I've seen a number of arguments for and against the presence of character social skills in tabletop RPGs, and further discussion on how they should operate in play if they're present at all. I'm personally in favor of social skills as a quantifiable advantage on one's character sheet. That is to say, I think a player should be able to buy skills and abilities for his or her character which make that character more capable through the game's mechanics of getting what he or she wants in social situations, be it through impassioned plea or conniving falsehood.
I understand the argument against letting modifiers to die rolls dictate the success or failure of social activities in play. After all, folks in this hobby tend to pride themselves on the "roleplaying" part of our hobby. We're dismissive sometimes of "those guys playing World of Warcraft" and their so-called RPG because there's no actual roleplaying required to get by in the game. Players of offline console or computer RPGs get a little closer to being able to roleplay a character and have a meaningful impact on the game's world, but they're still generally picking a canned response from a list of possibilities. A player can't have his character ask unscripted questions in the game, so the sophistication levels off at a point akin to a choose-your-own-adventure book with a dice roll happening behind the curtain. This is a sorry substitute for having the freedom to say whatever comes to mind when we roleplay at the table. Given that freedom in the tabletop medium of play, I can see why some would disdain relegating success or failure to a roll of dice.
Still, when push comes to shove, I can't let go of letting game mechanics help a PC out in social situations, and my argument in favor of this centers on escapism. One of the major reasons I play tabletop RPGs is to be able to get away from the ordinary life I live every day. For three or four hours a week, I'm not that chunky single guy with an under-utilized college degree. I'm a bold fighter or a cunning wizard with a world depending on my victory. I'm taking part in a legendary tale with the fate of the world resting on its outcome.
So we play, and we escape. We do it through a medium of words spoken around a table. We let die rolls alongside game mechanics substitute for the fact that I'm not a muscle-bound swordsman or a master of fearful arcane magic. Why should it be any different for a player who wants to escape by playing a silver-tongued seductress or charismatic general? Being socially competent is no less or more silly a thing to wish one could be than any other ability.
I think the medium is a big part of why people argue against the mechanical modifications to social activities. There's a freedom of will at stake for PCs and NPCs. If you, acting like your character, couldn't convince King Lockmoor to lend his troops to your cause, why should he illogically buckle once the player rolls the dice? I admit that it can threaten the believability of the fiction in some cases.
There are a few things I can think of that your group can do in play to limit the disconnectedness between what a player might narrate and the amount of impact the dice might claim he's had.
Let Uncomfortable Players Narrate Social Actions in 3rd Person - This is probably a less desirable solution for most games. The majority of players I've run into prefer to speak for their characters in 1st person. Still, if a less skilled player controls a face character, he or she may be more comfortable saying, "I ask him this," than he or she is stammering through the question in character. The more eloquent character's speech can be imagined as happening in the fiction.
Roll Before Speaking - This one may or may not work well depending on preferred styles of play. I think it mostly helps in situations in which the player is more charismatic than the character. If a player knows whether his or her roll has succeeded in advance, he or she can flub the execution or deliver smoothly in response. There's a degree to which this takes away free will that can grate on some players, but it does prevent the disconnect that happens when a really convincing argument goes nowhere because the dice said so. Alternately, the GM could fix the result on his or her end by making a reason for the NPC to take offense at or misunderstand something that the character said in response to a classy delivery. Basically, the GM canonizes a logical reason for the attempt to fail which likely didn't exist prior to the flubbed die roll.
Let the Die Roll Generate Hints - Couple this with rolling before speaking. If a socially-inept player with a smooth character makes a great successful roll, take a moment out-of-character as the GM to deliver some info about what would sway the NPC more. If a player is told, "The king is a known friend of the dwarven lord you defended earlier. If you can show some evidence that you're also that lord's friend, he'll be more likely to budge," that player will be primed to provide sensible narration.
There's a good reason that people are divided on the issue of using social skills in RPGs. The amount of reliance on die rolls and modifiers in social situations can have a great impact on how entertaining and immersive the resulting fiction is. While I understand that, I still think it's a greater shame to limit the breadth of escapism by forcing players to come to the table with a particular competency just to play a character archetype effectively. A little extra effort can help curb inconsistencies in narration, and I think it's worth the effort to let a player play his or her dream character.
