I am very suspicious that Steven Spielberg must be a closet gamer. It’s not just because the kids were playing Dungeons & Dragons™ in E. T. in 1982. 1985’s The Goonies, for which he is credited with writing the story (Chris Columbus is blamed for the script), just feels like a game adventure shifted into a modern setting. The kids find a secret entrance from some old basement into an underground cave complex that has all the marks of a dungeon, complete with traps, secret paths, and clues, and they keep moving through it until finally they find the long lost pirate treasure. What could be more like an early eighties role playing game adventure than that?
There is an aspect of the story, though, which is not exactly typical of the typical dungeon crawl, and it’s one worth examining closely.
After the initial setup, in which we find out how very much the kids need the money, they encounter some nasty (if stupid and inept) villains. They escape from these by entering the caves. Thereafter, although they are pushing forward on their quest to find the treasure and confronted by hazards and puzzles at every turn, and saved by their wits and tricks, they are also pursued by these same criminals, who dog their steps all the way to the end.
We have looked at quite a few designs for adventures over the past year. The last one, Spelunking, was the purely explorative model, in which the game world is interesting for its own sake and the player characters are driven to discover it. Before that we had three versions of the quest idea, analogized to Scavenger Hunts (multiple objectives resulting in concurrent miniquests), Treasure Hunt (following a trail from one interim objective to the next), and Flag Captures (knowing the end of the quest but choosing the route). This idea, though, is something of the negative quest, and perhaps shares much in common with the first model we addressed in Antagonists, that of planning the actions of the villains and adapting to the interference of the player characters. In this version, the players are attempting to escape.
Escape, in this sense, is more than merely a quest for the way out. Although such a quest can be an excellent adventure, what The Goonies teaches us is that the adventure is the more exciting if we are escaping something that is in pursuit.
However, such a design is fraught with complications.
Not the least of these complications involves managing the pursuer. Clearly there must be a real threat that the pursuer could catch the characters, or there’s no excitement in running. On the other hand, if the pursuers actually do catch the characters, that’s the end of the escape. Either the characters are then captured, or the threat of pursuit is eliminated. Thus you have to find a way to control the pursuers such that there is a serious danger of them closing the gap, but at the same time that the players can keep a good distance ahead if they make the effort, all without feeling as if it’s all too easy.
More fundamentally, perhaps, you have to have a situation in which the characters will flee. All too many games have been ruined because the quixotic players decided to turn and fight the unbeatable foe, either to be destroyed in the process or to discover that the game was rigged anyway as they did the impossible.
On that problem, players can be surprising. Some will think that this is their chance to fight a desperate battle against incredible odds, and that the referee would not have set an adversary against them that they could not defeat. Others can easily be induced to run, if the threat looks formidable enough. If your players are likely to run from something that looks reasonably powerful, that’s enough to launch the escape play.
If your players tend to be the reckless sort, there may yet be a way to overcome this. In most games there are non-lethal forms of combat. Grappling techniques, capture based weapons, drugs and gasses, and traps can all be used to imprison characters. It is entirely plausible for the villains to capture the heroes alive, proving their overwhelming superiority, and then after holding them for a time announce that they are to be executed. At this point arranging for them to break out of their confinement (presumably with outside help, as they will undoubtedly have attempted to do so on their own already) becomes the first step in setting them on the escape adventure. It is evident that the pursuing adversary has an overwhelming ability to capture and kill them, unless they can reach a place of safety where the villain will be overmatched by forces allied to the characters. This doesn’t guarantee that the players will not choose to stand and fight, but at least they will know what they are doing if they make that choice.
Matching the pursuers to the characters is a good place to start on keeping the gap open. Unfortunately this is not so simple as it sounds. After all, for the escape to be interesting, the players are going to have to face obstacles. Even a locked door slows them down, and unless they find a way to secure it behind them that same door will not significantly delay the pursuers. The heroes have to solve the puzzles and open the secret paths; the villains need only follow along the trail the heroes have blazed. The design must account for the time lost at each obstacle. The players must be afraid that the villains will catch them before they get through this part, but there must be enough of a buffer that escape remains possible even with one or two serious failure delays along the way.
One way to arrange this is to provide potential delaying techniques along the way. If the fleeing heroes can cut the bridge they have just crossed, this delays the villains and widens the gap. The downside of this is that the players might not recognize the delaying tactics that have been supported, and might instead use other methods whose efficacy is more difficult to determine.
A more direct means of controlling the gap is measure time rather than space. Rather than tracking the position of the villains on the map and working out how they handle various obstacles independently, determine a time factor. Start the villain a specific time behind the characters. If you know the normal movement rates of the characters and the villains, you can determine whether the gap will normally widen, narrow, or stay about the same. Use die rolls to impact whether this changes, and by how much, on the assumption that there will be some variation in the speed each party moves. If the players use a delaying tactic against their pursuit, adjust the dice accordingly; if they are themselves delayed, that too becomes part of the system. Allow the possibility that the enemy could be stalled for an extended time, such as ten or fifteen minutes, quite apart from any character actions, by such complications as being uncertain of the trail, or stopping to rest, or encountering some distraction or impediment. Otherwise try to arrange their relative speeds such that the tendency would be for the gap gradually to narrow.
The endpoint of the escape has to be the place where the characters are safe. It could be the fort, or the police, or some other secure place where there are reinforcements sufficient to defeat the pursuers. This might be because the villains would not take the risk of being captured or killed; it might be because once you’re there, they are no longer your problem, and they will be captured or killed. It could simply be a territorial matter. They say Shelob never leaves her lair. The police won’t cross the boundary into the next jurisdiction. Vampires cannot live in sunlight. Of course, this sort of escape is less certain. Shelob did leave her lair once. If the police think they can drag you back across the line and get away with claiming you never left, they might try it. A vampire might be angry enough to be suicidal, assaulting his victim in the daylight in the hope that the victim, too, will die–or worse. The design should be clear as to when the escape has been successful, and the players should be able to determine which way to go and where they will be safe at a reasonable point in the adventure, so that the escape will appear a possibility.
There are still some other adventure ideas to pursue, but adding this to your repertoire will make it considerably more versatile.
Next week, something different.
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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.
