Character Incapability: The distant side of the coin

“This is everything you need to know – you DO understand Temporal Regression Engineering, right?”
Flux Capacitor by GDJ for Back-to-the-future-day 2015 courtesy OpenClipart.org, Background Graphics Provided by Vecteezy users Sunshine-91, freevector, and onomonopeea. Click on the thumbnail for a larger image
Last week, I wrote about creating adventures based on what a character could do. This week I’m going to look at the far more difficult proposition of basing a mini-adventure on what a character can’t do.
This task is much trickier; just because a character is incapable of the action that would resolve whatever problem is the focal point of the situation doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable for the character to be considered helpless. No, they still have to have at least one and preferably several courses of action open to them that will resolve the problem.
At first, you might think “No problem, they can simply go to an NPC who has the appropriate skill to get around the handicap.” But that in itself raises a problem, in that the PCs are supposed to be the stars of the show, and not some GM fiat.
Nevertheless, there are simple solutions to consider:
- Using an NPC but providing a challenge that the PC can solve before the NPC will assist, i.e. a substitution of challenge;
- Using another PC who has the required skill, i.e. a substitution of challenger; or,
- Providing another path to a solution for the unassisted PC.
Each of these is a viable solution, each has its virtues, and each poses its own difficulties and challenges for the GM to overcome.
Substitution Of Challenge
This works, in principle, at the cost of increased playing time; effectively, you are adding a new scene to the mini-encounter. However, there’s a complicating wrinkle: doing so also increases the spotlight time for that PC.
The simplest way to redress this imbalance, at least in theory, is to also add an extra scene or complication to the plots surrounding the other PCs. Oh, if only it was that easy…
How Long Is A Scene?
One of the questions that I very carefully avoided getting too caught up in while working on the standard terminology article for Campaign Mastery was “how long is a scene?” The answer is almost as meaningless as asking “How long is a Fahrenheit?”
But that’s not especially helpful.
I’ve written and run scenes that last for 2 minutes. I’ve written and run scenes that – excluding combat – lasted for about 20 minutes. That’s an incredibly wide variation, and is the source of the trouble.
One way of making some sense out of the situation is to measure it by the degree of interaction that the PC(s) have with events. This is predicated on the notion that it takes a relatively short space of time – measured in seconds – to read a line of narrative. It doesn’t matter if it’s 1 second or 3 or somewhere in between, it’s such a small contribution to the total scene length.
What really takes the time is interaction between the player and the GM – whether that’s the PC doing something (which needs to be interpreted), or the PC talking to an NPC (i.e. conversation between the player and GM in their respective guises). That’s because these tend to be open-ended in duration: a conversation can be brief or extended, one action may follow another, and either of these can contain additional lines of narrative interspersed.
If you rate the degree of interaction between player and GM within a scene on a scale of 1-10, then estimate about 2 minutes per point of rating, you won’t be too far off the mark. The reality might be 1.5 minutes or 2.5 minutes each, but the degree of error is relatively small – and certainly close enough for practical purposes, because there will be other factors influencing the total real-time duration of the scene that will more than swamp the resulting margin of error.
Estimating Scene Length In Advance
With a little experience, you can directly perform such a rating based on the notes in your adventure in a lot less time than it takes to read and analyze the content to assess a rating.
Here’s a breakdown of one “scene” from last Saturday’s adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign:
Narrative, locates PC1 in Location 1.
Interaction with NPC.
Decision by PC1, outcome not described in this scene.
In fact, there were four scenes with different PCs that all match that overall description – all that would change would be the PC “number” and corresponding location.
The narrative doesn’t count as an interaction, and because the decision is not interpreted within this scene, only made and announced by the player, it doesn’t count either. So these scenes each have an interaction rating of 1 – indicating an estimated length of 2 minutes. Some were a little longer, some a little shorter, but that average was about right – probably closer to 1 or 1.5 minutes, in reality. These scenes were, in theory, occurring more or less simultaneously; quick changes of scene like this is a technique that we commonly use to rotate the spotlight when this is the case.
