her" the GM can veto any conflict that has as stakes the death of a character's named enemy, but it could be said that in that game the true opponents are the other player's characters (and any player can veto the death of his own character as stakes in a conflict), and no Player character or Enemy can be killed without using a conflict with that as stake. It's the most explicit (as "in-the-rules") matter-of-fact protection of any guy someone designed as his "enemy" that I remember at the moment without having the enemy protected by some endgame conditions as in MLWM.

[Christoph Boeckle]

Hi Paul

Care to share some experiences that could inform us on why you appreciate a type more or less? Also, how do you analyse antagonism in GM-less games and in Polaris in particular?

[Michael S. Miller]

With Great Power... definitely falls into #2. The villain's Aspects explicitly CANNOT be devastated (that is, affected in any lasting way) until the final space on the Story Arc is filled.

The old TSR Marvel Super Heroes game had an easily-missed rule that any supervillain could spend 50 karma points to escape certain death. I'd put this in your category #4, primarily.

I'd say that Extreme Vengeance bridged #2 and #3, because players got XP for rolling more dice against the bad guys AND for having the bad guys roll more dice against them. Even though players had no control over NPC villians, they got more points the longer the bad guys could put up a fight. A great idea that was, unfortunately, extraordinarily tedious in practice. Someone had to write down every die roll in the game!

[Mel White]

Spirit of the Century uses something like #3--antagonists can offer concessions through which, although defeated in a current plan, they get away to scheme again.  The players have to agree to the concession though, otherwise the conflict can continue to the complete defeat of the villain.

Shock uses method #2--the protagonist cannot usually resolve their story goal until the antagonist credits are reduced below a certain point.

Mel     

[Ben Lehman]

Hey, Cristoph:

I imagine that they're intended to fit into #3 or #4, depending.

To hit on Polaris, it uses something which, if I squint a little, is kinda-sorta like what Paul categorizes as #3. Mainly, if I cut off the first clause halfway through "The game mechanics enlist the players in appreciation of the value of the antagonist." Full stop. None of this lit-theory stuff. Polaris doesn't particularly tell you anything about how the antagonist protagonizes the antagonist blah blah blah but because the kill-rate is so high for non-Heart characters in Polaris, characters (which, naturally, include antagonists) only survive if they are of interest to the players. So antagonists survive based on player understand of their own "coolness."

The best example of this I can come up with was a game I played with a giant demon named Altair, who was so tall that his head reached the stars. Now, just like any other character in Polaris, he was supremely mortal. Any player could have said "I cut off Altair's head and he dies" and that would have most likely been that. However, we were all so invested in his size and invulnerability that killing him required traveling in to the sky, making pacts with the moon, and so on.

Note that we're not doing this because we understand in any conscious way that Altair protagonizes our characters. We're doing it because Altair is damned cool, and we're all really into how cool he is, and we don't want him to casually die*.

yrs--
--Ben

* This is all about the preservation of antagonist in Polaris at an individual level. The preservation of antagonism without respect to the individual antagonists, is more of a matter of Paul's #4: the fiction of the game contains a source of infinite and unending antagonism. Bliss Stage works the same way.

P.S. Hey, Paul, this may be kinda an edge case, but what about games that simply don't contain antagonists as such and get protagonism from other means?

[Valamir]

I was reading through Heavy Gear recently and that game seems like DP9 made a concious effort to cram every bog standard 90s design paradigm it could into a single game.

It deals with antagonists largely with #1 but there's no tacitly about it.  They use this "Chessmen" system to identify important NPCs from less important NPCs so that GM's can avoid messing up the meta plot by killing off key characters (DP9 was apparently REALLY big into the idea of doleing out the meta plot one splat book dollup at a time)...they spend a ton of time talking about these Chessmen...clearly a device they were very proud of.

Then there's a section on how to roll dice where the advice (VERY explicitly) is to allow the players to roll their own dice but never tell them the difficulty ("Threshold" in HG terms) that way the GM can set it to whatever they want after they see the rolls to make sure the players don't ruin the story...this is not extrapolation...its direct instruction in the text (too bad I didn't have this text handy for any of the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast threads).  And that includes saving NPCs who are "restricted". 

This isn't concidered "fudging" its considered proper play.  In fact, the advice for players who are "advanced" enough (direct from the text) is to forgo dice altogether and just let the GM adjudicate everything that happens.  That way you make absolutely certain that those nasty players don't ruin the GM's ability to regurgitate DP9s meta plot.

Yowza!

But in terms of protecting Antagonists...it doesn't get any more solid than that.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Christoph,

I can't say I appreciate one type more or less as an enduring and fundamental personal preference, but I can tell you why I'm currently interested in types #2 and #4.

