People Who think [Tabletop] D&D is just like Skyrim..
January 18, 2021 3:22 AM   Subscribe

Solo Video Game RPG's are not like Group Tabletop RPG's.. [SLYT 5min 6sec] 5 min 6 second amusing YouTube video.

There are subtle differences in the conventions and etiquette used when playing a Solo Video game RPG versus playing a Co-Operative Group Table Top RPG.

Subtle.
Differences.

Enjoy.
posted by Faintdreams (61 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
Tabletop NPC AI is so much better.
posted by Meatbomb at 4:16 AM on January 18, 2021 [14 favorites]


I've had tabletop RPG sessions that went like this, nothing to do with Skyrim players :)
posted by jozxyqk at 4:26 AM on January 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


This is a lot like playing with my 8yo kid (no, he hasn't played Skyrim). In the most recent session he climbed up a tree and then set that tree on fire.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:50 AM on January 18, 2021 [12 favorites]


It's too late. You've awakened the gazebo. It catches you and eats you.
posted by justkevin at 5:09 AM on January 18, 2021 [38 favorites]


If he put a bucket on the blacksmith's head he would have gotten away with it. smh.


hail sithis
posted by Groundhog Week at 5:15 AM on January 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


also in fairness, I have a fellow player who's running a rogue who's always asking the DM if they can hide just by getting behind another player or sneak down a hallway without cover while it's being actively monitored by guards. More than any other class, rogues feel like they're setup to test the DM's boundaries.
posted by bl1nk at 5:26 AM on January 18, 2021 [12 favorites]


So is this why Ultima Exodus has a "FIGHT" menu option that allows you to pick a fight to the death with any NPC from a lowly townsperson to Lord British? I have zero experience playing modern open world games, but I've always read that western computer RPGs tend to be more laissez faire when it comes to context and actions (any action, available at any time) as opposed to console JPRGs which wouldn't even consider the possibility that someone might want to cast a magic spell against a random NPC who is completely unimportant to the story (or might delight in getting you to waste precious items by offering you the chance to take an action out of context--see Palom and Porom)

This video also highlights why I find tabletop RPGs a little weird because I have a hard time understanding that the dungeon master is a human who has complete control over an open world and not some neutral computer code keeping track of state in closed one. If I don't make that perception check, was the trap door really there? By not finding the trap door, is that entire story branch closed off to me for good? Can I restart the game and try again to see if I'm missing something?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:34 AM on January 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


By not finding the trap door, is that entire story branch closed off to me for good?

Sometimes, sure, but often the gamer master recycles that into the next encounter or roll you happen to make. There's a certain amount of "illusion of choice" that happens at the tabletop. That's the usual joke answer; the game master just forces the same result later.

This is actually a significant issue in terms of advancing a story. What happens if players miss a clue to advancing the plot because of a bad roll? In the earlier games that did happen. But that makes for a very unsatisfactory mystery game if that's all the game master has. The better way to handle the missing the plot hook problem, be it a secret door or a folded piece of paper is to not rely on just one piece of evidence or one way through. Players often have significant resources they can expend to help them do things, so the game master has to have multiple results for multiple lines of evidence the players might want to look at: if they try to hide and wait because they can't find a way in, maybe a mook comes by on patrol and cheks the "secret" door, for example.

There's a related concept, failing forward, that comes from cinematic fiction, like Indiana Jones movies. This is a way to deal not only with low pressure failure, but high pressure cinematic ones. Say the player has to do something with obviously bad consequences, like grab a goblet before it falls in a pit at a climatic moment. If they fail a single roll, does the whole game fail? No, they fail because the friendly villain grabs for it too knocking it onto a ledge, but falls into the pit as well, barely hanging on. Now the player has a choice to make, their frenemy or the goal long sought. Failing forward is the idea of success, but with more complications. Not passing a check isn't absolute failure (always) , but might make success more costly, even feel pyrrhic. And that makes for memorable moments.

Because making memorable moments is 90% what the experience is about.
posted by bonehead at 6:10 AM on January 18, 2021 [34 favorites]


In short, every new DM/GM/Referee should read GUMSHOE at least once.
posted by bonehead at 6:19 AM on January 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


If I don't make that perception check, was the trap door really there? By not finding the trap door, is that entire story branch closed off to me for good?

This is a good question, and one that is debated amongst DMs - the Quantum Ogre Problem. If the party chooses the left door, do they never encounter the ogre behind the right door? Or do they always encounter an ogre, because the DM has decided There Will Be An Ogre Encounter, and the door it's behind isn't set until they choose one?
posted by EndsOfInvention at 6:21 AM on January 18, 2021 [11 favorites]


also in fairness, I have a fellow player who's running a rogue who's always asking the DM if they can hide just by getting behind another player or sneak down a hallway without cover while it's being actively monitored by guards. More than any other class, rogues feel like they're setup to test the DM's boundaries.

Likewise in fairness, I've had DMs who felt free to ignore the rules when they felt like it, even in situations where they really had no wiggle room to do so. There's a class in Pathfinder called the shadowdancer that gets cool shadow powers, like being able to hide in plain sight if they're within ten feet of a shadow... and this DM simply refused to allow me to do so, because they thought that I was trying to physically hide in the shadow. It's not rule lawyering if it's explicitly stated in the rules, and railroading is failing GM 101.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:26 AM on January 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I had one game where I had not had any time to write anything, but I did have some backstory from previous games available, so I ran a murder mystery.
What I did was to create a murder scene with a load of clues on it. Or at least clue like objects. The players looked at a few of them and theorised what they might mean and decided which ones to follow up on.

