29. Devil’s Bargain (2) - Consequences and Timing
“Four people are sitting around a table, talking about baseball — whatever you like.”
So begins one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most enduring lessons in film-making: The Bomb Under The Table. The story is short, and worth watching for yourself, but here’s the text:
“Four people are sitting around a table, talking about baseball or whatever you’d like. Five minutes of it. Very dull. Suddenly a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? Ten seconds of shock. Now, take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table and will go off in five minutes. Well, the whole emotion of the audience is totally different, because you’ve given them that information. [...] Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital.”
Hitchcock’s premise, as applied to roleplaying games, is that for a player to adequately feel tension under the effects of a roll, they must know what the stakes are. “Because” as he says, “you’ve given them that information.” And it need not be a trigger that’s pulled, it need only be threatening. The second half of Hitchcock’s advice is to offer the moment of release, the consequence either comes to bear (in a new and exciting way) or it doesn’t (in, also, a new and exciting way). This is the nature of consequences within the Action Roll: Players are handling tension, hoping to roll the Hard 6. That is why I disagree with how I see Harper’s advice around telegraphing and being clear with risk being interpreted and applied, and why I wish the game was clearer about the role of the Devil’s Bargain when compared to other consequences.
To speak to interpretation first, Harper is clear in their statements that risks should be telegraphed — “When the action is underway, show them a threat that’s about to hit, then ask them what they do. Then it’s easy to know what the consequences are. […] If you strongly imply the consequences before the action roll, though, then it’s obvious what the consequences should be (she shoots you, your cover is blown, he escapes, you alert a sentry)—they follow directly from the fiction as established.” (Blades, GM Actions, p191) I think a critical nuance here is that GM poses risk, but not consequences before the roll is made. The GM says “His eyes go wide when you walk in and he curses as he leaps out of his seat and runs full tilt for the back door. What do you do?” (p191, again) but doesn’t say specifically that the risk is that they’ll get away. Instead the GM paints with the fiction.
This is a tool I learned to love while playtesting 2023 Australian Independent Roleplaying Game of the Year Decaying Orbit, leaving details unsaid. Introducing subtext. Of course the implication is that he’s running for the back door to get away, you chase, get that 1-3 result and suddenly the GM shows that, twist, he wasn’t running that way to escape you, rather he was running that way to get you in an alleyway, oh, and he left his shotgun against the wall. Or maybe he was running that way, when players succeed is when it’s best to resolve consequences as expected. That represents the last-minute throwing of the bomb out the window, you knew the consequence but narrowly avoided it. In this case, the goal of each action roll is to function as a little roller-coaster of narrative — a mini plot arc with rising and falling tension. This is, I think, clearly supported by text, but rarely understood. Mostly I see GMs being explicit (“Okay, that’s risky” says the hypothetical GM who is definitely not me before I reread and understood these passages. “It’s risky and the stakes are harm, I reckon.”[1])
[1] I can’t express how much I did this playing Band of Blades. That game, for some reason, made me want to put words to everything on screen. “Risky standard, we’ll see if the Banner falls!” Instead I should be telegraphing the fiction “You look over to see Squire Montblanc holding the Legion Banner in one hand, and his pistol in the other. He fires once, discards it, and draws his second. The werebat barely flinches from the first shot, and he’s only got one more in hand. What do you do?!” Leaving it open helps, especially if 1-3, 4/5, and 6 stakes all want to feel different. The goal of position and effect is to set parameters, not stakes.
Devil’s Bargains do not interact with the bomb and the table. Devil’s Bargains do not build suspense. Devil’s Bargains are not a pacing tool. So…why are they there?
I think this is the design equivalent of teaching a bad habit, but for a good reason. We can imagine a “habit” in play is a muscle memory, a heuristic, a thing that we subconsciously do as players. By offering resistance, we “teach” players to avoid, deny, and defer consequences. But because Devil’s Bargains are usually non-immediate (ie non-tense, in the Hitchcockian sense), players can feel good about accepting them. Firstly, they’re taken on the player’s terms, secondly they’re taken for less pressing or less consequential effects. As players get comfortable with the idea of taking consequences, it becomes less and less of a race to avoid them by consuming stress, and becomes a behaviour that players have performed and normalised. It’s like a game design version of the polite mugging street magic trick (Polite Mugging Game Design. There. I’ve written it down. Now you have to cite me and this stupid blog when we inevitably talk about this in the future. Eat it, academia).
This is where I think Object-Oriented Design can suck a total design-dick. If we want to use things that look really close, we tend to use the same Object Class to define them. For example, Consequences. But a Devil’s Bargain Consequence is not called on in the same way as the Action Roll Consequence, and does not have the same interactions with other Classes (ie Resistance). We have to be very careful about how we present similar-but-different ideas. Devil’s Bargains may be consequences but they aren’t Consequences, and they’re not going off beneath the table.
