Imagining the Far-Future Year of 2025

It’s always an event when the real world catches up to the putative timeframe of a famous science fiction work. If you’re on any form of social media, you have probably seen this in action. Blade Runner, released in 1982, was set in 2019, and when the real 2019 arrived, people had a fun time posting about it. Soylent Green, released in 1973, is presented as taking place in 2022, so in real-life 2022, the Soylent Green posts duly appeared. It’s easy to pick some tentpole speculative fiction, particularly of the dystopian variety, and joke on social media about how the fiction does or does not reflect the real world.

But whatever you thought of the state of society in 2019, it bore only a faint resemblance to the rain-soaked, neon-drenched vision of Blade Runner. And while I saw posts comparing the pandemic-stricken world of 2022 to Soylent Green, I think that’s even more of a stretch. Soylent Green was primarily concerned with overpopulation, a pertinent topic in the 1970s that didn’t figure in real-world 2022’s problems. Different dystopia.

But I want to credit two* works of fiction that correctly predicted some interesting things about our real-life present year of 2025: the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her, and the 2006 Vernor Vinge** novel Rainbow’s End. I have endeavored to keep this post spoiler-free, but feel free to check out one or both works and come back afterward, if you are conservative on hearing plot details.

Her

Her is the story of a lonely man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence on his computer. It is hardly the first piece of science fiction to explore the idea of a person falling in love with a robot or other artificially created person. But most other works were about robots, and were set further in the distant future. The titular character in Her is decidedly non-physical, and much of the story involves the two main characters navigating what that means for their developing relationship.

Life imitates art, and in real-life 2025, there are now many stories of people interacting with AIs as if they were real people. The movie was so influential on artificial intelligence that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, tried to get Scarlett Johansson (who portrayed the AI in Her) to lend her voice to their products. After she refused, they went with an allegedly similar voice, which got them into legal trouble.

Her is not a precise picture of 2025. The setting almost feels like a utopia, apart from what seems like a widespread epidemic of loneliness. The technology around AI is decidedly well ahead of our real-world tech. But its vision of how AI would affect relationships, and how people would try to find genuine connections with AIs – is seriously prescient.

Rainbows End 

Rainbows End, like Her, is set in the California of 2025. The primary point-of-view character is an elderly man who has been cured of dementia and had his health so thoroughly restored that he looks like a 20-something. But he doesn’t fit in at all in this new world, and his struggles to grapple with change inadvertently embroil him and his family in a conspiracy that threatens world stability.

Rainbows End heavily emphasizes augmented reality, where virtual worlds and interfaces overlay the real one. This technology does exist in real-world 2025, and is getting more widespread by the day, but it is not integral to the fabric of everyday life as it is in Rainbows End, where many people have multiple overlays of projected reality on top of the “real” world. The real world may look a lot more like Rainbows End by the 2040s or 2050s, but it isn’t there yet in 2025.

That said, the Rainbows End is prescient on several other topics. A big chunk of the story hinges on a battle around a university library and the digitization (and subsequent destruction) of its book collection. It also thinks deeply about how education and careers would change in a world so completely saturated with data. The book understands how children become intuitively fluent in new technologies, often in ways that they can’t even explain, and how quickly they lose their connection to cultural experiences that aren’t represented in the virtual worlds and communities they inhabit. Finally, it groks how online fandoms become powerful forces on their own. The height of the Pokemon Go craze, with fandom filtered through augmented reality, would have fit neatly in the world of Rainbows End. 

If the worst thing you can say about a work of speculative fiction is that it predicted changes accurately, but a bit more quickly than they actually happened, that’s a good sign that the work did its job.

Sir, This is a Wendy’s

So what’s the relevance to roleplaying games?

You can create verisimilitude in a game world by thinking deeply about how ordinary people use technology (or magic, or whatever is the "disruptive tech" of your fictional setting). It’s easy to think about high tech or high magic in the ways our PCs will interact with it, especially in a heroic fantasy game or a cyberpunk thriller. But we should also think about how ordinary people use it, and how that would show up in the quotidian fabric of the world.

What is world-changing one day is completely ordinary the next. And the time it takes an idea to go from world-changing to taken for granted is surprisingly short. There’s no shortage of examples in real-world 2025; technology that would baffle the previous generation is completely natural to modern-day young people.

