Showing posts with label rollplaying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rollplaying. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Go ahead and roll

How many times has this happened: You're GMing and a player says "OK, we're at the burned village. I want to see if I can find tracks from the raiders." And before you can say "Yep, there's a set of huge footprints leading into the hills" the player has thrown his dice, read the result and glumly reported back to you: "Nope, I didn't find 'em."

A variation of that scenario happened last weekend during my Savage Worlds fantasy campaign (featuring special guest player Chgowiz, in his first-ever Savage Worlds outing!). It illustrated that "think, don't roll" can still be applied even to new-school game systems like Savage Worlds.

Had the player asked me what he was able to find, I would absolutely have delivered the details. But once those dice fall, it's tough to backtrack and be like "Weeeell, you officially failed, but it's tough to miss orc footprints in soft soil."

It also points to a general weakness in games where there's a known target number or difficulty class. If you want to roll and tell me you fail, that's fine and dandy—yep, you failed. But if you want to tell me what your character does, you might just get a surprise when I tell you, "OK, you do it."

I'm thinking of putting a little edict in place for my campaign: Unless you're in combat, you don't have to roll for anything unless the GM says you do.

Chgowiz, for his part, took the exact opposite approach. He described his character's actions in detail and tried to set up situations where he wouldn't have to roll—because that added the chance of failure. He had some observations of his own from the game, which I hope he's able to post over at his blog.

Regardless, it made for a very interesting game that truly spanned the divide between old school and new school.

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

4e and the Red Box

I'm one of those who was introduced to rpgs with the Red Box and realized the heights gaming could reach with the Blue Box (still my favorite rpg product ever).  As much as I've grown away from D&D since those days, I still look upon them fondly.  In that sense, I think I enjoyed 4emore than Pat (even though I'll probably never play it again) as it reminded me a whole lot of the old days, except with more options.

When I was a kid, I didn't play with a battle map (maybe just some scrawled out shapes of dim  dungeon walls on white paper).  My friend, Rusty, and I would just swing our sword at the monsters we GMed for each other over and over again in endless dungeons and in encounters that we didn't prepare in advance.  We then took the monsters' gold and XP, and miraculously advanced straight through from 1st level to immortality in no more than 10 sessions. 

Pat's description of 4e is dead on - it is battle map heaven and even seems disjointedly elegant (like Manu Ginobli of the San Antonio Spurs?) with its balanced tactical options.  But in the end, it is about rolling to hit over and over again without much attention to the other stuff that I've become so fond of since rediscovering rpgs (and comics).  Even when it was clear that we were leaving without finishing the 4e adventure at Games Plus, the DM awarded us experience points for our pre-gen characters.  If that's not old school, I don't know what it.

I can't find it in me to care about rpgs like 4e that emphasize bean counting.  But at the same time, playing 4e really did remind me of those days in the mythological past with the Red Box.

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.