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Tabletop Highlight: Player Fatalism and How to Salvage the Game

Chris Leave a comment

I honestly don’t know if I can speak for everyone, but it often feels like every tabletop gamer I know has a story about a game where someone was constantly pessimistic and fatalistic. Someone, perhaps even them, spent an entire session, or even several sessions, throwing their hands up in the air every time something bad happened and complaining that they knew this was going to happen or that there’s no point to them trying any more if they’re just going to die.

This happened recently in one of my games. There’s a player, the one I often bring up as the person who does some dumb stuff or makes questionable decisions (he featured heavily in the “Up for Interpretation” post from three weeks ago) who has been engaging in this kind of behavior lately. To be entirely fair, his character has died as many times as the rest of the party put together and he seems to always come up short when I roll to determine who gets to be the target of whatever is about to happen. Even his rolls tend toward failure when he tries something. He missed a sneak attack that would have insta-killed the enemy spell caster because he rolled in the single digits on his attack. He failed a skill check to make it back to safety afterwards and would have been knocked unconscious if not for an ability of his special weapon that gave him temporary hit points. The poor guy has had it rough.

To be entirely, fair, though, he makes a lot of assumptions and does a lot of stuff without thinking it through. He died during that same fight because he hopped over a barricade to attack an enemy he could have just stabbed from where he was. I let him live because he apparently didn’t realize he could do that and it’s pretty clear he wouldn’t have done it if he could have avoided it seeing as he was so low on hit points. Though, to continue being fair, he also didn’t retreat from the battle or take a back seat once he was down to nothing but his last few hit points either. He’d already seen how much damage his enemies could do with one hit and yet he continued to try to front-line them.

A lot of that behavior and those unneccessary risk-taking could have been a result of his expectation that his current character won’t be much longer for this world. He’s already created a new character to replace him, prompted by my jokes about a TPK, which I’ve managed to avoid so far since the players know when to run. There was a close moment, though, because they messed up some earlier stuff and had to deal with the consequences. That was probably the first time they were pushed to their limits from a marathon of battles rather than a single tough monster. It was winnable, though. I was never going to put them in a situation where they feel powerless or like they are being punished. If they screw up enough to get themselves killed, it will mostly be swift and decisive. Otherwise, they’ll always have options and only poor decision-making or bad luck will get them all killed.

It can be hard to keep again running, especially a story-drive one, when one of the players just lets go as soon as there’s any tension. I can’t make the game feel dramatic if someone is just giving up as soon as things look bad. They start to get angry if it keeps happening and a lot of drama and tension in story-telling is uncertainty or challenge, so I wind up trying to keep them invested without sacrificing too much story. I don’t think this player’s attitude is affecting the other players very much, but I’m hoping it’s just the recent string of bad luck he’s had (which is really just his perception of events, he’s also had some really good luck since he’s only come close to dying or getting captured).

I’m going to talk to him (and will have, before this post goes up) about what’s been going on and workshop some ideas on how to get through it. This isn’t a problem unless it’s making the game less fun for the other players and the person displaying the fatalistic behavior refuses to change. Usually when this happens, as is happening with my player, there’s something causing it. Before you try to address the problem, you need to figure out what this underlying cause is. Once you know that, you need to verbally (and privately) address it with the player so they have the opportunity to change. Not everyone realizes they’re doing it. I’m not even sure if my player recognizes that he’s doing it.

For him, the source lies in some of his first exposure to D&D and a long string of bad decisions compounded by bad luck. His first DM was very adversarial. He tried to manipulate the players constantly, forced them to act a certain way, did his level best to kill them constantly, and gave all of the good magic items and experiences to his closest friends so that other players wound up with under-leveled and under-geared characters who just died all that much more frequently. He’s had a few more experiences between now and then (most of which I’ve seen), but one characteristic of his gaming has always been making decisions without considering the consequences and bad luck on rolls. From the silly little campaign I ran to test out a book world I’d developed to a “Shits and Giggles” campaign I ran to fill my weekends, to my current serious campaign where he seems to constantly get the short end of the stick. Sometimes, it’s because he accidentally stepped on the large stick he had and wound up breaking it, but I’m sure that doesn’t feel very fun to him.