And it is better to take some big swings and big misses than to conservatively aim for what seems most plausible. The example of a conservative approach that always comes to mind for me is the driverless car aesthetic you see in a lot of TV sci-fi, like the third season of Westworld or the futuristic parts of Netflix’s Bodies. The car design there is very believable… a little too believable. I don’t see a vision, a speculative gamble that really makes me curious about this future. Don't play it to safe with speculative fiction; better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right.

*Honorable mention to Futuresport, the 1998 made-for-TV movie starring Dean Cain, Vanessa Williams, and Wesley Snipes. It isn't saying anything that Rollerball or the Running Man or other movies hadn't already said better. But to its credit, Dean Cain’s voice-activated smart home is pretty close to what an Alexa-plus-AI home would provide to a real rich person in 2025.

**Another of Vinge’s novels has one of my favorite examples of a science fiction author predicting the future and getting it almost (but not quite) right. Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime was published in 1986. The story makes passing reference to a big-budget film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings, released around the turn of the century. Fellowship of the Ring was released in 2001, so Vinge nailed this prediction. 

But Vinge, presumably working on the novel in the early 1980s, guessed that it would be none other than George Lucas helming that LOTR adaptation. In real-life 2001, Lucas was of course doing his own big-budget trilogy; but he was halfway between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, not working on LOTR.  

It is hard to fault Vinge for this guess, as he was writing when Lucas was at the height of his creative powers, fresh off Star Wars and his Indiana Jones script. And obviously Vinge couldn't predict the strange career path of actual LOTR director Peter Jackson, whose first feature film hadn't even come out yet when Marooned in Realtime was published. But I love these little moments in speculative genre fiction, and the subtle details that separate what is shockingly correct from what is so far off the mark.

Unfinished Business: Complicating Resources Like a Scene in a Film

Many games give players “resources” as an extension of character creation or advancement. Some of those resources are people. Family members, former colleagues, friends, and so forth.

It can be difficult to introduce these resources into the game in an evocative, dramatic, interactive way, because everyone knows that the resources are character features, and ludologically, not so different from a piece of equipment or a special ability.

How can we make these resources feel more like tangible elements of the fictional world? One way is to steal a trick from films. 

Imagine this scene in a movie; you’ve almost certainly seen it before. A character needs something to achieve their goals. Information, access, tools, whatever. They know someone who can help, but because of something that happened in their shared past, they are reluctant to reach out, and know this person will not be happy to see them.

Trainspotting 2

Why? 

The second-person subject in each result below refers to the PC in question, while the third-person object refers to the resource.

1. Unpaid debts. You owed money or wealth of some kind. They may want compensation with interest; or may have decided that money alone isn’t going to be enough to make things right.
2. You ended on bad terms. You argued, litigated, fought, or worse. Time has not healed any wounds, and they are ready to pick up the struggle where it left off.
3. Your connection was more than professional. Bodies or feelings were in play, and they were either left hanging, or punished after you left. Their reaction to you will be complicated and extreme, and they will be very interested in what personal relationships you’ve made since.
4. Respect has faded. They looked up to you, admired you, or perhaps saw you as the only "real" one. The circumstances of your departure or your long time away have dimmed that esteem. They don’t believe you still have whatever made you stand out back then. They will want you to prove it before they help you.
5. Competing obligations. Since you last met, they’ve started a family, committed themselves to a cause, or otherwise entangled themselves in obligations that rival or overshadow whatever loyalty they once had to you.
6. You’ve changed. They are disturbed by, curious about, or obsessed with how different you are since the last time they saw you. They’re going to have a lot of questions about what has happened to you and what you’ve done, and won’t take kindly to disambiguation. 
7. Old rivals. Whether you were sparring in the dojo or performing on stage, you were their only real competition. They still think they’re better than you, and want to prove it before they offer any help.
8. Left behind. You escaped. They didn’t. Maybe you thought they were as good as dead, or maybe you were just looking out for number one. They’re going to expect you to answer for leaving without them before they lift a finger.

As with any game element, these should not be punitive; if the resource is something the character earned through advancement or by virtue of their class, playbook, whatever – they need to have it. But these kinds of ideas can be useful when a mixed success or an emergent complication suggests the game needs some friction. 

Heist Logic: Why the Guards Stand Down in a TTRPG

False Machine had a nice post about the Thief video game series, its emphasis on stealth, and what aspects of the game can (and cannot) be applied to TTRPGs.

A useful comment by Kyana focuses on a particular issue for TTRPGs; how and why does security “reset” after an incursion? 

