Whether we’re talking about real-world politics or playing in an ongoing fantasy roleplaying campaign that uses an established shared setting (like the Realms or Golarion or Krynn), there are ways of “playing nice,” and there’s also behaviour that’s not considered nice. Breaking the rules, some call it.
Running around smashing things is generally considered not nice, though it does tend to be what adventurers (your typical party of Player Characters in most games) do. But here and now, as my pen swirls and flourishes, I’m thinking more of the referees of said games, and their überplots and Big Events that hopefully happen in the background and spur player adventures—rather than happening directly above the heads of Player Characters, and letting things, ahem, fall where they may.
When working in the Realms, Jeff Grubb had a firm house rule of “Don’t Blow Up The Moon,” and most shared settings, from Hollywood to your own gaming table, have a formal or informal-but-understood rule of “Don’t Break Or Steal The Toys, And Put Them Back Where You Found Them.”
Or to put this more concretely, if Kronth The Second, Lion of Ulmaria, is King of Ulmaria when you start game play or storytelling, he’d better be King when you finish, unless you have permission from whoever’s running the IP to the contrary.
If you are the DM of your own campaign, or a writer penning your own fantasy epic, of course you have your own permission. But the thinking behind this rule should still bear on the situation: humankind thrives because of change, but individual humans hate change unless they hate their status quo more than the uncertainty change brings. And despite what you might hear to the contrary, most gamers are human, and so, hate change. They’ve gone to all the trouble to learn and understand about this or that imaginary setting and its weird rules of magic and religion and monsters with odd perilous powers, and they hate having nasty DM surprises sprung on them, that leave them feeling they don’t understand the setting all around them. Do you remember your first day at school, or in a new country, or at a new job, lost and wandering, with any great fondness?
Or to put this is everyday terms, dethrone Kronth only for a good storytelling reason, not merely to stir the pot or because you’re bored and want a big headline.
The downfall of a god or an empire or a Great Old One is certainly news, and is probably very exciting for those at Ground Zero while it’s happening (though I suspect most of them would use more colourful words than “very exciting”), but if it happens onstage becomes a hard act to follow, and if it happens onstage more than once has the nasty tendency to kick off an arms race that rushes hard and fast into hollow anticlimax and cheapening everything and the jumping of too-handy sharks.
What engenders awe today will all too easily become ho-hum humdrum tomorrow. Which is why precedents matter and are perilous. I recall grown-up scientists and sf writers weeping openly when a rocket with people aboard first successfully launched, soaring from Earth up into the heavens, because it was such a long-pursued dream for them. Children today are used to launches and intergalactic empires and space battles; for many of them, that particular awe is long gone.
But there is always a first time, for every one of us. Those first times are precious; don’t waste them. The first time that gamers around a table really know fear…or awe, or burst into applause together over some achievement that is shared but entirely imaginary.
And more than that: the first time they feel like they belong. That they are part of a fellowship, a band of brothers (sisters, sharers of the Secret Faith, or fellow tentacled things) that stand for a common cause and have endured hardships together and learned to rely on each other. That they have done something that matters. A feeling we tend to have all too rarely in the real world, and all too fleetingly—and worse, that fades into a sour regard of what we did now being ignored, or swept aside, or cheapened by something else that happened subsequently.
It’s all too easy, when telling tales, to go straight to the top. We look over the shoulder of the king, or the princess, or the villain who’s about to murder both of them. Royalty is where power resides in our typical imagined quasi-medieval kingdom. We want to be there, where things happen that matter. And Hollywood and our television screens have taught us that will be there, that we will see for ourselves those key moments when important things happen, or are said, or are revealed.
So we expect to be on the spot when we’re reading fiction, or sitting at a gaming table. We feel cheated when a DM has things happen offstage, or last night when we were busy doing something else exciting. If we, the Company of the Bright Bold Blades, are sent by the dying King Ravilonadar to wrest the fabled glowing, floating magical gem known as the Heart of the Dragon from the Dread Dungeon of the Wyrm Undying because its touch will restore him to health, and we battle the dragon from beyond the grave and a lot of other nasty critters to bring the Heart forth and rush it to the king, we’re going to feel profoundly cheated if the DM smilingly informs us old Ravilonadar coughed and died as we were riding up to the Castle. Things aren’t supposed to happen that way!
Now, if the DM informs us the evil Vizier saw us from the battlements and rushed to stab the king with a poisoned dagger before we could get there, that’s different. We can turn our “We wuz robbed!” into fury and get after the Vizier with a vengeance.
And if we have a really good DM, we’ll be standing in the chaos of a kingdom that has boiled up into the open dagger-wielding strife of many competing factions all wanting their own stooge on the throne, and the Vizier trying to frame us for Ravilonadar’s murder, and foul magic is at work down in the dungeons beneath us as cultists summon and release eldritch, squamous tentacled horrors to feed on the courtiers and terrorize the populace, and a rival kingdom is about to invade, and we are indeed right there, on the spot, as things happen that matter.
