Month: October 2008

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Simulating Genre vs. Emulating Genre

Over at Critical Hits, Dave Chalker laments:

  • The Professor X Paradox | Critical Hits

    Unfortunately, there always seemed to be a wall that our campaigns hit, and has made us reluctant to pick up another superhero game in many years. While discussing the issue and attempting to settle on a new system, The Main Event and I hit on the core of our problem, and we dubbed it “The Professor X Paradox.” You see, take a typical party. You’re likely to have a wide range of different kinds of heroes in your group. To take some iconic examples, let’s say your party has the Incredible Hulk, Cyclops, and Professor X. Now let’s say, as what often happens in an RPG and in superhero stories, the party gets into a fight. You want to have a challenge for the party members, so you have a brute ala Abomination. Now, for the Hulk, this is an interesting fight. And Cyclops might be able to help out too. But for Professor X, either he’s going to completely take over the Abomination with mind powers and have him pose no threat, or he’s going to get obliterated by one punch from Abomination. Basically, the Hulk’s scale of toughness is so beyond a normal human’s that if you ever have a normal human in the fray, he’s likely to be killed if he happens to get involved in the fray.

My comment was:

There’s actually a fairly simple solution to that problem, that works with any system.

How do teams in the comics that consist of relatively normal guys with no armor or super-reflexes, like Cyclops, coexist with tanks like Colossus? The writer just grants script immunity to the weaker characters. If the Abomination attacks Colossus, he can land a punch, if he attacks Cyclops, he can’t. He might stun him with a near miss, or bury him in rubble, but he’ll never just splat him (unless Warren Ellis is writing it as a joke on the readers).

So grant script immunity to your supers characters. Just rule that if one of the heavy-hitter’s attacks actually lands on a non-tank, the GM decides what happens. What happens can range from being a complete miss, to being momentarily stunned, to being taken out of the fight until helped (rubble lifted to reveal that through luck or skill he has managed to create a safe pocket), to being taken out of the fight entirely. If you apply this equally to PCs attacked by heavy-hitter NPCs and PC heavy hitters attacking weaker NPCs, the PCs will even learn to stick to genre and have their Colossus character stick to attacking the Juggernaut instead of trying to one-shot Black Tom all the time

I’d like to elaborate on that though a bit, and what it means to try to simulate a genre instead of emulating it, and why I think it can be a big mistake.

Gamers are often trying to recreate the feel of certain kinds of genre fiction; indeed that may be the biggest thing that drew them to RPGs in the first place, the idea of what playing out what it would be like to be Indiana Jones, Conan, Sam Spade, or Spider-Man.  The problem they then run into is that the genres have recognizable tropes that they wish to occur in their games, but in fiction the tropes are there because the author put them there, and the tropes only “work” (yield a genre-conformant result) because the author is careful not to misapply them or subject them to too much scrutiny.  Players are not so careful, nor generally would you want them to be, because that care requires thinking about things as an author instead of as a character or player.

When it comes time to reproduce these tropes in the game, there are two basic approaches, which I’ll call “simulation” and “emulation.”  The goal of both is to have genre tropes work in the game, but the process is different.  Simulation attempts to make the tropes arise “naturally” or “organically” out of the rules of the game (sometimes conceived of as the laws of the gameworld); the tropes will, the players hope, occur as the emergent behavior of rules not specifically aimed at reproducing the tropes.  Emulation is concerned just that the tropes occur, by any means necessary.  Most attempts at genre games use some combination of the the approaches, though I think that simulation is seen as more elegant and generally preferable.

As a crude example, suppose you were designing a James Bond-style super-spy game.  It’s a feature of the movies that the villain always explains his fiendish plot to the hero.  The emulation approach would be for the GM to have the villain explain his plot, because that’s what villains in the genre do.  A more simulation approach would be to create a disadvantage (say, “Monologues”) which would grant extra build-points for creating the villain if he took it.  An even more simulation approach (in that it’s one that the villain as character could be aware of and trying to manipulate) would be to have it that the rules of that reality are such that the villain gains extra status or a greater chance of succeeding the more times he can explain his plot to a helpless hero.

