Gaming: A Discussion of Sanderson's Second Law, Consequences, and Tabletop War Stories

 As a refresher from yesterday, Sanderson's Second Law is:

"Weaknesses, limits, and costs are more interesting than powers."

There are, to my mind, two ways of interpreting this.  First is constraints - that for whatever reason there are left and right limits on how a problem may be solved.  Second is consequences - that the loss conditions are often more interesting than the win conditions.  In either case, I agree with Sanderson that these are much more interesting than "I always win."

Let's discuss constraints first.  My experience is that a character who operates under a set of constraints is far more interesting and memorable than a mere assembly of attributes.  The classic example is the old D&D Paladin, who would theoretically lose many of their abilities if they failed to hold to a code of behavior.  This same idea drove the development through the '80s and '90s of hindrances, flaws, and disadvantages, name varying by system.  These have never really caught on in D&D, even as feats became a feature of the system.  That is not a criticism of D&D; D&D has its own ways of handling this problem.  Characters with a poor attribute array, or self-imposed limitations with no mechanical benefits, are generally more memorable, and again, I view this as collaborative storytelling.  Telling a story worth remembering and retelling is the most important part of the game.

I will give an example, from experience.  One of my favorite characters - who, ironically, never reached his full potential, because he died - was a good necromancer.  That was the entire concept.  How do you approach the problem of a good necromancer? The answer, to my mind, was to generate an explanation for why the souls of the dead would willingly serve him.  As it happened, that game was an Egyptian-themed game, so my answer to the problem was that he was a priest - not a Cleric, but an ordained priest - of Anubis, and that his "spellbook" and his "components" were contracts which he had negotiated with the poor and indigent, who could not afford burial services.  It wound up dictating a lot of character behavior, because he was polite and diffident rather than forceful, he had to know contract law and abide by contracts, and so forth.  All of this stemmed from the fact that he'd committed to persuasion and service as a means for soliciting the aid of the dead.  Mechanically, that just meant that he was a necromancer who wound up multiclassing into cleric because he felt a calling to it, but it dictated a radical change in mindset from the standard cackling-evil D&D necromancer, and it was a much more memorable character to play.

A second fictional example - Superman.  Superman stories have evolved over the history of the character, to go from focusing on what he can do, to focus on what he can't do.  For instance, in Red Son, Superman has a blind spot in that he can't understand why Russia and the world might not accept that, as the superior man (it's right there in the name!), he has their best interests at heart.  As a side note, this is actually a trenchant comment on any centrally planned economic system, and is an especially perceptive comment on the Soviet Union given things like de-kulakization, Peter the Great's forcible modernization of Russia in the 17th and 18th Centuries, and Stalin's own forcible industrialization of the Soviet Union.  Superman's inability to understand this leads to him resorting to increasingly severe mind control, an unusual step in a Superman story, but within the story it is a very clear, very logical series of decisions made "for their own good."  Eventually the scales fall off his eyes, and he's once more the all-American (well, all-Soviet) paladin prototype that we all know and love, but the entire conflict is driven by the fact that Superman cannot be everywhere, and therefore cannot see all the consequences of his actions.  Even with an immortal, invulnerable, character of godlike power, the character's limits make a better story than the character's powers.

Now, back to gaming.  The problem with systems of hindrances isn't so much with systems as it is with players - which, to go back to mechanics versus narrative, is the entire reason that mechanics must exist, because players are humans and humans are prone to trying to get one over.  Hindrance systems tend to be open to exploits by players who are looking for mechanical advantages at the least possible cost.  You can call them min-maxers, you can call them munchkins, but they're a fixture of the gaming community despite shibboleths and phrases like "role-play, not roll-play."  If you are writing rules, you wind up having to write with them in mind, best intentions be damned.  The problem is that these people aren't really interested in stories, at least the way that I am, and are rather interested in wish fulfillment.  That's not in itself bad, it's that their play style doesn't really fit mine, and I don't think it particularly fits the genre as a whole long-term.  At some point power gaming gets boring.  It's (part of, Todd McFarlane had something to do with it too) why Spawn was super-interesting back in the '90s but faded from importance afterward.  It's also why supers games are really hard to pull off - by their very nature supers games emphasize powers, rather than limitations.  It absolutely can be done, but it requires a very high level of tabletop synergy between group and players, and systems can't generate that, even if they can destroy it.

So that was limitations and constraints.  Now let's talk about consequences.

One of the reasons that Empire is widely considered the best, or at least most narratively interesting, Star Wars film is that the heroes do not get their own way in anything.  Instead, the characters wind up moving from predicament to predicament, and each one is more severe than the last.  Every time they find their way out of one problem, their solution has unexpected consequences that set up the next predicament.  At the same time, the movie makes their tenacity, their improvisational skill, and their panache obvious, which means that the audience cares about it even as they're drawn onto the edge of their seats - surely they can't actually mean to freeze Han and cut off Luke's hand, do they???

(Side note, Empire is not my favorite Star Wars movie - that's Jedi, which is all about Luke being a grown-up, doing grown-up things, and choosing to be a hero.)

Mechanically, this is why more and more systems incorporate the concept of "failing forward."  Every time the characters do something, something happens that complicates their lives in the next scene.  Degrees of success and failure are an important mechanical innovation for exactly this reason.  They exist as aids to storytelling.  The earliest (to my knowledge) iteration of this system is critical success and failure, better known as critical hits and critical misses, and every gamer has the story of that one magical critical hit (Seth Skorkowsky's "Bonesaw" tabletop war story is basically the story of one critical hit that got WAY out of hand - "failing forward" indeed!).  Probably the majority also have a story of that one critical failure that wound up redefining the entire session - I can think of half a dozen times that the stealthy character blew a stealth roll only after they had moved so deeply into enemy territory that they veered into Scooby-Doo comedy territory, or into a tense rescue situation, depending on the table.  This is a rudimentary form of "fail forward," where the blown skill roll helps to drive the story even more effectively than a success would have done.

Sometimes even great success can drive a fail-forward.  To give a (semi-)historical example, Minamoto Yoritomo owed much of his success at the tail of the Gempei War to his half-brother, Minamoto Yoshitsune.  Yoshitsune is to this day regarded as something like a paragon of knighthood in Japan; Yoritomo is, at best, regarded as a man who understood realpolitik.  The inevitable outcome of this was jealousy and, because Yoritomo operated in a very different world from Yoshitsune, suspicion that Yoshitsune would eventually overthrow him.  The string of great victories that Yoshitsune won, albeit in Yoritomo's service, meant that he was more popular than Yoritomo, and Yoritomo slowly but inexorably turned against Yoshitsune, who had no clue until it was too late to seal that breach.  Yoritomo hounded Yoshitsune into exile and death.  The entire tale was driven by Yoshitsune's success and Yoritomo's suspicion.  There are plenty of parallel stories in every culture; I'd considered discussing Lancelot, Arthur, and Guinevere, where their successes expose their various vulnerabilities of character, and eventually lead to their downfall, but Arthuriana is a planned future discussion topic, so I saved it for then.

This has already gone on longer than I'd planned, and is a tad rambling, even if there are a couple valuable ideas in there, so I'll wrap up now.

Summary:

1. Characters with flaws are more interesting and memorable than perfect characters (but please don't overdo it).

2. Same as characters with flaws are more interesting and memorable than perfect characters, sometimes failure has a greater power to drive the story than success.

3. At best mechanics can support that, but cannot provide it; at worst they will destroy that.