Something that Needs More Consideration - Pacing

[Hussar]

Say what now?

I will have a more cogent reply to your post - and others, since my last post in the thread - later, but I saw this and had to comment on it.

sorry about that. My bad. I blame the new page. Yeah, that's it, new page I tells ya.

Huh? Who is on watch and when is strictly a player decision. If and when an encounter occurs is largely a DM thing ( which can be impacted by previous player activity).

This also removes an element of PC to PC roleplay. We have fun deciding in character who gets stuck with the middle watch shift.

And that's where the random roll comes in. Most modules have something like a random chance (1 in whatever) every hour. Which watch the random encounter occurs in is completely random. So, why bother worrying about the order of watch? Roll a random die for whose watch it is, and you're good to go.

And, as far as removing PC to PC roleplay, sure, the first time. Maybe the second time. But, after three or four sessions, there's no more role play here. It's, "We set watch" and you're done. The order doesn't typically change, why would it? Casters sleep first or last, and if you have an elf in the party, he keeps watch the rest of the time.

If something is not worth playing out then the table full of players shouldn't be engaged with it. Who decides what is interesting enough to explore through play if not the people at the table?

And, in a group of six, what do you do when it's two or three who want to engage and the rest of the group doesn't?

I guess I'm pretty much the anti-Hussar on this (yet again). It's true I don't like players to plan endlessly and not do anything. But as long as they're interacting with the environment, I'm happy. I just GM'd a 4 hour text-chat City State of the Invincible Overlord session that basically involved shopping and talking to NPCs, and I had a great time. The CSIO strongly supports this style of heavy-immersion play because everything is detailed, just walking the streets is an adventure.

See, to me, while I totally get that some people love this stuff, I do not enjoy it. No, wandering around fictional world is not an adventure for me. Someone's imagined space is not as interesting to me as it is to that person. I've played with far too many DM's who seem to think that setting can replace plot. "Oooh, look, they've got a wonderful market" Who cares?

If I wanted to wander around looking at stuff, I'd stick to computer games which have ten times more detail than any TTRPG can ever have.

The idea that heavy immersion=setting wank just blows my mind. Heavy immersion does not require much in the way of setting at all. It does, OTOH, require a deep, emotionally engaging story that is intricately tied to the characters. Whether that story develops from the players or the GM, doesn't matter. You can do it from either direction.

However, pissing around with talking to random NPC #2417 is not "deeply immersive". It's wasting time.

For me anyway. For others, hey, more power to you if it floats your boat. I want faster pace than that. I think it makes for better games.

 

[ExploderWizard]

And, in a group of six, what do you do when it's two or three who want to engage and the rest of the group doesn't?

The group will come to a consensus on it's own. Where to go, what to do, and how much time to spend talking to an NPC are player decisions. Most mature groups allow for some compromise between the go getem types and the the more laid back members of the party. If they want to spend more time arguing about this stuff than actually doing anything then that is fine too. The DM shouldn't have to lead players by the nose .

In tightly focused timeslot game such as a one shot, then a different approach is needed.

 

[Hussar]

The group will come to a consensus on it's own. Where to go, what to do, and how much time to spend talking to an NPC are player decisions. Most mature groups allow for some compromise between the go getem types and the the more laid back members of the party. If they want to spend more time arguing about this stuff than actually doing anything then that is fine too. The DM shouldn't have to lead players by the nose .

In tightly focused timeslot game such as a one shot, then a different approach is needed.

See, IME, leaving it up to the players means that one or two more dominant players will run roughshod over everyone else. Not intentionally I don't think. It's not like they're being deliberately jerks and stealing spotlight. Nothing like that.

It's just that some people like to talk. So, they start into talking. And talking. And talking. Delving into every little nook and cranny. They're having a blast. Meanwhile, the other half of the group is playing with their Iphones or whatnot.

I think it's absolutely incumbent upon the GM to keep an eye on pacing. To make sure that things move along, and, maybe move along just a hair faster than the players want. Don't beat every scene to death, stringing it out as far as it can possibly go. Cut it short. The shopkeeper gets another customer, excuses himself and doesn't come back. That sort of thing.

You asked earlier:

Why stop there? Who needs to carry weapons? Just have whatever anyone needs to make an attack appear as needed and vanish afterwards.

Why not? Does it REALLY matter if I have "Sword, Normal" written on my character sheet? I trust my players that they will not abuse things and they trust me not to screw them over for it. If you really wanted ten thousand feet of rope, meh, fine. Take it. It's your game, just as much as mine. If this will make you happy, let's run with it.

