Moments of emotion

There are many DMs and players who can leap into action and plot and make a memorable game. It happens every week, in thousands of households and gaming groups around the world.

Less common, though, are those moments of emotion, those scenes without combat, without even strife. Just a feeling, moving, meaningful. When a woman quietly admits her love for a man while they look out over the dim light of frightened city at night before a war. When a warrior dies and makes a last request that crystallizes the heroism of his companions who must carry on. When a child thanks her saviors, and the adventure becomes more than just monsters and treasure.

I don't know if I want to practice moments like these. They are rare and precious in all stories, not just games. But I do want to know how to work toward these moments, to give the game a meaning more than just fun, from time to time.

What do you think?

Oh yeah, I hear you. These moments are the point of play, for me.

Here's what I tend to do: Have the players create their PCs together, kicking ideas around the room. I heavily encourage them to create characters with strong motivations, goals, and beliefs, and complex relationships -- and I use systems that reward these things mechanically. (e.g. Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Wheel, The Shadow of Yesterday, or The Riddle of Steel. In a pinch, though, you can make these things a source of XP or Action Points, or use something like the excellent D20 addon Sweet20.)

Finally, I have each player come up with a "Kicker", something that propels their character into motion. Often this is based on those goals or relationships they've come up with.

Then, based on the input I've gotten from the players, I start prepping the campaign. I come up with NPCs who also have strong goals and beliefs, and work out a relationship map detailing how they're all connected.

First session, we play out the Kickers, and things start into motion. This kind of play has been really effective at getting those "dramatic moments", which are often laden with emotion.

If nothing else, check out Sweet20 -- it's an addon for D20 that handles XP based on the characters pursuing Keys, which are goals or motivations. If the players pick emotion- and relationship-based Keys, and everybody gets into the pursuit of Keys as a means of gaining XP, then you're literally guaranteed moments of emotional intensity in play. Seriously.

* http://www.anvilwerks.com/src/sweet20/experience.html

SweeneyTodd said:

If nothing else, check out Sweet20 -- it's an addon for D20 that handles XP based on the characters pursuing Keys, which are goals or motivations. If the players pick emotion- and relationship-based Keys, and everybody gets into the pursuit of Keys as a means of gaining XP, then you're literally guaranteed moments of emotional intensity in play. Seriously.http://www.anvilwerks.com/src/sweet20/experience.html

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That's a really cool idea!

Keys work really well in play; glad you gave it a look.

The guy who wrote The Shadow of Yesterday (which is all about Keys as a way for the players to drive the plot forward, and even decide what the plot will turn out to be) was cool enough to release that part of the system as OGL.

RangerWickett said:

There are many DMs and players who can leap into action and plot and make a memorable game. It happens every week, in thousands of households and gaming groups around the world.

Less common, though, are those moments of emotion, those scenes without combat, without even strife. Just a feeling, moving, meaningful. When a woman quietly admits her love for a man while they look out over the dim light of frightened city at night before a war. When a warrior dies and makes a last request that crystallizes the heroism of his companions who must carry on. When a child thanks her saviors, and the adventure becomes more than just monsters and treasure.

I don't know if I want to practice moments like these. They are rare and precious in all stories, not just games. But I do want to know how to work toward these moments, to give the game a meaning more than just fun, from time to time.

What do you think?

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I try to put a lot of emotion in my Ravenloft games, it makes the players more involved in it. And when I want them to be scared, it's easier when they had a strong moment just before with the threatened NPC.

Joël

The only thing I've found that really creates moments of genuine emotion is making the players really care about their characters.
Not just care whether they live or die, but actually care about the little details of their life.

IMO doing this requires more time invested in a character than a once-a-week game session can give. The only games I've ever seen this in were those rare games where the players schedules all synched up and we were able to get 3-7 sessions in each week.

The next key component to making players care IMO is detail. Nonbody is going to have a moment of genuine emotion for Bob the 14th level Fighter.
They might have some genuine emotion for Robert the Black, Champion of Eldemoor, consort to Empress Licentia.
The more detail you give a character, the more emotion a player will invest in it.
Note that I'm not just talking about better gear and some titles. These things need to actually mean something. IN the above example, Robert should have a story reason to be known as "The Black" he should have been involved in an egaging story that rewarded him with the titles of Champion and Consort.

