4 Hours w/ RSD - Let's Have a Flamewar!

Lets Have a Flamewar! I have, from time to time, been accused of making comments designed to inflame passions and ignite debate. That may be true to some degree, but when it comes to the art of driving people crazy with terminology, I tip my hat to the people at Global Underwater Explorers. In the 1980s this group became the stewards of a project designed to map the underground water...

Lets Have a Flamewar!

I have, from time to time, been accused of making comments designed to inflame passions and ignite debate. That may be true to some degree, but when it comes to the art of driving people crazy with terminology, I tip my hat to the people at Global Underwater Explorers.

In the 1980s this group became the stewards of a project designed to map the underground water filled caves of the northern Florida watershed. Cave diving has been called the most dangerous sport in the world – people die doing it every year. Yet something draws divers into those dark underground caverns, and challenges them to go deeper, further, and through more and more hazardous territory as they explore.

As a deep-sea diver myself, I fully understand the lure of this segment of the sport. Something about the attention to detail and precise skills needed to conduct this kind of dive appeals to me (and many others).

As the sport of cave diving matured and took on additional responsibilities like that pioneered by GUE’s Woodville Karst Project in Florida it became increasingly obvious that something needed to be done about the safety factor. To that end, the GUE pioneers and a close circle of associates developed a system of training, gear, dive planning, team diving, and technical gas mixtures they called “Doing It Right”, or DIR for short.

If you would like to see a community of folks combust like a phosphorous flare, tell a bunch of cave divers that by definition they are “Doing It Wrong”. To say the resulting conversations were “heated” would be the understatement of the millennium. As a marketing strategy designed to raise awareness, DIR was brilliant. As a way to bring a community together in pursuit of safer diving, well, it had a mixed result, at best. Echoes of this debate still resonate wherever divers gather to discuss their sport. Because in part the DIR philosophy suggested that safer diving wasn’t something that should be just limited to cave divers but should be a primary goal of divers in every condition.

The Core of Doing It Right

The DIR philosophy focuses on a couple of simple principles:
• Take only as much gear with you as necessary for your safety and the safety of your dive team
• Reduce or eliminate anything on your gear that can create an entanglement hazard
• Plan your dive so that you and your dive team have enough breathing gas to overcome a gear failure at the point of maximum danger – then dive that plan exactly.


Books have been written (and thousands of message board posts exchanged) on elaborating this concept. DIR divers have developed very specific requirements for how they rig every bit of gear they take on a dive – to the extent that such specifications have become almost Talmudic in their detail.

DIR has a lot of benefits to average divers, even those who will never exceed recreational dive limits or enter overhead environments like caves or wrecks.

One side effect of the DIR philosophy is streamlining. DIR divers are very streamlined. In the water they present a very small cross section to the water and thus use much less energy as they swim. Lowered energy consumption means a reduced breathing rate, and that translates into longer dives on the same amount of gas.

Another is an improved safety margin for everyone in the dive team. Recreational divers don’t have a very high fatality rate, but they do have a disturbingly high accident rate. Getting “bent” as an effect of returning to the surface too quickly for the metabolized gas in your body to be naturally released is no fun, and can be very expensive. Adopting DIR style procedures makes it much more likely that even in the case of a catastrophic gear failure (or a catastrophic mental failure like not monitoring your breathing gas consumption) you’ll be able to recover with the aid of your dive team and surface safely. That keeps you in the sport and reduces the negative press the sport gets when a diver gets hurt.

OK Ryan, Get to the Point

You may be asking yourself what this has to do with adding more fun to your 4 hours of roleplaying. At the risk of igniting a miniature version of the cave diving wars, I’ll say that I think that our hobby is pretty universally Doing It Wrong.

What’s Broken

There are basically 3 ways people engage in tabletop roleplaying in the current era.

The Standard Game

This is the typical concept that most of us have when we talk about a “gaming group”. The same people gather on a regular basis and play a campaign game where their characters and their adventures are persistent across many sessions.

The One Shot

Sometimes the group wants to try something different, or a player wants to try their hand at being a GM, or an ad hoc gathering of gamers spontaneously decides to break out the dice with no expectation that the session will be persistent. Some games, especially those from the small press / independent gaming community are explicitly designed to be played in single sessions.

The Massively Multiplayer Tabletop Game

Pioneered by the RPGA in the form of its Living Campaigns, and echoed by many successful tabletop RPG publishers (and several independent groups). This format is designed to be played at conventions and in game stores as an “organized play” event. Characters are persistent across sessions but the groups are usually ad hoc.

