Gabe at Penny Arcade: Does videogaming help?

[Witty Comeback]

People have been marveling at the success of Gabe at Penny Arcade who, after years of dismissing PnP RPGs and exclusively playing videogames, took a shot a DMing and appears to be brilliant at it.

I recently wondered if the exposure to videogames wasn't in fact a strength rather than a weakness. In videogames, there is a certain economy of actions or varied resources, and the trick to winning a game is to understand the interaction between those resources and build a strategy. Various games mimic each other, but there is a vast array of different games with different resolution systems, different victory conditions, etc.

Gabe has posted maybe a handful of different experiences, and in each one he has altered 4E to include some new resource. There is a hunt through the underdark for spider parts, etc. Someone might be kind enough to post links.

Anyway, every innovative thing that he has done was probably shaped in one way or another by a video game for him. Hasn't this given him a deeper bag of tricks to vary a game session to be something more than combat-skill challenge-rest-repeat?

 

[wedgeski]

I wouldn't fixate on the "video" part of game. These guys are simply *gamers*, right to the marrow. They've built a career around it. They thrive on social and shared experiences. They're intelligent and very, very funny. These are all grade-A ingredients for good DM'ing.

 

[Shemeska]

He seems pretty sharp, and he's drawing upon a source of inspiration when he's DM'ing. The source of your inspiration as a DM doesn't matter one bit, be it Tolkein from the local library or Disgaea on the PS3. There's absolutely nothing wrong with taking your inspiration or even style, pacing, etc from videogames or any other source, be it conventional to the PnP experience, or unconventional.

If it works it works, and if it works spectacularly well, well that's all the better.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I wouldn't be so quick to equate video games with novels for this kind of inspiration, there is something there, at least in terms of mechanics.

Video games have an urgency and artificiality to their structure that makes them ripe for mining mechanics in a way that a novel does not.

Example, I can think of a dozen "falling" sequences in video games that might have inspired the mechanics of his freefall sequence as well as the narrative. Novels can inspire the raw idea, the narrative arc, and so on; but they have less specific hooks that you can bring to mechanics.

All of that said, it helps tremendously that everyone at his table is also a video game enthusiast. On the whole, video gamers have fewer objections to obvious gamist constructs and "minigames" at the table. You play a few genre-crossing video games that jump back-and-forth between 3rd person action, shooter combat, accessorizing your outfit/ship, and farming.... and you don't mind so much that the D&D combat rules might take a hard left one night into something very different than you're used to. Heck, having the exact same combat engine every week (or for 20 years... /boggle) would be rather odd.

 

[awesomeocalypse]

I think video games can definitely provide useful inspiration--video games are probably closer to D&D in terms of fictional tropes and genre conventions than any other media.

Think about it. People always compare D&D to fantasy novels, but for the most part, while they do share superficial similarities like elves and wizards, when you look closer they aren't actually that close, structurally speaking--there are virtually no fantasy novels with anywhere near as much combat as any edition of D&D, for instance. They often prominently include elements which are next to nonexistant in most D&D campaigns, like love stories. Similarly, there are almost no fantasy novels or movies in which the heroes acquire power at the constant and extraordinary rate that they do in D&D. Magic items mean something vastly diferent to characters in novels and movies than they do to D&D characters. Neither do monsters--heroes may face hordes of monsters, but if so they will always be one or two kinds (e.g. orcs and uruk-hai, or trollocs), with maybe one or two dragons, nazgul or otherwise elite monsters, who will always be important to the lore. The menagerie of bizarre and powerful monsters that heroes face in D&D simply doesn't occur in fantasy fiction.

So as a DM, if I'm cribbing from my favorite fantasy fiction (which I often do), I will steal setting elements and characters, general plot hooks, etc. But I will never simply try to model my D&D game as if it were structurally a fantasy novel, because the "kill tons of monsters, take their stuff, grow stronger at a ludicrous rate" paradigm that prevails in D&D simply doesn't work for modelling, say, the Lord of the Rings or the Wheel of Time.

Most video games, on the other hand, are in many ways exactly like D&D. Even non-fantasy, non-RPGs will generally feature either a lone badass, or a small group of badasses, venturing into hostile locations loaded up with diverse, bizarre enemies, whose indiscriminate murder is incentivized by goodies like items, xp or plot advancement. The plots that show up in video games, and the sort of monsters and encounters that video game protagonists face, therefore tend to mesh very well with the default D&D playstyle. Heroes in books rarely go through dungeons that consist of them fighting different kinds of enemies in each room, solving several puzzles and foiling a couple traps, finding lots of items along the way, before facing an end boss. But Video Game Protagonists, and D&D adventurers, do that kind of thing all the time, which makes cribbing ideas easy.

Just look at Gabe's 3d lazer mirror puzzle. You'd never see something like that described in depth as a major challenge to the heroes in a fantasy novel, because reading about someone meticulously positioning mirrors is boring. But anyone who has ever played a Zelda game would recognize that kind of puzzle instantly, because its a staple of the series and 100% guaranteed to appear in the first dungeon you face after getting the mirror shield. And in those games it works, for the same reason it works in D&D--because while reading about solving mirror puzzles is abstract and boring, actually solving the puzzles can be fun.

 

[Scott_Rouse]

Gabe definitely draws influence from things like video games but his success as a DM is more a function of his overall creative talent.

 

[I'm A Banana]

More people will come to D&D in the future from videogames than will come from fantasy novels.

The Legend of Zelda is the new LotR, kids.

I don't think it's a weakness at all. I don't necessarily think it's a specific strength, though. Generally, the more games you're exposed to (and the better you grok concepts that underlie all creativity like conflict and dissonance and harmony), the better you'll be at any of them.

In this way, I do think it's better than most fantasy novels, because the impulse isn't to tell a story as much as it is to play a game (and many videogames show quite nicely how the two can reinforce each other).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think a deep knowledge of anything can enhance being a DM. If he didn't have a huge history with videogames -- which certainly are full of things that he could draw on -- a huge history as a PhD in Greek mythology could have also served him well or a lifelong passion for studying insects. (I was watching Life on Discovery, and holy crap, I now understand why Giant Bombadier Beetles were in early versions of the Monster Manual. Those things are SCARY.)

Having something to be inspired by -- especially if you have more sources of it than your players do -- is more important than what said inspiration is, IMO.

 

[Betote]

The Legend of Zelda is the new LotR, kids.

"Is"? Zelda was what drew me into roleplaying games, and it's been almost 20 years since then

 

[Betote]

The feeling I get the most when I read about Gabe's games is envy, mixed with a non-trivial amount of nostalgia. He's discovering the game, exploring what he can do with it, and that's something really, really cool that I miss doing.

These days, when I tinker with my homebrews or flip through the pages of some old-school game or retroclone, that's what I'm looking for: something new, something unknown and exciting, something to share with my friends. And I thank Gabe for letting me taking part of his own discovery voyage