As long-term readers of my column know, I just reshuffled the games I am running, my groups had finished some campaigns, and I added a set of new games and systems, as well as some games pausing because of player commitments.
As a result, the percentage of games I run being Dungeons & Dragons has shifted dramatically downward from five sessions a fortnight to two. The other three slots being replaced by Tales From The Loop and Call Of Cthulhu. This might not seem like that big a deal, but recently I have hit a player issue that I hadn’t thought about before that actually goes back to the first ever Genre Police article I ever wrote.
So recently, in Call Of Cthulhu, a few of my players caught a string of bad luck and their characters were wrecked for a while. It might not work out for them in the long term and one of them is having a bad time feeling that about their player character. While discussing this with another player they brought things into a focus I hadn’t thought about before.
They said “The thing is, we’ve lost two D&D campaigns recently and replaced them with horror games. You’re very good at horror but it means there’s no games where we’re there to be safe and heroic. All the choices are hard and costly’. And my brain finally clicked the final piece of why D&D is popular, why my Feng Shui group always seem to have an amazing time and why some of my players are having a hard time. And it comes down to a really sad fact of human life.
Hope is hard to come by. RPGs often provide people with comfort. As much as providing verisimilitude in a game is important and maintaining realistic consequence makes everything feel ok, sometimes people want to just make a decision that evil will not stand and go and kick its teeth in. They want to confront a monster without a sanity check, blow the doors off a castle and escape the explosion by sliding down a mountain side on a shield like a snowboard with no thought to the physics and geography of the situation. People want to be big damn heroes.
Emotional Agency
We constantly talk about agency in RPGs and by that we mean: Let us make sure that players feel they have the ability to affect the situation. Often this is done by not limiting player choices or creating scenarios where the players can create massive change and affect the scenario going forward. But the interesting thing is that sometimes players feel like they can’t do that either. The situation has gotten to much for them too imagine a way out. As I said, hope is sometimes a hard thing to come by.
In a recent Tales From The Loop game, a session started with the players realising they were way in over their heads, exposed and facing a threat they could barely deal with. It quickly became clear that the assault they were facing could break the whole group of kids. Once they escaped, I could tell the group were absolutely ragged, players frazzled. So I spent the next hour just on a heartwarming scene of kids causing havoc in a kitchen, overwhelming a pair of well-meaning adults. I did this not just to create a sense of safety but also to give some power back to the player characters. They are just kids and showing they can completely take over a house by force of personality showed that in this world, being a kid is weirdly empowering.
People need to know they can affect change. In the first article I ever wrote for this column, I talked about mythic storytelling, about how to make players feel like they are part of something bigger and deeper. And I wonder if when most people are playing a game, they are actually trying to reach that source. My Feng Shui group are not just happy because they are playing by the conventions of a 90’s Hong Kong action movie but because that genre empowers them to be heroes with a simple route to victory – kick the bad guys in the face, blow up the evil scheme, provide devastating quip. Job done.
Dungeons and Dragons follows a simiar route. Heroes are explosive and exciting and often able to have the coolest effect on a game. I own shelves and shelves of games and when I look at the games I have that empower the heroes the way that game does, I find it quite hard. Apart from the already mentioned, Feng Shui I can probably only really mention The Strange and Savage Worlds. It’s no surprise to me now I think about it that the companies that make those games have been successful.
Bring The Hope Back
Looking back over those older articles, particularly on the mythic, pulp and action styles of storytelling, the advice I give is quite simple but worth remembering. It boils down to this. We need to maintain a level of hope within our games. Give players ways to be cool. But also use the game to remind them cool choices exist. Make good guy NPCs have good action movie lines so that the players understand there’s room for it in their universe. Let the plans they have sometimes just succeed. Reward clever and inventive play, sure but also reward BRAVE play.
So often we associate the cautious choice with the correct one. But if players blunder in with good intentions and mess everything up, maybe consider also giving them some semblance of excitement, some taste of ‘at least the horrible status quo is gone’.
In my next few games, I’m going to try committing to this idea. My in Tales From The Loop game tonight, I’m going to give the players a wise cracking capable ally – who is their age. An Empowered kid. In Cthulhu, I’m going to give the character who had a run a bad luck a chance to feel safe – at a price that is both not good but also cool. In my Mage game, I’m going to prize dynamism over stasis – any action is good because it is fundamentally a movement towards change.
I’m going to try and breathe hope back, hand some power back to the players. This is a way for them to make choices that allow the to feel like they can change things. Where they can feel like those choices have meaning and that not everything is a fight.
Because sometimes, people just want to be Big Damn Heroes.
Creative Commons art credit: “Super Hero Female Concept” by ChrisDK11, “Big Fat Old Robot” by Maxiriton and “What if Meggy was Worthy?” by Nictrain123.