There are inherent problems with all of these play styles, but I’ll focus specifically on the Standard Game. That’s the format that most people would like to be playing in, and the format that many players have the fondest memories of. It’s also the format that has become the most broken over time.

Pathologies of the Standard Game

The Game Itself Is Too Complex: After just a small number of sessions, most games become extremely complex. Character powers and abilities proliferate. As character power increases, the abilities of their foes also escalate to maintain effective challenges. The net effect is that players and GMs rapidly find themselves in a spiral of decreasing “fun time” as the amount of “work time” grows larger and larger.

Parties Become Interdependent: The more sessions a group of characters play together, the more tightly dependent on one another they become. A wide variety of specialization options allows players to narrowly craft their characters to achieve maximum impact, while relying on other characters to make up for the deficiencies this specialization creates. Rules that enhance and reward these kinds of tactics have also become increasingly common, which further reinforces this interdependency. Of course, the problem is that when (not if) one or more of these characters becomes unavailable, the entire party may find itself seriously compromised. The more interdependent the characters become, the more likely it is that the absence of just a single player can severely limit the actions of the whole group.

Short-timers are discouraged: It is very hard for a player to just “sit in” in a Standard Game. Beyond the beginning power levels a one-shot character may be so complicated to create that the drop in player might spend the entire session just trying to complete a character sheet. Being able to master the abilities and options available in a short time is also hard for many players to do – especially new and inexperienced players of the type that the hobby needs to encourage to replenish itself as older experienced gamers lapse.

GM aspirations exceed their abilities: Time after time, GMs invest massive amounts of time in creating backstories, plots, characters, monsters, and environments for their players to encounter, only to find only a small amount of that content is ever used in actual play. Worse, a GM may induce the players to similarly invest a lot of time in character development and attention to detail, only to let everyone down as real-life pressures make it impossible to deliver the full vision that the campaign began with. GMs are subtly pressured into this situation by the actions of the publishers who present massive tomes of richly detailed campaign settings and establish a mental bar for what people think is expected of anyone who creates their own world.

Plot replaces Story: A related trap that many GMs (and some players) fall into is trying to develop a plot – that is, a pre-determined framework around which the players are supposed to build a story. This creates the feeling of being railroaded which players hate. It creates frustration for GMs when clues aren’t followed, events are encountered out of order, or characters wander off into the wilds. GMs feel a subtle pressure to deliver this kind of experience from the plethora of novels featuring their favorite game worlds, and the computerized RPGs which seem to deliver this kind of game effortlessly.

Doing It Right on the Tabletop

Here’s some general rules of thumb on how to improve the way we play the Standard Game:

• Bring only as much material as necessary to play the game session
• Encourage characters to be generalists
• Welcome players who can only drop in for one session
• Make the game about the basic story of the genre


Limiting the Game Material

How many of you have a bag (or box) filled with books that you lug to every game session? How many regularly take more than 5 books with you even when you’re just a player and have no GM responsibilities?

This is crazy. There’s no way to actually use all that content in a single 4 hour session. Finding anything in that mass of documentation requires one to have a near perfect memory for where desired information is transcribed.

I happened to pick up a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Compendium at the bookstore out of curiosity. This is a 320 page book. It is aimed at new players.

For comparison, I got out my copy of the Dungeons & Dragons blue book from the old beginner boxed set. 48 pages. Has the game really been improved in the past 30 years by adding 272 pages of content to the material we expect a new player to use?

I say no. I say that the first step we have to do is prune the tree of the game system and get back to something reasonable in terms of the rules as written.

EN World spontaneously generated a clever way to address this problem: E6. You can read about it here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/206323-e6-game-inside-d-d.html

E6, in brief, puts a cap on characters of 6th level. That cap has significant ramifications that reflect the goal of limiting the game material. It smashes the number of spells that need to be referenced. It minimizes the ability trees of the monsters the party encounters which helps the GM stay effective.

Encourage Characters to be Generalists

If your party consists of one character who does all the healing, one character who deals with all the traps, one character who fights the toughest opponent, and one character who uses area of effect damage to deal with lots of grunt enemies, you probably play in a Standard Game.

Like a well-oiled machine, this party has mastered the art of adventuring. They proceed from encounter to encounter with vigor – knocking out any challenge they’re capable of defeating and taking the resulting phat loot and XP with aplomb.

What happens when any one of those characters doesn’t show up? Total party kill, in my experience. Or total party shopping expedition, as the players recognize they’re not going to prevail in the adventure and instead spend the time dealing with their gear, their training, and interviewing townspeople for rumors.

