Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[Umbran]

Yeah, I've just never felt or played that way. I enjoy my PCs, but when they die I move on. My old group played that way too, and none of us were ever broken up about having make a new PC. The story goes on.

Which is fine.

But, having identified that, when discussing the topic, it pays to remember that there are aspects to character death that other people need to manage that you do not.

 

[pemerton]

If I-as-character wasn't prepared and ready to pay that price I wouldn't have supported the coup, would I? Or at the very least, my support would have been covert all the way.

Here is the post to which you are replying:

Suppose the thing you did was to support a coup. And the coup fails. And now you're banished - and have probably lost much of your wealth and fame in the process. Why would you not care?​

Your reply strikes me as an utter non-sequitur. It appears to me that many revolutionaries are "ready to pay the price" in the sense that a failed attempt at revolution can lead to exile, death, imprisonment etc, they are aware of this, and they proceed regardless. But most of these failed revolutionaries also care, in that (i) they would prefer not to suffer those losses, and (ii) they would prefer their revolution to succeed rather than fail.

I've GMed FRPG campaigns in which some PCs are part of political movements of various sorts (in some cases initiating them). Our play has taken it absolutely for granted that the players, both as participants in the game and as "inhabitants" of their PCs, care about whether or not those movements achieve their goals, whether or not their PCs succeed or fail, etc.

I remain utterly baffled by your suggestion that the norm, here, is to not care.

But the coup failed, and now my only viable option is to declare those parts of my past dead to me now, and move on as best I can.

Why is that the only viable option? History is replete with revolutionaries and coup leaders who identified and pursued other options. There's no reason why this can't also happen in RPGing.

OK: the coup failed, I can't go home, I'm almost skint, and I'm probably named on some "wanted" posters. Rather than bemoaning these things, as an adventurer/knight/thief/(etc.) I have to ask myself in-character what I can do next to both stay out of jail and get my adventuring/knightly/thieving/(etc.) career back on track.

There are so many assumptions built into this it's hard to know how to start unpacking them.

Here are the two obvious ones: that the character has no emotional connection to the coup or its cause; and that the character has no emotional connection to their homeland. Again, history is replete with counter-examples to those two assumptions, and so there is no reason why those assumptions should be true in RPGing.

I think one thing that might help here is to distinguish between setbacks and failures.

A setback slows or temporarily derails the character's pursuit of its goal(s), but the character can dust itself off and keep going. In the smaller scale this manifests as fail-forward; in the larger, it shows as your examples above.

A failure or loss (for lack of a better term) stops the character's pursuit of its goal(s) entirely or almost entirely, in the larger scale usually by rendering the character somehow incapable of continuing.

This is a spurious distinction, or at least a gerrymandered one. If you define failure = character death (or similar loss of the player's playing piece then by definition other sorts of loss or setback do not constitute failures. But so what? Why is your definition of failure of any interest? What does it actually tell us about the nature of RPGing, or the nature of stakes in fiction? My suggestion is that it tells us nothing about either.

If you are dead, and the story isn't over, you make a new character and the story continues. I don't understand why some people have so much trouble just making a new character.

In @Lanefan's terms, then, there is no failure here as the new character can continue to pursue the same goals. (And in a traditional D&D game where the players play their PCs as a party pursuing the opportunities for adventure provided by the GM, typically this is exactly what will happen.)

Like @The Shadow, I am puzzled as to how this "fungibility of characters" point is meant to square with the "death as the principal, perhaps only, significant consequence point".

There is a large part of the player base that just does not care: nothing will ever change that.

Suppose that's true - why is it relevant to me? I play with players who care about the fiction, not just whether or not they have to change their playing pieces.

Nearly everything else only makes a slight ripple in the story or plot...but death can make things really, really interesting.

Things less then death only cause slight ripples: that is just how things work.

The queen is sad so when she talks to the king he gets sad.....well, that's a tiny ripple that does not even effect the kingdom.

The king is assassinated on his throne is a massive tidal wave that effects the whole world, not just that kingdom.

As with @Lanefan's posts, there are so many assumptions being made here it's hard to know where to begin unpacking them.

One is that "the world" is an object of care or attention in RPGing. That's not true of much RPGing.

Another is that there is a "story" or "plot" in which ripples may or many not occur. This is not true either of much RPGing.

