10-15-2018, 01:31 PM | #1 |
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(If you have to ask . . .) Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Somewhere high up.
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Drama, dice-rolls and Plot
As I’ve said before, I’m an acolyte of John Wick. Not the movie, the game designer.
I don’t think that dice rolls create drama. It can happen, but, more often than not, it doesn’t. You should never have the players roll dice unless you’re willing to let them dictate what happens. Most of the time the random elements are just those moments that pad out the show. But, you should always be ready for an amazing success or failure: Todd being unable to fast-draw his pistols, Alistair breaking six lockpicks on a single lock, the cops believing the cute, eleven-year-old girl really is looking for her babysitter. None of them are drama in their own right, but, they can, eventually add to it, in the future. I view an RPG story not like a movie or book plot, more like a well-crafted TV series. Each session, more-or-less, stands alone, but there is a thread that ties them all together. As they reach the end of the arc/season, what the players have done and seen is shifted into more focus and little things that they’ve encountered make more sense. This works because hindsight is better than foresight. Having time between sessions allows me to review my notes and view things with hindsight, as well as, foresight. It’s then easier to tie together random events into important events that may not have been important at that exact moment, but maybe in the next session, the players discover that one of the prisoners actually knows something because they didn’t have time at the end of the last session to interrogate them. This also allows the players time to think about events and come up with their new plan of attack. It also gives them time to reflect on their characters and decide how they want to continue their story. “That’s great, Mark, but what does this all have to do with drama?” Well, imaginary voice guy I hear in my head, RPGs are a form of collaborative storying telling. It’s my job, as GM, to weave the events of the party together into a coherent narrative. However, they’re equally invested in assisting with that by playing their characters and collaborating with me and the other players. And drama doesn’t come from the uncertainty of dice rolls, but the uncertainty of action. Todd Diallo, from my first Infinite Weirdos game, was a gunslinger combat-monster. After his first fight (where Alistair the elf/mage/hacker had the “I shoot center of body mass, you should be doing backflips between moving cars shooting people in the eye because you’re awesome at this” conversation with Todd’s player before I could) there was never a fight in which Todd was ever in any real danger because combat was his time to shine. That’s what he wanted to run, so that was when he got to show the other players just how awesome he could be. The eighteen raiders weren’t a threat to Todd, even only armed with a pair of six-shot revolvers. The Deathclaw wasn’t a threat to Todd. The nanozombies weren’t a threat to Todd. Only one combat enemy, the Enforcer, was ever a threat to Todd, but that’s because it was a “boss” and the point was that the party had to come together as a team to defeat it. And they did. But, the raiders and Deathclaw fights were there to give Todd’s player a chance to feel out the character and get an understanding of how amazing he could be. The nanozombie fight—that was Drama. There was never a doubt that Todd could defeat all the nanozombies. That was a foregone conclusion. Wielding Warmonger, Todd was an agent of death with few equals. But, what was he willing to do to protect Sherry and Ana? They were also there. And they were separated from Todd. And the zombies were between him and them. And Warmonger said he should let them die. Ana was seriously injured and her environmental suit was compromised. Sherry’s laser rifle was empty and she wasn’t sure how to reload it. If he wanted to protect his friends, he had to get past the zombies, and keep their attention on him. Now the zombies are a threat to Todd. Not because he isn’t sure if he could kill them, but, could he kill them fast enough to protect himself and the girls? What was he willing to do, to protect them? Turns out, whatever he had to. And protect them he did. Which caused Todd and Sherry to bond more closely. So, at the end of the arc, when ISWAT showed up and kidnapped Sherry, it caused anguish to both Todd and his player. This was important because this was the first game Todd’s player had ever been in (not the first session, but Todd was his first character, ever, in a TTRPG). He said, after the nanozombie fight, he was wired because he was so scared, not for Todd, but for the other two. He told me that, after Sherry was kidnapped, that night, when he got home and it finally sunk in, he actually cried because he wasn’t sure if they’d ever get her back. That’s drama. And there’s nothing on his character sheet to protect him from that drama. So, now, he is aware that a major point of the new Infinite Weirdos game revolves around Sherry and ISWAT weaponizing her. That adds drama to the player. And the players are my audience. Foreshadowing the plot to the audience . . . well, isn’t that what a good TV show does? |
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