[D&D] Hot elves, morality, and the missing initiative roll
JoyWriter:
I can understand that moral puzzle angle, I actually think it's a more healthy way to approach moral situation; where if you see a trade-off you try and subvert it so you can get both sides, or avoid both dangers as much as possible. All too many moral dilemmas that people pose presuppose no compromise solution, which I think is a pretty dangerous thing to teach people. But this bit is more important:
Quote from: Meramec on February 03, 2010, 06:15:36 AM
The table provides the seed content to aid my creativity, the stat line for the dilemma itself provides the parameters for the resolution to help give my creative decision regarding its interpretation some boundaries that everyone playing understands BEFORE the action is undertaken (this is the part that is vital to making this part of “the game” and not just “OK, John is doing his own thing now, when are we getting back to the adventure?”)
I've said this before in more words, but I think active choices include prediction (passive agreement is going along with what already happened, actively choosing a future event means seeing a bit of it before it happens). In that sense getting players to agree to unknown stuff is a trade-off between unpredictability and predictability, and putting bounds on things. So I totally agree with you in that sense, but I think there are two ways to do this; one is getting the rules to be the boundary, another is making yourself more consistent so that you can form those boundaries:
The distinction doesn't have to be between pre-written random tables vs arbitrary changeable GM, if you make structures that allow you to be more consistent. For example, you could explain that you are going to take a certain set of principles and use them to make stuff happen, and people could agree to that, but if you're anything like me, 2 hours in when getting tired, and trying to make sure everyone is having a chance to contribute, you might break those rules. You can wait for that to happen and then allow players to call you up on those rules, pulling back, or you can set up systems to take over the more automatic "state tracking" stuff you were doing and focus on making sure you keep that, with reminders to keep you on track.
In other words, people will be willing to trust you to be a portion of the game's rules if you are principled and trustworthy (well, they'll trust you if you're much less than that if the game isn't very important), so you don't need to worry about being seen to act as the "avatar of the rules" especially as you yourself will be writing those rules! To a certain extent, people are already trusting you in just that way with all the hacks you're doing.
I think there is massive value to random tables in causing cool stuff to happen, but in my experience they are valuable because they force you to react to something different, act as a prompt if you're getting into a rut. They don't back you up much in your decisions. Now having said all that there is one way I can think of using randomisation, and that's for producing unexpected connectivity: Depending on the person, it can be very easy to focus almost all of your attention on the thing in front of you, the specific event and the players. (It may even be required by the system you use or the density of colour vs the pacing etc.) So when it gets all head-underwater, it's useful sometimes to add in different themes or relationships that you might not have expected.
Now that's probably still not very clear, but basically what I'm talking about is creating a list for yourself of interesting background groups/conflicts on one side, and themes on the other. So every now and again you can force-ably link things into "the plot" rolling on this table you've made of about 10 broad setting themes (either in the form of group agendas, issues or conflicts), which are there to cross-cut stuff and gain depth from each particular application. This kind of thing will often shift dramatically who and why the big bad is, and add the possibility of any scene being "important" according to one criteria.
As for ways to populate this random table, you can pull ideas from books you read, or even poems (a surprisingly dense source of themes if you pick the right kinds of collections), particularly ones you have a bit of a handle on but wouldn't know where to start; applying them to the situations that come up will give you a place to start!
But back to principles and why they can be more effective; with those examples I gave in the first post I tried to add to each consequence a pattern behind it that is consistent enough to be understood; not merely saying "the gods'll smite ya" but turning it into a general thing that happens, including to characters that are not the PCs.
So putting those two together, you might have the theme of "children" come up randomly, but then the moral feedback system that engages is the same one that has always been operating. In terms of your table/stats, the content that you start with is defined by the table (or you if you come up with stuff), but it's severity is not marked on a single table, but according to it's correspondence to certain patterns. In terms of old-school intuitions it's more like trap trigger conditions.
You can make it so you get away with even the most dodgy acts if you do it out in the wilds, or you can use the same random connectivity approach to say that perhaps this secluded spot is actually visited by a set of druids every winter, so they'll find all the burnt bodies and have an idea what happened. That can be done by the same approach; table of travel/trade situations, and rolling to see if any apply, then attaching the "other end" of the connection either to the nearest or most logical town, or just randomly selecting one.
Loads of possibilities!
Quote from: Meramec on February 02, 2010, 10:02:41 PM
I wish there were a way for the players to generate these situations, though. They can direct so much of the action and make the game their own through choosing where to explore in the game world, whether to settle down or lead a bandit horde or serve the Goddess of Goodness and Light (at least when you play D&D in an open-ended setting-based way.) But they can’t force these sorts of dilemmas themselves, because they require DM and other-player buy-in. They could possible create them in the way the player created the hot elf, but it seems to me it needs a bit more support than that.
