"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.
No comments:
Post a Comment