DB

In Season 3 of Young Justice, Dick Grayson has a conversation with Will Harper while they carry out a job with Bowhunter Security, which is a security company owned by the Harpers. The scene is here if you would love to follow along, but I would love to quote a few lines as they serve as inspiration for this post.

Will: You’re dropping the ball with these Markovian kids.
Dick: Taking care of strays wasn’t the mission.
Will: The mission is what the mission becomes. You know that! Those kids need you. Your team needs you.
Dick: It was just one op! I don’t do teams anymore.
Will: You do now.

This came to mind while I was talking on a panel at a convention with fellow GMs about running the game. A hypothetical came on board for discussion about how each of us would handle the situation.

You prepare an adventure or a campaign centered around fighting a dragon. The players start playing, and as they play their interests are not in fighting the dragon, but in establishing a business and fighting off business rivals in the town that the dragon is threatening. How do you handle the situation at table?

There were of course discussions about having proper session 0s so that everyone at the table would understand what they are signing up for. If you’re preparing a game that is a dungeon delving, hack and slash sort of game, and your players are preparing for a political game, there is a disconnect of expectation and communication. These characters would not thrive in a dungeon delve necessarily, and you didn’t prepare for politics and intrigue. By communicating with your table, you can avoid situations like this.

The conversation turned and developed and talked about the more general idea of players going “off the rails”. Say that they get fixated on something else and decide to go to another town, go to the forest instead of the cave, or something else. One of the GMs mentioned that you can solve this issue by lying to the party. If you prepared a combat encounter with goblins in the cave, you can send that same combat encounter of goblins to the forest. It is a way of making sure that you still use whatever you prepped in the session, and the players have the illusion of choice.

I don’t like the idea of illusion of choice. If I’m a player, I like the idea that what I choose matters. If I go to the forest instead of the cave, I want something different there. If what I’m seeking is combat, or if I’m seeking to help people out of aggressive forces, then swapping a combat for a combat in many cases is a low-stakes swap. But, if I’m seeking politics and I get railroaded into combat regardless of my choices, I don’t feel like I’m being listened to as a player. My choices don’t feel honored, and that’s a terrible feeling.

Thus, I didn’t completely agree with the lying to the party sort of ideal. I would rather improvise something, or take a break to create something for the party, or cut off the session so that I could prep that piece of content. I would rather adapt the mission and the game to what my players want rather than the single agenda that I am pushing.

In one of my campaigns, my players were hinted to ancient ruins that were hidden beneath the sands, and that they could discover these ruins and revitalize the desert. Sounds great, right? They had fun doing the first ruin, and eventually, they made their way to the city. In this city, they made friends with some business owners and decided to open a business of their own. Multiple sessions in, all of their interests are focused in business around the city. They were focused on helping the allies they found in the city, bettering their sales and business, and doing all sorts of shenanigans there.

I could’ve said no, and I could’ve found other ways to compel the characters to their call to adventure. While it can be fun to have a game and a world that will continue to crumble if the characters don’t act, that also implies a game and a story where the characters are destined to do something. I have mixed feelings about destiny, and I like free will. So, I didn’t push that responsibility on those characters.

Instead, I listened to what they wanted, what they were having fun with, and rolled with the punches of what the characters wanted to do. I continued to introduce conflict in the city based on characters they liked and were interested in, and it has been a ball of a time.

The mission is what the mission becomes. You have to listen to your players at a table, otherwise you’re just verbalizing a novel that you made on your own. If they can’t actively change the world or the story to what they want, why have them play at all?

I play TTRPGs and I improvise to collaboratively tell stories. And for me, winging it and honoring my players’ choices is a lot more important to me than my own reservations. And besides, if this is a group that I like gaming with, I’m bound to have fun too because they want me to.

It’s give and take, like all things. And for me? I’m giving story agency to my players.