Players must be empowered

by Alan De Smet

More GM tips

Role-playing games are about making choices. If players cannot make choices, or those choices seem meaningless, you aren't really role-playing. Players don't need to be all powerful, but their decisions need to be important. Even hopeless situations can be empowering for the right group of players, so long as they can choose what they die for.

The source of many empowerment problems a GM falling in love with his story, his plot, his scene, or his NPCs. Role-playing games are not a book, it is not enough to show the players neat things. Typical symptoms of players being stuck on the sidelines are "railroaded" games, invincible enemies, and any scene in which all the players can do is watch.

Avoid untouchable adversaries

Avoid pitting the PCs against an adversary that they can do nothing about. After the third or fourth time in which the player's actions have proved irrelevant against their enemy they will become frustrated. Challenge your players, but ensure that players feel that there is hope. Players don't need to be able to necessarily defeat their enemy, it may be enough to foil his plans. An enemy might be too powerful right now, but if there is a clear way to prepare to defeat the enemy in the future they will be satisfied.

Keep the players involved

Players should not watch climatic scenes. They should feel involved and essential (which is different than important). Players aren't tourists off to see wondrous things, they want to participate in wondrous things.

NPCs part of the party should not be supermen. Having NPCs in the group that are head and shoulders above the rest of the party is just frustrating to players. NPCs should generally should not be better than the players in any area the players are interested in. For example, if you have combat oriented PCs in your game, any NPC joining the group should not be as good at combat as the best PC. However, in areas the players aren't interested, it's fine for an NPC to shine, especially if he's much weaker than the PCs in the areas the players care about. For example, if no one in the party can track, having a highly skilled tracker join the party is fine.

Characters must make progress

The players must feel that they are making some sort of progress. Going for several sessions without feeling you've accomplished anything is draining and no fun. The progress doesn't need to be major, but it does need to be real and visible to the players. At the end of the session the players should be able to say "Thanks to that session, we're now this much closer." Don't constantly move the party's goal further and further away, that gives the players a sense that their accomplishments are meaningless. Players should feel that they are moving toward some sort of conclusion and that they are doing so because of their decisions.

It's important that the player's understand the progress they are making. For some players, slowly clearing out a dungeon can be enough. For others it won't be. A group of friends and I spent a real world year grinding through part of the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. We were clearing out the dungeon, but didn't really feel like we were making progress. We eventually gave up on the campaign.

The world must acknowledge the characters

The players need to see positive results from their characters actions, otherwise they feel powerless in the grand scheme of things. The players need to feel rewarded, but the rewards need not be experience, money, or new weapons. Players often find the non-tangible rewards more satisfying than simple money. Little details can really give the players a sense that they've changed the world. The character's exploits might be covered in the news, be it bardic song, newspaper, radio, television, or holovision. The characters might stumble across some children pretending to be the characters. Local people might offer the characters a hand, be it a warm meal if they're in the neighborhood or free drinks at the bar. A local community might chose to honor the characters, naming a street, building, or day after them. The characters might get an invitation to an exclusive party. Someone they respect might send them a letter congratulating them. A local noble might provide a letter of introduction.

Players need to see this sort of result with some frequency. Going without recognition can make a long adventure seem to stretch onward forever. If you decide to run longer games, remember to give the players opportunities for smaller successes in the middle. While tracking an ancient artifact, the characters might slay a monster threatening a town. Even something simple like a chance to randomly save someone from a mugging will do the job.

Minimize external plot elements

If player's cannot change anything about a given plot element it is pointless to your game and should be de-emphasized. Having the PCs witness but be unable to effectively interact with a major event (say, an evil summoning or a mighty battle) is frustrating. If you need such a scene, focus on the player's actions and on what they can do, not on the bigger picture over which they have no control. Make it clear as they enter into such a scene that they cannot impact the bigger picture and they should focus on smaller goals. Then you as the GM should focus on the player's exploits, delegating the big picture to background.

Don't force players into blind decisions

Don't force players to make decisions when they have no way of judging the possible results. These blind decisions are pointless. If the decision doesn't seem important the players will shrug and pick one randomly. The players won't feel empowered, they'll feel like they're doing grunt work. The most common case is picking a corridor in most D&D games. Most of the time the characters don't have enough information to judge which direction is best and will just pick one arbitrarily. Those players haven't been provided an interesting decision, their decision might as well be resolved by a die roll. (That said, it is possible to make an informed decision in some cases. The players might listen at a door to guess what is beyond, a rogue might scout ahead, magic might be invoked to divine the results of going down each passage.)

If the decision is important the players will spend hours arguing over entirely hypothetical risks and rewards. All of the analysis in the world won't make it a rational decision if you have no data. A cliche example is two doors. All that the players know is that behind one is certain death, behind the other great reward. It's a frustrating choice. A more realistic example is planning an attack against an a powerful opponent who has unknown defenses. If a Shadowrun or Cyberpunk group cannot get any research about a corporation they need to raid the only plan they can put together is to hope that things work out for the best.

Ultimately decisions need to be made with some level of understanding about the possible results. The information doesn't need to be perfect, but something needs to exist. The information doesn't even need to be easily acquired; finding enough information to make an educated decision may be a key part of the story.