Level Design Nostalgia – It’s Lying To You
It’s been a good long while since my last post, but something stuck in my craw recently, so here we go. Let’s talk about video game level design and the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia.
There’s an image that’s been floating around the intertubes for a while now:
Look how clever and cutting a criticism this is!
On the left is the map for E1M6 of Doom, “Central Processing”. On the left is a hyperbolic representation of the linearity and cutscene-abundance of a modern FPS.
For a lot of gamers, particularly those of the Doom generation, this seems like really trenchant criticism. Look, it says: back in the day levels were these sprawling, free-roaming, multi-path masterpieces of clever design! Now everything is a linear march from point A to B, stopping only to have a cutscene! To be fair, if you were a Doom player back in the day, it’s easy to understand why you might have that impression. But is it true?
I gave it away in the post title, of course. No, it is not true. That map looks nice and complicated and multi-path, but it’s a clever deception. And the line diagram on the right looks terribly linear and boring, but it’s also a clever deception. The first and most obvious reason is that if you took a top-down screenshot of a modern FPS level from within its own editor (which is, essentially, how the Doom map image is produced), it would look several orders of magnitude more complicated than the Doom map. The real question is: what is the actual gameplay? What is the flow? Because in the end, a level design in an FPS is a path, a flow – it is the creation of a course for the player to follow from a start point to an end. It may branch to multiple endings, it may branch but merge again later on, but it is fundamentally a decision about player movement through the level.
Let’s look at E1M6 again.
Now Embiggened
Examined in a bit more detail, we can start to notice some things. It’s really broken into only a few discrete sections which have limited, often single-path connections to each other. Now, unless you know which doors open in which direction, etc., you can’t really make a definitive statement as to how many paths there are. But it is nonetheless immediately obvious that, for example, the entire upper-left wing is a discrete unit, the central area is similarly discrete, the lower left, and so on. Given that that’s true, it means that these are places you at best go into and then backtrack out of – essentially dead ends or U-turns.
Next we have to remember that Doom’s gameplay was, aside from the shooting, simply a matter of finding a colored keycard to open a door of the same color so that you can find another colored keycard to open the next door. This was mandatory, it was true in every level, and (with damn few exceptions) there was no way around it. If the developers had designed the level so that you had to get the red card to get the yellow card to get the blue card to get to the exit, that was what you did. Which means the levels, by dint of this one fact, must be linear. Appearance of the map notwithstanding, if you had to follow a specific and breadcrumbed path to reach the exit, you’re walking a line.
With the help of a Doom wiki to know where the keys and doors are, we can even plot this:
OH LOOK IT'S A LINE
Yes, I know I didn’t follow the corridors exactly, but that’s sort of my point. Those places where you could go down one of two staircases and the like don’t represent real path branches – they all go to the same places and it doesn’t really impact the gameplay at all. That maze on the right? It’s not really multiple paths – you must end up at a certain location to hit a switch, so the “maze” has no dead ends -just a series of loops that all go to the same place. So when we map out the actual critical path of player movment, it’s “north, go right, go back left, go back right, loop through the maze, go back to the center, go north, hang left, exit.” There are no actual branches of gamplay, no alternative routes longer than a staircase. It’s a straight line that doubles back on itself a few times.
You’ll also see where I marked “Trap”. This was Doom’s THING, man. You walked into a room, the door closed behind you, and a closet opened up and a monster popped out. Every. Damn. Time. It was so ubiquitous that people referred to the technique as “monster closets” and poked fun at iD’s apparent dependence on them to generate scares. They were predictable as hell after a while: you knew, for example, that when you found a key, picking up the key probably was going to open a monster closet.
So, if E1M6 is actually a linear path, what does it look like if we do like the creators of our original image did with their modern FPS “example” and abstract it down to just the player’s simplified movement flow:
MS Paint FTW
Wait. Wait a second! That’s BASICALLY THE SAME DAMN THING. Only with monster closets instead of cutscenes.