Showing posts with label Opinion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Opinion. Show all posts
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
The Merits of the Short Campaign
Nearly every RPG campaign I've played in started with no prearranged endpoint. I'm not referring to a prearranged ending for the story regardless of character actions mind you, but rather a limit to the number of sessions or maybe a conditional ending such as, "This campaign will end when the outcome of the Nightmare War is decided." In my experience, most GMs tend to start a game with the intention of playing off into the distant future, telling grand tale after grand tale perhaps for years with the same characters in the same world.
And why shouldn't people play RPGs that way? Playing the same characters week after week is fun after all, and getting to play around in an ever-growing continuous story is one of the major selling points of a lot of different games. A D&D 4e campaign that goes from level 1 to 30 is structured by design to play for about 75 to 90 sessions lasting three to four hours each. (That comes to a minimum of 225 hours of play. Chew on that for a minute...) After you accommodate for missed sessions, holidays, and the like that's a campaign that will last for over two years even if played weekly. There are a lot of monsters to slay and treasures to find in that span. The game and its supplements have scads of content just waiting to be experienced.
Unfortunately, the real downer is that often it seems that waiting is the only thing that much of the content gets to do. The fact of the matter is that life gets in the way of the grand tales we want to tell, and before you know it a player has to move away or develops a scheduling conflict with the game. Next thing you know, either you can't find a time that everyone can meet, or you find yourself rushing your tale to a dissatisfying close full of loose ends just to ensure that the players all got to see it through.
I've personally grown tired of the sprawling campaign, both as a GM and a player. It's a structure that fails to fulfill its promises more often than not. I encourage you to consider the benefits of shorter campaigns. Until further notice, I've pledged to cap all of my future campaigns at 13 sessions. That's a span that, if played weekly without interruption, will last approximately one season. The most obvious benefit for this in my opinion is that it's a realistic length for people with lives and jobs to commit to, but it has other benefits too.
Deliberate Story Pacing - When you as a GM know that you have a certain number of sessions to tell the characters' stories, you'll have a pretty good idea of when to stop introducing new plot elements and start tying up loose ends.
A Taste of Advancement - Advancement intervals for PCs vary from game to game, but if we use the D&D 4e assumption of character advancement every two to three sessions, a 13 session campaign will certainly have space for at least four advancements. It's nowhere near the total breadth of the advancement available in most games, but it lets you tell a story across a pretty constant power level while still allowing for character growth. A span of 13 sessions also works well for games that have no growth at all like Spirit of the Century, for example.
Excuse to Rotate Games and GMs - Ever wanted to try out a new system, but found your gaming group smack in the middle of a sprawling campaign? If you stick to shorter campaign intervals, you can try new products and GMs more often. It will help keep the games fresh and will curb GM burnout.
The greatest campaign I've ever run (and the only one that I've ever GMed to the story's completion without something falling apart) lasted exactly eight sessions. It was a d20 Modern campaign in which all of the players played themselves on our college's campus overrun with zombies and other undead. At the end, all of the players were excited to have conquered the undead hordes, and they celebrated their victory by playing out a reel of "blooper footage" that they pictured playing during the credits of the imagined movie of their successful campaign. As I sat back and watched them celebrate the end of play, I considered that moment to be the finest "thank you" I've ever received for GMing. Don't rob yourself of the joy of a well-finished story, because there's more to RPGs than the journey.
And why shouldn't people play RPGs that way? Playing the same characters week after week is fun after all, and getting to play around in an ever-growing continuous story is one of the major selling points of a lot of different games. A D&D 4e campaign that goes from level 1 to 30 is structured by design to play for about 75 to 90 sessions lasting three to four hours each. (That comes to a minimum of 225 hours of play. Chew on that for a minute...) After you accommodate for missed sessions, holidays, and the like that's a campaign that will last for over two years even if played weekly. There are a lot of monsters to slay and treasures to find in that span. The game and its supplements have scads of content just waiting to be experienced.
