Suspense in RPGs

[Tony Vargas]

Just to add to your list, players buy victory with a lot of non-mechanical currency as well. Trading in that favor they are owed. Accepting loss of face to the court to beg the king to intervene. Promising an open-ended favor to an honorable villain for him to withdraw his support from the irredeemably evil big bad. Sacrificing themselves to allow the ritual to be stopped and the world saved.

Yeah, that's not buying victory, it's bartering for victory.

That's, like, totally different.



Somewhat seriously, though, there is a line between a price paid that's modeled in the system (you have so many slots/points/whatever, when do you use them?), and a price paid that's part of emerging story-line (this is the current situation, it could change/might not be what it seems, what do you do?). The former is part of the game, the latter is system-independent, so probably more relevant/helpful in a generic RPG discussion, now that I think of it.

 

[chaochou]

Thoughts? What do we have to do in a RPG to force the players, in the play of their PCs, to "buy victory"?

For players to be able to 'buy victory' they have to have something to pay with. In the types of games lumpley is talking about, players create characters with multiple dramatic needs and progress towards fulfilling these needs, or not, is how costs are paid and what drives the arc of the story.

Yes, you can find a Jedi master to train you, but your best friend gets frozen. Yes, your informant knows where the stash house is today but your lieutenant wants the investigation wrapped up by the end of the week. Yes, your daemon can open the safe, but you only have four humanity left and you don't want to hear what it wants you to do to your cat...

However, I think it's a mistake to think of 'forcing' the players. This is stuck in a tired, old dog-eared paradigm where roleplaying is the GMs show.

To have drama, the players have to be the dramatis personae. The players have the responsibility, before anything else, to create people with relationships, flaws, desperate needs, dangerous passions. They need characters who are part of a society, carrying the burdens that societies create - weighed down with debt, loaded with expectation, over-confident, addicted, at war with their family, haunted by ill-advised lovers.

These characters, their needs and situations, create the game. The GM doesn't create a world, doesn't build it and impose it on the players. The GMs job is to see what the players have created and breathe life into it, so the tensions and conflicts envisaged by the players begin to move and develop. The GM twists and weaves the threads, but those threads were created by, and belong to, the players.

This is a type of play where the imagining of setting, situation, conflict and opportunity comes from the players. It comes from the conceptions of the dramatis personae. If anything is decided prior to those characters being realised, the game will not feature the type of drama Vincent is discussing.

 

[pemerton]

With respect, I don't get at all what you are saying here.

I thought it was fairly similar to you.

In Dread, success is not inevitable. Neither is failure. In that, I'm deviating form your OP, which posits that we consider that success is inevitable.

In Dread, the inevitable thing is the fall of the tower. Death happens when the tower falls.

<snip>

The suspense is in how long the inevitable can be delayed, and on who the hammer will fall.

That was what I was trying to get at; and it seemed similar to CoC in that respect (insanity in CoC rather than death).

The suspense-inducing questions are:

“When?”

And when I do ultimately put his hat on the foyer table of a brothel where cattle rustlers are partaking of entertainment, the question turns into “what?”

Then, once we find out what “what” is, the question becomes “what now (and what cost or what are we willing to risk)?”

This seems broadly similar to Umbran on Dread: it is known that some crisis will occur (the collapse of the tower => PC death; the need to confront the PC's brother); but there is uncertainty around when/how this will happen (until suddenly it does!).

In terms of Vincent Baker's framing, this is not uncertainty about what the cost will be. It seems to be uncertainty about what might be achieved before paying the cost.

if death itself is not considered a price, then perhaps our priorities are a tad askew, hm?

Depends. I don't think death is much of a price in some approaches to D&D, for instance - you just bring in a new PC.

 

[pemerton]

there is a line between a price paid that's modeled in the system (you have so many slots/points/whatever, when do you use them?), and a price paid that's part of emerging story-line (this is the current situation, it could change/might not be what it seems, what do you do?). The former is part of the game, the latter is system-independent

I don't think the latter is system-independent at all. Compare [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s example of DitV, where the system establishes a relationship with the PC's brother; or In a Wicked Age (that's on my mind befause I GMed a short session of it not too long ago) which establishes interlinked and conflicting "best interests" for each character (PC and NPC).

For players to be able to 'buy victory' they have to have something to pay with. In the types of games lumpley is talking about, players create characters with multiple dramatic needs and progress towards fulfilling these needs, or not, is how costs are paid and what drives the arc of the story.

<snip>

The players have the responsibility, before anything else, to create people with relationships, flaws, desperate needs, dangerous passions. They need characters who are part of a society, carrying the burdens that societies create - weighed down with debt, loaded with expectation, over-confident, addicted, at war with their family, haunted by ill-advised lovers.

Ie not system-independent.

I think it's a mistake to think of 'forcing' the players. This is stuck in a tired, old dog-eared paradigm where roleplaying is the GMs show.

OK, replace "force" with "invite" or "create the opportunity"?

To have drama, the players have to be the dramatis personae.

<snip>

These characters, their needs and situations, create the game. The GM doesn't create a world, doesn't build it and impose it on the players. The GMs job is to see what the players have created and breathe life into it, so the tensions and conflicts envisaged by the players begin to move and develop. The GM twists and weaves the threads, but those threads were created by, and belong to, the players.

This is a type of play where the imagining of setting, situation, conflict and opportunity comes from the players. It comes from the conceptions of the dramatis personae. If anything is decided prior to those characters being realised, the game will not feature the type of drama Vincent is discussing.

In relation to the question in the OP, the bit of bolded is key. The GM twists and weaves the threads is metaphor; but what does it look like literally?