You might say this was a long way to go to “disprove” what amounts to a bit of internet trolling. I argue, however, that it’s important as a game designer or even as a critic (amateur or otherwise) of games to have a clear perception of what’s really happening when you play a game – when you experience a piece of level design. And it is equally important to understand that our perceptions of what old-school games were like are often as inaccurate as all our other memories – colored by nostalgia, viewed through the vaseline-coated lens of the emotional experience of the time more than with an accurate perception. Doom’s actually a terrific example for this, being as it is so deeply ingrained in the PC-gamer nerd psyche. For example, you probably think of it as an FPS, but in terms of gameplay mechanics it’s probably understood just as well as a Robotron clone played from the first person. This extends beyond video games into all forms of gaming. D&D grognards will swear up and down that 4E has basically done away with all the role-playing elements of the game, without ever noticing that there were often never rules for the things they are complaining are missing. They will moan bitterly that the focus on use of a map and minis has turned the game into a board game of resource management, while simultaneously A) forgetting that D&D was originally a miniatures game, and B) happily insisting on the importance of encumbrance rules and endlessly tweaking combinations of items, skills, and classes to justify some exploit.
The simple truth is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. And when you are looking at the dominant beasts in a field (FPS video games, D&D as an RPG), nostalgia is always convincing you the earlier versions were so much more creative and robust than they actually turn out to have been.
The Terrible Sound of Actual Play
Because someone demanded it (you know who you are), I am putting up the following links to real-time recordings of a combat from a game of Scion. It’s horrifying (the sound of my own voice, terrible GMing), but occasionally entertaining.
Context: the heroes (Scions of Loki, Baldur, Susano-o, Baron Samedi, Ares, and Artemis) are fighting a titanspawn of Amut, the Egyptian demon with the head of a crocodile, body of a leopard, and hindquarters of a hippo, in a giant subterranean temple dug out beneath the subways of NYC. It’s that kind of game. The cultists have all been dispatched, the Amut-spawn has awoken, and shit gets real. Things to watch out for:
1) Titanspawn have super-tough hides. Hard to do damage to them.
2) Many of the Scions have ridiculous Dodge DVs, making them very hard to hit.
The combination of the two means there’s a lot of whiffery in this fight.
Finally, talking about that game…and gun control (contains scenario spoilers, semantics, politics)
Quite some friggin’ time ago, I promised a post about the game of Unknown Armies I ran.
Yeah, that post didn’t quite happen. It turns out, finishing grad school can be kind of hectic! Amazing. But here we are, for unexpected reasons. I want to talk about that game briefly, and the game of Scion that followed, and tie it into our national discussion about gun control.
Seriously.
Unknown Armies has been described as Pulp Fiction as filtered through Clive Barker. Jim, of Struggle, Fast Talk, and Bluff, has called it “the Secular Humanist Call of Cthulhu“. Both of these are pretty apt. It is modern occult horror with a heavy tilt to the weird, and a good dollop of, as the game says, “furious action”. Now, when I ran the game some weeks back, I took a group of mostly-novice gamers through the “Three Bill Toges” scenario included with the core book. For those unfamiliar, this scenario is pretty much just straight up high weirdness by mail: the PCs encounter a 3-way accident on a country crossroad. All three cars are identical, and all three have the same driver. The cars explode, and the PCs come to to find themselves, 12 hours earlier, crouched in the middle of a supermarket in the midst of a robbery. Resolution of this scene leads back to the crossroads, another explosion. Now they’re in an apartment, where one man brutally beats another. Scene, crossroads, explosion, and now they’re in a trailer park full of cultists in the middle of a desert as the federales are moving in. The common thread is one Bill Toge, mystically (and unknowingly) split into three years ago, reaching crisis points in their separate lives, and then colliding as they fled, ripping reality apart. With no direct info, players have to sort out that Bill is the problem here, and that he has to be in some way stopped in each other life, to prevent this accident from having occurred. Weird and unsettling things happen when they fail to stop a Bill from meeting his destiny.
Now, this scenario has a lot that is quintessential UA: it is big on the mystical weirdness, chock full of uncomfortable topics (child molestation, cannibalism, and more), and never gives the players any answers. At no point are the players “rewarded”. They make it through the scenario or don’t; they stop Bill or don’t. “Success” doesn’t come with answers, and failure doesn’t come with known or understood consequences.
Some players like this. Some don’t. It’s UA, though, very much in the spirit of the thing: you don’t necessarily get to understand the what, the why, or the how.
But here’s where the gun control comes in:
My players were a mixed bunch, as were their characters. Only two, perhaps 3 of the 6 were at all combat-competent, and of those only one really used guns. What is interesting is how that affected play. All the characters were members of The New Inquisition; effectively occult mafiosos with the implicit understanding that killing may be necessary. But when combat broke out, most players opted to try to talk their way out of things, hide, or surrender (particularly to police). The characters most capable of combat, notably the gentleman with the gun, on the other hand, always opted to fight, and usually chose to do so as a first resort, not last. Indeed, the gun-toting character cold-bloodedly murdered people, killing even defenseless NPCs in the name of expediency.