Concurrent with these four scenes was another, slightly more involved scene:
Narrative, locates PC5 in Location 5.
Interaction with NPC.
Trivial Decision by PC5.
Narrative, relocates PC5 in Location 6 as a result of the decision.
Interaction with NPC.
Narrative resulting from Interaction.
Decision by PC5, outcome not described in this scene.
You will note that this introduces a new term, “Trivial Decision”. This is essentially asking a rhetorical question, and proceeding with the scene based on the answer. In effect, it excludes the decision from counting as “interaction”. Excluding the narrative section,and the decision-without-an-outcome, this scene effectively has an interaction count of 2 – the interactions with different NPCs – so I would expect it to take about twice as long, and guess what? It did.
The story then picked up on the other PCs, one after another:
Narrative relating the result of the decision.
Decision by PC1/2/3/4, outcome not described in this scene.
Normally, narrative doesn’t count as an interaction, but because this narrative involves the deferred interaction with the GMs relating to the earlier decisions by the player, this does – so each of these scenes also have an interaction count of 1.
When you add them up, PCs 1 through 4 had two scenes each with an interaction count of 2, while PC5 had one scene with a longer interaction count of 2 – the spotlight was effectively shared equally amongst them all. In terms of the overall adventure, each of these scenes served the same single plot purpose, with only the PC being affected by that purpose changing. Effectively, this could be considered a single scene taking place in 6 different locations involving 5 different PCs simultaneously – a total rating of 10.
When writing the adventure, each line given in the structure above was dealt with in an individual paragraph. Narrative text has no prefix; Interactions, canned dialogue, and any narrative that results from an interaction are preceded by a triple asterisk (***); and any decisions, rolls required, notes about interpretations of results, and any resulting dialogue or narrative, are preceded by a triple “>>>”. This makes it a trivial effort to count the number of paragraphs in a scene that have *** or >>> in front of them, giving a total interaction rating at something close to a glance.
Pacing doesn’t always work exactly as planned
We use this arrangement to structure the adventure and plan the pacing, including the optimum time to take breaks in terms of interrupting the narrative, in accordance with the two-part Swell & Lull article on emotional pacing (Part 1, Part 2). It permits some estimate of how much material we will get through in a day’s play – at least, once any unusually lengthy narrative passages, and unusually difficult decisions, and any combats are taken into account.
But there’s a lot of scope for variation on the day, and things don’t always go as planned. In this case, I accidentally left at home the plastic bag containing all the cables and extras that go with my laptop, including the external mouse. That meant that I had to struggle with the built-in pad, which meant that one piece of preliminary business took a LOT longer than planned. We attempted to compensate by keeping the dialogue with NPCs a little more brisk than usual – and, as is often the case, over-compensated. We ended up finishing the day’s place about an hour ahead of schedule, despite the initial delay, meaning that we could have taken the time for lengthier interactions.
So it’s not a perfect tool; but it’s a lot better than nothing.
Substitution of Challenge – the bottom line
If your adventure anticipates the need for a different approach (and it should), then you can thumbnail a reasonably scene breakdown like the examples described above during your planning. That means that you can determine the resulting interaction level of the scene that will actually take place, and from that, keep an eye on how much spotlight time each PC is getting within your adventure. The interaction planning “tool” that I have described makes Substitution of Challenge practical, by overcoming the difficulties experienced without it.
Substitution Of Challenger
The second approach is to recruit someone else to deal with the situation for which the PC is so ill-equipped. The downside is that the second PC takes up some of the spotlight time that should – in theory – belong to the first.
There are a number of strategies that can be applied to correct this problem, which essentially come down to different ways of making sure everyone either has a similar loss of spotlight time – so that what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts. The most obvious of these strategies is to put everyone into the same boat, so that the PCs effectively play a game of round-robin with the challenges. The problem with this technique is that it can only seem coincidental once; after that, it feels artificial and forced. Coincidence remains one of the hardest things to sell in any form of narrative expression, whether that’s cinema, television, politics, literature, or gaming, as I pointed out in The Conundrum Of Coincidence.
