D&D 5E "Labels" and D&D Gaming

[fearsomepirate]

Rules lawyering is as old as the rules themselves. probably older. It was made by wargamers, after all.

I mean, it's a game that appeals heavily to people who are happy to spend an evening arguing whether a Galaxy-class starship could defeat an Imperial Star Destroyer using semi-official canon and schematics.

 

[Oofta]

I mean, it's a game that appeals heavily to people who are happy to spend an evening arguing whether a Galaxy-class starship could defeat an Imperial Star Destroyer using semi-official canon and schematics.

Well, the answer to that is so obvious you'd have to be a tholian nerf herder to not agree that ... oh. Wait. That wasn't really a question. Never mind.

 

[the Jester]

Now, this concept is very interesting to me. In a vague, hypothetical sense this sounds cool, but I can’t picture how this would actually look at the table. Would you be willing to elaborate on this, particularly in terms of specific examples in actual play? What action steps should a DM who wants to try running a game this way take?

I can speak to this. This is the style of campaign that I run.

So for me, the way it works is this: I have a ton of players, too many to cram into one group. So different permutations of players form several different groups. Let's call them Teams Alpha, Beta, and Delta.

Alpha contains Joe, Aaron, Emmett, Big Aaron, Pam, Chris, Sue, and Jeff.
Beta contains Big Aaron, Jeff, Shawn, Joe, Laura, Aaron, Emmett, and Joey.
Delta contains Pam, Aaron, Emmett, Chris, Sue, and River.

In all cases, the groups feature occasional crossovers and transplants. For instance, Jeff's pc Haji has adventured in Alpha, then moved over to Beta for a while. When he did so, Jeff's existing Beta character moved into Team Alpha.

Now, the Beta group is looser than the others and includes at least three groups of pcs, all of whom include Big A and Jeff. Aaron and Emmett have a couple of pcs that are in one of those groups; Joe and Laura are in a different one, but those two parties are about to merge. So when Beta plays, the actual group we run depends on who is available.

In practice, this means that no group gets as much gaming in as I'd like (other than Beta, which has the easiest and most manageable schedule collectively and is most able to come up to my in-the-middle-of-nowhere house, whereas we otherwise mostly game at Pam's actually-in-town place). However, there's a lot to love about this style of play. First of all, you don't usually have to say, "Sorry, there's no room for you at the table" when someone new wants to join- it's more a matter of finding which group has room for another players. Second, you can have arcs in the campaign where the pcs are affecting each other (but watch out for screwy timeline issues!). And finally, you have things where groups can see how other groups have impacted the world.

For instance, the first pc to hit 20th level (and semi-retire) in my game is a cleric of Jeff's. This guy now has a temple out of town and he uses divine intervention to constantly improve it. He has a crowd of peasants outside his temple every day, because he uses his tremendous holy powers to help the poor, heal the sick, etc. Other adventurers drop in when they need something from him, usually have to wait a day or so until he has some spell slots, and often donate or sell diamonds to him to prepare for the day when they need him to raise them from the dead. (There's a significant diamond shortage in the area after he bought up all the ones he could find for a true rez some time back.) So he has improved the city's overall health and the dynamics of its population dramatically.

The main advice I have for a DM who wants to run this style of game is to develop a setting with lots going on. If you have multiple groups of pcs, they need lots of adventures to go through- and you shouldn't mess around with running multiple pcs through the same adventure, you end up with messy contradictions and duplicates of treasure, different outcomes, etc. Let each group do its own thing. DON'T try to set them against each other unless you have the full buy in of the whole group. Rivalries are fine- but don't force the groups to be enemies. Better still is if they can sometimes team up and trade members.

One tool I recently started using that is extremely helpful is a campaign calendar. Print it out, write which group is where when on it. Then you know that, for instance, Team Alpha can't interact with Beta for another game week, because Beta has already played that week out.

 

[Lanefan]

Umm, no.

1. Someone who was gaming at the age of 35 in 1995, had possibly been gaming for 10 years, quite easily. Now, they did cut off at 35 because their market research showed that gamers really stop buying after 35 (or, at least that was true at the time of the research). But, no, it wasn't "tweaked" to give the results they wanted. That would be blindingly stupid.

It was blindingly stupid, and that's just my point.

And whether or not those over 35 stop buying is utterly irrelevant when conducting research on how people play the game.

2. Even ignoring the actual market research, I can point you to reams and reams of anecdotal evidence of the time. Heck, poll after poll on En World, stretching back nearly two decades gives consistently the same result - most campaigns last 12-18 months. The overwhelming majority do.

May I point out something rather obvious that you've missed:

ENWorld's entire existence has been during the 3e-and-forward era. 3e was specifically designed to promote 12-18 month campaigns thus it's hardly surprising that most people ended up playing it that way whether they otherwise would have or not. 4e and 5e subsequently followed the same model.

