I haven't gone on at great length about abstract gaming ideas in quite awhile.....

So here goes.

Let’s compare a role playing game to someone telling a story.  When someone is telling a story, they are likely in complete control of the narrative.  They talk, others listen. They dictate what happens in the story.  The audience are just passive observers who have no control at all on what happens or the outcome.  The narrator has complete control over the story and it’s characters.

You could also consider a shared story.  One person might be the primary narrator, and through some means the audience can have some impact on the story itself.  It could be as simple as a binary yay/nay, up/down, and the narrator tunes the story as he or she goes, influenced to some degree by the audience who is now interacting.  The narrator still has complete or near complete control, but has agreed to give the audience some voice in the story.

A more shared story might go round robin, where one person tells some story, and then the next person continues telling the same story.  In this case, each person who is at that moment telling the story is in complete control.  Thus participants have complete control over the story when it is their turn, and no, or little, control when it is someone elses turn.

In a typical D&D style RPG, the GM/Narrator is assumed to have complete control over the story.  The players don’t dictate what happens, the GM does all of that - but the GM might give players a chance to influence the story in small ways, no directly on the story but instead indirectly through their characters.  Thus you find that the players can perform specific actions in the hope of having some limited control over the story.  Their interface to the story is through their characters.

In other, more ‘indie’ style games, you might find an arrangement where the GM is considered to be in primary control of the story, but the players are also given some narrative ability.  The difference in this and the previous D&D example is that in D&D, the players can try to convince someone of something, or to perform some physical feat, or to kill a monster, or save a friend, but that’s the limit of their interaction.  In this indie example, they might still control a character in the story, but they might have the opportunity to have more narrative control - to perhaps change the story itself in some mechanically appropriate way.  The electronic game Scribblenauts comes to mind.  

GM: “Men in armor with swords burst into the room. They seem to be searching for something, or someone…”

Player, exercising narrative control: “They bear the colors and sigil of Duke Harald, and the man leading them is my father!.”

I theorize that a story that lets multiple participants have the control to introduce elements or in some fashion to narrate will be a better story.  When we play, we all aspire to be like an author in some fashion.  But unlike writing, role playing is live - you don’t have the luxury of an editor or rewrites.

Players can gain some level of narrative control - or influence perhaps - when they say to the GM “Hey, I’d like to do so and so in the game.” And the GM says sure, and later incorporates some element of that into the game.  This is just a slightly different way of giving the player some control.

Some systems specifically give the players means to control the story, or rather to move it in directions that they think are interesting.  There are a few systems that allow a player to say “I know that person” when an NPC is introduced.  Thus they can make the story more interesting, and feel/be more involved with the story.  

I experimented with this in a Shadow of Yesterday game.  The party was searching for someone, and had a few clues, and then wanted to go to dice to determine whether they found the person.  Dice rolls are commonly seen as having a binary outcome.  Did you find the person, yes or no.  The players want to find the person, and the GM wants the players to find the person too, but the GM wants they players to have to work for it.  A dice roll is commonly seen as that work.  But what if they dice are unkind, and they say no?  Instead of simply deciding yes or no, let the dice be an arbiter of what’s going on - you could say that a failure results in a twist.  “Did we find uncle Bob?”  If the results are a success, then great - there he is.  Story continues.  If the result is a failure, it does no good for them not to find uncle Bob. The whole story revolves around him, or he’s the next step in the story.  But instead throw in a twist.  Yes, you found uncle Bob, but he’s about to be killed by evil aunt Wilma, or his house is burning down when you pull up in front of it, or he’s just plain dead.  At best, it’s a conflict/encounter that may be interesting, but again has the potential to be show-stopping - what if the party gets TPK’d or the fight doesn’t go as planned?  If you go for heavy twists (bob is dead), you can’t just drop that on your players without a plan for them.  There needs to be a lead - can he be resurrected? Can the information that they needed from him be found some other way?  A twist should be interesting and exciting, rather than frustrating and disappointing.

An interesting story is generally going to be one in which some sort of adversity was overcome.  No one wants to hear a story about how you went to the grocery store - unless you were mugged upon your arrival.  A good story is always going to have at least one conflict.  Two sides who want two different things.  It may not involve violence or war, but it could instead involve some sort of negotiation or compromise.

If you think of stories in terms of RPGs, you can imagine the dice rolling behind any blocking or conflict scene.  Is that door locked, can the party get through it?  Can the party escape from their pursuers?  Can the Duke be convinced to support the claim?  Will the owlbear kill the party?  Can the group find its way through the labyrinth?  Each of these are questions that have the potential for more than one answer.  The door is locked or barred and the party must find another route. What happens when the pursuers catch up to the party?  And so on.

RPGs are still basically a game about storytelling.  The GM is telling a story and the players are helping.  Stories require details.  Details make a story come alive.  Details make a story interesting.  They introduce new elements or possibilities.

Player input and dice rolls are commonly going to be informational or factual.  Informational might be whether they spot a secret door, or pending ambush, or interesting clue.  Factual is whether they were able to succeed or fail at some task. Climbing a wall, riding a horse, killing an orc, convincing a shopkeeper.  There is some logic that insists that informational dice rolling be dispensed with.  

There’s another facet here - and that’s random twists.  Much like the random encounter chart.  Consider that the party is traveling through a dark and sinister looking forest.  A player asks “Do I hear anything, or notice anything suspicious?”  The GM has not intended to drop an encounter here, and can simply say “no”, and move on.  Or the GM can have them roll a dice, the dice roll determines whether there IS in fact something to be encountered.  Random twists can be fun, but they can also distract when there is a story being told.  Some games could be very nearly one random twist after another - but this will result in a disjointed story.

So, what kind of control do the players want?  How do they want to interact with the story?  Do they simply want to be told what’s happening, and try to push buttons to influence the story?  Or do they want more control, and to be able to modify the story in significant ways.

When players create characters, they are making decisions about the kind of game that they want to play, and how they want to play it (and how they want to interact with the world around them, and the game before them).