In any event, in the real world, many interesting things happen both to individuals - they have children, they become romantically entangled, they lose their jobs, their homes are destroyed by natural disaster, etc - and to communities - they hold rituals and ceremonies, they elect new governments, they complete great works, their great works are destroyed by natural disaster, etc - that don't involve death. I don't see why fiction would or should be any different.

 

[pemerton]

It may not be the most exciting way to lose wealth, but it makes sense in the setting.. and that's a big priority for me. Genre fiction concerns come after that.

I mentioned what I thought were some more exciting ways to lose wealth - eg being banished from one's homeland due to political changes of fortune.

How does that not make sense in the setting? How is losing your wealth due to a dragon's breath more realistic - for a start, that posits that all or most of the character's wealth is stuff that they are wearing and carrying, and how is that realistic?

In the real world the Paris salons of the 1920s included among their attendees White Russians in exile. Some of these people has lost all or most of their wealth due to their flight. None of them ever lost their wealth due to a lightning bolt spell! So I'm not sure how the latter is more realistic than the former.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Here is the post to which you are replying:

Suppose the thing you did was to support a coup. And the coup fails. And now you're banished - and have probably lost much of your wealth and fame in the process. Why would you not care?​

Your reply strikes me as an utter non-sequitur. It appears to me that many revolutionaries are "ready to pay the price" in the sense that a failed attempt at revolution can lead to exile, death, imprisonment etc, they are aware of this, and they proceed regardless. But most of these failed revolutionaries also care, in that (i) they would prefer not to suffer those losses, and (ii) they would prefer their revolution to succeed rather than fail.

I've GMed FRPG campaigns in which some PCs are part of political movements of various sorts (in some cases initiating them). Our play has taken it absolutely for granted that the players, both as participants in the game and as "inhabitants" of their PCs, care about whether or not those movements achieve their goals, whether or not their PCs succeed or fail, etc.

I remain utterly baffled by your suggestion that the norm, here, is to not care.

Why is that the only viable option? History is replete with revolutionaries and coup leaders who identified and pursued other options. There's no reason why this can't also happen in RPGing.

There are so many assumptions built into this it's hard to know how to start unpacking them.

Here are the two obvious ones: that the character has no emotional connection to the coup or its cause; and that the character has no emotional connection to their homeland. Again, history is replete with counter-examples to those two assumptions, and so there is no reason why those assumptions should be true in RPGing.

This is a spurious distinction, or at least a gerrymandered one. If you define failure = character death (or similar loss of the player's playing piece then by definition other sorts of loss or setback do not constitute failures. But so what? Why is your definition of failure of any interest? What does it actually tell us about the nature of RPGing, or the nature of stakes in fiction? My suggestion is that it tells us nothing about either.

In @Lanefen's terms, then, there is no failure here as the new character can continue to pursue the same goals. (And in a traditional D&D game where the players play their PCs as a party pursuing the opportunities for adventure provided by the GM, typically this is exactly what will happen.)

Like @The Shadow, I am puzzled as to how this "fungibility of characters" point is meant to square with the "death as the principal, perhaps only, significant consequence point".

Suppose that's true - why is it relevant to me? I play with players who care about the fiction, not just whether or not they have to change their playing pieces.


As with @Lanefan's posts, there are so many assumptions being made here it's hard to know where to begin unpacking them.

One is that "the world" is an object of care or attention in RPGing. That's not true of much RPGing.

Another is that there is a "story" or "plot" in which ripples may or many not occur. This is not true either of much RPGing.

In any event, in the real world, many interesting things happen both to individuals - they have children, they become romantically entangled, they lose their jobs, their homes are destroyed by natural disaster, etc - and to communities - they hold rituals and ceremonies, they elect new governments, they complete great works, their great works are destroyed by natural disaster, etc - that don't involve death. I don't see why fiction would or should be any different.

As has been said many, many times, death is not the only important fail state. But it has to be a possible fail state in situations where it logically, by the rules of the setting, could be. If you're in a situation that, were it to happen in real life, could possibly lead to death, that possibility has to exist in a game simulation of that situation for me to take it seriously.

I've heard a lot of misrepresentation from folks here that wanting death to be a possibility means that we think nothing else matters. That is simply untrue.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mentioned what I thought were some more exciting ways to lose wealth - eg being banished from one's homeland due to political changes of fortune.

How does that not make sense in the setting? How is losing your wealth due to a dragon's breath more realistic - for a start, that posits that all or most of the character's wealth is stuff that they are wearing and carrying, and how is that realistic?

