Ruining the Game

Two quotes.  Pandred wrote today on my last post:  "I always regret the mistrusting impulse I get in situations like this, where something bad happened because of a risk I took, or the party took, and then Alexis gives us an opportunity to mitigate the bad outcome: in some ways, as upset as I would be, drowning abruptly would seem more just in the absence of an explicit rule stating, "In the event of a failed {blank} check, up to X nearby persons may intervene by—"  [emphasis added]

The second quote: "Why does God let bad things happen to good people?" —Anonymous

I do more than mitigate the bad outcome; I invent the bad outcome.  I invent the 2% die roll.  I invent the storm.  I could skip including weather in my game.  Many do.  I could tell the party, "If you go right now, there's a good chance you'll die."  I could handwave the journey.  "You leave Stavanger, there's a storm, you've reached your destination."  The die may have the final say, but I invent the reason to roll the die.

I could do worse.  I don't have to leave it at conjuring a storm.  The player's food could get swamped with water and ruined.  The boat could hit a rock.  A ship could have come out of the storm and hit them.  The newly-hired pilot could have been a sociopath.   The tiller could have broken.  A sea monster could have risen from the depths and upended the boat.  A plague of stirges brought by the wind could have attacked.  The crust of the earth could have cracked open and swallowed the boat.  A meteor could have struck in the Yucatan and blasted life from the surface.  I didn't roll to see if any of those things might have happened ... but I could have.  The "risk" Pandred took could have been choosing to be born in the 17th century, inconveniently before Hastur the Unspeakable appeared and began the decimation of all things.  So it goes with gods who have absolute control over things sprouting from imagination.

Am I "mitigating" bad outcomes by not going down these roads?  Yes.  Would any player feel I was more "just" by coldly rolling dice towards such ends?  I should hope not.  Yet it IS part of my agenda to LET BAD THINGS happen ... and to resolve to propose one bad thing or another, of my imagination, that doesn't need to be noticed.  I argue this is a necessity to a good game ... but certainly there is a line to be drawn.  Why this bad thing and not that bad thing?  Why is this die roll fair for the asking, where as that roll would be over the line.  How do I judge this?  How do I know which is which?

I could handwave the answer by saying, "Oh, you know, experience.  Lots of time running."  But that's a load of crap.  I see evidence everywhere of DMs who claim 30 years experience who either fiendishly flog their players with jeering cruelty or who so sweeten the gaming experience that nearby milk curdles spontaneously.  I have no memory of having ever sadistically torturing my players with gaming inventions, nor of suddenly realizing my fault as a DM and learning what's fair and what's not.  Rather, I happen to be concerned for my fellow human, a trait much lacking in many these days; and being aware that there WAS a line between what was decent to do to players and what was not—from the first day I ran a game—I have always treated players as I would treat myself.

If I were to get into a boat to cross a Norwegian fjord during a June summer storm, I would naturally assume that something bad might happen.  I'm neither a pessimist nor an optimist, either of which will insist that either something bad WILL happen or it WON'T.  I will only go so far as to say it MIGHT.  This is the quintessential principle underlying the roll of any die in the game of D&D.  You might receive the full blast of the fireball, but you might not.  You might hit with your sword, but you might not.  You might get across this fjord without a malady befalling you, but you might not!  Good gaming is recognizing when this "might" circumstance occurs; and recognizing that determining the odds of what might happen possesses all the depth of deciding what odds to assign Pavlov's Bell in the third, knowing that applying the wrong odds might eliminate persons betting on the horse OR bettors winning too much.  Either one will end your future as a bookie.

A DM has to look at a 2% chance in lots of ways.  One 2% roll is low, but a 2% roll every day will ding your bell before the summer's over.  Give a 1% fumbling chance of a combatant accidentally cutting off their own head, it will happen constantly when the combatants reach high numbers.  Assign a 1 in a thousand chance, however, and the game becomes a joke.  Players will waltz over magma fields and laugh at your game.  "Jeez, can you believe the shit Barry lets us do?"  "Yeah, I'm pretty bored with it."

Maybe God lets bad things happen because asceticism is good for the soul.  Or maybe there is no God, and the world is just full of bad things ... and the difference in players is that some have grown to accept this fact about the world, and some just haven't.  The world wouldn't feel real if bad things didn't happen.  Bad things happening is fundamental to the only experience we have, this one.

We can easily believe that we could slip and fall out of a boat and drown in the sea, so as a DM I can get away with that and be seen as "fair."  The player might get a cold, the player might catch pneumonia, the player could easily whack their head.  But seriously, a ship appears and runs over the boat?  What the fuck is that noise?  Threats to work in the game have to be credible.

And that means that any mitigation to the threat has to be equally credible.  One person on the boat is near enough to catch Pandred.  They can't all be in arm's reach.  The roll ought to be based on something intrinsic to each character; a flat 1 in 6 chance, what does that prove?  Consider the increased tension when the one character nearest to Pandred happens to be the hapless character with a 7 dexterity.  Hear the moans around the table when everyone realizes the chance of failure just went up.  It's like having the bases loaded, two outs, and the next up to bat is ... oh, shit, it's Eugene.  Fuck, we're all doomed.

I live for those moments.  The moment when Eugene hits a grounder and the second baseman flubbs the stop, letting two runs come in and Eugene gets his day where he's carried around on the team's shoulders.  When the 7 dexterity character rolls a 4 and catches Pandred.  DAMN.  Don't steal that shit from my game by assigning everyone the same roll.  Okay, so what if Eugene strikes out and the player throws a 10?  Life is hard.  Anyone who tells you different is selling you something.  Sometimes, however, every dog has his day.

Pandred's mistrusting impulse derives from what she says later in her comment: "... resistance built up by years of playing with arbitrary DMs."  DMs who will kick you down for no good reason and DMs who will prop you up, again, for no good reason.  Ruining the Game.  That's the approach that most take out of ignorance, willfulness, reluctance or plain stupid thinking.  D&D is an amazing, human-changing game that can lift participants to the heavens ... but it is there for anyone to ruin, who cannot or will not understand why certain things have to be done in certain ways.

It isn't D&D that's at fault.