Thief (1981) Michael Mann

I haven’t played the Thief games, but I’ve certainly seen the same problem in other video games, like Metal Gear Solid. You’re spotted in a secure area by multiple antagonists, the whole place goes on high alert, you’re caught in a firefight, grenades are exploding, soldiers are dying. But after 90 seconds spent hiding in a locker, the game reverts to its baseline state, and the guards resume normal patrols, as if nothing happened.

Video game players accept this artifice because it facilitates good gameplay. It would certainly be realistic if you had to wait hours (or days, or indefinitely) for the guards to stand down from high alert, but it would also certainly be boring. So the game speeds past the boring part and gets back to the fun part.

TTRPGs also endeavor to speed past the boring part and get to the good stuff, but they also have a generally higher expectation of verisimilitude than video games do. This is, in part, because players in a GM-led game expect the GM to dynamically react to PC action in a way that is impossible (thus far, at least) for a video game to match. 

So say you’re running a heist or infiltration in D&D or a similar game – basically, any game that isn’t like Blades in the Dark, which has built-in procedure for heist complications and failure states. You need a plan for how and why the guards are going to stand down or otherwise redirect attention in a reasonable amount of time, because you don’t want a single guard sighting to botch the entire enterprise. What kind of circumstances and conditions can we add to prolong the heist without resorting to video game-level suspension of disbelief?

1. Misdirected response. The guards react, but deploy their resources in the wrong place. Perhaps they cut off exits while the players are still delving deeper into the facility, or move to protect the big boss when the players are really after the MacGuffin. 
2. Expecting someone else. A twist on the above. The defenders suspect a completely different adversary is behind the incursion. Either directly (if they didn’t get a good look at the PCs) or indirectly (they presume the PC party is a decoy, or merely an illusion, or similar). It might be a faction or NPC that the PCs know, or even a group they weren’t already aware of. Either way, the defenders’ reaction to the perceived “true” threat wastes time or resources that give the PCs a renewed opportunity.
3. Multiple infiltrators. Twisting the above in a different direction, there actually are other infiltrators, unconnected to the party, whether here for the same prize, or something unrelated. The defenders catch one of the other individuals or groups infiltrating, taking some heat off the PCs. 
4. They don’t appreciate what they have. Most of these options presume that the defenders have a good idea of what they’re protecting. But if they don’t – if they’re unaware of the value of what they have, or don’t even realize it is within their area of control – the nature of the heist changes, and it’s more plausible that their reaction would be delayed, misdirected, or ineffectual.
5. A crisis is also an opportunity. There’s some internal conflict within the defenders’ ranks. Maybe a second-in-command wants a shot at leadership, or a sub-faction wants to leverage the situation against a rival sub-faction. Resources are spent primarily to advance this goal, rather than respond in full to the threat presented by the PCs.
6. Environmental distraction or complication. “Environmental” in this instance is just shorthand for something happening independent of any faction action. Something in the scenario outside the defenders’ control hinders their response. It could be bad weather, wild animals, invasive plants, stellar emissions, localized tremors, or even some supernatural effect of the MacGuffin itself. 
7. The heist is counterintuitively helpful in some way to the defenders of the location, and tacitly allowed to proceed. The aforementioned Metal Gear Solid game does this. The antagonist actually needs the protagonist to succeed, at least in part, to advance their overall plan, so some suboptimal efforts by the guards can be interpreted as an intentional ploy. But be careful with this one, as it can stray into gotcha-style GMing. The antagonists’ goal should probably be orthogonal to whatever the PCs are trying to do, rather than a direct negation of their success, so that circumstances out of their control or awareness can’t rob them of a win if they complete the heist.
8. Dumb but dangerous. This is essentially what Patrick recommended in the False Machine post with his ogre guards. Aggressive, loyal servants with goldfish memories are good antagonists during a heist. 
9. Programmed guards. Some or all of the guards act programmatically. They are undead, golems, trained animals, robots, mind-controlled servants, or similar. They can patrol, pursue, and attack, but they don’t have the capacity to react in complex, adaptive ways to PC action. The PCs can take advantage of this to continue the heist even if they’ve been spotted once.
10. A wizard did it. Similar to the above, but more open-ended. Perhaps the wizard or other magical antagonist is so paranoid that they dose their guards with amnesia-inducing chemicals. Perhaps the guards are all charmed, and some of the enchantments breaking (due to accident or PC intervention) disrupt an organized response to an alarm.
11. Magical passage of time. Remember how we said it would be realistic but boring to wait a really long time for the guards to stand down from a high alert? In a fantasy world with magic, that’s not a hard limitation on PC solutions. Some kind of magical item that allows them to do a duration-extended Rope Trick or similar effect could go a long way here. In this instance, the heist goes on, but every failure requires waiting some long period of (in-game) time, with possible complications in the outside world. This trick is the twist to a certain heist movie, where the protagonist waits out the guards for an implausibly long time. Hiding for spoiler purposes, but I'm talking about Inside Man (2006).
12. Life is complicated and mistakes happen. The simplest explanation of all. If you read accounts of real-world revolutions, battles, and other pivotal historical moments, it’s amazing how often the fate of nations and peoples hinges on situations where people simply make a lot of mistakes, fail to communicate, or organize suboptimally, and those errors domino out of control. Defending a secure location is quite complex, and some security failures are going to boil down to this kind of thing.

