One of the big discussions the other designers and I have had concerns guns and death. Both play a prominent part in Westerns but potentially create distinct problems in freeforms.

Background: Experience with Vampires

Seven or eight years ago I played in a live game of Vampire: The Masquerade. This was about the time that the Mind's Eye Theatre boxed set came out (complete with false teeth and fake blood), but the organizers weren't bothering with the rules of this set; they had some other rules figured out. Unfortunately, the organizers' ideas were very strange. These were the sort of live action gamers who found "realism" or "authenticity" more important than having a good time, and this had several effects on the game. Some were trivial. Some were not.

For example, the other players and I were told that if we wanted to smoke or drink beer, we'd have to spend some of our character points to obtain a special ability to smoke and drink beer. (Normal White Wolf vampires don't smoke, eat or drink. Or so I'm told.) As the venue was an alternative nightclub in Bradford, it was obvious that smoking and drinking beer was going to be an important part of the experience. That meant that everyone would have to spend five character points on this particular ability-this effectively further meant that everyone had five fewer points to spend. That just made the ability meaningless. (And it turned out to be impossible to police, anyway, so what was the point?)

And while I'm sure it's admirable to want to play Vampire while it's dark, what do you do in the summer when it doesn't get dark until after 10 p.m.? Some people have to get up early and work for a living. How about we just pretend it's dark? It's not like we're really vampires.

Further, I couldn't believe their policy on guns.

Guns

The Vampire organizers' policy on guns was:

"If you want to use a gun, you must have a blank-firing replica. A toy cap gun isn't good enough."

Yes, that's right. These people were advocating running around with blank-firing replicas. Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they thought the guns would only be used inside (ignoring, for the sake of argument, the serious risk to your hearing that firing a blank-firing gun indoors can pose).

Hardy's First Law

But the organizers were experienced live action gamers-they really should have remembered Hardy's First Law of live action gaming: "A gamer's intelligence halves the moment he puts on a costume. And it halves again as soon as he picks up a weapon." (Actually, I'm not sure who first said it, but I first heard it from Lynne Hardy, so it'll always be Hardy's First Law to me.)

But the organizers didn't remember. They had a stupid rule about replica firearms instead.

And so the game started. The game itself was probably pretty lousy-I don't know, I just chatted with people and had fun. There was some kind of plot, but I don't remember what it was. I do remember that the game spilled out onto the streets of Bradford. I further remember getting into a taxi and traveling to someone's house to watch an interrogation. (I also remember that there were several sessions of this, but this was some years ago and my memory is hazy and I can't remember what happened and where.)

I think my most vivid memory is of finding a police van outside the club and an officer of the law talking to one of the organizers. I found out later that there had been five reported shootings in Bradford that night. (Hardy's First Law, indeed!) The Armed Response Squad had been called out and was parked around the corner.

"Your guns fire blanks," the officer said. "Ours don't."

The organizers were lucky to get away with a warning. They were just as lucky that nobody was seriously injured. The game collapsed in a heap of apathy shortly after that-probably for the best.

The Armed Response Squad is a big deal over here in the UK. Our police are not routinely armed. I can't remember the last time I saw a real gun over here. But the experience has made me wary of using any kind of prop gun in a freeform. Guns in freeforms are often used in a threatening manner, and even toy guns can look quite realistic from a distance. As a member of the public is likely to see the guns only from a distance, he may not realize that everything is just a game. So guns are a potential problem.

And yet guns are such an integral part of the Western genre that it would be a shame to do without them. We have several options:

1. Fingers and thumbs. Our policy could be: "If you want to fire a gun, use your finger and thumb (like you used to do when you were little)." This would undoubtedly be the easiest option to exercise and worked perfectly well for Café Casablanca, but this is a Western we're writing and we're under pressure to do something a little more exciting.
2. Cardboard cut-outs. We could print up some guns on some heavy card stock and the players could cut them out. The advantage is that the guns would be approximately the right size, and nobody would mistake them for real weapons. Unfortunately, cardboard is a bit flimsy-we would probably need several replacements for each player.
3. Water pistols, rubber band guns, and the like. I can't remember who suggested water pistols, but I can just imagine our freeform degenerating into a big water fight. Therefore, this is not actually an option.
4. Toy guns. We could provide plastic toy guns for the players to use-hopefully these wouldn't look too realistic. However, it would take only one thoughtless individual and an unfortunate incident to bring us perilously close to my Vampire horror story. I'm not sure I want to take that risk. On the other hand, everyone should be in full Western costume, so having a few guns around shouldn't look so odd. (Comparatively speaking, anyway.) If we went for the toy guns, we would need to decide whether to supply the guns ourselves or expect players to supply their own. If we supplied them, we would have control-but at added expense to us. If we let the players supply their own guns then we would have to explain what we were (and were not) permitting, and would have to physically examine all of the guns.

Of these options, my personal favorite depends on what day of the week it is. The finger and thumb method would be simple, easy, and completely safe. And yet, I'm occasionally a fan of the toy pistol option. However, whatever happens, blank-firing replicas will not be permitted in Tombstone.

Killing Characters

Of course, if you give guns to your players, they will expect to use them. Hell, they'll want to use them. If they're like most gamers, they'll be itching to blast away at the first thing that moves. And that means that characters will be shot-and killed. After all, what's the point of giving players guns if you don't let them kill anyone? How thrilling will the shootouts be if you can't die? People need to be threatened in a game with guns-they need to be threatened with character death. And if nothing else, they need to die in a Western game. It's part of the genre.

Which brings me to another problem: character death.

Character Death

Character death causes a number of problems for players and directors-and writers. For everyone.

For a start, the threat of losing one's character can have quite an effect on some players. For example, if someone is playing a desperado with a price on his head and every bounty hunter is gunning for him, don't be too surprised if he never ventures from the safety of his secret hideout. That's unlikely to be much fun for him or for anyone else, but it's probably more fun than being killed. At least he's alive. At least he still has the character he started the game with, the one he did the research and rented a costume for. For some players, that's important.

Roleplaying games don't normally have "winners" and "losers". It's always been one of the great selling points about roleplaying-it's not supposed to be competitive. Although freeforms are technically roleplaying games, they are unusual because they do provide a measure of success-goals. The more goals you as a player achieve in a freeform, the more likely you are to regard yourself as successful-i.e., as having "won". You don't tend to be given the objective, "Stay alive until the end of the game", but that's mainly because it's implicit. Very rarely does anyone play a character deliberately to kill him-and even then, the character had to have been written that way.

So if a player is even slightly competitive, chances are that if her character dies, she will consider that she "lost" that freeform. For some people, that's important. (I have certainly found that the games I've enjoyed the most are usually the ones where I've stayed alive and achieved lots of goals-but I know I'm competitive.)

Even if a player doesn't mind the fact that her character has died, death does introduce a couple of problems. First, there may be plot threads that have suddenly become derailed because a character has died. Any important item or secret knowledge that the character has needs to get back into circulation. Or the character may be instrumental in arranging a big scene with other players (a wedding or a showdown). Without that character, the scene will fizzle and die-just creating a bunch of unhappy customers.

(Perhaps players with dead characters should be carefully debriefed before they are let loose with a new character. There's no excuse for not checking the in-game implications of losing a character. That's just bad game management.)

Then there's the replacement character. A player won't know her new character as well as her old one, and it's extremely unlikely that she will be as well integrated into the plots-after all, the standby character might not be used at all. Therefore, the writers cannot give her anything unique.

Then there's costuming-a player is not likely to be very pleased if he's dressed as Geronimo (his original character) when the only character left for him to play is General Custer.

And character death is not the only thing that causes these problems. If a player drops out unexpectedly (for whatever reason), the problems of plot derailment still apply.

Similarly, when a player achieves his goals ahead of schedule, there won't be anything keeping him in the game. He's effectively "died"-and it's time for a new character. (My own experience is that for even a competitive player who likes to achieve all of his goals before the end of the game, it is unsatisfying not to finish the game with the character he started with.)

As far as Tombstone goes, we have all these problems to consider. Several of us writers have had bad experiences with our characters being killed off or characters important to our plots leaving the game or with players dropping out. We are therefore eager to avoid these problems wherever we can.

