02-11-2011, 06:57 AM | #21 |
Join Date: Jan 2011
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Re: Creating Tension in a session.
I generally have bad experiences with a running clock. Unless you and your players are rules lawyers extraordinaire, you will end up having to check the book once or twice, and even if you don't, time will have to be spent on clarifications and descriptions. I wouldn't have the slightest idea what to set the timer to. Instead, I would recommend something similar:
Set up an in-game timer. Make a list of things that might or will happen. Set a time requirement for each activity. If the players come up with an idea that you haven't accounted for, make up a time limit ad-hoc. Let the players know about the progress of the enemy, by listening to their communication, or receiving panicked broadcasts from posts being overrun etc. As an example of what this might look like: Enemy movements: T+0: Enemy breaches Airlock 27. T+1: Enemy secures main corridor Alpha. T+4: Enemy reaches Security Block Alpha. T+6: Enemy secures Security Block Alpha. And so on. Player activities: Move between sectors: 1 minute Break armory lock: 1 minute Gear up at armory: 3 minutes Block blast door in Sector Delta: 2 minutes Then just keep track of where your scenario is, and keep counting. That should keep your players on their toes. It also allows you to go into combat time, if you feel like it, but of course you don't have to. |
02-11-2011, 07:36 AM | #22 |
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Oklahoma City
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Re: Creating Tension in a session.
As far as "countdowns" go, here's another approach that I've used in past games:
PCs had to go back into a burning airliner crash and rescue people. I told them it would explode at any second (flames approaching spilled fuel or somesuch), and then rolled some dice behind the screen, saying "I now know how much time you have"—but I didn't tell the Players how much time. They hustled appropriately, and tension was had. In actuality, The dice-roll was a dummy—I had already decided the plane would explode a second after the last PC was clear. But they didn't know that :P
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02-11-2011, 09:51 AM | #23 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Udine, Italy
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Re: Creating Tension in a session.
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I have never ever used a straight equation of session time = game time. But just for the record, the thing I'd use if I ever did that has a nice tell-it-all name in English: a _stop_watch. I mean, if you really want to have an actual countdown going, but you have to look the rules up... Stop the watch. Once the clarification is over... tick, tick, tick... It's not that I'm recommending it. But I suppose it could be done. |
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02-11-2011, 10:06 AM | #24 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Creating Tension in a session.
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Bill Stoddard |
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02-11-2011, 06:28 PM | #25 | |||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Creating Tension in a session.
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Now, like whswhs but less so, I seldom* kill a PC. But that's partly because character players take danger seriously in my campaigns, partly because I am usually trying to produce a different emotion (often the "Aha!" moment when players see the solution to a mystery), and partly because I am able to produce any tension I require without threatening PCs lives. * Three years ago a prospective group wouldn't take constraints in my games seriously and suffered two TPKs and an all-but-one in six weeks. We have since drifted apart. Quote:
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
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02-12-2011, 05:13 AM | #26 |
Join Date: Jan 2011
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Re: Creating Tension in a session.
Hm, one thing I read a few times now is roughly this: if the players are not genuinely afraid that their characters are going to die, then you won't get any tension going.
I think that is a bad attitude, that harms tension at the table more than anything else. It builds on an adversarial model of player-GM interaction that is unfortunately far too widespread on both sides of the table. What it usually results in, in my experience, is a meta-game with the GM trying to get the PCs dead and the players trying to keep them alive. The actual experience of the characters - which is what roleplaying is about, after all - falls by the wayside, becuase the players have no time to actually roleplay. What the OP needs is not some meta-game way of putting pressure on the players, but a convinving storytelling approach to make the in-story danger feel real to the players, allowing them to play a convincing reaction. The threat must be felt in character, not just in the metagame. In 15 years of gaming I've never seen a game improve because a PC got killed. |
02-12-2011, 06:48 AM | #27 | |||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Creating Tension in a session.
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On a separate point, there was a time about 1991 at which I had been rescuing PCs from their players' folly so consistently and so blatantly that I had lost all credibility in the eyes of my players. It got so bad that if a PC got into a tight spot, rather than scramble desperately to get out of it the player would raise the stake and the odds to the point where only a deus ex machina could save the character and the adventure. Precious few good adventures came or of that sort of thing. And then, though it would be far better that I had never go myself into that situation to begin with, I had to accept some losses to recover the rest of my career as a GM. The adventures and campaign that followed, in which PCs realistically died of doing reckless things, were not themselves improved by the deaths. But the adventures that came along after were. Now my players aren't reckless, and their characters seldom die. It is not characters dying that that improves the game. It is the players' knowledge that if the character did something foolhardy the results would be realistically dire. So they don't jump off cliffs and they don't die. They find something sensible and heroic to do, and everything goes smooth. I know this sounds like an absurd exaggeration, but about 1991 I was such a pushover GM that my players actually did that sort of thing. One PC, his castle having been occupied by enemy troops, sneaked in through a secret passage for no discernible purpose, and when he was spotted by part of the garrison he attacked ten armed soldiers single-handed rather than make a humiliating retreat. And most incredible of all, I as GM contrived a set of freak circumstances that let him get away with it and come out looking heroic. You can't make any storytelling approach convincing when you are that wet. After that I gave my players a stern lecture about taking their own characters hostage, and I gave a clear explicit warning that in future danger was going to be real. I promised not to decoy them into any no-win situations, but I told them that if they painted themselves into corners they would wear the consequences. Naturally a few words didn't undo what players had learned through years of experience, and it took several PC deaths, spoiled adventures, TPKs, and aborted campaigns to erase the previous impression and to make my players really feel that danger in Brett's campaigns will have your arm off. Which got me back into the situation that I ought never to have left in the first place. Eighteen months as a heartlessly "let the chips lie where the fall" GM was strong medicine, and I hope that others, learning from my mistakes, need never to take it. And so I'm not advising "kill lots of PCs". I'm advising "keep things real so that you don't have to", and "try to avoid setting the stakes so high that the players know you can't afford to let the villains win".
