Power in RPGs

The most important power in RPGs is the power to matter. If your actions don't make a difference to the game, why bother? Almost every other kind of power is important as a corollary of all this. Josh restated my thesis thus: The players--not the PCs--must have the power to affect the story.

However, players like to matter in different ways. One large subset of mattering is being cool, and here again, players define this in different ways. One obvious way of having power is to have a PC who can kick butt in combat. Feng Shui focuses on this power. It's that kind of game. Assuming that it's the kind of game you want to play, Robin Laws was careful to allow all players to have powerful PCs. He explained that Bruisers beat people up with fists, Killers with guns, Martial Artists with Fu, and Sorcerers with magic. No PC type trespasses on someone else's turf.

Although the power to kick butt is only one kind of power, in any game with significant combat, this power is important. If your PC doesn't have enough of it, you will be bored during combat, and many games have a lot of combat. Fred Herman found parts of my 7th Sea game boring for this reason. Although he didn't want to squeeze every last bit of power out of the rules, we prevailed upon him to bring his weakest PC up to snuff. Meanwhile, I had an inspiration. I gave him the power to affect the story by handing him the villain to play in combat. This was an NPC he liked, and he played the villain more effectively than I could have.

In the WoD games that Leslie Danneberger and her friends run, at least in all the sessions I've been in, things ultimately result in a big fight scene. Now, my PC is powerful in the butt-kicking department, but compared to the other PCs, she's a lightweight. I feel the lack of power, even though this is mitigated by Leslie's common-sense streamlining of the combat rules, and even though I do affect the game in other ways. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy the game. But the sense of weakness in combat gives me an appreciation of the problem.

One of the players, who has also GM'd sessions of the WoD game can talk for hours about what his PC did. The power he talks about isn't the power to kick butt, although his PC has that in spades. It's political power, the power to pull strings and act behind the scenes. It's the power to interact with the most powerful NPCs as an equal. Players don't want their PCs to be always in a position of inferiority to NPCs. They often want their PCs calling the shots, an issue to which I'll return.

Cthulhupunk had long periods of time where all of the players, including the GM, had a good share of power, despite the apparent power disparity between the PCs. Lizard got to affect the story in cool ways, just like Avram, even though his PC, Alec, was not as good at combat, as indestructible, or as much of a political heavyweight as Harry Kelton. Why was this?

I think partly because it was a long time before there was any combat. On the field of role-playing, Lizard and Avram may have had similar opportunities. Both are quite good at being witty. Also, much combat was done via manipulating the odds. The final battle in At Your Door had room for Norgroid Harry and vampire Bludendorf to make personal attacks, but Mike Rubin's character, the human, overweight talkshow host, George Stevenson, had the power to affect the battle, for he was the one setting the explosives. In early sessions, only Sam's PC, Theseus the Minotaur, rang warning bells, as his powers were too broad and ill-defined. Sam agreed that it would be best if Theseus returned to his home dimension, an went on to play Peter Venkman, who had less physical and magical power, but far more effect on the game.

None of these characters were in a hierarchical relationship with each other, something that can easily spell disaster. Yet, such a relationship currently exists in the Altclair game. In his junior year, my PC, Justin, swore a formal oath of fealty to Josh's PC, Michael. It was very carefully worded on both sides--for Michael swore an oath as well--and it basically formalized something that had been going on for some time. Despite various tensions following from this on the character level, on the player level, I have no problem with it. It does not curtail my power as a player to affect the story, though it might if someone else were playing Michael.

Nor, oddly, does the fact that Michael has, in many ways, more brute power than Justin curtail my power as a player. Magically, the two have different, and often complimentary strengths. Naomi said that Michael could use his magic to get cross country fast in a car on its last wheels, learning when he arrived at his destination that the car had actually fallen apart halfway to its destination, only arriving at all due to transportation magic. Justin's magic would mean that he'd arrive later, but the car would still be working when he did.

Politically, Michael has a lot of power in Burnham County, but Justin has a fair deal of power on campus, particularly in the Theater Department. Also, Justin keeps in touch with a lot of people around the world. All in all, the balance works.

As a GM, I had a hard time maintaining the balance in the last year or so of Cthulhupunk. Naomi acknowledged that her PC, Lozen, presented a challenge. Jonathan Tweet says give the players what they want, and Naomi wanted a war shaman, someone top of the field in the area of war. As the game focused more on the final battle with the Outer Gods, too much power to affect the story concentrated in her hands. In addition, she and Josh had another kind of power: greater access to the GM between sessions, which led to their having a greater effect on the game. I considered the imbalance something that was my job as GM to correct, and I think I was about 3/4 right. However, I went about it the wrong way. I ignored a few facts that I knew.

