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remusclaw posted:All this talk about death is also ignoring that oftentimes, in the specific game or game type that is being talked about, resurrection is pretty easily available RAW. Which one, is an indicator of how much that chafes some GM's enough to write it out. And two, shows how death is not even that big a consequence, at least again RAW. Now, of course, that makes a certain degree of sense, D&D of that vintage will happily kill off a character with poison or petrification or whatever on a single roll. Usually only after a certain level, though, gated as a service by being expensive and as a player spell by needing a cleric capable of casting it.
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Apr 27, 2023 16:54
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Yeah, this conversation is still D&D centric clearly, and the great majority of D&D games are low level. Because people tend to start at level 1, and then games tend to peter out or end. In non-D&D games, the availability of a character recovery is all over the map. Very setting-specific. I personally have only played relatively low level D&D games, have seen very few character deaths, but when they've happened, a resurrection has never been an option within the by-the-book parameters of costs and availability. Still, resurrection as a fantasy trope is there, and as a game mechanic that's perhaps a separate consideration, which ought not to be conflated? I think D&D has resurrection spells etc. because of fantasy tropes that the game makers were leaning on for most of the rest of their design decisions in early days, and not so much to make it so that players would never have to let go of characters they didn't feel done with. That's a guess of course. A broader point might be interesting to interrogate, though: what does "the way our RPG games usually end" teach us, and do we learn wrong lessons thereby? I think literally 100% of the RPG games I've played in ended due to interplayer scheduling conflicts, burnout by the GM, or a mutual lack of enthusiasm (or often a combo of these). Not from the game ending in a satisfying story conclusion. A good amount of responsibility for that is on me, because I haven't played as much as I could have and have had some level of reluctance to reach out and find games in the past ten years or so (I've been more focused on wargames and boardgames) but I think it's pretty common. And yet I don't recall a game that ever addressed that likelihood and presented tools or options or advice for it.
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Apr 27, 2023 17:01
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PurpleXVI posted:Usually only after a certain level, though, gated as a service by being expensive and as a player spell by needing a cleric capable of casting it. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 17:02
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Leperflesh posted:Still, resurrection as a fantasy trope is there, and as a game mechanic that's perhaps a separate consideration, which ought not to be conflated? I think D&D has resurrection spells etc. because of fantasy tropes that the game makers were leaning on for most of the rest of their design decisions in early days, and not so much to make it so that players would never have to let go of characters they didn't feel done with. Which is an interesting point, when you name it as a fantasy trope because... I have read an awful lot of fantasy novels, both trashy, classics and everything in between, and in all of those I can really only recall three instances of anything we'd identify as "Resurrection." One is Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings, though that's really more of a reincarnation. The second is in one of the first Dragonlance novels where... a character that's super central to the plot but whose name eludes me because there's nothing memorable about her, gets incinerated and then appears alive and unscathed later, but even that's more of someone appearing to die and then not actually dying. The third is necromancy in the Death Gate Cycle, which even when it's used to reanimate someone with their mind and will intact, is portrayed as an awful thing for both the resurrected and the world around them(reanimated mages tend to return insane and obsessed with killing everything, anyone reanimated tends to have a great difficulty dying, and whenever you reanimate someone, causality kills off someone who's their rough equivalent elsewhere). So I don't really feel like we can call it a fantasy trope, I think it's a pretty flat game design decision intended to make sure that when Kevinnnnnn dies the next time, his player doesn't have to reroll yet another Human Thief and level him up to attain parity with the rest of the party, and the GM doesn't have to invent a reason why this guy wants to join the team's quest, too.
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Apr 27, 2023 17:12
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Like there's greek and egyptian myths about going into the underworld to retrieve the dead, this is a fantasy trope that is millennia old. Also you know... The Resurrection.
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Apr 27, 2023 17:18
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It's certainly a comic book trope, and has been for close to a century.
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Apr 27, 2023 17:21
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Leperflesh posted:A broader point might be interesting to interrogate, though: what does "the way our RPG games usually end" teach us, and do we learn wrong lessons thereby? I want to say RPGs have mostly addressed this indirectly by just... being less monofocused on the D&D-style 1-20 mega campaign as the assumed default. Not to say that you can't burn out halfway through a five-session arc, but it's easier to deal with than the alternative. But also, I feel like a big reason this isn't seriously discussed in most RPG books is because... well, the solution for scheduling conflicts and waning enthusiasm is ultimately basic social dynamics, and these are still books. The author would need to be able to write both a good, inspiring explanation of game mechanics and good advice for creating stable friend groups in the modern era, and the readers would need to actually want to switch from reading an RPG manual to a chapter of relationship advice. They don't necessarily mesh super well, especially not when you usually want to keep your word count tight, so it's no wonder the extent of most game's advice on this subject is essentially "keep your games short and talk honestly about your feelings about the game with each other".
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Apr 27, 2023 17:27
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Leperflesh posted:Like there's greek and egyptian myths about going into the underworld to retrieve the dead, this is a fantasy trope that is millennia old. Also you know... The Resurrection. Okay, yes, for a sufficiently broad definition of "Fantasy" I will grant you that there is something of a trope about it.  However, those are, as you mention it, quests where the resurrector has to physically drag the dead person back to the world of the living after an arduous and risky journey or otherwise, you know, do some stuff. About the only one resembling the ease with which you cast a spell of Resurrection in D&D is Jesus and Lazarus.
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Apr 27, 2023 17:29
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PurpleXVI posted:
Weirdly while I have seen a reasonable amount of fantasy characters get resurrected (Jon Snow in ASOIAF being the one that jumps most immediately to mind) I don't think I've ever seen an rpg where someone's character died and they replaced it with an identical character.
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Apr 27, 2023 18:04
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hyphz posted:That’s true, but it works more direct ways as well. For example, the vast majority of Podcasted games are railroaded, even if they don’t appear to be on the podcast. In many cases, the players and GM together will have decided on the plot of the next session before recording starts, and then the players will fill-in reasons why the characters take actions which lead along that plot. If they’re good actors - and the most successful podcasts are all done by actors - they can make this appear to be spontaneous even though it isn’t. I still don't recall you actually showing this is the case other than a suspicion you have because of wording you found odd. I do think there is something noteworthy about a good portion of new RPG players being introduced by watching games. Session Zero is rarely shown (but likely happens), and play practices such as "yes, and"-ing and sharing spotlight are assumed instead of stated. In addition, they usually have an emphasis on character drama and deep world building. Those are all very fine traits for games to have, of course, but they do assume a very DND mindset. Edit: also, the world building is assumed to be almost entirely the GMs responsibility/privilege, with the GM occasionally handing discrete bits of narrative power to players for things their characters would be familiar with. Capfalcon fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 21:49
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Lamuella posted:Weirdly while I have seen a reasonable amount of fantasy characters get resurrected (Jon Snow in ASOIAF being the one that jumps most immediately to mind) I don't think I've ever seen an rpg where someone's character died and they replaced it with an identical character. *open-palm slams Paranoia onto the table*
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Apr 27, 2023 21:58
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Mirage posted:*open-palm slams Paranoia onto the table* Excuse you! Jim-R-DOA-4 was terminated for treason to against Friend Computer! Jim-R-DOA-5 is a new clone free from any treasonous defects and blameless in the eyes of Friend Computer!
