Doing it wrong Part 1: Taking the dragon out of the dungeon

[JamesonCourage]

I used to think this way. Until I took at look at actual fiction that does a good job involving people. Its not player/viewer driven at all. its story driven. If your story is good people will find a way to become part of it.

If however your story is "gee guys, make your own story" well... often players wind up looking at you like "what the hell are you here for then?"

I'm glad you found something that works for your group. But, trust me, I know what works for mine. As always, play what you like

 

[pemerton]

This is awesome

Thanks. I won't be reproducing the quote in the version I submit for publication, but in the context of a short presentation it did the job of (i) getting people's attention (by mid-morning of day 2 of a workshop audiences can begin to drop off a bit), and (ii) colourfully conveying the basic idea and implications of the position I was putting forward.

It's too bad some people today can't even get into a story like this because it has some parts that are racially insensitive (or rather, racially over-sensitive...).

I don't want to break board rules, but wanted to pick up a little bit on this.

As best I can tell from my limited research into the topic, REH was pretty virulently racist even by the standards of mainstream, white, between-the-wars America. And that comes through in at least some of his stories. But I tend to find that, in the best ones at least, there are enough other ideas that are interesting that I can more-or-less bracket the racial politics. (Tolkien is very different from REH, but I perform the same bracketing there too.)

I actually find HPL's racism harder to cope with (I'm thinking of, say, the Call of Cthulhu short story), in part because (contrary to widespread opinion) I find his writing and ideas less interesting, and in part because the non-fantasy setting makes the racism bite deeper and harder to bracket.

A question for you if you don't mind -- imagine playing 4e without doing any of that pre-game. The players make their characters in a basically gamist way, just trying to build a strong playing piece. They have some vague, sort of daydreams about their character concept and what they want to do in the game but they don't really verbalize any of this. The DM runs a sandbox-y adventure with some random encounters and a dungeoncrawl. Do you think 4e is worse at this than earlier editions?

Not addressed to me, but I thought I'd tackle it anyway!

I think the game you could describe would risk bogging down in essentially pointless combats. This would not be inevitable, but would require a GM with a strong sense of pace and of improvisation, who was able to handle a variety of non-combat resolution on the fly (if you just freeform this stuff in 4e, then the plaing pieces become irrelevant, which would make the gamist building of them by the players merely pointless illusion). 4e gives the mechanics to handle this, but not the GMing advice.

You might also want to toy with the short rest rules - make it half-an-hour or an hour, rather than 5 minutes, so that choosing to take a short rest interacts meaningfully with the wandering monster rules. This also makes it easier to run lighter, quicker encounters, which displace more of the game from 4e's default tactical context to a more classic-D&D-ish operational context. Unfortunately, the group would have to work this out for themselves because the 4e rulebooks don't talk about this sort of thing either.

For XP rules, you'd use the Quest XP mechanics to replicate the "gold for XP" of classic D&D. Again, something that the rulebooks don't canvass.

I don't think the game that I describe would leverage all of 4e's strengths (in particular, its tight - by D&D standards - integration of story and mecanical elements would be to some extent, at least, foregone). But I think it would be as playable as 3E or AD&D, and at low levels, once the GM found the right balance between encounter strength, short rest duration and wandering monster frequency, might get close to the breeziness of Moldvay Basic. (And that's not just conjecture - I'm drawing here on my own experience with running low-strength encounters against tapped-out PCs, which the game I'm describing would be aiming for as something like its default.)

It's a pity the designers didn't write some of this fairly straightforward stuff into their books!

 

[Libramarian]

[MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]
Yeah, for me rather than try to preclude the possibility of a crappy session with more sophisticated prep I accept that it happens sometimes and focus on trying to make it suck less when it does with a few social contract-level house rules: a) at any time, anyone is allowed to call for a break, b) we play for at least an hour, but after that point anyone at any time is allowed to suggest ending the session, c) after 3 hours, we all have to explicitly agree to keep playing, renewing every half hour. This is sort of my duct-tape fix for the issue. I guess I have another rule: we need to have two crappy sessions in a row before I worry about anything. I like it because it prevents me from confusing temporary tiredness or mood issues with legit group chemistry issues.

I have one player who has a tendency to develop more specific PC preferences than AD&D supports, but over time we've convinced him to relax in that regard and view character creation as a gambling game, and now he doesn't mind rolling for ability scores and seeing which classes he qualifies for. During play he's an old school gamist, character-as-avatar dungeoncrawler all the way; his pre-play character imaginings don't really matter when the dice hit the table, and when he fixates on certain character concepts he loses out on the fun of the new-character gamble (which I feel is important to lessen the sting of PC death in a fairly lethal game), so I don't feel bad about steering him away from that approach to character creation.

