Fated Roleplaying

Fated Roleplaying


This is another peeve of mine, and oddly one I take fairly personal when it comes up in games. As a bit of a lead in:

I was almost always The DM for various groups I've had since I first picked up D&D. I was the one who got my friends excited about it, I was the one who had to organize everything, etc. Even to the point where one group in particular would ambush me with DMing.

Seriously, I'd get a call, say that someone has a Game of ____ they want to try out (RIFTS, Robotech, Dragonball, various super hero games, etc, all got used in this manner), and they want me in as a player. Cool, I'm eager and excited to actually be a player for a change,  get there, we roll up characters for an hour and get sort of a plot briefing from whoever is DMing at the time. We get about 2 hours into the game, maybe through two or three scenes before the guy who was DMing told me he was "Done". He hadn't planned that far ahead. But no one wanted to quit playing. But he was "new" to DMing and couldn't carry on. "But hey, [me] is an excellent DM! I'm sure he could come up with an continuation of the adventure and take over DMing for us!"

I'd sputter, say I didn't have anything prepped, etc. They'd tell me "Oh we'll give you 15 minutes to cook something up while we go eat dinner/play a round of Smash Bros/etc".

So I learned to revel in DMing, and it kind of forced me to really appreciate the cooperative aspects of the game. Which I already did really. But having to take over for these stories that were already half laid out, the foundations set... I came to a greater understanding of what I saw as the chief joy of RPGs.

The cooperative development.

See, I saw it as something where it's not just "my story", as a Player, or a DM. If I just wanted to tell a story by my own deterministic desires, I'd just write a story, maybe share it with my friends after I finished it or something.

The fun was taking what I didn't expect, didn't add, and wouldn't have thought of and making things richer for it. My characters and settings were better due to the input of others.

Thus we enter Fated Roleplaying.

The story of Fated Roleplaying starts with me DMing a fantasy campaign for a group. The group told me that they were kind of burnt out on "standard" stuff. They didn't want to just delve dungeons, slay bad guys, get loot, etc. They wanted a more cerebral campaign that didn't wholly do away with those elements of Killing, Looting, and Delving, just that the setting had more to it than that.

So I decided to use Alignment as a Tool. Good was something you had to strive to maintain. People drifted towards Evil by letting their natures take over. Every time you were greedy, vindictive, petty, etc, it was driving you further towards evil. The world was built around this idea that it was a collapsing realm. That the Gods of Goodness and Such had been defeated in the local version of Ragnarok. This provided the backdrop of Dungeons, Looting, and Killing as there were the legions of evil as occupation forces essentially out there. If I needed someone to kill? Demons. That simple.

But it also meant that the powers of Good as DnD typically thought of it, from Healing Spells to protections and smiting were constantly fading away. The beings that granted these powers were gone after all. Still the big Positive Energy plane out there, but it was being crushed by darkness so even just random "I'm good for goodness sake" types like Paladins were losing their grips. The main conflict, and I sold the players on this up front, was the idea that the players were trying to maintain some shred of Goodness in the setting, the last of the Old Guard fighting desperately against the Darkness. That the morality wasn't just derived from "Smite Evil", they couldn't win by just Smiting Evil... evil was so pervasive that unless they set up some truly earth shattering event they'd never attrition it down enough. They had to try to be exemplars of Good Ideals to maintain as much of "Goodness" in the setting as possible for them to continue to draw power from. Their sort of obvious end goal as I pitched it to them being to somehow rouse the slumbering dragon of the vast population to elevating new gods with Pure Belief in Good to stabilize the setting, or to just try to hold out as best they could for as long as they could and make the best of a terrible situation.

At the time, I was young and dumb and it sounded oh so clever to me. But they jumped on it.

So I had 3 players. One Former Paladin of the God of Justice trying to find a way to revive him, one Thief who turned his back on his old ways when he realized just how bad being Evil really got and trying to save his own soul somehow, and a Sorceress who's stated goal was to try to "Find the chosen one" who would become a new god strong enough to fight back against Evil and win, since clearly the Old Gods failed and thus she disagreed with the Paladin on the idea of bringing them back.

All in all it was an okay group starting out. I tried to avoid pure Good/Evil decisions. I didn't want the choices to be Easy, nor did I like in games (Particularly video games) where morality choices were split between Baby Punting Psycho and Paragon of Virtue.

So morality became choices of doing what was Hard, versus what was Easy, as well as quests where you had to kind of navigate what the most important version of "Good" to you at the time. Are you going to focus on feeding starving villagers, or trying to stop the reason they are starving, or trying to relocate them to somewhere they might prosper, or use diplomacy to solve their problems, etc.

For the most part, it worked. I was a bit concerned about conflicting goals, but the players relished the chance to talk and think through their problems instead of just figuring out which combination of Effects murderdeaths their obstacles. But the problem came in the hidden "Morality" meter I had going.

The thing was, I didn't want players to know precisely where they were Morality wise, but just having to guess based on their behavior. I wanted to avoid what I sometimes saw in Star Wars games where people go "Eh, I can take a Dark Side Point. FORCE CHOKE!" sort of thing, or in D&D the tendency to go "Well... Atonement spells only got 500 XP, so as long as my evil is gaining me effectively more than 500 XP, then it's worth going evil for a bit".

The idea was that let me subtly play off the personality of the players and their characters. Evil could try to tempt them with things that were grey in shades, or even seemingly white hat options that were slowly corrupting them.

... in truth I ran into what I thereafter dubbed the "Fated RP" problem.

Here's how it went down. I had been trying my damnedest to get the players to fall convincingly. Not just something where I suddenly tell them "Go murder younglings", but by degrees and seeing just how far they were willing to go to accomplish their goals. At first it might be acts of petty theft for an obvious good. Then grand theft for less clear good, etc, until eventually I had the thief stealing for the thinnest of reasons.