Most popular RPGs, no matter the genre, boil down to the same effective level of control for the players.  They are provided with opportunities to tweak the story in small ways by the mechanics and by the GM.

Consider that there are already many elements of decision making done by the GM via fiat.  Is there a car on the street? asks a player.  Is the castle gate open?  Do the orcs notice us?  Is the Baroness mad?  All of these could be determined by GM fiat, or a random (or semi-random) dice roll, or even by player input.  “Say yes or roll dice” is a line from Dogs in the Vineyard.  That game encourages a GM to give the players what they want in the story, and if the GM is unsure of the outcome, to go to dice and let the game’s mechanics sort out the answer.

Those of us who are familiar with RPGs oftentimes have learned how to play “correctly”, or the way that we are accustomed to.  People who are new to the game will be interested in exploring how much control they have and what they can accomplish.  

What type of story or game is the GM going for though?  If they are trying to tell a very specific story, then giving the players more control can be problematic for them.  If the Lord of the Rings were taking place in an RPG environment, and the GM had already planned out much of the story, letting the players have more control could derail the story.  The GM wants it to be about the difficult journey to Mordor, fraught with difficulties, and the fate of the Ring and the protagonists.  Player control could send the story spinning off in some other direction though.

The back and forth of player input and GM narration can be configured in a variety of ways.  Consider the question of “How will the party get to Mordor?”  The party can likely choose a variety of paths to get to their destination.  Each choice may result in descriptive and narrative differences, and in conflicts or further decisions.  In an RPG environment, this can be approached either with the “all roads lead to rome” philosophy in which the story still progresses in much the same way.  A better example is perhaps a party in a cave system.  They arrive at a fork in the tunnel and can choose to go left or right.  In some games, the GM may have prepared for each choice, having descriptions and encounters and such ready for either choice.  This requires more work certainly, and leaves the possibility of some of that work going unused.  Another approach is for the GM to let the players make their choice, and to run descriptions and encounters much the same either way.  The hazard here is if somehow both choices are invoked.  “Well we chose the left path, but lets go back and do the right path instead.”   This forces the GM either to make sometimes arbitrary and meta-seeming decisions: “Rocks fall and block your way back.”, or to come up with something for the other choice.  

A common pitfall (or feature, depending on your perspective) for a new GM is giving the players a choice, and having designed their game in such a way that the players are required to make a certain decision.  If the players make a different decision, or ignore the GM’s offer/bait, then the GM is potentially left struggling with something important that was missed.  “The party completely ignored the basement, where they were supposed to find the ghost!”  The simplest answer to this sort of problem is to simply present what you need/want the players to find.  You WANT them to find the ghost in the old house.  If for some reason the ghost needs to be in the basement, then the players need to be guided to the basement, or placed into the basement (the floor collapses, or what have you).  Having a McGuffin that the players need to find can result in a boring search, especially if the players realize that they are trapped in the scene - and even worse if the players don’t know what is required to leave the scene.  

The party finds itself in the old McLauren house.  The GM wants the players to find the ghost of old Ms. McLauren in the basement so that they can get a quest from her and put her to rest.  

That’s the story that the GM has prepared for the night.  The players are initially unaware of the ghost though.  One player says that they want to look for the way out.  The GM is naturally opposed, so has 3 choices.  Say yes, say no, or roll dice.  The GM in this scenario is unlikely to say yes or roll dice, since he wants the players to remain in the scene and find the ghost.  The players may feel frustrated, and try increasingly escalating methods of leaving the house, once they see that they are blocked.  

The doors are all stuck?  Fine, we’ll chop them down.  

Now the GM is forced to start using weird meta devices, or to simply tell the players that they can’t leave, which is still frustrating for many players.  Instead, give the players what they need!  Have the ghost pop right out, or give them a trail of breadcrumbs to the basement.  But remember that players may ignore breadcrumbs - either they fail to notice the trail, or they decide that they’re not interested, or they think that it is unimportant.

Monsters and Morality

I think I touched on this subject awhile back, during my D&D 4e game.

This has been on my mind again lately, and I've read or heard a few clever and/or insightful perspectives and thoughts on this subject.

In short, we're taking about killing stuff in your role playing game.

To give us a little more focus, lets talk solely about D&D/fantasy gaming.

Another blogger (if I were less lazy I'd link and credit, but I suck) recently had some similar musings, discussing how "intelligent monsters" in fantasy were largely an invention of Tolkien. Before him, most of the bad guys that Conan and others fought were human in nature. Whatever clever fellow it was that I'm talking about went on to describe that Conan typically did battle with whoever stood in his way and tried to stop him, and we did not really have evil races, the way we do in Tolkien with orcs and such.

Killing orcs and other baddies is a staple of D&D. And in its most simple (pure, if you will) form, there is no morality to it. It just never comes up, from players or the GM. Orcs and goblins and so forth live in dungeons, and its up the adventurers to go in and kill them and take all of their shit.

But as we all grow up, or invest a little more thought into our games, we wonder things like "What do we do with orcish children, or orcish prisoners?". Many a paladin has shuddered and writhed in angst and confusion, trying to justify killing defenseless children, despite his or her Lawful Good alignment.

Another clever fellow suggested that there's no such thing as orcish kids. Orcs, and all other manner of nasty monsters are not mundane biological creatures, the way that humans are. No, they are spawned from the energies produced from murders and rapes and torture hatred and all sorts of other nastiness. They aren't born and raised. They are formed from some nameless and invisible mist, and spring fully-formed and armed, ready to spread hate. In this scenario, there are no monstrous humanoid societies. Bands, maybe. This removes much of the morality from it, nipping it in the bud, so to say. They are, quite simply, evil. And I'm a big fan of this strategy.

You can certainly go far with morality plays in D&D, and have a great time with it, but I think that it depends on what kind of D&D game you and your players are after. Political and religious infighting and such is great territory for shades of gray.

But I think that killing monsters and taking their stuff is easier when you don't have to agonize over it.

