Needing a Tiger

Before starting this post, I want to apologize for the unavailability of the Senex campaign blog on line. Several blog participants, including those who played the cleric Andrej and the bard Delfig, have revised their nicks on the blog to "Anonymous," as clearly they are not enjoying the deconstruction that these posts are offering.  This was done without any heads up to me.  Since I do not want to lose the content entirely, by having one or the other systematically go through and destroy content, I have removed the blog from public availability.

This was something that I thought might result from these posts.  I have not hidden my judgment of players participating in my campaigns ... just as NO game participant does, anywhere in the world, since the invention of games.  Game play in D&D is exactly the same as it is on a baseball diamond, as it is in a boxing ring, as it is between one chess master mocking another, as it has always been.  I have been entirely candid about my errors and mistakes as a DM, using these to emphasize that we learn from our mistakes.  I've been subject to the judgment of many a player who very unhappily disliked my form of play.  I have not gone through the blog and removed my tirades, my poor and impatient behaviour, or my embarrassing moments where I have made a mistake ... and my real name is on this content.  Not a player name, which is no more revealing of the real player than is the word "anonymous."

These are relevant further into today's post.  I'm just putting them here as a teaser.

Let's talk about hooks that don't work.  On the whole, this post will be about why ideas I had didn't pan out, and why that was my fault.

Hook #1

Let's start with a situation from 2010, which for some reason managed to hook a lot of readers, but not the players themselves.  The players were moving along a road in southern Switzerland, when they hear a scraping sound nearby.  Andrej hears a scraping sound that suggests metal scraping on rock.  When investigating, they arouse the attention of a hippogriff, hiding among the rocks above them:

DM: Andrej catches sight of something big - and black - about ten yards up the mountain from where he's standing right now; Avel is about halfway between Andrej and the wagon, and Delfig and Serafina a few yards further away than Avel.

Its body has the appearance of an emaciated horse, showing ribs, covered with dark grey hair, long and matted in clumps over its body. The front legs extend so as to be horse like, but end in hooves that are longer and more narrow than a horse's hooves, claw-like but falling short of being claws. The head of the animal is predictably avian - except that it is the head of a large, black crow, with sleek feathers, a strong, slightly hooked beak.

It is a fair guess that it is one of a many breeds of hippogriff - the animal is not limited to eagles, when mixed with birds.

The party engages with the hippogriff, damage is done back and forth.  The beast is seriously hurt, so it flies away; the party licks their wounds.  As my experience system does not require the actual death of the opponent, the party picks up some experience.  In the character department, I was able to demonstrate that the woman attending the party, the bride the party was sent to fetch for their benefactor, was able to look after herself pretty well.  The encounter was exciting and threatening enough; and the player fell for the hook afterwards ... or so I thought.

Andrej: Once we gather ourselves after the departure of the beast, I make mention to my companions of the glint I saw when I slid down the side of the road. I recommend we get some rope and lower me back down to investigate further. I know I could probably climb down, but the rope is a precaution. Also, I recommend me, because Delfig and Avel both are pretty massive guys. I'm only 5'4. Also, they can keep their missile weapons handy.

DM: Precautions thus made, Andrej must search briefly before finding the place again. Yes, it is definitely a glint of metal, buried beneath the loose rock. About the size of a breadbox.

Andrej: I will attempt to remove the loose rock around the item and avoid touching the item itself as much as is possible, working quickly but carefully. Do I notice any other details?

DM: It is definitely a helmet, apparently face down. It will require a tool to loosen it, as it is part frozen into the earth (the temperature up here, I've failed to mention, is just a few degrees above freezing). One thing you can be certain of ... the helmet couldn't have been buried here this last season - unless someone has a taste for armor that has been centuries out of date. You'd estimate this dating from about the millennium before this one.  The helmet is not deeply buried.  You can knock it loose ... you find a skull in it - with part of the upper spine.  The rest of the body isn't evident.  There's a chain with a bronze medallion hooked into the vertebra of the spine.

On the whole, I thought I was doing fairly well.  The descriptions are carefully arranging a set of clues that will set up the side adventure that I had planned, that would have led to a small dungeon and a wash of treasure that would have made this 1st level party flush with wealth.  Yet despite my belief that I'm providing enough to hook the party, I'm not. Not really.