Then I created the rest of the game around their theories about the clues.
So as they investigated the clues they built up a whole web of theories about what they meant. The ones which fit their theory got reinforced and the ones that didn't were turned into red herrings.
They had a few encounters to get more info (which was all based on what they had theorised earlier in the game) and eventually were super excited when they found the murderer.

They were very excited to have masterfully figured out my devilishly complicated murder mystery. But of course did not realise that they had written it themselves.

So, that's one way it can go. The story doesn't need to be fixed in advance.
Maybe they didn't find a trapdoor. It only matters if you decide it was relevant later.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 6:40 AM on January 18, 2021 [49 favorites]


By not finding the trap door, is that entire story branch closed off to me for good? Can I restart the game and try again to see if I'm missing something?
one of the experiments that my gaming group has gotten into is running one campaign but letting ourselves rotate who is DMing. It was an adaptation to pandemic and political crisis times as each of us has had a variable number of spoons based on work/unemployment/health/family needs, and so couldn't commit to an open-ended DM gig but could manage running a story for a few months.

So for, say, four months earlier last spring, I ran an arc involving players investigating this demonic cult, then let one of the players take over and I picked up one of the NPCs as my character, and they started a slave-busting arc that was related to that cult, and we're currently considering a proposal from another player to run a short arc playing some of the NPCs that the characters cross paths with, exploring one of the other factions and a plot branch we didn't pursue. We have a common world doc that tracks plot hooks, storylines, character agendas, etc. and it's been really fun seeing what different friends do with ideas that I dropped in a year ago, as well as letting my own imagination run with potential plots that they're weaving.

It's not for everyone. You need some mature DMs who don't need to make their NPCs the center of all attention and aren't super possessive about the story. And some players just want to navigate through a finite number of plot branches and get satisfaction out of "completing the material", but I really appreciate the way this rotating model has allowed my group to get into some deeper collaborative storytelling and see what we can create together.
posted by bl1nk at 7:27 AM on January 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


This video also highlights why I find tabletop RPGs a little weird

This I find a little weird, that people now empathize more with a computer, or consider it more "real", for an imaginary ruleset than a referee.

When you are old enough, you also get to vote, in like, the government. Wait till you hear about finance!

Humans write the computer code, y'all.

*slams Arcane Gavel of Thunderous Judgement

I hereby sentence RonButNotStupid to Remedial Baudrillard Classes, after a short rest.
posted by eustatic at 7:57 AM on January 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Sometimes, sure, but often the gamer master recycles that into the next encounter or roll you happen to make. There's a certain amount of "illusion of choice" that happens at the tabletop. That's the usual joke answer; the game master just forces the same result later.


I prefer to think of it as the "quantum ogre" when I DM. Sometimes, the characters miss something and that's it; it was maybe a neat piece of lore or a side quest/encounter or some treasure. Sometimes, however, what they miss is crucial to the plot of what they are doing, and they might miss it because everyone rolled low or they didn't go the place expected (which my players have done on multiple occasions - in one case, literally standing in the doorway of the room and deciding not to go in after they had thoroughly trashed every other room in the place). In which case, that encounter/piece of information or whatever gets moved to somewhere they are going next; it will always show up.

To me, it's about finding the balance between "forcing a result"/encounter, and making sure that the players get what they need to advance the story without taking away their agency. (And sometimes its about moving an encounter because they went off plan and I'm now improvising like mad, and the encounter is prepped so it's just going to happen because its 10pm on Friday night and I just can't build things in front of them fast enough).
posted by nubs at 8:09 AM on January 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


Oh god, I have a player like this.
posted by TheCoug at 8:16 AM on January 18, 2021


In short, every new DM/GM/Referee should read GUMSHOE at least once.
posted by bonehead at 6:19 AM on January 18 [2 favorites +] [!]


Thanks for this. I guess I play DnD like a detective game. but you can usually read a GM for physical cues where the story is supposed to go

Like, if you are seeing the GM wince, and she's taking a long time on her turn, and she's no longer having any fun roleplaying, and has stopped all jokes or funny voices---you're in 'no fun' land, and you should invent a reason to have your character get back to The Storyline the GM has Prepared.

This 'Quantum Ogre' problem sounds like the same category error--the GM makes the game to have fun, too! Just read their facial cues.

The Ogre only existed if it was fun.
posted by eustatic at 8:17 AM on January 18, 2021 [13 favorites]


I DM eleven-year-olds. Any time they're in a town, one of them insists on trying to catch a cat. Every. Single. Time. Finally, this time, she natural-20'd her athletics check. Now she has a screaming cat in a bag.

-6 to charisma checks and -15 to stealth, and now this world has a Vengeful Cat God.
posted by gurple at 8:35 AM on January 18, 2021 [34 favorites]


More than any other class, rogues feel like they're setup to test the DM's boundaries.

