ars ludi

The important thing in strategy is to suppress the enemy’s useful actions but allow his useless actions.

–A Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi

Flip it and you’ve got a game design maxim: make rules that block useless actions but do not block useful actions. Structure and rules can create order and set a baseline for good contributions but the danger is going too far and suppressing creative gold.

What happens if you do block the magic? Players will be annoyed. Or they will ignore your rules and do what they want. Often both.

Design craves to predict play but creative play is inherently unpredictable. It’s an uncomfortable situation.

The important thing in strategy is to suppress the enemy’s useful actions but allow his useless actions.

– A Book of Five Rings (The Fire Book), Miyamoto Musashi

The diametric opposite of role-playing game design. Informatively so.

Game design acid test: if your rules block ideas the players want and you don’t have an excellent reason for it, you’ve got a design problem. Players will work around it, because players are smart and adaptive, but now they’re fighting your game. Design fail.

And then you say “But you wrote Microscope?!? It restricts player contributions all the time! And I had a great idea I couldn’t use!” And I say yes, it gives huge creative power to different people at different times for very specific and fruitful reasons. Your restriction is another player’s field day.

After West Marches I ran a long-term superhero game, New Century City. Unlike West Marches it followed the more traditional “the GM creates a situation and the players have fun with it” model, which was fitting because superhero games are one of the most reactive genres you can play: villains hatch schemes, heroes react to stop them and re-establish the status quo.

Also unlike West Marches, the game was plot-heavy. Absolutely thick with plot. There was a big, over-arching thread that ran through the whole thing (Worlds In Collision), a bunch of individual threads that were part of that main arc (Queen of the Jungle, Emerald of Aktios, I am Maximus) as well as assorted unrelated adventure arcs (the lives and deaths of Dr. Null, the Echelon conspiracy). Then there were individual “rise & fall” character arcs for NPCs (Can we cure the Man-Beast? Is Nighthawk a villain or an undercover hero?). And then on top of all that, there were multiple personal threads for every player character (Captain Danger’s relationship with her sister, Moon Man finding out what really happened to him in those missing decades in space, the secret origin of the Eclipse, the dating life of the Eclipse, and so on, and so on).

In keeping with the comic book style, I wanted every session to be a self-contained episode with it’s own arc, complete with an episode title announced at the start of the game. So if you played any one game, it would be a complete adventure (or part of a few session mini-series at most). No bridging sessions, no filler sessions.

But coming right off of West Marches we had a big pool of great players. We wanted to keep playing with everyone, but ten people at the table is way too crowded for anything close to meaningful roleplaying. So again I opted for the mixed roster method: we’d float a date and see who could play, keeping each game at about 3-5 players.

We rarely had the same combination of players at two sessions in a row, which was great for the stand-alone episode part but a potential nightmare for plot threads. Each player is only seeing a fraction of the sessions, so how do you make sure what they’re seeing makes any sense? You say, “surprise! Nighthawk is really a good guy after all” and the players at this session look at you and say, “uh, who’s Nighthawk?” because they’ve never been in a game with him before, or they missed the last bit that set up this bit. Oops.

The cheap answer is to just let the players sort it out. Confused why that guy did that thing? Maybe you better chat with the other players if you want to keep up. While that was glorious in West Marches, where the whole theme was sandbox exploration, it seemed completely inappropriate in a character-centric game like this. The superheroes are the center of the story, the axis around which the plot wheel turns. Just hitting a player with plot X because I wanted to advance that plot and they happened to be there seemed aesthetically tragic.

So I took the harder approach: customizing every single session so it was lovingly hand-crafted to the characters that would be there. And advanced the plots. And made sense.

To keep track of all that, to understand the perspective of each character and figure out what plots they were involved in, I need a tool. I needed a plot grid.

The grid was a list of every important thing I wanted to put in the game: plots, events, episodes, characters, scenes, revelations, the works.