If I was a better storyteller, perhaps it would have worked better. As is I was having a hard time corrupting the Paladin. He was too humble to rise to a lot of "hero bait". It made him a good straight man to be the party face. The thief had too much distrust and paranoia over his potential history of flirting with Evil, he really dug into playing the conflicted nature of what his character "knew" was the right way to do things and what he was learning was the right way to do things. The Paladin really helped him in this way, and there were honestly some great moments.

Ah but the Sorceress... she was my dog in this fight. The players of the Sorceress seemed to have a hard time really navigating the morality. The player liked it. They said they liked having to deal with issues where she just didn't have to blast things, seemed to be having fun. But often I'd catch these looks from the other players towards her like to say ".... the hell are you thinking?" as the campaign went on.

I thought it was glorious.

I had started feeding her minor options to hep on her "quest", access to research, resources, and things. And it was generally starting with the line of "well.... it's not EVIL to keep them... but it's not good". Eventually it got darker and darker. She's hording supplies other people need because it's important to her research. She's protecting these goblins that are roaming around causing mayhem because they aren't bothering HER, and in fact help her out as minor mercenaries/flunkies from time to time.

8 months of weekly sessions into the campaign I had her sliding so far into Evil that I thought no one could have doubted it. The other players certainly didn't by their own admission. Her quest to find the "Chosen One" had her start doing obviously evil things. Tracking down a "prophecy" of unknown providence. Committing atrocities because "The Chosen One" would only arise in the darkest hour when it seems evil had truly won (And thus by doing things like: Burning down a village, causing country wide famines, and helping demons gain more power she was supposedly bringing on the Savior End Game). Willing to throw innocents under the bus if it meant getting even one more spell that might make her powerful enough to solve the prophecy and find the chosen one.

And eventually... a demon manages to trick her, and convince her that she IS the Chosen One. That all the prophecies and signs point to her, and it was her destiny to rise up and destroy the world, rebuilding it in an image of light.

... which she wholly throws in with as players are just staring in shock as she starts using her magic and her goblin mercenaries to basically burn out the last of the Good Cities and Nations, going on a omnicidal march to destroy everything to save the world.

The Paladin and Thief try to stop her. She says they must be corrupt and evil to try to stop her, and that the Prophecy will save them, etc. It was badly RPed but the players didn't really want to PvP so it didn't come to blows and resulted in what looked like a parting of ways because "I just can't believe that killing innocents is right".

Now as much as I was enjoying just having thoroughly mindscrewed the Sorceress from this good champion who was looking for Fantasy Jesus to save the day, I realized this was a bad thing, so I kind of just pulled something out of my ass, had the demon who had been manipulating show up and bow to her, going on about how she had finally achieved the prophecy and set in motion the end of all that was good, she was the greatest champion of Evil and accomplished with Arch Fiends and Dark Gods could not for aeons.

... I kind of expected a "... the hell... wait... you seduced me to evil you bastard!" realization and attacking the demon. Here's what actually happened:

The Sorceress player blinked, and said "No".

I wasn't alone in being confused, everyone wondered what was going on. The Paladin and the thief looked about ready to throw down in Combat before this, just not certain which side their Sorceress was actually going to go for. So I replied stupidly in the only way I could, "No?"

"No, I'm not evil." I blink and I couldn't really tell if it was IC or not, as the player tended to do an accent for her character and that accent was missing, though it SOUNDED like something that might be said ICily. I ask for clarification.

"No, it's OOC. I'm telling you I'm not evil."

This puzzled me, I pointed towards evidence of everything that had happened. Killing innocents, condemning them to death and suffering, all in a quest to gain more power and deluding herself into thinking she was a savior even as she butchered them by the hundreds.

"No, I'm not evil. I'm a hero. I'm good. It has to be that way."

Eventually I suss out there, at the table just too perplexed to really process it, what she means. What she means is that she created her character with a predetermined outcome of "I'm the hero and I save the day". I don't mind goals happening and striving for them, but this was different. This was FATE. No matter what happened, no matter what was done, she was determined her character was the hero. And not only that, that ICily she should "know" if she was risking becoming evil, and her character who has some iron will not represented in any way I could tell, would just resist the temptations of evil and default back to good.

Not only did it kind of defeat the purpose of the game, which I was up front about... but the whole idea strikes me as wrong still, and fundamentally against the entire purpose of an RPG. It means what you do doesn't really matter, because you are always destined to be what you're going to be. At least that was the gist that I got from her at the time. It trivializes everything else, and not only that just doesn't make sense to me. The nearest I could compare what was happening to is if suddenly in 1945 Hitler just went "You know what, I'mma stop being a drugged out lunatic and example of the worst of humanity and become a volunteer nurse at some bush hospital in the Amazon treating local tribesmen", and somehow expecting the universe, and other characters, to just accept that as how things are and it's all cool.

It did lead to a climatic and fun final battle against the Demon. But as the Bad End to Chrono Trigger says "But the future refused to change". In the end the Sorceress could admit no wrong doing, and saw nothing wrong with how they were operating despite having the manifestation of Evil in the campaign having just walked up, patted her on the back and said "Good job screwing your side!" The campaign broke up, and since then I've had an irrational hatred of "Fate" as it applies to Roleplaying. Even in the most minor of ways like "No matter what happens I'm always destined to fall in love with X" or "everytime I want one someone nearby just happens to hand me a cigar for some reason". I can't help but remember this story everytime, and how what could have at least been a decent moment of remorse and an attempt at redemption, adding a whole new act to the game just instead caused it to turn into "mindless" combat for the finale and an unsatisfactory end all around.