3. At the time the market research was done, the average gamer was in their 20's. Again, by an overwhelming majority. Like about 4:1 to those in their 30's or older. And that ratio has stayed true throughout 3e and 4e. Dunno about now.

If you're getting that data from the research itself, I'll just facepalm now and get it over with.

Of course most gamers would show to be in their 20s because responses from anyone in their 40s or higher, along with those in their late 30s, were discarded! (there was a low-age cutoff as well but I forget what it was)

Those who picked up the game in college in the late 70s/early 80s - i.e. a very large part of what drove the 1e boom - didn't qualify to be heard; they'd have generally been 18-22 then and thus in their mid-30s or higher when the research was done. How many of those people were still playing by then is, of course, anyone's guess...but I suppose we'll never know other than to say some of us are still playing now.

Sorry, but that's just crap research designed to give a pre-ordained set of answers.

 

[Lanefan]

If the DM has tailored the party for a low-magic stealth group and will be at a loose end if a different party is brought it, then the DM screwed up on Session 0. Full stop.

The DM screwed up, yes, but long before session 0.

Where the DM screwed up is in trying to tailor the adventures at all. The adventure should be the same no matter what the players try to run through it; and if the first batch of PCs doesn't suit then maybe the survivors will recruit some help that does suit.

The DM should never be at a loose end if she just runs what she's gonna run.

Sure, design the world and loose campaign concepts ahead of time, but I'd actually recommend doing a lot of the early core adventure crafting between Session 0 and Session 1, once you know how to build the game around the principle cast and what their motivations are.

I'm not building around any principal cast because I can be 95% sure that some of that initial "principal cast" won't even be around after the first adventure!

For my current campaign I started 'em off in Keep on the Borderlands and ran it pretty much stock. They filled a graveyard with PCs.

That said, once the players had rolled up their characters two of them came up with a really cool idea* for how the initial party could meet/form in the first place, which I straight-up ran with.

* - one brought in a Bard, the other a Cavalier; their idea for forming the party was that these two would travel up-country toward the mountains, and at every village they'd stop and the Bard would sing songs about the great heriosms they were about to do (and some non-existent BS ones they'd already done!), and invite brave people to join them. They picked up about one character per village and by the time they got to the mountains they had a rather big party.

 

[Lanefan]

I can speak to this. This is the style of campaign that I run.

So for me, the way it works is this: I have a ton of players, too many to cram into one group. So different permutations of players form several different groups. Let's call them Teams Alpha, Beta, and Delta.

Alpha contains Joe, Aaron, Emmett, Big Aaron, Pam, Chris, Sue, and Jeff.
Beta contains Big Aaron, Jeff, Shawn, Joe, Laura, Aaron, Emmett, and Joey.
Delta contains Pam, Aaron, Emmett, Chris, Sue, and River.

In all cases, the groups feature occasional crossovers and transplants. For instance, Jeff's pc Haji has adventured in Alpha, then moved over to Beta for a while. When he did so, Jeff's existing Beta character moved into Team Alpha.

Yep.

Ideally in this case I'd want to run Alpha on one night of the week, Beta on another and Delta on another (and in days of old was even able to pull this off once in a while!). Best I've done lately - and even that not for some years now - is to have two groups going, one on Fridays, one on Sundays. (now it's just Sundays)

You hit one key element: player overlap between groups. In your example Emmett is in all three, meaning his PCs can interweave between groups now and then and provide the reason for the others to know (or at least know of) each other.

In practice, this means that no group gets as much gaming in as I'd like (other than Beta, which has the easiest and most manageable schedule collectively and is most able to come up to my in-the-middle-of-nowhere house, whereas we otherwise mostly game at Pam's actually-in-town place). However, there's a lot to love about this style of play. First of all, you don't usually have to say, "Sorry, there's no room for you at the table" when someone new wants to join- it's more a matter of finding which group has room for another players. Second, you can have arcs in the campaign where the pcs are affecting each other (but watch out for screwy timeline issues!).

Here I can chime in with a few direct answers to @Charlaquin 's questions.

First, at the table during any given session 95% of the time thing look feel and play exactly the same as they otherwise would. You're playing the party you're playing in whatever adventure they're in, etc.

However, the other 5% is where the fun starts. There's four types of sessions that can be unusual:

- sessions (usually downtime) where multiple parties are in the same place at the same time and can thus meet, interact, etc. If it's all or almost all the same players just with multiple PCs this is easy; if it's groups with very little player overlap then you're probably doing a lot by email that week.

