There is definitely a clash when one attempts to overlay “historically accurate” medieval society with typical high fantasy adventure gaming. Everyone at the table has to be on the same page and have the same mindset and expectations.
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Yeah, and this extends not only to non-lethal tactics in combat but more broadly to non-combat approaches to obstacles, and to choices of campaigns and genre. Most players tend to be drawn to the kinds of efforts with robust mechanical support, and this applies not only to tactics and strategy, but also to the choice of what campaigns to join and what characters to play.
Things may be different with a circle of players who know you and who trust your GMing, but very often if you want to run a game in which PCs will intimidate and humiliate foes in combat rather than trying to kill them, or will gain access to the Secure Location by “social engineering” or by infiltration and escalade, rather than by assault and massacre, it pays very much to have rules that tell the players clearly that they can succeed by such means rather than feeling that success in such endeavours is according to the whim of the GM.
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Yes. They are also there to help the GM and the other players to come to a shared understanding of what the PCs are and can do. They are or include a character description language.
Sometimes a player generates a character with an OTT Farnarkling score not because they want to roll at over 100% on numerous attempts to arkle various farns, and not because they want to be confronted with lots of singularly ferocious farns that impose a -50% on arkling rolls, but because they want to be able to stop having to fuss about with all the farns you have been over-using lately. The high skill is not for adjudicating, but for rendering certain adjudications trivial.
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Yes and as GM, it is your responsibility to make sure that guy has a chance to shine - all the rest of the party are being swarmed by farns and they are like ‘oh no, this is the end. We can’t arkle any more farns!’ and your guy comes in and arkles the shit out of those farns and saves the day.
Personally, I’m not interested in simulation RPG - I don’t have to be an overpowered bozo (well, perhaps as a forever GM, I DO want to control the overpowered bozo… ) but I do want to be the hero of the story, or more usually I want my players to be the heroes. If I was playing a spy RPG, I think I’d much rather be James Bond, or maybe Ethan Hunt than be George Smiley or even Jack Ryan. Yes, there should be elements of investigation or espionage but I don’t want to roleplay analysing the type of typewriter that typed this letter and hunting down antique shops or a single merchant that sells that kind of typewriter etc. (Don’t me wrong, I LOVE reading those kind of spy novels - I love my real spycraft in a book)
But again, that’s just me and the types of games I run. Even running WFRP, which is supposed to be reasonaly gritty and realistic (to a given definition of realistic, I appreciate!), the heroes are still supposed to be heroes.
But I digress. Maybe all my bollocks should be taken off into a different thread of ‘heroic vs simulation rpg’ or something!
Anyway, I’ve digressed.
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That’s a thing that’s slid about over time, I think.
The way I usually saw original D&D played, the PCs were either the only class-and-levelled characters or the highest-level ones in the area. But by the time we get to D&D3 or Pathfinder it’s often the case that you’re just one more adventurer in the city, and there are people way tougher than you even before they start banding together into factions.
I think some of that is (all together now) the Long Shadow of the Adversarial GM. I’ve known players back in the day literally fight to the PC’s death rather than let them be captured, because they were sure the GM would use captivity to do bad things to their character. Which isn’t so great if the GM is trying to run a mastermind plot where the villain explains the plan to the helpless PCs, before they escape from the deathtrap. Players need to be able to trust the GM not to screw them over. (And vice versa.)
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Adversarial GM again! It’s entirely sensible in many situations for everyone to leave their weapons at the door (and whatever you’re going to do about magic and martial arts), but a player who sees this as a GM trap will resist beyond all reason.
And so my solution to your problem is to run it realistically. If you look like other people about the place, you’re armed like other people about the place, fair enough you’ll be treated like one. If the ominous music fades up when you enter the scene, you’re not going to have a meaningful social interaction. But also my players know that I am not going to say “har har, you took off your body armour to have a shower, but you didn’t check the drain for claymore mines”.
(To be fair it helps a lot that I mostly run modern and SF games with functioning societies in them — this can probably be done for high-powered fantasy too but it’s not my taste — so someone swaggering about being Tough is a social problem that there is a solution to.)
Yes! Very much so! I haven’t actually played Pathfinder but I read through it quite a bit for my GURPS/PF hybrid game, and it certainly felt as though the support for anything other than a fight to the death was fragile at best.
