Ah, metagaming

Someone espouses the viewpoint that metagaming isn’t bad and evil.

Modes of Character Advancement

D&D has levels.  A whole packet of relevant stats increase all at once.  This encourages playing to gather experience to get to the next level, so you can get higher stats and new toys (i.e. feats, prestige classes, and so forth.)  That causes all sorts of interesting play effects.  Depending on how you want to play, this may be a good or bad thing.  It’s not how I want to play.

L5R has a point buy system, combined with insight ranks (i.e. levels.)  Since the cost of raising stats increases as they go up, this encourages balancing stats out to find the cheapest point cost to get to the next level.  But balance isn’t nearly interesting as imbalance, so this isn’t how I want to play either.

I haven’t played 4e Shadowrun, but as I remember from the older editions, it simply has experience that you spend for more goodies.  Point costs go up as the stats go up, but there’s no “next level” to shoot for, so there’s really no reason not to spend them all on raising whatever you like.  This seems decent.

But if the degree of difficulty simply goes up as the characters become more capable, isn’t this sort of like an endless staircase?  So…why have character advancement?  Why not simply have character change?  I may have to track down some systems that do this.

D&D’s Reward System and Implications for Game Length

Over on SG, Paul T makes an interesting point about D&D’s experience and level system in relation to the length of a story vis a vis what players want to do.

Playing with your clones

I recently posed this question, after a discussion of play styles in our group.  It’s an interesting way to identify if your individual play style is frustrating your goals, or if elements of your style may be counteracting each other.

Suppose that you had a set of new groups.  Each new group is composed of five clones of one member of your current gaming group – I highly encourage you to start with yourself.  For which of these groups could you run the perfect game, one which satisfied all five of the clones?  What would that game look like?

This seems complex in most cases, so let’s lower the bar in order to explore a bit and come back to it.  Consider that satisfaction may not be a yes/no quality, and more like a percentage rating.  How much would you be able to satisfy the members of each clone group?

In some groups, could you completely satisfy some members at the expense of the others?

Is the average satisfaction in each group invariant, or would ways to boost the average exist?

Which groups are zero-sum games (if someone is more satisfied, someone else must be equally less satisfied) and which are non-zero-sum?

If non-zero sum groups exist, in which groups does increasing one player’s satisfaction increase other player’s satisfaction too?

With a little bit better picture of how these groups might work in mind now, consider this:  Which of these groups would require the most total work to satisfy at their maximum possible level?  Which ones would require the most work per percentage point increase in the average satisfaction?

System/Style Equilibria

Idea: The reason some systems support some styles better than others has much to do with the stability of the equilibrium that results from the interaction between the system and the styles of game the players desire (their preferences, or loosely, their creative agenda.)

I know, that barely sounded like English. Let’s try a picture. Imagine the course of the game as a red ball. The GM is trying to keep the red session ball placed right at the point that the players enjoy, the place that matches up with their preferences. And the system that you use dictates what sort of surface you’ll find at that point. Imagine that you have 5 players who want to play standard hack and slash dungeoneering D&D with no regard for the story. These players literally make no demands on the game except to have enemies to fight, traps to find, and loot to collect so they can level up and do it again. What sort of surface does that put the ball on?

Think of the horizontal in this picture as representing style. In the middle, we have the style that the group is aiming for. As the ball rolls on this surface away from the center, it will tend to roll right back down to the middle. The D&D system, by virtue of the rewards that are offered (experience, leveling up, stat increases, more feats) will tend to push the game back toward a standard hack and slash dungeoneering style game – even when you deviate from this style. For these players, under these circumstances the D&D system is self-correcting. They’ve found a stable equilibrium between their play style and the system that they use to achieve it.

Now consider a group that consists half of people with this style, and half new members that are interested in story or character immersion (or any number of other priorities.) The system still gives us our curve, but now, because the “creative agenda” is different, we’re looking at a different point on that curve. At this point, the system needs to support competing priorities. For some people, running D&D with these priorities works, and of course, based on that, we can’t discount the possibility that they’ve found some sort of equilibrium. In my experience, that equilibrium looks like this:

It is certainly possible to balance the ball on the surface at this point. The problem is what happens when the game deviates from precisely the right place. The ball still rolls downhill, but now, instead of self-correcting, the errors are self-magnifying. Now, the system will tend to push the session away from what the players want rather than back toward it. It’s an unstable equilibrium. The GM can certainly endeavour to push the ball back up the slope (and often successfully at that.) But it takes work (which none of us like, because we’re lazy.) Sometimes that work will require obvious attempts on the part of the GM to achieve this, breaking suspension of disbelief or bringing any number of other gremlins into the picture. And sometimes doing all this work will cause the GM to burn out on the game and give up, ruining the experience for everyone.