In Emulation, making the trope happen is the rule.  In Simulation, the trope is a side-effect some other rule and the more generally applicable the rule is (the less obviously the rule exists merely to justify the side-effect), the better.

A more subtle example might be to change the combat bonus that people have for ganging up on a lone foe to no effect, or even a penalty for getting in each others’ way, in order to better simulate a Jackie Chan-style martial arts movie.  The Emulation approach to that might be to have a rule that flat out forbids multiple opponents from scoring a hit on a single fighter; since it never happens that he’s overwhelmed by numbers, shading the probabilities in his favor may help, but may still result in a genre-busting defeat.

And this leads to why I think it’s often a mistake to try and simulate your way into a genre-compatible result when you could just emulate it.  Simulations usually work by trying to create or tweak generally applicable rules so that “good” genre results are more likely…but more likely isn’t the same as certain.  If some things are required or forbidden by the genre and all you do is adjust the probabilities, sooner or later you will get a genre-busting result.  Dave talks about one such result in his supers campaign: his super-speedster, who only needed to avoid rolling an 18 on 3d6 in order to avoid a Hulk-sized attack that would splatter him completely if it landed, rolled an 18.  This busted the genre for them, and led to them abandoning the campaign and eventually trying to even play super-hero genre systems because they couldn’t guarantee against similar results.

The problem his group is experiencing, in my opinion, isn’t that the system has trouble handling characters of different scales of power (the Professor X Paradox)…it’s that the system allows non-genre results in the first place.  If you’re playing a four color supers game, even if you required all the characters to be of roughly equal toughness (maybe you’re playing an all-powered armor Iron Man squad)…it would still be a genre-busting mistake if one of your characters could die because of a bad die roll.  But getting simulations to refuse to cough up non-genre results is incredibly tricky, and the more you want to hide the fact that you’re directly encoding genre assumptions (wearing glasses is a +20 to your disguise roll, only for purposes of concealing your secret identity), the trickier it gets.

On the other hand, it’s really quite easy for any GM and players familiar with the genre they’re playing to emulate it by disregarding or overriding non-genre results.  Certainly it’s helpful if most of the time, the system yields answers compatible with the genre…I’m not saying that system doesn’t matter at all, or systemless is the only way to do good genre games, but if you have a system that yields a half-way decent simulation it costs you almost no time, effort, or immersion for the GM to be ready to overrule that 1 in 316 chance in order to emulate the genre you’re all trying to play.

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How to Railroad Your Players

Don’t.

Figure out some other way of advancing the scenario, or at least what path it will take if the players succeed instead of failing.

If you absolutely feel that you have to, then:

For my money, the best way of handling this is openly telling the players that the outcome of the scene is required by the plot.  If you’re going to railroad the players then telling them about it will usually defuse any resentment and may even get their active cooperation. You may even be able to give them a free hand to describe how they fail.

Second best is to present them with overwhelming force.  Yes, the rails will be visible, and you won’t get their buy-in, but you won’t waste their time lying to them about whether they’re really playing a scene where they can have an effect on the outcome, and they won’t waste any rare resources they might have in game trying to escape their fate.  You’ll also avoid poisoning the game further down the road, where they’ll wonder (with good reason) whether every failure or setback they experience–or even every success–was manipulated by the GM.  It’s not even like encountering overwhelming force is likely to be immersion-breaking, unless your PCs are nearly the most powerful entities in the setting; it’s common enough both in real life and fiction.  It’s only in games (and in my opinion not very good ones) where everything is automatically scaled to your abilities and every obstacle can be overcome.

Trying to slip one past them so they think that they’ve actually played the game and made important decisions when you’ve secretly removed any possibility of that is, ime, the number one thing that players hate, and yet GMs keep coming back to it.  Railroading is reviled by players, everybody knows that it’s reviled by players, everybody gives lip-service to the idea that you don’t want to be doing that to your players….but people still come up with scenarios that won’t work without it and try to devise cunning ways to hide it so the players won’t realize they’re being railroaded.  Because, you know, the resulting story would be so much cooler if it came out the way the GM envisioned it without any player input but with the players unwittingly playing their parts.

