Ye Olde Staging Point

The adventure is a really great idea, and cleverly put together. I'm not surprised it provoked enjoyment and enthusiasm.

However, one thing I'm noticing about it is that the player's choice seems to be a little too easy, to the point where there's only one "right" choice. At that point is it a choice at all? The adventure itself states that the punishment is probably too "harsh." The adventure assumes that the players will destroy the first wight, making it a reasonable assumption that they are capable of destroying the second wight, so that no human sacrifice is really necessary -- hence, the players aren't actually making a sacrifice for the sake of a guilty person, but are simply using their greater skill and power appropriately.

This would change if they suffered some real, permanent losses battling the first wight, and could conclude that they would suffer more real, permanent losses to battle the second one -- especially if they had a real reason to believe they might not make it out alive.

But there's still the question of whether any other choice is really allowed. What if they let him die, "justly"? Is that acceptable, or will the players need to be encouraged/coaxed into making the "correct" choice?

Or what about really unusual choices like saving the man at the expense of the town (i.e. helping him to escape to another town) -- sacrificing the many for the sake of the few?

Oh, and just a point of logical consistency -- is there any reason they couldn't just leave the darn tiara outside the city gates and let the Wight go get it? :)

Just thinking Narrativistically about this. :) Theoretically, any of these outcomes might provide some meat for a discussion about the nature of sacrifice and justice... Whether the players "did the right thing" or not. But it seems that in the scenario as it stands there are no plans for the players to do anything but the one thing.

Thanks for the great comments, Ed! I think you're on target with pretty much all of them.

Some of the comments you make boil down to the adventure being pretty admittedly heavy on the railroading--i.e. it lays out one course of action and expects/forces the PCs to follow it. I normally find that sort of thing anoying, but in this case I may have to just let it go, and hope that nobody bothers to question why they don't just leave the tiara outside the town walls (heh, believe it or not, that didn't occur to me as a course of action, and now that you point it out, I cannot come up with a single reason why that wouldn't work. I chalk it up to the infamous blindness that GMs have when it comes to guessing what alternate strategies PCs will use to overcome in-game challenges).

You do bring up one of the big problems that I hit while trying to think up a scenario with a "moral message"--namely, as you point out, the big Moral Choice is a pretty obvious one. Barring really good roleplaying, nobody is going to not help out Len (especially since before the adventure I delivered a monologue about the Virtuous Qualities of a Tolkien-esque Hero). How to give an in-game choice like that any kind of actual significance? And, as you point out, what do you do if for some reason the players make the wrong choice--that is, the one I didn't plan for? Do they get a Bzzzzzzt! Wrong answer, game over, see you next week?

I thought about making the Moral Choice a little tougher by having Len come off as a truly obnoxious character, but I'm guessing that most Noble Heroes will still Do the Right Thing without stopping much to think about it. And yeah, having the sentence be unfairly harsh kind of pushes the heroes in the direction of making the Right Choice in a cheap manner.

I like your suggestion to make the choice a costly one for the players. But I am at a loss as to what would be costly enough to actually make the PCs reconsider doing the Right Thing. If the PCs catch even the faintest sense that they are roleplaying a Gospel Analogy Moment, they'll quickly be tripping over each other to make the analogy complete by having their character be the one who suffers the cost. Since the players in this case are all Christians who are aware that there is supposed to be a Moral Message lurking somewhere in the adventure, I'm afraid they'll pick up on it right away and make the whole moral thing meaningless by making the Right Decision for the wrong reasons--in this case, out of a meta-gaming desire to "successfully complete" the adventure by making the "correct" but artificial choice.

I think I've strayed away from your points, for which I apologize. However, writing the adventure and thinking about the issues you raise has confirmed my feelings about running Gospel- or moral-analogy games. I don't know how you could possible pull one off without it being forced or artificial--and that might lead to an OK discussion afterwards, or might even jar somebody into looking at a Biblical ideal somewhat differently, but in the end it's just pretty superficial. I think I'd rather just run a normal, no-hidden-messages game and deal with whatever moral issues arise therein, without putting pressure on the players to "find the Gospel message" and then make sure their characters do the Right Thing.

But I don't think any church in town is going to let me run a game of Unknown Armies no matter how hard I extol its virtues :)

Thanks again for your comments.

That's a really good point about people "trying too hard to do the expected thing." I hadn't thought of that but the way you explain it it's an obvious issue.

I think you really could run scenarios that had big issues like these successfully, though. You just have to really make two legitimate choices. I bet if you thought about it for a while you could make it a legitimate choice to sacrifice Len, somehow, and think of some consequences of doing so which would be worth playing out. Even if you had in your mind that it would have been right to save him and wrong to let him go off and die, that doesn't mean that good meaty stories couldn't come from the wrong choice being made the first time, with interesting consequences. (Think of all the wrong choices in The Silver Chair, and even wrong choices like Frodo offering the ring to Galadriel -- that was an attempt to evade his duty, and could have had horrible consequences if Galadriel hadn't overcome the temptation.) You could frame that wrong choice such that it's pretty easy to justify and hard to avoid, and it could lead to some good stuff.

Not that there's anything wrong with just running games for pure entertainment, as a social occasion for possible evangelism. :) That's good too. Just throwing out other possibilities.

Of course, you can always do both -- game for fun but be interested in and aware of issues brought up during it, without raising them to a level of obviousness that you're going to get the "railroad effect."