Every single item had its own line on the grid. Every revelation, every confrontation, every snippet that I thought needed to come out had its own line (Captain Danger’s sister has powers too! Felicity is really Cathy Grant!). Every thing that needed to come back in response to something that happened in the game had its own line (Maelstrom attacked those army choppers so the Feds are going to come after him, Captain Danger doesn’t know she has that thing in her jacket pocket). Every idea for a random situation, flashy encounter, or set piece had a line (Speed Demon tries to set a record for banks robbed in a day, a sorcerer transforms part of downtown to ancient Aegypt). It all went into the big hopper.

To the right I made columns for every single player character in the game (24+ characters). For each line I would mark the box to show how relevant each item was to that character, how important it was to have that character there when that thing happened.

Characters were marked essential if they had to be there (I can’t reveal the thing about Felicity being Cathy Grant without both Captain Danger and Guardian being there), or marked optional if they had some previous contact with this thread or had shown curiosity but weren’t required (Eclipse and the Shadow would be interested to find out the truth about Mr. Midnight’s background, but it’s only essential to Moon Man since their origins are secretly intertwined). For other characters that line was blank, meaning there was no special connection that character. Some lines had no marks at all, meaning they weren’t attached to anyone in particular, and I could use them whenever I wanted — a lot of generic “action” encounters were this way.

So let’s say we’ve scheduled a game, and I’ve found out who can play and which of their characters they want to play. I take my big grid, and sort the lines so that all the items important to those particular characters will pop to the top. That’s my starting point for brainstorming what to put in the episode. I mix and match, see what goes together and what emerges. Ideally something jumps out as the main plot for the session: some items are big and clearly need to be the centerpiece of an episode, others are just supporting encounters or scenes (it was a personal rule that each episode had a strong core concept, not just a mix of “this week on…” but that’s just me).

Sometimes the unexpected combinations of characters led to surprising but cool plot cross-overs. I didn’t foresee Dr. Daedalus returning with Moon Man to ancient Atlantis because he was only peripherally attached to that thread, but because his player was available and others weren’t that’s what happened and it turned out to be a perfect match. If you asked the players they would probably guess I planned it.

It was also nice because I could be flexible and follow my whims. I could let threads simmer for ten, twenty games without being afraid that I would lose track of them. I didn’t have to keep the game on tight rails.

There’s a counter-intuitive side effect: the less you play, the more the game is about you when you do play.

Yes, crazy, I know. But if there’s a plot that requires you (and just about everyone in the superhero game had a background or origin plot — the genre demands it), then the less you play, the fewer opportunities there are to move that plot. So if you’re going to be in a game, I’m more likely to push that thread up the stack. Guardian is showing up for a game? Gotta move that “Trials of Torvok” plot while I have the chance! Dr. Daedalus is in? Time for the “Armor Wars.”

Suffice to say, players did not mind this one bit. The less frequent players got the spotlight, and the more frequent players didn’t mind because they already had the spotlight in a lot of games.

As the game went on I added more and more columns to track things like the scale of the adventure (saving the world, saving the city, back alley brawling) or the style of the game (investigation, slugfest, personal issues), so I could sort and scan and see what kinds of games we’d had, and even break down what kind of games each individual player had been in (yeah, Mike hadn’t played in the last six games, but I don’t necessary want the next game he plays in be just like the game he played two months ago).

I had columns for all the major plot arcs, so I could mark which plot each item belonged to. I could track how long it had been (either in-game or real days) since a particular thread had moved. I could flag items as “important, do it soon!” or “maybe.”

As items got used, I put the episode number in the far left column: that thing had happened, so it was cemented in place. I’d change the boxes to checks to show which characters were in that episode, editing the description to reflect what actually happened, morphing my adventure seeds neatly into game records.

If you’re wondering how extensively this method was tested, or if you’re wondering if it was overkill, I used it for 119 New Century City games, with nine players running 24 different characters (after factoring out anyone who played fewer than ten games). There were an average of 3.4 players per game, plus GM. Yep, once again the average player only sees about a third of the games.

And no, I don’t think you have to run such a big game to make it worthwhile. It’s potentially a useful technique for any sized game.

Human beings crave cause and effect. When something goes wrong, we try to understand what happened so the same thing doesn’t happen again. It’s a good survival tactic.

Taken too far, it means we look for explanations for even the most random events. We don’t want to live in a universe where bad things happen for no reason, so we look for someone to be the reason.

