What do you do?

The call to action within a tabletop RPG implies freedom. When all is said and done, when the cards are down, the GM asks the players ‘what do you do?’ and they go forth as they see fit. Not bound by rules or procedures, only by their imagination of the game world; the rules are there to help explain what happens, not to limit what can be done. This is the siren’s song of the roleplaying game, the freedom to do, and to be, whatever and whoever you want. There are many roads to a roleplaying game, and most traditional games (and many popular non-traditional ones) are built around this question. There is another question, though, that a game can ask, and for me, games which ask this second question have been the ones providing the most affecting, engrossing experiences.

How do you feel?

While games don’t literally ask this question outright (with a few exceptions), it is the key to another layer of character development, of narrative, even of mere in-game consequences. Once a game makes you think about how your character is feeling, you’re inhabiting that character on a whole other level. The problem with this should essentially go without saying: Rules can’t make you feel things. Game procedures can’t make you feel things. If a game wants to make you feel things, and more specifically feel the things your character would feel, the designer has to be a lot more inventive in how they go about this task than they would be, say, determining the probability that you hit a target with an arrow. But there are designers who have succeeded in this, delivering gut punches, heart wrenching decisions, and a sprinkling of light trauma. To them, I have only one thing to say: I want more of it.

We’ve been playing a few emotional, drama-driven games here at Cannibal Halfling, and what strikes me about the best of these is not only that they have the capability to produce deeply affecting experiences, but also that they’re repeatable. It might not mean too much that both Seamus and I, decades-experienced GMs, turned DIE into emotional roller coasters for everyone involved. But when Aki was able to pick up Masks and both wreck our feelings and also have it literally be his first complete campaign, it was a much stronger indication that devastating games can be user friendly as well. At the very least, continued success across several of these games at multiple GM experience levels makes it easier for me to say that it’s the games, not just the people, creating the storylines I just can’t stop thinking about.

Since first playing Masks, I’ve been considering if designing a game to be more emotionally affecting is more difficult than mainline RPG design. It’s not clear-cut; the main reason most RPGs don’t go for drama is just because that’s not what they’re designed to do. Games like D&D which descended from wargames are rooted in killing things, and pretty much every other mechanic added to them later is secondary. It’s really only in the 2000s where you get rulesets that have walked far enough away from the hobby’s wargaming predecessors that they can begin to say they’re about something else.

That’s the first advantage Masks has. Powered by the Apocalypse is a ruleset which isn’t about fights and killing things, it’s about actions and reactions. If you want something, how do you get it? What happens when you do that? How do you react to what happens? Masks in particular sings because it creates a group of characters who want things very badly (teenagers) and have wild capabilities to get those things (superpowers). Of course you’re not just superpowered and superhormoned, you exist in a world of very clearcut tropes and expectations, where every adult has influence over you and every one of your peers may end up your archnemesis. You’re encouraged to want normal teenage things, like acceptance or good grades or a date to the dance, while existing in a world where getting those things is intensely difficult because of all the superhero nonsense also going on.

Masks requires buy-in. Any player who just wants the superhero half of the game and not the teenager half isn’t going to be happy. That said, the rules do a lot to emulate the teenage condition; having other characters (player or otherwise) shift your labels is an extremely common occurrence, and getting those labels to where you want them long enough to use a later game ability to lock them means, well, standing up aggressively for who you are. It’s very clever. DIE, in comparison, doesn’t force you to engage with its mechanics. It rewards you for engaging on the terms given to you (when the GM tells you what character class you’re playing), but the assumption is that all the driving emotional energy happens at the beginning. The secret sauce for DIE, as noted in Seamus’s review, lies in that character creation section, specifically for the Reunited scenario. You’re asked a bunch of questions that help you paint a picture of who your character is as a teenager, what’s special about them, what their hopes and dreams are. Then, towards the end, you’re pointed at explaining exactly why your dreams never added up, why you aren’t special anymore, why you no longer hope. And while this does sound obviously emotional and grim, there aren’t any rules for it. The GM is supposed to dole out the powers to those who match them. Being the Dictator is supposed to feed the character’s existing desire for control and influence, it won’t create it out of nothing. DIE also requires buy-in.

This is where the concept of a ‘devastating game’ starts to become difficult. While Powered by the Apocalypse games often give you more leeway to empathize with your characters, most of them don’t produce the same gut punches Masks does. DIE is a fairly light and fairly bog-standard RPG in play, but the character creation procedure, which requires no knowledge of the rules at all in its first and most crucial phase, is what creates all the drama. Mechanical support can certainly help the game (it does in Masks), but it seems completely unrequired.

