Happy New Year! – Lessons from yesterday
And so 2009 begins, and with it the countdown to the third most popular date in Science Fiction (behind 2000 and 2001). Funny, it doesn’t look all that different to the tail end of 2008.
That shouldn’t be surpising, since it takes the passage of several years and quite a bit of hindsight to be able to characterise a given decade.
Again, this is not surprising; decades are accidental groupings of years dictated by our calander, it should be no surprise that it takes a substantial period of time before the human habit of recognising patterns (and imposing them if there aren’t any) can isolate a common theme in a particular random grouping of years.
In some ways, it used to be easier. The pace of technological change was slower, and that meant that a single technology could be isolated and identified as characteristic of the era. The 1990s have to be characterised as the “internet boom”, as a related series of technologies came together to forge a social tsunami that affected almost every aspect of the human condition. Perhaps the 2000s can be characterised as the “Blog Era”, or the “YouTube era”, or even “The Hubble Era” – but my preferance is “The Google Era”, in which information became easier to find then ever before. But they are all artificial summations of an artificially-defined period of time.
And yet, in many respects, I can’t help feeling just a little cheated. The future those science-fiction writers promised us simply hasn’t materialised. The Concorde has gone, we still don’t have commercial space flights, flying cars and personal rocket packs don’t exist, we can’t debate philosophy with sentient computers, and where are the Lunar Colonies?
In 2000, this feeling was everywhere. We were entering the “age of tomorrow” but it looked just the same as what had come immediately before. The news just seemed so trivial and mundane in comparison to our hopes and expectations. Even giving reality an extra decade to get its act together hasn’t helped – the sense of wonder just isn’t there.
It strikes me that this expectation is one last, lurking, perspective of the Victorian Era. They must have held similar perspectives on the turn of the century in 1900, but their hopes of a new era were perverted into the First World War. Nevertheless, the 20th century was an age of wonders. Mass Transportation, Air Travel, Space Flight, Instant Communications, Atomic Energy, Thinking Machines, even Mobile Telephones, the list of wonders goes on and on and on. Have we become jaded?
A DM experiences similar feelings whenever an RPG comes to a premature demise. There is a sense of unfulfilled potential; the plot threads carefully cultured and grafted by the DM will never bloom to reveal the beauty and wonder as everything comes together into a big finish, as the hidden secrets are revealed.
In 1998, I ran an asteroids-exploration camapaign which quite deliberately had an Indiana-Jones-ish pulp rollercoaster feel to it. The campaign background was made up on the spur of the moment, as was the rules system. The first session brought the PCs together on earth, filled in a fairly colourless political background lifted largely from Alien, as it might have looked in the 2050s, and got the PCs as far as the Lunar Base from which they were supposed to get their ship. The context flavour was very Twilight Zone meets the X-files, full of misunderstood phenomena that were not “officially recognised”. Originally intended to be a fill-in campaign that would last only for the day, the players were full of enthusiasm and insisted that it continue – after all, they hadn’t even reached the Asteroids yet!
And so the game went to a second session, in which the PCs discovered that aliens had inflitrated the Lunar Base, emerging from great eggs that had been brought back by a previous asteroid mining expedition. Meanwhile, rumblings in the Middle East were slowly escelating towards Nuclear War; with officialdom having more urgent concerns, the PCs couldn’t interest anyone in “luridly paranoid fantasies”. In desperation, they managed to set the self-destruct on the Lunar Base (or, more to the point, cobbled one together), took the best of the asteroid mining ships on the launchpad and got the heck out of there.
And then came the third session. One of the eggs was discovered on-board – one that had hatched. A game of hide-and-seek ensued, as the alien sought to sabotage the ship and rebuild its systems to suit itself in response to a ‘homing call’ that only it could feel (grafted in from John Carpentier’s “The Thing”). NPCs were killed off, one by one, and the PCs had a couple of close calls; in at least one case, was seemingly killed (but could have been rescued) – the player had to leave early. Everything was proceeding splendidly. And then one of the PCs blew up the ship.