Cut to our Scion game. This is a game of modern day children of gods, literal half-divine, half-mortal sons and daughters of the gods of various pantheons. Our scenario took the band of godlings to New York City. A variety of clue paths had led the players to the swanky, high security apartment building of a well-known philanthropist. Some of the players had talked to him earlier; others had followed his trail from the scene of a crime. The group, gathered in the secure lobby, wanted to go back up to the gentleman’s penthouse. A couple not-so-thought-out social gambits were tried, but without much success (the security guards were not fools). While the party debated their next move, the son of Susano-o (one of the Japanese pantheon) drew his katana from beneath his coat and threatened the security guard (who was behind his desk).
Let’s cover this one clearly:
1) High security building, with
2) Very, very wealthy residents,
3) In NYC,
4) Under plenty of surveillance cameras,
5) And the guard is behind one of those big security desks you see in the fancier buildings, complete with monitors, radios, etc… and a panic button to the local precinct.
And this cat draws a sword on them. For no fucking reason.
Needless to say, the guard punches the panic button, jumps back, and all hell breaks loose.
Now, I hear you out there: “Josh,” you say, “what the hell does this have to do with gun control?”
Please allow me to explain.
An argument often parroted when the subject of gun control comes up in this country is the old saw, “when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” Or, as someone I know elsewhere recently put it: “Criminals don’t care [about gun control laws]“. Regardless of your thoughts on guns themselves, this, at first glance, appears to be a point that must be conceded. Obviously, criminals (gangs, organized crime, drug cartels, terrorists) are not going to be prevented by gun control laws from arming themselves. Thus, the laws only really serve to keep guns out of the hands of decent, law-abiding citizens.
“Hey!” you shout. “I cannot really argue that point, and that upsets my liberal ideals/coheres to my conservative worldview/fits nicely with my pro-gun but otherwise non-partisan opinions!” Gun control serves mainly to keep guns out of the hands of ordinary, law-abiding people. It’s true. What people don’t seem to understand is that this is entirely by design, and the debate is not over whether or not gun control does this, but whether it should.
The real question is: why might it be a good thing to keep guns out of ordinary, law-abiding hands? To answer that, we go back to the “only criminals will have guns” motto. See, the people who make this argument are implicitly suggesting that crimes are committed by a category of people called criminals. By extension, law-abiding types (who, they argue, should be allowed to have whatever guns they want: they’re good people, see?), do not commit crimes. Criminals don’t care about laws, and cannot be stopped by them. Law-abiding citizens obey laws.
Do you smell the bullshit yet? For this argument to be true, all gun crime must be committed by criminals, a category clearly implied to be synonymous with gangsters, thieves, and terrorists. Hardened criminal sorts. But what they forget is that the act of, say, shooting someone for rear-ending your car, or for sleeping with your spouse, or whatever…that act is transformative. It turns a formerly law-abiding person instantly into a criminal. We can’t stop criminals from shooting people if they really want to, but we can make it less likely that an ordinary, law-abiding citizen is transformed into a criminal, and we do so by making it more difficult to possess a gun. Yes, violence will still occur, but as violent crime involving firearms rose through the 80s and 90s, other violent crime went down. Leaving aside the fact that non-gun-related violent crime is drastically less likely to result in death or crippling injury, guns make violent crime easy.
People, decent, law-abiding people (even not-so-decent ones) have a certain aversion to violence. They may love it on TV and in movies and games, but ask them to take a bat to someone in real life, or just to punch someone, and they tend to balk. We’re conditioned to be (comparatively) nonviolent. But guns provide distance. They have a seductive power. Pointing a gun at something and squeezing the trigger is not at all like pummeling that same thing (be it person or target) with your bare hands, or with a melee weapon. It removes questions of size and weight and reach and all the other things that incline even the aggressive away from open violence. The gun is an opportunity. And people are insecure, often powerless sorts in a world much bigger and more powerful than them. A gun can make them feel like they can even things out, even if it’s just in this one situation. He stole my girl. He fired me. Fighting them would be hard.
But a gun?
Bang. Solved. Bang. Vengeance. Bang. I win.
