better gaming through chemistry

Jim Hague said:

Well, those aren't the only parts of plot, but they're important ones. As for hooks, you've hit the nail on the head:

Make it personal.

Think about it - in every good piece of fiction, things don't just happen, they happen to the characters in the story. Being detached from the action is a good way for players to lose interest.

Another tangent - heap trouble on the characters. Bury 'em in it. Don't introduce a new problem when they've overcome and old one, introduce it when they're halfway to completing whatever. Disarming a bomb, three seconds left? The door bursts open, bad guys rush in guns blazing! Keep the pressure on. When things are quiet, that's when the players and their characters should start getting suspicious and worried.

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I swear by this. And not just in pacing, but also in plots. I usually heap so many potential plot hooks on my players that they don't always know which ones to follow, or what happened to the ones they didn't look into. I keep track of where they're likely to end up by listing all my hooks along with a star rating from 1 to 5, where 1 is "Maybe we'll get around to it someday" and 5 is "The world is going to end unless we do something RIGHT NOW." Or, at least the level-equivalence of that level of import.

Tell it Like it Is, Brother ....

Teflon Billy said:

... I'm just glad that someone here at our beloved EN World was man enough to say something about play style other than "Every play style is of equal value" or "It's all good as long as everyone is having fun" ....

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Agreed; equivocation seems to be in vogue these days. Many people are more concerned about feigning "civility" than engaging in meaningful discourse.

It's a neat idea. I just don't know how much working on one source would really convince players to try things differently.

For example, after weeks of discussion, I was finally able to get the 'why loner characters are hard to gage--they give poor feedback' example to set in.

It took close to a year (three months of which he was miserable because the party hated him) to get a close friend to admit the possibility that his character wasn't really party-friendly.

After two days of heated discussion, 4/5 members of my superhero game believe that people should be able to play any character they want, and that players should not be required to think about how their characters fit in/work together as a group. They were, however, receptive to the story of how my character was usurped by another character who did everything I did, and was a better fighter.

Two members of my D&D group don't understand the difference between banter and insults. The same two also don't believe that having a character background makes any difference.

There is, on some level, an idea that sits around in all of our subconciousnesses. "Players get to come to the game and do what they want. Having to work or think is what the DM needs to do. The game is for players to enjoy."

I am slowly pushing the idea that better games have everyone involved. In a couple of years, I might have made some more headway.

This has been a very interesting thread. I think this proposed book tackles some very challenging issues. There are some root issues here:
1. Communication
2. Cooperation
3. Respect

If you could teach these concepts to every one who needed to learn them, you could be a VERY wealthy man.

Beyond these basics of any relationship (and membership in a gaming group is a set of relationships), the already mentioned genre conventions would be a great thing. What are some genre examples and how "should" they be played? Building a character that fits the group and adds to the game would be a great topic.

Other than those two areas, most of my player problems have been with players who are uncooperative, rude and disrespectful, or just outright lacking in social skills (or people with other issues, such as temper, obssessions, etc.).

DM

IMHO, one of the best ways to improve as a DM or Player is actually quite simple:

Play a lot of different RPGs. Too much familiarity with a single game leads to memorizing rules exploits and other kinds of metagaming and overall conceptual laziness. And lazy gamers can quickly become bored gamers who then become bad gamers

When you are unfamiliar with a game, you get forced outside of your comfort zone. You make different choices than you would in a system you know inside and out:

1) You don't know what a good PC looks like, so you may be satisfied with a sub-optimal PC and still have fun. Imagine playing the equivalent of a Halfling Paladin with 10 as his high stat...

2) You can't min/max or exploit rules as easily, so you make due with what you get.

3) You minimize rules lawyering.

4) You get forced into trying out unfamiliar roles. There is a guy in my current group who always plays a Ranger...even when we played RIFTS. Sure, he's happy, and he plays a good Ranger, but he's stunted as a gamer. How would he react to playing an RPG without an equivalent concept? (My guess- he might quit.)

5) Since you're "in unfamiliar territory with unfamiliar equipment," you'll have to rely more upon teamwork to achieve goals.

6) You think differently about the rules themselves- why have levels (or classes, or even dice)? Much of the change to D&D over the years is based on its designers' responses to the way other game developers handled certain things. The plethora of PC races in the current incarnation probably would not exist had it not been for games like Taliantha, GURPS or HERO.

I'm speaking from personal experience.

I played only 3 RPGs for the first 10 years of gaming- AD&D, Champions/HERO, and Traveller. I picked up a few along the way (Universe, Space 1889, Paranoia, Shadowrun, etc), but those were the only ones I PLAYED.

It wasn't until I was living in Austin and going to Law school in the 1990's that I was forced to play anything outside of my comfort zone.

Due to the dynamics of the group I found at Alan Hench's house, I was forced to play games like Mekton, ACE, RIFTS, MechWarrior, and GURPS...LOTS of GURPS. We even dusted off some of the games I (and others) had collected over the years.

Because nobody was familiar with all of the games, there was always a period of learning the rules- but it also meant that nobody could min /max every PC they played.

It improved my RPG play immeasurably. Even my fantasy PCs are different now from the first ones I created.

There is a book that covers some of this. I found it very interesting and enjoyable, but I didn't really like the presumptive tone it took.