This leads to two main things that are needed for an emotionally devastating game. First, you need a premise you can buy into. I don’t think every emotional game needs to be about teenagers. I think making emotional games about teenagers is easier, to the point where it’s almost cheating: invite players to reconnect with the most volatile part of their lives, which every single one of them will either remember or be going through at that very moment, and then use those reconnections to create characters in a roleplaying game. There is literally no easier recipe for bleed. Creating a premise with similar investment about adult characters is certainly possible, but certainly trickier.

The second thing you need is a platform from which you can empathize with your character. What this means is that most common RPG conceits and tropes go out the window. D&D-style murderfests create too much cognitive dissonance for you to empathize with your character on a real level. Hell, DIE employs this cognitive dissonance deliberately, by encouraging the GM to put recognizable faces on all the monsters and then just ask ‘you’re sure this isn’t real, right?’ On the other extreme, superheroes create a genre of fighting mostly without murder, of conclusions without killing, and where when a character dies onscreen it is generally accompanied with enough narrative weight that it makes sense to emotionally engage with that fact.

The other element you do need to abandon from most traditional RPGs is traditional advancement. What advancement in most RPGs does is create a very simple cycle: “As I become more powerful, I will more easily be able to solve my problems.” To offer an example, I’m currently playing a character in a game of Legend of the Five Rings who is, on one hand, a powerful Scorpion shugenja who can literally become shadows and steal people’s faces. On the other hand, he is famously promiscuous, very single, and wondering what he needs to do to actually be happy. As long as he can’t shortcut his journey to happiness with poison darts and magical shadow teleportation, the drama itself isn’t shortcut either. Unfortunately, the storyline with the cool powers is generally the one that attracts the player, whether or not it would be primary for the character. Legend of the Five Rings (like every RPG given the right group, of course) can be an emotionally affecting RPG, but realistically it will never be a devastating one.

---

If creating a devastating game is more about what you shouldn’t do than what you should, then it could be easy. Admittedly, there are other games which I’ve played that clearly have the ingredients to be profoundly affecting. Wanderhome, like DIE, is written in a way that you need to bring the character’s internal conflicts to the forefront. Monsterhearts, like Masks, has you create troubled and powerful teenage characters who are stuck between two worlds. I think what ends up being difficult about creating emotionally charged games is you have to move pretty far away from the typical RPG paradigm. You can’t let your characters fight their problems, or spend XP to get away from their issues. If the game turns into a power fantasy, it loses its emotional weight, but most games on the market either are or become power fantasies. It’s not, then, that writing an emotionally devastating game is hard, it’s that writing any other kind of game is so much easier.

My favorite games are ones that make me think, and ones that make me feel. And, to be frank, high stats, big dice pools, and powerful abilities don’t really make me think or feel beyond the entertainment value in using them. In my current group I have played or run 45 campaigns of various lengths (yes, we keep a running tally), and I know for a fact who my most memorable characters are. It’s Gil, the Beacon, who was just happy to be there but got steadily in further and further over his head. It’s Julia, the Doomed, who by the end was so sick of people trying to save her that she would have rather died than had her life saved without her consent. It’s Jay, the failed GM who was sick of just getting by and wanted adventure and recognition in DIE more than scorn and boredom in the real world. And it’s Donnie, who was tormented by the fear that everything that went wrong for him in his youth would keep going wrong, no matter how good things looked in the moment. As I get older, my characters do get more complex, more interesting, more flawed. This is as true in Cyberpunk as it is in Masks, as true in Star Trek Adventures as it is in DIE. But, even though all my characters are getting more real, the ones who stand out are the ones that come from these gut punches, these devastating games. I don’t think there’s any big secret in how to write a game like this, but you have to walk away from what you think an RPG is supposed to look like. Stories like those in Masks and DIE look different from the stories in other games. All I want is more games that look different as well.

Like what Cannibal Halfling Gaming is doing and want to help us bring games and gamers together? First, you can follow me @LevelOneWonk@dice.camp for RPG commentary, relevant retweets, and maybe some rambling. You can also find our Discord channel and drop in to chat with our authors and get every new post as it comes out. You can travel to DriveThruRPG through one of our fine and elegantly-crafted links, which generates credit that lets us get more games to work with! Finally, you can support us directly on Patreon, which lets us cover costs, pay our contributors, and save up for projects. Thanks for reading!