an RPG blog
Left to right they are:
Because of special guests from my other game-group, we had about four more PCs than usual last night.
This is the record of a game of Dwarven Fortress, as played by a series of people swapping off after each game-year. It’s both hilarious and sad.
Why Puzzles Often Suck in Tabletop Role Playing Games
A sample “puzzle”
Let’s take a few puzzles by example.
The Lich’s crypt is guarded by six levers, numbered one through six, and can only be opened when levers 2, 4, and 5 are up; 1 and 3 are down; and 6 is in the middle. The party finds said crypt. Ok, what is going to happen when you have five people who have not read your notes reach this dead end door?
To which I say: A combination lock isn’t a puzzle.
There are two ways that puzzles can appear in an RPG scenario: indirectly, as just another feature that the characters need to beat with the appropriate mechanic (skill roll, magical power, etc); or directly, as a challenge to the players.
The first doesn’t really require much discussion. Some kinds of puzzles, such as bank vault combinations, will occur naturally in the game world and if the characters want to get inside the vault they’ll have to figure out how to deploy their abilities to do so. It could be the whole focus of an adventure, say in a caper scenario, it could be a feature of a larger scenario, say a wall-safe in a room where a murder has occurred that might contain a clue, or it could be completely coincidental, as when a group of super-heroes interrupts a robbery in a bank. In any case, the exact details of the puzzles–even the solutions–don’t matter because the players aren’t expected to solve them. If there’s any solving to be done it will be at the abstract level of the characters.
The only reason to even mention the indirect kind is because scenario designers will sometimes confuse the two types, and present the details of an in-character puzzle as if it were a puzzle for the players, which leads to sucky “puzzles” as above.
Puzzles that directly challenge the players to solve them are a completely different kettle of fish. The first thing you have to decide is whether the kind of game you’re playing has any place for such direct challenges to the players at all. If the players want to approach everything from an in-character standpoint, player challenges are problematic. The player may even see the solution, but feel obligated not to point it out because the character wouldn’t get it. Now that’s a recipe for frustration right there, or even hard feelings at the table if not all the players are as dedicated to fire-walling in-character vs. out-of-character knowledge and insights.
Even if you decide you’re comfortable with direct PC challenges, you have to decide what the price of failure is: what are you willing to put up with in game if the players just can’t solve it. In old-school challenge-oriented gaming, the answer tended to be “if they can’t, they can’t.” If they don’t figure out the puzzle opening the door to the lower depths of the Liche’s tomb, and they can’t figure out a way around the door, they can’t go down there. Maybe they can come back later when they have an idea. That probably seems unduly harsh to most gamers nowadays, who may have an entire plot line riding on the party getting past that door, or just see having the players sit around the table brainstorming for an hour trying to figure out the puzzle as boring and a waste of time. You could give the players an out of letting the characters roll for it if the players don’t make progress after a certain amount of time, but not only is that likely to be a let-down, you still face the possibility that the characters will fail and the party is still stuck. At that point you could give in and give them a clue, or have a bright idea strike a party member or NPC from on high, but you have to wonder whether putting the puzzle in was a good idea in the first place. Whatever you decide, it’s best to have thought it out before-hand. With forethought, you could place clues or resources before-hand, or design an alternate (perhaps more dangerous) route so that solving the puzzle can reward the players, but failing to solve it won’t get them stuck (see “When Failure Is Not An Option“). Nothing you’re likely to decide on the spur of the moment as the players are getting frustrated and cranky will be as good as what you can design in from the start.
But supposing that’s all settled, and you’ve decided that the players will have fun with a challenge to their puzzle-solving skills and decided what to do if they get stuck: how do you design a good puzzle?
Good puzzles can be solved by reasoning. Anything that requires a brute-force approach isn’t a puzzle, it’s (at best) a time-sink. It’s possible that the puzzle can require some bit of knowledge about either the real world or the game world, though in the latter case you had better be damn sure that the players actually know it and it wasn’t buried in some twenty-page back-story that you handed to them and they never read. Let’s look at the liche’s crypt again:
Levers numbered 1-6 that need to be in an arbitrary pattern (up, up, middle, down, down) to open the door: not a puzzle.
Suppose, though, the levers weren’t numbered. Instead, each of the six levers has six positions. Next to each position is a letter. The letters, top to bottom, read: D, E, F, I, N, R.
That, at least, is a puzzle. Moreover, it’s a puzzle that a fantasy RPG geek is particularly likely to get.
