Risk Response and RPGs

I tell you, reading Robin D. Laws's blog is educating.

"Risk In RPGs

I am less interested in categorical distinctions between RPG game designs than I am in those that describe what actually happens during play. This is part because, as a designer, I’m more interested in providing tools that work than in adhering to an aesthetically or theoretically coherent framework. It also goes to the old saw about the rules not being the game, but the set of tools used to build the game.

One distinction between RPG play moments I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the one describing the players’ and GMs’ attitude toward risk. Does the play environment demand risk aversion on the players’ part, or is risk aversion a problem that leads to an unsatisfying experience?

Risk aversion is essential to tactical play. Players are expected to seek the greatest benefit at the lowest cost. The lower the risk, the lower the cost they stand to pay for their actions. The primal example of this style is the dungeon crawl. You aim to collect maximum treasure and experience points, while carefully shepherding your various resources: hit points, spells, etc. The major tactical decisions are all about timing: 1) when to use your limited resources and 2) when to give up and go home to recover lost hit points and spells. In other words, you keep going till you have to use your fireball, and then you split.

Risk seeking is essential to narrative play. The rules of drama decree that characters are placed under pressure, and are moved along a cycle of victories and reversals, the stakes growing ever higher until it all comes to a head in the climax. If you’re really emulating storytelling structure, everything gets as bad as it can get, until the heroes turn it around at the last climactic moment. Under this play environment, risk aversion is an impediment to forward motion—the characters have to get into trouble in order to get out of it. Although the characters shouldn’t appear suicidally reckless, extended planning sessions are counterproductive under this paradigm. In fiction, elaborate planning sessions are setups for reversals. Either the plan goes horribly wrong (as in most heist films), or the plan seems to go horribly wrong but is in fact a cover for the deeper, better plan, which succeeds in a surprising way: see the Ocean’s movies.) [sic.]

Because of the vicarious nature of the RPG experience, we tend to be much more risk averse as players than we want characters to be in traditional entertainment. Suffering a setback that would be par for the course in a dramatic adventure story feels like a sock in the jaw. If the GM didn’t give us a chance to get the benefit without the risk, we might even complain that we’re being railroaded.

Needed: better tools to help players embrace the judicious risk-seeking necessary for success in narrative game environments."

What I'm contemplating is:
While I see ways to adapt this approach to more tactical games, it seems that narrative playstyles are (obviously?) best suited to games where narrative play is already accounted for in the rules design. Would it be more difficult to use the above advice in more tactical RPGs, such as D&D, than it would be in games like HeroQuest?

Narrative Roleplaying and Player Planning

Robin D. Laws, who has written or contributed to a LOT of games that I'm very fond of, gave the following bit of advice on players' planning in RPG sessions:

"You Have Already Planned

Detailed planning sessions are cool for games with a heavy tactical element, where a low-excitement, high-results outcome is not only possible but desirable. Under a narrative paradigm, you want the characters to spend time working out what they want to do, but not necessarily the nuts and bolts details of how they're going to do it.

In a novel or movie, the only reason the author shows you the characters engaged in lengthy planning is either as a prelude to the plan going horribly awry, or to set up a false set of expectations in which the plan seems to be failing, but is actually going well, because we haven't actually seen the real plan discussed. For an example of the former, see most downbeat heist movies: The Killing or Big Deal On Madonna Street. The latter structure appears in all three Ocean's flicks. Both instances follow the narrative Law of Reversal: if we expect something to happen, and then it does, we're disappointed. Instead we expect one thing and are surprised when something else happens.

To do planning under a narrative paradigm, tell the players that they've had already a chance to plan their tactics for the invasion/infiltration/raid/whatever. But don't show the planning. Instead, allow them to improvise responses to events as they occur, as if they have brilliantly planned—but we are seeing the results of that planning for the first time.

So the heroes round the corner into the installation and find their way blocked by an XK-7 Drill-Kill autobot, intent on their destruction. The PC with the Robotics skill makes his ability test to see if he's properly incorporated it into his planning. If he succeeds, he has: he can emit a special IR beam to disable the bot for a precious 180 seconds (or whatever), enabling the group to temporarily surmount the obstacle. He gets to look cool, the action sequence continues, and you didn't have to go through hours of discussion in which the players find out there's an XK-7 on site, then discussing six different ways to take out an XK-7, complete with various sidetracks and digressions. They dispense with it as quickly (or not) as it deserves. You don't have to throw in some additional element to provide the necessary reversal to make the XK-7 encounter surprising, thus invalidating all that planning.

Because, when the scene unfolds, the planning has already happened."

Now personally, I love this bit of GMing and playing advice. It allows for delightful elements of surprise, keeps the players on their toes, and keeps the session moving rather than bogging it down in endless point/counterpoint arguing. (In over 25 years of gaming, I've seen far too much of that in RPG sessions.) However, it requires a few things of the players and GM:

1. The players need to be comfortable with improvising. If a GM is running for players that freeze like deer caught in headlights when they're put on the spot, then this technique might backfire.


2. The GM must be working with, rather than against, the players. If the GM simply stomps on every idea the player fires out, then this approach won't work. Then again, I suspect that the stomping sort of GM is unlikely to be interested in narrative play anyway.


3. The GM must be rather patient with frozen players; a bit of handholding might be necessary here.


4. The GM must be ready and willing to encourage the players' improvising with both praise and (here's the kicker) tangible bonuses. Otherwise, the players may descend back into endless planning and strategizing (i.e. bickering and bonus mongering).

What think ye?