Giving Your Players Shitty Choices

I grew up in a world where death happened more like an accident. That world was the 1990s tabletop roleplaying and those deaths were rarely a satisfying experience. Death happened more like an error made in a videogame. Except unlike a videogame no one in a tabletop game had a quickload button.

Back then, it was the GM’s job to balance an abstract world with very concrete rule set to protect the players from the game itself. But with the recent resurgence of dungeon crawlers and the modern paradigm of story-before-stats tabletop games, we’re seeing systems that rely much more on player authorship and collaboration than careful GM monster balancing.

This new perspective on roleplaying gives GMs the leeway to introduce dangers to the players without allowing your player to cheat. The new paradigm permeates the parts of the games that were once considered the holy realm of the GM.  It would be nearly unthinkable to ask a player what the name of an NPC was 20 years ago, and now we’re asking the heroes to take complete authorship with questions like, “How did you kill them?” and even down to the details of their own deaths.

With each new generation of game it becomes clearer that things that affect the agency of the players should always be, at least partially, in the hands of the player. And since character death is the ultimate for of loss of player authorship it stands to reckon that players should have some say as to how it goes down.

I never like killing characters but I have learned that death tells a good story and a damn good story if it’s done right. I’ve also learned that there are tricks to dong it without making your friends hate you, or feel like they want to give up on the whole game. So if death should happen how do we make death interesting?

I’ve discovered a secret; give your players shitty choices.

This idea developed organically with my first Dungeon World campaign. The players were outnumbered and in a perilous situation fighting an undead queen and her cursed castle’s minions.

At the very end of the game, our druid, Hycorax has the vampire queen latched onto her neck and she’s running out of vitae. It’s clear she’s going to go down in the next action unless she’s insanely lucky or someone does something. Kith, the fighter, decides to do something big. She’s atop a tall rampart looking down at the two grappling below. The mage also does something; Magic missiles fire from the mages fingers smashing against the druid injuring her even more. The evil fighter decides that dropping the castle gate on drained druid and her leech-ey companion. There’s a roll and yep, it looks like she’s going to die.

At this point I needed to make a decision; it’s time for this character to die, and I need to give her a moment, maybe of glory, maybe of complete and utter defeat.

I ask her, “The portcullis is dropping and you have moments to react. You can try to dodge it, knowing fully that this bitch is still sucking your blood and will probably kill you, or you can embrace her under the gate and probably take her out along with yourself.”

Sure, what I’ve done is presented a fact, “you’re going to die,” but I’ve still given her authorship over how it plays out. She can take the path of a survivor, game against the chance that the dice will roll low and she survives through mere luck , or she can play the hero, helping her compatriots (even the ones that dropped the gate on her) in the process, making her the hero.  It’s a hard, shitty decision but it’s still authored by the player.

Sadly Hycorax didn’t die. The Dungeon World mechanics allow players to cheat death with a decent roll, but had she died, oh glorious it would have been!

I Rolled a 10 and Sexed a Guy With a Mustache.

I’m sitting in a café with four of my closest male friends. I roll a pair of dice and declare loudly that I’m seducing my mustachioed compatriot. No one at the table bats an eye. It’s weird; I’ve never really been close to other men and this may be the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had with them. Actually, this may be the first time in my adult life I’ve had a close group of male friends.

Maybe that’s because I don’t like talking about sports or drinking beer.   It’s weird to write that; the beer-sports-thing seems like one of those stereotypes about men I think is bullshit.  But then I wind up at a party where some guy hands me a Budweiser and asks me about a starting quarterback for the Lakers. Those are the kinds of situations that make me so uncomfortable I sink into the crack of the sofa hoping that I will be sucked between the cushions into a dimension where men do other things besides drink and watch TV together.

But it’s true. Men do watch a lot of TV, about three hours a day on average. It’s the number one pastime in the U.S. Maybe it’s because men, especially my age, tend to be married, and are expected to budget their already limited time off with family. TV is at home and it’s passive, so you can do things like watch a game while taking care of your kids. Men also tend to play sports and exercise, but on average its way less than TV: just 19 minutes a day. Maybe its indicative that Americans call the time they relax in, “Sports and Leisure.” Watching sports probably goes beyond convenient and more is more of male cultural identity. They’re also activities that men can do while being part of their family or with other men, and beyond that there aren’t many activities that fit those criteria.

Some of us men do come together to do something besides sports. But we’re far from the average in terms of activities though. To an outsider it probably would seem pretty odd. Four or five men sitting around a table, mysterious polyhedral dice, books of lore and strange pieces of paper with cryptic numbers and crude maps scribed on them.

We loudly talk about weird things in coded language. We joke about the lives of fictional characters we personally have created. It’s an adult game of pretend.  If you think that sounds a little immature, you’re wrong. These aren’t the men that never grew up; they’re men with careers, families, ambitions and full lives. What’s amazing to me is how intimate the pretending can be despite our natural tendency to act like… well… men.

I’d say that we’re difficult creatures; we challenge each other about everything, we cover our mistakes with bravado and machismo and point out each other’s faults. I think that’s healthy and necessary.  It’s part of having higher levels of one hormone than the other.And for someone who has never been athletic and stand-offish about other men it’s nice to have a place where if some shit comes up during a game we  resolve the conflict there. Our friendships extend outside our gaming too and we build community and communicate about our lives.

Some of us roll some dice and have sex with another player’s character and that’s not weird, it’s male intimacy and expression. The same way we pretended to play Star Wars with our friends when we were young. It’s helping us understand and teaching us that other men aren’t only our rivals despite our natural tendencies to view this kind of communication as something immature or unmasculine.