'Course, there are whole games devoted to the morality of it all, like Vampire and Sorcerer and such. And I love those too.

(mmmm its nice to blog about gaming and get some of this stuff off of my chest!)

Players as Monsters

My apologies to anyone whose eyes glaze over when I get all gaming nerdy. But I gotta get this one off of my chest.

Ideally done with two different groups of players. One group: the adventurers, other group: the monsters.

The monster group gets a dungeon layout, randomly generated, or drawn, or whatever. They get to lay out what goes where (Which is what I did in my previous Old School game, printed off a randomly generated map, and then figured out what the rooms where for myself, so we had a temple, and dormitories, and garbage room, and kitchen, and so forth). And the monster players get an allowance of some type to setup traps and things. They have a finite monster population in the dungeon, yknow, 40 goblins or whatever. Once setup, the adventurers get a go at it. I'm imagining in a completely different session, not "head to head" really. Anyway, the players move through the dungeon as best they can, dealing with traps and monsters until they are killed off or forced to retreat to rest and rearm. Then, during that lull, the monster players may get an opportunity to reset traps, make plans for how to deal with additional assaults, etc. And we proceed either until one side kills off the other, or until some scoring system declares a victory for one side.

Yknow, because only in the most arbitrary and static dungeon do the monsters stand around quietly waiting on adventurers to knock on their door and kill them.

Initiative!

Initiative in combat is a weird thing in role playing games.

It's pretty much impossible to model the simultaneous and chaotic movement of a fight.

D&D and a ton of other games do it the easy way, by having people go around the table in some order, each taking their action.

This approach is super simple but always bugs me when I think about it. Granted, I'm not trying to completely accurately model a fight in my D&D game, but sometimes I do like trying to model the chaos and confusion of it.

Barring being able to actually have everyone do simultaneous movement and action, I have an idea or two about ways that I could do it, in a Labyrinth Lord game, for instance.

Using group initiative, when it is the party's turn, they go in order of Dexterity, highest to lowest. Even better if you've seated them around the table in that order. The player with the highest Dex either declares his movement and actions, or holds. The player with the next highest Dex then either declares her movement and action, or holds. A player that has held may then declare their movement and action after any other player has completed their declaration. Thus, if Frank has the highest dex, followed by Suzie, Joe, and Sam - Frank can hold, then Suzie goes ahead and declares her action, and Frank then jumps back in and declares his actions. Now, bear in mind that we're just declaring actions. No one has moved yet. That all happens in order of highest Dex again, just as outlined above, but declarations all happen before any moves or actions. And you can't deviate. You either do what you said you'd do, or do you don't.

D&D with your kids

Had this thought the other day after our gaming session.

Role playing games are great fun with children. Some folks shy away from elements like death and heavy violence. D&D is a game about fighting orcs, but it occurred to me that you could tweak it just a little, leave the dashing sword fights and magic battles in, and just cut away the death and maiming aspects.

Simple really: Rename Hit Points to "Bravery Points". This is how brave and courageous you and the bad guys are. When reduced to half, or Bloodied, call it "Shaken" or "Scared". And then when the points are all gone, they drop their sword and flee the battle.

Same is true for the players. If they're reduced to 0, they're going to try to run away. If you wanted to stick close to the mechanics, change the death and dying mechanics to a terrified and fleeing mechanic. Between 0 and negative "Scared" points, they are petrified with fear, and cannot move or attack or act at all, other than making a save. In regular D&D its the stabilizing save, to keep from dying. In Kids D&D, its to keep from running as fast as you can away from the fight. Your other party members can still "heal" you as normal, though everything becomes inspiring or making people brave, or what have you.

The descriptors for everything change. It becomes PG or G rated sword fights, with clashing blades and diving out of the way, and narrow misses.

Overly Complicated

So our most recent game of D&D had some difficulties, which I'll try to deconstruct here.

Since I know that at least two of my players read this, let me first make very clear that I'm not shifting blame to my players, or trying to be especially defensive. I'm just attempting to deconstruct things in the hope that I can work out what happened, why it happened, and how to avoid it or do it right in the future.

The problem, I believe, was that they players got frustrated with the lack of success or progress in their attempts to follow the plot. In a very broad sense, I think that I lost sight of what they were after, and I got way too tangential.

The players are following a thread in the game in which a family called the Lathiens seem to be somehow connected to a wicked cult of Orcus. The players have been trying to follow this down.

So far, they've sortof saved the neck of a fellow who was being hunted by the Lathiens, and they send that guy to Illyes. They discovered that a guy named Athurn was acting on the Lathiens behalf when he kidnapped a farm family. They ended up fighting and ultimately killing Athurn, and then did some sneaky stuff and intercepted a shipment of slaves destined for the Lathiens. They also ended up intercepting two orcs who were apparently being smuggled in to Drugen on the behalf of the Lathiens. However, this was where things got a little difficult. The players tried to sneak/beguile their way into the Lathien compound. As a DM, I had two choices, I could either start saying "yes", or roll dice. I went with rolling dice. Sometimes I like to keep things random, instead of just being the Ultimate Decider in stuff. In this case, the dice were not kind, and their ruse was foiled. The guards were onto them, the players fled, and the guards chased them. They fled from Drugen, and that was where we left off from the previous session.

In the future, I'm going to make a point to have some discussion at the end of a session if I don't have any idea what the players are going to get up to on the next session, so that I can prepare more. Last session, when they'd fled Drugen, we did not do any real discussion after, and so I didn't know what direction they were going to go. I don't feel that this has anything really to do with the problems of this past session, as I don't mind winging it, but I prefer to have some inkling as to which direction the players are headed.

After the session in which they'd fled Drugen, some of the players expressed some concern about having "broken" the adventure. I tried to explain that this is not the case, that they can't break it, cause its not written yet. I get the feeling sometimes that there is some conscious or unconscious reservations on the part of the players about not being on a tightly written adventure. And perhaps that ties in to some of the problems that we run into, or maybe I'm misreading my players. Put more plainly, when I tell my players "You are not on rails. THe story is not written yet. I'm responding to what you're doing.", they tell me something to the effect of "But its a giant sandbox and nothing is happening and we're bored!"

