Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S3|02: Ello Gov’nor.
I was thinking about Steve’s show notes, and in particular, the notion about how it’s the GM’s job to basically lead the players around to the conclusion they’re going to have to reach anyway. To railroad them without having them feel they’re being railroaded. The funny thing is: at first, I felt this little rush of ego welling up inside me, along the lines of “What are you saying? Players are stupid?” But the more that I thought about it, he’s basically right.
On some abstract level, YES, you would want every decision to be the direct result of player choices. As a player, you DO want agency and you DO want to feel like your choices matter. There’s little worse than a campaign where you’re just piloting a glorified NPC in service of the GM’s idea of what the story should be. “Oh, you’ll let me roll the dice in combat? How generous of you!” The more the GM spoon-feeds you, the more you feel like a passenger instead of a driver.
But the reality is when you have these completely open-ended goals like “make contact with the gang”… the players and the GM (and the person who wrote the adventure) might have drastically different ideas on how to solve them, and how much of people’s time do you “waste” fumbling around? We talk about metagaming from the player side quite a bit, but at what point is it too metagamey to have to get into the head of the person who wrote the story and figure out exactly what they intended? Especially if the players come up with something that would ALSO work. Players are supposed to come up with creative solutions to the problem; I’m not sure requiring them to be psychic makes for a good game.
There’s also the general concession one has to make to the value of people’s time. We’re past the years of teenagers spending an entire weekend gaming (Order of the Amber Die notwithstanding). We get three hours a week (OK, closer to two if we BS about fantasy football and TV shows too much), and that’s it. How much of that should we spend on blind alleys? Especially for Steve as the GM… if we come up with some blind-alley plan, Steve would actually have to create something to play through that, when it’s really not going to serve the overall plot in any meaningful way.
And not to throw you listeners under the bus, but all of this goes double when you’re doing this as a show for an audience. Now you have to factor in “is this blind alley something that’s at least going to be entertaining?”. And if it is, MAYBE you let the players bumble around a little because at least it’s “good radio” and makes for a fun story months later (cough-Sharky-cough). But if it’s not, you’re sinking in quicksand: you’re not moving the central narrative forward and the failure isn’t even entertaining.
And OK… at the far end of all of this, what does it do to the health of a gaming group if they’re allowed to meander to a point where they “lose”? Some stories are open-ended and time isn’t a consideration, but others have a strict time limit or victory conditions. In the latter case, there’s always the chance the players go down SO many blind alleys that it’s impossible to justify them solving the problem that’s been presented. The bank heist was a good example of this: what if we’d been at a different bank and the bank had been robbed and we lost all our leads for the next part of the story? Does the whole campaign just come apart? Do we get sent on our way with a condescending deus ex machina to keep the story going – “well, you totally failed at the goal of the last 10 sessions, but here’s some random clue that drops into your laps to keep the game moving”. Being treated as some sort of pity case isn’t fun for players either.
So yes, I think the balancing act as GM is to make sure the players have agency for the KEY decisions, but maybe use breadcrumbs to take some of the lesser choices off their plates. Speaking of that bank heist, that was a good example of this – on paper, there were six different leads, but three of them led back to the same basic destination, and one of the others was a demonstration of how obviously impregnable THAT bank was. So we were able to pick the order we tackled the leads in, but most roads still led to Rome.
I also wanted to comment on Seth’s reluctance to go undercover again. I think I get what he was feeling. I think we COULD’VE gone undercover and tried to make contact with the gangs that way, but it would’ve had a high “been there done that” factor, and it also would’ve strained credibility – so not one, but TWO gang leaders fell for our act? Really? So yeah… let’s go out in uniform and punch our way through this one.
So we get our marching orders to go out into the Docks and use ourselves as bait to attract some gang activity, and sure enough, we find not one, but both gangs. And in a failure of intel, they’re actually working together. Even though they have different “turf” and their leaders are supposed to be feuding, the guys in the trenches are cooperating.
The fight isn’t tough on an absolute level, but I do think maybe we took it a little lightly going in. The Sweepers are alchemists; I can accept having a little bit of trouble with them because they’re clearly going to have access to magic. Sure enough… sling bullets with extra force damage. Ow. But I actually didn’t expect the Cockney Clowns…. errr… Washboard Dogs to give us any trouble. And yet here they are beating me down to about half my hit points before the fight is really underway.
(Speaking of which, I’m half-tempted to go back and try a drinking game with this episode where you have to take a drink every time Steve says “OI”. I didn’t notice it for the first few minutes, but he says it a LOT. It was almost “Hey Now!” Hank Kingsley territory.)
After we finally start taking the fight seriously, things turn around, and we get the gang members on the ropes. Two are down entirely, and two flee in different directions, leading to abstracted chase sequences. Lo Mang screws his up, and his man gets away, but Dougie manages to catch his. Meanwhile, I’m tending to our existing prisoners, because it would suck if both of the runners got away, and then we returned to find that the two we beat had woken up and bolted.
So in net, we have three prisoners – two Sweepers, one Washboard Dog. I think the Dog will be more valuable since that’s the gang we’re directly interested in, but maybe the Sweepers can give us some “enemy of my enemy” intel. I don’t think the Sweepers are good guys (I mean, their boss’ nickname is “BLOODY Berleth”), but they’re also not the ones who chose to harvest bodies for a death cult, so if we’re gonna pick a horse to back, it feels like they’re the ones to go with.
And that’s where we’ll pick things up next week. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.