[D&D] Hot elves, morality, and the missing initiative roll
JoyWriter:
Quote from: Meramec on February 01, 2010, 07:02:57 PM
One, however, decided the fact that the lizard men were standing next to the fire to be a sign. He tossed the rest of his flaming oil into the fire…and play just kind of stopped.
“Dude, you shouldn’t have done that.”
First part I love is that everyone decided that was a bad idea, then stuck with the consequences. The next bit is that you really wanted to hit them with those consequences, make things in the game matter and not just be brushed past, however light your intentions for the game.
Quote from: Meramec on February 01, 2010, 07:02:57 PM
I’m just like, come on, I want to be a better DM, so please give me some rules to help out!
Couldn't agree more, even if the "rules" are just guidelines of how to work it out. From my experience, the first thing is whether you want it to be
reputation with the victims, (now the lizardmen hate your guts, and either you will have to fight them again, or you need them and they wouldn't help you to save their life, or you start a war of retaliation between them and some guys who know you) which can be done by considering the attitude and memories with which different factions relate to your group, as well as who they might associate with you (maybe you're nothing to do with that lord over there, just sorted out some kobolds for them, but the lizardmen might not see it like that),
godly kerbstomp (delayed preferably, perhaps next time you meet some priests they refuse healing or threaten to sic an angel on you unless you sort things out with the lizardmen) which requires you to put a bit of thought into that god's morality and why their not calling archons out on all the goblin invaders,
or reputation with your fellows (there are links between the people you know and them which are partially friendly, and you have to do a coverup to stop it damaging your existing relationships) or something else entirely.
Other solutions include having someone else do it to you/your mates, and use that as evidence why they're "so evil", leading to embarrassment/shame among the group, and a guaranteed kick the dog moment, as you already know the group consider that to be going too far.
In another sort of game, it could just get you arrested
JoyWriter:
I gammy'd up the quote tags a bit there.
NN:
Some thoughts on your thoughts
- the main thing seems to be get all the players into player-invention and "failiure can mean complication"
- Its B2 , right? because that adventure is deliberately underwritten.
1. hot elf hirelings
makes me wonder: what are hirelings actually for?
- to effectively be PCs (in which case, do recruitment 'rules' matter?)
- a resource to be managed (balance the extra resources you can win by having them vs. the resources they cost)
- redshirts to keep PC death down
- trusted henchmen to specifically help their PC employer (for games with high inter-character conflict)
i think this is murky in the original game, but your solution would depend on your choice.
2. consequences
-alignment problems as already mentioned
im not quite sure what a mechanical rules would help, as theyd get factored in to the decisions, and so maybe stop interesting stuff.
-reading your account, i had a vision of the party having to later prove their heroism in front of some powerful good npcs...and their audience is suddenly interrupted by a fire-scarred lizardwoman and a militant druid screaming "babyburners". Also I imagine Lizardius as a mammallian-supremacist-maniac who know thinks the party are fellow travellers.
..reminds me of a D&D game a played about 5 years ago. We were stomping around Basic modules - twisted a bit to fox those who'd read them - and we acted like a bunch of xp-obsessed thugs. I was a bit disappointed at the lack of consequences...but in fact the DM was craftily biding his time...we ended up having to defend the Keep On the Borderlands against a angry coalition of everyone we'd ever pissed off.
Callan S.:
Hmm, yeah, just noticed with the combat that it's an opt-in system. Instead of going from player to player pedantically as if they are going to do some special action (when they are most likely just going to attack), everyone just rolls an attack unless they opt-in to a special action. That's alot more ergonomic! I'll tuck that idea away in my head, hehehe...
Meramec:
Wow, thanks for all the responses! The welcomes and thoughtful posts are much appreciated. Reading them and writing the following has really helped me put more of a name to some of the issues that were tickling my brain during the session described in my play account.
Callan: Yes, the player who invented the elf also burned the lizardfolk (he was the only one who noticed “oil flask” on the equipment list because the others mostly just looked at weapons and armor.) I’m still trying to think whether they were judging the player or the character. The answer may be that they simply don’t differentiate the two. I think that if the entire game were a series of moral dilemmas that they would tire of that quickly, but I also think that having them arise naturally is fine because it just creates more interesting problems to solve. I don’t think they are interested in “exporing a character” per se, but they are interested in trying to get out of tough situations, and sometimes those situations can be tough not because of the enemy has 100 HP but because he has 1 HP and is holding a baby.
I see moral dilemmas in these games as another sort of problem to solve, albeit one that sometimes can have a longer postgame resonance . The only issue is that the contraints are all self-imposed by the individual player. Without rules for what happens when you make one moral decision or another, you could have one player who takes these questions seriously and another who decides to steal from the collection tray because he needs 10 more gp’s to buy some armor. You’d effectively have two players at the same table playing different games. And this isn’t even necessarily a bad situation, it’s just something that needs to be understood and perhaps made explicit (at least in the mind of the DM (at least when I’m the DM.)) My response below to Ron’s alignment question contains an experience of mine where forcing moral dilemmas did indeed lead to problems, but I don’t think it has to even when the players involved aren’t necessarily there to explore such things.
