Showing posts with label Devo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Devo. Show all posts

Saturday, August 24, 2019

RPGaDay 2019: 24 Triumph

These guys were prophets.
Man, that’s such a weird word. Triumph. It’s weird because when I hear it, I bring two things immediately to mind: a famous card trick invented by Dai Vernon (and one of my favorite tricks to perform) and conversely, my least-favorite Devo song “Triumph of the Will” from the album Duty Now for the Future.  I know I’m supposed to think about overcoming adversity, but I don’t.

So, trying to bore down on what I am supposed to be talking about, I came to this conclusion: D&D games aren’t about winning. They are about triumphing over the forces of darkness.

Maybe not all the time, but certainly when it comes to those big, long, multi-level campaigns with a giant bad guy and massive conclusions.

“Win” is a decisive term. It sounds final. It implies that the game is over.

“Triumph,” on the other hand, is still positive, but it’s more open-ended. It implies that the battle is over, but not the war. The forces of darkness have been beaten back, but only just. I usually envision the word "momentarily" in front of triumph.

In a campaign world with consequences that influence and drive games forward, having  your players triumph instead of win is essential if you want to maintain that verisimilitude of authenticity. The bad guys are banished, but never really destroyed. You can kill villains, as long as you want them to stay dead. The major forces that move the world always come back.

This is probably my personal life bleeding over right now. Sorry about that.

In my home-brew world, I like to have the events at the end of a major campaign spiral out and affect everything around, and then push those new developments forward ten, twenty, thirty years and see what it all looks like after that. The next game will be set in that approximate time period, as the new characters will be dealing with the consequences of the last set of characters. They triumphed, but the battle continues down the line.

Maybe we never really win in real life. It’s why we need games and movies and TV to win for us; we need something to make sense. 

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