Be it resolved that:

1. Role Playing Games are almost always action stories, involving fighting and bodily peril.

2. You want a sword to be able to kill someone. Anyone. Roland of Gilead can get his fingers chewed off by a lobstrosity and Tara can get capped by a stray bullet. You want this lethality to make #1 matter (also, just for its own sake).

3. You want interesting and complex characters that the players take the time to flesh out and make fully realized.

These three to a greater or lesser extent would appear to be in conflict with one another. How do you balance them?

(note, I'm fairly a newbie here, so I would love it if local jargon were explained or contextualized a little if it came up in replies; I'm aware of The Forge's particular patois, just not familiar with it)

Well, the key to good roleplaying is to give the player something to care about. Note that this is very different from giving the CHARACTER something to care about. Often times, a player will design a character to care about something the player is interested in, but sometimes they don't. Alot of traditional RPG history has encouraged players to seperate themselves from their character and to get "into character" and the like, and often players have taken this to mean that as little as possible of the player's desires should creep into the character. The player then will pretend to care about what the character cares about and thus play will move forward.

In reality...it usually doesn't work that way. There are a few dedicated immersionists who can really project themselves into their character and "see the world through their eyes" and who enjoy doing so. But for most players...trying to duplicate this just results in a character the player doesn't really give two rips about.


All of that is a long winded way of leading up to this:

Your #1 above presupposes that the only thing the player cares about is the continued existance of his character. The reason I brought all of the above up, is because many times...that's all the player does care about, and this is a "bad thing".

If you are establishing situations that the players are really interested in participating in, then they will have desires for their character and for the resolution of that situation that go well beyond mere survival of the character. In fact, most players will willingly and gleefully hose their own character far worse than any GM would dare to do if you get them in a situation that get the *player* really jazzed.

Thus I feel that your #1 above is symptomatic of play in which there is nothing for the players to care about other than survival and thus the game only has meaning and interest if (as per your #2) that survival is convincingly threatened.

If the only thing a player cares about is his characters life, then the only way to make the game interesting is to threaten that life. However, if the player cares about other things (really cares about them...not just "supposed to care because they wrote it on their sheet)...then you can maintain interest by making those other things the focus of the conflict and that conflict may no longer be about action, fighting, and bodily peril.

The mistake most often made by GMs who try to move a session or two away from combat is to present a situation that doesn't involve combat...but also doesn't involve anything the players care about. So now the players not only don't have anything new to care about...but they're not being challenged in the one thing they do...and so the session fizzles and the GM reluctantly goes back to combat declaring the "non combat" experience a failure.

In truth the only failure was the GM to engage the players interest. This is the KEY KEY KEY that I can't emphasize enough. Most RPing texts encourage the GM to engage the CHARACTER'S interest. This is bollux. It only works if the player's interest and the character's interests are the aligned* After all, at the end of the day the character is just a piece of paper and its the player who has to be interested enough to play it.

Grab the players, not the characters. Once you do that you find that the conflict between 1,2 and 3 above disappears entirely.



*Note: I said aligned here specifically to avoid saying "the same". Having a character who is a necrophiliac does not require the player to be interested in necrophilia. But it does require a player who's actually interested in telling stories involving necrophilia and exploring what that means for the character, the setting, the other characters, and indeed the other players at the table. If not, its just a word on a page and won't make an effect hook to hang a story from.

Hey Rob,

Welcome to the Forge!

These three to a greater or lesser extent would appear to be in conflict with one another. How do you balance them?

First, I want to say I appreciate your response. Focusing on the player rather than the character is something I think I've done subconsciously, but I'll be interested to come at these issues with it in the forefront of my brain and see what effect it has.

Thus I feel that your #1 above is symptomatic of play in which there is nothing for the players to care about other than survival and thus the game only has meaning and interest if (as per your #2) that survival is convincingly threatened.

C. Edwards wrote: As for complex character background, I opted to not include that as a feature, at least not at the start of play. I personally enjoy filling out and discovering my character in play, so that's how I've arranged the system.