The Inside Game – Buying Into a Bad Idea

Last week: The Magnetic Rose Scenario – Running Two RPGs at Once

Magnetic Rose follows horror movie logic. Not long after the characters enter the derelict spaceship, looking for the source of the distress signal, it’s obvious to the audience that This Is a Bad Idea and Will End Badly. The characters continue to go deeper, even as the audience says “no, run away!” This is an intentional choice in a horror movie (or book, or whatever). The audience knows (or reasonably expects) something that the characters do not, and that gap in knowledge creates tension. When the characters “sync up” with the audience in terms of their knowledge of the situation, it creates a pleasing release of tension. That’s not as easy to do in an RPG, because the characters and the audience are one and the same, not separate.

So the players need to be on board with the conceit that their characters get into this situation even though they should know better. I’m not certain what system works best for the inside game. It should not be a science fiction game; a different genre will help create the separation and different feeling we want. I have not yet played Trophy Gold (or its related games), but based on session reports and reviews I have read, I suspect it might be a good fit, because the players know more about the characters’ circumstances than in other systems, and have buy-in and input on their fates. I would need to try the game myself to say for sure.

It’s important that the PCs buy into the idea that the hallucinations are a beguiling lie. Their characters want to believe. The players need to be OK with controlling characters who are deceived, and in great danger because of it. This can be a challenge for players accustomed to a high degree of autonomy and a close alignment of their perspective as players with their character’s perspectives as, well, pieces on a figurative game board.

The inside game kicks in whenever a PC falls to the deceptions of the hallucinatory environment. That PC begins playing the new game. Other PCs continue playing the outside game until they too fall into the inside game. Those playing the outside game are in danger of entering the inside game as long as they stay in or near the shipwreck.

Successfully resisting the hallucination can “kick” a PC back up to the outside game, as happens in Magnetic Rose when Heintz, one of the salvage crew members, sees through the illusions. More on that in a moment.

Exploring the Details 

Incorporate all five senses. The salvage crew in Magnetic Rose don’t just see the station’s deceptions. They smell, taste, hear, and eventually touch the phenomena they hallucinate. A GM running this scenario should create a short list of objects, sensations, and phenomena that can trigger at least one (and preferably two or more) of the five senses. The chosen themes should appear in both the outside and inside games, but in different states.

Personal and foreign memories mingled together. Magnetic Rose was written by Satoshi Kon, who would go on to perfect the permeability of memory and perception in Paranoia Agent and Paprika. Throughout these works, deception often takes the form of mingling internal memories and desires with external stimuli. 

Particularly if run as a one-shot, each PC involved in the Magnetic Rose scenario should have something that anchors them to the real world. It doesn’t need to be a full backstory; just a few attachments in the real world. Family is the obvious one, and the focus of Heintz’s story in Magnetic Rose, but it could also be an occupation, art, religion, or something else entirely.

Attachments or connections are both a blessing and a curse. Heintz’s love for his family gives him a compelling reason to resist the hallucinations and survive the scenario, but his desire to see them again (and more subtly, his guilt over leaving them for so long to work) is also the hook the hallucinations use to tempt him.

Challenges and obstacles. They can be drawn from the standard selection of dangers and hazards in both the game’s or inside game’s system, or inspired by the following:

The outside game:

• Wayfinding challenge
• Physical obstruction
• Gravity/power/environmental control change
• “Split up so you can cover more ground!”
• Communication interruption
• Totally lost
• Automated defenses 
• The station computer intervenes
• Structural collapse
• Countdown to escape

The inside game:

• The most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen
• Releasing your burdens 
• “I never thought I would see you again…”
• Undoing a past mistake
• A chance to be the hero or the star
• Reliving your happiest day
• “Of course it’s a lie, but does that make it any less wonderful?”