I think if I’m being completely honest with myself, I’d admit that I had the lizardfolk women carrying the treasure precisely because I wanted to force this issue. So I think it’s relatively straightforward to generate such situations from the DM’s chair, but you don’t want to do so if the other players don’t like such play. (But, this applies to everything—you don’t run a game of court intrigue with a group itching for dungeon exploration. My players used to sing out “Da-da-da-da-da, Inspector Gadget…” whenever there was even a hint of a mystery in an adventure…)
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.
Ron: Yes! Absolutely I could have included her more in the adventure. She did remain as a recurring character in the tavern, but given the low roll she emerged more as an aloof figure than anyone really interesting. If this were a campaign she likely would have evolved into something else, but we only played a few hours.
The problem I run into as a DM is that the “game management” portion of the role demands a lot of my energy and my creativity takes a hit. I simply wasn’t creative enough in the moment to do more with the hot elf without help. I was thinking “OK, this player has taken 5 minutes just on this encounter and the other players are twiddling their thumbs and are bored, so I’d best move on to their characters soon” and as a result of my distracted play (and lack of helpful creative input from other players/rules) the hot elf never even got a name.
The thing about her was that she was created by the player, and I wish there were a way to encourage such creativity on the part of all the players. Perhaps that is a DM skill and I should just blatantly state “OK, tell me something that is happening in the tavern and how you interact with it.” Huh, that might actually work, and it might be awesome. (But I fear that if it’s not an actual rule that the game works this way some players may get annoyed with me in a personal way for “forcing” such play on them. If it were in the rules, then they’d roll with it because that’s part of “the game” (especially if it were tied into the XP system explicitly.) Maybe I’m just completely off base here, though, regarding player psychology.)
Regarding alignment, I ignored it completely in this session. My understanding of 70’s era D&D is that alignment has little to do with worldview and everything to do with which cosmic forces you “align” yourself and I find that notion to be unnecessary in my games.
In my previous D&D play, alignment has only ever served to cause problems. In my teenage play, it was completely messed up as we tried to figure out what “alignment” real people would have and many a session devolved into “your character so wouldn’t do that because he’s NG and that’s a CG action!” or childish philosophy of many sorts. In my experience perhaps the greatest negative in AD&D is its treatment of alignment. I feel that its loose use of the words “good” and “evil”, etc. can very well lead people who are smart but of limited perspective down an alley that, in my view, is detrimental to the development of a person’s philosophical worldview. The AD&D books advocate the DM tracking the characters behavior on an alignment chart, which implies that the DM can discern “good” from “evil” actions and the players all enjoy the same level of understanding of such things. Whether committing a small evil to serve a greater good is laudable or sinful is a matter of deep importance to the human experience in real life, but it is the sort of thing that the AD&D alignment system can end up leading kids into arguing over in ways both unproductive and hurtful to their longterm development as people. But, perhaps this is taking the topic in another direction completely, so I’ll stop here.
In my adult D&D play, I’ll illustrate the issues I’ve had with it through an example. I joined this campaign a month or so into it (the players were all good friends) and noticed they were using the Book of Exalted Deeds and the party included a character who had chosen the Saint template and another who took a Vow of Poverty. ( I consider the Book of Exalted Deeds to be far more objectionable than the Book of Vile Darkness, although I consider both to be WOTC extensions of the alignment problems started by TSR in AD&D.) Well, the rules in that book explicitly state that these sorts of characters are to face moral issues during play head on. So, I decide that it would be interesting if I make an evil character who is trying to repent of his ways and change his alignment from NE to LG. I play my evil-aligned character, however, as a good character: he gives away his own magic items to party members, sacrifices his character’s life to save another character, etc. I also made him suggest evil things, because he was still trying to redeem himself and I thought it would be interesting to see the reaction of the Exalted characters to his redemption quest. I wanted them to be my character’s mentors. Well, it turns out that they never saw past the “NE” on my character sheet and never enjoyed what I was doing. They judged my character based on one letter rather than on my out-of-game stated goals with him and his actions during play. Later, over a few drinks, we talked about it and the Saint’s player said “You know John, I just don’t enjoy having to make hard moral decisions constantly while playing D&D.” Turns out, of course, that he took the Saint template because of the mechanical boost and really had no interest at all in the sort of play I was introducing. And I believe it all came from the alignment line on the sheet. I could have made a true neutral character who suggested evil things and was trying to become good and play would have proceeded much more smoothly because the player would have felt less need to oppose my character (he’s not “evil”, after all) and could have just ignored or laughed off my suggestions rather than feeling he had to intervene.