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Apr 27, 2023 22:00
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Leperflesh posted:I think literally 100% of the RPG games I've played in ended due to interplayer scheduling conflicts, burnout by the GM, or a mutual lack of enthusiasm (or often a combo of these). Not from the game ending in a satisfying story conclusion. A good amount of responsibility for that is on me, because I haven't played as much as I could have and have had some level of reluctance to reach out and find games in the past ten years or so (I've been more focused on wargames and boardgames) but I think it's pretty common. Ending games is something that usually doesn't get talked about too much since who wants to end the fun - so the saying goes - but I like defining end states for characters and also for a given game. There may be a continuation afterwards of which there are many additional stories to be had and explored, but it is true that games tend to fall apart rather than wrap up. I think the primary responsibility of this lies in the referee and making an intentional plan to end the game with some kinds of conditions, whatever they may be. This should be communicated and negotiated, of course, but it should be considered in some way. For longer running groups I like the idea of having games go for a certain amount of sessions or real world time has elapsed where it wouldn't make too much sense to start that game back up again. That depends on the play group, but when people have a lot going on and it's been a month since people last saw each other or talked about the game it becomes much more difficult to remember what happened unless people wrote it down somewhere. Here's an interesting thing I read recently: stakeholders who ask for something inside of a software engineering organization will not only forget what they asked for, but why they asked for it at around the 90 day mark. They just have no idea what's going on even though people are hard at work in the background trying to deliver the thing they had asked for. Probably not a universal thing, to be sure, but it is something to keep in mind - people are forgetful! At the same time, people also could have some kind of play artifact like taking notes, summaries, or other such things, which primarily is in the hands of players - who, unless it's part of the game in some way, tend to ignore it or claim that it's too much paperwork (which might be true, but often is more the case that nobody wants to take ownership of that since it sounds suspiciously like being responsible for something other than showing up and rolling dice). These tend to last significantly longer in people's minds rather than just the storytelling aspect of it. Generally, there are some things that should be examined: - Scheduling play thresholds: since people are often very bad about scheduling, having a consistent time to play (often dictated by the referee) can be hard, but rewarding. I'm of the personal opinion that coming together to play a game is better than not playing, and while some people aren't interested in playing a "side game" but also don't want to leave people out of the main game, this needs to be talked about in much greater detail with people inside of the group. Often, trying to get a lot of people together who don't know each other that well to try and show up for an activity the same time every week, two weeks, whatever tends to get sour fairly quickly. I prefer to run whenever I'm at the table ready to go and have at least one player for an 'open table' game, and even if nobody shows up for a game I can use that time to prepare more things or have a couple of beers before wrapping up for the day. - Managing referee energy levels: It takes a lot of experience with boundary setting and trying out a lot of different things before having a good idea of when a referee is getting too burned out. Sometimes it can happen due to external factors not in their direct control - work, school, family, volunteering, etc. can all be quite demanding. Being able to have a backup plan is good, including having other people help with preparing those backup plans. I joined a group whereupon the guy running the game immediately burned out in two sessions and after a few one shots, I offered to run for the group until the other guy got back on his feet. He still showed up when he could to come play as a player, and that helped him recharge his batteries for continuing the game he had started. - Mutual lack of enthusiasm: This is an interesting one to think about since there are a lot of people who don't like saying they're not having fun or as engaged with a game and want there to be some change. It also gets frustrating when one side or another doesn't just lack enthusiasm, but instead becomes combative and hostile about the game experience. I've had that happen before and it pretty much killed any enthusiasm I had to run that game - having someone be invited to the table who immediately takes everything about the game in bad faith, complains about every aspect of the game, and then begins assigning blame is a strong mood-killer. I feel that it comes back to "well, what actually happens at tables"? Usually, they will fall apart unless someone carries on with the group. A healthy way of ensuring play continues is to have more communication on all sides of the social experience - not just a session zero, though that is something that is useful, it needs to be a constant feedback loop. Learning to ask the right questions instead of a binary "did you have a good time". This is an actual sticking point for a lot of groups - many folks are not only conflict averse, but there are a large amount of folks who may be shy, people-pleaser tendencies, or have another type of thing where their social perceptions and also social skills may be underdeveloped. Most, if not all, play groups I've been a part of over the years have encountered this issue in the past. It's often that when play ends with one group a lot of people will stop talking to each other completely, which is something that I find to be a bit sad. People will find different reasons to ascribe why a game ended and then try to solve for those things in some way, and overcompensation is a big thing I see. "I had a bad experience with my last group, so we're going to spend four hours exhaustively filling out a form for session zero and then talking about it in great detail" tends to be overkill for a lot of play groups. I like the idea of normalizing quicker play, which is why I'm exploring open tables and community tables once again. It's much easier to keep a table like this going and to be more inclusive of whoever may show up for a play session - similarly, folks who are feeling much more connected with one another can then go and figure out a new play group that's a branch of that wider group. This was common when I was growing up, and it was also common to take characters from one game to the next if they were in the same rules system even if the house rules at each table might have been different. If I were to formalize this in game rules, I would probably do something like this to incorporate into games: - Assuming a regular play group, discuss or set intervals to have checkpoints. That is, how many sessions before taking a session break to do a pulse read of the game. 4 to 6 sessions would be good to start, then spacing it out based on how things are shaping up (more mature play groups may wish to delay or adjust) - During each checkpoint, people should use some kind of scorecard to see how a few things are going. This should be a fast gut-read kind of thing where they do something. Points could be good, or thumbs-up/down/sideways. Categories and questions to ask can be something like: game narrative, mechanics, social dynamics, energy. You could create a few questions (one to three) for each category that your table cares about and give a count-down to do this. After the results have been tallied, talk about them! - Leave time open to talk about how people are feeling about the game as a whole from players and referees both. Not only should this be done, but others should reflect whatever's being said to ensure that they're actually hearing what is said instead of brushing them away. - Think about some changes to propose for the game based on what's happened so far. They can be small or large. - Ask the question: should we keep playing this game? I would also encourage to use other cueing tools during play such as X/O/Fast-forward cards, Lines/Veils, or any other kind of tool to allow for more structured play with nonverbal and nonviolent social cues.
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Apr 27, 2023 22:21
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PurpleXVI posted:I think the main problem with character death is that you have to undermine the effect somewhat in order to not make it a vicious slog for everyone involved. You're quite right. Some systems really are not designed to get past player death. A cool way of re-thinking some campaigns is having it be the story of like a military unit. Even if there are no survivors from the original bunch, 'The Flyin' Hellfish" have been through so many campaigns and they carry on the unit tradition. In Real-Life WW2, there were many US units that hit the beaches of Normandy and suffered greater than 100% casualties in the months between then and VE-Day. In one of our really long-running campaigns the only character from the early days that lived to the end was this random NPC that was just some throwaway guy from a random table, but became the heart of the group and the moral center of the squad, even as characters died, retired, etc, he eventually became the guy who knew everything about the conspiracy they were trying to unravel because of his sheer survival.
