The Wyrm’s Turn: Saying Yes

There’s an amusing web comic called “DM of the Rings” in which various screen shots of the Lord of the Rings films are used with captions from an abysmal table-top RPG where the players take on the roles of the Fellowship of the Rings. Unlike the heroic and sometimes naïve reactions of the Fellowship, the player’s reactions in the roles of those characters are less than mythic. In one strip when faced with setting up camp at Weathertop, the top of the ruined hill in the first film where the characters are ambushed by the Nazgul, the party’s hobbits would much rather camp at hill’s base. Pointing out that a fire on top of the hill is sure to attract attention, where as one built between stones at the bottom would be much less noticeable. The frustrated DM finally convinces the group to go with the story in order to get them to their next encounter.

Things like this happen in a lot of games, and even the best of GMs use this tactic from time to time. It’s called railroading, and only the most autocratic of GMs actual enjoys employing it in their games. I’ve done it a few times, and regretted it every time. Ideally your players will come up with an idea so good you have no other choice but to include it. That’s tough to pull off though. It requires players to be fully engaged and at their most creative. If you’re players are like mine, working folks with lives and families, this may not always be the case. The trick is as the GM to do one thing consistently: say yes. It’s tougher than it sounds.

She's the money.

Many times as GM you’ve invested a lot of time and energy into your story. You’ve spent hours, days, or even years coming up with every important detail to your world. You’ve poured your heart and soul out and shared it with your group in order to create a shared story. That’s the catch though. You’ve created the world and all the people in it, EXCEPT for the protagonists. It’s your world, but it’s the player’s game. Nobody wants to play a game in which they’re Miss Moneypenny or Q, helping James Bond to save the world by making witty remarks and explaining his latest gadgets. No, they want to be 007. They want to foil the villain, get the girl and save the world. As the GM you want to challenge the players enough to make it tough, but not so much that they can’t ever win, or worse yet, are just bystanders in your grand machinations.

It took me a long time to figure this out. Part of it was the games I played. I started running games like White Wolf’s “Vampire: The Masquerade,” a fantastic game, but one that suffered from two problems. First it had a detailed and increasingly convoluted game canon. Secondly, the players would often start as newly turned vampires that were mere pawns for millennia old monsters that spawned their bloodlines. Sadly, these weaknesses eventually lead to White Wolf rebooting the game line in favor of stories where players had more control of their fate. It took me a lot longer to get the hint.

As recently as this year I finally got the clue to just say yes. Most game books, and especially White Wolf and the more recent 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons have started explicitly instructing GMs to follow the “Golden Rule” of gaming. Fun trumps the rules. RPGs are games, and what makes RPGs more fun than other games is the creative aspect. Sure you can house rule board games, card games, and the like, but RPGs need rules even less than other games. Rules are not laws that bind the universe. They’re guidelines to keep the game fair and to allow players and GM a level playing field. If you want to jump onto a dragon’s face and stab it with a dagger, but the rules don’t tell you how it can be done, make it up. What’s cooler, stabbing a dragon in the face, or saying, “No you can’t do that”?

Recently I’ve been running two (or three) Gamma World games and one Mage: the Ascension game. Each of the stories is very different. One Gamma World game I’m just running out of the box. They’re pre-made adventures, each one written by the fine folks at Wizards of the Coast. The second and third Gamma World games are home-brewed, taking place in a Florida Keys nearly flooded by a rise in the world’s oceans. In one a conflict is brewing between the aquatic Conch Republic (peopled by mutant Conchs) and a group of Voodoo practicing chicken-people. My mage game takes place in Victorian London. The story is character based, following the exploits of mad-scientist Elizabeth “Lizzie” Raeburn, her man-servant Patrick O’Flannery who practices a grim form of Celtic death magic, and Anandabi Svarma, a devout Hindu and a woman doctor. So far the group has been drawn into the machinations of a Nosferatu Fagin who uses children to spy on and steal from a world that wouldn’t accept him. Each of these stories has been well received, and I’ve gotten to tell the story I wanted to, but only by saying yes.

When one of my Gamma World players got a mutant that had both the Plastic and Giant traits and asked if he could be a living clump of intelligent bacteria in the form of a black ooze in a dive suit, I said yes! When a Cryokinetic Alien needed a weapon that shot icicles and wanted to use a squirt gun, I said yes! When my Mage players wanted to spend a whole game doing research on vampires, making stakes, and building enchanted folding swords, I said yes! In all of these cases it was not something I had envisioned for my game, but it was something the players wanted. There’s nothing that will kill a game faster than saying no.

Jack's a vampire now. Vampires are cool.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes you have to say no. A character trying to do something unbelievably outrageous or disruptive or patently absurd should be cut off…unless it makes the game better. I regularly have characters that want to spend time seducing women and committing petty crimes, and I usually try and curtail these actions if it’s not adding anything to the game, or frivolously taking time from the story. It’s a fine line, one player may love those little game tangents, but if everyone else is sitting around stacking their dice and talking about something else then maybe you can just gloss over it. Other times players may want to buzzsaw through your plot, killing NPCs, torturing people, and basically going all Jack Bauer on your carefully laid plans. If you can still make it work, let them, but make sure there are consequences. Consequences make it feel real, and the closer you can get to suspension of disbelief, the more fun you’ll have.

In the end you’ll have to use your own judgment. Nobody knows what you and your players like better than you. Try it out in your next game, I dare you. No matter what, you’ll find that your games go farther, are more challenging, and can be a lot of fun, when you say that one word. Has it improved my game? I can answer with a resounding, YES!

About Stygian Jim

Stygian Jim was born in Missouri, but his family later settled in the Florida Keys. It is there that our benighted correspondent spent his formative years, and it is there he lives to this day. A consummate gamer geek he whiles away his life planning dramatic stories and plots for people and places that do not exist, and besting his compatriots at games of strategy.

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