Bringing Down the House

Broadly speaking, there are four possible outcomes for the scenario. 

Lose the internal game, lose the external game. Crew dead or missing, ship lost. That’s a TPK.

Lose the internal game, win the external game. One or more crew members lost to the hallucinations, but some crew members escape on the salvage ship.

Win the internal game, lose the external game. The salvage ship is lost, but some or all of the crew have survived, either by embracing the hallucinations or by escaping into space, hoping that someone hears their own distress call before their air runs out.

Win the internal game, win at the external game. The crew overcomes the hallucinations and destroys or disarms the derelict spacecraft, ensuring no one else will meet the fate they escaped.

The Magnetic Rose Scenario – Running Two RPGs at Once

Magnetic Rose is the first of three stories in the 1995 anthology film Memories. The premise is simple: The crew of the spaceship Corona explores a space wreck, looking for survivors and salvage, encountering increasingly creepy phenomena as they venture deeper into the derelict craft.

How would this work as a TTRPG scenario? I started thinking about it after someone mentioned Magnetic Rose in response to a question about spaceship graveyards on the Alexandrian Discord. I rewatched it for the first time in many years, and thought about using two different RPG systems to play out the difference between reality and hallucinations.

For this I am indebted to a campaign structure that I saw… somewhere online, where players would run Tales From the Loop or some other kids-on-bikes game as the first game system (what I’ll call the “outside game” from now on). They would also run a second game system – D&D or a similar system – as the “game-within-the-game” that the characters in the first game are playing (I’ll call it the “inside game” throughout this post). I can’t recall where I read this idea, so I apologize that I can’t give proper credit for the inspiration.

The Outside Game – It Was Supposed to Be a Simple Job

The scenario begins with the outside game, which could use various science fiction RPGs. The implied setting within Magnetic Rose’s story is lightly sketched, as the segment has less than an hour to work with, but it’s present. The characters are blue collar “space truckers,” in the mold of the characters from Alien. They’re experienced and work well together, but are driven by different desires and motivations.

The important thing is that the PCs are probably in over their heads; they are not hyper-competent Star Trek characters who can figure things out reliably. It should also be relatively rules-light, for reasons that will become clear later. I’ll be using Jason Tocci’s Orbital Decay as my north star, but this is more about vibe than mechanics.

After finishing one salvage job and turning down another, the crew of the Corona receives a distress call. Laws require that they respond and record video of their entry into an apparently abandoned space station, so they reluctantly check it out. They quickly begin to learn that Things Are Not As They Seem.

Other relevant media for inspiration purposes:

• Event Horizon (it muddles it’s message with inconsistent signposting, but it’s still an excellent reference)
• Scavenger’s Reign (Kamen’s story, and his flashbacks in particular; but also Sam’s backstory)
• Prometheus (and various bits of the Alien series generally)
• Sphere/The Abyss (the strangeness is in the ocean instead of in space, but otherwise similar ideas)
• William Hope Hodgson (the most famous writer of Sargasso Sea stories about mysterious shipwrecks; Magnetic Rose namechecks the Sargasso Sea explicitly)
• Many science fiction shows have single episodes that are variations on either Hodgson stories or similarly themed "Flying Dutchman" ghost ship stories
• Solaris, and Tarkovsky generally (internal made external, at the intersection of the unknowability of alien intelligence and the unknowability of one’s own interior world) 
• Annihilation and VanderMeer generally (not set in space, but otherwise similar to Solaris for our purposes)
• Inception (for the concept of “kicking” back up into reality, and the idea of beguiling lies)
• All Satoshi Kon works (for reasons elaborated upon in the next post)

Next week: The Inside Game – Buying Into a Bad Idea

Defacing the Party Face

Skill-based games struggle with resolving action organically when PCs are hyper-aware of which character is best at what. A player will outline an entire elaborate plan for solving a problem; the DM will call for a roll; and the player will immediately switch gears and start proposing reasons why another PC (who was silent throughout the aforementioned process) should execute the action (because their character has a 5-10% better chance of succeeding).

Some games solve this through various mechanical details or table rules. But can we help the ones that don’t?

Everyone Has Something to Say

While watching the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie, I was struck by how frequently the members of the titular adventuring party undermined their own plans because one or more of them couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Sure, social interaction is easy when the bard does the talking, and everyone else stands mutely behind them. It’s a little more challenging if the barbarian feels the need to interject with unhelpful or overly revealing commentary.

