Bait and Switch
Posted by Joshua on Dec 3, 2008
This month, the RPG Blog Carnival topic is “Transitions and Transformations,” so I’d like to talk a little about Baiting and Switching campaign premises in RPGs. The basic idea, seductive in its simplicity, is that you emulate a common staple of fantastic fiction where the protagonists find themselves in a setting or situation that is a radical change from their everyday lives and for which they are unprepared (as when a group of children find a strange world in the back of the wardrobe in the house they’re staying in, or a dying prospector is astrally transported to Mars) by having the players prepare characters as if they were going to play in a particular setting (e.g. the Old West), and part-way through the first session plop them in a new one (Barsoom). In one swell foop you short-circuit any temptation to meta-gaming in the character build process, eliminating any difficulty over professors, reporters and nurses curiously well-versed in the handling of shotguns and dynamite in your Call of Cthulhu game, and you present the players with the exact psychological experience that the characters have of being gobsmacked when their plans for their lives are turned upside-down. That’s a pretty rare thing to be able to accomplish in an RPG, so it’s quite tempting.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I’m going to warn you against doing it, because the risks are too great. The players might not like the new premise that they didn’t buy into; they may have built characters that have rich connections with the original premise and are reduced to hollow shells in the new one or may have an obsessive motivation to return to the original; if the characters aren’t built with the setting in mind they may be ineffective to the point of not being fun to play; if any characters are lost the switch in premise might make it impossible to neatly add new ones, etc. In essence you’re playing a trick on the players, and what they might have cheerfully agreed to if you’d presented it openly they may end up resenting when it’s forced upon them, ruining a perfectly good campaign for a brief moment of epiphany when they realize what the game is really about.
Let me tell you, though, that when it works, it’s beautiful, and can cause great awe and glee around the table. To me, that’s worth the risk.
That’s not to say that there aren’t things you can do to minimize the risk. Take, for example, the Escape From Tartarus game I ran. You might want to read the recaps of Part 1 and Part 2 before going further.
I knew going into it that the bait and switch I was planning was tricky, so there were some things that I did specifically to address that:
- The game was planned as a one-shot, instead of a full campaign. If things had gone badly the number of sessions ruined would be minimal (it ended up taking two sessions, but it was also apparent by the end of the first session that it was going to work).
- The players were all given pre-gens. This reduced their investment in the initial character concept (nobody spent two weeks working on a back-story that would be completely discarded), and allowed me to make sure that everybody had something they could do once the switch occurred.
- Because I know my players well, I was able to tailor the pre-gens to their preferences, to the extent of having them be reminiscent of characters that they’d already played and enjoyed.
- It was presented as “Here’s what I’m running this week.” Slightly high-handed, but again reduced the players investment in the initial premise and eliminated any hint of breaking a promise to deliver them a game based on what had been previously agreed to.
- The switch granted the characters a step up (in this case a big one) in importance and ability to exert an influence on the course of events. It’s much better for player buy-in for the alleged madman to find out he’s Corwin, Prince of Amber than for Corwin, Prince of Amber to find out he’s actually a madman hallucinating in the loony-bin.
- The shift left a goodly amount of continuity between pre and post. In this case, the literal setting remained the same, while the power-level and style underwent a radical change (from gritty prison drama to super-agent adventure). I think continuity helps: change the setting, keep the style; change the style, keep the setting; change both, at least keep the themes. If you change everything, the players may feel that you’ve just switched games in the middle.
The Escape From Tartarus was one of the most succesful games I’ve run, and everybody had a really good time. In fact, it’s one of the settings my players have indicated an interest in returning to some day.
I’ve run other Bait and Switch games, some wildly successful (The Midnight Special), some failures (The Irvine Effect) and I think the above hits upon the key points to make it work: Minimize the Bait, by not letting the players get too invested in or put too much work into the initial set-up, and carefully target the switch so that the players can experience some sense of continuity and the switch leaves them in their comfort zone as to the kind of characters and situations they like to play, or places them there if that’s not where they started. Done right, and it’ll be a game to remember.
Fluffy Crunch and Crunchy Fluff
Posted by Joshua on Oct 15, 2008
Matthew Conway recently wrote Fluff and Crunch Are Dead To Me, about how he’s grown to hate the terms, but I see them as getting at something. To me, anyway, Crunch is all the mechanics of the game: you roll this, and subtract that number from this other thing, if the result is 0 or less, the creature is dead, and so forth. Fluff is all the stuff that doesn’t touch the mechanics at all, and could be freely swapped with any other fluff without changing the in-game result. To take a concrete example, if you know the HERO game system: that an attack is 6d6 Energy Blast, Armor-Piercing, 1/2 End Cost, Activate 14- is all Crunch. It tells you everything mechanical you need to know to resolve the attack, and absolutely nothing at all about what the attack is or how it appears to the characters. The fact that it’s a bolt of flame, or darting daggers of ice, or even a pack of pink bunnies that materialize, savage the target, and disappear is pure Fluff, flavor without any substance.