We look for someone to blame.

The Blame Game plugin promotes tension and hostility between characters. You can use it for deadly serious “frag the lieutenant” military scenarios or something much more light and comical. Either way the structure promotes roleplaying because it forces you to forge opinions — bad opinions — about the other characters.

This system was originally developed for project hicks aka Nuke ‘Em From Orbit, now retired. We tried this mechanic and it was super-fun, if by super-fun you mean it got the characters at each others’ throats in minutes flat.

A team runs on trust. What happens if you don’t trust your teammates? You don’t rely on them. You aren’t sure they’ll do their job, and if that could result in something that could screw you (and it always does) you’ll spend time worrying at what they are doing instead of doing _your_ job. That makes a breakdown in trust contagious: you don’t trust Sawyer, so you are glancing at his fire zone when you should be watching yours. Griff notices that you aren’t watching your zone when you should, so he stops trusting you and starts worrying about your zone too. Soon the whole thing goes to hell in a hand basket.

To rely on someone you have to trust both loyalty (“Cole would never leave me behind”) and competence (“Cole knows what he is doing, he can take care of the bugs on his end”). It doesn’t do any good to know a guy is a deadly fighting machine if he would leave you hanging out to dry to save his own skin, and your best friend since childhood will only keep you company while you’re getting eaten if he can’t figure out how to switch off the safety on his assault rifle.

When bad things happen to the team, each character is burdened with a certain amount of “blame” they must lay on someone to explain to themselves why things went wrong. The bugs got the drop on us, and I think Marcus should have been paying more attention to his zone so I lay my blame on him.

Blame can be rational and based on facts (Marcus wrecked the transport, so naturally you think he’s incompetent) or it can be totally irrational (you weren’t there when the bugs ate Luther, but Marcus wouldn’t shut up this morning about what a bad idea this mission was, so you think he jinxed it and got Luther killed). It’s totally up to the player.

Blame Is Personal — A person may be trusted differently by different people. You think Cole is a slacker, so you don’t trust him, but Sawyer thinks he’s fine. Even two people witnessing the same events may come to entirely differently conclusions of whether someone should be blamed.

Blame Is Belief — An imaginary problem does as much damage to trust as a real problem. If I think you aren’t watching your corner, it doesn’t matter how on the ball you really are, I stop trusting you. If I think you are hiding a cowardly streak or you’re about to lose it, it doesn’t matter if you would really lay down your life for me, I stop trusting you.

When something goes wrong, each member of the team acquires an equal amount of blame they need to put on someone else. The worse things go, the more blame everyone gets:

everything goes according to plan — 0 blame
something goes wrong or someone gets hurt — 1 blame
someone gets killed — 2 blame
massive failure, catastrophic defeat, lots of deaths — 3 blame or more

You can scale these values up or down based on how quickly you want things to fall apart.

Write down all the other characters’ names side by side on your sheet. When you blame someone you establish a new (worse) opinion of them — you distrust them more. For every point of blame, come up with a one or two word description of the person you are blaming, like “loser”, “slacker”, or “incompetent.” Write that description beneath the person’s name on your character sheet, putting each new description below the previous ones.

Each new description has to be worse than the previous one.

You might start off with:

KELSO
thinks too much

After a few more bad encounters and laying more blame it might read:

KELSO
thinks too much
hesitates
unreliable
coward

If some missions go well and you start to trust Kelso a little more, you may erase “coward” and just think Kelso is unreliable.

Key point: you have to blame another player character on the team. You can’t pick an NPC or “the Brass.” Maybe you blame them too, but we’re not interested in that right now.

After an action sequence results in blame, play through these steps:

1) Each player gives a brief out-of-character summary of who they want to lay their blame on and why. They may base it on things that were already established to have happened during the action, or they can put forward details that they think fit. It may also be that a character just thinks something happened in a certain way. At this point no one should revise their plans based on what anyone else says. Don’t worry too much at this point about what actually did happen — that’ll get sorted out next.

2) Roleplay the interactions. Usually this involves insults, yelling, and recriminations. The flow of conversation and counter-accusations may lead players to change who they blame. There is no rule that your character has to openly say who you are blaming or why, but even sullen resentment should be played out somehow. More is better.

