Fapmaster5000 wrote...
Had anyone died yet? Yes. This was part of the grinder.
I'm a huge believer in player agency. Part of that, though, is that the player is also free to fail. It's not a stunning triumph if the DM just hands out victory. I stage encounters to range from moderate to challenging, with certain major clutch moments being tiered from tought to brutal, and the occasional cheese thrown in for fun. This also means that I run things in the open, with relatively open rolls. So, if things go horribly wrong in combat, and then I drop that natural twenty on the table from the combat monstrosity that's been pumping out thirty to forty damage a hit... well, someone's gonna explode. If I neutered that, it wouldn't be a game, it would be story-time-with-friends.
Because of this, and some REALLY bad rolls early on, the party of eight people had turned over six characters, one of those characters three times (poor guy, he just kept dying).
Tying to this, there had been one character who'd been locked onto "I will be the hero" mode. Unfortunately, he also wasn't the brightest, and got the party into a lot of trouble, and then got killed when he decided to stare down a monster with a nasty gaze attack... twice. This might have biased the party to listen to the more mercenary "survive at all costs" PCs in the group.
Since then, I've made sure to stack the deck, player wise, making sure at least one "leader" type player is running a good character, and rigging the alignments to be more good-dominant. It's like chemistry! With personalities!
Some of them went out in blazes of glory, blowing out one of the massive soul traps. Some of them died like ****es, when dice went cold. One even got his head blown by an NPC "ally" he'd been tormenting, and instead of the party starting a fight over cold blooded murder, they all just shrugged and said "Yeah, he had that coming for a while"... even that PC's player. I should have been worried RIGHT THEN, but I didn't know how bad it had gotten.
As for being appropriate to the world, I think you're right. ME3 never put the player into the position of "lose a little or lose a lot" hard choices, no "Asian Flu" framing issues, no "no right choice" options. The ME series was always a series where with a little bit of work (completionist) and a solid playthrough, the player COULD win everything.
I would accept a "screw off, you win by losing" in a game with a more brutal tone, but ME had always been space opera, with a solid dose of hope and "we can unite to save the day" and "your choices matter"... right up until you lose all hope, destroy/control/blenderize the galactic races without regard to your choices. It was a completely different ending, and I just don't get it.
I can see pieces of a mind screw in there, but that might be shadows of my old campaign, and I have to wonder if this was simple failure, or if they tried something similar, reaching so far for high art that they forgot the player, and the reason that we play.
There's a quote I enjoy from Robert Browning, "Man's reach should exceed his grasp". In creative works, the "reach" is the artistic drive, but knowing the limits of your grasp is the integrity.
I asked this question because, well, you teach players what kind of game they're in. If you're playing a character who isn't in constant pain, you'll have at least some vestige of fun.
If players see noble acts fail the vast majority of the time, but occasionally succeed, they can maintain hope. If the noble act fails every single time, you condition them to never take that risk. Now, it may have been that your single morally righteous player was, in fact, doing things that were obviously stupid. When you say "blowing out one of the soul traps," do you mean someone managed to die negating one of the awful, soul-crushing things you had planned? Personally, as a player, I would have taken that as a "win."
I talk a lot on these boards about the one Shepard for whom the ending makes sense: my old sociopathic renegade, Crow. Funny story, the prototypical Crow was actually a reaction to a DM who caused a series of characters with different levels of goodness increasingly high amounts of stress. I decided to play a character who was completely and utterly amoral. She actually wasn't the monster later iterations became after repeated exposure to the grimmest of darks; it was just an experiment in amorality. How would a character behave if she didn't care if her entire party died? It was very freeing in this particular campaign to behave that way, and my actions weren't markedly different than they had been previously. It was just that... when bad things happened, it didn't hurt. At all. This suddenly made his games far more enjoyable, and I never played a moral character in a non-one-shot game with him again.
I've since played variations on her a few times, and at one point, upon making a decision that caused the death of the entire party, her last words were "easy come, easy go."
I have a point here, I swear. And I am still thinking of other ways to talk productively about the ending, but right now this particular conversation thread is utterly fascinating.
I spent much of ME1 and ME2 expecting paragon decisions to blow up in my face. At this point I had just gotten done writing and designing content for a Warhammer-related property for over a year, so I was all-too-familiar with gloom and doom. There were four or five times when I just stood there and thought "ok, this will be the one that won't work out." I don't expect post-Roddenberry Sci-Fi to allow consistently positive feelings. When Mass Effect did, I exulted... for once, I could play a game where the tough choices weren't a meatgrinder for the soul. Legion's loyalty mission gave me a choice that felt real, compelling, and like there was no right answer, but posed the question in such a way that I didn't feel tainted. Zaeed gave me a moral test I thought I was going to "fail," because I had no problem whatsoever with him getting his revenge on this random mercenary, but as soon as innocents were in danger I switched gears. It was actually a game where, quite often, the "right" decision actually felt smarter than the wrong one. I was actually going to let Garrus take his revenge too, but when I saw how vicious he got when interrogating that ex-cop, I decided not to... not because revenge killing was wrong, but because I didn't think it was going to be healthy for Garrus if he did it.
I actually wrote some things back in my ME2 fandom days about how the game could be made more rewarding for renegades without damaging the rewards for paragons, because I though they needed more catering to. My Crow was bored out of her wits most of the time.
My point is that Mass Effect actually broke me out of a rut of feel-bad cynicism and despair, and made me believe in heroes again. It made me believe in happiness, and hope. It made me believe in an imperfect universe that could be made better, maybe, slowly.
To clap a Monty hall showcase of evils on the end of a world like that... sometimes a Monty Hall showcase of evils is fine. Sometimes it fits. Sometimes it even fits in a tale that has otherwise been heroic. But not this one.
If they hadn't pitched it as a tale of joy and heroism, I would have played something other than a joyful hero. I might have even enjoyed the resulting game, though I would not have exulted in it in a way that changed my life, as I did with Mass Effect. But until those last ten minutes, I never felt any indication that it was "that kind of story."
Hopefully that made something resembling sense. I'm very tired, all of a sudden.
Retour en haut
commonly used by scoundrels to force concession to some distasteful policy or another, and c) typically deliberately constructed to ignore alternate solutions.
