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So this came up in the TG feedback thread and it sounded like it could lead to some interesting discussion. There's this catchphrase that gets bandied around about how "D&D causes brain damage" and I have some beef with that nomenclature. I'm not looking to delete that catchphrase and replace it with something else, but the origin of the term is vile and feels reductive of a pretty complicated process of how we learn to play Tabletop Roleplaying Games (TTRPGs). Picking up and playing them isn't a transcendental experience, but it's certainly a unique overlap of improv acting, creative writing, varying levels of math and chance odds, and social engagement with other dorks. I think it's still worth talking about both the way we learn to play TTRPGs and the way run them. Maybe even give advice in how to teach it to others or learn ourselves? I know there's a GM advice thread already, but it tends to be more about practical advice like how to handle a situation in an ongoing game, asking for help on a story beat or encounter design, or get pointers on addressing a problem player. I feel like a lot of it is inherited knowledge, guesswork, and messy trial and error. It can also vary a lot by system. I've seen a decent amount of words spilled over the difference between Dungeons & Dragons and Powered by the Apocalypse type games: shifts in GM expectations, player agency, the "burden" of managing the world and narrative itself, etc. It makes me think a lot about the "play conditioning" concept hbomberguy was tooling around with in his Bloodborne video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC3OuLU5XCw&t=873s He discusses how the Souls games and Bloodborne teach you an "expected" way to approach challenges, and you could easily pull something similar out of the ways different TTRPGs prioritize certain solutions to challenges in their rulesets: the expansive equipment lists in Shadowrun, the spell lists in D&D, the combat rules in World of Darkness games, etc. I do feel like D&D as the first game most people learn, as the most pervasive, and as a game that generations of other TTRPGs are either directly trying to "be" or "not be" shapes a lot of perceptions of the hobby, game design, and player behavior. I don't think it's all negative or bad, either. I wanted to throw things out in the open and see if there was anything to talk about related to this stuff: what are some games that teach their rules well? What are some games that don't? What feels like never gets addressed well in games? Or heck, are there any embedded game conceits that you wished would get tossed out or used more elsewhere?
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Apr 13, 2023 01:38
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I feel like it's hard to pin down a game that teaches poorly or teaches well since it always seems extremely personal. For instance, Fabula Ultima is super simple mechanically, yet a bunch of stuff refuses to stick in my brain, but most of the other players figure it out easily. On the other hand I have an easy time dealing with other systems that have a bunch of objectively more complex systems and gearing setups, so I feel like it's not just a matter of me being an idiot. When it comes to something I miss related to teaching, it's examples-of-play that aren't drowning in metafiction. Like, just explain to me how the rules work, I don't need poorly-written faux-players accompanying it. It tends to distract from the actual mechanical parts even when it's well written and... God, it usually isn't.
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Apr 13, 2023 02:07
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The term in question was infamously coined by Ron Edwards about WoD, not D&D, and he was very unclear about what it actually meant. It was much later that he posted his definition:Ron Edwards posted:The person cannot distinguish between "hopping over a fence" and conflict, between "this guy meets that guy" and a decisive plot event, or between "dramatic close-up" and character decision-making He also commented about it on a podcast named Theory From The Closet, which is years old but archived on the Wayback Machine. There, it was more about over-focus on characters rather than story. The example he used was Cowboy Bebop which I am not familiar with, but seemed to be something along the lines of: a player expecting a “story driven” RPG of The Matrix to facilitate the “guns, lots of guns” scene would be making an active error since that scene is not a story beat but a presentation of Neo’s confidence at that point in the act structure. I’m not advocating Edwards’ viewpoint but I think it could have merit to be aware of. I do notice the belief that “a good story means a good game” is rather common and unexamined. But I’d rather know if RPGs and RPG communities cause people to lie about RPGs.
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Apr 13, 2023 05:49
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It should also be said that a game having simple rules isn't necessarily the same as the game being simple to run or play. Sometimes what "simple rules" means is that a lot of stuff is left to players or the GM to work out for themselves unsupported
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Apr 13, 2023 06:25
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Lamuella posted:It should also be said that a game having simple rules isn't necessarily the same as the game being simple to run or play. Sometimes what "simple rules" means is that a lot of stuff is left to players or the GM to work out for themselves unsupported True, and some games make it clear that they've got some ideas on how to adjudicate it even so, or to jury-rig existing mechanics into covering it, while other games just shrug and go "lmao, figure it out" which can sometimes be a bit daunting. Like I know that for me, at least, the default assumption is sometimes that if the game doesn't have rules for it, don't even bother trying it. hyphz posted:The term in question was infamously coined by Ron Edwards about WoD, not D&D, and he was very unclear about what it actually meant. It was much later that he posted his definition: His definition very much seems to be "this person disagrees with me about what's important and doesn't present their opinions like a technical essay, but instead like some sort of disgusting story/games enjoyer."
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Apr 13, 2023 09:56
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PurpleXVI posted:I feel like it's hard to pin down a game that teaches poorly or teaches well since it always seems extremely personal. For instance, Fabula Ultima is super simple mechanically, yet a bunch of stuff refuses to stick in my brain, but most of the other players figure it out easily. On the other hand I have an easy time dealing with other systems that have a bunch of objectively more complex systems and gearing setups, so I feel like it's not just a matter of me being an idiot. Some of it's down to personal learning styles, probably? Consistency and repetition across rules help me internalize things quickly. Like, I appreciate how the Blades in the Dark rules usually define the difficulty of rolls on both a "how risky" and "how effective" axis, and then similarly abstract scope/effect/duration, etc. ratings down to a number between 0 and 6. They're simple abstractions that end up being very clear and flexible, too. However, I've seen newbie GMs get tangled up in stuff like when to use fortune roles, how to handle downtime action-type stuff like acquiring assets during the nominally separate free play phase of the game, and how severe of consequences to apply to a mixed result or failed roll. And the consistent through-line in all of that is that the guidance in the rules leans into GM discretion, with the presumption that the GM is going to be adjusting the rules for how much of a low-risk action pulp adventure vs gritty noir crime thriller they want. Except, how are you suppose to know what an appropriate level of "danger" is for the tone you want? You can test it out yourself, but it's not hard to accidentally overtune it either way and bang the player characters up more than you wanted, or make it feel like they barely took any risks. It could really use some guidance on example consequences for a few danger levels, because otherwise I think that does run into the problem Lamuella mentioned, where gameplay can end up bogged down in unguided or unsupported rules the GM and players have to negotiate. hyphz posted:He also commented about it on a podcast named Theory From The Closet, which is years old but archived on the Wayback Machine. There, it was more about over-focus on characters rather than story. I think that is an interesting point to raise about TTRPGs and play expectations, too. It's also a lot harder to break away from, because it is a pretty broadly expected conceit that every player character at the table is a main character that shares spotlight with the others, and the narrative will ultimately wrap around them. New people and experience players alike come to a table and usually expect to stat up a character and watch that character grow in power and infamy for however long that game lasts. I'd say there are some games that diverge slightly from that. Rhapsody of Blood (a hack of Legacy) focuses on bloodlines of characters, with a new one chosen to fight an evil force when it reappears between generations. Pendragon played out over a long time will involve multiple generations of knightly families, and players might have a few knights in their family that are semi-active at the same time as some age out and new ones come of age. Then you get games that might not have fixed player characters, like Legacy: Life Among Ruins itself, The Quiet Year, Kingdom, and Microscope. Where there is still a fixed POV, but it's built around broader communities. Players might have recurring characters that act as stand-ins for their voices in the community, but it's advancing a broader narrative that might outlive the lifetime of the characters, depending on the scope of the game. There still needs to be an entry point for the players in "the narrative" of the role playing game, and rules to the game to adjudicate conflict. I guess as far as things serving a narrative besides the player's own goals, the old Polaris game and its hack Thou Art But a Warrior would be a shift as well? A tragic downfall is inevitable there, but the point of playing the game is to sketch out the particulars in an interesting way, like watching a tragic play.
