what works in fiction but not rpgs or vice versa?

[WayneLigon]

1, A classic bit is where one person has authority and others do not. Look at several instances on Firefly, or the Serenity movie, where Mal basical says 'Shut up and do what I tell you or I'll blow your damn face off'.

Watching that, one thought was 'you know, if someone pulled attitude like that in a game, the other characters would (1) ignore him or (2) tell him where he could put the gun and leave.'

2. Any scene where characters surrender. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've seen a party of adventurers in any game surrender to even the most overwhelming force.

3. For most campaigns, almost any romance whatsoever.

4. For almost any game I can think of: any scene where characters drop their weapons and raise their hands because the bad guy has the drop on them. Unless they are purposefully planning to be captured.

5. For many campaigns, any recognition of any living creature outside the party as someone of equal worth and deserving of any real emotion be it respect, fear, love, etc.

 

[Torm]

Just as long as it isn't turned into a liscense to railroad, it can work fine.

Right. I had a player in one of my games - this sort of homebrew "D&D meets WWII" thing I was running - that I made the reincarnation of King Arthur. He still had complete control over his character, though - at least, until he stopped being able to come to our game toward the end of the campaign. At which point he became an NPC and some truly bizarre things happened because of it.

 

[Ubiaratne the weird]

blow the pcs head off using a high level kobold. that will get their attention. then, if they think anything they encounter might be able to utterly destroy them, they will pay more attention. also, judicious uses of bluff and intimidate make the characters behave, even if the players dont want to. on dramatic exits: spot shecks to see how far away and judge if you can hit them. on long range shots of anything i have my players make a spot sheck to gauge the distance as well as an attack roll. monologue as you fight.speaking is a free action and you can keep it up as you fight. if you want ot monologue without fighting, i suggest a carved wand thingy that the villain(or hero) can pretend is a detonator to his base, which will catch the pcs attention. And if they disregard the threat, make it real and spare one so they can pick up the peices. pcs learn quickly when their experience is on the line.

 

[Kelleris]

Everyone's been doing "stuff that works in a novel, not in a game" - how much of the reverse (stuff that works in-game, but not in a novel) can we think of? As someone noted, dungeon-crawling's a tough sell in a novel. Anything else?

Any attempt to threaten, cajole, or intimidate the protagonists WILL fail.

Well, it's not impossible to get away with these things, it just takes extraordinary measures. Like (to take a recent example from a game I DMed) a tower full of bugbear mercenaries and led by an aboleth mastermind. Things got so confusing and I kept the pressure up so long (with heavy illusion use and bugbear rogue-types), that they were eventually intimidated into leaving long enough for the aboleth to complete its Mid-Level Villainous Plan (tm). That said, I can count the number of times that sort of thing has happened on one hand.

 

[sniffles]

1, A classic bit is where one person has authority and others do not. Look at several instances on Firefly, or the Serenity movie, where Mal basical says 'Shut up and do what I tell you or I'll blow your damn face off'.

Watching that, one thought was 'you know, if someone pulled attitude like that in a game, the other characters would (1) ignore him or (2) tell him where he could put the gun and leave.'

2. Any scene where characters surrender. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've seen a party of adventurers in any game surrender to even the most overwhelming force.

3. For most campaigns, almost any romance whatsoever.

4. For almost any game I can think of: any scene where characters drop their weapons and raise their hands because the bad guy has the drop on them. Unless they are purposefully planning to be captured.

5. For many campaigns, any recognition of any living creature outside the party as someone of equal worth and deserving of any real emotion be it respect, fear, love, etc.

#s 1, 2 and 4 are all too true in my experience also.
I'd add any occasion in which one character remains behind to sacrifice himself so the rest of the protagonists can escape some deadly event. In my experience once one person says "I'll stay behind to hold the door/set off the bomb" the rest of the group decides to stay as well.

Mass combat seems to work better in a book than a game for me, because in the book you can focus on the experiences of a single character, or describe the battle in a sweeping overview. Playing out a mass combat usually tends to be an exercise in boredom and frustration for me, which is why I don't play wargames.

In reference to Kelleris' comment about things that happen in RPGs that wouldn't work well in a novel, I think that a lot of the discussion about what to do next would not come across well in a novel. I have read novels in which characters spend a long time assessing their options and deciding what to do, but I generally don't enjoy those types of novels.

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Hmm... our groups are a bit different...

1, A classic bit is where one person has authority and others do not. Look at several instances on Firefly, or the Serenity movie, where Mal basical says 'Shut up and do what I tell you or I'll blow your damn face off'.

Watching that, one thought was 'you know, if someone pulled attitude like that in a game, the other characters would (1) ignore him or (2) tell him where he could put the gun and leave.'