In the real world the Paris salons of the 1920s included among their attendees White Russians in exile. Some of these people has lost all or most of their wealth due to their flight. None of them ever lost their wealth due to a lightning bolt spell! So I'm not sure how the latter is more realistic than the former.

Its not. They are equally realistic within the setting, and either could and should be a possibility. Who said otherwise? My main concern is making sure the setting makes sense, not generating narrative beats.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To be fair, I do think that's a generally held position. The difference is more in where you put the player side incentives. I generally prefer games where the goal is to try and ensure everything goes right, and my choices and planning can lead to that as an outcome. Games that use narrative structures for pacing/resolution tend to suffer from the opposite problem, in my experience, where they insist things must go wrong, so as to be "interesting." I want to allocate resource, makes contingency plans, and ideally steamroll through obstacles through my skill....I also, of course, want to fail to do that and have to think reactively when it call comes crumbling down and goes bad, but that means the obstacles can't be structurally impossible to defeat that way, and that I can actually be rewarded with that kind of easy success when I earn it.

I generally think players should be able to mitigate death as a consequence, but not using a meta-game resource. Encounter structure should make them fairly survivable and sufficiently competent that they have tools to deal with most situations. Ideally also, players should have sufficient awareness to know when they can't deal with something and have tools to disengage.

I don't think variability is the interesting part of risk. It's not that you might randomly die that's interesting, it's that the board state will evolve dynamically in a way you can't entirely plan for, and iterated, tactical decision making is necessary to proceed. There should certainly be a flowchart that leads to death on the table when you're modeling combat, but it should take an exceptionally bad player to find it.

I agree, its not controversial, there is going to be some sort of mix of skill in deploying fiction and game mechanics, but I do think there can be skill in deploying dramatic elements to the game as well. Like, 95% of what is happening to my character in our BitD game is basically of my own devising when it comes down to it. I picked my rivals (invented them) as well as a good fraction of the NPCs that are my allies, contacts, and followers. Obviously the other players of the rest of the crew have a significant part there as well. One player brought in a lot of the cult stuff that is driving significant parts of the overall story arc, another has invented much weirdness that is mixed into it all, and another just throws bombs at everything and has also brought in quite a few different threads. @Manbearcat has also tossed stuff at us, though I wouldn't say 'out of the blue' exactly, but there's a definite element in there of mixing things up.

So, yeah, it is entirely true that your life in Dungeon World, or BitD, or Torchbearer is NOT going to suddenly become easy and conflict-free. I'd be EXTREMELY surprised if that happened in a D&D game either, unless it marked an end-state of the game. I would say any of those 3 games I just mentioned could also work out that way, if its the will of the participants and the dice cooperate a bit. You get to level 10 in DW, defeat the campaign front's final danger, and yeah, you can retire in glory! It is actually pretty hard to do, but possible. Same with BitD, I can see the possibility of a crew that just sort of reaches tier V or so and lives happily ever after, basically.

But in terms of the parts of these games that you ACTUALLY PLAY, and I include D&D in this, you really only end up focusing on the conflicts and crises. No 9th level fighter's player spends all their time playing out the details of running a keep. No, orcs attack, dragons threaten you, ankhegs eat half your peasants, and bullettes eat all their horses. The Empire decides your frontier needs their 'benevolent' overlordship and a war starts.

So, in the end, I am not super convinced. I mean, try me in a DW game, if you say "I want my character to be able to just go to the tavern every day and drink!" OK, fine, that's it, roll up a new guy! Or be ready for something to kick you in the head, just like it would in a D&D game!

 

[The Shadow]

I've heard a lot of misrepresentation from folks here that wanting death to be a possibility means that we think nothing else matters. That is simply untrue.

For what it's worth, I've found your contributions to this thread much more comprehensible and reasonable than that of some others.

There's at least one person here who has outright stated that nothing but death really matters.

 

[The Shadow]

Like, 95% of what is happening to my character in our BitD game is basically of my own devising when it comes down to it.

Totally! I often design my characters to be in a pressure cooker - they're in an unstable situation that simply cannot go on the way it is. I can't predict ahead of time how the situation will explode, I just know it will, and that it will be bound to be interesting!

One thing I'm convinced that systems like GURPS and Champions get wrong is giving you points back for disadvantages. Those suckers are precious, you should have to pay for them! (Or better yet, like Fate, they should benefit you precisely when they hinder you.)