I did my best – I rewrote the operating principles of the ship on-the-fly to change an immediate explosion into a countdown to disaster. I managed to get one PC into a space-suit and headed towards the engines while the others played games with ET. Tension mounted as he reached the engineering compartment, only to discover that there wasn’t one alien, there were two – and he wasn’t alone. Combat ensued, as the clock continued its relentless countdown. Finally, he reached the controls – and turned them the wrong way. Assuming that he had misunderstood how these things (theoretically) worked, I went over it with him again, slowly, and then asked again if he was sure this was what he wanted to do. I had the other PCs get the radio working to enable them all to contribute. I gave him skill rolls to figure out what “didn’t seem right”. I dropped hint after hint.
The Player proved impervious to it all, and stubbornly insisted on taking his action as he described it. I even gave him a DEX roll to set the controls “incorrectly”, but he had decided it was better to blow up the ship and everyone on board than to take the chance of these things getting loose, and that is exactly what he did.
And so the campaign came to a premature conclusion. The PCs never discovered that the ETs were actually survivors from Minerva (a world that had been blown up to create the Asteroids) who had colonised a Jovian Moon, and Phobos & Deimos, had a primitive star drive, had been using earthly cattle as breeding stock for centuries (cattle mutilations), had a ship shot down at Roswell, had experiemented with Humans for decades to determine whether or not a more effective hybrid could be developed, that those hybrids were behind the nuclear war that was about to begin and sputter out, and so on and on and on. As the PCs learned to fight back, they would have exposed the aliens and ultimately driven them from the planet.
All I can do now, over a decade after the fact, is look back and mourn the missed opportunity. It’s one thing for a game to be terminated through mutual consent because no-one’s having fun any more; it’s quite another for a game being enjoyed by all to come to a crashing halt because one player decided to be “noble” and “self-sacrificing”. What do you do when this happens?
You dust yourself off and start another campaign, that’s what. And for some time to come, you ask yourself if there was something more that you should have done or could have done.
Which brings us back to the beginning of 2009. In many ways, it feels like 2008 has finished prematurely. Too many of the problems of the last year have not been resolved – we have conflict in the Middle East, we’re still entangled in Iraq, we still have an economic crisis to manage, oil supplies continue to shrink because we havn’t started exploiting the pools of petrochemicals in the Jovian Atmosphere. But all we can do is dust ourselves off and tackle the new year, with its’ new opportunites and hopes and dreams. Happy New Year, everyone.
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January 6th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Happy New Year, Mike.
2000s – I’d classify them as a flip in power to the customer, as new technologies in information access, distribution, and manufacturing allowed customers to get whatever they wanted, however they wanted, wherever they wanted it. So, maybe the “customer era”?
That’s a cool sci-fi plot. Well done.
At least with premature campaigns there’s something to note and miss. Games that fizzle leave no memory of time spent.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
What to you do when a game crashes and burns? Wait, reveluate, develope further, and try again.
In a few years you will have a new crop of players who may be less stupid and rash and this time all the effort you have put in to plot and background will not go to waste. Abandoning a well developed world, into which you have put decent createive energy, time and effort is nigh criminal. Even moreso if you are one of the lucky few for whome such endeveors come efortlessly. If you realy cant stomach returning to that story write it up and post it online. Someone somewhere will take your old and broken ideas and make something wonderfull! They deserve that second chance.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:24 am
Actually, Alexei, there was no time and effort on my part. I pretty much made up the campaign concept and background in under five minutes, on the spot – the only given was “asteroid mining” because one of the players was interested in the subject. There were no notes made, either; what I’ve written about the campaign was all done from memory. What you’ve read is all there is! I spent the time developing other campaigns, which ran for a great many years. It was in hopes of inspiring someone else out there who might be looking at a scifi campaign in the near future (insert shout-out to my collaborator on these blogs, Johnn Four, here) who might find the ideas useful.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:43 am
I hate it when I create a campaign that should go on for at least a dozen sessions if not two to three times that amount. It drives me nuts when someone new (or old, thats happened too) to roleplaying messes it up for everyone by doing something stupid. I think the worst instance of campaign where that happened was in my early days (six years ago). We were playing DnD 3.5, I had a group of buddies who had finally gotten to 12th level, just when you can start throwing in some of the heavier stuff and the stories get to be a ton of fun.
