Dumb Little Bumps and Pops: Crowd Control and Agency

"Very good! Off to Zarkhenar, then. Off to see my friends and family and loved ones. "

"...To kill them, of course, for harming your dragon."

So let me tell you about a thing. Sit down on the story carpet and grab yourself a juice box because we're starting with a little story. In fact, it's a story of the thing that caused me to write this article.

These are the Ley-Ruins of Zarkhenar. The red arrow is pointing to where our boy Prince Ael'yith hangs out.

Ael'yith and his boys are Nightfallen elves who were booted out of their city and thus are starving for the mana they need to survive. Problem is, they're sucking the mana out of Blue Dragon whelplings. This is actually more than just a dick move: Blue Dragons can no longer have children. These whelps are it. So, enter our hero.

This is Malarky.

She's a ""good-natured"" asshole tagging along with the Horde mostly because sitting around in Orgrimmar doesn't afford her many opportunities to maliciously make fun of people. She meets a nightfallen nearly as sarcastic as she is, so helping the blue dragons out to give him a little redemption sounds awesome. The idea? Go here, find Ael'yith and his lieutenants, and feed them their fucking teeth.

So the quest line has been really interesting before you get to this part of it, you meet some awesome, memorable NPCs and you feel like you really gotta help these dragons. You come up on the ruins and Ael'yith stars yelling at you, sounding like he lost it a long time ago. He gets angry and starts firing arcane bolts down on you from his tower, which was kind of a tense moment. SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT DODGE ROLL kind of stuff.

Only...I noticed that they didn't really do any damage. They just bumped you around. I still enjoyed the storyline, but Ael'yith's insane ranting really lost its edge. The few other times he launched his arcane barrage at me, I just got annoyed. I stood there and let him bump me around. The tension is gone, Ael'yith feels like less of a threat, and I'm capital-A Annoyed.

In a scenario, players have to feel challenged. In a fight, we're talking appropriate numbers and abilities. Crowd Control(for the two of you who don't know) is a category of abilities, spell effects, and such that either restrict your character or prevent actions entirely. Grappling, webs, entangling roots, stunning fists, hamstring attacks, sapping strikes, tasers and the classic Hold Person are all examples of crowd control. Bull Rush, Amazing Blow, herding, and Overrun can be considered Crowd Control as well because they can push you out of position and force you to change your action. They are dangerous because it lowers the party's action economy, which is(in super general terms) the total amount of actions they get. Action Economy, without a doubt, is the most important thing in terms of effectiveness in most pen and paper games.

So Crowd Control is threatening. A monster that can paralyze or swallow whole can feel(and even BE) more dangerous than another monster that simply has bigger numbers. In addition to that, it mixes up what the player is challenged with and concerned about. If they're able to prepare it can even lend importance to a "support" character type who can memorize cures or dispels. So, they're a pretty good tool for you to use.

...but here's the thing. They take away player agency and can easily become more irritating or infuriating than challenging. I'm going to tackle those two concepts individually.

Agency is a person's control over a situation. It is hyper-important in pen and paper games since this is a collaborative effort and the GM must be very careful about when and where he takes it away. Even when he DOES so, he should try to make the players feel as though they had it the entire time. When you see someone complain about Plot Railroading, what they're really saying is that they're angry that their agency over the plot has been taken away. Nobody's ever going to be happy when it's gone, and Crowd Control can be a dangerous tool because of this. While it's tactically sound to try and keep a particular person in a fight unable to act, as a game with players this is an awful idea. Remember when I said there's things the players are allowed to do but you are not? This is another one. The GM controls the entire enemy force, and the player(usually) only controls one person. I shouldn't have to say that sitting out of an entire fight isn't fun, but in my experience I've had to spell out a LOT of things that I thought were obvious, so I'm not taking any chances.

Basically, you want the player to feel challenged. It's another common mistake to think that irritated, annoyed or infuriated is an acceptable substitute. It's not. In terms of crowd control, this means that more frequent but less effective and/or easily overcome control effects are much, much less fun than less frequent but more dangerous effects. You also have to be aware of the difference between "There's something you can do" and "There's something you could have done." Basically, if your answer to an effect being unfair or unfun contains the phrase "should have" as in "You should have raised your will save" it might not be a very good answer. Obviously, sometimes a player won't take a hint about a glaring weakness in his character or the players will prepare very poorly. You can't really do anything about that except maybe to softball them a little bit. Don't kill them. Punish the poor choice, then figure something else out. However, a "should have" response often implies the players acted in a way contrary to you think they should have. Try to remember that you don't actually control their character. In addition, it's very easy to forget or overlook that they simply don't have the information you do: It seems like a stupid idea to ignore your will save when you know the next ten encounters are going to feature will-save abilities, but the player has no idea.