Unfortunately, the real downer is that often it seems that waiting is the only thing that much of the content gets to do. The fact of the matter is that life gets in the way of the grand tales we want to tell, and before you know it a player has to move away or develops a scheduling conflict with the game. Next thing you know, either you can't find a time that everyone can meet, or you find yourself rushing your tale to a dissatisfying close full of loose ends just to ensure that the players all got to see it through.
I've personally grown tired of the sprawling campaign, both as a GM and a player. It's a structure that fails to fulfill its promises more often than not. I encourage you to consider the benefits of shorter campaigns. Until further notice, I've pledged to cap all of my future campaigns at 13 sessions. That's a span that, if played weekly without interruption, will last approximately one season. The most obvious benefit for this in my opinion is that it's a realistic length for people with lives and jobs to commit to, but it has other benefits too.
Deliberate Story Pacing - When you as a GM know that you have a certain number of sessions to tell the characters' stories, you'll have a pretty good idea of when to stop introducing new plot elements and start tying up loose ends.
A Taste of Advancement - Advancement intervals for PCs vary from game to game, but if we use the D&D 4e assumption of character advancement every two to three sessions, a 13 session campaign will certainly have space for at least four advancements. It's nowhere near the total breadth of the advancement available in most games, but it lets you tell a story across a pretty constant power level while still allowing for character growth. A span of 13 sessions also works well for games that have no growth at all like Spirit of the Century, for example.
Excuse to Rotate Games and GMs - Ever wanted to try out a new system, but found your gaming group smack in the middle of a sprawling campaign? If you stick to shorter campaign intervals, you can try new products and GMs more often. It will help keep the games fresh and will curb GM burnout.
The greatest campaign I've ever run (and the only one that I've ever GMed to the story's completion without something falling apart) lasted exactly eight sessions. It was a d20 Modern campaign in which all of the players played themselves on our college's campus overrun with zombies and other undead. At the end, all of the players were excited to have conquered the undead hordes, and they celebrated their victory by playing out a reel of "blooper footage" that they pictured playing during the credits of the imagined movie of their successful campaign. As I sat back and watched them celebrate the end of play, I considered that moment to be the finest "thank you" I've ever received for GMing. Don't rob yourself of the joy of a well-finished story, because there's more to RPGs than the journey.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Now Playing: Savage Worlds
The only game I'm participating in right now is a Savage Worlds game in the D&D campaign setting of Eberron. The group is playing over Skype and without any miniatures or maps, so perhaps I'm not getting the as-it-was-intended SW, but so far, I'm not finding it to be the incredible system that many on the internet claimed it to be. I'm not saying that people who dig the system are having bad/wrong fun, but rather that my personal quirks and tastes aren't leaving me with a net-positive opinion. I'm reluctant to call this post a review even though I'll be judging the game in some capacity. Think of this more as a description of the system through my eyes and expectations from the player perspective.
PROS
Simple, Frequent Advancement - When you advance in SW, you do so in a discrete chunk of capability. Characters earn about two experience points per session, and gain one advance for every five points. An advance is usually a boost to a skill or two or a new ability (called an edge), and you're free to shop the whole system for anything that your character meets the prerequisites to get. I'm leaving out a few additional nuances to it, but that's it for the most part. There's no going over your entire sheet to adjust all of the math upward at once. You just pick and go.
Meaningful Character Features - Every widget you can stick on your character is a big thing. This is a nice change from D&D and similar games where you might pick a feat that gives a +1 to a die roll in a specific circumstance. In SW, an advance you pick up might let you do something like attack all adjacent foes at once, or cast a new spell.
Accessible Price Point - Not enough good can be said for having a printed, full-color core rulebook available at a $10 price point. Even the most casual players can afford to have the rules on-hand.
CONS
Spell Points - I'm playing a bard in the game, and finding the spell point system to be a downer. Spell point systems in general leave a bad taste in my mouth because when they're done like they are in SW, they come off as saying, "You may have this much fun before you lose potency."
