Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[Umbran]

Forgot this one. This is undoubtedly a "problem" for you. It isn't a problem for us. (Also, in Fate at least, nobody's ignoring any die rolls.)

Yeah. There are entire games that explicitly take death-by-die-roll off the table. In Fate, death is a separate choice that can be made by the one who won a conflict. In Sentinels Comics RPG, death only happens if the player decides it is time for the character to die.

No ignoring of die rolls, no lack of setting consistency, no predetermined stories.

Heck, folks, not all games even use dice!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah. There are entire games that explicitly take death-by-die-roll off the table. In Fate, death is a separate choice that can be made by the one who won a conflict. In Sentinels Comics RPG, death only happens if the player decides it is time for the character to die.

No ignoring of die rolls, no lack of setting consistency, no predetermined stories.

Heck, folks, not all games even use dice!

I acknowledge that these games exist, and that many people have a lot of fun with them. And I'm happy for those people and wish them good gaming. Personally, however, I have very little interest in these sorts of games, and do not enjoy that style of gameplay.

 

[pemerton]

But it's not just "random encounters" it's all encounters except that once a year ultra rare "Shakespearean tragedy kind of way". S

Why would meaningful encounters be "once a year, ultra rare"?

Why not have every encounter be meaningful?

 

[The Shadow]

Why would meaningful encounters be "once a year, ultra rare"?

Why not have every encounter be meaningful?

Why not, indeed?!

 

[Arilyn]

Gaming is a wide and varied hobby. I had fun with my DCC elf who survived the funnel despite crappy stats and 1 hp. She has managed to get to 5th level playing DCC, by the book. I'm GMing OSE right now.

I also play Fate, super hero games and others with death off the table, or in hands of the player. I love games with deep character growth and personal arcs.

I would hate to restrict myself to one type of gaming when we have a myriad of choice.

 

[The Shadow]

.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Why not have every encounter be meaningful?

I'm not @bloodtide, but I wanted to answer this second part of your post as this "dilemma" within my own games interests me.
So as you know D&D is an attrition based game which means it would be quite a task to make each and every encounter meaningful.

Without the so-called meaningless encounters how does one stop a party from going nova every encounter? Is every meaningful encounter then built at the super deadly level? How does a game with Random Encounters fit into this?

I suspect this may link with @The Shadow's comment earlier about having sporadic fun in an OSR game he recently played. It is a common issue within my mind when I design my D&D sessions. Is this encounter necessary? How deadly do I need it to deal with the necessary attrition? Will the players have fun or will it be considered a slog? If slog, how can I make it interesting (move the story, exciting combat challenges, dialogue...etc).

This is something I constantly battle with since obviously gaming time is valuable and you don't want to expend it on meaningless encounters but you also don't want to cake-walk through combat on the so-called meaningful encounters due to the nova issue.

EDIT: I should add my table's characters are at the cusp of level 14, so the higher level aggravates my issue I think. Hence why it's on my mind more and more.

EDIT: I suppose my post ties in to the Is Resource Management "Fun?" thread which is currently active.

 

[pemerton]

But to me, the guarantee of drama immediately makes it less verisimilitudinous, and therefore interesting to me.

See, if I could have game sessions that came within cooee of LotR, they would be absolutely amazing. If they could come within cooee of the better REH Conan stories they would be awesome.

And all those stories are constructed, like all fiction is. They rest on contrivance and authorial "manipulation" of the fiction. Presumably on the long trek from Rivendell to the pass of Caradhras someone got sore feet or a stubbed toe, but JRRT doesn't tell us about that. He does, though, tell us about the things that happen in the pass, when dark forces bring the mountain down upon the Fellowship.

I personally don't feel that the fact that JRRT, and REH, only provide us with dramatically meaningful fiction reduces verisimilitude at all.

I'm not @bloodtide, but I wanted to answer this second part of your post as this "dilemma" within my own games interests me.
So as you know D&D is an attrition based game which means it would be quite a task to make each and every encounter meaningful.

Without the so-called meaningless encounters how does one stop a party from going nova every encounter? Is every meaningful encounter then built at the super deadly level? How does a game with Random Encounters fit into this?

