Roleplay games, goal based sessions and working structure

Okay, you have to go get the Mc Guffin!!! It's done alot in RPG games, so let's look at it. Also, there's a short version down the bottom of this post!

The thing is, as a player you have absolutely no idea how to. You're trying stuff, but it seems to arrive at dead ends. Or maybe what you're trying to do takes a really long time to do in RL playing time - kind of a dead end by the slowing down of how long the act takes to execute in the fiction in RL time.

This is an issue with most traditional RPG's - there is no fail condition. No explicit point jumps out and says 'well, you can't try anymore, it's too late, you've lost'. So you keep trying this or that and they don't work, but neither does the game. Thou art in limbo!

A primary issue is that yeah, the fiction tends to give no fail condition. If you're standing in front of some puzzle door, unless the ceiling was coming down slowly, there's nothing that says that once you've tried something and it didn't work, you are that much closer to failing or have failed.

Which results in a sort of RPG blue screen. A limbo.

Some traditional RPG advice is to have the players be able to move onto something else. Indeed in classic AD&D, if you can't find the hidden treasure in dungeon room...well, the players can just shrug and say they go to the next room. Which works out great.

But you/the players have to go get the Mc Guffin!

About the only solution is to explicitly make clear that it is valid for the players to just give up.

Let's not treat "Well, we've gotten to near the end of the night soooooo....we'll just have what the players just did in the last thirty minutes solve the issue, even though if they had done that at the start of the session it wouldn't have worked!" as if it's a perfect solution. If the play session is four hours, that means pretty much any solution works, as long as you sit out the four hours and just suggest anything in the last thirty minutes. Well, I guess I can only argue from my own preferences, but as much, that's not something I desire anyway.

Of course the problem with players giving up is what if some do just want to admit defeat, but others just gotta try more things, and more things, and more!

I really am not sure. Perhaps players who have given up can head out early, or they can sit in at the game table but they don't have to try and wrack their brains anymore, they can just watch the other players. Basically you don't want someone to feel they are stuck unable to know what to do next, but also unable to simply give up and move on.

The other problem is, potentially, session time. You might have four hours to play, yet what if the players give up two hours in?

At that point the whole 'well, their actions can't make them fail' probably starts to look attractive, as if the RPG blue screen actually is how you play, since it will indeed fill in the time. It's just a question of what it fills it in with.

I would suggest a secondary optional goal, that you don't introduce at the start of play but merely hint at the possibility of ("There may be an extra mission to perform latter on - they'll send a message if there is"). If the primary goal has been completed, failed, or the players have given in and admitted defeat on it, then you can bring in the secondary optional goal to pad out the session time.

Lets be explicit though - this is an optional goal. If the players don't want to take it up, then they don't. If they have to play it, it doesn't escape the RPG blue screen problem really, as the players are now stuck with another problem because they couldn't solve the prior one.


Short version
1. Tell players they can simply admit defeat on their pursuit of the Mc Guffin. Those who do can retire from the table or sit and watch the others, but they no longer have to run their PCs (whether they can offer suggestions to any players who continue is up to you - I think there's benefit in that. On the other hand, they did give up already and that aught to be acknowledged)

2. Have a secondary optional goal they can move onto. They don't have to take it up, but it benefits them somehow (even if just in a sense of increased PC prestige!). This goes by rule #1 as well, as they can just let it go. If really concerned you could make a third optional goal, probably the second is enough to fill out the extra session time (if filling out that time is a concern).

D&D 4e/5e Encounters Take Ten Damage - oh yes, we're playing already, btw!

I went to the D&D encounters program the other night. It had this section where you essentially get held and these monsters say a strange rhyme in your head, then...well, they ask you questions, but the start of my problem is that I thought they were still just saying some rhyme. And if you don't answer the question in ten seconds, you take ten damage automatically.

That's part of the problem of these heavily scripted yet not acknowledging it modules for this series - the scripted game just wont let you do certain things. So how about a cue for when were supposed to do something, rather than just go along with the script?

Most of us went down after a few unanswered or incorrectly answered questions. Wait no, we got to the end, we rolled initiative, then actually no, initiative doesn't matter (even a nat twenty +12), they go first. Drops me and some others. I'm not sure if there was a safety net built into that or if it could just TPK everyone.

The other thing is, this is thick with GM fiat. This isn't the game. It's not like it's part of the regular rules that you decided to play. How can you like this as being the game? I mean, if someone wrote an RPG which had this question and damage stuff in the rules, then for that RPG that'd be the game you set out to play. That'd be fine.