BARD SAYS HELLO.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 8:48 AM on January 18, 2021 [17 favorites]


In the contest for which is the more potentially disruptive class — between charismatic bullshitters (bards) and amoral thieves (rogues) — everybody loses.
posted by darkstar at 9:16 AM on January 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


Monks, man. Monks are the worst.
posted by Mogur at 9:21 AM on January 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Likewise in fairness, I've had DMs who felt free to ignore the rules when they felt like it, even in situations where they really had no wiggle room to do so.

That's sometimes because the best GMs have a "rule zero" -- I think first articulated in a TSR Judge's circular from an early GenCon and now lost in time -- that pre-empts all other rules and has no wiggle room: "Aim for player pleasure."
posted by The Bellman at 9:24 AM on January 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


So, that's one way it can go. The story doesn't need to be fixed in advance.
Maybe they didn't find a trapdoor. It only matters if you decide it was relevant later.


That's one of my favorite speculative theories about advancements in science. The laws of nature, or even facts about what is where, aren't actually decided until someone looks. Silly, I know, but prove me wrong.
posted by hypnogogue at 9:30 AM on January 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


The laws of nature, or even facts about what is where, aren't actually decided until someone looks.

Your experiment is complete. It turns out the chirality of DNA is... (rolls d20, gets a result higher than 10)... right-handed.
posted by gurple at 9:41 AM on January 18, 2021 [12 favorites]


In the contest for which is the more potentially disruptive class — between charismatic bullshitters (bards) and amoral thieves (rogues) — everybody loses.

Maybe because I played with a simulationist group for a decade or more, I don't find either of those to be that bad. Continuous, predictable application of consequences is, IMO, the gateway to non-teenager play (i.e. my rogue sets the inn on fire killing everyone inside to avoid paying my 1 silver bar tab). Just have reasonable things a bullshitter can get away with or limits to how far the evil league of bartenders will go for amoral tab-skippers. Shenanigans are fun, but amoral murder-hoboism gets old real fast.

I have a very fast-talking bard at my table; he's IRL a successful salesman. So I give him things he can certainly do, but you can't magically charm[*]/talk a king to give you their crown even with the best roll. At best, you'll get a laugh out of them and a call for more wine for such a fine joke. At worst, you're imprisoned for execution for lèse-majesté the next dawn. That's a really hard check to make---going to prison for a few whiles or banishment from the kingdom are the "average" results there. For something like this, I would warn a player that this might be really rude and then ask "Is that really what you want to do?"

The harder challenge for me, and the more important one is making sure all the players do get their chances to have fun and it's not the big talkers or the edgelords want to be spotlight hogs all the time. So we have a deal that everyone has to take a supporting character role for someone else as often as they take the lead. That seems to work pretty well.

The DM's simulation issues in the video are pretty easily solvable really; it's that the rogue insists on being the centre of attention for the whole time is the bigger table problem in my view.

[*] Charm in D&D 5e terms specifically means "making someone think you're their best friend" for a time. There are stronger ensorcelments to bend wills further.
posted by bonehead at 10:00 AM on January 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


Zoom D&D has basically become most of my social life (outside social media) since the pandemic began.

We both work at home. No parties. No friends over. We don't go out, except to shop, when we need to. I go for walks alone just to get outside. But we're in 1-2 games a week, and 1 or 2 on the weekends, and sometimes it feels like it's not enough.

At 47, I would feel like maybe that's kinda weird, but hey, pandemic. Shrug.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 10:01 AM on January 18, 2021 [12 favorites]


I've had tabletop RPG sessions that went like this, nothing to do with Skyrim players :)

Can confirm. Skyrim was released in 2011, which is thirty years after one of my fellow players in a high school AD&D game established the SOP of, “I kick open the door and slice everything inside to ribbons.”

My thought watching this is that any good GM with this scenario would have told the player, “Yes, you see a trapdoor at the back of the tavern but there is an occupied chair sitting atop it.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:31 AM on January 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I watched the same person's follow-up about rogues ruining D&D and wondered if the DM has ever heard of checks being adjusted for difficulty. Even in the post video I'd have made some of those stealth checks notably higher. Walking behind someone in plain sight, picking up their entire stock of large metal objects that clank against each other and then walking back out with them balanced behind your back would be at least Hard, which has a target of 20 (roll + ability modifier) and I'd have said more like Very Hard, which has a target roll of 25. That alone would shut down the shenanigans quite a bit.
posted by Karmakaze at 10:33 AM on January 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


EndsOfInvention: This is a good question, and one that is debated amongst DMs - the Quantum Ogre Problem. If the party chooses the left door, do they never encounter the ogre behind the right door? Or do they always encounter an ogre, because the DM has decided There Will Be An Ogre Encounter, and the door it's behind isn't set until they choose one?

YES! That's exactly it! I'm used to RPGs as being essentially a finite state machine. Whether I choose the right door or not, there exists a state where I do choose the right door, and that state contains either an ogre or has a predetermined probability of encountering an ogre. In either case, I'm just observing the universe and my observations have no effect on the structure of it
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:38 AM on January 18, 2021


IMO Tabletop D&D should be *more* like Skyrim -- an environment rich in plot hooks with interesting stuff to do around every corner.

