This is a hard world we find ourselves in, where everyone is looking to steal our money, screw us over, and make wee-wee on our hats. This is a world that hates and punishes naiveté, and loves and rewards cynicism and suspicion. Trust no one and fear everyone, strike before you’re struck, an extended hand conceals a blade, the arm around your back connects to the hand in your pocket. It’s an unfortunate reality, but this is a perfectly sensible reaction to this world, so slimy full of realtors, spammers, lawyers, and liars.
Sadly, we carry our real-world wounds into the games we play, which transforms our characters, first imagined as sweetly smiling pure souls with cartoon birds lighting on their shoulders, into gritty, hard-bitten, heartless, soulless bastards. This may be because of experiences with a DM that shattered hope and trust like a cinderblock on a crystal ornament, and we have decided we cannot allow ourselves to be hurt like that again.
Players who are young (figure under 14 years old) or brand new to gaming can be unspoiled by distrust and doubt, which means they might actually release the defeated kobold chieftain, and might actually touch the faintly glowing altar in the middle of the cobwebby temple, and might actually believe the exotic beauty needing an escort back to her underground city. The paragon level cynic cries, “Kill the chieftain! Avoid the altar! Ignore the beauty!” Each of these situations is obviously a trap.
And here’s my question: So what?
When I first started gaming (many lifetimes ago), when I was young and dumb and full of… um… foolishness, I regularly blundered into regrets and traps and betrayals, and these were in games riddled with DM statements like, “The room appears empty,” and, “The wardrobe appears safe,” and, “The woman appears honest.” Naturally, all of those “APPEARS” rang my alarm bells, but I still got caught, hurt, nailed, and crushed.
Every villain that got away always came back, more dangerous, better equipped, and insane with the need for revenge. Every time I didn’t obsessively prod the floor with a 10′ pole, I fell into a deep pit with poisoned spikes at the bottom. Every femme I trusted turned out to be extremely fatale, usually working with the escaped villain and often the architect of all those spiked pits.
And despite all that pain, despite all those times I was burned, I had some real fun in those way-back-when games. I am so careful and worried and neurotic in the real world, I could really enjoy being reckless in a fake one, rushing ahead, devil may care, and let’s see what happens. I’ve seen it in so many games, where the party is skulking fearfully around a chest as though it were an unexploded bomb (which sometimes, it is), and then somebody grunts, “Ah, screw it,” and kicks the chest open. In the moment that this happens, there’s always a look on that player’s face, a look of relief, a look of release, a look of freedom.
What I’m calling for here are more “Ah, screw it” moments. And why not? What is at risk exactly? I’ve placed several of my characters in dangerous circumstances, and even watched sadly as a few of them died, and outside of some mild razzing from other players, I never personally suffered from the outcome. The DM often rewarded such brash action, or, failing that, didn’t overtly punish it. Usually, I wound up with a funny, wild, loopy story with which I could bore friends and family for years afterwards.
Happy Ending Example: In a post-apocalypse game, our group was under assault by metal-heads inside a sprawling mansion, and Steve and I needed to get across a wide hallway that ran north-south along the mansion’s spine. We knew there were leather and spiked killers waiting for us to show our faces, so there we were, crouched and dithering inside the laundry room. Finally, I stood up, turned to Steve and said, “Cover me,” and made my dash. I was two strides across the hallway when a metal-head leaned from a nearby room, leveling his rifle on me. I dove, snapping up my .357 and firing… CRITICAL! I vaporized the top of his head from the eyebrows up, then curled into a tight ball and rolled into the room across the way.
At the table, my heart was going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa and my hands were slick with sweat, but I had my moment, all because I was willing to say, “Ah, screw it,” and try something extremely stupid. But what if it hadn’t gone my way? What if I fired and missed? What if the metal-head fired and hit? I’d still have a great story (“Remember that time you ran out into that hallway and got shot six times?”), just without a great ending.
No-So-Happy Ending Example: In our D&D game, Kevin was the quintessential “ah, screw it” player, and always acted without thinking, kicking down doors, charging into combat, and chugging unidentified potions. He found himself lots of feet up a tree when an orc shambled into the clearing underneath him.
Immediately he said, “I jump onto it.”
We all stared in horror, and the DM, grinning in bemusement, asked, “How many hit points do you have left?”
Kevin looked down, then back up and said, “One!” He didn’t seem remotely concerned.
“How do you expect to survive the fall?” the DM asked.
“I don’t know. But I should hurt the orc, right?” You can’t argue with that kind of logic.
So he leapt from the tree, rolled to hit… and got a natural 1. Ker-SPLAT!
Once we had all stopped laughing, Kevin asked with a sniffy kind of pride, “Any chance my 20 oil flasks explode?”
I am issuing a challenge to every DM who runs games for me, and it is this: bring it. Bring your enemies, bring your traps, bring your double crosses. I’ll buy into it all, swallow it hook, line, and spiked chain, and still want more. I am going to live (and probably die) dangerously. And after it’s all done, I’m going to have some stories to tell.
