We Play in a Society: The Importance of Choice in RPGs

Hey folks!

Today's post is a mix of theory and an actual play anecdote from my ongoing Red Hand of Doom game. It's not breaking particularly new ground - there are a ton of other bloggers that have tackled this topic (I'll list several of those posts at the end, for further reading). However, it's advice that I think a lot of Pathfinder players in particular would really benefit from hearing (and also 5e players, I guess - really anyone who tends to play more linear modules/APs).

It can be really easy when running a more linear adventure to focus on just keeping things moving, on getting from one plot point or location to the next. Some adventures take this to the extreme and do not function as a result, but even adventures that are on the spectrum of decent to good (like most Pathfinder APs) can fall into some of the same traps. In addition, while I agree that Pathfinder is great for improvising a lot of things, there's also so much going on, so many rules, that a lot of newer GMs in particular often feel overwhelmed and struggle to do so.

So, today we're going to talk about Chrono Trigger, Red Hand of Doom, APs, and the importance of choice. To be clear, I will NOT be arguing that you not run APs - instead, I'll be giving advice for capturing the best part of roleplaying games even when you do.

Let's jump in!

Go Play Chrono Trigger

I'm a bit too young to have played Chrono Trigger growing up, but after reading this blog post a few years ago, I did what it suggested, stopped reading, bought the game, and was blown away. Then I came back and read that post. I recommend you do the same, as it's a great game, even if it's not my favorite combat system. Seriously, go play it! And try to give the article a read too - I know the Angry GM is a bit abrasive and can be off-putting, but this article in particular has some really great insights.

I'm not going to go as in depth as that post did, both to avoid (most) spoilers and because there's no point re-hashing that article in its entirely. Instead, I'm going to focus in on one moment fairly early in the game.

I'm going to keep this vague to minimize spoilers, though still feel free to skip to the next header if you don't want any at all!

The first real scene of the game is the player, as the titular Crono, exploring a fair. You can play games, eat food, participate in a drinking contest, and interact with a ton of cool NPCs! Some of the choices seem really minor, too - you can help a young girl find her cat, and some guy's lunch is on the counter, just begging to be eaten! You also meet one of the game's other protagonists, Merle (who is totally just a normal girl nothing to see here thank you very much) and can decide whether to return her pendant, steal it, or sell it to a shopkeeper. She also spends a really long time shopping for candy while you presumably just wait there. At the end of this scene, some stuff happens, you are pulled into an adventure, and presumably return a hero!

Except, upon returning, you aren't welcomed as heroes - you are put on trial for something (mostly) unrelated! There's not really any evidence one way or another, so it comes down to a question of your character. All those seemingly minor choices from before are brought back, either for or against you! I remember being absolutely floored by this. For example, in my first playthrough, I'd eaten that guy's lunch because I didn't realize it was his (I thought it was just food on a table in a video game) and I was hurt from a side fight, and I was never able to figure out how to bring the girl her cat back. Thankfully I'd been nice to Merle and given her pendant back, and waited patiently while she went candy shopping, because those would also have been used against me otherwise! Before this, I'd kind of been treating it like just another video game, but after this I really started to question my choices in terms of the characters and the world.

None of this has a huge impact on the story. Cronotrigger is mostly a linear story - there are a few things you can tackle in different orders, the NPCs all have optional sidequests, and you can basically always go anywhere in the world allowing you to seek out all the little hidden treasures, but the main plot is more or less a straight shot (unless you choose to interrupt it by fighting the main boss early). In this instance, the King is mad and has all the power, so he basically just decides that you're going to jail anyway, even if you did everything right at the festival! But the more things you do right, the more people will feel sorry for you for your unfair treatment and give you little gifts that will help you later.

I've talked a lot about how much I love sandboxy stories, but ultimately it's these little moments that really sell the players on the world being alive and responsive. Again, I was floored by this moment - I remember thinking "holy shit, this is the best game of all time!" Even though it doesn't have an impact on the story, it has an impact on how it feels. I was really thinking "did I ruin the game by eating that guy's lunch?" Which made me think, "shit, it probably wasn't very nice of me to each this guy's lunch!" In other words, it got me thinking about the game as a living breathing world where I could affect people with my actions, rather than just a hero quest where I'm the best.

