The Caller and the Mapper

[Iosue]

A lot of this is similar to how I like to GM - I set up backstory, a lot of how NPCs react is based on random rolls (typically skill checks in my game, rather than reaction rolls, but for current purposes I don't think that's a huge difference).

I think the single biggest difference, for me, would be non-random stocking and non-random encounters. In a type of continuum with my non-gargoyle mode of engaging with player planning, I have a non-gargoyle mode of setting up these elements of backstory and framing situations: I deliberately set things up to pod and proke and get responses from the players. (Not any particular sort of response - hence why I say that, like you, I'm affecting but not controlling - but some sort of reasonably passionate response.)

I think this is probably the main marker of my game being a non-exploration game.

I suspect there's also something related to our previous discussion about where the meta-tools fall, and the paradox inherent in D&D. I put greater reliance on random content so as to remove as much as possible the tension between supporting the players while also running their antagonists. And since in B/X the majority of the meta-tools fall on my side, I remove myself from the discussion as much as is necessary to avoid undue influence. Not that this is easy! Nor does it always end well; sometimes the players end up spending lots of time exploring an "uninteresting" area when, with but a nudge from me, they could be exploring a much more "interesting" area! But I put those in quotes because interesting/uninteresting is an a priori judgement that I only I can make, seeing the whole picture and imparting my own biases. As an exploration game, exploring an empty room can be just as interesting as "getting right to the action".

Mileage varies, of course.

Enough about me! @Libramarian has frequently posted that, in order to maintain interest and avoid boring bits in an exploration-based old-school game, he puts "unrealistic" amounts of wacky stuff into his sandbox. (And so, eg, has fewer empty rooms than the traditional stocking tables would suggest.) Do you have any particular approach to this issue? (Maybe you don't think there is an issue.)

Probably my approach to this is, "No result does not make sense." I rely on random content generation, including random reactions. Time and time again I see people demur this style because of "results that don't make sense." Reading the Pulsipher and (and to a certain extent, the Musson) thread, I felt that they took this attitude, and a lot of their advice involved avoiding results not "according to logic" (Pulsipher), or "fighting-and-looting" games that result from a random stocking approach (a subtext I got from Musson).

I understand that impulse, but I've come to reject it personally. No matter what the result, I see my job to make it make sense. And this is certainly part of the affect on the game I have that I mentioned to Umbran. Doesn't feel like control, though! More like set dresser working for a capricious and zany producer. IMO this helps cut down on a "fighting and looting" mentality, because the players (and I!) are often surprised.

 

[pemerton]

I suspect there's also something related to our previous discussion about where the meta-tools fall, and the paradox inherent in D&D.

I just reread that thread. It seems to have been cut short - the last post is yours, and you seem to promise that you'll be covering more materials.

You should necro it and do that stuff! (Plus your reading Moldvay Basic thread - as best I remember the scenario creation tools and advice haven't been discussed yet.)

I put greater reliance on random content so as to remove as much as possible the tension between supporting the players while also running their antagonists.

<snip>

Probably my approach to this is, "No result does not make sense." I rely on random content generation, including random reactions. Time and time again I see people demur this style because of "results that don't make sense."

Now this is good stuff!

And it is very apposite not only to old school play but to "modern" play as well. I'm sure you've encountered the recurring complaint about 4e skill challenges that (for instance) it "doesn't make sense" if a player comes up with a fool-proof plan, then succeeds on the skill roll, but that's only the 2nd of N required successes (where N > 2). Whereas the correct response - if you're interested in running skill challenges at all - is "OK, what happened to mean that the foolproof plan turned out not to work after all?"

It applies to DC setting as well. Level-appropriate DCs (or any other metagame based way of setting DCs) requires a willingness to make stuff up to make the result make sense within the fiction.

Skill challenges, metagamed DCs, etc are the tools of the "modern" GM that correspond, in functional terms, to the randmoness tools of the "classic" GM, helping to put a brake on GM power and stop railroading. And to work, they require this attitude of "Everything makes sense - it's my job to come up with an explanation".

