Lamentations of the Flame Princess is made of lies
Ron Edwards:
Minor point: Vincent, maybe Eyes of the Overworld is the best reference phrase. Vance wrote a lot of stuff, after all. That's how I've been interpreting your "Vance" phrasing, so let me know if I'm reading you correctly.
Best, Ron
lumpley:
Yes! What I've been reading is Lyonesse, with Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga as immediate backup.
There are long stretches in Lyonesse that are a lot like long stretches in the Cugel stories, with the difference being that Aillas of Lyonesse has compassion and a genuine sense of justice, and Cugel doesn't. I'm prepared for the PCs to go either way (or any other way of their own). I'm not depending on the players to play their characters the way I'm playing my NPCs.
-Vincent
rabindranath72:
Thanks for sharing your experiences, Vincent.
I think what's most illuminating here (for me, at least) is seeing how a game designer/player not "used to D&D" approaches the core mechanical elements of D&D, and tries to frame them.
It's quite possible, as I see it, that the disconnect between the weird horror tropes described in the game, and the game mechanics themselves (character creation in particular) could have been correctly interpreted only by someone who had already been exposed to the D&D semantics.
If Vincent had already been familiar with "old" versions of D&D, he would have recognised the GM text as, to use a computer science technical term, "syntactic sugar." All the basic tropes of LotFPRPG can be found, mutatis mutandis, in, say, the Mentzer edited D&D. The latter featuring however more explicit Vancian references just by virtue of the game mechanics which reward acquisition of treasure/magic items, exploring and (collaterally) killing stuff.
In this respect, LotFPRPG references to weird horror tropes act as "noise" which the GM NEEDS to know how to filter prior to play, either to use it, or discard.
Cheers,
Antonio
Abkajud:
Wow, this is a great discussion!
Eero, I was really pleased when you shared this bit, way back on page 1: Quote
D&D (and LotFP, being as how it has that same die-for-your-stupidity-and-money-is-its-own-reward thing to it) truly is an utterly cynical world, I recognize that unwillingness on the part of the players to play the hero; it's not encouraged by anything in the system, and it can so easily become an unneeded difficulty that it's no surprise the players will most of the time gladly play immoral opportunists. Their characters will still do the right thing when presented with the easy opportunity, but the gravity of the risks in baldly refereed D&D is enormous; it's one of the few games where I've ever seen a player balk at doing the heroic thing when given the chance, when the same player will always take that option in your average narrativist game. The combination of random mechanics leading to random death for the brave ones and an uncaring universe does that.
^ This is the world I stepped into the first time I played a roleplaying game. It was a homebrew "freeform" game called "Quest" that ripped off Warcraft 2, Final Fantasy 3, and Chrono Trigger pretty blatantly, with the races of Warcraft and the classes and special abilities of FF3 and CT. Anyway, the big, strange new thing was that, somehow, my 11year-old GM managed to nail this cynical, horrid D&D-world perfectly. But he didn't do it through a set of merciless rules - - he ruled how all of our actions would turn out, based on our descriptions.
He created this world dripping with despair through a few simple techniques:
- he portrayed all NPCs as rude and hateful towards the PCs.
- he portrayed everyone as incredibly cynical, laughing scornfully at people who try to do the right thing
- he took our words in the most literal manner possible, like a Devil's Bargain, and would deliberately stop listening the moment he arrived at a response/ruling that he thought would be amusing.
In short, I hated his guts. Our characters were terrible at everything, what we did made no difference, and no one liked our characters. Clearly this was a one-sided form of escapism, and either he had a lot of emotional baggage for a 12yo, was some sort of sadist, or secretly didn't like any of us. Except the elf-mage. That guy got to shine while we toiled in the dust.
So, in any case, upon actually playing old Dungeons and Dragons, 1976ish style, well into the OSR, I was in love. Since the dice were calling the shots and the DM was trustworthy enough to hear our plans and ideas in a reasonable light (he was a bit sadistic, but not so much that it wasn't fun), any time we had a spectacular failure it was hilarious, or at least amusing and engaging.
When I was in 5th grade, playing Quest, getting zonked or taken too literally or whatever was a huge pain in the ass, and it felt personal. Intended. Honestly, it had to be - there was no mediation whatsoever between the GM's ideas and what would happen in play.
Playing Keep on the Borderlands at the age of 27, by contrast, was amazing. The characters were iconic - my thief, named something like Garrett Lampblack, was chaotic-aligned, and lawful people could feel it on him and know not to trust him. The castellan was old, bent, and wary of us wandering vagrant adventurers. The goblins were fierce, and cruel, and merciless.
The warriors charged a few goblin spearmen in the dark, and were cut down in seconds. My thief survived on rats and cactus fruit (or something) in the goblin-valley, long enough for the other players to roll up a couple of elves and come looking for me. It was great! Knowing that I could trust the DM (Adam Dray, as it happens), but not those scheming dice, made things feel like actual fun, and lots of it. I equally enjoy running OSR games for the same reasons: there's that "I feel 12 years old and full of wonder" effect that they have on me. It's great.
-- Zac
Eero Tuovinen:
Yes, my experience from the GM side of the table is along those same lines. The players in an immoral, cynical game like this need to be able to trust the GM, even as the dice will betray them again and again. At our table we have a very clear creative agenda now that we're approaching the 40th session: we all want to see how the game develops as characters are played to higher levels of challenge and we get to explore the world of D&D deeper, always moving organically and according to the methodology, not the content and preconceptions laid out in the literature. In this creative context everybody realizes that I as GM and the arbiter of challenges am very much on the same side as the players, insofar as my being audience for their exploits goes: I want to see them succeed, figure out the solutions to low-level D&D and move on to new challenges. This interest on my part just happens to be completely detached from my responsibility as a co-player, this responsibility being to provide an objective and real resistance that proves the skills of the players and certifies them worthy of getting to 2nd level one of these days. I find that D&D would likely be completely unplayable for us socially if there didn't exist a trust in the GM's ability to be fair even as he is fully invested in enjoying the antics of the adventurers: we all need to be able to trust that I'll let the ogres kill their party when they stumble upon them, and also that I won't put the ogres in there just to get the PCs killed.
(Of course the notion of "objective resistance" and "appropriate level of challenge" is all about constructive denial. The paradigm of our campaign is consistent, and it's challenging as hell, and that's enough to make us feel that the accomplishments are real and objective even as we know in the abstract that in the next town over there probably is some GM who lets you get to 2nd level without having to learn the skills and earn the treasure.)
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