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The imagination makes it worse...
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Welcome back to Mastering The Game, where I ramble about how to run
RPGs and hopefully you get something useful out of it.
Today, I want to talk
about something that’s come up in some conversations recently, both
online and in meat space, talking about how every system isn’t the
best for every game. What do I mean? Well, one example that someone
gave was people trying to use D&D 5e for science fiction or some
kind of space epic. The point isn’t that D&D can’t do it,
it’s that it doesn’t do it as well as something that’s designed
from the ground up to handle space stuff. Related to this topic was a
discussion of how old games (think 70s and 80s) didn’t have
everything mapped out in the rules, so people could come up with
stuff to fill in the blanks, that it was expected that Game Masters
and their groups would come up with the rules they needed to play the
game. Now, while I disagree that game designers intentionally left
things out, as I believe that most of those old games weren’t as
well play tested or developed as modern games (which doesn’t mean
that they should be compared on a one to one basis, modern game
design has tons of tools they didn’t have back in the day), there
is a point that players and GMs will try to do something with the
system that the designers didn’t even think of.
So, let’s use the
example that came up in another conversation with a friend. She likes
horror movies and was looking for a system that would help her create
the look and feel of a horror movie, having found a game on
Kickstarter. I let her know that there was already a game with a
similar name and premise, and we found that it was super cheap on
DriveThruRPG, plus I had played it once before. While we were
discussing horror gaming, I brought up some of the classics, like
Call of Cthulhu, White Wolf games, AFMBE, Deadlands, and some others.
I also mentioned that there are some universal systems that do have
horror mechanics (GURPS and Savage Worlds are the ones I had the most
experience with), they aren’t designed to be horror games. Just
because a game has the mechanics for something doesn’t necessarily
mean that those mechanics are the best for that thing. Another part
of this discussion was that the simpler the mechanics, the worse
they’re going to be to handle the thing you want. Now, I will admit
that my statement there is a very general one and there are
exceptions to it, however, we must also admit that it’s probably
more right than it is wrong.
Perhaps horror isn’t
the best genre to cover with a rules discussion, as the real thing
that determines the effectiveness of horror is the atmosphere created
by the GM and maintained by the players, but there’s enough there
for it to run with. But let’s take a closer look at horror and the
various things it includes, mechanically speaking. Horror, at its
core, is about fear and dread. Now, there’s a lot to unpack there,
and I’m sure some might disagree, but we really can’t argue that
it is the intent of horror to invoke dread and/or fear.
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Yeah. Nope.
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Of the two, dread is
something that needs to be cultivated by the GM, by using all the
tricks in your book. Randomly rolling dice and making nonsense notes,
asking “are you sure you want to do that?” or by asking a player
where their character is looking during a quiet period are all simple
things that you can do to make the players uncomfortable. Keeping
them on edge is the goal of it. Keeping their characters low on
health and ammo is another thing that will make them stressed.
Another thing is to play creepy or unsettling music, or maybe
watching a scary movie together in the same genre while making
characters. You want to be subtle over overt when making players, and
their characters, feel dread. However, it’s not something that can
be easily done with rules mechanics or dice rolls. Dread is something
ethereal and fleeting. It can’t be done well with something written
in a book. And it can be easily ruined with one well timed joke. Not
that you shouldn’t let the tension break now and again but it the
class clown is acting up, it’s going to spoil the mood. One of the
best things I’ve found to keep players on their toes is to keep
them guessing as to what they’re up against. A lack of detail in
description can go a long way to making them afraid and tense.
Fleeting glances, things in the shadows, unusual sounds, and being
unable to get a good look at what’s there are great ways to do
this. Because their imagination will always make it more frightening
than the words you can say, as they will bring their own fears,
insecurities, and emotional baggage to the fore when they have to
picture it in their heads.
Fear, on the other
hand, can be handled (to a degree) with mechanics and rules. For the
characters, that is. When someone is afraid, they’re usually not as
sharp as they are when they’re calm. So, most horror games, or
games that can handle horror, will have some kind of effects for
characters when they’re afraid. Of course, making the players
afraid will also make the characters afraid, but you can’t always
count on that happening. Fear mechanics are really what is going to
make or break a horror game system. They need to translate the human
Fight/Flight/Freeze mindset that appears when something jumps out at
you in the night. And this is where you can see how well the game
will work for what you want to do. A flat penalty to rolls is one of
the weaker things. To use an example, the classic Deadlands system
has a very detailed fear table, based on how badly the character
failed the roll, plus how scary the thing is in the first place. And
while it does repeat a lot of things, mostly just by adding things to
the results, it also gives some varied reactions. You can soil
yourself, run away in a panic, or even have a heart attack and die,
assuming the thing is scary enough. It doesn’t have to be totally
realistic, especially if you’re dealing with the supernatural, but
it does have to feel reasonable. Fear is something we all feel, to
some degree or another, through out our lives and our reactions to it
changes over time, with our experiences. That means that your fear
mechanics should take this into account. That doesn’t just mean
that you have a system that varies by age, but that the system should
have ways for characters to react differently to fear. To go back to
our example of Deadlands, there’s Edge you can take which says that
you don’t run away if you get that results. You suffer every other
effect, but you stand your ground. Which is the Fight part of the
list above. And the system you use needs to have those variations
inside it, if you want it to do a good job.
