I remember running a game for some friends a long time ago, long enough that we were playing a new Judges Guild adventure. There was a TPK. The PCs came to a crossroads and could go left or right. They went left. The module said "800 orcs attack the party. There are no survivors." This was after a couple of summer vacation months of building them up from first level. It was ugly. We were playing in a friend's basement. He was hurt worst of all. He started crying and ran up the stairs.
His mom came down shortly thereafter and said, "Maybe we should all go home today and find something else to play tomorrow." She didn't understand what had happened. He didn't understand what had happened. None of us understood what had happened. We just knew that it hurt.
Forty years later, I'm still pointing at the horizon instead of letting the rocks fall.
Earlier this year, every time our Wizard rolled a complication when casting a spell in our Dungeon World demo game preceding Arden Vul, I had a choice. I kept making the wrong one. He would choose “You draw unwelcome attention or put yourself in a spot.” Instead of putting unwelcome attention on the doorstep, I kept pointing at the horizon.
I record and transcribe our sessions, and I kept seeing myself doing it. I wanted to stop.
Promising myself to “do better” wasn’t going to work. I needed a plan. I thought about how I could practice promising danger and delivering. I settled on some games that I thought would put me in that position repeatedly. Helping me to build the muscle memory that meant I didn’t let my players off the hook. If it worked, it would take my games up a notch. If it didn’t, I’d feel like I was cheating the table out of the experience they deserved.
In CfB I (and everyone at the table) had a little shiver each time I replied to a player's fear of how failing a move would turn out with, "It's worse than that! . . ." The game was tooled to take it out of my hands. People think of CfB as a mystery system. It's not, it's a pressure system.
I realized that there were other games that focused on pressure, too. GMless games and diceless games meant learning how to negotiate pressure and bring it to fruition together. When the head of our academy humiliated the Backalley Duke and threatened to upend his petty fiefdom in the market district, we had to decide together what that meant. Kingdom made it a pressure classroom: what escalated a crisis, what resolved a crossroads, and how to make consequences feel earned rather than arbitrary. (I've written about another thing I learned from Kingdom here.) I also leaned on solo games to help me steward pressure and consequence.
I grabbed Thousand Year Old Vampire because the whole point of the game was to watch things go sideways. I would roll for my prompt and start writing, then I'd stop and think, "No, I can do better than that." And, I'd try again. At first, TYOV was a Kata, like It's Worse Than That!, but pretty soon I learned something else. I learned that it was easier to be hard on myself than on others.
There's an asymmetry between GMs and Players, but that didn't exist when I occupied both seats. I realized that it's mechanically reduced in CfB and FitD. In CfB’s Night Move, the player describes an action and the Keeper calls for the move, saying, “What are you afraid will happen if you fail?” The player describes the outcome they fear and the Keeper responds, “It’s worse than that …” After the Keeper describes how, the Player chooses whether or not to go through with the action or to try something else.
Mechanics like that make it easier to keep the promise of pressure in those games. And the players enjoyed it. Heck, they even laid into it. I've never seen players lean into steep odds and bad ideas like they did in my Public Access campaign.
“It’s worse than that Javi, if you fail, your girlfriend won’t die, her mouth will unhinge like a snake's revealing row after row of sharp, tearing teeth. She’ll join the monster you were already fighting and make it a two-on-one brawl.”
“Yeah, that sounds right. Let’s do this!”
All of a sudden, pressure was fun.
But it was still easier to throw myself to the wolves than any of my friends gathered around the table with me.
TYOV also taught me that “all teeth, all the time” isn’t sustainable. I love me some bleak doom spiral as much or more than most folks, but I found that I needed to step away from my vampire's journal for a bit. As I looked at the games that hit my table I realized that I did it at a broader scale too. It’s not a mistake that Toon did so well in my Sweet Sixteen, or that Crash Pandas made it into the mix. Absurd comedy and other forms of pressure relief are a lot of fun, and they help the horror land harder when it’s time for that. Besides, Friend Computer from Paranoia has teeth too, even if they’re hiding behind the slapstick.
So, where have I landed? I’m looking for negotiated consequence in pursuit of catharsis. I want to promise players real risks, a game with teeth, and I want to deliver. We talk about it at the beginning of a campaign, we show it during sessions. It’s not cheap shots like that 800 orc ambush, it’s deserved consequences that land.
Shadowmaster realized the nuclear device was about to explode. He stepped into the shadow and carried it with him. The other heroes waited for him to reappear. He didn't. There wasn't time, and he knew it. The action promised a consequence. When it delivered, the table went quiet.
There may be asymmetry between GM and Player, but there can also be agreement. When players knowingly participate in the possibility, when they see the risk, then not feeling the agony of failure also means not tasting the sweetness of success.
What have you learned about letting the world be honest and letting things fail when that’s what should really happen? Even better, what taught you that?