Perhaps you mean to suggest that danger be deemphasized? That danger isn't as important as . . . something else? Even in an action story?

Valamir wrote: In that story there's plenty of action...but survival and personal danger wasn't the issue, it just provided the color and flavor. The important thing was saving the queens honor.

Even in Song of Ice and Fire, death is the means to larger goals (or the obstacle in the way of the larger goals). And sometimes a person submits TO death because of the larger goal.

Death isn't "what's going on." Survival and personal danger are the backdrop to the huge, world-spanning themes in Martin's work.

Lxndr wrote: Even in Song of Ice and Fire, death is the means to larger goals (or the obstacle in the way of the larger goals). And sometimes a person submits TO death because of the larger goal.

Is that sort of thing just not possible in the random and participatory environment of a role playing game?

C. Edwards wrote: I think that it's very possible. Particular if the system is focused on risk taking and heroic action. Also, giving the players some say into the "when and how" of how their characters go out never hurts.

Not necessarily. Stunt dice aren't a guaranteed reward. But that's not the only way to give characters a when-and-how.

Lxndr wrote: Not necessarily. Stunt dice aren't a guaranteed reward. But that's not the only way to give characters a when-and-how.

Hi Rob,

On your number 3 - do you mean to include interesting and complex behavior by those charcaters as play continues? Because that's where the real conflict occurs, right? Players are either willing to put a bunch of work up-front into the character and then risk insta-death, or they're not.

But if insta-death can "just happen" quickly and somewhat-randomly (an accurate model of many battlefields), the continued evolution of interest and complexity stops. So many RPGs and/or RPG groups (not all, certainly, but many) have various ways of decreasing the risk of PC insta-death - luck points, GM-fiat, very cautious play, whatever. That bothers some people - but yeah, the alternative can be problematic. I can't find it at the moment, but somewhere on the web there's an excellent "simulation" of D-Day to play through - players create characters, and then experience things like "encounter machine gun nest - roll D6. 1,2,3 or 4 - you're dead." As a regular thing, that doesn't sound too fun to me.

I find it interesting to wonder why it's OK to know in a 225-page Vietnam war novel (say) that the protagonist is unlikely to die on page 125, but it's a problem in an RPG. Ralph points to one place - if ALL the players care about is survival, there's no interest unles that's at risk. But I also think this ties in to your point 2 - about which I'll ask, what do you need to do to establish that a sword can kill anyone? Bullets can kill anyone in our Vietnam novel - they're probably doing so all the time. Yet, most of the time our protagonist is NOT going to be killed by gunfire on page 125. No problem in the book when done well - isn't it also no problem in an RPG when done well?

Which leaves us to determine what "done well" means. For which we may need specific examples - can you give a sample of a play experience where the interplay of the three things you mention resulted in an unstaisfying RPG experience for all/most involved? Maybe that'd help - because there are many, MANY ways to answer that "what's done well?" question.

Gordon

PS: I'll add a WttF - Welcome to the Forge - even though Chris already gave you one. No such thing as too much welcome, is there?

It doesn't necessarily require special mechanics. You CAN do it with special mechanics. The Riddle of Steel's Spiritual Attributes are perhaps a prime example of this. You roll more dice when fighting an opponent where an issue of crucial importance is on the line then you do when fighting an opponent in a fight which has no meaning.

But mechanics are not required (though I encourage mechanical reinforcement of play). What's really required is situation. Once you have the situation established that grabs the player the rest takes care of itself. Its not a question of avoiding danger or deemphasizing it. Its a question of giving the players something more important than their character's life (to them) to strive for.

This was touched on by posts above, but I thought I'd second it, namely the idea of Alternative Consequences or "Non-Lethal Death". You want action and characters who the players are willing to detail and enjoy exploring, but danger too? Apply the danger to something other than the characters, or let them survive "death" at the cost of something else.