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Apr 13, 2023 14:35
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Nuns with Guns posted:And the consistent through-line in all of that is that the guidance in the rules leans into GM discretion, with the presumption that the GM is going to be adjusting the rules for how much of a low-risk action pulp adventure vs gritty noir crime thriller they want. Except, how are you suppose to know what an appropriate level of "danger" is for the tone you want? You can test it out yourself, but it's not hard to accidentally overtune it either way and bang the player characters up more than you wanted, or make it feel like they barely took any risks. Aside from what the GM wants, there's also the question of what the group wants, and something that it feels a good number of older RPG's miss is pointing out that you should have a conversation with your group before you stop adjusting the dials.
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Apr 13, 2023 15:35
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Oh, I have thoughts. I first was introduced to tabletop roleplaying games at an early age through a gaming club that most often ran D&D - at the time, AD&D 2e was out, but most of the people running the game were much older and ran the games in the more traditional "referee describes the world; players do their thing" rather than "game master runs the world, players do their thing". The nuance there meant that as a very young player, I found myself in trouble in fantasy land and either paid the consequences or got out of trouble because the world was not lenient. Just because it wasn't lenient didn't mean it wasn't fun - those formative years of gaming would go on to fuel my curiosity because they took place during historical eras, or featured elements that I would go on my own to research and ask questions about. One of the most memorable discussions was 'how to approach a wild dog', in which I learned that the way that I had described my actions approaching a wild dog was, in fact, a good way to get into trouble when the dog (actually a winter wolf) and its pack breathed frozen mist at us. I've written extensively in other threads about identifying and using different components of different games and understanding why those components are there in the first place. I have learned from an in-person community that encouraged experimentation and loved to talk about -- but more importantly, play -- games. The key thing here is the 'play' aspect. One of my primary criticisms about modern D&D and other games in general is that its structure tends to encourage a very specific type of play that is appealing to a broad base of people, but not to me. This also is seen in other games as well, where rules complexity, video games, and other media will engineer new or even well seasoned players into a specific habit of "playing the game" versus "interacting with the world". If they don't have the specific thing on their character sheet which gives them explicit permission to do the thing they want, then it doesn't even enter their headspace. Rather than treating D&D, or games in general, strictly as a game with stats and abilities and all that, I have always viewed them as social experiences which can be done in any number of contexts - on a long road trip with no dice, on the side of the street one-to-one, in a larger club in the back of a restaurant, organized play, pick-up play, weekends of back-to-back gameplay; these are the kinds of experiences that could only be done with a community that encouraged it, and the rules of play whatever the system also encourage the community. I am also the firm believer of solving my own problems because the rules are not a perfect model of the world. If there's a specific thing in the rules that I don't like, or is problematic, going back to my first principles to understand and then make meaningful change in those rules for better play is ultimately what I do, rather than get mired into denigrating flamewars online over whatever it is people get twisted about. Playing in tabletop RPGs, by and large, is a learned behavior. Ergo, what teaches the behavior first and foremost tends to not be rules, but media and presentation surrounding those rules. Early tabletop RPGs encouraged world interaction and often had a fantasy or military type of bent to it due to their history from wargames and also other media. I recommend "Secrets of Blackmoor" as a really great way to look further into the oral history of Dave Arneson. Some tabletop games take a very broad approach to "presentation trumps rules", such as MÖRK BORG, which shows a lot of stuff and splatters text all across graphic images with loud high-contrast designs. It's easy to get a feel for the game as soon as you flip through a page or two. Finding rules is a little trickier, but the presentation is strong enough you could realistically just roll some dice and make poo poo up based on what is shown, not told. The video games mentioned also use this type of structure to show the world to players - rather than telling them how to play outright, it puts them in situations where they must learn about the world and its interactions. It's up to the players to do things, and while there are certainly more efficient ways to play the game and an intended way to 'solve an encounter', that isn't the only way permitted. This isn't solely in their camp, though, because they themselves descend from a lineage of games in which the game itself will teach you the basics. You see this in video game design when you trace back to earlier eras with games like Mega Man X. Metroid, and so on. For games that teach their rules well, I would challenge if the rules themselves are worth teaching or not. Does the game inform what it's about well through its presentation and its rules? Do the rules support the presentation of whatever the game's aesthetic is? Does the game encourage social community building through its rules and presentation? Lastly, do people want to keep playing that game? Castle Blackmoor (and later, early D&D) hit upon these questions by keeping rules very simple and straightforward and focused more on group play. Gygax's interpretation of a campaign being a multi-party setting-driven sandbox expected that the game would scale not just from a small group but potentially to a full blown club (even though the majority of groups never played up to the 50 player count that I'm aware of). In those cases, the rules supported or encouraged community building in addition to ease of play. For games that don't teach their rules well, I would say that games which expect you to have some rules familiarity or otherwise have a complexity barrier which implies it builds or extends upon a prior system (read: derivative works) tend to do so in ways that I personally find disengaging. Because of the breadth of the TTRPG industry, there are so many games out there that lure in with a fine aesthetic of some kind but the rules themselves take too long to get to the point. Gubat Banwa is guilty of that, Weapons of the Gods is guilty of that, and D&D 5e is also guilty of that. The question of agency in the world is a big one which is challenging for games to design rules around. You can tell a player how to interact with the world and the choices they make, but how do you encourage them to go beyond those choices and treat the world or narrative like it was whatever genre the game attempts to emulate, if any? In other words, how do you guide players and referees to customize the game to suit their needs? How do those needs even get discovered if they're brand new to gaming in general? There are no easy answers to these questions but games have made attempts to describe them. In Ryuutama and other such games, the referee does have abilities to exercise steering the game into different ways in a setting and rules specific method - the referee will pick one of four types of dragons, who reside in the background of the story watching the players, but give them a little bit of help here and there. This is extended in games like Apocalypse World and Fellowship - Fellowship takes it a step further by explicitly having a character reference sheet for the GM. Learning how to learn about tabletop RPGs also does not address the current digital mediums we use to often communicate very well. Only now are we starting to see TTRPGs like Alice is Missing actively leverage the tools that players already use at the table, or Thousand Year Vampire, which eschews the digital for an analog approach. A lot of games also teach referees and players by creating, rather than by using published material. Anything which has explicit rules for creating something tactile and meaningful to the game world is probably the greatest fun a group can have - Microscope and Quiet Year touch upon this very excellently, but also lesser known games like How to Host A Dungeon. Similarly, the creative exercises that people put out there like Gygax 75 (revived by Ray Otus and others) and Dungeon 23 (which has its own thread here) encourage the more important concept of "using the game rules to create stories", rather than "using the game rules to tell stories". It is probably no surprise to anybody who has played with me at a table that I'm significantly interested in creating stories -- telling stories is what happens away from the table. I would rather the rules support me in that endeavor rather than try to tell me some nonsense about building the perfect game breaking engine, something that rules-heavy systems tend to encourage but fight hard against. For me, I consider to be a game to be nice and cool and good if it provides answers to three abstract questions: - Does the game spark the imagination, even before looking at the game mechanics? - Are the rules presented clearly, and can be explained in less than ten minutes to a new player? - Do the rules provide flexibility to create a meaningful artifact, such as a map, history, community, etc.? At this point, the only games which meaningfully fulfill this are games like old school D&D, Wanderhome, Ryuutama, and that's maybe it. Old school D&D barely gets a pass here since it got a refresh in Old School Essentials and has a whole host of content to extend the system by creating something novel with it (else, how would people be able to create the amount of content they have to publish for good or ill). I might be getting to the character limit for a post, so it's a good time to close the laptop. I think there should be more media that talk about referee and game master theory as well as player theory, and highlighted more prominently - this thread, for example, will only ever reach a fraction of the wider TTRPG community, but hopefully people might take discussions from this thread and extend them to create something fun.
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Apr 13, 2023 15:46
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Quick question aldantefax : Am I misreading/misunderstanding your list of questions or am I just missing something? Like, how is The Quiet Year not on that list, the incredibly simple game about making a map of a post-apocalyptic community? That would seem to have all three criteria pretty easily.