 

[pemerton]

I had your Prince Valiant games, and several folks BitD family of games, in mind when I was trying to phrase the first sentence

In part I was trying to get at how a lot of not-those-game-folks - like me - seem to use games that aren't designed for the level of lethality/stakes/randomness/control that the underlying fiction is. And wondering if it's because a lot of people seem to like plot armor, but only if it isn't too obvious (we want the feeling of lots of risk and lack of bumpers... but apparently want the effect that not too much risk and having some bumpers).

I wonder if part of it is just what each individual is willing to buy into. Do contented D&D players just shove aside concerns about what HP and AC imply about the world as necessary (for D&D anyway) evils, and then just go on with life ignoring those implications?

I think it might be close to a tautology that contented D&D players shove aside concerns about hp and AC and what they might imply about the fiction if treated as other than metagame devices. (I say close to a tautology because a small number seem to embrace "hp as meat" and treat high level D&D PCs as literally non-human in their physiology.)

In the late 1970s through to the early 1990s FRPGers who enjoyed some of the basic tropes of D&D but didn't accept hp and AC tended to move to other games with more "realistic" combat systems: Chivalry & Sorcery, RuneQuest, RoleMaster and the like.

These systems also tend to have other features that increase "realism" - eg their skill systems - and hence, at least as I've experienced them (primarily RM, secondarily RQ, and C&S only by reputation) tend to shift play away from the notorious D&D-ish cycle of combats towards more "grounded" or "realistic" or (as the advocates of these systems would say) "sophisticated" concerns.

For my own part, I began this trajectory playing the original OA in the mid-to-late 80s before moving to RM. Today, I regard the premier RPG for this sort of play as Burning Wheel. Prince Valiant is a lighter system that can also fill this niche to some extent. But there are many FRPGs now that completely eschew the trapping of realistic combat, skill systems etc but can still fill this "sophisticated alternative to D&D" niche.

There may also be D&D play that fills the same niche!, although I think there are some features of D&D - starting with the default emphasis on the cycles of combat - that can make it tricky to do this, or that can cause obstacles to doing this that can easily be tripped over.

Do most things in fiction - whether books or movies or ttRPGs - have different strings pulling things that some folks can ignore and others can't?

it feels like every work of fiction (from movie to ttRPG) has some strings and unreality hiding in them. I wonder what makes it easy for each of us to ignore some of those strings, and to be aggravated by others.

Take crime-noir detective shows from back when. How many times can the hero be knocked out, seemingly with a concussion, without the villain ever going too far and killing them and without any long-term bad effects? Are there some readers/viewers/listeners who run across that a few times and then just can't because it seems silly? Are there others where it's just a genre trope and they go with it? Are hit points in some ttRPGs and meta-currency in other ttRPGs examples of things that some people are fine with ignoring and others aren't?

I think that if you want your game to produce something that is recognisably a story, you are going to need to use techniques that will support that. (Though those techniques need not be ones that take production of a story as their direct aim. It is possible to have a game that reliably achieves X although its techniques of play make Y rather than X salient to the participants - this is a special case of a more general point about institutional design.)

One thing that all stories depend upon is contrivance, in the sense of non-random concatenations of events. For instance, characters turn up "at the appropriate time", or sequences of events unfold so as to provide interwoven opportunities for realisation, catharsis etc. How RPGing produces these contrivances can vary - eg it can be GM side, player-side, both (independently of one another) or both (cooperative). It can be linked to resolution mechanics, or left "free-floating". One element of these contrivances is the endurance, despite sometimes even severe physical suffering, of the protagonist at least until some sort of climax occurs.

As far as I know, hit points weren't invented to support storytelling contrivance, except in the thinnest sense of ensuring the endurance of the protagonist. The only version of D&D I know of to adapt them to this end is 4e.

Therefore, when I read a post from someone who is happy with hit points but rejects metacurrency and/or story contrivances, what I infer is that they are playing a RPG in which story and drama do not figure prominently, in which PCs are not thought of first and foremost as protagonists, and in which the main goal of play, from the player side, is to struggle against obstacles which have little meaning beyond "being there", and which pose no profound threat other than having to start over (eg with a new character). In the case of posters like @Lanefan and @bloodtide, this impression is reinforced by the suggestion that players won't care about the fiction as long as they still have their playing piece available to them.

If you'd like to post some thoughts on how Prince Valiant supports the play with links to or new posts of actual play, I'd sure hope some folks would find it interesting!

