"Fun"

[MRTrice]

collaboration

RPG games are different than literature or film. Games are collaborative where a GM has a concept but grants the players an amount of control within the story.

This means playing to the needs of various players at various times. Unlike a movie or story, a GM has a constrained audience, the people seated before the GM. This allows toying back and forth with story elements in mutual collaboration. It also means a GM need not assume full responsibility for which scenes to cut or not to cut.

This element of collaboration favors advice that reflects the different form of story-telling involved. Chekov had to write for an audience that couldn't respond to his work in process or relate its needs. A GM has the benefit of working with his audience. This suggests that really only a GM and the players can have any idea what style of story-telling works for them.

In the end, that's what makes an RPG such a wondrous and uniquely creative process.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

I'm not so sure, hong. Those kids grew up on Japanese RPGs, yet 4E also cut out random encounters. I played FF VII, and if it weren't for the random encounters, the game would have been "20 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours of cut scenes".

We must have different books. At the top of page 193 in my DMG I see "Random Encounters".

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

If these people really have been around for long enough to know that sweating the small stuff is fun for them, they have also been around for long enough that they know how to do what works for them, whatever the book tells newbies to do.

We were all newbies once.

Shouldn't newbies get the benefit of what experience has taught us?

 

[Old Gumphrey]

An even more extreme example: There are more people who have used crafting skills in an MMO than ever used them in 2E or 3E.

Heck, those player characters typically had to go out and gather the components first. There's few things quite so thrilling as carrying a heavy backpack full of clay over to the pottery wheel in Qeynos.

D&D = too much about the kewl stuff, not the deep roleplaying stuff embraced by MMOs.

Man, that was funny as hell. Bring back craft skillz or RP iz ded!!!1

 

[hong]

We were all newbies once.

Shouldn't newbies get the benefit of what experience has taught us?

They already know what they want. The DMG tells them how to achieve that.

 

[Campbell]

I am amazed how everyone has ignored how that is THE blue print for Railroad gaming. Skip past everything, just take them immediately to the next encounter. Railroading in its purest form.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Treebore, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Story oriented gaming need not result in railroading. The trick is to collaborate with and take cues from your players, as well as not having any given outcome set into your mind. One can present conflicts without handing players a solution.

Of course this assumes that dramatic conflict is desirable.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

Except perhaps *listening to* another player describe her PC carrying a heavy backpack full of clay over to the pottery wheel for 20 minutes, then discuss with another potter the weather, his family life and different varieties of clay for another hour.

Stop, you guys are killing me.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

For better or worse 4e isn't built for players that enjoy chewing scenery or managing minutiae. It is built for players that enjoy action (in the dramatic sense). The basic conceit is that focus should be on meaningful drama and edge of your seat excitement (the parts most films focus on) with occasional forays into more mundane matters to help provide context to the characters' adventures. You skip past the dialogue with the guards if that dialogue doesn't serve to propel the action of the game forward, not because it involves talking.

Yes, this is it exactly. When you watch a movie, you will see that it will skip past the minutia. Each scene is crafted to reveal something about the plot or the characters. Characters don't have a conversation about their childhood because it's a bit of fun roleplaying. They instead have it because it lets you know that one of them has a fear of the dark that will be important later in the movie.

It's important to show them having to pay the guards to let them into the city if it is also showing that they are running out of money and can't afford passage to where they need to go, and so on.

 

[Corinth]

Tabletop role-playing games are neither console nor online role-playing games. They are not television programs, comic books, novels, plays, poems, memoirs, documentaries or any other medium. Tabletop role-playing games are their own medium, unique unto the world, and as such should not play to the strengths of other media; they should resort to their unique and distinct strengths, and not at all attempt to instead make inferior versions of other media by way of aping them- which is what D&D 4.0 does, and demonstrates that neither the designers nor anyone else at Wizards of the Coast understands what tabletop role-playing games are, let alone how to make full use of their unique qualities to best effect.

I see no need to play this v4.0 game; everything it does, I can do in a superior fashion by logging into World of Warcraft, firing up Mass Effect, or breaking out a copy of Decent. This is the folly that Melan (at the RPGSite) labeled "The Tyranny of Fun", and it is a short-sighted fool's errand that will prove to be bad for the hobby in due time.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Story oriented gaming need not result in railroading. The trick is to collaborate with and take cues from your players, as well as not having any given outcome set into your mind. One can present conflicts without handing players a solution.

Yeah, I've said this before and I know a lot of people will still assume it's railroading. But there is a difference between having a storyline and railroading.

Adventures will have planned events that happened at planned times. How the players get from one encounter to another and whether they face all the encounters or not is up to the players and what they decide to do. It has forks where the story goes in one direction or another based on player action.

But knowing that the barkeep will not let them into the bar or that a group of goblins will attack them on the road is not railroading. Nor is knowing that the undead will animate in the graveyard as soon as the PCs get there or that the bad guy will steal the magic artifact from the vault on the second night they are in town.

The idea is that the DM presents interesting conflicts and situations for the players and they get to deal with them. Whether that conflict is "The innkeeper refuses to rent you rooms" or "A beholder attacks the town" it is up to the PCs to find a way to solve it. However, most adventures still rely on the PCs coming up with SOME solution and continuing on the adventure.