Here’s an interesting bit of nostalgia. Remember the old 1st and 2nd Edition system for demihumans? They could be multiclassed characters and humans could only be single (or dual) classed. The advantages of demihumans were strong, and lots of people played them despite the limits built into the system on their power (mostly ignored in the breach, of course). All those multi-classed demihumans gave the game a resiliency that the modern game can lack. D20 multiclassing was designed to encourage this kind of character development but in practice what players use it for is to become ultra-specialized rather than broadly competent. In making multiclassing more flexible, we inadvertently created a feedback loop of character interdependency.

As GMs there are ways to address this. Even in the E6 system the general idea that characters should be less specialized can be implemented. Bring back demihuman multiclassing – just require demihumans to alternate levels between two or three pre-selected classes. That’s a good balance with the benefits that demihumans get in the E6 system vs the humans. Let the human characters multiclass at will, and suddenly you’ll have many more broadly competent characters and groups that are far less fragile.

We’d Love To Have You Join Us!

Make your game as welcoming to one-shot players as possible. As a GM, always have a couple of good characters ready to give people who want to drop in on your game. It’s easiest to give them characters that do simple things like fight or heal. Discourage drop in players from taking more complicated roles like arcane spellcasters.

Give Them That Character When They Leave! It seems obvious, but it's easy to forget: you’re far more likely to come back and play again if you have some connection to the game. Worst case, you’ve given away a character that could be cloned instantly and put back into your file of drop-in PCs. Best case, you may have planted a seed that will blossom into a new tabletop roleplaying gamer!

I’ll write more in a future column about experienced players with pre-existing characters who want to drop in on your game, but for now I’ll just say that it’s far more likely to be beneficial to your group to allow it than to make it a hassle.

The Power Of The Core Story

If you have a Dungeons & Dragons game, make it about dungeons, exploration, small battles against monstrous foes, getting cool magic items, and leveling up.

If you have a Vampire: The Masquerade game, make it about the struggle to retain a shred of humanity as a monstrous creature of darkness living in a society of predators obsessed with station and power.

If you have a Star Wars game, make it about the struggle of the good Rebels against the vastly overpowered evil Empire, as seen through the eyes of a group of galactic adventurers.

If you’re running a Champions game, make it about exciting superhero fights and dramatic life & death decisions against a background of wonder and amazement.

In other words, figure out what the “core story” is of the game you’re playing, and stick as closely to that story as you can. There are games out there for virtually any core story you want to play. Rather than trying to bend a game to fit a story of your choosing, choose a game that embodies that story intrinsically. Both you, and your players, will find the experience greatly enhanced.

Core stories also help the Power Gamers and the Thinkers get quickly involved in the game. They are less interested in the elaborate world you’ve built than the immediate challenges you’re presenting. These games have achieved multi-decade success because the core stories they embody are intrinsically popular with huge populations of players. Take advantage of that vested wisdom.

Coming Soon!

Next month I’m going to talk about a holistic approach to integrating these principles into your gaming hobby. I’m also interested in hearing about ways you’ve streamlined your own games – especially non-D20 game systems – in the mode of the E6 system.

--RSD / Atlanta, April 2011
 

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Ryan S. Dancey

Ryan S. Dancey

OGL Architect

WheresMyD20

First Post
Ryan,

Excellent insight! The advice you give in this column matches up pretty well to my own gaming experience.

It's all about keeping it simple and keeping it all in balance. Too many rules and you'll frustrate some of the group members, too much plot and you'll put others to sleep, etc. The "less is more" approach seems to work pretty well. It seems to have the broadest appeal.
 

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scourger

Explorer
While I don't agree with all of this, I do agree with some of it. So here are my thoughts. First, the system does have to be limited. I started this with AD&D 2e by eventually limiting my game to just the core rules. It worked so well that I ported that concept over to d20. Of course, the "core" of 3e is still about 1200 pages (PHB, DMG & MM); but it was better for me than allowing all the content that exploded afterward. I would use the core of another d20 game, but that was generally all. My favorites were Judge Dredd d20 and Omega World d20, the latter being a great example of a concise but brilliant game where less is more in the presentation.

For non-d20 systems, the best I have found and brought to my group is Savage Worlds. The design concepts for that game seem to deliver many of these concepts. I think one of its best features is that it keeps coarse granularity of options for the GM while allowing fine granularity of options for the players. In other words, GMs can easily stat up foes or other NPCs that are good at one or a few things without worrying over the exact "right" calculations. That makes it easier to run. Meanwhile, players get to enjoy a rich level of character development through advancement options that preserve the game-within-a-game to keep them engaged.

