Revisiting Trophy Gold

 

So I was really happy with Trophy Gold after the first campaign. I had run what I imagined to be the perfect OSR game: lots of puzzles, scary monsters, and so much blood. I. Was. Happy.

I think Will may still be sitting in a corner, gibbering in incoherent ramblings of triggerdom.

When I asked my players what was wrong (because the rest of them were in shock as well) it was explained to me that they had no idea that was coming. These were storygamers: characters needed to matter, a narrative needed to be forming in the fiction, and so on. Kinda hard to form an acceptable narrative when everyone's dying left and right! I reveled in my blood and told them that Trophy Gold was not for them.

Alas, I am not a complete asshole. 

Cause I wanted to play again. And I knew that in order to do that I would need players. And those players were not going to try the game again. I mean, I could find another group, but I wanted to see if maybe I'd missed something. A negative reaction that strong means I may have done something wrong, regardless of how much I enjoyed it. So I had to ask the question, if only to satisfy my at-times crippling self-doubt.

And before someone says it, yes there are objective markers on whether or not you're running a game as was intended. Whether or not you enjoy how you're doing things is, as always, a subjective thing. I am making no claim as to whether or not "YOU'RE BAD' for sticking with the intent of a design or not. I am claiming that I find that objective reality important to my enjoyment, however. The sanity of that importance may be argued. But I have what I have. And so I decided to look it up. Turns out that The Gauntlet folks have released a number of podcasts on the subject. I've listened to almost all of them.

Dear God I did it all wrong.

First off, Trophy Gold is not an OSR game in the sense that many of those games are. Lethality is supposed to be rare. The game does not entirely hinge upon gold gotten, although the more gold you get the faster your character advances and heals. Trophy Gold is an OSR game because of the narrative built outside the game, as OSR games are mostly the story of the players braving the dungeon, with characters as avatars. There are explicitly two stories being told in Trophy Gold: the story of the characters making their way through this awful awful place they found, and the players trying to screw each other in the darkest and (sometimes) most hilarious ways they can imagine. Two thirds of the rolls have you polling the group, asking either "what could go wrong" or "what do you want to go wrong". 

Yes, there is a difference. 

Almost every time a roll comes up you're polling the group for bad stuff. This has the effect of letting the players be a lot more okay with bad stuff happening, as it's their ideas being selected from, almost all the time. Even if your bad idea isn't selected by the GM or another player, be patient; you can learn your group and sharpen your bad idea pitches. There's a level of collaborativeness that I've not really seen since Tenra Bansho Zero... in a system with half the crunch. Which means all you're focusing on is this delicious back and forth. It's a multiple-way game of chicken as everyone goads each other into a game of mutually assured destruction.

It's amazing.

And I never would have done it if my players didn't have the guts to tell me "No, we didn't like that." Turns out that listening and re-examining pays off! Who knew?