Say someone falls in battle trying to defend their home city. By the rules they're dead, however that works in your game. Rather than wipe them out and end an interesting story, they wake to find themselves being tended by a few ragged survivors. Their equipment has been looted, their city is in ashes, and lots of NPC friends might be dead. So they "lost" and they know it, but the game doesn't have to stop. In fact it might well grow as a result; maybe the player decides to pursue revenge, or the game moves from a defender-of-the-realm phase to a wandering-ronin or rebuild-from-the-ashes phase. Or whatever.

Have the danger threaten the queen's honor or a friends life or the character's hopes of wealth or status. The key, as others have said, is encouraging players to care enough about other things that this can work.

Hi,

This was my post to this thread on its clone over at RPG.net. Thought I'd put it here, too.

Hi,

I agree. I think you have got a Gordian knot here. Let me see if I can take a hack at it.

Michael is right. You need a different threat than random bodily harm if you want the characters to matter. Because what matters about characters is not whether they live or die, it’s how they choose to live or die.

I know this runs counter to a lot of RPG conventional thinking, but its true. When we go to a movie (and I know, RPGs aren’t movies, but bear with me), we know the star is going to make it to the end. They might die at the end, but up until the end, all threats of bodily harm are simply there to test the character: Will Ripley take charge of the ATV to go rescue the marines, even if that means getting closer to the aliens which she really, really does not want to do? Will Boromir fight to protect the hobbits even though he’s been arrogant and dismissing them their whole journey? Will John McClane continue his attack on the “terrorists” even though his feet were just cut up on shards of glass?

Each of these are great questions for great characters. The questions hang on the threat of violence yes. But the real interesting point of the character meeting the violence are the decisions the character makes under the threat of violence.

So, first, cut one to the Gordian knot: get rid of the need for random violence inflicted on the PCs. Tara was never a PC. She didn’t get an opening sequence credit until the last season. Her death was, like the threat of violence, a test for the main characters. How do they respond to the random death – if you’ll recall, Willow didn’t take it very well. And her response made every other main character respond to her choices. That’s what the story was about – not random death, but how characters responded to random death.

Second, the threat of death must be a credible. I’d say this means, if you want decisions and not bodily harm to be what the story is hanging on, you’ll have to scrap almost every RPG out there as an honest option. Because most games tell the GM to “cheat”, “fudge rolls,” “and ignore the rules" to keep the players and story satisfied. That’s just not honest. How can the choices the players make for their PCs matter when ultimately the consequences of those choices are in the arbitrary hands of the GM?

An honest option might be HeroQuest, where death for PCs is difficult to come by – but can happen. If a character makes decisions that press his character’s chances for life far enough, the character might well die. The threat of death is present, but it’s based not on a random die roll (see Cut to the Knot One, above), but on the player pushing his characters choice with such determination that he does die. (Boromir is a perfect example of this.) In other words, how far will a character go to get what he or she wants? Every character should have the option of risking death to accomplish his or her goals, and sometimes that risk will end with death.

The trick is in HeroQuest you don’t fudge the die rolls. You don’t ignore the rules. You actually play by the rules. Cold. And as a result, death is a constant risk, but a risk brought closer by the choices of the players. Sorcerer is another game that works this way. You never fudge the rolls or ignore the rules in these two games. To do this would be to invalidate the purpose of having the rules in the first place. They are designed so that death is not the great risk for the character. Instead, the great risk is a character betraying what matters most to him or her. Or, to look at it another way, the threat of violence also lets a character determine what matters most: “Am I willing to die for this?” is a great testing point for anyone.

I think you’re point about action points and hero points is somewhat valid. In most games they are used to overcome the wargame baggage rules where there was no connection to the units and random death in the face of certain calculated odds on the battlefield made sense.

But a story, and especially PCs, seem to demand a different logic. I’d offer, again, that only by stripping out the basic assumptions underlying most RPGs will you really nail this very different quality. When the Player is focused on his PCs hit points to determine whether or not he’ll continue playing that evening, the choice becomes – “Do I fight?” – independent of any other character or narrative concerns. But if the real stakes are tied to something greater than life or limb, then we don’t need to keep focusing on hit points as the evening’s basic concern. For example, in HeroQuest, advantages for the PC are tied to support for kin, faith and culture, than can be lost depending on what choices the character makes; in Sorcerer, what’s at stake is the character’s “Humanity.” A character in Sorcerer might die, but have retained his Humanity doing it – a great end for a character and a good bit of story telling.

