Unintended Consequences

[Mathew_Freeman]

I’ve heard it said that a good GM is well aware of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The other way I’ve heard to look at this idea is to think of stones being dropped in a pond. There are always ripples, and you can’t always predict where they land.

Unintended Consequences means, to me, that as a GM you think about the wider effects that your players are having on a world. Have everything they do, ripple onwards. This can go from something as small as spending a lot of money in a particular town (they come back to find it much more prosperous, perhaps) to as big as killing a major campaign villains (who leaves a power vacuum that someone else moves in to fill, perhaps someone worse). When everything your characters do ripples outwards, soon the campaign will start to write itself. This works particularly well if villains escape, or if you do a good job of making the players really hate the villains.

The reason I bring this up is that I’ve found some excellent examples of it in Mass Effect 2, the PC and XBOX360 game. I’d played it through once, taking it as a fresh game, and then a friend let me borrow Mass Effect to let me utilize the save-game mechanic to have one character through both games. Playing Mass Effect 2 a second time, and carrying on the story from Mass Effect directly, has shown me that Bioshock understand the Law.

Cameo characters from Mass Effect are showing up in Mass Effect 2, sometimes doing surprising things. One former criminal has decided to become a social worker, one has forsaken a life of crime (mostly because I threatened him at gunpoint before) and has a regular job. One is impersonating me! In each case, these character weren’t there on my previous play-through, and the game was lesser for it. I also believe that if I take different actions in another play-through of ME1, and continue that game on ME2, those characters will probably have different behaviours again.

The larger events of Mass Effect are referenced to. As I chose to act in a Paragon fashion in ME1 (that is to say, heroically and idealistically) I’ve had several quite touching hugs from people when I’ve met them again. What makes this even more impressive is that I know that if I’d acted differently in ME1 I would have had different reactions in ME2. It’s enough to make me want to play through all 40 hours of ME1 again, just to see the differences.

Bioshock have written an awful lot of material for this game that will only be seen in particular circumstances. The majority of players will not take the time to go through the game with different styles of play, I suspect, the way that I am. I am extremely impressed with the depth of the game. What’s more, with ME3 reported to be in the works, we may be seeing a game in which actions you took two games previously and several years of real-time have an effect in a way that won’t be matched by another player. It’s a remarkable idea.

You can make this work in an RPG. Make sure that you pay attention to what characters say and do, and who they talk to and where they go. Take a memorable moment from a session, think about where it can go, and try and reintroduce it several sessions later, or when the characters return to that area. If you want some examples of how to do this in an RPG campaign, I’d recommend the ENWorld Story Hours by @Piratecat: and @Sagiro:. Their players have learnt that things they do have consequences*, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always personal.

Anyone got any other good examples of this kind of DM? Any unexpected consequences that you can think of?

*In Sagiro's game, it's Dranko

Spoiler

throwing the bottle into the Far Realm

that springs to mind, but it's just one idea amongst many.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Interesting ideas. It's something I don't do all that much, though a certain amount of it is bound to happen with any kind of persistent world. I have a low boredom threshold, so I don't like to revisit old material, preferring to have the PCs encounter new characters and situations. Another issue is I'm not sure how much influence a 'straighten up and fly right' speech would really have on someone. Scrote all, imx.

Quite often in adventure fiction, particularly of the recurrent variety such as pulps and superhero comics, the protagonists have very little influence on the world. A villain is killed and he comes back from the dead. He's put in prison and he escapes. The Joker's personality never really changes, he's never cured. If there is a change, it's just the illusion of it. Captain America and Batman don't stay dead for long.

It's a bit of a problem because, if the PCs are good guys, they want to make the world a better place. But in order for there still to be adventures, the world can never be free of weird threats. There still have to be interesting bad guys out there. D&D traditionally solves this problem by increasing the scope of the game. Save your village from orcs, but then the city is imperilled by giants.

The world is safe... but for how long?

 

[Raven Crowking]

Agree with regard to superhero comics; disagree with regard to pulps.

John Carter changes Mars, and has persistent characters known to him. David Innis in Pellucidar changes things, and those changes are still in force when Tarzan visits. Conan conquers Aquilonia, and the kingdom is better for it. El Borak doesn't make Afganistan better, but keeps it from getting much, much worse.

Pulps are largely about characters being able to affect the world in which they opperate. That the world keeps getting bigger is besides the point.


RC

 

[Doug McCrae]

Another question is - are unintended consequences better than intended ones? If a player means well, and good results come of it, is that worse than if he means well and bad things happen? I would've thought the former would be more pleasing to most players. If a PC tries to sober up a drunk, and later sees him to be prosperous that would be more pleasing to the player than sobering him up, only to learn that he's now a successful criminal.

Sometimes the players know the results but the characters don't. If the PCs disturb an ancient ominous seal in an underground ruin in session one of a campaign, they can be pretty sure they are going to release a campaign long evil such as a demon. Many will find a reason to do it anyway because that's obviously intended by the GM and interesting things will follow. And the players might like to feel they've done something important even if it has negative consequences for the game world.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Another question is - are unintended consequences better than intended ones?

