Suspense in RPGs

[Tony Vargas]

I think if you are in a campaign where death traps are known to exist, it can be incredibly suspenseful going into virtually any corridor.

Suspense also wears off, if not eventually resolved or, if continuously repeated in spite of resolutions. It becomes stress, or boredom, or fatalism, or PTSD, eventually, I guess.

If you know for sure this place has traps, it is also going to be a suspenseful time getting through that gauntlet. Obviously if you don't like characters dying without forewarning, this approach isn't for you.

In other words, if you /like/ arbitrarilly killing off PCs without warning... ;P

It doesn't have to be death though. Any permanent condition is pretty high stakes. I've also used traps that cut off limbs (in the game we play there isn't any kind of limb regeneration ability).

(...and, I assume, no resurection?)
In D&D, specifically, Death & Dismemberment are technically, with high enough level magic, temporary conditions.

One conclusion I reached a long time ago was that the loss condition of an RPG wasn't character death or failure to attain an objective in a scenario - it's /loss of control of the character/. I've heard a similar idea put a different way in recent years: "the prize of 'winning' an RPG is that you get to continue playing."

 

[chaochou]

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?

Well, to be fair I did give three solid examples of what it looks like literally...

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...

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)?

I can't answer 'should' questions! But in my own play, the answer is 'mostly yes'. So when I run a game, every situation develops with both opportunities and threats. Only if a character steadfastly refuses to engage do I cut and move on.

But in practical terms, a lot of the time a player is aiming to make progress towards one of their goals, and either succeeding, failing or getting to trade off progress here for difficulties there.

However, there are times - eg, in the PbtA games there's a move called 'announce future badness' - where I'm simply describing some new facet and throwing it in the mix. It's generally broad brush stuff, and it will only take form as the players decide if and how to interact. In Apocalypse World it could be a plume of thick, oily smoke on the horizon. Could be a mean, mile-high wall of red dust closing in. Could be a the stench of something long dead and decaying blowing up through the sewers.

In those cases no-one (including me, the MC) knows what it all means. There's no answer until the interaction of the characters in the world and the dice hitting the table forces the creation of an answer. So it can't be said to be related to an existing dramatic need... but it is fuel for the players to ignite something new, or if left alone for me to build a new line of pressure on them.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Suspense also wears off, if not eventually resolved or, if continuously repeated in spite of resolutions. It becomes stress, or boredom, or fatalism, or PTSD, eventually, I guess. In other words, if you /like/ arbitrarilly killing off PCs without warning... ;P

You can spin any playstyle negatively if you want. And every play style has an extreme mode that isn't fun under the wrong GM. But there is nothing wrong with having death on the table, even allowing it to come in suddenly without warning. Doesn't mean it is omnipresent. It means it is a possibility in the game. If you don't like it, don't play that way. I am talking about what I enjoy.

(...and, I assume, no resurection?)
In D&D, specifically, Death & Dismemberment are technically, with high enough level magic, temporary conditions.

Sure, but D&D isn't the only game out there. And I specifically said in the game I use, maiming has rules and is permanent (unless something really extreme like the intervention of a deity undoes it).

One conclusion I reached a long time ago was that the loss condition of an RPG wasn't character death or failure to attain an objective in a scenario - it's /loss of control of the character/. I've heard a similar idea put a different way in recent years: "the prize of 'winning' an RPG is that you get to continue playing."

I think there are lots of potential loss conditions in RPGs. Not succeeding at the adventure is a potential loss condition. So is dying, or losing an arm. Having your family or close friends wiped out is a potential loss condition. Not winning an election can even be a loss condition. Losing a powerful magic artifact could be another. I don't think it is all about loss of control of the character.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You can spin any playstyle negatively if you want. And every play style has an extreme mode that isn't fun under the wrong GM. But there is nothing wrong with having death on the table, even allowing it to come in suddenly without warning.

There's nothing morally/ethically wrong with the style, no. But, it's not the only way to build suspense, and may well work against the experience of suspense if over-played.