I would be interest to hear you describe the results of randmoness as you use it - eg what sorts of aesthetic/emotional experiences does it lead to in play? Can you give any examples of how the technique has played out in your game?

In my own case, I feel that taking the approach of "everything makes sense, and it's my job as GM to help make that true" means that you get a lot more surprises. Which means that the game is fun: both these little vignettes, which don't necessarily lead to anything very profound but are just fun to play through, with no one at the table having expected or planned for them; and also ideas that send things off in new directions, and so help shape the subsequent direction of the game. Here are a couple of links to examples: this one I'm very proud of as probably still the best skill challenge I have run, and it produced multiple vignettes of the sort I've tried to describe which just wouldn't have happened in a "follow the logic of common sense" approach; this is a much more recent one, where following the logic of the skill challenge rules and the dice roles led the PCs to binding a demon to their service to go and soften up the Frost Giants in advance of the party's assault. (I'm about to run G2, suitably mechanically adapted and set in the Feywild and the politics of the Winter Fey, for my 26th level 4e group.)

Besides its other problems, railroading is boring!

 

[Sadras]

Probably my approach to this is, "No result does not make sense." I rely on random content generation, including random reactions.

Just want to ask, how do you implement random content generation - do you use random encounter tables for each room/corridor/tavern?

 

[Iosue]

I just reread that thread. It seems to have been cut short - the last post is yours, and you seem to promise that you'll be covering more materials.

You should necro it and do that stuff! (Plus your reading Moldvay Basic thread - as best I remember the scenario creation tools and advice haven't been discussed yet.)

You are my EN World conscience, pemerton. I'll see what I can do.

And it is very apposite not only to old school play but to "modern" play as well.

...

Skill challenges, metagamed DCs, etc are the tools of the "modern" GM that correspond, in functional terms, to the randmoness tools of the "classic" GM, helping to put a brake on GM power and stop railroading. And to work, they require this attitude of "Everything makes sense - it's my job to come up with an explanation".

Indeed. IMO, aside from focus on exploration, the primary difference between early TSR D&D (0e, 1e, and Classic) and WotC D&D (with 2e representing in my mind a kind of bridging point) has to do with what the players use to interact with the game. In early TSR D&D, this is the DM. In WotC D&D, this is the rules themselves. But these are just different paths up the mountain, so to speak.

I would be interest to hear you describe the results of randmoness as you use it - eg what sorts of aesthetic/emotional experiences does it lead to in play? Can you give any examples of how the technique has played out in your game?

In my own case, I feel that taking the approach of "everything makes sense, and it's my job as GM to help make that true" means that you get a lot more surprises. Which means that the game is fun: both these little vignettes, which don't necessarily lead to anything very profound but are just fun to play through, with no one at the table having expected or planned for them; and also ideas that send things off in new directions, and so help shape the subsequent direction of the game.

Well, we're getting pretty far afield of the topic, but what you've written here applies very much to games I've run in this style. Lots of little surprises, and unplanned vignettes that keep the game fresh. On the DM dungeon stocking side, one of the first dungeons I stocked with this philosophy was the 2nd level dungeon map found in Mentzer's DMG. I rolled Traders. Twice. Uh, okay. So what would traders be doing in the 2nd level of a dungeon? Later I rolled Bandits. A-ha! The bandits attacked the traders who fled into the dungeon, eventually reaching the second level, where they split up and the bandits lost them. Then I rolled Giant Geckos. Two rooms down from one of the parties of traders. And with a surprising store of treasure! So, it came to mind that the traders found themselves in the room with the geckos, and barely escaped with their lives. One didn't make it out, and it was his treasure that was in the room. Later a string of animal rolls in another section of the dungeon suggested what the giant geckos were doing there. They'd escaped from a menagerie!

During play, the players were searching around the outside of the first level. I rolled for wandering monsters and came up with...one Trader! And his initial reaction roll to the party was negative. So, improvising, I said that he was practically catatonic in shock and fear, and after the party talked him down, he explained about the traders and the bandits. This became one of the side quests for the party as they explored the dungeon -- rescue the traders from the dungeon. None of this was planned; until the PCs happened to run into the trader outside the dungeon, I didn't even have a "save the traders" plot hook. It all just turned out that way through the rolls I made.