In terms of running a game, both unintended and intended consequences are important.

The players need to know they can change people or events in the world based upon their conscious choices and actions of their PCs. That immerses the players in the world, and gives them a sense of ownership.

Unintended consequences gives the world greater vibrance. Unintended consequnces may be positive or negative, but either way, as long as the consequences have some logic to them, they give the sense that the world is real and moves and changes not based only upon the set script.

 

[amerigoV]

I'll track potential consequences for adventures, but it is hard to do more broadly. Games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age have the advantage of the player being able to get through the material in a relatively short time (well, if you call 40-60 hours on DA as "short"). Heaven forbid if you are doing pbp, where it takes months real time to get through what would be done in 30 minutes in a video game or a couple of sessions in a f2f game.

So its a great concept, but the GM has to be careful that they are not pulling something too obscure (or meaningful) for the players to remember given the frequency of play. "You remember that dog your character kicked when he was Level 1? No? Well, the dog ran off, got rabies, bit the mayor, who went crazy and ordered the town guard to dispurse and the Evil Overloard took over. I hope you are happy with yourself!"

 

[ExploderWizard]

I attempt to make most decisions the PC's make in my campaign meaningful by doing this. It is important that these consequences flow somewhat logically from the actions that triggered them. Unintended doesn't (and shouldn't) always mean something negative. Sometimes good intentions can lead to undesirable consequences and vice versa.

Some examples from my campaign:

The PC's rescued some captives from a band of gnolls. A couple of these captives were goblins. The players simply turned them loose without humiliating them or mistreating them in any way.

Several sessions later the PC's explored a cave that turned out to be the lair of the goblin tribe. One of the goblins recognized the PC's and invited them in as friends. The party learned a lot of valuable info from the goblins and even got a map of the area with notations from them. During their exporations of the other caves, the party was able to rest and camp with the friendly goblins.

Many sessions later the party defeated the leaders of the evil temple and sacked the treasury. They decided to reward the goblins for the hospitality by giving them all the copper coinage (over 130gp) on their way back to the keep. What they didn't know was that a slithering tracker guardian was following the treasure. When next they passed by, the goblins were all slain and the copper missing. They eventually figured out what happened and raced back to the keep in time to save some other rescued captives (whom they had given silver from the hoard).

The players felt genuinely sad for the goblins and a little guilty once they realized it was their generosity that killed them.

These events and interconnected consequences are what make ongoing campaigns so much more rewarding than one shots.

 

[Psychotic Jim]

I attempt to make most decisions the PC's make in my campaign meaningful by doing this. It is important that these consequences flow somewhat logically from the actions that triggered them. Unintended doesn't (and shouldn't) always mean something negative. Sometimes good intentions can lead to undesirable consequences and vice versa.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. Incorporating down the road, unintentional consequences of character actions requires a certain degree of finesse and discretion. Sometimes including tragic consequences for a handful of a good deeds can sometimes be dramatic, but it shouldn't get to the point where "no good deed goes unpunished." There has to be some element of variability in the possible consequences of good and evil actions.

At the same time, the unintended consequences should make some degree of sense. The effect of unintended consequences is most dramatic upon the players if they could have plausibly seen the consequence coming (but didn't). If the chain from cause to effect is too drawn out, it can come off as a heavy-handed Rube Goldberg device. As a gm, I definitely don’t want my players o go into analysis paralysis worrying about every possible ripple effect of every action.

 

[Stormonu]

Thinking about this, I've actually used it quite often - though mostly with NPCs the characters have interacted with. I've already had a couple of campaigns that were entirely sparked by "what happened later" based on the previous group's activities.

One of the most recent activities was based around a baby green dragon. The characters, while exploring a derro-controlled "dungeon" encountered a baby green that was being forced to fight in an arena for it life. The characters cut a deal to free the dragon, allowing it to vent its revenge on the assembled derro before leaving. A few adventures later, the characters encountered the dragon again, and it led them to its deceased mother's former den, harboring them from an orc bounty-hunting party (hired by the surviving derro) that was hunting them. For most of the rest of the campaign, the dragon parleyed with the party at different points, the characters exchanging treasure to add to the dragon's hoard in return for sending supplies and information to them whenever it could. All from a throw-away encounter in one of the first adventures the party played in.

 

[Gilladian]

I love letting the events in one campaign affect both the future of that particular campaign, and future campaigns set in the same world and region. I have a kingdom called Greenvale which I've run 5-6 campaigns in, and I love it.

For example, in one early campaign, Greenvale was a tiny city-state clinging to survival. The PCs helped build it up, explored and helped make safe the surrounding regions, and eventually led an army of defense against a lich and his orc horde. The main fighter became the first Prince of Greenvale, the cleric established a major temple of Kehret in the region, helping to make it the most prominent Temple, and the rogue became leader of the Thieves Guild, binding several nascent, evil groups into one much more stable and more lawful (neutral) structure. At the same time, the lich escaped them and has been a background villain in several other campaigns.