- sessions (usually downtime) where multiple parties could be in the same place at the same time but because one or more groups hasn't been played up to that point yet you're not sure. These are messy. I can't count the times I've said to a group "Well, you make it back to town but I-as-DM have no idea what other characters are here right now, other than A, B and C who retired here full-time."

- sessions where for game-time reasons you-as-DM have to force one group to stop and jump to another group so you can catch them up in time. This is I think what @the Jester means by "screwy timeline issues"; you have to stay right on top of game time for all involved, and if a group starts lagging behind you've got to speed them up while if a group gets too far ahead you've got to put them on hold. Ditto for indivudal retired or inactive PCs, but these are usually much easier to update.

- sessions where something affects the entire group at once e.g. an attack on a shared home base when multiple parties are in from the field. Here you might end up running a combined-group session or two to deal with the one situation before they split out again.

Most of the time these days how it goes is we run one party through an adventure or two, then put that group on hold and jump to another group doing something different during that same stretch of in-game time. One result of this is that in-game time does end up passing MUCH more slowly than real time; my current campaign has been going for 11 years real but the leading group just got to 5 years game time since the campaign began.

And finally, you have things where groups can see how other groups have impacted the world.

Very much yes, even including having one group go back to the site of another group's previous adventure but for a different reason.

The main advice I have for a DM who wants to run this style of game is to develop a setting with lots going on. If you have multiple groups of pcs, they need lots of adventures to go through- and you shouldn't mess around with running multiple pcs through the same adventure, you end up with messy contradictions and duplicates of treasure, different outcomes, etc. Let each group do its own thing. DON'T try to set them against each other unless you have the full buy in of the whole group. Rivalries are fine- but don't force the groups to be enemies. Better still is if they can sometimes team up and trade members.

Almost completely agreed.

Running multiple groups through the same adventure isn't a problem provided anything after the first is framed as a "return to" and it's acknowledged that the treasure taken out by the first group through won't have magically reappeared for the second.

Another big factor IME is whether the groups can find a way to generate a common shared home base (at a halfway-central location!) where they can share and-or pool resources, swap out members, trade items, and so forth; and can also serve as a retired characters home. In different campaigns I've seen this germinate from a castle given as a royal reward, a pub built by a PC (and then greatly augmented by others) specifically as a group meeting point, and a keep given by a Deck card.

This is where player overlap can become huge.

One tool I recently started using that is extremely helpful is a campaign calendar. Print it out, write which group is where when on it. Then you know that, for instance, Team Alpha can't interact with Beta for another game week, because Beta has already played that week out.

I have a file in my computer for this, though I rarely print it out. But tracking who is where in game time is vitally important.

 

[Charlaquin]

Thanks, @Lanefan and @the Jester for your insights and experiences! Lots to consider.

 

[Marandahir]

That's one way to do it, but if the GM has an existing campaign world with a lot of built in conflicts and things, the GM should provide a primer for the players and say, "This is where you'll be adventuring and the kinds of things you will likely find to do. Create characters that fit there."

Absolutely – that's personally my favourite way to go about it, alongside a Session 0 where we figure out what sort of games they're interested in so that I can draw out the conflicts and game-play they prefer. But even with a primer, the players need to buy into the pre-existing world and story theme. You don't have a game if the players revolt, and trust me: the players WILL revolt if they're looking forward to high seas action and adventure and suddenly the mists roll in at the sea and they're in an oceanic domain of dread horror adventure.

The DM screwed up, yes, but long before session 0.

Where the DM screwed up is in trying to tailor the adventures at all. The adventure should be the same no matter what the players try to run through it; and if the first batch of PCs doesn't suit then maybe the survivors will recruit some help that does suit.

The DM should never be at a loose end if she just runs what she's gonna run.

I'm not building around any principal cast because I can be 95% sure that some of that initial "principal cast" won't even be around after the first adventure!

For my current campaign I started 'em off in Keep on the Borderlands and ran it pretty much stock. They filled a graveyard with PCs.

That said, once the players had rolled up their characters two of them came up with a really cool idea* for how the initial party could meet/form in the first place, which I straight-up ran with.

* - one brought in a Bard, the other a Cavalier; their idea for forming the party was that these two would travel up-country toward the mountains, and at every village they'd stop and the Bard would sing songs about the great heriosms they were about to do (and some non-existent BS ones they'd already done!), and invite brave people to join them. They picked up about one character per village and by the time they got to the mountains they had a rather big party.

Thanks for the insightful response.

I think we may be talking a bit past each other. You sound like you're referring to a DM with a group of players that return time and time again with different party members to challenge the same dungeon. That's a classic and fun way to play (and I probably wouldn't run Tomb of Horrors, for example, in any other way – you kind of NEED the dead bodies to build a meat wall to get past some of the traps!)

