Game Ideas Un limited: Fog

  Many years ago I read a rather unfortunate true story; it may illustrate something useful for games, although that would be little consolation to those involved.

Police in a metropolitan area were responding to a burglary; someone had robbed a store.  Arriving moments after the alarm sounded, they looked and saw someone running down the street.  They called to the man to halt, but he did not stop, nor turn back, nor acknowledge that he heard them.

  One of the officers ran after the fleeing suspect, and in a moment caught up with him, grabbing him by the collar to try to bring him down.  The man began reaching into his pocket.  The other officer, watching from a short distance, shouted, "Look out, he's got a gun!" then proceeded to fire a warning shot into the air.  The first officer heard the shot, and, thinking that he had been fired upon, drew his own weapon and fatally shot the suspect.

  The man they had brought down was trying to pull from his pocket a card on which was printed that he was deaf and mute.  It seems, in reconstructing the events, that he was trying to catch a bus.  Whether he was aware that anything at all had happened at that store is unknown, but it would be foolishly redundant to say that he did not hear the police telling him to stop, nor know why he was being accosted from behind.

  It was an honest mistake, certainly.  It is difficult to find where the police went wrong.  A man running away from the scene of a crime moments after it occurred would of course be suspicious, and the more so if he refused to acknowledge a police order to stop.  A suspect reaching into his pocket when seized by an officer could well be looking for a weapon, a gun or perhaps a knife.  In the midst of melee, who can tell with certainty from what direction a nearby shot sounded?  It was all a series of misunderstandings, a serious comedy of errors, which left one innocent man dead.  Often mistakes are made, and sometimes apologizing for them is not enough.

  That's a horrible story.  Why did I even tell it?

  Frequently in our games, everyone knows exactly what's going on around them.  It is all described with perfect clarity.  You know who was shot and who was hit.  Yet in life things are frequently much less clear.

  Let's tell this story two different ways.  Here is the way it would be told in most games; the player character is one of the policemen, but the others are all non-player characters.

You and your partner have arrived at the scene of the crime; the window of the jewelry store is broken, and as you hop out of the car you see a man running down the street.

I call out for him to stop.

He is still running, ignoring you.

I'll run after him; can I catch him?

You catch up with him easily enough.  You grab him and try to force him to stop.  Then your partner shouts that he has a gun, and fires a shot into the air.

Do I see a gun?

No, but the man seems to be trying to get something out of his pocket.

What is it?

It's a card; it identifies the man as a deaf-mute.

Dang, we got the wrong guy.  I try to apologize to him and let him go.

  The entire encounter hinged on the fact that you knew where the shot originated.  Now let's tell it again.

You and your partner have arrived at the scene of the crime; the window of the jewelry store is broken, and as you hop out of the car you see a man running down the street.

I call out for him to stop.

He is still running, ignoring you.

I'll run after him; can I catch him?

You catch up with him easily enough.  You grab him and try to force him to stop.  Then your partner shouts that he has a gun, and you hear a shot but you aren't hit.  What do you do?

  Suddenly it's not so clear what you are going to do.  That shot might have killed you; you don't have time to ask questions about what's happening.  You might well pull the gun and shoot him, only then to discover what we know, that there was no gun.

  Soldiers speak of the fog of war.  In battles from the dawn of gunpowder through the beginning of the twentieth century, this was a very real part of combat, as the smoke from gunpowder filled the field and obscured everyone's vision.  Even before explosives were in common use, battle was a moment of confusion, in which it was easy to become disoriented, to find yourself retreating when you thought you were advancing, fighting your friends instead of your foes, charging toward the wrong objective.  Even since the development of smokeless powder, mistakes have been made as disoriented troops attacked their own allies, particularly as night battles have become increasingly common.  Yet if you pause to orient yourself, you can easily become a casualty, or at least lose the initiative, the momentum, the opportunity, letting victory slip through your fingers for the sake of caution.

  Some battles are simple enough, clear and uncomplicated; a duel between two people seldom becomes so confused that they don't know who they are fighting.  The red coats of the British army may have marked them as visible targets, but it probably went a long way to assuring that they recognized each other on the field.  On the other hand, sometimes the characters will not have the same clarity of vision in the situation, and at those times the referee may want to begin limiting the information given.  Limited information can lead to confusion, and confusion can lead to the kinds of realistic, perhaps tragic, results that often do happen in life and death situations.

  I must recommend an article by Charles Franklin, Keeping Their Heads Down, in the second issue of The Way, the Truth, and the Dice, in which he suggests ways to bring some of the effects of this aspect of battle into play.

  Give some thought to what the player characters actually can know about the fight; make the players make decisions based on the fragments of information that are reasonably available to their characters.  The results may be surprising.

  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.