[DSA/D&D] How to stage a really exciting battle?
Rimke:
For 18 years I’ve played DSA now, which is a rule wise a kind of D&D (though I might offend DSA players by saying that). At first we played everything by the book. In dungeon chamber #whatever was monster #VeryScary 2 with hit points #TooMany and if in a fight it turned out the heroes were eaten by the monster then they were dead and had to create new characters.
Later on we changed our style. Now characters can be stupid and weak and still not lose the fight. All is focused on “Role Playing” which means that even the fights are staged. The GM cheats so no one dies and the heroes save the day at the very last moment.
This also doesn’t satisfy me, all suspension is gone, every body knows we are going to win somehow, and nobody is going to die.
Some people say it is just finding the right amount of monsters against the heroes and then play a kind of strategic game. I disagree. The best strategy for the GM (and also for the players by the way) is to single out one opponent and destroy that first. I will give an example.
5 warriors against 5 orcs, both have 10 HP and do 5 damage.
The warriors are stupid and attack each one orc and the orcs are evil and attack 1 warrior at the time until he dies and then focus on another.
First round:
Orc1: 5HP
Orc2:5HP
Orc3:5HP
Orc4:5HP
Orc5:5HP
Warrior1:Dead
Warrior2:Dead
Warrior3:5HP
Warrior4:10HP
Warrior5:10HP
Second round:
Orc1:Dead
Orc2:Dead
Orc3:Dead
Orc4:5HP
Orc5:5HP
Warriors: All dead!
Moral of this story, focus all attacks on one opponent and you’ll be more effective. In my experience players will do that when their lives are in danger (usually they’ll start out with each one foe though). But it will be unacceptable for a GM to behave in this kind of way, because a player will feel it is not fair to his character at all.
My question to all of you is, how do you create a really exciting battle in these kinds of RPGs? Do you cheat with the dies? Do you let characters die because of bad luck? Do you always punish “stupid actions” And how about “stupid actions” that happen because the player is just playing his role as a “naïve enthusiastic 16 years old” very well?
Eero Tuovinen:
Well, my solution at the time was to write 200 pages of house rules to fix D&D. It worked, surprisingly enough, perhaps because I'm not the worst designer on this earth at all. Stuff like focusing attacks on individual characters to kill them quickly can, after all, be worked around in a bazillion different ways, beginning with the loss condition: if being out of the battle does not equate death, it's not a problem to begin with if characters fall in battle. Another solution is to specifically give characters abilities that allow them to control the flow of battle, so as to avoing monsters ganging up on them; the fighter could, for example, use the terrain to force the monsters to attack him first, or he could even have some ability to attract the monsters away from other characters. Alternatively, you could attack the strange and unrealistic assumption that orcs will just gladly fling themselves to death by indiscriminately focusing attacks instead of acting in a manner that leaves each individual orc some chance of self-preservation; that's how real people fight, after all, and if the rules-system of D&D does not support actually protecting yourself, then the rules need to change.
Barring that kind of rules-modifying, my solution is to move towards genuinely challenge-based play wherein character death is celebrated as the highest stakes at the table; the player has to be able to choose it, but when he does, the death is never insignificant. Traditional roleplaying games too often recommend a kind of paralyzing DMing method that forces the DM to take control and responsibility for more and more of the game process, coming to head with the notion that the DM is responsible for character welfare. If you allow players to make genuine choices with real information, they can be the ones responsible for the life and death of their characters, instead. That solves most of the problems witha that play style.
Of course, all that first requires that the group has a coherent creative agenda. Often enough the first problem in this kind of fantasy adventure game is that the players are expecting all seven kinds of different experiences from the game. One player might be patiently waiting for the GM to lead the game into situations where his character can be a great hero who saves nations and slays monsters, for example. From what I know of DSA, it might be quite possible to play years and years of grim, deadly adventures with the impression that the real heroic, dramatic stuff is just beyond the corner. If that's what a player actually wants, then tracking back towards real challenge is actually counter-productive - that player really will get his character killed in the process of roleplay, perhaps "sacrificing" his life to "save his comrades", which seems to be the highest point of drama a drama-seeking player can reach in a traditional adventure game when the group is not actually looking for dramatic plots with heroic characters.
But if the group knows what they want, then it's not that difficult to give it to them by simply changing the GMing methods used. If the players know what is likely to happen to their characters if they go into that building, and if they have genuine options that include not going into the building, then it's not a problem at all if the five orcs in the building would probably be the death for the whole group in a heads-on fight; after all, they chose to risk it themselves by going into the building.
Rimke:
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on February 24, 2008, 08:15:21 PM
Barring that kind of rules-modifying, my solution is to move towards genuinely challenge-based play wherein character death is celebrated as the highest stakes at the table; the player has to be able to choose it, but when he does, the death is never insignificant. Traditional roleplaying games too often recommend a kind of paralyzing DMing method that forces the DM to take control and responsibility for more and more of the game process, coming to head with the notion that the DM is responsible for character welfare. If you allow players to make genuine choices with real information, they can be the ones responsible for the life and death of their characters, instead. That solves most of the problems witha that play style.
group in a heads-on fight; after all, they chose to risk it themselves by going into the building.
I'd like to discuss this idea, because I agree with it, but I think it is less easy than it sounds.