I was speaking, rather, to a long-running, narrative-focused campaign, especially one the DM is selling to a party of players who may not be wedded to playing with that DM if they don't like the game. In order to secure ANY group of players, one needs to know WHAT those players are looking for. It may be as simple as "I want to play D&D, and I need a DM to play it, so I'm stuck with you." But there's a certain point when some players will NOT suffer a DM any longer if she keeps pulling the wool over their eyes.

Sounds like your group is down for whatever you throw at them though, so that's great!

 

[Neonchameleon]

The DM screwed up, yes, but long before session 0.

Where the DM screwed up is in trying to tailor the adventures at all. The adventure should be the same no matter what the players try to run through it; and if the first batch of PCs doesn't suit then maybe the survivors will recruit some help that does suit.

Well yes. If you think a meatgrinder is the only way things should be run the DM screwed up by deciding to run something else.

But there are times and groups where I want to run Blades in the Dark for a heist game complete with derring do and flashbacks to explain what's really going on. There are other times I want to run a comedy game with piling up of consequences but no one actually dying (I use Firefly for this). There are other times I want to run Monsterhearts - a game about teenage monsters, sex, violence, and tons of angst. If I'm running that I want to make sure in advance that my players are all on board.

The DM should never be at a loose end if she just runs what she's gonna run.

This applies if and only if there is only one type of game the DM wants to run and they can be trusted to always run the same type of game. Meanwhile even within the scope of D&D I can think of at least four types of game I run from sandboxing and dungeoncrawling while letting the PCs live or die depending on their choices to epic adventure paths with the end goal of saving the world and that are largely driven by the bad guys.

If the DM only runs in one style and works to build up an audience they may never be at a loose end. But if I were to switch up what I do and not match what I did to the players I'd be producing a game that might well not work with some of them and it would give them bad experiences. Meanwhile if I play to their strengths we all have much more fun. And I get far more out of running for them and they get more from playing in my game.

This can occasionally lead to clashes; two of my favourite players to run for ever (one of whom has alas moved across the country) were in the same group but had completely different playstyles and things they were looking for in a game. One likes a tight fairly heavy and defined game, and the other is just this side of freeform (and they both run in their styles; both are experienced GMs). And playing with either of them in their style is amazing - but playing with both always made me feel I could do better. Which set a challenge for me.

For my current campaign I started 'em off in Keep on the Borderlands and ran it pretty much stock. They filled a graveyard with PCs.

That's a good way to filter your players. Some of my favourite players (including the freeform one above) would probably have dropped out after the second PC death. Not that he minds the occasional dramatic PC death - but a graveyard full is not what he wants.

So the DM screwed up in session 0. D&D is broader than just one thing. You don't need much of a session zero because you have a simple pitch. But yours is not the only way to do things. And frankly if I ran the way you did I'd have given up and moved to other hobbies after about three years. Which isn't to say you're doing it wrong - just that sticking to one way is not for me.

 

[Lanefan]

Well yes. If you think a meatgrinder is the only way things should be run the DM screwed up by deciding to run something else.

Doesn't even have to be a meatgrinder, but it does presuppose a degree of sandbox-like mentality where the DM has various adventures ready to go depending on what hooks the party bite; with those adventures being predetermined well before char-gen.

But there are times and groups where I want to run Blades in the Dark for a heist game complete with derring do and flashbacks to explain what's really going on. There are other times I want to run a comedy game with piling up of consequences but no one actually dying (I use Firefly for this). There are other times I want to run Monsterhearts - a game about teenage monsters, sex, violence, and tons of angst. If I'm running that I want to make sure in advance that my players are all on board.

Unlike you who seems cool with learning lots of systems, I'm the sort for whom learning an RPG system is work I feel I should only ever have to do once, after which I'll just tweak that system to give me what I want if required.

This applies if and only if there is only one type of game the DM wants to run and they can be trusted to always run the same type of game. Meanwhile even within the scope of D&D I can think of at least four types of game I run from sandboxing and dungeoncrawling while letting the PCs live or die depending on their choices to epic adventure paths with the end goal of saving the world and that are largely driven by the bad guys.

One can do all of these and more within the same campaign.

That's a good way to filter your players. Some of my favourite players (including the freeform one above) would probably have dropped out after the second PC death. Not that he minds the occasional dramatic PC death - but a graveyard full is not what he wants.

The player-filtering occurs much earlier in my case, at point of deciding who I'm going to invite in.

As it turned out, the four players who went through KotB had an absolute blast with it - and got really good at rolling up characters, too!

So the DM screwed up in session 0. D&D is broader than just one thing. You don't need much of a session zero because you have a simple pitch. But yours is not the only way to do things. And frankly if I ran the way you did I'd have given up and moved to other hobbies after about three years. Which isn't to say you're doing it wrong - just that sticking to one way is not for me.

Fair enough.