When the Adventure Fails: Responsibility to the People at the Table

Sometimes you know.

You don't need to wait until the end of the session, ask everyone how they enjoyed themselves, read the comments afterward, or conduct some elaborate postmortem. You can feel it while the game is happening. Something that normally exists between the Game Master and the players—the exchange of energy that makes a roleplaying game come alive—simply isn't there.

You describe the scene.

Silence.

You present another clue.

Silence.

You look around the virtual table, hoping someone will seize upon something, ask the question that brings everything into focus, or make the decision that finally sets the story moving.

More silence.

For a Game Master, there may be few sounds quite as loud as players who have nothing they want to say.

I recently ran an episode of Star Trek Adventures that failed that badly.

I don't mean that it was merely below my usual standard, or that there were a couple of scenes I would handle differently if I ran them again. I mean that, by my own judgment, it was one of the worst roleplaying sessions I have ever presented. A few players who have gamed with me for years essentially agreed. They knew what my games normally felt like, and they knew this one wasn't working.

That hurt.

It should have.

Not because every creative failure ought to become an exercise in self-punishment, and certainly not because a Game Master should expect perfection from himself every time people gather around a table. It hurt because I care about the experience I give the people who have chosen to spend those hours with me.

That distinction matters.

There is a difference between bruised pride and responsibility.

The first says, I can't believe I failed.

The second asks, Why did this fail, and what am I going to learn from it?

I have been thinking a great deal about that question.

The episode was conceived as a mystery, and from the design side I thought I was attempting something ambitious. I wanted an intellectual challenge in which apparently unrelated clues gradually formed a coherent picture. There was a Federation field science installation, personnel transfers between the installation and the USS Azimuth, a supporting character, a cadet, scientists, and a mystery that I expected the players to slowly unravel. Our regular science officer was absent, which meant another player—normally playing the ship's executive officer—was operating a supporting character instead. That alone changed the chemistry of the group more than I anticipated.

Then there were the NPCs.

Too many of them.

In my notes they all made sense. Each existed for a reason. I knew who was arriving, who was departing, who belonged to the field team, who knew what, and how each person related to the underlying mystery. From behind the Game Master's screen, the structure seemed perfectly understandable because I possessed the one thing the players did not possess.

The answer.

That is one of the great traps in mystery design. Once you know the solution, it becomes remarkably difficult to remember what the mystery looks like to someone who doesn't.

A clue that seems obvious to the writer may be almost meaningless to the player. Three pieces of information that form an elegant pattern in my head may appear to the players as three completely unrelated facts. If the connection between those facts depends upon an assumption that exists only in my notes, I have not constructed a difficult mystery.

I have constructed an incomprehensible one.

There is a profound difference.

I had mistaken complexity for challenge.

Worse, I had overwritten the scenario. There was too much information competing for attention, too many characters requiring identification, too many relationships that mattered to me because I had designed them, and not enough clarity about what mattered to the players standing inside the situation.

I had built an elaborate machine and forgotten that the players could not see the gears.

Yet even that does not completely explain why the session failed, because there was another problem that may have been more important than all the others.

It wasn't the kind of Star Trek my players wanted that night.

I wanted to give them a cerebral mystery.

They wanted adventure.

They wanted the Original Series.

They wanted the sense that somewhere beyond the next planet there might be danger, discovery, a beautiful alien diplomat, a Klingon plot, a fistfight, a moral dilemma, a phaser drawn at exactly the wrong moment, or some impossible decision that Captain Kirk would have contemplated for approximately thirty seconds before ordering the Enterprise into danger.

They wanted swashbuckling Star Trek.

I gave them homework.

That may be an exaggeration, but not by very much.

And the painful thing is that all the production value in the world could not rescue it.

I had graphics.

I had Desilu-style backdrops designed to evoke the visual language of the Original Series.

I had audio through Syrinscape.

I had prepared scenes, characters, clues, and atmosphere. All the machinery I normally use to help turn a virtual tabletop into something resembling an episode of television was there.

None of it mattered.

The session fell flat.

The best comparison I can make is a stand-up comic who walks onto a stage convinced that the new material is brilliant, delivers the punchline, and hears nothing.

Not outrage.

Not heckling.

Nothing.

Crickets.

There is nowhere to hide in that moment.

You can have beautiful lighting. You can have the best microphone in the theater. You can have a perfectly designed stage and an expensive sound system. If nobody laughs, none of it matters.

Roleplaying games possess the same ruthless honesty.

The players either engage or they don't.

