Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8341598" data-attributes="member: 42582">I read Ovinomancer here as responding to what I've bolded in Malmuria's post. I tend to agree with Ovinomancer, in that I frankly don't think it's necessary to convince the players that it was there idea. If you tell them Today we're playing Lost Mines of Phandelver and what you're trying to do is XYZ . . . then I think there's no reason to think the players won't go along with it.When I started my brief Moldvay session the other day I dutifully read out the backstory, which is three paragraphs on page B55 and includes the following:Recently, a tribe of goblins has been raiding the countryside. On their last raid they captured a dozen prisoners. . . [T]he player characters . . . have banded together to rescue their relatives. The party has tracked the goblins to the Keep . . .Now that's pretty thin stuff, and it didn't have any actual effect on our play. You can see variants on it in all the adventures that were published around this time (eg look at Albie Fiore's regular mini-adventures in White Dwarf, which are really just excuses to showcase new monsters; but also look at a classic White Dwarf adventure like The Lichway, which Ragi then seems to have further developed as Death Frost Doom). It's just a veneer of story to get things moving; I think even the Donkey Kong games I played as a kid had something similar to "explain" why there's this giant ape throwing barrels down at you.In the context of a simple neo/trad game - one that at least beginning kids aren't going to object to - I don't think the motivating premise probably has to be much more developed than that. It's basic function is to lampshade (did I use that word right?) the party starting together as a group; to notionally motivate their entry into the first scene of the adventure; and to foreshadow some possible upcoming scenes. In Moldvay Basic that first scene is the entry into the Keep, where my daughter's Halfling fell into the pit but didn't die (the damage is d6, the starting hit die for a Halfling is d6, but she had rolled 3 whereas I rolled a 2). In a neo/trad game I'd expect something a bit different for the first scene, given the underlying principles of play - but the goal of advice, and of design that reflects that advice, would be for each scene to have a fairly clear reason for why the PCs are coming into it, a fairly clear sense of how they're going to transition out of it, and some thoughts about what will happen during it. A more subtle sort of scene (eg one involving duplicity by a NPC) might not be transparent to the players about how the PCs are meant to move through and out of it, but - especially in a beginner context - that would need to be handled with a high degree of deftness, and given the deftness won't be coming from the GM you'd want the advice on how to run it to be top-notch!Now I agree that this sort of advice is going to be controversial in the sense that it's not universally accepted as the best way to play D&D. But that can be handled in a number of ways. Here are two I can think of:(1) Put the advice in a module, like Mike Carr's advice in B1 or Gygax's advice in B2, rather than in the rulebook itself.(2) Include, in the rulebook, advice for two or three standard approaches - Typical play which is also recommended for beginners; Old-school play which is overtly about beating the dungeon and includes explanations of exploration turns, the use of wandering monster dice as a clock, and the warning that it is possible to play in this fashion and have the players lose and get frustrated, just as might happen the first time they try a new and hard video game; and Exploration play which is about some form of sandboxing and/or setting tourism depending on what their market research suggests is the best way to set it out. This one would also be a chance to plug all those old setting books for sale on DriveThruRPG.I don't think, in marketing terms, that it's feasible for a D&D book to have advice on how to use contemporary D&D to play a "story now"-type game. Putting to one side whether or not 5e D&D actually has the resources (actual or even potential) to do this - I tend to think it doesn't, which is one reason why I don't play it - I think it is going to be very hard to frame advice for how to do that which doesn't come into some sort of direct conflict with the advice on how to do (what I have called) "Typical" (ie neo/trad) play. Even with a "plot point" type option, you would want to present that as integrating into one of the three main modes: in Old-school play a plot point is simply a do-over for when you get ganked (like a save point in a video game); in Exploration play its about getting an auto-success on your desire to meet someone or to find something, or maybe getting an auto-success on a reaction roll, so you're still engaging with the GM's material but it has to happen now and on the player's terms; and in Typical play maybe it's as simple as allowing it to be used in any of these fashions.</blockquote>

Verification