3) Final decision. Players may choose to revise who they want to blame based on the roleplaying scene, then everyone writes down their final blame. No negotiation or discussion at this point — just decide, write it down and then tell everyone what you wrote.

After an ambush goes bad and a trooper gets killed, everybody gets saddled with a point of Blame. Spruce’s player declares he’s blaming Wallace for not being alert, and Taylor’s player jumps on the bandwagon to blame Wallace too. Wallace’s player decides to blame Taylor for messing up the demolitions used in the fight, even though there was nothing rolled that indicated the demolitions were a problem — maybe it happened that way, maybe it didn’t. Truth is subjective.

Taylor: “Wallace man, you screwed up!”

Spruce: “Yeah, Wallace if you’d been watching your zone Sammy wouldn’t have gotten killed. Sammy! I’ll miss you buddy!”

Wallace: “I was watching my zone! It was Taylor who set off the mines too soon and screwed the ambush! They were all over us!”

Taylor: “Me? That detonator pack was fried! Spruce was supposed to check it this morning!”

Spruce: “That’s bullshit man! It was good when I checked it! You’re so full of crap!”

After roleplaying is over, Taylor changes his mind and blames Spruce (fucking slacker). Spruce also changes his mind and blames Taylor (the lying bastard). Wallace could still blame Taylor as he planned, but the roleplaying might sway him to blame Spruce instead.

Is any of this true? Did Spruce mess up prepping the demo packs? If it is not a detail that came out during the action we may not know.

What we do know is that if a player lays blame, they are saying their character believes that person is to blame for what happened, right or wrong.

Other players may say your character did things that you don’t think your character would ever do. My character would never fall asleep on guard duty!

If that’s what you think, say so! Have your character call bullshit on them. Another player saying something happened doesn’t make it so. On the other hand when players make accusations that do fit your character, well maybe it really did happen that way. You can still deny everything (at least to start with), but maybe your protests ring a little hollow.

With all this talk about who you trust and who you rely on, it may seem strange that there are no rules for showing that you trust someone more than usual, like that blood brother you’ve served twelve tours with and who you’d lay down your life for in a heartbeat.

If you want to show you really, really trust someone and nothing can make you doubt them, just don’t lay any Blame on them. Go ahead. Even if they obviously screw up, just blame someone else.

The full rules included things like blaming yourself, suppressing blame and potentially cracking up over it, changing your mind and shifting blame to other people, heroic catharsis, Sarge keeping a lid on things, and so on, but this is this is all you need to use it in a game.

You’re probably also wondering, what mechanical effect does all this have? Do I get negatives if I team up with someone I distrust? What’s the deal?

And the answer is: zero mechanical effect. None. Which makes it a great plugin.

It works because the secret ingredient is human nature. If I sit across the table and discuss how my character thinks your character is a coward and liar, I am pretty likely to roleplay that way even if nothing in the rules makes me do it. Likewise if I call your character a clueless screw-up, you are likely to have your character take it personally. You are going to react to the insult.

I’m a big believer in non-binding game mechanics, meaning rules that trust the players have good intentions and will play well (or at least interestingly), rather than distrusting the players and mechanically forcing them to obey. Maybe I’m so sick of your guy that I leave him behind for the bugs to munch on when the chips are down. Or maybe I say screw it and throw myself into the fire to save him because I just can’t leave a brother-in-arms behind. It’s up to the players to play their characters.

Try it out. It’s a very short hop to total team breakdown.

“You are members of a shadowy government conspiracy to assassinate the President and derail the proceedings to have the US join the League of Allied Nations. To do this you have tracked down and taken control of an experimental weapon created by a secret government project.”

– excerpt from the conspirators’ handout

During my New Century City superhero campaign (the one that spawned all the M&M adventures), one of the subplots was that a main PC, the rookie hero Eclipse, didn’t know his origin. He was raised by foster parents, but had vague hints that his real parents were scientists that had given him his powers (with science!) before some disaster had taken their lives yadda yadda yadda. I know — crazy superhero stuff.

