Reports of Two Contrasting Games: MLWM and Donjon

[marcus]

Over the last 9 months, I have acquired a variety of the games that are promoted and discussed through the Forge Forums. I thought, at first, that I might deal with my experiences with all those games, with a general assessment of what I take to be Forge gaming philosophy in this post, but I have realised that such a posting would simply prove too long (and too diverse in subject matter). I will thus, for the present, confine myself to my experiences with two games- Donjon and My Life with Master. This is appropriate as MLWM and Donjon were the two games that originally attracted me to The Forge. Both games looked like such original and exciting concepts I remember purchasing both with glee online, just as soon as I learned how the PayPal process worked.


My Life With Master

I am very impressed by MLWM. The book itself is very nicely done, and the rules are easily to understand and implement. I went out and purchased some special dice and started play promptly with my regular RPG group. This is a group that has been together over almost 20 years (albeit with some changes along the way), having played a large number of RPGs in that time, including several games either designed or very heavily modified by various group members.

Although several people in my group have GMed games from time to time, mostly that role falls to me these days. From previous unsuccessful attempts at trying to consult players about setting up a game (not to mention a general unwillingness of players even to read rules) I was convinced that there was no mileage in attempting to co-design with the players the Master (or any other aspect of the game), so I simply invented the Master myself. In my group, there is stiff competition to get one's desired game run, so one needs to be all ready to go and to be able to interest one's fellows pretty quickly in the game. or the whole enterprise is a non-starter.

The Master was Baron Cosmo Manteufel, a frustrated opera singer whose life ambition was to perform with the Ingolstadt Opera Company. Unfortunately for the world, however, the Baron was obsessed with improving his voice through gargling the vital fluids of children, which fluids were extracted by feeding them through a squeezing machine that would pulverise them to a pulp. The job of collection the kids fell, of course, to the minions. The minions also had the job of carrying out opera-related missions- the Baron is putting on a performance at his castle for the benefit of the IOC and needed the nearby town to be ransacked for a choir, cast-menbers, props, costumes, statuary etc to ensure that the eventual production is first rate.

The game has run fairly well- I've always enjoyed it, and most of the players seem generally to have fun too, although reaction is mixed. We play with the soundtrack of Phantom of the Opera running in the background, which is generally agreed to add greatly to the game. I find the dark humour of the game quite appealing.

All of the players seem to have some trouble with concept of the game, and are not sure exactly what to make of it. There are considerable differences of opinion amongst the players as how the game should be played or what the goal should be. The player of Krevchek (the Invisible Man in the Iron Mask), for example, is only out to do good, and constantly tries to disobey the Master, not fulfill missions, incite the townsfolk to storm the Baron's castle etc. On the other hand, Ludwig (the Evil Hypnotist), cares for nothing other than fulfilling missions to the letter and earning the praise of the Master. Most of the other players seem to try to keep some balance between good and evil- generally making a fair attempt at evil but often stuffing up the mission so nothing too bad happens. On the whole, I think this is a reasonably functional balance, as too much of either do-gooding or not caring about the evil side of minion activities could easily destroy the game.

I think there have been about 5 sessions of play so far, and the plot has progressed to the imminent arrival of the Ingolstadt Opera Co at the castle for the gala performance. Unfortunately 2 of the minions (one of them Krevchek) have been captured and are imprisoned in the town. I am not quite sure what to do about this. The last play session involved some of the minions trying to rescue Krevchek, but that oinly lead to another capture. With recovering the openly disloyal Krevchek pretty low priority for the Baron with the opera now imminent, it is hard to justify another rescue mission, and Krevchek has decidedly mixed feelings about returning to the castle in any event.

Anyway, despite a degree of culture-clash between my RPG group and the design of MLWM, I think the game has been successful in providing a good deal of entertainment and an interesting variation from the usual games played by the group. I would certainly recommend the game, and consider it a good model of what an indie game can be.


