Something that Needs More Consideration - Pacing

[Imaginary Number]

Wasting an hour on something totally trivial is not worth preserving five minutes of immersion.

I completely agree with this as well. As far as I'm concerned, what you've described is a big DM fail. If the DM wants to run the players through a skill challenge, the DM needs to give the players information sufficient to determine not only that they're in a skill challenge but also what the nature of the challenge is. I can't imagine that staring blankly at the players for an entire hour as they try to figure out what they're supposed to do would be fun for the DM or for anyone else at the table.

I don't agree, however, that announcing the existence of a skill challenge to the players necessarily has to destroy immersion. The DM standing up and yelling, "OK people, this is a skill challenge, you need to use skills X, Y, and Z, start rolling!" probably would, I suppose, but you don't need to do it that way. I have no idea what the nature of your skill challenge was, but for the sake of discussion let's say that the braziers in the room actually are powered by magical pools of elemental fire that float high above the braziers and that the idea of the challenge is to get someone up there to disrupt the pools somehow. As soon as your rogue made the disarm roll, I'd say something like "You initially think that you've disabled the mechanism, but soon you see hot sparks leap down from circles of fire that appear above you and repair what you've done. You're reasonably certain that eliminating these circles of flame would deactivate the braziers, but you don't think that you can get up to them and eliminate them without help." My players have figured out that "you don't think you can do X without help" = "skill challenge," so when they hear that they get other party members involved and try to figure out what they all can do to achieve the goal. That's still a little metagamey even though it's all narrated in character, but it's better than the alternative.

 

[Hussar]

Imaginary Number - that's hitting the nail on the head.

Communication is, as usual, the key. I tend to err on the side of giving more information than less. Way back in the early days of my gaming, it was a common sight around our tables to pixel bitch our way through adventures. And this sort of thing was only encouraged by a number of modules that we used at the time.

Since that time, I've swung over the other way. I try to present the situation in such a way that a number of solutions become fairly obvious. Now, how to achieve the solutions might not be obvious. After all, that's no fun either - it should be a challenge. But, expecting the players to read my mind is something I've taken off the table.

Things like the whole searching a room routine, for example. Some people want you to describe in detail what exactly you're doing. Me, I'm groovy with "We toss the room, what do we find?". Unless there was a time constraint, I just assumed the party took 20 on the search and found whatever was hidden.

Scouting is another area where things can get moved along. When I did the World's Largest Dungeon, we used to send a scout ahead to "open up the map". Standard practice was to leave doors mostly alone, just trek on down corridors to see what was ahead. At first, we'd do it almost round by round - hide and move silently checks, listen checks, etc. After about three sessions of that, we skipped it. Unless there was something that would interrupt things, I just sped things along and said, "You go down the following corridors, find these doors, there's an inscription here and you see an open doorway with a light behind it down this passage. What do you do?"

Suddenly 15 minutes of die rolling got cut down to 30 seconds.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Disarming the flame trap is a good example of something that should be handled by a single die roll. It was a really uninteresting, unimportant task.

The GM made two mistakes:
1) Choosing the wrong level of abstraction - skill challenge over single roll.
2) Failing to communicate the level of abstraction to the players.

As I discovered myself with that superhero battle, communicating the LoA one intends to use can be tricky but 4e actually provides a good mechanic to do this - skill challenge vs skill roll - so in this case he had the tool right there.

On the immersion issue, I also agree with you Hussar, but I know that some people really, really value immersion. It's like their #1 reason for playing.

 

[Hussar]

Doug, yeah, different strokes and all that.

I know right now that what I like is not what others like. I think I can state that with a pretty high level of certainty.

I wonder if this is something that GM's and players should hash out in the first session of a campaign. I mean, we hash out who's playing what characters, usually the general expectations of the campaign are outlined, the setting gets discussed and any house rules get talked about. Or, at least they should.

Perhaps adding "expected level of abstraction" to the discussion is a good idea.

I've done the "Greyhawk the dungeon" thing. I enjoyed it. I don't think I would enjoy it any more. Has a lot to do with session length IMO. I play pretty short sessions - 3 hours minus time for people being late, interruptions, whatnot - which means that if you want to get anywhere in that timeframe, you need to abstract stuff.

I wonder if those who like a much high level of detail also play longer sessions, if there is some correlation there. Chainsaw, forex, mentioned playing 5 hour sessions.

 

[GnomeWorks]

On the immersion issue, I also agree with you Hussar, but I know that some people really, really value immersion. It's like their #1 reason for playing.

Break my immersion, and you have broken my reason for being at the table.

Skill challenges are - IMO - nonsensical and pretty fatal to immersion. With that out there, I'm going to try not to dwell on that aspect of the example and address the stuff behind it.

In the example, you have a skill, and it should have worked as expected. If not, the DM should've made clear why - to turn that into a skill challenge without announcing it, my response to your first roll would've been something like "Well, you've found the housing for the driving mechanism, but it's going to take more work to actually disarm the trap." Some kind of cue, at least, to let you know that you needed to do more, but that you were on the right track.

It was a really uninteresting, unimportant task.

I disagree entirely. Anything the PCs choose to do becomes important by virtue of the PCs' focus on it. They should not be special snowflakes by any stretch of the imagination, but they are the individuals the game is focused on. If they are interested in something, it becomes important, regardless of whether it's an epic fight with a deity or something as mundane as potato farming.

