Are roleplaying characters just lucky (in contrast to protagonists in other media)?

[Moogleproof]

Just recently I heard of a session where the party was saved by a lucky shot with an arrow that practically turned the tide of the battle, since it slaid a particulary tough enemy. I don't remember what particular monster it was, but the hit was a critical I guess.

I started thinking about how the party said they got lucky. Had it been an action movie, the heroes wouldn't have been lucky - they would've been competent. There's the scene in the LotR movie where the Fellowship flees through the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, and Legolas shoots an orc who's miles away (okay, perhaps a few a hundred feet...), behind a cover and Legolas' arrow swirls all over the place, but finds the orc's head spot on. He wasn't lucky, he just was very, very good with a bow. Why is it when we are playing heros in a game we credit it to luck, but in other fiction such as books and movies we give the heros the credit they deserve?

I do understand that if combat is resolved through dice there of course IS an element of luck involved and the players tend to take it into account, but I'd at least like that in-game, if not out-of-game, we'd dish out the fame for displaying heroics. I've noticed a tendency (consisting of merely subjective observations, though) that players consider their characters competent only if they have solid stats and kick those monsters' behinds who are NOT out of their league. Isn't it more heroic to beat the bad guys if they are tougher than you?

Any opinions on this?

Have you noticed any other deviations that occur between roleplaying and other types of fiction besides the critical hit... ....thingy?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Just recently I heard of a session where the party was saved by a lucky shot with an arrow that practically turned the tide of the battle, since it slaid a particulary tough enemy. I don't remember what particular monster it was, but the hit was a critical I guess.

You mean like Bard in The Hobbit?

We're playing an interactive game where the effects of random chance are directly visible (i.e., the dice rolls), not passively absorbing a work of fiction (book, movie, etc). I think that's where you are seeing the difference.

 

[Rechan]

Not only are you dealing with dice rolls, which are random chance (rather than intentional narrative), but there's a very important bit of information:

Some conventions of Fiction do not work in RPGs.

Instead of people telling stories about just some characters, players are pretending to be those characters. This has a fairly significant effect:

Players don't like to lose.

When anyone here asks for advice along the lines of "Hey, I have this idea for an encounter/story arc, but it REQUIRES the PCs to fail/get captured/whatnot", the advice falls into two categories: 1) Do not do it, period, or 2) Do it, but exercise the utmost caution.

In fiction, by the end of the second act, the protagonists have been really down and out. The whole story can be seeming to dump on them, they can be beaten up, have their mom shot, whatnot. Things are rough SO that when they pull themselves out of it, it's a triumph. But your average player would think the DM is being an abusive jerk if he lost all that stuff, all this horrible stuff was just HEAPED on his character just so "I can triumph in the end". They want to be awesome the whole way through (or at least past the beginning after they made it through the first 2 levels of suck). A story where the protagonist just can't win and is forced into a situation/certain path can be interesting and entertaining, but when you're playing the character, being railroaded is rarely enjoyable, and a game where "Everyone and everything is out to get you" is often labeled as "DM vs. Player" mentality.

A few weeks ago there was a thread about "Plot Characters"; in stories like Superman or Star Trek, you can have a character who is there PURELY to give noogies/abuse to the main character, and this character is IMMUNE to everything. HE's just a major annoyance to be suffered through. Seeing this is fun for the Audience, who are seeing the wind being taken out of the sails of the character. But in an RPG, the player is playing that character, he's not viewing from the outside in, but the inside out, and so it's him who's getting humiliated for the amusement of... the DM? This is an exampe of a situation that works in fiction, but not in an RPG.

The salient point being that while folks may come to an RPG to "weave a collaborative story", the #1 priority is to "Have fun". And some things that are fictional conventions do not translate into "fun" for people who are pretending to be the protagonist.

What does this have to do with the OP?

Characters in an RPG are "lucky" because the deck is stacked (at least underneath it all) in their favor. When they fail, SOMETHING WENT WRONG. The DM miscalculated, the dice were just not there, they made bad choices in the heat of battle, or something, but typically FAILURE IS THE EXCEPTION, not the rule, and it almost always is NOT planned for (as opposed to in a work of fiction, by the authors). Players are "lucky" because things are balanced, and they are typically expected to win, not fail. Risk is there, but it's the difference between the risk of hurting yourself while rollerskating versus skating on thin ice.

The dirty secret of DMing is that the DM is supposed to let the players win, without the players knowing that he's letting them win.

In Fiction, the protagonist is going to beat the guys out of his league because the author decided that was going to happen and makes it so. In RPGs, the dice have to make it so. Because the DM can't make the dice do what he wants, he normally doesn't risk it because it is due to random chance, and badguys much tougher than the PCs have the deck stacked in their favor.

(DISCLAIMER: I am well aware I'm making generalizing statements. I'm sure there are players/Dms out there who like their PCs abused, want to fail, etc etc. But I believe that is the exception. There are many gaming philosophies, and the "My character getting abused and going through great amounts of suffering" is pretty far removed from what I think mostly goes on here, or at your average gaming table. The same with the DM "letting the PCs win without letting them know it"; I'm sure there are 'they win, they lose, whatever' DMs and other opinions, but again, my belief that's not the average.)

 

[howandwhy99]

You mean like Bard in The Hobbit?