It's very Zen to let go of all these niggling details. And very liberating. Maybe it's because I've been playing a lot of rules light systems lately. In Sufficiently Advanced, for example, any equipment that is of equal to or less than your inherent capabilities, your character can be assumed to have. So, if I have a very high attack score (for example) and I declare that I draw my Zooper Nootron Blaster and blow up something, not a problem. I do it.

Now, again, I can honestly see why some people don't want to play like that. I get it. For some people, the level of detail is important. It's not to me. Whether you have five days of food or six, I don't care. The only time it's going to matter, there will be an in game event where you lose all your food anyway and now you have to deal with that situation.

Again, it gets back to pacing. My group will never, ever run out of food accidentally. It just won't happen in my games. I don't track rations, nor do I force the players to. If they write "food, for the purposes of eating" on their character sheet, that's good enough for me. And, honestly, they probably don't even have to do that. I presume, just like I don't have to ask the players when their character's are going to the little fighters room, that their characters have enough survival instincts to know that carrying food and water when traveling cross country is a good idea.

However, if an event occurs - forest fire during the night and the PC's are forced to jump into the river without their equipment to get away (since they would drown if they actually carried their equipment) - now I can go into the whole survival thing. Is it DM forced? 100%. Totally. I'm the GM, and I'm a good enough GM to engineer a situation in a realistic, logical fashion without straight up rail roading the players. The fire destroyed your food. You're lost in the desert, your water runs out. What do you do? (ok, easy one, the cleric casts create water, but you get the point)

The idea that everything must occur organically, with the DM only reacting is not how I like to run a game. I am far more pro-active as a GM. There's pro's and cons to both approaches.

 

[GnomeWorks]

Alright, happy-fun response time.

...it is possible for most of the table to be engaged in something that is not worth playing out.

To me, this sounds like a contradiction. "It's not worth the time, but people at the table are engaged and interested."

If you're engaged or interested in something, it is worth the time. Most folk, I think, don't spend time on things they don't care for, at least not with their leisure time.

You are assuming that the reason that the players spend time on things like this is because they enjoy it.

Yep, and it sounds like a pretty sound assumption to me.

My own experience is that they spend time on it because they learned to play from the Moldvay Basic Set or 1st ed AD&D rulebooks, or among players who were familiar with those rulebooks, and that certain ways of playing the game are conventional or received wisdom.

I call shenanigans. I'm 23. Most of my gaming experience is with 3e.

Just because you learn to do it one way doesn't mean you stick with it. You figure out eventually - either from someone else or own your own - that you don't like it, and find a way around it, either intentionally or accidentally.

Regardless, I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that the only reason people enjoy the nitty-gritty details of dungeon searching and such is because they don't know a better way. Some do like it.

I've never finished a session and heard the players talking about the session higlight being the twenty minutes it took to resolve the looting of the bodies and searching of the room after the combat finished. Nevertheless they get sucked into playing out this stuff because they just see it as expected.

Since most folk around here like to liken their preferred gaming experiences with movies, let's run with that analogy for a second. In an action flick, is every moment of the movie filled with explosions and chase-scenes and gunfights and what-not? No. There are lulls, there are calm moments.

This is because it gives the audience a chance to sit back for a moment, to recalibrate their vision so that they are prepared for the next five-minute-long nonstop-action sequence.

To approach your point from another angle, it is my belief that some players - myself among them - see this sort of thing as part of the experience, as part of trying to get into the character's head. Much like I wrote in a post some time ago about what I would do if I were an adventurer, this is in the same vein: if I were going into dungeons killing things, you're darn right I'd check their corpses for usable stuff. You're darn right I'd be making a map, ensuring that my fellow crazies and I had a reasonable marching order, that we did everything just right so that maybe, just maybe, we might not die horrible, horrible deaths.

Like I said in my first post, I'm working on ways to just eliminate this stuff from my game. It's gradually working - and every half-hour saved in a 4-to-5 hour session is a reall payoff.

Real payoff towards what, exactly?

As for the wandering monster point, I'd rather do the watch order something like this: if an encounter is a result of a skill challenge, then the PC on watch is determined at part of the logic of resolving the skill check that led to the encounter; otherwise, just roll a die to see which PC is on watch, and perhaps allow one player to spend an action point, or a relevant utility power, to have their PC be the one who is on watch.

This solution irks me, primarily because it feels like retconjuration. "You didn't have a watch order set, but now that there is a reason to have one, you do, and this is who is watching." Sorry, but if you don't have a watch order set, then you don't have a watch order set.

You asked, "move on to what?" Well, the simplest answer would be, something that isn't this. Something different.

I don't like that answer. Give me something concrete, please. You owe me that much, at least, for mangling my name.

