D&D 3.0- Gamism ain't easy...

[Bankuei]

Hi folks,

Last few weeks I've been running an ongoing series of D&D 3.0 one shots.  Each session is a self contained adventure/mission, with no real connection between them.  Play is explicitly Gamist, with the focus on the PCs working as a team against the challenges put before them.

I like gamism, but I don't like D&D for gamism.  So far, I have found the DM's guide to be almost completely useless in establishing effective and fun challenges.  The CR ratings and advice given have been... less than helpful.  It's taken 3 sessions to finally come up with a worthy challenge that wasn't too tough or too easy.  I've learned more by studying videogame level design rather than following the advice in the Monster Manual or the DM's book.  

Thoughts on D&D and Gamism in general:

-Challenges are really, really dependent on the character classes available, equipment, spells, etc.  Therefore, in a one-shot pick up game, challenges may be breeze throughs to Total Party Kill walls depending who shows up and what they're playing, etc.

-In play strategy falls completely on the group to work as a team.  Again, pretty tough in a pick up game.

-Most players do not find D&D gamism satisfying.  It seems that most are used to Sim/Illusionist play, and find raw gamist hack and slash boring.

-It's also interesting to note that D&D seems to function most effectively when the DM is fudging encounters to up or down the challenge accordingly.

-Challenges seem to swing into being pushovers if they lay within a given groups' strong points, or being nightmares if the challenge exploits a weakness.   There seems to be little middle ground.  Player strategy seems to focus around trying to decide if a given encounter is "winnable" and at what cost.  There doesn't seem to be any viable reason to try alternative tactics outside of your class specialty and strong point.  In other words, game-wise, the strategy is not much different than playing 21... "How far do I go?", with extra bits of nifty magic weapons and monsters and such.

Details:

-3rd level characters, any race from the PHB, any class, multiclass as you will

-Players are given a list of magic items(appropriate to 3rd level as the DM's guide explains), to choose from.

-Sessions are typically 2 hours in duration.  This encompasses typically 3-4 encounters

-2-4 players have shown up for each session.  Only one player has been a regular.

-Play is strictly according to the book.  Minatures and battle maps, oh my.

-Challenges range from one to a few traps each session, about 3 combat encounters, and usually a few saving rolls/skill rolls as well.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Has anyone else played D&D 3.0(or 3.5) according to the rules as written without drift or fudging?

Chris

[MachMoth]

Call me fudge king.  Many moons ago, I used to run campaigns "by the book."  I would spend hours on end formulating and rolling up adventures.  One day, I was supposed to run an important adventure for the group.  All were about Level 3, and I wrote a pretty good one for them.  Well, as life would have it, I was still working food service at the time, and we had just opened a new store.  Understaffed, overworked, and taking 15 credit hours to boot, I had to delay the session.  They continued without me, and reached about level 5.  I didn't think much of it, and wanted to run this same adventure, as it had some important exposition, and introduced a major nemisis for later.

Long story short, they were wiping through it.  This group has always been known for using their brains.  The castle was under seige, and I had planned on getting them split and conquered.  Instead, they set an ambush in the king's hall.  They noted my description of how the king looked almost dwarf like (purely for flavor at the time).  One bag of flour, and some kingly robes later, they had one awesome ambush setup.  At this point, I scratched the hours of work, and threw something together on the fly.  The nemisis was boosted, and the goblin foot soldiers were done up in my head.  Due to superior tactics, the players won, but at least they felt they earned it.  The boss fled to return in future adventures (though he left an impression as one of the few enemies the barbarian didn't forget).

After the game, one of the players noted how much more fluid the session felt, compared to what they had been doing.  A few months of play and feedback later proved that the improptu enemies and encounters were far more enjoyable than the hours of work.  Unfortunately, this is also where I developed my slight distaste for D&D.  It seemed I was working around the rules, and not with them.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Here's an older thread with some good stuff in it about this: Gamism in action or why I hate arts & crafts.

The more I think about it, the more Tunnels & Trolls strikes me as one of the most brilliant RPG designs ever.

Best,
Ron

[joshua neff]

The more I think about it, the more Tunnels & Trolls strikes me as one of the most brilliant RPG designs ever.

I knew you were going to say that, Ron. I have this image of you in some podunk gaming store. "No, I don't want Dungeons & Dragons, dammit. I'm a T&T man!"

Chris, have you checked out D&D 3.5? I've heard it's gone even more gamist (to the point of assuming people will be using miniatures, & writing the game accordingly) (er, not that miniatures are inherently gamist, but you know what I mean). But I don't know how well it's actually pulled off.

[MachMoth]

3.5 is primarily a balance and clean-up job.  If its more gamist, its because they must have taken out all of the paragraphs upon paragraphs explaining to the players how they shouldn't be a bunch of gamist, munchkin power-gamers.  In an attempt to prevent munchkin gaming, the writers of 3.0 essentially asked its players not to be gamists.  A bit of an over step, IMO.

[Andrew Norris]

I'm going to talk about the online CRPG Neverwinter Nights, which is almost all I bring up here, I know. :) This time, though, I think my experiences are relevant. (To let you know my perspective, I am involved with DMing 1-2 games a week at a variety of levels using this product. It's an isometric 3D rendition of D&D 3.0 where a DM 'superuser' client allows adjustment of many elements of the adventure currently being run.)

Playing D&D 3.0 online definately changes things quite a bit. One thing it does is make the Gamist elements of a session flow much more smoothly than they ever did for me in pen&paper. Obviously the computer handles all the grunt work (die rolling, simple tactical decisions on the part of the NPCs), but the DM client allows you to do so much on the fly that the Gamist element can be as impromptu as you like.

In most of the games our DM troupe runs, there are a very few 'set pieces' with the remainder being filled in one or two rooms ahead of the PCs. So if they blew through the four orcs in the first room, the third room can have six. Or four orcs with additional bonuses added. (I've noticed that damage being high and HP being low makes for unsatisfyingly short combats in real-time, so we tend to boost the HP of most creatures in combat.) Heck, there's even a difficulty slider that can change the challenge of a given battle while it's going on.

I suppose my point is that D&D 3 is somewhat of a Gamist failure because, as has been said earlier in the thread, the 'fudge factor' is absolutely required. When it takes a dozen hours to hand-craft a challenging series of encounters that can instead be 'faked' in ten minutes by adjusting the game while it's going on, I think that is clearly a case of having to work against the rules. What all the complex adjustments in the CRPG really boil down to is fudging dice rolls and statistics, and I haven't yet been in a game where we could make combats fun and interesting without fudging almost minute-by-minute. Our DM troupe has actually abandoned all pretense (to ourselves, at least; I grant we're still Illusionists at times) of games being static challenges -- players realize that the challenges will be exactly hard enough, regardless of their capacities, that they *almost* lose. When it works well, the pacing is reminiscent of an action movie; when it doesn't, I fear the players feel they're being stage-managed. I'd like to address this with my group, decreasing the Illusionism involved, but I don't think we can entirely remove it without losing much of the appeal.