The second basic variant on the overall strategy to solve the problem is to restrict the “swapping” of headaches to just one or two PCs and equalize things for the rest (more or less, there will always be a little variation) and simply to add an extra complication or encounter of some sort to the other PCs mini-adventures.
Another complication that has to be carefully managed is that combat notoriously takes up a LOT more game-time than non-combat. That imposes another restriction on the nature of any complications or extra challenges.
All in all, there are so many complications that this is a very challenging solution for the GM. That makes it all the more satisfying when you do pull it off, but demands much greater detail of planning to achieve.
The Solution to (most of) these problems
Luckily, there is a solution – the same one that was used to handle “substitution of challenge”, in fact. Break the adventure into smaller slices until you get it down into scenes, count up the scenes that feature each of the PCs by interaction rating, then balance those values so that everyone gets the same total.
The differences in interaction scores tell you exactly how big an additional plot sequence the PC handing off the challenge requires to give them an equal share of the spotlight.
For example, let’s say that PC1 has a plotline with an interaction score of 4. PC2 has a plotline with an interaction score of 2. But, after 2 interaction points, PC1 realizes that they don’t have the required abilities or skills to resolve the challenge they face. Instead of claiming the third interaction point, he or she instigates an unscheduled one that is shared with PC2 – so that counts for both of them. PC2 then claims the 3rd and 4th interaction points allocated to PC1’s plotline. The totals are:
- PC1: 2 + 1 = 3;
- PC2: 2 + 1 + 2 = 5;
and the difference between these totals is 2. So PC1 needs an additional challenge or problem to deal with that is worth 2 interaction points – another 3-to-5 minutes of plot.
No matter how convoluted your plans get, this enables you to balance expected play over all the PCs.
Supplemental scores
At least, it would, were it not for a complicating wrinkle or two, that can be summed up: “Not all scenes or scene elements are created equal.”
There’s a basic assumption in the simplicity of the system described that narrative doesn’t go overlong; that conversations are all the same length; that non-trivial decisions all take the same length of time to make; that there’s no combat; and so on.
It’s actually not all that difficult to take each of these problems into account, solving them one-by-one by allocating Supplemental Scores to adjust each PC’s share of the spotlight.
- Any narrative that is more than 6 lines long is “extra long”. Every 5 lines, or part thereof, beyond that adds 1/4 to the interaction total for each PC who is supposed to pay attention to the narrative. So if a PC isn’t there, they get nothing extra; if they are, they do – unless you are intending to shortcut later events by assuming that the PCs who are present will bring the PCs who aren’t up to speed when the time is right without actually roleplaying a conversation that is nothing but recapitulation, possibly erroneous.
- Conversations can basically be described as call-and-response exchanges. A typical conversation is 2-to-5 half-exchanges; AB, ABA, ABAB, or ABABA (assuming only two participants – more complex conversations have more complicated patterns). For every 2 additional full exchanges, add 1/2 to the value of the scene element; and if two or more of the participants are PCs, add an extra 0.5 to the total for each PC after the first.
- Decisions can be tricky, but 2 minutes is a long time, and that’s what a full additional point is worth. That means that a scale can be set up: trivial decisions and rhetorical questions (“Are you going to try and prevent the zombie apocalypse?”) are worth zero; ordinary decisions are worth 1; difficult decisions are worth 2; and extremely difficult decisions are worth 3. If there are any decisions needing more than about 5 minutes, the game has stalled, and the players have no idea of what to do; the GMs may have to resort to skill checks, hints, and/or intelligence saves to get things moving again.