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Apr 28, 2023 01:00
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Nuns with Guns posted:I just wondered why you didn't ask your DM directly if you could switch characters. Inexperience, it sounds like? Correct. I just didn't know it was a thing that was even done. In our first session we had a guy go down, we learned how to roll Death Saves, it seemed to me at least very simple that it'd be easy for me to just do some reckless leap into a horde of enemies and die drowning in blood when I failed my saves or they attacked me while I was down. I didn't know it was an option to just tell him, and everyone was already role-playing really hard, so I thought maybe they'd think it was cool that I did this in-game, rather than just have my hardcore berserker guy just opt to go home. Then I could avenge him! Nowadays I'd just message the DM if I could just roll a new guy up and let the DM figure out some natural way of tossing him into the story if that sort of thing was important to the campaign or maybe it's more casual and they are cool with "Here's Toad the Wizard, he's with you guys now. Barbarian ran off". Nuns with Guns posted:Your original anecdote was raised as evidence that fudging is bad, but there was apparently a lot more at play than the DM lying about some dice results here that led to a breakdown of your two-session campaign. I don't blame anyone for destroying it or something, but there's more at play than just "fudging. It also opens up discussion about what counts as "fudging" and what is outright "cheating." I'd treat fudging as ignoring a die roll or maybe permitting a spell to do something not explicitly outlined in its rules, like a fireball setting curtains on fire. Is an OP NPC follower "fudging"? It sounds like stronger manipulation of the rules to me. Is all fudging "cheating"? I'm talking in a broader sense because the whole concept and how it is ingrained in TTRPG culture is certainly a complicated and hot-button issue. There were other Fudging Issues but they didn't really de-rail the game in the way that the suicidal dwarf did. There was a lot of hidden Difficulty Checks that were pretty obvious he was just letting roll on through for success. You've probably seen a DM say "Roll an Investigation Check" and then the player gets like a 9 and the DM furrows their brow and just tells us the thing anyway because obviously they wanted us to find it. I think that's a newbie DM mistake to put key content past narrow funnels and in the past I wrote a crappy mystery or two with this very flaw myself. We would fail some check and then The Healer would investigate it and the DM would roll behind the screen and be like "Ahh, Healer knows that this plant is poisonous and was probably used for the murder!" Even in my newbie stage I was aware that this was kind of a railroad, but I knew he was running a single module from a book in his hands so I was willing to play along. I liked Half-Life and that's a railroad, I just figured we'd have some fun in challenging combats. Once I realized we couldn't lose the combat nor get off the plot railroad, it became a "Why are we even here?" question in my brain. In this Suicidal Dwarf game, for example, monsters would have an Opportunity Attack if you attempted to move past them while in combat. The monsters would do it to us. But, the monsters wouldn't do it to the NPC healer ever, and the first few times I didn't really notice or care but once I was pretty determined to stay down it became very obvious that the healer could just run past 4 guys to get to my body and none of them would take a swing. Is that fudging? I think so. Everyone was using Spell Slots to cast spells and these were quite limited but the healer never ever ran out. I call it "The Healer" because that is what my relation to the NPC was, but they were never introduced as some famous Magic Doctor or something, it was just a helper NPC that we were using as a guide that turned out to be a virtuoso swordsman, magic healer, whatever was required to get us through the encounters. I think OP DMPCs are a whole other can of worms and never use them myself, but if it was statted out ahead of time I wouldn't consider it cheating, just a bad idea. Personally I think it is fudging if you write some NPC with stats and then they just gain new abilities or spells or whatever on the fly in response to in-game stuff, unless it happens in a cool diegetic manner like this weird cultist eats brains and he eats the wizard brain and learns Magic Missile or whatever. The DM rolled all their dice behind the screen which sure, that's a choice, and many DMs do it, but I think when they get dishonest about Thing A and also roll dice behind the screen then I'm just going to assume they are lying about the results behind the screen. For me, at least, having a fireball ignite a curtain or something doesn't track as fudging to me because it seems a natural consequence of a fiery explosion going off in a room full of stuff that burns. If anything, I'd see it as Fudging to have stuff not burn if the PCs are launching fire all around a straw hut or a sawmill or something. I have no idea if Fireball in certain editions specifically does not burn stuff. I suspect a lot of DMs 'balance stuff on the fly' like secretly subtracting monster HP during the fight to ensure it dies at the right time, or doing the opposite and beefing the monster HP because you wanted a good boss fight and two players rolled Nat 20 in a row and would have just ripped its head off with no effort. Buffing some NPC to just do whatever it takes to get us through the encounter covers that. .I would consider it cheating, and wouldn't do it in my own games, and wouldn't want to play in a game that did it. I'd be pretty annoyed if the DM did it secretly and I found out. I think it's cool to do if you straight out tell the players ahead of time "I'm going to ignore dice rolls when it makes good dramatic sense or leads to an outcome I didn't intend, or rebalance NPCs and monsters mid-game to tell the story I'm aiming for." In that scenario I'd just say "No, this campaign is not for me." before we started rather than become a problem player when I get annoyed by it during the game. Nuns with Guns posted:1 I'm not a lad. Apologies, was just an expression, but my bad for assuming. Nuns with Guns posted:2 Knowing it was a two-session deal that broke down into an argument, and knowing you were still pretty new does change the level of toxicity I read into what happened. Your original post framed it as a much longer-running affair where tensions built up over multiple sessions of you becoming "the problem player" with escalating ridiculously suicidal stunts, and not you running into a mob of kobolds 6 or 8 or 10 times in a night. Yeah I'm not trying to say that I totally owned this dude. We both acted like dumbasses in the same night, and a lot of it was due to expectations not meeting reality when dice hit the table. He was new-ish at the time as well and I see a lot of newbie DMs can make similar mistakes when they are trying to just get through a session with everyone alive and having fun. Anyway, I think we've relived the Suicidal Dwarf that couldn't die enough to honor his invincible memory. On a related but different topic: - Do you think online games lead to more/less toxic behavior or big problems with beginning a campaign? Let's say that the people don't know or barely know each other, and it's not a group of established friends who are doing it because Covid or whatever. I have no experience in online games myself, but if you do, is there a tendency for people to act more or less understanding in relation to a lot of the issues we've already discussed. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 01:34
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gurragadon posted:Your right that when one character dies you do have to undermine the effect. It can be lessened by not making a carbon copy of the character you were playing before, but then you run into the problem of how this new character just happens to be at the right place right time. I usually just roll random race, class, background so I don't deliberately try to fill the old role. With our group we try and make it 'fit the fiction' and we don't have the next room suddenly have a fully equipped new guy that's friends with the party. Almost always we have some sort of hirelings or sidekicks or whatever around so the instant someone dies, even in the same combat, we'll just have them control the NPC until we've got a good point to introduce the new guy. Sometimes they just turn the NPC into their character and if that means that the NPC now has a few new abilities or whatever that just represents them stepping up into a more leadership oriented role during a crisis. Obviously it would be taking the piss if I made them wait several sessions or something ridiculous. gurragadon posted:Most of our deaths in combat in the groups I play end up being TPK's. When we are at the place where one or two characters are dead, it usually leads to a cascading effect of us all dying because the remaining characters can't handle the combat by themselves. That's pretty hardcore. Do you have retreat rules in your system? I have had more player deaths than I could ever count but we've never had a TPK with the exception of the time the players all willingly sacrificed themselves in kind of a Randy-Quaid Independence Day moment to end the campaign. I think with 'realistic' opposition and ways to retreat it is hard to have a TPK. Like, a single hungry Owl-Snake doesn't want to kill 4-5 people, it wants to bring down the halfling and drag it away to eat it. Does the Death-Save system encourage TPKs in an oblique way because lots of people take ages to die and everyone kind of hangs around to save them, and then it causes a cascade of death? Is retreat more likely if someone just takes a bullet to the brain and is 100% dead and no point in trying to rescue him? Obviously you can have the best retreat rules in the game and players can be obstinate and stick around to charge into their dooms but I'm curious. gurragadon posted:That kind of leads into the type of game you are wanting to play though and expectations going in. All of our campaigns are basically just hex crawls where we start doing some random mission and kind of just go where the story leads us. We always deal with the lingering effects that our old characters left on the world and that's how our DM develops the world. For example, a wizard in our group planted a bean from the good old bag of beans, but it ended up causing a mummy lord to rise and enslave part of the sword coast. Our characters in that campaign died before they could even deal with it, but the next characters we made had to deal with it as well. We've gotten 3 groups up to various levels, the highest was 9th, and they have all had impacts on the common world the DM is building. I agree with pretty much everything you've written here, and I suppose another thing to think about is if the DM just spent like 100 bucks on the Avernus book (DnD books are expensive!) then they are almost certainly gonna try to get their money's worth out of it. Would be pretty funny to team-wipe in the first encounter and have the DM just go "Welp, that's that" and never use it again.