So we’re about 40 games into the campaign, and I decide to run a showcase episode “Origin of the Eclipse” to explore the secrets of his past. At least that’s what I say I’m doing…

We start off with all the usual shticks. Suspicious people turn up who seem to be either trying to warn Eclipse or find out what he knows, there are old photos of people who seem eerily familiar, incomplete files of ominous portent, allusions to secret projects better left buried — all the standard build-up as we warm up the mystery.

There a few are close scrapes and a bad encounter with knock-out gas, until finally Eclipse corners one of the guys who seems to know a lot but dreads saying anything useful (“you’re better off not knowing! leave the past alone!”). And this guy looks very afraid of Eclipse, which is strange, because Eclipse is a lovable hero. Just then Eclipse spots a sniper on a nearby roof and heroically leaps to shield the guy. Bang! Eclipse gets shot (did I mention his powers did not include being bullet proof?) but when he looks down instead of blood he sees sparks and broken circuitry. The guy he just saved is looking at him in horror, saying “oh my god, it’s true! You’re not human. You’re a robot!”

And then Eclipse blacks out. End game session: to be continued.

Woo, surprise! You’re not what you think you are!

But that’s not the experimental part.

As the game is breaking up I have a quick huddle with Eclipse’s player and admit that no, of course Eclipse really isn’t a robot, just wait and see what happens. Because it’s his character, right? I’m really not trying to jerk him around or leave him hanging. But I tell him to keep it under his hat and I don’t tell any of the other players, so on the email list there are all these “holy crap, Eclipse is a robot?!?” messages flying around, because it is a pretty surprising twist.

So the next game session (Origin of the Eclipse, part 2) we have this NormalVision/VillainVision scene where the other players (who are running their own superheroes most of the game) play the NPC spies/conspirators who’ve now captured robot-Eclipse and are reprogramming him to follow their orders and carry out a scheme to assassinate the president. [Technically it's only sort of NormalVision, since the NV players are in the scene with a normal PC.]

I send Eclipse’s player out of the room to brief the other players on their roles as the conspirators. I give them a background handout outlining their whole plan, how they need to handle the robot-Eclipse and get him to relinquish his delusions of humanity, the works. They’re even told how they’ve opened an access panel on Eclipse and attached leads to monitor his functions, and how if he gets uppity they can override him with a particular command phrase.

But here’s the thing: as I already said, Eclipse really isn’t a robot. Early in the last game when Eclipse got knocked out by gas, the conspirators really captured him and hypnotized him. They gave him a post-hypnotic suggestion, so he would think he was seeing cybernetic parts in his body and think he was a robot. The sniper shot blanks, and the rest was a hallucination. The conspirators are just brain-washing him to think he’s a robot so he’ll carry out their nefarious plan without his morals getting in the way. They’re just pretending to attach leads and monitor his “electronic brain” and all that stuff.

The conspirator NPCs of course know all that, but I intentionally don’t tell the players running them in this scene. So now everything in the scene is backwards:

- Eclipse’s player is running a character who thinks he is a robot, but the player knows that’s not true (player knows the truth, character doesn’t)

- The other players are playing characters who are pretending that Eclipse is a robot to trick him, but the players think it’s for real (characters know the truth, players don’t)

It’s crazy backwards metagaming, players having less knowledge than the characters.

They play it all out, with the conspirators pushing Eclipse to stop pretending to be a person, and Eclipse doing a reticent “yes– masters–” bit. Then just a few scenes later the players (now back playing their normal superheroes) uncover the conspiracy, find out about the brainwashing attempt, and realize they have to find and stop Eclipse. Mystery over.

The question is, who was that scene for anyway? Sure all that inversion of player/character knowledge is interesting and experimental, but what purpose did it serve?

The more obvious reason is that a good story needs to come out one piece at a time. You have to absorb and accept each moment before the next twist comes along and changes everything. If you just summarized what happened or skipped to the end (“Eclipse was brainwashed to think he was a robot and assassinate the president, now we have to stop him”) it’s all at arms length. It’s not interesting. But if you live through all the twists and turns you get sucked in (q.v. Revelations).