This is a side note, but as GM, you have the luxury of NEVER having to kill the party. If everyone dies, runs, gets controlled or what have you, you can simply pull a plot twist and put them in a worse situation...but one they can get out of. A pack of seemingly feral ghouls is actually controlled by a necromancer hiding deep under the swamp...a pack of ogres were fighting to subdue because they need slaves for their mines...the list goes on. Of course...you don't have to TELL them there's no danger. If they win the fight, none of that was true. Obviously. Try not to make getting another PC "back" a huge, long adventure though: Simply put, no matter how 'logical' it is and no matter how 'fun' you think it sounds, the bottom line is that one or more of the players is not playing. There are a lot of situations where their death or subdual wasn't necessarily their fault either, so don't pull that excuse.

Back to annoyance. Annoyed people will usually have one of two impulses. They will either want to stop playing to avoid the irritation, or they will want to retaliate. Neither is good for your game. A sole exception is if an NPC intended as an antagonist is, in fact, antagonizing them. Even then, I'd do that sparingly because it can easily "leak" to the real world, especially if fight tactics are part of their plan. Frequent abilities that make you change your tactics in some way can be extremely annoying, and some classic Pen and Paper villains are even set up for this style of irritation, making them a sort of "trap" to GMs. Prime examples are any monster or antagonist that has an omnipresent crowd control ability, regardless of how easy it is to overcome. Antagonists like ghouls, ghasts, SWAT teams, mind flayers, and troglodytes. Add in the natural inclination for a GM to use a "pack" of these monsters and you get a 'machine gun' stream of low DC saves, which is by far the worst(and most irritating) way you can use crowd control.

Obviously the target numbers and save bonuses can't change based on the individual being targeted, but I would try to put targets around a 50% chance for the 'mid bonus' PC, give or take. Too low and you risk the ability being an annoyance and too high risks being unfair. Low save DCs also often need to be used frequently in the irritating 'machine gun style' to be balanced. Do not balance numbers around the person with the highest save, nor the lowest: either one removes something important(the high person's benefit, or the low person's punishment). The same number can make the person with the high defense feel good, and the person with the low one feel vulnerable. Try to balance frequency in the low-to-mid range. This lends an air of importance to the CC ability and helps to lower people being taken out of the fight. If you have to raise the DC a bit to achieve this, that's better than the opposite.

While taking a break from writing this, I played Payday and was reminded of the OTHER side of the coin that Ael'yith's dumb face is printed on. Payday has an enemy called the Tazer. They're unhinged private security dickheads hired by Washington's police out of desperation. They can taze you from very, very far away, and when you're being tazed you're shooting automatically(to drain out your clip, of course) shaking wildly(to fuck up your aim) and rooted in place. Eventually, the tazer will 'down' you, forcing another person to come help you up. Obviously, this is a co-operative game where someone is intended to help you and DOES have the ability to do so. But many, many things pile on top of each other to make the tazer an infuriating experience: His abundant HP, his ability to keep himself safe while controlling you, draining so much of your ammo, and.,..the worst part? If there's not other cops shooting you, you're stuck there for a very long time. He can't kill you quickly at all. Ael'yith's blasts being undertuned is bad, but so is the Tazer being severely, severely overtuned. His inability to hurt you by himself is not a balancing factor: In fact, it makes it feel worse.

Crowd Control can feel like an awesome challenge, and don't think by this article that it's hard to balance: It's just something you'll learn by doing. Especially now that you know what to look for, it'll be easy to find well balanced antagonists who happen to have crowd control abilities.

Oh, and don't worry. Ael'yith was pummeled to death. It wasn't pretty.

Conveyance

"Don't kill him! If you kill him...he won't learn nothin'."