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Apr 13, 2023 15:56
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Nuns with Guns posted:I think that is an interesting point to raise about TTRPGs and play expectations, too. It's also a lot harder to break away from, because it is a pretty broadly expected conceit that every player character at the table is a main character that shares spotlight with the others, and the narrative will ultimately wrap around them. New people and experience players alike come to a table and usually expect to stat up a character and watch that character grow in power and infamy for however long that game lasts. I think that's exactly it. The Forge generally coined a negative term for that expectation. I guess an important question comes from whether we're focusing on what's learned from actually playing and running RPGs against what is learned from their marketing or perception. In particular, the idea that they're about "being" a character - or rather, about "being" the projected version of a character, which is often different what the character's viewpoint would actually be (Trinity problem). Consider the final lightsaber battle in Return of the Jedi. Star Wars RPGs have classically sold themselves on the characters (I'm old enough to remember the "what's this guy's story?" adverts for the old WotC version). But in most tactical RPGs, if you try to play the duel between Luke and Vader, one of them kills the other in the first round because lightsabers are just that insanely dangerous. No, says the player (which I am using as a general term, but it may be a GM also), that's a terrible story - it's clearly a matched duel in the film. Well, ok, but at the abstraction level of most RPGs that duel is just a series of parries/misses. No, says the player, the duel is clearly not boring in the film, and so it match the "story" it must be modelled in greater detail until it's exciting. So we end up trying to add a dedicated swordplay system to Star Wars, while the Edwards advocate is over in the corner pointing out that the duel in question is nothing to do with the story, the actual conflict in the scene is between Vader and Palpatine and Luke is just their McGuffin. And if we finally get the detailed swordplay system, then the player finds that it's massively high tension and high risk so that Luke is constantly one wrong parry away from being murdered by his father and everything coming to an end. "That's wrong, Luke isn't making GBS threads himself throughout that whole scene," comes the complaint. "Uh, yes, he would be," comes the rejoinder, and when you think about it that's quite true, but the film doesn't present it. But the problem of either of these - that either Luke's player must be on the edge the whole scene or spending a ton of Force points or whatever we want to call them, or that Luke's player only provides flavor text to the scene because it's not actually his scene - is that both sound rather unappealing compared to the implied thrill of "watching a character grow in power and infamy for however long that game lasts".
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Apr 13, 2023 16:47
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Xiahou Dun posted:Quick question aldantefax : It depends on who's making the list. I've done a solitary exploration of the Quiet Year and I've seen it used as a tool for other games, just as Microscope or other games have been used to help as inspiration for other games from their creations. However, I would argue (hot take incoming) that the Quiet Year doesn't create a meaningful artifact that can be extended for a social construct. Qualified: when I played Quiet Year, I played through it and was done, and had a good time; however, for me returning back to it a second time it does not fulfill the answer for the first question on if it sparks imagination. Similarly, omission in the brief list I provided is a personal opinion and should be treated as such rather than an absolute. The amount of games out there which could feature prominently would be far lengthier an examination, but those are the three games which consistently return to mind absent other things.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:03
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Ok, I'm just going to brain dump all of the "indirectly learned" things I've encountered among D&D players and grogs and myself. Bear in mind that I'm not arguing that any of these are gospel truth, only that they are attitudes which especially D&D players have picked up over time that are not explicitly part of the rules of the game. * The Plutonium Rule: Role-playing games are universally superior to board and video games because the PCs may take any action. To challenge this in any way (by quering whether or not this benefit is actually manifested in a given system or campaign, querying the value of this benefit, or considering the philosophical value of untrammelled free will) is to announce one's exit from the hobby. * Role-playing games are primarily about combat, as it is the activity that engages all people at the table for the longest time. However, it is necessary to pretend that this is not the case, in part in order to keep the previous rule. In many cases it will be possible to solve problems without combat, but doing so is frequently tantamount to "spotlight hogging" as it removes content that otherwise would have engaged all players, and the GM and players must limit the frequency with which it occurs. * The majority of combat encounters will be impossible to ultimately lose due to GM manipulation, but this must never be stated. * The GM will repeatedly state that the game will not be combat focused, that actions will have consequences, and that the PCs will build the world around them. None of these will be true. No player may query the veracity of these claims. * PCs will rarely if ever suffer long-term wounds, no matter how many comments they engage in. This does not apply to NPCs. No NPC nor PC may ever comment on the PCs apparant regenerative ability in-chararcter. * At any given moment, the PC group will have an immediate goal and a known method of working toward achieving it. If the immediate goal is not known, the immediate goal is to discover the actual immediate goal. If the method is not known, the method is to passively explore the current location and inconsequentially interact with NPCs until the actual method becomes apparent. If an NPC informs the PCs an immediate goal or a method, it must be accepted unquestioningly, regardless of the nature of the NPC. * The PC group may have a notional long-term goal, such as defeating Strahd or recovering the dragon's treasure. This exists purely in background and no proactive steps can be made towards completing it, but the players may trust that it will automatically be fulfilled if the PCs follow the presented chain of immediate goals. * At any given moment, the GM will have predicted a course of action that leads to the PCs success, and prepared for the PCs to take it. In order to both succeed and experience the highest quality of prepared content, the players must attempt to discover and follow it without making it explicit that they are doing so (see the Plutonium Rule). * If a goal has a time limit, then no matter what approach the PCs take or what the time limit is, the PCs will at worst achieve their goal only moments before time runs out. Time will never actually run out. * The PCs will compose a party with skills that complement each other. The PCs must always act together or a gap in skill coverage will eventually cause failure. Any disagreement between PCs must either be resolved immediately or must not prevent the PCs working together. * Magic that exists in the setting may do anything at any point. Magic that is used by the PCs may perform only actions chosen from a fixed menu. * Non-magic feats may only be those directly known by the players to be possible by mundane and average or above-average individuals. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, high levels of skill at non-magical abilities grant the ability to deliver an average level of results in increasingly dire circumstances. The ability for exceptional non-magical individuals to deliver exceptional results is not considered. No non-magical PC can achieve 132ft of movement in a 6 second round, even if they have a Strength score higher that the human maximum of 18 and a maxed Athletics skill. (Roger Bannister was clearly a wizard) * PC exploration alternates between two modes: grid-map and abstract-map. Even if the map is not actually shown on the board, one of these is always in play. * PCs may only choose their path in grid-map mode. In abstract-map mode, the PCs must choose locations to go to by naming a location that they have previously been informed about. * Under no circumstances may the PC party leave their current map unless going to a named location which they have previously been informed about. * The majority of PC goals will not be achieved without entering grid-map mode. * The PCs may be expected to catch or punish individuals performing illegal actions. Any illegal action by the PCs will be punished immediately by NPCs. Um, I think there might be more of these than I thought and this is getting way too long.