Problems with characters and DMing I can fix. I have no problem helping my players create the best possible version of their character (though I usually insist they stick to a personality rather than just minmaxing) and I generally try to avoid getting adversarial in any context. Bad luck and poor decision-making… There’s not much more I can do beyond being forgiving when he’s legitimately making a mistake as a player versus when he’s doing something reckless or risky. It’s a fine line, but I wrote an entire blog post about how to tell the difference so I’m confident I can manage it.

I hope we can figure something out. I’d hate to think he’s not having fun. That’s all I really want, as a DM.

Tabletop Highlight: What to do When You TPK

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It finally happened. Because of some mistakes, poor decisions, or just a run of bad luck, you’ve encountered your first TPK. Don’t worry! A Total Party Kill isn’t the end of the world! You have options! But first, as you should do any time you have a serious, potentially irreversible character death or one that felt like a particularly stinky pile of bullshit, take some time away from the table to breath. Thankfully, only characters have died. The players can still play, the DM can still run, and the game can go on. However, it will likely be different. That’s okay, though. Every time anything major happens, the game changes. This will be just one more of those changes.

The first option is generally the easiest. Instead of being killed, the party has been captured and now must escape the clutches of some dreaded foe. Finally, the rogue can put that escape artist skill to use! The paranoid ranger who has a chime of opening hidden on his person is finally vindicated! The barbarian… well, they just hulk out like usual, but it’s still fun! They’re short on gear, don’t have many hit points, and are on a time limit! They need to escape quickly or quietly. If they’re spotted, they need to move fast. If they get stuck, they might need to make some tough choices about who lives and who dies. If they can remain hidden, they might need to find the hole in the guard rotation so they can escape undetected. Maybe they need to talk their way out and suddenly the paladin’s high charisma is good for more than never failing a save. Or maybe the wizard finally gets a chance to show just how capable he can be in a pinch, even without an hour to prepare his spells. No matter what choice you make, it’s sure to make a memorable adventure.

The next easiest option is to have a conversation with your players. There are three options most players take, sometimes individually but usually as a group. First, they might elect to create all new characters who are going to pick up from where their previous characters left off. Sometimes they’re intentionally recovering the remains, sent on a mission to find the now-dead characters by whoever sent the characters in the first place. Sometimes they’re doing their own thing and stumble over the remains of the dead characters and choose to pick up from where they left off. If they don’t do that, another option might be to just create new characters in the same world, doing their own thing, in a space far from where their characters died. Maybe they’ll eventually have to defeat the villain their previous characters fell to at some point, but maybe not. This is a new adventure and that doesn’t mean they need to even inhabit the same world, much less inhabit the same area of said world. The third option is to decide to stop playing. Some players might decide they want to move on to something else, now that the journey their character was on came to a conclusion. That’s totally fine, as long as they’re not departing angrily. If they are, or if all of your players are choosing to abandon ship now that their characters are dead, it might not be a bad idea to look back and assess if you were running a game they wanted to keep playing.

Another option, which would require a lot of work to keep the players from feeling like you just saved them for expediency, would be to have them wake up in a stronghold of an ally. Maybe they were brought back to life or maybe they were rescued, but it must have been for an important reason, whatever the method. Maybe this ally wants to use them for something and figured having a group of adventurers in their debt due to being returned from death would be sufficient motivation to get them to do whatever this ally wants. Maybe it isn’t an ally but a previously neutral NPC who wants the characters to work for them. Perhaps there’s even some kind of curse or geas placed on the characters that forces them to work for this NPC and now they need to not only pursue their given goals but figure out how to escape from the NPC controlling them. This would be a lot of fun because it’d require a lot of clever thinking on the part of the players, though I can understand that it wouldn’t work for every group.

There’s always an undead campaign. It’d work really well if they died fighting a necromancer or failed to disrupt some horrid ritual that would give the souls of everyone mortal on the material plane to some evil god. Maybe something didn’t go entirely wrong and some aspect of who the characters was before their transformation lingers. With the right kind of build-up, you could create an adventure where they either embrace their new undead forms or find a way to undo their transformations. Maybe they find the last divine caster in the area who was saved from the ritual because they were praying within a consecrated area and they can be returned to life. Or maybe they figure out how to save their souls and then take on the new undead overlords before (or maybe after) using a miracle spell to return the world to the way it was before the ritual went off.

