Mastering the Game: The Right Tool For the Right Job

 

The imagination makes it worse...

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. 

Yeah. Nope.

 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.

Fear is relative

 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. 

Also, kids are goddamn creepy...

 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.