Freedom in rpgs

Renfri

Watching the second season of the Witcher TV series does not fail to bring up memories of the first. I find it quite pleasing that the rather high quality remains mostly unchanged, even if the material in the first season remains just a bit stronger. There's something special about Cavill's portrayal of Geralt. 

Freedom and fate and the cruelty of choices and the lack of them remains a theme, but I find that it came across strongest in the ark centered around Blaviken. The evil prophesy created its own prophesied villain, but the story also leaves the mystery of if it is just fallible men or truly magical reality. I get the impression that in the story the two are one and the same, human fear and ignorance being as mighty a primal power as any other. 

Such situations, where choice square up against destiny are highly dramatic and well suited for a show like this. It's a meeting of immense powers with equally great importance in our world as in the fictional one. Thinking critically about choice and responsibility remains one of the strongest ways to foster a deep and resounding moral character. 

Negadungeons

It is unfortunate to eschew it with little thought in favor of ease of play when it comes to ttrpgs. A blog post spurred my disagreement enough to post my own take. The offending advice in question is a showcase of ways to bring players back into the negadungeon by way of curses that manifest when attempting to leave the dungeon. 

Keeping players on track is an age-old problem, but I feel it slightly egregorious that it should rear its face in the lair of the negadungeon. The design has sprung out of the OSR where player agency remains such a high priority. The last thing I would want to do if I included a negadungeon in my campaign would be to afflict my players with a curse to force them back inside. It would easily cause suspicion of railroading and antagonistic GMing. For a linear adventure pursuing the plot might be expected of the players, but in a negadungeon that expectation is intentionally subverted. Forcing the players to pursue it anyway robs it of its storytelling power, making it little more than a self-indulgent gorefest. Tomb of Horrors works on the principle of being a challenge, something distinct from the concept of the negadungeon. 

But still, there is something interesting about a fate that actively resists being avoided. In the case where the GM uses fiction to guide the players they are inadvertedly acting as the hand of fate. This puts the player in the position of being able to very tangibly accept or reject their fate. For normal gameplay this isn't the most interesting choice, as rejecting fate is usually a recipe for poorly paced meandering, but what if it was intentional?

Most rpg systems include reward systems of some sort, most often taking the experience gain design pattern and tweaking the conditions for gaining that experience. This has a similar effect, but lacks the fictional backing of the GM's hand punishing wrong moves. There is no rebelling against experience without changing the system itself, which is usually beyond the bounds of the player characters. The fictional punishment hold the key to making fate gameable. 

Fate itself

The most common fate is as we've established for the PCs to experience the content that the GM has prepared. In the playstyles where railroading is a risk this is often in the form of an pre-established plot. This type of fate is in many ways powerful, containing a depth of experience when accepted, but is for obvious reasons also the least interesting to reject. In practice it is inadequate for enabling the choice to accept or reject the fate. 

A lesser variation of the same phenomenon is the side quest or adventure, where a shorter plot is used and often with the assumption that players may miss it or choose to not pursue. This is potentially more useful, but invariably tends to lack the backing by the GM that makes felt the hand of fate. The choice to reject a side quest is rarely made as interesting as accepting it. 

A sandbox-style campaign is built on the premise that characters will explore and forge their own destiny free of outside influence. This type of destiny is less available to GM-intervention by its nature, but the emergent gameplay can produce interesting moments of contrast between a player's set goals and the reality of their situation. Strong and deep procedures for events in the campaign help produce the foils to the ambitions of the players, but self-imposed destinies unfortunately tend to lack the thematic strength of those imposed by outside forces.

My suggestion is that in order to include Fate itself as an object in the campaign the GM should design an "inverted plot". A normal plot functions by way of events with clues towards further events that constantly call upon the player to affirm their ambitions to follow along. At many intervals events are also used to drive the plot along. To invert this is to create events which drive the plot in a certain direction but which are completely counter to a character's motivation or belief. The character can attempt to reject the direction of the encounter, and only in doing so do they actually progress along the inverted plot. If they instead complete the encounter as preplanned and follow its directions they immediately reach the fullfillment of the Fate, which should of course be something undesirable for them for the choice to oppose it to be at all relevant. 

An example:

Rhackbal the far-sighted encountered a demon which cast a spell upon his thread of fate, cursing him to lose his precious wizard lair. After the session the GM takes the opportunity to create the "destiny" in the form of 7 (a suitably mystical number) events that will befall him. These events will each pose a risk of him losing the tower. They can be linked, but vital for the feeling of a curse is that some of them appear unrelated. Unfortunate Rhackbal will have to fight off all the nonsense that fate throws at him, but fate being fundamentally dramatic allows us an excuse to build these as encounters that are intentionally difficult but defeatable. 

This is at its heart much the same as Fronts from the PbtA genre, but a vital difference lies in that I advocate an detailed approach. This is not a method for giving life to the background of the game world but rather a specific type of meta-level challenge to encounter. It is a tool to consider. 

This is as of yet untested, but please, do tell me if it produces any success or failure. If using this tool I suggest informing players at session 0 but to not tell them when an encounter is because of fate. The tool achieves its purpose when players consider their stance and the correct side in every encounter they meet.