This goes, at least in part, to the issue of "obstacles" that I mentioned above.

Every time the play of the game makes the table care about and focus on some bit of fiction that does not speak to what is at stake, and every time it makes the table engage in a mechanical process whose connection to what is at stake is opaque at best, it distracts from the stuff that we (ostensibly) care about and therefore makes it harder to maintain our caring about it.

Here are some things that D&D tends to make participants care about, even though it typically won't speak to things that are at stake: how much time has passed (spell durations, recovery cycles, etc); how much distance has been traversed or how far things are from one another (movement rates, spell ranges, etc); whose turn it is (initiative cycles in combat); how frequently an ability can be used (spells are the stand-out here); tallies of numbers (eg hit points) whose connection to the fiction is often tenuous at best; etc.

D&D also tends to have many player-side abilities whose impact on the fiction is independent of what is at stake. This can mean that stuff that is high stakes resolves very easily (anti-climax) or stuff that is low-stakes is very challenging (at the table, in the fiction, or both) to resolve.

(It's not a coincidence that 4e D&D tackles all these things, in various ways and with greater or lesser degrees of success.)

Prince Valiant has basically none of the above. This makes a big difference to the play experience.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah. While I suppose disinterest in events other than death is valid, it isn't a game I want to run.

Maybe the issue here isn't about whether or not the PCs can die, but how to get players to engage with the setting events enough to care about something other than PC death, so that isn't the only lever the GM can pull.

I think this is hitting on the nut of the thing. Some of us were chatting earlier and I mentioned something that we did in a D&D game WAY back when. Instead of acting like typical D&D characters, our PCs decided they would act basically a lot like normal people might, granted ambitious ones. So, we went to the Dungeon Entrance, after buying some men-at-arms, a couple crossbows, a couple big tower shields, and a mule. Now, we were pretty broke after that (we pooled our starting gold). So we carefully explored the mazy dungeon a bit until we found some gold pieces, killing a couple level 1 monsters in the process.

So, now we go back to the town, and the fighter goes to the local lord and says "hey, we've found a dungeon, if you give us an exclusive delving license, we'll follow all your rules, cut you in for your share, report all our hauls, and whatever other reasonable rules you want." So he says "Sure, why not?" Next we go to the moneylenders and get them to front us like 100gp for better equipment, and make them partners in 'The Dungeon Company'. Now we proceed to systematically exploit this dungeon like we're miners, not 'adventurers'. We build wooden hordings that we can push down the hallways, carefully survey everything, block off any area we aren't interested in exploring, and basically just do what any actual living breathing people that want to clear out a dangerous place would do. We plan out every little trap clearing op, build simulations of the complicated traps and work out how to disarm them under safe conditions, etc. etc. etc. Sure, there's danger, Jelly Cube eats one of our walls, we come back with lots of fire and that's that, etc.

The point is, this lead to a discussion of the UTTER CRAZY NONSENSICAL NATURE of the characters in adventure games of a D&D-esque ilk. What insane person wants to just do stupidly dangerous crazy things? Nobody in a million years would ever behave ANYTHING like a typical D&D character, not unless they were literally certifiably mad. People in the real world exist like that, sure, but most of them die young, and the rest are looked at a bit askance at the very least. They are also fantastically unusual, and I'd say that a game which can only handle play where that sort of character is ALL OF THE PCs is somehow bent. It sure isn't a very sophisticated RPG!

Now, we CAN come up with reasons why you might have someone a bit more like an adventurer, but NOW you get into games where the story is a LOT more like something that could be brewed up in Dungeon World or Torchbearer. That is, you got no choice, the world craps on you, and you have to respond. Something happens, you take what resources you've got, and you deal with it. Now, you can play D&D that way too, but here we are at the point where I hear people objecting that "stuff shouldn't constantly just happen to the PCs." Well, sure, that's nice, but its that or you're kind of a psycho, or maybe alternately you can play our 'Dungeon & Co.' style campaign where we mined the dungeon (totally the players idea, BTW, the GM thought we were the crazy ones until we explained it to him).

My point, ultimately, is that you cannot really say that you're role playing in any significant way if the characters are just these crazy murder hobos effectively. It just doesn't make sense. I remember thinking the same sort of thing about Traveller games, like "Why don't they just sell the Free Trader and like buy a mansion and retire right now before play even starts?" Sure, you can come up with some reasons why not, but you're playing a very narrow range of characters when you have to always do that!