You've hit on something super-interesting there, when players take on GM-like roles, contributing stuff because they think it will do a cool thing to the story, rather than because they are all hunkered down in their characters psyche. I see it a lot in new roleplayers who are already practised at using their imaginations collaboratively, and there are quite a few games that focus on it as the primary focus of play (Universalis comes to mind immediately).
Looking back it seems the "hot elf" actually already did require player buy in, and he didn't really get much of it! Player-supplied content can flop just like GM-supplied content, which in itself isn't so bad. As to support to make it interesting, with the sort of system I outlined above, you could have players suggest themes for the setting at the start, and periodically you could assess what you're doing with them and whether to change them. The players would still be able to suggest avenues of conflict, but they wouldn't know when they would appear. There are a lot of other ways to do it, and I'm almost tripping over myself avoiding braindumping into this comment field, so I'll leave it there for now.
Meramec:
athornton: Thanks for the vote of confidence and point taken regarding the rules-light system. I guess I want a rule system to help resolve things, but not in the sense of “any given action can be thrown into this black box and out shall be spit a YES or NO”. Rather, I want the resolution to spit out some creative hooks that I can then use to drive play as the spirit moves me. I want a social resolution scheme that doesn’t say “Roll d20+diplomacy vs a 25 DC to see if you convince the hot elf to join the party”, but that says “Roll to access a list of parameters to give the DM some guidance in how to resolve the action.” These parameters could be “she hates the party but will come along anyway” or more crytpic like “secrets are kept, wine is imbibed, and her past will haunt”. This way it’s not just a board game. Since I’m not a good enough DM to come up with that sort of creative material on my own during play, I want my resolution system to do it for me. I guess this is “rules-heavy” perhaps, but not in the WOTC D&D way where you have to roll to see how many feet you can jump and all that.
I did facilitate the players having fun, but I want more than that. I want it to be reproducible to some extent. I want to be able to write down the resolution rules I used and be able to play out the same scenario again and see how the rolling of different creative hooks drives play in other directions. I want to be able to play the same adventure over and over, even with the same players, and have different outcomes. I also want it to be enough of a “game” that there are player-knowable rules governing the manner in which I, as DM, am allowed to introduce new content into the game as a response to their actions.
Your “sit back and let the narrative win” scenario is awesome. You introduced creative hooks that the players grabbed a hold of to drive play in new directions. That is the essence of what I am trying to do here, except I realize that to do that consistently I need help—I need rules which aid me in generating these creative hooks.
I find myself in conflict between the “game” of it and the “narrative” of it. For example, there were several chase sequences that I completely flubbed because I didn’t know how to resolve the “game” part of it. I lost the “narrative” completely because I was just like “OK, so the bandits know the woods better than you and are just as fast as you therefore you can’t catch them” because that seemed reasonable from a “game” standpoint. It completely ruined the “narrative”, however. I am trying to link the two via resolutions a bit more strongly, but without each completely losing their individual souls.
You ask if you can add these elements and still be playing D&D? Well, I don’t so much care whether I am still playing D&D as much as I care whether the game I am playing is the one I want. My understanding of Dogs in the Vineyard is that the mechanics drive play towards moral dilemmas and then the mechanics are there to resolve the situation on the moral level as opposed to the “can I do it?” level. If you are willing to shoot the 8-year old in the face, say, then you can do anything—the only thing stopping you from accomplishing something is putting up on the player level with the morality of what it costs your character. I am not really after that. I still want the “can I do it?” to be determined in part by stats on the character sheet (to me, that makes it a “game”). I just want some direction for how to adjudicate the results. It’s just a system to tack on to D&D or any other game of its ilk, not something to redefine the entire way a player thinks about the game.
I’d say Essential D&D is just open-ended imaginative group problem-solving within a magical and dangerous environment.
Adding to that a system whereby players can challenge themselves in some way--morally, spiritually, intellectually--is not severing D&D from its own essence.
Daniel: point taken Re: the “severity” of killing a baby. It seems from one perspective the reason to have moral dilemmas during play is to reflect on the situations as players (if I read your soccer video game analogy correctly) and that if it becomes just another number-crunching resource management process then such reflection is robbed from the players. I guess I was hoping to split the difference—allow the players who want to engage in the moral dilemma for “narrative” or personal reasons to be so absorbed while not alienating the players who are not interested in such play. I can see how it could end up satisfying neither rather than drawing both in perhaps.