Lethality - I've heard people say that the lethality of SW depends a lot on the GM, but for what I've played, it seems like characters can be driven from not-a-scratch to death's door in the space of one rotten round. I tend to prefer a game where the characters have more time to intervene over the course of their downward plunge when they're ganged up on.
Death Spiral - The death spiral in SW feels harsh. It takes four wounds to drop a character, and each wound along the way applies a -1 to all die rolls. This seems to have the power to really tip the momentum of the fight quickly, particularly if one side makes a solid alpha strike on the other.
Low Default Starting Power Level - The game isn't kidding when it calls starting characters "Novices." Before you take disadvantages, all of your five primary attributes balance to the human average and you only have an edge if you're a human. (So for every above average one you have, you need a below average attribute.) Now this could easily be remedied by starting at Seasoned (four advances in) or Veteran (eight advances in) ranks, but because the game pitches starting at Novice as the default, I'd speculate that's where most GMs start their games. It's where my GM started ours, and I'm finding a disconnect between the starting power level of a D&D character that I'm expecting to emulate and the SW power level that I actually have.
Disadvantage System Feels Weak - Players can take disadvantages for their characters to gain more resources for character creation, but they're inconsistent in their potency. Some are strictly qualitative while others affect the game math. For example, Heroic (your character can't say no to people in need) has the same value as One Arm (You're missing an arm. -4 to all checks normally requiring two hands). The game advises giving bennies (re-roll tokens) to characters who play their hindrances well, but if your character changes legitimately through play, he might still be stuck with a personality based hindrance until he buys it off somehow (which, to my knowledge, isn't an option in the core rules). Furthermore, the impact of personality hindrances depends on the GM regularly forcing the character into a situation where his quirk causes trouble to make the hindrance actually function as intended.
All of the above said, I reiterate that I play over the internet and without miniatures for combat, which may improve the experience, but the bulk of my distaste for the system is seated factors seemingly not dependent on those missing pieces.
PROS
Simple, Frequent Advancement - When you advance in SW, you do so in a discrete chunk of capability. Characters earn about two experience points per session, and gain one advance for every five points. An advance is usually a boost to a skill or two or a new ability (called an edge), and you're free to shop the whole system for anything that your character meets the prerequisites to get. I'm leaving out a few additional nuances to it, but that's it for the most part. There's no going over your entire sheet to adjust all of the math upward at once. You just pick and go.
Meaningful Character Features - Every widget you can stick on your character is a big thing. This is a nice change from D&D and similar games where you might pick a feat that gives a +1 to a die roll in a specific circumstance. In SW, an advance you pick up might let you do something like attack all adjacent foes at once, or cast a new spell.
Accessible Price Point - Not enough good can be said for having a printed, full-color core rulebook available at a $10 price point. Even the most casual players can afford to have the rules on-hand.
CONS
Spell Points - I'm playing a bard in the game, and finding the spell point system to be a downer. Spell point systems in general leave a bad taste in my mouth because when they're done like they are in SW, they come off as saying, "You may have this much fun before you lose potency."
Lethality - I've heard people say that the lethality of SW depends a lot on the GM, but for what I've played, it seems like characters can be driven from not-a-scratch to death's door in the space of one rotten round. I tend to prefer a game where the characters have more time to intervene over the course of their downward plunge when they're ganged up on.
Death Spiral - The death spiral in SW feels harsh. It takes four wounds to drop a character, and each wound along the way applies a -1 to all die rolls. This seems to have the power to really tip the momentum of the fight quickly, particularly if one side makes a solid alpha strike on the other.
Low Default Starting Power Level - The game isn't kidding when it calls starting characters "Novices." Before you take disadvantages, all of your five primary attributes balance to the human average and you only have an edge if you're a human. (So for every above average one you have, you need a below average attribute.) Now this could easily be remedied by starting at Seasoned (four advances in) or Veteran (eight advances in) ranks, but because the game pitches starting at Novice as the default, I'd speculate that's where most GMs start their games. It's where my GM started ours, and I'm finding a disconnect between the starting power level of a D&D character that I'm expecting to emulate and the SW power level that I actually have.