I'm quite grateful for the fact that the vast majority of the time all I have to do to re-align group expectations is just emphasize that it's a "game" (i.e. play up the gamism aspect). I don't mind the players treating it like a videogame. I can tell a new player that they don't need to come up with any character backstory before play and they can just play it like Diablo or Skyrim. They still have to say what their character says and ask questions and make agreements and promises and deals, so by necessity they will buy in to the shared imaginary space and role-play to that extent. It's very easy to explain to people.

Wow. Sorry for the long post. And Merry Christmas!

No need to apologize! I didn't mind reading it and I think we agree on a lot of things actually. I hope you had a Merry Christmas as well.

 

[Manbearcat]

During play he's an old school gamist, character-as-avatar dungeoncrawler all the way; his pre-play character imaginings don't really matter when the dice hit the table, and when he fixates on certain character concepts he loses out on the fun of the new-character gamble (which I feel is important to lessen the sting of PC death in a fairly lethal game), so I don't feel bad about steering him away from that approach to character creation.

Yup. I gotcha. I still play 1e with 2 of my buddies from my current group when we go visit another couple of buddies for a weekend ocassionally (maybe once a year). Our table style and agenda is uniformly the above. I basically come up with a mini-sandbox + dungeon romp that they can sink their teeth into and try to challenge them as best as I am able and provide color. Light-hearted, lethal and fun times. We might play some Cthulu or Shadowrun as well if we want to just run some stock horror or sci-fi.

Like many long-time gamers, we all have various tastes and preferences and depending upon what may manifest, we have a system to fulfill it. We just basically use 4e to scratch our "maximize protagonism and empower co-authorship of of high fantasy through tight, robust mechanics with fancy pants tactical depth (Narrative/Gamist hybrid)" itch.

 

[KidSnide]

Exactly. Generally, when people talk about "story" in D&D, there's a strong element of preplanned sequence of events. There are often campaign themes, a final villain in mind from the start, set piece battles that the dm has in mind. I'm positing that it is no less D&D to play a total sandbox, made before the players generate characters and without any hooks tailored specifically for those pcs or players (but rather with adventures growing from the interaction of the places, npcs and general campaign weirdness set up in advance), with no singular end point in mind (but rather an evolving world in which the pcs move and act), no BBEGs per se (but rather a slew of npcs and monsters that the pcs can interact with as they choose). My whole position is that this is a fine and dandy playstyle, but that saying that you're "telling a story" fails to accurately describe either this type of D&D or, in my view, telling a story.

There's no 'plot' if the dm lets the pcs do what they want. There's no 'story' (except as it emerges) if the dm creates a setting and then turns the pcs loose, acting as an impartial arbiter. That's not what a story is. But later, you do 'tell the story' of the game as it happened. It's the difference between writing a book about going to high school- that's telling a story- and going to high school. (Later, when you're in college, you tell the story of your high school years, but while you're in it, you're living it, not telling the story of it.)

I think you're conflating "story" with a common technique for generating story. If the PCs thwart the schemes of an evil count by seducing his daughter to reveal her knowledge, tracking the count's servant to diabolical ritual (that they disrupt), deliver the evidence to the king's guard, and then capture the count in a daring rooftop chase -- that's plot. That's story. And it's story whether the DM planned in ahead of time or it came purely from PC actions.

The difference is that -- if you have great players (and you're a good DM) -- you stand a good chance of getting satisfying story by just letting your players loose. If you're players are closer to average, you'll still get some good story by leaving them to their own devices, but you'll probably get "bigger" story if the DM plans it out in advance. I'm not going to judge whether "little" story generated by pure player initiative is more or less satisfying than "big" story planned out in advance. That's more a matter of preference than anything else. But I think it's a mistake to label "letting the PCs do what they want" as "not story."

Or at least it's a mistake if you want to avoid misunderstanding...

[sblock=My Personal Preferences]For my part, what I get from D&D is PCs making interesting decisions about things that matter. (As an extreme example, the climax of my last campaign involved the PCs deciding whether they wanted to try to destroy their adversary and do the best they good to put their messed up world back together or to mess with the timeline, destroying the world they knew in the hopes of ending up with a better one.) That kind of meaningful PC agency is best served by a DM who has a pretty good idea of what the key inflection points are in the game world and steers the PCs towards those points so they have the best chance of being able to influence the game world. Or, if the PCs don't choose to exercise that power, it's a conscious choice on the part of the players and not just an accident of where they chose to go.

