The best games I’ve ever run have totally destroyed characters in extremely personal ways (up to and including completely rewriting their history/backstory through powerful evil forces and slowly killing everyone and everything they loved until they had a choice to succumb to evil or hold onto good and end up killling their beloved grandfather who ended up being the ‘big bad’ for the entire campaign.). I often questioned whether it was going too far, but they’re the games my players still talk about, years later. It’s still hard to remember to make them suffer when it’s supposed to be FUN!

Personally, I like it that you got more out of it than I put into it in the first place.

Also, I like the erotica vs. porn comparison, although I would say, “The difference between erotica and porn is that erotica has a real plot.”

Cortex has a system of plot points to give the players when they role play (or make milk come out of your nose). I really like systems that use such mechanics. It gives players a chance to use (or misuse) something to do something heroic. The current pulp rules make use of a similar system (though a bit more stringent in that you don’t always gain them…but you can).

The attempt of D&D 4.0 rules to bring in some Role Playing rules falls way short.

I’ve got a team of excellent players right for my Serenity game who sing the mantra: the DM giveth, the DM taketh away. They seem to sing it happily though and have suggested a dance.

But yeah, conflict has to happen. It can’t be to drawn out or it gets lost. It’s a fine line. A razor sharp one at that.

That wasn’t a section of our play, that was just the most popular Danger Patrol story with the people I play with: I told them about that series of Dangers and it completely cracked us up. Still does. :)

But THANK YOU! Because I could never find the damned AP report after the first time I read it, so I didn’t know who it was.

1. DnD really doesn’t have any help in there for GMs who want to be “dicks in a good way”.

2. The sort of “I’m screwing you, but here’s a cookie” reward system built into games like Danger Patrol and Fate (and PTA, though it’s a longer time until pay off) and such hard-code the positive aspects.

3. Mouse Guard has the same kind of reward for things going badly, but it’s much more subtle; skills go up by being USED, and they only get used when stuff is HAPPENING — you can’t just randomly decide to start rolling skill tests in the middle of the adventure (because, in MG, that’ kind of like giving yourself free XP), so you get a reward when a Test goes badly, in that it now leads to ANOTHER test, and thus, you get more skill checks.

4. Bangs, the most primeval of the story-games systems for this, doesn’t have any reward-cookie for bestowed conflict beyond “if I face you with this tough question, where there are two or more equally good (or equally unpalatable), fun and interesting things will happen, and we’ll have a good time.” That’s a good cookie, but it’s not an obvious one.

5. The DNPC/Disads system from games like Champs and GURPS… just kinds of lays there. You mess with it in character generation and then no one ever really talks about it again. To be engaged and engaging, that kind of stuff needs to get hit IN game.

You know… those disads would have been SO MUCH BETTER in Champs if they’d been rolled back into the GM’s Toolbox as “A Way to Build This Week’s Adventure”: You just take a long list of all your character’s “sometimes it happens, and sometimes it doesn’t” disads, and you roll the ‘shows up’ chance for each one — make note of which ones show up positive, and those are the elements you have to interweave for that week’s session. Easy.

Geez that would have been so damned easy. Why didn’t we DO that?