Overly Harsh?

[monkey prime]

So ran my first ever self-penned game for some friends a couple of weeks ago. One had RPG-ed several times before with me, one had played some RPG when he was a younger (mostly D&D) and the other hadn't at all before.

During the course of investigations, the investigators went to question a university professor who was speaking to one of his students. The student goes to leave. The chap who who had played D&D before stops him and tries to question him, the student tries to run on. He then stated that he had a gun. At this point I had the student run away screaming. The professor, who has power issues, starts raving at the player to get out. At this point I had police whistles sound. He goes out and gets shirty with the police and finds himself arrested for a period of time. Now afterward, he accused me in a semi-jokey way of taking what he said literally as he had been only joking.

My question is this: Was I too heavy handed? To me there was no question of it being a joke. But should I have been more careful and ensured was that really what he wanted to do? Feel free to pass on your own stories of retribution towards players who decided on silly courses of action

(This is my session report I posted on Yog-Sothoth in my blog: http://www.yog-sothoth.com/blog/423/ent ... my-thumbs/ apologies for the terrible English in places, I tend to struggle to get all my thoughts down on paper so it reads like literary diarrhea, especially towards the end!)

[Dr. Gerard]

This raises all kind of interesting issues.

Issue 1: It sounds to me like your player's assertion that they had only meant the action as a joke -- was kind of a cover-up. If they meant it as a joke, they could say so immediately and you could deal with it in the moment. I've played in groups where if you say something even in jest, your character does that. It can be fun, and it can be impossibly annoying. It can lead to really daft outcomes like a librarian breaking the hands of a misbehaving child because the player makes a joke out of frustration.

But in any case if you operate under those kinds of rules, you want to be super clear about it from the beginning and make sure your players think it's a fun idea.

It doesn't sound like you had a "no takebacks" rule in place. But if the player waits for things to unfold before mentioning that they weren't serious, they have to take responsibility. You can't be asked to guess whether a player is serious or not about every action. If an action sounds extreme or outright implausible to me, I will ask the player if they really want to go there. If they do, I will do my best to roll with it. I might even foreshadow what will happen, to let them know that it's going to change the game's direction.

Issue 2: Harshness. I'm not normally of the "punish your players" school of thought, but many people do this and it gets results. It sets a tone for your game, and establishes expectations. To my mind, consequences can be as harsh as you want as long as they're fun and drive the story forward. It sounds to me like getting the law involved bruised your player a bit in the ego.

Issue 3: Jail is just about my least favorite outcome in an RPG. It's easy to take a player's actions in that direction when they seem to violate the rules of the game world, because that's what we do with people who violate the rules in real life. And if that outcome was fun in real life, the threat of jail wouldn't work as a tool for social control. In fact, it breaks down as a threat in real life when gang members, for example, are exposed to new business opportunities and earn trust within their organizations when they do jail time. But I digress...

So as hard as it might be, I think it's better to look for consequences that turn up the heat, increase pressure, create new barriers, give benefits to enemies and generally make characters' lives more complicated (and by the way more interesting).

But there are dangers that way, too. Not sure if you've heard The Inheritor actual play on this show that Dan ran, but there's a prime example in Episode 2 when Murph's anarchist makes a bomb threat in a hospital as a diversion. (Murph man, hope you don't mind me dredging this up again. You know you are my bro.) That's an extreme action, and you can't really proceed from that point without addressing consequences. Dan could have gone in a few different directions after that. He could have sent in the cops and taken the character to jail. That certainly would have been realistic. There were real bomb threats from anarchists in that era and police cracked down with no mercy and often no regard for actual evidence. But again, it sort of breaks the game to have a character go to jail in the middle of a session. That way ends with Murph rolling up a new character.

Another way to handle it would be to roll with the consequences, to have the characters become targets of a huge manhunt, and therefore shift the whole focus of the game. Keeping the plot of the written scenario in that case would have been tough to pull off. It hardly becomes a priority to investigate a haunted house when you have to suddenly go into hiding. I have no idea what I would have done as Keeper. I guess you could start having the badness come after the players somehow while they're on the run. There were specters in that scenario, so perhaps you could have them come unfettered from the house and bring encounters to the PCs in whatever spider hole they've gone into. Perhaps have an NPC suffer a weird death. That would signal to the characters that the supernatural badness is a big enough threat that they would risk capture by police.

There's actually a manhunt scene written into the scenario later, so Dan could have increased the stakes in that scene to pull some of the heat off of the PCs. The crazy guy with the pumpkin probably would have to commit a few murders to justify that much police attention, however.

Dan went down the middle road, and I don't blame him. He didn't exactly ignore it, but he basically dismissed the larger consequences and resolved our complications over just a couple of scenes.

So anyway, I don't think you could have done much differently with your example, but you might think about having options other than jail in your back pocket.

