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

amnuxoll

First Post
Short-timers are discouraged: It is very hard for a player to just “sit in” in a Standard Game.
I don't think this has to do with complexity. I think it has to do with the natural inclination of humans to clique.

I agree that the 3E and 4E systems often create too much complexity. I don't think E6 is the only solution to that. And I definitely don't think that you will ever find a fantasy RPG that appeals to everyone.


Plot replaces Story

The other extreme is the sandbox campaign. I hate those just as much as railroads. The best DMs can ride in between the two extremes. I think there is a lot of value in the GM creating a loose plot as a skeleton to build the story around. If the PCs deviate too strongly, don't be afraid to dismantle it and rebuild.

Encourage Characters to be Generalists

I think this is fundamentally bad advice. Not only will players refuse to go along with this, I don't think they should. Being master adventurers that work together as a team is downright fun. It's awesome to defeat a foe together you could not have defeated alone.

One of the FLAWS in 3.5e was that you could be a generalist. You could be a PC that was a good melee fighter who could heal, cast arcane spells and find traps. I shared a table with a few of these twinked out one-person-party PCs. No fun.

I firmly disagree with the notion that one absent PC makes for a TPK. It just makes for a challenge: an adventure that builds perspective and character.

We’d Love To Have You Join Us!

This is very solid advice. Also, do reverse: Join other groups from time to time. Play some RPGA games. Meet people. It pays off.
 

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Kestrel

Explorer
I agree with the post, and its something I've been struggling with in my own game. I've dropped d20 and started playing Savage Worlds because of the complexity factor. I'm tired of the hyper-specialized characters and all the time spent on just trying to play the game by the rules.

As to inviting new/one-shot players, we did this in the last session. Two players from another game dropped in and they were able to grab a pre-gen, and get into the game with no problems. They grasped the game within minutes and were playing with not having even looked at the rules book previously.

My goal now is to focus on trying to have the game run without using the character sheets. I want the players to envision the characters acting based on what is going on in the game and using the rules only to adjudicate those actions. I really want to get away from the boardgame and focus on the roleplaying, but I know its going to be an uphill climb. We've spent way too many years looking at the battlemat and our character sheets to determine what we do.
 
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GameDaddy

Explorer
Judges Guild recognized the power creep early on as a game breaker. Bob's solution? Change the experience points table to slow the rate that characters gain levels. The result, a basic D&D game that plays very much like an E6 game today.

Another option, especially for the more complex modern games, i.e. 3.x is character multi-classing. Have multi-class characters be the norm and single class characters (and npcs) a rare exception.

Fighter/Clerics Fighter/Thieves Fighter/Wizards or Fighter Sorcerers and wizard/rogue combos make for a much more interesting characters and a much more interesting game. Advanced games use some prestige classes to create this effect, and new prestige classes that round out characters and give them a wider range of abilities will help to create homogenous characters more adept at handling a wide range of characters.

There are plots and storylines that do make it much easier to integrate new and visiting players into a campaign, among these:

The Army Campaign
, where the players are marching with a vast Army into unexplored or enemy territory. Each session the players undertake a "new" mission for the commander.

The Extended Family Campaign where the players are members of a clan or tribe. The players have obligations to fulfill for the benefit of the clan, more importantly though, they have obligations to look out for each other.

The Great Migration/Resettlement Campaign, where the players are part of a large group that have traveled into new territories and are exploring, looking for suitable locations to settle in.

Each of these basic storylines lend themselves well to allowing one-shot opportunities for play by new players, and it's also easy to include infrequent but recurring visits by one-shot players that decide to return and participate.
 

GameDaddy

Explorer
My goal now is to focus on trying to have the game run without using the character sheets. I want the players to envision the characters acting based on what is going on in the game and using the rules only to adjudicate those actions. I really want to get away from the boardgame and focus on the roleplaying, but I know its going to be an uphill climb. We've spent way too many years looking at the battlemat and our character sheets to determine what we do.

For the more advanced games like 3.x a redesigned character sheet could go a long way toward changing the style of play too.

For the GM, the character sheet would include all the crunch detail, the numbers, the exp, the precise desciptions of feats, equipment, magic and treasures.

For the players, the ability scores, their background, their training, a brief description of their talents as well as some notes on who they know in the social hierarchy.
 


KidSnide

Adventurer
I have to say that, while I agree with some of the general ideas in this post, I really disagree with the idea that GMs should focus on the core story of the game.

I play RPGs in order to have a wide variety of stories. Furthermore, IME, most players put it a significant amount of time learning rules systems. If GMs focused on the core story of the game, they would have to teach players a huge variety of rules systems. It is far, far better to adapt well known game to create the type of campaign that the GM wants to run. As a counter-point, I've been playing for over 25 years and - for the last half of it - it has been the exception for the "core story of the game" to match the core story of the campaign.

I think the better advice is to make sure that (1) the players understand what the core story of the campaign is, and (2) that the players want to play that core story.

-KS
 

erikscottdebie

First Post
Thanks for the post!

Interesting post, and a very good read.

The concepts you raise here are things that bear a great deal of thought--a number of them, in my experience, can sneak up on you and mess up your game before you realize it's happening. I would encourage every DM to consider these points, feeling free to agree or disagree as appropriate for an individual game.

I am a firm believer in "DIR = customized for your game." The game is going well when you and the players are happy and fulfilled. Gamers vary widely in their expectations regarding RPing, railroad vs. sandbox (personally, I agree with the skeleton plot + adaptable story concept), generalist vs. specialist, etc., etc.

In my experience (and I've been a DM about two thirds of my life now), the key to running a good game is to know your players and be able to adapt to their needs and expectations.

Cheers
 

billd91

Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️
I think this is fundamentally bad advice. Not only will players refuse to go along with this, I don't think they should. Being master adventurers that work together as a team is downright fun. It's awesome to defeat a foe together you could not have defeated alone.

One of the FLAWS in 3.5e was that you could be a generalist. You could be a PC that was a good melee fighter who could heal, cast arcane spells and find traps. I shared a table with a few of these twinked out one-person-party PCs. No fun.

I firmly disagree with the notion that one absent PC makes for a TPK. It just makes for a challenge: an adventure that builds perspective and character.

I think it's great advice. The problem as I see it with 3e wasn't that you could generalize, it was that it was too mechanically advantageous to specialize. A single generalist in a party of specialists wasn't going to do very well. A single specialist in a party of generalists was still going to cause trouble.

Stepping back, it may not be a problem that 3e allows either approach, per se. Rather, it's an issue with players who don't all get on the same page about the type of game they want to play and the style of PC they want to have. So, I'd add a caveat to advice on specialization/generalization of any strip: harmonize your approach with the rest of your players.
 

guest

First Post
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Jadasc

First Post
The Game I Run: Vampire: The Masquerade, Revised Edition.
How I Streamlined It:
1. Only two books were canon at game start: the Revised Core and the Guide to the Camarilla. Material from any other sources was hearsay at best, malicious gossip at worst. Along those lines — no clanbook material that hadn't been reincorporated into those two books.

2. Mass combat in Storyteller can be a grind. Mass *anything* can be a grind. So I repurposed the Extended Action rules into something akin to the Skill Challenges of 4E… except that it apparently works better. Used them to handle 8 players in a great debate, a grand ball, and a "fox hunt."

3. Specialties let you "peg" a die from your pool — 4-dots is an auto-6; 5-dots is an auto-8. Two specialties and a Willpower means that a specialist can often get a complete success without needing to roll in their area of expertise, which moves things along and gives a feeling of competence to boot.
 

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