Donjon

My experiences with Donjon are far more limited. A major reason for that is that after the first session of play, I don't think I can ever get anyone to play the game a second time. Although I concede that, being my fist attempt at Donjon, my Donjonmastering of the game was less than optimal, I find it hard to believe that the game itself was not the major contributor to this disaster.

Even before I got to play, the fist major pitfall of the game became evident- the need to outlay far more than the cost of the rules themselves by purchasing humungous loads of d20. I went to my local games shop and pretty well purchased every d20 in the store to make up a collection of 40 such dice, and even this seemed less that I would actually need to avoid having to remember and re-roll dice during some combats.

The one thing about the game my players seemed to like was character generation. As soon as the game proper started, however, the fun was over. The whole process of equipping the party through a series of die-rolls seemed very tiresome, and not at all the snappy substitute for wading through price lists that it is presumably supposed to be.

The adventure proper then began- the sample adventure "A Fungus is Among Us". One of the reasons I had originally purchased Donjon is that it looked like an interesting new tack on a D&D-style dungeon game, and perhaps it would revive my interest in the dungeon-crawl genre, being a genre for which I have considerable nostalgia (coupled, however, with a longstanding distaste for D&D rules). Unfortunately I found that the game of Donjon I was playing not only had all the pointlessness of a game of D&D, but had it raised to at least the power of three. The device of allowing players to dictate much of the action instead of the DM seem to bemuse the players rather than empower them, and by effectively removing the DM's power to control the plotting or pacing of the game there was little chance of anything interesting developing. Call me an incurable xxxist (for xxx insert your favourite GNS-based term of abuse), but this system that looked so cool on paper seemed so unworkable in practice.

Another major problem with the game to my mind was the combat/magic system. Although my lack of familiarity with the mechanics were surely at least partly to blame, the whole system just seemed so cumbersome to use. Although the highpoint of your classic D&D is its combat, in Donjon I just prayed for each fight to end. And the magic system does not strike me as usable even in theory.

I realise that at least one rationale of Donjon is to parody the D&D style game, so I guess one should not take it too seriously. I understood, however, that the game was also supposed to work as a good game. I guess it is possible that I could spend another couple of hours re-reading the rules, practicing running combats, and then trying it all again, but I really don't think the effort would be worth the result. What joy my first (and, presumably, last) Donjon session yielded was mainly through the novelty of the system seen for the first time, but that joy faded pretty darn quickly.

As you might gather from the above, Donjon is not a game I can recommend, although I guess it is possible it may appeal to some tastes. It strikes me as representative of a substantial proportion of indie games in that it makes a good try at a novel approach, but is hard to make work in practice- at least not for me and my group (although we are admittedly evil xxxists, the lot of us...).


Marcus (the other M Young)

[Michael S. Miller]

Hi, Marcus.

Just wanted to let you know that I had a similar reaction to Donjon the first (and only) time I've run it. It's billed as "the game of old-school dungeoneering with an all-new twist." I was so impressed with the twist (i.e. the narration mechanics) that I overlooked the fact that I *don't like* old-school dungeoneering, and never did.

Upon further thought about the game, I think it would work (and others have attested as much) if played highly competitively, much like a pick-up game of basketball between friends, or a serious game of Risk. I think the narration mechanics would then come into their own and everything else would fall into place. Since neither I nor my players are fans of competitive role-playing, I've not pulled out Donjon since.

[TonyLB]

Let me juxtapose two quotes from your discussion of MLwM:

From previous unsuccessful attempts at trying to consult players about setting up a game (not to mention a general unwillingness of players even to read rules) I was convinced that there was no mileage in attempting to co-design with the players the Master (or any other aspect of the game), so I simply invented the Master myself.

... and ...

All of the players seem to have some trouble with concept of the game, and are not sure exactly what to make of it. There are considerable differences of opinion amongst the players as how the game should be played or what the goal should be.

I would offer that the one is a direct consequence of the other.  The creation of the Master is the built in warm-up that lets everyone get on board with the concept of the game, and to develop the social dynamic that they will use in the game.  You skipped it, with the result that nobody quite knows what to do.