I’m not saying guns cause violence. They don’t. It is true that people are what kill people. But guns change the psychology of the situation, and to pretend otherwise is to play the fool. But I’m not here to advocate for gun control (in truth, my stance on the matter is…complicated). I’m here to talk about how this is relevant to gaming (my apologies for such a long route to get here):
Guns, or any weapon, really, change the psychology of the person who carries them. This applies in gaming as much as it does in real life. Think about your games: violence has probably figured strongly in most of them if you’re anything like most groups. Sure, part of the reason is that RPGs are the descendants of wargaming; they were explicitly combat simulators before they were anything else. And it’s true that part of it is almost certainly due to the fact that combat is one of the easiest forms of conflict – to set up, to make rules for, and to resolve. You can try to lay the blame on our cultural referents, as well: action films and pulp thrillers are full of fights.
But none of these are really the main reason. Plenty of games have moved beyond the wargaming roots. Plenty of games are drawing on cultural references that are as much, if not more, about nonviolent conflict as they are about violence. And most games make at least a cursory nod towards rules for resolving non-combat conflicts. The real reason gaming tends to keep being about combat is, I think, because it’s almost always about weapons.
Pick up an RPG at random. Odds are better than chance that, even if the game is not supposed to be all about combat (say, I pick up Vampire, which is ostensibly a “storytelling game of personal horror”), if you turn to whatever passes for a section on equipment, most of said “equipment” will be weapons (or combat-related, such as armor). Players especially have a tendency to only think about their character’s possessions in terms of what they put on their sheet; what goes on the sheet is usually what they find in the book. What they find in the book, is, of course, weaponry. I would argue there’s a not-so-subtle reinforcing effect: the player thinks of their possessions as being, in essence, a collection of weapons. When they face a problem in-game, their toolbox is, basically, full of hammers. So everything looks like a nail.
In our Unknown Armies game, the players without weapons tried honesty, they tried deceit, and they tried persuasion. They tried cowardice; they tried surrender. They tried cunning and running and thinking.
The players with weapons attacked.
Every time.
I can’t say whether or not that’s a bad thing. It may not be, for a given game or for a given group. But I think it’s interesting. And it makes me think about the applications of the realities of gun control to gaming: not to to prevent criminals (bad guys) from committing crimes, but to prevent good people from becoming criminals. It’s often been remarked upon that RPG “heroes” are really violent sociopaths. But maybe, just maybe, that’s because a character isn’t “done” until they’ve chosen from a list of weapons.
Sweet Chin Music
Tonight I ran a session of Unknown Armies for some folks here at the Guildhall. Violence, madness, tragedy, and just plain weirdness ensued. A full after-action report will follow tomorrow, but for now I just wanted to note that it’s good to put on the GM hat again, good to revisit this truly strange game, and that I still don’ t feel like I’ve got the chops to run a really good weird game.
My thanks go out to the players, whom I hope I did not bore overmuch.
Audacity in Non-Traditional Gaming
Not necessarily success, not necessarily victory, but action, adventure, and a damn good story. And if you’re not getting that out of your gaming, why are you playing?
So I said last time. “But Josh!” you exclaim, “I play them newfangled indie RPGs! They’re not all about action and adventure!”
You silly straw man. Always missing the point. Still, it’s worth talking about briefly.
First, I think we can agree without debate that the point still includes getting a damn good story out of the game. Indeed, with more narrativist-oriented games, this is an explicit goal. So let’s put that aside for the moment.
Working backwards, let’s move on to “adventure”. Adventure is a much broader term than people give it credit for, especially in gaming. Within old-school circles it is synonymous with “scenario” or “module”, specific units of designed play. By extension, it carries a bit of a sense of that style of play as well…the archetypal fantasy “meet a stranger in a tavern yadda yadda treasure hoard”. We also associate “adventure” with a certain kind of story, full of action and wild events and long journeys. We think of The Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones.
“Adventure” doesn’t just mean these things though. “Adventure” means an exciting or unusual experience.1 When we play a game, we do so to experience something different from our everyday lives. Even the most relentlessly avant-garde gamers are unlikely to play a game about ordinary people leading ordinary lives doing nothing of interest.2 We play for excitement or novelty. Perhaps we want to explore fear, or madness. Maybe we want to use a game to ask ourselves questions about morality by confronting them in play. Or maybe we just want to pretend we’re half-dragon bards. Regardless of whether we’re buckling our swashes on an epic journey across a mystic land or we’re playing a quiet, deeply psychological game about love and loss, our play is an adventure. We are moving beyond our usual experience.