Tavis Alison, of ACKS and Autarch fame, gave a podcast interview extolling this mode of play, which I highly, highly recommend. He's talking mainly about OD&D, but what he talks about can be entirely applicable to any kind of RPG, IMO.

Just want to ask, how do you implement random content generation - do you use random encounter tables for each room/corridor/tavern?

If I'm making my own (rather than one of the handy random dungeon generators out there), I use primarily the rules in B/X that pemerton mentioned above. I either design my own dungeon/wilderness layouts, or use the layout (but not the key) of a pre-published module. For dungeons, Basic D&D has a random stocking table that uses d6: 1-2 Monster, 3 Trap, 4 Special, 5-6 Empty. If it's a monster, you roll on the Wandering Monster table of appropriate level to find who or what and how many of them are in there. Then you roll another d6 for Treasure and cross-check with what kind of room it is. 1-3 means there's treasure in a Monster room, 1-2 means there's treasure in a Trap room, and a 1 means there's treasure in an Empty room.

I sometimes dip into the random content generators in the 1st Ed AD&D books if I need inspiration, especially for dungeon sections. Using the random dungeon generator in the book can take you right off your graph paper, so I generally don't use it for the whole dungeon, but it's great for spicing up sections.

Few things have made me jump up and down in anticipation for 5e like the news that there will be reams of random content generators in the DMG!

 

[Desdichado]

Seems like maybe the discussion has migrated away from the OP topic to some degree...

But I'll say that in about 35 years of play (sometimes off and on) I've never once used a caller and only very rarely a mapper. Both roles are appropriate to a very specific kind of playstyle that emphasizes large groups of characters exploring dungeons and doing little else. I think this playstyle was always very specific, never very common, and practically non-existent by 1980 or so, if not even considerably earlier. It also hearkens back to the notion of tournament play. Which, while I'm aware that it existed, it certainly didn't come very close to representing any game I ever was in.

I guess I'm saying that you must be older than me, or something

But really it's not as much about age as it is about playstyle. I didn't come into the hobby during the mid-70s as a war-gaming enthusiast who was excited about this new take on my existing hobby. I came into the hobby in the very late 70s and early 80s as a fan of fantasy books who was excited about this new take on my existing hobby. And coming at it from a totally different hobbyist background than Gygax and Arneson did, or initially assumed for the first wave of D&D fans, I always did find much of the early assumptions about playstyle to be very strange and even uncouth (!) given what I wanted the hobby to provide. While I later came to understand some of the war-gaming context inherent in the early game, I never really did take to it all that well.

The "second wave" of fans, those that made D&D a household name in the early 80s in particular, seemed by and large to be more like me rather than the old grognards who made up the first wave. This is why it was probably inevitable that the so-called Hickman Revolution took place and stuff like the elimination of the caller and mapper from the basic gamer lexicon eventually happened. The game evolved to meet the demands of its player base, and with a significant sea-change in what the player base wanted, the game eventually changed to meet that. In fact, I believe that for many years, the game was caught up in a bit of an old boys network where old skool designers and writers were unaware of, or at least specifically did not cater to, this pent-up demand.

There are still a lot of lingering legacies of this first wave inherent in D&D, though. Plenty of little features here and there that are retained out of tradition or habit or inertia, but which don't really do much for the audience in many respects.

 

[Stormonu]

Having used the caller and mapper until late 2E (I started in '79), I don't want to go back to using either. Though, generally we do use an unofficial treasurer (woe betide the players if I have to keep track of their treasures - someone on the player side better be writing this stuff down).

Generally I feel that the caller puts an unnecessary buffer between me and the players. I've also seen several players lose interest when they feel someone else is calling all the shots. Yes, sometimes the table resembles a scene from the Goonies with everyone talking at once (at can be quite amusing to watch), but if I need to step in to get bring some order to what's actually going on, not a problem and far easier for me to address/engage a single player rather than filter it through someone else.

