What Grinds Wizard’s Gears
Last time we talked about genre mashups, Fighter was driving around in a tank. Now he’s piloting a British accent, something he is equally unqualified to do. My opinion, however, remains the same: genre mashups are fun, but you need buy-in from the the whole group. As I recently found to my chagrin (“OK guys, this campaign is going to be musketeers but with dragons. Except now there are ancient technological artifacts! And now you’re fighting the giant floating head from Baron Munchausen!”), even the GM needs to stick to the spirit of the setting.
Rather than rehashing that conversation, however, I’d like to take a moment to ponder that peculiar beast known as suspension of disbelief. When a guy like Wizard—an elf who, I hasten to remind you, is able to cast magic freakin’ spells—can talk about the implausibility of steampunk with a straight face, you know that something peculiar is afoot.
In my travels to strange and distant lands I’ve met all kinds of interesting folks, including professional furries, practicing demonologists, and Whovians. But amidst the sea of 501st members and burlesque babes and (on one memorable occasion) Lloyd Kaufman, I think that the strangest conversation I’ve ever had was with a steampunk. The guy’s cosplay was spectacular, but the story behind his gears and gadgets is what stuck with me. “My whole character is based on actual debunked science!” he proclaimed. He went on to recount the biographies of forgotten Victorian scientists and their failed theories, pointing to the galvanic oscillators and receiving antennae poking out from all parts of his costume. I can’t remember the particulars of his story, but the unbridled enthusiasm that this steampunk had for it stuck with me. Here was a type of science fiction based off of factually inaccurate science. It was known to be wrong but—and here’s the important thing—that didn’t matter. What mattered is that it felt real. It made story sense. And when we’re talking about the suspension of disbelief, that’s the only thing that matters.
For my money, clockwork gadgets and magical powers are both genre markers. They are elements that denote steampunk and fantasy in the same way that bugged cell phones mean “political thriller” and creepy mansions mean “horror.” Both elements are implausible, but they only interfere with the suspension of disbelief when they violate genre expectations. That’s the moment when they “take you out of the setting.”
Shall we test this little theory of mine with a question of the day? Let’s shall: Have you ever been in a game that broke your suspension of disbelief? What did it?
ARE YOU AN IMPATIENT GAMER? If so, you should check out the “Henchman” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. For just one buck a month, you can get each and every Handbook of Heroes comic a day earlier than the rest of your party members. That’s bragging rights right there!
Okay…I’m going to tell a story. It’s just a trifle embarrassing to recollect, but it does answer the question.
Way back in the day when I was playing that Complete Warrior Samurai, myself and my friends were…kind of weeaboo. We also decided that we weren’t because we actually knew some stuff about Japan and we didn’t slaver at the mouth whenever a favorite anime came on.
But…when my guy (who was based *cough* off of the Rurouni Kenshin series) actually met Kenshin? It was at that point I thought “Huhhh…okay. Maybe that’s too much. Maybe we dived a little deep. I thought that Shinya was branching off nicely from the canon of the manga into his own story…this is awkward now.”
Since then, the lesson has been learned and all of my characters come 100% from my own headspace.
Interesting… You went “too deep” rather than too far afield. I guess maybe that’s part of genre in an RPG: You assume that your story is standalone, so bringing in some other continuity breaks genre…?
That’s basically it. I was all mentally invested in the Pink Samurai, courtesy of a cursed ring that glowed like a torch (pink) that somehow became my trademark. Suddenly, I’m in character but also talking to Mr. Watsuki’s characters at the same time…suddenly it didn’t jive.
The one time I met canon characters in a game, it was a few of the iconics from Pathfinder. It actually strengthened my connection to the Golarion setting because those characters belonged in the world. There was a narrative reason for their presence. If I happened to run into Kenshin, He-Man, or Super Mario that would be a different story.
Has Wizard been listening to this recently by any chace?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA
Well then. That’s joining my geek playlist tout suite.
I used to be very sensitive to anything from outside a setting. This was particularly true of Forgotten Realms, which I had grown up reading about. However, recently I started roleplaying on a Reddit sub that accepts a wide variety of TRPG characters, from AD&D to Warhammer 40k, and it has broadened my horizon.
Like, my half-elf Arcane Trickster meets someone from Star Wars. He looks more or less like a human, but is covered in fancy armor and has a weapon that shoots rays of light. That makes him what, a Cleric? That’s not even close to the weirdest thing my character has seen. She’s seen bears come out of nowhere! Literally, nothing there one moment, angry bears the next. She wouldn’t bat an eye at heavy armor and a weapon that, to her sensibilities, is just a fancy Wand of Scorching Ray.
Since then, “bears from nowhere” is my typical rejoinder when people wonder if things are getting too weird.
Now I’d be curious about your opinion, but I’d theorize that you are playing in a game where genre mashup was part of the setting. Knowing that up front, it’s actually difficult to break genre. If someone entered the game attempting to RP as Donald Trump, however, I suspect it would distract from the game.
Yeah, that’d probably do it. Although, Trump is a character in one of our campaigns. He’s a Brass Dragonborn pretending to be a Gold Dragonborn.
Size category yuge.
The worst offender in a game I’ve played was actually during a collaborative online campaign where multiple DMs worked towards fleshing out the homebrew setting’s lore and houserules. Generally speaking, it was the familiar late medieval fantasy world with a few splashes of ‘clockpunk’.
Sooo, as fate would have it.. During a scene, one of the, shall we say, more lackadaisical DMs decided that he wanted to bring in a Mary Sue NPC from the far future (3000ish years ahead of the setting’s timeline).
