Standard discourse about RPGs is that they are games you can’t win. No one party is declared the victor, in theory there’s no ‘end state’ where we are told by the game that it is over, we have succeeded and beaten the game. Part of understanding the game, we are told, is knowing that we are telling a story as a group. The important things are the narrative flow, the decisions made, and how the world is changed by the characters.
So why does it feel bad when stuff happens to those characters that sucks? Why are there multiple examples of advice content that tells GMs to remember that they aren’t supposed to be trying to kill the players? We’re told to think about the power fantasy and agency, and how not to torture players with constant pain. Shouldn’t this all be just part of the story?
I’ve been thinking about this recently because I’m considering jumping back into PBTA games as a GM, and I started reading The Black Madonna, a longform campaign that has been republished for the latest edition of Kult. It’s an unbelievably cruel experience for player characters, from the start of the game, things happen that mean they are in for a rough ride and continually up against disadvantage and setbacks. Now this is to be expected given the game is supposed to be somewhere between Clive Barker at his most graphic and Silent Hill in tone. However, I found myself wondering if players would actually enjoy the game. Could they divorce themselves enough from character to enjoy the spiral of degeneration that was happening, or is the manifestation of character too much?
Fail States
I’ve noticed in games before that there’s a sort of training in games where taking damage to a statistic or incurring a mechanical disadvantage seems to result in a player feeling like this is a loss. To begin with, I didn’t even see this as a thing to think about because I’ve also been trained to see it as a penalty, something which hampers my optimum operating efficiency. But I think I first realised this thought process might be an issue when looking back at my player group playing Masks, a PBTA game. In that game, when the teen superhero characters take a hit, be it physically or emotionally, the player chooses a box to tick which hampers them but also speaks to the emotional state they are in. The damage is not only a number but has a narrative effect chosen by the player.
The players would rush to clear the box by doing whatever it was they needed to clear it, usually by acting out in some teenage way or seeking council from a friend. This created a situation where every player felt like a teenage whirl of emotions constantly zigzagging between being fine and supported and needing support. And while I am sure that is part of the games design, I wonder what would have happened if a player had said ‘My character is scared, I’m going to sit with that feeling for a session or two, see what it does’.
Doing that requires a suboptimal playstyle, right? Well only if you main objective is ‘I must avoid harm and operating inefficently’ not ‘I am telling a story where I explore an emotion’ because under the second criteria, you aren’t failing to operative optimally because the game is not asking you to operate optimally. It’s asking you to tell a story. The success state of the game is not being powerful. It’s telling a good story. It therefore stands to reason that the fail state is not being in a position where you are unable to operate at full strength. Instead, the fail state is being uninteresting and not having drama.
This made me realise that I kind of need to think about how I help players understand what a game is about. About what a ‘win’ looks like.
Success States
While it’s not possible to win RPG games, we can be ‘winning’ at playing the game. It’s quite possible to look back at any campaign you ran and be able to feel which ones went well, which the people playing it to really elevated. So while it’s not possible to succeed, we can agree there’s a sort of ‘success state’ where everyone understand what the game is asking of them and does that. In a D&D game this a campaign that slowly increases its stakes and drama, becoming a story of people rising to the top despite the odds. In Call Of Cthulhu, it instead requires the players to understand that going mad is part of the play experience. It’s not even just a penalty you suffer for failing a roll, it’s the Desired state in the game. You are supposed to slowly go mad and live on a knife edge between effective understanding of what you are facing and total horrid knowledge that breaks you. The character being in that despair should, in theory bring the player joy. Being committed to an asylum while muttering about old ones is something the game considers a ‘good story’.
I think it’s the reason that PBTA games are often a complicated beast to sell to players raised on a more ‘invested in character over narrative’ games can be. Because the success state of the game is often counter to making character choices that keep the ‘avatar’ of them safe. The game attempts give them additional tools to control the narrative outside of the character, not only improving agency if bad things happen to that one character but also sort of separating them character from the player, helping the player see the narrative as a whole, If you make the choice in World Wide Wrestling to purposefully make a choice that your old warhorse wrestler sustains an injury overdoing it, the game does its best to take you right into a bigger story as player reminding you the promotion continues and it’s easy to pick someone else up for a while. But telling the best story sometimes means putting them through it to get to that narrative. You’re gambling investment into pay-off at a pace a D&D campaign would never entertain.
So it can be really complicated to do, especially if we’ve come to love our character or feel kinship with them. Bleeding at the edges of our personality and theirs is often a fact of playing these games with a level of investment. Watching them suffer isn’t always easy. As I’ve mentioned before, my recent Cthulhu campaign ended with several of the character retiring from the fight because the players wanted them to have a happy ending. No shade there, the campaign was beautifully uplifting at the end. But it was a decision by the group that we were telling a certain type of story, one slightly more hopeful than I think the game originally intended. We’d maybe invested in the characters harder than the game expected us to and therefore the games narrative intent had ceased to matter, we decided to seek an ending that made sense for us. It only worked because we as a group were still committed to telling an effective story. So it was a wonderfully effective end to a campaign and one we all loved, but a ‘success condition’ as defined by the game? Harder to tell.
It’s always worth thinking about how a game might have a success state that is more complex than ‘fight the bad guy and succeed, get more powerful, repeat’. We all need to be on the same page about where the game is going. I have no issue with a D&D player getting upset if we resolve a plotline without some form of heroic confrontation. But if a Vaesen game ends with talking the monster down and resolving a misunderstanding and then a player gets upset, I’m going to realise we aren’t on the same page. So check your success states and make sure the players understand what you are all aiming for.
Creative Commons Credit: Screens of Terror by ptitvinc.
