Last night, while lying wide awake and watching the excellent Avatar cartoon series, I started pondering on how important it is for a characters to be shown as having an effect on a story.
Avatar is filled to the brims with this. In each show, characters make choices, wrong and right. This ends up affecting where the story goes and how characters interact with one another.
Compare this to a pair of movies I saw in the last year: The Last Mimzy and the 1st Chronicles of Narnia.
In The Last Mimzy, a sentient toy from the future is found by a pair of kids. It then goes to show them (directly and through telepathic suggestions) how to create a Time portal so that the essence of one of the kids can be ‘borrowed’ to save the future.
Throughout the movie, the kids only basically do what the toy tells them to do and then their civilization is saved. I don’t recall them making a decision of importance about anything related to the story (except “Do we tell mom?”)
Something similar happens in the first Narnia movie. Some kids find a parallel world, are drafted to become its leaders and basically end up being figureheads for the near omnipotent Lion who steals the show with the old ‘make them believe I’m dead’ ploy.
(Yes I’m being somewhat unfair to an otherwise good movie).
Movies/books are not the only culprits. In the early days of the d20 game, Privateer Press published a beautiful, fluffy adventure cycle called the Witchfire Trilogy. The adventure was, to me, nearly unplayable because it was such a darned linear railroad. I felt that the PCs were only a glorified audience to the events of these adventures.
An audience that got to fight at certain intervals.
Much like J-RPGs on consoles…
Am I loosing my thread here? Hmmm.
Anyhoo. My main point is that in both classic narratives and Roleplaying games, significant choices made by characters are key to an enjoyable experience. Yet as Gamemasters and adventure writers, its often easy to get caught in the coolness of your story and unwillingly relegate your players to an audience in certain scenes.
The choices you give PCs don’t have to be colossal. You can let them choose to let the bad guy live or die. They could chose to help the Baron instead of the Baroness for a given side quest. You don’t need to make your game into a sandbox if that’s not your style (it sure ain’t mine).
So be they combat powers to choose from or getting to influence the story with a key moral choice, players want the feeling that what they chose matters.
In my next campaign I had planned to send my players to establish some new trade relations between their Halfling Robber Baron boss and the Underdark elements of Thunderspire Labyrinth. In my first mental draft, the mission was a straightforward plot hook to get the players into a published adventure.
But as I was pondering choices, I foresaw that the PC’s patron will likely encourage them to choose the best trading partners and negotiate the deals (for a cut of course!) This will likely make my Storytellers more interested to participate in an otherwise battle-heavy adventure.
I also have to keep that in mind for the freelance adventure I’m writing. 🙂
So when you write your next adventure, make sure that your PCs have an impact on the events they participate in. Your players will appreciate and your efforts as GM will be better rewarded.
I slapped my forehead and said, “Duh!” Mostly because I didn’t really think about it until now, and it seems so obvious!
This is why we like Bloggers; they tell us things that we either don’t know, or should already know! I’m actually in the middle of pulling together what COULD be my first group in several years. I’ve been thinking about converting Keep on the Borderlands for the system I’m using, but I think I should implement some key changes, like giving it some freedom.
But I think this can be taken a babystep further. Make sure the choices are balanced out. (Most of the time) A party is going to “Save the World” rather than hit the “Nuke the World” button at the campaign climax. I think it’s a good idea to make sure the choices are balanced for the whole party.
Maybe there’s a path to the village that the enemy goblins are going to come in from, and you have the option of either blocking the path by dislodging boulders at the top, or to go to the canal and flood it when the goblins march through. If you flood the goblins, you’ll disrupt the villages agriculture cycle, and ensure a bad harvest. If you block the road and ambush them, it’ll take weeks to clear the path again, which would stop trade and pilgrimages to the local temple. The cleric might want to flood while the fighter might want to block the road.
It’s 3:20 A.M., I’m tired and rambly!
Thanks Chatty!
I agree with you completely on Avatar being awesome and J-RPGs being a monotonous railroad of “here’s some battles in your CGI movie.” (We need more Mass Effects!)
A good point – looking back at my face to face adventures I find that I offer far fewer real choices than I planned to do. What appears to be choices are just a series of linear adventures, the PCs just to choose which to do first. I find it is far easier to give real choices in PBeM games as here both the DM and the players have time to make choices and respond to the decisions that are made. Sometimes in a face to face game having too many choices can bog down the play – especially with large groups – so there needs to be a balance between a linear game and chaotic mass of choice.