There’s always retconjuration, the magic of changing how things happened, but that almost always feels cheap unless they died because they all rolled a bunch of fails in a row while their enemies rolled nothing but natural twenties. I’d recommend against it if you have literally any other option. You could also effectively un-do their death by stripping them of their gear and saying they managed to just barely survive, but they were looted and left for the vultures. Whoever beat them did to them what they’ve likely done to countless other humanoids and monstrous races. That would be a fun spin on things and I’d love to see how a group of players recovers from being stripped of everything that wasn’t hidden. I love creating moments for improvisation and outside-the-box thinking, so I’d really enjoy seeing what my players did in that case. I might do it as a one-off, sometime, just to see.

All of your options pretty much fit into three categories. Figure out how to get the current characters back into play (capture, not-quite-dead, or undead), create new characters (who may or may not encounter the corpses of their former selves), or just stop playing. If you have any ideas of other options, besides what I’ve listed here, I’d love to hear about them! I’m really curious about what other people do in TPK scenarios when they come up.

Every Day is an Adventure

Chris Leave a comment

I remember, the first time I sat down to watch Adventure Time, remarking to my friends that I wasn’t drunk enough to watch this show after only the first episode. For those of my friends who are adults and trying to start the show, I usually recommend sitting down to it with a strong drink because while I adore the show, it starts off a little weirdly. It also continues weirdly, but it isn’t jarring once you’ve made the mental adjustments required to enjoy the show. They’re not strenuous, of course. It just takes a bit of time to adapt to the over-the-top action and characters before you start to see past the surface to the surprising depths of the story and character development arcs.

Like a lot of “children’s shows,” Adventure Time can be enjoyed on multiple levels. At the most basic, there are good lessons about how to be responsible, what it means to strong, how to deal with emotional problems, and how to treat people who are different from you, to name a few. These lessons are delivered through fairly straight-forward plots and the colorful fun of an action show with heart, making it an instant hit with most kids. For those looking for a bit more, there’s actually some complex emotional and interpersonal problems that happen through the various seasons that are resolved slowly. It can be difficult to watch if you want the sort of cleaner wrap-ups of most adult shows since, for example, some things are introduced in season 1 that aren’t addressed until season 5. Emotional development takes a long time, in terms of seasons and shows, but it happens at a rate that lets the adults watching the show appreciate what is going on beneath the surface but also lets the kids slowly see the changes happen in a way they’ll understand as they go through similar (if somewhat less fantastical) situations in their own lives.

For instance, a lot of the earlier episodes are non-sequiturs, with nothing to place them inside the show’s overarching timeline, but there are details that slowly fill in the world around the protagonists, Finn the Human and Jake the (magic) Dog. Finn’s sword is an easy indicator of when an episode takes place as he has a tendency to go through them a lot faster than you’d think. His behavior and age are much more subtle ones since they don’t mark most of his birthdays or give a number to his age that frequently. Instead, you can follow the show’s continuity using plot markers and shifts in character relationships. Old enemies become friends, allies reveal ulterior motives and become enemies, and background characters rise to sudden prominence before establishing a firm place in the long list of secondary characters.

The way information is revealed to the viewer can make it a difficult show to watch haphazardly. While understanding most episodes isn’t dependent on having watched all previous episodes, a lot of foreshadowing or important subtext can fall between the cracks in your understanding of the show. As information is slowly revealed, one small bite at a time (bites that increase in size as the show goes on as the first two seasons are particularly light on details), so much that you suspect is confirmed. If you pay attention to the background in almost any episode, you could reasonably draw the conclusion that Adventure Time occurs in a post-apocalyptic world. You could also conclude that humans are rare, magic has risen in the place of most of the sciences, and there’s an incredible danger present in the world that most people see as ordinary because of how screwed up the world became following whatever apocalyptic disaster befell it. Eventually, you get enough information to assemble a picture of the past on your own. Full reveals or complete pictures are super rare, but they become reference points for the show that help shore up the history you assemble as you watch it and you can usually tell where you are in the show’s timeline by references to these points.

