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Old 02-11-2011, 06:57 AM   #21
downer
 
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Default 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.
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Old 02-11-2011, 07:36 AM   #22
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Default 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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Old 02-11-2011, 09:51 AM   #23
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Default Re: Creating Tension in a session.

Quote:
Originally Posted by downer View Post
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.
I like this approach a lot.
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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Old 02-11-2011, 10:06 AM   #24
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Default Re: Creating Tension in a session.

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Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
This creates an environment where on a meta-game level, in the gaming room, the appearance of three little cubes causes the players to start to sweat. Once the dice get involved, failure is always an option.
I'm less strict about this, but I certainly see the point of "you have to roll dice" as a dramatic signal of "this is a make or break situation."

Quote:
Finally, note that all of this requires long-term thinking. . . . And knowing your reputation as a GM so that you can gauge what your gamers think is believable coming from you can take years and years.
I would note that this is probably my core reason for not fudging dice rolls. Deaths in my campaigns are actually extremely rare—though other serious consequences are less rare. But I remember, for example, a combat scene in a supers campaign where an NPC team member got hit by an electrical elemental villain with a move through, which left behind a vaguely humanoid lump of charcoal. The players were all in shock, and were asking if there couldn't be some way to have it turn out that the NPC wasn't really dead—for example, if I could change the dice roll. And I just said no. That was an invaluable investment in being able to create tension.

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Old 02-11-2011, 06:28 PM   #25
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Default Re: Creating Tension in a session.

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Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
I am known to let the dice fall where they may, but I also encourage every player to buy Luck and decent HT for her PC, and I raise a yellow flag when nobody creates a medic/healer PC; thus, it isn't common for PCs to die in my campaigns. However, I've never pulled punches on setups like "gas them all and have them wake up naked in a cell" or "roll kidnapper's Stealth vs. PC's Per, and if the PC loses, the next thing he remembers is being tied up." Those who pass out from wounds wake up prisoners unless evacuated by friends . . . and those who evacuate friends and fall behind because they're moving too slowly risk ending up trapped in other ways. Fates short of death – lost equipment, body parts, NPC allies, etc. – are common.

<snip>

In general, PCs are played like kamikazes; they don't fear death much. In most campaigns, a heroic death is an admirable exit, and in many campaigns, a player who loses his PC gets to create a new one.
In short, high stakes are not as effective at generating tension as a believable (i.e. real) prospect of defeat.

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And knowing your reputation as a GM so that you can gauge what your gamers think is believable coming from you can take years and years.
As I have described before, I made the mistake around 1990 of building myself a reputation as a *****cat GM. It crippled my ability to produce any real tension, and it sucked the vim and vigour out of my games. I had to kill a lot of PCs, TPK a few parties, and accept the loss of a number of campaigns in defeat and anticlimax, over a span of about eighteen months to rebuild my credibility with my players.

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.

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Tension does not work well in short-term, one-off, and pickup games. If that's your situation, you're really better off trying for another emotion.
It is difficult, for sure. But it can be done. My greatest success with tension was in a miniseries campaign that was absolutely constrained to a limit of seven weekly sessions. And I have achieved tension in one-session three-hour games at cons—aided, in those cases, by a sense of competition and the total credibility of PC failure and defeat.
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Old 02-12-2011, 05:13 AM   #26
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Default 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.
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Old 02-12-2011, 06:48 AM   #27
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Default Re: Creating Tension in a session.

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Originally Posted by downer View Post
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.
Nope, not what I said, not what Kromm said, not what whswhs said. What we said was that if the players are not genuinely afraid that they might lose you won't get any tension going. And therefore (we said), develop a scenario in which the bad guys can win without killing the PCs or destroying the world. Don't try to base your tension on life or death for the PCs and the destruction of all they hold dear. Base it on some threat that the players will believe you would go through with. Less is more.

Quote:
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.
That's right. The danger has to be convincing, and you can't be convincing in a threat that your players don't believe you'd go through with. So unless you're prepared to kill lots of PCs, threaten something else rather than their death.

