Penny Arcade posts interesting puzzle challenge

[OchreJelly]

Ah, so that recent post explains what was in the twitter pic. I like how he explores different approaches to running a game as he's getting his feet wet as a DM. His influences are video, and now board and card games.

I don't think I would be comfortable just telling my players they would be stuck with just the one initiative roll and no time for a short rest. I would need a good reason, perhaps the spiders move around the warren so much that no one can rest. His players seemed to have a good time though.

 

[Henry]

People talk about how embarrassing it is for a new gamer to come up with so much cool, but in truth I've often found it's the new set of eyes, unjaded by years of gaming, who come up with completely new and cool approaches to gaming.

Once, the mods were playing a game of Spycraft with Piratecat as GM at a gencon several years back; a friend of Morrus was playing, and we all taken aback at how much fun she brought to the table; she roleplayed the hell out of that Wheel(wo)man! I can't remember if it was her first RPG session, or if she was just new to the hobby, but it was agreed she was the MVP of the table. I knda envy new gamers, because it's a really hard thing to see RPGs like they're new all over again...

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

New gamers have the luxury of not knowing the rules. They just DO things with their character instead of worrying HOW to do things within the rules. It's usually refreshing to have a new player at the table.

 

[Celebrim]

Hmmm... I have so much mixed feelings about that.

On the one hand, encorporating the 'beam of light' in the dungeon design is pretty cool and presents some fun puzzles. There is absolutely nothing wrong with porting your experience in gaming into a PnP RPG.

On the other hand, I look at those photos and I don't see 'fun' or even good RPing. I see:

1) A tactical board game.
2) A lot of money invested. I always shudder at 'the quality of the props is a good indication of the quality of play'. I find props pretty much always detract from play.
3) An attempt to do a computer game in a PnP game.

I don't really think anything about the encounter couldn't be done without the props, the board, the minatures, etc. Light behaves pretty predictably. I think Gabe's getting propers for all the wrong things. He should be getting propers for good encounter design, and instead I get the impression that people are wowed by his expensive props and wouldn't have commented on it were there not elaborate sets and props to stage the play in. Yet, for my money, it's the good encounter design I want to buy and be a part of, and I could care less about the props.

One thing I absolutely agree with is that new RPGer's on the whole tend to be better than veterens. On the whole, I hate playing with 'experienced' RPGers because they bring so many bad habits to the table. 'Experienced' RPGers tend to be pretty good at 'playing the game', but tend to be terrible at role play precisely because they are spending all of their time 'playing the game'. I was very very fortunate early in my career to be more or less tutored on playing well, indeed was forced by the DM to play right, so that I can self-critic and tell when I'm being sloppy and unentertaining because I'm thinking about the game and not the role, and I've been very fortunate over the years to introduce alot of people to the game who've just been a joy to play with. But I shudder now at the thought of joining a random group of 'experienced' gamers, because so often all their experience has really been bad.

 

[Celebrim]

New gamers have the luxury of not knowing the rules. They just DO things with their character instead of worrying HOW to do things within the rules. It's usually refreshing to have a new player at the table.

Precisely. XP for that.

New players can't think about the game because they don't know the game. So they are forced to think about the things they do know and hense, to interact with the world presented to them. As players get more experienced, if they don't have a quality DM (or never had one to begin with), they forget to play that way and their play becomes more circumscribed, less imaginative, less interactive, less entertaining, and frequently disfunctionally focused on 'winning' and 'beating the DM'. Sometimes I get players at my table and I just want to beat their old DMs with a bullwhip for ruining good players and making my life difficult.

 

[Benimoto]

I don't really think anything about the encounter couldn't be done without the props, the board, the minatures, etc. Light behaves pretty predictably. I think Gabe's getting propers for all the wrong things. He should be getting propers for good encounter design, and instead I get the impression that people are wowed by his expensive props and wouldn't have commented on it were there not elaborate sets and props to stage the play in. Yet, for my money, it's the good encounter design I want to buy and be a part of, and I could care less about the props.

I think people are wowed not necessarily by how the props are expensive, but by how well they convey the mood and atmosphere of the dungeon, as well as the specifics of the puzzle.

Your post seems focused on the fact that the post and the pictures don't tell you a lot about the encounters or roleplaying, and you're right about that. But, the game isn't all encounters or roleplaying. Exploration is a major mode of the game. It is what you are doing when you're not in an encounter and it's important to put time and effort into that portion of the game as well. People play the game not only to develop their characters and slay menacing monsters, but to visit strange and fantastic places as well.

The post shows a lot of time and effort (and some money) put into the exploration portion of D&D, and I think that's great.

 

[Celebrim]

I think people are wowed not necessarily by how the props are expensive, but by how well they convey the mood and atmosphere of the dungeon...

But that's just it, they don't. They convey the mood and atmosphere of a game table. I can't begin to imagine what the mood and atmosphere of the dungeon is by looking at a bunch of brightly colored plastic playing peices.

Your post seems focused on the fact that the post and the pictures don't tell you a lot about the encounters or roleplaying...

I think you are missing my point entirely. I think my point is more that a collection of plastic playing boards and a laser pointer doesn't constitute visiting a strange and fantastic place, and to me its minimal adequacy may constitute a barrier to doing so.