Here, it's obviously the author of the module sticking this thing in and...I don't know, I guess I have some scope to accept 'Oh yes, that's what I signed up for' when I didn't explicitly accept something. And this isn't within the scope of what I signed up for. It's clearly this interjection on the authors part. But I get the feeling I'm supposed to evaluate it as being part of D&D (as in the game - as in rules and such. Not the fluff). Well no, not the D&D I signed up for, anyway.

It's almost like they try and train you what D&D IS is various things that you didn't sign up for when you decided to join D&D. Yes, get your head around that! If this is 5e's direction - it's just back to the head hurting murky non game play of yesteryear. Gameplay who's tension was more about nobody knowing what the hell to do next at a basic procedural level.

Looking at the '4e' store encounters program and it's 5e direction

If the new D&D encounters are representative of play, then it seems to be going backwards. Back to where dice are thrown in a desultory manner and you start thinking (or at least I start thinking), I'd really just prefer to hear the GM give an oral reading of his short story (which is fine - I could sit for 10 to 15 minutes just hearing someone read their story, it's not a crazy concept), because that's how 'play' ends up in this state, where the make believe part is that the players are playing.

Well, in the first session of the new encounters campaign, there were various choices in terms of where do you go in the world. But while 4E, on the battle grid the rules mechanics gave you various choices. While here, going down this path, or figuring a riddle an imp gives or fighting it, these choices are either created and presented by the GM, or they don't exist (unlike the battle grid choices, which remain in the rules).

Now I don't want to aggrandize the 4e encounter program either - some battles felt as if you could just do basic attacks and still win. Much like this thread '[4e] The day I tried to die'.

Others in the 4e encounters seemed to hinge on pre play choices. Ie, we got whipped by a krackens tentacles, because we had no wizard. Though at least that absence of a class hinges on player choice somewhat.

Never mind that even if you got TPK'ed, the next week the next encounter just happened anyway. It was that linear. When we got whipped, the after battle text didn't even have an option for losing and the GM actually took the piss by inserting the facts into the fluff text 'Oh, heroes, please help us with the next threat, as you were so awful at dealing with the Kraken!'. But it wasn't taking the piss, because it was just true.

BUT, having said all that, I've seen interesting things on the battle grid take place. As one fellow put it 'we make our story during the battle'. And indeed I'd agree it sometimes does happen.

But not in this new, 5e style campaign. If 4e occasionally made a 'battle story' happen, but with some lame on the side, 5e makes sure only the lame comes through - unless you have a GM making up all these paths to go down, all these imps riddles to figure.

And some GM's get off on that. Being so absolutely in charge of the fun. I get that. Trying to define roleplaying as fundamentally requiring being so in charge, not so much.

But hey, if you find players who want you to be utterly in charge of the fun, okay. Perhaps D&D is trying to get back to you, then.

But really the second encounter session reminds me of why one grows tired of this - how it slumps into a linear track, with desultory fights you can neither really win nor really lose - combat becomes it's own kind of fluff text, fluff lent to the GM's linear story. I'll just note that the encounters program comes from WOTC - they send it down, the local GM doesn't make it up.

But it's a slide backward to me, back to something which flatters GM's ego's that they are so great (what else is being 100% in charge of fun, but such a claim?), balms them when players attempt to riot from the linear, with a much assured forum culture that it's the players fault, they are being douches, find a new group, no play is better than...etc. All hinging on the bastardisation of the word 'game', whereas actors know they are to follow a script because their playwright uses words which mean that information, to tell them that information, not words which mean something else entirely, but then still expect them to be happy with a script.

Back to the murky, like wading through molasses 'play'.

Yuck.

I just hope a distinction survives in gamer culture, between at least some kind of rule set that occasionally empowers player choices so much you get a battlefield story deriving from the players actual play, Vs one where the GM is in charge of the fun (and really player choices get in the way of his solemn duty).

So when we talk, we can refer to one or the other as what were pursuing and want, instead of all discussion seeming to point at the latter, given it's dominance in gamer culture over the last thirty years.

[Gamma World 4E Solo Playtest] Dystopian

Going the solo test was interesting to begin with. See, trying to create some sort of story that either 'hooks in' players or can just be dropped, never to live, not even in bad fiction format, forever, is just an incredible exercise in creative whorism. I'm not attributing this to exclusively to GW, plenty of other games I own operate off the same principle - your supposed to make some compelling story, but if everyone just doesn't feel like it, well, in effect you may as well have just thrown your effort in the bin. And you know, that's fine - the texts in all of them basically tell you that's normal for how you treat your creative outlet. I guess perhaps this read comes to a head in my contact with Gamma World because it's actually succinctly written, while all the other books (rifts, blue planet, D&D 4E and lower, underground, hol, others I forget, etc) use obsfucation methods, primarily very large texts and hiding the tell tale signs in various semi random positions amidst mountains of text that suggest something else entirely. So it feels a bit bad to knock the book that is better written and more honest for it.