I was impressed at how the the Phandelver adventure in the 2014 boxed set was like this. There were adventure hooks and secret factions everywhere, all wanting something from the PCs. That module did a real nice job of centering the player characters while giving the world motion, which is a neat trick.
posted by Sauce Trough at 10:42 AM on January 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


Continuous, predictable application of consequences is, IMO, the gateway to non-teenager play (i.e. my rogue sets the inn on fire killing everyone inside to avoid paying my 1 silver bar tab).
My gateway to "non-teenager play" was to not play with "teenagers."

in my experience, people who are more interested in disrupting and less interested in creating a shared vibe at the table generally need stronger social incentives than hit point damage.
posted by Sauce Trough at 10:52 AM on January 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


Apropos to this discussion, Sauce Trough, I love your profile picture, and I love that artist / adventure module!
posted by darkstar at 11:10 AM on January 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


I run D&D in a fairly sandbox way. Usually, following the advice of Mike Shea's The Lazy Dungeon Master, I have sketchy notes for three possible paths ahead. Some will have a defined adventure location - a dungeon, a ruin, etc. Others will just have potential trouble the PCs will encounter. I also give them hooks to indicate that, depending on what they want to accomplish, they can take one of several paths to accomplish this. Then I have tools, usually a combination of setting books and tables and charts, to help fill out details in any of the places they go.

One advantage of this method is that you wind up with adventures in your back pocket that can be repurposed. In the campaign I ran from 2019 into 2020, I wanted to do this one ruined fort adventure, but the PCs were resistant to the bait I laid out for it. This resulted in several sessions - all very enjoyable - that I basically ran from the seat of my pants. Then I redid the ruined fort adventure for a higher level at a later point in the campaign, and on the third try they finally got to it. It wasn't a quantum ogre, there was no point that a ruined fort was ever foisted on them, but it was a theme I reused for my prep a couple of times.

It's very important in sandbox campaigns that there are plots in the background. I've found that what works well is to have several loosely defined plot threads that the PCs can hook up at any time. Then every three or four sessions I'll brainstorm and figure out where the plots are headed given what the PCs have been up to. Maybe I'll drop one that they never pursued and make up a different one, based on what the players seem more interested in. In my experience, the most important thing is to find what engages the players (whether that's combat, sneaking around, finding magic items, getting to indulge in character quirks, etc) and figure out ways to make that part of the challenges in a growing story.
posted by graymouser at 11:12 AM on January 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


IMO Tabletop D&D should be *more* like Skyrim -- an environment rich in plot hooks with interesting stuff to do around every corner.

This is an excellent approach if your DM can swing it but it requires a hell of a lot out of that DM.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 11:19 AM on January 18, 2021 [15 favorites]


also, to the problem of "missing a clue and not advancing the plot."

I avoid this problem by not running investigation adventures. "What is really going on here?" is very rarely an interesting question to answer. The answer is generally something that is more beautiful to the DM than to the players.

But "what are we going to do about this?" -- that's an interesting question to answer, because the players are making decisions, they're protagonizing, they're not slot car racers or Skyrim toons anymore.

So I am biased towards giving players good and useful information about anything they're curious about and I've enjoyed DMing a lot more since I figured that out.
posted by Sauce Trough at 11:44 AM on January 18, 2021 [9 favorites]


Usually, following the advice of Mike Shea's The Lazy Dungeon Master, I have sketchy notes for three possible paths ahead.

That's the way I want to DM! Have a Big Picture story roughed out, and a lot of ways the party could get from point A to point B.

But COVID. I'm prepping everything for online (roll20) sessions -- battlemaps, monsters, art -- and it can be really hard to do all that prep between one session and the next if the party does something unexpected. In-person was so much easier.

So, I've started taking a break of a week or two after the party makes a big decision that affects the plot. I rough out the material for a couple months, build out everything I need for the first couple sessions... and then they're more on-the-rails than I'd like.
posted by gurple at 12:47 PM on January 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


IMO Tabletop D&D should be *more* like Skyrim -- an environment rich in plot hooks with interesting stuff to do around every corner.

You realize you're making this request of your friend sitting at the end of the table with kids and a day job and not infinite funds or time to prepare each week. Their tools for going off-script are mostly random tables and improvisation. Many will simply shut a session down early if the party wants to do something unexpected, so that they can build out their plans to include that.

I have a friend who tried this. He had job boards, NPCs with interesting plot hooks around every corner. Each had associated mini-adventures, or at least a session worth of plotting attached. He'd spend weeks writing. He ran a really fun game but two things happened. He really burnt himself out and even a couple years later doesn't want to DM. Secondly he got really bummed out that we didn't see most of his content and we played nearly 30 4-6 hour sessions in that campaign.

A fully-fleshed world like that is kind of a lose-lose for most DMs.
posted by bonehead at 12:50 PM on January 18, 2021 [18 favorites]


My usual gaming group tends to a lot of roleplay over combat, collaborative storytelling, and DMs/GMs building stuff around character backgrounds and random things players say. All that said, I've recently taken to running published old-school dungeon crawl modules refurbished for 5th ed. and the whole aesthetic of it has brought its own joys.

Why is this monster here? How is this trap still active after all these years & all this traffic in the dungeon? How does this room make any possible sense? Sometimes that stuff can get really annoying, and other times it's all part of the gag.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 12:53 PM on January 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


heavy warning: I'm gonna tell D&D stories in this post & no one can stop me

I mostly play in games run by taquito boyfriend, who's been DMing for 25 years & has these rules:

* The world exists. If you don't open the door with the ogre, the ogre's still behind there, and if he's not locked in he can open the door himself whenever he wants.