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Apr 14, 2023 00:51
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PurpleXVI posted:Aside from what the GM wants, there's also the question of what the group wants, and something that it feels a good number of older RPG's miss is pointing out that you should have a conversation with your group before you stop adjusting the dials. That's true, yeah. I think there's been more of a push to have starting conversations about expectations, and then also regular check-ins with everyone to see how they feel about a game. Games from decades prior presumed the GM would tell you what kind of game they're planning and you'd roll with it or not. aldantefax posted:Oh, I have thoughts. I don't believe I've heard that story before, what happened in that scenario that shaped your play perception? aldantefax posted:I recommend "Secrets of Blackmoor" as a really great way to look further into the oral history of Dave Arneson. I do need to grab some more books to read on the background and history of TTRPGs. I was thinking of picking that up along with at least some of the Designers & Dragons series, though I heard that gets a bit unsatisfying as it "catches up" with the then-present. aldantefax posted:In Ryuutama and other such games, the referee does have abilities to exercise steering the game into different ways in a setting and rules specific method - the referee will pick one of four types of dragons, who reside in the background of the story watching the players, but give them a little bit of help here and there. This is extended in games like Apocalypse World and Fellowship - Fellowship takes it a step further by explicitly having a character reference sheet for the GM. I like Ryuutama. I felt like the GM dragon mechanics with the artifacts and benedictions were a bit uneven, but on the other hand I think physical book itself is gorgeous and lovely to flip through. It's also a great easy reference and I think it'd work very well as a beginner RPG for a lot of people just based on the readability and imagery of the book itself. hyphz posted:But the problem of either of these - that either Luke's player must be on the edge the whole scene or spending a ton of Force points or whatever we want to call them, or that Luke's player only provides flavor text to the scene because it's not actually his scene - is that both sound rather unappealing compared to the implied thrill of "watching a character grow in power and infamy for however long that game lasts". This dilemma sounds like it's running up against a something of a design issue that's hard to solve for a few reasons. Like, overall I'd say that Star Wars media has leaned much harder into faster paced action set pieces than the original trilogy set up, but the showdown between Vader, Luke, and Palpatine from Return of the Jedi is such an iconic moment, we have to "find room" for that in between tense dueling rules. "Cinematic" games offering benny points of some kind to cheat the odds of the higher risk combat systems to allow for those "unlikely moments" to play out do often feel like an awkward duct tape solution that falls short of what gets promised. The other option would be to declare that something like the Luke/Vader/Palpatine encounter is ultimately a "social fight" and defenses need to be stripped in some non-physical way before true death can happen. Spellbound Kingdoms knitting narrative immortality into the in-game rules and in-universe metaphysics does mean you have a system where taking down a powerful bad guy is a lot of work, setting up their downfall by stripping away the things that make them strong (and unable to die), and bringing them to a low point, and offering that same system to players is compelling and thematic. It might be hard to port though, given that it's a ruleset the game world's flavor is built into and hard to extract or generalize.
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Apr 14, 2023 02:23
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On the story about the winter wolves. I was about 10 or 11 years old I believe and we were playing in the club room at a local place in my hometown. This was early to mid 1990s. The person running the game, a very old hand at running games in general already by that point, had decided to run a fantasy historic medieval European campaign. Everybody was very excited about this, and the first thing I had proposed not knowing any better was to play an elf in historical medieval Europe. I was cautioned that elves were not something that the population was used to, so I’d probably have to avoid civilizations and my identity which sounded particularly excellent. We assemble the crew and get going. Some time in the wilderness we are getting ready to make camp in the woods and come across a pack of giant dogs. Rather than ask for a skill check (no idea what those were) I decided to go and see if I could get them to go away and shoo them off somehow, having very little knowledge on dogs, certainly not a lot about wild wolves, as a young lad. The rest of the party hung back while I tried to do some kind of elf-to-dog negotiation, so I was asked to describe or show how I was approaching them. So, I got to my feet and mimicked whatever I could remember from a movie or something which included approaching the dogs with my hands face down. As it was explained to me out of game, doing that makes what appears to be a striking motion to a wild dog, and they did not take kindly to this. We ended up in a very difficult fight - nobody held it against me that the fight played out the way it did, and characters had a tendency to die on a pretty regular basis if not played conservatively (something I had yet to understand in my formative years of play). The whole experience did provide me some fruitful insight on what otherwise would have been to most people a throwaway random encounter. “But you could have X Y Z!” I’m sure an argument would go, “Would your character have known not to do that?” Because of the way the group was organized and how the game was run, the rules themselves did not necessarily even enter play in this situation: it was me interacting with a fantasy world in a way that I still remember decades later. Of course as the years went by and we all learned more about rules and such we wanted to be more exacting of them but also continued to engage in the fantasy world at the table in ways that were not just a strict board game or some kind of pure combat engine, though we did trend towards much heavier combats in D&D 3.5e and beyond. We were encouraged to try running games, experiment and talk about them, and also to explore games that weren’t just D&D - we tried MERP, Tekumel, Final Fantasy RPG, World of Darkness, Palladium (specifically, Robotech), Shadowrun 2e, and all stripes of AD&D campaign settings, of which AD&D 2e’s campaigns were the fondest. As we began moving away and the nature of the games turned to different things, I occasionally wonder why it is that I encounter other people who started playing games in different eras or had different origins and they have a radically different philosophy when it comes to games. Strict rules brinkmanship on both sides of the screen, for example, or wanting to use a pet character concept before even understanding what the game was about, or any number of other problematic player behavior seems to stem from groups which are averse to inclusively educating its members, but also letting them make mistakes with real consequences - or, perhaps there are no right or wrong choices, simply choices, all of which have consequences.
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Apr 14, 2023 03:02
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Also, aside from story time, I think this video succinctly explores two of the major ideas about the play cohorts - as contextualized by D&D (in light of the recent trash fires with the licensing and such, but that’s for another thread). I highly recommend this as part of context in this thread as well - just remove D&D and replace it with “tabletop RPGs”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l198KwRfeo I post this after the story with the winter wolves because I identify with a more folk type of game playing in general. Rules, in general, can be lovely but their intent can be explored and then the specific rules can be forgiven, ignored, or altered so long as the larger structure of the game is still intact, and that thing is fun for the social experience.
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Apr 14, 2023 03:13
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Another thing regarding rules complexity because apparently my brain is off on a tangent. Rules need not be simple, because a game’s merit does not necessarily (despite what I had written earlier) need to be eloquently expressed in some kind of ideal fashion. I’m used to trying to sift through obscurely worded and poorly laid out games starting with AD&D 2e. Part of the learning process for me was to create play aids for myself, and having access to computers early on meant I could also start creating play aids on a computer and then print them out and take them to a table - portable electronic devices, even cell phones, weren’t a thing during that era. I told my mom I was going to go play games at the bar down the street and gave her the number for the place and off I went. Anyway, this is an interesting concept because play aids for modern games tend to come with the rules, but they also have a thing where sometimes they aren’t that relevant to whoever is attempting to use them. A referee’s screen for various rule systems out there is a good one - it attempts to predict what the most commonly referenced tables will be for the broadest group of referees, but also does not really take into account that some of the things that referees might struggle with are things like describing the world, being reminded of the aesthetics or precepts of the game, and so on. I haven’t seen a game that encourages you to make your own play aids, or if they’re out there, it’s not really in any wide syndication. People create and sell or provide freely play aids like character sheets and such pretty readily, but a game itself encouraging this kind of creation and interpretation is a missed opportunity. These artifacts of play I believe are key to what makes gameplay much more robust in tabletop RPGs. I used to keep binders or notebooks dedicated to all the different notes that I would have for the dozens if not hundreds of characters I made, world information from places we explored, dungeon maps, and just “Stuff”. One memorable character ended up in a position where he had so many ridiculous weapons and abilities during the AD&D 2e era that I learned how to calculate and then lay out and print THAC0 tables for each of his weapons, in addition to all the extra rules that he had since thanks to contrivances of play, he ended up as some kind of wandering half-vampire with a magic sword that could eat and release fire magic. Take that, Blade. In the modern era we see a lot of digital tools that make some kind of attempt at making games more convenient but also tend to cause play disengagement at a physical table. It might be a bit easier to manage information in this way for people, but I prefer the axioms of “if you have to open a rulebook to look up an edge case, you should just judge at the table quickly and move on”. This meant that play proceeded at a reasonable pace and arguments could be put into a parking lot later. Then again, as late teenagers we preferred to argue and quarrel over every little thing, which led to multiple arguments that were hours-long each about horse mechanics that I was the unfortunate bystander of.