There isn't enough information here.  The mere existence of the armor, and its age, wasn't enough of an enticement.  The party was already on a quest ~ returning this very beautiful bride, Serafina, to her would-be husband.  The party was concerned about getting the quest over with as soon as possible (though the time frame I had granted gave them plenty of time, that was not how they saw it).  I needed to be more explicit with what was being found, and I wasn't.

Andrej: Interesting. Is the chain bronze as well? Does the medallion depict anything or have any further decoration? Is it badly verdigrised? What of the helmet? Is it iron, bronze or something else? Does it have an unusual or recognizable shape?

DM: The chain is also bronze. The medallion has an image of a sun with twelve points. On the reverse side, there are sharp ridges where the metal is raised, and there are words that read, "thesaurus prohibitus."

This situation is another trap, one that has gotten me into a lot of trouble where it comes to recalcitrant parties.  Let me give the background and I'll explain.

This is a soldier of the Lombard empire who was killed here about 725 AD, some 925 years before the party found the body.  The soldier is not the only one.  There are soldiers' bodies scattered all over the mountain side, both above and below the trail.  This was a battlefield, once ... but it was covered over by a rock slide and the bodies have since escaped discovery.  Slowly, slowly, the rocks have shifted, and now there are many bodies just waiting out there to be discovered, by a party that will search for a little time.

The phrase, "thesaurus prohibitus," has a double meaning.  "Prohibitus" could mean, "keep away, hold back, avoid;" but it could also mean, "defend, protect."  Both of these are legitimate usages, and the quest could certainly hang in the balance. Meanwhile, "thesaurus" is Latin for treasure ~ and though I don't have multiple living languages in my world, I'm more than happy to litter the background with dead languages.  [Latin wasn't dead in 1650, but just assume it is for my world, as everyone speaks common].  Treasure is, however, a pretty loaded word ... and I assumed the party would take the helmet to someone who could explain its meaning and thus whet the appetite. This didn't happen.

Here's the trap, one that I know a lot of DMs who run sandboxes are facing.  The hook is 100% voluntary.  The players can take it or leave it ... and if they don't take it, nothing bad will happen to them.  Now, for years I've thought, that's fair.  I shouldn't be creating hooks that force the party to do things.  Unfortunately, here's what happens:

Delfig: "Andrej, let's not spend too much time here, or we'll be on the mountains after sundown."

Andrej: "Noted, friend Delfig. Allow me a brief look about and we can be gone soon. While I'm below, look up upon the face of the mountain beside us and above the scree... are there any openings that could be caves?"

Delfig: I'll look as Andrej asks, but I'll also reply, my irritation giving my voice a sharper edge. "We do not have time to dig in scree or look in caves. We have a creature whose very lair could be above us and who could bring down more of their number. Let us be done with this quickly!"

Andrej: "I understand your urgency, Delfig, but are you not tantalized by these bits and pieces?"

Delfig: "No, not enough that I wish to remain exposed on a mountain pass with the day passing us by without having shelter. I wish to get back to Dachau with Serafina. We can always return if you wish to dig for treasure."

Andrej: Understanding the importance of this particular task to Delfig, Andrej shall relent. "Let us be off to Dachau, then, if we are all agreed. We can talk of these things later."

Andrej would like to mark a stone... with a cross, scraped with another stone and set beside the road, cross side down to protect the mark from the elements. Also, I ask those present to assist me in gathering stones enough for a small cairn. Andrej assumes the skull and spine have not been properly buried and will go about the specifics of quickly doing so. This we shall pile near the stone that was marked.

Forgive me for posting the whole conversation, but I think it is relevant.  The party never returns; never knows what is strewn down the side of the mountain.  Until now, I've never given this away.  There's no reason to return; there's no downside here, and the party well knows it.

There's a trope in journalism that I think I've described before.  When writing a story that will get a reader's attention, the goal is to invent both a carrot and a stick.  Imagine that you are walking along a road, and you look up into a tree.  There, high above you, you see a gold watch hanging on one of the branches.  You don't know how it got there ... but curious, you decide to start climbing the tree in order to get it.

Suddenly, at the bottom of the tree is a tiger.  And as you climb towards the watch, the tiger climbs towards you.