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Apr 28, 2023 01:57
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SniperWoreConverse posted:I always made them start over as feeble level 1s, but get big xp until they reach parity. They're learning from seasoned adventurers A lot of systems make it really easy to grab a bunch of levels early on. Like, 1000xp to Level Two, 2000xp to Level Three, 4000 to Level four, so while everyone else is grinding away to Level 7 you actually catch up pretty quick. Something I have always wondered: Do low (or zero) lethality games make players more competitive? Like they all know or suspect they are gonna get through this, so the game becomes more about who can womp the biggest damage or show off the hardest or get the best magic items for themselves? At least in my limited 5e experience it felt that way, that people would compete to be the big star of the show. I have no evidence beyond my own experiences here and not trying to say that this style is wrongbad. In the OSR stuff we run things are often pretty brutal so everyone is thrilled when someone succeeds at anything and level disparities are not such a big deal because everyone is scrabbling for any possible advantage to achieve their common goal, rather than optimizing their One Cool Dude. One way I have of fostering cooperation (and making my own DM life easier) is during XP at the end of the session we give out bonus XP to the: Mapper (Draw the drat map!) Treasurer (Tracks the money!) Quartermaster (Keep up with the supplies) Scribe (Write down important info or lore or names or deals) Crier (Tracks the calendar, writes the recap) Then we also have everyone nominate the MVP of the night and they get some bonus XP as well. Oftentimes players fall into the same roles but if they wanna XP boost the new character they can take on some of those ancillary roles and zoom through the low levels a bit faster. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 02:06
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PurpleXVI posted:Part of my issue with this sort of game, personally, would be that I'd feel like I was repeating a lot of stuff. "Ah, yes, time to spend ten to twelve sessions fighting kobolds and orcs in Dogshit Valley so we can then move up to fighting trolls and minotaurs in Trashfire Canyon." There's always going to be a limited array of level-appropriate options, especially in a combat-heavy hexcrawl. This isn't really a mechanics or system problem, this is a problem of the DM writing dogshit encounters. The best way to write random encounters is to make them always interesting. I know that sounds kind of bullshit, like "Just do things good!", but: - Hexcrawls are often NOT super combat heavy, exploration is a big part of the appeal. - A good random encounter is never just "Here's 10 goblins". That being boring is not a problem with hexcrawls, it is a problem with lazy unimaginative hexcrawls. The way I'd write one and throw on my table is: "10 Goblins of the Skull-Munch tribe [HQ at Hex 7] dragging 5 captives they kidnapped from Slimeburg Village [Hex 23]. They are bringing them to feed to the Ogre family lurking in Guano Cavern [behind the waterfall at Hex 11], in order to entice the Ogres to join them as muscle. (Moving): Goblins are singing a marching song and demanding the captives join in, but the captives cannot make such warbling tones and are being abused everytime they gently caress up. (Resting) Goblins are gathered around a campfire with surviving captains, two of them are wearing bloodstained human clothes and have draped the skins of slaughtered humans over their faces. They entertain their compatriots by putting on exaggerated human voices and reenacting their raid "OH, Hans, run, hide the children! They're here!". " I would also get bored and tired and frustrated if every encounter was just "Oh no, it's some Orcs, roll initiative." The above encounter is something I wrote in 5 minutes. It has multiple points of interaction that the players can make interesting choices on, and links to things going on in the campaign map. Maybe the players can talk to the goblins and find out about these Ogres, and go slaughter them. Or maybe they find out about the Ogres and try to feed the goblins to them, and now they have Ogre muscle because the Ogres will work for anyone who feeds them meat? Or maybe they buy the captives off the Gobbos? Or yeah, gently caress it, let's kill these bastards! Once you begin seeing "Random Encounters" as some poo poo that should be interesting rather than some time-tax on the players, then it is not 10 to 12 sessions of killing trash mobs. I always seed my encounter tables with connections to other things going on in the map, as well as lots of verbs so the encounters are always Doing Something rather than just some mooks on a battle board. It is fun and interesting and engaging from the start. One of my design goals is that the players shouldn't be able to tell if something is "just" a random encounter versus something planned and important. The important cool stuff is whatever the players are doing and having fun with. Obviously this is more effort than just "A troll attacks you!!!!!!" but it is probably better to have a random table with 10 good and interesting encounters than a table with 40 trashy ones, because how many are you really gonna see? In between sessions you can then just replace the 'used up' encounters with something cool. PurpleXVI posted:
Yeah, a lot of these are problems that must be thought through to make the concept work in an interesting and fun way, but some of this is just taking the piss. Like, no one who does this is spending several sessions where people sit out. If we're doing a hex-crawl they are often outdoors and in the world and it is relatively simple to have a new character join. They often have made contacts and links with various factions (a major point of hexcrawls!!!) so it is not complete hand-wavey bullshit that they have a ranger from Robin Hood's crew or a warrior from the Bloodroot tribe if they have in the past robbed the Sheriff's wagon for Robin Hood or returned the holy idol to the Bloodroot tribe. "Adventurers" is just a dumb gamey way of saying "Band of Mercenaries". If the Band of Mercenaries who are my player characters are going around kicking rear end and taking names, then they earn a bit of a reputation, and it is likely that up-and-coming low lifes and thugs and mercenaries and warriors, or "Adventurers" are gonna want to join them for a chance at loot, fame, revenge, or whatever the hell that the party is doing. This is realistically how mercenary warbands develop in real life - people begin to gather around a successful company that earns money and reputation. I think stuff like 5e is not designed to handle player death very well, and it is one of the reasons I switched out of it when it became evident to me. Here is just a list of how player death both stings and is not something that sucks all the fun out of the game. Usual caveat that this is how we do things and there are other cool ways to do things, and the points you brought up are something that was considered from a conceptual level from the ground up. D100 Tables No character is ever the exact same. Funeral Rules Nobody is inheriting Daniel's stuff. Important Quest Stuff like maps or documents or keys or whatever are looted, but he's getting buried with most of his stuff. Funeral Rules New character can start with boosted XP due to players spending gold on the funeral. The choice is in their hands. Sidekicks/Hirelings Player instantly is playing again, as somebody. "But, that's just a generic sidekick!". The solution is to make hirelings and sidekicks also interesting, just like random encounters. Level 2 fighter is not interesting. A little better would be Mad Marius the Lunatic, the Level 2 fighter, has a grudge against the moon, and will fight with extra +2 Attack Bonus if he can see it, because he's not going to fail in front of that treacherous bastard! Motivation: Earn enough gold to buy passage into the Dwarf-Hold of Kazak Kazakistan, where he will never have to see the Moon again! Knows nothing about Dwarfs, but would never admit it, and considers himself an authority on them." A player can have fun with Mad Marius for a little while before they get their new character going. He doesn't need to be a full fledged amazing character, but just a little something special that makes him fun to embody for a short-term, or permanent if the player really ends up enjoying it. OSR Combat Your level is not the big determinant of success. Low HP totals across the board mean clever plans can win fights, and thus Level 1 Player With Cool Idea may be just as important as Level 7 Fighter Who Swings An Axe. You are not only useful because of your +3 sword, and your wits are more important than your equipment/daily abilities, so losing Bob's Magic Sword is not the end of the world. No trash content No one is 'repeating' anything. Aim for everything to be good. No 'balancing' It is not important for Dead Bob the Fighter to be replaced by Bobert the Fighter because the game is fine to play without someone taking on the Tank, DPS, Healer, whatever role. You want a party of all Wizards? Do it. You want a party that can't do magic at all? We've done it plenty of times. Be what you want, the game can handle it. People aren't pressured to play any particular character to balance out the party or whatever, I just tell them to play whatever the hell they want to because I haven't balanced it anyway. Open World TPK's are unlikely because you know you can go somewhere else, you're not doing the encounter the DM planned for tonight, you have choices and retreating is cool and good. Retreating from the dragon's cave means you come back later with the 200 mercenaries you hired or the Dragon-Stabbing Spear you looted from a tomb. 'Realistic opposition' with goals No, the pack of wolves won't TPK the party because they are animals that are hungry, they just want to eat the little wounded halfling and gently caress off. No, the Inquisition isn't gonna TPK you, they want to bring you back alive for a trial in front of the public. No, the cultists aren't gonna TPK you, they are looking for captives to sacrifice a the temple to birth their fetal god. I get what you're saying, I really do! You're right, actually. If you're going to have death rules then you need to find a way to make it both sting while simultaneously not let it totally ruin the session. My argument is that people have figured this out, and I'm here in this thread showing how my group has figured this out, though it is not some groggy statement from the mountain of hardcore that you must do the same as us. I am not trying to argue that everyone needs to have high lethality. I'm trying to show that if anyone reading this thread is interested in high lethality, here are some practical solutions to the problems that may arise if anyone wants to actually try this. I'm also happy to share D-Whatever Tables or documents or rules with whoever is curious about doing this. I like the idea of this thread having practical resources for people who want to try to learn or play games in ways they might be unfamiliar with. I've seen some cool stuff that I'm going to be borrowing for my own games already. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 02:42
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hyphz posted:I’ve seen this. One when I was running the fighting tournament AP for PF2 a player looked exasperated when a fight ran long and said it was boring because they knew they must eventually win the tournament for the adventure to continue. If you have read the module you know that one of its better aspects is that this is not the case. The PCs do not have to come 1st and the adventure can continue even if they are eliminated. But at the same time I couldn’t tell the player exactly that because a) for all they knew it would just be what I “had” to say and b) if I told them the entire truth they would then feel the tournament was a waste of time because nothing of lasting consequence happens no matter what they do. So I had to fall back on the old trick of being ambiguous. I learned that from somewhere. I don’t know where, and I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t. This is interesting. It is kind of a double bind. I guess the advantage of a long-running game is that they only really work if some sort of trust develops with the DM. I'm not saying trust in that "The DM will never fudge the dice", but just trust that the DM is actually running the kind of game the players want to play, whatever that means. For your fighting tournament game: Would it have helped, to tell them that yes they could fail, and that the adventure would take a 'new path' if they failed? I'm imagining this is some kung-fu fight tournament where they aren't necessarily fighting to the death. Not saying you did this wrongly or whatever, but sometimes I have found that showing them a little glimpse into how the sausage is made can help them get on board. Kind of like knowing Tom Cruise did all his own stunts or whatever in Mission Impossible so he really could be hurt falling off that helicopter makes the scene more exciting, or that Keanu Reeves really did learn kung fu for the Matrix so those moves are a little more amazing.