So, in my opinion, the problem was that I'd created plot that was too complicated, or too tangential, or my players are too easily frustrated, or all three.

I analogized that I'd blindfolded them, and placed them inside a home, and told them that there are three exits, and to find their way out. They felt along and found a door, went through it and were in a room, felt around and found another door, and when that door was not the exit, they threw up their hands in frustration. So either there were too many rooms in my analogy house, or they just gave up too quickly. Either way, like I said, I'm not trying to pass blame for a mediocre-at-best game session, instead just puzzle out what went wrong.

So lets assume that my players are blameless, and that I am responsible for fixing the problem. Going with that mindset, I need to simplify my plot and conspiracies, or at least make them more direct and less tangential.

In further detail, what happened previously was that after being chased out of Drugen, the players were still interested in the Orcus/Lathien thread, and figured that they had two routes to pursuing it, one being through the Lathiens, which they were at a loss on. They were completely unsure about how to get at the Lathiens. They figured that they could also pursue it via the orcs. The previous session had them picking up two orcs, that they later battled with in the streets of Drugen. They'd picked up the orcs via Velder (via Athurn, via the Lathiens). They decided to go back to Moore's Creek and talk to Velder and see if they could get onto the track of the orcs. I threw in a fight against some bugbears because, well, it IS D&D. They made it to Moore's Creek and tracked down Velder with only a small amount of trouble. As I recall, Velder was happy to give over some information, but not quite all. The party parted with some cash, and wanted to get in touch with the people that set Velder up with the orcs.

At this point, on a lark, I decided that Velder had some stuff that he needed doing, as opposed to simply wanting to get some cash for his info. Why? I like trying to create a world that lives and breathes around the players. I'm not interested in all of my NPCs simply being "quest givers", and entirely one dimensional. I like to try to give my major NPCs at least a couple of motivations and such. Anyway, I think that this was the beginning of our trouble.

Velder tells the group that one of his rivals in town, Palmer, is getting some gems from somewhere that he is using as payment and such. Velder wants to know where Palmer is getting the gems, and figures that the party isnt associated with his people, and could find out more than his own people can.

The party starts to track Palmer, trying to figure out an 'in'. Palmer goes to a number of warehouses and seems to conduct some business there. Also, Andrew's thief goes and breaks into Palmer's place to do some snooping. He finds a list of names with numbers beside them. One of the names is that of a mercenary company captain. This particular mercenary company guards the food stores for Moore's Creek. After a little more snooping, Andrew and Jason's characters ended up deciding to take jobs with the Merc company, guarding one of the warehouses, hoping to get an 'in'. The shift passed uneventfually, and shortly afterward, we wound down.

Now, without trying to show all my cards, my plan involved a link between Palmer, the gems, the food warehouses and its mercenary guards. The party was doing a fine job of trying to slowly pursue this, and all of their actions were moving them closer toward their goal. However, I think that my players felt that they were just floundering, and that I was letting them flounder.

So, I think that I need to have less convoluted plots. My players aren't stupid. They are however expecting more immediate rewards, I believe. I need to keep things to one or two levels of complication. If all of the cats in town are vanishing, it needs to be because a Nasty Monster is eating them, or it needs to be because a wizards apprentice is snatching them to give to his Nasty Monster, but it does not need to be... a wizards apprentice snatching them because his wizard master blackmails him into doing so because an orcish chief holds mystical power over the wizard and feeds the cats to his Nasty Monster. etc.

I also need to be more careful about getting too tangential. I need to remember that side quests are stand-alone, minor quests that are really pretty much optional. I need to keep my players goals in focus. Their goal in Moore's Creek was to find out how to get to the nasty orcses. Instead, I had them guarding food warehouses in the middle of the night to try to figure out where some gems are coming from. Simpler quests. Everything should work toward the goal, instead of going off in all different directions. I'll cite Lord of the Rings: everything in the books was done with focus on the main goal, that of returning the One Ring to Mount Doom.

So I need to find a balance. Crafting stories and adventures and plots that are memorable, and can hold a few surprises, but not ones that make my someone's brain hurt, or that start to read like the entire set of Robert Jordan books.

Approaches to Games

By "Games" I mean tabletop role playing games. But you assumed that, I bet.

It occurred to me that there are at least two ways that people approach a session or sessions of a role playing game.

There's "Beer and Pretzels", which needs very little explanation. Most games of D&D are this, heck - most role playing games are this.

"Serious Drama", Unlike the Beer and Pretzels approach, Serious Drama approaches role playing like people approach art or opera. This is "Serious Stuff". Not for kids or the faint of heart. In fact, one might not even want to refer to this as a "game". I'll pick on my own kind here when I say that folks in a Serious Drama game are likely to be elitist, aloof, a little snotty, and very particular about what goes on in the "game". LARPing and games like Vampire and some Indie RPGs can easily fall into this group.

I'm breaking these down because I noticed something recently on a gaming forum. Folks were discussing games in which "One person does something while everyone else twiddles their thumbs". I could be wrong on this, but I think that you'll find two things, that are sorta one, but I'll call them two.

One: You tend to only get this much in Serious Drama games. The rest of them let the players run around as a team or group, and often their goals are not so wildly divergent that they end up all over the map.

Two: The only games that this would be tolerated in anyway are Serious Drama games. Your average D&D player is going to get bored and start playing Yatzee after about 5 minutes of Watching Someone Else Do Stuff. And I don't blame them. Watching other people play games while you wait around is boring.

Let me pause for a second and note that I'm not trying to say that you have to involve everyone at the table, every second of the game. I feel compelled to throw in the word "FUN", all caps. The whole point of the first form, the Beer and Pretzels gaming, is fun. You guys could theoretically be playing a game of Talisman or watching Lord of the Rings, and having a great time too. While Serious Drama is a little different. Its not that you can't have fun, or that its not supposed to be fun, but its more serious than that. It means to be. It requires more investment, more time and focus, and those that favor that type of game would probably argue that the reward is greater.

