Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[Campbell]

My personal stake is that (at least for my enjoyment on either side of the screen) that something needs to be at stake and that tension needs to be real. I would also prefer that what is stake be as immediate as possible, rather than just attrition. I don't think it needs to be a player character's life on the line or even whether will defeat whoever they are facing in combat as long as something the players really care about is on the line. It could be stopping a ritual before it goes off, trying to save an ally, trying to turn an enemy, etc. When you are individually stronger than the opposition you face secondary objectives are key to making play feel compelling.

These sorts of secondary objectives played a huge role in our L5R game. Our 3 bushi started the game as pretty damn competent and by the time we reached Rank 3 there were very few samurai who could individually match either of our duelists. So much of the challenge came from secondary objectives: protecting NPCs we cared about, rallying troops, preventing rituals, trying to capture rather than kill, conducting ourselves honorably in combat (at least for the other two bushi who were Dragon clan rather than Scorpion).

Also, sometimes you are just that good and it might not be combat that challenges you. There will be some challenges that you could easily dispatch physically, but the cost of doing so might be too high or require lateral thinking to pull off. This has often been the case for Brujah in our Vampire games. No one wants to face Ignacio Valdez (one of the player characters in my last chronicle) up close and personal, but very few are willing to try without some backup.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Hasn't "A song of Ice and Fire" proved that you can have a gripping narrative while being perfectly willing to kill characters?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Interesting! So your character's reaction to this situation is psychosis! That's actually a pretty cromulent bit of character development.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's... not a really accurate description of the game, in my experience. It would be closer to say that the GM is supposed to encourage the players to make sure to the other PCs are wiped out, so there are no witnesses to contradict their version of events when debriefing comes....

The point of the game is that life is pointless, your character is completely powerless, and the computer WILL destroy you. Its just icing on the cake if it happens because the other characters are trying to save their own asses. It won't matter, they will die too. Trust me, I've been playing it for almost 40 years, lol.

 

[John Dallman]

Is a problem with emulating a lot of popular fiction using many ttRPGs that the main characters in the fiction typically have massive plot armor and most bad guys are mooks and go down easily - but the folks playing the game might not like having that be too obvious?

That's why ttRPGs are their own form of fiction, and emulating other forms of fiction should be confined to themes, not plot structures. I don't use mooks or plot armour; the bad guys need to have plans to get away.

Towards the close of the long Pendragon campaign I played in, there was a session where some of us confronted Mordred and his allies. The GM announced before we started "You can't kill Mordred. You can injure him, but if you kill him, the plot comes apart." That was highly exceptional, hence the announcement, and we were willing to go along with it for the sake of the story. For that session.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

More generally, in terms of stakes, is character death really a very significant 'stake'? I mean, maybe, if you have really gotten into the development and story of the character! However, in general that isn't some sort of rule. Certainly in the D&D 'old days', character death meant squat. You went back and spent 5 minutes rolling up a new one (often we'd just erase the ability scores on the current character and use the same sheet!). The adding of 'Raise Dead' was basically just a convenience, you paid some gold and didn't have to do all the paperwork. This was especially true at the point where players didn't have to go back to zero and start at level 1 anymore (and even Gary and Co. played that way).

So, other stakes seem to me to be AT LEAST as substantive, in a game where they come up. Thus there isn't really any particular link between 'difficulty' and 'stakes' in the way most people seem to define those things.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Is a problem with emulating a lot of popular fiction using many ttRPGs that the main characters in the fiction typically have massive plot armor and most bad guys are mooks and go down easily - but the folks playing the game might not like having that be too obvious?

What about movies, comics, TV shows, and novels let's us get past that? What lets me ignore that Marshall Dillon will certainly live to be in the next episode of Gunsmoke, or that the entire 4077 won't be wiped out before the next episode of MASH. Does it need other stakes? Does it need to give enough other plot to to distract me? Does having a big character go down fairly early help (lots in GoT, once in a while in Black Company, Boromir in LotR, most people in the Silmarillion)? If main character death isn't a thing in the fiction, what makes the combat interesting? Does easy raise dead in D&D map to how unseriously super hero death in the comics is?

For IRL heroes, is it just that we're doing things in reverse. They're heroes we're reading about because we already know how it turned out? So, what makes us watch a story about a war hero where we know how it ends? Can one even have a historical emulation game where it is guaranteed to end with success in a similar manner to the original, or is there no game there?

Its funny, in some genres people don't habitually have any problem with this. You have to work like hell to die in most superhero games, and a lot of them cheerfully have brittle mooks too.

I suspect you see it less in fantasy because a lot of people are influenced in part by dark fantasy, where as you note the plot armor tends to be far more erratically placed...

 

[pemerton]

I suspect you see it less in fantasy because a lot of people are influenced in part by dark fantasy

I think the influence of D&D probably plays a bigger role in this respect! Which is in turn influenced by wargaming.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think the influence of D&D probably plays a bigger role in this respect! Which is in turn influenced by wargaming.

The first is a what-came-first question, but I think the latter is entirely salient.

 

[bloodtide]

I hate how most fiction goes the way of silly, goofy PG-13, at best. The idea that you have action adventure, with just silly slapstick, does not make for an interesting story.

In the early 20th century there were not many Forever Heroes. The typical format for radio shows, novels and most of all pulp printed magazines was more the Anthology. "Weird Amazing Stories" would have an adventure with a randomly made character like "Rex Strong" . And roughly half of the stories would have the heroes die. A lot of stories had what most modern people only see in The Twilight Zone...or Black Mirror. Like Rex Strong would save Elle from the evil kidnappers, but shed get bitten by a snake. So Rex would suck out the poison and save her life.....but then die of the poison himself.

After a couple years, some characters get popular and become Forever Heroes. Worse, is TV enters the mix. They decide all TV must be happy kids stuff and family stuff. This gives you the standout of the TV Westerns: where guns bang and bad guys just fall down to take naps. Pulp fades, and is replaced by safe comics. Movies are kept "adult".

This is kept up until the 80s. While there is silly stuff made for kidz, like GI Joe and He Man, there is also some stuff like famously Transformers The Movie. We also get foreign things...like Robotech: lots of death. And if you watch most "teen" comedy movies from the 80s, they are insanely risky. Also, somehow horror movies escape the blandness.

The 90s go overwhelming for the safe rated G stuff. My favorite example is Wolverine from the 90's cartoon. In just about every fight Wolverine would run towards a foe, pop out his claws and look super cool.....and then sheathe his claws and punch the foe with just his fist. And things only get worse from there.

While public fiction is stuck in the Rated G soup, RPGs are not like that: you can have real stories. The best thing about a RPG is the emergent story where anything can happen. Including things people don't "want", like character death. You can get unique stories....the PCs rescue the princess, but right before they get her home...BAM some random monster kill her: where does the story go now? The one player character is the special lost prince chosen one attacks a band of giants alone and is killed: where does the story go now?

Though too many games keep it "cinematic", like a Marvel movie or a cartoon for kids. The PCs can't be killed or even harmed or even slowed down. Much of the game play feels pointless. Sure they take the "10 points of damage" to there character, but it does not matter. Even if the character had only 10 hit points they would just ignore it as no player character can die ever.