Exchange of Realities

Today, I thought I wasn’t going to have anything to write about; it’s the third week of what’s rapidly looking like a month-long conflict. (Hence the rather late post.)

But I found a comment that demands response. So instead of talking about my own game, I’m going to talk about other people’s games. Specifically, the ones that Tzuriel claimed “did it all wrong”. This one, I have to admit, rather ticked me off; while I often talk about things that are too easy for my taste, I do point out that my opinions are mostly for people with a rather specific playstyle, and there are a lot of gaming posts I haven’t written because I know mine is a very minority opinion in those respects.

To put it simply, the answer is this: There is no such thing as “doing it all wrong”. (I mean, come on, one of my favorite campaigns involved a very blatantly unkillable DMPC, a rather strict script, and a TPK at the end, and I’ve already written about how that turned out.) And in war, there is particularly no such thing, and conversely no “right way”, and if there was a right way, I do not think it would be Tzuriel’s “None of this hero bullshit” ideal.

Point the first: it doesn’t work for all systems. As I often have to remind my readers when they bring up the dangers of involving gods in a plotline, I play Exalted—and almost all of the games I gripe about inevitable wars in have been in that system. (And let me tell you, you do NOT tell a group of Solars that they’re going to have to be grunts in the battle they’ve just been railroaded into. Particularly not when two of them don’t belong in a mass combat in general.) So a system-general explanation would need to take into account games in which “the PCs are all random grunts in the army” just doesn’t fit.

Point the second: it doesn’t work with all players. I, for one, would respond to someone pitching a game like that to me with “sorry, no good”, even if all my other games were gone. Nothing’s worth that much combat to me. And if someone even thinks about taking an existing game and funneling it into that, particularly if they billed it as something else entirely, I’m willing to take my PC death count up to three to get out of it.

Point the third: You don’t lose all characterization by making the PCs able to influence things. As reference, I’d like to present the game in which I play my primary character, Tuyet. Inevitable war? You bet. PCs Doing Something About It? Also a factor (and I’ll admit, a lot of it my fault—I yelled at an army as a way of dealing with not being sure what else to do, and it kinda succeeded, and next thing I know I’m playing an accidental military hero trying to end a rather pointless civil war because a. she knows how hard picking up the pieces are going to be and b. she’s a career spy who considers all these military maneuvers cheating when it comes to resolving her country’s succession). But during this game we had a whole lot of ‘dear gods why is this necessary’, making sacrifices and dealing with them, three of the four PCs went from amoral at best and downright vicious at worst to heroic, the fourth was in a near-perpetual state of crisis of confidence from considering himself responsible for the life of someone who was rather prone to seemingly suicidal strategies, and the characters were overall so well-developed that the ST was getting As in a college class with psychological evaluations of them and what aspects of their players brought them forth.

Point the fourth: That Lord of the Rings analogy? Doesn’t necessarily hold water in this case. Last three war games I was in were three different setups. One (see link, again) could have been seen as a parallel—only the DMPC’s importance was entirely retrospective (he actually came into his symbolic leader of the free world role during the story when it was vacated), and his accompaniment included at various points a severely nerfed archmage, a princess from one country, the sister of the symbolic leader of the evil country, a very quickly reformed spy for the real BBEG, and the DMPC’s semi-accidental predecessor (granted, it was going to be one of two PCs to begin with, but nobody saw which one coming). Who had every reason to be changing the course of history. Two was the aforementioned example—and sure, in the end only one of them was “in charge”, but that was only because the PC who’d originally had designs on the throne said “you’d do it better, now go on.” (And because that one was bloody flashy—but also rather regularly in need of rescue because of said flashiness. Couldn’t've been done without the whole group.) Third one: Quintet of demigods hear about an army of chaos-twisted things marching on their city and decide to fight back—some directly, one by sneaking in and sabotaging the siege engine. And even the saboteur was a sort-of-hero of the piece—not glowing the way her counterparts were, but she HAD technically saved the entire battlefield from a really nasty explosion by the end.

Point the fifth, and quite possibly the most important: When even the person who hates combat and is loudly complaining about the inability to avoid war is still having fun by the end of the game, clearly what is being done is right. On this, I will accept no arguments.

The short version? Sorry, Tzuriel, but these people aren’t any more wrong than you are.