What if there was a game rule that the scene doesn’t end until every character speaks? Or, for larger adventuring parties, at least two characters (besides the charismatic “face”) speak?

The goal is to get some friction into the dialogue. Some PCs will be tempted to just say “yeah, what he said.” PBTA systems and other games that provide a mechanical payoff for the player failing, acting suboptimally to advance the narrative, or otherwise indulging a flaw can do this most easily. But it can work in any kind of game where the players buy into the idea and trust the DM to encourage them to cause interesting problems without responding punitively. 

Actions Speak Louder Than Words 

Let’s take another page from fiction. Movies, TV shows, and books are good at moving the spotlight from one character to another to make sure the story gives each of them something to do. Many of the same tricks work in a TTRPG.

How to move the spotlight after the face makes their case? It’s easy:

• The chieftain respects strength and strength alone; an arm-wrestling contest with the warrior would bring him around.
• The security system is unmoved by guile; it wants the cyborg to explain why you need to get in, using reason and logic.
• The fence agrees to find the missing artifact, but only if another member of the brotherhood of scoundrels (like, say, the party criminal) personally vouches for the deal.
• The elemental only speaks primordial, the language the dwarf PC got at level one and promptly forgot about. The elemental can’t make sense of the nattering, flighty language of man; say it  again, in words of stone and fire.

No More Talk

Implicit in some of the examples above is that a good rule for handling social situations is to know when and how to end the dialogue.

In listening to some actual play podcasts recently, I’ve been driven up the wall by GMs who will let players cajole, wheedle, beg, hector, and berate NPCs long after the interesting part of the conversation has ended. This is doubly bad in a podcast, where the session has to be entertainment for an audience, in addition to the players. But it should still be avoided in games where the players themselves are the only audience.

A terribly underrated tool is to simply say “they don’t buy your arguments and are no longer listening to you. It looks like you’ll have to explore some other way to get what you want, or come back to them after the situation has changed in some way and there’s a new argument to make.” Phrase it as narration  rather than in-voice dialogue, so it’s clear that you’re moving on to something else. This can be a little frustrating in the short term to players who want to “win” every interaction and scene they participate in, but it pays dividends in the medium to long term, with tighter, more interesting sessions.

17 RPG Lessons from the Raiders of the Lost Ark Bar Fight (Part 2)

Previously: 17 RPG Lessons from the Raiders of the Lost Ark Bar Fight (Part 1)

You’re always hitting SOMETHING

Glasses and bottles shatter as a gunfight rages across the tavern.

Games featuring combat can devolve into a familiar pattern. “Lothgar attacks with his sword… 7… miss. The orc swings with his axe… 4… that’s another miss.” Described this way, combat can feel weightless, boring, static, and low-stakes.

But attacks that miss are rarely just sweeping through the air. Every miss can tell us something about the combat. The resiliency of armor. Quick reflexes. The difficulty created by the terrain or dungeon dressing.  

Every miss is a chance to loop back to previous action, or foreshadow what may happen next. Is a miss making noise? Knocking things over? Creating rough terrain? Separating the combatants? Destroying cover?

Of course, a miss is already a bad result for a PC, so we should avoid creating effects that feel like piling on. Changes triggered by misses should usually affect all participants equally, or be random in their ongoing effect.

Reward PCs for engaging with the environment

Jones, targeting an enemy behind cover, fires at the burning logs in the fireplace, igniting the pool of spilled liquor.

Jones’ player asks the GM, “can I hit the guy in the center of the room?” The GM says “he has cover behind a sturdy table, it will be hard.” So the player says, “how about hitting the fireplace?”

Some GMs will have a knee-jerk reaction to players trying to “hack” the scenario, but this is exactly the kind of thinking we want to encourage. A GM should absolutely offer more favorable odds or an improved opportunity for success when a player engages with the fiction in a logical way. 

Break up static situations

The gunfight is interrupted when one of Toht’s henchman flanks Jones and grapples him.

Fights that don’t end quickly can settle into a static equilibrium. Perhaps PCs and antagonists are just slugging it out, whittling away at each others’ hit points; or both sides have turtled up.

When this happens, introduce disruptive elements, like an enemy flanking a character making ranged attacks. For most TTRPGs, it’s probably more important that this is dramatically interesting than tactically optimal. 

Connect one event to the next, even if the rolls were unrelated

After Jones loses a contested grapple roll, Marion succeeds on a stealth check.

