(Crosspost from Amagi)Players declare actions for their characters all the time, stating that their character is doing this thing or that one. It’s fun to say yes. Saying yes, telling them that things happen as envisioned, giving them what they’re looking for, all keep energy up and running. When you can say yes without losing anything of value to the game, it’s a good thing to say.
SOMETIMES, “YES” IS ENOUGH.Minor details, actions that just ‘fill in the backdrop’ and are meant to move the characters on to the good stuff? These aren’t the places to engage; these are ‘yes’ moments, and nothing more. The player wants to use their street lore to find a seedy bar where a fence hangs out? Yes. Move on, go, go, go.
SOMETIMES, IT’S NOT.Let’s say that you have the world’s greatest swordfighter kicking around in your group. There will be swordfights. He will win them; most of them, without even breaking a sweat. You can say yes, all the time, but in this case, “yes” isn’t enough. The character has gone right past the question “Will you succeed?” and into territory that requires other issues to remain interesting. So here are a few of those:
• Rampant Confusion: Having the ability to throw a punch that can knock down a building leads inevitably to the question of what happens next when buildings actually get knocked down during fights, and of the character that can’t lose a straight fight being challenged not to win, but to either avoid dealing with incredible property damage, or face the problems that go with it.
• Moral Choices: The greatest swordsman in the world can easily disarm his foes, hold them at bay for hours, choose not to kill, turn them in to the law. Making this obvious to the player, and later, making it obvious to everyone that watches him fight, makes for an entirely different question from “can you beat them”.
• Showmanship And Spillover: A superb poet at court, engaged in a contest of performance, might well be assured of victory. By changing the question from whether or not they are going to win, to what they are using the contest as a platform to do, things change. If they choose to lampoon the king with their exquisite verse, or reveal the peccadilloes of the Captain of the Guard’s wife, or praise the virtues of a specific lady, things get more interesting - and it’s sometimes true that the player won’t even consider such possibilities unless you make a point of changing the context away from “do you win”?
• Famous And Drafted!: The highly skilled and the very best are often praised for their abilities, raising expectations, and potentially leading to odd repercussions. When the best gunfighter around starts getting challenges from fifteen-year-old wannabees, there are some decisions to be made. When the king decides that only you are capable of defeating the evil overlord of the north, and decides to ungraciously demand your service, likewise.
YOU’RE NOT ALWAYS THE BESTThe examples above are made especially clear by describing the characters involved as astonishingly skilled, the very best at what they do. Even so, the characters are often skilled enough that the same principle can be applied. Sometimes, victory simply isn’t interesting, but the other stuff that might or might not come along with that victory is.
CHALLENGES OR CHOICES?All of the ways of changing a ‘simple win’ into something more engaging do so either by presenting an opportunity to make a choice that comes out from success, or by creating yet another, more difficult challenge layered on top of the apparently simple one. It’s possible to get ‘stuck’ in some of these situations, trying to figure out when to emphasize the challenge, adding the complications right in as part of dice-and-numbers resolution, and when to emphasize the choices, dropping hefty roleplaying right onto the players.
The way to determine whether to layer on more rules, or simply hit the player with a decision, is often best made not by following some special formula, but by looking at your players and figuring out which way would be most interesting to the group and the playing style to date. If the players were utterly engaged by combats until they got so big that the combat started to get weak? Layer it up - make it so the challenge isn’t killing the goblins, but keeping someone important to them but vulnerable safe from harm; their artifex, their fence, the inside man they’ve been paid to extract; keep the fights rolling, with added difficulties and confusions. If, on the other hand, the fights were never really the big thing, and the players aren’t especially engaged by tossing the dice around? Drop dilemmas in their laps, decisions only they can really make because in the place, at the time in question, they’re the ones that have the capacity to decide.
THIS BARELY SCRATCHES THE SURFACEThis article is only the barest hint at some of the interesting ways to approach these kinds of situations. The basic point to be made here is that “saying yes” to an action is by no means needs to be the end of resolving something. In many cases, it’s just the beginning.
SO, MY QUESTIONS- Do you think this article is broadly correct?
- What are other good kinds of broad 'follow-up' to 'yes'; I hit the four that I could think up as I wrote, but I know there are planty more I didn't think of.
- How do you know when to just "say yes" and move on, when to engage with choices, when to hit with challenges? Is your method anything like mine?
(Note: This Article is Public Domain. No Rights Reserved.)