I think 4e attempted to change this to a significant extent. XP is as much about playing the game as about risk (quest XP, roleplaying XP per DMG2, XP for skill challenges whether succeeding or failing as per Essentials, etc). And skill challenges are also meant to establish a mechanic so that "defeating" enemies out of combat isn't entirely up to the GM, but is structured in a systematic way.
[Very Long] Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War: a Key Difference in D&D Play Styles...
Great framework OP. Dkyle outlines my perspective pretty well. I like CaW because it encourages player creativity, but not when that creativity:
1) leads to wild deviation from the genre we are collectively aiming for
2) trivializes the character mechanics that are in place to model within the genre what the character is suppose to be able to do and not do
A great aspect of table top rpgs is the freedom to be creative and do anything, but I like systems that do a decent job of putting some structure / mechanics around the key elements of the genre. Supers means a good power system, heroic fantasy means a good magic and martial combat system, etc. Player skill should matter but shouldn't trivialize the character.
If player skill is suppose to be a strong measure of success then I prefer a system with less mechanical rules than any addition of D&D so far (or at least mechanical rules that more directly support this style of play).
My cure for this is to play in the 1st-12th level slot (in 3.5e), which doesn't allow for a lot of "Easy Button" solutions.
Also, while for a normal castle I just think of medieval mundane defenses (locks, guards, walls), I do think (vaguely) about the higher level defenses the national ruler's castle should have, informed partially by the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook. I'm thinking things like Detect Magic and See Invisibility on the gate, plus mundane stuff like confiscating weapons from adventurers who visit, and of course having a high level cleric (retired PC) and a gold dragon (long story in an old campaign) sleeping in the basement, next to the teleportal to an allied fortress.
I hear you. I haven't played in or run a weekly game since 1991 (when I graduated from college). I don't like to run stuff on the fly, either, so I put a LOT of prep into running my games -- at least 10x the game time, I'd say. That's possible when you only run a live game a few times a year.
And for my email campaign, it's also possible to do intense preparation and give them lots and lots of setting/background. Outside combat, I must write 50 lines of setting and NPC activity/dialogue for every line the players add (typically short version of what general actions they want to take, or dialogue). It doesn't take much time for them to read it and get immersed in the story, looking for hints and foreshadowing and going deep with NPC's that interest them -- and I have time to do things like write a summary of a history book one of them read. In combat, it's more balanced, more like the tabletop game.
I've seen stuff like that in the first few games with a new group. Once people get used the "sandboxy" nature of "downtime" in my campaign, and get to know what's going on in the setting and with the NPC's, it's usually not a problem -- usually, they have goals they're going after, and they'll tell me when they are ready to move on.
Might be about practice.
If they wanted to get drunk in the bar, I'd say something, "Sure, go ahead. At the other tables are groups of merchants here for the fair, some folks that look like farmers in their holiday best, some with mercenary guards in leather armor, and sweaty poor folks who made money today lugging stuff around for the fair and seem to want to spend their coppers as soon and as loudly as possible. The bartender is a large, bald, human, and the servers are a female half-elf and a male half-orc."
That gives them something to interact with. The fair stuff is the setting material (what's going on in my email campaign as we move into my variant of "The Speaker in Dreams") and the rest is just riffing on it/on the fly.
If they don't interact with anyone, I might send someone to interact with them.
About the banks . . . I'd say there are no banks, but (as they already know in my campaign, if they've been around a while) some temples store and transfer money, as do jewelers and sometimes merchant guilds.
If someone insisted on wanting to rob, say, the Temple of Pelor (certainly where the most money is in town), I'd warn them OOC about the consequences. They would make an enemy of both the church and state, and would be hanged if caught. If they couldn't be apprehended but the ruler somehow figures out whodunnit, they'd be declared outlaws in absentia, which means other adventurers, bounty hunters, and assassins would be entitled to kill them for a reward, and anyone who aided them in any way would be guilty of a felony -- and would hang if the PC's commit murder in their robbery (aiding a fugitive murderer is a death penalty issue in my campaign, as I think it was in Merry Old England). So, do you want to be villains and get hunted down while losing all ability to buy healing potions, etc., or do you want to be heroes?
That's ridiculous. I've never had a group refuse to play the game before. If they did that, I think I'd say, "That's not what I'm running. If you want to RUN a gladiator game, I'm happy to play in it. But I'm running this campaign over here, and I'd like you to play in it."
