Balancing "RP" and "G"

[The Shaman]

Here is a tangential question.

What kind of game/campaign lengths do you usually run.

Good question.

It varies, depending on the game and the players.

Generally I don't plan campaigns around reaching a specific "ending": I don't enjoy writing or playing "save the world from the McGuffin" type adventures, and getting rid of a BBEG usually means someone else is waiting in the wings to take her place.

However, I am running a historical game right now that follows a set timeline, leading to a definite conclusion - this is an exception to my usual open-ended approach. It is a very lethal game and I fully expect that some of the players will lose characters, possibly more than once.

And when someone spends 20 hours fiddling with a character to make him just right, with the idea that this guy will be the players alter ego for the next 5 years, killing that character early on has the same problem.

Someone once suggested that grognards take a "Life's cheap, here's my new character sheet" approach to roleplaying games, while gamers who cut their teeth on 2e or World of Darkness tend to be more protective, adopting a "We're the heroes and we're part of the story 'til the end!" stance. I don't know if this is true or not, but I certainly see some of each to varying degrees in gamers that I know.

My feeling is that death lurks for the unwary and the unlucky - as Flexor the Mighty! noted, adventuring is a dangerous career choice. I wouldn't enjoy playing in a game where that element of risk for my character is blunted by "the needs of the campaign" to last over many years.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

My feeling is that death lurks for the unwary and the unlucky - as Flexor the Mighty! noted, adventuring is a dangerous career choice. I wouldn't enjoy playing in a game where that element of risk for my character is blunted by "the needs of the campaign" to last over many years.

Although I see your point, I don't try to make the campaigns last that long, they just tend to. The last fantasy game I ran, I had a basic overplot, with a begginng middle and end, but they were all nebulous rather than detailed, so that everything shaped itself to what the charaacters did. It ran about 2 and a half years. And everyone wanted more, even though I figured it was done, so a couple years later I ran a "sequel" campaign that lasted about three.

Yeah. I think a lot of what I see in this discussion and where I land on this question explains why I play Superhero RPGing primarily. Characters don't die, and if they do, they come back in some spectacular fashion. It's totally in genre for characters to last for years, and not die. And in a genre where things like deathtraps and monologing villians are accepted, it's much easier to run/play the idea of "failure without death" to work, rather than that idea is one of blunted risk.

.Someone once suggested that grognards take a "Life's cheap, here's my new character sheet" approach to roleplaying games, while gamers who cut their teeth on 2e or World of Darkness tend to be more protective, adopting a "We're the heroes and we're part of the story 'til the end!" stance. I don't know if this is true or not, but I certainly see some of each to varying degrees in gamers that I know.

I can see that too.

On an old mailing list I was one, populated by the more extreme types of theatrical gms and players, I was the one always arguing the game side of the G/RP equation. And here I'm arguing the other.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

doubled. Ug

 

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

I can't imagine whay you'd ever choose to run D&D, then, since the system is very weighted toward chance. Other games do what you want, with far less need for fudging because the randomizers aren't so powerful.

believe me, my biggest complaint with DND is that the die is too big. i make no bones about that.

However, by starting games at no lower than 5th level (so the skill modifier is "big enough" to play a significant role compared with the die) and a few other house rules, I manage to mitigate that somewhat.

But, there are a LOT of reasons to play DND other than its randomness.

And before you answer "because my players want D&D", stop a think about that. if your players want D&D, maybe they want something different than what you're offering with all the fudging, especially since you're lying to them about how their characters are doing.

"with all the fudging". geesh. Just how many "really bad results" do you think DND produces that you have to keep surmising that those who fudge in the system have to do it so often?

Ok, let me state this simply: even though you might not think so, there is a lot more to DnD than the randomness. My players don't play DND because "on a bad die roll or string of bad dice our characters might die!!" Really, they don't. From discussions with them, often about my house rules, the "one roll dead" aspects of DND are some of the elements they dislike and are happy to see that i have adjusted them with house rules and the like.

We play DND in spite of the randomness, not because of it, for all the good things about the game.

if you really cannot see why anyone would play dnd for reasons other than the randomness, thn you seem to be far more critical of it than i.

as for other systems, every system i have ever played has been house ruled and none of them was perfect. Every system brings its own baggage. DND is no different.

 

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

Here's a shocking revelation. I've DMed 3.x for 5 years now and in all of that time I have had 8 PC deaths. All but 2 were raised back up (they were only 1st level and made some terrible choices - the party barely escaped).

oh cool. lets whip 'em out and see whose is longer.

my dnd game lasted 3 years with about 7 players average. We played about 33 sessions a yearn so thats 99 sessions. We had four PCs die during the game. All were raised back. I instituted "after-life scenes" where each time the character got a significant scene wherein he found something out about him/herself, had to resolve or at least address a personal issue and make a choice between coming back when called or to go on to their afterlife reward. Three of the four characters ended up making significant changes to character following these after-life events. I also added a couple of death cults, one of whom chased after those brought back to kill them and another who sought them out because they considered them blessed and sought to help them develop and understand the gifts the goddess bestowed on them.

inn short, even though the deaths were countered later by rezing, each became a special and pivotal moment in the character development,

(Ok now for all you who are reaching for keyboard to explain how in DND the rules say you don't remember any of your afterlife and so how wrong this was... go away.)