The other players were surprised to find out Eclipse was a robot, and later when they find out it was a trick they get to say holy crap all over again. They really “get” the experience of Eclipse thinking he’s a robot, because they’re in the scene doing it, rather than just hearing about it later. They’re participating in the plot, not just watching it. That’s part of why it’s _a game_ not a story.

Which leads us to the other more slippery reason, which is that this whole metagaming flip actually makes the conspirator players stand in as surrogate-victims. By tricking those other players into believing the lies their own (temporary) characters are telling, those players are taking the place of Eclipse’s player as the ones getting deceived. We get the suspense and impact of a player character turning out to be some kind of monster, but the player who actually cares (Eclipse’s player) isn’t left hanging by it because he already knows it’s all fake. See, I told you it was slippery.

Attentive readers will jump up and down and shout that in a previous article I said something along the lines of “it is forbidden to interfere with the flow of information between the character and the player. You can never say ‘yes, your character knew that all along, but I didn’t tell you.’” But I’d remind the gentle reader that I also said, hell yes you can, just recognize that you are playing with dynamite and breaking all the rules.

This game was definitely a special case, since the players were controlling NPCs, not their normal characters. I took pretty good care to make sure the people with real investment (Eclipse’s player in this case) were not usurped — that was really the whole point.

And that’s the take-home lesson. If there’s ownership and investment, respect it and think about what you’re doing, but if there isn’t, well knock yourself out. You can get away with crazy stuff in a one-shot game that you couldn’t in a long campaign, but of course the flip side is that if you did it in a long campaign it is potentially much more meaningful. But dangerous.

What happened to poor not-really-a-robot Eclipse? When the dust settled, he knew nothing more about his origin than he did at the start — the clues the conspirators left in his path were just fabrications to throw him off balance and make him vulnerable to their suggestions. Luckily he also failed to assassinate the President — but not for lack of trying — and the heroes found out that in a world with superheroes and supervillains, the Secret Service is not to be trifled with, because you can’t outrun telepaths.

(continued from part 1, of course)

We’re told that the premise of the scenario is that our two teams have boarded an abandoned freighter and are vying to gain control. The goal is simple: wipe out the other team and you win. Theoretically this is only the first scenario and we may play through others if we have the time. As it turns out there will be no time for more scenarios: this one combat will consume the entire game session.

I don’t waste any time establishing that my character is a smart-ass. There’s an equipment draw, the caveat being that there is only one of each thing on the list — if someone already picked it, you can’t have it. Instead of taking the items that were obviously meant for my character (like the big dwarven hammer), I grab things that are essential to people on the other team. The samurai wants the one (foam) katana, so naturally I take it instead. Then I make light sabre noises while I wave it around mockingly. Of course I have zero ability with a katana, but as a player I am trying to start breaking down the simulation and kick start the feuding and the fighting. Forget the scenario: the samurai now wants to find me and kick my ass.

For good measure I provoke everyone else too: as a dwarf I have lowlight vision (or whatever they call it in Shadowrun) so of course I use every miscellaneous draw I have to snatch up all the nightvision/infrared goggles… which of course I don’t need. Now I’ve cornered the market on seeing in the dark. My neck is gleefully festooned with unused goggles and (hopefully) I’ve made myself public enemy number 1.

Big ship floor plans are laid out on the game table and our two teams are placed at different starting points. Theoretically we don’t know where the other team is and we don’t have a map of the place (even though we can see the whole thing) so there is substantial metagaming required to block out all this information. It’s something of a moot point because (surprisingly) the teams start out right next to each other and both have surprisingly good means of finding each other (either magical life detection, or super senses, or just listening carefully for footsteps).

Again I’m thinking: clever! By showing us the whole map and letting us metagame, the GM is diffusing the tactical element and making it easy for us to manipulate events. We can split up and “accidentally” bump into people if we want, setting up interactions with particular characters we might want to face off against.

Of course none of that happens. The two teams collide almost immediately, get locked in a brutal slugfest in a small room. Most of the characters never leave that room for the rest of the game. It’s a long, long point-blank gun fight across a conference room table. With fake guns.

