Elite: Not So Dangerous

The Thargoids are here! For definitions of “here” that are limited to certain locations in the game Elite: Dangerous, anyway. And ObisidanAnt, premier journalist of the game, asks, “Does anybody care?”

The short answer is that some do, but most don’t, and I’m pretty sure this is on purpose. One of the sacred cows of these sorts of games is, “Don’t impact the fun of the players.” For the most part, this gets translated into, “Whenever you add some new content to a game, make sure people can ignore it if they want to.”

This makes sense. After all, if you’ve got tens of thousands of players having fun, you don’t want some new, untried, and experimental content harshing their buzz. But it also traps the game in its current state. Nothing momentous can happen because truly momentous things can’t be ignored.

ObsidianAnt observes that, while everyone thinks the Thargoids wrecking space stations and leaving them on fire is cool, not everyone is gung-ho about hauling the massive list of materials needed to repair them. And why should they be? Let’s be honest: a burning station is far cooler to fly past than another perfectly normal and functioning station. Sure, you can’t really get all the normal services at a wrecked station, and they can even be hazardous to dock in, but that’s not a huge deal when there are almost certainly other stations and even planetary bases elsewhere in the system to dock at. And these invariably have not been affected by the Thargoid attack. Because if the Thargoids could disrupt an entire system, then players would have a harder time ignoring them.

This should bring to mind Jeff Rients’ Broodmother Skyfortress. That game is all about blowing things up: favorite taverns, political alignments, even the very mechanics of the game the players have come to rely on. When the Broodmother shows up, you can’t ignore her and her brood. It’s do-or-die time and no matter what you do, your campaign will never be the same.

And it is AWESOME!

Granted, it’s far safer to take these sorts of risks around your table. Your players are probably not paying you to play and you’re not relying on them to keep the lights on. And if some change really does the dead-fish belly-flop at your table, you can always retcon it out of existence. Frontier Developments don’t have that kind of flexibility or security. But if Elite: Dangerous has a problem it is this: nothing really matters. You can wrack up your various scores (ships in your stable, credits in your account, prestige titles, etc.) but there’s little you can do with that stuff that’s meaningful to the game as a whole. For good or ill, it’s difficult to have any sort of visible impact on the world of the game. Which means your fun is unlikely to be interrupted, but it also means once the fun is over, there’s really nothing left to hold your interest.

For something like the Thargoids to matter, they have to have some impact. And for them to truly have an impact, something needs to be at risk. And risk is far easier to pull off around your kitchen table than it is on a triple-A computer game.

Jeff Rients Wants to Blow Up Your Game

I never thought of Jeff as one of those black-jacket anarchist types, running about smashing things with tire-irons and crowbars, but, well, have you seen Broodmother Skyfortress?

If you haven’t, and you want to play in it, ***SPOILER ALERT***READ NO FURTHER***SPOILER ALERT***. If you haven’t and you’re just curious, there are many good reviews of it out there. I’m not going to do that here. Instead, I’d like to talk about what Mr. Rients has going on under the hood in that adventure.

First off, he thinks you need to blow stuff up. If there’s a favorite tavern the PCs enjoy hanging out in, or a particular lord they love (or love to hate) or whatever, he suggests you have the Skyfortress giants come down on it like a ton of bricks. And he’s not talking about a little raid that knocks over tables and kidnaps a few peasants. He suggests you ask yourself:

If the Giants attack by surprise at night, as is their wont, is there any possibility of survivors or would visitors find nothing but a collection of bloody smears?

Death Frost Doom is (in)famous for the possibility that the PCs might unleash a plague of zombies on the world. Broodmother Skyfortress assumes something nearly that bad is happening already.

I love this idea when used in moderation (as Jeff himself suggests in the book). A destructible world is more real, more immediate to the players, and far more interesting. Being willing to blow up the Keep on the Borderlands (illustrated beautifully on the back cover of the book) tells players that they’re gaming in a truly dynamic world where their actions (or lack thereof) will have real consequences. That’s cool.

On the other hand, if the players never know whether or not all elves will be transformed into cat-people, or all wizard spells now result in explosive flatulence, or all the gods are simply going to vanish at the drop of a hat, it actively prevents them from investing in the setting. Doing one of those things over the course of an entire campaign might be cool. Doing one (or more) of those every time you sit down to play tells the players that nothing is trustworthy, and they’ll just avoid investing in any of it.

While that’s fascinating all by itself, Jeff’s after more than just blowing up your campaign. He wants to blow up your entire game.

There’s little more sacred in D&D than the to-hit roll: d20 + mods to reach or beat a target number. The sanctity of this mechanic has only grown over the years as it has been expanded to cover nearly every situation, from saving throws to skills to tool use. Pretty much anything a PC wants to do in 5e is accompanied by rolling a d20.

When fighting the giants, Jeff suggests you just not bother having the players roll to hit. Yep, they always automatically hit the Giants. However, they have obscene numbers of hit-points and the first five points of damage from any attack don’t count. Attacking them with mundane weapons (or even lesser enchanted ones) is barely going to scratch these monsters. Normal combat is going to lead to TPKs; the players simply can’t put enough hurt on these monsters fast enough to take them down (unless they’ve got access to some really nasty magic). And, by eschewing the sacred d20 roll, players should immediately understand that this is an unusual situation.

Jeff calls this Mechanical Alienation, and it’s a cool technique. Again, it’s probably most potent when used rarely (I’m thinking of invoking it at the end of one of my current campaigns), but it does drag into the middle of the table the central question of what your RPG is. Gygax is famously credited with saying, “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.” This is that idea turned up to 11. It’s not quite free-form RPGing, but rather understanding that all the rules are there to promote the fun. Rules that don’t promote the fun should be tossed aside, maybe for good, maybe for only a few moments. It would be too much fuss and bother for us DMs to create a completely original set of rules for each encounter (and if you did, you’d destroy player trust in your campaign; see above). But there is a time and a place to set the book aside and recreate the game in a more fun shape. At its heart, this is what Broodmother Skyfortress is all about.