My favorite part of the show is the way the writers use the same method of small hints and details mixed in with a few big reveals in the emotional development of the characters. Finn, as the primary protagonist, deals with the most as he grows. Jake, the secondary protagonist, has his share as well. Even a lot of the secondary characters (who occasionally have small arcs featuring them) have complex emotional journeys throughout the show. The best example of that is probably the Ice King, a certifiably insane wizard with ice powers given to him by a magic crown he wears. Not only does he feature in a lot of Finn’s emotional growth, he changes throughout the show from a pathetic villain to a tragic villain who can’t help himself, seeing as he’s been driven insane by the magic crown he wears. Some of the most powerful and emotional moments in the show come from his stories and the way people start to treat him as they grow to understand and somewhat accept him. There’s a whole list of other characters, some with their own special mini-seasons, that undergo growth and change, and each one gets their moment to shine, even the pesky whiny ones you want to just disappear.

 

Throughout it all, aside from the big reveal or big change moments, the show manages to keep an upbeat sense of humor and a positive look on even the most difficult situations. The characters rely on each other to get through their weak moments and humor is a constant aid as they try to cope with the world they actually live in as it pushes aside the world they want to live in. Even the most resilient characters are sometimes knocked down and we get to watch them struggle to their feet again. The entire show is a lesson in getting back up after failure until you succeed and learning to accept change and growth into your life gracefully.

I’ll admit the pacing can be weird early on and that it can be difficult to accept some of the asides the show makes as it slowly works its way through a difficult problem, but every episode has something important to say if you’re willing to look for it. A lot of these messages are repeated many times, but they’re usually important enough that it’s worth hearing them again. Plus, with how human they all act, even Jake the Dog and Princess Bubblegum (who is made of gum), it can be incredibly refreshing to see people struggle to deal with lessons they’ve already learned and taken for granted.

I recommend watching it. The seasons are pretty cheap on Amazon or Best Buy, but I wouldn’t recommend getting them on a streaming service as they are sometimes in weird orders and the season-by-season breakdown in the later seasons gets super wonky. It is way cheaper to get them on DVD or Blu-Ray than to buy them on Amazon or iTunes. If you want a show that will make you laugh so hard you cry and so sad you just have to laugh, that will take you on an incredibly complex emotional journey through the eyes of a wide range of very (mentally and emotionally, since “diverse” means very different things in our world than it’d mean in their world) different characters, and will leave you constantly wanting more, I cannot recommend Adventure Time strongly enough.

Tabletop Highlight: First Reactions to Fifth Edition

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Over the weekend, I took my first deep dive into D&D Fifth Edition. I’ve made characters and even briefly played it before, but this was the first time I actually explored characters rather than rushing through the process. Carefully considered each class and, after looking at what I had to work with, settled on playing a Sorcerer. The first D&D character I ever played and the most fun D&D character I ever played were both sorcerers, so the class is near and dear to my heart.

My initial impression was that the system is complex, strange, and makes very little sense. Over time, though, that shifted. The more time I spent with it, the easier the system seemed. So many of the 3.5 rules I know by heart and so many of the choices I’d made in a 3.5 campaign just aren’t options. Feats are entirely optional, ability scores cannot be increased over 20 via natural level progression, and everything in the system feels a lot more balanced. My past remarks about the 5th edition being more like addition than 3.5’s multiplication still stands, but that means that all of the classes still wind up in more or less the same neighborhood.

The biggest revelation I had while exploring the system more fully was the way it lends itself toward role-playing. 3.5 can be entirely numbers with no role-playing unless the players and DM are specifically making room for it. 5th edition doesn’t necessitate role-playing, but it does make it a much more regimented part of the character creation process. There’s room on the standard character sheet for flavor text about who your character is, the backgrounds provide a basis for less experienced players, and even the class features help you figure out who your character is based on what specializations you pick.

The hardest thing for me to learn is the new rules around combat and actions. I’m used to poison results being specific to the poison used and much more complicated skills that play off of each other and are full of conditional modifiers. The simplified “advantage, neutral, or disadvantage” system takes all of the conditional stuff and wraps it up in one neat little package. I can see combat and skill encounters are going to be much easier for new players to handle since the math isn’t as potentially complicated. I’m going to miss my ridiculous bonuses and OP bullshit that I can pull when I’m feeling petulant in 3.5, but I can see myself running a lot of 5th edition games because it’ll be so much simpler. Instead of spending time looking up rules players are asking about, I can focus on storytelling, good encounters, and keeping the game moving along. I’m really looking forward to how the pacing changes between the two systems.