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Apr 28, 2023 03:01
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aldantefax posted:Really Good Post I think you've hit on a lot of points that often don't get discussed openly. I wonder: Do a lot of games fall apart due to the overplanning stage? Like, the referee has created this Epic Quest that's gonna take the players from Level 1-20 or whatever, but we all know that this is incredibly unlikely and that even if the DM has loving nailed it on every level, there is a very high chance that Real Life just fucks the group up? Several-hour Session 0 probably sabotages more games than it saves. I have moved into the low-barrier to entry stuff because I like having friends pop in as Guest Stars for just a night in our long-running game so having a system where you can roll something up in 5 min and get right to playing is pretty essential for our table. Is it almost always better just to plan something small that will be awesome right away, and then if the group manages to cohere we can very easily expand things outwards and upwards? I consider myself fortunate in that I play with a group of friends who are my friends anyway and they aren't people I met through RPGs. So, even if every second Sunday is RPG day but if some people can't make it well, we're probably gonna hang out anyway so if some people can't show up the ritual is still intact even if we end up playing Spirit Island or something. I guess a lot of the Social Contract stuff is way more tenuous with people who are only getting together for the game, and can lead to greater DM burnout if they feel like they're getting used for a game in a way that they wouldn't if they were doing this with someone who is a friend already. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 03:19
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The advantage of running certain genres like superhero or pulp horror is you get a complete thing every session. The conspiracy is discovered or not, the villain is defeated or at least thwarted. Multistage quests that rely on the same people are vulnerable to real life. The degree of vulnerability is related how much of the group are random players or your friends.
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Apr 28, 2023 05:55
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When I ran The Between I really took advantage of that formalised structure - one session equals one full set of phases. The game having a definite end point definitely helped us pick things back up whenever we had a long break due to holidays or illness. I think burn-out is a fairly natural result of games which are either entirely open-ended or where the notional end goal is way off.
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Apr 28, 2023 06:11
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Golden Bee posted:The advantage of running certain genres like superhero or pulp horror is you get a complete thing every session. The conspiracy is discovered or not, the villain is defeated or at least thwarted. Multistage quests that rely on the same people are vulnerable to real life. The degree of vulnerability is related how much of the group are random players or your friends. There's a podcast that does Lasers And Feelings the same way as this. Each game is a complete "episode" with beginning, middle, and end, and a rotating cast of characters based on who is available.
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Apr 28, 2023 06:33
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I think you've hit on a lot of points that often don't get discussed openly. I have definitely over-planned a game by preparing a 20-ish page screed with full world, theater of engagement, general plot, major factions etc. etc. only to have me run out of steam because the rules weren’t a good fit for what I wanted (thanks GURPS for not having giant robot rules that worked - this was before LANCER had come onto the scene) and the medium that I ran it in (play by post on here) wasn’t a great fit for my own playstyle. I learned a lot from that experience in mostly that there’s worth to plan some very broad strokes and to dynamically evolve things through play. In terms of failure rate of games it’s important to return back to that there are more people entering the hobby than ever before and they’re forming a lot of different opinions on how “the game” ought to be played, and also find out that things just aren’t for their own lifestyle. A well-established social group (that may have already been established well before a TTRPG comes into the picture) tends to be quite resilient in this aspect because the game itself is not the only glue that holds the group together. It might turn into a main component of that group, but usually most groups which encounter high failure rate are “a bunch of strangers with different expectations and schedules who come together to play a long multi-session epic narrative of staggering genius”. Particularly as adults (at least from personal experience) we don’t have a single social group and thus tend to have much broader social responsibilities. People get roommates, romantic relationships, non-romantic relationships, professional relationships, all kinds of stuff. It also becomes much more difficult outside of some pre-defined contexts to make new friends - particularly for people who are more naturally introverted, and this hobby has a lot of that, despite being a socially engaged activity. Something that I’ve seen is that players and referees both will kind of use TTRPGs as this kind of substitute for other meaningful relationships in their life. Note that I said TTRPGs and not “the friends made through TTRPGs” here, because this turns into a bit of a cargo cult. “If I run and/or play in a TTRPG with a bunch of strangers this will provide me with deep meaningful relationships that I crave, but I’d be far too embarrassed to say that’s what I want right out the gate.” This kind of repression of what people are looking for turns into, oddly, “If I run and/or play TTRPGs, then I will have friends” - not *make* friends using TTRPGs, just that the act of participating in a TTRPG will automatically solve the problems of loneliness for a person while at the same time completely disregarding the social work required to maintain a play group. My soapbox about building community becomes much more important here. In reality, games being taken to completion is not the end goal in TTRPGs for most play groups - it’s that deeper unspoken desire and need to connect with others on a more basic level, and using TTRPGs to fulfill that in a very oblique way. Why would someone go through the trouble of preparing so much content for a play group they had just met, or spend hours trying to validate the social and play experience with a session zero before even getting to know the people who are at the table as people, rather than as some kind of transactional fun agent that’s only a component to the game? In a way, it’s the game and those unspoken needs (more of the latter, but the former does play a role in it particularly with clever advertising) that drives people to think, “I’d better put everything I have into this thing because I don’t have anything else going for me”, or some other kind of quiet desperation. Of course, that’s a bit dramatized, but also it’s true for some folks. I know some coworkers who the only way they can meaningfully engaged with their remote friends is to play the same games they do, to the point where they will walk away from in person social engagements with in person friends to go raid on an MMORPG - it’s that important to them. Who’s to argue? It’s not about the game - it’s about the shared social experience. The social contract inside of the game context then should be revisited, but the level of honesty that people are used to, particularly intimate non-romantic social contracts like you see with TTRPGs, is a bit lacking. We talk a lot in this thread about elephants in the room or unspoken whatevers like it’s some kind of taboo to bring up talking about feelings - which, in a lot of cases, that is in fact taboo because it projects a certain kind of image that society at large finds to be weak in some way. Anyway. — The notes about things like “random encounters” have to do, I think, with how the mindset of random encounters have become very twisted from their actual origin. In video games, certainly in older RPGs, the “random encounter” was often actually a “random battle” complete with its own set of tropes and cliches, like the “battle transition” and so on. In JRPGs such as Final Fantasy or even early dungeon crawl CRPGs like Wizardry and Ultima, random encounters really were random battles where the only two options were to fight or flee. I would make an argument (more of a well-baked take than a hot take) that random encounters should be in even more games but the rules about how to leverage them should be better structured and better labeled. Let’s change away from the more stigmatized idea of it being “at random” and equating “encounters” with “combat” for this case. Being able to prepare these kinds of situations for a rainy day would be a very strong tool for referees as long as the supporting structure - that is, the instruction manual for how to use the tool effectively - is actually laid out. I’ll have more thoughts on this but for a preamble, I talk about them in greater detail in the old megadungeon thread in that context. For now, it’s breakfast time.
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Apr 28, 2023 11:20
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aldantefax posted:Let’s change away from the more stigmatized idea of it being “at random” and equating “encounters” with “combat” for this case. Being able to prepare these kinds of situations for a rainy day would be a very strong tool for referees as long as the supporting structure - that is, the instruction manual for how to use the tool effectively - is actually laid out. I’ll have more thoughts on this but for a preamble, I talk about them in greater detail in the old megadungeon thread in that context. For now, it’s breakfast time. Let me tell you about our Lord and Savior the 2nd edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide which presented this exact perspective of Encounters as being merely any situation in which the players had agency and could make meaningful choices that affected things, and where "random encounter tables" included everything from passing patrols to merchants and other oddities rather than merely an exhaustive list of angry wildlife.