Disadvantage System Feels Weak - Players can take disadvantages for their characters to gain more resources for character creation, but they're inconsistent in their potency. Some are strictly qualitative while others affect the game math. For example, Heroic (your character can't say no to people in need) has the same value as One Arm (You're missing an arm. -4 to all checks normally requiring two hands). The game advises giving bennies (re-roll tokens) to characters who play their hindrances well, but if your character changes legitimately through play, he might still be stuck with a personality based hindrance until he buys it off somehow (which, to my knowledge, isn't an option in the core rules). Furthermore, the impact of personality hindrances depends on the GM regularly forcing the character into a situation where his quirk causes trouble to make the hindrance actually function as intended.
All of the above said, I reiterate that I play over the internet and without miniatures for combat, which may improve the experience, but the bulk of my distaste for the system is seated factors seemingly not dependent on those missing pieces.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Like Button: Talent Trees
There was a period of time before D&D 4e came out during which it was rumored that WotC's Star Wars: Saga Edition RPG could be considered a preview of the design philosophy for D&D 4e. Upon hearing that news, I drove out to my local book store to page through the game and ended up purchasing it instead of perusing. One of the things that I really liked as I read the SW:SE rules were the talent trees. I remembered being pleased with how talent trees worked in d20 Modern, and the ones in SW:SE were clever and evocative.
I see several benefits in the use of talent trees for character building and progression in RPGs.
They're great for organization - Want your character to be a master of deception? Page over to the Con-Man talent tree and take a look. Odds are the talents that you need are all in one tree. Where a character class in an RPG tends to be broad and general, a talent tree (which might be a component of a character class) tends to contain all of the qualitative character widgets needed to make a character perform in a particular fashion. It's one-stop shopping!
Prerequisites create a sense of progression in play - Imagine an "Airborne" talent tree consisting of spells that get the caster or target into the sky. Maybe the first talent is Great Leap, letting the caster enhance natural jumping abilities. That could be a prerequisite for Levitate, which could in turn be a prerequisite for Flight, which could be a prerequisite for Flight Mastery. A structure like this produces a history of increasing mastery over flight in play, and the player can look back on his or her character's achievement with a satisfying sense of knowing where current abilities came from. Contrast this with choosing a Flight spell at level X. Suddenly, the character can fly in play. It adds little to nothing to the continuing story.
They give players benchmarks for power in the setting - This point assumes that antagonists are constructed using a system at least a bit similar to the one for PCs, but even if that isn't the case, when a four-armed sword-wielding horror shows up to mince the characters, the fact that it's making four attacks each round gives the players something to compare their characters' power levels to. They can glance at a Dual Wielding talent tree for example and see when a PC would have a comparable level of power, and be impressed or relieved accordingly.
I've thought from time to time about writing my own RPG. If I were aiming for a moderate to high level of rules complexity, I would likely end up using talent trees as a basis for PC progression.
I see several benefits in the use of talent trees for character building and progression in RPGs.
They're great for organization - Want your character to be a master of deception? Page over to the Con-Man talent tree and take a look. Odds are the talents that you need are all in one tree. Where a character class in an RPG tends to be broad and general, a talent tree (which might be a component of a character class) tends to contain all of the qualitative character widgets needed to make a character perform in a particular fashion. It's one-stop shopping!
Prerequisites create a sense of progression in play - Imagine an "Airborne" talent tree consisting of spells that get the caster or target into the sky. Maybe the first talent is Great Leap, letting the caster enhance natural jumping abilities. That could be a prerequisite for Levitate, which could in turn be a prerequisite for Flight, which could be a prerequisite for Flight Mastery. A structure like this produces a history of increasing mastery over flight in play, and the player can look back on his or her character's achievement with a satisfying sense of knowing where current abilities came from. Contrast this with choosing a Flight spell at level X. Suddenly, the character can fly in play. It adds little to nothing to the continuing story.
They give players benchmarks for power in the setting - This point assumes that antagonists are constructed using a system at least a bit similar to the one for PCs, but even if that isn't the case, when a four-armed sword-wielding horror shows up to mince the characters, the fact that it's making four attacks each round gives the players something to compare their characters' power levels to. They can glance at a Dual Wielding talent tree for example and see when a PC would have a comparable level of power, and be impressed or relieved accordingly.
