The Gaming Outpost

As MJ pointed out, one way to use choice in an RPG is the old dilemma of: You can do A or B, but you can’t do both (usually used by villains in comic books and movies). MJ also touched on the idea that this isn’t always how it works.



Sometimes the hero can do both. Sometimes he can save the girl and children which gives us three options instead of just two, and allows our hero to confound the villain. There is also a fourth option that I haven’t seen too many folks try – You can choose not to choose.



If you haven’t planned for this contingency it’s a good idea to think of what will happen if the choice of no choice is made by your players. Does the villain win? Do both the girl and the children die? Do our heroes fail the test? Do the forces of darkness take over the town?



Not choosing can be because of apathy, fear or even quick thinking – For sometimes the choice of no choice the right choice…





At one point during my original Vampire campaign my bad guy, Michael, had set up the players so that all but one of them was in a position to make a choice between A or B. The twist was that both choices were wrong.



If they chose A, it was bad. If they chose B, it was worse. Michael, being a cocky sort of bad guy, kept one player outside and allowed him to witness each other player’s dilemma. He granted the outsider the ability to give one sentence’s worth of advice/direction to the player – Otherwise he could not speak. Michael hated to loose so he decided to stack the deck further by making the two wrong choices the only obvious ones, and to hide/not mention the only right choice.



As you can no doubt guess, the right choice was not to choose. Michael was trying to make the party play his game with his rules. If they party refused to play along they would escape and foil his plans for, as is the way with evil plots, it hinged on at least one player making the wrong choice.



The first player was taken aside and given his scenario. It was a chess game against Michael. The player had the white pieces so it was he who had to make the first move. The player on the outside didn’t know what to do, so he waited to see what would unfold. He wanted to give some advice, but he wasn’t sure what to say as he feared bad advince might doom them.



The player at the chess board asked me a number of questions trying to divine what he should do. He got the two obvious options right away – He could forfeit, or he could play and try to win. He didn’t like either choice. He wasn’t a quitter so he didn’t want to forfeit. He also knew he couldn’t win as Michael was a master of tactics and had magical foresight that unbalanced the chess match.



As the player pondered his situation, Michael became frustrated, as bad guys are wont to do when their plans are close to fruition and the good guys are stalling, so he bated the player.



“Choose!” said Michael. “You must either forfeit or play the game.”



The player looked at me and said: “I kick the table and send the pieces flying.”



I said. “Michael looks shocked and angry as the chess pieces fly across the room… What do you do now?”



The player folded his arms, looked at me and said, with a very big grin: “Checkmate!”



He had figured me out. And at that moment the player watching also figured it out.



“No choice is a choice!” I heard.



“Perhaps…” I said doing my best to roleplay a bad guy who’d just been busted.



“Perhaps? HAH! We’ve got you!”



As a GM you don’t want to overuse any of the tricks in your bag so don’t do this too often or it’s uniqueness is lost rather quickly. Depending on the type of players and game you run, you may not want the consequences of failure to be too dire. Sometimes the loss of something small is enough.



Then again, there is something to be said for the fun that comes from the player’s choice being the one that saves or dooms the world.



Brett J.B.

I woke in the common room of a pub to the sound of bodied being dragged out. Jolly tars in white shirts, blue pants, and a red sash were toting the drunks about me outside.



Not being totally up to speed, I protested when they came to me.

“Ye’ve taken the Queen’s mark haven’t ye, ya’ landlubber scum?” *smack*smack*smack* The heavy sticks landed on my skull or thereabouts with professional economy.



The rest of the trip to the ship I did not protest since I was unconscious. Later I found they rolled the dead into the harbor, but unfortunately I survived. Although, I saw double for a week afterwards.



After three days, I was rousted out of my hammock by a villainous lot who seemed to delight in sadism. They had me climbing the rigging before I could see which rope was real, and which was an illusion generated by my fogged brain. So I closed my eyes, and relied on my sense of touch.



This earned me a nickname, ‘Blind bat’ or ‘bat’ for short.



By now it should be obvious that much of my preternatural skills did not function. Although I healed faster than a normal man might have due to my prayers and my herbs, still this was a far sight from conjuring a water elemental to carry me away from this pestilential rats’ nest.



The first time they struck me with a knotted rope, my training I had received at the hands of Master Wau Lei kicked in. Grabbing the rope, and jerking the bosun’s mate off his feet was instinctive. So was wrapping the rope around his neck.



