by John S.R. Schutt
While the world RPGs is filled with abstractions and simplifications, from the hit point system to the alignment system, one thing that remains constant, at least while sitting at the table with other people: the emotion that goes into a session.
There’s anxiety, joy, sadness, anger and even surprise when the unthinkable happens at the right (oftentimes wrong) time. The players experience a myriad of emotions in the course of a game, adventure, campaign, whatever, and it should follow that their characters do as well. I mean, they wouldn’t be roleplaying games if the emotion given out by a player didn’t come through in the character.
What’s always bugged me, however, is the seeming lack of emotion from the world at any given moment. One can make the case that the overworld reacts to the actions of the PCs, and good GM’s make sure that it does. Indeed, a static world of stock characters who care nothing for the living, breathing landscape around them would be subject to a constant yawning from the players. I think what needs to happen is that the adventurer, and perhaps even the adventure, should take less from the roleplay and the combat and dig into the emotion of life.
Allow me to set the scene. An entire town is massacred, torched and salted by a roving band of…something bad, let’s say. The adventuring crew, our PCs, are outraged, perhaps because they grew up there, or they had friends or companions or mentors who are now naught but scorched bones and withered clothes. In a fit of righteous (or malevolent) fury, the band sets off in search of revenge, justice and good old fashioned loot. They adventure across many lands and find the end boss who orchestrated the whole thing. They defeat him and take his stuff, avenging their fallen comrades or what have you, set out to restore the lost location to its former glory. The adventure ends with the doling out of XP and a sincere feeling of accomplishment for the characters and, by extension, their players. From there the PCs perhaps spend a few in game months to years making sure the town remains strong and that they know their loved ones did not die without memory. They then set off for the next big adventure.
Perhaps that scene is exaggerated, but my point is this: adventures and those that undertake them are creatures of moment, where emotion takes a backseat to action. The best adventures try to meld them and some even succeed.
In my eyes, the emotion needs to drive the action.
Players, and the NPCs and world around them, should act not because of the metagame, or out of a single set of negative emotions, but in response to a full gamut of feelings and emotions. A tall order? Perhaps. But I’m going to share a little secret with you, and hope that our friends in the editorial department don’t mind (if you’re reading this, they didn’t).
We here at Nevermet Press are attempting something quite akin to that. You may have heard of our newest project, the Dead Queens of Morvena. In it, we’re tackling horror, and I myself am spearheading a graphic novella project to truly give the feeling not just in words but in pictures and thought and feeling. In the Dead Queens, one of the prime ways we’re tackling the problem of emotion is the idea of helplessness. Certainly the setting might be played as an action packed undead hunt using the Pathfinder or 4th Edition rules, but it might be better served played by PCs without all that power. The world around them collapses, wracked constantly by supernatural forces and evils beyond imagining. The darkness of the night is something to dread with one’s own soul, and every step might mean a fate worse than death. What I want, and I hope the others do as well, is that glimmer of hope in the distance. The best horror does one of two things: first, it shatters the perceptions and leaves one powerless; or two (and my personal preference), it shows one his own insignificance while allowing him the opportunity to understand himself on a deeper, more powerful level than before.
What I’m really trying to get at here is that life, real life, is a conflicted set of chaotic occurrences that make no sense even after countless explanations and wherein hope might be the only path to sanity. In RPGs, something like this is hard to find. There’s a really bad thing going down and as the party grows in power and influence through a set of carefully crafted circumstances, they learn about this very bad thing. Because they’re adventurers, they instinctively seek it out and end it in some way. What I want, and what I hope Nevermet Press can deliver to you, our readers, is an adventure setting that defies this conception and allows for situations of the darkest sort, while still allowing for little bits of joy to shine through. I don’t want a real life simulator. We get enough of that through living and The Sims. What I want is an adventure where life intrudes and breathes energy into the action. Where helplessness gives way to empowerment, and where, if you’ll indulge me in the cliché, the little guy saves the day.
We always try to put some emotion into our games. The tough part is that it takes a buy in on everyone’s part. If the GM isn’t bothering about then NPC’s will end up being piles of HP to loot and kill. If the players just want to hack and slash and run with it then it doesn’t matter what the GM has set up.
It really adds to the story and can take in some unexpected directions and is really worth it. I wish more people would thing of NPC’s and PC’s as characters and not just a pile of numbers designed to kill stuff.
I think this is an interesting point. While some of this is achieved through the GM and his or her descriptions and settings, there’s nothing in game mechanics that suggests options for creating this type of scenario. Perhaps some of these things could be achieved with a GM setting an encounter too many levels above the PCs for even a chance at success and have the villains of the encounter leave the PCs bloodied and beaten, letting them know that they are beneath those villains. Or perhaps create tension through skill challenges against villains and not let the PCs physically battle them because of overwhelming circumstances. I guess there are ways to fiddle with the settings and types of encounters to simulate these emotionally driven scenarios, but having some type of rules/mechanics assistance is an intriguing possibility.