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Apr 14, 2023 03:30
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I had the somewhat dizzying thought recently that the first RPG game session I ever played, in which my dad DMed D&D for me and several members of my family and my level 1 thief with 1 hit point died falling into a pit trap in the first room... he was considerably younger than I am now, and had likely never played a roleplaying game before, and had read the rules but had no loving idea what he was doing and was just trying to do the thing. Like that one experience was formative for me because first, it was funny - Vimp the Wimp was doomed from the start, poor guy - but second, it revealed immediately to me, perhaps in a way I'd never been aware of for any previous game, that this game had flawed rules and that we needed to modify them if we were going to have fun long-term. Which is to say that if you roll an unmodified die for hit points at level 1, you might roll a 1. Or hell, a 2 or 3, and the magic user only got to roll a d4, and this was loving stupid as gently caress if you also had like an 80% chance of falling into a pit trap that could do 1d6 damage to you. I was... probably 10? ish? I think most players of my age (late 40s, now) who learned on the games of that era learned very very quickly that houseruling wasn't just an option, it was required. Perhaps because we got rules wrong, perhaps because there was nobody (and no internet) to teach us how to play beyond what was printed in the rulebook, but also because the games were not built to be played as-written, whatever the intention the writers had. We played D&D, and RIFTS, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I played AD&D with some friends, and then a little Paranoia, and WHFRPG, and Shadowrun, all by the time I was 16. These games taught me to homebrew, think about game structure, but also to focus on the setting and the fun of the game rather than worrying too much about the rules because hell, the rules would eventually let you down, the only thing that was true and real was the players' desire to play in this fantastic world dreamed up by the game maker. I think when we talk about "how we learn to play" to some extent we're talking about the pacing and beats at the table; stuff like, we take turns, we choose from the options on our sheets, we ask the GM what we see and they describe the scene, we talk to someone and the GM does a voice for them maybe, we search for traps and loot the room and set fire to something and laugh. But to some extent we're also talking about the mechanical boundaries and edifices of the systems we have played. If you have always played with hit points, would you find a game where you simply do not track "damage" to be confusing? If you're accustomed to character advancement via levels, would you imagine without seeing it first what the xp/points-buy system of WHFRPG is like? If you're used to taking turns in a fight, would you just assume that a game where everyone just says what they're doing in any order would be a mess, impossible to deal with? If you're accustomed to thinking of characters as being good, neutral, or evil aligned, would you find a game without any alignment system freeing, or disorienting? I think most people can imagine these things, actually, perhaps with a little prompting. I think most people who have played any RPG at all, actually can shift gears, with not much adjustment time, to a radically different system. I think most games still have pacing and story beats, they still have character sheets, a dialogue between players and GM; they have discovery and exploration, description of places and people and things, usually some rolling of dice, quite often setting fire to things and having a laugh. The mechanical stuff tends to be explained in the rule book and if you're willing to read, or patient with being explained-to, you can grok what this different system is asking you to do differently. I suppose a big deal is just having a good or a poor teacher, feeling safe among friends and allies as you take the emotionally vulnerable position of being a disoriented newbie at a game table, having a sense of excitement vs. reluctance, being dragged into this new game vs. intrigued by it. Motivation, atmosphere, social rewards or obstacles. I kinda doubt the unfamiliar nuts and bolts of new system are the crux of these issues. But maybe a sense that the rules aren't inviolate, that you houserule anything you want, that the game books aren't some work of genius or a difficult math homework assignment helps too. It's easier to not be intimidated by a game when your first experiences with games taught you that they're usually really shaky and somewhat brittle and full of like, typographical errors and cliches and logical gaps. So it's hard for me to say from anything but my own experience and that may make me less sensitive to the very difficult problem learning how to play anything other than D&D (or whatever), for the first time. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 07:37
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Not just from the gaming tradition but I was always encouraged to learn and explore and experiment, so long as I had some idea of where the boundaries were - social, physical, what have you. If learning something is not that fun to another person, then it makes sense that they won't want to learn a new game, new rule, or what have you. Learning being fun, and how to make learning a game fun, is probably in scope of this thread. Generally speaking, a tabletop RPG is a mental exercise - there is imagination, creativity, but also some adherence to a rules framework. Learning all of those things can be quite taxing (and all three can be learned). Keep on the Borderlands was considered to be quite important for a lot of early D&D as it provided contextual advice to new referees and also to players that were otherwise not readily available. It encouraged experimental play and also for referees to let players do what they wanted, even if that meant they got into trouble - one of the more infamous tricks Keep on the Borderlands had was the kobold password rumor in the home base of the adventure. The design of the local dungeon complex by Janelle Jaquays also rewarded through play multiple entries, new places to explore, places that transformed, and otherwise a lot of fuel for creativity and imagination. Modern examinations of why this type of dungeon crawling sandbox gameplay worked was mostly in part to a built in experimentation and reward structure that the game and its material included. Creating a dungeon from scratch is hard - so, here's a dungeon for you. People don't know how to play the game - so, here's an introductory tutorial that shows the main gameplay loops. Just as there is no one best way to teach something universally, there is no one best way to learn something either. Board games, particularly more complex ones, take the lead here because it assumes if you intend to play it for a meaningful length of time that you should learn how to play effectively within the constraints of that game; the same is true for tabletop role playing games. I am responsible for onboarding new players to my games all the time since I run open tables. They are low stakes entry points that are welcoming of all skill levels, orientations, and ages. Most often, people who have prior game experience will not only be able to pick up on the context of the game but also model behavior for other players to learn. Some players (particularly new younger ones) will be ready to explore and poke at things and take their concepts and go for it. One of the most common pitfalls, particularly with more complex rules systems, is to introduce "book rules" in an over-comprehensive way to new players. Character creation, particularly, is some of the most mindbendingly complex and boring things to do for new players for tabletop RPGs, which many modernized systems have attempted to resolve through things like "Playbooks" - Apocalpypse World really sets the standard here. "Social rules" tend to be more important to teach - or, model, rather - for players to consume at their own rate, and they tend to be much more difficult for newer folks unless there is someone more experienced who is a guide. I would hazard a guess to say that there are more people now who want to start playing but model their social rules at a table after what they see on Youtube, rather than a local community organizer providing some kind of instruction. Awhile ago I attempted to dive into this by inviting local referees to a "Game master's clinic", which really was more of a roundtable for people to eat expensive chips and share their game stories with one another in a social context. Too often there is the sense that being a referee is a lonely exercise, and so turning to the internet is the way to go. This, it turns out, is probably one of the shittier choices, because people are ready to start a fight or speak authoritatively waging some kind of crusade on one game system or company or another, completely blowing past what the original request for help might be. In short, a toxic atmosphere teaches just as effectively as an encouraging one, but they teach negative habits that are difficult to unlearn. Online communities are notoriously bad for those kinds of atmospheres. Of course there is an increasing amount of educational and well produced content, mostly for D&D and its ilk, with likable personalities who have good camera appeal for various reasons - their opinions and perspectives, such as they are, are just as valid as anyone else's, but their overall audience reach will be much broader. I would also make an observation that if we are "thinking about how we learn to play and GM TTRPGs", as the title of the thread notes, then we ought to understand if the way that we think about learning is, in fact, narrowly examining just one element or another, or if it seeks to answer a larger question, such as: "How can we more effectively learn to play and GM TTRPGs?" or "What teaching styles have you found that work well for introducing new players and GMs to TTRPGs?"
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Apr 14, 2023 15:34
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aldantefax posted:Another thing regarding rules complexity because apparently my brain is off on a tangent. Rules need not be simple, because a game’s merit does not necessarily (despite what I had written earlier) need to be eloquently expressed in some kind of ideal fashion. I’m used to trying to sift through obscurely worded and poorly laid out games starting with AD&D 2e. Rules don't have to be simple, but it definitely helps if they have a unified and simple basic mechanic. Like I love 2e, grew up with it, but if there's anything my players forget more often than anything, it's whether, say, a given roll is a roll-under or a roll-over. Also something I've been trying to put into words is something that a lot of people seem to have learned and bring out as a defense of certain games(mostly OSR): "The rules are meant to be harsh and unforgiving, because you're not meant to engage with the rules." That is to say, the game is built around thinking up situations where there's no hard and fast rule, and you can potentially sweet-talk the GM or logically twist their arm into permitting your Magic Missile to work as the trigger for a jury-rigged nuclear weapon. And while I can understand the satisfaction of finding a "cheat" at points where the game's rules would otherwise prevent you from doing what you really want, that always just seemed like the strangest lesson to take away from any given game: That you were supposed to take all these rules, and stats, and setups and toss them out the window and instead explicitly play with everything not ruled, or statted, or set up. aldantefax posted:Awhile ago I attempted to dive into this by inviting local referees to a "Game master's clinic", which really was more of a roundtable for people to eat expensive chips and share their game stories with one another in a social context. As a personal experience, I also feel like a lot of GM's are running the games they wish they could be playing in, and I know that personally a lot of how I run games is as a response to games I've been in that I felt were run awfully.
