Thoughts on boring systems...

Despite having a wealth new games to play (or never play, but admire, and the same old suspects are wheeled out again and again), I often find my thoughts turning to the world of Titan, and Fighting Fantasy in general. A couple of days I read an old blog post, which I cannot now find. In that post, nostalgia for FF gamebooks was tempered by the assertion that you couldn't get kids these days to play these books when they could be smashing things to bits in [Insert Current Game Title Here]*. And I think that assertion is, sadly, more or less true. But a fantasy adventure gamebook does things in a different way to a viscerally thrilling fantasy adventure video game. And in that difference there is a virtue that we should remember when playing roleplaying games. 

FF combat is boring. It is boring because there are no choices (most of the time). Roll dice until one side wins, with not even the possibility of retreat, is not uncommon. This means that the whole thing could be settled by a single dice roll, the probability of victory being fixed the moment the encounter begins. It'd lose some tension, sure, but the end result, mechanically speaking, would be the same.

So where is this virtue, eh? Well, mechanically boring combat is feature, not a bug. 

I play mostly with people who have not and will not read the rules. And so I am acutely aware that combat with lots of choices equals victory to those with system mastery. I find nothing more disheartening when I read roleplaying forums that are 'epic' accounts of encounters that concentrate on the 'synergies' that the players managed to set up between their powers or other clever exploitation of the system. In the games that I run, once combat is started I want the encounter settled quickly. I want it settled quickly because I want the consequences of that combat to result in further interesting choices for the PCs. Choices about the game world, not the game system. 

By having such boring combat and task resolution, FF gamebooks remind me of the things that roleplaying games can do better than video games. Roleplaying games can never match the complexity of micro-choices about the system that are the focus of many (not all) video games - ability to master the controller and the powers and abilities of the character. And if we use a system that wasn't put together by designers worrying about that, the actual play of a roleplaying game will by necessity focus on the choices being made in relation to the game world rather than the game system. And while a gamebook has the same 'dead' GM as a video game, in a tabletop RPG this perspective can be taken to the extremes, with truly open worlds existing in living imaginations rather than fixed on paper or in code. 

So thank you Fighting Fantasy - I glad that you were my introduction to fantasy adventure gaming and not [Insert Video Game Title Here]*.

*I am out of touch, but not that much. I could have named a video game - probably one that I have enjoyed tremendously - but I don't want to make this about that particular  video game. This isn't about denigrating video games. But simple systems force the play(choices) to be about the world, while a complex system allows the play(choices) to be about the system.

Worst. Module. Introduction. Ever.

I've been looking through some old adventures in my cupboard, particularly those that are poorly regarded, with a view seeing what I can 'rehabilite'. But when on page 4 of a book you find the following lines introducing an adventure... 

"[Adventure X] is a race against time - but the exact times and dates have actually been kept vague. Role-playing should always be about creating an exciting story: not just problem solving or beating the clock. [...] If the GM can impress on the players that there is no time to waste, and then create a persistent and mounting sense of urgency without actually keeping track of the exact number of days until the [climax], the adventure will stay exciting and tense. [...] Players may feel their characters are being 'railroaded'; forced from encounter to encounter with little choice in the matter; but you should make them feel that this is because Fate has forced them into this path, not the adventure writers of the GM's style of refereeing."

Obviously the title is hyperbole, but these lines epitomise what I really do dislike in many published adventures, even those who are not as explicit as this in their assumptions of what constitutes a role-playing *game*. I would argue that if you set the scenario up as a race against time, and then proceed to absolutely invalidate every single decision that the players take (and the actions taken by the PCs) vis-a-vis this 'race', the best part of the game is an illusion. 

With regard to a conversation I have been having elsewhere: I have no problem limiting player choices*. The game world naturally limits choice. And sometimes it is a useful GMing technique to present possible choices to the players, gamebook fashion. But I really hate invalidating player choices by rendering those choices meaningless. This doesn't mean that the world is fixed - if the players know nothing of the plans and plots of the villains of the world they can remain in an indeterminate state, waiting for the PCs to encounter them. But once the players and making decisions, and the PCs are taking action, with regard to these villainous plots, the *game* is having these choices and actions have consequences.

This module suggests that the vast majority of what the players choose to do over the weeks it would take to play this adventure ought to have no real consequence. Having played in these kind of games, even the merest suspicion that this is going on is an enthusiasm-killer. But when I have found myself employing techniques such as these as a GM I have felt that I have cheated myself. I don't want to 'tell a story', I want to play a game.

Anyway, guesses as to the year, the system, the adventure itself?

*Addendum - ten minutes after 'publishing' this post I realised that I'd forgotten to say that player choices are also limited by the social contract that ought to bind people when they are playing a 'fantasy adventure game' (or 'horror investigation game', etc.). YOU are playing an 'adventurer' (or 'investigator'), and the player choices you make should not be made to prevent adventuresome things from happening. Yes, your PC might want to settle down to a farm, but you as a player have a 'contract' with the GM and the other players to play a fantasy adventure game for three hours that evening. I've seen criticisms of (presumably hypothetical) sandbox games in which the (imagined) campaign devolves in non-adventuring. If this isn't what the group wants, it is a result of people breaking the social contract, and correcting this shouldn't necessitate introducing heavily-plotted railroads.

Player Character Suffering ≠ Player Suffering

Or, a few more thought on the ‘pathetic aesthetic’.

The pathetic aesthetic is not about making players suffer. It is not about the machismo of endurance. Players are not player characters, obviously. A game that evokes the pathetic aesthetic will involve player characters enduring – if they are lucky – possibly catastrophic negative consequences. The players do not endure these consequences, they are playing the game whether their characters are ‘succeeding’ or ‘failing’. A player does not ‘lose’ when his or her character fails, it is simply more play.

Playing a gaming is not work. But some games can make play feel like work. And while play leaves behind nothing but the experience of play, work should leave behind something more tangible. If gaming feels like work, it would only be natural to feel cheated if your character suffers a catastrophic negative consequence that would undo hours of work, and would require hours of work to rectify, if it is even possible. Hours of play cannot be undone, those hours are their own reward.

Computer games can often feel like work. Consider Grand Theft Auto IV. A great computer game; terrific environments to explore, full of humour, and some pretty sharp social commentary too. When I started playing GTA:IV I drove cautiously, careful not to attract the attention of the police, and I tried to play smart to keep my character alive. But the consequence of being caught, or killed, was not that your character suffered any permanent negative effects (death, prison, disability etc.) but simply that you needed to play though parts of the same game again – whether the recover the money and equipment that you had lost, or to replay the same mission. Again and again. Player character failure is not meaningful to the/in the world of the player character; it demands that the player endure.

If a tabletop RPG treats failure in this way, as something that can simply be erased through more gaming, then failure is something that the players endure and gaming can start to become work. Failure, and the real risk of failure in the pathetic aesthetic is about the consequences of such failures having real, lasting effects on the player character. Their failures, and the consequences of their failure, should be meaningful – in the sense that they have a real effect on the character and his or her world – and while some failure will be dramatically meaningful, by the fact that the player characters are protagonists (not heroes), the fact that the game involves random elements and valorises player agency demands that many of these failures will be 'pathetic'.

 

It is that it is the very fact that failure in games that embrace the pathetic aesthetic always has the potential for catastrophic permanent consequences is part of what makes failure a fun part of play, not a speedbump to be overcome through work.