I like stupid, petty, mundane things to set up my epic stories.
The story means a lot more to me if the setting seems real and deep -- "The Hobbit" starting in the Shire and moving to the epic world makes it connect deeply for me. If it started with the infiltrating the Lonely Mountain, I think I'd be bored.
I like meat and veg more than dessert . . .
Radiating Gnome
Adventurer
I enjoy both COW and COS, and don't see them as mutually exclusive. I think they take some very different DMing to promote.
I think what players (and DMs) enjoy about the CoW is the creativity it involves -- most of the stories offered of those CoW moments cited in this thread are moments of player creativity. And, at the same time, great DM flexibility.
So, IMO, any time you have a choice to make, you have an opportunity to be creative. You can make an unusual or daring choice, or you can make a typical, pedestrian one.
4E created a much richer variety of choices within tactical encounters for PCs. The powers system alone is a major component of that. Every round a player is making choices about which powers to use, where to move, how to get there to avoid OAs, and so on.
That sort of creativity -- call it "small c creativity" although I don't want to belittle it -- has one primary advantage: It can be adjudicated by the game rules pretty handily, and does not require flexibility from the DM on the same scale that the CoW examples do.
I think there's important insight to be found there: CoS can be a whole lot easier on the DM, because by and large combat can run itself these days.
And, because 4e focuses so much attention on the encounter as the primary atomic unit of a game, it can be more difficult to create opportunities for that kind of CoW creativity within a 4e game.
I love 4e, and have since it's release. I think it's a superior game to 3.5. I also think it's a FAR better game for what I think it was intended to do -- create an entry game for new players and DMs. I don't think anyone would argue with me that it's far easier for a noob DM to pick up 4e and run it than it would be to pick up 3.5 and run it. It's not easy, but it 's easier.
BUT I think it's important to be aware of what the system does well and doesn't do well, and make sure that you're doing what you can to bridge those gaps.
In my case, I work to try to use skill challenges and other mechanics to build a stronger framework around the encounters -- and to make the story told by the encounters more interesting and cohesive. I try to make sure that there's something more at stake in encounters than just killing everything on the table that isn't a PC.
And it's not perfect. But I'm having fun.
-rg
I think what players (and DMs) enjoy about the CoW is the creativity it involves -- most of the stories offered of those CoW moments cited in this thread are moments of player creativity. And, at the same time, great DM flexibility.
So, IMO, any time you have a choice to make, you have an opportunity to be creative. You can make an unusual or daring choice, or you can make a typical, pedestrian one.
4E created a much richer variety of choices within tactical encounters for PCs. The powers system alone is a major component of that. Every round a player is making choices about which powers to use, where to move, how to get there to avoid OAs, and so on.
That sort of creativity -- call it "small c creativity" although I don't want to belittle it -- has one primary advantage: It can be adjudicated by the game rules pretty handily, and does not require flexibility from the DM on the same scale that the CoW examples do.
I think there's important insight to be found there: CoS can be a whole lot easier on the DM, because by and large combat can run itself these days.
And, because 4e focuses so much attention on the encounter as the primary atomic unit of a game, it can be more difficult to create opportunities for that kind of CoW creativity within a 4e game.
I love 4e, and have since it's release. I think it's a superior game to 3.5. I also think it's a FAR better game for what I think it was intended to do -- create an entry game for new players and DMs. I don't think anyone would argue with me that it's far easier for a noob DM to pick up 4e and run it than it would be to pick up 3.5 and run it. It's not easy, but it 's easier.
BUT I think it's important to be aware of what the system does well and doesn't do well, and make sure that you're doing what you can to bridge those gaps.
In my case, I work to try to use skill challenges and other mechanics to build a stronger framework around the encounters -- and to make the story told by the encounters more interesting and cohesive. I try to make sure that there's something more at stake in encounters than just killing everything on the table that isn't a PC.
And it's not perfect. But I'm having fun.
-rg
Good story, but I've given you too many XP.
Majoru Oakheart
Adventurer
It's nice when you can get it. I like my games to keep going, and my players hate low levels. I was told by one of my players once that if I started a game at less than 5th level, he wouldn't be playing. They like having cool powers, and you only get those at higher levels. Of course, the cool powers are exactly the problem.