That doesn't mean every quiet player is bored, every failed clue is bad design, or every difficult session is the Game Master's fault. Groups have off nights. People are tired. Important players are absent. Real life intrudes. Chemistry changes depending upon who attends. Sometimes a perfectly good adventure encounters exactly the wrong combination of circumstances and simply refuses to ignite.

That happened here too.

Our missing science officer mattered. Another player was therefore occupying a different role from the one in which he normally helps shape the command dynamic aboard the Azimuth. The scenario itself depended heavily upon scientific investigation, making that absence particularly unfortunate. Fewer players meant fewer minds attacking the mystery from different directions, and the people who were present were being asked to engage with unfamiliar supporting characters and an unusually complicated cast.

Those things contributed to the failure.

But I don't want to hide behind them.

The scenario was also bad.

At least in the form in which I presented it, on that particular day, to that particular group, it was bad.

Being willing to say that matters.

I think one of the easiest traps for any experienced creator is to become defensive about failure. Experience can become armor. If you have run hundreds of successful sessions, received good reviews, entertained people for years, and developed confidence in your craft, there is a temptation to explain away the disaster.

The players weren't paying attention.

The wrong people were absent.

They didn't understand what I was trying to do.

They should have followed the clues.

Perhaps some of those statements might even contain a little truth.

They are also mostly useless.

The audience does not owe the performer the reaction the performer intended.

That lesson extends far beyond roleplaying games.

A reader does not owe an author excitement because the author spent three months designing the world.

A player does not owe a Game Master fascination because the Game Master spent six hours preparing the mystery.

Effort deserves respect, but effort does not guarantee effect.

That is a difficult truth for anyone who creates things.

We experience our work from the inside. We remember the hours that went into it. We remember the research, the discarded ideas, the maps, the rewrites, the moments when some complicated piece finally clicked into place. The audience experiences none of that. They encounter what we actually put in front of them.

That is all they can judge.

And that is fair.

It has made me think about something larger than one unsuccessful episode of Star Trek Adventures. What responsibility do I have to the people who choose to spend their time in worlds I create?

I think the answer is: quite a lot.

Time is one of the few genuinely irreplaceable things people give us.

My players could spend those hours doing almost anything. They could watch a movie, play a computer game, read a novel, spend time with their families, go out for dinner, or simply sleep. Instead, they choose to show up at my virtual table and say, in effect, All right. Take us somewhere.

That is an extraordinary act of trust when you think about it.

My Traveller players give me that trust when they board their ship and head into my own setting.

My Conan players give it to me when they enter some dangerous alley, forgotten ruin, or blood-soaked wilderness of the Hyborian Age.

My Dune players give it to me when they step into a universe of political intrigue, duty, betrayal, ecology, religion, and power.

My Star Trek Adventures players give it to me every time the USS Azimuth goes to warp.

Different games require different rhythms. Traveller can linger over trade, exploration, survival, and the consequences of decisions made parsecs ago. Conan should sometimes move with the savage momentum of a sword stroke. Dune can thrive on conversations in which every polite sentence conceals three threats. Star Trek should carry that wonderful combination of optimism, intelligence, danger, humanity, and adventure that made me fall in love with it in the first place.

My responsibility is not to make those games identical.

My responsibility is to understand why the people at each table came.

The same is true of readers.

Someone who opens one of my TransStellar stories is making the same fundamental bargain as someone joining one of my games. They are giving me their attention and asking me to make that investment worthwhile. The reader following Kars Vandor does not care how many spreadsheets I maintain or how carefully I have calculated the chronology of Known Space unless those things ultimately make the story richer. Someone reading one of my cyberpunk stories is not obligated to admire the setting if the characters never come alive. Someone entering one of my zombie apocalypse stories does not care how meticulously I worked out the collapse if there is nobody inside that collapse worth caring about. A fantasy world can contain ten thousand years of history and still be lifeless if the story happening today is dull.

Worldbuilding supports storytelling.

It cannot replace it.

Production values support Game Mastering.

They cannot replace it either.

That failed Star Trek session reminded me of this more effectively than a dozen successful sessions probably could have.

Success is pleasant, but it can be a poor teacher because success encourages us to assume that whatever we did must have been correct. Failure is less polite. Failure walks into the room, sits down directly across from you, and asks uncomfortable questions.

Were there too many NPCs?

Yes.

Were the clues sufficiently clear?

No.

Did I mistake confusion for intellectual difficulty?

Probably.

Did the absence of an important player damage the structure of the scenario?

Yes.

Did I recognize quickly enough what kind of adventure the players wanted?

No.

Did I keep trying to make the prepared material work after the energy at the table told me it wasn't working?

Probably longer than I should have.