* The world has its own history & current events. Elves & dwarves fought a bloody war for hundreds of years, dwarves went underground, the power vacuum was filled by necromancers who were dispatched by the Church, now the Church is having tension, etc. This may or may not ever come up as relevant but it's what happened.

* Everything exists as part of an ecosystem & is where it is for a reason. Creatures who eat magic live where there's lots of magic to eat. If we break the swamp witch's windows, we might very well run into her at the goblin market in the abandoned sunken castle, because she needs new windows & it's the closest shopping location to her house.

(By "might very well" I mean "yeah this happened & it was so awkward & the mage tried to hit on her?! and made a dinner date?! even though we know she trafficks mages?!" Anyway.)

* The NPCs have their own agenda & will keep doing whatever they're doing regardless of what the PCs are doing. If one of them really wants to assassinate the King, for example, they'll run attempts in the background and one day you might hear that the King has been assassinated or that some assassins have been captured. This might have nothing to do with what the party is off doing but it's a new world fact & has repercussions.

* The dice shake down how the dice shake down, even if this means your massively crouton-petting players drop everything to go spend a session rescuing a horse they like (Fancy Horse, he's fancy!) that got sleep-darted in the neck & fell into an underground river, then never stop making fun of you for saying "It'll be all right as long as I don't roll a 4."

Oh right, also it means you can wind up with situations where the NPC bard (Fancy Horse's owner, he's fancy too!) gets killed while riding a magic carpet & makes his roll to become a ghost so now he's a ghost haunting a magic carpet& the PCs figure out that the carpet works on voice commands so there's no reason he can't fly around by himself & then the party wakes up & finds he's been out all night picking up sorority girls at taverns, ANYWAY

* NPCs are 100% full characters with agency. Piss off the Courier's Guild and they'll stop delivering your mail. Ask the shopkeeper whose rental canoe you lost if he wants to rent you another canoe and he'll say "No!" in a surprised voice, as though astounded by your chutzpah.

* This is kinda the big one: The PCs can do whatever they want; events are taking place all around but there's no "main story" as pre-written, the main story emerges from the interaction of the PCs & the world.

This completely eliminates the "You missed the chest with the one key to the boss's lair" problem; any powerful entity can be a boss if you decide to go kill them, or not. (Also the "world makes sense" rule usually means there's more than one way into their lair.)

Someone might think the stories that come out of this method must be lacking in comparison to an authored story, but that's because they weren't there when the party was exploring an old unstuck-in-time elven ruin as part of the Trial by Labyrinth to claim Fancy Bard's body so we could have him resurrected (turns out he'd pissed off a LOT of sorority girls' & fraternity boys' parents by... being very sexy)

& we freed a positive energy plane creature that kept discharging positive plane energy & turning things sentient, which is how we wound up with a cheerful sentient flagstone that took its new existence in stride & a VERY DISTRAUGHT flying horse statue that kept tearfully asking us why we'd given it life, did it have some purpose or

& we felt terrible

until we got in a mage fight with Fancy Bard's brother on a windy bridge & Stone Horse wound up sacrificing itself to save the life of our pirate NPC then saying "It's okay, I think I found my purpose" before dying

not a dry eye in the dang house even though tb was doing all of this in the goofy-ass cartoon horse voice he'd established for the character

anyway that's what he does & I think it's a lot of fun but afaict it's a TON of work
posted by taquito sunrise at 1:05 PM on January 18, 2021 [22 favorites]


You realize you're making this request of your friend sitting at the end of the table with kids and a day job and not infinite funds or time to prepare each week. Their tools for going off-script are mostly random tables and improvisation.
yup, this is one place where the traditional all-powerful DM model breaks down; the DM doesn't scale very well and yet the D&D rules route all the activity of the game thru them. That's why the games I prefer are more player-centric, with the players driving the agenda and the DM largely in a reactive role. If the DM doesn't do any planning, then there's no planning to be ruined!

this topic is dear to my heart, I have written lots about how not to prepare for game sessions, mostly by offloading that onto other participants.
posted by Sauce Trough at 1:49 PM on January 18, 2021 [10 favorites]


taquito sunrise, that is a great summary of what I have been trying to do. My current storytelling theory boils down to this:

The BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy/Gal) is the protagonist.

The BBEG is undertaking a great project. They are the agent, the active party, and the hero of their own story. They are powerful, persistent, resourceful, and intelligent, and if thwarted in their project, they will route around the problem and keep trying. There is lots of other stuff ("side quests") going on in the world too, and the PCs can engage with the BBEG or not as they like, but the BBEG will keep trucking along, if not decisively stopped, toward their great and terrible goal. Re-centering the narrative this way helps keep me from railroading the PCs. Instead of saying "what should the PCs do to make a good story" and then trying to make them do it, I get to ask "What can the BBEG do to accomplish their goal?" And since I am the one in charge of the BBEG but not the PCs, nobody has to get railroaded.

This helps me cope very well with a party that has its own motivations, and lets them write their own story to a huge extent. They get to decide what they want to do, and since I don't have a plot written, they can't interfere with my story! I just have character motivations and abilities.

