Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9871972" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here's an example, from Rolemaster play, that I just posted in another thread:Left to our own devices, no one at the table would have chosen that the romantic partner was cut in two by a single blow from the rogue demon. It was too horrible, especially because the PC in question had already gone through a terrible arc of degradation and hopelessness, which had come to an end when (at one particular low point), he was rescued by the NPC (who had been spying on him, and thus had the opportunity to rescue him) and the two fell in love. Her dying in any fashion brought the PC's apparent change in fortune to and end; it was all the worse because the PC summoner, whose rogue demon did the killing, had been dominant over and manipulating of the suffering PC during the prior period of despair. The PC's recover by way of love had, to an extent at least, liberated him from the summoner PC's grip; now the summoner PC had (indirectly, via his rogue demon) restored the circumstances (utter sorrow and despair) that restored that grip.So, as I say, that's something that no one at the table would have chosen, out of sympathy for the player of the suffering PC and sympathy for his character. But it happened, because that's what the mechanics (in this case, in particular, the crit mechanics) dictated.Another example is one that I've already pasted in this thread:Left to my own devices, I would not have had Aedhros hesitiate: I, playing Aedhros, was intent on murdering the innkeeper. The GM, left to his own devices, wouldn't have stipulated that I (that is, Aedhros) hesitate, and thus give Alicia the necessary time to use a Persuasion spell against me (that is, Aedhros): there is no provision in the rules for that, and even if the rules were completely freeform it would be a type of "playing favourites". And for more-or-less the same reasons, left to our own devices we wouldn't have had Alicia collapse from the Tax of her spellcasting. The intersection of failures in ability to follow through on desire is not something that anyone at the table would have chosen.Here's a third example, also from Burning Wheel. Like the Aedhros example it also involves failure, which in the context of Burning Wheel should be no surprise because on a success in BW the PC succeeds at the task and achieves the intent that their player specified for them, and so the outcome is something that someone (ie the player) would have chosen. But unlike either of the previous two examples, it doesn't involve despair or degradation on the part of the PCs:I don't know what we would have chosen, as the events that occurred in Auxol when Thurgon returned there, with Aramina, keeping any eye out for his family members. I'm pretty confident, though, that it wouldn't have been what actually happened. No one would have wanted to break Rufus: for the GM, Rufus was his NPC he'd introduced in service to "the master"; and for me, Rufus was Thurgon's brother with whom he was hoping to be reunited. And as a player I don't think I would have chosen for Aramina to be so nasty (or at least pointed) at the end, except for what the mechanics had already delivered up. And it was the mechanical result that gave the GM licence to choose to make Rufus so hostile towards Aramina.<a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/360" target="_blank">Here's Vincent Baker's account of what is going on in these sorts of instances of RPGing</a>:As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction. The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted - you want things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create. And it's not that you want one person's wanted, welcome vision to win out over another's . . . what you want are outcomes that upset every single person at the table. You want things that if you hadn't agreed to abide by the rules' results, you would reject. . . . The challenge facing rpg designers is to create outcomes that every single person at the table would reject, yet are compelling enough that nobody actually does so. . . . An interesting part of this challenge is judging the threshhold of your target audience. When I play with Emily and Joshua, you can kick us in the [freaking] face and we'll abide by it, if it's even a little compelling. When I play with Emily and Meg, give us even a little shove and it had better be damned compelling, or you've lost us. How punishing is your vision, and how much of your audience are you prepared to sacrifice?I have friends I play RPGs with who won't play Burning Wheel, because they regard it as too punishing. But they'll play other RPGs that can still treat the PCs pretty harshly! So I think it's not just about degree of punishment, but dimension of punishment and/or tone of punishment - eg <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/played-some-wuthering-heights-today.672161/" target="_blank">when we played Wuthering Heights</a> pretty bad stuff happened to the PCs, that none of us would have chosen (one died early in the session, and was played for the rest of the session as a ghost; the other brought the session to an end by burning himself alive in his bookshop, with the suicide instigated in part by the PC ghost); but it's a light-hearted game that (at least as I experienced it) doesn't draw one into the emotional life of the characters in the way that Burning Wheel does.</blockquote>

Verification