That being said, I think I’m going to stick to 3.5 for my big story campaigns. 5th edition is still relatively new and I can’t find as many resources for it as I can find for 3.5, so it would be a lot harder to make up some of the stuff I have for 3.5.  5th edition’s power scales are too linear to be able to just fudge a few numbers and make it work, even at mid to high levels.

This past weekend, I stuck to mostly first level things for my sorcerer (and a rogue as a backup character for when my aggressive, “think’s he’s a tank,” sorcerer gets smeared on a dungeon floor). Next weekend, if I’ve got the time, I’m going to look into future levels, magic items, and how all the rules have changed so I can start planning out a campaign to run in 5th edition. I’ve got a lot of friends who want to play now and 5th edition seems like it would lend itself well to online play, so I might actually be able to help my friends who don’t have anyone to play with in their areas, finally. That’d be great. I like running big games full of organized chaos and laughter. Even if I can’t see everyone’s face, I think this would be a lot of fun to do.

Oathbringer is Breaking the Pattern.

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I really enjoy Brandon Sanderson’s writing. I haven’t yet read even half of what he’s written, but I discovered him through his completion of the Wheel of Time series and have been a fan ever since. While my enjoyment of his writing hasn’t quite reached the level of my love for Terry Pratchett or Patrick Rothfuss, I would still rank him among my favorite authors. My love of Pratchett and Rothfuss comes as a result of their craft and their characters while my love of Sanderson’s writing comes from the interesting and different worlds he has created. When I first started reading his Stormlight Archive series, I was instantly hooked on the way his world differed from our own. All of the creatures and the lands were different because of the enormous storms that visited most of the world, so everything either had some kind of rocky shell or carapace to protect it from the storms and weather.

While he doesn’t do as much world-building as he did in the first book, I’m still enjoying his series. The latest, Oathbringer, was just as exciting as the previous two, following a few main characters as they try to deal with the horrible storm that sprang up at the end of the previous book. Despite the early warnings coming from the protagonists’ group, most of the world doesn’t believe them and is thus caught unaware when all the shelters they have built to protect them from the normal storms fail to protect them from a storm coming from the opposite direction. While a lot of the previous novels was a mixture of action, character development, and political intrigue, this novel saves a lot of the action and character development for the end. Instead, most of the novel is a little on the dryer side, covering lots of history, some new perspectives and characters, some character development focused on one person in particular, and tons of politics.

Initially, I was surprised by the amount of people in my various social media feeds commenting that Oathbringer was rather slow and not as fun as the previous two books. After reading the book, I can kind of understand. I don’t agree, but I recognize that this book is a bit of a departure from his usual constant world-building with action to move the scenes along. I think that this book is important proof that Sanderson is going to be able make this potentially ten-book series a success. Plus, he’s managed to do it very well, mixing in plenty of interesting information that, while somewhat predictable in terms of plot and outcomes, does an amazing job of fleshing out people and the world. I really enjoy the sense of history this book has added to the series. It answered so many questions that I’d had since the start of the series and even threw in a couple twists I did not see coming at all. They caught me entirely off-guard and that was wonderful.

While the book’s major plot twist was unexpected, it was also kind of expectedly unexpected. Sanderson intentionally paints the characters into the corner, making it seem like they have no choice but to give in or surrender to the bad guys, because making something happen. Most of the time, it is only unexpected because it adds some new world mechanic or gives us some rule or information we didn’t have previously. There’s always some foreshadowing to pick out in retrospect and he always does a good job of laying the groundwork so whatever happens never feels entirely like a Deus Ex Machina, but there are a few close calls during some of the big moments (and that’s not just restricted to this book). I don’t mind it too much, but it can feel a bit annoying to have all this build up of a dramatic moment happening while you’re just reading along calmly because you know they’re going to magically get out of the tight spot using some brand new power or mechanic that develops right then. The best thing I can say in Sanderson’s defense is that he literally built that mechanic, the spontaneous power-up and new power moments, into this series.

