Game Ideas Un limited: Romanian

  In The Thomas Crown Affair, insurance investigator Catherine Banning is asked whether she speaks Romanian.  Who would ever bother with Romanian? she replies.  The point is that in the grand scheme of the world today, this is an unimportant language; world travelers don't need to know it.

  It catches my attention because it happens that I did bother with Romanian once long ago.  I was in Romania for three weeks one summer (traveling with a high school choral group at the invitation of the Romanian government).  Many of the locals spoke English; but if you wanted to buy anything, if you wanted to be able to order food or beverages, if you wanted to get directions to your hotel, or merely to ask for an outlet to plug in the amplifiers for the guitars, you needed to know at least a few words of the language.  Romanians still bother with Romanian, and if you're going to be in Romania, it is still useful to know a few words of the common tongue of the land.  The fact is, Romanians need to know Romanian; people who want to talk to Romanians need to know it.  Most of the rest of us don't have that much use for the ability.

  Every high school kid has at some point asked about some subject he had to take--most commonly something in the math field--when am I ever going to need to know this?  It is difficult for me to sympathize in retrospect with that question, as I've probably used most of the things I learned in high school for something through the years, and certainly have more than once wished I could remember things I should have learned then, or which I once understood but allowed to fall into disuse and forgetfulness.  I may be exceptional in that regard; there were probably many things I learned in high school for which most people would find no use whatsoever.  Then again, at the time I could not see how most of it would ever be relevant to my planned career as a phenomenally successful musician and recording artist.  I didn't even know what a role playing game was back then, let alone that it might ever involve me in using the formula for acceleration at one gravity to determine how much time a character had in which to act before he hit the ground, or that I might create an algebraic equation to help me design a dragon who would be an adequate adversary for a particular paladin.  I've done a lot of things I never expected I would do, and so discovered uses for a lot of skills I never thought I'd need.  That doesn't alter the fact that most people learn a lot of skills they'll never use.  How many readers have gotten any serious practical use out of whatever foreign language they had to learn in high school?  When was the last time you calculated the volume of a sphere?  If you dissected a frog (a task I managed assiduously to avoid throughout my extensive educational career), do you remember any of the parts?

  Taking those three examples, however, it is clear that some of those skills have been useful for some people.  My sister was for a time a United Nations translator; the years of French she had in high school combined with the mastery of Cantonese she attained in college gave her that job.  We've got an engineer on our forums who probably has had several occasions to calculate the volume of a sphere, and indeed of considerably less regular objects.  My wife cares for critically ill patients three nights a week, and probably could still give you a tour of the insides of that frog.  These skills have value to the right people; they just don't have much value to the rest of us.

  There are undoubtedly thousands of skills in the real world which are like that.  They are very important for some people, and not for others.  They are important for those people because their lives have taken them into places where they use those skills with some frequency, and need to have that knowledge to operate effectively.  The ambassador to Romania probably should have a functional grasp of the local language, even if the Romanians are going to provide English-speaking contacts for his convenience. 

  In a role playing game situation, however, it is in some ways far more complicated.  Player characters usually are limited in the number of skills they can have, and in the number of skills at which they can excel.  Because of this, it is inherently important in play that character skills align well with game world realities.  No one should speak Romanian unless the game is going to take them to Romania, in which case someone should.  Getting this match between character skills and game needs can be tricky, and many games fail to address the problem.

  I will admit that Multiverser makes no efforts in this regard.  However, as should appear through the article, there are reasons why in that particular case it's not so important.

  The oldest approach to solving the problem is a type of niche protection built on character class or template.  That is, the game designers identify a variety of skills that are certain to be useful within the game world and the types of adventures and scenarios they envision, and apportion these such that no character can have them all.  We spoke of such approaches to niche protection briefly in CharGen and again last week in Negative Points.  This could be said to be a sort of cookie-cutter approach:  we have one basic concept of what is going to happen in this world, and four, or ten, or a hundred, basic types of characters whose skills are useful within that concept.  Pick whatever pre-made character type you like; his skills will be relevant to the world, and as long as each player takes a different type of character there won't be any situations one of you can't handle.  It works, certainly; in a sense it is a brilliantly simple solution to an extremely complicated problem.  It is also very limited and very limiting.

  Very early in the hobby another approach developed:  tell the players during character generation what abilities they're going to need to have represented in the group, so they can be certain to select them.  If the game is going to take the players to Romania (or require that they interrogate some Romanian prisoners), someone should have the language.  Skills that are usually silly and superfluous which are going to be important because of unusual circumstances need to be recognized as such up front, for game play to be effective.

  This, however, has at least two significant drawbacks.  The first is that it tells the players well in advance that there are certain events they should expect in the game ahead.  There are only so many reasons why a character might need to know Romanian; once it's stated that they will need this skill, the players will be looking to determine how it will be used.  The other is that it involves a particular sort of pre-plotting by the referee, which often (although not always) indicates a sort of railroading of the story which will carry player characters into situations whether they wish to be there or not.  The referee may plan on the villain escaping to Romania.  If the players are a step ahead, should they be able to thwart that escape (particularly since, thanks to the skill needs announcement at the beginning of play, they know Romania is important and will be watching that specifically)?  If the villain does make his escape, and the players decide not to pursue, should the referee attempt to coerce them into doing so?  The referee may have an idea of where he expects the game to go, but if he has locked that idea in place, the players have lost a great deal of autonomy.

  As a possible solution to these problems, you might try what we could dub mystery skills.  At character creation, the referee should announce that there are certain skills which the characters should have which will be revealed as they are needed; they'll go on the sheets as Mystery Skill One, Mystery Skill Two, and so forth.  Then when the villain escapes to Romania, the referee asks who has Mystery Skill Four, and tells him he can speak Romanian; later, when they find the nuclear bomb counting down, he informs them that the character with Mystery Skill One has studied the operation of such bombs and has a chance to deactivate this one.  The necessary skills are in the game, but the players don't know what to expect from having been told to have them.

  Yet there are good reasons to take this power away from the referee and give it to the players.  That is, why should the players design characters to fit the referee's scenario?  Doesn't it make at least as much sense for the referee to design a scenario that gives the players the opportunity to use their skills?  To do this, the referee must understand that whatever skills the players give to their characters, those are the things they want to do in the game, and it's up to him to give them opportunities to do those things.  Similarly, if the game allows them to take disadvantages (as in character generation systems that give the player points to spend on his character if he takes a characteristic that might be disadvantageous), the referee should assume that the player expects any disadvantage he takes to be implicated during play as a problem.  The way the player designs the character should be a reflection of what the player wants the game to be.  The referee then should respond to this by creating a world that meets the players' expectations.

  Of course, if player characters are sufficiently complex that they have many skills and can find many solutions to any problem, a lot of this is of considerably lower concern.  Also, if the game includes a system for adding needed skills to characters on the fly, this, too, can take the sting out of it.  If within the game there is any mechanism for the spy to suddenly say, But of course, I speak Romanian, so I can communicate with the underground effectively, then a lot of this doesn't matter.  That is a viable way to play; it will not appeal to everyone.  No single solution will appeal to everyone.  The trick is to find the solutions that best work for your group, and mix and match them in the most effective balance.

  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.