[Pathfinder card game, Lords of Waterdeep, Dungeoneer] Non-SIS D&D

[Ron Edwards]

It's been a week for somewhat abstract games, with the exception of a kickin' session of S/Lay w/Me - I've played The Quiet Year, which I'll post about later and which rekindled my interest in playing Chronicles of Skin; and more pertinent to this post and the ongoing "heart of D&D" topic here (and which seems to be steaming all over G+ lately too), the new Pathfinder card game and Lords of Waterdeep.

According to the guy lugging the box, the former was the sleeper hit of GenCon. Call me Scrooge - it's boring as fuck. For one thing, it's easy to play in that dumbed-down way that ensures minimal strategy. For another, it purports to invoke the fun of playing a character in D&D via some deckbuilding and buckets of color ... and which falls flat on its face because all characters do exactly the same things at the strategic level despite some niche-y details at the tactics level. It's a cooperative game; the group is trying to beat the layout with no possible inter-player conflict of interest. There's a Big Bad character somewhere in the piles associated with various locations, and you find stuff and allies by exploring the locations and closing them down one by one - basically, whatever you find that's good for someone else's character, you give it to them, so it makes little difference who finds what. Characters might die, but I saw very little chance of it.

It specifically lacked my perceived core qualities of playing D&D - no skirmish tactics whatsoever, no baked-in inter-player-character conflict, no ruthlessness, and no windfall achievements. Instead it invoked precisely those features of the late-stage orthodox game: all mission, all cooperation, all obedience to finding and stopping the Big Bad, a promise of "greater adventures yet to come" (cough - buy) which are clearly just more Big Bads to find and stop, and a weird generic blandness to the fantasy no matter how intricate and colorful the illustrations. The strategy is so uniform and effectively baked into your options that you can literally check out to text or jerk off or whatever until it's your turn, tuning in only when someone points out they could use help for something or other. I made a couple of good decisions on others' turns which probably contributed a lot to our winning, but they weren't hard - it's the kind of game you lose only because you're literally clueless. The only cool-beans color for me was that the sorceress got to have snake pets ... except oh, that's only when she becomes "elite." And wham, another item for my list of things not to like about that iteration of D&D, the whole "one day you'll be cool" thing.

Playing Lords of Waterdeep right after was instructive in comparison, not because I liked it much better,* but because it was unabashedly a boardgame, dammit, all about fucking winning specifically because you made the other guys lose. It had tons of color, up to and including a "character" to "play" in the same sense as the Pathfinder game, but ... how can I put it ... it doesn't pretend to be fiction/SIS, or even invoke to it as something related.

I got to thinking about Dungeoneer, the original card game - shoot, my copy is actually the Citizen Games edition, that's how original - which I frankly love. I dug it out of my drawers and plan to carry it around with my game stuff, in part to bring out when someone hauls out one of these insanely overpriced boxed-set "D&D with cards" games so I can say, "Come on, if you want to do that, this is how." It's a map-building game; players lay down the map cards and construct the dungeon as part of the game, and they play monsters on each other - so you explore and seek stuff on your turn, but fight critters on anyone else's turn. It's easy, but the setup tends to yield unique tactics-problems per specific instance, so you have to think, and what every other player does totally affects what you'll be faced with on your turn. To win, you're either the last one standing or the first to make fourth level (finish four quests).

Do you explore a dungeon? Yes. Do you go on quests and level up? Yes. Do you fight critters? Yes. Do you cover yourself in peril and glory? Yes. Do you have to strategize? Yes. Do you weigh the possibility of screwing a fellow player? Yes (actually it's a pretty competitive game, no cooperation to speak of).** If you want to do these things without an SIS, Dungeoneer is a critical hit.

