Sep 26 2008
Why Heroes Should Fail
I’m not going to get into the Tyranny of Fun argument; it’s been done to death, undeath, redeath, and nonliving states we don’t even have concepts of. Instead, I’m looking at the idea of people—even protagonists—not always succeeding from a more dramatic standpoint.
First off, failure is generally better for characterization than success, particularly when the character is accustomed to succeeding more often than not. After all, without the expectation of failure, success just seems like more of the same. (Success against all odds is another story—I’ll get back to that later.) But when people fail, they usually react strongly to their failure. Perhaps they attempt to assign blame for it to something or someone; maybe they look at their own failings and try to figure out what weaknesses to shore up. They might respond with fury, or resignation, or just take it in stride. But whichever they do, that’s likelier to say something about them than just watching them win at everything they try. And then, isn’t it that much more rewarding for them to come back to the problem that bested them, with better skills or a new approach, and succeed?
By the same token, too much success in a row can lead to complacency and a sense of entitlement. People who make a habit of winning, particularly those whom the world seems to smile on, might take for granted their victories—in character, this is only interesting if it’s the prelude to a fall, and out of character it can ruin suspense or tension, as the outcome is rarely in doubt. (It’s even worse in games when they come into the game with this kind of attitude, particularly when that’s not the feel you’re looking for.) But if every now and then things don’t all go right, it doesn’t start feeling like they always will.
Another thing to keep in mind is that people who realize that failure is a possibility are likelier to know when to run away. This is more of a gamer’s issue than an author’s, but can be applied to both. Imagine a group being sent up against something they can’t possibly handle. There’s a chance they’ll realize that, but it’s just as likely, if they’re used to nothing but winning, that they’ll figure it’s just another fight they’re “supposed” to win—perhaps we just haven’t found the right gimmick yet!—and thus keep going even when the only way to live is to cut and run. (It’s hard to tell what’s worse: how insufferable they get if they win anyway, or how much they kvetch if they lose.)
A side bonus to creating situations in which failure is probable is that those who succeed anyway are going to be that much more excited by it. To what might they ascribe their success? If it’s not in one of their normal strengths, might they try to pursue that as a new emphasis? How do they react to the world around them being equally surprised that they made it through? (One of my best characters was almost entirely a result of processes like these.)
A last note on why the main characters shouldn’t always just succeed—in my opinion, winning all the time gets boring.
Echoing Tomcat’s statement that “often in-game the stakes are too high for it to be a good time to fail”, are you planning on detailing types of in-game failure, good examples of handling it, and bad examples of handling it? I’ll contribute a failure I experienced from the PC side:
TYPE: Betrayal
SETUP:
We were teleported to another world, near a major trade city taken over by a tyrannical faction. The local rebels asked us to be their agents in the city, since we weren’t well-known. We agreed.
In exchange, they outfitted us with cover stories, a cottage in the city, and a butler. We begin seeking out the rebels’ contacts.
THE FALL:
We return to a meeting set up in the cottage to find one of our contacts dead and an undead troll ready to tear us to pieces. The cottage is then set on fire by our butler, who insults us and changes back into the local ogre magi constable. We retrieve our belongings from the house and run from the guards sent to execute us.
Our other main contact is killed before we reach her. While we are fleeing the scene, we run into the Head of City Security; he implies he’s toying with us, smirks and waves goodbye before teleporting away. We try to disguise ourselves and crash at a mundane inn; we are ambushed within an hour. It appears the entire city’s guard is hunting us down. We flee into the sewers to escape them.
RESULT:
We are exhausted. The entire city guard wants us dead. There is at least one high-level mage that could easily scry us. All of our contacts are dead. All of our leads are dead. We have no idea how to get out of the city. The only possible ally we have is a necromancer the Party Fool tried to flambe. Even if we knew how to get to her, her cooperation is iffy after that incident.
OOC, we yell at each other over what to do. “Give up and go home” is loudly presented, every other solution is shouted down. The GM calls a 15-minute break for us to get our act together and do something or he will end the campaign on the spot. We finally decide to keep moving and stumble upon a Deus Ex Machina that could lead us out of the predicament.