I don’t think I want a table with “lizardfolk mothers in a fire” as a random encounter—what I want is a table that helps guide me as DM how to resolve the fallout from setting lizardfolk mothers on fire. As you point out, the adventure as written provided for this possibility, and it also provides zero guidance as to how to turn it into a “burning sandbox” where the non-combat results of the actions are adjudicated within the “game” without the DM just “making stuff up.”
I like your notion of "burning sandbox" where moral dangers abound just like physical ones. This is a great way of summing up some of my wordiness in previous posts. To me, in order for the moral dangers to be a real part of the "game", then there must be rules to cover how to resolve their outcomes. And this is what I'm driving at with all the talk of "tables" full of content to help focus the way I as DM am allowed to introduce stuff to the imaginary field of play in response to various actions. (In comparison, the combat rules do this: if I roll a 1 for the goblin attack, then I am not allowed to add to the imaginary events the element that "the goblin hits you for 8 points of damage" because the resolution system says the 1 is a "miss". I just want a similar system for noncombat resolutions.)
Callan: I don’t know that I’d say I want to “impose my sense of justice” or anything, although I suppose by statting up the moral fallout of encounters I am necessarily saying that the writer of the moral dilemma gets to impose his or her sense of right and wrong on those playing the game. This leads to more issues, I think. You must have some human arbiter in the loop regarding these things and the game must impose some sort of consistent definition of good and bad else you have players taking the same action but assigning to it different morality stats. I need to think on this more. Thanks for the question.
contracycle: the revenge attack is a fine idea, but I have two issues with that: (1) I am probably too lazy to come up with such a thought on my own in the heat of play and (2), even if my laziness is overcome by surge of creativity I feel like I am no longer playing a “game” because I am introducing elements to the imaginary world based on absolutely no input from the system at all. I feel that to play the “game” means to introduce elements in a way at least partly prescribed by the game. If I am playing Temple of Elemental Evil and take out the green slimes on the stairway to the moathouse dungeon then I am actually NOT PLAYING that adventure. So, I want each scenario to have the ability to be respected on its own, in a sense, and any ad-libbing I do must be through the prism given to me by the scenario.
For the lizardman situation, I want there to be a system in place to tell me the parameters acceptable for the fallout of the action. Is a revenge attack appropriate? What is the severity? Are there higher powers invovled? Do the hirelings find out? Etc.
I don’t want every step planned out, but I want some creative push to help me come up with stuff and to reign in and focus the things I add to the imaginary world that are not already given.
I don’t know that I want a rules system to drive players into troubled situation. I just want one that helps me resolve the non HP related results of them when they arise.
JoyWriter: I like what you say about boundaries using rules or my own internal consistency. I guess I see value in the resolution being a formal part of the rules, as this establishes at the social level that the “game” actually does include such things. And although I reference “tables” a lot, I don’t really care if the resolution is in table form. Tables are just a shorthand way to write “some sort of systematic method.” It could be a full-on state machine whose transitions I’d calculate on the fly or a list of short poems which I'd allow to move me towards some path.
Another reason for this is because it is just more rewarding for me. I’d rather PLAY the game while DMing than see the DM role as just providing fun for the “players” (as if I weren’t one of them.) Getting to riff off of awesome seed content within a constrained way is really fun and rewarding and lets me as DM actually play in a way that I can’t do without the rules. So my goal here is one-part “help DM figure out what is going on” and one part “give the DM a game he can play, too.”
I love your idea about the list of themes and conflicts. This is close to what I am getting at. I need to further study your post to be sure I really understand it.
I am not too excited about getting hunkered down in character-psyche necessarily. I want the players to add content to the story because they think it will be cool, for whatever definition of cool they have at the moment. Sometimes it’s because “my dude is mad at his father for leaving when he was 5” and sometimes it’s because “yeah, I watched Die Hard today so I think it will be awesome when this inn we are staying at gets taken over by criminals.” Whatever. Just so long as we have a system in place to give parameters to what is allowed to be generated and players can decide from session to session what they want to get out of their play.
The way it is now, when a player decides to "role-play" a long encounter with a barkeep or something, the other player get tired of it after a few minutes and view this as a disruption and a waste of time. I want to get to the point where the player wanting to "role-play" can do so in a way facilitated by the rules (spend his "generate encounter" power on this or something) so that the other players see it as part of the "game" and not an imposition on their time at the table.
Much of this could be a reflection of my play group and may not generalize to other groups. This could be why some of my desires here may seem a bit off to some. I do think there is value, however, in accommodating a group of people who may want something different out of play that evening but who all want to play the same game together.