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In 15 years of gaming I've never seen a game improve because a PC got killed.
Well, in thirty years of GMing and of playing characters, I have. Not often, but several times, I have seen PCs die magnificent, perfect deaths that were exactly right for the character and the adventure.
  1. There was the time Shupararuash used a suicide bomb to make damned sure that Marduk was dead.
  2. There was the time Otis Grond willing went back into the poison gas to recover the evidence that would prevent a war.
  3. There was the scene in which Otis Grond realised that the woman he had just rescued from the Kitchener Hawkmoon (retired Executioner of Thanatos) was another Thanatos cultist, just in time to understand why she shot him. The players decided that that one was so perfect, and closed the grand campaign arc so beautifully, that they retired their characters and asked me to start a new campaign.
  4. There was the time that an entire party of PCs, having laid down their lives to ensure that King Arthur would rise to save Britain from NAZI invasion, and dying of hypothermia in an underground lake in Austria, hallucinated a barge draped in shimmering samite, crewed by three queens of Faerie—or was it real?
  5. There was Ogier Bane, having avenged himself on all but one of the people on his list, and getting thrown over the gunwale of a ship with an anchor tied to his legs, sinking his teeth into his last enemy's leather corselet and taking the bastard with him.
These were great moments in my GMing, which the players involve still talk about in thrilling tones almost, or more than, twenty years later. Sometimes dying is a far, far better thing that a PC does. Sometimes a PC comes to the end of his or her arc, and death is the appropriate and satisfying period.


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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Old 02-12-2011, 07:37 AM   #28
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Default Re: Creating Tension in a session.

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Originally Posted by Brett View Post
Nope, not what I said, not what Kromm said, not what whswhs said. What we said was that if the players are not genuinely afraid that they might lose you won't get any tension going. And therefore (we said), develop a scenario in which the bad guys can win without killing the PCs or destroying the world. Don't try to base your tension on life or death for the PCs and the destruction of all they hold dear. Base it on some threat that the players will believe you would go through with. Less is more.
OK, I misquoted you guys. That doesn't make it any less wrong. The players do not need to fear that they will lose. On the contrary, players should feel that they cannot lose, unless they want to. It's a contractual thing. The players and the GM have to agree on a sort of ratio that suits the campaign. In a dark setting, the players will regularly lose, and will understand that that is only proper - it wouldn't be a dark setting otherwise. In fact, they will make themselves lose, by having their characters succumb to their own dark sides, and so on.

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That's right. The danger has to be convincing, and you can't be convincing in a threat that your players don't believe you'd go through with. So unless you're prepared to kill lots of PCs, threaten something else rather than there death.
Not true at all. Roleplaying is based on suspension of disbelief. If I want to have a great game, I have to switch off the knowledge that nothing's going to happen to my character and try to see things from his perspective - play a role. My character doesn't know it will all be fine. So if I actually play him, I will play out his fear of losing, even though I know he won't lose.

Quote:
Well, in thirty years of GMing and of playing characters, I have. Not a lot, but several times, I have seen serveral PCs die magnificent, perfect deaths that were exactly right for the character and the adventure.
So not what I was talking about. The death of a PC can be a great experience, but killing him off to prove you mean it - I don't think so.

Quote:
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.
And instead of addressing the issue, you let those players, who evidently either didn't know, or didn't care about the roleplaying part of the game, turn it into a meta-conflict. That's just not a good thing, however much it may have eased your problems. It just perpetuated and effectively legitimized their bad play, putting the ball in your court instead.
Quote:
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.
Your problem was not that you saved the player from doing something stupid. The problem is that he was acting "for no discernible purpose". I play in a game where a fellow player is just like that. He keeps announcing actions that make no sense in context and should get is character in serious trouble. What does the GM do? Let him do it, then let him have it, so he knows that the GM is serious and won't be crossed? Nope. He asks "Why do you do that? What is your purpose? What does your character think?". And the player keeps finding himself in the embarassing situation of not having an answer. You bet he learned his lesson. Which is not "if I act up, I will lose", but "if I act up, the game will be less fun for everybody, including (surprise) myself". Makes people grow up, instead of working up "tuff GM street-cred".

Quote:
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.
Like I said, you learned the wrong thing. Beating players into submission only reinforces the whole "win-or-lose" thinking, which is killing actually roleplaying like nothing else ever can. Cooperation is the cure. With everyone in the know about what the investment is, how the setting and the characters are supposed to tick, there will be no stupid acting up that has to be corrected against by playing tough. I haven't had such issues in years, despite never ever killing a character without prior announcement and rarely letting my players lose. And do you know what happened, when my players felt that was too soft on them. They came up and asked me for a darker campaign, where their characters would be up against enemies they couldn't defeat and would have to really fight for their lives. I gave them one, no sweat. But the point of the exercise was just to get a different kind of character play - after all, they asked for it, I wasn't inflicting it on them.
Quote:
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".
My advice, play with people mature enough to know that in a roleplaying game, it doesn't matter who wins. What matters is a good game with interesting stories and well played characters. And for that, everybody has to work together. And that doesn't have anything to do with how tough and unforgiving the game is, but with how well the players manage to get in character.
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Old 02-12-2011, 08:09 AM   #29
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Default 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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Last edited by Humabout; 02-12-2011 at 08:13 AM.
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Old 02-12-2011, 09:11 AM   #30
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Default 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.

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