But you wouldn’t want all of this to happen every Thursday, would you?
Running around smashing things is generally considered not nice, though it does tend to be what adventurers (your typical party of Player Characters in most games) do. But here and now, as my pen swirls and flourishes, I’m thinking more of the referees of said games, and their überplots and Big Events that hopefully happen in the background and spur player adventures—rather than happening directly above the heads of Player Characters, and letting things, ahem, fall where they may.
When working in the Realms, Jeff Grubb had a firm house rule of “Don’t Blow Up The Moon,” and most shared settings, from Hollywood to your own gaming table, have a formal or informal-but-understood rule of “Don’t Break Or Steal The Toys, And Put Them Back Where You Found Them.”
Or to put this more concretely, if Kronth The Second, Lion of Ulmaria, is King of Ulmaria when you start game play or storytelling, he’d better be King when you finish, unless you have permission from whoever’s running the IP to the contrary.
If you are the DM of your own campaign, or a writer penning your own fantasy epic, of course you have your own permission. But the thinking behind this rule should still bear on the situation: humankind thrives because of change, but individual humans hate change unless they hate their status quo more than the uncertainty change brings. And despite what you might hear to the contrary, most gamers are human, and so, hate change. They’ve gone to all the trouble to learn and understand about this or that imaginary setting and its weird rules of magic and religion and monsters with odd perilous powers, and they hate having nasty DM surprises sprung on them, that leave them feeling they don’t understand the setting all around them. Do you remember your first day at school, or in a new country, or at a new job, lost and wandering, with any great fondness?
Or to put this is everyday terms, dethrone Kronth only for a good storytelling reason, not merely to stir the pot or because you’re bored and want a big headline.
The downfall of a god or an empire or a Great Old One is certainly news, and is probably very exciting for those at Ground Zero while it’s happening (though I suspect most of them would use more colourful words than “very exciting”), but if it happens onstage becomes a hard act to follow, and if it happens onstage more than once has the nasty tendency to kick off an arms race that rushes hard and fast into hollow anticlimax and cheapening everything and the jumping of too-handy sharks.
What engenders awe today will all too easily become ho-hum humdrum tomorrow. Which is why precedents matter and are perilous. I recall grown-up scientists and sf writers weeping openly when a rocket with people aboard first successfully launched, soaring from Earth up into the heavens, because it was such a long-pursued dream for them. Children today are used to launches and intergalactic empires and space battles; for many of them, that particular awe is long gone.
But there is always a first time, for every one of us. Those first times are precious; don’t waste them. The first time that gamers around a table really know fear…or awe, or burst into applause together over some achievement that is shared but entirely imaginary.
And more than that: the first time they feel like they belong. That they are part of a fellowship, a band of brothers (sisters, sharers of the Secret Faith, or fellow tentacled things) that stand for a common cause and have endured hardships together and learned to rely on each other. That they have done something that matters. A feeling we tend to have all too rarely in the real world, and all too fleetingly—and worse, that fades into a sour regard of what we did now being ignored, or swept aside, or cheapened by something else that happened subsequently.
It’s all too easy, when telling tales, to go straight to the top. We look over the shoulder of the king, or the princess, or the villain who’s about to murder both of them. Royalty is where power resides in our typical imagined quasi-medieval kingdom. We want to be there, where things happen that matter. And Hollywood and our television screens have taught us that will be there, that we will see for ourselves those key moments when important things happen, or are said, or are revealed.
So we expect to be on the spot when we’re reading fiction, or sitting at a gaming table. We feel cheated when a DM has things happen offstage, or last night when we were busy doing something else exciting. If we, the Company of the Bright Bold Blades, are sent by the dying King Ravilonadar to wrest the fabled glowing, floating magical gem known as the Heart of the Dragon from the Dread Dungeon of the Wyrm Undying because its touch will restore him to health, and we battle the dragon from beyond the grave and a lot of other nasty critters to bring the Heart forth and rush it to the king, we’re going to feel profoundly cheated if the DM smilingly informs us old Ravilonadar coughed and died as we were riding up to the Castle. Things aren’t supposed to happen that way!
Now, if the DM informs us the evil Vizier saw us from the battlements and rushed to stab the king with a poisoned dagger before we could get there, that’s different. We can turn our “We wuz robbed!” into fury and get after the Vizier with a vengeance.
And if we have a really good DM, we’ll be standing in the chaos of a kingdom that has boiled up into the open dagger-wielding strife of many competing factions all wanting their own stooge on the throne, and the Vizier trying to frame us for Ravilonadar’s murder, and foul magic is at work down in the dungeons beneath us as cultists summon and release eldritch, squamous tentacled horrors to feed on the courtiers and terrorize the populace, and a rival kingdom is about to invade, and we are indeed right there, on the spot, as things happen that matter.
But you wouldn’t want all of this to happen every Thursday, would you?