The idea on its own wasn’t the problem though; and while I’m sure the right DM with the right imagination could make an astounding story from this, he wasn’t the man for it. The future-NPC was a handsome young teen in a time-travelling mecha suit, with a cringey potpourri of modern slang and media references. And, yes, of course he took an immediate shining to the party’s sole female, and strongly implied that she’d rise to prominence in the history books. I don’t remember what the rest of the quest was like (something blandly akin to kill monsters down the road and take the crystals?), but we never saw him again either, and I think the rest of us silently agreed to consider this as a non-canon episode.
All things considered, I still don’t get why the DM went with a Dr. Who knockoff over the classic village elder in plight, for example. The quest itself didn’t need anything spectacular, really.
I’m reminded of the Impulse storyline from “Young Justice.”
http://youngjustice.wikia.com/wiki/Impulse
Weird that he’d introduce such a big plot device and then let it die. That has the makings of a major campaign arc. I think I agree with you that “the right DM with the right imagination could make an astounding story from this,” but the mecha suit and the pop-culture is no bueno. I mean, why not try to invent a magic-infused future rather than a purely technological one? Bleh. At least it was short-lived.
In my first ever 5e game, the DM had a homebrew campaign of the party needing to stop a necrotic bubble that was threatening to overwhelm the world. In order to do that, we had to collect 5 artifacts & place them on the “Alter of Information”, to create an anti-magic field to break through to stop the BBEG.
While this was a great idea for a campaign, when it came time for the reveal of the “Alter of Information”, it turned out to be a supercomputer. Apparently, all the races of the world (Elves, Tieflings, Dwarves, Gnomes, what-have-you) all descended from humans that went underground & evolved over millions of years. Our ENTIRE campaign took place on Earth, millions of years in the future. My entire suspension of disbelief was ruined in that one moment.
That’s too bad. I can picture that being a cool moment if you foreshadow it properly. Plus the science-fantasy stuff has a long pedigree in D&D. Temple of the Frog, the Jack Vance influence in general, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks…
As pictured however, that mess is always controversial. Some players love the crap out of the peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate mashup that is sci-fi D&D. For others it’s a one way ticket to a ruined campaign.
Maybe genre mashup is a good survey question to include in Session 0.
I hate to say it, because I love this campaign to bits, but the Trap Card thing I’ve told you about. It isn’t something that the character knows about, it’s something that the player plays. That takes me RIGHT out of it. Koschei Asklepio didn’t do it; Nina did. Koschei also wouldn’t have approved, which took me out of it even more because I wasn’t even playing according to his wishes.
I like it as a device in that campaign, in theory, but I much prefer the bits when I feel happened-to as much as my character does. I, me, the player, made something big, DM big, happen to the universe, and that feels fundamentally wrong… even though, again, I really really love that whole campaign.
I struggle with that sense of authorship myself. I quite like the idea that players can invent things and add them to the world (through back stories, spell creation, etc.). But if the thing being created extends too far outside of the character, it stops feeling like an interactive game and starts becoming an exercise in creative writing. That’s a very thin line to walk for me.
Yeah! I’m happy to add to the world with my character backstory, and I actually ended up developing the Drow a bit and accidentally created a whole new religion, but it was all entirely dependant on things that had turned Koschei into who he is. Also as a backstory-writer, I do become an author, while in-game I should be playing a character. In my opinion, at least.
I had one moment completely obliterate my suspension of disbelieve to such a degree that I stopped playing the game.
It was Fallout 4. There’s this little quest you can do to follow this little yellow painted line around a ruined city to various manholes and each manhole has a letter circled on it, and at the end you go into a little crypt with like 3 ghouls in it and put the code in the secret door at the end.
I was having a BLAST doing this quest, really getting into the world and all that, it was great! And then the secret door opened into this little guildhall thing of these ‘underground railroad’ people, and 3 of them had a dramatic entrance with lights coming on pointing guns at me and were all like “Hey! How’d you get it! We are suspicious of you!” and long story short you literally aren’t allowed to mention that you came here BECAUSE THEY MARKED OUT A SECRET PATH FOR YOU TO FOLLOW. Like LITERALLY, they laid a trail of breadcrumbs anybody could follow – that I myself followed I might add! – and you can’t bring it up, and they don’t bring it up, and they try to force you to ‘prove yourself’ and join up through dialog and it was just HORRIBLE.
Well. That sucks.
As I think about it though, this sounds like one of those “mythic underworld” problems. Check out page 22 over here:
http://www.grey-elf.com/philotomy.pdf
My read on the situation is that the game’s designers were designing a fun game for its own sake. You wanted to experience a believable and internally consistent secondary world. That disconnect results in Galaxy Quest: “Whoever wrote this episode should die!”
When you have blindsense AND tremorsense, and the DM makes you roll to perceive invisible figures on a slightly foggy floor while they’re completely in your range of detection. And only on certain parts of said floor, to boot.
Needless to say, i stopped playing with that particular DM after that debacle.
Well to be fair, if your abilities were actually good, you might beat the monsters and have fun. That could ruin the game!
It wasn’t a game, but a scene while watching a movie. The movie was Kingsman: The Golden Circle. The scene was when Elton John starts beating up his kidnappers. At first it was hilarious. “The thugs are getting their asses kicked by a 70-year-old!” Then Elton (or rather, his stunt double) did a flying jump kick and the magic was broken. Up until then, it was all stuff that was believable. Things that Elton was actually capable of doing. But the jump kick is definitely not one of those things. That just ruined it for me.