Just like the Pathfinder game (or vice versa), the cards dictate the situations and supply resources, and resolutions are handled through dic e... but dammit, I don't know how to describe it, Dungeoneer references the D&D fiction very effectively so you feel almost like you're playing a character, but not enough to interfere with winning this fuckin' card game, whereas the Pathfinder game somehow falls flat at the same task. As if you're supposed to be enjoying playing this character instead of playing a card game because the latter is simply not real tough, but since you're not playing a character, you end up with zilch.

There's something to be learned from this. Maybe it's merely my old points about Gamist play, that to do it, you have to do it and that means real Challenge with real risk and payoff. But I think as well there's material here for discussing the role of playing a character ("the fiction" thereof if you like, merely Character in my jargon) - somehow the lack of Challenge in the Pathfinder game is not compensated by the story-part, that your character and the others are finding and defeating a Big Bad in the fixed fiction of the game.

Best, Ron

* No real slam intended - only that I couldn't see a dime's worth of difference between it and Ticket to Ride, seriously. Since Ticket is so good, that's not really a criticism of Waterdeep as a game beyond saying it offers little else. It might arguably be less good; I did think the quests/rewards and individual bonus-conditions for Waterdeep were weirdly random in their values, and the rules had too much denial in them so you spent a lot of turns not getting to play.

** It occurs to me that my points here might be misinterpreted as a simple preference for interplayer zero-sum competition as opposed to team competition against a fixed/non-played set of conditions, but I don't think that's really it. What I like about inter-player strife in D&D is not because that's "it," but because it's genuinely possibly rewarding but necessarily juxtaposed with a need to work together, producing tension at the Challenge level.

[Callan S.]

Is that partially the baked in 'You WILL defeat the big bad' premise? What if you could decide to ally with the big bad? And to make it that you don't just make such a choice five minutes into 1 or 2 hours of play (or worse, before play even begins!), perhaps certain qualities of the big bad could come up - you might decide to crush him, but then certain qualities show up and maybe you think its bad, but its for the greater good (or maybe instead of a binary ally/enemy binary, you might be able to semi ally and strong arm him from doing certain deeds, in a kind of martial politics?). So the qualities could be revealed as play goes on, with people potentially shifting their ally/enemy status during play, perhaps conflicting with other players/characters ally/enemy status? All that as opposed to 'Yeah, you ARE going to beat the guy - now fondle some cards and dream about your character re-enactment of a fixed (semi-classic) story'.

How's Dr. Chaos going, BTW?

[Ron Edwards]

I definitely found myself in what I like to call "Callan muses about D&D and Warhammer" mental space after playing those two games and thinking about Dungeoneer. Especially because Dungeoneer is fun for real, so this has nothing to do with "D&D fantasy is stupid" (another topic entirely) and more about what different kinds of games are for.

Doctor Chaos Beta fresh from last month - a quantum step forward.

[Miskatonic]

I swear I'm the only person on the planet who enjoys the implied SIS of Lords of Waterdeep. The thing where you're like, I spend four thieves and a fighter to get the thingy, and how there was a whole "adventure" that happened in there? That stuff just cracks me up. But no, no one else seems to care even a tiny bit about getting into that, to the point of not even calling the little cubes fighters and wizards.

[Jesse Burneko]

Ron,

If you get a chance to play the D&D Boardgames (Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, or Legend of Drizzit) I'd be very curious as to how they compare to your experience with the Pathfinder Card game.

It's weird because there's a lot of features you describe liking in your D&D that I loath in my D&D.  For example, I really hate inter-party conflict and much prefer the we're a team, here to do a mission attitude.  The D&D board games do that very well but a key difference might be that I've found them to be very challenging. 

I've LOST just as many games as I've won.  I might have even lost MORE games than I've won.  The game can get almost downright claustrophobic as the board fills up with monsters and you start dreading having to draw from the Encounter deck.  You keep flipping over tiles hoping to god that you'll finally find the thing you're looking for.

So, if the Pathfinder Card Game delivers none of that tactical stress that maybe what's missing.

Jesse

[Mike Holmes]

Hi Jesse, long time...