Those are useful answers.

None requires me to conclude that I am a terrible Game Master.

That conclusion would be just as self-indulgent as refusing to acknowledge the failure at all.

One bad performance does not erase years of good ones.

But years of good performances do not make the bad one good.

Both things can be true simultaneously.

I think experienced creators sometimes need to remind themselves of that. Confidence should allow us to survive failure, not become immune to criticism. If I know I can run a good game, then I should be secure enough to admit when I ran a bad one. If I know I can write a good story, then I should be capable of looking at a weak manuscript and saying, This isn't there yet.

There is freedom in that.

The disaster becomes an event rather than an identity.

I ran a bad game.

That is very different from:

I am a bad Game Master.

The first statement contains useful information.

The second contains nowhere to go.

So I have chosen the first.

I ran a bad game.

Now I intend to run a better one.

That does not mean retreating into safety and never attempting another mystery. Quite the opposite. If failure teaches us only to stop experimenting, then we have learned the wrong lesson. I want to try difficult scenarios. I want to challenge players intellectually. I want to experiment with structures I have never used before. Some of those experiments will fail.

They are allowed to.

What they are not allowed to become is an excuse for carelessness.

There is an important distinction between accepting mistakes and accepting mediocrity.

Everyone gets a bad night.

Nobody should make bad nights the plan.

If a session fails because I attempted something ambitious and misjudged it, I can forgive myself. If the next session fails for exactly the same reasons because I couldn't be bothered to learn from the first one, that is different.

The first failure is tuition.

The second is refusing to attend class.

That principle applies to writing as much as gaming. A novel may fail. A character may not work. A chapter may need to be thrown away after weeks of effort. An experimental structure may prove unreadable. There is no shame in any of that. Creative work involves risk, and risk implies the possibility of failure.

The responsibility comes afterward.

Learn.

Rewrite.

Simplify.

Listen.

Try again.

Do better.

Not perfectly.

Better.

There is a phrase I have been thinking about lately: the audience deserves my best effort, but they do not require my perfection.

I like that distinction.

Perfection is impossible and chasing it can become another form of paralysis. Best effort is something different. Best effort means respecting preparation. It means paying attention during the performance rather than becoming enslaved to the notes. It means noticing when the players are deadly quiet and understanding that their silence is information. It means being willing to abandon something I spent hours preparing if the table has clearly found a more interesting direction.

It also means remembering that a roleplaying game does not belong entirely to the Game Master.

That may be the most important lesson of all.

I can write the scenario.

I can design the mystery.

I can create the NPCs, select the music, build the graphics, prepare the maps, establish the stakes, and understand everything that happened before the opening scene.

Then the players arrive.

At that moment it becomes ours.

Their curiosity matters.

Their expectations matter.

Their characters matter.

Their enjoyment matters.

The same strange transformation occurs when a book is published. Until publication, the manuscript belongs almost entirely to the writer. Afterward, readers bring themselves to it. They interpret characters in ways the author never expected. They care deeply about things the author thought were minor. They sometimes overlook things the author considered profound.

That is part of the bargain.

Creation begins privately.

Meaning becomes collaborative.

I find that humbling.

I also find it motivating.

Because I want the next episode of the USS Azimuth to be better.

I want the next Traveller session to leave my players arguing excitedly about what they should do next.

I want Conan to feel dangerous.

I want Dune to feel like every decision carries consequences.

I want readers entering Known Space to discover characters worth following across light-years. I want the TransStellar stories to reward the hours people invest in them. I want Kars Vandor and all the other people inhabiting my fiction to feel as alive to readers as they do to me. I want my cyberpunk cities to pulse with life, my post-apocalyptic worlds to hurt, and my fantasy landscapes to contain genuine wonder.

I will not accomplish that every time.

Nobody does.

There will be bad sessions.

There will be weak chapters.

There will be ideas that looked magnificent at midnight and ridiculous the following afternoon.

There will probably even be another night when I sit behind the virtual Game Master's screen, present something I was certain would work, and hear those terrible metaphorical crickets again.

When it happens, I hope I have enough confidence not to collapse under it and enough humility not to dismiss it.

I will listen.

I will figure out what happened.

I will learn whatever the failure has to teach me.

Then I will go back to work.

Because the people who come to my table deserve that.

The people who open my books deserve that.

And perhaps, in the end, I owe it to myself as well.

Not perfection.

Not an impossible promise that every game will be unforgettable and every book extraordinary.

Something much simpler.

Care about the work.

Care about the people receiving it.

Take risks.

Accept mistakes.

Never become comfortable making the same mistakes again.

And next time, do better.