I think people will tend to be in one of the two pools, and while you'll find some exceptions, I think that finding people who can hop between those two types of games are somewhat uncommon.

More on Stakes in TSOY

(As a followup to my previous post on our recent Shadow of Yesterday game)

For simplicity sake, here are some ways that stakes can work in tsoy:

win/lose: "If you win this dice roll, your action is a success. If you lose, its not and you fail." I generally think that these kind of stakes are boring and try to avoid them.

win/complicated win: "If you win the dice roll, your action goes off without a hitch. If you lose, you still did what you wanted to do, but it just got complicated - more guards just came in, or you realized that its a trap and they were waiting on you, or your sword/lockpick/gun/tools break during the process, etc" I love this kind of stakes, and usually try for this kind of thing. I think that it is important to note that these stakes are actually toying with the facts in the game, beyond "Am I successful or not?".


Its worth noting that Role Playing games are all about using dice to determine facts - Dungeons and Dragons does it - you roll your d20 to hit the orc, pick the lock, jump the wall, etc. Did you succeed at your task, or fail, you ask. The dice answer.

TSOY has taken this a step further, and that's one of the reasons that I love the game so much. Dice checks are usually very binary, the answer is either Yes or No. TSOY changes that, and lets you talk about what "yes" or "no" means.

I recently got to play with Inspectres, and read through Houses of the Blooded. Both systems use mechanics that turn over some narrative control of the game to the players. The players get to say "This happens." Which is totally cool.

I have always run TSOY in a somewhat traditional fashion. I, the GM, know what is happening in the story, and through the game I share that with the players. I have a cast of good guys and bad guys, I have a plot, I know where the McGuffin is, and what it does. The players are along for the ride, to interact with the story that I've created. The difference with this game was that I pitched that out the window. Kindof by accident. I mentioned in my previous post that we did some stakes like: "Win - Stephan walks right into you, Lose - he went into hiding somewhere that is going to be damn tough to reach." This makes me froth at the mouth a little because I let the players decide how the game goes. Right now, brewing in my head are stakes like "We arrive at the keep of our dear Uncle Bob, how's he doing these days? We'll roll our Socialize skill. On a win - he's doing just dandy and there's going to be a huge gala held here in just two days, woo! On a loss - he just died from an assassins dagger, like - two minutes ago. The keep is in an uproar!"

Narrative Control

One of the coolest things about the game of Shadowrun of Yesterday that we did, was that thanks to using Shadow of Yesterday rules, I had much more control over the narrative of the story.

Case in point: the Cyberzombies busted in. In a normal game of Shadowrun, one of two things would have happened. 1) The players manage to somehow take down the cyberzombies. 2) more likely, the players shoot back in an intense firefight, cause that's what players do, and the cyberzombies would have eaten them for lunch.

Two vastly different systems. In Shadowrun, which is pretty hard core "Sim", the rules are the boss. With TSOY, which gives alot of space to "Narrative", I had the ability to direct the story by deciding the stakes. And I guess that's the difference. With Shadowrun, I have no real control over the stakes/outcome. Its all down to the dice. I can influence it, by rolling more dice, but I can't control it. With TSOY, we talk about what happens, instead of letting the dice decide for us.

/game nerd

Questioning your players ethical choices

Questioning your players ethical choices is tricky business, and one should be very careful when doing so.

Obviously, its just a game, and everyone except the most pure and expert of theatrical role players will, to some extent, behave and respond accordingly.

D&D functions best with well defined black and white/good and evil. While groups will vary wildly, D&D doesn't feel geared for soul searching morality plays (go play Sorcerer, or Dogs in the Vineyard, or maybe even Vampire). Its all black and white - "That guy is evil. We're gonna kill him." And then, to some extent, the end justifies the means. If he's fleeing, riding away as fast as he can? Shoot him down.

Games like Sorcerer or Dogs in the Vineyard are geared toward being stories about morality, and as they put it "how far will you go?".

So, if I follow my own line of thought, I'd say that D&D should probably be kept simple. Its a game about heroic adventure against dastardly foes. Do D&D players want to have to deal with tough choices, or choices in which there is not a reasonable choice? I'd say no, for the most part. I'm not insulting D&D players by any means, but I think that people sit down to play D&D so that they can take part in what D&D does well. I'm not saying that they want mindless "old school" adventures in which the toughest choice that you'll face is whether to take the left passage or the right passage when trying to get to the minotaur at the bottom of the dungeon.

Note: I probably owe a short apology to anyone that read this. I started this post like 7 times, and erased it and started from scratch 6 times. I don't think I really have a point, or much of a conclusion. This is just me musing.

another note about the game

Sorry for the spam, feed reader people.

It also occurred to me that, when running TSOY games, I can liven up stakes by doing things like this:

If you win this conflict, the fellow does what you say, and leaves the room, shamed. If you loose the conflict, you are embarrassed and humiliated, and you leave the room, but you'll get a clue about the location of the lost mcguffin.

Clever Critters, Napoleon, Player Powers and DM Knowledge. A Rambling Assault on the Senses.

So I had a conversation with one of my players related to our recent sessions of D&D4.

I'll try to be concise. It had to do with the DM altering the behavior of the bad guys in an encounter based on the information that the DM had about the players pending actions.

Example: Player A says, "Okay, I invoke this special power that lets me get double damage on any opportunity attack for the next round." DM says, "Ok cool." and proceeds to move the bad guys in such a way as to not invite opportunity attacks.

In that example, the DM takes the information from the player, and (probably) is influenced by that information. So it brings up a couple of thoughts/questions.