I'm guessing that your distaste of intra-party conflict comes from the usual dysfunctions associated with the intersection of it and the incoherence of D&D rules. Meaning that you often are talking about asshat "my guy" play, where players are really just trying to piss off other players. Or just confusion between modes of play between players. Or... well lots of other reasons it breaks down.

Because, I'm sure you'll agree, that intra-PC conflict where players are on the same page and having fun with each other, is really an interesting source of fun. Such as in the case of competitive gamism play, or cooperative narrativism to create an interesting story that revolves around the themes of the conflict. No?

I've played the D&D boardgame, and generally I'm with Ron in that if the game promises a SIS somehow and doesn't deliver, then I'm bound to be disappointed. The D&D boardgame doesn't really promise this... other than by putting D&D on the cover. Any moreso than Dungeon did when TSR put that out wayback. Very roughly the same time that SPI put out DeathMaze (which I bought at the time and still own), a very early precursor to Dungeoneer: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3625/deathmaze

Note that, to my mind, much of the D&D play going on at the time had near zero SIS, and actually matched the boardgames in question pretty well. So it may well be that folks thought that they had managed to capture to some extent a "RPG boardgame." The epitome of this effort, to my mind, has to be Magic Realm: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/22/magic-realm

I've had a fondness for Magic Realm since we bought the unplayable (literally) first edition from Avalon Hill. On the other hand, my boardgame design buddy Bill Byrd had declared it to be perhaps the worst board game ever created. I think that those things that make him despise it so may well be all of the very detailed rules that go into trying to make it enough of a simulation to feel like a RPG. Almost like a CRPG, in a way. To the extent that they interfere with the game being a good gamist game - balanced and tactical, etc - these are horrible intrusions. A ton of cruft with no perceptible advantage to the pure gamist perspective. And yet, it also fails to provide much of any real feeling of SIS at the same time. And yet, I still love the game.

I've often thought that what creates a SIS is, in fact, the notion that you can do "anything your character can do." The CRPG-like limits of board games (or are they boardgame-like limits of CRPGs?) in terms of options are what make them fail in this way. Or as Ralph Mazza puts it, "I hate it when I come up to a hip-high fence that I can't get over, or a wooden door I can't chop down in a CRPG." It doesn't really matter how extensive they make the set of possible actions in a CRPG, there's always a feeling that there are limits on what you can do. What RPGs do is create literally infinite sets of potential actions you can have your character take, all of which have in-game repercussion.

And I'd argue that the usual method for accomplishing this is by having human adjudicators of action and how they fit into the system. It is precisely to the extent that you have a GM or GM-like authority distributed somehow in the game being played, that allows for this infinity of potential actions, and the need for you to imagine the SIS to have your character's actions make sense. Someday we may have computers that can handle this, but it's a long way off (to say nothing of the impossibility of a simple boardgame providing a SIS).

In this way, I find this quality to be definitive of the split between RPGs and boardgames. Though I may be creating a tautology, admittedly.

[Ron Edwards]

I played Dungeoneer again! Probably for the first time in about a decade, which is too bad and leads me to think I should carry it around with the other smaller games in my dice and cards and tokens man-purse. My fellow players were new game friends Mark and Brian, at the Bad Apple in Chicago. For reference, this is the original version published through Citizen Games and if there are rules changes or whatever, then I don't know about them.

It was fun to play in the bar/grill joint, drinking beer. Some passers-by asked about the game during the evening, one of them almost certainly a fellow gamer guy and another a young woman who was in a college boardgame club.

About the game, for those who don't know: Dungeoneer is a game based on a relatively small deck of cards, with subsets for dungeons and quests. Every turn, you add a map card to the ever-expanding dungeon, and you play monsters from your hand onto the other players; you also play good stuff from your hand onto yourself, and you move about the dungeon trying to fulfill quests. The quests are usually location-specific, so the map matters a lot. It's brutally competitive, including making the map more difficult for others' quests and easier for yours, winning via assassination instead of quests (or combining the two), and using nasty combos on others with your monster cards. Every character gets Peril and Glory just by moving around, and you can play bad things on others by spending their Peril, and good things on yourself by spending Glory.

