Going Rogue
July 4th, 2011
Hello, and welcome to Rogue Week, which, as you might be able to guess, is devoted to everyone’s favorite backstabbing, sneak attacking, money-grubbing party members. Later in the week you can look forward to rogue-centric adventure ideas, a rogue-themed encounter, and mechanical support for rogues in both Pathfinder and 4th edition. Today, however, I want to examine an issue that’s related to a somewhat different kind of rogue.
As in, “going rogue.”
Specifically, I’m referring to one or more players taking it into their heads to do crazy, chaotic, borderline-suicidal things with absolutely no regard to others’ lives or property…but in a bad way. After all, many roleplaying games have a very high tolerance for kicking in doors, killing everyone on the other side, and taking their stuff without a second thought – as long as that “everyone” is green or scaly or hairy or otherwise not human enough (dwarves, elves, gnomes, and halflings are generally considered off-limits). That rarely means, however, that your GM will appreciate it if you apply that same mindset to, say, the human peasantry. We’ll come back to this dichotomy a little bit later, I just wanted to bring it to your attention and give it a little while to settle in before we deal with it fully.
The sort of behavior I’m referring to can take on a lot of different forms, but generally it quickly tends to devolve into the murder of characters who shouldn’t pose any sort of fair threat, and who the GM never even considered as a possible target for violence, let alone any kind of threat or obstacle to the party. Alternatively, it’s the drunken sort of logic that says that it’d be a good idea to sneak into the good king’s castle and make off with the treasury (usually at level four or so). In rare (and extreme) cases, this antisocial behavior is quickly turned on other members of the party, for example, characters who steal treasure from other characters, or who kill one another in their sleep over, oh, I don’t know, let’s say women. Not real women, mind, but women who exist solely in the game. Don’t laugh. It’s been known to happen.
Leaving aside such intra-party conflicts for a moment, these sorts of things are understandably (for the most part) frustrating for DMs, for a couple of reasons. The first of which is likely that this sort of behavior isn’t very heroic, and isn’t really what the DM signed up for when he decided to DM. That farmer you kept insulting and then decided to murder isn’t real, but he didn’t just pop up out of nowhere, either: your DM had to sit there and take that from you, as the farmer, the whole time. Most DMs are mature enough to recognize it’s just a game, and let it slide, but when it’s a more or less constant theme throughout a game, that sort of thing can make its way under a guy’s skin, and cause a DM to wonder why he spends so much time working on this each week.
Another reasonable frustration in many of these cases, though one that tends to cause more problems for newer DMs than more experienced ones, is that often they highlight some logical holes with the structure of D&D worlds that, when not highlighted, we’re largely able to blissfully ignore. Like, for example, how a level 9 fighter really has no peer in most towns, and could probably defeat the entire royal guard singlehandedly. This doesn’t really mesh well with how most of us envision fantasy medieval society, where, for example, no one argues with a thousand crossbowmen aiming in their direction, except maybe dragons, but, you know, the more you think about it, the more it seems like it’d be awfully difficult to fly if your wings were full of little holds and you had thin shafts of iron sticking out all over your body. DMs forced to suddenly create stat-blocks for town guards, and to balance the razor edge between trying to make them an appropriate challenge (or, better yet, strong enough to keep the PCs from doing this kind of antisocial, unfun behavior), without suddenly declaring that the sleepy fishing village of One Horse has level 15 guards, or a balor for its bailiff, or that the melon vender is secretly a wizard of ungodly power.
Of course, more experienced DMs have long ago found ways to navigate that treacherous pass, and are generally more flexible at coming up with plausible explanations and solutions for exactly this sort of problem, and so the town guard may be quickly defeated, but the king might send his knights, or the mayor may hire bounty hunters, or any number of similar issues, making this less of an issue the more experience you have as a DM.
And, of course, many DMs are upset by PCs, say, razing whole villages to the ground “because it’s funny,” primarily because, well, they liked that town. This is also especially true of newer DMs, who, in my experience, have a much greater tendency to get emotionally involved in the settings they create. Obviously if you’ve painstakingly spent hours populating the little backwater village of One Horse and filling it with lots of interesting tidbits for the PCs to discover, and generally making it an idyllic, perfect little town where no one has any (serious) problems and everything is perfect all the live-long day, you don’t appreciate it when the PCs decide it would be fun to try their hand at being petty brigands and wind up burning the place to the ground. It just doesn’t mesh with your creative vision.
This, in a way, segues nicely into the final major reason that DMs get fed up with this sort of irreverent sociopathy, and that is that it seems to make light of the DM’s hard work. The amount of work a DM does on a weekly basis to prepare for his game varies from person to person, but as a general rule of thumb, they all feel like they do a lot of preparation work, and when players run off looting, pillaging, maiming and/or defiling everything and one in sight, they tend to feel like their hard work is being ignored and unappreciated. Not just because of the not-so-metaphorical destruction of the world they worked so hard to build, but because it feels like the players don’t really care about the game, and they aren’t taking it seriously.
These are all important things to bear in mind, and for the most part, when it comes to this sort of behavior (which I have heard dubbed “chaotic stupid,” and feel that that generally sums it up pretty well, though sometimes it’s more like “stupid evil.”), there is certainly something to be said on behalf of those players, as well.
For one, though it’s very important that the DM have fun, it’s equally important that all of the players have fun, as well. This sometimes means making a compromise as far as what the game is all about. For example, if only the DM is really interested in having the PCs go on a long and arduous quest to retrieve the Sword of Perfect Perfectness to destroy the Great Demon Idfjklaegja, because the PCs would rather play pirates on the high seas, conflict is more or less going to be constant. Similarly, if the DM wants a bright, happy, idyllic fantasy adventure, but the PCs want something grim, dark, and foreboding, well…you get the idea. Often, PCs “go rogue” because the player is trying to make the game more into the sort of thing that, well, he wants to play. Proper communication between DMs and players, as well as a little give-and-take on both sides, can resolve this issue right quick.
It’s also worth noting that, ultimately, a lot of the time, this sort of behavior actually isn’t all that odd, especially in relatively new players. After all, if it’s OK to murder hundreds of goblins for their loot (not to mention invading their homes), why should peasants be any different? The game actively rewards sociopathic behavior in some cases (or, at least, depending on the adventure and the game, it does), so it only makes sense that some players will feel encouraged to continue this antisocial behavior in other aspects of the game. The difference between a commoner and a goblin, mechanically, is that a goblin is smaller but better armed. If you can murder and terrorize one, why not the other?
Ultimately, though, as long as players and DMs communicate with each other about their expectations, and what kind of game they really want to be playing, these sorts of issues should quickly be minimized.
That’s it for this week. Join me next week, when I’ll continue to slowly put together the kyton class for Races with Class, showing step-by-step all that goes into their design. In the meantime, think twice before you go rogue.