Should the players keep their conditions like this a secret from the DM? This has the mindset that the DM is the "Opponent", which, like Schroedinger's Cat, is both true and not true. My answer is no, I do not think that conditions should be secret from the DM. I trust the group that I play with, and I do not think that they would be dishonest, but the way that D&D is structured, the DM is the final arbiter of the rules and the actions in the game world. I think that on the pro side, having things like this a secret from the guy who is "playing" the monsters does increase the likelihood of true impartiality, it also, I believe, would create more rules discussions and difficulties - for instance, if a monster has a power that makes it immune to some certain form of attack.

Related point - The role of the DM, or at very least, MY role as DM, is not to foil the players and their characters. The DM's job is to craft the world around them and share it with them, to mediate and arbitrate the rules, and to "play the bad guys" in a way that makes for fun and interesting encounters. I'm not interested in doing "Gotcha" gaming, as I've mentioned previously. But part of my job is to run fun and interesting encounters. I ribbed Andrew the other day, when he complained about tough monsters, and I told him that I was changing the game style, and that their party would travel from village to village, participating in Bake-Offs, to see who could cook the most delicious cake.

D&D4, with its seriously grid based minis combat, is part chess. I have to wear two hats at once, seeing the pieces in front of me as markers on the field, and moving them in a way to give maximum advantage to my side. Not because my goal is to defeat the players - because it is not, but instead because I am interested in making it challenging, as opposed to simple or easy. On the other hand, I'm supposed to be "playing" the monsters, and not every cave slug has the battlefield prowess of Napoleon. Which is fine, but it makes for sometimes tough decisions for me. "How clever is a shadow bat?" Does it know to stay out of the fighters sword range while trying to get to the juicy guy behind him? My source and reference material is.. lacking.

D&D4 works a little differently than previous editions. This one is all about powers. So it raises the question in my mind of "How do these powers get represented in the game?" I don't want every power use to involve a 30 minute discussion about whether the fighter gives obvious signs that he is doing some super-smashing-power-thingy or not.

If the DM alters the behavior of the monsters in a way that negates a special ability or function that a character has, I'll give that it is in a way penalizing that player. Or at very least negating their Cool Thing.

So, having rambled and jumped around alot - its a tough call. I'm not certain which way to go with this, or how to do it in a way that is 100% fair to my players, and also 100% fair to the critters and the system.

Obviously, I'm thinking too much about it, and have managed to ramble now for two or three pages of text.. but I'm hoping that this will help me feel my way through it.

Lately: D&D

So lately I've been a little off of the blogging tip.

Lots of stuff going on though.

For one, D&D 4 is now actually out and on the shelves.

I've got myself and seven folks lined up to play. Due to scheduling problems, we're waiting until the 21st to get together to create characters. Wish we could do so sooner, but them's the breaks.

The people that do have their hands on the books are excited. Jason has yet to get his, and has been occupied with other stuff. John and Maddie have been flipping through the Player Handbook some, and Maddie has preemptively started outlining a Tiefling Paladin, though she has one or two backup strategies as well. John is still waiting to see how the cards fall - I think that he has a few ideas about things that he's interested in playing, but is waiting to see what kind of stuff everyone else is putting together. Jason claims to be ambivalent, and Krissi is pretty dead set on a warlock. We assumed that Jeremy Y. would stat up his old 3.0/3.5 mainstay, Corrigan, a fighter, but he's talking about trying out the controller role. Our guesses for Jerry and Andrews characters are pretty up in the air, though I'm betting Andrew will go the Striker route - probably two weapon ranger or rogue, and Jerry will go Leader, or perhaps Defender.

The roles are sortof important in this incarnation of D&D. You've got Controllers, Leaders, Strikers and Defenders. If you create a party that skips on one of the roles, you can still function, but you're going to be missing out on something.

I'm a little torn on dealing with death in the game. In recent times, I've been loathe to let characters die, because it screws up my stories, and punishes the player, and generally brings the fun to a halt. I'm going with a new tactic though, for this D&D game. The dice are going to have to be the boss. I've setup that expectation with my players, so I will rely on them to play accordingly. The difficulty that this still presents though, is that if we do have one or two characters die, it can throw off the role balance of the party. Its been my experience that when a character buys the farm, the player either creates a carbon copy of their recently deceased character, or creates something radically different. If we loose a character, and they create something radically different, it could leave us with a role that is not filled.

I'm working on setting up some framework for a homebrew world. Not for the reasons that I used to do so - which were to immerse my players in a world steeped in history and politics and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzsnorezzzzzzzzzzz. I'm doing a homebrew to make my job easier. I don't have to feel compelled to stay on top of all of the details of someone elses world. So I'll be plagiarizing rampantly, and coming up with stuff that seems cool or fun. Its kindof taxing, and alot of work though. While I'm not trying to be an anthropologist about it, I'm trying to do better than having a big white sheet of paper with the town of "Here" in the middle with the river "Amozan" nearby, and a forest marked "Elves", and some mountains marked "Dwarves", and some orcs scattered about in the white places. Anyway.

I'm interested in coaxing my players to keep up with the game, through notes, after-action-reports, and maybe even some actual play stuff. I'll try to keep up with the actual play myself.

So yeah, I'm kinda geared up about getting the game going :)

Stories, Plot and Improv

I thought this was an interesting read, related to GMing a game.

The "Role" in Role Playing

So I enjoy some Role in my tabletop RPG.

Maybe some gaming groups are blessed by such talented and motivated role players that no reward system or mechanics are required. Good for them. I don't play with Patrick Stewart or Quentin Tarantino though, despite that I do have the luxury of playing with a generally terrific bunch of people. I'm sure anyone who's sat at a table with D&D nerds has played with people who had little or no Role in their RPG. All metagamey, all mechanics. If that's fine for them, then cool.