Almost every game I've run has taken place in a world where most people don't understand magic. Sure, there's Wizards but you don't go an hire a Wizard to enchant your gate, even if you are the King. Wizards are too powerful for most people to demand anything from. They are also mysterious and tend to live transitory lives or live in seclusion in the middle of nowhere.
Even when Wizards are found, they don't have the power to permanently enchant something unless they are extremely powerful. Exactly the kind of Wizard you don't want to mess with. And the type of Wizard who won't just do what you ask since he's got much more important things he's interested in than some stupid King.
And when I come at it from that point of view, I tend to view even the hardest to get places as places that won't be protected by magic.
I'm too lazy to do that. I like to be prepared, but I generally don't write anything down. Too much work. I just want to make sure I have the enemies planned out for the battles and the general flow of encounters(including non-combat ones) for the session.
And I've tried to do that in my most recent campaign. I told them all to pick themes from the Neverwinter Campaign Guide and each of the themes has a tie in to some of the villains throughout town. Between adventures, I've given them time to pursue their own goals. I figured a bunch of them would start investigating the city to find evidence of their particular villains. So far, I believe one of them got drunk for a week straight. One of them found an empty house to squat in and started stealing furniture from other abandoned houses to furnish his new place. The rest of the players are just staying in the inn. One of them started attempting to bluff their way into people's houses to prove he was a better liar than one of the other PCs. One of them is helping out in a temple. But the temple has nothing to do with any of the plots in the city, so it won't go anywhere.
So, after a week of them giving me no hooks to plan an adventure off of, I just come up with a hook and hand it to them. I don't have any huge problem doing that...but a number of other people keep telling me about the nirvana that is "Player Driven Campaigns" where the PCs are the ones telling YOU what they want to do. I've just never seen it.
And I did that one time, but they made it perfectly clear that they didn't want to play that adventure and would be leaving every chance they got, continually running away from the plot if I kept having it interfere with their ideas. So, I told them I wasn't running the game anymore.
At the time we had about 20 different games running at once(I was younger and we had a game running nearly every day of the week). So, we just dropped that game and played the other ones instead.
If it happened these days, it would likely cause our group to stop meeting weekly.
I like the PCs to be at least somewhat epic. I almost always start the adventurers off as "adventurers". They are professionally employed to do the impossible like killing monsters and finding rare and exotic items.I like stupid, petty, mundane things to set up my epic stories.
Which is why I like to yadda yadda over the parts where they sit in bars drinking and hand waive them until they get to the dragon slaying and treasure finding. That's why I almost always have to hit the players over the head with a plot, since they'd never get to that point on their own.
We have a very different group dynamic. I've never started a campaign as anything but 1st level, and even for new people joining an existing campaign, I make them either: (1) start at 1st level, (2) take over an existing NPC in the campaign, or (3) start at 1st level with a higher ECL monster race.
I think part of it is that I'm usually bringing in friends (from non-gaming activities) who have never played or haven't played since AD&D, whereas you're dealing with people who played probably 10,000 hours or more already, know what they want, and are assertive about getting it.
Are your folks people you primarily know through gaming? I'm a player in a group like that, but the dynamic is still DM led (and he's a 4e fan, mostly CaS in attitude, with the only hints of world building interest actually starting in 4e).
Wizards are much more "involved" in my campaigns, not a whole lot more special or separate from society than clerics or attorneys or merchant princes, but highly powerful people of any class are rare. In my campaign, the ability to cast Fireball marks you as "high level" and not to be trifled with.
But Kings and countries are very important. Nearly every adventuring party works for Bissel (the country) as a patron at some point -- lots of missions result from problems reported to the national authorities and the "guy who runs adventuring parties" (a high level druid named Dertol) trying to find someone to do it.
Thinking about the involvement of Wizards and politics in my campaign:
-- Dubricus is a second-son of a nobleman, raised by his nobleman uncle (a childless gay wizard), trained as a wizard and barrister. He just was made a Baronet in his own name and given the Keep on the Borderlands for service to the crown, and from the Margrave (ruler's) point-of-view because the Keep is strategically important but lacks a leader, needs someone with money to prop it up, and buttering up an important family never hurts.
-- Lindoras is the daughter of an elvish weaver and cloth merchant. After surviving a bandit attack on her father's wagon while travelling, she decided to learn magic and become an adventurer, and moved to Bissel from Celene because Bissel is an exciting place, raked by war and sucking in mercenaries and adventurers by the bushel (kind of like the Spanish Civil War). She has no problem taking missions for Bissel's government.
