Mr Wicks style in particular has the positive aspect of presenting interesting and tragic character arcs. All of his examples would have been fun to play, with all the drama and heartbreak the characters would have gone through. Interesting stories in short, and not to dissimilar to actual comics i have read (we are speaking of superherogaming after all), especially from the gritty nineties.

The one thing you should be careful about in these campaigns is to make sure the players understand that their characters will most likely be killed in terrible ways during the campaign. Thereby setting a social contract where everybody understands that the stories about to be told are not going to be happy and character mortality will be high. Then you play this interesting and tense campaign and enjoy the tragedy of your characters inevitable demise in much the same way you would enjoy reading an Alan Moore comic.

Wick states that he was wellknown as the resident killerGM at that campus. I find it likely that everybody went into that campaign with full knowledge that it was a bit like feeding your character to a papershredder. In that type of campaign, that is one of the fun things.

The first is that when I said one rarely gets positive feedback, it was a statement in general, not specifically with reference to this article. I have published perhaps over two thousand Internet articles/web pages by now. I often get posts and e-mail from people who want to tell me why I am wrong, and even when I get letters which praise what I have done they usually turn to “but I have a problem with this part.” People don’t often say, “I agree with you 100%, thanks for writing, I look forward to reading more.” (In fact, most of the time when you see posts like that on public forums, they’re created by Spambots trying to embed links to commercial sites.)

Applying that here only means that it’s quite natural that those who disagree would post and those who agree generally would not. We’ve had a few post in support of what Wick presents, but most of the comments have been opposed–which follows the basic rule that those who disagree will be more likely to comment than those who agree.

The second quibble is that there have been a few positive posts in the mix from people whose reaction is that this is useful advice. I admit that I don’t run games the way John does, and probably would not enjoy playing in one; but there are a lot of kinds of games I probably would not enjoy at all that a lot of people do play and enjoy. Some referees probably can make this advice work really well for some players; all referees can learn something from it, even if it is only that a referee must at least maintain the illusion of fairness when he undermines his player’s characters or he will be called for it.

Thanks again for your comment.

–M. J. Young

I’m sure John Wick somehow manages to make his games fun for his players. I’m sure he’s a brilliant game designer. I’m sure he has more acceptable things to say in his other writings. But the stories told and suggestions given in this article here, removed from all of that, simply aren’t good. (And there’s nothing in the article itself to suggest that it shouldn’t be taken on its own – no external links to other articles or anything of that sort.)

It’s easy to say that character death should always be possible and the game should have risk. And I agree completely – without the threat of character death, the game loses much of its tension. (There are plenty of other sources of tension, especially with a good story, but the threat of death is always a simple and effective one.)

But there are different ways of threatening character death. If, at the beginning of each session, I were to roll a d20 for each character and cause any character who came up with a 1 to instantly die of a heart attack. that would certainly make the campaign more dangerous and threaten more death, but it would hardly be fair or fun for the players, because their own actions were not the cause of it. A player should always be able to look back at a death and say, “Yeah, that thing I did there was a mistake that lead to my death. I’ll be careful not to repeat that mistake in future.”

So what mistakes will the players here regret? They can’t stop Jefferson Carter from finding out about their weaknesses because he is John Wick and reads their character sheet directly. They can’t stop him from wanting to destroy them because he has no human motivation that can be used or persuaded. So what does that leave? Well, that leaves negating his actual attempts at killing them. So what should each hero have done?

Malice should have… not taken DNPC at character creation. Either that, or she should have… never been hit by a single attack.. Ever. Even – nay, especially – when in her civilian life and not apparently involved in combat. Because ever being hit by anything ever is a stun, and once that happens the player isn’t allowed to do anything and must just watch making no choices as the GM destroys everything.

Paladin should have… inspected everything he ever touched for random mind-control poisons before touching it. You know, just in case a completely motiveless adversary he doesn’t even know exists and who uses different methods every time he acts might decide to slip him a mind-control poison just for fun. (You’ll notice that I don’t mention not taking Psy Lim at character creation as an option. That’s because this humiliation doesn’t actually depend on the Psy Lim in any way – any hero could be mind-controlled into killing civilians to exactly the same effect.)

The Lucky characters should have… not taken Lucky at character creation. Either that, or they should have… never made use of Lucky in the entire campaign. (And no, don’t tell me that making the “Lucky” character jump alone into a stack of insurmountable foes is totally fair because they could conceivably have escaped by rolling nothing but critical successes while the opposition rolled nothing but critical failures or something like that; nobody could look back on that and not feel cheated. Especially since, you know, using something defined as “makes things turn out in your favour” to make things worse is just insane troll logic from the very start. And the idea that taking any self-defense ability is somehow selfish is itself ludicrous; maybe you should make everyone who took more than 3 CON or any form of defensive buff die because they weren’t protecting others with those points instead.)