I've been in groups where a shopping trip to get supplies for a journey could take over an hour of session time because the players were so paranoid that they felt they had to account for every single piton in the list.

It's not paranoia!

In some groups, alright, fine, it might be. But I don't accept that as a blanket rationale for this behavior.

From my perspective, again I bring up the post I made awhile ago. If I were an adventurer, you're darn right I would care about every piece of equipment I own, that my fellow crazy-people own, how they're distributed, possibly (and probably, depending on the item) even where they're being carried.

These are things that sensible human beings doing ridiculous things would worry about. It therefore makes complete and utter sense, to me, that adventurers would - and should - similarly care.

Now, when I GM, when the shopping trip comes up, I say, ok, you guys spend x gold. Anything within reason under that X limit? You have it. It weighs 100 pounds. Move on.

Shopping goes from sixty minutes to sixty seconds. Any time a player says, "Hey, do we have ...?" I interrupt him with a "Yes" before he even finishes."

Yeah, I'm not really a fan of that solution. Shopping is an important part of the experience. It should matter, because once you're out in the wild, all you have is what you have, end of story. I feel it important to track that sort of thing, because it is terribly relevant to the adventuring lifestyle.

Shopping is not important. Whether you have fifteen or sixteen pitons is not important is a total waste of time. I simply do not care any more. I've played those games before and I no longer care for them.

It is unimportant to you, because you have decided it is. It is not a total waste of time for those of us who care about it.

If that's not the way you want to play, fine! I'm not trying to tout OTWism, here. But trying to say that my preferred method is a waste of time or due to paranoia or whatever is... frustrating.

 

[pemerton]

So you are saying that exploration based play isn't really enjoyable and that the only reason someone would bother with it is because they were used to it? I have been enjoying the exploration of the game environment for 30 years just because I don't know any better?

I was talking about my experiences. If you enjoy exploration based play, great! But in my experience, for most players it's just a legacy of the old rulebooks.

In my opinion these techniques bring to much artificial gamism into the fictional gamespace. The things you seem to enjoy cutting out of your games are the important details that make the the game world feel like another place as opposed to just a stage for particular scenes.

<snip>

Why stop there? Who needs to carry weapons? Just have whatever anyone needs to make an attack appear as needed and vanish afterwards.

A lot of basic needs can drive adventure hooks but only if they are important in the campaign. Who needs to follow a clue that may lead to an oasis if the party can wander in the desert forever and never need water?

Running low on ammunition while still being harried by enemies inspires desperate plans to aquire some or find creative ways to deal with foes.

If the PC's are all Rambo with endless M-60 belts the world feels cheap and fake.

If I wanted to run a search for an oasis in a desert, the number of waterskins written on the character sheets would be a relatively minor consideration - it would affect the colour of the Nature and Endurance checks, but not alter the underlying DCs.

As for the relationship between "fakeness" and not bothering with tracking ammunition, that is simply at odds with my experience. What makes my gameworld a rich and "genuine" one, to the extent that it is, isn't the need for the players to track their ammunition. It's the history, the ruins, the lost temples, the secret cabals. I want my players to ponder on the aesthetic or religous or political significance of the faded tapestries they discover, not to spend all their time poking behind them for secret doors and caches of loot.

Who is on watch and when is strictly a player decision. If and when an encounter occurs is largely a DM thing

As Hussar said, if encounters are random then there's no functional difference between randomising the time and randomising the PC, except that the latter cuts out the need for the players to faff around setting a watch list.

This also removes an element of PC to PC roleplay. We have fun deciding in character who gets stuck with the middle watch shift.

For me, this highlights the ultimate issue (and this might be the issue for Hussar also) - it's a mostly zero-sum game. In a four hour session there is time for at most four hours of PC to PC roleplay, and I would rather that roleplay be about interesting things - both inherently interesting, and tending to propel the game forward - than about the watch order. Every minute spent searching for secret doors, or describing in detail the steps taken to look for the secret heel in the dead gnoll chieftain's boot, or spent drawing up a watch list, is a minute that is not available for (to give an example of actual and interesting PC to PC roleplay from my game) the drow sorcerer to argue with the tiefling paladin of the Raven Queen about the merits of carving patches of skin off the dead demon, as one of the steps to become a Demonskin Adept at 11th level. It's this latter sort of thing that I think is more interesting in a game, and I've got no reason to think my players have very different opinions.

 

[Doug McCrae]

A wise woman once said that D&D looks like 20 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours. That sentiment expresses how I sometimes feel about rpgs, and, indeed fiddly little tasks in other games, such as managing one's bank in World of Warcraft.