A huge amount of my blog posts can be boiled down to a single sentence, if I thought that would do them justice. Don't withhold rewards, Don't be afraid of high stat values, the villain is the most important part of your game's plot, et cetera. I kind of don't mind that, since you wouldn't understand what I mean if I just flopped it out there like a tiny little dead fish. Knowing what I mean is actually our next topic, Conveyance.

Conveyance is a fairly important thing in movies, a very important thing in video games, and an EXTREMELY important thing in pen and paper. Basically, it's telling the viewer(slash player) how they're intended to think and what they're intended to do. Giving them the information they needs to move forward or to understand what's going on. Basically, a lot of the time when you're confused about a movie, it's because it's got poor conveyance. Maybe you don't know where or when a scene is supposed to be taking place because the filmmaker didn't include an establishing shot. Perhaps you weren't sure if a character is present at a scene or not, or where they got an important tool or other item. Video games have a lot of the same thing there but also have to teach you about rules, patterns, controls and other things. A bad game throws conveyance out of the window and simply lets you learn via repeatedly dying. A good game? Well, I have a bit of multimedia homework for you guys since someone else explained it way better than I ever could. This isn't required to understand how conveyance fits into Pen and Paper gaming, but I'd like you guys to watch the Sequelitis on Mega Man X.

Here it is, narrated by the beautiful Egoraptor.

What's this have to do with tabletop gaming? Basically, good conveyance is the art of conveying information without just saying it out loud. Remember when I said it's impossible for you to be objective? Conveyance is something you have to do because of that. Basically, on top of doing it for decent quest and world design(more on that later) you have to convey what you think of the player's plans and actions.

People obviously like their own ideas. They think they're sound. Duh. In the real world when you disagree with them, well. We all find out who's right eventually after the action is taken. In a pen and paper game, the GM is going to control some or all aspects of whether something was a "good idea" or not. So in the spirit of good faith, you as the GM need to try to convey, subtly or unsubtly, what you think of what they're about to do. Luckily, our conveyance in a pen and paper game doesn't have to be GOOD, just okay. It's most of your job to just directly tell the PCs things anyway. You can easily get away with reminding them some aspect you feel is important or that they've forgotten, telling them "that might not be wise" or having them roll a knowledge skill.

You need to do this. It's not optional. You can be sparse with it, or withhold info if they fail checks, but on some level this is very important. It's your job to challenge the PCs, and it's very important that you give them the right kind of challenge. Just because something was difficult doesn't mean it's going to feel rewarding: It's very, very possible to give the party the wrong kind of challenge. Never mistake poor conveyance for a proper challenge. In fact, especially never poorly explain yourself on purpose if you're discussing objective information. I had a GM once who thought it was best to promote any idea the PCs have, right up until it spectacularly failed. He thought that a shitty idea would be obvious and that the GM shouldn't hold someone's hand. Well, he's right about one thing: I'm NOT telling you to hold their hand. However, what's a good idea and what's a shitty one maybe isn't so obvious.

To give a really simple example, the PCs have a quest to get a little girl a pet. In the real world most of the PCs have cats, so they feel a kitten is objectively the best possible option. However, the GM is a dog person. Their efforts are wasted. More importantly, this isn't information the players were necessarily privy to. Of course, if they know the GM well they would've gotten a dog simply because they know the GM and noticed he owns like ten of them in real life. However, this sort of double-think is tiring and really shouldn't be promoted. It's not fun to have to psychoanalyze the GM when you're gaming. Most PCs will just want to try their own ideas. In fact, if they're super excited about an idea they've got and you feel like you can challenge them with it, consider swallowing what you think would be 'better' in favor of moving on from the 'planning' phase of gaming and getting the PCs to the action. Planning can be a lot of fun, but you lose some of that fun every time the PCs have to scrap their idea and start back on square one.

Conveyance is used for more traditional things in gaming too, like what the creators of Mega Man X did. We'll go into this more in another topic, I think, but in general terms you're using it any time you want the PCs to be prepared for a challenge. This should be most of the time. It can be as simple as an old tracker in a bar warning them about ghouls appearing in the swampland near the town, or as subtle as the PCs passing half-drowned graveyards, headstones barely sticking out of the water, or half-eaten bodies long dead. Mix up your tactics and find what works best for your group. Some groups will respond well to subtlety, and some(most) will be fairly bone-headed about clues. It's a very crappy thing in a movie to see someone just announcing a huge load of info all at once, but in a PNP game it's a bit more acceptable. It's a common, mostly beloved cliche to see the old wizened sage delivering an ominous warning or piece of vital information, or the terrified, raving villager who only just escaped a monster withtheir life. In a pinch, they can deliver the info you need to get across.