 

[pemerton]

@Hussar and the trap skill challenge - full agreed - no need to spend an hour on it when the conclusion is foregone and the process is tedious.

@Doug - agreed on levels of abstraction, and I think this connects to Hussar's example. It might be interesting to resolve the trap in a complex fashion during a fight (given 4e's default level of detail in combat scenes) but it's pointless outside a fight.

The only game I'm familiar with that explicitly builds into the rules the option of setting the level of abstraction for every challenge/encounter is HeroWars/Quest. Every contest can be run as either a simple contest (roughy, a skill check) or an extended contest (roughy, a skill challenge but with more back-and-forth than in 4e), at the GM's discretion.

A few pages of the rulebook for this system is devoted to helping the GM choose which sort of contest to use, in order to maintain pacing, thematic oomph etc.

Are there other systems that have this sort of feature built in? I know LostSoul is working on a less intensive combat system for 4e.

 

[pemerton]

Anything the PCs choose to do becomes important by virtue of the PCs' focus on it.

As a GM I don't agree with this.

For example, it is very common in fantasy RPGing for the players to set out an order of watch whenever their PCs camp in the wilderness or the dungeon. This is a convention arising (I imagine) out of old-style wandering monster play. It also has a certain degree of realism about it - there is something sensible about maintaing a watch while camping in dangerous territory.

But by no means is it important. It's almost always trivial and irrelevant, at least in my games where I use overnight attacks only quite rarely.

There are a lot of other things that players have their PCs do (searching rooms and corpses, haggling over prices etc) because these are simply conventions of fantasy RPGing, or genre conventions. But a lot of them aren't important at all, and are (in my experience) precisely the sorts of things that can suck up time needlessly if the GM doesn't keep a tight rein on them.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Yeah, just because I say my PC is searching the room doesn't mean I want to manipulate moose heads. I might just want it resolved by a die roll.

Which raises the question of who decides the level of detail. I think it's mostly the GM, he certainly always has right of veto, the ability to 'cut to the chase', cutting a scene short, or to keep it going by asking questions.

I remember Ariosto, who is about as old school as it gets, saying he wanted to describe his PC's search of a floor in detail but being disappointed when the GM was all 'new school' and resolved it with a single Search check.

It's interesting how much the GM can affect these things. I once played in a fantasy game which had a much higher level of detail about the horses than I'm used to. Not wanting to stereotype here, but the GM was female. As players we ran with it* a bit, but I did find some of her horse-y descriptions a bit perplexing.


*I named my horse Pebbles.

 

[Jack99]

Yeah, pacing is important. However, as others have stated, the players should decide what they feel is important to focus on, and if they want to explore the sewers, I will let them do just that - as long as it is the party as a whole who want to, and not just one player.

The only time where I force the game along, is when it comes to discussions about what to do. My players (or rather, most of them) can argue (amicably) for hours about what to do next, how to handle the NPC or whatnot. If I just let them argue, my campaigns and thus the game, would never get anywhere. So, therefore, I let them presents their arguments, and once all arguments have been presented and they are down to trying to convince each other, I cut the discussion short and they vote on what to do. And then we move along to the next chapter of the adventure.

 

[ashockney]

Love the topic and love the idea of compiling and sharing some best practices about pacing.

I wrote a blog about pacing, in particular with 4e. I was honestly SURPRISED at my inability to get more than 4 encounters into 4 hours.

Since then, I've been experimenting with some ways to influence this, and the thing I did most recently had success. I noticed that in 1e and 2e the villians have really few hit points, but they're a deadly threat at all times. Catoblepas - save or die. Bodak - save or die. Orcus rod - save or die. Sometimes, the threat doesn't allow a save, just die...power word, kill. This is awful for character development and investent, but removing it has really affected pacing for D&D. Same is true for 3e, but in my experience, 3e had the advantage of "layered" defenses to prevent and prolong some of the "insta-kill" effects. So, then I continued to experiment with minions. One of the things I love about 4e is the convention of minion, elite, and solo villians. Awesome. So, what if these "minions" could provide a threat, that wasn't just an insta-kill effect. A threat to an npc. A threat to a PC's weapon. A threat by "exploding" if destroyed. A threat by conveying a "disease". Combine these encounters with some great "skill challenge" or "environmental threat" such as a trap, and you have an interesting encounter, and it won't take an hour.

I tried this, and it worked. There were also two standard combats, with elites, which took about an hour, and were very fun, and fulfilling tactical combats, that tested the limits of their resources. The final battle was a three-stage solo boss encounter, along the lines of an MMORPG raid fight.

This was Queen of the Demonweb Pits, and it was for 22nd level characters. 7 encounters, 4 hours. What a blast!

The other thing I wanted to call out for the purposes of pacing are rules-lawyering, and roleplaying. I've seen both of these take the train entirely off the rails in a game. I think the skill challenge rules system did an excellent job of preventing what I would call the "rope bridge" effect. In the past, I've seen a game session go completely off the rails because no PC had the "in-game" resources to deal with an environmental threat. So, one of the questions is how do you put a similiar "in game" resources to give the PC's the ability to deal with rules discrepancies and roleplaying.