A clever GM can frame Marion’s success on her attack as stemming directly from the distraction of Jones’ player’s failure on the previous roll.

Of course, we know that these were independent rolls. But part of GMing is finding meaning and patterns in randomized action. Emphasizing that Marion is taking advantage of an opportunity makes her player feel more capable; and perhaps Jones’ player also feels better about their failure, as it “set up” Marion’s success.

 

Allow the antagonists to make suboptimal tactical decisions

Despite holding a gun, Toht decides to light the bar on fire, creating a less effective but more exciting threat.

Players will usually fight in tactically optimal or near-optimal ways. Unless the game in question has a specific focus on tactics, it’s fine to have most antagonists act sub-optimally, as long as it creates a more interesting situation, or “tells the story” of what that antagonist is all about. It shouldn’t be done because the GM is giving the player a break.

Of course, at least some of the time, an enemy should fight just as tactically as the PCs. It will be that much more of a challenge contrasted against the typical encounter.

Morale checks may play out in unexpected ways

Toht tells his henchman to “shoot them… shoot them both.”

There are many ways to imagine how we get to this particular juncture in a fight. Perhaps some previous action in the fight weakened the enemies’ cohesion, even though the fiction points to them holding the upper hand. Dissension and betrayal are powerful tools to spice up an encounter. 

As in the previous entry in this list, the important thing to remember is that this follows from what we know about NPC drives, factions, and relationships. As long as the action follows from the established facts of the scenario plus the results of the dice, it can enhance the situation.

Remember that antagonists fail too

Toht reaches for the medallion, not realizing it is dangerously hot to the touch.

It can be difficult to separate GM knowledge from NPC knowledge – but it is useful and rewarding. An NPC who acts with less than the GM’s full knowledge – but in a way that is reasonable given what they do know, and what they want – creates a believable, responsive world.

If the villain escapes, it’s before combat is over

As victory (quite literally) slips from Toht’s fingers, he flees the tavern. 

GMs often try to protect antagonist NPCs, with the idea of creating recurring villains, but the rules in many TTRPGs make this unlikely. It works much better if Toht was an unimportant NPC (possibly even unnamed – after all, no one ever speaks his name in the movie) who only becomes important after the fact, based on the events of the fight. That’s classic play-to-find-out action. 

Note how Toht gets away while the medallion is still at risk, the fire is still burning, and a henchman is still fighting. A villain who does flee should always try to do so a round or two before combat ends.

As combat ends, pause to consider the complications and developments

Marion joins forces with Jones in the wake of the tavern’s destruction.

The final part of this scene reminds me of the Urban Shadows game I play in. In Urban Shadows, Marion would have a new debt on Jones, and it would inform the subsequent action and give them a reason to “party up.”

In D&D, this would be a great way to add a new PC to an adventuring party. Marion would make an excellent NPC-turned-PC.

The GM in this scenario would also make a note that Toht survived, and that the symbol was burned into this hand, ensuring that the encounter would have far-flung effects later in the campaign…

17 RPG Lessons from the Raiders of the Lost Ark Bar Fight (Part 1)

GM attempts in TTRPGs to create a “set piece” imitating film crumple when confronted with the uncertainty of player action and the randomness of the dice. Games are a different medium than film, and any adaptation of film technique needs to draw lessons and learn from underlying ideas, rather than merely imitate the action on screen.

A classic example that I return to again and again is the bar fight early in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In short, adventurer Indiana Jones visits a bar in Nepal operated by Marion Ravenwood, who owns a medallion he needs. The scene begins after Jones has visited and left, and Nazi officer Arnold Toht (who also pursues the MacGuffin) has arrived with hired thugs to take it.

How many lessons can we learn from this five-minute scene? Enough that this will be a two-part post!

The entire scene is here. The bolded text below each heading lead directly to the corresponding timestamp in the video. 

Shout character motivations from the rooftops

Shortly after her bar closes, Marion contemplates the medallion that Jones wants, considering her options. 

RPG NPCs don’t need much to drive them. Around the internet, I see complex generators and intricate prep tools designed to create page-long NPCs, and I find them to be overly busy. An NPC doesn’t need much more than a clear driving desire or goal that the players can learn and understand. Three bullet points is usually enough for almost any NPC. Everything else emerges naturally through play.