N.B. this system is easier to implement if you don't let the PCs directly interact with the BBEG until very late in the BBEG's plot. Really, don't let the PCs directly interact with anyone whose death spoils a lot of your written content. Entering a room with PCs in D&D is not always fatal, but smart NPCs avoid it.
posted by agentofselection at 2:33 PM on January 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


When I and Grant Howitt and Paul Dean were rebooting Paranoia a few years back, we pushed hard for the GM Screen to have all kinds of fiddly charts and distracting important-looking tables on the players' side, and on the GM side nothing but thick foot-high letters reading MAKE SOME SHIT UP.

(Didn't happen, alas.)
posted by Hogshead at 2:44 PM on January 18, 2021 [24 favorites]


D&D has been the only thing keeping my house sane in the pandemic. Both my son and I have 2x week Zoom/Discord games.

I managed to cross the streams a few weeks ago with Brave Fishboi Adventures, a one shot where everyone played a kuo-toa with 4 feats/stat increases of your choice. I asked my group if my son, who is 10, could join in, and they said sure. He played a Chef Kuo-Toa named Escargo and got super in to it, constantly gathering and cooking up random bits. Now my normal group is asking when he can play again.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 2:51 PM on January 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


yup, this is one place where the traditional all-powerful DM model breaks down; the DM doesn't scale very well and yet the D&D rules route all the activity of the game thru them. That's why the games I prefer are more player-centric, with the players driving the agenda and the DM largely in a reactive role. If the DM doesn't do any planning, then there's no planning to be ruined!


I've played and DM'd a lot of both styles, and not every DM is suited to taking either approach at a whim. Games like Dungeon World and Apocalypse World & assorted hacks are great if you have a DM who's totally good with the walls being made of paper and the story changing completely on any given player's whim. If you can run it, that's awesome.

It's not for every DM/GM. I don't say that to suggest it's a shortcoming on their part, either. Personally, I don't have the spoons to do it consistently. I've run it and it can be great but it can also be draining af and potentially leaving you and/or some of your players unsatisfied.

I would also suggest that DMing on the fly like that isn't really a Skyrim-like approach, because all that stuff in Skyrim was planned in advance. A DM running on improv isn't likely to give you that sort of detail and satisfying narrative as regularly as they might if they have prep time for a couple predictable scenarios.

Mileage varies wildly.

On a personal note, the weird thing I've found since shifting to a creative (novel-writing) profession is that I have to budget my creative energy. Changing gears from writing a book to game prep is costly and it sets me back on both.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 2:58 PM on January 18, 2021


I prefer to run off a vague outline of beats and improv the rest. My problem is that this involves me being able to read people at the table, something that is impossible for months at least. Turning the cameras on does not help as I end up getting overly distracted by my own image, plus I like to be able to see the glances exchanged between players as that's always a good tell when you have the fish on the hook.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 4:17 PM on January 18, 2021


For me, it's a warning sign when a DM starts talking about "writing" or "plot." As a DM, I create scenarios that players can react to however they want to. There are factions and actions going on in the world that potentially hook into character backgrounds, but if someone doesn't pick up a hook, I'll just throw another one out there. My brain comes up with copious ideas while walking the dog. I never lack for ideas for hooks that might lead to interesting places.

I don't love the concept of the BBEG either. To me, everyone's just an NPC until they come into conflict with the party. They choose their own villains for the most part.

The most challenging thing for me is when it becomes clear things are drawing to a close and various threads need to be wrapped up. It's hard for me to stop throwing out hooks and start throwing out resolutions. But players, when given the chance, are great at providing their own dramatic scenes and memorable arc moments. When you have a good group with history and trust, RPGs really shine.

I don't see how any computer game could hold a candle to it.
posted by rikschell at 6:26 PM on January 18, 2021 [2 favorites]



nubs wrote:
To me, it's about finding the balance between "forcing a result"/encounter, and making sure that the players get what they need to advance the story without taking away their agency.

Well there's the problem right there. My advice to GMs is always: If you want a predetermined story, write a goddamned novel. GAMES ARE NOT STORIES.

The story is what happens when the scenario meets the characters. It's the result of the players actions. I find railroaded storylines just incredibly annoying and constraining, as opposed to creating the setting, giving a goal and timeline for the challenge, based on how it affects the PCs, and then setting the player characters at it.


taquito sunrise wrote:
The world exists.

Honestly, AFAIC the world only exists inasmuch it affects the chracters. Otherwise, it's at best a waste of valuable gaming time, worst it's basically GM masturbation.

The NPCs have their own agenda & will keep doing whatever they're doing regardless of what the PCs are doing. If one of them really wants to assassinate the King, for example, they'll run attempts in the background and one day you might hear that the King has been assassinated or that some assassins have been captured. This might have nothing to do with what the party is off doing but it's a new world fact & has repercussions.

My attitude is generally, if the GM wants to do something like that, again they should write a goddamn novel.

I mean seriously, why are they coming up with something so interesting and NOT involving the player characters? Why is he really spending development time and game time on that? Is the GM expecting to just rattle off some background element and then the players will applaud his skill in coming up with something that doesn't affect them? I mean I see this time and time again, and it basically devolves down to a creative writing exercise.

Traveller got to be really bad at this. Pages and pages of the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society devoted to border conflicts or a civil war a year's travel away, that the PCs had no possible chance of affecting or even being involved in. And then there's World of Darkness with it's metaplot that boiled down to a huge "Who cares?" Was anyone even supposed to use in a game the fact that Baba Yoda got torque wrenched by Vodanyoy the Plumber?

