RPGaDay 2023, Day 28
The Places That Scare You ...
Can I just say here that I don’t scare easily?
I don’t scare, I don’t get bored, and I don’t ever whinge or whine about things. But most of all, I never get scared.
Not the way tabletop games would like you to get scared.
I don’t run “Waagh it’s a monster” critter of the week stories. I don’t even like “monster” as a term for non-human beings. I like “supernatural animals,” “non-human beings,” or “encounters.”
“Monster” infers a blight whose only raison d’etre is to kill the characters or to be killed in turn. Tabletop roleplaying games always seem to run encounters along the lines of “A monster jumps into your hex. When two parties enter the same hex, combat must be engaged, and the foes must be fought to the death. There are no exceptions to this puerile video game logic. This game serves no other function than to send you this series of random combat encounters.”
Now that is scary, because it presumes so little of the imaginations of the players and the capabilities of the Guides. Everybody’s reduced to just pushing their characters around the board and killing anything that moves.
I can’t run games like that. Seriously, where is the fun?
I’m recommending two books - Encounter Theory by Ben Riggs’ Plot Points Publishing, and Entanglements by Yaruki Zero.
Entanglements has a supplement, Ewen’s Tables: Entanglements Tables:-
Even's Tables: Entanglements Tables
All of the above are highly recommended for anyone wanting to design a more nuanced, complex encounter structure which leaves the old “mandatory combat to the death” paradigm forever in the dust.
I think we need books like the above, and I think that adventure designers need to read them and make sense out of them, and allow their teachings to colour their adventure designs, because seriously, published adventures are scarily railroady, unusable, linear affairs.
I’ve just reviewed The Curse of Sariniya for The Design Mechanism’s Mythras, and I’m going through The Secrets of The Ancients by Mongoose for Traveller, and they are railroady as hell - all encounters are along the lines of “And then wild primitives appear ROLL INITIATIVE!” or “And then robot assassins appear ROLL INITIATIVE” and one of the robot assassins has an Ancients device which nullifies all the power in a household, and why does it have to be TL 20+ when you can probably create something TL 9+ that can do the trick?
No. That’s not scary. That’s stupid. Bloody stupid. Beano comic stupid. Marvel comics stupid.
And yet if you go on the Discords, all you’ll hear is the little boys asking the most pointless questions such as “What damage can this do if I back it up with a plot device from Yadda Yadda Da Daah Da Daah supplement?” or “If Plot Device X comes up against MacGuffin Armour from Book Y, which force prevails?”
Some of these little boys are older than I am, and they’ve never left the D&D murderhobo nest, and it hurts to hear them talk. And that is scary as hell.