I've thought from time to time about writing my own RPG. If I were aiming for a moderate to high level of rules complexity, I would likely end up using talent trees as a basis for PC progression.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Dislike Button: Point-Build Systems
Inspired by Facebook's "Like" button (and the often requested "Dislike" button), I thought I'd take an entry now and then to talk about things I like and dislike in RPGs. I'll tag all of these posts with "Button" so that you can see them all in one place and get an idea of whether or not my tastes are like yours, which should be useful to you if I ever review RPG products here.
Dislike Button: Point-Build Systems
Now I'm not talking about little things like buying your attributes in D&D 4e. That has a very minor impact on the direction of character creation in that game, which mostly involves picking abilities from ever-growing lists. Offenders for this crime include systems like GURPS and HERO. Games where a player can't just sit down and say, "I want my dude to throw fireballs!" and then look up the fireball power and reference it on his sheet. If you want your "dude" to "throw fireballs" in these systems, get ready to crunch some serious numbers.
"Okay. Do you see your fireball being a thing that just hits one guy or hits a bunch of guys? Area powers cost extra you know. Hits a bunch of guys? Okay, does it explode or just kind of land on them? If it explodes, maybe you could buy the knockback feature with the power. You'll need three or four levels of it to lift anyone off the ground though. How far away can you fire it from? Do guys keep burning after it hits? Alright, buy these adders too then... This is getting too expensive for your character. You'll have to buy it with endurance drain to offset the price. Ooh, or you could take an allergy to cactus jelly and a dependent NPC with chronic anemia! That should give you just enough points to buy this without having the drawback of needing a material focus to use it."
Do you see where I'm coming from? These systems often gloat of their capability to handle any genre, but you're practically making a game yourself by the time you build all of the components. And even after that, we still don't know what a fireball really is! Another player in the same game could want a fireball-throwing power and build it completely differently unless you decide that the first player's decisions are canon in your game world.
The only way I could see myself enduring one of these systems would be if the GM had, in advance, custom built all of the options in his world from the point system. This would provide a consistency and logic across powers that would make sense in the world. But even at that point I'd end up building my character by poring over a text document, and at that point, I'd just as soon use a system built for whatever genre I'm trying to play.
Dislike Button: Point-Build Systems
Now I'm not talking about little things like buying your attributes in D&D 4e. That has a very minor impact on the direction of character creation in that game, which mostly involves picking abilities from ever-growing lists. Offenders for this crime include systems like GURPS and HERO. Games where a player can't just sit down and say, "I want my dude to throw fireballs!" and then look up the fireball power and reference it on his sheet. If you want your "dude" to "throw fireballs" in these systems, get ready to crunch some serious numbers.
"Okay. Do you see your fireball being a thing that just hits one guy or hits a bunch of guys? Area powers cost extra you know. Hits a bunch of guys? Okay, does it explode or just kind of land on them? If it explodes, maybe you could buy the knockback feature with the power. You'll need three or four levels of it to lift anyone off the ground though. How far away can you fire it from? Do guys keep burning after it hits? Alright, buy these adders too then... This is getting too expensive for your character. You'll have to buy it with endurance drain to offset the price. Ooh, or you could take an allergy to cactus jelly and a dependent NPC with chronic anemia! That should give you just enough points to buy this without having the drawback of needing a material focus to use it."
Do you see where I'm coming from? These systems often gloat of their capability to handle any genre, but you're practically making a game yourself by the time you build all of the components. And even after that, we still don't know what a fireball really is! Another player in the same game could want a fireball-throwing power and build it completely differently unless you decide that the first player's decisions are canon in your game world.
The only way I could see myself enduring one of these systems would be if the GM had, in advance, custom built all of the options in his world from the point system. This would provide a consistency and logic across powers that would make sense in the world. But even at that point I'd end up building my character by poring over a text document, and at that point, I'd just as soon use a system built for whatever genre I'm trying to play.
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