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Apr 14, 2023 20:23
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PurpleXVI posted:That you were supposed to take all these rules, and stats, and setups and toss them out the window and instead explicitly play with everything not ruled, or statted, or set up. I find this to be an interesting viewpoint since the rules themselves attempted to have a go at simulating reality in some way but acknowledged early on that this was a bit of a fool's errand; however, there was this very specific phase in tabletop game development history where the doctrine had changed to go from "some rules for most stuff" for "all rules for all stuff". This was of course most apparent as a means of income generation since the more rules are made, the more books ought be sold, and TSR (later Wizards) had a bottom line to answer to. Steve Jackson Games also entered into the fray with the kitchen sink approach, and from the late 80s to after the millenium it was en vogue to have a rule for everything. Of course, with the arrival of third party content more people could make money by making and selling extra rules or what have you as early as Judges' Guild during the hey days of Basic/Expert. I would put a perspective, maybe an argument position even, that the core mechanics should be easy to grasp and their design language unified (rolling big number or small number on dice seems the easiest of the bunch). The complexity I think comes from rules that should be procedural in nature and compartmentalized in such a way that they can be tweaked and adjusted to better suit the needs of a table; if not adjusted, though, they should be serviceable enough. GURPS does the former (add as much complexity as you want) but also falters in the latter (it is complex to determine what complexity you want for your games and sometimes you want to just beat up monsters instead of worry about armor divisors). PurpleXVI posted:As a personal experience, I also feel like a lot of GM's are running the games they wish they could be playing in, and I know that personally a lot of how I run games is as a response to games I've been in that I felt were run awfully. I think there's a certain concept of the "tragic, forever DM" that is perpetuated because running a game in its current state (narrative driven and such) is, to put it mildly, hard as gently caress. It wouldn't be out of place to put a DM (or referee, more generically) into a certain box which demands several years of play experience, 'mastery' of the rules (whatever that means for people) as well as the creativity to adapt things to their social groups; and, for a lot of them, they carry a large portion of the responsibility to host and maintain those social groups. It's a lot of work to do what many would consider to be a thankless chore -- but, this is perhaps because of the nature of the games we see in the wild and model our idea of a game master on. In increasing numbers now there are games like Gubat Banwa that can be run "headless" that use some kind of mechanic for determining what the antagonists may do (if there are any; not all games are explicitly about the glory in violence, as Gubat Banwa is). Enemies have a preconfigured list of moves that can be used, statistics are visible, and it has an opportunity to reinforce a collaborative element to the game. This may also speak to a broader social expectation at many tables that should be revisited - things like showing up to a new table with a new referee and expecting some kind of world class game, and only being there for "the game" rather than "the social experience"; as soon as play stops, nobody will ever interact with each other again. This absolutely baffles me, but I've seen it in dozens of groups I've been in -- and, I am also guilty of this. Without the glue that is the game at the table, the one piece of common ground that people have together gives way. I still keep in touch with at least a few of the people from the gaming group I grew up with. They've been close friends, confidants, as well as people who I generally like interacting with. I'm not sure that tabletop RPGs in any era explicitly are friendship generators; but, if the conditions are right, then friends may be made at the table and those experiences can go on to influence other parts of someone's life. One of the things I'm interested in seeing in the future is games that have rules which have a go at scaled play - that is, play that has an intent to be done with not just a single group in a single setting, but multiple groups in the same setting and timeline. To date, the only game that I know of which has this as part of its original design is the early versions of D&D, and even then does not clearly draw this out. Such a project (which I may personally attempt to tackle someday) would be of remarkable value because it is probably the paramount thing that tabletop games fall short on.
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Apr 14, 2023 21:50
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aldantefax posted:I'm not sure that tabletop RPGs in any era explicitly are friendship generators; but, if the conditions are right, then friends may be made at the table and those experiences can go on to influence other parts of someone's life. 
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Apr 14, 2023 23:50
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The biggest thing I'd say as far as training people to play that everything above the ashcan production value of games needs to have a GM section that includes the following: How to pitch the game How to create an adventure A sample adventure, with asides showing how they used the tools from the previous step. How to run a session, i.e. examples of the conversation of play These obviously don't apply to all games, but the general idea of pitch, how to prep, ready to go material, and detailed examples of play should apply to most.
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Apr 15, 2023 03:50
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Capfalcon posted:how to prep, ready to go material Just teach people the glorious art of making poo poo up at the last second instead.
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Apr 15, 2023 11:25
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PurpleXVI posted:Just teach people the glorious art of making poo poo up at the last second instead. For some of us that isn't an option that works regardless of the amount of teaching.
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Apr 15, 2023 13:53
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PurpleXVI posted:Just teach people the glorious art of making poo poo up at the last second instead. I don’t know if you’re joking, but that is legitimately a major issue.
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Apr 15, 2023 14:52
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PurpleXVI posted:Just teach people the glorious art of making poo poo up at the last second instead. Honestly, that's fine, but even "make poo poo up" works a lot better with a few ideas going into a session. So, pointing out the difference between what's important to prep and what can be done on the fly is pretty essential. On the player side, there's the general rules of course, but I'm not really sure how to teach "player best practices," as that seems much more social than I could put in a book.
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Apr 15, 2023 15:46
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aldantefax posted:One of the most common pitfalls, particularly with more complex rules systems, is to introduce "book rules" in an over-comprehensive way to new players. Character creation, particularly, is some of the most mindbendingly complex and boring things to do for new players for tabletop RPGs, which many modernized systems have attempted to resolve through things like "Playbooks" - Apocalpypse World really sets the standard here. "Social rules" tend to be more important to teach - or, model, rather - for players to consume at their own rate, and they tend to be much more difficult for newer folks unless there is someone more experienced who is a guide. I would hazard a guess to say that there are more people now who want to start playing but model their social rules at a table after what they see on Youtube, rather than a local community organizer providing some kind of instruction. That's funny, character creation was always one of my favorite bits. It is very time consuming for me though, even in games with fairly "short" character creation I like reviewing all my options and thinking about future things to pick up. When I'm reading through a new rules system, I find it helps me learn the system better if I go through some of the basics, then go and generate a character and look up rules things as they come up in chargen, then finish reading the rulebook, and then sometimes I'll go back and roll up another character with any other experience I got from completing the rulebook. I find it helpful because it does help embed what the game will look like to the average player, and it helps me think of what are points I got confused by as I was making a character myself. aldantefax posted:I would also make an observation that if we are "thinking about how we learn to play and GM TTRPGs", as the title of the thread notes, then we ought to understand if the way that we think about learning is, in fact, narrowly examining just one element or another, or if it seeks to answer a larger question, such as: "How can we more effectively learn to play and GM TTRPGs?" or "What teaching styles have you found that work well for introducing new players and GMs to TTRPGs?" I went with a kind of broad title because I figured it would open up avenues for a lot of discussion like that, yeah. There's room to narrowly examine small elements, or look at broader scope things, and I wanted to leave this as a place people could come for advice or feedback, too. As far as learning styles, I've always been a hands-on learner who commits things to memory better by doing them. (Might tie into why chargen helps me learn the game's rules so well.) Other people learn well by reading everything. I would say that one area that is sorely lacking in RPGs is audio books or other ways for people who learn best by listening to digest the sometimes textbook-sized tomes these games have. The closest equivalent I can think of is the vein of Actual Plays where they actually talk about the rules as they're going, but not all Actual Plays do that, and even the ones that do often present an abridged version of the rules for the sake of the performance part of the AP. PurpleXVI posted:Just teach people the glorious art of making poo poo up at the last second instead. I think you're half joking, but I do get why that's a problem for some people. I think I'm decent at improv and I like doing it, but I've been with plenty of GMs and players who struggle with it or get anxious at the pressure of coming up with something on the spot and freeze. Then again, I also love random tables for everything and random X generators online now, and I think that the presence of those in a lot of RPGs is partially because they do help people who struggle or aren't confident in what they can come up with on the fly.