Which brings me to another point: unless you’re running a straight-up challenge-oriented game where everybody will happily spend an hour or two wrestling with a juicy puzzle, good puzzles in RPGs should be simple. Complicated enough to give that little buzz of aha satisfaction when they get it, but nothing the players are going to agonize over unless you’re absolutely sure that agonizing over puzzles is how they’d prefer to spend their RPG time. Err on the side of the obvious, which at least won’t slow down the game. Also, unless you have personal knowledge that one or more of your players is quite familiar with something, trivia and pop culture references can be dangerous. Just because they seem blindingly obvious to you doesn’t mean the players will have the slightest clue, and unless you let them Google it, they won’t be able to obtain one during the course of the game, either.
Good puzzles should also relate back to the adventure at hand, if at all possible. Don’t just plop a riddle or a logic puzzle that you got off the Net in the middle of your adventure unless you can relate it back to the themes and motifs of the rest of the adventure. A riddle whose answer is “The Sun” might be good in the Temple of Ra, but seems kind of random in the Tomb of the Liche Lord. The lever puzzle might be improved by using the Liche’s original name as the key instead, if that’s something the players had good reason to know.
Good puzzles, at least in RPGs, also should reward the players immediately. If it’s a clue, make it a big honking obvious one, not something that itself further confuses the players or that they file away in their minds and might or might not remember later. And for heaven’s sake, don’t punish them for figuring it out. Yes, if you really were a diabolical Liche Lord designing a room, you might think it’s hilarious if you arrange it so that “success” in figuring out your lever puzzle releases a swarm of flesh-hungry beetles into the room, but while the Liche Lord may be a dick, you the GM are not. And unlike the Liche Lord, as GM you’ve got an interest in the players continuing to accept and look forward to your challenges.
I think the best puzzle I’ve ever put in a game, at least from the players’ point of view, was in a game of DC Heroes, where I cut up a picture of Tutankhamen’s mask into a simple jig-saw puzzle (about 7 pieces, iirc) and had the Riddler leave one piece of the puzzle behind at each crime scene, leading up to a big Museum of Antiquities heist. These were college-age players, so it’s not as if a 7-piece jigsaw puzzle was a real challenge, but by careful cutting of the pieces and arranging which order they got them I was able to keep them guessing until piece 5 or 6, and they really seemed to appreciate the whole thing out of all proportion to the difficulty of the puzzle or the amount of time I spent preparing it. And when they figured it out early (before they had the last piece(s)), I let them get to the Museum in time to be waiting when the Riddler and his crew arrived. That was a moment they really enjoyed.
In conclusion, if your players are interested in being challenged directly, and you’ve thought out the stakes and the fall-back if the players are stumped, puzzles can be one of the most satisfying things in a game. After all, it’s not the players actually swinging the sword, or flying the chopper, but it is the players themselves matching wits with the puzzle and it’s not lucky dice but the players’ own triumph when they succeed.
Requirements: Novice, AB:Demonology
Demonic Rituals take 1 hour to perform per Rank of the demon being summoned. The TN for the ritual is 4 for a Novice demon, +1 per Rank of the demon. A raise on the summoning roll grants a +2 to the attempt to compel the demon. The demon appears at the end of the last hour of summoning, at which point the Demonologist must make a Spell-casting vs Spirit roll to compel the demon to do his bidding. If successful, the demon must perform one task for the summoner. If the Demonologist fails on the initial attempt to compel the demon, the demon may either return to whence it came or break the summoning circle and attack or possess the summoner. The Demonologist must know the true name of the demon he is attempting to summon; Demonologists collect the true names of demons and hoard them jealously, since while a demon is performing a task for (or worse, is in a pact with) one Demonologist it will not heed the summons of another. Taking this Edge gives the Demonologist the name of one demon of whatever rank he chooses for free; additional names have to be acquired in-game, or by taking the Edge again.
The demon will use all of its normal abilities and powers to carry out the task. If the task is ongoing (such as guard this room), the demon may attempt to break the compulsion (spirit vs. spell-casting) whenever the Demonologist sleeps (treat as once per day for simplicity) and once more if the Demonologist is killed; if the demon fails to break the compulsion that final time, it is bound until released by magic. If the demon manages to break the compulsion, it can never be re-summoned by that Demonologist, and it will attempt to seek out and kill him (this becomes that demon’s Major Habit until the Demonologist dies). Generally it is safest for the Demonologist to specify tasks that can be accomplished quickly by the demon, before the Demonologist needs to sleep again.
