ars ludi

“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.

I got my copy of Open Game Table, The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs.

Is there some ars ludi in there, you ask? On yeah. The Braunstein: Roots of Roleplaying article is reprinted, along with all five West Marches articles and Making the Party: Wedge Issues.

My only regret is that because of concerns over copyright, the original plan to include some reader comments along with the articles got scrubbed. I really would have liked Major Wesely’s replies to be included with the Braunstein article — what could be more fitting? The reviews of the anthology have included a lot of nice comments about Braunstein, and it’s nice to see both Major Wesely and Dave Arneson getting some well-deserved recognition, plus gamers learning about their roots.

…hmm, just one post in two months? Well it’s not like I normally post on a schedule, but lately I’ve been knee-deep developing microscope. More on that later.

Years and years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I did a psychological study that looked at the relationship between gamers and the characters they played.

I had two phases of questionnaires, one asking a lot of standard personality index questions and the second asking what kind of character the person played, how their character would handle different in-game situations and so on.

My theory was that if you compared self-acceptance (how much a person liked who they were) versus character similarity (how similar the character they choose to play was to their personality in real life) you would find an arc.

On one end, the people who didn’t like themselves very much (low self-acceptance) would choose to play characters that weren’t like them (low character similarity), because they would want to escape or (more productively) practice a different personality to arm themselves for switching in real life. I want to be a bolder person, so I practice being bold in the game.

In the middle we have people who were moderately happy about themselves (medium self-acceptance), who I predicted would play characters that were a lot like themselves (high character similarity). For them roleplaying was really just more practice being themselves. They weren’t comfortable enough to expand their horizons with radically different roles, nor were they unhappy enough to want escape from their personality.

On the other end, people who were very happy with themselves (high self-acceptance) would play characters that were different (low character similarity). Why? Because they could experiment with different roles without the risks and sanctions of being (for example) an evil dictator in the real world. They were comfortable enough with their current personality to try new things and learn from those experiments.

Fear my ancient bitmapped graphic!

After all the data was compiled and the numbers crunched, I found… well, not a lot. I didn’t have a ton of subjects (less than 50), so while there were hints of the curve I expected the results were not, as they say, statistically significant.*

The real question is: years later, do I still think this theory makes sense?

Probably. I haven’t thought about character vs player this way in a while, but it still seems to shed light on what I see in games now. Agree? Disagree? That’s what the comments section is for.

Funny story: shortly after I finished, I sent a copy of my research to the editor of Dragon Magazine. I never got a reply, but shortly thereafter came an editorial (Dragon #164, “What you are in the dark”) that was pretty much a “nothing to see here” summary, without every mentioning the existence of my research. Go figure.

* Complete tangent: I want to see a game that uses statistical significance as a mechanic:

“I hit the ogre!”
“Yeah, but not by enough to be statistically significant. We can’t say confidently that your swing was the result of your warrior’s skill and not just chance. This fight isn’t a big enough sample size.”
“So is the ogre dead?”
“Maybe, or it might just be an artifact of the data.”

This trick is really too simple to even mention, but when I bring it up at games I’m always surprised that people don’t know it, so I’ll record it for posterity.

Say you’re stumped coming up with a name for a character in your average fantasy / sci-fi / not-modern-day-Earth setting. Here’s what you do:

1) Take a normal name

2) Change or drop one letter

Done.

Robert becomes Rolert, Rubert, Obert, or Roberi
Frank becomes Brank, Urank or Frunk (half-orcs in the house, yo)
William becomes Illiam, Willia, Welliam, or Wixliam
And so on.

Try it. If you pick random letters you may get unattractive results (like Zrank… hmm, maybe that one isn’t so bad after all) but with a minimum of effort you can weed out losers and score good names. You can use this trick as a GM trying to brand random NPCs on the fly, or as a player struggling to find a good character name. If you’re the GM, don’t tell anyone this is what you’re doing — it’ll just distract everyone.

You’ll be surprised how quickly names look nothing like their original version. If a name does look too much like the original you probably want to ditch it so it doesn’t break the mood (Jonathan => Jomathan might be too close). If you wind up with a homophone ditch it and try again (Bill and Byll look different but sound the same, so no go).

Changing the first letter or a major vowel will usually have the most impact. Linguists can step in at this point, but I suspect you’ll get the biggest results by altering letters in the emphasized syllable of the name — just a theory. You don’t need to worry about that, just experiment and trust what sounds good.

If one letter is not enough, you can go completely crazy and change two letters. You are now in the completely unexplored frontier of rapid name generation. You have been warned.