I haven't had players have the need to map in a long time, and back in the days when we did do mapping the map was generally wrong ("Was that 20' down the hall from the start of the corridor or not counting the 10' section we were in." or "Wait - we went West. You filled in the East corridor"). Also, with a lot of battlemats, dwarven forge tiles or whatnot, keeping a map just wasn't really necessary.

 

[Iosue]

I guess I'm saying that you must be older than me, or something

I don't think so! I'm part of your "second wave" that got into the game via Basic in the 80s. But the rules (both Moldvay and Mentzer, and 1e books by Gygax) suggested the use of a caller and mapper, so that's how we played.

But really it's not as much about age as it is about playstyle.

Oh definitely. IMO, if you're running game heavily dependent on exploration (dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls), both caller and mapper have utility. But if exploration is peripheral to your game play, a la the Dragonlance modules, then there's very little need for either of them. I think the mindspace of the game is quite different. In the former, the player perspective is pulled back. Your focus is, in effect, on the environment being explored. Combat isn't simulated, it's resolved, preferably quickly, so you can get back to the exploration. The map isn't an extraneous obligation -- it's a record of progress made and goals achieved. In the latter mode, though, you have more of a "first person" view. Your focus is on (typically non-exploratory) goals in front of you. Combat is part of the immersive experience. You no more need detailed maps than any character in a fantasy novel or movie.

Kind of like the difference between Legend of Zelda and Knights of the Old Republic, say?

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I remember the Caller. It was the very first rule I ever tossed. I remember going around and around as a 10 year old with the Holmes Basic (or maybe AD&D, whatever) rules trying to find some way it was a good idea. When I came up empty I decided to do without.

The Mapper was really important in my early games where the goal was exhaustively plundering a dungeon. Later, when I went to mission-based adventures and site maps that were mostly bubbles indicating locations and lines indicating connections, the Mapper went by the wayside too.

Never had a treasurer either. When the party got something, they tossed it in the bag and I added it to my written list. They generally divvied it up at the end of an adventure.

This thread gave me an idea for a monster called a "Caller" with mas suggestion powers and command powers. It always wins initiative and PCs must save or carry out the tasks it announces. Its suggestion and commands are usually not hostile, instead directing the party towards early D&D dungeon exploration, with 10' poles and so on.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I can understand the existence of a caller for large parties (i.e. more than 6 players) in dungeon-oriented games, but for smaller parties, or in more RP-oriented games, where PCs may want to do opposed things or very separate things, it seems like an actively bad idea. I can think a few times when there's a lot of confusion, disagreement or cross-talk, where I've designated one player and had him get what everyone is doing out of them, then tell me, but I've only had to do that a handful of times in 25+ years of DMing, so I think it's probably not something we'd have benefited from. Have a player who tends to act as the leader can often be helpful, but he doesn't need to call everything (I tend to be that player when I play).

Mapper is also interesting, and I have used them, back in the day, but I've found that it is very rarely faster and better to have a player draw the maps by responding to my descriptions than it is for me to draw in front of them. Plus I feel it's totally unfair and my bad if I am not clear enough in a description, and the map gets messed up as a result (because the PC would be able to see the real situation), and I've known that to happen, so again, I prefer to draw the maps (we use a battlemat most of the time so they can just copy from that usually).

 

[howandwhy99]

We've been using Callers for 10 years now and I can say if you don't use them in combat, combat can quickly turn v e r y s l o w. Callers are a tactic the players can use, a sharing of actions such as opening a door or initiative. After cooperating players (however big a group that may be) have decided what they want to do, the Caller relates the order of actions to the DM. This speeds up play play regardless of the scale of time units in-game.

I'm guessing this play advice might be in D&D Next like advice on treasure distribution by the players, but they aren't designing a role playing game as they used to be (as pattern recognition games). It's firmly in the 4e design methodology, though I do like what I've heard more than before.

So yeah, Callers are a tactic. So is being a mapper. Not recording stuff you've learned on your Character Log or not mapping (or over-mapping) are definitely all options. If you don't care what's going on or about getting lost, the players can skip this stuff (or maybe they simply remember that well).