In later playthroughs where I looked everything up, the King felt even more unjust and unfair, because even by his own made up rules I had done everything right! It creates this incredible feeling that even the smallest decisions are important, that the world is a living breathing place, and that, good or bad, your decisions matter! And in my opinion, that feeling is what RPGs are all about.

Lizardfolk in The Red Hand of Doom

For folks who don't know, I converted The Red Hand of Doom to PF2! If you're not familiar, this video is a good intro. It is often held up as the ur-Module, one of the best ever written (and it was written in part by Paizo's own James Jacobs!), for many of the same reasons as people love Chrono Trigger. The overall goal of the campaign is clear pretty early on (from the end of Chapter 1) - stop the hobgoblin army from destroying everything you hold dear! - but there's still a lot of variety in the adventures you go on to pursue that goal.

I think there's a lot to learn from the module's structure, but that's not what we're going to talk about today. Instead, I'm going to hone in on a recent moment in my game. The group is near the end of Chapter 2. They had just (finally, after a bit of dicking around) defeated the main antagonists of that chapter. Their final plan was even pretty solid, using a mix of kineticist wood powers and raw strength to pilot a raft, and using a wind ocharina to keep the archers in the belltower at bay (that's why I put that item in my sidequest, as an aside). It ended in an epic brawl, with their elven allies distracting the dragon and most of the archers while they took down the leader and the remaining Red Hand forces. They spent some time cleaning up, looting the dragon's horde, and healing, and then were on their way!

On their way out, however, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by several dozen Iruxi, joined by a wandering Knight called Matilde the Bold. Confronted with their offenses - ransacking a hut, stealing rafts, and almost destroying their eggs with fire - the party immediately apologized, and through good roleplay and good rolls managed go avoid a fight. They came away from that encounter with a vastly different understanding of the Iruxi - instead of mindless monsters whose children would grow up to fight with, they were a complex people who had stewarded this land for generations, and who were just trying to keep their children safe. There was even talk of holding a grand feast to bring some semblance of unity, but this was put off due to time constraints. And, later on, the sorcerer did a whole lot of self-reflection about the rashness that led them to fireball the eggs, leading to them forgiving the cleric for similar rashness earlier.

All of this flowed from the players choices! The elves only helped them in that final fight because they dedicated so much time befriending and helping them before heading to Rhest. The Iruxi were only angry with the PCs because they had unnecessarily damaged a lot of their equipment while dicking around/info gathering (I think the reasoning was basically "these guys are our enemies, make their lives harder"), and because they tried to fireball the Iruxi eggs along with the corrupted Harrowblade eggs. More importantly, they never once thought of the Iruxi as people and tried to talk to them, or even understand why they were doing this - informed by a pretty racist history of "monstrous races" in D&D, they kind of just assumed that they were bad by nature. The sorcerer had even previously tried to justify going back and destroying all the eggs so the Iruxi don't grow up to fight the "civilized" races - if he'd done so, negotiations would not even have been pospsible. And Matilde was only there because the party saved her by healing her up after a big fight (and she was only injured in the first place because the party got in over their heads, and she rushed in to save them).

I did a lot of setup that helped lead to this moment (and other similar moments) by adding sandboxy elements to my campaign. Of particular relevance here are adding Matilde as a wandering knight, dueling her undead brother over and over again, and humanizing the Iruxi a bit. In the module as written, they aren't given much characterization. The only reason given for working for the Hobgoblins is that they worship the dragon they have with them. It's also never really explained where the Harrowblades come from, other than that the Red Hand are hatching them. I basically combined the two and fleshed things out a bit, making it so that the Iruxi's eggs had been stolen by the Red Hand as a tool of control, and that several of them had been transformed via infernal magic into these fiendish creatures. So, I figured, the Iruxi mostly care about their eggs, and won't do anything to put them in jeopardy, but probably aren't happy with the Red Hand - if the PCs manage to convince them they have a shot at winning, they might have even helped them out! The last piece of the puzzle is that I figured that Matilde must have encountered the Iruxi on several occasions wandering through the swamp. I decided to make them fairly friendly, to reinforce the Iruxi as actual people potentially worth allying with and to cast doubt on the racist assumptions that come so easily in the D&D sphere.