[monkey prime]

I had listened to that podcast and thought it was handled well, just didn't think about that! I involved the police because I wanted him to have to explain his actions and instead he just got awkward. I was asking him questions and he was giving one word answers so I just thought right and arrested him. But you're right about the last resort. It might have been him being banned from university property just or even the police watching him closely as part of their duty was to clear a young mans name so that scrutiny would have made things difficult.
I gave him luck rolls to get out of prison but his rolls were hideous. His companions weren't too fussed on getting him out, in fact they thought they were doing better with him stuck in prison.
Thanks really hadn't thought about jail shutting down their actions, you're right it should be last resort unless it's part of the story!

[Shannon Mac]

Didn't come across as a joke to me when I read your entry.

[Russacky]

Issue 1: It sounds to me like your player's assertion that they had only meant the action as a joke -- was kind of a cover-up. If they meant it as a joke, they could say so immediately and you could deal with it in the moment. I've played in groups where if you say something even in jest, your character does that. It can be fun, and it can be impossibly annoying. It can lead to really daft outcomes like a librarian breaking the hands of a misbehaving child because the player makes a joke out of frustration.

But in any case if you operate under those kinds of rules, you want to be super clear about it from the beginning and make sure your players think it's a fun idea.

It doesn't sound like you had a "no takebacks" rule in place. But if the player waits for things to unfold before mentioning that they weren't serious, they have to take responsibility. You can't be asked to guess whether a player is serious or not about every action. If an action sounds extreme or outright implausible to me, I will ask the player if they really want to go there. If they do, I will do my best to roll with it. I might even foreshadow what will happen, to let them know that it's going to change the game's direction.

I've had this happen in my current run of MoN (which is going fantastically btw) where the investigators took down a large door and found something horrifying within and when I asked for sanity rolls one of my Investigators said "No, I didn't enter the room." I said that he never said that and the natural outcome of opening a door is entering it unless stated otherwise. He rolled his sanity. Then a few moments later one of the investigators was knocked unconscious and then was brought back by a medicine roll and decided to shoot at the horrifying creatures. The other investigators yelled at him "No, don't shoot it. It doesn't work." But, as they had found that out when he was unconscious, he still had to go through with the attack even though the player knew it was going to be useless.

I think that what happened in your scenario was perfectly fine, Monkey Prime. If the player did not state that he was joking immediately after saying that he pulled out his gun (and to be honest I wouldn't let that fly anyway) or if he didn't say it in an obviously ironic manner then I think what you did was completely valid.

You can always kill him horribly in the future anyway. Hell, my most recent kill was done cos the investigator was being a self-entitled white guy. You'd think 4 warnings was enough...

[Dr. Gerard]

I had listened to that podcast and thought it was handled well, just didn't think about that! I involved the police because I wanted him to have to explain his actions and instead he just got awkward. I was asking him questions and he was giving one word answers so I just thought right and arrested him. But you're right about the last resort. It might have been him being banned from university property just or even the police watching him closely as part of their duty was to clear a young mans name so that scrutiny would have made things difficult.
I gave him luck rolls to get out of prison but his rolls were hideous. His companions weren't too fussed on getting him out, in fact they thought they were doing better with him stuck in prison.
Thanks really hadn't thought about jail shutting down their actions, you're right it should be last resort unless it's part of the story!

I get the sense that this guy was just being kind of a jerk. To be fair, when you play fantasy RPGs a lot, intimidating NPCs and brandishing weapons in scenes is part of the deal. So maybe he was having genre-adjustment issues. Hopefully you guys will be able to laugh about this down the road, and he'll recognize that you can't make big moves in Call of Cthulhu without playing through some big consequences. Plus, you'll be more ready for zany actions the next time they come up. And they will come up. Listen to The Gaming Grunts and count how many times the players resort to burglary as an evidence-gathering strategy. With the Murph's Bomb example, when you listen to the episode we're actually laughing the entire time, having fun and ready to roll with whatever happens in game.

A side note: I wouldn't depend on luck rolls too much. It's good for details like whether the batteries in the flashlight are fresh or whether there's a tire iron under your car seat, but for big plot developments, just decide how you want it to go and describe what happens. It took me a while to figure this out for myself, and I was always backing myself into a corner when my players failed luck rolls.

[fox01313]

I can see how the time in the local jail being somewhat of a problem at least for keeping the story going. A nice alternative I just thought of that can be good is that the person gets caught by the police, thrown in the drunk tank overnight while they are trying to get more evidence/information (which gets lost), so without the grounds to hold the person the police might just give the player a small fine as well as a rough night sleep in jail then kick them out. Might work out too if needing more clues/leads to find that also in the drunk tank is some profession the player meets while in there to now contact as they sat around all night swapping stories while in jail overnight (or a clue overhearing the police talking about something strange going on down by the university).