Finally, and importantly, “action”. Again, to object here you have to misunderstand this term to have a narrower meaning than it does. “Action” is what happens when someone is active. It’s what happens when people are doing things instead of talking about doing them. In gaming, action is what happens when your character is doing something rather than you, the player, is talking about what to do. Note that even a conversation is action, if it happens in-character. The meat of play3, the tasty bit, happens in-character. It’s where the story happens. It’s also where you learn things even you didn’t know about the character, until that moment when you had to take action. Writers often say that their characters sometimes surprise them, and it’s true in gaming as well. But it can only happen when the character is active. No matter how experimental your game of choice, no matter how narrativist or abstract the rules may be, action happens in-game, not out of it. If you spend all your time talking about the game but aren’t actually doing anything in it, you’re not really playing…and it will be no surprise when you find you’re not having much fun.
So we want action and adventure, even if the game is about barbers solving the problems of their customers with an understanding ear, homespun wisdom, and a good $10 haircut. And we want it to be a good story. For less-traditional games, audacity still matters, perhaps even more so. In games where there is less (or no) focus on the sort of combat-action typical of traditional RPGs, it is more critical than ever that players be bold with their choices and willing to invite risk. Safe is boring in these games, many of which specifically depend on players to shape and dive forward the conflicts that make them so potent. A player unwilling to belly up to the table with a character sheet full of problems is a player asking to be bored. Audacity lets the player say, “screw it, let’s make my enemy the KING…a baron just isn’t dangerous enough.” An audacious player knows a flawed character invites drama, tension, and the kinds of scenes you talk about later.4
So what I said stands. If you’re not getting action, adventure, and a damn good story out of your games…maybe it’s time to look at the choices you’ve been making and ask yourself, “am I playing it safe?”
1: Worth noting: “adventure” also means a bold or risky undertaking; it even used to simply mean a risk (or as a verb, to risk). If you’re not risking anything, you’re not having an adventure…and you’re probably not having a very memorable game.
2: If you are: why, for fuck’s sake?
3: Or the juice, if you’re veg.
4: Please note that we’re not talking bullshit scene-stealing asshattery here. This is not about making everything be about your character to the detriment of the other players. But it’s good gaming when each character occasionally has a moment to shine (or at the least, be in the spotlight), and that works best when there’s drama and conflict built-in, ready for that moment.
THROW THE SWITCH, IGOR!
To inaugurate this bit of online presence, let’s talk about the title a bit, and why it’s there.
Jim has a blog he calls “Struggle, Fast Talk, and Bluff”, named for what he refers to as the core competencies of most of his RPG characters. Amused by the idea, I asked him, as one of the people who has gamed with me the most, what he felt were the core competencies of most of my characters. “Audacity?” he replied.
He wasn’t wrong.
This isn’t a talk-about-your-character post, but his point was valid. I have always most enjoyed playing characters who often should not have gotten away with the things they did. They succeeded, not just by skill, but by acting with a total certainty (sometimes from blind naiveté, sometimes as a deliberate gambit) that the insanely risky actions they took were perfectly reasonable. These were characters that took time out to browbeat a villain on the evils of collaborating with Nazis while the airship collapses around them. Characters that walked into highly secure corporate research facilities mumbling in a barely-comprehensible accent about “mhrmuhnuh consortium ferahmmmrhm private investors” until a PR flack gave them a tour to solicit an investment. Characters that dove out of planes without parachutes or into arctic waters in their skivvies.
Some of this is comedy. Some of this is genre-convention. The unifying factor, though, is a willingness to not merely court danger, but walk headlong into it. This behavior has led to some of the most satisfying gaming I’ve had, and by most accounts seems to increase the overall fun for the other players at the table. So, I want to kind of break down exactly what I’m talking about as a behavior, and why I think it leads to better gaming.
Most players in games, RPGs or otherwise, are fairly risk-averse. They would rather not gamble significant resources on a longshot if more conservative avenues offer better odds. This is mitigated by the severity of consequence. Players in a video game, particularly with frequent save points and especially with the ability to save anywhere, find little risk in bold attempts and are much more likely to try unusual tactics. Players in a board game are often more willing to take large risks, as the time-investment is often minimal and another game can always be played. But players in an RPG often face much more severe consequences, up to and including character death. The game, as they currently experience it, can truly and permanently be over if they make a poor decision or are unlucky.1
What tends to happen, then, is that RPG players are particularly risk-averse. They will spend significant time arguing over what gear to take, what path to choose, how to approach the castle/compound/cave. They spend hours of gaming time trying to avoid trouble, to minimize the risks to their characters, and essentially render them impervious to negative consequence. Sometimes this is genre-appropriate: Shadowrun, for example, expects a fair amount of pre-op strategizing. Most of the time, however, this is simply wasted play time. The players argue over the “best” plan, rarely agree unanimously, then things don’t work out as planned and the new argument is over who screwed up and whether or not the plan sucked. This is not fun, I think, for most people. Fun in games comes from the action. Not combat, necessarily, but “characters doing things”, rather than planning to do them.