Seriously, I get it. I have spent hours and hours creating planets and spaceships in Traveller, as well as NPCs in Champions and Mage and Aeon. GMs tend to be frustrated writers. But if it's not actually engaging with players, then it's kind of pointless in a game sense.

And anyway that is what AO3 is for. We can take our awesome characters and extensive world background (That totally isn't a blend of Tolkien and Game of Thrones- look at how different our elves are!), and post it for an audience of oh, at least ten or fifteen people! Two or three times as large as audience than at the gaming table! Just remember to turn off the comments...


This is kinda the big one: The PCs can do whatever they want; events are taking place all around but there's no "main story" as pre-written, the main story emerges from the interaction of the PCs & the world.

See, this right here is good gaming. Focusing not on ephemera, but in how the PCs deal with the scenario. Note that when you tell your gaming stories, it wasn't about "Oh wow, the GM talked about the political interface between the Church and necromancers. It was what THE PLAYERS were involved in.

Players and their characters, and how they react to the scenarios and challenged presented to them are important. Everything else is just a writing exercise.
posted by happyroach at 8:43 PM on January 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


I became used to a very generous DM who just created a world and then let us players interact with it while machinations happened in the background. Probably similar to taquito sunrise's B's world. This led to me valuing role playing more than solving the puzzle and having fun creating a story together with my fellow gamers. Cue my visiting and gaming with high school friends who were absolutely solve the puzzle gamers. Dear reader: do not actually role play with puzzle solvers who expect your character to just be a competent stand-in for yourself. Trying to role play actual written down flaws on your character sheet will not go well.
posted by indexy at 9:36 PM on January 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Is the GM expecting to just rattle off some background element and then the players will applaud his skill in coming up with something that doesn't affect them?

I used a made-up example & might have explained this badly; a better (actual) example is if the party finds some horrible Underdark monsters while exploring a ruin & reports it to a local lord, and that local lord is suitably horrified & gets some soldiers together to clear out the ruins, those soldiers are off fighting monsters in real time even if the party has opted to go do something more pressing elsewhere. Which makes sense as a thing that would be happening.

Then that war has run-on effects, and those effects have effects... it's not presented as "Here is information that I'm telling you," it's presented as "When you arrive in this town you chose to check out, it's absolutely backed up with stopped caravan traffic. [description of stopped caravan traffic]" Then if you talk to the caravan drivers or the townspeople, they'll tell you it's because of some war going on in the south.

It's a holistic system & the PCs are part of it, which is what allows us to be able to go anywhere. Because everywhere exists, meaningfully.

Getting back to my invented assassination example: if we meet an NPC who wants to hire us to kill a king, & we're like "no thank you" & go do something else in a completely different town, it strikes me as unrealistic that the NPC would change their mind about wanting the King assassinated just because we turned them down.

Then when you encounter the ramifications of an assassination attempt from whoever that NPC did hire it's a cool "oh shit" moment, especially if it throws a wrench in or changes the texture of whatever the party was trying to accomplish.
posted by taquito sunrise at 1:33 AM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


Lots of good advice here. I have an additional suggestion: If you feel that AD&D promotes an unhealthy dynamic in the game or around the table, try and get your group interested in other table top RPGs. It might shake things up and lead to a better experience for you all.

I suggest trying for instance Free Leagues's Forbidden Lands, if fantasy is your thing. It has a hex crawl and a bunch of material to run with low prep, and a campaign that can be introduced in bits and pieces as you feel like it. The rules are fairly simple to get into as well.
posted by Harald74 at 1:40 AM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


I created a bunch of compelling background characters for my game, with their own consistent intrigue and relationships. But then (in the session I mentioned above with the clues) the players needed to talk to someone I hadn't created, so whilst vamping a bit about their choice I threw together a Roll20 battlemap (or repurposed a corner of one that they hadn't been to) and randomly generated a character with an online random fantasy name generator.

Turns out my players don't remember ANY of the characters I had handcrafted, but they all universally love "Wisym Dyng" the head of the wood enchanters guild. some of them even have "Loves Wisym Dyng" on their character sheets as a personality trait.
After that I moved to a much more improv style DMing.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:06 AM on January 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


This is a good question, and one that is debated amongst DMs - the Quantum Ogre Problem. If the party chooses the left door, do they never encounter the ogre behind the right door? Or do they always encounter an ogre, because the DM has decided There Will Be An Ogre Encounter, and the door it's behind isn't set until they choose one?

Much also depends on whether the DM is running their own campaign or running pre-written adventures, especially in an organized play system like D&D's Adventurer's League. In writing an adventure for organized play, I relied on DM David's Four Essential Qualities of a 4-Hour Dungeons & Dragons Adventure. (A four-hour adventure is typically run at many cons, such as GenCon and Origins.)

Even in the four-hour format, DM David advises giving the player's a choice. In my adventure, the quest giver believes the thing he seeks is in one of two locations, and he doesn't care which one they check out first. After the PCs explore the first place, the quest giver tells them he's found more information and instead wants them to check out a third possibility. As written, the players will never explore the other location, though they won't know it at first, and it ultimately doesn't matter.

