![]() They include the decisions in the game AND make them as worthwhile of a choice as the “smart” alternative. Just as the willing GM in my tabletop RPG story was a necessity for me to be able to accomplish my ridiculous “jump off the roof” maneuver, the developers of both Wildermyth and Disco Elysium embrace the beautiful chaos of the wild and illogical decisions that their players might want to make. The first is the intention of the developers to allow this kind of play to take place and be rewarded. If you manage to shoot the body down successfully, you can pull off the autopsy and get a lot of valuable information about the crime.īoth of these scenarios and countless others like them from each respective game are possible for a couple of reasons. Now this is clearly a horrible idea – there are kids nearby, an apartment building to your left and a hostel to your right, and what if you shoot the body? – but as a police officer, the tool you are given to solve problems is a gun and by golly you are going to solve your problems with a gun. Relatively early in the game while attempting to perform a field autopsy on a corpse hanging from a tree, you have the option to shoot the belt keeping the body suspended. Now it’s left to your interpretation whether that drinking made you weird or if you were in fact always a bit eccentric, but either way the most interesting paths forward available to you are rarely the ones that make the most logical sense. ![]() In Disco Elysium you play as a police detective whose memory has been blasted to smithereens by near-lethal levels of drinking. The game rewards you for making a risky decision rather than punishing you for not making the “smart” play. In Wildermyth, it leads to your character looking down at the end of the battle and seeing their leg fundamentally transformed, now made of gnarled wood that, at your option, can spread to other parts of the hero’s body and unlock new abilities. Now in most other RPGs I’ve played, the decision to leave in the splinter would be the obviously sub-optimal choice, a path that leads only to pain (and probably a penalty to health). Battle is imminent and an option is presented to you: take the splinter out before the fight or rush into battle and leave it in. One such event is called The Splinter, and while walking through the woods a party member gets a huge, nasty splinter in their leg. In Wildermyth (a turn-based tactical RPG) your battles begin with random events chosen from a large pool based on the personality and abilities of the characters in your party. Which seems more dangerous: selling your soul to the wolf god or demeaning it with the nickname “Woof-God?” Both games support bold decision making through their design sensibilities and the mechanisms that make them work. Recently I have had the pleasure of playing back to back two different games that shake that trend: Wildermyth and Disco Elysium. These games ask you to be measured and punish you for curiosity, experimentation, or just doing the weirdest possible thing to see what in the world will happen as a result. ![]() Instead they reward optimization, building your character in the smartest way possible and then only making choices which capitalize on the best aspects of that character. The guy running our game could have at any point said “nah man, you can’t OHKO the first phase of the boss with something this dumb.” But he was open to my bold move and although there was still a second phase to contend with, I got to knock out a boss with my silly and incredibly dangerous plan.Ī lot of the video games I have played don’t really reward this sort of thinking. Now this moment could have gone sideways in one final way: gamemaster fiat. And even if I succeeded I still also had to pass the check not to get myself killed in the process. ![]() While my character was certainly built to plant the arrow in the boss’s chest with relative ease, her strength stat was absolutely terrible – I would be rolling at a disadvantage. My intent? To drag the boss off the roof and then use one of my special abilities to rescue myself from the fall while the villain fell to his death. I then tied the rope around myself and proceeded to jump off the roof where the encounter was taking place, plummeting directly towards the ground at full speed. During the final battle of a Dungeon World campaign, I described my ranger tying a rope to one of her arrows and firing it into the chest of the villain. One of my favorite moments playing a tabletop roleplaying game was also one of the most ridiculous actions I had ever narrated for a character. ![]()
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