Folks seem to think that the collaborative Master-design phase of MLwM is optional.  I really don't think it is.  It seems to me that olaying MLwM without player input and buy-in into the Master is like playing D&D without dice.

Since you've had a bad experience, you'd probably have a hard time trying to pull your people back to the table in order to play MLwM as it's meant to be played.  But for those who are reading this and considering what it takes to play My Life with Master, I strongly urge you to play it at least once precisely as it is written.

[Valamir]

100% with Tony on that.

The master is not "consulting with players about setting up the game"...it *IS* the game.  It is actually an important part of actual play.  Don't think of it as "game prep" that you do maybe with phone calls or emails or discussions in the car and then get together to actually start play.

Treat it as play.  The very first session, the very first time everyone is sitting around the table saying "lets go"...that's when you make the Master.  It is as important to the play of MLWM as roleplaying the minions afterward.

[Mike Holmes]

While I agree that master creation is important, I also think that he understands that, and only made the change reluctantly so as to get players to play at all. That is, as he said, they'd have seen it as set-up, and not have played. So telling him that this is the repercussion is of limited use.

Especially since he seems to like MLWM, and so do the players.

The "not sure what to do with it" section intrigued me. That is, you have players doing good, evil, something in between...all of which are intended by the rules. That is the point of the game is to have the players do what they think is most fun of these.

I'll agree that the game has a problem if everyone does nothing but evil in that it'll never end. The Love mechanics do intend that the minions are protaagonists with something redeeming about them eventually. Which is how  end game is reached. So you might want to mention that to the players. But protagonist doesn't mean "good guy" necessarily, and evil acts are OK in the short run if the player thinks it appropriate. The "seed" of the character's protagonist status are the connections with which he starts.


On to the more problematic of the two games. First, I agree with Mike that the game requires the same mentality that you would normally have in good old hack n' slash D&D. That is the players are competing against the system, the GM and each other to have the "best" character. If you have that, it works a lot better, from what I've seen.

Second, there are some mechanical problems in Dunjon. Many of which Clinton has addressed on his forum. So it's maybe not as good as it could be, perhaps.

Lastly, yes, you are "evil XXXists." As are we all. You'll forgive me if this seems to be a very resistant response to a very non-controversial idea. Which is, basically, that every group has ideas about what RPGs are, and how to play them, and they bring these to each game that they play. As such, some designs will work better for some groups than they will for others. Which is saying nothing more than that you can't say that a game will be bad for another group just because it doesn't meet your preferences. Where it's broken or something - that's a different matter. But if it just isn't fun for you because of the subject matter or how it's handled, that doesn't mean that it automatically won't work for another group.

And that's not to say that the feedback is irrelevant, either. That is, it's perfectly valid to say, "not my cup of tea." But whether or not you agree with the theory here doesn't make that fact mean that it's not just an opinion.

In any case, what I find rather troubling is the assertion that there is some problem of not achieving goals with "a substantial proportion of indie games in that it makes a good try at a novel approach, but is hard to make work in practice". That is, I'm glad that you see that this may be something specific to your group, because I can say with some certainty that there are lots of people for whom the majority of indie games are actually very easy to make work in practice. OTOH, if you have more specific criticisms or specific games, by all means you should let them be known.

I don't want to seem like I'm defending all indie games on principle or something. Each is different, and certainly some are much better than others. In fact, tossing them all together is very problematic, because you're making a lot of assumptions about how these things come to be, it seems to me. For example, I assume that by "indie games" you mean those created on The Forge, and not the multitudinous numbers of others produced constantly by others? Even then, narrowing it down this way, there's such variety in the styles, quality, and types of RPGs produced here, that saying anything about them as a whole seems pretty pointless.

So, again, specific criticisms would be far more appreciated.

Mike

[Bankuei]

Hi marcus,

Sorry to hear neither game worked out very well for you.  It's definitely good to try out new things, but its also good to be honest if something isn't your cup of tea.  Honestly it sounds like your group's style of play didn't mesh with these games, and that's fine.  On the other hand, both games are pretty clear in "what they're about."