Anyway, that’s my wordy reflection on alignment. I just don’t find it well-supported in D&D and I think with players who have significant experience with the game the notion of alignment is way too riddled with thousands of tiny slices of their personal gaming history that me saying “Alignment means X in this campaign” can’t modify their understanding of it. I drop alignment completely from my D&D games. Maybe others have found it added value to their play, but I have not. So, in this play report alignment does not factor in to the possible repercussions for the burning of the lizardfolk noncombatants.
Finally, regarding your last point, I’ve never played Tunnels and Trolls. I ported to this D&D game a simultaneous combat system I use in a game I threw together myself (which has a very different resolution system in its native form.) I’ll have to check out the T&T system.
JoyWriter: Yes! I wanted to make this event have consequences. The immediate consequences were that the character’s hireling started to view him with disdain, but the character died shortly thereafter and so this was never fully explored. (Actually, now that I think about it, the character died because he sipped a Potion of Poison that was found within the lizardman treasure… perhaps consequences WERE meted out after all!) Thank you for the suggestions, now what I want is good solid content like that in a table so during play I can dice for the kernels of retribution. What I want is a table that says “Roll Thy Die Herein When a PC Doth Indecently Act” and has entries like “betrayal of a henchman” and “action draws the ire of a local assassin”, and “traveling bard makes an epic poem from the misdeed and plays it in the local playhouse”, etc. I want the game to give me a seed that I can expand, reduce, ignore, or embrace as I see fit during play. Additionally, the players being aware of such a table would transform “oh, that’s just role-playing” actions into “wow, this is important” actions. If this happens then I think we have a new dynamic of play afoot because the players now know there are rules in place and that the imaginary things they do relate directly to a physical roll of the dice which will generate more imaginary things to change the course of the adventure. Without that “physical roll of the dice” step, it is simply “the DM making stuff up” and I think the players (well, at least my players) will feel that they are not actually plugged into this aspect of the game and therefore their actions don’t matter because they aren’t sure what the parameters are for how I’ll interpret or respond to their actions (is this the time he does nothing or is this the time the forces of Roald the Most Excellent One chase us out of town?)
Huh, I think this is the first time I’ve actually adequately verbalized this idea, even to myself. I think I can go work on that table now! Thanks for the comments! (To be clear: I’m not looking for a system that will exactly resolve every single possibility. I just want some help along the way. It’s just like combat—the rules for hitting and doing damage are there to provide a creative base for the real ebb and flow of the battle, which is driven primarily by the DM’s determination of what actions the enemies take—flee, charge, parlay, split up, cast spells, etc. The combat rules help me figure out when the goblins are scared for their lives and when they’re sure the party will become the first course in the Dark Deathless One’s Feast. I want, in a like vein, rules that do that for other situations, that help my limited creativity along in a way the players know and can anticipate, yet not predict completely.)
Tim: As I stated above in the response to Ron, I completely ignored alignment. I have zero interest in D&D pseudo-philosophical arguments regarding the morality of killing the children of Chaotic humanoids. I never would have used the children of such creatures in anything I prepared (I consider goblins and their ilk to be nearly supernatural evil incarnate forces whose only reason to exist is to oppose those who enter the depths of the earth), but I was sticking with the module and it, indeed, detailed lizardman and goblin family units. That said, there is a clear line (at least during the play given in this account) between killing Chaotic beings who are threats to innocent folks (which is what the initial attack accomplished) and hammering them more than is necessary (by torching them while they were retreating.) I have no interest in D&D as a “kill monsters and steal their treasure” game. What happened in the lizardman encounter was that the killing of the children changed the nature of the fight from “righteous defense of the Realm of Mankind” to “we are now simply thugs.” I guess the players subconsciously picked up on that and objected.
I, too, think the group regulation that comes up at seemingly random times during a game as violent as D&D to be interesting and weird. I think there is something important to that, but right now I can’t think clearly about what that may be.
Anyway, glad you liked the D&D recap! Of course I modded it! You HAVE to in order to play it at all! This is what I love so much about the White Box version of D&D—it’s not actually a game at all, but a collection of paragraphs which point you to where a game might be, if only you add in a bit of your own creativity. It’s like that game NOMIC, where the point of it is to change the rules as you play until someone wins (unless that rule has been changed.) D&D is about a “feel” more than “rules.” The AD&D hardcovers are the most evocative game text I’ve ever read, yet the game rules have all sorts of problems. This is why the “rules” are there to simply guide. Perhaps this is what I am after in rules for this game—a way of generating “guides” to my creative play. I don’t know. Haven’t thought about it at length in these terms yet. But thanks for bringing up the “you have to mod it” aspect of D&D, as I think that is critical to any understanding of the game.
More thoughts in the next post.
Thanks!
John
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