Which brings me to my next point. The final, and IMO most crucial element that helps imbue emotion into a game is suffering.
If Robert from our example above never really faced any challenges in his quest to become the Black Champion and Consort, why should the player have any real emotion about it?
If on the other hand, Robert is known as the Black because he slew his own father rather than suffer a great dishonor, and he became champion by fighting his way through the gladitorial areans after his imprisonment for that crime, and his role as consort is more akin to "Imperial Whipping Boy" then we can see how the player would be emotionally invested in these things.
C'mon, the best, most memorable stories aren't the happy ones where good and justice always prevail, and the land is full of sunshine, puppies and ice cream. No, the stories we remember and become emotionally involved in are those where the heroes triumph only after great hardship and personal sacrifice.

Some examples: (YMMV)
Most Emotional Moments of LotR - Sam carrying Frodo up the slopes of Mount Doom, When we realize just what a piteous wretch Gollum is, Frodo says goodbye to his friends for the last time.
Most Emotion Moments of the Original SW trilogy - Han frozen in carbonite, Luke learns Vader is his father, Vader dies to stop the Emperor from killing/turning Luke.

None of these are happy moments, and yet they all resonate with emotion. These are the kinds of moments you have to include to make your games have serious emotional content.

I'm not saying there's a sure-fire formula to develop great emotional games, but these are the elements that I've found to be consistently present when my games DO become emotionally charged.

Hope this helps.

Tinner said:

The only thing I've found that really creates moments of genuine emotion is making the players really care about their characters.

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....And there, in one sentence, is the key.

I was in a game where a very emotional scene between one of the PCs and his wife (NPC) was played out. She was dying, and the farewell scene was so emotional that pretty much everyone in the room was misty-eyed. We all thought that the PC's player was about to shed the tears that the character was. Even the Gm was misty-eyed.

If I do FFZ right, it'll help that to happen. Oh yes. It could be beautiful.

NPCs can drive this if you play them right. The reference to the NPC wife's death scene above reminds me of the PC (many years ago) that fell for an NPC that was hostile to him. The night she finally diegned to allow him a chaste kiss this group of twenty something bad-boys was near tears... Until the ribald jokes started anyway

Twenty years later it hadn't changed. The character challenged a knight to battle for calling her "wench". One of the other players said "dude, that's a little over the top, wench is common enough." he said "She's nobility. It's an insult. And he's dead."

It can sometimes work against you, but if you know your players really well and know the things that are deep-seeded within them, it can come out playing.

For example, there's a good friend of mine that usually always played a paladin (recently, he's branching out into other kinds of characters) because he's got that kind of personality in real life. When he saw a guy slap his daughter across the road when we were all in high school, rather than call the police, he picked up a stick and just started marching toward the scene (it wasn't pretty what followed).

In games even where he doesn't play a paladin, scenes like that have his character flying into the worst types of rages, and he'll drop whatever he's doing to stop or avenge such kinds of abuse.

After a long game that involved something like that, I'm wondering what his character (and he) would do if the little girl he saved went to him, holding her Mother's hand and looking down at the floor all shy, offering him a daisey and then just hugging him with tears streaming down her little cheeks and saying thank you (much like the OP had mentioned). I bet I'd probably see one of the toughest guys I know shed a tear or two.

Still, might not always turn out that way. Some people, even ones you know for years, can become a very different person when the right emotion hits. I'm not saying like violent or crazy or anything, but you never know. It could enrich your game, or cause everyone to wrap it up early because the person(s) got a little sad, or depressed, or reminiscient and decided it was time to go home for awhile.

I'm all for a touching scene, though. When I was playing FF7, and Aeris died.. and Cloud was holding her.. I shed a few tears and had to stop playing for a few minutes. It also made killing ol' Sephiroth that much more rewarding.. (Imagine a big ol' guy, standing about three feet from his tv with the controller in hand.. yelling at the screen.. "You killed Aeris, huh you ************!? You're going to pay, you *******! Oh yeah! Try some of this! *Knights of the Round, dancing with the controller when the little figures do damage to Seph* You like that, huh boy? Oh, the WRITING ON THE WALL, eh?! Bring it on!!!" Which led to my Mom bursting in and thinking I was beating up one of my friends or having a fit or something lol.. but that's another story..)