Choices are what gaming is about. Adventures where plenty of them are embedded can be hard to design, as choices potentially create branches and hence exponential growth in the number of paths the players can put their characters on.
Good luck.
Well said.
Role-playing should be collaborative story-telling where the GM sets the events in motion then lets the players run with the tale. Players tend to be able to tell when they’re being railroaded, and rally against it. Quite right too 🙂
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Thanks for the feedback guys. This was not so much a stance against linear adventures as it is that even linear adventures must feel like the choices the PCs do in them matter.
For instance, in a linear quest such as Go to the Dungeon of Dread and recover the Amulet of Gloomblah, it helps that PCs:
a) Have multiple choices in regards to which NPC gets the amulet
b) Have to deal with Gygaxian Factions of Humanoids in the dungeon that they can work one against the other
c) Obtain sidequests of their choices.
Linear adventure, significant choices.
Peace out!
I figure that players always make choices and that its up to the DM to turn the subtler ones into world-changing choices – word being a relative term.
Its easier to do over the span of a campaign than within a single game – even for DM with railroading tendencies.
You first need to observe enough to figure out what choices were made during the session and ‘butterfly-effect’ them into the next play sessions.
Things like reputation are easy to implement. Religion-based characters can have dreams, nightmares or visions related to the actions taken (a classic).
You might have a faction of creatures that no one knew about pissed off that someone trespassed on their land give trouble to a nearby village.
If you think of your campaign as a living, breathing world in which the heroes are the proverbial “center of the universe”, pretty awesome things can come out of simple situations.
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I think publishers discourage such things in published adventures, but offering players alternative paths through the dungeon or storyline that have real differences is another good way to give them meaningful decisions. Ideally, the players know, or at least have good hints about, what they are choosing between, too.
@Linnaeus: I don’t know if it is actually discouraged by the publishers or if its just the nature of the beast.
I haven’t used much published adventures – the one at the end of the DMG is the first one I used and I’ll most likely be running my adult players through the first one in Forgotten Realms. I’ve always improved everything on the spot.
I think I remember the DMG actually encouraging such use of published adventures – modify it heavily to fit your campaign world.
I always assumed it included “add world-changing consequences”.
I have already modified the adventure at the end of the DMG almost beyond recognition… and I expect (hope) to do the same with the one from Forgotten Realms…
Eric Maziades last blog post..Playing a zombie character
@Eric Nature of the beast how? It’s not that hard to design a non-linear dungeon.
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@Linnaeus I was referring “choices that affect the story”. I never would expect a published adventure to have unlimited options or an effect on the world outside of the adventure itself – which are both things that, to me, make DnD awesome!
Non-linear dungeons can indeed (and should, in my opinion) indeed be done! I suppose that the path picked through a dungeon could have a non-trivial impact on storyline… I never really thought about it that way…
Eric Maziades last blog post..Playing a zombie character
Narnia is an interesting choice of example.
The original books are very heavy christian, (Azlan = Jesus / Narnia = Heaven). The author wrote the character’s choices – Edward chooses Turkish delight / dark side / evil; Lucy and the others choose good, rescuing Azlan etc etc.
But they aren’t real choices, the story is set up and the characters developed explicitly so that the author enjoy his christian analogy.
As you note, GMs do this. Writing a plot that forces the characters into whatever analogy / film rip-off the GM is interested in.
But how as a GM do you fulfill your desire for an epic plot whilst allowing the players to make choices that might ruin your complete campaign?
The secret is small choices.
Lots of work on stress, especially in workplace stress, shows that even having a small amount of control over your environment greatly relieves stress. Your job may be crappy but as long as you can open the window when you want, you will be happy.
Players need to be able to make choices about the world their character lives in even if they are very small choices. The more the GM forces characters down a particular route, the greater the need for some choices somewhere in the game.
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@Chris: While I had read about the Christian fable behind the Chronicles, I didn ‘t want to broach the subject as I never read them.
When GMs do this, I think its because they want to implement what they consider ‘Cool’ in a given game. Its often related to depth of Story or ‘capturing that feel’ of a given source the GM is borrowing from.
Except that such elements should focus as background elements and as tools for players… not as Center stage pieces that the players aren’t allowed to touch for fear of breaking things.
Heck just look at the current thread of the Darth and Droids webcomic… this is pure ‘GMsturbation’ of the kind I don’t really appreciate.