Maintaining atmosphere, building character

I’m playing in Brian et al’s Pakh Pakh, which is about to end, and I’m running Feng Shui, which has recently started up again with a bunch of different characters. Both have a similar problem: they’re not as good as they could be. And I think this is down to comparatively poor roleplaying.

Note: I’m not blaming the players. In both games, there are a lot of good roleplayers, and in any case I’ve seen games with worse roleplayers produce better roleplaying. I think there are problems with the setting that are detracting from the roleplaying.

Pakh Pakh

Consider Pakh Pakh. This started off with pretty damn good roleplaying (Sinclair’s Tafu deserves plaudits here), and some good GMing too. But as it went along, and the power level went up, even though we were no longer trudging through the mud, but were instead making first contact with entire nations and, damnit, creating magical artifacts that would be renowned centuries later, somehow it felt less… special. We became increasingly aware, as players (and I think as GMs) that, damnit, we were playing AD&D.

I mean, tonight, in the middle of what was, effectively, the planning session for a year-long movement of multiple armies for the first time in all of these civilisations’ histories, we got bogged down in “the rulebook says what?” AD&D-mongering, as we realised that the wizard had access to spells that could effectively let him create huge walls of meat to feed our army with. (Incidentally, I kid you not, such a creation is mentioned in the Monstrous Manual.) Cue the kebab jokes.

Brian admitted that he wasn’t trying as hard now as he was at the beginning of the campaign, and I can see why. Sometimes you just can’t take AD&D seriously. It just, point blank, doesn’t lend itself to epic fantasy.

Well, OK, maybe it could. But that requires that all parties contribute to maintaining a mood of epic fantasy. I think this means a) an absolute bare minimum of random OOC comments; b) good, quality music at all times (this also means that the GM needs to be able to change the music whenever it’s inappropriate, which I do with a laptop); possibly c) lighting / absence of munchies.

I think that high-level fantasy, in fact epic anything, pretty much requires a high level of seriousness. You can’t joke about. Humour is OK, but it can only happen sporadically. Merry and Pippin find a whole bunch of food and pipe-weed at Isengard, but only after two major battles that the last few chapters had been leading up to (Ents vs Saruman, Rohan vs Saruman again). And almost immediately afterwards, Aragorn has a battle of wills with Sauron, and because he’s won, walks the Paths of the Dead, jettisoning a potential love interest almost as an afterthought.

High-level fantasy is not frivolous, by any means. And I think that the GM(s) and PCs have got to be vigilant to make sure that they maintain the appropriate atmosphere.

Feng Shui

There appears to be an unwritten rule that there has to be at least one major fight scene in any given Feng Shui session. And, at least at the beginning of a campaign, that mostly means rail-roading. Plot happens to the PCs, at the expense of character development.

This is mostly my fault, and I’m going to try and address this in the next session by giving the players more of a free reign, more latitude to flesh out their characters. But I think it’s also a problem with the idea that the PCs are in an action movie.

Action movies are built upon slick editing. Anyone who has observed players discussing matters knows that their method of arriving at a consensus is anything but slick. You could edit a lengthy argument down to about a quarter of its actual length and not lose anything of value, because people repeated themselves, argued inconsequentially, went off on tangents and so on.

So if, as a GM, you think you’re in an action movie, you’re going to curtail player discussion, because, damnit, there’s this really cool sequence that I want to run, but I only have an hour left in the sequence, and the players are going to ruin it with their babbling. So I dial 1-800-McGUFFIN.

I think the conclusion you have to draw is this: apart from one-offs, PCs cannot properly reproduce Arnie-style action movies. But they can reproduce the feel of long-standing TV series, like, say, Babylon 5 or Starsky & Hutch, in which inter-party debate and conflict is almost essential for the plot (if not the meta-plot).

So, GMs: be aware of what type of game you’re playing. And do what is appropriate to that sort of game.