There are three major lessons here:

Imagine the world complexly. I had no idea the PCs were going to make the choices they made, or in several cases even that those choices were options! But by taking the world seriously in advance, I was pretty easily able to figure out how to respond. This doesn't have to mean adding sandboxy elements, though I personally like to when I have time.
Honor the PCs choices. Good or bad! Unlike Chrono Trigger, where the designers had to code in those choices ahead of time, GMs don't! Taking 5-10 minutes between sessions to think about what choices the PCs made and how to respond to them can make a tremendous difference.
Show the players. While it's nice when the players affect things, they'll only feel that if you show them! I like to keep certain subsystems hidden (like Victory Points - I don't tell my players how many they have or want), but they should still see the impact in game (for VP, describing their progress through the obstacle or in the negotiation). Just like Chrono Trigger, it's okay to hit the players over the head a bit with it.

By taking seriously the players choices and showing them the consequences, they were able to imagine the world more complexly and consider the Iruxi not as monsters, but as people worthy of consideration. That's roleplaying! And it only took me about 10-15 minutes of prep.

Choices in Linear APs

It's a lot easier to consider this sort of thing in more sandboxy adventures like the Black Wyrm of Brandonsford or an Alexandrian Remix, where there are tons of moving parts for the players to interact with, and therefore lots of choices for them to make. Indeed, a lot of structured modules seem tailor-made to deny or obfuscate choice at every turn! WotC modules do this worse than anything else I've seen (esp the one I linked before), but I've seen it in Paizo APs as well.

Don't Be Like This

The worst example I've seen from Paizo is Gatewalkers. I'll keep this short, for more details read my review, but essentially it drags you around from place to place, often with nonsense justifications and tenuous connections to the main plots; it has an NPC do everything really interesting, and basically tell the PCs what to do; and it seems to go out of its way to make sure that the PCs don't matter by having that NPC return as a ghost if she ever dies.

I also had a pretty bad experience as a player in Outlaws of Alkenstar! Not only is it an extremely linear adventure (why a heist ended up as a quick series of combats followed by a dungeon crawl through a trash pile, I'll never know) that just tells the PCs what to do at every turn (including going from "we're outlaws/criminals!" to "you work for the government now, but the good ones"). Even when there are choices to be made, they aren't real choices, you're just meant to hit the Buttons that the game gives you until you Max your Points.

What do I mean by this? Book 1 is a lot of folks favorite book in this AP, and I can see why! Weird escape route aside, chapter 1 opens with a fucking heist!! In chapter 2, however, you have 4 days of downtime, but really you want to be spending as much of that as possible Scouting the Route for your next thing (especially since the book doesn't give you any other compelling things to focus on). So, you spend however many half days making checks, pick your best skill out of the list, and almost certainly max out the pool unless you intentionally ignore it or the GM undersells how important it is. A lot of APs have problematic subsystems like this, where it seems like the designers conflate "making lots of dice rolls" with "meaningful and engaging play."

Even worse, however, is that this preparatory phase could've been really interesting! Imagine an Alkenstar with different factions with different territories, and you have to choose whose to go through or secure safe passage ahead of time (or at the very least, various routes with tradeoffs). Imagine a writeup on how to keep Gattlebee hidden, and wandering threats that are on the prowl for him that you have to stay just one step ahead of to smuggle him safely. Imagine this same quest written up as a situation, rather than a linear sequence, as a series of tools for the GM to use as they see fit.