I've mentioned only the negative aspects of character death here. There are benefits-going out in a blaze of glory can be wonderful. Replacement characters can breathe a spark of life into some plots (and you may want to stagger the arrival of some characters, anyway). But thanks to our personal experiences, we generally regard character death as a Bad Thing.

And yet we have guns in our Western game.

No Death 'til Sunday

So how do we reconcile the fact that we have lots of guns, and players keen to use them, with the fact that no player actually wants his character to die? How is the game to work?

In movies, the important characters rarely die before the climax. Until then, various minor characters might have been blown away in a variety of gunfights, but the lead villain (or, occasionally, the hero) doesn't die until the last reel. So that leads to our first rule-no deaths until Sunday. The plan is to run the game over a weekend, starting on Friday and wrapping at lunchtime on Sunday. And if we prohibit character deaths until Sunday, we should be able to keep everyone happy. Even we difficult-to-please types don't mind going out in a blaze of glory in the final reel.

Café Casablanca had a similar rule, but it also enabled particularly evil characters to kill other characters earlier in the game. (I personally think the game would have been better without the grant of these particular abilities.) Well, we're not permitting them. But if we are to maintain the action on Friday and Saturday, how are we to go about doing it?

We're expecting that gunfights will still take place before Sunday, but the losing gunfighters will merely be wounded. (There may be some other consequence as well-such as having to give up an item or losing an ability; we haven't finalized the details yet.) The losing gunfighters will then have to find some way of healing, but they won't be dead.

Our second trick is to use something I first discovered playing Arabian Nights. Freeforms don't really have non-player characters. Unlike in other live action games, which often have players who "monster" for the paying customers, the cast of a freeform is usually all you need. Everyone is a player character and all are created equal. Arabian Nights, however, introduced me to the concept of "bit parts" and the idea that if you were bored, or stuck, or just fancied a change, you could go to one of the directors and ask for a small character to play for a while. Such a character might be, say, a bounty hunter out to collect the reward on Billy the Kid's head. Of course, having a bit part, he won't be expected to do anything except demonstrate how good Billy's gunfighting skills are.

Bit parts are fun. They are often rather off-the-wall (one bit part in Arabian Nights had me playing an oyster!), and playing them is a refreshing change of pace. And, of course, the minor characters who make up bit parts can die well before the final reel. But that's not the only use for bit parts; other roles include clueless poker opponents, drunken miners, inept rustlers, and so on.

The only problem that occurs with bit parts is that sometimes a character wants to speak to the "main" character of another player who is currently having fun with a bit part. However, as bit parts usually last for no more than about a half hour, I've not found that to be a big problem.

A third trick for dealing with a dead character would be to have the character avenged by his brother or sister (played by the player of the dead character). While that may work for a couple of characters, it's unlikely to work for all sixty. I don't think we're taking that route, but it's still an option-we haven't finished the game yet.

Of course, we still have to overcome the problem of characters leaving because they've accomplished all of their objectives. We've got two ways around that-the first is to provide so many plots that they'll be struggling to do everything before Sunday. Second, anyone who leaves the game early will be killed by Indians in the pass. It's a pathetic, unmourned death-and we're going to be upfront about it and put it in the rules. We want the characters to stick around so that they can face their enemies in a climactic showdown, and we're prepared to play dirty to achieve that end.

We're also going to tell the players about the no-deaths-until-Sunday rule. We'll be upfront about it, and we'll explain why and tell people about the bit parts. I've found that freeformers are usually a very reasonable and civil group of people. As long as you explain your reasoning for something, they'll be more than happy to play along.

Conclusion

So that's our writing philosophy regarding guns and death for Once Upon A Time In Tombstone. We've got guns-lots of them, but in keeping with all those Western movies, we're not letting anyone important die before the end. Which is surely as it should be.

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Article by Steve Hatherley. Steve is an active freeformer in the UK and has written a number of freeforms. For more information about Once Upon A Time In Tombstone, please visit http://www.flar.demon.co.uk/freeform/tombstone.htm. Steve also sells freeform-style murder mystery games that can be downloaded at http://www.mysterygames.co.uk.
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