The demon may leave, and the summoner may not attempt to summon that particular demon for 1 year and 1 day. If the demon chooses not to leave, it may attempt to break the summoning circle as an Action; this occurs in the same round as the Demonologist’s attempt to compel the demon, so the Demonologist has already used his Action. The demon makes a Spirit roll vs. the original summoning roll. If it succeeds, then it can leave the circle. Starting the next round it is dealt cards as normal, and on its Action it may try to attack the Demonologist, possess the Demonologist (Spirit vs. Spirit), flee physically, or retreat to its home. The Demonologist may attack it or attempt to compel it, but cannot reform the circle. If it does not succeed in breaking the circle, then the Demonologist may attempt to compel it again or dismiss it. It may not attempt to break out of the circle again until and unless the Demonologist once again attempts to compel it.
Demonologists get their powers from consorting with demons. Demonologists have three ways of using demons to perform magic: as familiars, by performing rituals to summon them and strike a deal or compel them to perform a service, or by forming a permanent pact. Demonologists may take the Arcane Familiar Edge multiple times. The Demonologist may only take Power Edges if there is a pact with a demon, and those Edges are actually applied to the demon (so if the demon is ever exorcised, the Demonologist loses them).
Arcane Skill: Spell-casting (Smarts)
Starting Power Points: 10 (these are actually the demon’s points and are lost if the demon is ever exorcised)
Starting Powers: 3 (see above)
Demonologists can take a normal animal and bind a minor demon to it to serve as a familiar. Use the Arcane Familiar (AB:Magic) rules from the Fantasy World Builder Toolkit. The familiar has no special demonic powers other than the ones described in the Familiar Edge.
The key to most Demonologists power is the pact they form with a particular demon. This allows the demon to dwell within them, and for them to use the demon’s powers as their own, but it comes at a price, namely the risk that the demon will take them over, either temporarily or permanently.
All demons have one Attribute: Spirit. Their Spirit is determined by the Rank of the demon, from d4 for a Novice to d12 for a Legendary demon. All demons have one Major Habit; this is a vice that the demon will try to indulge in to the maximum extent possible if it ever gains control of the body it shares with the Demonologist. Demons do not get Bennies when they are in a pact with a Demonologist. The GM may choose to create stats, skills and Edges for the demon, in case it ever manifests physically, but while the demon is inhabiting the body of a Demonologist, they are irrelevant. All Demons are also Wild Cards and get a Wild Die on their rolls.
As an Action, the Demonologist may force his demon to use one of its powers. Roll the Demonologist’s Spell-casting die without the wild die. On a roll of a 1 there is Backlash (the demon tries to take control), otherwise the demon will use the power as directed (roll the Demon’s spell-casting die and wild die). The Demonologist may spend Bennies normally on the Demon’s spell-casting roll.
On a roll of a 1 on the Demonologist’s spell-casting die, the demon attempts to seize control. The Demonologist now makes a Spirit vs. Spirit test against the demon. If the Demonologist loses, the demon takes control. Regardless of the outcome, whoever is now in possession of the body is Shaken.
Once a demon takes control of the body, it will remain in control until it sleeps, or it gets a 1 on its casting die (which causes another struggle for control). If the Demonologist botched the spirit test in the struggle for control, then the demon may remain in control even if it goes to sleep, though it will still have to struggle again if it gets a 1 on its casting die. While the demon is in control, the Demonologist has no awareness of what is going on in the outside world.
During the time when the demon is in control, it will attempt to indulge in its favorite vice to the exclusion of all else. For instance, if it craves alcohol, it will wander off in the middle of a battle in search of a drink. It will defend itself if directly attacked (because the pact forces it to), and avoid placing itself in obvious immediate danger (sitting down in the middle of a stampede to have a drink), but it cannot or will not consider the costs and benefits to anybody else of its actions or voluntarily defer gratification for a greater reward later. A character can make a successful Persuasion roll to bribe the demon, but demons don’t consider themselves bound by any promises that aren’t magically reinforced, so it won’t stay bribed if it spots a better opportunity. The demon may or may not choose to try to hide the fact that it’s possessing the Demonologist, depending on its past experience; if every time it’s gained control in the past, the Demonologist’s companions have tied it up and knocked it out, it will pretend to be the Demonologist at least until it can sneak away. If the companions don’t seem to be in any position to stop it from indulging itself immediately, though, it won’t engage in a long charade unless it’s particularly cunning.
Because control reverts to the owner of the body when the demon becomes unconscious, demons will do everything that the setting allows to avoid falling asleep until absolutely necessary.
Whenever the Demonologist gains an Advance, he may choose to improve the demon by taking a Power Edge that applies to the demon. Whenever the Demonologist goes up a rank, the demon’s Spirit attribute automatically advances a die.
