I've made no attempt to hide my utter fascination with sandbox-style gaming. Last summer's old-school renaissance, with its focus on non-linear, location-based campaigning, struck me like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. Here, I thought, was the sort of gaming that I had been striving toward for most of my adult life. I've seen the light!
Well, almost.
See, I had an opportunity last weekend to dig through my old RPG notebooks. The earliest was from 1997, when I had become enamored with West End Games' Star Wars RPG. At this point, I'd owned the game for several years—indeed, it was the first RPG I ever owned—but hadn't yet had an opportunity to play it with anyone. I was 15 at the time, and I cobbled together a campaign to run for my high school friends. The game quickly degenerated into a fairly traditional "adventure path" type of campaign, with the PCs shuttling across the galaxy following clues I had painstakingly arranged for them to follow and interacting with PCs that served only to further the game's plot. It was my own original work, but I was definitely railroading them.
But that first adventure, when I was still trying to lure my friends into regular gaming, was different. I had no clue how to write an adventure. All I knew was that my friends—occasional D&D dabblers—had a tendency to run all over the place and get into trouble. Knowing that, I made a location-based introductory adventure set on a wacky space station full of cantinas, bazaars and brothels. I had a few scripted encounters, sure, but my primary motivation was making sure I could react appropriately when they tried to do crazy stuff.
And it worked! We had a great time playing, and the one and only goal of this adventure (get the players a starship!) worked out well.
Fast forward 12 years, and here I am, re-discovering those very fundamental elements of making games hum. Doubtless my 15-year-old self has a few more lessons in store for my 27-year-old self to discover.
Showing posts with label roleplaying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label roleplaying. Show all posts
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Monday, July 7, 2008
It's All about Timing or When It Rains, It Pours
I read a decent number of websites about gaming. Some of them recount actual play, and some of them analyze actual play. Others discuss sweet power arrays for characters and tactical options, while still others theorize about character driven play and collaboratively creating plot. With all of these sites, I generally find it to be the case that gamers are a problem-focused lot. Many gamers are problem solvers - they're good at identifying problems in their gaming and figuring out how to address them (e.g. how the kill that monster better/faster, how to design a system that makes a game more character driven and fitting a setting). And out of these two skills - problem identification and solving - gamers are often best at the former. We're just a naturally negative lot.
All of this brings me to my current gaming problem, which seems to be a strange duck: After half of year of sporadic play, two games that have the vibe of regularity about them are vying for the same slot. And one of my buddies who's in both games (and is almost always free to game) maybe can't make either.
Forget about the substantive problems of gaming. We should just be grateful when we get the opportunity to sit down around the table with 5 friends, all who have busy schedules, and roll fistfuls of dice.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
After-action report: Dungeons and Dragons 4E demo
Last weekend I demoed D&D 4E (note that the rulebook itself doesn’t actually use this phrasing; it just calls itself Dungeons & Dragons) with Kevin, Ben and a couple pickup players at our semi-local game store (it’s 30 miles down the highway).
Lately I’ve been learning my way around D&D 3.5 for my occasional Midnight campaign, so I approached this 4E demo with any eye toward possibly switching over to it eventually. We spent two hours around a table, slugging it out on the battlemap; for this, we got a free miniature and a free d20. Here are a few random thoughts.
Battlemap Rules
Without a doubt, this ruleset was developed for use on the battlemap. Characters don’t move 25 feet in a round, they instead move 5 squares (a single square equaling 5 linear feet). Nearly all the special rules reference the battlemap in some way. The imagined spatial relationship that made old D&D so exciting (ex: “You’re about 20 feet from the bottomless pit and goblins are approaching from the west. What do you do?”) is completely gone, replaced with the sterile grid of the battlemap. Oh, and did I mention that WOTC sells its own D&D Miniatures game?
Feeble Roleplaying
A laugh-out-loud moment occured for me during our first combat round, when the rogue character used one of his new “powers” to skewer a shadow spirit. I asked the player to describe the attack visually - I wasn’t satisfied with having him say “I attack the darkness!” Well, he looked at me dumbly for a long minute, then looked down at his character sheet and read the power description verbatim. It was something like "The thief produces a curved blade from the depths of his cloak and slashes at his foe!" This, it seems, is the extent of creativity and originality possessed by today’s D&D players. Given a premade character and a demo adventure, they prove themselves unable to deal with even a modicum of storytelling. Hope they never want to DM!
Party Roles
I drew a little criticism from my group because I (one of the two fighters) chose not to participate in our first fight. Instead, I tried to figure out the dungeon puzzle while the rest of the group slugged it out with the shadow spirit. Afterward the cleric player made some comments about my “role” in the party, and I responded that I was roleplaying. Roleplaying, not rollplaying. I generally disklike the four broad categories of character (striker, controller, leader and I forget the other one) and the forced playstyles they represent.
Fewer Feats
I did like the common-sense solution for feats. The designers, it seemed, split feats into combat powers, which got cool descriptions that made you want to use them over and over, and feats that you call on for various situations (like Snatch Arrows or somesuch). I also liked the idea of at-will/encounter/daily powers, although in retrospect they did seem to be a little too combat-centric for a group that doesn't break its campaign up into neat little encounter-sized chunks.
Lately I’ve been learning my way around D&D 3.5 for my occasional Midnight campaign, so I approached this 4E demo with any eye toward possibly switching over to it eventually. We spent two hours around a table, slugging it out on the battlemap; for this, we got a free miniature and a free d20. Here are a few random thoughts.
Battlemap Rules
Without a doubt, this ruleset was developed for use on the battlemap. Characters don’t move 25 feet in a round, they instead move 5 squares (a single square equaling 5 linear feet). Nearly all the special rules reference the battlemap in some way. The imagined spatial relationship that made old D&D so exciting (ex: “You’re about 20 feet from the bottomless pit and goblins are approaching from the west. What do you do?”) is completely gone, replaced with the sterile grid of the battlemap. Oh, and did I mention that WOTC sells its own D&D Miniatures game?
Feeble Roleplaying
A laugh-out-loud moment occured for me during our first combat round, when the rogue character used one of his new “powers” to skewer a shadow spirit. I asked the player to describe the attack visually - I wasn’t satisfied with having him say “I attack the darkness!” Well, he looked at me dumbly for a long minute, then looked down at his character sheet and read the power description verbatim. It was something like "The thief produces a curved blade from the depths of his cloak and slashes at his foe!" This, it seems, is the extent of creativity and originality possessed by today’s D&D players. Given a premade character and a demo adventure, they prove themselves unable to deal with even a modicum of storytelling. Hope they never want to DM!
Party Roles
I drew a little criticism from my group because I (one of the two fighters) chose not to participate in our first fight. Instead, I tried to figure out the dungeon puzzle while the rest of the group slugged it out with the shadow spirit. Afterward the cleric player made some comments about my “role” in the party, and I responded that I was roleplaying. Roleplaying, not rollplaying. I generally disklike the four broad categories of character (striker, controller, leader and I forget the other one) and the forced playstyles they represent.
Fewer Feats
I did like the common-sense solution for feats. The designers, it seemed, split feats into combat powers, which got cool descriptions that made you want to use them over and over, and feats that you call on for various situations (like Snatch Arrows or somesuch). I also liked the idea of at-will/encounter/daily powers, although in retrospect they did seem to be a little too combat-centric for a group that doesn't break its campaign up into neat little encounter-sized chunks.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Is it the players or the system?
I was having a discussion recently with Ben, a great friend and member of my local group here in Chicago, about the merits of gaming systems vs. gaming groups. Lately Ben's been on a ruleset kick; he's been buying PDFs of various games and monkeying around with different mechanics. I guess you could view this as something of a research project, since Ben is set on writing his own full-length RPG in the next year or two.
Anyway, we were discussing the recent rash of indie games that take narrative control out of the GM's hands and distribute it amongst the players. Games like Burning Wheel (whichn I'm currently playing) encourage players to base dice rolls around their more esoteric traits, rather than waiting for the GM to instruct them to. (Ex: Using "Nobleman's Son" to defuse a potential combat scenario rather than Persuasion or simple fighting. There's no stat attached to it, but the GM can react appropriately when the player asserts the trait.) This drives players to resolve encounters in a variety of ways, both social and combative.
Ben is really jazzed about systems that provide for this sort of character-driven interplay. I, on the other hand, have been playing devil's advocate a little and suggesting that the right gaming group doesn't need to be poked and prodded by a quirky ruleset. Roleplaying will just happen, without any sort of conditional system to encourage or refine it.
Case in point: the d20 system is the yardstick for measuring most new RPGs. It's fairly traditional, somewhat versatile and satisfies most rule-hungry gamers. It doesn't really promote roleplaying through written mechanics - but that hasn't been a problem in my D&D campaign. I'm playing Midnight, a fantastically dark setting by Jeff Barber, with a group of guys here in Chicago. We're all about the same age (late 20s to early 30s) and we're all remarkably on the same page as far as what we want out of our game.
As such, we don't have any problem engaging in some nice meaty roleplaying within the parameters of the d20 system. I'd point to this as evidence that the game group, not the system, ultimately determines how satisfied everyone is with the RPG experience.
Anyway, we were discussing the recent rash of indie games that take narrative control out of the GM's hands and distribute it amongst the players. Games like Burning Wheel (whichn I'm currently playing) encourage players to base dice rolls around their more esoteric traits, rather than waiting for the GM to instruct them to. (Ex: Using "Nobleman's Son" to defuse a potential combat scenario rather than Persuasion or simple fighting. There's no stat attached to it, but the GM can react appropriately when the player asserts the trait.) This drives players to resolve encounters in a variety of ways, both social and combative.
Ben is really jazzed about systems that provide for this sort of character-driven interplay. I, on the other hand, have been playing devil's advocate a little and suggesting that the right gaming group doesn't need to be poked and prodded by a quirky ruleset. Roleplaying will just happen, without any sort of conditional system to encourage or refine it.
Case in point: the d20 system is the yardstick for measuring most new RPGs. It's fairly traditional, somewhat versatile and satisfies most rule-hungry gamers. It doesn't really promote roleplaying through written mechanics - but that hasn't been a problem in my D&D campaign. I'm playing Midnight, a fantastically dark setting by Jeff Barber, with a group of guys here in Chicago. We're all about the same age (late 20s to early 30s) and we're all remarkably on the same page as far as what we want out of our game.
As such, we don't have any problem engaging in some nice meaty roleplaying within the parameters of the d20 system. I'd point to this as evidence that the game group, not the system, ultimately determines how satisfied everyone is with the RPG experience.
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