This is a situation that the journalist wants to create.  To give a recent example, Rosanne Barr was just fired from her show, and the show dropped from the network, a couple days ago.  She wrote an offensive tweet, and as I write this, the news channels are talking non-stop about it. But that's just the gold watch.  The other side of the story is that racism is tearing though America like a storm, and if something isn't done, the people of the country are going to be consumed by this terrible, awful thing.  Racism is the tiger.

In the example above, I made a very interesting gold watch.  I set it up, I sorted out how the players would chance to find it, I demonstrated that the NPC Serafina was a stand-up fighter, so that the party could start climbing the tree ... and the players dismissed it.  Look at the way the bard talks about the NPC: "I wish to get back to Dachau with Serafina ..."

She's baggage.  No one in the party asks what she wants, or what she thinks, and because the party is a group of strangers, she doesn't offer.  The party does not care about gold watches.

If I had created a tiger, one that chased them across the valley, so that they couldn't stop from stumbling over a dozen skeletons in armor; and if I had the tiger steal the girl [ugh, what an idea], which was certainly the only gold watch the party cared about; and if the party had been forced to get the girl, or find out what the bodies were all about, because the girl refused to walk away from this scene [which would have meant an NPC was running the game, again, ugh], then the hook might not have been wasted.

Hook #2

En route to Greece in 2013, the party has expressed a desire to raise a little coin, so they choose to adventure in the foothills of the island of Zakynthos, west of the Greek mainland.

I had two plans for what they might encounter there.  This was the first encounter:

DM: About three hundred feet above you, also in the defile and near where a cliff strikes up into the sky, the party - in their wet misery - can see something huge and shaggy. It shudders from time to time, sending a burst of water off its body and into the air, like an enormous round dog.

It was raining hard at the time, so the players weren't having a good time about the encounter ... but I rush to explain that by this time, the rain was not something I had decided to happen, but was the result of die rolls that I had made according to weather charts I had built.  Therefore, the existence of the rain was a rule that I was also obeying, whether or not it was convenient to the encounter.

The players began to debate over what the creature might be.  Was it a bear?  Was it a giant boar?

DM: [further describing the scene] The folds, the defile that you're in, is pretty much only grass heath. There isn't enough water up here and the surface is too porous for thicket.

Off-hand, it definitely looks too big for a bear. The rain makes it difficult to see, but the thing looks fuzzy and about 8 feet tall. And it so happens that above it, at the top of the defile, another has moved into view.

The party begins to deliberate.  I suggest that the druid in the party, Maximillian, suspects that they might be non-aggressive.  I mention that the party cannot see any legs on the beasts.  The party mentions a "pig incident," in which a fight with a boar did not go that well (though frankly, I can't remember the encounter now).  The party definitely does not express an interest in going to fight the two things they can see.

Here again, I've already failed.  Here again, I haven't given enough information.  These are two giant, wild sheep.  They're dangerous ... but they are grass eaters.  They're what's called, "seasonally aggressive" ~ particularly dangerous during rutting season, but it isn't during this encounter.  Still, these are tough animals.  I'm seeing them as giant mouflon (see way above); which most of us would not want to meet in normal size.  They haven't been shorn, so the fleece drapes to the ground, obscuring their legs.  The horns aren't visible because the sheep are facing away, and the party is a hundred yards away.

The sheep are ripe for the taking.  They don't belong to anyone, they're wild.  The party wants money: there is a fortune in wool, leather and meat just standing there for the taking.  The druid has the power to talk with them, but he has to get closer, and he's not sure.  And then, we have this conversation:

Lukas: "If we talk to it, we could pass it by. Of coarse, it might know about some dangerous creatures around here."

Andrej: "Dangerous creatures are what we're after, yes? I say we move closer and let the tree-hugger have a word or two. We should be careful not to frighten them, though... perhaps we send only the less-threatening ones, eh?"

Ahmet: Ahmet grumbles. "Money is what we're after. Let's wait for the storm to pass and perhaps those creatures will move on. If not... then the sorcerer can try his witchcraft."

Andrej: Andrej shrugs, "The storm could last all day. I say we either speak to the creatures or move on." Pulling his hood further down against the rain he contemplates the reverse of create water, lamenting the infinite volume of rainwater.