I seriously considered just having it out with the lot of them right then and there, but I thought too long. The marines arrived, and beat me into unconsciousness with the butts of their muskets. Waking up tied to a mast is not a fun experience.



The Captain had me ‘helped to see the light’ by a flogging. Then he tried the good cop method of kindly explaining to me the necessity of his methods. The crew were the scum of the Dockside. Modern American killers would have fainted with terror at being caught with much of them. But several were decent people who had the bad luck of being walking down the wrong street when an impressment gang swept the street into the service of the Queen.(I was not even sure of her name, or the nation.)



We spoke a vaguely English/Germanic tongue with spots of Spanish. It was close enough to English and German and Spanish that I had quickly learned it. Versers pick up an astonishing array of langueages. I recall a man who claimed to know two hundred separate languages, and at least thirty of them were alien.



He had a point, harsh methods were needed to deal with most of this lot. Of course, those methods tended to create some of the problem. And I really resented such treatment. And I had seen the Captain licking his lips while they flogged me. He enjoyed it despite his fine words.



But we kept on across the sea, and after demonstrating in a few fights that I should not be messed with despite my relatively sane countenance, they left me be. I took to protecting the few other decent folk on the ship. This was not well-looked upon by the wolves whose primary entertainment was pestering(in a very rough way) my new friends, and openly betting about what day which of them would finally commit suicide.



More than a few times, I looked at the whole ship, and envisioned killing the lot of them.



Then pirates showed up, and our crew showed their fighting spirit. Literally. The captain passed around mugs of strong liquor to get them intoxicated so they would fight. Cowardice and the need to kill something wavered for control in their heads. The rotgut and the whips and swords of the officers tilted the balance, and the crowd of scum rose to the occasion.



We roared into the fight. It was a chaotic horror. But we won, and only one of my friends died. Another proved himself by cooly using a fallen sniper’s rifle to take out the enemy captain.



As part of the boarding party, I saw horrors which made my ship seem like a paradise. I shall not go into them here, but I could see the Captain’s viewpoint a little more.



A prize crew took the battered hulk of the pirate ship to the nearest port, and my crew was ectstatic at the prospect of prize money. The regimen relaxed as the officers felt that the men were in a good mood, and did not need to be rode so harshly.



It is often a mistake by a dictatorship to liberalize its rule. The French aristocrats did not march to the guillotine because they maintained their harshness. No, they marched because they decided to be nice, for a change.



The crew’s avarice grew, and they thought how nice it would be to have another prize. Naturally, the officers did not approve. They were slightly more sane than the men. They were aware of our damage, and the men dead, and the loss of the prize crew as a fighting force on this ship. The men just saw in their liquor edited memories how easy it had been.



So, they mutinied. And one of my friends was caught with them when the storm surge whipped up a passageway. They were met with extreme forcefulness. The Captain dressed to the nines, and loaded with five horse pistols barred their way, and cowed the treacherous lot.



I stood on the side as I had been scrubbing the deck. For some reason, I filched a neighbour’s broom, and snapped it in half. One end was jagged and sharp.



The Captain took the matter in hand, and pointed out the five in front when he knew that the true ringleaders were mostly in the back pushing the mob forward. My friend, a decent sort who would never agree to this, but no one but the few of us liked him because he was quiet, and decent. In this lot of boisterous braggarts who would knife their own mother that was a capital offense being a good man.



So they laughed to see the pale, but composed face of my friend, and I saw the Captain’s eyes and I knew he had planned that. I saw the shining in them, and I knew he wanted to kill the innocent.



I try not to be a braggart. Of course, being a verser makes bravery so much easier that it is not really much at all to speak of.



I protested, and the Captain sadly denied my request. So from twenty feet away, I flung the broom handle through the Captain’s left eye and into his brain.



Then I sprinted forward and vaulted up on the quarter deck, and shot the first two crew men who were charging me with the Captain’s own pistols. I turned and shot the first mate, a beastly thing, who was coming up behind me. Then with a pistol in each hand, my last two, I hollered above the madness.



“I’m the Captain, anyone who says differently step forward now.”



This converted the mob of men and the mob of officers into groups of individuals who each asked themselves if they personally wanted to take me on, right now.



One very large brute took the challenge, and I was much relieved. I plucked the broom handle from the Captain’s eye, and put up the guns in my waistband. I walked past the men I had shot, and the few others who had made it up to the quarter-deck without showing my fear of a knife in the back.



The humongous brute came to the base of the stairs, and I flung the broom handle into his throat. The sheer shock of seeing a ninja technique on their European ship made it even more effective. None of them could have pulled off that stunt. It made them wonder what other trump cards I held.



