A (False) Sense of Place
I was recently reading this article by Rock Paper Shotgun's contributor Sin Vega. I was suddenly reminded of the numerous struggles I've had when trying to convey any sense of history or meaningful presence as a Game Master in various tabletop role-playing games. Surely video games have an advantage in this arena as they offer a real physical place in relation to your character(s), which is simply impossible to maintain beyond small arenas in the tabletop realm. However, the elegance and effectiveness of purely using imagination to fill in the holes you didn't even know were present in a setting is pretty spectacular.
It's totally acceptable if a game has idiosyncrasies all over the place, but hits just enough marks to convince your brain that its setting is a real enough place. Fallout 4 is a game full of "jank" on multiple levels. In terms of believability, the skeletons that litter its world only make sense if nobody used these spaces that were full of human remains, but all kinds of characters make full use of them. Countless scraps of paper from countless offices haven't been rendered into dust after two hundred years of decay and a radioactive holocaust. Bandits of various factions far outnumber the relatively peaceful or productive people in the game, yet somehow they all survive.
None of that matters! The world of Fallout is distinct enough to draw your attention to the stuff it wants you to discover or blow up. Okay, that stuff does matter, but not as much as it could in a more boring world.
As a game master I've thrown a lot of things at my players to get them to feel like they belong. I have a vested interest in doing so, it cuts down on murderhobos. You know, the characters that just travel from place to place and use violence to solve everything? Yeah, murderhobos are really bad for most settings. It's difficult to tell in a single instance how immersed the players were, but after a couple of sessions it's pretty clear if something like playing ambient forest noise is doing anything. There's certainly a place for the unconscious mind in getting immersed into a world, I just have trouble actively courting it.
Crafting the mechanics of a functioning society is certainly possible; I even have books dedicated to things like the ecology of magical worlds in traditional role-playing games. It's just so hard to do. Then you did it, but it never surfaces in any meaningful way for the players and it was a colossal waste of time. Although if the players keep running around the same world for a long campaign, you can probably eventually use anything that you put in that world.
It's times like these that I rely on two rules of thumb.
The first rule of thumb is to pull, not push. Show interesting hooks, but let the players decide if they want to pursue them. If they have reasonable justifications for what they were already doing, then they'll probably remain reasonable when it comes to responding to your hooks and you don't have to worry about distracting players with way too much hyperactive energy (read: murderhobo energy). Of course if you're facing murderhobos the goal should probably just be to show them cool things to kill, which works out by itself.
The second rule of thumb is to be ready to wing anything. It's not really that simple, it's actually about making lots of cool stuff like characters, magical items, and places, but only put in enough effort to flesh out the cool thing, not its surroundings. The rest of the story's fabric can be made on the fly, the distinction doesn't really matter if someone chose to ride a horse or walk to a new city.
Both of these ideas benefit from the imaginative aspect of tabletop role-playing games. In fact the reason why I like both of these approaches is because they let you not "sweat the small stuff" and position the game master better to tell an epic story. That is also why I don't expect most video games to have fully fleshed out world changing revelations, they're mostly static unless a lot of work was put in somewhere to accomplish something similar.
Ultimately it's a pretty cool trade off if you play both video games and tabletop games. The skeletons that don't belong in a Fallout place are fine, whatever. The skeletons that do belong in a dusty catacomb in a D&D session are totally there, I just forgot to mention them.
A society is really hard to emulate.
See you later.
 |
| A person... |
 |
| ...in a place. |
It's totally acceptable if a game has idiosyncrasies all over the place, but hits just enough marks to convince your brain that its setting is a real enough place. Fallout 4 is a game full of "jank" on multiple levels. In terms of believability, the skeletons that litter its world only make sense if nobody used these spaces that were full of human remains, but all kinds of characters make full use of them. Countless scraps of paper from countless offices haven't been rendered into dust after two hundred years of decay and a radioactive holocaust. Bandits of various factions far outnumber the relatively peaceful or productive people in the game, yet somehow they all survive.
None of that matters! The world of Fallout is distinct enough to draw your attention to the stuff it wants you to discover or blow up. Okay, that stuff does matter, but not as much as it could in a more boring world.
 |
| Neither a person nor a place. |
Crafting the mechanics of a functioning society is certainly possible; I even have books dedicated to things like the ecology of magical worlds in traditional role-playing games. It's just so hard to do. Then you did it, but it never surfaces in any meaningful way for the players and it was a colossal waste of time. Although if the players keep running around the same world for a long campaign, you can probably eventually use anything that you put in that world.
It's times like these that I rely on two rules of thumb.
The first rule of thumb is to pull, not push. Show interesting hooks, but let the players decide if they want to pursue them. If they have reasonable justifications for what they were already doing, then they'll probably remain reasonable when it comes to responding to your hooks and you don't have to worry about distracting players with way too much hyperactive energy (read: murderhobo energy). Of course if you're facing murderhobos the goal should probably just be to show them cool things to kill, which works out by itself.
The second rule of thumb is to be ready to wing anything. It's not really that simple, it's actually about making lots of cool stuff like characters, magical items, and places, but only put in enough effort to flesh out the cool thing, not its surroundings. The rest of the story's fabric can be made on the fly, the distinction doesn't really matter if someone chose to ride a horse or walk to a new city.
Both of these ideas benefit from the imaginative aspect of tabletop role-playing games. In fact the reason why I like both of these approaches is because they let you not "sweat the small stuff" and position the game master better to tell an epic story. That is also why I don't expect most video games to have fully fleshed out world changing revelations, they're mostly static unless a lot of work was put in somewhere to accomplish something similar.
Ultimately it's a pretty cool trade off if you play both video games and tabletop games. The skeletons that don't belong in a Fallout place are fine, whatever. The skeletons that do belong in a dusty catacomb in a D&D session are totally there, I just forgot to mention them.
A society is really hard to emulate.
See you later.
Comments
Post a Comment