As a nod to the recent narrativist threads, what of the idea of not writing a story? "Just let it play out, man!" along with the well written article. It depends - to me, GW and the other books, they allow a dead character, devoid of any desire or hunger, to be brought into play (an exception to this is 'The Riddle Of Steel', I think). Drumming up players to do more just feels like tacking on some sort of TROS spiritual attributes onto it, but being in denial of that modification of the game. It definately wouldn't be just playing the game. I'm pretty damn sure that upon contact with the regular joe gamer, you will just get dead characters. Perhaps with non gamers you wouldn't, interestingly, but I suspect the structure would soon train them into dead characters. Probably from having their alive and fruitful character becoming dead, ironically, at some random moment and that really being a non moment in play due to structure. But anyway, that's my nod toward that idea. Any argument that it doesn't break down that way?

So anyway, it occured to me to skip that self flagellation process (one that feels like being a whore sitting in a window sill facing the street, there for taking or forgetting on whim) and simply play by myself, so instead of just looking at this thing I'd bought, I could actually, you know, play it. Sure, it's kind of an equivalent of masterbating, but a cheap thrill beats not only beats no thrill, it also beats beating yourself up for the hope of a grander thrill that may just not come.

And after a couple of encounters won (one PC), barely, I have this reluctance to play further. I really wonder if I have some instinctual grasp of the crap shoot and that comes out as reluctance to play further. Because the odds will eventually add up and kill me. There is no other mechanism that'll make anything else happen. And that'll be it. If it were a book you were reader, the character just gets pinched out and no eplilogue, nothing, the book just ends. How bizarre is that?

And I've kind of being trying to think of ways to get to level 10 or continue play and in as much, experience play.

But the reason I type this is because I suddenly thought I have experienced play. And it is utterly dystopian. All the bright and colourful monsters - do they make it some mario-esque fun land? No, they actually add to the dystopia. Are you going to find it fun dying to a wierd moving cactus that shoots spines at you? Unless as a person you heartily enjoy schadenfreude, the cartoonishness of the monsters adds horror instead of levity. The world is a cartoon and joke filled - and it's going to murder you just as much. Whats the difference between a scar faced man or a clown faced man murdering you - the latter makes more of a joke of your end. That reminds me of Hol as well - haha, the soddomy bikers! How funny is that idea! And yet if you play it out, is it funny when they are going to either kill you or incapacitate and rape you? There's like this family guy-eque humour in making them and thinking about them, but if you actually make fiction via playing the rules, how is that funny anymore?

So I was basically trying to dig through the bleak stone to find the seam of gold to follow in play. Until I realised that either the bleak stone is the seam is the fun of the game, or don't play it.

Now, you get alot of bullshit advice, just like in the other books I mention, where it's all about the fun and...what the hell does that mean? I'm guessing it involves stuff which, since it's advised in the text, is essentially in game stuff, but in terms of experiencing the system in play, it's advice to stop the players experiencing the system. Well, every time the GM thinks they don't seem to be having fun. It's classic 'stone soup' design, where the game insists its fun ... if you just add an ingrediant ... or two ... or three ... or a dozen. And after two dozen things your GM adds into the pot, isn't this game just freaking awesome!? Except it's the classic stone soup - it was just a pot of water that is vacant anything. What tastes good isn't the pot of water.

Except Gamma World isn't vacant. Revealed of it's stark core, just as much as drinking straight whiskey has its place, indeed you might want an evening of drinking straight whiskey and being in a world where joy and hope and sense of noble death are utterly, utterly blown away. No, I'm not being sarcastic. It's be a hell of a frightening ride to just feel the dead world and maybe beneficial for it. Beneficial if you don't go in expecting a mario fun land. If you've ever written fiction and no one gave a shit about it but you still did (and good on you), well play this and expect to make fiction that doesn't even care about itself. Zip, a critical, that PC is gone and...so what.

There's a feeling in that. One that does not confirm your existing beliefs. One that does not comfort. GM, resist the temptation to put 'fun' first, and you might find another type of fun. One which requires nothing of you. One which might require a few stiff drinks to get over.

It depends though - I don't think that was the intention of the designers. So is it really playing the game to play it that way? Probably not. And yet when you get rid othe GM pulling the wool over your eyes every time you stop having fun, it is the truth of the game.

And where else would dystopia be, but beyond good intentions?

Handle with care.