D&D nerdery: Varied roles, empty rooms.

Over at Eleven Foot Pole, Greg writes about an unexpectedly empty room in Thunderspire Labyrinth, the 'Crypts,' described as follows in the written adventure (H2):

Crypts: The remains of about two dozen minotaur warriors lie here in burial niches along the walls. In the southern hallway stands a statue of a grim-looking skeletal minotaur with a greataxe—a minotaur version of the Grim Reaper. An iron door leading to the south is locked. It can be unlocked with a DC 20 Thievery check or broken open with a DC 25 Strength check.

Greg seems irritated not by the emptiness as such, but by inconsistency:

The skeletal reaper is a classic archetype, and here we have a new bull-headed twist on the idea. It's a great way to build on the undead from the last encounter and really tie the Horned Hold into the ongoing minotaur-themed history.

Unfortunately, yet again, it's not to be. The statue doesn't come to life; the dead don't rise from their graves. There is, in fact, no tactical encounter for this room whatsoever, making it the only part of the Hold not covered in this way. Players will be completely baffled as to why nothing in this room is animating and trying to kill them. It does, after all, run contrary to their entire previous experience.

I tend to insist that games should 'play fair,' not penalizing players for reasonable assumptions based on precedent. But that insistence doesn't extend to situations like the one. A roleplaying game's primary feature is the playing of roles; a strong role (in drama, at work, in school, in sports, etc.) offers its player interesting choices, compelling challenges, and - this is crucial - more than one note to play. Dogberry in Twelfth Night is a fool, sure, and he gets laughs aplenty - as does Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice - but for an actor neither holds a candle to Lear's Fool, who gets to do sly wit, big physical comedy, teary pathos, and that wild Merlin monologue, all in a relatively small written part. Lt. Daniels on The Wire got to be the angry careerist hardass in the first season, but the part came right to life as Lance Reddick revealed the long game Daniels was playing - and that smile of his 2/3 of the way through the season opened up the role, changing its relationship to the world around it. Great dramatic roles offer both subtle nuance and stark contrast - they vary in various ways.

(The wildest screen performance I've seen is Michael Gambon's in The Singing Detective, in a role as technically demanding and fine-grained as Hamlet but with an even broader range. See it if you haven't. Now.)

In combat-driven roleplaying it's important to emphasize for players that the combat has a purpose; violence in the real world is an extreme interaction, the end of communication, not (for most people) a basic mode of coexisting as depicted in shallow sword-and-sorcery gaming. D&D 4e is combat-heavy; indeed it's assumed that the primary mode of character development is through combat itself. But that gets a little monochromatic after a while. How do you know something's Big and Important if there's nothing mundane to compare it to, no baseline of experience, no mere life? How can the revelation of a secret be meaningful without it being withheld for a while? Who fights with nothing to fight over?

Why are your characters doing what they're doing? What is the world, to them?

Questions like these can be answered in well-designed combat, but your campaign's story - the emerging Tale of Years that includes but hopefully isn't limited to your party's great (and other) deeds - will be unreadable if it consists solely of one kind of action. A list of fights may as well be the bathroom-cleaning time card at the Burger King, a schedule of obligations.

Ever read The Da Vinci Code? It's not a good novel by any standard other than one: it's absolutely impossible to stop reading once you've started. (By that standard it's pure goddamn heroin, a near-perfect example of a bad idea embodied.) People remember it as a breathless ride in which the action never stops, a chase across Europe to confront conspiracy/history or blah blah blah. It's a chase book, an action book. Right?

Actually no.

Most of The Da Vinci Code is talk.

The constant chatter - blunt exposition, inept one-liners, endless portentous crypticisms about 'the universal feminine' or what have you - occurs in the midst of ongoing hustle and bustle, but it's still chatter. The puzzle-solving is just part of it - ultimately The Da Vinci Code is a fast-moving detective story about a guy solving pseudointellectual puzzles about the history of a religion. It's not a shooter (though perhaps you remember the shootings), but it's not even really a sneaker. It's a talkie. Dan Brown's vile genius is to situate the talk carefully, punctuating it with deaths and escapes and travel and the like.

And yet the story moves like the devil's chasing it. The story isn't 'good,' but it sure works.

An empty room - what looks like downtime, wasted space, a fidgety longueur for ADD-afflicted players - is an opportunity to move the story in another direction: backward into history, down into the secret tale of the world, in to the characters' motivations and fears, out beyond the story the players think they're living to even more complex threats, possibilities, ramifications. This is true in straight storytelling as well as in games, and for teachers guiding students as well: If you treat a scene as a challenge, the players who trust you will rise to that challenge. That's true in and out of combat, of course. It's a historical accident that American roleplaying games evolved from wargames (and everything stupid and retrograde about the industry and culture of RPGs in America stems from that basic fact); we owe it to ourselves to think of roleplaying as an activity that can include simulation (e.g. of combat), but that's really about - surprise - playing a role. Structured make-believe. Storytelling with dice. It could really be so.

The strength of a role is this: the variety of strong actions it allows for.

* * *

All of this is to leave aside the technical question, 'How do you make an empty room interesting?' Which is a storytelling challenge dating back millennia, of course. Here's a simple solution: let the players stock the room. Describe it, set the scene, lay on some creepy atmosphere, and when a player describes searching the room, hand over control: 'OK. You find something in the statue's shadow, embedded in the floor. What is it?' Or maybe just: 'You hear a keening sound, distant, worrisome. What does it sound like?' And let the player(s) tell you.

It's their story after all.

Comments

[wow gold]

Yes. I have to agree with you. As players, we should own and play the game as if we are the characters we portray inside the game. Before, I used to think what it feels like to have your own game themed like World of Warcraft.