Claudia Cangini from Narrativa a couple months ago asked me to write an article based on my Play Passionately stuff so that she could have it translated and published at convention over in Italy. In that article I talked about the difference between Drama and Tension. I defined Drama as mostly being about character decisions and actions: grand speeches, sudden betrayal, bold lies, jumping off a cliff, etc. And I defined Tension as: trepidation over a possible outcome. The actual fear that things might not go as expected.

In my experience gamers value Drama and are usually quite adverse to Tension. I’ve noticed that the two biggest safeties that gamers rely on are Genre and Character Archetypes. They use those two things in various combination to guarantee certain outcomes and thus avoid Tension. Well, this is a set-piece action scene in my martial arts movie so of course I’m going to win. It would be “bad for the story” if I didn’t win. Similar justifications are used for failure as well. This is a noir story and it’s early on, so I should get beat up a lot.

I recently saw the film Michael Clayton. And what I loved about it was that I had no idea what “kind of” movie I was watching. It looked like a legal thriller but had so many “genre” assumptions placed at awkward angles. I felt incredibly unsafe in how I wanted things in the film to turn out. I literally had no idea how the film was going to end, until it ended. I didn’t even feel comfortable until the credit sequence had actually faded to black. At any moment it could go in any direction good or bad and still stay true to itself. That uncertainty and uncomfortableness and, well, Tension is what I want out of an RPG.

And I have found out that a great deal of people don’t. A great number of people want to know that we’re in an Action Film and I’m the Plucky Side-Kick and thus feel safe and secure in knowing (a) what their role/function is and (b) knowing that that their ability to enact that role with the expected outcome is secure.

Jesse

I’d suggest that safety and tension aren’t either/or, they’re yin and yang.

I’d also take a look at Bliss Stage, which has a nice mix of tense piloting scenes and interludes that can build or relieve tension.

I thought the recent movie “Paranormal Activity” was very good at building tension, although thankfully it didn’t do the thing I was fearing it would do, but the shadow of that thing was itself a source of tension. Tension in the audience builds as they come to understand that the characters’ perception off safety is badly flawed. I think something similar could be done in a game.

I am not a fan of sudden PC death; DitV really crystallized for me the power of players owning their own character’s death. But some players dig the bolt out of the blue; Mike Montesa could probably dig into that far better than I could.

This paragraph would contain my usual examination of the question in terms of Agency and Experience, Mirror Neurons, and OODA loops, but this comment is already long enough, so

I perceive guns as dangerous and unsafe. I see a soldier standing there holding a gun, even if the safety is clicked on on that gun, it does not feel safe. I experience tension even though the risk of that gun going off in my face is minimal.

I feel like there’s some of this at work in DRYH. DRYH definitely has a point past which you ARE in a potential immediate danger of death. But I think the perception of the zone of risk takes up a greater area than the actual zone of risk, because the mechanics lay out pretty directly how quickly your fortunes could change.

So I think you can slightly insulate against capricious sudden character death, while still putting sudden character death on the table, and still get your tension benefit.