- Combat is THE trickiest problem. You can try to estimate how long the fight will take – but such estimates are notoriously unreliable. A better solution is to arrange the sequences of events so that every character has some sort of combat or pseudo-combat encounter at the same point in the scene, then run them as one big fight taking place in multiple locations, or to employ a more cinematic technique. A brief cinematic combat will take 2 minutes or less (rating of 1); a more substantial cinematic combat will take 4-8 minutes (rating of 2-4), while a really big cinematic combat will take 10+ minutes.
Distribution Of Spotlight
Whenever you split up your PCs and let them act independently, you need to plan carefully to avoid a situation in which a player is just sitting around for a long period of time.
That problem is depicted in the example above, in which PC1 is in blue, PC2 is in green, and PC3 is in Red. On the left is a poor distribution – PC3 has to wait quite a long time before receiving any GM love, and then becomes the focus of attention for quite some time while the others sit around. The distribution to the right is more balanced, but also fairly predictable; though that is better than the alternative. With a little work, it’s possible to craft solutions that are both less monotonous and balanced.
You might appreciate the principle of a balanced distribution of spotlight, but be wondering why unpredictability is such a virtue.
The simple fact is that if a player doesn’t know whether or when you are going to throw the spotlight in his direction, he is more attentive and focused. Quick rotation of focus, as described earlier, has the same effect. It isn’t easy, but with appropriate planning of the spotlight, you can have each PC doing something entirely independent of the others while still feeling like part of the group.
Once again, these arrangements become a little trickier when the lengths of scenes begin to vary. Perfect solutions are rarely possible, but these are nevertheless something to be striven for.
Of course, your goal might not be to equitably distribute the spotlight as you would for an ensemble cast; your campaign might operate on the principle of the revolving star vehicle, in which each PC in succession gets a disproportionate share of the spotlight. In the long run, it therefore evens out, but in terms of any one specific adventure, it can be heavily biased. Those interested in this aspect of game philosophy should read Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign?.
Low Road vs High Road
The third approach is the hardest of all – finding an alternate path to success, adapting what the character can do to get around the limitation of what they can’t..
It can be either the most- or the least-satisfying of all three options, largely depending on whether or not you (as GM) have to feed the solution to the problem to the player or if he comes up with one without GM prompting.
Quite often, a player has to look at the challenge before their PC in just the right way for a solution to present itself, and the slightest variation in nuance can be enough to derail the creative process.
To some extent, permitting players to brainstorm, even if only for a limited time-frame, can solve that problem – but it can also send players off down an entirely incorrect tangent, especially if someone makes assumptions, offers interpretations of theory as fact, or simply missed a key fact offered by the GM.
How much assistance?
Some people question the extent to which the GM should be permitted to hand-hold the players when they are fumbling around in the dark. There is a reasonable argument that players should be free to make mistakes, and that the GM should be more concerned with what the players do or don’t do than with what they should do.
There is an equally-valid counter-argument that players are not their characters, and it’s part of the GM’s job to help them bridge the gap.
There is also a valid point to be made that fumbling around trying to work out what the PCs should do to solve their problem is absolutely no fun, and that it’s more important to keep the game moving.
I take a lot of the sting out of these problems by putting an NPC amongst the PCs ranks as an ally. While my first goal is always to play that character faithfully to his restrictions and limitations, it does permit me an in-character mouthpiece to interject food for thought, sound appropriate cautionary signals, and offer ‘helpful’ suggestions. Occasionally, when it is in-character for the NPC to have the insight, he or she may come up with the right answers (after the players have crashed and burned) – and occasionally, when it’s appropriate, the character will throw misinformation, mistakes, or flawed reasoning into the discussion.
The NPC isn’t a magic mirror revealing the perfect solution, or no more often so than any given PC does; but they are a tool to at least keep the conversation moving. Everything they say has to be filtered through the players’ assessment of the NPCs personality and capabilities, and sometimes given weight and sometimes not, as a result.