At the end of an adventure in DSA there is usually some kind of "End Battle" between the villains and the heroes. The heroes have little choice in this, unless they'd like to be cowards. Still this battle should be exciting, it should be the climax of the adventure where the heroes beat the villains. The best possible scenario would be that the heroes defeat the villains at the very last moment and win the day. But what are the real changes of that happening if you don't cheat as a GM? In my experience they are next to 0. Or the foes were to weak and defeated easily, or they were to strong and you have to intervere to not get everybody killed. Mind you, you could of course give them opportunity to flee or die, to give them a choice, but the frustration in my party would be high when I gave them an end battle in which they were not able to achieve a victory after a whole adventure of hard work, no matter how well they planned. What are the chances of a really exciting battle when you leave all up to chance? I think they are pretty slim. The solution might be that you cheat (which we used to do), but then it is not fair at all to let a character die.
I hope I gave a better idea of my problem. I am not sure there is a solution, some people in my group don't even need one. They feel tension even when they know the GM will cheat things so that everything has a happy ending. But one of my friends and I (who DM the most (we change DM every adventure are a bit unsatisfied with how things are going). We would like to a game where you have a "Heroic Death" as you described, where a dead means something and is not just a bad piece of luck. But I am not sure how we might achieve such a thing.
Eero Tuovinen:
Well, the heroic death I mentioned was actually me bitching about semi-play that happens when players don't really get what they want from play. I always felt that the heroic dressings the GM gave to a character when he died in some meaningless little adventure were like unto bones thrown to starving dogs to placate them when the GM himself was more interested in the grim mood of his game.
Anyway, that's not pertinent. What might be is this blog posting of mine, which some have considered useful. Check the accompanying adventure as well: it's not written very carefully, but it might help you see how a climax battle like you describe can be set up: my adventure does not presume that the climax will happen in the first place, because such a battle will only be possible if the players choose to take an adversial stance against the NPCs and monsters in the scenario. The adventure might happen in ways that sidestep the battle at the climax, or the climax might happen and the characters die in it; if the players were really grogging the idea of the game, however, they wouldn't be frustrated by dying in the hands of Nifur the giant, as the death would happen as a consequence of their own choices and their own decision to risk death in a situation where they could have chosen other paths, instead.
However, all that might not be pertinent for your group; from what I'm reading between your lines I understand that your group would like to have lots of plot and exciting adventure, with perhaps less hardcore stakes than the method of play I'm describing here. So maybe another tack is in order here: have you considered the simple solution of running the rules exactly like they are, with no cheating, but redefining the death condition? I'm not familiar with the details of DSA, but if it's as traditional as they say, then it should be pretty simple to just declare that the condition the game calls "death" is instead just "incapasitated", with the character too tired and wounded to continue fighting, but able to be revived in a relatively simple manner after the battle. This way you don't have to pull your punches when fighting, and the group isn't really suffering anything, unless they all die in the battle. And even then, if this train of thought works for you, you could just take it one step further and just stop putting lethal combats into the adventure. Just stop, it's that simple. If the heroes fail to stop the rampaging monster, have it lose interest and continue going wherever it was going in the first place when the heroes attacked it. If the heroes fail at stopping the evil mastermind, have him capture the heroes and throw them into the slave pits, from whence they can then escape. If the heroes fail to stop the evil demon from escaping to the wilds, then have them live with the consequences; no need for the demon to eat their still beating hearts then and there.
Other than that, changing the rules is still my first and best solution, perhaps because I love fiddling with rules. I'm reminded of a D&D variant I saw somewhere once wherein you could "raise the death flag" for your character in a given fight to gain temporary extra power, representing character motivation or whatever. Normally characters would always survive combat along the lines of that last paragraph, but if the death flag was raised and the character was defeated, well, he'd at least get seriously maimed if not outright killed. This way the player could choose which battles are important enough to risk death and glory be, heroic death starts to abound! It's not that difficult to make sure that characters can still die heroically, you just need to give up the control over it and let the player make the call on when death is appropriate.
contracycle:
Oh I just cheat and lie. There is a fundamental problem in this kind of "final battle" thing, which is that really we want the players to win. We want good to triumph over evil. And if the battle is REALLY fair and even only evenly matched, the odds are at least 50:50 that evil will triumph over good. Even if the "good guys" do win in the end, they will probably only do so with significant losses. And that means that rather than a final scene with Bruce Willis limping out of a burning building and gathering his loved ones together for a cathartic hug, you end up with characters mourning over the dead - and thats IF they even win.
So you have one of two choices - either the fight is for real, with all the anti-climactic, anti-story results that this implies, or the fight is fake, with an essentially guaranteed outcome, and doing it is a primarily a matter of stage-craft and storytelling. Having chosen the latter, I see my job as convincing the players that I could have/ would have killed them, more than any thing else. Its all about creating that impression, and nothing else.
Probably the best purely mechanical approach I have seen is that in 7th Sea, in which opponents are organised in 3 tiers from minions to henchmen to proper villains. Realistically, even henchmen are not likely to actually kill PC's, although they will probably inflict some damage. And what this means is that you are only likely to be killed by a proper villain, and thus such a death has more meaning than simply a bad run of the dice. If you gert taken out, it's most likely by the Big Bad, and at least you can go down knowing you went down heroically and at the hands of serious and important opposition.
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