If you actually think the players will believe the story is cooler too, then put it to them openly.  If they think the point of the game is to make a satisfying and dramatic recap, they’ll be happy to cooperate.  If they disagree, then you’re doing them no service by lying to them to get the story you want.  And on the off chance they actually do think that it would be good if you sometimes disregarded their input to force the story in one direction or another, but they don’t want to know about it when it happens, then you can go back to worrying about how to camoflage your rails.

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When Failure Is Not An Option

Don’t make it an option.

Seriously.

Wandering the RPG blogosphere and forums, I’ve seen a lot of advice for GMs along the lines of “What to do when the party fails?”  The advice goes on to detail some clever or not so clever ways of preventing the module or entire campaign from going down in flames, but it’s almost always from the point of view of picking up the pieces once the party has failed to notice the clue, bypassed the room with the key, alienated the noble who’s the only one with the information they need, and so on.  Conspicuously absent, from my point of view, is a discussion of how the GM got the party in that pickle in the first place.  And it is the GM that got the party to the point where everything hinged on a single action, make no mistake.

You don’t want a single point of failure in your business processes, and you don’t want it in your RPG scenarios.  Unless, that is, you and your players are perfectly happy to fail (a possibility in some challenge-based games).

I’ve talked about “Scenario Breaker Rolls” in the past, so I won’t go into that again, but a botched die-roll isn’t the only way that the party can reach an impasse.

Take NPC interactions.  Too many GMs (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) make NPCs basically inert in social situations until the PCs prod them, and then decide how the NPCs react based on the PCs’ approach (plus or minus a die-roll).  Then they let the whole game get derailed when the PCs fumble the role-playing part of the interaction, perhaps by offering less deference to the King than the GM thinks the situation warrants.  That’s fine if there’s no problem for your game if the NPC declines to offer the quest after the PCs have insulted him and/or stolen from him, or you regard them ending up in the King’s dungeon as a good adventure hook.  If failure is going to be a big issue, then, as GM you should be taking charge and making sure that failure doesn’t occur.  Don’t make the NPC a surly and suspicious bugger if you need him to trust the PCs, no matter how neat you think it would be if the PCs were able to jolly him around through brilliant roleplaying.  Don’t put on your GM stone-face and wait for the PCs to start talking; have the NPC greet them with open arms and move the conversation along to where you need it to be (e.g. at least the announcement of the quest) before they open their mouths.  Yes, this steps on the role-playing opportunities of the situation, but you know what?  That’s what you get when you make an NPC a plot device.  You can have all the other NPCs interact in a more naturalistic fashion, or even that NPC in other situations, but during the portion of the adventure where you need that NPC to convey certain information or offer a particular deal to keep the PCs from hitting a brick wall, it’s a mistake to leave it up to the RP of the players if you think there’s any chance that they’ll screw it up.

Again, let me emphasize that “screw it up” means ruin everybody’s enjoyment with a failure to get the information/come to terms…whenever “failure” can be just as fun and interesting for everybody as success, I strongly encourage GMs to let things fall out however the players direct it.  But even GMs who are strongly committed to open-ended games without any rails can reach a point where the decisions of the players to that point have committed them to a course of action, at which point game-breaking opportunity for failures can crop up.  My feeling is that unless you and your players are equally committed to challenge-based games,  even in an open-ended sandbox campaign it’s the GM’s responsibility to minimize the single-points of failure.  If the players have decided to solve a mystery, and successfully uncover the murderer, it’s a mistake to make it so the fact that they’ve antagonized the Chief of Police along the way turns the whole adventure into a failure; you either have to make the Chief honorable enough that given proof he’ll make the arrest anway, or there has to be somebody else they can turn the culprit over to and see justice done.

To sum up, fixing game-breaking errors is no substitute for not making them in the first place.  There are all kinds of techniques you can use to recover from error, and it’s good to have some of them in reserve, but your first line of defense should be designing your scenarios so that there just aren’t any places where the PCs could fail unless you are willing for them to fail.  You can’t generally make players happy to fail, and you can’t (IMO) make success inevitable without cheapening it, but I think you can and should make every effort so that even if they fail, the players regard it as time well spent; failures should never result in them saying “That was stupid. What a waste of time.” if you can possibly help it.