this too shall pass

[reverancepavane]

Change. Change is important in role-playing games. Both change in the characters and the universe. It's what drives a fulfilling story. And an important part of change, especially in RPGs, is the reversal of circumstance. For example, if a gamemaster introduces an escape-proof prison then they are almost guaranteeing that the players will be escaping from it or rescuing someone from it, negating the nature of the prison. Think of how unfulfilling the story would be if the prison really was escape-proof. "Nope. It's no use. Let's get a beer." But this technique also applies to characters as well. If a player has a powerful character then they are just asking to be humbled, to be brought down low, to be inconvenienced. That's where the good story is. [Of course, they can then get to change their status again, and regain their power. That too is change, and excellent storytelling.] It's when a player is unwilling to relinquish their power that they start to disengage with the game. The objective of the game changes from "continuing play" to "winning." And how exactly do you win a role-playing game?

Comments

[scurvy-platypus.livejournal.com]

Ah, I think I see.

I'd say that up until recently, that really hasn't been the case. Almost all of the old games were about acquiring some sort of marker to show improvement. XP, Gold, Items, Status... that sort of thing.

The improvement isn't exactly related to "change" as a driver/motivator of play though. Yes, change happened but it's occurring in the context of "when you start play, you're a zero. As time goes on and the character survives, they get stuff."

In other words, "change" was something that happened as an outcome of the traditional "zero-to-hero-heroic-journey" style of play that still dominates the rpg scene.

So a character gets status. Often a (traditional) GM knocks them down at least a few notches, if not all the way down. Why? It's not because they're saying, "What's going to be a good story about change for the character and how are they going to respond?" Instead, it's re-playing that "heroic journey" thing that people are obsessed with.

Supers is an rpg genre that definitely gets less play compared to fantasy. Why? I think a large part of it is because of the style of story and what happens with the characters. Players are hooked on a reward cycle of constantly getting more things for their characters. They've been trained into that in part because of fantasy games. The problem is that the genre isn't really about characters continuing to improve.

It's about change.

Usually it's personal things, such as relationships with team members, other agencies, loved ones or rivals in personal lives, that sort of thing. There's a chunk that are about _preventing_ change of a sort that the super feels would be bad, either in their personal lives, their hero lives, the world at large, and so forth. A much smaller chunk of stories relates to how a supers' power changes or disappears. You could argue that this sort of story is still about change, because it relates to how a super views themselves and relates to the world.

All of that taking place against a background of beating the stuffing out of other people and saving the world.

The thing is, a lot of people are stuck on doing the "heroic journey" thing like you see classically portrayed in Star Wars. That _might_ work as the beginning of a supers game, but you can't keep going back and drinking from that trough. At least not the way that fantasy games do it.

A lot of the older games and even a fair amount of the newer ones are still struggling with this. Like many industries out there, people (consumers as well as producers) are reluctant to take a chance on something new. And if it is "new" it needs to resemble the old enough that people don't feel like it's "too" new, just new enough to be different.

It's only in the relatively new small press games where you're starting to see people pick apart the game and try and make these bits of a character actively drive play, instead of passively counting coup.

It's possible to retro-fit some of the new small press/indy games ideas, applying some of the principles and methods to older games. But that winds up being more the "houserule" territory as opposed to an explicit or even implicit approach to the older games.

I'll note that I'm painting with a pretty big brush here. I'm sure plenty of people over the years in their small groups here and there played around with this sort of thing to a greater or lesser degree. There's always some monkey out there that starts screaming about how he run massive and sprawling political games using AD&D that lasted for years back in the 80's.

But the thing is that rpgs are a product.

As a product, they wind up catering to their target market and their goal is to get the most amount of money that they can. The majority of product producers take the conservative approach, offering an already proven formula and simply reflavoring it slightly in order to distinguish it from the other stuff out there. It's the rare product producer (or the niche market) that is going to step forward and take a genuine risk of failure.