The Immune characters should have… never taken Immune at character creation. Either that, or they should have… fled to the hills the moment any sort of disease broke out, recognizing that their immunity to disease made them vulnerable to disease.

Let’s dispense with the whole “John Wick has lots of players and is famous so you just don’t understand” defense, because I’m attacking the article and the advice contained therein, not John Wick himself. This article purports to give advice to GM’s on how to make their games more interesting, and any GM actually taking this advice seriously would not remain a GM for very long.

–M. J. Young

Anyway, thanks for a nice column and keep those players afearing.

But certainly, if his gaming tables enjoy playing with him, that is cool for him and his. Sill I avide to my previous posts. But as you say, there are a lor of ways to game and to each its own, so I agree in which we disagree which would be enjoyable to each other in general.

I can relate to that. I’m pretty proud of my work in time travel. Understand that I co-authored Multiverser and its related books including a published novel. I’ve also got several Christian books in print and teach an online Bible class in which several pastors and educated laymen from diverse denominations participate. I’ve written several hundred songs and played solo and in dozens of bands throughout the Northeast Corridor. The time travel stuff is almost a joke–I started because people asked me about the movies, and now I get paid to write analyses of time travel movies and recently consulted on a film script. The fact that I’m recognized as an authority on time travel is a source of pride for me, even though to my own mind it is such a small corner of what I am and what I do. In the same way, I can see how John would be proud of the recognition he received for being a killer GM. I would be, too. That’s not the whole story of John Wick, and he’s got other articles–some of them quite memorable, wonderful articles about things like how his wedding ring is in some sense a magical object–but it is the thing that gets attention.

That said, I’ll note that since I mentioned your post to him, he has replied to the comic, and if you go there you can read not only his response but the support of others who know him and have played in his games.

So in the final analysis, let’s accept that there is a place for saying, “What John proposes here is much too harsh for anything I would do in any of my games, because my players just wouldn’t enjoy it, even if there are players who do,” but there’s no place for saying “John Wick is a sadistic jerk who abuses his masochistic players.” At least, as long as you’ve never actually sat at his table (which I have not) and played in one of his games, you have no right to say that.

I’ve put Multiverser player characters in no-win fatal situations, and worse, because part of Multiverser is expanding the variety of the kinds of play experiences we explore, and ultimately your character will survive, even if he is changed by his experiences. I don’t play Champions, so I can’t really assess what John proposes; but it doesn’t sound to me as if his players are complaining about how he treats them or their characters. At least, no one has posted here to say that they played in one of his games and thought he abused his power as referee; everyone who has said that has been a complete stranger to him who never played in his games.

–M. J. Young

My complain is mostly because someone prides himself not of making exiting games, o exiting adventures or because his players have fun… he prides himself of abusing his characters in such a way that they prefer using the powers, advantages and disadvantages he as a GM doesn’t like.

For example there is only oneclear example of a character long… one that he really liked… so this sounds like being partial… he liked the concept, he liked that he was small, simple character and humble, something that he expected of a character, because of that the character lived for a long time, only dying because the player and him wanted it, and only to begin another part of the chronicle… I bet you that the “heroe” that dound about this kids being payd by Carter was the new character of this said player.

So basically he has a player that is his main character… everyone else can die around, and he actually will search for them to die. If that is the kind of game they like cool for them… but taking pride of that and telling others basically “you should fuck your players like this every time or otherwise you are going easy on them.” (which basically he did, making him judge other’s games through his standards).

If he cares or not about my words is not the point, I simply give my opinion… considering how he is through this text I am sure he couldn’t care less about my words. I Myself only finished his text to be able to give my opinion with full knowledge of what was it about… usually I would have closed it a lot earlier.

John has absolutely no love for Ron Edwards’ theories of role playing, but on this point I think Ron’s ideas come to John’s defense: people are playing in his game because they are enjoying it, on some level having fun. You might not understand why. I don’t understand why people enjoy playing the horrors Call of Cthulu or Paranoia; I don’t understand why people enjoy playing games of Gamma World in which their characters can abruptly die from something completely unanticipated and unavoidable. People do. Some people apparently enjoy seeing how John is going to get around their carefully-planned protections and destroy their characters–or whatever it is that they enjoy. I don’t run games that way, and I don’t play in them, but I don’t condemn them simply because it’s not something I would enjoy. Who knows? Maybe I would enjoy being in one of his games–it doesn’t sound as if all the characters get slaughtered at every session, and there is something to a game in which you know you might meet an unexpected end that keeps it edgy. Let’s put it this way: I’ve been in an illusionist game where the illusion that I was threatened with death several times a night and by my wits I survived was exciting, until I realized that it was an illusion and I was never really threatened because the referee needed my character to stay alive. It wasn’t much fun after that–or rather, I had to change my expectations of what was fun, from any idea that I was playing a game to that of participating in a story that he was telling, in which my color contributions would never really impact the plot.

No fear of that boredom in Wick’s game.

–M. J. Young