In the first game, we focused mainly on our quests, with only one instance of character-vs.-character, I think, and none of the characters were killed. The dungeon branched out pretty far - the main easiest thing was that the Well of Healing showed up early near the entrance. I won this game in part because I landed both the spell and the item that permits teleporting, plus eventually the movement-bonus boots, and because my final quest didn't depend on getting to a particular room. So I hung out in the Well of Healing and kept trying for the quest there.

The planar shift and similar cards which allow you to relocate rooms in the dungeon are serious game-changers late in play. They're also a good indicator of how important the dungeon layout becomes.

We misplayed a couple of things as I found after I reviewed the rules later, but I don't think any of it necessarily altered the primary outcomes. One of the most important ones is that you can only play a given Encounter upon other players during your turn, even if it does bounce back to your hand or even if the target player has enough Peril. I think my character had more treasures than she could carry at one point, but I hadn't used any of them yet - it did mean I'd blown some Glory, though.

A couple of days later I played it again at the Dice Dojo, this time with four players total - me, John, Carol, and Jim. Carol almost won the game within a very few turns given her lucky combination of quests and the rooms in question showing up pretty fast. She was at third level (you need fourth to win) when the rest of us were at second, first, and first. We acted upon that quite ruthlessly, and I am sad to say that after impaling Vlad in the crypt, rescuing a soul from the crypt and getting it to the entrance, and upon slaying various undead who tried to kill her there (and coming within an ace of killing Serak the Assassin), her elf character was gruesomely slain by her erstwhile comrade, my dwarf character wielding the Axe of Weeping Wounds. And the first character to start going after her was the paladin. I pulled ahead next and was eventually slain by that fucking blinker lurking in John's hand, which I never managed to land a hit on through several encounters. John and Jim then competed for quest completion, but it was a bit of a mismatch as Jim's paladin (treacherous backstabber that he was) was two levels ahead and completed his final quest.

I'm posting about Dungeoneer because it really hits the spot for me for a card or board game which is not role-playing but which deeply references role-playing or at least a particular sort. Neither the Pathfinder game nor Lords of Waterdeep did that for me, although perhaps the latter touched upon it more. I'm finding it a very productive head-space to examine.

I've been having trouble with this post, and this is my first try at saying what I mean - there may be later tries. Here are the components that I think we need to separate.

1. The setting being a dungeon which elfy-dwarfy-et cetera characters explore and try to do stuff in.
2. The utterly brutal interplayer competition with clear win (or rather, lose) conditions.
3. The deliberate invocation of D&D stuff just outside the range of copyright, such as the Blinker which is simply and only a Beholder but we don't call it that.

So how is it different from Gamist role-playing? Clearly SIS is not really an issue, and you can't do stuff that isn't pre-described by the rules. And clearly characters don't change their minds about anything. The interesting point is that some RPG experiences were and presumably still are like this, such that the activity of such groups arguably passes out of the range of my definition of role-playing.

And how is the whole role of D&D as a "thing" involved? I fully acknowledge that a solid piece of play is enjoying its D&D invocation. But I don't know why, nor do I understand why I like it so much when the bloodthirsty dynamics of that sort of D&D play don't appeal to me at all in role-playing.

Still scratching my head about this.

[glandis]

Ron, as I recall, you had a Magic: the Gathering phase at some point. Does thinking about/remembering that help stop the head-itch at all?

[Ron Edwards]

I thought about it during the past day and I don't think so. What won me over to Magic was its numerical purity: no derived values, the numbers were the numbers, in a fashion that in the early 90s was nigh absent in RPGs. It's one of the same things I found exciting in the Fighting Fantasy books, which I was also into at that time, in my never-ending retooling of The Fantasy Trip, and in Prince Valiant and Over the Edge.