To deal with a diminished number of players in our group, I really embrace the idea of allowing a pool of allies to the PCs. We started this concept in Savage Worlds games, and the key is to make sure all the players have extras to control--not just the player whose character has a leadership feat. I've brought it over to our current Gamma World game, and it works well. The heroes have some extra muscle that is somewhat expendable, and it opens up the possibility for the player characters to discover more allies in unexpected places through roleplaying the story. For example, when they rescued 4 people they turned out to be needed replacement allies; low-powered but available. Same for a robot they defeated, reprogrammed and repaired. And, since the game is simplified the allies are relatively easy to manage in additions to the stars.

There are some limits to simplification, though. In our Gamma World game I find the players less engaged because they don't have enough character development work to do. Each PC really is defined by the first rolls for backgrounds, and they are pretty even tactically. This hurts the story development because the players do not feel invested. It's to the point that I am not sure I want to continue the game even though I have 2 expansion modules left to explore.

I had the same experience with a D&D Minis skirmish campaign that I ran a couple of years ago. It was awesome for its simplicity. I chose a pool of minis for the adventuring group to include the heroes and the extras. The players took on characters and even made one each their primary character. But, the advancement was very simple from the Miniatures Handbook, and there were no defined feats or skills to choose or use. Next time, I plan to use a hybrid approach with the players having PHB levels of options but giving myself some freedom as DM to use a minis level of complexity for the foes.

Unfortunately, I think the best way to limit the game material is to limit the magic. I say "unfortunately" because magic is really a big driver of the fun for D&D. But, it takes up a lot of material. Going back to 3e, magic is about 1/3 to 1/2 of the PHB. So, for the next game I would like to run, Sons of Conan, I plan to limit the PCs to non-spellcasting classes. So, they are basically barbarians, fighters, monks or rogues. It has to work for the story, though, so magic-users are limited to foes and occasionally helpful NPCs; like the original Conan stories. My hope is that the players will actually be liberated from niche roles and that I won't have to worry about magic so much and can just use foes from my stock of D&D minis. That should in turn free me to focus more on the story development.

Similarly, I would love to run a game based on the Slaine comics with classes limited to "celtic" themes: barbarian, bard, druid, fighter & rogue. I think Slaine d20 presented some interesting themes and the Horned God graphic novels present a basic story that could make a good adventure arc. But, the rules options need to be narrowed to empower the game--for me.
 

rayt38

First Post
I agree with some of it Ryan

My group has played D&D from OD&D to 4ed and has now returned to Swords & Wizardry and what we have from OD&D still usable. As a group we got tired of the amount of books and options that kept growing out of sight with 3e and 4e and decided at the beginning of the year to go back to OD&D and the new S&W Complete to have a game with a few agreed upon house rules we could enjoy and not have to remember a boat load of rules and 2 hour combat rounds to enjoy.

Role playing games have always been about the story not the crazy amount of rules that tell you what you can and cannot do at a given moment in the game. That why we went back to the beginning.


I have 4 players ages are 39, 54, 42 and 25. We are having a blast playing the old rules again and thats what matters.
 

Anselyn

Explorer
Funnily enough, today and elsewhere, I answered the question "Why isn't Call of Cthulhu more popular than it is?" by pointing to

http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfile...chSummary.html
http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfile...PGPlayers.html

I find it particularly interesting the statement from the summary of the survey that:
All (emphasis mine) of the people who indicated a strong interest in RPGs identified eight "core values" that they look for in the RPG experience. These 8 core values are more important than the segments; that is, if these 8 things aren't present in the play experience it won't matter if the game generally supports a given segment's interests - the players will find the experience dissatisfying. These 8 core values are:
Strong Characters and Exciting Story
Role Playing
Complexity Increases over Time
Requires Strategic Thinking
Competitive
Add on sets/New versions available
Uses imagination
Mentally challenging

Now, I find that some of these absolute core values don't apply to my gaming desires (I also think that they are not buttons pressed by Call of Cthulhu.)
  • Complexity Increases over Time
    Requires Strategic Thinking
    Competitive
    Add on sets/New versions available

Hence, CoC doesn't align itself with the desires af a large section of gamers and so is not highly commercially successful.

However, I also think that pushing D&D to fulfill these latter needs - and how well MTG worked to do this too - has been detrimental to roleplaying as a whole as D&D painted itself into a particular hobby corner. I think the article above indicates this - especially on the complexity front.

