My dusty donjon: adventures in player-driven RPGs

[coxcomb]

Tonight I played my first-ever session of Dust Devils. We had a good time, but I'm not sure we quite got it. I should mention that this game comes after five sessions of Donjon with this group and that both games have been a bit of a stretch for the players. I have been the one lurking at the Forge and soaking up some theory. I am also the one interested in game design.

Anyway, these six sessions have left me with some observations, and given me a strong opinion. I'll tackle these in turn:

Donjon Delving

I ran the example adventure from the book--and things went off at an angle right from the start. In five 2-hour sessions we didn't even make it through the adventure, and we had pretty much had enough. I'm sure that my inexperience at running the game (and player-driven games in general) had a lot to with it, but here are some observations.

1.) There are TONS of die rolls. Every combat we hit quickly devolved to a dicefest. Two (often large) die rolls per combatant per round grew tedious quickly. See related #2.

2.) The system didn't seem to encourage my players to loosen up and start trying wacky and wild actions. I repeatedly reminded them that they could (and should) go wild, but they didn't. This may have to do with the abilities they picked. "Hit people with sword" and similar abilities seem to have the effect of making the player say the ability name when he uses it. More than once a player would say "I'll sense danger" to activate his Sense Danger ability. Somehow, the players seemed to feel more restricted than empowered by the system.

3.) Magic words left them speechless. We had two magic-using characters. Both of them found it hard to come up with good magic words. When they did decide on words, they found them hard to use in play. All I could do was show them the few examples in the book and give them my take on how they should go about it, but I wasn't a lot of help--having never played the game before myself.

4.) Spell effects are hard to adjudicate. I read through the magic rules a couple of times, and felt pretty confident with it before play. The first spell cast had me stumbling. Any spell that isn't pure damage gets complicated. Here's an example: player A wants his character to cast an obscuring cloud against a group of orcs. The hope being that they won't be able to see character B, who rushed into their midst, in order to smite him. Sure, fine, spell roll made, resist with save. So how do I deal with the results. There's not a lot of help provided.

Now, so that Clinton doesn't think I'm totally trashing his baby, let me say that when I read through the rules to Donjon I was extraordinarily stoked. The goals of the game (as I read them: player empowerment, fewer fiddly rules, freeform fun and mayhem) got me going. But when it came to actual play, I felt a bit left out to dry. More on this a bit later, but now...

Dust Devils
Tonights game went OK all things considered. We only had a couple of hours in which to play, which is a natural hinderance to learning a new game.

Again, I chose to run the sample adventure. This time I thought it would be good to play with pregenerated characters so that everybody would be pre-woven in to the story. As the adventure came with four cool characters, we were golden. We lost one player, leaving us with only two.

So I described the game and how the mechanics worked. Then we jumped right in. I gave everyone their background information and let the player with "Gentleman" Jim start (since he is sort of the 'main' character of the adventure).

Both players had a good time but were intimidated by the amount of narration that was expected of them. This style of play is a bit of a shock fwhen coming from a more traditional "ask the GM if this action is OK" mode.

Jim's player would say, "I'm going to look for a place to stable my horse", and then wait expectantly for me to tell him what he found. I would say, "OK, tell us what you found, then."

It seemed to take, on average, three prods from me reminding him that it was his scene and to take it where he wanted before he would come up with something creative and cool.

I was a little frustrated in framing conflicts. A poker game happened, which I dealt a hand to resolve. Only part of the way through did I realize that this poker game had no bearing on the story and should never have been a conflict. This sort of thing is entirely me learning a new way to play.

Conclusion
I come away from these six sessions with a new strong opinion: games that provide a new and different way to play should give you lots of help making the transition from the way you play already.

There was a discussion on one of the Forge forums a few days back about book length and what the right amount of material for a game is. My new feeling on the subject is that you cannot devote enough space to giving the GM and players advice on how to play your game.

Both of these games would benefit from some expanded material about playing and running. High on the list should be an extensive example of play written like a script. There's this thing about old dogs and new tricks. And it isn't that they don't want to learn them.

I also think that the temptation to keep your indie game short and sweet is perhaps too strong. I'm not talking 300 page books or anything, but keep writing until someone can pick up the book and learn how you play from what's inside.

To Sum Up
Donjon and Dust Devils are both cool games designed by innovative indie folks. Both books left me wanting more in the way of examples, advice, and (in the case of Donjon magic) meta-rules.

[Valamir]

Hey Jay, I tend to agree with you.  I think for some folks the mere suggestion that they can narrate their own stuff is enough to send them off to the races, but for others...not so much.  

Donjon magic does take some GM tap dancing to adjucate.  For stuff like the Obscure spell I can think of 3 possible rulings.
1) use the successes to subtract dice from the chance to hit of every orc in the area of effect representing how hard it is to see.
2) Force the orks to make an observation roll vs the successes of the spell to be able to see well enough to attack.
3) Have the player use the dice as facts to describe what the spell does, and then have the GM describe the rest.