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Fear is relative
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Now, let’s jump back
to some examples of popular games. While I’m not very experienced
with D&D 5e, I do know that the system is very simple and
streamlined, meaning that fear effects are probably going to be
something like giving a character Disadvantage when they’re afraid
or something similar. I’m sure I’m wrong, and I bet that D&D
expands the mechanics when fear is much more important (like in
Ravenloft) or when they want to introduce a bunch or optional rules.
And to draw back to a point I touched on earlier: you could come up
with some house rules of your own, if you feel like it. As a brief
aside, I find that having rules in the books to be better than stuff
people come up with on their own, as it leads to less arguments and
has a better chance of being balanced. For the other popular game I
mentioned, Call of Cthulhu, that game is based around Things Man Was
Not Meant To Know, which always includes some kind of insanity or
madness. But not every horrible thing is going to make you crazy and
it’s not going to be some random insanity rolled from a table. For
example, in a D&D 3.5 game, the DM got a hold of the CoC 3.5 port
and used it for some stuff. When my cleric ran up against some
terrible thing, do you know what insanity he got? He was unable to
see the color yellow. It made it into a joke. The fact that RPGs
don’t have the best history with handling mental health issues is a
big one that I might have to tackle another time. Moving on, the
problem with CoC isn’t just that it skews towards insanity, but
that it has a more modern, real world premise. CoC is set either in
the modern day or last century, and requires a book (if there are any
for the current edition) to be taken into space, as an example.
So, what do we do if we
want something that can make the exact game we want? Well, there’s
always options and you can always modify stuff. Let’s say we want
to run a horror game, but in space or on a moon colony. There’s a
few options. The easiest one is to pick a universal system that
handles horror and just plug the books in and play it. You could use
GURPS or Hero System, both of which have rules for fear and science
fiction stuff, and go from there. Of course, you could also try to
find a game that’s based around a science fiction horror franchise,
like the Alien RPG and run it as is, or slightly modify it to match
the game you want (just re-skin the Xenomorphs into some other
monster and run with it). Or, you can take a system that does the
horror well, and find or make up stuff for the science fiction part.
A prime example for me would be AFMBE, which does have a science
fiction source book. It might not be exactly what I want, but there’s
enough there to get it off the ground. If you have some genre that
you really like, slasher films as mentioned earlier, there’s going
to be a game out there for you. At least one that I know of. If it
doesn’t work for you, that’s a problem.
The path of most
resistance is going to be taking a system you like, the one that has
the basic rules that you know really well, and forcing it into
something it’s not designed to do. You can look around and see if
someone else has already done it, as we live in an age where you can
find that information online without too much of a hassle, which I
bet someone already has. Once you find that information, make sure it
works for you. If it doesn’t, drop it or work on it so it does
match what you’re looking for. I find it a hell of a lot easier to
modify something than just pull a whole thing out of my ass. (You
know what I mean.) The thing is that it’s way easier to add in
rules for radiation and surviving in the vacuum of space to a game
then it is to come up with a system that reflects real horror and the
tropes of horror movies in a game. Let someone else do the hard work
for you, rather than doing the hard work yourself.
The real point of the
matter is that you need to find the system that works the best for
the core of the game. That’s the most important part of the game,
which is why I’m saying this again. If the system can’t do what
you want it to do, try something else. Find a set of quick play
rules, you’re usually free or very affordable, and see if you can
find something that works for you. Don’t try to make something do
something it wasn’t designed to do. If you can’t find something
that does everything exactly as you want it to, then try working on
changing something into what you need it to be. But, just remember,
it’s easier to fudge the small stuff, not the big stuff. What you
need is the system that matches more with what you want than what you
don’t want. If you want to do a thrilling space epic, it’ll be
easier for you to find something that was designed to do that, rather
than forcing D&D to try to handle something it wasn’t designed
to do.
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Also, kids are goddamn creepy...
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I understand that
people get afraid of trying new things or learning new rules. I know
that you want to stick with what you know. However, the problem with
something like D&D is that the simplicity that made it easier for
you to learn in the first place will hold you back when you want to
do something that has the complexity of what you want to do now. Most
people start with D&D for a reason but you don’t have to stay
there. Especially these days. There’s so many different games out
there, some that you might like even more than D&D, so you need
to spread those wings. You can’t be afraid of a harder system. The
thing is that, as you play the game more, the easier it becomes to
play. You’ll get the rules more as time goes on.
Okay, almost started a
tangent there. Ahem. My point is that you need to find the game you
want to play, not make what you’re currently playing into what you
want to play. I hope that makes sense. And I hope you got something
out of this ramble.