Roleplaying Mastery by Gary Gygax. You'll find details elsewhere, and I've written a review of it on RPG.net. http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9959.phtml

Of course that was a while ago, and I'm probably going to get more flak.

It'd be interesting to see if the book could work out how GMs could be better players. I find that I tend to have too much meta knowledge. A good example of this is our Midnight GM uses a lot of illos from the Monster Manual and BAM! I know what it is. I haven't acted on that info, hard to since I'm playing a single class fighter whose stick is him them until they die! but I do worry about it effecting game play.

Many people are more concerned about feigning "civility" than engaging in meaningful discourse.

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Since when was poncing about like imaginary elves meaningful discourse? Patooie. I love D&D, but it's a game, and falls very short of any forced meaning that style can inflict upon it.

Dr. Awkward said:

This isn't about telling players, "It's my way or the highway." It's about telling players, "Look, we're in this together. We can cooperate and make a fun game for all of us, or we can piss off and do our own thing alone and not have fun playing a game with each other. I think that the former choice would be the better one." People who are playing the game to win, or playing to crush the other players, or playing just to be a nuisance (whether they know they're doing it or not) are not good players, and a book to teach them how to play might help both them and the people they play with by making them more like the sort of folks we'd all like to game with.

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I see your point, but it's a point that I think DMs need to know and players will either know or not depending upon what kind of fun they want to have with the game.

A player who loves improv and story will do this without any sort of manual telling them how, just like a player who loves crunchy mechanics and rulesbits will make a mechanically powerful character using only the PHB and his own imagination. The player who loves history will inquire about it, and the player who loves tactics will use them. Because that's what's fun for them and their imagination. There are useful tomes about min/maxing you character mechanically, and the market can only benefit from books about how to use other styles effectively, too, but those will be even less useful than the Munchkin's Guide books because what they "teach" is much more ephemeral. In other words, making a supplement about how to improv well in D&D will fall short of a book about how to improv well in general. So why reinvent the wheel?

The DM needs to be able to do this MORE than the players. That's why there's volumes more DM advice -- the DM needs to recognize where the players are having fun and emphasize those aspects of fun (or tell the players to look elsewhere if they're uncompromising). The DM needs to include moments of improv for the actor, moments of mechanical difficulty for the min/maxer, moments of history for the historian, and moments of brilliant tactics for the tactician. It's much more likely that a DM doesn't have all these skills, and it's more important for a DM to recognize where he won't give players the fun they want. Players can largely decide for themselves what's fun or not, and generally already have by the time they get to the table.

jim pinto said:

If I sit down and write this book, it will be for everyone. It will talk to each kind of gamer, explain their role and make sure they understand that they are 1/4th, 1/10th, or 1/516th of the campaign; depending on the number of people at the table.

The book will explain Plot-oriented, Event-oriented, Character-oriented, and Location-oriented adventuring.

(someone said something about railroading and that's event-oriented gaming... which I personally hate, but became big when people stopped playing in dungeons and hadn't figured out the other two types yet)

Lastly, there is completely freeform adventuring as well, which would get some attention.

...
The player's should be vested. They should have a reason to show up, just as much as anyone. They should have a vote over what's in the world, what they play next, and what they can do. They don't get a veto. But, they get a vote.

We recently lost a player from our group at home because he couldn't understand or accept these last two concepts and believed everyone could just show up in whatever mood they wanted.

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I think your first difficulties are that you are overcategorizing and assuming too much. You're putting "event-based" on a continuum from worse to better that doesn't nessecarily exist. You're delimiting the categories of adventures when a good campaign will have a mix of those and more. You're saying the players should be vested, but that's an opinion, and not one eveyrone shares. You say you lost a player because HE couldn't understand the concepts, without ever addressing the fact that the issue could have been (and probably was) much more complex than that.

It sounds like you want to "fix" bad players. But it's my stipulation that the only bad player is the one who doesn't enjoy herself. So all you need to do is encourage that player to seek what's fun and tell the DM that. It's the DM's job to balance everyone's wants and needs, and that's a much more difficult task (and thus is worthy of many more volumes of advice). And that doesn't require a manual. Just a bit of assertiveness (which not everyone will have, admittedly).

While D&D generally supports a variety of play styles, it is at its heart group-oriented. In this day and age, people who don't work and play well with others have the option of CRPGs, and those who only want "crush, kill, destroy" have any number of options like D&D miniatures, HeroClix, etc.

Some players need to ask themselves, if you aren't interested in interacting with others, then why are you in a ROLE-playing game? If you aren't interested in positive interactions, then why would anybody be interested in playing with you?

Kamikaze Midget said:

But it's my stipulation that the only bad player is the one who doesn't enjoy herself.

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A player who cheats is a bad player.

A player who is disruptive, in or out of game, is a bad player.

A player who is selfish is a bad player.

All of those things may contribute to a player's enjoyment, but they have no place at the gaming table.

Kamikaze Midget said:

It's the DM's job to balance everyone's wants and needs, and that's a much more difficult task (and thus is worthy of many more volumes of advice).

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It's the GM's role to present an exciting adventure in an interesting game-world - players should not expect to have their every whim catered to.

Not happy with that? Walk, playboy.