A thought experiment:
A group of players plan a daring raid on a castle to rescue a princess.
In Universe A, the players spend one and a half hours of real time arguing over the plan of attack. One faction favors a stealthy midnight raid, another wants a heavily armed and armored assault, and one guy wants to just try to bluff their way in. Flaws are found in every plan, accusations are made, tempers get a bit hot. Everyone is trying to control all the variables and cover all the bases. Eventually, a crude and grudging compromise is formed, the players spend 20 minutes actually attacking the castle without a lot of interest before they have to go home for the night because they’re out of time. Everyone kind of grumbles a bit.
In Universe B, the players spend 15 minutes debating strategies, take a quick vote, and run with the winner. It’s not a terribly well-thought out plan, and things go awry. One of the characters is captured, and the players spend the next hour and a half sneaking into the prison, meeting the captured character (who has meanwhile tricked the warden, stolen his keys, and is making his own escape), rescuing the princess, setting fire to the place, and escaping on stolen horses.
The Universe A group is risk-averse. They’ve tried to manage those risks into nonexistence, nobody is really happy with the plan, and they’ve used up a big chunk of their gaming session fighting over the plan. The Universe B group is risk-aware, but action-focused. They consider the options briefly, but recognize that no plan survives first contact and instead roll with the punches. The problems this leads to are seen as opportunities, because they are further chances for the characters to take actions. In Universe B, the players spend most of the night playing the game. Now, it’s possible Universe A had more fun, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
“So, Josh,” I hear you say, “you’re saying that players shouldn’t plan?” No, you foolish little straw man. I’m saying that planning and playing are rarely the same thing, and that the excitement and energy of a game dips sharply when the former takes precedence over the latter. I’m also saying that RPGs are about conflict. Conflict includes the possibility of failure and of negative consequences. Trying to plan to avoid those consequences and to rule out failure is both futile and counterproductive. Take a die roll. Rolling that die determines, say, your character’s life or death. You can build a bit of tension by shaking it a few times in your hand and uttering a few comical prayers, but once you spend five to ten minutes planning an elaborate die-throwing strategy intended to maximize the possibility that a six will come up, the other players will rightfully want to kill you and the actual roll will have lost a lot of interest, too. That may seem like a silly example, but it is, in essence, what elaborate planning and risk-avoidance is in most games. It is a long and mostly-pointless attempt to influence a die roll, operating under the misapprehension that the die roll is the interesting part of the game and that the goal of the game is to succeed on all your die rolls.
JOSH’S MAXIM: Getting out of trouble is more fun that avoiding it.
JOSH’S COROLLARY: It is better to spend an hour and a half getting out of trouble than it is to spend an hour and a half trying not to get into trouble.
When the players are in trouble and trying to get out of it, their characters are active. As players, they are building the stories they will tell other gamers about their characters. “Oh, man, there was this time Totally Not Drizzt got caught sneaking into the Forbidden Temple of Blood…” They are role-playing, revelling in success and improvising wildly when they fail. When the players are trying to plan to stay out of trouble, their characters don’t exist. The players are having that argument (usually). They are debating the likelihood of scenarios, trying to find modifiers to die rolls, looking up charts, and the like. The game grinds to a halt, and that session almost certainly slides out of the memory as kind of boring and uneventful.2
To bring it back to the beginning, audacity is the quality that players bring to the game when they spit in the face of the whims of chance and accept the risks, confident that a better game comes to those who take action. Not necessarily success, not necessarily victory, but action, adventure, and a damn good story.
And if you’re not getting that out of your gaming, why are you playing?
1: This post is about player action. I’ll talk about how the GM fits into this later, but for now, suffice to say that if a GM is allowing for player death as the consequence of anything but combat or the most dramatic and story-relevant of rolls, they should be slapped (my opinion).
2: Yes. There are players who actually consider this to be the fun part of the game. These players should be gently pushed towards Warhammer or perhaps Advanced Squad Leader.
