Old Farts Demanding Swords : Points of Light Make For Bad Long Term Campaign Settings

Adventurer-Conqueror-King is an OSR game. It leads us back to the old days where heroes set out to dungeons, and brought back treasure. They used these expeditions to tame the surrounding wilds, bring order to the chaotic, crush evil civilizations, and build order and justice.

Some have called ACKs a ‘Points of light’ setting. It’s not.

Points of Light, the default D&D 4e setting, posits numerous small kingdoms and sparks of normalcy (the points in the points of light) amidst the bleak, chaotic and insensible wasteland. It’s a return to the Dying Earth of Jack Vance, where if you went forty five minutes away from your particular encystment of ‘civilization’ you were liable to come across some sort of brain eating slug monster, or daemon, or dark thing from before that would crush your spirit and render you a motive husk. D&D owes a lot to Jack Vance and this outlook, but the problem with basing your setting on The Dying Earth is that well, it’s a freaking dystopia.

The Dying Earth is a world where people stab one another over who has the fanciest chair, the sun is going out, everybody is a backstabber, there are practically no good people left on the entire planet, and basically things just kind of suck. Dark Souls is cheerier. Dark Souls at least has good people in it.

 I bring this up in our High level discussion because the way a world is structured, determines how high level play is meant to look. The Points of Light setting, notably, and as I touched upon in the last post, is terrified that if anybody can do anything, the players won’t be ‘heroic enough.’

As a result, the only people who have ‘good stuff’ are the bad guys, and the PCs are solely responsible for fixing every damned thing in the entire setting.

Lost puppies? Players.

Orcs? Players.

Demons? Players.

Chaos gods? Players.

Inefficient tax code? Players.

Marriage ring down the well? Players.

The players are the only competent people in a world of benighted super-competent hell barons and ‘normal folk’ who are so normal and folksy it’s a surprise they can breathe without assistance.

All, in the misapprehended belief that if the king can keep his own people safe from orcs, the players would have ‘nothing to do’ or ‘wouldn’t feel special.’

This creates additional problems as the players level up as it never feels like they actually accomplish much. Their legacy will disappear the second they stop playing their characters, and there is always. ALWAYS. A bigger, badder threat and one day they will be worn down and destroyed.

Evil triumphs ultimately, screw you.  

In the short term, they get to lord over the 0-level humans and town guard, at least unless they piss off the DM, at which point the town guard who can’t fight a kobold effectively become hyper competent in taking them down.

The problem here is that the DM or world designer wants so badly for the players to feel important, he makes a world that doesn’t function properly. Nobody exists except for the players. Inns and merchants exist to supply and provision the players. Bad guys exist solely to challenge the players. The afterlife and demons exist only for the players. And there must always be an enemy to challenge the party, so the forces of evil just seem to constantly unlock bigger and bigger guns as the players level up, like some sort of hidden arms race.

And if the players do make solid changes? They have to be undone, or negated, or pushed aside, so the next batch of PCs can feel ‘important’ compared to their PC predecessors.

The motivation to make players feel important and special is good. Evil however works by bending goods to wrong purposes. And so it is here. In such a desire to make the player and his accomplishments meaningful and challenged, they are instead rendered pointless. Nothing fixed can be allowed to stay that way. Meaningful changes to the setting cannot be achieved.

The player’s actions are meaningless beyond the initial thrills of success.

Now, if the players never intend to revisit the setting, or are happy with the sudden flash of success, then this can work, but points of light settings never work as recurring campaign settings, or they stop being points of light.

Old Farts Demanding Swords

 The party sits around the table, talking to the weird old man who hired them. They received their payment, a miserable two thousand gold pieces for having to fight all of those orcs, that troll, and deal with that one barrier wight, to recover the sword they’d rather not turn over. Chuck the fighter decides, that he wants more money, or he’s keeping the sword. He makes his announcement firmly, and then finds himself turned into a newt. His party objects and find themselves effortlessly in similar states.

After denewtification occurs, they grump and wonder, if that old fart could spontaneously defeat them, why didn’t he get the sword his own damn self.

And they’re justified in their anger.

Players in this situation have numerous valid concerns. And those valid concerns arise from DMs trying to make them feel special. Yes, you heard me right. This jerk ass in the bar is there because the players are meant to feel special in the eyes of this DM.  

One persistant bugbear I see in world design and DMing is the concept of ‘everyone is competent when working against the players.’  They don’t necessarily call it that. Sometimes they call it ‘points of light,’ but it boils down the same thing.

The PC is a 12^th level cleric? Only four other men in the entire history of the world have reached such heights as he! Except for the drow who have like three evil 10^th level clerics, per encounter! The wizard is really tough, but there seem to be reams of evil necromancers (some even work together!) The fighter is a god among men, and encounter gods among orcs of similar level (in groups of four) guarding chests in 10x10x10 rooms.