Remember when you first started gaming? Someone said, okay we have these imaginary characters in this imaginary world and they’re going to slay imaginary monsters and collect imaginary treasure. And you might have thought to yourself, why would I care what happens to an imaginary hero? Who cares if I jump into the imaginary dragon’s mouth or kill all the other imaginary characters in their sleep and take their imaginary treasure. None of it’s real, right?

This is the first critical step of learning to game: agreeing that the fate of all these imaginary people means anything. Agreeing to treat the whole imaginary sequence of events as being in any way important. Buying in and respecting the fiction.

It’s a crucial skill, but in a game like the Battle of Chuck E. Cheese it can be your worst enemy.

The fight breaks out, and bang bang bang, it’s shadowrunner versus shadowrunner. Katanas slash, monofilament whips slice, and guns blaze… except of course, they don’t.

It’s all fake remember? Our characters are running around in a maze of rooms, but we’re shooting “lazer tag” guns and hitting each other with foam boffer weapons. The terrifying monofilament whip is perhaps a bit of string. Damage was indicated by a wrist gadget with colored bars. You had ten slots and each lit up as you took more damage. When it hit ten you were “dead”, which meant (by the rules) your character was supposed to stand still and refrain from talking.

And here lies the rub. Players at a game table are trained over and over again to look at little figures on a board and roll dice and imagine they are fighting for their lives. Then the Battle of Chuck E. Cheese comes along and says “your imaginary character isn’t taking pretend damage this time, he’s pretending to take pretend damage.”

Intellectually that’s easy to grasp. Reading this description, you get it. But at the table, in the moment, that distinction got lost over and over and over again. Everyone forgot it was a game about a fake fight and acted like it was just a game about a fight, just like every other game. Their training took over.

It didn’t help that we used the exact same combat rules as normal Shadowrun. There’s a lot of dice rolling, a lot of calculating results and figuring out damage thresholds and all that crunch puts the focus back on the details of the combat even though there isn’t really a combat going on.

“Oh man, that explosion is going to wipe you guys out!” But wait, I say, it’s not an explosion, it’s just a flashbulb going off or something like that right? “Uh, yeah sure. But look at the Shadowrun rules for explosions inside enclosed spaces! The shock waves will bounce off the walls and do damage again!” But there are no shock waves, there is no explosion, right?

We even used the penalties caused by being wounded: you get shot by a faux lazer tag Uzi, take a big hit on your damage badge, but because the Shadowrun rules say wounded people take penalties you now have a harder time doing things like climbing up ladders. Which of course makes no sense — you’re not wounded, you’re fine.

So when a shadowrunner popped up and strafed someone with a (fake) smartgun and then rolled massive damage, the reaction wasn’t “well ha, ha the damage is fake so I don’t care.” Because of the wound penalties the imaginary damage wasn’t really imaginary at all. It really did impair you. So your urge is to react like it’s a real fight, because it is, sort of.

Add to that a very basic psychological factor: if you are getting spanked by mechanics, you want to hit back. When another player spends five minutes rolling dice to heap damage on you (and yes, resolving a single attack took a pretty healthy chunk of time) you want to show that your character is just as effective and smack them back with the mechanics. But it’s another trap: you get sucked back into believing in the fake fight. You play you character fighting for his/her life, instead of playing your character running around pretending to be in a fight.

Something I do quite a bit in games is make suggestions in-character that as a player I don’t want to have happen, and then let the other characters talk me out of it.

I have my shady mercenary grumble about how we could forget protecting the village from the bandits and just slink off with our reward money. Why? Because that gives other more noble characters an opportunity to speechify about goodness and the sanctity of human life. No, I (the player) don’t want to slink off. I (the player) want to spur roleplaying. I’m passing them the ball, providing contrast so the other players can show off their virtues. I’m providing a straw man for the other players to beat on.

Where it goes horribly awry is when the other players (or even the GM) don’t get it. You can stop play and say straight to someone’s face “no, I don’t really want to do that, I’m having my character say this because you are going to talk me out of it and it will lead to an interesting roleplaying interaction” yet some people will still look at you like you have two heads. They think you are doing the “why would my druid leave the woods?” slavish roleplaying thing, blocking the game because it’s against your character.