Do you think the players might have chosen not to play from the beginning if they had read the texts?

-Also, side note: What were the PC's buying in Donjon?  Normally you'd buy a weapon and armor and be on your way... This never took long for me...

Chris

[JamesSterrett]

Donjon is an odd duck, in that for it to work, the players and the GM really *must* exist in the same shared imaginative space and be pointed in the same direction.  When I've played it, the sessions where it lives up to its promise are those when everybody is riffing off of the same general idea, tossing new stuff back and forth smoothly - and this is really very cool!  When the participants aren't on the same sheet of music, things are muddled and half-hearted unless and until everybody gets onto the same page.

Donjon is actually very hard to GM well, because you need to set the scene aggressively enough to give the players material to play around with, and then let them turn things in new directions, and still be ready to catch the ball if they ever decide a given scene is played out & it's time for a new one.  It is, frankly, sometimes exhausting; especially compared to having a static pre-set dungeon with ready-to-fight critters and traps and whatnot.


What about the magic system did you find non-useable?

[marcus]

Thank you all for your various comments.

On the subject of MLWM, I'd like to make it clear that I playing this game was a generally good experience. Although the novelty of the style of game caused some difficulties, the game was generally pretty enjoyable. Please don't misunderstand my position: I am giving a thumbs up to MLWM- it ran about as smoothly as I could expect a non-mainstream game to run in a group unused to such games.

I agree with comments to the effect that if all the players had sat down and collectively created the Master that would have made it easier for some players to play subsequently. I agree with that proposition primarily because in order to participate meaningfully in such an exercise each players would have had to read the rules and thus would already have internalised some of the spirit of the game without relying on experiencing that spirit only vicariously through me, the sole rule-reader. In the circumstances I found myself, however, I viewed this as a counsel of perfection. As Mike points out, I felt that I had to compromise on this matter or the game would simply never have been run. Although my players are sometimes willing to make a special effort for games of which they are especially fond, it is hard enough to "sell" a new game to the group when the game is ready for instant play, let alone require everyone to spend an hour reading a set of rules first. And if I tried group Master creation without those in the group each having first obtained some familiarity with the rules then the players would not be able to make any sort of intelligent contribution, and would probably just look bored and confused.

My comment about not knowing what to do next in MLWM was directed only at the situation of having captured characters, as the rules provide nicely for gettign captured but do noit deal at all with becoming uncaptured, except to imply that such a thing is possible. The variety of different ethical positions of the player characters was not something I saw as a problem in the game, but rather as a strength, despite the fact that it sprang in part from players not really knowing what was expected from them- each player simply came up with his own solution to this problem, and the result was perfectly functional.

With Donjon, I did indeed concede the possibility of the game appealing to others with different tastes, although I must admit that I do have some difficulty imagining this. I can't really envisage the game working well in a competive context, but if others have tried this and it does indeed work, then I will bow the the greater experience of those people and just have to take their word for it.

In response to the question about what my players were buying that made things so hard, I think it was nothing more complex than weapons and armour, but even this seemed so terribly complicated. Then one of the character who had smithing ability decided to make a desired piece of equipment with his ability, and that added further difficulties. I should concede in relation to this purchasing that things may have gone much more smoothly for a DM well experienced with the rules, but to be well experience one needs, of course, to like the game enough to play it repeatedly...

I agree that a game can be "not my cup of tea" but not be a bad game in general. A game can alternatively be "not my cup of tea" because it is a bad game. In relation to MLWM, I am saying the game is my cup of tea and therefore, presumably, not bad. In relation to Donjon, my position is that the game is not my cup of tea; that I suspect the main contributing factor to this is that the game is simply bad rather than being a game merely let down by my poor DMing or simply appealing to a subset of gamers of which I am not a member; but that I concede the possibility that a more polished running of the game by me and/or a different group of players might have made a difference.