There is floating around the internet a picture of a younger smirking me sitting on a garage floor which has been covered in 3x5' note cards laid out on a grid (each representing a city block), various bright green cardboard cutouts representing fortifications, and 5000 assorted cardboard chits representing units on the field. Looking at the blurry picture wouldn't impress anyone who wasn't there at the battle. All those props were necessary for the goal, which was to resolve a battle for which no one knew quite how it would end - in victory or defeat. But, looking back on my memories of the battle, I find that while I don't always remember cardboard chits and 3x5 notebook cards and instead sometimes remember the city blocks on fire and the screams of dying troops, what I do find about my memories whether I see in my mind the prop or ideally the thing that the prop stood for is that they are always from the perspective of someone looking down on the city from high above and at a particular angle. It was the position I was kneeling in through much of the battle.

On reflection, I find this to be pretty typical of my memories whenever props are in play. I always see things as an external observer, even when I ought not to do so, because my character was in the middle of it. My best memories of the battle, that is to say best in the sense of those that most transport me to a faraway and fantastic location, aren't of the battle itself but of a meeting held between the PC's a group of city leaders in a lull in the fighting. In those, what I remember is actually being there. That's not an experience I've ever had using props.

 

[Henry]

But that's just it, they don't. They convey the mood and atmosphere of a game table. I can't begin to imagine what the mood and atmosphere of the dungeon is by looking at a bunch of brightly colored plastic playing peices.

Oh, come now! You sure that's not the jaded gamer talking, and not the guy who set up the really cool street battle that was probably talked about by the players for a long time afterward?

For my experience, props for props' sake might not be that great, but the value of a good prop on the table always brings out a lot more fun than even a good description. "Show, don't tell" and "pictures are worth a thousand words" are aphorisms that have proven true time and again. Of the times I have gone to the trouble to set up good props (not as I say "props for props' sake, but something that actually added a tactile and appropriate element) it's always proven worth it. I don't do it all the time, because if you did it might get stale, but time to time it always brings out a little something that just descriptions don't do.

I once set up a home-made Coruscant street scene in a star wars game, during the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, consisting of some bridges, archways and stairs. The simple three-dimensional element, with the threat of PCs and Vong falling a thousand feet to their deaths, added a whole different element to the session, and led to a fall from grace for a Jedi in our group, as he was enjoying grabbing Vong with move object and tossing them off bridges FAR too much. (This was in the days before it was clarified what the Vong were and weren't immune to in the Force.)

A co-GM in his Star Wars game gave us three prop objects near the start of the campaign: a crystalline datapad, a broken sith holocron, and a the broken lightsaber of Mace Windu. Each came with a couple of surprises that were discovered by interacting with the props themselves in certain ways; it added a lot of fun to the game session, as each session we spent our spare time trying to figure out the significance of these props, and what they did.

There's a world of value to be gained from a good prop or puzzle, as long as it doesn't become a show-stopper or a sidetrack that takes you away from teh focus on your game itself. Gabe himself apparently made sure of this buy checking to be sure his light puzzle was solvable beforehand, and not too difficult. I give him kudoes for bringing the kind of enthusiasm to the table that a new player often does.

 

[Benimoto]

I think you are missing my point entirely. I think my point is more that a collection of plastic playing boards and a laser pointer doesn't constitute visiting a strange and fantastic place, and to me its minimal adequacy may constitute a barrier to doing so.

Well, to me, some sort of a beam-and-mirror puzzle is certainly something strange and fantastic, and having physical, correctly-themed props enhances the immersion.

Having read Penny Arcade off and on, Gabe (the DM in question) strikes me as sort of an arty type that pays a lot of attention to presentation. People always try to argue that presentation doesn't matter, but I've never really bought it.

Really though, I'm just a sucker for effort and creativity. I love it that he says he went out and bought little craft-store mirrors to set up his puzzle. I love that he evidently picked through his collection of minis (I see D&D Minis, WoW minis and metal minis) to get ones that most closely represented the monsters. I love any kind of effort that DMs or players take to make their games more fun, and I think I get a little defensive when I perceive people attacking that.

 

[Celebrim]

Oh, come now! You sure that's not the jaded gamer talking, and not the guy who set up the really cool street battle that was probably talked about by the players for a long time afterward?

If it's a bias, I'm not sure I could know except by being there. As I said, I think its a great dungeon design, and Gabe is obviously putting the work and effort into having great sessions, so I probably would have enjoyed it.

But I still think that for me, the 'Wow' is not in the props and that I might have found the props a hinderance.

Besides, I've been imagining running something like this in my head, and the first problem I've been running into is that my character almost always has a hand mirror for dealing with lethal gaze attacks (I'm old school), and I can just imagine the group attempting to bypass much of the puzzle I've been creating in my ('find all the mirrors', 'clean the corroded mirror') by simply pulling polished silver mirrors out of their backpacks and going from there.

I guess I should say that I'm more against minatures than 'props'. The tactile props you describe get around at least one of my basic complaints, which is that they externalize the action. And I do find myself sometimes forced to or desiring to use minatures where the map is so complicated that it warrants clarification or where terrain based tactics are the focus of the combat, but I'm never completely happy with it even then.

A co-GM in his Star Wars game gave us three prop objects near the start of the campaign: a crystalline datapad, a broken sith holocron, and a the broken lightsaber of Mace Windu. Each came with a couple of surprises that were discovered by interacting with the props themselves in certain ways; it added a lot of fun to the game session, as each session we spent our spare time trying to figure out the significance of these props, and what they did.

More please? Like, how do you make such props interesting when you can't do magical and awesome things in the real world without movie magic?