I always liked the idea of the sandbox game where the players choose their destination relatively free of guidance and interference. But, in practice, most of the DMs I play with (including myself) just don't have enough time to make sure that there is something interesting in each plausible direction. So, instead, I prefer a game where the PCs have a choice of where to go, but the most interesting parts of the game are lit up in neon, so there's no question that we're playing out the game that has the most potential for fun.[/sblock]
-KS

 

[S'mon]

The difference is that -- if you have great players (and you're a good DM) -- you stand a good chance of getting satisfying story by just letting your players loose. If you're players are closer to average, you'll still get some good story by leaving them to their own devices, but you'll probably get "bigger" story if the DM plans it out in advance.

I have not found that. Maybe I have never played with average players, but it seems to me more about the GM's side. If the GM does not plan a story in advance, he can work with the players, drop some hooks but then reacting to what interests them and what grabs him, to create an interesting story ad hoc.
I find this technique keeps me interested over the long haul, whereas planning everything in advance usually leads to a 'Greenbriar Chasm' style epic fail where the GM realises he has already told the story in his head, gets bored, and the game tails off. Or the players get bored of being told to stay on the rails (I'm starting to find this a problem playing 'Rise of the Runelords' currently).

 

[JamesonCourage]

I think you're conflating "story" with a common technique for generating story. If the PCs thwart the schemes of an evil count by seducing his daughter to reveal her knowledge, tracking the count's servant to diabolical ritual (that they disrupt), deliver the evidence to the king's guard, and then capture the count in a daring rooftop chase -- that's plot. That's story. And it's story whether the DM planned in ahead of time or it came purely from PC actions.

On the one hand, this can match the definition of "plot", so I can see where you're coming from. On the other hand, I usually think that "plot" carries the implication of planning. You can plot to do things; you don't really "story" to do things. Likewise, when events unfold, I would usually describe the "story" of what happened, not the "plot". So that's where people like me tend to bristle a little at the word "plot" being used this way, even if I don't think it's technically incorrect. Just my thoughts on it. As always, play what you like

I have not found that. Maybe I have never played with average players, but it seems to me more about the GM's side. If the GM does not plan a story in advance, he can work with the players, drop some hooks but then reacting to what interests them and what grabs him, to create an interesting story ad hoc.
I find this technique keeps me interested over the long haul, whereas planning everything in advance usually leads to a 'Greenbriar Chasm' style epic fail where the GM realises he has already told the story in his head, gets bored, and the game tails off. Or the players get bored of being told to stay on the rails (I'm starting to find this a problem playing 'Rise of the Runelords' currently).

This is also my experience, but it won't let me XP at the moment (the window won't even pop up). As always, play what you like

 

[pemerton]

it's story whether the DM planned in ahead of time or it came purely from PC actions.

The difference is that -- if you have great players (and you're a good DM) -- you stand a good chance of getting satisfying story by just letting your players loose. If you're players are closer to average, you'll still get some good story by leaving them to their own devices, but you'll probably get "bigger" story if the DM plans it out in advance.

<snip to sblock>

meaningful PC agency is best served by a DM who has a pretty good idea of what the key inflection points are in the game world and steers the PCs towards those points so they have the best chance of being able to influence the game world. Or, if the PCs don't choose to exercise that power, it's a conscious choice on the part of the players and not just an accident of where they chose to go.

<snip>

I prefer a game where the PCs have a choice of where to go, but the most interesting parts of the game are lit up in neon, so there's no question that we're playing out the game that has the most potential for fun.

There is a big difference between "DM plans it out in advance" and "conscious choice on the part of the players . . . [in] a game where the PCs have a choice of where to go". The former sounds to me like a railroad; the latter like a player-driven game.

I prefer the latter, player-driven approach. I'm also happy for "the most interesting parts of the game [to be] lit up in neon". The question is, though, who gets to decide what those are about: the players, or the GM? I prefer to take the lead of the players in that respect. For instance, the reason why Orcus is a prominent enemy in my game is because three of the PCs are Raven Queen devotees.

For me, one measure of a good system is that it should tend to produce a good story, or at least not get in the way, when run according to its own rules and guidelines. So it should make it easy for the players to send signals to the GM, and for the GM to build encounters/scenarios that respond to those signals.