In relation to my perception of "indie" games, "indie" is a term I have seen on the Forge, which term I took to be used to cover all Forge games, as well as non-Forge games of a similar ilk. I have assumed that the main quality that would make a game "indie" is that it is produced by a small business run by the game's creator, and is more a labour of love or bold experiment in game design than an exercise in money-making. It would follow that as a general rule "indie" games are likely to be bolder departures from the historical mainstream of RPGing, although I can see this would not necessarily be the case for every such game.

My comment that indie games as a class include a good proportion of games that are "nice tries but don't really work" is based on direct experience with only a rather limited subset of such games (although also on reading the comments of others about games I have not played), but is also supported by the logic that when one makes a deliberate effort to depart from the tried-and-true past methods of game design it is almost inevitable that although one is going to score some brilliant successes, there are bound to be many more barely adequate products- surely game design is likely to be like evolution, in that although mutation of traditional forms is necessary for any progress, most mutations will make a game less rather than more fit as a product. Still, I would have to concede that my comment is more an intuition than something I can solidly prove by close argument supported by extensive footnotes. Those that have played loads more indie games than me may well differ with my opinion, but then again that is unsurprising- presumably those people would not play all those games unless they liked a large proportion of them, so the set of people with wide experience of indie games will not be a representative sample of gamers overall but will surely contain a disproportionate number of staunch indie game defenders.

I should state further that I am not suggesting anything like "indie games are a bunch of crap, don't buy them". Although there may well be some indie games that are irredeemable rubbish, others (like MLWM) will prove quite good, and doubtless there is a substantial class of games that will appeal to at leat some small subset of the gaming world even if they are lacking in more general appeal. Further, even if my intiution is correct and there is a substantial failure rate of indie games, the alternative of simply sticking to well-tried formulae is hardly a particularly attractive alternative to such bold experimentation.

Marcus

[Paul Czege]

Hi Marcus,

I am giving a thumbs up to MLWM...

Thanks. I'm glad you had fun.

Regarding capture, the game text describes it as "temporary," and a "lead-in to the next scene." Some folks interpret that as a mandate to resolve the capture in the next scene such that the minion is again at large by the end of it.

I personally don't take such a hard stance. It can be very cool to have a series of scenes with the minion still captured. Overtures can be made to Connections who come to see the minion in the jail. The Master could whisper a command through the barred window. Violence could be perpetrated on the jailer. Capture is merely a creative constraint produced by the game mechanics. Subsequent play must incorporate the fact of the minion's capture. The dramatic sensibilities of the group should determine whether the capture only lasts for one scene, or several.

Paul

[Rich Forest]

Hi Marcus,

I'm going to add some thoughts about Donjon, which I've both GMed and played pretty extensively. I think you're probably right that the system was a (maybe "the") major contributing effect to the problem. I say this from the standpoint of a guy who loves the hell of out it, and who has had some very successful sessions of it. Successful in part in spite of some of the rules and in particular, in spite of the current version of the in-game text about how to play the game.

I'm going to start with some of the points that you made yourself, and work my way to other things from there.

Killing Things: As you mentioned, in your case combat was not as much fun as you'd hoped. We've had the same problems. One major contributing factor is how slow combat is. Another is how little strategy is involved. As written, it's mostly a dice off. The players don't have much control over whether they succeed or fail in the context of the battle itself, and speed-wise, the core rolling mechanism is more friendly to small-ish die pools than to the really large pools common even to first level characters in Donjon. It's also built so that a large advantage in the number of dice rolled doesn't guarantee success, which leads to a problem with whiffed damage rolls after successful attack rolls. We ended up, after a number of sessions using the original rules, collapsing attack and damage into a single roll, and likewise collapsing dodge and soak into one. We've played it that way ever since. It makes the fights go by more quickly and gets rid of the problem of damage whiffs. It doesn't make fights any more tactically interesting, but that's not a problem once you've figured out what kind of play the game actually supports (I'll come back to this).