I think it has something to do more with what I like in card games. I eventually decided Magic was not as fun as I wanted, including the games which imitated it however well (On the Edge, and the Feng Shui game come to mind), and was sad to see eventually that the one CCG I really liked wasn't very popular: Wyvern. I know why: because as with certain standard card games I like the most (Hearts, Omnibus variant), every single round counts, the "board" changes significantly as you move through a unit of play, and although you may hold an advantage at some point, you must still play skillfully to win all the way to the end. And there is never any doubt, pretense, or ambiguity that you are here to kick ass and chew bubblegum.

Dungeoneer has these qualities. I thought some more about the direct route to winning - killing the other characters - and realized that both ends of that strategy are nicely related to overall play. On the one hand, if someone gets a lucky draw or two and finds that they can complete two quests in two or three turns, the other players really have no choice but to kill that character ASAP. But if you decide to go all Der Rock the Destroyer* on the others for no reason, then they're in the same boat. So you are neatly forced to be very tactical with that option.

Best, Ron

* Fucking stupid internet! No picture?! I can't believe it, NSA must have fiddled with Google too much or something and blown a gasket.

[Callan S.]

Another idea to consider amongst others; perhaps it's the premade fiction element leaves no room for fiddling with that (it's nice premade though, regardless) and coupled with that is that tactically rich and interpersonal competition ground just waiting to be had. Meanwhile roleplay (in D&D or otherwise) has fiction which is like wet clay (rather than already baked). The clay is already engaging and indeed requires a certain amount of co-operation to form anything (well 'anything' as in what the group would as a whole call it an anything/something) otherwise people just squeeze it all into pieces. So you have that very engaging quality and moreover the need for cooperation to engage it - which conflicts alot with cut throat player vs player play, which ironically both needs the very fields it play out upon to be crafted, yet that crafting would take cooperation (thus outlining the primary difficulty gamism has faced in roleplay history)

[Dan Maruschak]

I haven't played any of these games (I have played some theme-heavy near-RPGs like Arkham Horror and Betrayal at House on the Hill) but the other day a video about the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game popped up on my YouTube "recommended" list and I got sucked into watching a few videos of people playing the game: Here's one series that edits out a big chunk in the middle but presents some concluding thoughts about how the lack of much "imagination" component makes it feel more like a computer RPG rather than a tabletop RPG, another series that has two complete adventures so far, and a solo playthrough. From the way players on the videos were reacting to it, it seemed to me that the game was providing the "people kibitz as a committee about the 'best move'" kind of play, which I think is a big element of play in some RPG groups. I found it amusing/interesting that people seemed to get very excited about noticing and exploiting an avenue that rules interactions would open up (Ooh! Because you have this card, you can use this power over here to get an extra 1d4!) but be totally blase about rules mistakes or forgetting to use options that they had available to them, which also seemed reminiscent of some flavors of RPG play.

(Also, there are some videos of Lords of Waterdeep on YouTube, too: Here's Wil Wheaton's Tabletop which is heavily produced and has overly "theatrical" play for my tastes, and a more straightforward video of people playing the game from boardgamegeektv).

Ron, I'm curious if you have had any experience with other cooperative boardgames, like say Pandemic, just as a basis for comparison.

edited to fix italics format - RE

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dan, I immediately thought "sure I've played the cooperative ones" but then couldn't think of any. I stress, however, that while playing the Pathfinder game, I threw myself right into that mode and conducted several cross-player, cross-hand-play, several-turn tactics with others. My only problem with them was how easy and obvious they were, not strategy so much as procedure. I.e., you win not by playing well, but by playing with any attention to the opportunities in front of you at all. If I were to analogize to competitive play, it's why I and most adults don't enjoy playing Go Fish with one another, because ultimately all you do is respond to what's there in your hand the way anyone needs to respond in order to keep playing at all. Winning and losing in those circumstances then becomes a matter of (i) the draw and (ii) occasional necessary arbitrary decisions which turn out to be poor only after the draw. H'mmm ... as a contrast, Gin Rummy is almost as mechanical but it's fun because you have to make a strategic choice about what to discard to the common draw stack.

