DM-less D&D - Welcome to board games

[dm4hire]

Was reading through the DMG last night and came across the method suggested for playing without a DM using encounter cards and randomly generating your encounters as you go. There's just a brief paragraph or two on page 195. I admit my first thought was it would be fun to play it like this but my immediate thought after that was "why wouldn't we just play a board game.

I've never got a chance to play the D&D board game that's out in Europe and always short on cash when I saw it at GenCon. This suggestion makes it obsolete actually and not because it is based on 3.x but in the sense it the book really points out how to make your own board game using D&D.

This opens up a whole new market for the game (board game with expansions) as well as you could design modules to be ran by a DM but also ran without one by selling it with the encounter cards and map tiles which could be placed in any order causing each module to play differently every time. The potential is huge and my only thought is why isn't WotC doing this? I know they have the minis set for scenarios very similar but nothing like this. The mini scenario packets tend to focus playing against each other.

Granted I know there are games like Talisman, the WoW board game, House on Haunted Hill, Descent, and a few others that work on the same principle, but they only go so far I think. This concept hits every market in one shot - D&D, Minis, and board games.

So Rouse or Mr. Mearls when can we expect this wonderful product you guys are hinting at in the DMG?

 

[Remathilis]

Sigh...

The miniature's handbook had an entire chapter on using D&D Mini's to make random dungeons. They even go into detailed rules for selecting terrain, shuffling the DDM cards, and players "taking turns" running the monster. DM on the fly. That was 2003.

Furthermore, I have an old Basic D&D module (Rage of the Rakasta) that requires NO DM. There is a poster map, and the "box text" is located on cover map so you can read it, then "chose your own adventure" to different parts of the module. The rest is the honor system (you roll the monster attacks) but it was designed to not need a DM. That was 1994.

D&D without a DM is still an aberration, but the fact that the DMG even suggests it for groups that lack a DM (or a dedicated DM) is a major step to allowing different playstyles to be "validated". I doubt its the death of the DM, it didn't die in 1994, or 2003, it won't die in 2008.

 

[dm4hire]

I'm not saying there will be a death of DMing. I'm suggesting DM-less play as a method of expanding their market. If they market modules along the lines indicated they could sell it to more than one market. They have already started including the DDM maps in the modules but if they would switch to tiles instead in exclusive modules they could market to all three markets.

 

[SlyFlourish]

DMless D&D

I'd love some one-on-one adventures or two adventures with zero players for a way to kill an hour and have some fun with a friend or spouse.

 

[Korgoth]

The problem with it is that the DM is what makes a game of D&D go beyond mere "theme mechanics".

I played Arkham Horror with my friends last night. It's a great game and always a lot of fun. However, if you wanted to sit down and do the work, you could keep exactly the same game mechanics but strip away all the Cthulhoid theme elements. A board game is a set of mechanics with a "paint job" of theme. Sometimes the mechanics cleverly support the theme (like Knizia's Lord of the Rings game, which rewards self-sacrifice and punishes selfishness just like Tolkien) and sometimes the mechanics simply run independent of the theme. But any board game could be "stripped of paint" and re-themed. You could change the names of all the skills and powers in Arkham horror and rewrite all the flavor text and make the game about whatever you want.

You can't do that with D&D because the DM determines how things react based upon their meaning. D&D incorporates semantics into its mechanics, you might say. As a DM I know that the players will do things I don't expect, and that if I know the NPCs then I can react appropriately. There's no way to strip the theme from the NPCs and have them still behave in the same way, because a character from a medieval fantasy milieu will react differently than one from a modern spy thriller or a science fiction tale. The things that in a board game we would call "theme elements" are bound up with everything we know about the individual milieu, setting and all the other particulars that go to making up our deliberations.

 

[Mercule]

Um... My 1e AD&D DMG has a whole appendix on random dungeon generation that can be used for solo play -- it also has random wilderness generation. That didn't really seem to negatively impact the hobby.

For 3.5, I even bought a 30 page 3rd party product that did the same basic thing so that my wife and I could kill orcs together after the kids went to bed. It never replaced the Tuesday night games, but it was good for occasional fun.

The same part of me that enjoyed the old Wizardry or Rogue-like games enjoys random solo (or pair) dungeons. It's a different experience, but I can learn more about the system I used for group play while I'm doing it.