I'm back! MonCon was ? as all cons ? exhausting but rewarding. Both events I ran were fully subscribed (A first! My reputation is growing.) and went pretty well. I sorta blew The Lunatics are in theHall; I allowed the tone to become sillier than I intended, so it was a boisterous ride rather than a creepy one, but there it is. Sometimes plotlines twist off in unpredictable directions; that's in the nature of improvisational storytelling.
But then, the tendency for carefully-plotted adventures rapidly to go to hell in a handbasket isn't entirely the result of group improvisation, or the unavoidable confusion of several authors trying to direct the story at once. Players gravitate toward the more chaotic options. Their characters do things a real person would never consider, typically with dramatic and disruptive results.
Take, for example, an adventure I played last January at Running GAGG. The basic story line was that the characters were the staff of a tabloid newspaper, taking a camping holiday together. (The area, it turns out, was filled with Frankensteinian creatures enlarged by mutagenic chemicals, but that's another story.) Before the characters were terrorized by gigantic wildlife, they had a chance to shoot the breeze. One offhandedly insulted another, who felt that zapping him with a taser would be the perfect witty comeback. In real life, such casual brutality would be psychopathic. In a role-playing game, where players have the luxury of considering violence to be ?just pretend? or ?only hit points? or just desserts for a ?bad guy,? thoughtless cruelty is all to common, even a matter of course in some groups.
I related the story of the tasered camper to a fellow player at a Fulminata adventure Saturday afternoon, and we had a good laugh over it, shaking our heads at the folly of players who indulge vicarious power fantasies. I felt I was in good company.
How wrong I was. Later in the adventure, my fellow player directed her character to snoop about the docks of Ostia, looking for evidence of smuggling. She blew her stealth roll, and was spotted by a sentry. When the sentry belittled her gender, she pushed him. He pushed back. They came to blows. She killed the sentry and two more who tried to intervene, then chased a fourth through town, hoping to prevent any witnesses. So much for inconspicuous intelligence-gathering. The situation had escalated from ?He insulted my fighting skill, so I had to beat him up? to ??so I had to kill him? to ??so I had to kill him and all his friends, too.? Pity the poor GM.
Thoughtless violence is common enough a problem in role-playing that one often sees articles in magazines and sections in rulebooks offering GMs advice on how to curb it. The advice generally centers around pursuing the consequences of violence. Killing a cop should land you in prison, or the electric chair. Killing an evil conspirator who appears to be a respectable banker, ditto. Tromping around town in full armor or kevlar jacket should draw the hostile attention of the local constable, at a minimum. Setting fires in the warehouse district should provoke a manhunt.
But you know, I don't think players really care. I don't know why players are implausibly violent in games. Maybe it's a therapeutic release of frustration. Maybe it's the corruptive influence of too much Hollywood. Maybe it's the metagame knowledge that, later in the adventure, our sins will fade in the escalating climax. Maybe it's the only way to force another character to pay attention. Whatever the motivation, RPGs are escapist fun. If we're forced too often to behave ourselves in a game, to abide by the law, to be nice to unpleasant people, to play things safe, the escapism is ruined, and we cease to have fun. GMs will just have to bear with letting their players' characters run amok now and then, and not squeeze the jaws of the nutcracker on them.
But, players, try to keep it down to a dull roar, okay?