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Apr 15, 2023 17:35
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making poo poo up is a skill that comes with comfort and confidence, both in the general and in the specific situation. Like, I've played enough d&d 5e now that even though I've only GMed it once or twice I could probably bullshit a session as long as I had a defined beginning and end and some points I wanted to hit. Because I've played Pathfinder a lot less (and I'm GMing a campaign in it for the first time) I'm preparing tons of poo poo because it makes me feel more comfortable and confident. Now, once I've been running this Pathfinder game for 20 sessions or so, will I feel confident to just take whatever weird decision the players make and run with it? Probably. But until then I'm prepping against eventualities so that when the unexpected comes up I'm improvising off a solid base.
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Apr 15, 2023 18:06
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Thing is, if you actually look at most mainstream RPGs they only mention “making stuff up” very briefly, and often it’s presented as just a temporary thing to get the PCs onto the track of the module. Narrative RPGs often tell the GM not to prepare certain things, but often don’t directly say that they’re just making things up. And almost no game gives actual guidelines for how to make those things up - I remember having that trouble when reviewing GM advice books (which someone on one of the Discords described as being like reading an alien’s report on Earth, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t a compliment) The only direct advice on making things up I remember seeing was in Robin’s Laws. Examples of play are almost as bad - it’s incredibly rare to see an extended example of play which includes any failures rolled on the dice, for example . But reading an example of play doesn’t tell you how that play was achieved any more than watching Critical Role makes you Matt Mercer. On The Edge in its earlier editions had by far the best example of play, because it actually recorded the thoughts of the GM as they ran the game and how they came up with things, but also might come across as a little disappointing compared to promises made about how the game works.
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Apr 15, 2023 18:36
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Die (at least in the pdf they've put out) is pretty good at giving advice on how to improv and make poo poo up, but that's because the game is meant to involve the GM making poo poo up. And specifically instructs the GM not to overprepare.
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Apr 15, 2023 19:12
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Lamuella posted:making poo poo up is a skill that comes with comfort and confidence, both in the general and in the specific situation. Yeah, I liken it to improv on piano. You can't just tell someone "make poo poo up" because they don't have the mental tools to know "these keys, combined together, will make chords that sound good together." Which is why the basic rulebook needs to teach those skills to allow improv to flourish.
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Apr 15, 2023 19:15
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hyphz posted:I don’t know if you’re joking, but that is legitimately a major issue. I am joking. Even when I improvise, I have a pretty clear framework in mind to fit things into, like that's what makes the difference between lolrandumb "a dozen clowns explode out of the orc! they're all wielding alligators as weapons! roll a save vs cheese!!!"-idiocy and actual improvisation. But also some games absolutely require some meticulous note-keeping and some very clear prep in terms of preparing enemies and NPC's stat-wise for things to function.
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Apr 15, 2023 19:41
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PurpleXVI posted:Just teach people the glorious art of making poo poo up at the last second instead. Emergent gameplay used to be the norm since sandbox style play in things like dungeon crawls and so on used to be the norm, so I believe that this could be taught. There may be a perception that people pull things out of their rear end on the fly and it turns into a brilliant endeavor, but usually this is due to the fact that they have a large amount of experience to pull from, not all of it related to games specifically. If you study the structures of sandbox style gameplay, it provides clues as to how to create this kind of experience at the table. Because most tables will run in a more narrative driven play style where the referee is attempting to get people through some kind of storyline, this will often run counter to letting players have agency to do what they want (and suffer the consequences). In most to all tabletop games, even in board games where this is highly ritualized, there is the idea of the “encounter” - the basic container which all gameplay happens in. String together enough encounters, you have a session. String together multiple sessions, you have an adventure. String together multiple adventures, you have a campaign. String together enough campaigns, you get…A cookie? You get the idea at least. Encounters often can be broken into one of two major categories, which is important to think about : - Planned, in that the referee has prepared something for it in advance; - Unplanned, in which the referee has truly prepared nothing. I would argue that teaching improvisational and emergent encounter play should be considered “planned”, but the detail at which it is planned is something to call into question. Some have only very basic notes on an encounter, others plan exhaustively to the last detail. You can teach and leverage a mix of both, though sandbox style gameplay will often have referees err on the side of looser plans except with regard to the game world’s structure as defined by wilderness/dungeon maps and other major features (town details and so on). Then, we must consider why two people were very quick to respond with “That’s impossible (for me/some)”. My assumption here is that because there isn’t enough structure to improvise with, the whole façade comes down like a wet napkin. We (generically, but in specific, the rules of play for referees) can teach the structures of planned emergent encounter design. To use an oft-maligned term, “random encounter”. Most people eschew random encounters because of a core assumption that they are filler content that takes away from the fun of the game, whatever that is assumed to be. This is also further reinforced by the fact that modern games use the concept of encounters in a more specific way - the combat encounter. Many words are spent to create an encounter budget, assign the opposition values in that budget (since it’s always the opposition in this case, a problematic stance to take when you encounter strangers and strange things in the wild), and then go on to run Encounters to near exclusion as combat encounters. This is particularly true of games like D&D 5e, but other games such as LANCER do this, even though they compartmentalize it tightly - combat encounter rules do not interact with dramatic encounter rules, in LANCER’s case, and if you challenge that structure the game unravels fairly quickly. With this then we can create a more robust structure of designing emergent gameplay by creating open-ended encounters. Note that because we plan for the encounters but don’t know when they may be utilized, they can be made ad nauseam before play and used liberally through whatever method the game structures allow them to be conjured up. To contextualize this then, let’s say that there is a random encounter in the wilderness which involves a massive dragon. Because the context in which players encounter the dragon needs to be taken into consideration, understanding and planning what that situation is will be of importance. Some of the variables in that encounter are fixed - there will be dragon. Others are pre-generated based on the world parameters - the players determine their own positioning in the game world (hopefully), the power level of the players and their possessions may play a role, and because of where they are geographically, even weather and time of day play a factor. If I prompted someone: “Make an encounter right now. Go!” You would likely get a blank stare of horror from most. However, if I said: “Make an encounter from the following situation: the players, a bunch of new adventurers that are down on their luck and running out of supplies, run into a massive dragon in the woods during a rainy night. Go!” There is considerably more structure even though both would be considered an emergent encounter. However, one has significantly more structure and would likely be easier to improvise with. Why is that? The game’s structures have worked together to create the conditions right for emergent gameplay: - The local world has been generated in advance - The dragon was placed into that world - The player characters and their belongings have also been placed into that world - Based on the needs and wants of the characters, it can drive gameplay forward You can create more layers of structure on top of this, but hopefully this communicates how rules can provide the structure for improvisation just as having an ordered kitchen with prepared ingredients can make improvising at the stove much easier. Rather than preparing an exact recipe, you’re creating something with what’s to hand and going from there.
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Apr 15, 2023 19:45
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Has anyone played the game "You Awaken In A Strange Place"? It's a very lighthearted single session game, where the setting, genre, theme, and character skills are all made up by people as they play. It's very much a lesson in GMing on your feet. https://tummy-boy.itch.io/you-awaken-in-a-strange-place
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Apr 15, 2023 19:50
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PurpleXVI posted:But also some games absolutely require some meticulous note-keeping and some very clear prep in terms of preparing enemies and NPC's stat-wise for things to function. But very few give a lot of information about learning this, or if they do, they encourage the romeroading technique where improvisation is only to drive the players back onto track. And too many compare RPG improvisation to theatrical improvisation, which doesn't really fit. While it's true that in a crunchy system you might need the stats for that dragon ready, a bigger issue is that if a bunch of newbie adventurers see a dragon, they might just run away and then there is no encounter. In theatrical improv they would be expected not to do that but in theatrical improv they don't get their characters killed.
