Expanding D&D adventures past mere combat

[I'm A Banana]

What it is more of an aspect of is the "let's kill everything and have the best PCs for doing that" mentality. When you come down to it, magic items are primarily useful in combat. When the game focuses on that, of course magic items rise in importance.

I'll buy it.

D&D3e was specifically something of a reaction against the 2e (at least) idea of "here's a bonus, but it's REALLY RARE!" or "here's a bonus, but IT MAKES YOU UNPOPULAR!" Problem being that those characters dominated in combat (which was a part of almost everyone's game), and their weakness was sometimes never asserted (because not everyone played games wherein characters had to be popular or who couldn't be rare or special).

So the mythical 3e balance came into play in the known (nearly) universal of the game: combat.

And they left individual DM's to do the whole flavor part of it.

Which has lead, through the influence of the core books, to very little attention paid to that flavor part of it.

To reverse the trend, if indeed we want to, we need influential products that successfully focus on non-combat, that also aren't just for the DM.

Combat is crunchy. Combat is random. Combat is fun, fast-paced, exciting..almost by default. Work needs to be done to make the rest of the game feel and play that way, to make the drama of intrigue as tantamount to the players as the drama of combat.

So far as WotC has been concerned, and they are the most influential, it's been a mixed bag. Eberron's adventures from my hear tell are weak sauce. While books like Heroes of Battle are generally only moderately well recieved. DMGII was in that vien as well, but it was DM-focused, not player-focused.

 

[lgburton]

i'm actually seeing this problem in the Age of Worms storyline that's currently being published.


there's a fun and interesting story going on behind the scenes, HOWEVER, the players have no way (yet) to really get the information that makes up the story. if, as a DM, i were to give them the info too early, it would get them killed, but if i don't give them SOME kind of info, it gets boring.

i think this problem is even more typified in a fairly serious cause of issues in general module design: the places that the PCs don't go because they either can't find them, don't have the information neccecary to figure out what's going on, or any one of several other problems.

*AGE OF WORMS SPOILER BELOW*


for instance, in blackwall keep, there is NOTHING driving the players to go and investigate the eggs of the lizardfolk. there is no reason to even touch the black dragon egg other than the players being idiotic. the players never even have much of an opportunity to gain the lizardmen's story, unless the DM does a fairly serious re-write of the whole adventure (which i'm doing, because i can't stand it as written). if i want the storyline to actually matter to the players, i have to give them some clues as to how to interact with the story.

*Spoiler over*

unfortunatly, this can come off as railroading. the basic problem with concentrating on story is that the players need a lot more information about the story to make it fun and interesting. most dm's cant or won't deal with thinking up all of the information that's going to be needed for any given story, and can't figure out how to hand that information out in a fun and interesting way.

so, my analysis of removing the combat orientation of the game is this: it comes down to serious role-playing sessions, where both players and DM are willing to work a bit harder to make the game fun.

 

[I'm A Banana]

it comes down to serious role-playing sessions, where both players and DM are willing to work a bit harder to make the game fun.

If this is the case, it may be sadly just one of those rare things. Finding peple whoa re willing to work hard at making something fun when they could just go do something fun instead is an ultimately unwinnable uphill battle...

 

[The Shaman]

IMX GMs need to make more use of non-combat action encounters - getting up a crumbling cliff or tower wall, fording a raging river, running a boat through high surf over a dangerous reef, finding and defusing a ticking bomb, rigging a rope bridge across a deep chasm, and so on. Too often these types of situations (if they appear at all) are handled with a single skill check roll, rather than breaking it down into a series of steps to complete, each with its own potentially hazardous outcome.

Another problem with these encounters is the lack of meaningful choices to involve player decision-making: do I climb the cliff along the chimney, which is safer but longer, or do I chance the riskier but shorter face route? do we take the gap in the reef that may be visible from the guard post, or do we chance running the reef break and maybe swamping or capsizing? A complex environment with which the players are encouraged to interact is every bit as interesting, and often as perilous, as a combat encounter.

As far as intrigue, well, it's not everyone's cup of tea. More often than not I am a kill-things-and-take-their-stuff gamer, unless the GM is really good at setting a scene, rewards investigation with meaningful clues, and not a hopeless rail-baron (the other RBDM... :\ ). I think it's too easy to make intrigues either too simple (which is dull) or too complex (which is also dull) - hitting that "sweet spot" can be tough to do.

Finally, the conventional wisdom says that adventures and campaigns should build to a dramatic conclusion, such as the final confrontation with the BBEG - usually this involves a combat encounter as good vanquishes evil (or at least something gets killed and its stuff taken...mmmm....taking stuff...). Right now I'm running an encounter that stands that on its head a bit - we started off with a sharp combat encounter that's setting up a complex social encounter as the payoff for the opening. If GMs never experiment with the adventure format, it doesn't seem reasonable to bemoan the consistent outcome.

 

[MerricB]

One of the fascinating things I discovered when I played the Amber Diceless Roleplaying game was how important the PCs backstories and goals could become, and how much they would interact with each other as a result.

There is a DM-player adversarial relationship that was assumed from the early days of D&D (there's an aspect of it with the existence of the "caller"), where the DM creates all the challenges and the PCs deal with them, but rarely with each other.