The best signal that I’ve found for when I want to take the NPC out of my back pocket is when the players have discussed the situation from all angles, touched on the correct solution, rejected it for some reason, and begun to repeat themselves. That’s when there is a risk that positions will become entrenched and confirmation bias will set in. As a general rule of thumb, I’ve found that the moment something is stated for the third time, the statement takes on a life and reality of its own. Which means that as soon as you hear a second recitation of the exact same thing from a player, you are treading on dangerous ground.
I wasn’t able to find any credible information connecting frequency of recapitulation of information and confirmation bias, or I would have cited it. What I did find is that there is a wealth of anecdotal reference related to “tell me three times”. Portions of two articles in particular were of interest:
- Tell Me Three Times: A 3-Pronged PPC Balance System by Howard Jacobson, published on Search Engine Watch, 10 July 2012, in particular the introduction and the first section (entitled “Tell Me Three Times”); and
- Tell me three times: The importance of quality assurance, by globalPMguy, published on Boss Logic Sept 30, 2013, in particular the opening section.
- The most reliable reference that I could find is a section in an article published in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations in 2007 (pp 239–256) by Lyn M. Van Swol of Northwestern University, entitled (deep breath) “Perceived Importance of Information: The Effects of Mentioning Information, Shared Information Bias, Ownership Bias, Reiteration, and Confirmation Bias“:
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Other researchers have investigated this ‘reiteration effect’ (Hertwig, Gigerenzer, & Hoffrage, 1997) or ‘validity effect’ (Arkes, 1993; Boehm, 1994). Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino (1977) verifed that repetition of information increases the perception that the information is true, valid, and reliable. Repetition may be used as a heuristic to the truthfulness of a statement when there are no other indicators of the statement’s validity, and this effect of repetition is often automatic and uses few cognitive resources (Alba, Chromiak, Hasher, & Attig, 1980; Hasher & Chromiak, 1977; Hasher et al., 1977; Hasher & Zacks, 1984).
That last quoted statement is telling, if I understand it correctly; it states that if you repeat a theory or statement often enough, or hear it repeated often enough by others, especially from different sources, you are more likely to accept the theory or statement as truthful without people actually thinking about it.
There are several other factors that can overwhelm this tendency or reinforce it. Critical dismissal or refutation of the statement by a trusted authority falls into the former category, for example, while critical dismissal or refutation by a mis--trusted authority reinforces both the belief in the theory and the prejudice against the authority (as an aside, the natural selection of preferring like-minded sources, when coupled with these facts, explains the modern phenomenon known as the Social Media “Echo Chamber”).
Bottom line: I was unable to find any definitive research on the effect on perception of validity of different frequencies of repetition, and the research paper cited was unable to even verify that the effect occurs, except under very restricted circumstances where other validity triggers were also in effect. That suggests (but doesn’t prove) that the “echo chamber” effect only amplifies any pre-existing bias towards confirmation. Nevertheless, my personal anecdotal experience is that both confirmation bias and repetition bias are real, and that a third repetition is often the trigger point.
Identifying the Low Road
The biggest problem with expecting a problem to be solved via an alternative path is that the player has to find that solution. Sometimes, that’s easy, and sometimes that’s hard.
The second biggest problem is that before the player can find that solution, the GM has to have found that solution; otherwise, he risks throwing a problem at the player that he and his character are unable to solve. Helpless PCs are never fun to play, and so insoluble problems have to be avoided!
Quite often, the best technique is to deliberately build the alternative into the encounter. You do this simply choosing another skill (this time, one that the PC does have) and deliberately creating circumstances within the encounter that make it a viable substitute.
Some examples:
- A PC doesn’t know how to disarm a bomb safely, but does know electronics and therefore how to stop a digital timer, preventing the bomb from going off.
- A PC doesn’t know where to find a specific biblical verse, but does know how to use Google Search – if there is an appropriate device on hand.
- A PC doesn’t have Negotiation, but may attempt to use Persuasion or Intimidation to force an NPC to do what the PC wants him or her to do (NB: in theory, Seduction can also be used in this way, but it often has undesirable and unintended consequences and complications) – if those interpersonal skills will have the desired effect on the target.
