Blog Book Club #49: Getting Worse

[Barnum]

Welcome to this week’s blog book club. We’ve made it to the penultimate week of 2012’s blog posts from Marcia B’s list. We will be discussing “Getting Worse,” by Erik Jesen of Wampus Country, although “the Confession” helps give this post a bit more context.

Next week we’ll be closing out 2012 by reading “Dungeon Design and Stocking - with examples!” by Gus L from his old blog Dungeon of Signs. Having forayed into Gus’ dungeons as a player, I’ll be looking forward to this.

You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.

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A lot of times on this blog book club we are discussing house rules just for the fun of it. These are fine, but often don’t stick with me for long. I respect that the mechanics we discuss are meant to reinforce the default genre of mythic underground in D&D but on some level they feel interchangeable. Which is entirely okay! the games I enjoy most are modular. So I enjoy that post “Getting Worse” is framed with a discussion of house rules in the context of Wampus Country and what makes that campaign unique. The central idea of the post is not opting for PC death right away and instead focusing on ways to move the story forward and create more drama or tension. This reminds me of the aptly named chapters of the Hobbit involving the capture by and escape from goblins.

Thorin & Co. Capture by Goblins, The Hobbit, 1977

While Death is in some ways central to the OSR, if used excessively, the game either becomes a hassle (restarting from TKP) or life becomes too cheap (disposable minions, whacky decisions during funnels). Exploring alternate ways to handle conflict are important if we want games to exist beyond the binary states of ‘PC are in complete control’ and ‘ the PCs are dead’ That’s why I believe these conflict escalation skills recommended within the post are important to practice even in games where death is still on the table. For me this is part of what stops RPGs from being Pen & Paper video games.

Red Dead Redemption Death Screen.

I think my main reservation of implementing something like this rule would be the uncertainty over when player actions should lead to death. Ultimately, “it gets worse” hinges on good referee judgement. Sometimes when refereeing there isn’t much use for imagination in a traditional OSR game after the prep has been done. A world has been created, a system has been set up, a dungeon drawn and keyed. Through common sense and die roll probability a GM guides player inputs toward logical conclusions. ‘It gets worse’ relies on story telling skills like looking ahead, creating twists, and honoring past actions. While this pushes games closer to the realm of what I imagine ‘storytelling’ RPGs are like. I’m okay with it!

Barber, John W. The Handbook of Illustrated Proverbs 1857

I only recently started GMing again after taking a year off. While I usually leave an escape hatch for my players to escape weasel their way out of precarious situations, I think I could be doing a much better job of switching out types of conflict and moving from one hazard to the next. Have things ‘Gotten Worse’ in any of your games lately?

[ktrey]

I use this technique quite often, but especially in the games I run for much younger Players. In those games with children, Death is often a Fate that is “Off the Table” do it behooves me to be creative for other kinds of escalating consequences like this.

It is really interesting how it still drives Play forward, and how sometimes those consequences can have similar impacts on decision making.

“Be Careful, if that Goblin bonks you on the head one more time, you’ll wake up chained to a cauldron and having to wash his entire family’s super stinky socks!”

[martin]

I have previously thought about doing something like this. (I mean, technically I introduced it as a house rule in a short-lived campaign, but then none of the party died).

Several of the examples given in Erik Jensen’s post strike me as difficult to run in the ordinary kind of dungeon adventure game I tend to run (possibly they fit better in Wampus Country), unless there is a TPK. Otherwise you will end up having to switch back and forward between the characters in different situations.

My thought had been instead to narrate something like “you wake up in chains, somewhere deeper in the dungeon” but then not run that as a full agency situation on par with the main game. Instead, maybe give them a fixed (e.g. 1 in 6) chance to escape their captors every 24 hours, followed by an outcome roll to see whether they end up: out of the dungeon, dead, or under a different faction’s powers. (or more esoteric outcomes: e.g. becoming an evil NPC, mad (temporarily?) from scrabbling for survival in the shadows).

And in the meantime run a new PC like your character had died. So I guess it’s more like dead with a chance of resurrection, but rather than that sending you away from the dungeon it encourages the group to intensify exploration in hopes of rescuing the lost character.