I've had PC's with authority over other PC's, in Knight/Squire and Captain/Officer relationships. As long as the players trust each other- and can realize that it's JUST A GAME- it works fine, even if there is some insubordination.

2. Any scene where characters surrender. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've seen a party of adventurers in any game surrender to even the most overwhelming force.

I haven't seen many surrenders either, but they have happened.

3. For most campaigns, almost any romance whatsoever.

I seldom use it in my own games, but some of my friends make quite a bit of use of romance in their campaigns. Different strokes for different folks, I guess...

4. For almost any game I can think of: any scene where characters drop their weapons and raise their hands because the bad guy has the drop on them. Unless they are purposefully planning to be captured.

Hmm... this has happened three times in my games- once in D&D, twice in Star Wars.

5. For many campaigns, any recognition of any living creature outside the party as someone of equal worth and deserving of any real emotion be it respect, fear, love, etc.

Haven't had any problems with this; but then again, when you game with a bunch of storytelling-focused ex-theater majors, who treat the game as their own epic fantasy drama and not as a power trip, it's not that hard...

(Love is harder than other emotions, but not that difficult with the right players. Fear and hate are easy...)

 

[Stormborn]

1, A classic bit is where one person has authority and others do not. Look at several instances on Firefly, or the Serenity movie, where Mal basical says 'Shut up and do what I tell you or I'll blow your damn face off'.

Watching that, one thought was 'you know, if someone pulled attitude like that in a game, the other characters would (1) ignore him or (2) tell him where he could put the gun and leave.'

2. Any scene where characters surrender. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've seen a party of adventurers in any game surrender to even the most overwhelming force.

3. For most campaigns, almost any romance whatsoever.

4. For almost any game I can think of: any scene where characters drop their weapons and raise their hands because the bad guy has the drop on them. Unless they are purposefully planning to be captured.

5. For many campaigns, any recognition of any living creature outside the party as someone of equal worth and deserving of any real emotion be it respect, fear, love, etc.

1. Actually, I've seen that done several times. As long as thats the way the game is set up, with an obvious captain/leader and a clear chain of comand, its not a problem.
2. and 4. Did it last saturday. Of course this was in Conan where we had been told repeatedly going into it that there were no CR rules and that there were times we would have to run away or surrender.
3. Oh, there are times when I wish that we could have just one campaign with out SOMEONE being in a serious romance.!
5. See 3. Our games tend to have family, allegiance to leaders, etc. all over the place.

Having said that. I do think that any game that has a "main character" is not only difficult to pull off but unfun. More than briefly splitting up the party doesn't work either. And a lot of mood establishing techniques that work in film or in print do not work in person.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

1, A classic bit is where one person has authority and others do not. Look at several instances on Firefly, or the Serenity movie, where Mal basical says 'Shut up and do what I tell you or I'll blow your damn face off'.

Watching that, one thought was 'you know, if someone pulled attitude like that in a game, the other characters would (1) ignore him or (2) tell him where he could put the gun and leave.'

Noted. I had one "GM's favorite PC" pull that off on me, but I had a bad GM at the time.

PCs almost never try to give orders to other PCs - maybe strong suggestions, or they try to outvote another player, but they're never going to issue orders at gunpoint unless they've already decided to kill or eliminate the other player. I've seen this happen very rarely in a couple of campaigns.

2. Any scene where characters surrender. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've seen a party of adventurers in any game surrender to even the most overwhelming force.

I'm running a non-FX Modern campaign. The only NPCs the players would surrender to are the police. They've run away from the police, taken on a SWAT team (and lost), and finally got the hint and got arrested once - after they've had the hell beat out of them in an encounter (which they won) and every other way into town was blocked by bad guys.

Any other bad guys would not just capture the PCs. They would kill the PCs. Good reason not to surrender. (The Mafia doesn't take prisoners that I know of - certainly not more than one at a time. Terrorists take prisoners, but they know these heroes are too dangerous to leave poorly guarded in a makeshift jail.)

Now I'm starting up a game set in Ancient China, where uneducated NPCs (like low ranking Yellow Turbans) might actually try to capture the PCs, not realizing how dangerous they are, hoping to sell them for phat loot. Then they realize the heroes have no patrons who can pay ransom, and the heroes probably took over their band when they went to answer the call of nature, drawing that form of free enterprise to a sudden and bloody close. Even powerful people were captured and "turned" in that period, but still, not in groups. This would only happen to lone NPCs, and would probably result in them dropping their character (the other PCs would never trust them again).

However, in DnD campaigns I've been in, PCs don't surrender either. They don't want to give up their magic items.