REASONS FOR FAILURE:
We trusted the butler. (However, the GM implied our mission was compromised from the start by a rebel leader who wanted us dead.) A trigger-happy companion alienated the one ally that was strong enough to survive the city’s contact purgings.
EFFECTIVENESS OF FAILURE:
Bad. The overall sense of manipulation & futility almost tanked the campaign; when the Deus Ex Plothook rolled around to save it, we were so grateful we didn’t even bother lampshading it. (”What a coincidence this important location was right next door to us!”)
LESSONS TAKEN:
1. Foreshadow, foreshadow, foreshadow, even if the butler-in-disguise crits his Bluff check.
2. Every cloud should have a silver lining. Players need at least one obvious solution to pursue after the failure.
I speak from experience that losing all the time (or only technically winning) gets boring a lot faster. It seems quite pointless to keep doing anything if your problems keep piling on faster than you can do anything about them. That’s from a writing and gaming standpoint. It’s hard for a reader to imagine people continuing their heroic journey when the odds against them always prove true. And I’ve seen books that prove it’s not the best writing device.
And there are two types of important loss. The kind that the heroes need to win back, and the kind that they can’t. They both have totally different effects on the story. It seems like a distinction that could provide you material, in any case.
Hot-button issue, this one?
From what I can see, most of the bad-failure stories you’re posting came from situations that were a little too stacked against the players, or insufficiently foreshadowed twists. (Getting to that later. So getting to that later). Or… honestly, I wouldn’t want to have played in half of those games either. It’s the middle you need to have your setbacks in to make them really work from a dramatic standpoint, not the end.
Brick: When did I say always? I seem to recall sprinkling a lot of “every now and then”s into the riff.
Tom: Knowing they can is pretty much what I’m getting at. I’ve a friend who riffs at me regularly about players who seem to think they have no limitations, or at least should have no limitations, and I’ve been frustrated by the same sort of complacency in my game.
Mike: Yes, I definitely plan on following up on this one! (Probably shouldn’t've posted it on a Friday, but hey, more time to get my solutions together.)
Pointy: Was there any way you could have figured out what was really going on?
Wow. I think that may be the best example of what not to do I’ve seen in a while.
Some interesting stuff and on my two favourite topics. Writing and Gming. The two go hand in hand as far as I can tell. As for this blog. I can’t agree more. The lads and I have been playing for nigh on twenty five years and there hasn’t been a lot of failure in that time. It could be said that things were getting a bit staid.
We also seem to be of that rare genre of gamers who play role master almost exclusively and if you are familiar with the system you will know that the crit system is killer. However it didn’t seem to matter how many times one of the characters got hit or what the severity of the crit was, no body died. I don’t think we even noticed it to tell you the truth. (I will add at this point that most of us have pretty good idea on how to disect a plot and are as a rule reasonably judicious and not prone to acts of stupidity.)
However on a whim I decided to change things a bit. As G.M. I made it well known that no dice I rolled would be adjusted in any way to benefit the player. Meaning if you give my bad guys a shot at you then like all good bad guys they’re going to take it. Defend yourselves gentlemen or face the consequences.
A few mutilated characters later the boys had the gist of my meaning and got quite serious about the how and when and why of things before just leaping into that next scrap. Or wandering about aimlessly or insulting the big bloke in the bar etc.
Do characters need to fail?
Damn right they do. Just read the ‘deadlands’ Blog nzrpgamers.blogspot.com to find out just how badly the cocked up. One does not bargain with ancient beings and hope to get one over on them. Still they live and can move on with the adventure in tact.(In fact I’m surprised. Only one of the players wasn’t clamouring to indenture himself to the creature for life in the hope they might get something out of it.)
Welcome; good to see you here!
Must’ve been quite the incident, that; I wish I’d seen it firsthand. (First-and-a-half-hand? Gameworlds make it rather hard for a spectator to truly say firsthand…)