Even though I couldn't run my regularly scheduled game yesterday, I did get to play Betrayal at House on the Hill. It is a fantastic board game. One of my favorites. I highly recommend it. I was going to talk more about that, but instead I bore witness to the disintegration of a table-top game over the past couple of days, and I decided to share my ponderings.
We were using Roll20, which has some great tools, but for some reason I was having connectivity issues with it. That isn't what caused the problem. Or maybe it contributed to it. We'll come back to that.
The GM was running a game based on Ghostbusters using the Savage Worlds game engine. The franchise is fun (yes, internet assholes out there, I did like the new movie), but that engine, as much as I like it, is problematic. We'll come back to that, too.
During our last session, our busters were investigating some rival ghost hunters who were clearly up to no good. However, we were having a hard time convincing the general public at large that was the case, but we had been mounting some evidence against them. But the last encounter of the session was what tore up the game.
We found these rival ghost chasers, the Ghost Dudes, consorting with a shadowy character in the parking lot of a church. My connectivity issues were heightening at this point, but as I understand it, the shadowy character was helping the Ghost Dudes conduct occult rituals to summon up ghosts for the ghost dudes to put down. When someone in the party moved to confront them, the GM called for initiative.
Needless to say, everything went ploon-shaped. Two of our team kidnapped that shadowy occult character in broad daylight, while I (supposedly playing the smart lawyer character; yes, sometimes I suck at role-playing) broadsided their van with a proton pack. We got in trouble with the law. Probably not as much as the EPA messed with them in the first film, but more than what happened after the very suspicious death of a character played by a high profile cameo in the new one.
The next day the GM sent an e-mail asking everyone what happened. He had been hoping we would approach the situation more realistically and not break a bunch of laws. He wanted us to focus on running our own business and using legal means to fight shady competitors. I actually, privately, e-mailed him some of my suspicions on what happened. He thanked me for my input, and waited to hear from everyone else. As I watched the other players, I had my suspicions confirmed.
From running and playing World of Darkness and running Deadlands, I've learned a simple truth when it comes to players and investigative games: when the investigation (i.e. the game's actual story) stalls, players become frustrated. And when players become frustrated they often revert to the old D&D standby: getting their murder hobo on! And when murder hobos run roughshod in a setting with a semblance of normal reality, like actual law enforcement and violence-fearing inhabitants, it can derail an adventure or a whole campaign. Sometimes this isn't bad! It might have been something the players wanted (or the best thing they never knew they needed). The GM did asks us if we wanted to start down the new direction: becoming fugitive Ghostbusters with stolen tech and no franchise backing. The group decided not to take that new direction. (As interesting as it could have been. Ghostbusters 2 was almost that story, and thinking about it now, if it had been the movie might have been much better. Maybe passingly mediocre instead of "God why!?" mediocre.)
But there is an important lesson here: in my last post about gaming with kids, I talked about the importance of gaming as a social teacher. A tabletop game is literally friends and family sitting around a table to have fun together. And for all that we're social animals, we seem to suck at one important facet of socialization: communication.
It's why I have no problem employing one of Gumshoe's core concepts: everything faces the player. I've learned from hard experience sometimes as a GM you just need to tell players, "You found everything there is to find here/learn everything you're going to learn. Next scene." Too bad as a player I have yet to learn to ask "What exactly is our goal here?" (If I had asked that in the GB game, my character would have acted a lot different.)
So, from all the advice in "how to role-play" and "how to GM" that's been written over the years (I've read a lot role-playing books, kiddies. I started when I was 10 and haven't stopped. Honestly, I think I might have a problem.) one thing that seems conspicuously absent is communication.
Now I'm going to go back to another thread I've talked about before: system matters. And part of why the system matters is because different systems communicate with the players differently. For example, Savage Worlds and d20 games use structured time (initiative and rounds) primarily during combat. So when initiative cards are dealt it's easy to assume hostile activity is taking place. (For this Ghostbusters example it didn't help that my audio kept cutting in and out, so I had no idea that our "opponents" weren't taking any hostile actions but were merely trying to run away. I didn't help by not asking for a recap of what I had missed, either.)
But also, where games sit on the Gamist/Narrativist/Simulationist continuum (really, I almost imagine it as a triangular graph), will depend on what the rules sets focus on. Savage Worlds has a lot of material written for it, but it is definitely very gamist with a more simulationist than narrativist bend. It focuses a lot on combat, and in particular mass combats. This focus is why it really wouldn't be my first pick for an investigation or horror focused game, even though it grew out of original Deadlands, which was very much a horror focused game. Gamist is fine in horror and investigation, but the bend needs to be more toward narrativist than simulationist.
So what would I have picked? Gumshoe or FATE probably. Hell, Kyla is interested in playing Delta Green, and I recently picked it up to. And they did some really nice hacks of the venerable BRP engine to make it more narrativist.
Plus, there's making sure as a GM you are up front with your players about what a campaign entails. After I had finished the starter box with my encounters group, I offered them some options: Go into one of the published campaign threads with their characters, and I told them about Elemental Evil and Rage of Demons and what each would entail, or create new characters for Ravenloft, a horror focused campaign. They opted for Ravenloft. It's why as a player, if I'm joining an established group I will often ask "what do they need?" before making a character.
Well, that's today's nerdy life observation. See you next week, when the party will have delved deeper into the Amber Temple.
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