I designed the adventure so the players won't miss anything vital no matter which path they choose. But I hope they'll wonder what would have happened if they went to the other place.
posted by Gelatin at 5:16 AM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


"Wisym Dyng", heh. I can improvise characters with motivations and backstories all day, but names often stump me. So some sessions I've run with just a vague idea in my head and a list of character names I pull from.
posted by Harald74 at 5:48 AM on January 19, 2021


I remain very disappointed that my players didn't spend some time getting to know hobgoblin Voolish Khan Cistensi from Lyttle Mines before they killed him.
posted by nubs at 5:57 AM on January 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


Dear reader: do not actually role play with puzzle solvers who expect your character to just be a competent stand-in for yourself. Trying to role play actual written down flaws on your character sheet will not go well.

Heh. I see people arguing about this on Reddit.

I love puzzles, but look, my wizard has an INT in the mid-twenties. If we're role playing puzzles he just knows the answer, which would be boring, so we're not role playing, so everyone can jump in. Once we (the players) have solved it we can stipulate which character solved it in-game if you care.

(Apropos to the thread, I also think puzzles is where computer games mess up some GMs, who try to implement overly designed mini-games.)

a rogue who's always asking the DM if they can hide just by getting behind another player or sneak down a hallway without cover while it's being actively monitored by guards. More than any other class, rogues feel like they're setup to test the DM's boundaries.

I think about 80% of the bad stories I see in gaming tables involve players or DMs trying to communicate about the kind of game they want to play by arguing about the rules, instead of just talking it out directly. "In a Scooby Doo cartoon they can hide behind anything at least six inches wide, does that not work here?"
posted by mark k at 8:55 AM on January 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


I think about 80% of the bad stories I see in gaming tables involve players or DMs trying to communicate about the kind of game they want to play by arguing about the rules, instead of just talking it out directly.

Yeah, that's about it. I did have a good talk with my group before starting, which included a comment on the fact that while there were factions after certain things and a general storyline I had in mind, they were free to go wherever and follow their own priorities and that storyline could unfold in the background...but they've glommed onto it with a fixation, which is both gratifying and a little concerning because I can't seem to get to them move off of it and explore anything else now.

My ongoing issue is the player who described himself as primarily interested in the tactical problem solving parts of the game, not so much of the roleplaying; we worked a lot on his character concept because he wanted to play a Warlock. But not just any Warlock, one with a certain focus around vengeance that required some home design of his patron and pact. I pointed out to him that (a) warlocks are interesting characters, but they might be more role-play heavy than his interests indicated and that (b) there's already an Oath of Vengeance Paladin that might work well instead. But he kept insisting, and here we are now with a heavily home-brewed Warlock that he still complains about not being powerful enough on the regular. I've sat down with him (and the whole group) a couple of times to discuss the fact that I'm not interested in running a game where there are little to no limits on the PCs; that I want to put them in situations where they have to make the best use of all their resources to eke out wins from time to time. Not sticking.

One of the other guys who plays with us is running a more "monty haul" type of game and I was hoping he would get his fix there, but it actually isn't helping.
posted by nubs at 9:41 AM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


When I and Grant Howitt and Paul Dean were rebooting Paranoia a few years back, we pushed hard for the GM Screen to have all kinds of fiddly charts and distracting important-looking tables on the players' side, and on the GM side nothing but thick foot-high letters reading MAKE SOME SHIT UP.
Isn't like like every roleplaying game tho? A robust and colorful hardback that'll look good on a shelf, full of carefully detailed data about skills and weapons and armor and targets ... and a rule zero that says "you already know how to do this, but here is a good-looking book for your collection."
posted by Sauce Trough at 11:15 AM on January 19, 2021


Sauce Trough:

" Isn't like like every roleplaying game tho? A robust and colorful hardback that'll look good on a shelf, full of carefully detailed data about skills and weapons and armor and targets ... and a rule zero that says "you already know how to do this, but here is a good-looking book for your collection." "

Simply put - No.
Because every game is potentially someone's first game and also a groups first game.

Table Top role-playing is popular right now, (arguably) far more popular than it has ever been in the past, but no one is born knowing how to do it.
posted by Faintdreams at 1:14 PM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


If you’re willing to throw money at not having to do a ton of prep, there are folks who work as paid DMs / write D&D content to use as shortcuts. I have a couple friends who do this, your local game store probably also has employees who do this and could use the cash right now.
posted by momus_window at 3:14 PM on January 19, 2021


I love puzzles, but look, my wizard has an INT in the mid-twenties. If we're role playing puzzles he just knows the answer, which would be boring

ah, I see you've also done escape rooms with Kevin
posted by taquito sunrise at 7:26 PM on January 19, 2021


If you’re willing to throw money at not having to do a ton of prep, there are folks who work as paid DMs / write D&D content to use as shortcuts

Sly Flourish (referenced above for his great Lazy DM's Guide) wrote an entire campaign book which is much more usefully organised (IMO) compared to official material as it lays everything out to minimise DM prep. All the monsters you'll need in a session: listed up front instead of scattered through the chapter. All the secret info and rumours the PCs might hear or discover: listed up front so the DM can use them as and when is appropriate. All the notable NPCs: listed up front so the DM can quickly review their info. Going back to an official adventure after running that for a year was a shock, as I had to start skimming an entire chapter to make notes on the above info instead of having it pre-prepared for me.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:21 AM on January 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


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