Callan S.:
Quote from: Meramec on February 10, 2010, 05:49:46 PM
Callan: I don’t know that I’d say I want to “impose my sense of justice” or anything, although I suppose by statting up the moral fallout of encounters I am necessarily saying that the writer of the moral dilemma gets to impose his or her sense of right and wrong on those playing the game. This leads to more issues, I think. You must have some human arbiter in the loop regarding these things and the game must impose some sort of consistent definition of good and bad else you have players taking the same action but assigning to it different morality stats. I need to think on this more. Thanks for the question.
I didn't mean impose absolutely your sense of justice - I mean imposing an influence. Imposing it to a degree. The amount you can impose it being limited by mechanics and so your going no further than the mechanics they know are there.
This is what you did with the lizard women and children carrying the treasure - as you noted, you realised you were pushing a pressurised issue toward the players. Because their responce and how it turns out is interesting.
I mean, I think your sensing that if you impose too much you'll determine that responce yourself, which makes play pointless. But if you don't impose at all you wont get pressurised situations. I'm thinking your looking at mechanics to help regulate that? Or does it seem way off?
athornton:
Quote from: Meramec on February 10, 2010, 05:49:46 PM
athornton: Since I’m not a good enough DM to come up with that sort of creative material on my own during play
Bah! (See below)
Quote from: Meramec on February 10, 2010, 05:49:46 PM
You ask if you can add these elements and still be playing D&D? Well, I don’t so much care whether I am still playing D&D as much as I care whether the game I am playing is the one I want.
YAY! Seriously, yay. Playing the game you (well, you and your players) want is the important thing and something that a lot of Serious [Insert System Here] Gamers lose sight of, in my opinion.
I'd suggest reading a bunch of different systems and seeing what works for you. Weirdly, Trail of Cthulhu (or maybe Gumshoe which is the generic form--and which I haven't looked at) might fit--the mechanics are all about "what does your successful (usually investigative) action cost you?" rather than "is the action successful?" Which is weird at first, but it grows on you. Well, grew on me, anyway.
As far as introducing creative hooks and letting that steer the story--I didn't even realize I was introducing the hooks. I don't think you really need rules support per se although I understand wanting your players to not think your decisions are arbitrary. I think what's needed is to realize that stuff you just threw out there may be taken to have significance by your players, and then the confidence to--and this is the part I struggle with--not say "no."
That is, yeah, it's your story you're telling as the DM, but the awesome comes from the player actions. And so if they suggest something awesome, even if it's something you were totally unprepared for, the right answer is usually "yes"; sometimes "yes, and..." or "yes, but..." but, usually, "yes." But to do that you have to believe that no lasting harm will be done if things veer off in a direction you didn't expect.
I find that reminding myself that it's a game and that there are five of them and one of me, and so if I didn't get to use my super-duper planned encounter, well, that sucks for me, but if they pulled off something they're still going to talk about ten years later (true story: just after Thieves in the Forest came out, one of the very first 3d-party 3E modules, we fired up a brand-new 3E game. The players went about it the wrong way, met the wererat, had no silver weapons yet, and one of them grabbed a fistful of silver coins and socked him....and rolled a 20. The moment is still remembered) then that was a win. And they'll never know that Draco The Irritable was really supposed to be in the Tower of Deceit and not actually where they found him in the Caves Of Unreasonably Foul Odor three weeks later.
I don't think rules help with this. Experience as the guy behind the screen helps with this--those nights when it went off the rails, in my experience, it wasn't because I let the players do what they wanted to do. And players who will tell you "DUDE, THAT WAS F*#@*$)N' AWESOME!" help a lot--especially when you're all like "I didn't do anything here...it was all you guys. All I did was roll hits and narrate NPC death scenes." I do have a Dastardly Trick, which is (I think) yet another Jeff Rients (if you don't read jrients.blogspot.com, you probably should) great idea: the Big Purple d30.
I have a Big Purple d30 at my table. Once per session, each player, and I, get to roll it instead of whatever die we'd usually roll for....whatever. Last session my group took down a vampire they shouldn't have because a Magic Missile did 23 points of damage. Letting the DM roll it once per session means that even if Otto The Flatulent is going to get pasted a lot faster than you planned for him to, he can put the hurt on someone. Players....usually use it for damage rolls, actually. I don't know why such a stupid trick makes everyone (DM included) feel more in control, but it really does.
But, in some sense, all RPG rules are really just Dumbo feathers. My advice would be, scout around and see what you can find between the full-on morality-poker bet-and-bluff game of Dogs and the "morality, schmorality; how many XP did I get" of straight-up classical D&D. As I've said, I think Trail of Cthulhu might be an interesting place to start, but the Sympathy rules from Dying Earth could work, or a Humanity Point tracking system, or lots of other things.