See, what this boils down to, and it just wont sink thru no matter how many times its said, is that people who fudge don't fudge for every mishap, for every skinned knee, for every PC death even if only temporary, for every failure and really, really it isn't that we are just so dense that we, unlike you clever "dont fudge it guys", cannot come up with anything interesting to do with the failure, the skinned knee or the PC death.

guess what?

in the midnight game we played in, i was player not the GM, the Gm fudged. he fudged a lot. Most of his fudging, frankly, came from the adversaries going butt dumb stupid once he realized his scenario was overmatched and we were all going to die. It happened repeatedly. It became less fun. Towards the end, one of the players actively psshawed planning even stating outloud several times "lets just rush on in and everything will turn out for the best anyway" whenever we bogged down trying to plan our way thru an encounter we could lok at and see was beyond us.

not the best use of GMing techniques i have ever seen. He used the fudge tool badly to cover for his own lack of ability to assess encounters and to provide meaningful planning options or alternatives.

so, yes, from the pro-fudging side, i am listing and example in play where the Gm botched using that technique and it hurt the game.

got any example from the no-fudge side of how not fudging hurt a game?

 

[Odhanan]

What kind of game/campaign lengths do you usually run.

Long. Usually between 3 and 8 years for a campaign.

When some characters die, there are always solutions. Bringing back the PC from the dead, or create a new one that joins the company, or create a new company if everyone died and use the opportunity to run different things we couldn't do before. Plus my campaign uses Ghostwalk, so you can actually play your dead character... still.

I use the events in/of the game as stones to build the following adventures of the campaign as I would to build the further stories of a tower. The tower will grow in unexpected heights, even angles and proportions, much like a wizard's tower, free from mundane forces and limitations, would grow into an amazing construction. I am like an architect: I'm not the only one doing the job, far from it, and I roll (pun intended) with whatever comes up with the people working hand in hand with me to finish the tower.

Sorry, Shaman, another silly metaphore.

Bottom line is this, for me: I build on the experience of the game to have further adventures/game sessions. The result, after the end of the campaign, will be a story worth telling, I hope. But I do not treat the campaign as a story as it is being played, nor do I try to manipulate dice, players or characters into following the events I'd think *have to* occur.

 

[swrushing]

I think it's not absurd if this plus/minus one applies to a significant roll in a game, and/or if it repeats itself regularly. Then there isn't any "meaning" for dice rolls anymore. You might just as well forget the dice and let the DM decide the outcome of all the actions undertaken by PCs and NPCs, and for me, there wouldn't be any excitement in that kind of game.

Again, since so many seem to maybe not get it, there is often more meaning to a die roll than its most extreme result. Deciding to drop the most extreme result doesn't equate to throwing away all the other bits you get from it.

An orc swinging an axe at my fighter can get a miss, a hit with damage between 5-16, or a crit with damage between 15-48 damage, Even if i as Gm decide "this hit wont do more than 39 since more than that would kill the character outright" and I will fudge the offchance result of 40-48, that DOESN'T (even tho it seems repeated often here) mean I also ought to or have to or have effectively removed the die roll's meaningor "might just as well forget the dice" since it provides me all those other ranges that chime in resulting in less than 40 damage which are easily 90% or more of the outcomes.

Just because the bar has a half bottle of scotch and i won't drink scotch doesn't mean i am throwing out the entire bar and the bottles of tequila and rum and vodka to boot.

 

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

Do you tell your players that you fudge die rolls? If not, why not? If so, how did they respond?

yes. no complaints so far.

Do you allow your players to fudge die rolls? If not, why not? If so, how does it affect your game?

yes, rarely. the two times it has happened overtly (guy made roll, botched the roll. i said "nah thats silly, you succeed.") people loved it because it made sense within the scene. in general they respond better when things are done "that make sense" rather than things are done "because the dice roll went wierd."

more often it actually comes when i tell the player "don't roll for that, you succeed" even though "by the book" there is a small chance of failure. usually that goes over well too.

 

[swrushing]

Here is a tangential question.

What kind of game/campaign lengths do you usually run.

my games tend to run 2 years, three at the most and the shortest i think i have run in a decade was one year.

they also tend to start at, in dnd terms, somewhaere around 5th level.

 

[Odhanan]

Deciding to drop the most extreme result doesn't equate to throwing away all the other bits you get from it.

For me it often is. As a player, I get pissed off when a DM fudged. I actually remember a game of Vampire The Masquerade where a GM fudged a die roll on a Domination 6 power (kind of upgraded possession) that would have annihilated my character's will and allowed the Elder (NPC) to use my character's body as a vessel. Basically my character was dead. I thought "shoot". I had provoked the NPC, told him from my 11th generation that I would rip his heart off his chest if he called me again by my real name (the guy was a Tremere possessed by a demon - we didn't know it at the time) and I tried to when he obliged. I was, as a player, ready for the eventuality of my character's death. And the GM decided that wasn't "in the interest of the story". That got me pissed off, because the balls I had to provoke this Elder didn't have any meaning anymore. I might just as well provoke every NPC in the neighborhood: I won't die if it isn't "meaningful to the story".

Here is, concretely, how you lose me as a dedicated player. Let me assume my choices, my RP, my actions. If my characters dies, so be it. (as an aside, I had some of my characters die in silly situations too, and that's alright! That makes the game all the more believable to me, and the day I get a character to survive for a long while, I get all the more invested in the game - which was the case with the vampire character I was just talking about).