Something that I’ve put into the notes that were originally going to be “how to run this game I’ve designed” but are increasingly “how I run every game”: a skill (or whatever) roll should only be made if both success and failure are potentially interesting. Flying to where the adventure is going to happen? You make it. Scaling the Unscalable Cliffs? You try various things but it doesn’t work. And further than that, some tasks are “you’re good enough at this, a normal person might have to roll but you don’t”.
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Well, no. Not in the wilderness, where rifles were used to hunt and handguns to shoot rattlesnakes and dispatch cows or horses that broke legs or were injured too badly to treat.
It’s when people take their dangerous work tools to the into town, or worse, to the pub, when they might meet with shock and the attention of legal authorities. Chainsaws and two axes of different designs are perfectly natural tools for logging, but you might not want lumberjacks taking them with them into the pub.
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Having listened to some of @Shimmin 's game sessions the impression I get (which may of course be incorrect) is that these PCs can casually wipe a town off the map and deal with any force sent after them… but they don’t want to act like the demigods they have become. They aren’t shouldering the responsibility to protect somewhere or someone, they’re not bringing on a new golden age of safety and plenty for everybody, they’re just carrying on accumulating stuff and bashing their enemies.
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As I said, it depends on your setting. Most RPGs are going for the pulp style Western, than a strictly realistic setting.
When it comes to authorities, I usually make it clear (if the players are really pushing the envelope of what is expected) that, yes, they could take down the average guard. They could take down quite a few of the average guards. But could they take down the entire of the town’s militia? 100 (to pick a number at random) relatively weak guards, armed with a variety of melee and ranged weapons are still going to cause a problem to most players, even at high levels.
And IF you beat all them, you’re now going to face a national hunt with the entire of the country’s legal forces hunting you. Not much fun adventuring in that environment!!
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Again system helps. A traditional fantasy game can make you the kind of hero who razes armies with his glare; a modern or SF game mostly doesn’t do that. (Superheroes are a special case and one I tend not to play much either, but then you usually have (a) codes of honour and (b) superpowered opposition.)
Someone strolling around in powered armour is more or less the equivalent of someone rolling into downtown in a tank. Yeah, we have anti-tank weapons, even if takes a while for us to get them.
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If it were just fear of the Adversarial GM, players should not be equally unwilling to run away or even back down, as those don’t leave their character defenceless or in the hands of enemies. I think there might also be an element of, ‘If It Can Be Fought, It Is a Level-Appropriate Challenge’.
A refusal to believe that ‘skipping’ fights doesn’t lead to less experience and a totally unjustified belief that they are Fate’s beloved champion and the forces of the universe will never let them lose.
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This is definitely how I ended with a TPK - the players (admittedly pretty new to RPG) were in a situation where they were facing an adult Red Dragon and they were relatively low levelled - it was really a roleplaying situation, not a combat encounter. But no matter how I reminded them about how big and fierce this dragon was, imbued with might and ancient knowledge, they were so used to computer game where you reach the end boss and it needs to be fought no matter how desperate that might look, that they just rolled straight in and started attacking. I held off for ages, the dragon basically flicking PCs around the room, but they insisted so in the end I just had the dragon breathe on them, killing all but one, who was squished with a claw the next round.
I always try to remind players that there will always be a way to get to their objective - the fight is something in the way of their objective, NOT the objective itself. If they avoid the fight through clever play then brilliant, they have solved my ‘giant red dragon (or whatever) puzzle’ and they get the XP. Likewise, I also try and remember that the NPC/Monster will also have an objective and when that objective is achieved, they won’t continue fighting i.e. a monster defending its nest won’t necessarily pursue PCs that retreat or run past into another room because its objective was to protect the nest and that has been achieved.
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All the D&D I’ve played, going back to OD&D, has always had NPCs around who were more powerful than the PCs. This tended to make the PCs behave more responsibly, and even suppress the random violence of some new players themselves.
“Can we object to that plot as a hopeless cliché, please?”
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Sometimes clichés become a cliché because they work
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All right, topic divergence, but if the PCs are Men of Action™ (and the audience is assumed to be a bit hard of thinking) then someone needs to explain why destroying the night sky forever might be a bad thing. And not every group has its Dr Zarkov.