So I really don't think my annoyance with the game has anything to do with cooperative vs. competitive. It has to do with whether we're playing a game with a high enough bar for the required skill.

I also should mention that since posting, I've had occasion to confirm that the guys I played Waterdeep and Pathfinder with are kind of dicks. During play, they were constantly putting me down in snide ways, e.g., as the one new to the game, I'd look at the spread in front of me in Waterdeep and say, "What am I looking at," and one would say, "A card," and then the two would instantly start talking without me. After a while of this kind of thing, I leaned toward one of them (that same one) and said, levelly, without inflection, "It's fun playing games with you." He flinched and apologized. To clarify, I am a horrible trash-talker in competitive play, to the extent of hubris (doing this actually makes losing more fun if that's how it goes) and enjoy receiving it too, but they weren't trash-talking as a fun thing, they were making the atmosphere of play cold and mean. They did it in Pathfinder too, even when I strategized cooperatively with them - one (the other one) even literally snarling "give me the card" on my turn in tones reminiscent of a mean parent or an angered dog, and this was the same card I'd shown to him previously when I drew it and promised to him. Anyway, I saw them again at the second visit, when I played Dungeoneer for the second time, and they did the whole ostentatious "we're not noticing that you exist" social trip on me.

So maybe the game would be more enjoyable - and reveal more strategy, if it's there - if I weren't playing with dicks.

One more thing: in contrast to one of the references you linked to, I am put off by any pretense that a game of this kind somehow shares the qualities of a tabletop RPG as opposed to enjoyably referencing it. That group seemed to value the potential that a card/strategy game would overlap in concept with role-playing.

[Callan S.]

I'm actually kinda bothered you were treated that way, Ron - it doesn't matter if a person can take it, that's not how anyone aught to be treated, regardless.

I'm not sure about finding any new platou of tactics, but as much as I understand the game from its description, such games have a 'were all in it together' effect (certainly the warhammer quest boardgame, which was primarily cooperative, was like that). Somewhat like those 'fall backwards and trust your team will catch you' thingies, though I don't really like referencing that. Just as much as having the guts to gamble doesn't exactly require tactical thinking, so to is building team cohesiveness not all that tactical, yet it's a thing like guts is. I read a review of the warhammer quest boardgame port to a phone game and the reviewer actually referenced the lack of that 'in it together' part as it was a single player version on the phone. Man, I almost feel it's an overall betrayal they'd act that way - why would someone, let alone a couple of them, do that? Yuck!

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Callan, I appreciate the kind thoughts - I know myself well enough to say that if I hadn't spoken up in the moment, I'd be twisted up and angry afterwards, and their subsequent behavior might have bugged me greatly. Given that I did, the second encounter had no resonance for me and merely confirmed my suspicion - that's why I posted about it (rather, in addition to its relevance to the topic), as if they'd been decent I would have seen the first encounter as a social gears-grinding moment, a common thing across many or perhaps all activities.

I understand about the cooperative activities, because I was in the generation and subculture which played the New Games in many venues - quite a few of them are a lot of fun. I think I even recommended them as a resource for RPG designers at one point at the Forge, hoping that some of the interesting and challenging dynamics could be implemented toward or with an SIS. As for board and card games along these lines ... it'd be pretty cool to get a list of such things, as Dan jump-started in my head by mentioning Pandemic.

Again, as I'm sure people reading this thread are getting tired of hearing, my primary concern isn't the cooperative-competitive issue (nuanced and perhaps as emotionally sore as it might be for many role-players), but the D&D / "dungeon fantasy" / fun equation, if there is an equation, as it relates to playing with or without an SIS.

Best, Ron