As an audience of the film, we get to see Marion, alone, contemplating the medallion. Without any dialogue, the audience understands that this character is going to be important to the rest of the movie. In a tabletop game, we’re going to have to be a lot more obvious in broadcasting Marion’s (temporary) refusal of the call to adventure. Figuring out what characters want usually isn’t the interesting part in an RPG. Shout the motivation at the PCs, or they may miss it.

Put the MacGuffin itself in peril

Marion hangs the medallion on a candleholder, where it will soon be at the center of the bar fight. 

Think about a typical RPG fight for an object that both sides want. A PC grabs it. An antagonist wins a grapple check and steals it away. It goes back and forth like this until the strongest, fastest, or most numerous prevail. Not too exciting.

What if instead, on each action, it was highly likely that the object would be dropped, knocked aside, thrown, rolled, ignited, bobbled, immersed, or obscured? The success-with-a-cost thinking of PbtA games’ 7-9 results is instructive here, versus the (superficially) pass-fail nature of D&D.

The Indiana Jones movies do this again and again. The grail is falling into the chasm. The stones are burning through the bag and dropping into the river. The treasure you are seeking is there, but your friend who is in danger is over here. Escape is this way, but the treasure is that way. We can do this in games too.

The antagonists should be visually distinct (...sometimes)

Toht and his three goons enter the bar. 

Note how the four men who enter the bar are all immediately different from each other in clothing, height, and facial hair. A little bit of description can be an anchor in the ensuing combat (“you want to hit the one with the scar?” “no, the one with the fancy boots”) Simple portraits for a rival adventuring party can go a long way from turning faceless bags of hit points into compelling antagonists.

That said, this is a device that can be used sparingly, because in tabletop versus film, so much more of the information is auditory rather than visual. In many cases, five orcs can simply be five orcs, and any additional detail is unnecessary unless the players ask for it. 

Positioning can help set a scene

As Toht and Marion converse, Toht’s henchmen spread out through the room in a threatening manner. 

As Toht moves from a purchase offer to a threat of violence, note how much of the drama of the scene is conveyed by the positioning of his minions, particularly behind Marion. This doesn’t have to be – and probably shouldn’t be – miniatures on a grid, at a point when the scene is still more conversation than conflict. 

Again, there are limits in how much film language is going to translate to an RPG. But think about how easy it would be to run this scenario in an RPG and essentially have the four men standing clumped together in the entrance, and how much better it feels when they move around while talking.

Narrate what initiative means 

Some of the antagonists move quickly to escalate the threat against Marion, while others move more slowly.

A low initiative roll for an antagonist can feel like a screw-up, in a way that undercuts the palpable menace they present. But the GM has the power to frame this action in different ways, presenting them as patient, or condescendingly deliberate, or waiting to base their action on what their ally does first. All could apply to the bar scene.

Narrating initiative effectively makes it feel as if this largely random ordering was intended all along.

Make improvised weapons make sense whenever possible

Toht uses a red hot poker to intimidate Marion. 

Improvised weapons are cool. They help “tell the story” of the location, encourage improvisation, and make for memorable fights. The battle where a PC used a hot poker; or a bottle of liquor; or a squealing farm animal as a weapon is going to be a lot more memorable than the 139th time Lothgar hit someone with his longsword.

If the rules of the game don’t already endorse improvised weapons, think about ways to make them more appealing. And have NPCs show off their effectiveness. Players who see NPCs do something cool will follow suit quickly enough.

Put conversations on the clock

Toht declines Marion’s attempt to make a Persuasion check.

PCs love to endlessly banter, query, and wheedle, even with antagonists on the precipice of violence. Since talking is (or at least feels) “free,” PCs will use it as much as possible. This is fine when it’s a genuine attempt to engage with situations beyond combat. But it can turn into an indefinite stall on interesting conflict.

It’s helpful to remind players that they can’t freeze the action, and the easiest way to do this is to say “the NPC answers you, but they’re continuing with their aggressive action at the same time they talk.” When Toht says “that time has passed,” it’s driving the situation towards interesting decision points for the PCs. 

Accidents will happen

Jones disarms Toht, accidentally lighting a curtain on fire in the process.

This feels like an interesting way to frame “partial success.” Jones’ player gets what they want, but there is spillover. Echoing “put the MacGuffin itself in peril” from above, this is something that happens a lot in the Indiana Jones movies.

In a game that doesn’t specifically instruct the GM to resolve partial success in this manner, we should constantly be looking for opportunities to interpret action in this way, because of how well it drives the action in interesting directions.

Next Week: 17 RPG Lessons from the Raiders of the Lost Ark Bar Fight (Part 2)