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. Last edited by Agemegos; 02-12-2011 at 07:04 AM. |
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02-12-2011, 07:37 AM | #28 | |||||||
Join Date: Jan 2011
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Re: Creating Tension in a session.
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02-12-2011, 08:09 AM | #29 |
Join Date: Aug 2008
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Re: Creating Tension in a session.
This is going to sound trite and somewhat repetitious considering what everyone has posted, but if you want tension, make sure the PCs constantly feel an elevated threat level.
This does not mean that they need to be in a firefight every second of every session. It also doesn't require PCs getting picked off or wounded, or even captured. The idea is to make them think they are constantly in immediate danger. There are several little gimmicks you can use, and some broader ones that work pretty well, too. Some simple stuff just involves environmental changes they might not be prepared for - sudden loss of power that knocks out the lights and any electric doors; security systems that begin to operate without warning (potentially sealing off exit routes); etc. Another one uses a lack of information mixed with implications - the party is running down a corridor when a crowd of about forty people come running out of a door toward them and away from the direction they're headed, and no one will stop to tell them why; a party of PMCs sent to a secret military research facility has no information, excessive pay, and when they land, they find an empty transport identical to the one they arrived in already docked there; the occassional radio report of a nearby section falling into enemy hands. Probably the most crucial major trick you can use is information deprivation. Don't let the PCs have the whole picture at all. Don't let them have even half the picture. They should know enough to know they need to get out or suffer Really Bad Things. How tough or powerful or scary the enemy is hardly matters; the enemy is coming. They need to get out Or Else. The more you describe in terms of "Or Else", the less scary it is, and the less threatened they will feel. Knowing their enemies are sadistic, human-eating, uplifted gorillas wearing warsuits armed with disintegrators won't invoke fear; it'll give the PCs something to base plans on. Saying that the enemy is an unknown humanoid military force with highly advanced technology makes the situation scarier. Saying that your allies are taking heavy losses and don't even see the enemy - we don't stand a chance! makes it really frightening. You can also drop some hints about how things are going overall. In the middle of running down a hallway, they hear a dull thump and the station trembles for a couple of seconds. Random power outages occur. Comms get jammed. They stumble on a battleground full of allied corpses. They hear a firefight in what must be a parallel corridor. All of these things up the threat level. None of them involve any real threat to the PC, let alone killing off PCs. Heck, none of them even require a single die to be rolled. But they should keep the players on edge the entire time. As was said before, the prospect of a PC going out in glory is a reward for dying in many players' minds; not even knowing what might happen next drives players crazy - especially if they can't even rely on the dignity of a glorious ending.
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02-12-2011, 09:11 AM | #30 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Creating Tension in a session.
downer: There's a useful old saying, "Just because I say I like sea bathing, I don't mean that I want to be pickled in brine." Your whole response ignores it. You take the statement that it's useful for players to know there is a risk of death or other harm befalling their characters as if it were a call for a steady series of actual deaths. And from this you infer an adversarial relationship in which the GM tries to destroy the players at every opportunity. (Need I point out that this is entirely something you have imagined about how my campaigns run, without ever having seen one?) This is as if, when I said that I wanted a little salt on my oatmeal, you envisioned me pouring the entire content of the shaker over it.
In point of fact, I said in so many words that character deaths are quite rare in my campaigns. It's does not make a good case for the merits of your own position when you turn the other person's position into an exaggerated caricature, and even worse when the inaccuracy can be seen directly from the other person's actual words. It suggests that you are not interested in understanding what is being said, but only in attacking it to "prove" yourself right. Ironically, that's the very "win at all costs" mentality, applied to intellectual discussion, that you are taking as a bad thing in roleplaying. My personal opinion is that my players are quite good roleplayers. At any rate, they put a high value on roleplaying; the stories they like to repeat often involve good dialogue or dramatic scenes, and the players they regard highly are the ones who are best at these. My style of GMing does not seem to prevent this, or drive away players who like it. Since your theory predicts otherwise, I suppose your theory must not describe the situation accurately. In any case, I'm aware that there are different opinions on this particular point. I was simply making a side comment to Kromm that his view of a different issue seems congruent with my particular opinion. Bill Stoddard |
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