RPG Errata: Cast Away, and Suffering

Cast Away, written by by Joe O’Brien & Reilly Qyote, is a survival RPG. Your characters are survivors of a disastrous event, anything from a shipwreck to a zombie apocalypse, and must manage their health, fatigue, food, and shelter in a hostile aftermath.

The system is quite good at what it sets out to do. This is a game of struggle and strife, fighting to survive, and every mistake you make or failure you suffer results in more trouble for you down the line. Failures beget failures, and death for your character is permanent. This game is so good, in fact, that it brings up a significant question about RPGs in general:

This is a difficult game. You’re not expected to survive; not without some serious luck. You’re going to fail, fail hard, and you’re not even allowed to roll up a new character. This game is hard, and if you fail you’re done.

Does that sound like fun to you?

There is an underlying assumption to everything that I’ve written about RPGs: namely, that people should have fun playing RPGs. Wait, let me rephrase. If someone chooses to play an RPG, whether they are newcomers or veterans of the medium, the goal of everyone at the table should primarily be “enjoyment,” or satisfaction at the very least. If someone is miserable during play, the game is on some fundamental level a failure.

But am I correct in that assumption? (If this seems to come from nowhere, let’s just say I have witnessed some…shall we say unpleasant comments and conversations along these lines, and wanted to say my piece.)

There is a concept that has floated about the Game Design space for a while now, usually referred to as “The Tyranny of Fun.” It’s a phrase that doesn’t need much explanation, really. It is a worldview that says if a system, mechanic, or rule exists that purportedly limits a player’s enjoyment, then that thing needs to be fixed.

On the one hand, it’s a very easy mindset to agree with. It’s the entire point of games, isn’t it? You play a game because you want to, so anything that makes playing the game unpleasant will reduce the amount you want to play the game. In video games, this involves things like improving the GUI and ingaging game-loops. It’s why there are “take all” buttons on most treasure chests; picking up each of twenty individual items and dropping them in your inventory brings the flow to a screeching halt.

On the other hand, there is a real insidiousness to the idea that if something isn’t directly drip-feeding dopamine into your brain, it must be removed. The bliss point is utilized to encourage addictive behavior, and video games are constantly being refined and polished to make it easier for them to dominate your life. Putting pauses and break-points in a game’s flow can also be used to guide a player’s focus. It can’t be a constant adrenaline rush; games need shape.

One of the big questions that became ubiquitous during the heyday of Pathologic reviews, was “Can a game be good if playing it is uncomfortable or unpleasant?” Reviewers everywhere said “well, it’s a good game, so…apparently so.”

This comes from a mistranslation of the word “good.” “Good” can mean so many different things in different contexts and clusters them all together into an amorphous property. Quality of design, clarity of intent, effectiveness of invoking emotion, pleasant feelings…all of these can, concurrently or consecutively, make a “good” game.

But enough about video-games. What about RPGs?

Well, RPGs can’t provide immediate response the same way a video game can. The blood pumps differently with finger-twitch action than tensely gripped dice. There is naturally more ebb-and-flow of excitement in TTRPGs; but that’s not to say there hasn’t been a lot of polishing done in recent years. The languid bookkeeping of yesteryear has been streamlined: I’ve already talked about how “Gold” has become more and more an intangible thing in most RPGs. Keeping track of how many coins your character has is rarely important anymore, similar to iron-rations and exactly how many arrows in your quiver. RPG-design has decided that encumbrance management, financial budgeting, and asset tracking aren’t as fun as, say, using your “Swift strike” ability to put an arrow in a dragon’s eyeball.

But is that “the Tyranny of Fun” or just clarity of vision? There are people who, when they sit down to role-play, aren’t doing it because they want to see the GP number go up. They want to see new places, overcome monstrous obstacles, and play at being a hero. Is that goal served by making them penny-pinch to be able to afford enough potions of healing to survive?

