I had two new players at last night's Boot Hill game, young fellows maybe still in high school. The PCs were hired to be the law in a rough and tumble mining town, but one of the new guys didn't want to do that. He accepted the assignment, but his first action in town was to stone cold murder a drunken gambler in broad daylight, in front of a livery stable that was open for business and across the street from the boarding house the PCs were staying in.
He was not expecting one of the other PC lawmen to shoot him down in the street like a mad dog, but I'm kinda glad he did.
Carl made it unnecessary for me to act, but the murderer had two witnesses who saw the PC and the victim leave together just moments before the murder. This incident points towards something I've seen from young people many times over the years. Some kids are so flush with the raw power of playing a game where holy crap! I can do whatever I want! that they completely overlook the obvious consequences of their actions. I'm all for PC shenanigans and I truly believe that one of the useful functions of roleplaying games is that they allow us to stretch our ids a bit without ending up in jail, but especially with adolescents I feel that the game world needs to bite back in these sorts of circumstances.
In my experience a younger player with this problem will get his first couple of PCs killed stupidly. If he or she (and I've seen young ladies with this same difficulty as the boys) can get over that hump they can then go on to become ordinary amoral, bloodthirsty PCs, i.e. the kind that make sure not to get caught. I've actually seen this process play out in a single con session. It's one of the reasons I bring spare characters to any con game where chargen will take for than a couple minutes.
Mince Pie Fest 2024: Waitrose No 1
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These often get picked as the best supermarket mince pies by the gutter
press, so let's see. The pastry has a good texture, firm but also soft, but
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I really like game worlds with consequences. My current game is Conspiracy X, a sort of X-Files-ish RPG. The party are FBI agents and the world has bitten back quite a bit.
ReplyDeleteFor one example, one of the characters just finished a rather lengthy civil trial for a shooting in which she was involved (that was a lot of fun: I created about 8k words of written court material for it). Another PC may or may not have accidentally purchased the services of an underage prostitute, which might end poorly for him...
What happened after the sheriff shot the deputy? I.e., how did the newbie react to the world hitting back?
ReplyDeleteHe tried to talk his way out of it by arguing that Gentlemen Jim was acting on PC knowledge when he opened fire. I didn't buy it. After a few moments he bucked up, erased his charsheet (which annoyed me when I discovered it, I collect dead PCs) and rolled up a new guy. Now he's a bounty hunter.
ReplyDeleteEven in a game I think consequences need to be important on some level. The risk of getting caught or possible getting killed can make it all the more fun.
ReplyDeleteMy instinct as a PC is still (a little bit) to kill everybody willy-nilly. Maybe it's a phase I haven't grown out of because I haven't got enough game time in as a PC but I often find DMs are too heavy handed about this sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteI think DMs don't realize some settings are much less rigidly policed than the modern world. I'm no historian, but I've heard that medieval settings are almost anarchies by comparison. And I've heard that samurai sometimes, when they got a new sword, would test it out on some random peasant that just happened to be nearby and that this happened "more often than you'd think".
Once in a D&D game an NPC was mouthing off to my PC for some reason. I tried to call him on it but the DM had him run off pretty quickly, giving me a shove as he walked past. Well that was the last straw for me, so I took out my bow and shot him as he was walking away. Everybody at the table groaned like I was being an idiot, and maybe I was, doing this in the middle of town, but the DM response was to instantly surround my PC with a dozen guards. Even if I was across the street from a police station type building, am I supposed to believe that there was a dozen of them armed, ready, waiting and watching so they could pour out in _one round_? I'm fine with a chase scene breaking out and/or my reputation in the area being ruined but going from Stupid Act to Execution in one turn is heavy handed. (and who's to say it's any dumber than dungeon delving anyway? adventure is the name of the game...)
As a DM I'm now trying to be more supportive of random slaughter. I explain it to my players by saying "I like a little wild west in my settings". Some DMs use high level NPCs or unrealistically tough town guards to keep the players in line, and I wont be doing that. Even vampire I've started to run as a poorly policed quazi-anarchy. I used to get bent out of shape every time someone would kill a bum in an alleyway. Then I realized my poorly thought out consequences were just a big bummer and for PCs running wild is half the appeal.
Anon brings up a good point, in that unless you are seen to do the deed, and unless the person slain is of high enough reputation, you might get away with murder. Not all the time, but at least sometimes. I guess it depends on how realistic your setting is. Is it Ultima, where calling out "guards" has them teleport in? or is it some sort of grubby dark ages world, where you CAN test out that new sword on someone as long as they are of lower social class?
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