In conversation with Thor Hansen on Saturday I made the observation that I'm not a very good roleplayer. And I supported the observation with references to great roleplaying I'd seen at Gen Con, by Eero Tuovinen in particular, and John Harper as well, and from Thor himself. He challenged the observation with a reference to my excellent roleplaying of a specific NPC when running Lacuna a few months ago.

And y'know, I'd enjoyed the hell out of that particular NPC. And it got me thinking about how so many of my favorite gaming experiences, where I had great fun and feel like I was roleplaying well, were with NPC antagonists. So now we're going to be playing Grey Ranks next, but after that I'm wanting to run something that'll support me in running NPC antagonists. I don't want a type #3 game, because I want unshared ongoing  ownership of the NPCs. And I don't want type #1 because I've seen it fail to work too often.

So I'm interested in types #2 and #4. Know of any non-superhero games that fall into type #4?

Paul

[Frank Tarcikowski]

Paul, I think #4 is not usually something that's part of the game itself, in terms of general mechanics or setting. Rather, it's part of scenario design. For some Forge games that's largely congruent as scenario design is part of the game, but for others and certainly for traditional games it's not.

Say you have a contemporary setting and the PCs are cops or some other sort of law enforcement guys. And your antagonist doesn't give himself away easily. So, they could just put a bullet in his brain but they wouldn't, because that would be illegal. There's your #4 at work.

Or say your PCs are Hogwarts students and your antagonists are a teacher and an annoying Slytherin student. The social context within the fiction and also the genre conventions prevent the PCs from just hurling an Avada Kedavra at the antagonists from behind. That's your #4, too.

In both cases, it doesn't matter whether you play The Pool or HERO. So, I can't point you to a specific game that does this, but my point is: You don't (necessarily) need one. Thoughtful scenario creation will do that trick, too.

- Frank

[jag]

How about games that have an explicit meta-game resource for the antagonists?  This could either be general "Twists of Fate" the GM can employ in any situation he wants, or specific "Villian Points" that in-color antagonists have.  This way the antagonists can be defeated by sufficiently skillful actions of the players, but won't die from a single exceptional roll.  Combined with an interesting economy like in Pace, this could allow a great protagonist-antagonist dynamic.

Depending on what you're seeking from the game, it's possible that the constraints introduced by scenarios #2 and #4 would be unsatisfying -- it might be the case that being undefeatable (at least permanently) would make the parts before the endgame less exciting.

James

[Ben Lehman]

Hey, Paul. Do I read you rightly that you're not interested in the preservation of antagonism but in the preservation of antagonists?

If the character ceased being an antagonist, but you got to continue to portray them, would that be satisfying on not satisfying? Why?

yrs--
--Ben

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ben,

P.S. Hey, Paul, this may be kinda an edge case, but what about games that simply don't contain antagonists as such and get protagonism from other means?

Name one?

Hey, Paul. Do I read you rightly that you're not interested in the preservation of antagonism but in the preservation of antagonists?

If the character ceased being an antagonist, but you got to continue to portray them, would that be satisfying on not satisfying? Why?

I dunno. I'm not interested in an antagonist to protagonist reversal that eclipses the protagonism of the player characters. I'd hate that from the other side of the table. I'm also not interested in owning a bunch of NPCs who're largely window dressing to protagonists and antagonists being run by the other players. If some NPCs fall by the wayside from my own failings, I can handle that. It's on me. Failures like that are part of the creative fun. I'll have other NPCs that might fare better. What I don't want is my best efforts getting authored out from under me or killed early on the upslope of my enjoyment of them.

Paul

[Paul Czege]

Hey Frank,

Paul, I think #4 is not usually something that's part of the game itself, in terms of general mechanics or setting. Rather, it's part of scenario design. For some Forge games that's largely congruent as scenario design is part of the game, but for others and certainly for traditional games it's not....it doesn't matter whether you play The Pool or HERO. So, I can't point you to a specific game that does this, but my point is: You don't (necessarily) need one. Thoughtful scenario creation will do that trick, too.

The challenge for scenarios with things like codes of bushido, or the requirement that cops be law abiding, is that players recognize the protagonizing power of transgressing and pursue it with their characters, because most genres that have such behavioral codes are actually about the transgressions. Perhaps I'm failing to see the forest, but I can't put my finger on a single other genre besides classic superheroes that actually breaks if the the code is violated. And that's what you need for #4. Something fundamental to the genre, but in a way that doesn't invest a transgressor with protagonism. What am I missing?

Paul

[Frank Tarcikowski]

Well, more likely it's me who is missing something because I just don't get superheroes at all. It's not my cup of tea, as our British friends would put it. You are of course right about transgression, but speaking of a dramatic structure, wouldn't one usually build the action towards said transgression so that it will only happen at the climax of the story? I mean, you don't want to preserve the antagonist forever, do you?

- Frank