A final reminder, even if the group doesn’t seem to be focused on their PCs hit points, most likely this will be because the GM is massaging the rules and so forth. Thus, not really using the rules. Everyone is in a sort of denial about that aspect of the rules until its called up an manipulated accordingly.

Thus, again, get a new game. There are a bunch of cool new ones on the market right now that I think will offer you what you’re looking for, cutting the knot and letting you get the kind of game I think you’re looking for.

Take care,
Christopher

RobNJ wrote: These three to a greater or lesser extent would appear to be in conflict with one another. How do you balance them?

Be it resolved that:

1) Many RPGs claim to generate action stories, but these do not resemble any known "action" stories out there, unless you count Tolkien.

2) Lethality is the hobgoblin of a consistent mind. Almost all systems can be deadly lethal. Throw my 1st level D&D 3.5 party against an Ancient Wyrm with a Lich template and 40 epic levels of Wizard and then tell me how robust D&D characters are compared to GURPS characters.

3) Interesting and complex are independent variables.

Gordon C. Landis wrote: I find it interesting to wonder why it's OK to know in a 225-page Vietnam war novel (say) that the protagonist is unlikely to die on page 125, but it's a problem in an RPG. Ralph points to one place - if ALL the players care about is survival, there's no interest unles that's at risk. But I also think this ties in to your point 2 - about which I'll ask, what do you need to do to establish that a sword can kill anyone? Bullets can kill anyone in our Vietnam novel - they're probably doing so all the time. Yet, most of the time our protagonist is NOT going to be killed by gunfire on page 125. No problem in the book when done well - isn't it also no problem in an RPG when done well?

M. J. Young wrote: I'll note that in games like Legends of Alyria, a player character can only die if the player decides it's time to do so (and I think some of Jared Sorensen's games do that, too, but I haven't had any experience with these). I'd love to have one of them come and talk about that method. In narrativist play, it can be very compelling.

RobNJ wrote: Be it resolved that:

1. Role Playing Games are almost always action stories, involving fighting and bodily peril.

2. You want a sword to be able to kill someone. Anyone. Roland of Gilead can get his fingers chewed off by a lobstrosity and Tara can get capped by a stray bullet. You want this lethality to make #1 matter (also, just for its own sake).

3. You want interesting and complex characters that the players take the time to flesh out and make fully realized.

These three to a greater or lesser extent would appear to be in conflict with one another. How do you balance them?

(note, I'm fairly a newbie here, so I would love it if local jargon were explained or contextualized a little if it came up in replies; I'm aware of The Forge's particular patois, just not familiar with it)

Mark Johnson wrote: Be it resolved that:

1) Many RPGs claim to generate action stories, but these do not resemble any known "action" stories out there, unless you count Tolkien.

M.J.,

Mea Culpa. Perhaps a better phrasing would have been: "Many RPGs that claim to generate action stories do not create action stories resembling any known "action" story in existence (minus Tolkien)." I.E. out of the group that was making the claim, many do not meet my criteria, not that there are no games that meet my criteria. I have definitely heard good things about Multiverser Actual Play in regards to creating this kind of story. And there are games that deliver exciting play that still don't look much like an action story.

What a mouthful.

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't reread it at any point to see that I was making a point other than I intended. It was good to have the chance to clarify this.

Talk Soon,
Mark

Sorry about the delay in my follow through on this thread. I plan on going through and replying to posts where replies are helpful.

I wanted to say that I've been considering adopting an alternate "hit points" system where there are only three wound levels, battered (bruised, scratched, nicked), wounded and dead/on death's door.

After all, what other states or levels are dramatically important?

In response to your question, Rob, and seaking from a designer's standpoint:

It's much more illuminating to think in terms of useful game mechanics rather than important ones. So, do you think you would find it useful to have more than three wound levels?