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Apr 28, 2023 11:41
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PurpleXVI posted:Let me tell you about our Lord and Savior the 2nd edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide which presented this exact perspective of Encounters as being merely any situation in which the players had agency and could make meaningful choices that affected things, and where "random encounter tables" included everything from passing patrols to merchants and other oddities rather than merely an exhaustive list of angry wildlife. Yes, that's where a lot of my own experiences have pulled from with the concept of random encounters. It's such an oddity in terms of the rest of games out there because after the big fragmentation of content in the D&D franchise, most people decided to, like a lot of things from older versions of the game, just throw it out either because it didn't fit with their personal game vision, it was misunderstood and implemented poorly, or it didn't fit the overall franchise direction. My argument thus is to add these kinds of things to other systems and games that could benefit from it. Of course, not all games would benefit from having this tool, just like you probably don't need a 12 pound sledgehammer for fine woodworking. However, I think that most games that are narrative driven or exploration driven could benefit greatly from this. In the original examples you would typically create the encounters table in a bell curve, so you encounter some things more frequently. Quantities of whatever you encountered also influenced greatly what the nature of the encounter was. What wasn't explicitly provided in the encounter rules (they were provided as connecting rules) were disposition via the reaction roll, and almost nowhere did the actual rules provide context for what specific tags an encounter would have. These would often be verbs, in my mind, and so you could extend from them because action follows action. 1. Determine encounter basic parameters. This would be whatever's being encountered, as well as the scale (typically number appearing or something else) 2. Determine encounter tags. These can be short phrases, or even just verbs and adjectives which provide description to the encounter. 3. Outline wants, needs, and fears. This is something that I saw in Wanderhome but is just as applicable in any game. This isn't just limited to people, but can also be related to places and things. At this point, guidance ought be given in order to leverage each step to create new points that can flesh out the encounter somewhat, and outcomes ought to influence other encounters as well. To use a non-D&D example of this, I ran a FATE Core one-shot once where rather than determining the encounters randomly, I put index cards on the table that were evocative locations that had a few things going on in them. If they encountered something or someone important, that got its own card and either was put into one of the locations, or in the possession of the players. After the kickoff scene, the players had a run of the locations in whatever order they wanted - I believe they were a touring intergalactic rock band, or something like that, and they got into some trouble before their big show in a mining asteroid. As they went from place to place (gangster restaurant, music venue, drug warehouse, you get the idea) they came up with things to do at each location, define new locations dynamically, and eventually wrap up the game in a satisfying way that could be extended later on. The cards were preserved as an artifact of play, and though I don't play with that group anymore I do hear from some of them from time to time about that game. This didn't even really feature explicit tags for each location or wants/needs, but was enough of a framework for the players and me to stay anchored in the game and to keep things moving. There was a lot of physical interaction, for example, when players argued where to go next. They marked the cards and tapped them insistently to drive home different points to one another, which simulated, in a lot of ways, the bickerings of intergalactic bandmates, which we all found to be quite enjoyable. In this more generic way of structuring locations-as-encounters and then nesting further encounters in them, I was able to apply the principles of what those were for emergent narrative play using a small stack of index cards, no dice required. If a newer referee needed more structure than this then they could certainly take the framework and improve upon it in their way but remain open and flexible to different things that can happen. Fighting, of course, is always an option, as well as bypassing the encounter entirely; however, there are more than enough rules in almost any game system to account for those two things. I like to make the idea of encounters more interesting, the situations more weird, and this helps player imagination considerably. In more strategic and tactical oriented games like LANCER, in the first published campaign setting "No Room for A Wallflower" there were multiple points which, after a SITREP (fancy term for a setpiece combat) players got to choose where their next theater of engagement would be. Since that game is more or less entirely about combat, it also came down to what the results were of the previous combats, how resources were doing, and figuring out what and where to go next that was the most strategically relevant. Between those theaters of engagement we could optionally add more random encounters that could be potentially interesting in a dramatic way - received a garbled radio signal from somewhere nearby - is it a distress signal? Something different? Wreckage signs that suggest a fight took place here (emergent foreshadowing for something else happening in the setting, but also opportunities to scavenge or meet scavengers) - the ideas behind implementing this tool can extend as far as people want to go. You could get very absurd with it and talk about a murder mystery on a train, a literal railroad game. Adding random encounters in different locations as the train hurtled towards its destination almost certainly would be interesting and almost certainly wouldn't exclusively feature combat unless it was some kind of zombie apocalypse train. As long as people were reminded of who they encountered, when they encountered them, and in what location (ideally with physical artifacts to back them up) then they could meet the "encounter table" in any order or not at all. At this point it should be clear that 'random encounter design' is very similar if not completely the same as 'planned encounter design' but how a given play group actually engages with those encounters is something different entirely.
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Apr 28, 2023 16:23
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Mr. Grapes! posted:With our group we try and make it 'fit the fiction' and we don't have the next room suddenly have a fully equipped new guy that's friends with the party. Almost always we have some sort of hirelings or sidekicks or whatever around so the instant someone dies, even in the same combat, we'll just have them control the NPC until we've got a good point to introduce the new guy. Sometimes they just turn the NPC into their character and if that means that the NPC now has a few new abilities or whatever that just represents them stepping up into a more leadership oriented role during a crisis. On the occasions that only one person dies because of bad choices or bad luck we usually have that person assist the dungeon master for the rest of the session/possibly the next session if we were really somewhere a replacement wouldn't make sense. I think it's kind of a good way to get people interested in the whole game and possibly becoming a dungeon master themselves. It's the only time I've really looked at monster stat blocks. It takes buy in from the whole table though because if I'm running monsters, I've got to put aside my desire for the group to finish the quest, but our table is pretty adversarial in a way that works really well for us. That might be a way to get new players interested in the game and learn the rules without going through the whole hassle of character creation. They could observe a game and the interactions of the group to see if they are going to want to join the party. Mr. Grapes! posted:That's pretty hardcore. Do you have retreat rules in your system? I have had more player deaths than I could ever count but we've never had a TPK with the exception of the time the players all willingly sacrificed themselves in kind of a Randy-Quaid Independence Day moment to end the campaign. We don't really have specific retreat rules, I don't think 5e or Pathfinder 2e has them. But our DM doesn't like to give us opportunities to escape either because he always blocks escapes and plays enemies in a really mobile way. We haven't wiped on things that don't make sense for it, we do the same thing with beasts, they won't just indiscriminately attack. But it kind of goes both ways, zombies and undead stuff will keep eating a corpse of a downed character so you can die really fast if you get swarmed without help. I think the thing about 'realism' is to remember that half the stuff we were fighting are literal monsters that probably just want to kill and eat the party. The death system does encourage it though, at least in 5e. Going down and popping back up encourages minimal and reactive healing and you get to the point where everyone in the party is at like 4 health and no abilities left so unless we roll good, or the enemies roll bad were lose. Sometimes the wipes are just a string of crits from the DM and a string of 1's from the group, we set up the story but the dice tell it. Retreating is pretty hard to do if you play directly from stat blocks though. Most of the monsters move faster than the party and we are attacking them in their domain, so they are gonna know more about the area than us probably. I'm not familiar with games with retreating rules, but they would be a good addition for an epic campaign, just make it a bit easier to run away and fight another day. Mr. Grapes! posted:I agree with pretty much everything you've written here, and I suppose another thing to think about is if the DM just spent like 100 bucks on the Avernus book (DnD books are expensive!) then they are almost certainly gonna try to get their money's worth out of it. Would be pretty funny to team-wipe in the first encounter and have the DM just go "Welp, that's that" and never use it again. The funny thing is we tried Avernus with our DM as his first game, and he wiped us almost immediately upon getting to the open world part of Avernus. It was helpful to play a campaign like that because our DM realized he didn't really like to be in charge of an epic story like that because you have to fudge rolls to keep them going. I don't think there is any information in the dungeon masters guide about different styles of games, which would be pretty helpful for a game that's trying to be more of a generic everything system.
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Apr 28, 2023 17:14
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I don’t know why you need a new character to be chained up in the dungeon ahead of you. Maybe they entered the dungeon for the same reason you did, just using a different route.
Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 19:26
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What mr. grapes did manually, via including some follower NPCs in the party that any player can take over, is done formally in a few games like Modiphius 2d20 Star Trek. In that game you actually play a "bridge crew" main character, and also (typically 1?) "red shirt" type character, often used for things like away missions where your main character wouldn't reasonably be there. Main characters have more plot armor than redshirt types anyway; and the game supports your sort of Tasha Yar "the writers killed off this actors' character" stuff as an option if you want it but more frequently you can have dangerous away missions where people get vaporized without yanking your high-effort high-development main PC out of your hands and ripping it up. So like you're playing the ship's doctor, they sometimes go on away missions but in this episode they're in sick bay trying to science up a solution for the space plague that is taking out the away team, and the away team heroic ensign nurse is tricordering the victims but OH MY GOSH she's also infected now, will she die??? (Maybe! Genuinely, maybe!) I'm sure there are other games that do similar things.
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Apr 28, 2023 19:35
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Design language shifted from high lethality in older TTRPGs where survival was the primary focus of the game and it shows in how hard it became for characters to die, particularly as the game became more complex to create a character. The concept of the "guest character" or something for players who to do when eliminated is a subject that is always of interest. I like the idea of retaining the player as an active player in some way for the group. Character elimination (whether it be a narrative death or a material one) is interesting because it's a very direct way to increase the stakes of a given game where survival of the characters really is one of the top focuses. However, this isn't always the case and other kinds of consequences that the players would care about should be considered as well. I like the idea, for example, of a character that is going to die operating on borrowed time for the rest of the session. This changes gameplay for them completely since they know their moments are numbered and so their risk profile adjusts to the point where they become incredibly reckless or experimental - what's that lever do? Who knows, I'm going to pull it because I'm already a goner! Having a heroic last stand while the rest of the party retreats is also interesting as well. The game "The Pool" as well as other games like "Dread" play with this in a very material way by openly displaying a resource that can never replenish (a pool of dice or a Jenga tower, respectively). The "DM's assistant" is good even when a player isn't eliminated - asking players to move monsters tactically in a game where strategic knowledge is important takes some clever obfuscation (particularly when some stats should be public knowledge and some should be private) and while it might not speed the game up, it makes combat engagement far more interesting. "I go, then you go" causes the sort of downtime that tends to cause people to immediately tune out and start stacking dice when it's not their turn. Another one that I've toyed with is that a character who dies actually is a celebration of a kind where that player will "earn" something - secrets from beyond the grave. In one of the old megadungeon campaigns I had a whole sub-system I wrote out for what happens when characters died - as long as their bodies were retrievable they could be brought back to life in town and then also get a third party replay of what actually killed them in an after-action report. Since character death was relatively rare due to a lot of conservative play, this was an intensely interesting in-world exploration point but not one that was actively pursued - just a little bonus when something like that happens. One of the other things (similar to the "borrowed time" example) is to have a character turn into a ghost. Changing around the ways they can interact with the world as well as communicate to players can be a fun exercise, particularly if they get a secret card (most players love secrets) that says they can only say the names of junk food instead of regular words. They were free to use gestures, though, so they could point at a door and try to say something, but only end up saying "Nacho Cheese Flavor Blast Doritos" to a bewildered party. This "fake language" subsystem actually is a large amount of fun for players whenever they encounter it - particularly if they eavesdrop on monsters and they have no idea what language they're talking in, they end up with gibberish like in that one scene from the 13th Warrior (which I will forever remember as the movie where Antonio Banderas gets his face sponged with cow urine to cure an infection). I think in the cases where there are a higher incident of total party kills, it comes to asking whether or not that's okay because survival plays a higher role in that social experience regardless of the ruleset. If people decide to use meta-narrative things (that is, focused only on optimizing mechanics of healing, as an example). "Retreat isn't an option" not being an explicit thing and instead being an implicit one is a bit interesting as well - I try to reinforce that running away is always on the table, and also that fighting to the death, particularly with what seems like an impossible foe, is probably inadvisable. This baffles some players and goes to show just how entrenched some modes of thought are. I gave a new player a hint to try talking to some skeletons since it seemed like they were cornered and had lost their hirelings and were getting ready to fight to the death, but I reminded them that they could try anything, and decided to talk to them instead, which now has the characters involved in that interaction placed under an oath to find and restore the crown of a long-lost empire, so they have a bit of a long term goal in the game to work on now. They just assumed that they had to fight to the death and that there was no way out until giving them a nudge to say "Hey, just as a reminder, there's always something else you can try even when it seems like there isn't." That went off on a bit of a tangent, but modern D&D doesn't handle loss conditions gracefully at all (as noted in the anecdotes above about pre-established campaign and mega-adventures from the franchise). Being able to scope non game-over conditions in the event of individual or party death in a game is definitely a good idea, but there should be some appropriate consequences instead of ending up at the next story node but with a comically large bandaid on everybody's forehead. I think the main challenge is that the rules often do not have a great way to make material loss meaningful other than a game over - at least in D&D, but also in other games I don't see nearly as much treatment about what happens if players beef it. I prefer to find ways to keep the game moving forward rather than doing a "soft reset" unless that's more interesting for the group. That said, characters in situations where they are in mortal danger should truly be in mortal danger - something that most modern games and modern players are not nearly as interested in (those that are trend towards games where survival is indeed prioritized as part of the game's challenges).
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Apr 28, 2023 20:06
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PurpleXVI posted:Let me tell you about our Lord and Savior the 2nd edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide which presented this exact perspective of Encounters as being merely any situation in which the players had agency and could make meaningful choices that affected things, and where "random encounter tables" included everything from passing patrols to merchants and other oddities rather than merely an exhaustive list of angry wildlife. Yeah I don't believe Random Encounters should be combat, though they often can be. To me the Random Encounter is something that can happen randomly due to the dice roll, in that I didn't an for that hobbit chef to be there, but he showed up, and it adds life to the world. I have different encounter tables for different areas and it's not just gonna be monsters on there, maybe it's just a cool pool full of singing frogs or an abandoned wagon loaded with cheese and if the players don't care then we move on in thirty seconds but I'll never know until it shows up and they interact. I guess you're right in that the language is muddled because some people see Random Encounter and always assume A Slime Attacks while to others it could be any number of things. I suppose the 5e rules stating that there should be 6 to 8 encounters (or whatever I don't remember) per Adventuring Day puts the weight on them being oppositional and designed to use up HP and spell slots and stuff.
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Apr 29, 2023 10:57
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I guess you're right in that the language is muddled because some people see Random Encounter and always assume A Slime Attacks while to others it could be any number of things. I suppose the 5e rules stating that there should be 6 to 8 encounters (or whatever I don't remember) per Adventuring Day puts the weight on them being oppositional and designed to use up HP and spell slots and stuff. Part of the problem is that people take a lot of their cues from official modules, and many of the modules I've seen with overland travel and random encounters easily end up with seven or eight encounters just moving from point A to point B, with all of them as various combat encounters. And even if they weren't, if I, as a GM, had to whip up eight random encounters for every jaunt from town to town, yeah, sooner or later I'd be falling back on "[rolls dice] as you move down the road [rolls dice] seven... [rolls dice] Zaratan approach. they are hostile, roll for initiative. No, I don't care that Zaratans are aquatic, being on land is why they're so pissed off, let's just get this over with." because combat encounters require a lot less context and work than roleplaying encounters. No one's going to ask the giant turtle where it's going and why while it's trying to bite their head off, while Borgdorg the Merchant is going to be interrogated for his life story and also haggled with, and I can only improvise so many comedy side NPC's per hour.
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Apr 29, 2023 11:15
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PurpleXVI posted:Let me tell you about our Lord and Savior the 2nd edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide which presented this exact perspective of Encounters as being merely any situation in which the players had agency and could make meaningful choices that affected things, and where "random encounter tables" included everything from passing patrols to merchants and other oddities rather than merely an exhaustive list of angry wildlife. traveller also has this but traveller has 6d66 tables for every subtable so better pray RNjesus takes the wheel. Probably a good idea to use them lightly if you have any kinda plan for a campaign that isn't just let er rip, but at least even if you leaned hard i don't think you'd get too many repeats.