“Gentlemen, and I use the term loosely, we are going pirating. Strike the colors, and run up a black flag.” Somehow, I was sure that it would not be hard to find scum in this world that in my moral view deserved a pirate attack. And I would drop my friends off in a nice port with enough gold to make up for the trouble, and get them home.

“And oh, by the way, my name is not Captain Bat, it is Captain Roberts, the Dread Pirate Roberts.” I laughed almost hysterically in relief of tension at my little joke, and they joined in even if they gave me strange looks. But sanity is not a requirement of pirate captains.



We lasted almost two years of freeing slaves, hunting pirates, releasing impressed sailors, and double-crossing corrupt Imperial governors. But finally, a squadron caught up with us, and rather than fight to the last man, they dumped me overboard in a ship’s boat. And my crew ran for it. Understandable really.



Tadeusz

  There’s not enough time in the day, I hear myself saying.  I’ve got e-mail to answer, forums in which to participate, books to write and edit, articles to do.  Someone is wondering why a project is lagging behind; someone else wants me to put something together for something else.  Dinner was a bit late tonight, I’ve got movies overdue at Blockbuster™ that I’ve not yet viewed, and as I check on things I realize that I’m falling behind on–or, depending on how you view it, catching up with–my Game Ideas Unlimited series.  That is, each week another one posts, and I try to keep several in the queue so I have time to review them, polish them, prepare them.  Just tonight I added two hundred words to the one that’s supposed to be uploaded tomorrow night.  Six months ago, I’d already have sent that article to someone to proofread, and it would have been in its final form at least a week before that.  I need to generate a few articles; but when can I get the time?

  It’s not as difficult as it sounds.  I’ve actually got a list, currently nineteen fragments (not including a couple already finished, and at least one on a scrap of paper on my desk for which I’m trying to remember an important piece).  Each of them could be, or at one time was, an idea for another article.  It’s just a matter of getting those fragments to bloom into something worth writing.  I scan the list, and suddenly realize that one of them, an idea I jotted down probably over a year ago and have not yet expanded, is particularly poignant at this instant.  All it says, now at number five on the list, is Opportunity costs.

  For those who don’t know, this is a term commonly used in accounting.  I know precious little about accounting, but I once heard an accounting student preach a sermon based on this idea:  everything we do costs us something in terms of what we can’t do.  That is, if I have a hundred dollars to invest, and I put it all in Wizards of the Coast, that means I have nothing left to invest in White Wolf.  Every dollar I spend on one thing is a dollar I do not have available to spend on something else.  My financial choices have a hidden cost, a cost in terms of what might have been.  Everyone has to make such choices, even if only in terms of recognizing that having butter on your bread instead of margarine might mean you can’t afford jelly.

  The point of the sermon took this into our life decisions.  He particularly said that he needed to invest his life such that in the end he would hear the words, Well done, good and faithful servant.  He noted that there were some things he might do with his life that he might want to do or like to do, but that they were too expensive if they cost him this.  To move it a step away from that focus, opportunity costs mean that if you want to be one particular kind of person, you can’t do some things that that kind of person wouldn’t do; if you want to have a particular sort of reputation, you can’t do certain things that would mar that reputation.  Note that this cuts both ways.  The person who wants to be known as kind and caring can’t do something cruel; but the person who wants to be known as tough as nails can’t risk being seen as soft.  What we do costs us in terms of whether we are who we want to be.

  I said the idea was particularly poignant at the moment, and I hope you see how.  Opportunity costs impact us in our time.  There is not enough time to do everything; that’s given.  We might find a way to have more money, or to conceal information about ourselves that would damage our repuation, and so overcome some of the costs in those areas, but there is no way that any of us can get more time.  In everything we do, we are choosing to do one thing instead of something else.  Those who are particularly organized may be able to arrange their lives such that they manage to do all the things they think important; but that in itself is an acknowledgement of the cost, of the fact that we can’t do everything, and must choose to do the things we consider important.

  I note that I am obliged to make dinner every night for my kids; that, and getting them off to school in the morning, are the most fixed, most immutable, of my obligations.  Beyond that, everything is a matter of priorities–well, almost everything.  I might not sleep tonight, but if I don’t, I will almost certainly sleep tomorrow, whether or not I would choose to do so.  There are one or two other bodily functions that demand my attention.  Beyond that, everything is ultimately a choice.  You think you have to go to work; in fact, you choose to go to work because the cost of not doing so is too high.  Because you go to work, you don’t have that time for other things.  If you did those other things instead, you would lose your income, a cost you can’t afford.  I read to my youngest two sons every night, time that could be used to finish my other work sooner.  I believe that there is some return from that; it is worth the time, even though the time could have been used for something else.