Gordon C. Landis wrote: On your number 3 - do you mean to include interesting and complex behavior by those charcaters as play continues? Because that's where the real conflict occurs, right?

I can't find it at the moment, but somewhere on the web there's an excellent "simulation" of D-Day to play through - players create characters, and then experience things like "encounter machine gun nest - roll D6. 1,2,3 or 4 - you're dead." As a regular thing, that doesn't sound too fun to me.

Which leaves us to determine what "done well" means. For which we may need specific examples - can you give a sample of a play experience where the interplay of the three things you mention resulted in an unstaisfying RPG experience for all/most involved? Maybe that'd help - because there are many, MANY ways to answer that "what's done well?" question.

PS: I'll add a WttF - Welcome to the Forge - even though Chris already gave you one. No such thing as too much welcome, is there?

I don't mean to be rude but it doesn't appear that a lot of this post engages my question, really. Just refutes the premise. But maybe that's my fault for making it unclear.

Mark Johnson wrote: 1) Many RPGs claim to generate action stories, but these do not resemble any known "action" stories out there, unless you count Tolkien.

2) Lethality is the hobgoblin of a consistent mind. Almost all systems can be deadly lethal. Throw my 1st level D&D 3.5 party against an Ancient Wyrm with a Lich template and 40 epic levels of Wizard and then tell me how robust D&D characters are compared to GURPS characters.

John Kim wrote: novels." They are fundamentally different from passive reading of story.

Shreyas Sampat wrote: In response to your question, Rob, and seaking from a designer's standpoint:

It's much more illuminating to think in terms of useful game mechanics rather than important ones. So, do you think you would find it useful to have more than three wound levels?

Refutation of premise is a form of engagement in argument.

In response to your question, I was posing that question to you to give you something to think about; you sounded like you were designing a game, and so I responded like someone would who was talking to someone designing a game.

As for your original post, it seems to me that the way one resolves these three conflicting forces (as you describe them) is to remove one or more of the forces from play.

I will assume that you don't want to remove #3 and discuss only the alternative options:

In Four, I am exploring removing #1. The game is all about interesting and complex social behavior, not risk to life and limb. You can probably kill someone by stabbing them with a knife - but there aren't rules for it because that's not what the story is about.

In Torchbearer, I eliminated #2. As in Alyria, a player has to choose to kill his character (or sometimes, to allow his character to die), because that isn't the story we're interested in; the story we care about is the story of a character's life.

Different games resolve this apparent conflict by unbalancing the factors to different extremes.

The threat of character incapacitation provides the same tension as the threat of character death without the permanent loss. If you get knocked out you're still open to being kidnapped, imprisoned, experimented on, killed or whatever other goal inspired the violence. If the opponents don't have any reason for the violence, then there is indeed nothing to worry about. Other than random encounters, when does that happen? The bad guys jut beat on you until you fall over and move on?

The question is: Do you want characters to die?

If so, if this is an acceptable loss condition, then I think you have to live without #3 (original post). Barring some sort of mechanic that postpones a character's death until they are suitably interesting.

I not, then why have rules that state 'The character dies if...' (running out of health levels, for example). That would be contrary to the goal of 'characters not dying.'

RobNJ wrote: Sorry about the delay in my follow through on this thread. I plan on going through and replying to posts where replies are helpful.

I wanted to say that I've been considering adopting an alternate "hit points" system where there are only three wound levels, battered (bruised, scratched, nicked), wounded and dead/on death's door.

After all, what other states or levels are dramatically important?

So, Noon, do you think that a three-tiered wounding system is a good idea? Maybe this is better for a different thread.

RobNJ wrote: So, Noon, do you think that a three-tiered wounding system is a good idea? Maybe this is better for a different thread.

Paka wrote:

RobNJ wrote: So, Noon, do you think that a three-tiered wounding system is a good idea? Maybe this is better for a different thread.

Rob, it feels like one more thing to keep track of in an already rule-heavy, number-crunchy game. If you think it will increase drama, go for iit, but I'm not sure it is going to help overall.

RobNJ wrote: So, Noon, do you think that a three-tiered wounding system is a good idea? Maybe this is better for a different thread.