Encumbrance; the D&D wealth system (keeping track of every copper piece); keeping track of rations, torches, iron spikes, ammunition, spell components; calculating treasure totals and dividing them up; calculating xp totals.

All of this seems pointless* to me. I agree with Pemerton that PC dialogue, particularly dialogue that reveals character, is much more interesting.

I was in a 3e game where the GM listed each art object and so forth in each treasure hoard individually. I took the job of being party accountant and tbh it seemed like needless busy work. If the GM had just given us a total for each hoard or, even better, for each adventure, it would've been better. I suggested this, but he said it wouldn't feel as 'real', taking a view similar to GnomeWorks.

*Running out of rations, etc, is exciting ofc, but one could write a less time consuming mechanic for this than keeping track individually.

 

[GnomeWorks]

I suggested this, but he said he wouldn't feel as 'real', taking a view similar to GnomeWorks.

I'll be honest, I don't think D&D - in any incarnation - does what I'm looking for very well.

The whole "describe each art item in a treasure hoard" thing... that works well when you're dealing with adventurers for whom 100g is utterly ridiculous, and a typical hoard might have one or two such items.

Not so much when 10000g worth of stuff is getting tossed around. It does get difficult - and annoying - to track.

 

[pemerton]

I call shenanigans. I'm 23. Most of my gaming experience is with 3e.

Well, you can call shenanigans all you like. It doesn't change my experiences. They are what they are.

To me, this sounds like a contradiction. "It's not worth the time, but people at the table are engaged and interested."

If you're engaged or interested in something, it is worth the time. Most folk, I think, don't spend time on things they don't care for, at least not with their leisure time.

I don't agree with this. In my experience, many RPGers are prepared to put up with quite a bit of nonsense and tedium as part of their gaming, if they accept that it is an ineliminable part of the game.

And this isn't true only of RPGs. It can be true of boardgames and wargames also, at least in my experience. You put up with the annoying stuff because you don't know a way of playing the game without it. Thankfully (for me at least) there are more recent gaming publications that set out alternative ways of playing, of the sort that I described and that Hussar has also been describing.

Now to the best of my knowledge we've never overlapped in our gaming circles - you being 23 in Wisconsin, and me being 38 in Melbourne, Australia - and so your experience may be different from mine. Great - that means legacy-style D&D play will excite rather than infuriate you!

Just because you learn to do it one way doesn't mean you stick with it. You figure out eventually - either from someone else or own your own - that you don't like it, and find a way around it, either intentionally or accidentally.

I'm not a very good game designer. In my case, I figured it out by reading rulesets and commentaries written by people who are better designers than me.

I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that the only reason people enjoy the nitty-gritty details of dungeon searching and such is because they don't know a better way. Some do like it.

I never denied that some like it. Presumably Gygax and Moldvay liked it, or they wouldn't have written their rulebooks that way. But in my experience there are many players who don't particularly like it (nor necessarily hate it) - they just do it because that's their understanding of how to play, but when shown a different way of playing which can increase the payoff-per-session-hour they are quite happy to embrace that.

This solution irks me, primarily because it feels like retconjuration. "You didn't have a watch order set, but now that there is a reason to have one, you do, and this is who is watching." Sorry, but if you don't have a watch order set, then you don't have a watch order set.

I think you may mean retconning rather than retconjuration, given that there is no one in the gameworld who has the power to undertake the retcon. But anyway, retconning is always part of RPG play. What is your PC's mother's older sister's name? Your PC has always known the answer to that question (assuming no dark secrets in the family), but the players at the table won't know until it becomes relevant to play.

Likewise for who's carrying items that are jointly owned by the party. Mine can't be the only group where this is often indeterminate until a need to specify it comes into play!

And as to the suggestion that if no watch order is set by the players, then none is set in the game - why not? My players never talk about their PCs urinating, but it's never occurred to me to suggest that, like Tycho Brahe, they're dying of burst bladders. Similarly, if they say "We set up camp" I'm happy to assume that they're setting up a watch also, and to make ex post facto calls if it becomes relevant.

Since most folk around here like to liken their preferred gaming experiences with movies, let's run with that analogy for a second. In an action flick, is every moment of the movie filled with explosions and chase-scenes and gunfights and what-not? No. There are lulls, there are calm moments.

One of my favourite action movies - heck, it's one of my favourit movies full stop - is John Woo's "Hardboiled". And it has what is, in my view, a very powerful reflective scene when the two main protagonists are locked in a room together and talking about their lives and their futures. The same film also has some nice vignettes of Chow Yun Fat playing his saxaphone in the club as he reflects (one gathers) on the pointlessness of his partner's death at the hands of the criminals.

