Building tension in your game, part 1

I hope that this is the last time I try to start this series.

You see, many weeks ago I started out writing a post about wandering monsters and why they were important.  But then I realized that because there were different modes of play, random encounters would be shaped and timed around the mode of play that was engaged.  So, I started writing about dungeons and wilderness and social encounters and down-time.  And then in so doing, realized that what I really wanted to write about was risk and reward and making player decisions meaningful.

But even that isn’t what I really wanted to write about.  At least not completely.  It finally occurred to me this past week that what I want to write about today (and probably for the next few weeks) is about tension in Pathfinder.  How to use it to make your game better, and why it makes your game better.  

What’s so great about tension anyway?  Well, Pathfinder is a game, and like most games, there is a conflict that forms the core premise of the game.  The mechanics of the game determine win and loss conditions.  The possibility of losing creates tension.  If there’s no tension, things tend to get boring rather quickly.  Sure, you could play a game where everyone gets along, success is always the outcome and it never was in doubt.  Wake me up when that game is over.

Pathfinder has tons of opportunities to create tension.  Combat, skill checks, social encounters and character interactions all are great examples.  A lot of the time, tension does indeed result from some or all of these elements.  But in my campaigns, it doesn’t always happen.  Particularly at higher levels, the tension level seems to drop to nearly catatonic levels.  I’ve ended years-long campaigns because of the lack of tension in the game.

I’ve recently been examining the elements of my campaigns to determine what are the causes of decreased tension.  One of my recent posts, Why My Campaigns Suck, talks about optimized gear and settlement rules and such, but there are other points where I have unknowingly made my game more boring by making them less tense.  Most of these instances involve hand-waving rules that make character decisions meaningless.  Let’s dig deeper.

Player decisions

One of the worst ways to damage a player’s engagement with a role-playing game is to make their decisions meaningless.  “Railroading” is what the kids call it these days.  The characters are trying to prevent an orc raid on their village, so they search for, locate and infiltrate the orc lair, killing many of them before returning to town.  The raid happens anyway.  The main bad guy of an adventure is defeated by the characters earlier than expected, so the GM has the villain escape through some deus ex machina because the adventure says the bad guy has to live until the end of the adventure.  This is the kind of disempowerment that most people refer to when discussing railroading.  But there is also a more subtle variety, one that doesn’t necessarily make player decisions meaningless, but rather turns decisions into non-decisions.

Let’s say your adventuring group just killed some ogres in a cave, and wants to loot the bodies and search their lair for treasure.  The GM calls for a Perception check, which is followed by every single character’s result, at least one of which is bound to meet or exceed the DC (I lovingly refer to this as a Skill Gangbang).  The GM reveals the hidden treasure, the group distributes it, and they move on to the next encounter.  Sounds familiar?  It does in my games.  

After completing a dungeon, your group is ready to travel to the next destination and continue the adventure path.  The GM briefly narrates the journey, describing some of the terrain and identifying how long the journey takes.  Rolling for random encounters is skipped, because both the GM and the players agree that they are a waste of time and add nothing to the story.  The characters arrive at their next destination, clean, refreshed and ready to take on their next challenge.  Sounds familiar?  It does in my games.

Before they set out on their next adventure, the group gathers up all the unwanted loot they accumulated, sell it and buy the gear that best optimizes their character.  The unwanted gear is always purchased and the desired gear is always available.  Sounds familiar?  You get the point.

In these examples, the GM asks the players for a decision, and they respond with their intended actions.  Acceptable results are normally obtained, and the game moves on as expected.  Where’s the problem in these examples?

Meaningful decisions

Above, I talked about how making player actions meaningless is bad, and how you end up with disengaged players and uninteresting stories as a result.  But in none of the examples provided do the players lose any agency.  They are free to skip the search for treasure if they want.  They are free to travel anywhere they like. They sell the loot they want, and buy the gear they want. They have decisions, and their decisions matter.  Right?

Well, no, not really.  For a player’s decisions to really matter, the decision must balance risk and reward.  If either of these elements is missing from a decision point, it isn’t really a meaningful decision.  Any decision made by the characters should involve a weighing of the potential gains against the potential losses.  If there’s no risk, it’s not a decision that matters.  Nor is it if there is no reward. 

We make decisions constantly through the course of our day as adults.  Each decision we make in real life involves comparing the potential benefits of a choice with the potential drawbacks of that decision.  Should I pay the electric bill today or buy that new entertainment system?  Should I get all my work done for the day, or write a blog about role-playing games?  Our decisions matter, because what we choose involves potential loss.  The lights get shut off.  Our boss puts us on probation.  Et cetera.  Keeping this in mind, let’s go back to our examples so I can explore this idea in the context of RPG’s.

Our adventuring group has killed the ogres, and now make the decision to loot the bodies and search the room for hidden treasure.  There is obviously a reward involved; if they are successful, they will find treasure and improve their character in the form of currency or items.  But is there risk?  Well, you could argue that the risk is by not searching the room, or by missing your Perception roll, you don’t get the treasure.  The risk is missing out on the gold and magic, which means your character doesn’t improve.  Now, go back and read two paragraphs above this.  A risk must involve a potential loss to be meaningful.  Missing out on treasure isn’t really a risk.  The net result of not getting the treasure is that your character remains the same.  They don’t lose anything if they don’t find the treasure, they just miss out on the opportunity to improve.  This isn’t a real risk, and therefore the decision to search the room isn’t truly important.

