Forbidden tropes that "players will refuse to play"?

[pawsplay]

Well things are already off to a wobbly start if the GM *requires* the PCs to be captured. If the PCs fight like hell to avoid capture, and then either do or don't get captured, that's all well and good. It just shouldn't feel cheap. If a determined enemy captures them, there should be a good reason they want prisoners.

[Spence]

First off, sorry for starting a thread and then just disappearing.  I was doing getting ready to rotate my tires and rediscovered I am old.  I went to pick up a jack-stand and my lower back and side protested enough for me to be down for a couple days and really really slow for a week or so. 

 

That said.

 

I just read through all the comments and they were very interesting.  Thank you all for them.

 

I did notice that a lot of them seemed to draw on non-Supers influence.  Which is something I would have never thought about.  I guess I shift some major mental gears when I go between a supers RPG, a sword-swinger like D&D, other games like CoC, ToC, or even a game like 2d20 Conan which runs entirely different from something like D&D. 

 

I would only use the tropes I listed in a Superhero game or maybe a Pulp Action game.  To me they simply do not fit in a D&D or Call of Cthulhu game. Oh, I’ll use kidnapping or other violent crimes in a GUMSHOE game or assassination in a espionage game like Delta Green or NBA. 

 

Back to Superheroic. 

 

None of the tropes should be used too often.  Doing so simply reduces their dramatic impact. 

 

I did notice a lot of references to PC’s being forced into situations, capture etc., with out any ability to influence it.  Basically, lack of any choice.  To me that is completely unrelated to the tropes themselves and are more of a poor GM issue. 

 

In a Champions game, captures usually happen after the hero in question is knocked out.  I personally don’t do it willy nilly.  A capture serves a purpose.  Since my games feed on the players actions, by the time my game involved a capture scenario the players are probably expecting the attempt.  After all, by that time they would have a pretty good idea of who their archenemy was. 

 

I am personally very against player versus player in any of the games I run or play in.  So on the betrayal front it will always have to be an NPC. 

 

All of the tropes I mentioned are not something you can use very often, and then they have to be directly enabled by the players themselves. 

 

I did notice more than one mention that implies the trope is bad instead of the issue being a non-Roleplayer.  Again, I am thinking of a superhero game, and the example may be thinking of D&D or something.

 

The vast majority of the games I run these days are one-shots with pre-gens, but my campaigns haven’t been rejected by players in a very long time.   While I don’t consider myself a genius GM, I am not the novice either.  My next planned campaign will be interesting.  Using Sandy Peterson’s Cthulhu Mythos and a little GUMSHOE influenced homebrew I am running a D&D 5th Ed horror game the next time my group gets together.  The plan is after the D&D game is complete, I will convert the PC’s to Hero and then run another fantasy horror. 

 

The eventual plan is to run either a Champions game or a Fantasy Hero game. 

 

Back to the subject. 

This has given me a lot of info to mull over.    

 

Thanks

[Duke Bushido]

Feh--

 

never, _ever_ concern yourself about tropes:  it is absolutely _impossible_ to have a trope-less anything.  TV Tropes dot-something-or-other has beaten that word so thin and spread it so far that if I were to get up, walk to one of the spare rooms, lock myself in the closet and fart, I would have committed at least seventy-four tropes by their reckoning.   They have damned near made the word political: "it means whatever the hell I want to complain about; that's what it means!"

[Ninja-Bear]

10 hours ago, pawsplay said:

Well things are already off to a wobbly start if the GM *requires* the PCs to be captured. If the PCs fight like hell to avoid capture, and then either do or don't get captured, that's all well and good. It just shouldn't feel cheap. If a determined enemy captures them, there should be a good reason they want prisoners.

Not necessarily. The last game we played, was an arena battle. So the capture was no surprise. I will say though that it was player buy in and the game was figuring out how to escape the arena and the shock collars.

[Hugh Neilson]

15 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

How would they be able to tell when they were supposed to win or supposed to lose?

 

I recall one game where the PCs were doing quite badly, and one player noted "I think this is one of those battles we just are not intended to win."  It was not - I had no grand plan for what would happen if they lost.  So I had to do some thinking between games.  As I recall, the villains developed a plan which would best be served by capturing the PCs, by which time some of their foes were no longer on-scene.  So, of course, the players "knew" they were supposed to lose that first battle because they were overwhelmed.

 

In another, they made some poor tactical choices (had they seen the villains' character sheets and known which opponents they should have focused on first, of course ).  These opponents had no reason to do anything but depart, having beaten the PCs down (or maybe that was when they found themselves in an arena faced with the deadly Giant Slug, perhaps the finest miniature ever created with SillyPutty (I may be biased ).  I had not intended to re-use that particular hodgepodge of villains, but the table talk on how they would approach the combat differently next time clearly said there HAD to be a next time.  There was, and their tactics resulted in an easy victory, but a vary satisfying one for the players, facing the same opposition in similar terrain and winning handily.

 

I liked the way the old V&V modules always had an "if the players lose" segment right after each major combat, typically setting up a "last chance - win or it is all over" rematch.  Of course, as a GM, when we come up with that fantastic scene if the PC's lose, now we get really invested in a PC loss...

[Dr. MID-Nite]

I've done all of the above with few issue. The way to make it work is to do your best to not make it feel arbitrary. Make sure there are strong story reasons for each scenario....and make sure players can still affect things. That is the point of the game after all. I had the "friend betrayed them" scenario and even though I initially wasn't planning on it, the players did such a good job talking to the former ally that he eventually reformed.

[pawsplay]

14 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

Not necessarily. The last game we played, was an arena battle. So the capture was no surprise. I will say though that it was player buy in and the game was figuring out how to escape the arena and the shock collars.

 

That's still a bet I wouldn't take.

[Spence]

8 hours ago, Dr. MID-Nite said:

I've done all of the above with few issue. The way to make it work is to do your best to not make it feel arbitrary. Make sure there are strong story reasons for each scenario....and make sure players can still affect things. That is the point of the game after all. I had the "friend betrayed them" scenario and even though I initially wasn't planning on it, the players did such a good job talking to the former ally that he eventually reformed.

 

Yes, my experience is much of the same line.  To me the purpose of the GM in a superhero game is to provide opportunities for the heroes to be superheroic.  I've used all the tropes I mentioned, but they must be used sparingly.  I never understood why people freaked out about being captured until now.  For me my villains planned the capture and prison based on the villains knowledge of the heroes.  Not the GMs.  So generally, unless the PC is a poorly written one trick pony,  they could easily escape using that power, talent or skill the villain didn't know about.  More than one PC pretty much ensures an escape.   But you can't make it too easy or it won't be dramatic.