RobNJ,

This thead has drifted severely off course. And that may be somewhat my fault, my post was a tad snarky. I am sorry for that. Old habits die hard.

I do think that your idea for a new thread is a good one. Rather than responding to posts individually with a one sentence response about this rather general topic, you might try to develop a unified thesis or a playable game that demonstrates the concepts that you are talking about here. Then continue to incorporate other people's ideas and continue to develop the ideas. I actually have some sense that you are doing that, but it is probably not as explicit as it could be if you start a new thread from scratch with a more defined goal.

Talk Soon,
Mark

[Edit - I also wanted to add to John - yup, I didn't mean to imply that there is NO problem here - just that it's not NECCESSARILY a problem. Novel etc. stuff can sometimes be applied to RPGs, but the fit is not always great, nor to everyone's taste]

Hi Rob -

Up front and during play - got ya. That's important.

I think you've mentioned two different problems here - the first is the "t's important to me that it's credible to players that a guy with a knife can kill you," and the second is the "I don't have a problem with preturnaturally deadly heroes, I have a problem with heroes who never have anything to worry about." The second can be solved by the "Ancient Wyrm" route - the heroes do have something to worry about (in terms of survival) when faced with the appropriate adversity. But with the first, if anyone with a dagger can kill your PC - and folks with a dagger and the will to poke it at said PCs are common - that kinda takes over everything in the game.

And ultimately, you have to decide - is that what I want? Will you and your players (disregard the PCs for the moment) get the most enjoyment out of facing that survival challenge at every moment, worrying about your skill as players keeping the PC alive? Or would you rather develop the interesting/complex PC/story, and appreciate that (in several possible ways)?

Because you CANNOT maximize all three of your initial variables - something has got to give. All three can be there in some way, but not in their ultimate, purest form.

Gordon

PS#1-Within d20, there are many ways to mitigate the "mere guy with a dagger can't hurt me" problem. Make him a Rogue with some serious Sneak Attack damage. Use the Massive Damage rules. Change (as you suggest) Hit Points to just three would levels. And etc. Still, if what you as players (I include the GM as a "player" for use here) focus on is the flat survival or death of the PCs, you're focusing on that - NOT the other stuff.
PS#2-(for the GNS-savvy) Yup, I'm making parallels here with GNS - it may be that Rob's issues can be summed up as "how can I play Gamist and also play Sim/Nar?" Or "how can I play Sim and also play Game/Nar?" To which the answer is, in the pure sense for all of Game/Sim/Nar, you can't.

That post reminds me of the old saying about speed, quality and quantity. You can only choose two. It sort of applies here in a different, but similar way.

I should probably say that I consider #1 not to even really be worth discussing. It's sort of a given, almost.

So that leaves me with a tension between #2 and #3. I'm not convinced that there's no way to overcome this. Unfortunately I don't know what the answer is. I don't suppose any PCs need to actually die, they just need to understand that death is easy, so that they respect it.

Well, there's systematically implimenting it and there's theatrically implimenting it. Have you tried talking with them?

In fact if they can't do it theatrically they'd probably be stumped even if the system implimented it.

By the way, Rob, is NJ where you live, or is it coincidentally your initials, or something else? Just wondered if we were neighbors.

RobNJ wrote: I wanted to say that I've been considering adopting an alternate "hit points" system where there are only three wound levels, battered (bruised, scratched, nicked), wounded and dead/on death's door.

After all, what other states or levels are dramatically important?

you wrote: It's important to me that it's credible to players that a guy with a knife can kill you. Think of D&D (put away the torches!). Almost anyone can come at you with a dagger and you're not going to be that worried.

and wrote: Actually, I mean, whenever my players say, "There's no way they can kill me," that's an example of my worries.

and wrote: The 15th level fighter who sleeps without fear in a tavern full of smalltime cutpurses because even if they coup de grace him there's no chance he'll die.

M. J. Young wrote: By the way, Rob, is NJ where you live, or is it coincidentally your initials, or something else? Just wondered if we were neighbors.