Also - and I know I'm going to be irritating by saying this - but a lot of people are going to look at this and reply well those values do apply to me. (see replies above already). But, of course they are likely to your presence here is a statement that you almost certainly fit the dominant mode.
 
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delericho

Legend
I was with you right up to "Core Story".

Having just guided a group of near-novices through the process of 3e character creation, I'm fairly strongly convinced that even at its simplest, this edition is needlessly and uselessly complex in places. (4e is a bit better, but not much.)

So, yeah, I agree with that.

However, I don't agree with your "Core Story" notion. For me, the principle value of simplifying the game is so I can get "the work" parts out of the equation so I can focus on "the story" parts of it - but that value is negated if I then limit myself to a "Core Story". This is especially true since I specifically don't want to have to change games often for lots of different stories - unlearning and relearning the rules is a real pain (especially if there are lots of minor changes - something the d20 games tended to be particularly bad for).
 

delericho

Legend
Also, I wonder if we allow drop in players and they enjoy it but then you don't have room for them, what happens? Hopefully you could get them into another game, but I could see someone getting upset if they showed up for one game and weren't welcomed back.

In a "game club" environment, I would very strongly push for a policy that "all new campaigns start at less than full load". That is, if the DM (and game) can handle 6 players, the campaign is limited to 5 players at the outset.

This guarantees that if someone new joins, there will always be a spot for them in at least some game, and ideally they'll have a choice of games to play.

I base this on an experience I had on both occasions I joined a game group - although there were loads of games going, they were all full, so the organisers had real trouble finding me a spot at any table, never mind a game I actually wanted to play.

(The clubs also had the problem that every time a given DM would kick off a campaign, the same group of players would immediately jump in - and sometimes they would be pre-registered by the DM. That made the club very clique-y. But that's another rant...)

We're perfectly happy to not have new people. I realize that's not how you grow the hobby, but if I liked meeting new people I'd have never gotten into DnD.

I once thought as you did. Then I watched my game group slowly fall apart over many years.

While you're in school/university (or perhaps the army?), it's easy - you have a bunch of friends all with a similar schedule and demands, so you can find a time when they're all available. This state of affairs can go on quite happily for several years.

But in time, you hit the constraints of the real world. Al decides to move away for work. Bob gets married and starts a family. Chris and Dave have mutually-exclusive work schedules.

And suddenly, instead of having seven people able to turn up most of the time, you have four - few enough that even one cancellation means the game is off for everyone... and most sessions there's someone who has to cancel.

(Even worse - when we got to that situation, we found that we couldn't recruit. There was so much history and so many in-jokes, and habits, and references that any new player automatically felt like an outsider. They never stuck around. It sucked, but there was nothing we could do.)

Trust me - you're much better maintaining at least some loose ties to the wider network of gamers - that way, you can maybe pick up some people to replace those you've lost, and when people do have to leave your group, they can probably find another game that suits.
 


pneumatik

The 8th Evil Sage
Trust me - you're much better maintaining at least some loose ties to the wider network of gamers - that way, you can maybe pick up some people to replace those you've lost, and when people do have to leave your group, they can probably find another game that suits.
I do that. I just mean that we don't care if a given game is conducive to bringing in new people. It's just easier.
 


Henry

Autoexreginated
I have to say I agree with a lot of what Ryan says. If I were introducing a brand new group of people to role-playing, I would NOT NOT NOT use 3E or Pathfinder, or really even 4e, though that wouldn't be as bad.

I would go with Basic D&D, (or Labyrinth Lord as it's now known) or Castles and Crusades. I would not give people more than 15 things to keep track of, and the six ability scores, their AC, attack and damage dice, and (MAYBE) saving throws is about it - and even then, I'd use Fort, reflex and will instead of the classic saves, and I'd keep it to a simple "by level" chart with no bonuses.

For newbies, there's just too much to decipher, as a general rule.

Now, for the established group, I'd say we love complexity. Everyone who delves deeply into a hobby loves to push up the challenge level by planning and stretegy - Ryan, didn't you say that DIR divers have discussions of almost Talmudic detail? Having no experience with Judaism, but getting a few glimpses from Potok's The Chosen, I can see where people who love a subject enjoy digging into it far more than a novice would. Not everyone needs to love Strat-o-Matic baseball to enjoy a ball game - but chances are a big time fan who loves diving into player and team averages will grab on to Strat-o-Matic with gusto.
 

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