Which is what happens in the Battle of Chuck E. Cheese. I play devil’s advocate and have my smart-ass dwarf prattle on about how we could just find a quiet room and hide and take a nap, wait the whole thing out — we get paid either way, right? Naturally I (the player) don’t want to do that because it would be incredibly boring, but I want to provoke a discussion of why we would or wouldn’t do that and underline that this whole thing isn’t real. Get that roleplaying started, I figure.

It doesn’t fly. Not even a little.

I think I’m embracing the premise and mocking the suits from Chuck E. Cheese.

The other players think I’m rejecting the premise and mocking the GM.

Once again this is a good habit that has gone horribly awry. Any prepared GMed game requires a gentleman’s agreement: the players are basically agreeing to play the game that was prepared. It’s a faux pas to let the GM prep a dungeon and then show up at the game and say “you know what, let’s not go in.” Sure it happens all the time, and sure sometimes it turns out great, but as a player you have to recognize what you are doing. You have to respect the time the GM already invested, just as you respect the time everyone at the table is spending right now, during the game. (and yes, there’s the whole other discussion about how interacting with the prepared game is not the same as doing what the GM wants — you can interact with it however you want, you just shouldn’t walk away from it)

The players in this game have learned that rule and taken it too far. They are confusing the GM and his authority with the NPCs within the game who are giving us the job. They are forgetting that Chuck E. Cheese is not the GM. Breaking the rules of the simulation is not breaking the rules of the game we are all sitting down to play.

Mix all that together, and you have a painful, painful game. Sometimes games get bogged down in combat and drag on, but at least then you get to win at the end. But there are no winners in the Battle of Chuck E. Cheese, because the battle was (by design) meaningless in the first place. You couldn’t even weakly cheer about surviving danger because there wasn’t any.

There were bright moments where the game almost broke through, where the players almost crossed the line. We’d established that the different types of armor we got were also just badges, and one of the players got the clever idea to just snatch the uberpowerful assault armor badge off his opponent’s lapel in the middle of the melee. It was an awesome idea, and I jumped up and down and screamed for the player to go through with it even though he was on the other team. I was hoping the whole slugfest — which was now boring almost everyone to tears — would finally turn itself on its head, but he missed his attack roll and the whole idea got dropped. No one else ran with it.

Another time one “dead” character was standing around in the middle of the firefight, muttering to himself about how tragic it was that now that he was dead all he had to do was stand around and wait to collect his pay (“oh the agony!”) but that roleplaying was a few slender seconds next to minutes and minutes of other characters rolling dice and figuring out their attacks (again, overwhelmed by crunch).

There was also a momentarily hilarious exchange where that same “dead” character got frisked in the middle of a firefight by a female teammate desperate for some equipment. They momentarily alluded to how she was copping a feel on the handsome “dead” guy now that she had a chance (“um, that’s not the pocket I keep the medkit in”) but again it got overwhelmed by the needs of the fake fight.

In the end even the people who were interested in roleplaying (my comrades in arms) were just too bored and tired to try anymore.

My mistake was thinking there really was a secret plan for this game session. There wasn’t. It was a straight fight between PCs, minus the danger of death. It was a way for the GM to accommodate a bunch of players for a single game session without derailing his usual game. That’s all.

Even without a plan, it could have been an accidental masterpiece. Even completely inexperienced players could have wandered into interesting territory by getting irked and choosing to break the “rules” of Chuck E. Cheese. And it could have been awesome.

But good players don’t break the GM’s rules, and that’s where the tragedy comes in. Great players would have run with the scenario. Even worse players would have probably done better, because they might have rebelled more. The middle path of “following the rules” led to the worst of all possible games.

Please… seriously? It’s a fake fight remember? “The only way to win is not to play,” and so on.

I will tell you that the dwarf (harkening to racial stereotypes) was the only character to search for and find treasure. But that coveted treasure turned out to be a measly heavy pistol. Blinded by rage (and a desire to finish the game dramatically since time was up) he sprang on his foes, foam katana flashing, and was mercilessly (virtually) cut down by flashlight guns. Finally. Then we all went home.