To me, these questions have more teeth than concerns about verisimilitude, which - as per my remarks just above - does not seem to me to be threatened one iota by a focus on the "dramatic" or the "meaningful".

I don't have an easy answer with the context of D&D, other than 4e which doesn't really use attrition as its basis and hence does allow a focus on meaningful encounters (yes, it has daily powers and healing surges but I found that 4e works perfectly well with these treated as (i) a type of pacing mechanism and (ii) a means to push the players hard in relation to their resource suite).

Even in my RM play, which also has the potential for attrition as an element of play, my group never focused on attrition as a significant consideration. (And once we worked out that everyone wanted to play a caster, we reworked some of the rules around power points and multiple attacks so as to make sure that a nova-ing caster and a non-magical warrior were roughly comparable in mechanical effectiveness. In that second campaign we had two non-magical warriors as key characters up to and beyond 20th level.)

I don't want to exaggerate what counts as "significant", "dramatic", "meaningful" etc. There's plenty of scope for rising action as well as climax.

Also, I think one element of some clever RPG design is to leave the question of whether something is rising action, or climax, as open-ended until the resolution itself takes place. Eg in my last Torchbearer session the PCs went to their frenemy's house, as they had agreed, to free his cook from possession by an evil spirit which had escaped from the heart of one of the PCs when she attempted but failed to cast a spell. This looked like it would most likely be a component of the rising action, with the climax being something involving the spirit itself (they hoped to cow it so that it would carry a spellbook into the PC's dream library, so she would then be able to add the spells to those she can memorise).

But the conflict was a spectacular failure for the players, and hence they ended up facilitating the spirit's escape from the cook - who was left a dried and withered husk - and into their frenemy, who is now just an enemy again, powered up by the evil spirit which also took the spell book into his dream library, so now he has a better range of spells with which to foil the PCs. Prior to the conflict, the random weather roll had indicated rain, and in my narration of the failure - which was also the end of the session - I decided to unleash my climactic cliches and described a lightning bolt striking the house and blasting it asunder, with the PCs out on the street with the charred timber of the front of the house while their shadow-empowered enemy stood above them gloating.

It is a common issue within my mind when I design my D&D sessions. Is this encounter necessary? How deadly do I need it to deal with the necessary attrition? Will the players have fun or will it be considered a slog? If slog, how can I make it interesting (moves the story, exciting combat challenges, dialogue...etc).

This is something I constantly battle with since obviously gaming time is valuable and you don't want to expend it on meaningless encounters but you also don't want to cake-walk through combat on the so-called meaningful encounters due to the nova issue.

EDIT: I should add my table's characters are at the cusp of level 14, so the higher level aggravates my issue I think. Hence why it's on my mind more and more.

This all makes sense. I'm sorry that I don't think I've got much that is useful to say within a D&D attrition paradigm. Maybe @hawkeyefan has some thoughts?

I suppose my post ties in to the Is Resource Management "Fun?" thread which is currently active.

I've seen that thread. I can see the overlap, but I think the two issues can be orthogonal to one another - as in, it is possible to design a RPG which has resource management but separates it from the issue of "meaningful" encounters. I think Torchbearer is an example of this, because it doesn't rely on "filler"/"slog"-type events or encounters to generate resource attrition. It just uses an ever-ticking clock (which the game calls "the Grind").

 

[Micah Sweet]

See, if I could have game sessions that came within cooee of LotR, they would be absolutely amazing. If they could come within cooee of the better REH Conan stories they would be awesome.

And all those stories are constructed, like all fiction is. They rest on contrivance and authorial "manipulation" of the fiction. Presumably on the long trek from Rivendell to the pass of Caradhras someone got sore feet or a stubbed toe, but JRRT doesn't tell us about that. He does, though, tell us about the things that happen in the pass, when dark forces bring the mountain down upon the Fellowship.

I personally don't feel that the fact that JRRT, and REH, only provide us with dramatically meaningful fiction reduces verisimilitude at all.

To me, these questions have more teeth than concerns about verisimilitude, which - as per my remarks just above - does not seem to me to be threatened one iota by a focus on the "dramatic" or the "meaningful".