- A PC doesn’t know how to Shadow someone without detection, but might know how to Track them. Or how to use Sleight-of-hand to plant a tracking device on the target – if they have one. Or perhaps the PC is able to fly, and can follow the target from overhead – if the local buildings and route being taken by the target permits it. Or perhaps the PC can use a Crystal Ball or other form of scrying – if they are able to obtain something personal from the target through which to focus the spell.
None of these are likely to work “by accident”; the GM has to recognize that the ideal or simplest solution to the problem he is posing the PC requires a skill that the PC doesn’t have, and deliberately incorporate into the encounter a less-ideal solution based on a skill or ability that the character does have.
The trick is then to get the player to recognize this alternative path to success. You may need to drop a hint. For example, if I expected a character to use the “follow from above” solution, I might (a) have the target wear a wide-brimmed hat; (b) have the character complain about a sore neck (implying that they may not be able to look up very easily); and (c) offer a hint of some sort that the target is new to the intrigue business and a little unskilled by highlighting behavior that the player knows is inappropriate under those circumstances, like arguing with a waiter instead of trying to blend into the surroundings. If I forewent (b), I could also have the target look over their shoulder repeatedly, very obviously, and quite clumsily. “You spot your target as he enters the square. Spot him? It’s hard to miss him, the way he has his cloak draped over his forearm which he keeps raised in front of his mouth and skulks melodramatically as he slips from doorway to behind a stack of baskets, then to a pillar, then behind a wagon, before arriving at your table. Taking a seat, his face still covered, he leans conspiratorially towards you, and in a loudly whispered voice, offers the code-phrase you were told to expect.”
By playing this scene for laughs in this way, I establish that the target is going to be ridiculously easy to follow – so much so that the player might well smell a rat, and wonder if the target is concealing his true skills beneath this amateurish veneer.
Unskilled Skill Use: The Fly In The Ointment
There’s one perpetual risk when designing an encounter or plotline around an ability that one or more characters don’t have, and that’s the facility offered by many game systems for attempting a task Unskilled.
The problem is that you are using the character’s lack of skill to steer events in a more dramatic or compelling direction; successfully shortcutting things with unskilled Skill use violates that plan.
There are two things that GMs have to do in their planning and preparation to be ready for this issue to arise. The first is to ensure that there is a significant penalty or downside to making such an attempt and failing and that the player will be aware of the risk. This can’t be a bluff by the GM; he has to be fully prepared to back up his implied threats. The second thing is a consequence of this; the GM must also have a plan in place to salvage the situation and keep the plotline moving towards a resolution.
The idea is to make the notion of looking for an alternative more attractive to the player than taking the risk.
As a general rule of thumb, I usually consider a successful Unskilled use to yield an inferior result to a successful Skilled use in some major respect. A critical success Unskilled yields only what a successful Skilled use would achieve. And a failure, unskilled, is always far worse than a failure, skilled. The exceptions happen when I need the player to succeed in order to keep the plot advancing, or when the need for the unskilled check is because of some mistake in planning that I’ve made; under those circumstances, I’m a lot more gentle as a GM!
Wrap-up
I thought about developing a simple checklist-style process for creating this sort of mini-adventure, but the results were either so horrendously complicated because of the three different alternatives that they were useless, or so generic as to be valueless. I thought about doing a larger example, in the same way that I did for the Character Capabilities article, but found myself short of time – because there are the three alternatives and they are so very different from each other when you get down to the nitty-gritty underlying them. And besides, because I had inserted key (smaller) examples throughout the text, I didn’t see the utility of doing so.
All that remains, then, is to wrap the discussion up. Basing a scene around an ability that the PC doesn’t have is a lot more difficult than the converse, but there are three approaches that make it possible, each offering the player a different way around the problem. Each of these carries its own set of complications and caveats, but there are ways of making these wrinkles at least manageable.
And it’s always good to challenge your players from time to time.
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