So yeah, at some point when I talk about quest design this is going to come up again. This is one of the keystones of running a game. If you want this boiled down to a single piece of advice, though, just look up to the bolded sentence above. Poor conveyance is not a challenge, it's an irritation. A good challenge is something that the PCs have all of the parts to, so they can put their strategy together. Poor(or no) conveyance is like taking several puzzle pieces out of the box.

Example Danger

So I thought maybe I should explain something. No, it's not why I've been gone. When I write this blog I try to stay as far away from using examples or analogies as possible. So, today I'm going to explain why. This isn't exactly advice for arguing with someone, instead it's advice on how to be better understood at the gaming table, because every time you're misunderstood is a tiny, tiny weight hung onto your game. Too many, and it might sink. This is also advice on how to properly understand a rule book, because most of them have some small element of poor design in them, and the overuse of examples is a very common one.

An example is a powerful tool, though. That's why so many rulebooks use them. There are times(particularly with complex systems) that an example of real play can hit home how a system is supposed to work. That's the idea, anyway. You can tell I don't agree. Anecdotal evidence SUCKS, but most of the time when I encounter someone who's confused over the rules, it's because of the following reasons:

1. The book's wording is complex, obtuse or misleading.
2. The rules were explained poorly by another individual.
3. They read the example first, or ONLY read the example, or the example made them second guess their understanding of the rules.

So yeah, that third one's a pretty specific event, huh? I see it all the time. In fact, number two can be a culprit of 'examples' too, more on that later. Honestly, the only one we can't really do anything about is the first. So how SHOULD you read a rule book? I want to tell you to utterly ignore any play examples unless you're extremely confused AND tried to reread the rule AND there's nobody handy who knows the system better than you. Actually? I'm gonna suggest that. No 'but' this time. The example isn't the rule, it's meant to illustrate the rule, and if it's wrong? You can't in good conscience use the example as ANYTHING. It's NOT the rule, it's NOT a clarification, and it's certainly not a reason on its own to argue interpretation of an otherwise clear rule. It's just there to try and explain the rule and if you already understand it...you don't need it.

The other problem is using examples to explain something. It's a neat little shorthand, but shorthand can be deadly to someone who doesn't already understand something. You're most likely to use these tactics in a new player situation where you don't really know where their understanding lies, and that's(ironically) the least helpful time. What I see happen often is that you either oversimplify the rule with the example and the other person misses some of the subtlety and trips up later, or that you find a great example only because YOU'RE wrong about the rules. Obviously that's a little bad, but it's compelling when you think of a great example. It's like coming up with a great joke: You REALLY want to tell it, even if it's not exactly right.

Try to resist. I should also parrot some awesome advice I heard from Spoony here too: When someone's confused, don't just answer their question, try to find out why they're confused and solve it. "What do I roll?" shouldn't necessarily be met with "D8.". Saying "You hit, so you're rolling damage, it's right here. Longswords are D8 damage plus your strength." is a hell of a lot better.

A special shoutout goes to using examples or analogies in discussions or arguments. I think most people know I can't stand this. If you want to convey your opinion, it's not exactly in your best interests to simplify it unless you think the other person is stupid. ALSO, you shouldn't talk as though you think other people are stupid. I learned that from the classic game Go, which I have no idea how to play. Overuse of examples or analogies proves you don't really have much to say; it's very easy to fill talking time with them because all you're doing is rewording your argument. If you're having a rules discussion, this habit can lead to a lot more confusion than clarity, because people bring 'baggage' along with an example due to associations. If you tell me a system is exactly like grappling in Dungeons and Dragons, I may start to believe you mean to say it's poorly balanced and confusing, when all you meant was you have to roll hit to touch and then initiate a contested check.

So, yeah. What did we learn? Examples are shorthand, and shorthand is terrible for learning, and pretty bad for trying to explain yourself.

Really, I'm just upset that I couldn't get through the examples post without using one. I guess there's a time and place, right?

...Right?