They say you can’t help but put your kinks into your work.
One of my absolute favourite things to do in my tabletop games is to force the players to do something they don’t want to do.
Man. That makes me sound like an asshole! Let me figure out how to say that differently.
The world around us is full of shit we don’t want to do. We have to go to work to sell our time to someone else in order to pay our bills, and to afford food that our body requires to keep running.* We have to interact with people we don’t want to interact with, because they control a thing we want. We have to renew licenses, pay taxes, maintain a vehicle, clean the house even if we haven’t been to that part of the house in a week because it still somehow gets dirty. We have to do things we don’t want to do.
*I personally resent the fact that I have to put food into my body at seemingly random intervals throughout the day, multiple times. The amount of time I waste every day buying food, preparing food, eating food and expelling food is astonishing and I resent almost every second I do it. You know that white oatmeal gruel they eat in the Matrix? “Everything the body needs?” Yeah gimme that. Just shoot it out of a canister into my mouth and solve 90% of my problems.
Red tape is the only thing the players can’t stab their way out of.
I love making the players deal with mundane bureaucracy. When my D&D group first entered my huge metropolitan city Dawnharbour, they had to give up all their gold at the gates of the city in exchange for a bank check, that they had to cash at the bank in exchange for Dawnharbour’s paper money. (The bank took 10%, of course.) When they wanted to build a tavern, I outlined a detailed list of all the taxes and licenses they would need and all the guildspeople they would need to speak to and get approval from. And then I had a guy show up at their house to collect their taxes for the year–not their home taxes, their adventuring taxes.
The players hated this. They hated every second of it. The bullshit that they had to do in order to achieve their goals. I loved it.
It’s not something I put in every game session, but it’s something I think should be there. Occasionally the players should just have to deal with something that’s a pain in the ass. I don’t know why I feel this way, but I do. Maybe this is the way I make the world feel realistic.
I’ve occasionally gotten comments about the space travel rules in our game SEE YOU, SPACE COWBOY…–that they either don’t make much sense or it isn’t clear why they exist. They are a little bit crunchy–nothing close to the original Traveller space travel rules, but they require you to roll a check, figure out how many days a journey might take, buy fuel, and then roll some dice to figure out how much you spend on food for the journey. (It should be noted that there are zero mechanical consequences for not eating or being hungry in CUSC, merely that you must announce at every opportunity that you are hungry. Unless you’re smoking.**) You can wrap your head around it. It isn’t difficult. But, it is annoying.
**Smokes in CUSC cost $$1, by the way. Everything else in the game costs $$50 or a multiple thereof. This means that if you smoke, you will always have a surplus of $$49. In an early playtest, someone asked “Why not just make smokes $$50?” and when I asked if having $$49 left over annoyed them, they said yes. I responded with, “Congrats, that’s the point!”
That’s really the point. Getting from point A to point B can be annoying, and you should plan ahead for it. And, everyone does it even if it’s a pain in the ass, so you have to do it too.
You could excise these rules from the game and just let them gallavant from planet to planet, and if that’s what your group enjoys then I’m not going to stop you. But I think you lose something about the world. The players should always have the sense that the world is out to fuck them over at every turn, and by making space travel difficult, you make it something they have to deal with.
Also, it opens lots of opportunities for generative storytelling. They can end up off course, adding multiple days to their journey, which can cause them to run out of fuel. Now they have to stop off somewhere they weren’t planning on stopping at, interrupting everything they wanted to do, and now they have to go somewhere else. This is GREAT for a Bandleader because now they get to riff on a whole new area they weren’t planning on using. If the players are too broke to get back on the space road, then they need to go hunt a bounty that’s around here. That’s great stuff! And it’s super in genre for the show.
I don’t know how to end this article. I just felt like writing about why the rules are the way they are, and why they’re in the game. Stay gold.
