Infinite Adventures

Kyrinn S. Eis tried post­ing a com­ment to my post, Vari­a­tions. That didn’t work for some rea­son, so she posted it to my share of Vari­a­tions on Google+. Since not all of you go to G+ here is her com­ment in full.

Ex­cep­tions aside, I think that one can think of the D&D style games as be­ing very char­ac­ter-cen­tric, and so, the game’s pri­mary rules fo­cus is on the one thing that can make the char­ac­ter dead, namely, com­bat. Every­thing else has vary­ing de­grees of fo­cus and page weight given to it, but the char­ac­ter-end­ing com­bat sec­tion is there to in­form the player what it means to en­gage the char­ac­ter in com­bat, or even what it means for the rogue or mage to be caught with­out de­fences. One can, and in fact, the New School does, write a game fo­cused on any­thing else that is im­por­tant to the tone and style the de­signer has in mind, but when it comes to the uni­ver­sal lan­guage of peril and es­cape or even tri­umph, com­bat rules mat­ter most. The GM and Play­ers can be trusted to work every­thing else out to their sat­is­fac­tion.

I can’t en­tirely agree with her. How an RPG is han­dled de­pends greatly on the de­signer and writer. Some do play at pre­sent­ing their work as in­volv­ing role play­ing, but as you read through their prose it be­comes ev­i­dent their minds are ac­tu­ally on some­thing quite else, most of­ten on fic­tional blood­shed and imag­i­nary trea­sure. For the most part peo­ple tend to leave cer­tain mat­ters aside, with the ex­cep­tion of those such as Bill Stod­dard, au­thor of GURPS Fan­tasy and other works. Bill has other GURPS sup­ple­ments avail­able, among them guide­li­nes on han­dling so­cial en­coun­ters, which can be eas­ily adapted to other RPGs.

To sum up, there are al­ter­na­tives. Nor can I agree that fight­ing is the most ex­cit­ing thing you could do in an RPG. Com­bat in an RPG is more of­ten like a car chase in an ac­tion movie, in­serted to waste time and to give the GM an op­por­tu­nity to avoid think­ing. In the hands of a lack­lus­ter GM it can get bor­ing.

It re­ally comes down to a mat­ter of how the mat­ter is pre­sented, and all too many GMs are hes­i­tant to put any ef­fort into their per­for­mance. They get em­bar­rassed and as a re­sult act dull and life­less. Adults are re­served and dig­ni­fied.

And no­body ever goes nuts at a foot­ball game, ei­ther fla­vor.

My point it, there’s more to do in an RPG than just kill peo­ple and take their stuff. Some­times there’s bam­boo­zle peo­ple and take their stuff, but that can ac­tu­ally in­volve work.

Now Ms. Eis is right in that com­bat can be a chal­lenge, but not all the time, and it’s not the only chal­lenge the play­ers can face as they play their roles. As an ex­am­ple, you have the Bre­men Town Mu­si­cians en­coun­ter for AD&D2 — one of a deck of en­coun­ter cards for 2e. In the AD&D ver­sion four gob­lins take the place of the farm an­i­mals in the orig­i­nal story. To keep this short, the gob­lins have be­come mu­si­cians — good ones in fact, and they are now look­ing for peo­ple to act as their body­guards as they roam from town look­ing for places to play. There is the po­ten­tial for com­bat here, but not nec­es­sar­ily when the play­ers meet the gob­lins, and not of the po­ten­tial com­bats need end in com­bat.

It all de­pends on how you want to han­dle the sit­u­a­tion, or any of the fol­low­ing sit­u­a­tions. This type of sit­u­a­tion ap­plies to other en­coun­ters, and it’s very much up to you how you deal with it. But fight­ing needn’t be the only way to han­dle it, or the most ex­cit­ing.

As to Kyrinn’s first point, it is my ob­ser­va­tion is that it is how we make a ses­sion of any RPG char­ac­ter cen­tered. For it is the duty of the GM to fo­cus on his play­ers and the parts they play.