Category Archives: Greater Reviewaverse

Nov 2 2010

Fytayn’s Gaming Rants: Adversarial Gaming *or* Death is Not a Gift

Greetings and happy- Alright, alright, not going to do that. Welcome to the first day of our one-month delve into the various topics of madness and irrelevance that my mind mulls over on a daily basis. I am Fytayn; some of you may know me from various appearances in some of Cin Wicked’s less-polished (and more fun) endeavours, or might be following me on the Twitters, or, possibly from the months-old teaser for Let’s Play Tales of Phantasia. Which I continue to apologize for… But, whatever your reason for being here, I welcome you to this blog experiment.

Ground rules: This is a variation on the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge. I’ll be writing a blog post a day for the entire month of November. Each will be my own words with very few references or quotes, as really I’m supposed to be doing creative writing, and will be about 2000 words long. Each topic will be something different but it’s likely that they will be concerned with things in my life or interests rather than current events — this is not a news blog, it’s a “special” interests series. Comments are always welcome, as are links to other related resources, but keep in mind these are (poorly researched, for the most part) opinion pieces and so please don’t go into this expecting comprehensive essays. With all that said I bring us to our first topic:

Adversarial Gaming *or* Death is Not a Gift

First thing you need to know: I am a gamer. Video games, computer games, card games, board games and, most importantly for this article, role-playing games. I’ve enjoyed playing in many of the larger-name brands such as the most recent World of Darkness series (including Vampire, Promethean, Werewolf and Changeling), Exalted, Rifts, Gamma World other smaller games like 3:16 and Grimm and even live action role-play including Vampire: The Masquerade and NERO. But my game has always been Dungeons & Dragons. Yes, the oldest and most reviled of all games, inspiring such mockeries of gaming culture as Mazes & Monsters and the infamous “Chick Tracts”, turning kids to Satanism and witchcraft since the late 70s. And still I enjoy a weekly game of it with friends.

Our game is a simple one of fantasy and genocide, of a world in decline headed towards less interesting times. And it’s fun, and we like playing. But in recent months there have been changes to the basic rules and formulae of the game. One thing you have to realize is that many tabletop RPGs have a lot of math in them, numbers to determine everything that goes on. Or at least how easy or hard those actions are: you describe what you want the character to accomplish and you usually roll dice and add numbers to it to figure out how successful the character is. And half of you are now asleep or confused, but bear with me here. Recently in D&D they decided to change the numbers that the monsters used, namely to make them stronger and a greater threat to the player characters. This ended up with the monsters killing the player characters twice as fast or, with just the wrong rolls, instantly.

And that’s right, I said “wrong rolls”. While the designers wanted the monsters to be larger threats to the player characters, as they thought the game was a bit too easy, their solution was a simple brute-force “kill ‘em dead” approach. Discussing it with a friend of mine, the DM in fact, he immediately started telling me just how few times he’d managed to “down a PC” in his game. That this was a goal of his as the DM and the rules change would help him do it more often. Which I disagree with, while there should always be a threat to player characters in a game killing them should not be the goal. I’m aware that a lot of DMs (or STs, GMs, etc) have an adversarial relationship with their players but I don’t think that’s the point of playing these games.

Think about it for a moment. What is gained by taking down a player’s character, even if it’s just knocking them out for the fight? Sure the DM gets to feel large and powerful for once, the monster they are controlling actually took someone down rather than dying. I once heard of a DM referred to as a “professional loser”, or someone who makes a career of getting kicked around by the players. But that’s a matter of perspective. I ran a short game using the new rules and, yes, the players had a much tougher time beating the monsters. One of them nearly died. And you know what? I felt like I had failed as a DM. That’s right, because my players almost failed I felt like I had nearly failed with them. This is a cooperative game, after all, and I’d like to see my players reach the wonderful story and setting I’ve laid out for them. That doesn’t mean I’m going to pull punches, but it does mean that I’m not going to enjoy it if they are killed off prematurely. Character death is, in my opinion, a bit too important to story to leave it up to a roll of the dice.

And think of it from the perspective of the player. Their character has gone down, usually unexpectedly, in the middle of a fight. Putting aside the emotional attachment you now have a player who is no longer involved in the fight. Sure they’ll sit around and watch, maybe even offer advice to the other players about how to survive and win, but their direct participation in the battle is over. This is another thing that makes me disagree with the idea that a DM is constantly “losing” — the DM has a vast cast of characters to play and use while each player (usually) has only one. If a DM loses monsters they have plenty of characters left to play, stories prepared to tell, but if a player loses a character they’re pretty much stuck either watching or spending the rest of the session making another. The player has lost all interaction with the game.

And this baffles me further because the designers themselves have been talking about different ways of dealing with conditions that remove characters from the control of the player. Daze and Stun are effects in the game that heavily limit what the character can do, and the designers have expressed that they aren’t happy with them anymore. And yet they design monsters to do more damage, which makes it far easier to apply the Dead effect to a character — an effect that removes all control of the character from the player. It doesn’t make sense to me, really. Removing control one way is just as bad as another…

Okay, lets forget game theory for a second and move on to the obvious issue: feelings. In a particular article in a recent The New Yorker there is actually a story about a dysfunctional group of kids who have a regular D&D game. It ends with the line “…nothing is harder than feelings.” And it’s true. No matter how good a roleplayer someone is they will be upset when their character dies. It’s a fact. Now mature people will express their unhappiness and move on but in the heat of the moment with it all on the line (and maybe drinking, some people mix alcohol and gaming) sometimes level heads are hard to find. But even if maturity reigns the character going down disconnects the player from the scene emotionally. For them the story stops, the character they were playing is no longer connected to what’s going on. It causes a distancing that can make getting back into the game difficult.

Finally, and I admit this writing thing has been harder than it looked so I’m cutting it short tonight, an actual death is incredibly disruptive for a running campaign. A DM has likely set up subplots for each character, planned ahead on how they interact with the story. While some might enjoy taking out a player character it ends up being far more work in the end. Story has to be rewritten, the character needs a reason to join the plot in progress, rewards need to be reevaluated, heck even the combats that have been planned need to be looked at in case the new character changes the dynamic significantly. Not insurmountable, but still not something to be done lightly or encouraged frequently.

So basically I see it all as being a detriment to the game as a whole, especially if it’s an unplanned roll of the dice. It fosters the antagonistic relationship between DM and Player, it disconnects the player from the game, it creates additional work for both Player and DM and finally it’s rarely an enjoyable experience for anyone. C’est fin.