If the internets are to be believed, the world is filled with tyrannical “behold my works ye mighty and despair” GMs, game masters who dominate the table and tell their story with the players as witnesses or minimally free-willed participants. They go by many names: storytellers, railroading illusionists, social puppet masters. Tyrant GMs.

There are lots of arguments why this happens: the GM has more the authority and power corrupts, rules-heavy systems require the GM to do lots of prep which gives him a disproportionate ownership of the game when everyone gets to the table, etc.

But never mind for a second why a GM would want to be overlord and god: instead ask why a player would put up with it.

If it’s a widespread problem, then there must be lots of players agreeing to play in those games. The usual disclaimer is something like, well, the players don’t like it but it’s the only game they’ve got. They have no choice, the poor waifs! But that’s hardly a flattering explanation. It’s almost as insulting to the hapless players as it is to the tyrant GM.

I started out making a value judgment that GM tyranny is a bad thing, but by doing so I skipped over the possibility that there could be something advantageous about the whole arrangement.

Let’s face the unspeakable question: are there benefits to GM tyranny?

Let’s say there are two kinds of responsibility a player has at the table: creative responsibility and social responsibility. On the creative side you are trying to make a good story, to do something interesting and add to the fiction. On the social side you are trying to make sure everyone else is having fun, and that their idea of what is good and interesting is also being respected.

All that can be a lot of work. But with the tyrannical GM, you have one person who steps up and says “this is my game, it is my creation, I’m in absolute control and make everything happen. I resolve all disputes and I make sure all players are entertained.” Which means you, the player, are completely off the hook. You can be as selfish as you want, or as rude as you want, or as lazy as you want, because the GM has taken responsibility for making the game work and taking care of everyone at the table.

By claiming absolute authority, the tyrannical GM frees the players from responsibility. They don’t have to worry about making the game good, or playing well, or really just about anything. They get to abdicate responsibility, so they can kick back and have a beer. They can just indulge themselves and have fun.

This basic truth can be found in many walks of life: you can live a happy and carefree life if you just let someone else make decisions for you. It’s an old, old story.

And think about it: this is just a game. A recreational pastime. Why not relax and let someone else do all the work? What’s wrong with that? You watch movies right? What’s the difference?

That’s pretty much the philosophical dividing line: do you think gaming is recreation or a creative art form. And even if you are someone who believes gaming is art, a tyrant GM gives you the luxury of grumbling about every single thing that’s wrong with the game without having to worry about blaming yourself. You aren’t in control, so you can’t possibly fail, like the would-be writer who just knows he’d be great if he ever wrote something, so he doesn’t write lest he finds out he’s wrong. It’s a cozy being a critic, an oppressed genius.

Am I saying this is a good thing? Am I saying this is a desirable dynamic? Am I saying this is the game I want? No to all three. But if it works for some people, that’s what’s important.

Instead of just saying “damn, those people are stupid, my way is better” take a deep breath and accept that different people want different things from the table. Maybe your game-fu is superior, or maybe they just have an entirely different goal than you do. Different victory conditions.

Is it ironic that playing with a tyrannical GM is a more like playing a video game? Not when you consider how many more people play video games than role playing games.

The game table can be a lonely place. Everyone else is running around, having fun exploring their pet plots or doing cool things, but no one seems to be interested in the thing you want to do. So you sit quietly and wait, and you get more detached and disinterested in the game. You drop out.

The bigger the group the more this happens. It’s an inescapable mathematical rule that more players means less play time per person.

So how can you salvage things? You need to find a partner in crime, someone else at the table who’s willing to do the thing you want to do or talk about the thing you want to talk about. Two players working together have more influence over the game than two players flying solo, and even if you don’t get to do everything you want you’ve got some company and moral support. A co-conspirator makes any game more fun.

Look around the table. See another player checking out? That’s could be your partner in crime. They may even need a buddy more than you do, so do them a favor and team up.

A good partnership requires compromise and reciprocity: if they do what you’re interested in, you should also push for what they’re interested in. Sometimes it isn’t even an issue — lots of players are flexible about what they do so long as they get to do something. It’s more about having a voice and participating than pushing any particular agenda.

If you’re playing something story gamey, even agreeing to be adversaries can be teaming up — you’re cooperating in bringing your conflict front and center.

GMs, same advice: look for orphaned players and try to hook them up with someone else. If you have a large group (by which I mean even 5 players in a roleplay-heavy game) start people off in pairs or sets. Never leave a man behind.