I don't remotely object to these sorts of moments, either in a game or in a film. But they have nothing to do with searching the bodies for concealed copper pieces.

I want PC-to-PC roleplay. I'm happy to have PC-to-NPC roleplay. But I want it to be thematically rich and engaging. For me, searching for secret doors doesn't usuallly fit that description.

To approach your point from another angle, it is my belief that some players - myself among them - see this sort of thing as part of the experience, as part of trying to get into the character's head. Much like I wrote in a post some time ago about what I would do if I were an adventurer, this is in the same vein: if I were going into dungeons killing things, you're darn right I'd check their corpses for usable stuff. You're darn right I'd be making a map, ensuring that my fellow crazies and I had a reasonable marching order, that we did everything just right so that maybe, just maybe, we might not die horrible, horrible deaths.

<snip>

If I were an adventurer, you're darn right I would care about every piece of equipment I own, that my fellow crazy-people own, how they're distributed, possibly (and probably, depending on the item) even where they're being carried.

Fine. But I'm not particularly interested in GMing or playing a game of adventurer survival (and even if I was, a "crazy adventurer who keeps all his equipment well-stashed in his backpack" attribute might do the job). I'm interested in a game that explores what it means to be a hero in the D&D world with an epic destiny ahead of you. I won't pretend that that's a very sophisticated aesthetic or thematic goal. But searching bodies isn't a big part of it.

And to the extent that I enjoy seeing my players play their PCs, I want to see them engage with their histories, their religions, their political and moral choices. Do they fight to free the slaves, or pay the slave traders to buy them back? (They chose to pay.) Do they take the hobgoblins prisoner, or massacre them in revenge? (The wizard massacred them while the other PCs were out of sight behind a ridge - the other PCs were a bit shocked, but opted to let it pass, given that the wizard's city had been destroyed by goblins and his own mother murdered by them.) Does the would-be archmage try to rescue his companion from the enemy cult, or allow her to be sacrificed as part of a play to turn the energies of the cult to his own purposes? (He allowed her to be sacrificed, and turned the cult into a useful ally in his climb to greater power.) Is the paladin prepared to sacrifice his own future to replace a god he loves in the eternal and soul-destroying fight to keep an ancient evil it bay? (By tricking a fallen Lord of Karma the paladin managed to invest a simulacrum of himself with a replica of his own soul stuff, thus having the simulacrum take the place of the freed god in the eternal battle.)

This is what I want in my game, and frankly tracking ammunition is just not a big part of it.

Real payoff towards what, exactly?

For my answer, see the previous paragraph above.

 

[S'mon]

The idea that heavy immersion=setting wank just blows my mind. Heavy immersion does not require much in the way of setting at all. It does, OTOH, require a deep, emotionally engaging story that is intricately tied to the characters. Whether that story develops from the players or the GM, doesn't matter. You can do it from either direction.

Yeah, to me a GM-story-driven game smacks of railroading. Player-driven story is great, because I as GM remain engaged, not knowing what will happen next. I like 'bangs' (X happens, what do you do?) But I loathe pre-written stories in an RPG. The most linearity I can take is single-session, like a 3-encounter dungeon delve, and even that is pushing it.

The game yesterday, all the NPC interaction was potentially important, one PC met a halfling baker/inventor and got a lead on an adventure (rescuing missing halfling youths from the goblins in the Despot Ruins), another made friends with a fellow paladin/escapee and got a slave collar off her neck, without getting them killed or otherwise into more trouble. They could have gone different ways, done different things, but everything they did was interesting (or else I skimmed over it), and their decisions to do or not do certain things were their own, and had meaningful consequences.

 

[ExploderWizard]

And as to the suggestion that if no watch order is set by the players, then none is set in the game - why not? My players never talk about their PCs urinating, but it's never occurred to me to suggest that, like Tycho Brahe, they're dying of burst bladders. Similarly, if they say "We set up camp" I'm happy to assume that they're setting up a watch also, and to make ex post facto calls if it becomes relevant.

You might be under the impression that a DM who wants players to be in control of these seemingly fiddly operations expects a detailed account of each instance and wants to spend an inordinate amount of game time describing them. This isn't the case. Most groups that have been together for a while will develop a standard UNODIR operation for things like watches, camp setup, opening a typical door, etc.

UNODIR= Unless Otherwise Directed.

This means that when the PC's are ready to make camp, all they have to do is say, "we make camp/post watches as usual." The details of what that involves have been worked out earlier. So I know who will be doing what and when without spending any real time on it unless the players want to make changes to the standard procedure in a given instance.