Instead, we get "push the Scout Route button til you get all the points", "Bottleneck Bridge, a famously inefficient crossing that's nevertheless the only option to get Gattlebee to the Yeast of All Brewery" (despite 1. being an obvious trap, 2. being nowhere NEAR the path between those two locations, and 3. it being a city with literally infinite paths - imagine if there were tradeoffs between those paths instead that the players had to sus out?), a chase sequence no matter what they do (though they can get a small bonus from prep), a mini-side dungeon that punishes you for exploring (those oozes are nasty and unecessary), and then to top it all off you are found by mercenaries no matter what you do with no explanation for how they find you (my party even had Gattlebee under a Disguise Self from our Hats of Disguise, so in theory they shouldn't've known that he was even with us!).

Many of the individual pieces are fun or cool, but strung together, it feels like an absolute slap in the face how little control the PCs have over what actually happens. I honestly think that the writer had a lot of really cool ideas, but was hamstrung by needing to add more encounters to hit the XP requirements of PF2, and by the company's insistence on paragraphs of text / paying by the word that makes creating a more complex situation out of the question due to space concerns.

APs Done Right

I want to give some credit where credit is due. There's been a lot of improvement on this over time! For example, Book 2 of Triumph of the Tusk has the PCs make decisions early on that are paid off, including a sequence right at the beginning where they plan out priorities and get one type of help or another, and several points where if they make a certain choice, someone comes back to help them. That's really freaking cool!

And modules don't need to be non-linear to work - I just think that Outlaws of Alkenstar in particular really wants to be, and that many APs (especially Gatewalkers) handle their railroading really poorly. I've praised Strength of Thousands in the past for the way that Book 3 (linearly) strings together and for how cool the linear dungeon in Book 4 is! And while I haven't read all the way through it yet, I have heard that Season of Ghosts handles its string of reveals really well.

However, 1. Many adventure concepts really want to be more sandboxy (hence my remix of Book 2), and 2. It's really easy to accidentally handle Linearity in a way that arbitrarily restricts player choice. Striking the balance between scenario hooks that are neither fragile enough that there's a chance they might be missed or overbearing and railroady can be tough, and not every AP does it well.

Making APs Your Own

At the end of the day, however, I don't think we can rely on APs to do this for us. It's really great when they do, but ultimately Paizo has really tight deadlines and some unfortunate guidelines/tendencies that I don't think are going to change any time soon. So, what can we do about it?

The straightforward, though extremely work-intensive, option is to make your own remixes! Flesh out content, create whole new sidequests when your players go off the rails (like I did in Book 2), and add new elements for the players to interact with. I think adding this sort of thing to more linear APs can add a ton of depth, and has almost always been worth it for me, often leading to the coolest moments. That being said, it's really only necessary when the AP as written is broken in some way.

Even if you don't have time to do all that work, however, there are still some things that you can do:

Take Notes, Pay Attention! Not just to major events, but also to minor choices! Did the PCs befriend a shopkeeper? Did you invent an NPC on the fly while they were gathering information? Did they help someone out who was in a crisis? Sometimes, these choices are already in APs, but they get dropped later on. Other times, they're spontaneous choices the PCs make that you weren't expecting! Either way, take note!
Play NPCs Smart! Bad guys should run away when they're clearly going to lose. They should call for reinforcements. They should set ambushes and try to outnumber the PCs. They should fight a little dirty. Even without restructuring APs, this can add a ton of life to the dungeon.
Bring Back Elements. Every so often, go through your notes and pick things to bring back! Maybe that shopkeeper gives them a discount now. Maybe the person they helped comes to them with a tip on their next quest. If the PCs treat someone badly, who might they tell, and how might that affect their reputation? Same question for treating someone well!
Encourage Creative Ideas! Make a habit of asking your players what they do, not just what they wanna roll. Try to frame problems as open-ended, like there are infinite possibilities, and your players will imagine the same. When they do come up with out-of-the-box ideas, do your best to roll with them and reward them if they make sense! If your players want to plan, make their planning matter. If they want to take precautions, show them how helpful they were. If they find a way to skip encounters creatively, whether through dialogue or stealth or social engineering or whatever, let them skip the encounters and reward them the XP anyway.

The main goal is to make the players feel like the world is alive, like the NPCs they meet are real people worth engaging with on that level, and like their decisions matter. If you can capture that, you'll find a whole new level of depth to explore with your players.

We Play in a Society

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

The Importance of Choice in RPGs