[I’m starting a new semi-regular thing on this blog called “Friday Fun and Games” in which I’ll wax on about something fun, and usually game-related (or, at least, play-related!) There may or may not be any craft discussions. Usually there are, since I’m often thinking about how these playful experiences intersect with my work.]
This week I’ve been working intensely on a game project, a tabletop RPG adventure, and thinking a lot about making space for the player. There’s an interesting balance between trying to set a mood and tone and theme for the adventure, and having those be coherent and meaningful and resonant, and also letting the player occupy the space of your work in the way they want to. You can offer hints and nudges, but the point of TTRPGs is, after all, to let the player explore your systems the way they want to.
(There’s a whole ‘nother post to be written about how systems provide and story and meaning but today I don’t want to open that door! That closet is stuffed way too full and needs to be organized and — okay, this metaphor is also getting too cluttered, I’ll stop.)
One way I’ve been thinking about this is, how do you make failures interesting? I think there’s a tendency, for those of us (ahem) raised primarily on digital games, to make failure a binary condition to progress. You either complete the puzzle and you progress, or you don’t. You either defeat the boss and you progress, or you don’t. If you don’t, your only option is to reload and try again. But in a TTRPG there is no reload. The players actions and decisions stand, they’re persistent. So failure should lead to somewhere interesting, somewhere fun, somewhere the players don’t feel like “we fucked up” but more like “oh, cool, what new choices do we have next?”
So in other words, failure shouldn’t feel like a story-ending failure.
And (here we go, relating it to writing fiction! I can’t help it) a lot of fiction is about how characters respond to failure. A lot of heroic fiction, especially. The protagonist is faced with a problem. They try to solve it. They fail, and the story progresses to a new set of problems or the same problem, evolved. The protagonist tries again; and fails again, etc. This is a very common plot structure. So why not steal that for games? Let the players fail, and let the problems get worse, but let them feel like there’s ALWAYS something they can do. In other words, try not to trap them.
I’m trying to solve this issue in my current WIP in part by using allegiances. If the characters fail to make progress with one NPC to get what they need, a rival NPC who observed their failure might approach them with an offer. If the characters fail to complete a quest for one faction, pissing off that faction, the rebels who hate that faction might get in touch and offer to become allies. Playing off different relationships has been interesting, and it also forces me to think a lot about how the NPCs are connected to each other, which is always useful for writing games. And plus, it gives lots of alternate routes for the players.
But I also remind myself that I don’t have to script out everything. Each game has a GM and players who are wildly inventive and unpredictable, and if your world feels rich enough, if it feels deep enough, then they’ll make the failures fun on their own!
Next time, I want to think more about this idea of “making space for the player” and how that’s also impacted my prose writing. But for now, happy Friday!