We're playing an interactive game where the effects of random chance are directly visible (i.e., the dice rolls), not passively absorbing a work of fiction (book, movie, etc). I think that's where you are seeing the difference.

Who are you again?

I think this poster has it solid. Luck occurs because of randomizers. Skill is demonstrated by players when making choices in the game. Competency is each player's skill, but abstracted when talking about PC skill (which clearly doesn't exist). In the later case, it is the randomizer's numerical bonus or can/cannot ability.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

I feel like characters in fiction are lucky much more often than PCs in the sense of being rewarded for taking chances that are extremely unlikely to pay off. When watching a genre movie, I often put myself in the protagonist's shoes, as if I were playing that character as a PC, and think "How could they possibly know that all the factors will line up in just the right way that's required for that plan to work?"

Examples are the movies Yojimbo and Point Blank: the latter is especially striking because in the Westlake novel it's based on, the protagonist acts instead like a PC has to, carefully weighing probable risks and rewards and considering all the things that could go wrong on the assumption that the opponents are as smart and capable as you would be in their position. Lots of fiction, especially movies and TV where it's harder to show the opponents' point of view, seems to me to describe events that are only possible because the hero is incredibly fortunate and facing enemies who are absurdly careless and dumb.

 

[Aran Thule]

I think it is the other way around, movie protagonists are far more lucky then roleplaying characters.
In your average action film how many knives / bullets / cars / buildings / explosions / ect just miss the main character?
One film that seemed to me to have a different grasp on a fight was Sherlock Holmes when he mentally previewed a fight planning his moves, but if players tried to plan something like that then combat would take a long time.
So its not really fair to compare the different media types as they all have their own way of describing and demonstrating themselves.

Have you had your players describe a 'crit' so it does appear awesome? Adds a little flavor and looks more impressive then just saying 50 damage.

 

[WayneLigon]

One film that seemed to me to have a different grasp on a fight was Sherlock Holmes when he mentally previewed a fight planning his moves, but if players tried to plan something like that then combat would take a long time.

Well, they DO take a long time in it, sometimes. I've seen people plan for two hours for a fifteen minute fight. Then again, a guy in my game based his gnome rogue directly on the movie Sherlock Holmes. To do that particular 'I know how this fight will go' thing, he uses the 'Bardic Music' ability with Oratory, where he orders people around to give them the combat bonus.

Olgar and Rechan have the right of it. Well said.

 

[ST]

It depends on the system. I've played in games where the traditional fictional conventions of a protagonist applied to the PCs.

D&D does not give that feeling particularly well, as you say, because the underlying model is "State intent, roll dice, wait to see what the GM says happens." It's like the design is set up to let you try to be cool, and it's up to the GM to decide if he's going to allow it. And yeah, it's definately not how most protagonists function.

For a game that, say, lets you for-certain do what you said you wanted to do, be badass, and then used the dice to assign a certain level of consequences, adversity that you had to deal with as a result of being so badass, fits that model later. Although those PCs might be considered "Skilled, but unlucky as hell".

It's an interesting design topic, I think. Our group's more the "Horrible, horrible things happen to our protagonists and we revel in trying to get them out of them", but I know that's rare. The key that is hard to get across sometimes is that with certain approaches, you can get the characters to suffer, without the players going "I'm losing this sucks".

My experience is that approach doesn't really fly unless people are interested in seeing how adversity changes the character, rather than "Do they overcome adversity or not". I mean, duh, of course they overcome the adversity, we all know that's going to happen. The "at what cost" part is what gets me interested.

 

[Umbran]

I've noticed a tendency (consisting of merely subjective observations, though) that players consider their characters competent only if they have solid stats and kick those monsters' behinds who are NOT out of their league. Isn't it more heroic to beat the bad guys if they are tougher than you?

Any opinions on this?

If you can regularly beat things that are tougher than you, then they weren't actually tougher than you.

If I fight an exact duplicate of myself, then by definition I'm fighting something that is just as tough and smart and heroic as I am, right? If you think about it, which of us wins should be pretty much a coin toss.

It then follows that if I fight something that's more badass than I am, the odds are not in my favor, and I need a little luck to win the fight.

 

[Negflar2099]

If you can regularly beat things that are tougher than you, then they weren't actually tougher than you.

If I fight an exact duplicate of myself, then by definition I'm fighting something that is just as tough and smart and heroic as I am, right? If you think about it, which of us wins should be pretty much a coin toss.

It then follows that if I fight something that's more badass than I am, the odds are not in my favor, and I need a little luck to win the fight.

I think that comes down to how the GM describes it in game (or in a movie what visual clues we are shown to indicate the relative capability of each opponent). If, for instance, you were GMing and you described a foe in a way that screamed particularly deadly and capable then when the PCs defeat that foe they are going to think their characters are deadly and capable even if the foe were at exactly their challenge rating or level. After all the PCs don't usually know the monster's or NPCs stats now do they?

A similar principle works in movies and television. When Aragon fights the Urak-hai at the end of Fellowship that felt like a tough battle with a capable foe that Aragon barely survived. Mostly it's because the Urak looked intimidating and snarled a lot (and took a sword through the chest no problem, enemies who do that are always badass). The point is we don't know that the Urak was more powerful than Aragon but it sure looked that way.