thread: 2011-05-11 : The Un-frickin-welcome
On 2011-05-30, Joel wrote:
So, I have a lot to say about this, but I just got caught up on the discussion.
First, some personal experience: I have numerous examples of the Unwelcome cropping up in my long years of D&D play, here it didn't feel valuable, rewarding, etc. to allow for those situations at all. Here's a blog post from a couple years back where I grope and fumble at what made one of those experiences so frustrating:
tl;dr: We're playing a long-running campaign, player who's been a passive-aggressive jerk in the past wants to join, GM lets him, he creates a character who's all about killing vampires, assists us in rescuing a PC from vampires(which we've been waiting months of real time to do), wants to kill him when he sees he's been turned to vampire, we, in character talk him out of it because we're taking him to get cured, said jerk bides his time, then attacks and kills said PC, exploiting combat rules to circumvent my character's precautions against him doing just that.
So: there's a lot going on there including a shitty social dynamic with already-broken trust being broken still further. So I'm not trying to blame the game rules (D&D 3.5) for that, though I might be inclined to blame D&D play culture. But what's relevant here, maybe, is how the rules enabled this unwelcome outcome, and why it felt crappy.
It's not so much the outcome (We work hard to rescue our friend, only to have him killed by our new ally) that I object to...it's HOW the rules brought it about. The rules gave me no meaningful tools for achieving my desired outcome. The other player knew this, and so took an action he KNEW as undesirable for others at the table, and that he KNEW the others would have no means of opposing. It was a zero-risk action for him. He knew that my having a crossbow pointed at his back did not in the slightest prevent him from delivering a single punch to a helpless opponent—all I could do was deplete his hitpoints, but not enough to drop him. And when he ran away, he knew that the movement rates meant I could never catch him.
(in reviewing the incident, I realized there were some different, creative rulings the GM could have employed, or I could have suggested, that could have brought about a different outcome. But our best interpretation of those rules in the moment gave us that flat, lifeless piece of unwelcome.)
I should state, btw, that we weren't doing challenge-focused play, by a long shot. Our priority was, insomuch as play was coherent at all (which is to say, not much), to play our characters with integrity to their fictional goals, and thereby explore the story and the world.
So, Vincent, when you talk about wanting to look at game designs right at the point where they produce the unwelcome...you're not saying "if it produces the unwelcome, it's good;" rather you're saying something like "the parts of the design that produce the unwelcome are the crucial components, which make or break the game," right? So, does this example sound to you like an example of a game design producing an unfruitful unwelcome, at least for our group with our set of play priorities? Or am I just a whiner, or what?
Meanwhile, I'll follow up with an example of a "fruitful unwelcome" from my own play.
Peace,
-Joel