The more interesting question for me is: is there value in creating a game where the intended experience is unpleasant? The answer is, of course! There are hundreds of video games where the actual playing of the game is not particularly fun. Octodad, Surgeon Simulator, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, bullet-hell shooters, and any number of cruel Kaizo Mario ROM hacks have long proven that there is a market for games that ask the player to suffer. It’s tense, absorbing, painful, and then you finally win. Ah! Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Well, maybe?

I’m talking about video-games again. Part of the fun of those games I mentioned is the overwhelming difficulty built into the game’s design. You could spend your time making Octodad walk about the world carefully and thoughtfully, never knocking over a single thing, but the game is fighting you the whole way. Surgeon Simulator uses a bizarre input scheme that makes even simple acts a complex brain-bender of a puzzle. What would that same design-ethos look like in an RPG?

An RPG that fights you? One that resists its playing? One that provides friction rather than flow? That suggests a game with byzantine rules, poor player practices, and extensive time spent beating your head against an unyielding wall. That’s just unpleasant. No one wants to play a game like that. No, if we want to create an RPG that abolishes the Tyranny of Fun (sic semper tyrannis) we need to embrace the idea that having fun, enjoying our experience, isn’t the primary goal.

I’ve talked about this before with games like I Have Gone This Far and Endure. Cast Away is similar, and Breathless Games are designed to build increasing tension towards an ultimate climax. Dread fits in the same camp.

Why should I — why should any of us — be concerned about “having fun” during an RPG? Spending seven months on an epic quest only to die at the end because of a bad roll should be agonizing. Having fights about rule minutiae should leave you seething. RPGs aren’t just about fun and pleasant emotions, they’re about math, strategy, and yes, conflict.

One of the values of play — a value that I repeated several times in my treatise — is the chance to practice. RPGs allow practicing of situations and emotions that we otherwise might not feel able to express. Suffering is worthy of practicing, especially in safe environments where nothing is actually lost. Losing an ally in a war against the Orcs or failing a mission for the Company is a milder and more manageable injury than losing a loved one or a job.

But your brain doesn’t know the difference.

Loss of a loved one is a real psychological injury, and your brain doesn’t differentiate between loss of your pet, your spouse, or your favorite character. We certainly do, society does, but your brain? Nah. This has been proven time and time again. Whether it’s a real tiger or a cardboard cut-out, your heart will still skip a beat.

Nevertheless, there is certainly a case to be made¹ that struggling builds character. A life without setback can create people without the fortitude to sacrifice for others. If pain is foreign and frightening, then an individual might hurt others in their attempts to avoid it.

In this framework, it’s more important to get hurt and pick yourself up again. Difficult or punishing RPGs can be a method for “toughening up” people who haven’t suffered enough in their own lives, and if that last sentence didn’t give you pause, then good God, please talk with a therapist!

“A therapist? You’re overdramatizing this. People get hurt all the time, and it’s just a game! If losing in an RPG breaks your psyche, maybe you shouldn’t be playing RPGs.”

Here’s the thing…

I don’t care.

I don’t care if you have the mental fortitude to get into a furious screaming match with your best friend and then behave as if nothing happened. I don’t care if you’re sure your friends can find social or psychological value in having a miserable time for three hours every weekend. I don’t care if you can find purpose in a seven-month-long slog that ultimately amounts to a TPK by the second-to-final boss. I don’t care if you think “people just need to toughen up.”

There is a place for pain and suffering in roleplay, much as there is in life. Growth isn’t always comfortable, and breakthroughs can be downright abysmal. But, as has been proven time and time again, there is just as much risk as there is chance for reward.

Some people want that bitterness, that sense of failure, that crushing defeat. That’s fine, you’re not broken or anything, that’s a perfectly fine way of engaging with games. I’m not here to try and get you to change, I’m trying to get you (or not you, but someone else) to accept that all those people who don’t want that sour-lemon in their life aren’t wrong, broken, or weak.

A world of “just toughen up” is a cold world. A world where pain is shameful and meant to be ignored. Where support is little more than dismissive and moralizing attitudes. It is a world without love, without seeing others as individuals with their own inner lives.

I think we can imagine a better world than that.