Now, neatly separating things into Crunch and Fluff is a huge convenience to the game designers, who can on the one hand say “Hey, I don’t need to write any special rules for Ice Daggers versus Fireballs, an Energy Blast is an Energy Blast is an Energy Blast…take some advantages or limitations if you want it to have a different mechanical effect” and on the other can say “Here’s an adventure you can use for any system whatsoever, just plug in your favorite mechanics and go.” It’s also a convenience for the player and GM insofar as it makes the rules streamlined and elegant and lets them use this or that material with their favorite system.
But… it’s not a pure win… at least for players who are interested in having the rules closely track the game description and story. See, unless you’re approaching it as a board-game, almost everything that actually interests the players is at the level of description. What they want to do is toss their Fireball at the bad-guy and see the fur fly (or singe); rolling the 6d6 and subtracting the target’s Energy Defense divided by 2 while ticking off 3 endurance spent is just a means to the end, and the end is telling them what happens next when they throw that fireball. But when the game designer has severed the link between mechanics and description, which is what designating them as crunch and fluff is mostly about, that can make the interface…mushy and undefined. In extreme cases (cough 4e cough) the player can lose the sense that they know what’s actually happening in the game world to cause the mechanical effect, or worse know that the description is just “flavor text” and ought to be ignored lest it give you the wrong impression of what ought to be possible in the game world. A clean separation of crunch and fluff makes it impossible to reason from the level of description.
So what players often would prefer…you’re way ahead of me here, I’m sure…is a less clean separation, what I call “fluffy crunch” and “crunchy fluff.” Fluffy Crunch would consist of making every bit of crunch have a visible, comprehensible description-level corresponding bit of fluff. You don’t just Soak a wound, you desperately twist out of the way so that it just grazes you.
Crunchy Fluff is making sure all the description-level stuff gets reflected appropriately in the mechanics: If your super-power lets you created Ice Daggers out of nothing, you darned well should be able to create one and use it to cool your drink, or ice-down a twisted ankle. No saying the rules don’t support that that just because the crunch description doesn’t allocate a +1/256th advantage “Can be used to cool physical objects in a non-violent fashion.” Your ice daggers might get a bonus (or a minus) versus fiery creatures, or be easier to generate in artic conditions and harder in the middle of the Sahara, but in any case shouldn’t be indistinguishable from your companion’s Laser Pistol.
Crunchy Fluff also comes about from making the mechanics support the details of the setting. If vampires in your setting are unable to enter a dwelling without an invitation, it helps to support that with actual mechanics: is it an absolute prohibition? Can a sufficiently powerful vampire overcome it? If so, how? A Will roll? Or is it something that the vampire can do, but it will have consequences. Will it take damage for every turn it remains uninvited? Can an invitation be revoked? If it can, can the occupant just say the words, or does the occupant have to engage in some kind of test of wills? This kind of tuning the rules to reinforce the description of the setting is an important way of making it feel like the setting has “heft”…that the adventure that the players are on couldn’t just be “re-skinned” (to use a computer gaming phrase) with the vampires being replaced with killer androids or cattle rustlers and nothing else but the fluff changing.
If you try to write something as pure Fluff, that can be applied to any setting, those are the kinds of things that can come back to bite you, no pun intended. If the adventure assumes that vampires can’t enter a dwelling without an invitation period, but the system mechanics say that any sufficiently powerful vampire can…and the adventure has a vampire that’s supposed to be one of the most powerful in the world….
In any case the rules should be used to support the description that’s the heart of play. Fluffy Crunch is there to give the mechanics a reason and a description; a neat mechanic is not self-justifying, even if it does give the player something extra to think about in terms of winning the board game. Crunchy Fluff makes the descriptive level of play have consequences as well as consistency. Both are important to a satisfying RPG, and IMO both are preferable to designs where one is divorced from the other.
How to Railroad Your Players
Posted by Joshua on Oct 2, 2008
Don’t.
Figure out some other way of advancing the scenario, or at least what path it will take if the players succeed instead of failing.
If you absolutely feel that you have to, then:
For my money, the best way of handling this is openly telling the players that the outcome of the scene is required by the plot. If you’re going to railroad the players then telling them about it will usually defuse any resentment and may even get their active cooperation. You may even be able to give them a free hand to describe how they fail.
Second best is to present them with overwhelming force. Yes, the rails will be visible, and you won’t get their buy-in, but you won’t waste their time lying to them about whether they’re really playing a scene where they can have an effect on the outcome, and they won’t waste any rare resources they might have in game trying to escape their fate. You’ll also avoid poisoning the game further down the road, where they’ll wonder (with good reason) whether every failure or setback they experience–or even every success–was manipulated by the GM. It’s not even like encountering overwhelming force is likely to be immersion-breaking, unless your PCs are nearly the most powerful entities in the setting; it’s common enough both in real life and fiction. It’s only in games (and in my opinion not very good ones) where everything is automatically scaled to your abilities and every obstacle can be overcome.