If at all possible, the GM should let the player still play the character while the demon is in control, since otherwise the player can be left sitting out a significant portion of the game. If the GM doesn’t like the possibility that the player’s character will not regain control of his body even after the demon has to sleep, remove the effect of a botch on the Spirit vs. Spirit roll. If that’s still too long, you could allow the player more frequent attempt to break out, but you might want to reconsider letting players take AB: Demonology in the first place.
This month’s blog carnival, hosted by The Chatty DM, is on the theme Super Heroes in RPGs.
Superhero RPGs are actually one of my favorite genres, though my current game group….well, let’s just say that our last couple of attempts didn’t work out. I don’t want to be pointing any fingers at Badger Lord (Master of the Super-Sonic Tunneling Vampiric Badgers) or Kikko-Man (chinese food delivery bicyclist with the power to create illusions…of chinese food), but it’s never really clicked as a campaign. I’ve had much better luck with one-shots where the PCs have super-powers, but the setting doesn’t assume any of the standard superhero tropes.
In the past, though, ah, the glorious past….
I believe our very first super-hero campaign, back in High School, used Superhero 2044, the very first superhero RPG ever, but we played them all at one time or another: Superworld (one third of the Worlds of Wonder), Villains and Vigilantes, Champions…I don’t really remember much about it, although I do recall that it had a somewhat unusual setting (it all took place on an island nation in the year 2044) and that my brother Alex’s character in that, a super-speedster called Silver Streak, was carried over into successive campaigns as we tried new systems. I think that was also the original home of an NPC hero that reappeared in campaign after campaign of mine, PyroMan of the International Agency Command.
The next one we tried was Villains and Vigilantes, which I remember mostly for its generation of super-powers via rolling on random charts. Thus was born one of my only PC super-heroes of that era (since I mostly GMed): Kodiak, Bear Detective… a private eye who could shapeshift into a bear and had laser-beam eyes. I decided that the bear form was actually his real one, and his power let him shapeshift into human form.
Somewhere in between Villains and Vigilantes and Champions, I created a home-brew system, and most of our super-hero gaming was done in that, though towards the end of High School we did some gaming with Champions. I liked it a lot, but most of my gaming group didn’t want to be bothered with the bookdeeping, either for character generation or playing out the combats. They were much happier with the freewheeling style of my home brew.
Notable characters of that period include:
In college and beyond, I played a lot of Champions, but that’s a story for another time…
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.
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.
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.
Patrick over at RPG Diehard just had a post on Rations and record-keeping (basically asking whether it was a good idea or not to make the players track things like food), which set me to thinking.
One of the neat insights in Savage Worlds, which I’ve mentioned before, is that you can sometimes replace frequent small events with rarer more significant ones to accomplish the same goals. That’s most evident in the way damage is handled, but appears in other places in the rules as well, such as the way ammo is handled for the PCs allies. Savage Worlds is intended to allow the players to control bunches of NPCs as allies, but keeping track of ammo for them whether it’s bullets or arrows, would be a big bookkeeping hassle. So they abstract it into the allies having four possible ammo levels: Very High, High (they start at this level unless you take special effort to equip them), Low, and Out. Every combat where the allies are heavily involved in fighting, they drop a level; if during combat they are dealt a 2 as their init card, they drop a level after that round. There’s no game effect until they hit Out. When they’re Out, they’re all out. So it’s simple to keep track of, allows for the possibility that they run out during combat, and makes it so you have to pay at least some attention to keeping them supplied.
It seems to me that a similar mechanic could work very well for things like rations and torches, even for PCs. Give them 4 levels of the significant groups of consumable (e.g. I’d do food and water together, but light sources as a seperate track). Then have the level drop if some event occurs.
For instance, in an overland adventure, you’d almost always be rolling at least once a day for either weather or encounters. It would be simple at the same time to roll to see if rations dropped. You could either put it as an “event” on the encounter table, or (and I kind of favor this) you roll the best character’s Survival die, and on a 1, the party and all its allies drop a ration level. Once the level drops, it can only go back up if the party touches base at some relatively settled area such as a village or farm (depending on the size of the group), or if the party spends a day foraging and gets a raise on the Survival skill. If they ever reach Out, they start to suffer the effects of Hunger as per the core rules.
While it has the drawback that bad luck could result in running out of food quickly after leaving the settled areas, you could explain that as something specific happening (a bear getting into the supplies, the food turning moldy, etc) I think that adds a nice bit of flavor that is otherwise pretty unlikely to crop up in a game that isn’t obsessively detailed, and the upside of requiring almost no bookkeeping besides a couple of tick-marks while making sure the players at least occassionally consider where their supplies are coming from is quite high. And if you’re running a fantasy campaign, it finally makes spells like Create Food and Water or those pouches of neverending food something the adventurers will be quite pleased to have.
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers 