It is the difference between a game with infinite continues and one with 3 (or some other discrete amount) of continues. In the former, the only full fail condition is to stop playing and the latter is to fail 3 times at which point you have to entirely start over. In fact, this is a rather interestingly made point in the game Metal Gear Solid 2 where the fiction-within-fiction narrative of the game makes it so that the ONLY win condition for the game is to STOP playing.
I think that it's easy to feel like "infinite continues" (banning meaningless PC death) are necessary if the DM comes to the table with an agenda of what has to get accomplished during that session. It's gotta happen or else the story doesn't move forward. I've done it myself -- I've had several levels planned out that involve specific PC backgrounds/histories, then an important PC dies. Subsequently, I have to re-write 80% of what I'd worked on. It's deflating.
That's where the rub comes in. Unless I'm willing to fudge die rolls, change the monsters' battle plan, or make it so that the enemies are not every bit as interested in not dying as the party is, a PC dies. That's not my fault as DM and as long as I've followed the rules for encounter building, I don't think it makes me a "bad DM". But it hasn't fit until now, which is why YagamiFire's approach is so interesting. By adopting a campaign design style in which "the players are the ones pushing the "story" forward with their actions and goals, death then is merely a reality of their efforts. When the story belongs to the DM, the players have a "right" to feel betrayed when killed." Good stuff.
It is the difference between a game with infinite continues and one with 3 (or some other discrete amount) of continues. In the former, the only full fail condition is to stop playing and the latter is to fail 3 times at which point you have to entirely start over. In fact, this is a rather interestingly made point in the game Metal Gear Solid 2 where the fiction-within-fiction narrative of the game makes it so that the ONLY win condition for the game is to STOP playing.
I think that it's easy to feel like "infinite continues" (banning meaningless PC death) are necessary if the DM comes to the table with an agenda of what has to get accomplished during that session. It's gotta happen or else the story doesn't move forward. I've done it myself -- I've had several levels planned out that involve specific PC backgrounds/histories, then an important PC dies. Subsequently, I have to re-write 80% of what I'd worked on. It's deflating.
That's where the rub comes in. Unless I'm willing to fudge die rolls, change the monsters' battle plan, or make it so that the enemies are not every bit as interested in not dying as the party is, a PC dies. That's not my fault as DM and as long as I've followed the rules for encounter building, I don't think it makes me a "bad DM". But it hasn't fit until now, which is why YagamiFire's approach is so interesting. By adopting a campaign design style in which "the players are the ones pushing the "story" forward with their actions and goals, death then is merely a reality of their efforts. When the story belongs to the DM, the players have a "right" to feel betrayed when killed." Good stuff.
I understand what you mean completely. I used to do the same a long time ago. DM expectations require either fudging or throwing out vast amounts of pre-planning. Great Expectations (other than being a dreadful book) are the bane of DMs and many DMs generally don't even realize it. It is building a house of cards in a hurricane because you are playing a game where ANYTHING can happen. Inevitably you get stuck in situations where you are either throwing out work or changing stuff so that your stuff still works...and either sucks. The latter can be downright toxic to a game because it undermines player agency AND pulls the curtain back from the wizard. I fudge NOTHING with my players no matter how much I want to and, believe me, the incentive can be great...but it's important to resist. Fate has to be fate and the dice have to be the dice that way player decisions can remain their decisions.
I'm on a journey of enlightenment, learning and self-improvement. A journey towards mastery. A journey that will never end.
If you challenge me, prepare to be challenged. If you have something to offer as a fellow student, I will accept it. If you call yourself a master, prepare to be humbled. If you seek me, look to the path. I will be traveling it. #SuperDungeonMasterIITurbo
Thankfully for us DMs, players tend to be power & treasure-hungry daredevils so they will seek out "bigger & badder". Allowing them to do so as a goal instead of as a matter of fact is very important.
This is off-topic, but something I'm struggling with right now, too.
I think how much risk a party is willing to take on is group-specific. My group [unfortunately] is not this way. I've got a couple players who will take on big risks, but scream bloody murder if they ever fall below 0 HP. There's a third player who won't take any risks unless he thinks he has a significant chance at success (i.e. not dying). I suppose that's how we make decisions in our own lives, but not something I'm use to having to worry about as a DM. Now, it seems, I spend a significant amount of time each week trying to come up with reasons that will compel this one player to "bite" on a given adventure hook. Ideas?
Generally this is from past experience or from a lack of confidence in ones ability to play the game. That is natural. It's a player stage. The importance is in helping your players come out of these shells because then they will start embracing risk and risk mitigation. I think that might be worth a thread on its on and, if you pursue it, I'll happily take part.
Oh by the way, since you've given me a couple compliments you can probably be expected to be accused of being a sock-puppet account any moment. :/
I'm on a journey of enlightenment, learning and self-improvement. A journey towards mastery. A journey that will never end.
If you challenge me, prepare to be challenged. If you have something to offer as a fellow student, I will accept it. If you call yourself a master, prepare to be humbled. If you seek me, look to the path. I will be traveling it. #SuperDungeonMasterIITurbo
I would say a large part of that mentality is actually looping back from how some DMs have been portraying their role. When a DM portrays their role as that of a story-teller primarily (or entirely) with a narrative for the players, naturally character death will seem both pointless and absurd since the DM is supposed to be engaging the players in a story and to have a "pointless" (I prefer "sudden") death interrupts the story.
Of course, the game is not meant to be a narrative in that manner. Story-telling is a small part of the DMs role with their role as judge, refereee and rules-arbiter being their mandate above & beyond everything else.
When the story belongs to the DM, the players have a "right" to feel betrayed when killed...but when the players are the ones pushing the "story" forward with their actions and goals, death then is merely a reality of their efforts. Instead of something foisted upon them by the DMs "story" it is something that has resulted from their own actions.
Essentially, this is a snowball effect of trying to shift the role to storytelling-first and game-second.
Thankfully for us DMs, players tend to be power & treasure-hungry daredevils so they will seek out "bigger & badder". Allowing them to do so as a goal instead of as a matter of fact is very important.
This is off-topic, but something I'm struggling with right now, too.
I think how much risk a party is willing to take on is group-specific. My group [unfortunately] is not this way. I've got a couple players who will take on big risks, but scream bloody murder if they ever fall below 0 HP. There's a third player who won't take any risks unless he thinks he has a significant chance at success (i.e. not dying). I suppose that's how we make decisions in our own lives, but not something I'm use to having to worry about as a DM. Now, it seems, I spend a significant amount of time each week trying to come up with reasons that will compel this one player to "bite" on a given adventure hook. Ideas?
I think that it's easy to feel like "infinite continues" (banning meaningless PC death) are necessary if the DM comes to the table with an agenda of what has to get accomplished during that session. It's gotta happen or else the story doesn't move forward. I've done it myself -- I've had several levels planned out that involve specific PC backgrounds/histories, then an important PC dies. Subsequently, I have to re-write 80% of what I'd worked on. It's deflating.
That's where the rub comes in. Unless I'm willing to fudge die rolls, change the monsters' battle plan, or make it so that the enemies are not every bit as interested in not dying as the party is, a PC dies. That's not my fault as DM and as long as I've followed the rules for encounter building, I don't think it makes me a "bad DM". But it hasn't fit until now, which is why YagamiFire's approach is so interesting. By adopting a campaign design style in which "the players are the ones pushing the "story" forward with their actions and goals, death then is merely a reality of their efforts. When the story belongs to the DM, the players have a "right" to feel betrayed when killed." Good stuff.
I think here lies a particular problem of just about every TRPG I've ever experienced, both player-side and DM-side: how we approach the storytelling aspect of a roleplaying game.
Unless I'm mistaken, D&D was classically run in a very specific way, which is similar to how the Sims or the Elder Scrolls series worked: you have a fantasy world setting, you have players controlling their avatars, and the stories build themselves as the players faced the dangers the DM threw at them. Sure some DMs would have a predetermined story like how Elder Scrolls had a main storyline, but otherwise D&D was all in all a modified fantasy wargame where stories were the aftermath, and not the crux of the sessions or the system.
As storytelling became a greater priority than the game aspect -- to the point where the game's mechanics were being used to tell a story, rather than the story being a by-product of the gameplay -- this created all sorts of problems, especially when you consider how classical storytelling works; each story has a start, various levels of tension, and an ending, often in the form of "happily ever after". As YagamiFire pointed out, the problem with classical storytelling is that it utterly fails to take into account how D&D used to be run, which means that the expected ending of a character in story-centric campaigns and the actual ending of a character in combat-centric systems is horribly dissassociated.
So what specifically went wrong, and what can we do to fix it?
I think the main thing that went "wrong" is that, in part due to lack of exposure to the myriad of TRPG systems out there (as well as the fact that D&D is often the first TRPG system taught to budding DMs), DMs end up forcing a storytelling-centric campaign into a game-centric system, rather than running a storytelling-centric campaign in a storytelling-centric system. By running campaigns with solid arcs complete with scenarios where a specific PC or number of PCs become key components in the story, because you (should) have absolutely no control over the fate of the PCs, unexpected death becomes problematic at best.
Or to put it bluntly: If you play a combat-centric, story-light campaign in GUMSHOE, you're doing it wrong. So why are you playing a story-heavy campaign in a fantasy wargame system that you can tell stories in, like AD&D?
The way I see it, the solution to this issue involves three things:
Good in-group communication.
Casting plot hooks without truly understanding what would make the player and his character want to get involved in the campaign in the first place will always be a frustrating endeavor. Rather than waiting until you either run out of ideas or use the right plot hook, why not just ask the player what his character's motivations are for being there in the first place, and then design the challenges and campaign from there?
Are the players open to the idea of PCs being permanently killed or not, and why?
What sort of campaigns do the players really want?
A solid system appropriate to the type of game you want to run.
It's probably cheaper to do a bunch of houserulings for a system you've already invested in, but let's face it: no single system can accomplish everything that may be needed in a campaign. Not even Microsoft. For instance:
A lot of threads I've read have basically agreed that D&D isn't designed with PvP in mind. You could try doing it - FourthCore Deathmatch has certainly done it - but compare D&D to Paranoia and I think it's clear which of the two is really designed with PvP in mind.
GUMSHOE is expressedly a system with investigation in mind. True you can do an investigation-centric campaign in D&D, but if you compare the two systems, failing in D&D tends to hamper a storyteller approach to the game, while GUMSHOE essentially gives everyone auto-success but with complications, which means the story always flows, just in different directions. Those are two very different -- both valid, but very different -- mechanical approaches to skills.
Learning, practicing, and mastering improvisation.
Improvisation is the most important skill that a DM should learn, because that, I believe, is what really sets TRPGs apart from CRPGs: the human factor.
Note that it's one thing to say that, with Rule 0, all rules are merely guidelines for improvisation... and it's a completely different thing to actually teach improvisation.
While D&D 4E has given me a glimpse of what improvisation could be, it was 13th Age that truly taught me what improvisation is. The difference: 13th Age rules talk directly to the DM, telling them things like, "GMs, make a call on this", and "GMs, here are a few ways you can use these things".
It was only in 13th Age where I was able to finally break away from pre-planning because the system gave me the tools I needed to do so. Especially after reading http://www.pelgranepress.com/?p=9061
You are both rational and emotional. You value creation and discovery, and feel strongly about what you create. At best, you're innovative and intuitive. At worst, you're scattered and unpredictable.
If you're crossing the street and see a city bus barreling straight toward you with 'GIVE ME YOUR WALLET!' painted across its windshield, you probably won't be reaching for your wallet.
This is what I believe is the spirit of D&D 4E, and my deal breaker for D&D Next: equal opportunities, with distinct specializations, in areas where conflict happens the most often, without having to worry about heavy micromanagement or system mastery.
Interesting that I would happen upon this thread. Last weekend, two of the party's players that I DM died. They died to a large Gelatinous Cube elite monster. It wasn't an encounter meant to run a risk of death per se, but apparently the combination of events and player decision caused it to take the lives of two characters. The Cleric and the Ranger fell while the wizard almost did and the other two survived.
The two deaths happened within two rounds and did actually catch me by surprise, along with the group I believe. However after it happened, I didn't get a feeling that the group was angry or that they found in unfair. One player in fact stated that he believed it had been a very fair encounter and that "**** happens".
I've never been against player death as, to me at least, it feels like it's a part of the game. You play with hp amounts, hp means that when it drops to zero something should happen. It doesn't have to be bad and can actually be positive for the story, RP, etc..
"Non nobis Domine Sed nomini tuo da gloriam"
"I wish for death not because I want to die, but because I seek the war eternal"
Interesting that I would happen upon this thread. Last weekend, two of the party's players that I DM died. They died to a large Gelatinous Cube elite monster. It wasn't an encounter meant to run a risk of death per se, but apparently the combination of events and player decision caused it to take the lives of two characters. The Cleric and the Ranger fell while the wizard almost did and the other two survived.
The two deaths happened within two rounds and did actually catch me by surprise, along with the group I believe. However after it happened, I didn't get a feeling that the group was angry or that they found in unfair. One player in fact stated that he believed it had been a very fair encounter and that "**** happens".
I've never been against player death as, to me at least, it feels like it's a part of the game. You play with hp amounts, hp means that when it drops to zero something should happen. It doesn't have to be bad and can actually be positive for the story, RP, etc..
Exactly. If you play a game, and you lose, you shouldn't feel bad about it. The problem is, because you can weave stories around D&D, some people tend to focus more on the story, and thus when their story is interrupted, hampered or outright stopped cold, they do feel bad about it because the thing they value more - the story - is shattered by the game.
[ And as D&D moved from fantasy combat simulator to story simulator the problem became more apparent, and although there was an attempt to make a combat-worthy game that can support effective storytelling, apparently people are just as confused as ever as to what they actually want in their games. ]
Even with previous editions looking similar to each other as opposed to 4E, the subtle and not-so-subtle mechanical additions and modifications to each edition resulted in a huge change in game dynamics, which is why you have people who never left their system of preference in spite of "compatibility".
My best compromise for this whole thing is to simply limit the high death risks to inform player decisions. If they know what they're doing in spite of the risks, and they get what's coming to them, then they shouldn't be complaining because you already told them what will happen and they still proceeded. That way, they're still writing their stories, and if they die, it's their choice, and not because of some "gotcha!" trap that the DM placed to kill them.
You are both rational and emotional. You value creation and discovery, and feel strongly about what you create. At best, you're innovative and intuitive. At worst, you're scattered and unpredictable.
If you're crossing the street and see a city bus barreling straight toward you with 'GIVE ME YOUR WALLET!' painted across its windshield, you probably won't be reaching for your wallet.
This is what I believe is the spirit of D&D 4E, and my deal breaker for D&D Next: equal opportunities, with distinct specializations, in areas where conflict happens the most often, without having to worry about heavy micromanagement or system mastery.
I agree, I always ask my players when I know things could get rough. The cleric who died for example decided to make a ranged attack in melee combat, which caused him to get hit and immobilized, the cube then automatically engulfed him which led to his death. After failing efforts of getting out. Unfortunate but he made the decision.
"Non nobis Domine Sed nomini tuo da gloriam"
"I wish for death not because I want to die, but because I seek the war eternal"
You don't like Dickens? I've lost what little respect I had for you.
On the contrary I like quite a bit of Dickens. I just find Great Expectations to be mind-numbing and dismal.
I'm on a journey of enlightenment, learning and self-improvement. A journey towards mastery. A journey that will never end.
If you challenge me, prepare to be challenged. If you have something to offer as a fellow student, I will accept it. If you call yourself a master, prepare to be humbled. If you seek me, look to the path. I will be traveling it. #SuperDungeonMasterIITurbo
I would say a large part of that mentality is actually looping back from how some DMs have been portraying their role. When a DM portrays their role as that of a story-teller primarily (or entirely) with a narrative for the players, naturally character death will seem both pointless and absurd since the DM is supposed to be engaging the players in a story and to have a "pointless" (I prefer "sudden") death interrupts the story.
Of course, the game is not meant to be a narrative in that manner. Story-telling is a small part of the DMs role with their role as judge, refereee and rules-arbiter being their mandate above & beyond everything else.
When the story belongs to the DM, the players have a "right" to feel betrayed when killed...but when the players are the ones pushing the "story" forward with their actions and goals, death then is merely a reality of their efforts. Instead of something foisted upon them by the DMs "story" it is something that has resulted from their own actions.
Essentially, this is a snowball effect of trying to shift the role to storytelling-first and game-second.
Thankfully for us DMs, players tend to be power & treasure-hungry daredevils so they will seek out "bigger & badder". Allowing them to do so as a goal instead of as a matter of fact is very important.
This is off-topic, but something I'm struggling with right now, too.
I think how much risk a party is willing to take on is group-specific. My group [unfortunately] is not this way. I've got a couple players who will take on big risks, but scream bloody murder if they ever fall below 0 HP. There's a third player who won't take any risks unless he thinks he has a significant chance at success (i.e. not dying). I suppose that's how we make decisions in our own lives, but not something I'm use to having to worry about as a DM. Now, it seems, I spend a significant amount of time each week trying to come up with reasons that will compel this one player to "bite" on a given adventure hook. Ideas?
I think that it's easy to feel like "infinite continues" (banning meaningless PC death) are necessary if the DM comes to the table with an agenda of what has to get accomplished during that session. It's gotta happen or else the story doesn't move forward. I've done it myself -- I've had several levels planned out that involve specific PC backgrounds/histories, then an important PC dies. Subsequently, I have to re-write 80% of what I'd worked on. It's deflating.
That's where the rub comes in. Unless I'm willing to fudge die rolls, change the monsters' battle plan, or make it so that the enemies are not every bit as interested in not dying as the party is, a PC dies. That's not my fault as DM and as long as I've followed the rules for encounter building, I don't think it makes me a "bad DM". But it hasn't fit until now, which is why YagamiFire's approach is so interesting. By adopting a campaign design style in which "the players are the ones pushing the "story" forward with their actions and goals, death then is merely a reality of their efforts. When the story belongs to the DM, the players have a "right" to feel betrayed when killed." Good stuff.
I think here lies a particular problem of just about every TRPG I've ever experienced, both player-side and DM-side: how we approach the storytelling aspect of a roleplaying game.
Unless I'm mistaken, D&D was classically run in a very specific way, which is similar to how the Sims or the Elder Scrolls series worked: you have a fantasy world setting, you have players controlling their avatars, and the stories build themselves as the players faced the dangers the DM threw at them. Sure some DMs would have a predetermined story like how Elder Scrolls had a main storyline, but otherwise D&D was all in all a modified fantasy wargame where stories were the aftermath, and not the crux of the sessions or the system.
As storytelling became a greater priority than the game aspect -- to the point where the game's mechanics were being used to tell a story, rather than the story being a by-product of the gameplay -- this created all sorts of problems, especially when you consider how classical storytelling works; each story has a start, various levels of tension, and an ending, often in the form of "happily ever after". As YagamiFire pointed out, the problem with classical storytelling is that it utterly fails to take into account how D&D used to be run, which means that the expected ending of a character in story-centric campaigns and the actual ending of a character in combat-centric systems is horribly dissassociated.
So what specifically went wrong, and what can we do to fix it?
I think the main thing that went "wrong" is that, in part due to lack of exposure to the myriad of TRPG systems out there (as well as the fact that D&D is often the first TRPG system taught to budding DMs), DMs end up forcing a storytelling-centric campaign into a game-centric system, rather than running a storytelling-centric campaign in a storytelling-centric system. By running campaigns with solid arcs complete with scenarios where a specific PC or number of PCs become key components in the story, because you (should) have absolutely no control over the fate of the PCs, unexpected death becomes problematic at best.
Or to put it bluntly: If you play a combat-centric, story-light campaign in GUMSHOE, you're doing it wrong. So why are you playing a story-heavy campaign in a fantasy wargame system that you can tell stories in, like AD&D?
The way I see it, the solution to this issue involves three things:
Good in-group communication.
Casting plot hooks without truly understanding what would make the player and his character want to get involved in the campaign in the first place will always be a frustrating endeavor. Rather than waiting until you either run out of ideas or use the right plot hook, why not just ask the player what his character's motivations are for being there in the first place, and then design the challenges and campaign from there?
Are the players open to the idea of PCs being permanently killed or not, and why?
What sort of campaigns do the players really want?
A solid system appropriate to the type of game you want to run.
It's probably cheaper to do a bunch of houserulings for a system you've already invested in, but let's face it: no single system can accomplish everything that may be needed in a campaign. Not even Microsoft. For instance:
A lot of threads I've read have basically agreed that D&D isn't designed with PvP in mind. You could try doing it - FourthCore Deathmatch has certainly done it - but compare D&D to Paranoia and I think it's clear which of the two is really designed with PvP in mind.
GUMSHOE is expressedly a system with investigation in mind. True you can do an investigation-centric campaign in D&D, but if you compare the two systems, failing in D&D tends to hamper a storyteller approach to the game, while GUMSHOE essentially gives everyone auto-success but with complications, which means the story always flows, just in different directions. Those are two very different -- both valid, but very different -- mechanical approaches to skills.
Learning, practicing, and mastering improvisation.
Improvisation is the most important skill that a DM should learn, because that, I believe, is what really sets TRPGs apart from CRPGs: the human factor.
Note that it's one thing to say that, with Rule 0, all rules are merely guidelines for improvisation... and it's a completely different thing to actually teach improvisation.
While D&D 4E has given me a glimpse of what improvisation could be, it was 13th Age that truly taught me what improvisation is. The difference: 13th Age rules talk directly to the DM, telling them things like, "GMs, make a call on this", and "GMs, here are a few ways you can use these things".
It was only in 13th Age where I was able to finally break away from pre-planning because the system gave me the tools I needed to do so. Especially after reading http://www.pelgranepress.com/?p=9061
Excellent post, chaosfang.
I'm on a journey of enlightenment, learning and self-improvement. A journey towards mastery. A journey that will never end.
If you challenge me, prepare to be challenged. If you have something to offer as a fellow student, I will accept it. If you call yourself a master, prepare to be humbled. If you seek me, look to the path. I will be traveling it. #SuperDungeonMasterIITurbo
