[I Attack the Darkness is a semi-regular feature by tabletop gaming evangelist Erin Palette, who spins words about her love and appreciation for pen and paper RPGs, while waxing poetic about all things devoted to gaming unplugged.]
Ah, Valentine’s Day. That time of year when a young girl’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of brutally abusing her players in the RPG she is running. In this week’s installment of I Attack the Darkness, we explore in great detail the forbidden love inherent in all role-playing games: Sadomasochism.
No, really.
Part One: Players are Masochists
Every gamer secretly likes to suffer. They won’t ever admit it, of course, and in fact will heartily bitch and moan whenever their beloved characters are even slightly inconvenienced, but don’t let that fool you. One, players will bitch about anything, given half the chance; this is how you know they’re paying attention and engaged in the game. A quiet player is usually one who has lost interest and is now idly paging through magazines, building dice towers, or fallen asleep. Two – and here is where the analogy really begins to heat up – the complaints of a player serve the same function as the cries of pain from a masochist who is being beaten by a really good top, i.e. “Ouch!” and “That hurts!” really mean “Yes! Yes!” and “More, please!”
Players like to suffer because there is no glory in an easy victory. Go to any game store, any convention, any place where RPG grognards congregate, and you will hear them tell stories of great woe, tales of Dungeon Masters so evil that it would chill the blood and the incredible misery they inflicted upon their players… and yet the players triumphed anyway.
That’s the key. The point of all the suffering, all the pain, is that at the end of the campaign, a player can look his DM in the eye and say, “Yeah, you hurt me. You put me through hell. For three months I showed up every Saturday, and you made every step excruciating. But you didn’t beat me. I kept showing up, and you kept throwing things at me, and I kept going. You’ve done your worst to me, and I still finished that adventure. I WIN.”
Players like to suffer, because it validates their experiences and gives them a sense of accomplishment. They want you to do your worst to them. Which is convenient, because all good Game Masters are sadists any way.
Part Two: Game Mastering as Applied Sadism
Of course, some of you may be asking yourselves, “But why would I want to be a sadist? Surely there is a way to run a game that doesn’t involve abject cruelty? Can’t we all be mature individuals and mmmph –”
Sorry about that. Well, not really. I just felt the need to gag you. And that, you see, is precisely how a Game Master starts down the Black Rose path. You may start out with good intentions, but eventually you have a troublemaker in your group who simply won’t respond to anything other than a good old-fashioned whipping:
- The Rules Lawyer who feels the need to argue every ruling you make
- The Clown who won’t stop making Gilbert Gottfried impressions at the table
- The Digresser who leaps upon any pause in the game to discuss what happened on TV last night
- Mr. “I can destroy any dramatic moment with a Monty Python quote”
For whatever reason – maybe you’ve been warning these guys for months, or maybe you just had a bad day – you just snap. You pull out the biggest, meanest, nastiest encounter you can, and before you know it you’ve taken out a third of the party.
And it feels GOOD. You’ve discovered the powerful catharsis of role-playing God Almighty. The PCs are but puny mortals before your wrath, your GM screen is the Mount of Heaven, and the dice are your thunderbolts. You realize that, if you wanted, you could drop elephants upon them from orbit. An evil grin crawls across your face, and as your players give you that “Dear Jesus what have we unleashed?” look, you know that you will never deny yourself this pleasure again.
Funny how so many GMs go the Old Testament route, isn’t it? But that’s a subject for another article.
Still, a goddess needs her worshippers, and killing everyone’s characters all the time is a good way to lose your players. Besides, fairness must be maintained – or at least the illusion of fairness – so while Total Party Kills are no longer de rigeur, you can keep your players suffering enough that they won’t sass you. Give them the right kind of pain, and they’ll keep coming back for more.
To be a proper sadist, you have to know what turns your players on before you can give it to them firmly across their backsides. As it turns out, this is relatively easy, since when it comes to suffering there are two kinds of players: Engineers and Drama Whores.
Engineers like rules and complex rule systems. They enjoy point-based character design, as it gives them a high degree of precision regarding what their characters can do, and to what degree. They prefer having many tactical options, and for combat to simulate real life (or whatever genre you are using) as accurately as possible. They like having lots of dice, and using them, because random numbers are fun. Champions, Shadowrun, and Dungeons & Dragons are excellent examples of Engineer games.
Drama Whores prefer the spirit of the rules to the actual letter. It’s important to them that they have a good feel for their characters and know what makes them tick, even to the point of creating detailed histories and psychologies for them. They are more concerned with being part of a gripping story than with getting treasure, and will frequently handicap themselves just because it makes for better roleplaying. Drama Whores prefer games likes Vampire, Nobilis and Amber Diceless.
Both of these types are easy to abuse, assuming you possess basic Game Master skills (the ability to make a challenging encounter, comprehensive knowledge of the rules and setting of the game, and a black void where your heart once was).
Engineers want to suffer in a manner that is precise and game-defined. They love it when you break out obscure rules for encumbrance, hypothermia, and sleep deprivation because it enhances the simulation of actually being there. The more you can accurately model “the suck” without bogging down the game, the better.
You should also make use of the fickle randomness of dice; PCs love it when they score critical hits, so why shouldn’t you? Let the dice fall where they may, often in plain sight of the victims players. You don’t have to kill them, either; often it’s the fear of impending doom, as you roll 1dHandfull, that is more frightening than the numbers themselves. Sometimes merely living through a critical hit (albeit horribly mangled) is enough to satisfy the masochistic urge.
Drama Whores, on the other hand, are perfectly happy if you have a session without dice-rolling. Some of them are so into their characters that if you took their sheets and dice away they’d barely notice. You can’t punish these people mechanically, because they’ll find an in-character reason to run away or whatever. No, you need to give them what they crave: romance and tragedy, Shakespearean in scope.
This might be difficult for you, if not for the fact that a Drama Whore is in fact your willing accomplice in all this. Given half the chance, they will quite happily “Top from the Bottom” and present you with all sorts of opportunities for abuse: family curses, lost loves, doomed relationships, unfaithful spouses, even terminal diseases and dark fates. Soap operas and comic books are full of this sort of thing, as was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
What you must not forget, however, is that this suffering must be emotional and in-character. A Drama Whore will care not one whit that he has a –10 to his “to-hit” roll; instead, it is far better to say “As you pick up your sword, you become keenly aware of all the blood spilt and lives ended by your hand. Even though you will die if you do not defend yourself, you find yourself asking, Does one such as I even deserve to live? With such thoughts foremost in your mind, your skill at arms is greatly diminished.”
In Conclusion: Dominance and Submission
The relationship between a GM and her players is equivalent to that of a Dominatrix to her submissives. Both come to her looking for abuse, and both feel cheated if she goes “too easy” on them. A well-run RPG, like a Discipline session, contains Rules, Punishment for disobeying those rules, and Rewards when those Rules are obeyed. When completed, both sides should feel pleasantly tired, yet gratified.
Feed your ego. Flog your players. It’s what you both want.
This exquisitely written novel has many suspenseful elements: a sinister librarian, a graduate student whose father has mysteriously disappeared, and several vampires, one of whom is Vlad the Impaler who ruled in the Middle Ages. Yellowed letters and an ancient text offer clues to Vlad’s existence; though countless scholars have risked their reputations and their lives and have failed to prove or disprove that vampires really do exist beyond the legend. This is a thriller with an absorbing story and a bevy of complex characters who keep you on the edge of your seat until you turn the last page.