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And there isn’t much fun in:
“My names Bon…” (gunshot, Bond falls down dead).
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As I never decide ahead of time what happens, I never have a preconceived plot, let alone one which relies on the PCs being captured. On the other hand, most of my campaigns have factors which would encourage PCs to surrender rather than die.
Even in the one with the most violence and a gritty war going on, the PCs take prisoners and ransom all the ones the other side wants. As the TL1+1 enemy society, with TL2+1 levies and TL3 mercenaries, does not send peasants to war, but a professional warrior class higher up in the social order, they have ransomed all their captured warriors, not to mention clergy, administrators, wizards and other experts with high social status. Foreign mercenaries and slaves are mostly not ransomed, but that refusal to ransom them generally ensures that they will seriously consider an offer to work for the mercenary fleet and army the PCs command.
Formally, all slaves are freed, but finding work for them all has proved challenging. It required negotiating a loan, with land as colleteral, between foreign investors and the Purple Reign Merchant House, owned and operated by the PCs (one of whom prides himself on being the best merchant in the world). The resulting capital was used to start infrastructure projects that fifteen years of war made acutely necessary, with foreign engineers brought in to design and supervise things like aquaducts, sewers, road and bridge repairs, etc.
In any case, if a PC were captured, the players know that the sensible thing to do would be to hold them for a massive ransom. Everybody knows that they are richer than Croesus (so to speak, the setting does not have an actual Croesus).
They even brought clergy serving the Goddess of Trade and Wealth to serve as witnesses to contracts, loans and other transactions, not to mention helping them with financial schemes, like dealing with the weak and distrusted local currency, which has had its precious metal content diluted. They’re minting silver and gold coins on behalf of Purple Reign and introducing what amounts to travellers’ cheques (a practice known in various temples) as the first step toward paper currency.
PCs have also entered the enemy capital unarmed, for negotiations about ransoms. When they enter private homes and taverns, festhalls or opium dens, they may be asked to disarm. They can walk around some cities with swords at their sides, but not in visible armour. In other cities, wearing a sword on the street, if you are not a local warrior or noble with the right to wear one, can be very dangerous. Knives are carried by everyone to eat with and there are always those who’ll have a knife or dagger just under the legal size limit where it starts being defined as a sword.
While PCs have not been captured as the result of losing a battle, they’ve deliberately put themselves completely at the mercy of various horrifying beings. A necromancer, rakshasa and several ruthless warlords. On two of those occasions, the PCs were impersonating an envoy from a powerful undead dragon, and their cover would have been blown if they were unwiling to hand over their weapons in order to perform their duties as an envoy. The warlords were usually enemies of their enemies, so the PCs were trying to increase the size, power and public support of their coalition.
Most of my other campaigns take place on Earth in the 20th or early 21st century. Killing people is a very dangerous risk to take and even villains will often hesitate if there are options with a lesser law enforcement response. Not to mention that a non-zero amount of time, when PCs capture someone or something dangerous, they ally with it, adopt it and, in at least one instance, marry them. There’s no reason to expect that a civilized conversation and the discovery of the potential for mutual benefit could not happen with a PC as the captured one instead of being the capturer.
Followed by ten hour-long episodes which showed the gritty reality of Cold War espionage, while following many viewpoint characters whose connection to spying varies, sort of like The Wire for 1960s Berlin, Vienna, London, Prague and all the other places important to the history of intelligence?
I would watch the hell out of that TV show. They managed one good Bond movie after the Cold War, Goldeneye, but none of the ones after that were worth watching. Casino Royale was all right as an action movie, but it wasn’t about Commander James Bond, Royal Navy (Ret.). It was about some rough, working class hardcase who might have been in the SBS, which is a fine origin for an action hero, but it’s not James Bond.
Ian Fleming described the Bond series as, “Snobbery with violence.” Neither of these ingredients are optional.
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But then that wouldn’t be Bond. Or indeed a superspy RPG (which is what I was getting at). That would be a John Le Carre series.
As for what Ian Fleming said, if we’re truly going to stick to his model, we’d have to include massive racism, homophobia and mysogyny as well as Snobbery and Violence!
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