Expanding on the last two posts, I’ve written about how the limitless choices of an RPG may be too much for most people and as it’s overwhelming to them they never become players.
I have to admit, this is where throwing your players in a labyrinth filled with monsters starts to make a lot of sense from the perspective of the players. There is little choice, right, left or straight. Fight or run. That’s about all the choices and it settles the players into the mechanics of the game. The players get to say ‘Hey my pet character did cool stuff’ and they begin to identify with them. At some point they realize that there might be a more interesting world outside of the labyrinth. It starts off on the trip to buy a nice new sword. They actually start to play out the interaction of buying the sword, then they say ‘Where do we sleep at night? I want to reward my pet character with a nice warm bed to sleep on instead of a blanket on a stone floor.’ They began to realize their character would logically have needs and wants.
That only happens after they’ve run them around like board game pieces for months or years. Long time players assume the thought is natural. If I just tell a new player that their character is like a real person, they’ll understand. Sometimes they do and a new player is born. Most of the time they don’t, it really is too much for the person to grasp. They haven’t formed an emotional connection to a character (most times they haven’t even made a character yet) before they’re told they need to treat them like a real human (or real whatever creature they are).
Now this is a different argument than what I started with the last few days. I have talked about choices and limiting how many choices the players have to make. The thing that allows the players to make choices is having goals. If the goal is a better cleaving tool, then they need money. If they need money, they need to make or find that money somehow. We start throwing players into a much richer world than that and it’s very hard to imagine why the choices in this virtual world matter. We want to speed them along the path that we took but it doesn’t work that way. We’re skipping a thousand steps that we took, probably in our teen years that we forgot about.
So the question is, if they really don’t get the desire to make their own goals just by explaining them, how can they be helped? The answer, for the most part is to learn the way most role players probably learned. Slowly.
Learning slowly, growing slowly
In order to not overwhelm a new player, they need to be eased into making choices. They need to start out with things as simple as left, right, straight, run or fight. You could substitute a direction (up, down or right) or an action (talk or run away) but adding to the choices will quickly overwhelm the new player. In addition to this, the new player must be told what their options are to make it clear there is a limited set.
So how do you know when the new player is ready to take on more? They’ll tell you. When one says “There must be another way of dealing with this guard, I want to try talking to him.” you know they’re ready for more. Not a lot more, but they’re growing.
If one says “I’m going to try using the rope I have to cross this gorge.” they’re growing. Let them introduce the possibilities. Be ready with a way of going around the gorge and give them opportunities to see new possibilities for handling things.
The point is, give them a limited set of choices, make the choices obvious but don’t limit the players to the choices you present. Thus the title of this post limit your player’s (presented) options but not your players (actual options). When they want to expand, when they’re ready to expand, help them do so. In essence there are rails that the players can run on but when they see something they want that’s not on those rails, let them jump off and go get it.
The Apple Strategy
Apple Computer has an interesting strategy with their products. They know that customers think they like choice but in truth they want to know they’re getting a good choice. The best way to make sure of this is to give them only a few choices. Each one is almost the same as the last but cost more and more as you go up the chain. Each step offers a little more functionality and the highest step has a prestige bonus (the white one) so everyone knows you picked the highest step.
This is an excellent model for beginning players. Give them a few options, clearly delineates them as to cost and give the most costly one a prestige bonus (something shiny that proves they did it the hard way). Two options may be a little restrictive but three is usually a good number. Any more than that and the choices start to overwhelm the players. A GM has an advantage that Apple doesn’t. Once a player starts asking for a different choice, he can usually make it available in short order.
The Problem of Mixing
One problem that is perplexing is how to handle a new player who can only handle limited options who is playing with advanced players who are already making goals for themselves. This is a hidden danger because this is exactly the situation where I have seen new players bow out. They don’t understand the complex thinking of the advanced players and feel they never will. The experienced player can actually poison the new player’s desire to play.
More and More
Each time I sit down to write about this, I keep coming up with more that needs to be explained or discussed. I’ll have to let this topic spill into next week.
Anything click with this idea? Anything not work in your experience? let me know in the comments.
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