Enemies make mistakes
Over the past few weeks I’ve been on vacation and otherwise engaged, including an evening where I played a table-top role-playing game with some friends. We’ve been playing D&D 5e for several months now and that’s a system where the longer you play the more the PCs11 Player Character; the protagonists, each played by a different player you control approach superheroic power. We’ve been mixing up the social, puzzle, and danger situations and this time was set up to be danger: the PCs were going to try to harvest some ichor from a nightmarish monster from an alternate dimension to give to an ally who needed it to make a magical item the PC’s need for an ongoing quest.
The monster I chose is one I first encountered when playing D&D 4e22 I associated 4e with only re-skinning earlier content so I assume it was introduced in 2e or 3.5e, the peak of D&D’s content introduction. It was a creature that could easily take out small armies of low-level characters, but after a few month of play the PCs in our game were more than a match for it in a straight fight; it probably wouldn’t have lasted more than 2 or 3 rounds of combat. However, they were asked by their magical crafter ally to leave it alive, which I though might slow them down; and it had a menu of abilities to teleport itself and the PCs and become invisible which I thought would make the fight more interesting. It was also being stalked in its own lair, giving it some home-turf advantage, and was not going to be surprised by their entrance.
Because I knew the monster was no match for the PCs, I decided to play it intelligently. I usually don’t do that (more on which anon), but collectively the PCs could take twice as much damage as it and dish out damage twice as fast as it, so it seemed like it would need to be clever to be an interesting challenge. Thus, as soon as one of the PCs separated himself from the others I had the monster grab that PC and teleport away, out of the other PC’s line of sight. The other PCs started trying to reach it, but it kept moving away and while doing so it rapidly brought the PC it had in its grasp quite close to death. It was easily outmatched by a party of 6, but easily outmatched any one of them alone.
Two rounds in I realized that if I kept playing it smart I’d end up killing a PC or two and having the monster escape while all the other PCs would feel helpless. Not a good way to have fun. So I switched tactics and started playing only seemingly-smart instead.
Over my 30+ years of running RPGs and various related experiences, I’ve found that players don’t like very clever antagonists. They’re excited by antagonists that have clever-looking plans and seem to be thinking one step ahead, but antagonists that actually out-think the players make them feel foolish and helpless and often result in frustration and claims of unfairness.
I first realized this as a teenager when reading Skip William’s book for AD&D 2e entitled Dungeon Master Option: High-Level Campaigns. In it was a suggestion about how to make a troll act in a more intelligent way so as to threaten even PCs who had enough power to squash a troll without exerting themselves. I tried that suggestion out, and added a bit more cleverness too. It worked, in that the trolls easily beat PCs far to strong to face one-on-one; bit it also failed, in that no one had fun.
After noticing that, I started looking for examples of clever antagonists in books and shows and so on. In doing so I realized that in virtually every hero and adventure story the protagonist out-smarts the antagonist. Even near-invulnerable superheroes are routinely depicted as out-smarting villains even if the villains are depicted as being super-humanly intelligent. And that leads to an interesting thought about intelligence
in such stories.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Swords of Mars, which I read around the same time as Dungeon Master Option: High-Level Campaigns, pits a genius, Gar Nal, against a soldier, John Carter. Carter is portrayed as without parallel with a sword and very athletic; he’s technically competent and able to maintain his high-tech equipment, but not a genius. Nal is portrayed as a world-class intellectual, designing and building synthetic brains and space craft and planning interplanetary explorations. But Nal is only a genius in big, impressive ways; he is easily fooled by Carter, runs his staff in foolish ways, and overlooks enough details that Carter can surprise and foil him repeatedly. Repeatedly because Burroughs uses these defeats to further paint Nal as a genius: Carter uses a loophole33 Loop from the Middle English for a hole in a wall
; reposed loophole
to distinguish it from loop from Celtic for a bend or fold
Nal didn’t know he’d left open, Nal performs a great feat of intelligence to close it, rinse and repeat.
That description, though worded based on one particular book, is a template you can likely apply to any other story with an intelligent antagonist that you think of. Almost every opus in Burroughs’ oeuvre follows the pattern of strong-and-healthy warrior outsmarting everyone around him. Almost every Marvel movie has the same pattern; even within most fight scenes the superheroes win by outsmarting, not outmighting, their weaker foes. The few sports books and shows I’ve had the patience to complete follow a similar pattern, with clever plays or clever psychological maneuvering leading to the win rather than skill or athletic ability.
A satisfying victory usually involves being cleverer, not being stronger.
When I tell a story (which is fundamentally what a GM44 Game Master, also called a narrator; the player who sets up the scenario and runs the antagonists, my preferred role for an RPG does), I’ve learned that it’s best to make the antagonists appear clever but make many suboptimal and even foolish decisions so that the protagonists can out-smart them. Part of appear clever
means hiding that I’m doing that, making the cleverness evident and the foolishness obscure. It’s more satisfying that way. And many other story tellers seem to have figured out the same thing.
But what’s the moral? Why are there so many stories about out-smarting and so few about our-forcing?
Perhaps we just like feeling clever; it’s just an ego stroke, nothing more.
Perhaps because we consume stories with our minds, not our bodies, there is more satisfaction in a story that wins with mind, not with body.
Perhaps it’s a reflection of the belief that goodness is smart and evil is self-destructive, short-sighted, or foolish.
Perhaps it’s an expression of story teller’s innate belief that if you don’t win intellectually you can’t actually win, that no amount of might can ever be on the winning side in the end without even more cleverness.
Perhaps it’s because cleverness requires explanation, the core component of a story, where might is hard to stretch into a full tale.
If only I were clever enough to know.