I don't have an easy answer with the context of D&D, other than 4e which doesn't really use attrition as its basis and hence does allow a focus on meaningful encounters (yes, it has daily powers and healing surges but I found that 4e works perfectly well with these treated as (i) a type of pacing mechanism and (ii) a means to push the players hard in relation to their resource suite).

Even in my RM play, which also has the potential for attrition as an element of play, my group never focused on attrition as a significant consideration. (And once we worked out that everyone wanted to play a caster, we reworked some of the rules around power points and multiple attacks so as to make sure that a nova-ing caster and a non-magical warrior were roughly comparable in mechanical effectiveness. In that second campaign we had two non-magical warriors as key characters up to and beyond 20th level.)

I don't want to exaggerate what counts as "significant", "dramatic", "meaningful" etc. There's plenty of scope for rising action as well as climax.

Also, I think one element of some clever RPG design is to leave the question of whether something is rising action, or climax, as open-ended until the resolution itself takes place. Eg in my last Torchbearer session the PCs went to their frenemy's house, as they had agreed, to free his cook from possession by an evil spirit which had escaped from the heart of one of the PCs when she attempted but failed to cast a spell. This looked like it would most likely be a component of the rising action, with the climax being something involving the spirit itself (they hoped to cow it so that it would carry a spellbook into the PC's dream library, so she would then be able to add the spells to those she can memorise).

But the conflict was a spectacular failure for the players, and hence they ended up facilitating the spirit's escape from the cook - who was left a dried and withered husk - and into their frenemy, who is now just an enemy again, powered up by the evil spirit which also took the spell book into his dream library, so now he has a better range of spells with which to foil the PCs. Prior to the conflict, the random weather roll had indicated rain, and in my narration of the failure - which was also the end of the session - I decided to unleash my climactic cliches and described a lightning bolt striking the house and blasting it asunder, with the PCs out on the street with the charred timber of the front of the house while their shadow-empowered enemy stood above them gloating.

This all makes sense. I'm sorry that I don't think I've got much that is useful to say within a D&D attrition paradigm. Maybe @hawkeyefan has some thoughts?

I've seen that thread. I can see the overlap, but I think the two issues can be orthogonal to one another - as in, it is possible to design a RPG which has resource management but separates it from the issue of "meaningful" encounters. I think Torchbearer is an example of this, because it doesn't rely on "filler"/"slog"-type events or encounters to generate resource attrition. It just uses an ever-ticking clock (which the game calls "the Grind").

This is why you and I rarely see eye to eye. I am a simulationist. The integrity of the setting is the most important factor to me, creating a plausible fantasy world for the PCs to interact with and inhabit on its own terms. Generating a satisfying and dramatic narrative is a secondary concern.

I balance this desire against the interests of my players, which is why I play a version of 5e instead of some other game.

 

[hawkeyefan]

This all makes sense. I'm sorry that I don't think I've got much that is useful to say within a D&D attrition paradigm. Maybe @hawkeyefan has some thoughts?

I probably don't have much to offer... I haven't run 5e in some time, now, though I play in a weekly game.

When I was running it regularly, I found a lot of these same issues. My PCs were about level 14 or 15, too, so comparable to @AnotherGuy 's game. I tended to rely on big combats as the kind of major encounters... their last battle in our game was against Baphomet in his maze. In that case, we had a series of smaller encounters that were not meant to be challenging in and of themselves, but were more about how many resources they used up, knowing that when the PCs got to the heart of the maze, they'd have to face Baphomet. So that gave the smaller encounters some weight.

Otherwise, I tried to give combat encounters some dramatic weight beyond just the stakes of the combat itself... an NPC to save, for example. This kind of dynamic can make all the abilities and spells at the PCs disposal matter far less... they have two rounds to get to the NPC and save them, so the challenge is less about a test of the PCs' overall power, and more about choosing specific actions to help achieve the goal in time.

It can be tricky to come up with different angles like that to make combat compelling aside from the expected attrition model of the 6 encounter workday, but fortunately, if you come up with a few of them, you can vary things up a bit. Once you have more than one trick up your sleeve, the players will be less certain about their ability to go nova.