First, it is not sufficient for the PC to have power--the player must have it. If your PC is out of the game for an hour doing research, she's had an effect, but you've done nothing. The GM may give you a handout of information that saves the day, but you might as well not have been there. I can put Harry Kelton in charge of an army and say he wins a great battle, but Avram, lacking opportunity to affect events, might as well not have come.

Another fact: Quantity cannot substitute for Quality, though it may be a necessary supplement. Just because the GM spends a lot of time with players, this does not mean that they have a satisfying experience or get to affect the game. During one session, I tried to focus more on Matt and Avram, but since I hadn't any concrete idea of what they might do, they had no greater effect on the session and no less frustration, while Naomi and Josh were understandably, though understandingly, annoyed at being ignored.

Mind, there's still that remaining 1/4 of responsibility. Of that 25%, figure 15% belongs to Naomi. The thing she should have worked most on was opening up the action to everyone else. This includes building connections between Lozen and Avram and Matt's PCs. She should have found reasons to draw other PCs into the action, rather than exclude them. It's a tricky call, as Lozen was a young, angstful general with a war she had to win. And note that it is in hindsight alone that I can identify possibilities. Note too that Lozen excluded Josh's PC, James, from much of the planning, and with good reason. However, this contributed to James' isolation from Matt and Avram's PCs, in particular, destroying the odd comic relationship between James and Jacob. I should have pushed more on getting Lozen to interact with the other PCs. I only used a GM mouthpiece once to suggest that; I could have done more.

A lesser issue was the power Lozen had as a) the character of a player who knew far more about the Native American culture than I did and b) a shaman. Naomi calls a) "unicorn trouble", and I've no obvious solution. As for b), Naomi did what any self-respecting player does: squeezed every last drop of power--power to affect the story--out of it that she could. Avram did the same with Eve's electrical power. In both cases, I should have defined limits better. In Naomi's case, I had an obvious tool that it never occurred to me to use. As a war shaman, Lozen answers to the war spirit. I could and should have used War as a GM mouthpiece.

If you're keeping track of the math, you'll recall that I've assigned 90% of the responsibility for the power imbalance, 75% to me, 15% to Naomi. I'd say the remaining 10% goes to Matt, Avram, and Josh. I asked Matt and Avram several times for input, spoke to them by phone and email, saying that they should let me know anything they wanted their PCs to accomplish. But I should have been better at introducing things for them to want to deal with. Josh could have had James move to prevent Lozen from gaining as much power as she did, and he could have made sure that James communicated more with the other characters during the later sessions. Again, I should have suggested this to him. My GMing was off.

Remember how I said earlier that if your PC does research, but the player merely gets handed the information, she has no real effect on the story and might as well not be there? Except that mileage varies, and there are many ways of effecting a story. When she was in NYC, Naomi ran a short Altclair adventure where logic says I should have been frustrated. Justin was given a mystery, and then he was handed, one by one, all the clues forming the solution. But I had fun.

Josh says it's because I focused on character, on, well, role-playing. I wouldn't want to play this kind of scenario all the time, but the power I had was to affect the story by playing Justin. His reactions were important here. He was extremely weirded out, but was coordinating everything because he was less weirded out than anyone else. I think it was also that the focus was on Justin's reaction. I'm currently reading a scenario that supposedly gives PCs a chance to affect the world, but it's all a string of events that -will- happen, No Matter What. The players have no power and the focus is not on the PCs' reactions, but on the overarcing, world shaking events. The plot is the hero, and the authors should have written a novel.

I have plots, but I've let them break when the players get good ideas. But sometimes, I'll cheat. Why? If I don't, there's no story. It's best to cheat in a way that does not leave players convinced that nothing they do matters. Andrew Dawson mentioned Amber. A common Bad Example is the Amber GM who comss up with ways to say, "None of the cool powers you bought work, and all of the safeguards you came up with fail." Yuck. Folks play Amber either for subtle politicing or cool role-playing or precisely to enjoy characters who are disgustingly powerful. They do not play to have that power squashed by the GM. There is no shame in not wanting to GM such a high level game, but don't GM it to get into a nasty power struggle with your players.