I think there are lots of potential loss conditions in RPGs. Not succeeding at the adventure is a potential loss condition. So is dying, or losing an arm. Having your family or close friends wiped out is a potential loss condition. Not winning an election can even be a loss condition. Losing a powerful magic artifact could be another. I don't think it is all about loss of control of the character.

There's a lot of potenital victory/loss conditions for a character, in a scenario, certainly. They're internal to the larger context of the RPG, though. Your character can fail to find (or manage to lose) the Lochnar, and fail his mission, but, if the world doesn't blow up or anything, there may be other missions. Your character can die in the process of saving something bigger than himself (like "the World," or something less over the top) and count that a victory, or lose an arm and become a more 'interesting'/fun-to-play character (or just crack the occassional Admiral Lord Nelson joke - heck, in some systems you could just decide to play a one-armed character).

(Why, yes, I am arguing both sides of the 'death is good/bad' thing - it's nuanced, I guess.)

 

[Bedrockgames]

There's nothing morally/ethically wrong with the style, no. But, it's not the only way to build suspense, and may well work against the experience of suspense if over-played.

I never suggested it was the only way.

 

[Bawylie]

On definitions: Google gives me suspense = a state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen.

On outcomes: some outcomes (in films, say, or novels) are known. When I'm watching The Bourne Identity, and 10 or so minutes in Matt Damon's character is involved in some mad hijinks the lead to him being chased by security guards, police, etc - well, I know that he's not going to be shot dead (there's another hour-and-half of running time). And I know that he's not going to be locked up with no hope of escape. And, given the posters I saw on the way into the cinema, I can be pretty sure that he's not going to be arrested and put on trial - because this hasn't been billed as a courtroom drama!

But there can still be suspense - anxious uncertainty over what may happen. So what is the event that is generating anxiety because it is possible but not certain?

Let's say it's the manner and consequences of the character's escape from the security guards and police. What approach to RPGing will allow this to be replicated (in some fashion, to some degree of approximation)? For instance, what would GM prep look like?

So how do we do this in a RPG (if we take it as a premise that the GM is not just going to narrate cut-scenes to the players)?

For instance, the player(s) make a check, and it fails (so they eg aren't able to successfuly disguise themselves so they can walk out unnoticed) - if we want suspense, rather than just a cut straight to failure of the sort that you and [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] noted might be anti-climactic, what should be the response?

Do the players get a reroll by staking more? If so, is the reroll purely metagame (that's how 4e, by default, tends to handle it) or something further in the fiction (that's how DitV handles it, and I've done it that way in 4e).

Or some sort of "fail forward"? Which raises the question of where we get the requisite story elements from eg must they have already been implicit in the scene, or just implicit on someone's PC sheet? (Say as a relationship, or Bond in 5e.)

Something else?

Thinking about this a little bit. What if you did just straight delay the time between a declared action and a die roll?

Like say you have a player who decides to sneak into somewhere an steal something. Most people start asking for stealth checks pretty quickly in most systems. But what if you just had the player pick up and hold the dice? Just hold them until the results of a check need to be known. Say there’s a specific security guard with a flashlight and the beam is swinging right toward you, ROLL for all that’s good and holy, ROLL!

Yeah. Now I’m thinking of Alien. Moments of suspense there are where the audience knows the alien is around but the character in the scene is unsure or unaware. So there may be situations where you might play on the paranoia of a player by telling them that their character doesn’t know they’re getting snuck up on. So they’re gonna keep doing whatever they were doing while you get to just describe an impending doom. That might be interesting, even if it does pit the player knowledge against the character’s ignorance. I’d be up for it, personally, but maybe not everyone.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I’ve always found that having a player roll a die, and then not revealing any kind of result to be a pretty basic way to build suspense. Even if there is no need for a roll. If you had a scene where you wanted to build tension, I’d probably have a series of such rolls combined with some fitting narration to help establish the feel. Some of the rolls may be for a skill check or what not, and others can simply be to ramp up the tension.