For instance, should every situation that is framed by the GM have, implicit in it, not just the prospect of success (in relationship to dramatic need), but the prospect of paying some cost (in relationship to a different dramatic need)? Or can the cost be brought into play in the narration of failure, if failure occurs? The latter looks like it has the potential to be narratively arbitrary, but perhaps that's just the result of stating things abstractly?

 

[Bawylie]

Ah, yes. Well known suspense thriller BABE.

I think I disagree with the premise here. Suspense doesn’t involve the cost of victory at all. Not directly anyway. I suppose it might seem that way after the fact, a sort of narrative rationale of how the conflict resolved.

IMO suspense is actually a pause or a break in between actions taken to resolve a conflict and the outcome/resolution itself. And tension is a sort of measure of the emotional strain between the action and resolution.

Easiest example I can think of is the cliffhanger ending. The protagonist dangling on the edge of peril with no salvation in sight and the narrative abruptly ends. You might think “there’s no way the protagonist dies here” and you may reasonably conclude “it’s just a matter of what it costs him to get out of this - physical strain, injury, whatever.” But, your assumption is faulty. You don’t know the protagonist will survive even though you are anticipating it: you won’t actually know the outcome until you see it happen. And so long as your anticipation of the resolution is put off, you’re in suspense, experiencing tension that won’t slacken until the conflict resolved. HOW that resolution comes to pass is emotionally irrelevant so long as it doesn’t violate or cheapen the conflict/stakes.

Imagine a protagonist dangling over peril and the next time we see them, the fall itself is six inches to the ground - unless you’re watching a comedy, you’ve been cheated and it feels cheap. Whereas if the story was a comedy, you’d be well paid with a good laugh from the dissonance.

Right. So pretty plainly, the means of resolving tension isn’t important to creating suspense in your game, even though it is important in terms of keeping to the overall theme.

Then - how do you create suspense? First, you need to have a conflict that does NOT have a predetermined outcome. There has to be some risks or stakes that mean something to the people in the conflict. Second, you need to have some endeavor, effort, or action undertaken to resolve that conflict. And finally, you need to create (perhaps force?) a break or pause between the endeavor and its outcome. It is probably best if that pause capitalizes on the emotional ties the participants have to the stakes. You’re looking for a kind of arrested feeling, like watching a tightrope walker or something like that.

In the end, you’re looking to capitalize on opportunities and play with your pacing. You’re not necessarily introducing markets or costs for victory, most probably because that’s simply transactional. No you want a feeling of gambling instead. More like a wager than a cost. And that’s why dice can feel suspenseful! But you might find other wagers within the game itself that have stronger emotional tension.

 

[Umbran]

This seems broadly similar to Umbran on Dread: it is known that some crisis will occur (the collapse of the tower => PC death; the need to confront the PC's brother); but there is uncertainty around when/how this will happen (until suddenly it does!).

In terms of Vincent Baker's framing, this is not uncertainty about what the cost will be. It seems to be uncertainty about what might be achieved before paying the cost.

Okay, I think I get it now. Small differences in wording matter.

You had said, "So the suspense is not in relation to the outcome..." And my thought was - it totally is suspense in relation to the outcome - but around When and Who, rather than What.

Depends. I don't think death is much of a price in some approaches to D&D, for instance - you just bring in a new PC.

That's not death. That's a nap.

 

[Aldarc]

Ah, yes. Well known suspense thriller BABE.

Keeping in mind that this is also the same director and co-writer of every Mad Max film (and Happy Feet).

 

[Bedrockgames]

For me, the real threat of character death is a source of suspense or trepidation. There are other places for suspense in the game as well (it can occur around drama or just not knowing what is unfolding). But I quite like the classic experience of walking down hall, hoping a blade trap doesn't cut me in half or something.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Suspense is definitely all about timing. When will the PC achieve what they want to achieve? Delaying that outcome is the source of suspense, as has been mentioned.

In addition, what are they willing to do to achieve their goals? I’d say this is more about drama than suspense, but the two are related.

As for PC death, I think that can be a source for suspense. If the PC has a goal, but his life is in danger, there’s the possibility he may not love to achieve his goal. That can create some real suspense.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Easiest example I can think of is the cliffhanger ending. The protagonist dangling on the edge of peril with no salvation in sight and the narrative abruptly ends. You might think “there’s no way the protagonist dies here” and you may reasonably conclude “it’s just a matter of what it costs him to get out of this - physical strain, injury, whatever.” But, your assumption is faulty. You don’t know the protagonist will survive even though you are anticipating it: you won’t actually know the outcome until you see it happen.

Meh. You prettymuch do know the protagonist will /survive/ in some sense. You don't know if he'll extricate himself from predicament, or if he'll miraculously survive the fall, or get rescued, or fall presumably to his death, only to show up later with some improable story ("From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak I fought with the Balrog of Morgoth... Until at last I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountain side... ") that doesn't really adequately explained how he survived.
;P

Then - how do you create suspense? First, you need to have a conflict that does NOT have a predetermined outcome. There has to be some risks or stakes that mean something to the people in the conflict. Second, you need to have some endeavor, effort, or action undertaken to resolve that conflict. And finally, you need to create (perhaps force?) a break or pause between the endeavor and its outcome.

In a cliffhanger, you just come back later ("same bat-time, same bat-channel!"), in a movie you can cut to a different scene, or show the character's efforts in agonizing detail. In an RPG, what are you going to do, get a /reeeeallly/ tall dice tower? Resolution mechanics are not overly time-consuming - heck, some RPGs go out of their way to make 'em fast.

I think that's what the point was, you put things in the way of the 'inevitable' resolution that, in turn, need to be dealt with, somehow, thus creating that suspense-filled 'pause' between the intent/need/danger and the resolution. And, yeah, it may add up to a 'cost' (or may seem like pointless temporizing).