  It seems to me that in many of the role playing games I’ve played, characters have what might be called unlimited resources.  That’s not to say that they can have and do whatever they want; rather, they don’t usually have to make the particularly tough choices about things.  Once in a while there will be a question of which of two items to buy, or whether to save the money for something you can’t yet afford.  But overall this doesn’t happen.  I’m reminded of the moment in the Spiderman movie when the Green Goblin tried to force our hero to choose between saving the girl and saving the busload of kids.  That was inherently about opportunity costs.  The villain was attempting to set up a situation in which the hero couldn’t save both.  Choices like this are dramatic; they are opportunity costs in stark relief.  Even on a smaller scale, putting characters in a position in which they can’t do everything they want to do in the time they have, or they can’t afford all the things they think they need, or even that they can’t maintain two important principles–such as get the job done quickly and maintain their reputations for integrity–creates a dramatic tension, a critical element in a good story.

  So the next time you find yourself trying to decide whether to buy lunch at McDonald’s or save the cash for that game book you wanted, take note that it is decisions of this sort that you want to force on your player characters, to get truly challenging stories.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

Mark’s article on Graffiti he gave us a very important bit of advice:



“…if the only tapestry in the castle is the one that hides the secret door, it’s a bit obvious; but if there are tapestries on every wall, players will stop looking.”



One of the hardest parts about adding details to an RPG setting is getting the players to attach the right mount of concern/interest to the right things. That’s not to say we want to strong-arm our players into following our clues, but it can be difficult to drop subtle hints. When it comes to writing, be it graffiti or high school chemistry books, one way to lend a hint of plot importance to text is to change the language it’s written in.



Let’s take Mark’s graffiti as our example. If we have a dwarven stronghold in which the players find some occasional information carved on the walls, and then they discover some written in an ancient elvish dialect instead of dwarven or orcish as they’ve been seeing before – we suddenly add importance to the information. Is it a clue? Is it simply a mark from another elvish adventurer? You can hear the party asking around “Who can read elvish?” as they try to determine the meaning of the words.



Using alternate or strange languages is the easiest way to make text stand out for players. If all the bad guys books are in Latin except for one that is in Hebrew, chances are the players will look into the Hebrew text. Differences that stand out are great clue identifiers.



Another, more subtle and sneaky way is to change the tone and/or writing style of the text.



In one of my Vampire games the players came across some papers that were found at the residence of a mortal vampire hunter. They had slain the hunter and were now trying to find out what info he had. They were specifically looking for clues that might uncover the recent string of rather exceptional violence that they were experiencing.



In the hunter’s papers they found his journal and some letters to newspapers that he wrote but never mailed. Nothing of obvious interest, it all pointed to a lone hunter bent on vengeance against vampires. One player didn’t buy it though. He offered to go over these texts with a fine toothed comb to see if he could dredge up something that the group may have missed the first time around.



“Anything written in Latin, ancient Greek or German?” (some of the languages they’d run into in the recent past linked with some bad folks)



“No, everything is in English.”



“I’m going to spend the whole night looking over these papers – something’s not right. I can taste it.”



I went on with the rest of the party for a bit, about 15 minutes or so, and then came back to the player and said: “You notice that one page is actually a poem. The reason it sticks out is that there is no other poetry.”



“Really? What’s it about?”



The key here wasn’t a different language, but that there was a tone/writing style change. The hunter had no other poetry except this one page. To add further import to the poem, I told the player it was written in an obviously different hand. The poem was upgraded to Clue status and I gave the player a handout with the poem on it so he could further analyze it.



I could have very well just given the players the poem right off the bat and told them “This poem strikes you as unique as it’s the only bit of poetry in the papers you found, and it appears to be written by someone else.” But that’s not nearly sneaky enough, and I like sneaky.



If the player hadn’t told me he planned to search the papers, and if he had failed the skill check I asked him to make, I wouldn’t have told him anything about the poem. He or another player could always go back and re-check the papers, but he might have struck out the first time. Research is like that sometimes.



Once the players understand that such small nuances are important in your games, they’ll begin to specifically ask for details when they find writings. Sure, they may strike out or go down the wrong path sometimes, but they’ll learn that the details are important – And that sometimes graffiti is just graffiti.



-Brett J.B.