What's the worst that could happen?

One of the things that’s entering upon my game-related thinking a lot of late is making mistakes, or having efforts fail. There are two things in immediate tension here, which can be stated as “good stories depend on some efforts failing” and “players hate failing”. The conclusion of these is “players hate good stories”, which isn’t quite true.

Imagine, if you will, the situation where the group of player characters, exploring the somewhat dangerous forests of the Shrikan hills at the edge of winter, are looking for a safe place to camp. Survival checks are called for, nobody rolls higher than 7 (the druid was distracted), and the DM says “Well, you find a place. It looks great! There’s a good view over the valley below, and thick, nigh-on impenetrable forest up the hill behind you.” And a player goes “we are absolutely going to be attacked in the middle of the night! Fire spells at the ready, it’ll be fantastic!”

… and now we return to the real world.

When my immediate group played Fate-based games, we tried to use the mechanic whereby your character, when they act according to their written aspects, gets benefits they can use on future rolls (“fate points”). For context, in the single game session I have ever played in Fate, I absolutely swung out of this mechanic, in the manner of a swashbuckler on a chandelier. It was a convention game, the characters started with four points, and I had blown through thirteen (and gotten my character nearly killed twice) before the first other player at the table spent one, let alone gained one. I assumed - from the slightly stunned expressions around me - that they hadn’t played Fate much before, and didn’t quite grok how it worked. I hadn’t played it much either, but it was clear to me that by making all kinds of in-character mistakes at the beginning, you could basically succeed in anything you pleased by the end of the session. It wasn’t a Dresden Files game, but I really do think of this as the Harry Dresden approach.

(AKA: Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, realisation, BOOM!, stupid. It’s Harry’s arc in almost all the books.)

But the other players in the game, and most other people playing Fate that I’ve played with since, couldn’t and can’t seem to bring themselves to do that. While they can acknowledge completely in an out-of-game conversation that failure makes for better stories, it’s a different matter in the game, in the moment. They are afraid that failing at something (making a mistake, doing the wrong thing, going the wrong way, opening the door, answering the phone when it rings unexpectedly) will result in something terrible. This leads to a very slow, cautious, negotiation- and investigation-heavy playstyle, and one where the player characters spend a long time setting things up so that nothing can go wrong.

D&D is set up a bit differently, in that you don’t get benefits for things going wrong, and this is probably where the fear comes from. As far as I can tell, it happens with nearly every group - I saw it in the accounts of Kevin Kulp’s games on ENWorld over a decade ago, I see it in Critical Role today, and so on. The only game I’ve encountered where players were really embracing failure was a Monsterhearts actual play podcast I listened to… sometime in the recent past; time is weird. And that game was brilliant. It’s stuck in my head a lot more firmly than some of my own games.

One of my current groups, though, has a couple of players who are either new entirely, or relatively new to the group. They’re still willing to act impulsively - to pull the lever, shoot into the dark in the general direction of the suspicious noise, open the box, or let the fleeing necromancer get away because she’s not worth chasing after and they’re more interested in what she dropped (examples mostly invented). This is fantastic. I can do a lot more in terms of getting ounces of story into hours of game session this way than otherwise.

But here’s the thing: these are new players. Thinking about this, I am reminded of a situation I see in board games, where an established player - someone who knows the game - will advise a new player to do certain things because [insert long explanation of benefits here]. The new player will often listen to the first few instances, get a bit bored with the next few, and sometimes, assuming they have the social capacity to do do so, get quite annoyed if it continues. The established player pushes their (sometimes, but not usually, metaphorical) spectacles back up their nose and notes that they’re just trying to help. And while impulsiveness and willingness to make mistakes is not quite as evident in a board game as it is in an RPG, I think this is the same tendency.

So, broadly, caution is learned. Efforts to prevent caution with game mechanics don’t really work in play, however well they work in conversation. How do we go about un-learning that caution, and getting back to the kind of good story that starts off with, for example, the whole group clinging to the sides of a coach that’s hurtling into a gorge because the sorcerer failed his animal handling check? Importantly, we want everyone going “this is awesome”, not “why didn’t you use your special re-roll-to-avoid-failure power?”

Some of this does still lie with the players, I think. The experienced folk are going to have to bite down on their dice and let the new people get in there and do things with enthusiasm, if they can’t bring themselves to apply the same kind of enthusiasm. But there’s a chunk that goes with the DM, too. Those of us behind the real-or-metaphorical screen can describe the “failures” with more enthusiasm, give the player in question the credit for getting the story moving, and maybe provide some actual benefits to that player in particular. Some of that, of course is the mechanical benefit that didn’t work in Fate and similar games, but I think it might work better in retrospect than it does in preparation, as it were.

My plan for this is not fully formed. But for a start, I’m trying out using the 5E Inspiration mechanic for this; handing out a free advantage, applicable to any roll, to the player who greases the plot wheel. I’ve given some consideration to extra experience points, but I feel they’re kind of abstract, on the one hand, and also mean that a very impulsive player might pull ahead by a level or two (or that the extra is so small as to be essentially meaningless).

I’m also having to consider if this is a convenience for me as the DM, or something that serves the players as well. I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing for the players; they’re getting more story in the session time. Sure, that can be overdone; sometimes a session is one where people want to talk about stuff and debate their approach and agree on things before they go forward. If that doesn’t happen sometimes, some players are going to feel hard done by. At the same time, the story has to progress at a reasonable pace for there to be stuff to talk about, and there are some other players who are there to kick ass and take names - and they keep forgetting to bring pencils. This distribution of preference becomes more urgent in a game with nine players than it is in one with two or three, of course. We’ll see how it rolls out.

Separately, I gave in to the marketing and bought Candlekeep Mysteries on D&D Beyond. I think this may be the first time since Planescape was out that I have bought an adventure, let alone a compilation of them. But I have it in mind to try my hand at some publication of stuff on the DM’s Guild sometime soon, and it’s therefore a good idea to see what the existing published material is like. The thing that eventually pushed me into buying it, though, was finding that Hannah Rose was involved in both development and editing. Thus far, she’s a reliable sign of quality, and my trust was not misplaced in this. Arcadia Magazine, in which she’s also involved, is a thing of beauty, and I very much hope that it continues to appear. I should probably just acquire her entire back catalogue.

I’m looking forward to Ravenloft, of course. I think that the 2nd Ed version was the first setting box I bought. Availability of D&D material wasn’t always that reliable in Ireland, and it was a matter of what the Virgin Megastore on Aston Quay or Forbidden Planet, when it was in Dawson Street, had in stock, which did result in my playing for a while with the PHB, DMG, and instead of the core monsters, the Greyhawk Monstrous Compendium. That gave things an odd flavour. By the time I got hold of the Ravenloft box, though, I had some more of the basic monsters. I didn’t run games in the setting, of course, just pilfered it for ideas. Having just checked, I do have a Ravenloft box on the shelf here, but from the intact Tarokka deck and the not-ripped-and-sellotaped post of Von Strahd, I know it’s not my original.

Ravenloft - well, the announcement thereof - was preceded by an Unearthed Arcana featuring “gothic” characters. The most recent one has fey characters. That could be a precursor to a 5E Planescape. If it is, you can imagine me in the Take My Money meme and be entirely correct. Here’s hoping.

Drew.