How about travel?  Are there any decisions that matter in the second example?  Let’s get the obvious one out of the way so we can talk more about the opaquer one.  I’ve said this a lot, but I play adventure paths.  In my Giantslayer campaign, the group must travel south from the frost giant village of Skirgaard, through the Mindspin Mountains to get to the fire giant lair and the next chapter in the AP.  Obviously, even though the characters could potentially decide to go somewhere else, the players know that they must go south if they want to continue the campaign.  Going anywhere else means that the campaign is over, and we start playing some other campaign.  The decision of which direction to travel is just an illusion.  The players willingly choose to travel to the next location in order to continue the campaign.

Okay, having dispensed with that, there is another problem in this example that I want to call out which is more germane to our discussion today.  It involves the unwritten contract between myself and my players which mutually agrees that random encounters during travel are boring and a waste of time.  Out of curiosity, I looked at both the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, 5^th edition and the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook, 2^nd edition to see what they had to say about travel and exploration:

D&D PHB: THE THREE PILLARS OF ADVENTURE - Exploration includes both the adventurers' movement through the world and their interaction with objects and situations that require their attention. Exploration is the give-and-take of the players describing what they want their characters to do, and the Dungeon Master telling the players what happens as a result. On a large scale, that might involve the characters spending a day crossing a rolling plain or an hour making their way through caverns underground. On the smallest scale, it could mean one character pulling a lever in a dungeon room to see what happens.

Pathfinder RPG CRB: Exploration - Most of the time, your character will explore the world, interact with characters, travel from place to place, and overcome challenges. This is called exploration. Game play is relatively free-form during exploration, with players responding to the narrative whenever they have an idea of what to do next. Leaving town via horseback, following the trail of a marauding orc tribe, avoiding the tribe’s scouts, and convincing a local hunter to help in an upcoming fight are all examples of things that might occur during exploration.

Throughout this mode of play, the GM asks the players what their characters are doing as they explore. This is important in case a conflict arises. If combat breaks out, the tasks the PCs undertook while exploring might give them an edge or otherwise inform how the combat begins.

Well slap my ass and call me Judy!  The #1 and #2 roleplaying games in the hobby agree that exploration is one of the principal ways that players engage with the game.  Huh!  If that is true, then why does exploration get hand-waved so often?  Does it have anything to do with player agency and meaningful decisions?

How about social interactions with NPCs?  Reducing a social encounter to a single skill check is unrewarding, and usually only includes the character with the best applicable social skill.  Whether you use the verbal duels system from Ultimate Intrigue or Everyman Gaming’s excellent Skill Challenge Handbook, you’re broadening the roleplaying experience of a social encounter, giving depth to NPCs, and (in the case of the Skill Challenge Handbook) opening up opportunities for multiple characters to engage in a social conflict.

Lastly, there’s downtime.  You may be thinking “What?  Downtime is when the characters get to rest and relax, and take a break from all of the tension of combat and exploration and talking and stuff!”  Yes, I do agree with that reaction but only up to a certain point.  If we remove any element of uncertainty from downtime activities, it becomes dull, unimportant and meaningless to the characters.  For example, the group of characters returns from the dungeon bearing treasure and magical items.  The liquid assets are divided among the characters, the non-magical solid assets are sold for their value and the unwanted magical loot is sold, with the proceeds of the sale being used to buy more desirable magic gear.  If this transaction is satisfactory to your group, that’s fine.  But I do believe that you are missing out on some great worldbuilding and roleplaying potential, as well as the chance to inject tension into this mode of play.

Firstly, the group needs to find someone to buy their unwanted magic gear.  Since the price tag on these items is pretty large, the pool of potential buyers is quite small.  If we use the modern concept of The Two Percent, we could say that only 2% of the population of the city would have the funds necessary to buy the item.  How do the PCs find their potential buyer? 

 

The same premise holds true when the PCs want to buy a magic item.  Using the magic treasure generation rules from Ultimate Equipment, the GM determines that a rod of withering is available for purchase in the city, the PCs learn of its availability and want to buy it.  They can’t just wander into the local WizMart; they need to determine who has it, if they want to sell it, and if so, how much do they want for it.

Introducing these elements of uncertainty accomplishes three main goals: First, it gives the players an opportunity to engage in a process, rather than just accepting a foregone conclusion.  Why is this good?  Because it creates an opportunity for the character to use their skills and/or abilities to improve their chances of success.  A character with skill ranks invested in Diplomacy gets the opportunity to Gather Information to locate a potential buyer or seller.  A character with ranks in Appraise may get a chance to determine if the price offered by a buyer or seller is fair.  A character with a social skill such as Bluff, Diplomacy or Intimidate may use those skills to influence the outcome of a financial transaction.  

Second, it creates roleplaying opportunities.  Looking for a seller may lead the PCs to meet an important local noble, or a crime lord, or a wealthy merchant.  Any roleplaying encounter gives the GM a chance to introduce an interesting NPC and maybe a potential plot hook.  Perhaps the NPC will never be seen again.  But maybe they come back again at a later time in the campaign and becomes important to the characters.  The NPC may be nefarious and want to rob the characters of their new shiny bauble at the earliest opportunity.  Or they may be in need of a favor, creating an adventure hook for future sessions.

Last, it improves the player’s immersion in the campaign setting.  Instead of a faceless, impersonal transaction, the characters meet someone in the setting.  Maybe it’s Marcus Thalassinus Endrin, leader of House Endrin or Toff Ornelos, Headmaster of the Acadamae.  Regardless of who, the important thing is that they have a name, they have a role in the setting, and the players may just remember their contact, and seek them out for future transactions.  This creates persistence in your world, and persistent NPCs make your setting more vibrant and believable.

In my next post, I will offer a system that adds tension to each of these modes of play. 

Happy holidays to everyone!