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Apr 15, 2023 23:28
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Characters' ability to entirely avoid encounters is unrelated to whether they are pre-prepared or improvised or something in between. That is a detail of the encounter itself (let's call it "avoidability") and the game's rules and structure (let's call this "fleeing rules" as a shorthand, but this isn't necessarily running away). A structure where the GM can/does eventually have the PCs wind up where X marks the spot, no matter what choices they make, is also unrelated to improvisation - it is a choice about adventure structure. Let's call this "open-ended" vs. "closed-ended" adventures. Games that support all of these modes could say so explicitly, and perhaps provide some advice for how to do each. However, let's not assign qualitative values to any of them. There's nothing inherently good or bad with having: unavoidable encounters, avoidable encounters, rules for fleeing or leaving that unstructured, open-ended or closed-ended adventures. Well. It's probably "bad" if encounters are avoidable and encounters require a lot of preparation by the GM, because that means wasting the GM's efforts... unless prepared encounters can be re-used or repurposed, as with a closed-ended adventure where a previously avoided encounter could be made unavoidable later? So what I extract from all of the above navel-gazing is that it's good if games don't waste people's time, including the GM's. How do we teach how to avoid that? e. and, re-reading this post, maybe also "it's not good if characters are expected to be able to flee, but they physically cannot, because of the action economy and movement speeds or whatever". Improvisation might include improvising rules for unanticipated situations, whereas houseruling in rules for fleeing for repeated use is something other than improv. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Apr 15, 2023 |
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Apr 15, 2023 23:45
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I think some of the best improv education comes out of the better half of the OSR hobby. Kevin Crawford’s extensive oracles are like training wheels and he has worked examples of how to use them. The “drop dice on the graph paper” trick is good too. Electric Bastionland has sections on this. Or, and I’m not kidding here, a good Tarot for beginners book. But it’s not commonly taught as part of the intro GM section, it’s true.
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Apr 16, 2023 06:15
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I really like games that incentivize players doing things other than ‘proceed cautiously’. Most PbTA games do this; it’s remarkable how “XP on a failure” took so long to go from inspirational truism to a game mechanic. About learning to play, I am surprised how long the “learn to play fate core” videos are compared to what new players need to know. The GM kinds of needs to know the how and why of the system, the economy and what the players are about. The players need to know how to read their sheet. I pre-generate characters for my ongoing campaign and no one has complained as long as they have a choice to pick from. People who know a lot of RPG’s, people who’ve never played before, easy enough to teach. The one sticking point that people have is that you don’t need to invoke aspect to do a thing, only when you spend a fate point. They know what compels are and how to create advantages, how to help others and mark stress, but that idea just doesn’t penetrate.
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Apr 16, 2023 06:48
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Golden Bee posted:I pre-generate characters for my ongoing campaign and no one has complained as long as they have a choice to pick from. I would say that resources for onboarding to a new system in general are placed heavily on the referee of the system to begin with. It’s one thing to read and understand information from any rules set, but knowing enough to be able to teach it, particularly for new rulesets, is a tall order. “Preparing your first few games” is only something that I’ve see written explicitly in GURPS’ “How to be a GURPS GM”, which was written by a longtime referee of the system and only many years after its publication. In its infancy, LANCER also had similar issues, but enough material is out for it now four to five years after its initial full publication that similar to D&D it has a strong enough community that picked up on and innovated the ways to play those games. I will write a little more later as an exploration into why communities over certain games form at all. Since a lot of learning and playing TTRPGs is community driven or encouraged, this is a worthy and relevant topic to delve into.
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Apr 17, 2023 13:34
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I think that there's a difference between two types of complexity which has to do with breadth and depth. Some rules systems are considered complex because of how much breadth there is - the amount of sourcebooks to have what most would argue is a full experience. Others have a lot of nuance in how relatively few rules can be leveraged and interpreted. Communities have a higher tendency to form around game systems which have either of the two kinds of complexity or both. To wit, this is partly why games which are relatively straightforward in practice like Apocalypse World tend to have robust communities due to the depth of the rules structures providence. LANCER, D&D 4e - specifically, the combat portions of them - have a lot of breadth and depth (activate powers and use a tactically robust character to engage with the world). D&D 2e, 3.5e, 5e, GURPS, RIFTS, and other such systems prioritize breadth when their core rules are fairly understandable (roll over/under with a basic throw of the dice, whatever that might be). To further highlight this, if you removed the core component of combat from LANCER or D&D 4e, most people would argue that the game will be somewhat lackluster, as there is not a lot of breadth or depth in the narrative components of either game. Pretty much all supplements for either system fan-made or otherwise are for the combat componentry and light on touching the narrative portion. Contrast the above to Apocalypse World and its derivatives, which have depth in how narrative moves are interpreted, but fairly light combat resolution mechanics that are mostly extensions of the narrative rules. An offshot of this which is also attracting a lot of attention because it provides some more structure (and thus breadth and depth) to the narrative driven rules are games like Blades in the Dark, which have a combination of individual and group rules dynamics that have attracted a large following. GURPS has a lot of breadth but you can run its core gameplay for free using GURPS Lite, which abstracts all gameplay down to its basic task resolution mechanic of rolling 3d6 and comparing that to a number - and, the more options that are there (provided in the core rules or otherwise) means that its somewhat cheeky title of "generic universal role playing system" comes into focus. Even if you don't hear about it very often, there is quite a strong community of people who play GURPS on a regular basis - and, there was a time on these forums where the community played just as much GURPS as any other system since it was play by post friendly. Communities then could be said to be influenced in a major way by how complex a game is, whatever that complexity looks like. The complexity is something that encourages a large amount of debate and discussion, arguments in good or bad faith, and also a very wide swath of interpretation and disregard for some of the complexity. I might even have an argument to say that games which have both types of complexity have the highest chance of success at encouraging communities indirectly. Nowhere in LANCER says to go create an official Discord server or thread on here to talk about it; nor was there any explicit rules text to suggest that people should hold internet arguments about how best to build a magic sword for GURPS using its point buy system (I pity you, by the way, if you remember *that* discussion). People feel the need to check how their interpretations of complexity are, and in that curiosity and excitement so too encounter other people who are interpreting the rules complexity in potentially a very different way, intentionally or not. This is a strange thing to include in this thread, but since we learn to play and run tabletop games because of social connections and a community is one of the largest representations of that, then it's worth thinking about. The broadest interpretation of community tends to be the least important of the bunch, though, since local communities and the health and wellbeing thereof creates the kind of atmosphere which encourages learning, and by extension encourages playing. A community that is more interested in arguments and rarely, if ever play with each other such as message board threads dedicated to some kind of franchise or specific rules system (and the personalities that tends to invite) mean that at best they trend towards being filler when it comes to education. Conversations that I've seen or been a part of with these kinds of larger "never play with each other" community structures tend to fall flat because when someone presents an issue (possibly abstract or practical) about a given rules interpretation or concept, some suggestions are offered and then playing it out tends to be the ultimate course of action. People don't actually play it out in the thread - such a thing would be a massive derail from the very concept - and so instead there are a lot of opportunities to idly pick apart the suggestion to play. This might end up in a bad faith argument that has nothing to do with the original ask. Because the loop of experimentation doesn't get closed for play, something else fills that gap. Communities will become experts at the specific interpretation of the games they're playing. Whether that community is a handful of people (or just a single person) to a well established and entrenched local group may point towards if there are healthy spaces to gather and spend a meaningful amount of time together, such that the community can grow, learn, teach, and play its specific interpretation of whatever game is at the table that week. Anyway, that exploration probably has a lot more to think about but beyond the scope of this thread, perhaps, since it would imply that local community engagement is a thing to look into.
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Apr 17, 2023 19:05
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