I definitely recommend the book and the series as a whole because they’re honestly just so much fun to read. They move along well, are easy to read, and there’s just so much interesting stuff happening that they’re hard to put down.

 

Song in the Silence: A Loud Endorsement

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“Song in the Silence” is the debut novel of Elizabeth Kerner, published in 1997, and the first novel in what eventually became a trilogy. There is a wonderful story captured in the pages, just waiting to be explored once you’ve managed to make your way past the stereotypically nineties cover art. I don’t know if I can say it was a unique story because my knowledge of female writers of fantasy from the nineties is sorely lacking (something I’m trying to change), but I can definitely say it had a much different tone from most other fantasy novels I’d read.

While the world doesn’t have the same kind of almost-human characterization some other fantasy novels go for, it still conveys a sense of breadth and depth to the readers. The bits of historical information Kerner provides to make the world feel real are worked into the flow of the story and they never feel like exposition or an information dump aside from one or two moments where a major historical event is shared with the protagonist so she understands the enormity of what’s going on. Even those moments feel a lot more natural than they otherwise might because they’re almost always delivered in the form of smaller stories told by one character to another. Though only a small portion of the world is shown through the course of the story, the introductory narration and the traveling the protagonist does firmly establishes a much larger world that you can feel hovering around the edges of the story as you read through it.

The mythology, which sets the stage for the main conflict of the novel and of the trilogy, is not entirely new though Kerner does a great job of breathing new life into it. The mythology plays into the trope of Dragons as beings of order and demons as beings of chaos, informing the ways the two groups interact with not only each other, but with the neutral humans who can, of course, pick either chaos or order. Which, in this story, means that humans can be good or evil, relying heavily on the cliché of order being good and chaos being evil. There is no way to avoid clichés entirely, nor is it necessary to do so, but this particular one has always felt like too much of an oversimplification to me. That being said,  I would call this particular cliche more of a pet-peeve than an actual issue in this case. Kerner’s story may lean heavily on the “human ability to be good or evil” idea, but the idea is used as less of a crutch and as more of a support beam. It is incorporated into the story as an important aspect of the story itself rather than used to prop up a weak philosophical concept a character is espousing. It turns from “chaos is evil and order is good” into “this person is evil and uses the power of chaos to act against order and good separately, in pursuit of their selfish goals.”

One of my favorite parts of the book is that every character in the novel could be you, your friends, or someone you’d meet at work. Unlike most fantasy characters, who I would not want to meet because they’d be insufferable, I would actually love to hang out with the people from this book. Maybe get a drink or a late brunch. They all have their flaws and they all tend to keep running into trouble as a result of them, but never in the same way. Some characters learn of others’ flaws and exploit them, young people are inexperienced and rather stupid, and the powerful are somewhat impulsive as a result of overconfidence. The protagonist, a young woman, falls into a few traps over the course of the novel because she is naive. She struggles with how to relate to some of the other characters because she learns of these huge gaps between her experience and theirs. The villain almost cackles over a steaming cauldron, but it is strongly implied that he’s gone insane at that point, as a result of all of the demon magic he uses. It feels a lot more natural because you can also imagine him cackling over a bowl of oatmeal or as he goes for a pleasant afternoon hike.

In direct opposition to the humanity of the characters (including the non-human ones), there was a rather heavy-handed romance subplot in this book. The protagonist and her love interest wind up in a relationship and loving each other not because they’ve gotten to know each other well and developed a relationship, but because they lay eyes on each other and begin to fall in love. There are prophecies mentioned here and there, as a part of the prophecies driving the major plot points of the trilogy, that make it seem like they were destined to love each other. After they’ve confessed their love for each other and had a soul-bonding moment, the relationship gets significantly more normal if you pretend they actually took their time getting to that point. I like the later depictions of the romance and their relationship better because it more closely matches the more human way most relationships in our world work.

I would recommend reading “Song in the Silence” if you want a book with interesting and real characters, a well-developed world that fits nicely into the “high fantasy” genre, an entire race of intelligent and rather “human” dragons, and don’t mind one of the major plot points being a Disney princess style romance that feels a bit shoehorned into the rest of the story. It is a rather quick read, though I recommend taking the time to pace yourself rather than attempting to devour it in one day. Though quick, it is still a bit too meaty for a single sitting.