Why? The DM is simultaneously trying to make the players feel awesome and cool and special, and trying to balance out the requirements of the challenge of the game. Hence every bunch of dirt farming kobolds has to have someone who can challenge the party, the bad guys have to have an ample supply of evil clerics, wizards and the like for the party to battle through, while their own side consists of a collection of morons and low level folks.

It used to be a joke that the city guards couldn’t handle an orc tribe the players could decimate at level 3, but could destroy a level 12 adventuring party. When they were allies, they were scrubs, but as opponents? They got some of that nifty antagonist only steroid cream.

So our wizard in the bar comes from that. He has to need the party so they feel special, but has to be able to destroy them if they step out of line. For their own good of course.

This is ultimately a failure of two things: Trust in players and world building. The DM hasn’t built his world properly, and thus uses carrot and stick approaches to try to keep them in line.

This leads to a paradoxical lesson, and one which I’ve found it’s the most controversial point I ever posit in these sorts of discussions.

If you want the players to matter, don’t make them the only people in the world who can get shit done.

This takes away from the ‘you are the world’s only hope’ or ‘you alone are the heroes of legend,’ thing a bit, but there are many legends, and many hopes.

I think I might expand more on this in other posts. Having trouble keeping focus..too many things want to get out.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Stay safe everyone and enjoy Thanksgiving with your family.

If you're not American, or celebrate Thanksgiving on a different day or something, well, have a good day!

Bad Consequences are Necessary

I mentioned in my post about railroads that there are suboptimal choices and consequences for choosing them, and that this is a good thing.

I stand by that. It’s a good thing because well..

Some actions profit, and some actions represent loss. If you do things right, you should see a positive benefit from it. If you do things wrong, you should see a negative. It is absolutely vital that things go badly when the players make a bad decision. This means their decision MATTERS.

This in a way ties back to a concept that comes up frequently in theological discussions, particularly in the field of theodicy, or to simply ‘Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen™’.  The usual answer is that without the capacity, the free capacity, of man to choose evil over good, his choice to pick good is meaningless.

Or to put this less philosophically.. If all your options at a burger stand give you the same plain burger, but with different names (The Simplistic, The All America, The Bare Bones!), it doesn’t matter if their menu claims to have two thousand items. It only has one. That one burger. It’s a thesaurus, not a menu.

If any decision the players pick turns out to be the right one, and the beneficial one, then you’re coddling them. Their choices don’t matter. And even if you act like they have freedom, you’ve hooked them onto the cattle car on the rails you’re riding.

This can hurt at times, but the benefit is that a good plot is course correcting, a bad plot isn’t. The only answer for the DM is to avoid those bad plots.

By course correcting, I mean that evil plots, evil events, threats and the like don’t just have one moment of gleaming kismet for allowing the players to grab on and ride, we run a rail company, remember? You can walk between stations, take a bus, look at the nice dam, go and meet up with your sweetie, or do a hundred other things and the station will still be back there, but the initial train won’t.

Let’s posit that our players have encountered two threats on an adventure. One is a ‘local’ threat, an evil orc chieftain whose men were all over the last dungeon. The other is Grimnak, High Priest of the Demon Lord of Fire Ants. The players see both, and see that Grimnak is fleeing to his ANTHILL OF THE DAMNED, and the chieftain is running to another locale to raise more orcs to do evil orc things. Now, the ‘adventure’ has the players chasing Grimnak, but the players decide that the orc is the bigger threat.

This might be because of DM error, or player interpretation, the reasons don’t matter for our example though.

They hunt down the orc. While they’re busy putting a conclusive closure to the Chieftain’s evil, Grimnak uses the opportunity to summon the demon servant he was trying to, who if the adventure had gone the ‘correct’ way, the players would have stopped. So he has his demonic servant. While you were steam rolling orcs, the priest called in pretty terrible hefty back up. Fire ant demons are everywhere now.

You made a bad choice. You gotta deal.

The players will embrace it. Some might gripe about ‘the railroad’ at this point, and how you always intended for Grimnak to succeed, but you know you didn’t. You expected him to be stopped, he wasn’t. Consequences follow.

Thus the players actions MATTER.

Now the beauty of this is that if they didn’t go after the orc chieftain, you should also have that have ramifications. Maybe not as large, but still present. Make the opportunity cost of certain actions be something that actually has weight. The players will start thinking their plans and desires are important, this creates drama, and makes them realize that their reaction itself is a resource they need to expend.

Teach them this early.

Its abso-freaking-lutely vital for high level play and avoiding the ‘Why isn’t Elminister helping us’ “paradox.”