-- Melias is a friend of Lindoras. His father is involved in a secret society in Celene, called the Knights of Luna, that opposes the elvish queens isolationism and want to help Mankind fight Iuz and other troubles. Melias is both a fighter and a mage, and mostly quiet and very polite to humans, who make him uncomfortable. He's happy to offer his assistance to Bissel's government.
-- Gorunn is a dwarvish wizard. He got in trouble with his dwarvish clan for aiding a captured elvish thief, Aramis, and the two escaped together. He and Aramis became somewhat roguish adventurers. He didn't like it when Bissel strongarmed them into taking a mission, and now he follows his own path, mostly interested in exploring fallen dwarvish ruins.
I do a lot of prep, and I also write summaries of what happened. That helps when you don't play very often. I read the summary from the last time to my group each time we start a session, and helps get people in the mood and remembering what's going on.
For my email campaign, we've been going to 10 years, and I'll pull up stuff that happened long, long ago and reference it. Two adventures ago, they encountered a former party member who betrayed the party in 2002 real time . . . they killed her in two rounds -- what I hoped would be a cool battle as she tried to escape/hold off the party, was instead a quick one, as they snuck close enough before combat started that she could quite escape.
I don't mind that -- they had fun getting the old villain, even if it wasn't the tactical set piece I was planning on.
I've never seen a "player driven campaign", but I have seen players get goals and pursue them, mostly in "downtime mode" in my email campaign.
I suspect having people pick goals/plots at the beginning of play doesn't work most of the time. I find "emergent" goals -- stuff that arises in play -- works better. I TRY to think of ways to tie in the background stuff on character sheets, but it's difficult, since they usually have very unrelated stuff. So it's easier to try plots back to stuff that's gone on "on screen".
Sounds like your players are bored and killing time -- or at least some of them are, and taking their characters not all that seriously as "people".
With the email campaign, some people being engaged and going deep while others are bored is not as much of an issue -- if a few people are going deep on something, the others may just go silent for a while, until something that interests them comes along. Everyone tends to wake up for combat!
Like recently, the PCs were given rewards for service to the country, and could choose to request pretty much whatever they wanted. Some choose gear, but three chose lands (it's a big party, 8 PC's). The cleric asked for an isolated village he'd rescued, where the party built a church earlier, to be made a church fief, and he was made its lord. The wizard (Dubricus above) asked for the Keep on the Borderlands. The monk asked for a monestary next to the Keep (he got a sizable wilderness land grant and permission to build it with his own money). So we've added a new dimension to the campaign, because the players asked for it, and it fit the campaign -- the cleric, the noble wizard, and the knighted-earlier-in-the-campaign monk were "the right sort" to be entrusted with fiefs, if they were interested in that sort of thing -- PC's who'd developed relationships with the upper class ruling NPC's and were "respectable", not the types to be alcoholics bluffing peasants for no reason.
I think mostly that rulership stuff will happen offscreen, but they did spend a good amount of time dealing with a bunch of refugees and getting them organized and supplied to resettle to their fees. Some of the players were very interested in this, others didn't much to say for a while.
The campaign is moving on to combat and adventure, which is coming to them in the city and going to mess with an NPC associate or two of theirs.
Your old days are quite different from mine. Sounds like you were living an "Elfish Gene" sort of experience (big gaming group with an official club and location to play). My D&D experience was always a "home game" with friends, more "Knights of the Dinner Table", though sometimes it was a ping pong table to coffee table.
Even in college, there was typically just one or two campaigns at a time, with maybe 8 players, playing in somebody's dorm room.Well, my live game is more focused on action; email allows more digressions. But we've spent whole sessions on doing stuff in town or travelling the live game too.
Majoru Oakheart
Adventurer
Yeah, in short, I met a bunch of people on my BBS way back when I was 14 and joined their group. They had 13 players, played weekly and wanted to play every RPG in existence, almost everyone in the group was also a GM. We voted on which game to play each week, played for 5-8 hours and then voted to play a different game after we got bored. And we'd play 2-3 games every week.
That group switched to only every second week. I loved gaming so much that I started up my own group on the off weeks and we picked up the same tradition. Half the other group joined mine. But we always kept it to 6 players and a DM. One of those people is still in my group 19 years later. But we cycle in new players when people leave. So, the majority of the group has been playing for a long time.