I don’t mean to pick on D&D here, but it’s an easy target. The same thing happens with some story games. They work great for the author during playtesting, and then they simply fail for some groups. As people have pointed out, many of these games just don’t work unless you bring the right mindset to the game. Bringing the right mindset is sitting down to play the game with priorities that find a stable equilibrium point on the system curve. The system then keeps you right on the sweet spot. Some groups have trouble ditching their old assumptions about how roleplaying games work when confronted with a new beast. Those old habits put them at an unstable equilibrium point on the system curve, and the result is that the game degenerates into…something else. Certainly not the game as it was intended to be played, and generally not a fun experience. These groups sometimes take away the message that story games suck at producing fun.

To sum up: Some systems work better for certain styles (duh.) For many combinations of system and style, there exists an equilibrium point. The existence of such a point indicates that the desired style can be achieved with that system. The stability of the equilibrium point indicates how difficult the desired style will be to achieve. In unstable equilibrium, the system will tend to push the game away from the desired style when deviations occur. In stable equilibria, the system will tend to push the game back toward the desired style, even when deviations occur.

Rewarding Players

In light of a recent (and still unfinished) conversation about rewarding players semi-independently from rewarding their characters, I found this quote, lifted from a forum post, interesting.

“The reward for doing something awesome is the story that grows out of it. “

I think that’s an important point – whether the consequences are positive or negative, they’re always better than being ignored.

A New Hope

(This is a post by Fang Langford, from the Forge in 2003. I’m reposting it here to preserve and share it.)

There seems to be a great conflict. One side is screaming: Let the damned player do what he damn well feels like! This is Star Wars, not Star trek! What kind of GM tries to control their players anyway? The other side is screaming: Eric! You need to set priorities and stick to them! STICK TO THEM!

It really is interesting. I think that I wanted the latter. I think I’ll try a bit of the former next session.

I see no conflict at all. Put letting the player do what suits them and Star Wars at the top of your priorities. After that comes things like ’spread the spotlight’ and ‘pacing, pacing, pacing.’

At least I saw no conflict until…

Absolutely, the fact you would even consider forcing a player to do anything is a serious problem with the way you’re approaching GMing.

This confuses me. A GM who has no control over the player’s actions has no control over the game. Even if you don’t believe in illusionism, it is hard for me to understand the concept of “zero GM control”.

The mistake you are making is onto everything we’ve said here, you’ve projected your obsession with the gamemaster who controls the game. Forget it. Leave it behind. A gamemaster who controls the game is an attention-starved author who should be writing, not gaming.

The very first thing you need to do to improve as a gamemaster is strike from you mind the idea that the gamemaster should control the game. That alone is probably responsible for every one of your conflicts with the players and the source of your own lack of pleasure in gamemastering.

You know what happens when you don’t control the game? Back in Scattershot, we call that sharing. That’s right, a bunch a guys get together with some rules and share creating a cool game. The two best pieces of advice I can offer is don’t plan and don’t plan.

Don’t plan out what game will do (they go here, they go there, they do this, the end). Any time you do that you are assuming two things; your ideas are inherently better and that the players ‘not knowing’ will keep them from screwing up a wonderful plan. Sooner or later we call that ‘railroading’ because the players eventually catch on that they’re only being taken for a ride.

You want to gamemaster something that comes out like A New Hope? All you need is the character write-ups (one lives on a farm, another is a hermit, the third lives by his wits from payload to payload, and the last – a non-player character – has the plans), some vague idea where things will climax (the death star), and that’s it.

You set the stage by giving the plans to the robots and the robots to PC#1 to give to PC#2. What do the players do? PC#1 wants to go ‘back to the farm,’ not cool – think of something on the fly – blow up the farm! Okay now they’re off on the quest. Cut to the chase, don’t bother actually giving them a choice who to hire simply run the scene until their sitting at the table with PC#3 (maybe a little cool lightsabre action for just color). Scene starts getting to slow with ‘negotiations;’ time for stormtroopers to show up. Why? Um, um; oh yeah, the lightsabre antics. Toss in a scene with a bounty hunter to make PC#3 feel cool (for no more reasons than pacing, remembering the character write-up, and to ‘push things’ not just forward, but in any direction). Off they go….

Next you need to put some punch into the ‘what are the plans for;’ Alderaan is gone when they get there. Was this a part of some plan? Is the gamemaster controlling the game. Heck no, it was late and you realized that a bunch of sneaky stuff planetside would be boring. You can blow up planets on the fly, you’re the gamemaster. Next, capture them by the ‘big bad evil thingie.’ Don’t even run it, just tell the ‘now your captured and in the hold, think of something cool to keep yourselves out of the brig.’

And they do, soon their hacking the deathstar and sneaking around in stolen stormtrooper costumes. The plan? That they’d come up with something cool and they did. (‘Where did you get those hidey holes?’ Um, um; I’m a smuggler right?) They’ll need to do something while they’re there; and things are picking up a lot of pace; what’s left? Save the princess and destroy the fortress. Okay, that puts the princess on the deathstar; did you plan her there? No, you thought she’d be somewhere planet side or something, it hardly matters now. So off hoots R2D2, “she’s here, she’s here; I found her” and away they go.

Confronting the guards in the brig is stupid with a capital ‘S.’ But damn cool, go for it. Just let ‘em get her, why not? You can always have the reinforcement beating down the doors as they leave if you need the tension. And that garbage disposal thing? Who saw that coming? The players make up something on the spot, you didn’t even consider space station sewage, but having them in the trash compactor is a great place to let them squirm and then just let them go. A few more chase scenes and since they haven’t invented a destruction for the fortress, you just let them escape. (But hey, Bob isn’t gonna be there next week, let’s kill off PC#2 just to ‘up the ante.’)

And so on. None of it is a matter of planning but simply responding to player choices (which are actually inventions with things like the compactor) and continually turning up the tension level and the pacing.

That’s really all there is to it. Don’t plan; don’t get hung up on cool places or cool villains so much that only a railroad will take the player to them. Remember let the players decide where to go and just put the maguffin in their way along the way. (In the above, you had some nasty fortress; you didn’t ‘control’ them to there, you kept moving it ‘on the board’ so it was in front of them. Think about it; at any time, did the movie goers know where the deathstar was relative to the motion of the characters? Only when they used the word Alderaan, you could just as easily establish that after the fact when play is done.)

So what I am saying is that you make your own conflict by deciding that ‘you know better’ and should be ‘in control’ of the game. I’m not surprised you didn’t have fun, they weren’t being obedient little characters like when you write a story.

So pick one: gamemaster or sole-author, ya can’t have both.

Fang Langford

 

Compromising

For a long time now, I’ve seen this basic idea in a lot of places, and believed it myself:

“Even if the group decides to compromise on nothing about the content of a scene, they will still have to compromise, since everyone wants spotlight time.  There’s only so much spotlight time to go around, so they’ll need to compromise by sharing it.”

Here’s the problem I see: there ISN’T only so much spotlight time to go around.  It’s true that there is a limited amount of time in the session, but subject to that constraint, there is no limit on how much time a player can have regardless of how much time the others get.  The reason for this is simple: each minute of game time might constitute spotlight time for more than one player.  So the “make the pie bigger” solution is to play more scenes that involve multiple characters.

If it seems like there isn’t enough spotlight time, try sharing it a bit more.  Where along the scale between “one character per scene” and “everyone in every scene” is right for your group is for them to decide.

Cliches

Ah, the tropes of computer rpgs.  How many of these slip over into pen and paper?  Only a few, but it’s still worth a read (and a laugh!)

Random Character Death

At a gathering to watch some football last night, roleplaying came up as it inevitably does with this group. It’s the most significant shared experience we have.

One way or another (which is to say, I probably did it but I don’t remember how), we got on the topic of D&D and random character death. And I posed the question “Is random character death ever fun?” I have never seen a circumstance where dice were rolled and a character died that the group was satisfied with. In fact, I’ve seen this occurrence torpedo more than one campaign. We argued about it a lot, and the main contention against removing random character death was that, in order for succeeding to be fun, there needed to be the possibility of failure. This might be true, but I don’t see that failure and death are always connected in either direction. Another problem people had was that they always assume any combat is deadly and so the don’t fight unless they’re willing to die. I hypothesize that this makes more sense in, say, L5R than it does in D&D. Rarely can a fighting problem be resolved by talking in D&D, much more rarely than in L5R. Yet another issue was that sometimes people truly are willing to have their character die in order to accomplish something, and this should be possible.

In any case, this brings me to a bit of technology to deal with making character death happen at appropriate times in the story. Initially I thought that a good way to manage this would be to simply ask before a combat – “Raise your hand if you’re OK dying during this fight.” Someone pointed out that this would totally break their immersion, and would not be acceptable. So, my idea is to give everyone a signaling device that they can set in two positions to indicate whether they are OK with lethality. This could be a poker chip with different colors on each side, a miniature that could be standing or laying down, whatever. The key to it is that the GM needs to be able to see it from across the table so they don’t have to ask and interrupt the game. Some players will never change their answer; they need only set it once per game and leave it there. Other players will be OK with dying if it’s sufficiently epic; these players may switch back and forth.

There might even be consequences of having your signal in both positions. Perhaps if you’re in “non-lethal mode,” you’re responsible for suggesting an appropriate complication other than death, but you get bonuses to social skills. And if you’re in “lethal mode,” you get bonuses to combat, but are responsible for something else. The exact effects of both modes will probably depend on what game you’re playing.