Maybe my players I whiners, but they hate it when they face "overwhelming" force. They complain about EL when that happens. Some players have low tolerance for defeat, but I ignore them. It's when the whole group complains... Now, if they did something stupid which resulted in them facing overwhelming force, I won't hold back, but I avoid deliberately generating such scenarios.

And, of course, they know surrender is rarely an option.

Capturing in novels is basically rail-roading from what I've seen. (At least, it would be rail-roading from the point of view of a game.)

Worse, it always seems to break 101 tips to be an evil overlord. I've read lots of bad fantasy, where sometimes-intelligent bad guys suddenly turn stupid due to a desire to kill another allied bad guys as the heroes are banging down his door (Katharine Karr*, I'm looking at you) or they capture the hero and tell him all their plans, etc, which results in them losing. Seriously, break out the machine guns and hose down the jail cell three seconds after the PCs are in jail. I appreciate bad guys written/played with a little intelligence and realism.

3. For most campaigns, almost any romance whatsoever.

True 'dat. Any romance results in "fade to black" because I've got better things to do than copy the unstable romances I read about in every fantasy novel. (Seriously, I'm happy when the main character is happily married, like in Willow. If the author wants to indulge in sex, go ahead. If they don't, no problem. Either way, I don't want to see "the pursuit" over and over and over and over and over again. It's twice as bad when the protagonist has just barely achieved puberty.)

4. For almost any game I can think of: any scene where characters drop their weapons and raise their hands because the bad guy has the drop on them. Unless they are purposefully planning to be captured.

Well, there's a chance you can spin around fast enough and dodge... this only works if the PC is by himself, and hopefull armored, and IMC at least, capture = death anyway, so the PC will just try to survive being shot or stabbed in the back and fight back.

5. For many campaigns, any recognition of any living creature outside the party as someone of equal worth and deserving of any real emotion be it respect, fear, love, etc.

No, that occasionally happens. It's just rare, however. The PCs spend more time talking with each other than with NPCs, work as a fairly well-oiled team, won't tolerate friendly NPCs who are better than they are at something (no one wants to find out the skill they've invested in can be outmatched by an ally), etc. I find it's a bad idea to use higher level friendly NPCs for many reasons, unless they're retire or for some reason simply cannot do the PCs job for them.

I guess I should add another one: obvious competence. In a lot of fantasy novels, the big good guy is obviously more competent or somehow superior to the bad guys. The good guys are only in danger when the big good guy (Nevyn, Gandalf, resident Chosen of Mystra, etc) are away from the scene.

There's also the situation where two fighters "evaluate each other" to figure out who is better. Not only does that not happen in campaign due to lack of appropriate rules, but it would also lead to metagaming. In some novels, the good guy and a henchman met and fought ten years ago, with the good guy winning. So of course we know he'll never lose to the henchman again. That makes the upcoming combat between them really boring/

Novels let you see things from the bad guys' perspective. It's really hard to get the PCs to respect the NPCs or even know what they're doing because the info available to them is usually pretty limited. (It has to be - otherwise the bad guys would have been arrested, roasted by Elminster, or whatever is in your setting.)

* Most of her fantasy is okay, but she makes it obvious who will win long before it happens, and I hated the Dragon Ascendant.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

Everyone's being doing "stuff that works in a novel, not in a game" - how much of the reverse (stuff that works in-game, but not in a novel) can we think of? As someone noted, dungeon-crawling's a tough sell in a novel. Anything else?

casual return from death as a slightly less powerful but otherwise unaltered person. Generally speaking IF you come back from true death in fiction, it is a big deal and you are massively changed, sometimes for the better, sometimes the worse. The only fiction I can think of that had resurection capability similar to rpgs is Stargate, and they ended up demonstrating that that option had slight but cumulative personailty effects. Gadalf's return in LotRs is more typical - purified and strengthed by his journey through darkness to rise up even more powerful....

 

[Brother MacLaren]

#s 1, 2 and 4 are all too true in my experience also.
I'd add any occasion in which one character remains behind to sacrifice himself so the rest of the protagonists can escape some deadly event. In my experience once one person says "I'll stay behind to hold the door/set off the bomb" the rest of the group decides to stay as well.

I pulled this off in a staged event; one player wanted to change out her PC, so we agreed upon the very rough outlines of the encounter. The party was breaking the old PC's son (the new PC) out of a keep full of orc berserkers, and the chain holding the portcullis was on the inside. The player recognized this was the appropriate situation. The old PC (the party tank) was guarding the rear, chopped the chain trapping himself on the inside of the keep, and held off the horde of raging orcs long enough for the party to escape. Awesome scene, but required scripting, which I normally loathe.

Some of the other players said they wouldn't have guessed it was scripted unless I had told them... but for some reason I felt that I had to be straight with them about it.