Daniel B:
Quote from: Meramec on February 10, 2010, 05:49:46 PM
athornton:
I find myself in conflict between the “game” of it and the “narrative” of it. For example, there were several chase sequences that I completely flubbed because I didn’t know how to resolve the “game” part of it. I lost the “narrative” completely because I was just like “OK, so the bandits know the woods better than you and are just as fast as you therefore you can’t catch them” because that seemed reasonable from a “game” standpoint. It completely ruined the “narrative”, however. I am trying to link the two via resolutions a bit more strongly, but without each completely losing their individual souls.
O_O .. yow! Very interesting!
A quote from Ron Edward's essay System Does Matter:
Quote
I have heard a certain notion about role-playing games repeated for almost 20 years. Here it is: "It doesn't really matter what system is used. A game is only as good as the people who play it, and any system can work given the right GM and players." My point? I flatly, entirely disagree.
"Whoa," you might say, "my GM Herbie can run anything. The game can suck, but he can toss out what he doesn't like and then it rocks." OK, fine. Herbie is talented. However, imagine how good he'd be if he didn't have to spend all that time culling the mechanics. (Recall here I'm talking about system, not source or story content material.) I'm suggesting a system is better insofar as, among other things, it doesn't waste Herbie's time.
When I first started reading this post, I was of the opinion that the juicy narrative stuff necessarily *had* to be at least considered beforehand, if not outright fully prepared for, because of the limitless possibilities for such things. Therefore it was pointless to build rules for their resolution, lest you risk building parts of "system" that a lot of Herbies out there must waste their time culling.
However, you make a great point!! Your comment on trying to link the systems without losing the souls of either really struck me. Not an ugly mongrel of game and narrative, but an economic and aesthetically-pleasing union of the two such that the two halves complement each other to make a whole greater than the sum of it's parts. If I may propose: the gamist rules should be like a swiss-army knife, handling all the mechanical issues quickly and efficiently, but should neatly sliiiide out of the way when the players (and GM) collectively decide the encounter is more elegantly handled "narrativistically".
How interesting would your game have been if the battle with the bandits began fully within the game system, maybe with a touch of the narrative system to handle the budding romance between a PC and the hot elf adventuress bandit (and with some link handling it's effect on the battle), before switching fully into narrative mode when the bandits escape into the forest, since the normal gamist rules simply fall flat in this domain.
Quote from: Meramec on February 10, 2010, 05:49:46 PM
I don’t think I want a table with “lizardfolk mothers in a fire” as a random encounter—what I want is a table that helps guide me as DM how to resolve the fallout from setting lizardfolk mothers on fire. As you point out, the adventure as written provided for this possibility, and it also provides zero guidance as to how to turn it into a “burning sandbox” where the non-combat results of the actions are adjudicated within the “game” without the DM just “making stuff up.”
I like your notion of "burning sandbox" where moral dangers abound just like physical ones. This is a great way of summing up some of my wordiness in previous posts. To me, in order for the moral dangers to be a real part of the "game", then there must be rules to cover how to resolve their outcomes. And this is what I'm driving at with all the talk of "tables" full of content to help focus the way I as DM am allowed to introduce stuff to the imaginary field of play in response to various actions. (In comparison, the combat rules do this: if I roll a 1 for the goblin attack, then I am not allowed to add to the imaginary events the element that "the goblin hits you for 8 points of damage" because the resolution system says the 1 is a "miss". I just want a similar system for noncombat resolutions.)
For a system like this to be feasible, I think it would either need to be tailored to a specific adventure, or you would need to find some way to pare down the problem. Even within a single setting, there's too much scope for a simple catch-all table. However, you switched me on to the idea of trying to find a system that could resolve general non-combat encounters of the "moral" variety.
Quote from: Meramec on February 10, 2010, 05:49:46 PM
JoyWriter: Another reason for this is because it is just more rewarding for me. I’d rather PLAY the game while DMing than see the DM role as just providing fun for the “players” (as if I weren’t one of them.) Getting to riff off of awesome seed content within a constrained way is really fun and rewarding and lets me as DM actually play in a way that I can’t do without the rules. So my goal here is one-part “help DM figure out what is going on” and one part “give the DM a game he can play, too.”
I like this. It's something I've strongly believed in for a while. If even the GM is not engaged and entertained by the very game he's running, the players certainly won't be either. You're right; if the system itself provides little nuggets of content into play that the GM wasn't expecting (outside of the content introduced by the players'), it certainly would be a breath of fresh air.
Thanks again for the original post, Meramec
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