This is probably the most basic and immediate way I can think of to achieve the goal.

 

[pemerton]

Well, to be fair I did give three solid examples of what it looks like literally

True, but not with RPG techniques attached!

However, there are times - eg, in the PbtA games there's a move called 'announce future badness' - where I'm simply describing some new facet and throwing it in the mix. It's generally broad brush stuff, and it will only take form as the players decide if and how to interact. In Apocalypse World it could be a plume of thick, oily smoke on the horizon. Could be a mean, mile-high wall of red dust closing in. Could be a the stench of something long dead and decaying blowing up through the sewers.

In those cases no-one (including me, the MC) knows what it all means. There's no answer until the interaction of the characters in the world and the dice hitting the table forces the creation of an answer. So it can't be said to be related to an existing dramatic need... but it is fuel for the players to ignite something new, or if left alone for me to build a new line of pressure on them.

OK, that's a technique, thanks!

In my BW game, the PCs getting word of the marriage of the Gynarch of Hardby to an established nemesis NPC played a similar sort of role.

To go back to the Star Wars example:

How do we set up (something like) Han being frozen as a possible cost of finding a Jedi Master?

I'm not that good at weaving split party stuff together (but need to get better - it's an important GM technique in Cortex+ Heroic), so when I say what I'm thinking about this it will probably be a bit half-baked.

But what I'm thinking is that first we need to split the "party": Luke goes one way, Han and friends the other. (In Cortex+ Heroic this is a simple GM move, requiring some Doom Pool expenditure).

Then, it needs to be clear that delays or setbacks on Luke's side (faffing around when he meets Yoda; failing the test in the tree; trying rather than doing) escalate the consequences for failure on Han's side. In Cortex+, this can be done mechanically by using the Doom Pool dice that Luke's player is generating in resolution aginst Han's player - but there is no easy way, I think, of revealing this in the ficiton before you do it, because Doom Pool dice just sit there untagged.

But now that I'm thinking about it, one way is to use those Doom Pool dice to establish assets for Vader - Complian Planetary Authorities; Readied Carbon Freezing Plant; etc - which build up the threat against Han, which Luke's player is not able to help against because (in the fiction) Luke is still on Dagobah and so has no means of acting at that distance.

In my next Cortex+ Heroic session I'd already been thinking that I have to run a split party (because one of the players missed the last session and so his PC was not with the other characters, presumably having gone off on his own path). I'm going to have to see if I can do something like the above to generate suspense as to the fate for one group resulting from challenges faced by the other.

 

[Umbran]

But now that I'm thinking about it, one way is to use those Doom Pool dice to establish assets for Vader - Complian Planetary Authorities; Readied Carbon Freezing Plant; etc - which build up the threat against Han, which Luke's player is not able to help against because (in the fiction) Luke is still on Dagobah and so has no means of acting at that distance.

Which makes sense, except you then have the meta-issue of Luke's player deciding to quit before things get dangerous for Han. If they see these assets start to build up, the threat to his friends become obvious, and they are apt to stop before the situation gets so critical that Han ends up in carobonite.

 

[Umbran]

It occurs to me that, in general, mechanics may not be the best place to look for creating suspense in RPGs. As soon as you have a player doing math to see uncertainty or danger looming, they're out of the immersive moment, and dong metagame analysis - logical thinking - which isn't what you want when you want suspense, right? You want visceral thinking.

I may not have missed it earlier in the thread, but there are immersive approaches as well. Sound and lighting, for example. If you're running a Hunt for Red October scenario, having the room be a bit stuffy... these things may raise suspense. In the construction of your scenario, not having your villain jump out in the open all at once - but giving the PCs hints and glimpses. The gruesome dead body here, the low pitched rumble and ripples in the water glass there, the glimpse of a form mostly obscured (the cinematics of Alien, or some sections of Jurrasic Park, for example) may go a long way in building suspense in a way that is mechanic-agnostic.