Trying to slip one past them so they think that they’ve actually played the game and made important decisions when you’ve secretly removed any possibility of that is, ime, the number one thing that players hate, and yet GMs keep coming back to it. Railroading is reviled by players, everybody knows that it’s reviled by players, everybody gives lip-service to the idea that you don’t want to be doing that to your players….but people still come up with scenarios that won’t work without it and try to devise cunning ways to hide it so the players won’t realize they’re being railroaded. Because, you know, the resulting story would be so much cooler if it came out the way the GM envisioned it without any player input but with the players unwittingly playing their parts.
If you actually think the players will believe the story is cooler too, then put it to them openly. If they think the point of the game is to make a satisfying and dramatic recap, they’ll be happy to cooperate. If they disagree, then you’re doing them no service by lying to them to get the story you want. And on the off chance they actually do think that it would be good if you sometimes disregarded their input to force the story in one direction or another, but they don’t want to know about it when it happens, then you can go back to worrying about how to camoflage your rails.
When Failure Is Not An Option
Posted by Joshua on Oct 1, 2008
Don’t make it an option.
Seriously.
Wandering the RPG blogosphere and forums, I’ve seen a lot of advice for GMs along the lines of “What to do when the party fails?” The advice goes on to detail some clever or not so clever ways of preventing the module or entire campaign from going down in flames, but it’s almost always from the point of view of picking up the pieces once the party has failed to notice the clue, bypassed the room with the key, alienated the noble who’s the only one with the information they need, and so on. Conspicuously absent, from my point of view, is a discussion of how the GM got the party in that pickle in the first place. And it is the GM that got the party to the point where everything hinged on a single action, make no mistake.
You don’t want a single point of failure in your business processes, and you don’t want it in your RPG scenarios. Unless, that is, you and your players are perfectly happy to fail (a possibility in some challenge-based games).
I’ve talked about “Scenario Breaker Rolls” in the past, so I won’t go into that again, but a botched die-roll isn’t the only way that the party can reach an impasse.
Take NPC interactions. Too many GMs (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) make NPCs basically inert in social situations until the PCs prod them, and then decide how the NPCs react based on the PCs’ approach (plus or minus a die-roll). Then they let the whole game get derailed when the PCs fumble the role-playing part of the interaction, perhaps by offering less deference to the King than the GM thinks the situation warrants. That’s fine if there’s no problem for your game if the NPC declines to offer the quest after the PCs have insulted him and/or stolen from him, or you regard them ending up in the King’s dungeon as a good adventure hook. If failure is going to be a big issue, then, as GM you should be taking charge and making sure that failure doesn’t occur. Don’t make the NPC a surly and suspicious bugger if you need him to trust the PCs, no matter how neat you think it would be if the PCs were able to jolly him around through brilliant roleplaying. Don’t put on your GM stone-face and wait for the PCs to start talking; have the NPC greet them with open arms and move the conversation along to where you need it to be (e.g. at least the announcement of the quest) before they open their mouths. Yes, this steps on the role-playing opportunities of the situation, but you know what? That’s what you get when you make an NPC a plot device. You can have all the other NPCs interact in a more naturalistic fashion, or even that NPC in other situations, but during the portion of the adventure where you need that NPC to convey certain information or offer a particular deal to keep the PCs from hitting a brick wall, it’s a mistake to leave it up to the RP of the players if you think there’s any chance that they’ll screw it up.
Again, let me emphasize that “screw it up” means ruin everybody’s enjoyment with a failure to get the information/come to terms…whenever “failure” can be just as fun and interesting for everybody as success, I strongly encourage GMs to let things fall out however the players direct it. But even GMs who are strongly committed to open-ended games without any rails can reach a point where the decisions of the players to that point have committed them to a course of action, at which point game-breaking opportunity for failures can crop up. My feeling is that unless you and your players are equally committed to challenge-based games, even in an open-ended sandbox campaign it’s the GM’s responsibility to minimize the single-points of failure. If the players have decided to solve a mystery, and successfully uncover the murderer, it’s a mistake to make it so the fact that they’ve antagonized the Chief of Police along the way turns the whole adventure into a failure; you either have to make the Chief honorable enough that given proof he’ll make the arrest anway, or there has to be somebody else they can turn the culprit over to and see justice done.
To sum up, fixing game-breaking errors is no substitute for not making them in the first place. There are all kinds of techniques you can use to recover from error, and it’s good to have some of them in reserve, but your first line of defense should be designing your scenarios so that there just aren’t any places where the PCs could fail unless you are willing for them to fail. You can’t generally make players happy to fail, and you can’t (IMO) make success inevitable without cheapening it, but I think you can and should make every effort so that even if they fail, the players regard it as time well spent; failures should never result in them saying “That was stupid. What a waste of time.” if you can possibly help it.