Four out of the five of these guys had already played DnD before, they knew what was going on. The newb in our group listened to them about practically everything in the game. “Charge the Troll!” and he’d do it. “Flank the Giant!” and he’d do it. “Power Attack the Sorcerer!” and he’d do it. We had a system where we rotated who made the decisions. It was the newb’s turn and this time he said he would ‘ask’ for advice. Nobody had problems with that, you need ideas, just ask. That never happened.
So the guys are dungeon crawling a crypt full of Nerull’s cultists, just par for the course and we get to a point were the hall branches in three directions. He decides it would be a brilliant idea if the part split three ways. He (a fighter) takes the right side, the bard and the cleric take the left and the sorcerer and the rogue take the middle. I ask him “Are you sure?”, he says “Of course.”, I ask “Really?”, and he insists. Nobody else in the group felt this was a good idea, but they kept quiet. The fighter falls into a pit of spikes and loses a third of his health before he pulls himself out. Only to die two rounds later when he fails a fortitude check from the massive amount of damage he recieves from a cultist thrall. I didnt even try to kill him… oh well.
The bard and the cleric now check for traps every two seconds. Each time (three times) they attempt to disable a trap, the bard rolls to low and gets hit with half damage. No prob, cleric heals him. While healing him, the cleric (fails his listen check) is death attacked by a cultist assasin. The Cleric makes his save and only takes half damage, but he has no more heal spells. The bard (finally!)rolls a crit and after taking a huge amount of damage from the attack, the assasin flees. The bard and cleric give chase and set off a pendulum trap, kills the cleric but the bard evades it. I tell my friend playing the bard to retreat, back to safety. (I had meant to kill the cleric in my original plans)
Meanwhile the rogue and the sorcerer fight their way through four cultist thralls and a dozen skellies, with virtually no loss in HP. They encounter the wizard who was supposed to be the main boss battle. Rather then fleeing back, they take him on! The sorcerer magic missiles the crap out of the wizard using his best spells on him, while the rogue (who had in a previous adventure been given an item that turns him invisible) sneak attacks the wiz like no other. Due to some great rolls, they kill the cultist wizard in four rounds.
Then comes the test, I have given them three levers to pull. A shiny one opens a treasure room, a red one summons a demon and the black one collapses the dungeon. Earlier in the session I had practically told them which one to pull. They had encountered a diviner who told the party a bunch of useful hints which they had completely and totally followed up to this point. The hint concerning this portion of the dungeon was something like “The bright is true…”
Obviously the shiny lever was the right one… right? Right… my friend who played the fighter thought that this was far to obvious, who told the rogue to pull down the black lever. I thought, “Okay I can still change this to my favor”. I told both the rogue and the sorcerer to take intelligence tests, they both failed. I then asked the sorcerer to try to convince the rogue to pull a different lever… he failed his test. HOW DO YOU FAIL A TEST WHEN IT WAS DIFFICULTY TWENTY AND YOU HAVE EIGHT RANKS IN DIPLOMACY PLUS A CHARISMA BONUS OF +5???? Damn… the rogue pulls the black lever. Game over.
But we had fun and everybody learned how to take a hint… at least I think so.
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Masteh Casteh, maybe the problem is that you expect the players to do a specific thing but let them select other choices? If they are supposed to pull the shiny lever, why have others? Why have them roll if failure is unacceptable?
January 30th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Forgive my earlier ranting, when I hear horror stories much like mine, it gives me an excuse to vent. Like I said, it was during my younger days… when the idea of DMing was new to me and half the time I made mistakes that should never have happened.
January 31st, 2009 at 8:58 am
I wouldn’t describe what you wrote as ranting – rants are nothing but emotion. You describe an emotional reaction, but then justify it with a description of events and circumstances, which you discuss quite rationally. So it was venting, perhaps, but not ranting; and venting, moreover that was relevant and on-topic, which means that no apology is necessary. The events were what I would characterise as a ‘learning experience’ – and sharing those can help prevent someone else from having to learn the same lesson the hard way.
February 2nd, 2009 at 6:10 pm
[…] Bourke also wraps the year up nicely, and brings us into 2009 with much food for thought in his Happy New Year! […]
April 19th, 2015 at 3:28 pm
[…] This was also the period of the failed Asteroid Mining game (where the PCs solved the alien invasion by blowing up their own ship), which I described in my New Year’s article of 2009, Lessons From Yesterday. […]