Okay, two more issues I want to cover. First, reluctant power grabs. In Matt's pulp game, my characters talk too much. They take over the planning too much. Why? Because nobody else was doing it. This was frustrating, so I started grabbing control to make sure something would happen so Matt wouldn't be forced to hand us the answers on a silver platter. I've gotten better at refusing to be chief plotter since. It was an odd situation. I do grab for the reins at convention games if no one else does, given the limited time, but this doesn't usually come up in hometown campaigns. Usually, all players jockey for their share of the pie.

I see two reasons for this situation. One is genre-related. Matt's game, like the NightLife game run at Origins/GenCon where I became self-appointed leader, are plot centered. Role-playing is not discouraged, but the action should not stall. The second factor is the mix of players. For some reason, none of them were grabby.

The second point is this: The GM is also a player. She has a responsibility to the rest of the group, at least in most games, but the GM too should have the power to affect the story.

Obvious, surely? The GM has the ultimate power? Not necessarily. Or, perhaps more precisely, once we discount the idiotic adversarial GM and the frustrated novel writer, we have GMs who are not, thankfully, omnipotent. This makes power struggles, such as the one Robert Dushay described last issue, possible. These can be nasty or friendly, but it's the rare game that doesn't have them. To make them easier to resolve, all parties should try to increase the number of possibilities they will accept.

In Cthulhupunk, this manifested in at least two ways. First, I often needed the bad guys to be in a position of power. I had a number of tricks I used. Sometimes, I decided that I was wrong. The bad guys didn't have to be in a good position, and clever PC planning could sabotage them before their plans took off. I didn't need to wield power in order to enjoy the story. A corollary of this is that the PC actions closed off one plot thread, but opened others in the form of consequences to the action.

A different trick, and one I recommend, is making sure that whatever Must Happen No Matter What happens before the PCs intersect with the plot. They walk into a situation they could not have prevented, but once there, anything goes. In a long running campaign, this does not always work, however. As the Cthulhupunkers got more powerful and knowledgeable, it became more difficult to explain why they had somehow let a situation slip. As the world became better defined, it became harder to explain satisfactorily where the latest random factor came from.

Another trick is to get the players to have their PCs delegate certain things to NPCs. Have the NPCs fail. But if this happens too often, the players get disgruntled and stop trusting the NPCs or insist that their PCs have hired competent help this time. A better trick is to get the players to focus their PCs' attention elsewhere, so that they agree the PCs dropped the ball. A final trick is to explain what needs to have happened to the players, and get them to work with you to come up with an explanation of why it happened.

A second manifestation of the-GM-as-player principle: I don't want players to have their PCs always walk over all of the NPCs any more than they want the NPCs always walking over their PCs. It isn't that I necessarily have an attachment to a particular NPC as that in the story I am seeing, the PCs cannot walk over WO Babylon, Daemon information broker. When this seemed in danger of happening, Naomi modified Carlen's behavior before I needed to make a judgement call. But it is an issue to bear in mind, for if the players run roughshod over everything, the GM isn't having fun and might as well not be there. The players have decided everything and are cutting the GM out of the action. Note also that those published scenarios that give players no choices give the GM no choices either. The storyline remains unchangeable, as far as the scenario author is concerned.

In Altclair, when Josh and I learned about a plot twist Naomi had planned, we protested it on the story level, and Naomi decided she didn't have to have that twist. A trickier call was when she wanted an NPC to do something that would have left Justin feeling guilty and miserable. Not unplayable, but not in any condition to fit into the next plot twist Naomi wanted. Fortunately, given a slight timing change, the NPC could act as desired without wrecking the plot twist. All settled amicably, but it was odd to find myself in an outright power struggle. What else can you call it when, however sure you are that you're right, you say to your GM, "If you do X, I won't do Y"? Naomi and I have been on both sides of that equation with each other, and it still feels odd. It feels odd even when the player, regardless of which of us that is, says that she'll accept the GM's decision with no hard feelings either way, but the character simply won't do Y if X happens.

It's a dance, I suppose. As long as one person isn't unfairly dominating, as long as all parties are open to compromise, no single tactic is necessarily fatal. The thing to remember is that it is not a war of players against each other or the GM, but a collaborative effort to create an enjoyable gaming session.

I was going to end there, but as of last night, 9 April, there was a promising new development: In Altclair, the collaborative effort to create an enjoyable game is happening in a way new to me and to Josh: Josh has decided to take Naomi up on her suggestion that it might be nice if someone else were to GM the game once in a while. He is going to run the Classics-Anthropology war that we all agree should happen. Initial preparatory work was discovering which characters and departments Naomi wanted to keep inviolable, and which characters she considered her PCs. In other words, a negotiation for the sharing of power.