The folks that I play with general do a good job about throwing some Role into their Playing. My dwarves stay dwarf-y, folks nibble at story driven bits ("That's the man that killed my father!"), and so on. But I like having a mechanism within the game that provides some reward for getting into it. I've played or looked at a couple of systems that do have good mechanics for this kind of thing. Shadow of Yesterday, Riddle of Steel, Burning Wheel, to name a few. But lately I've been scrounging around in the dark corners of my brain for a way to add some mechanical whumph to Role Playing in D&D. I've seen the "Sweet 20" Keys and stuff, which is cool, but I'm not really looking for an xp conversion. I'm also not really looking for generic stuff like "My dwarf is greedy, likes to gamble and drink booze." Or "my guy always protects the innocent". I think what I'm looking for is building solid stories around characters, and then having them *play* those characters. A lot of my D&D play in recent memory has been minimal on the background. Folks have character sheets? Great, then we're ready to go! I recall the Vampire days, having 8+ written pages of back ground, and well developed characters, but that's a whole different system. Almost a different sport.

I want to find ways to motivate the characters.

I considered, for my upcoming Tower of the Necromancer game, handing out pregenerated role playing bits, like "Necromancy is wicked. End of story.", and "Love conquers all." This applies to my Necromancer story in a very real way. Also in a very specific way. Those two would make the characters likely to lean one way or the other when it comes time for decisions, and that's good conflict.

Sometimes "Greedy" is just too broad, and "I love my family and would do anything to protect them" is way too narrow. "I'm afraid of water" is kindof a lame role playing schtick. Mostly, I think because its basically: I am afraid of this one physical thing. Sure - it can mean complications or changing plans, but its not as much fun as something which can force conflict, which has room for an opposing view...

I thought about a system where they take rp bits:
"Organized religion is a sham, and the practitioners are con artists", or "The forces of King Nychek killed my family and I am sworn to revenge", or "I swore to never let someone humiliate me again", or even "I always believe that my plan is the right one". And assign dice to them. For 1st level folks in D&D, each one has a value of 1d4. When a conflict comes into play - and I'm talking mostly about a skill check, maybe for combat, once per encounter - they get to roll that 1d4 in addition to their d20 for the check. As time goes on, or better - after they've used it, and it becomes a stronger motivation for their character, the dice change, in number or in size.
I've thought too about bastardizing TSOY's system, and letting them take keys, and giving an XP bonus to people who have x key points.
Maybe a way to give someone credit for being in character the ENTIRE game session.


Ridiculous afterthought: I almost titled this post "The role of 'role' in Role Playing"... because I'm so clever.

Shared Imaginative Space

More game/D&D stuff. Here goes:

When I first got my hands on fantasy role playing, and then shortly after, actual D&D 2nd ed, there was no battlemat. No minis. Sure, there were maps. I can't swear that we didn't sketch out environments and movements sometimes on paper, but I don't clearly recall doing that. So, what I mean to say is that ages ago, we didn't use any kind of tangible representation for movement and positioning. This also means that scenes were painted using only words, gestures, and creativity.

D&D 3.0 (re)introduced battlemats and minis, 3.5 solidified that, and 4e seems to be continuing that trend. Now, I'm not here to rail against that, merely to conduct my internal debate about grid vs not-grid. I sorta like the grid and minis, but I feel torn on it. For me anyway, too much in the way of boards and grids and tiles and minis and so forth reduces or eliminates my imaginative space. Let me compare it to monopoly for a moment. Never have I played monopoly and fleshed out in my imagination the thimble rolling down boardwalk, checking into a hotel, and spending every dime to its name. So too I think that you can overkill D&D into actually being a boardgame with a lot of rules. And I guess I don't want D&D to be just a boardgame. I still want to see it all happen in my mind's eye. I do appreciate how a board and minis can make the experience easier in some respects. It provides an immediate and easy medium to convey positioning and spacing and some general environmental stuff.

Economy of Actions

Economy of Actions, a post on the gleemax forums by one of the WOTC guys, Rodney.

In very brief form, he's talking about how many things each player at the game table gets to do. In older D&D, players often had access to multiple attacks/actions in a round, not to mention minions, followers, summoned creatures, pets etc, that gave a player more share of the game pie than it did others. If the four of us are all playing D&D, and I've got two wolf companions, each of whom get to do stuff during a turn, and none of you have anything like that, I'm getting a bigger share of the game pie than any one other player.

This struck a chord with me when it comes to BBEG's (Big Bad Evil Guy), the endboss, or whatever you want to call him/her. And this goes for most gameist/sim games, D&D, Werewolf, etc. I had a hard time pitting 4 characters against 1 bad guy. This came up more than once in our recent Werewolf game. And quite frankly, I had to cheat like a fiend just to keep these big fights interesting, and to make them last more than like 2 turns. See.. it gets into numbers... if I have a big bad guy that I want to stand up to the four players, he needs to be able to last more than a round, so he needs to soak, or otherwise deal with the combined damage of the four players. He also needs to be able to hurt them back, in a convincing manner. He can't do mountains of damage, otherwise he's quickly dropping the good guys, which no one wants. But if I use "the rules", and he's doing his one measly attack per round, he's still a cakewalk.

Anyway, I didn't mean for this to be a YAY D&D 4e! post, but it kinda is - since 4e is gonna fix this little problem for me. Mostly I was whining about how terribly I had to cheat previously :P

More D&D

Part of the reason I love Mearls:

http://mearls.livejournal.com/146778.html


Particularly:

(quote)
my job as a GM is to chase the characters up a tree and let them figure out a way to get down. The thing is, there's a snake climbing the tree, the tree's on fire, there's a mob of zombies around the tree, and the rescue chopper floating overhead is piloted by a drunk 5 year old. You've got choices, but none of them are "I sit in the tree and while away a pleasant afternoon with happy thoughts." There's peril in every direction. As Ralph said in the quoted bits above, not choosing is still a choice with interesting consequences.
(/quote)

and

(quote)
Most D&D players want a background that looks like this:

1. My character has no notable friends and family.
2. My character didn't have any major villains or real issues with anyone.
3. My character wants to... get some treasure?
(/quote)



edit:

Since I'm all game theory and linking other people's stuff today, here's some more stuff that chased down from someone else linked from mearl's LJ. Mostly for my own reference, but feel free to enjoy it as well:
Great set of five articles about gaming: character motivation, central conflict, etc.