There was a discussion on one of the Forge forums a few days back about book length and what the right amount of material for a game is. My new feeling on the subject is that you cannot devote enough space to giving the GM and players advice on how to play your game.

Both of these games would benefit from some expanded material about playing and running. High on the list should be an extensive example of play written like a script. There's this thing about old dogs and new tricks. And it isn't that they don't want to learn them.

I also think that the temptation to keep your indie game short and sweet is perhaps too strong. I'm not talking 300 page books or anything, but keep writing until someone can pick up the book and learn how you play from what's inside.

I tend to agree with this too.  I tried to write Universalis that way, and I'm trying harder to write Robots & Rapiers that way too.  I could write the core resolution mechanic in about 5 pages bullet point style, but I expanded that to almost 40 in an attempt to convey the purpose and concept and thought process behind the rolls.

I'd love to send you a copy of that section and have you evaluate how well I did or didn't accomplish exactly this.  In fact, it sounds like you and your group would be perfect for such a task.

[Matt Snyder]

Jay,

It's great to hear you played Dust Devils. You're right that it can be intimidating to those who are used to another style of play. As has been argued previously on the Forge, the people who seem to have the biggest problems here are traditional dyed-in-the-wool gamers who have to "un-learn" authority in order to play Dust Devils.

This is intentional in terms of design, but I think you rightly point out that the text could do a better job of helping players learn how to do that. I'll consider that as I get ready to re-print the game for con season.

Thanks!
Matt

[coxcomb]

I'd love to send you a copy of that section and have you evaluate how well I did or didn't accomplish exactly this.  In fact, it sounds like you and your group would be perfect for such a task.

I would be pleased to beta test it for you.

[coxcomb]

Matt--
In case it didn't come across in the original post, I really love Dust Devils.

In particular I want to emphasize how cool the sample adventure is. Reading it really gave me a clear idea of the kind of characters that are appropriate and how to weave them together.

I'd like to know your experience with running it. One thought that I had was that if I had four players, bringing all of the PCs into play, there would have been more threads to get everybody rolling. As it is, we have "Gentleman" Jim and Zeke Munroe. The player with Zeke couldn't think of anything to do other than drink.

The stuff that is hard for me as Dealer is in figuring out how much I should be injecting to get the plot moving along. I tried inserting little bits here and there, like when Jim's player described the sheriff guarding a stage coach coming into town, I mentioned that he looked like a mean son-of-a-bitch. And I had him catch Clara checking him out as he came into town.

[Zak Arntson]

For Donjon, you could try changing the currency. Instead of 1 die = 1 success = 1 fact; change it to: 1 die = 1 success AND 1 fact. I did this with my own group (as part of transforming Donjon into Fighter-D Alpha) and it promoted the inventiveness from play similar to what you experienced.

Magic is a sticky subject. My proposal there is a pre-game discussion on how magic works in your game. Given some creativity, nearly anything can be done with a word; you may need put more guidelines into it.

(Granted, as a player, I love the broad power that magic provides, but I have flustered a group with attempts at stretches of the meaning of my words)

[Matt Snyder]

Keith, I've played the Hanged Man scenario several times, with varying numbers of players (even with more than four, where Ralph Mazza played the Sheriff Long Tom Meredith, if memory serves).

Often, I never even get to the love triangle aspect of the scenario. For quicker demos, interaction (and conflict) among the four pre-generated player characters takes over.

If you have only Jim and Zeke "in play," you've still got a lot to deal with. Zeke's issue is that he's a mean drunk, sure. But, he may also have a guilty conscious upon learning that he's brought in the wrong man. Will he take it out on the real Jim, and get a bounty? Or, will he help Jim out, maybe get a little "justice" by taking it out on the crooked town (or at least the crooked sheriff)?

(It should be pretty easy for anyone playing Gentleman Jim to figure out what to do. Clearly, the town expects him to be dead, and that means he has to make some serious choices.)

Zeke's Devil is tricky because it's not the act of drinking that matters. It's how drinking  helps or hurts more important things he does. If he's drunk, will that help or hurt him in the situation? If it's a social conflict, he's likely to suffer. If the situation is a brawl, he's gonna smear some faces in the dirt easily, and he won't feel pain, for example. (Or, maybe he tries to resist the Devil's temptation.)

As Dealer in the game you played, I advise you really hammering home the "hanged man outside" issue. This town has either actively supported or passively allowed an innocent man to die by public execution. That's some nasty stuff. What are the players going to do about that? Anything you can do to drive that point home to the players should help fuel some action by them. And, chances are, their Devils will really come into play.

Which reminds me . . . saying their Devils will "come into play" means not that the Devil "takes over" and that Zeke is automatically a mean drunk. It means the Devil factors into the situation, and the players must DECIDE when, how, and if the Devil affects the character's actions.