One of the difficulties in having the PCs have their own goals and interacting personalities is that the DM needs to devote time to bringing along each story, rather than the group's. The interactions get more interesting when there are more players (I had one session of Amber with 13 players!), but progressively harder for the DM to handle.

Amber is all about the intrigue.

It is interesting to note that the original D&D adventures - the GDQ series - has a fair deal of mystery and intrigue. The giants are manipulated by the drow, and so the PCs discover something important at the end of G3. Unfortunately, it all disintegrates rather messily in the D3-Q1 connection. (Lolth had nothing to do with Eclavdra's splinter group!) The motivation of the PCs has become obscure by the time of D3.

Cheers!

 

[wedgeski]

What about giving each PC a few details about the motivation of the villian or people the villain is interacting with, and having them play out the scene. Then taking whatever resolution they came to and weaving it back into the plot.

Could this work?

The interactive cut-scene. It has worked for me in a past D&D campaign, but I doubt I would do it again. Finding out the motivations of the bad guys is usually one of the primary goals I set before any group I DM.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Well, it appears to me that one way to set the sights of players and their characters outside the boundaries of combat encounters is to make them interested in the world around them...provided that you have players who play along, or actively pursuit that kind of interest. As such, there is nothing better than getting their characters involved with NPCs who aren't combat targets at all, but great for interaction. Possibilities are plenty, like:

- somebody showing a romantic interest towards them
- somebody being grateful for something they did during their last adventure
- somebody trying to make them do something for him during their next adventure
- competition rising up in a non-violent way about reaching some goal.

Having interactions like that, and making them interesting for the players and characters of course needs a minimum amount of preparation and familiarity on the side of the DM where his NPCs, their personalities and motivations are concerned. Ideas about long-term plans and about reactions towards sudden changes in circumstances, brought on by the characters, can help a lot in fleshing that out.

Another point touched here was that characters don't get the story behind the encounters, which is kinda surprising. There's two simple methods of giving a player an idea what his character his fighting for, or against. One, build on his existing skills. If a character has ranks in a skill related to the problem, let him make a skill check. Scale the amount of information gleaned from that to the success, like the Bardic Knowledge table does, and feed him a few facts, rumors or stories he knows. Two, introduce parts of the ongoing story either through NPCs who have an interest in it, and want to see the characters successful (Tolkien did so admirably through Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond and a handful of others), or through a PC who joins the group in that adventure (Aragorn would be a prime example for that, returning to Tolkien). That way, characters get a glimpse into the story developing, and players get an idea what the game is about.

Of course, all this only works if you have players who want to play along and are interested in that kind of game. If you have a group that is only out to kill monsters and loot them, they'll probably be not too happy with that.

 

[S'mon]

D&D has always featured combat heavily, but I do think 3e suffers from the designers' obsession with combat mechanics above everything else. "Balance" is always defined in terms of combat, for instance. The combat rules are so detailed that combat takes up the vast bulk of a typical game session. I like combat but I wish 3e combat didn't take so long, 3e often feels like a miniatures wargame with a bit of roleplay to link the fights. The big problem with this is that in an RPG unlike a wargame, one side always has to win or the game ends, yet without the possibility of either side winning lengthy battles get real boring.

 

[rounser]

Currently, D&D adventures are written as a story. The audience of that story is the DM.
There's some background for the DM. A number of set scenes. The DM really is the one who knows everything that is going on. He gets to read all the text, and he gets to integrate characters into that story (like the PCs) in interesting ways.

But an adventure isn't meant to be a story for a DM. It's meant to be a way of telling a story to the players. Rather than just an adventure background section for the DM, perhaps there should be a Player Revelations section that describes how the players discover the information in the background section, what information they don't discover, and how this information might fit together to lead them toward their goal.

YES! Someone else understands!

Perhaps Dungeon magazine editors will consider strictly limiting or abolishing the DM Background section for instance; there are far too many adventures which still seem arbitrary and unjustified to the players even when they're completed, with no hint of what happened and why (excellent idea, your Player Revelations section, though in theory the entire adventure should sort of be that in most cases). DM Background of Mr X did Y to Lich Z 30 years ago and setup setup setup the otherwise arbitrary-seeming plot put all the pieces into place so it makes sense to the DM and not the players is all too common...

I suppose that in a way, DM background is sort of like exposition dialog in the movies - it's lazy storytelling - or worse, the cause of the equivalent of people walking out of a movie without understanding what it was about and why (I suppose there are only so many Mulholland Drives you can watch before you want your movies to make sense - same for D&D adventures). If the reasons for the adventure existing aren't apparent to the PC participants during the course of the adventure, then the design of the adventure needs to be rethought.

Easier said than done, though. DM Background is a huge crutch that makes adventure writing so much easier.

 

[diaglo]

If they're truely into metagaming, they know to ask for her story.

that is an implied element of the game.

you, the player, are there with a group of your friends or just one other friend. in order to interact with them you have to assume that it is best to stick together as a group or you end up "playing with yourself"

which anyone can do, but is obviously not meant for this game.

edit: if you look at the text i was referencing you will see it is barely a paragraph in the Basic set. yet, with the players and the referee's help it can be expanded to be much more.