Monster Design in D&D

Pardon me as I wax metanerdy.

I imagine that most folks that read this have played D&D, and even if someone happens to be reading it that hasn't, you can easily imagine that its a game about killing orcs and dragons.

So anyway, about monster design in D&D. As I said, everyone assumes dragons and orcs and stuff. Check. Good solid monsters, close to "realism" - assuming that by realism I mean "Traditional Tolkien style fantasy". But the medium for Lord of the Rings was film*, while obviously D&D is an interactive game.

Let me pause here. I'm writing this because of course my brain churns furiously, lately, about D&D related stuff, and I saw this post by another blogger, about monster books, and about the difference in monsters that are "fun", and monsters that are designed mechanically. He's referring to a difference in approach. "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a monster that sucked people's faces off and had like four arms with lobster claws on them?!?" as opposed, as he references, to: "We need an aquatic abberation monster that fits into Challenge Rating 2."

I recently also read, and posted about this stupid monsters article. It rails against, I think, both types of monsters. Those created simply as filler, because they needed 80 monsters to slap between these covers so that they could sell a book for $19.95, which gives us such gems as the Owlephant and Duckbunny. Then there are monsters that were created with the Gygaxian theory that you can never make your player's lives too hard. Monsters that eat your armor. Monsters that pretend to be treasure. Monsters that pretend to be clothes. Monsters that pretend to be swords. Monsters that are the floor. Monsters that attack you from the ceiling. Monsters that pretend to be a cloak. Monsters that live in books and attack you when you read them. Etc etc etc ad nauseum. Jeff, in his previously mentioned blog post, talks about the fun of a monster that steals the map from an adventuring party. Yet another monster that exists solely to screw with the players (oh, and their characters).

And as I sit and ponder on these things, it occurs to me that sure, crazy ass monsters that eat your armor and steal your map are fun - in a way. It challenges the players as well as the characters, in a different way that encounters with non armor or map destroying monsters do not. I guess its all about the group, and the mindset. I mean, the rustmonster is easily a part of why we have satire like the card game Munchkin. I remember rustmonsters and mimics and things, and how much spice they added to D&D. Yet, as I've seen others discuss, I'm not sure whether I'd be hugely pissed, or able to just laugh it off and tell stories about it later - if the plate armor I'd just dropped all of my life savings on, got eaten by a beastie the next time I was out at the local dungeon. I think previously, I'd have laughed it off - not being of the questioning mindset, and that the DM/the rules were always right, and were just how it was. You don't get pissed, dude, its D&D! The rust monster ate your armor?! That's AWESOME! Let me tell you about this one time that my cleric found this succubus who was fighting a mimic......... Now I remember how fun stuff like level draining was too :P

So anyway, yet again, I run out of steam and wind down.


[edit:

I own the 2nd edition AD&D book Monstrous Compendium Annual volume I. I love flipping through it, checking out all of the completely ridiculous monsters in it. I don't have it here, or I'd be more specific, but you've got (from memory)
A monster that pretends to be a house
An elephant-humanoid with two trunks and a bad attitude
Cats with antlers
A monster that pretends to be a sword (previously mentioned)
Evil fish
A man-purse that sucks your blood like a mosquito
A monster with a scorpions tail that pretends to be a coin
A skeleton monster
A skeleton monster on fire
A skull
Two skeletal arms
A mushroom monster

/edit]






* Sorry, I don't know why I half-ass baited you, there.

4e playtest, player perspective

This past weekend, for GaryCon, I ran some friends through some pre-release D&D 4e stuff.

Here are the thoughts from one of the players:

There were a number of us trying it out, and the class structure was
interesting. Our level 1 group of misfits tore a bunch of kobolds a new
one, then using the new superpowers handled a young black dragon which at
first was quite scary but Pally taunt + Warlock Sliding Nightmare power +
Quarry = Dead Dragon, then we tried our luck with some skeles. Things I
liked: Second Wind as a Last effort do not cause your charrie to die
(twice in our campaign, let's say the newb's did something stupid, like a
mage or the cleric running in front of the meatshields and getting smacked
down by the numerous kobolds/skeles, secondwind causes heroes to have at
least a few hitpoints when they get smacked down to negatives, assuming the
negative number is not negative bloodied), class powers making it so that
the mage does not cast 1 magic missle and then sit for 2 hours of combat,
every class had something they could cast, pray, throw, shoot, or swing
every round, that was cool. "Marking" or as I call it, The impact WoW
has had on D&D. Tanks can now taunt to the detriment of the mob. The
Pally taunt is BRUTAL (mob's were taking 8hp of damage everyround it tried
to attack someone NOT the pally we dropped the dragon because of it's
numerous attempts on attacks of opportunity) Maddie played a fighter
pregen, and we did not use a power of hers until the end but the fighter had
the ability to attack on 5 ft steps if the monster was trying to move to
another person and if successful, stop the mob in its track. Rangers
finally get the DPS they deserve, lol more WoW influence. New Healing
Surges rule and 5 min rest rules. New "Bloodied" rules and what that does
for MOBS that get bloodied.

Things I did not like too much: combining a daily power with an encounter
power for Maximized result and still fizzling because I rolled a 1.
Nothing is more brutal then losing two big powers on a bad role.
The rate of Action Point earning. You have to get to the third encounter
to get the next your second AP point, With the fizzling of powers, AP
points to replace the fizzle is possible but it may take awile if you have
to get to encounter 3.
The game is fun now but it does feel a little like a cross between Final
Fantasy and WoW sometimes. I'm sure that there will be mobs now with
THOUSANDS of HP maybe hundred of thousands, and you'll need a part with HP
in the several hundreds to compete with them. The whole time the Final
Fantasy fight song will be going in your head.

Overall, I thought the good outweighed the bad. It was a lot of fun and the
players only stopped because the DM was tired :). Will I buy a ton of
books to play? Not sure, but maybe if there was a good DM and a consistent
game, I just might.