Interlude: In defense of non-optimal choices
What, writing something other than an adventure review? Why the heck not? I'm not certain how often this will happen, but I've been thinking about choices in adventure games a lot recently, so I figured I'd put some of these thoughts down.
I've been running a few longer open table games at the present, and I've been noticing a common thing happening quite often, most recently in Wolves Upon the Coast-- a lot of players are hyper-focused on making The Right Decision and, unless they are nudged a bit, will spend an awful lot of time discussing and carefully considering how to get to The Right Decision rather than doing anything else in the session. In most of these cases, I've been able to gently push things along by asking questions like "what are you going to do at this moment?" in an attempt to nip extended theoretical speculation in the bud. But the past few days at work (when I should probably have been thinking about job stuff, but who does that) I've been trying to articulate why that kind of adventure game decision-making doesn't sit right with me. The thing I have settled on is that in this kind of story, the interesting things most often happen when the non-optimal choice is made, or when things go wrong due to unforeseen consequences of a decision.
Think about nearly any adventure story; an obvious example would be The Odyssey. This epic would have been pretty short and unmemorable if Ulysses made it back to Ithaca on the first attempt and never made any questionable decisions about how to deal with the various things his crew encountered. Beowulf would still have been a cool story if Grendel was defeated and Heorot was saved, but it's even cooler because as a consequence of Beowulf killing Grendel, Grendel's mother came and caused more havoc, which nobody saw coming. In The Fellowship of the Ring, a whole bunch of interesting storytelling happened because Gandalf didn't get to the Prancing Pony in time to meet the hobbits. The list goes on!
The point is, adventure games are about Adventure, which is defined as "an unusual, exciting, and possibly dangerous activity, such as a trip or experience, or the excitement produced by such an activity." There are elements of danger and the unknown baked into any adventure, and these things should remain. It undermines the very essence of adventure to carefully consider and plan out the most optimal choice; if you only pick the safest route and work extra hard to make sure that nothing goes wrong, all you are doing is avoiding adventure.
The events in my recent Wolves sessions that sparked all of this tended to center around two things: rations and money. Would the crew have sufficient rations to travel around and explore the islands? Would they have sufficient funds to pay the new recruits they hired to man the oars? While it is all well and good to be mindful of your resources and not just hand-wave everything away, it's also worth asking yourself: "what actually happens if we run out of something?" First let's look at rations in the context of my Wolves game. I'm borrowing a lot of procedures from Adam and Canyon's excellent fanzine, and they have some good advice in terms of using and gathering rations. In essence, if you run out of rations while exploring, it's not a huge deal right away. Over time, it will definitely start to be a major hindrance and eventually lead to death, but it's not immediate. You always have the option to live off the land by hunting, fishing, or foraging. And when you do these things, you create an opportunity to get a random encounter, which in the context of Wolves Upon the Coast means that you are highly likely to get some sort of interesting hook leading towards a nearby hex, thus creating a whole organic way to Get More Adventure! The same thing holds true with money, of course, and I think that this is the more traditional impetus for adventuring. There are so many opportunities for interesting stuff to happen if you run out of funds to pay your rowers when you're a long way from home-- will you get desperate and do something dangerous? Will you bargain with the men, perhaps offering greater rewards if they stick with you just a little longer? Will you reconsider that boring fetch-and-carry quest and go on a whole other tangent that gives you more chances for weird encounters and meeting new NPCs?
Truly, the best way to inject good content into your games is to make non-optimal choices. Just go with your gut and take a risk, and see what happens. This doesn't imply that your character is not competent at being an adventurer-- quite the opposite! You're a seasoned adventurist, and you don't need to agonize over small decisions to carefully weight the options and make a considered choice. The best parts of the game come when you least expect them.