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Apr 29, 2023 13:16
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I like using some of the more streamlined things that boardgames have done that are reinterpretations of what you’d do in a game. For example, Gloomhaven has one “city” and one “road” encounter each, and these can provide some diversion or changes to what you’re going into a given scenario with. It may also open up new avenues of exploration as well, but you only get one of each encounter type, and you’re guaranteed it. Rather than constantly rolling checks, this can remove some of the guess work and also provide a little more interest, but you can stack encounters in different ways. I believe that it was a common table rule that if you had a random encounter, you were done for the day/night - we used to roll random encounters during camp as people took watches in addition for every day of travel in the wilderness. Since people were asking questions about “what would referees want players to do to help offset things that cause referee burnout”, I also want to float the inverted question: for players, what can referees reasonably do in order to avoid player disengagement and burnout, and how would you include rules or social structures to encourage the behavior you want?
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Apr 29, 2023 21:35
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aldantefax posted:Since people were asking questions about “what would referees want players to do to help offset things that cause referee burnout”, I also want to float the inverted question: for players, what can referees reasonably do in order to avoid player disengagement and burnout, and how would you include rules or social structures to encourage the behavior you want? Player generated mapping is a nice idea, but I've never met anyone who enjoyed taking careful notes for the entire session. Especially given how difficult it is to verbally communicate spatial relationships that would be instantly, visibly obvious to the characters who were actually in the room being described. In all genres of games I give out mechanical rewards (XP, a single floating reroll or other system appropriate bonus) any time player created notes are useful to me for remembering something. Even if it's just "what did the players want to do next session?" One of the frustrations of note taking and play reports is nobody ever seems to read what you wrote. Explicit acknowledgement that someone found your work useful is a strong incentive to keep doing it.
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Apr 29, 2023 23:00
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I’m certainly in the category of person who takes lots of detailed notes as a player about everything in the game world, and I have been the mapper where appropriate to do so. The unfortunate side effect of being on the other side of the referee screen is that I don’t really get to experience that nearly as much anymore with having a pad of graph paper and doing a single blind movement through a pre-planned space. I also enjoy picking out every piece of equipment and its weight to note the encumbrance and where it’s packed, not just in the game, but also being aware of that when I also load up my bags for a day trip or a longer journey. I think there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy here where if it’s not important mechanically/structurally for players to take detailed notes then they won’t take notes. Similarly, if it’s not important to do a recap then players won’t do a written recap. I wrote in depth about how to make gameplay loops rewarding awhile back when exploring making loresheets for megadungeons. You’d want to ideally make a positive reinforcement loop through the rules themselves that is easy to understand, enjoyable to do, and engages players. Recontextualized, you’d want a positive reinforcement loop to engage in the loop of Wonder > Explore > Create > Remember > Repeat. If you’re just doing the Create > Remember portion (as is the case of writing the session recap) it becomes old hat pretty quickly. Here’s an idea then. Why not have a template for writing session notes that has, explicitly, the Wonder and Explore sections? You can propagate them with leading questions that can have brief answers (since brevity is actually much more difficult to do than taking extremely verbose and detailed notes). In fact, you may turn it into a game, such as: As a group, write a haiku (or multiple) of the most memorable thing from the last session, name a reward for doing so, recite it during the next session to claim that reward. Over time, the poetry will tell fragments of stories that stuck out most to players - they can invoke the poetry during play for mechanical and/or narrative benefits (rerolls, experience, advantage dice, narrative clout, revealing secrets, etc). This is an interesting exercise because a haiku is a specific poetry form that requires brevity in structure - it’s even more stringent than that if you want to follow the full impact with it with key words and phrases (kigo) and how they are ordered in the form, but most people would be able to bang out one with a little bit of thought, since it’s observational in nature. - It’s brief but structured, which prompts players to Remember, Wonder and Explore - The mechanical or narrative award creates an incentives for players to Create - Everybody gets a chance to experience the artifact in the future, which further reinforces the loop If you’re in a more cinematic mood, why not write a sizzler reel inspired by Saturday morning cartoons or movie trailers? In the same kind of thought? Each person gets to write out something, and someone can use a dramatic movie trailer silly voice to read everything out loud (which should be brief, maybe 30 to 60 seconds) that gets people pumped up for the next session. You can ascribe the same rewards to this that you would by writing something else plus you can play around with what players think will happen next, reinforced with something mechanical to validate creating the artifact in the first place. On the topic of detailed player mapping, I think I generally agree that most players find the act too laborious because it hasn’t been adapted to modern sensibilities. Also, players may just not understand how to map or recognize why it’s fun in the first place. Sure, the referee chortles in delight in their goblinesque dice cave while they hit the randomize button on Donjon or Watabou or whatever and prints it out, scribbling crazed notes in the margins - players can absolutely experience a similar thing as long as the loop above is noted. - Set the expectation before the game starts that someone should be responsible for mapping and give them a symbol reference card and an example map of a well traveled area. - Referees can give players map fragments for new places, not the entire map to use as anchor points. Interesting symbols can be provided, a scale should not - just shapes of rooms and corridors, along with some interesting notes in the margin. Don’t tell a player how to make a map, show them! - When entering a new place, give them a new map fragment or other way to orient themselves. - Give mappers a mechanical benefit for doing the mapping that relates to the mapping - reveal a secret door once a session, have the referee make a map correction, whatever. - Save a before and after picture of the map each session!
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Apr 30, 2023 14:40
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aldantefax posted:I think there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy here where if it’s not important mechanically/structurally for players to take detailed notes then they won’t take notes. Similarly, if it’s not important to do a recap then players won’t do a written recap. I mean, it all depends if you're willing to actually apply the consequences when the PCs have forgotten the king's name or not. Most groups don't because they figure that the game doesn't need to compete with real life for mental load, but if you want to push players to make notes it could make sense?
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May 2, 2023 16:38
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hyphz posted:I mean, it all depends if you're willing to actually apply the consequences when the PCs have forgotten the king's name or not. Most groups don't because they figure that the game doesn't need to compete with real life for mental load, but if you want to push players to make notes it could make sense? That’s an assumption that “most groups”, it should depend for each group and be part of negotiation if having a detail oriented game is part of it. By their very nature, taking notes offloads mental load, and making the time to play a game carries a certain level of mental load on a moment to moment basis, so this doesn’t make a lot of sense and makes a broader presumption for play. If something is important in the fiction of a game then it should be reinforced through multiple ways of remembering. Operationalizing that through assistance tools such as notes, storytelling, recaps, and so on are tools to support the game people want to play. If it’s important to someone but not everybody and it jeopardizes the social experience, that needs to be addressed at the social level and consideration of the mechanics should take place as well. Also, if people are coming to the table to turn off their brains and chuck dice and just go buck wild, that’s also a different kind of game to talk about in advance. You would likely use different tools, but the tools themselves as proposed aren’t less valid, just not as appropriate for that kind of game.
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May 2, 2023 22:55
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aldantefax posted:Also, if people are coming to the table to turn off their brains and chuck dice and just go buck wild, that’s also a different kind of game to talk about in advance. You would likely use different tools, but the tools themselves as proposed aren’t less valid, just not as appropriate for that kind of game. I'm not sure it's that easy to talk about that in advance, because people's energy levels will vary seriously from session to session. With the world being what it is right now, there will usually be at least one person worn out in any given session, and you don't necessarily want to penalise them for having a rough time, but equally you don't want to target the lowest common denominator.
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May 2, 2023 23:03
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hyphz posted:I'm not sure it's that easy to talk about that in advance, because people's energy levels will vary seriously from session to session. With the world being what it is right now, there will usually be at least one person worn out in any given session, and you don't necessarily want to penalise them for having a rough time, but equally you don't want to target the lowest common denominator. Doubting that something is going to be easy to talk about in advance is also making a decision on behalf of someone else. It’s a skill to be able to talk openly. However, those skills need practice and trust. If people don’t want to put the work into doing that, that’s also beyond the scope of play to reasonably handle at every table. If you’re playing with folks who have wide swings in condition from one session to another and also people aren’t able to talk openly about how they’re feeling in the moment, then that is beyond the scope of game rules constructs; that is, again, a social construct type issue. It also is not to be taken as a universal constant for every table. Assuming that it is, and then taking that assumption and not having a conversation is, in my opinion, foul play. It is worth asking, sincerely and openly: why do people come to a table to play at all? If they can’t answer that question honestly, then how can anybody expect to be able to have any kind of enduring, quality social experience? That’s a serious question to think about. We all would have much better experiences at the table, learn, and play much better if that conversation was constantly revisited and refreshed with care and respect.
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May 3, 2023 15:52
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