And so, the party deliberates for a day of real time, before finally getting themselves to move 50 yards closer.  Whereupon, they discover they're dealing with giant sheep.  And the party is ... disinterested.

I point out the potential gain in pure wealth, which would certainly be met with a very dangerous defense, but the party expresses the probability that the sheep will just run away, and they have no way to transport the carcasses once the sheep are dead anyway.  There's a day of further deliberation ... and the party rides away.

It's the same problem as before.  All watch, no tiger.  If I had the sheep rush the party, if the sheep were supported by five or six others, that then chased the party across the Zakynthian hills, if the party was fighting for its life, the encounter might have progressed to the benefit of all involved.  But because the quest was optional, nothing came of it.

For this reason, as a DM, you'll be pressed into creating situations where the party won't be given a choice ... and that can be hard to reconcile.  On the one hand, we want the party to have one last chance to bow out, before fully committing themselves.  That seems fair.  It is akin to letting the amateur boxer have a good look at the competition before accepting the challenge ... and in most boxing matches, the decision to step into the ring is fully optional.  Anyone can bow out, if they feel they're not up to the fight.

That works fine in reality but it can make poor drama.  In a dramatic telling of the boxing match, Hollywood will usually create some other reason why the boxer has to fight.  His children need to eat.  The mob is holding his wife prisoner, or he's being told that if he doesn't fight, he'll be taken into an alley and executed.  Hollywood feels it has to create a tiger in this situation, because it recognizes that most of its audience is not going to identify with getting into a ring to box with someone.

So, to get you, the audience, to identify with the boxer, we push the tiger.  If someone were ready to kill your wife, or your mother, you'd get into the ring, right?  If your kid was starving, and this was the only way to get it food, you'd be a boxer, right?  Sure.  For that kind of situation, you, the audience, can build up a little suspension of belief.

But if I show you a huge boxer, and ask you, "Are you ready to fight this guy for the equivalent of a month's pay?" You have to really think about that.

And probably answer, "Um, no."

As a DM, I can invent tigers all the live-long day.  But the question arises, at what point does making tigers remove the notion that we're not just running a railroaded campaign?  When does it happen that the tiger we've created might as well just be the DM opening up a book and declaring, "You will now quest for the Ruby of Rascaxxlin," and all that that implies?

The line is pretty damn close to the first tiger we seek to create.  If, like me, you're conscious of the tiger's existence, and what it's there for, and the unfairness of being able to make the tiger as big, as threatening and as numerous as necessary, you've spent a fair amount of time questioning just what your role as DM really is.  In fact, why not just run a railroaded campaign?

I haven't got a good answer here.  I can argue, for example, the principles of legitimacy in holding any kind of authority: that our motivations must be fair to everyone in the party, they must be consistent and predictable by the party, and they must be in the interest of the party ... any other approach to DMing is selfish and irresponsible.

Yet none of those principles are inherently sandboxy.  They apply just as legitimately to a railroaded campaign, if that's what the party expects.  And that is the key.

If we want to give the player a choice as to whether or not to climb into the ring with the monster, a sandbox campaign wants players who want to fight.  We may not be fighters at heart; but a sandbox just doesn't work if the players are cowards.  Or animal lovers.  Or live-and-let-live sort of fellows.  Or a little too keen on minding their own business.

"He [Billy "Dynamite" Douglas] was a fighter to the core, a man who would travel anywhere, anytime ... to fight anybody.  Didn't matter how big the opponent was, didn't matter how small the purse was (okay, maybe that mattered a little bit).  If there was an opportunity to fight, Bill Douglas was first in line to accept the offer  It wasn't merely that he had a family to support (although that was clearly paramount in his mind) or that he was prone to self-destructive behavior.  He just liked to fight.  And anybody who stepped into a ring with him knew that in fact they had been in a fight."

That's what's wanted.  Though truth be told, a group of players who are put into a railroaded campaign are probably going to fight just as much as players who are in a sandbox campaign.  The difference isn't in how much fighting is done ... but in who is ready to start the fight.

Players who don't want to start fights need tigers.  And players who are more than ready to fight, don't need tigers.  Your goal as DM is to decide what kind of players you have, and make up your mind whether or not a tiger is needed.  If you try, as I did, to get people who don't want to fight interested by waving shiny objects at them, you're going to get nowhere.

That's something we all need to remember.