Over the years we've switched to only playing 4e and no other games. But we still play weekly, and all the people are people I met through gaming of some sort(my current group mostly played Magic The Gathering with me and asked if they could learn D&D)
Yep, that's basically how I work it as well. I also run my games in Greyhawk whenever possible. Though the game I'm running right now is in Forgotten Realms and I treat Wizards a little more common.
It's one of my big beefs when this happens. I really hate mechanics that allow the battle to end so quickly. But I hate cheating more. So, I always let battles like this end in a round or two and then just feel bad about it afterwards.I don't mind that -- they had fun getting the old villain, even if it wasn't the tactical set piece I was planning on.
I guess I just keep reading on ENWorld about games where the PCs are not "railroaded" at all. That they often decide on their own goals without any input from the DM at all and then the DM is forced to write an adventure to go along with that desire. Like the PCs decide "We're going to clean up this city and defeat the Thieves Guild." and then the DM now needs to write up a bunch of encounters with Thieves.
I've never ran a game like that. Every campaign starts with: Plot hook, the PCs take it and then follow every clue I leave them without ever coming up with their own ideas.
Yeah, well, they expect that the game is where they get to go on cool adventures made up by me. So, they wait for me to lead them from place to place so they can go on adventures. Without my guidance, they just do nothing. Or at least nothing important.
They don't really take their characters seriously as people...no. I've been complaining about it for years. Hoping some people will come up with real personalities. Problem is, that we're used to games ending so quickly or PCs dying so quickly that coming up with background for your character and a real personality is almost always wasted when you die during the second session. Or the DM decides to stop running his game.
Plus, a number of them LOVE character building. They want to see what kind of broken power combos they can come up with. So, after one session of playing their character they are almost always ASKING to have their character leave so they can try a different concept.
We had a TPK a couple of weeks ago and every last member of the group said they didn't want to be brought back to life because they'd rather just make new characters. Thereby ruining all of the plot I had put into the game up until that point.
Nope, we just played at my house. But we loved playing RPGs so much that a bunch of my friends from Junior High and I would just hang out on weekdays. We spend almost every day together for a couple of years. And when we couldn't come up with anything to do, someone would say "Hey, let's start a Rifts game" or "Let's start a D&D game". Then we'd all make up characters and agree to play the game more often. But we started so many games we never had time to play them all. My brothers would both play as well, so we had a full group.Your old days are quite different from mine. Sounds like you were living an "Elfish Gene" sort of experience (big gaming group with an official club and location to play). My D&D experience was always a "home game" with friends, more "Knights of the Dinner Table", though sometimes it was a ping pong table to coffee table.
We just...played a LOT. For about 2 years, we played about 4-5 times a week. One of which was 14 hours long.
I think the amount I played was one of the main reasons I hate CaW style play. There's only so many times you can see the same "creative" plan play out before it doesn't seem creative anymore. And if it got used even once in one of our games, it got used in all of them.
You are exaggerating a bit, but not much. I for example dish out a lot of plot hooks, but it's up to the PCs to pick and choose or go looking for others.
Cleaning the city of the Thieves' Guild is a perfect example of what might happen IMC in response to a (possibly random) encounter with a group of low level thieves. One time it didn't go so well and the party decided the city had become too dangerous for them, so they moved to another city. Too bad they didn't know the two cities' Thieves' Guilds were controlled by the same cult of born again vampires...
It's working great for me in my 1e AD&D Yggsburgh online campaign, playing with grognards from Dragonsfoot. Reasons:
1. Players are used to this play style.
2. Setting supports this play style, it's a well-developed sandbox.
3. The system supports this play style - I don't have to worry about 'creating a bunch of encounters so the PCs can fight Thieves'; encounters take seconds to create and that's done during play. The random tables support me and mean I'm never at a loss for what happens next. PCs can be threatened by, and survive, a wide range of monsters, at a wide range of PC levels - the 'status quo sandbox' works with the system.
I've definitely had problems with other systems though, notably 4e D&D, and with players 'trained' to just follow the adventure: players brand new to RPGs do fine, but players who've got used to follow-the-path tend to be very passive. The worst thing is that when I try to prompt them "What are your PC goals?" they always ask me for a path to a tailored magic item/artifact: putting the burden back on Me to give Them stuff.
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