Shopping: There's a good chance with the shopping rules that characters will not get the stuff they want or need before going into the wilderness, so you have to really push through this stage or house-rule it. We started out playing it by the book, but again, we ended up house-ruling it -- in our case, we usually skip it and start with basic mundane equipment. That's with my main group at home, but I've played it successfully in other situations. The shopping rules do work ok if you're playing the game pretty silly. I played it recently with Ben Lehman, and when his character couldn't buy the massive hammer that his combat ability was designed for, he bought a giant foam rubbery one instead. That's the only time I've played the game in full-on silly mode, and the only time the equipment rules worked well for me, now that I think about it. In my regular group, we always play it tongue-in-cheek – the characters totally believe in themselves and the world and everything, and are totally earnest about this dungeon crawling thing, and the players are sitting there laughing at the D&D jokes they're making via the characters.

Smithing: In hindsight, it's easy to spot, but anyway, it seems to me that having a Smithing skill is... kind of strange in Donjon. It's not useful in the wilderness or in a donjon at all, so it can only be used in town, and god help you if you want the character to have to have a forge and materials in order to do it. I'd just use the shopping rules to handle it, since it costs money for materials to make things, so you could just use the shopping rules as written but give a bonus equal to the smithing skill??? But I dunno man, I think the skill doesn't work in the game, honestly, unless you're going silly and having the player use it as a bonus to appropriate provisions checks to smith up stuff in the wilderness without equipment like some kind of D&D MacGuyver. Otherwise, if a skill can't be used in the donjon or wilderness, I'd rule it just background information that isn't relevant as an actual score on the character sheet, and that's that.

GNS: I've played it quite a bit and thought about it quite a bit and mucked with the rules and then put them back, and recently after talking with Ben Lehman about it a bit, I think I've figured it out. I think Donjon is a game that thinks its about competition, but really is about exploration. I think Donjon best facilitates "Exploration of Nostalgia." As James says, everyone has to be in it for the same reason, and I think recreating the feel of old D&D sessions is that reason. The game text is filled with all this stuff about competition between the GM and players, but this stuff wasn't really part of the first draft of the game that was published online as a playtest file, nor was it (I think) part of how the game actually arose, nor is it part of how I suspect Clinton actually runs it. Now of course those last two points are mostly conjecture, but if you read that little write-up at the beginning of the book of Zak and Clinton playing it, it reads to me like exploration of nostalgia right there from the inception, followed by a game system that supports (more or less) exploring that nostalgia with its narration mechanics and way-cool rules for looting the bodies, and which was run that way by Clinton at least as far as some of the playtest reports I read indicated.

I could be way off base here, but I always had the impression that Clinton really wanted to think of it as a gamist game. But the feedback and playtesting said the game didn't really support that. But he liked the rules he had. So instead of messing with the rules, he added the text that said stuff like, "This game is about competition between GM and players, like you remember in those articles in Dragon magazine back in the day about how to really screw over players when they're using the wish spell. That's how to play this game." But that didn't change that the system didn't support gamist play well, and wasn't even really meant to. Now maybe some people are out there playing the game like this and it's working... in which case I'd really like to hear about it. We found some isolated mini-games where you could get some gambling-related gamist fun out of the game -- narrating encounters that are crazy tough is one, and looting bodies is the other. But only the second one really works fully within the system itself. The first one is limited by the problems in how combat works.

In fact, many of the design decisions that were made during the phase between the web-published first draft and the print/pdf version of the game make sense from an "exploration of nostalgia" standpoint but not from a gamist standpoint. I can remember two specific examples from actual play threads: 1) it was clear fairly early on that the difference between a limited combat ability like "fight with swords" and a broad one like "fight" was not really comparable to similar limitations with other skills, like "sneak in the woods" versus "sneak," in part because players can search to find just about whatever items they want, so it's easy to get a sword if that's what you fight with. 2) Health scores are really low, and there's no incentive in most cases to do attribute damage instead of health damage. Both of these rules can cause problems if the players are working the system to maximize character effectiveness. But they're not so problematic from an exploration standpoint (players do attribute damage instead of health damage to make the fight more interesting and not have it get over with too quickly, for example).  

Now, let's look at a system that shines in play -- looting the bodies. It's pretty simple, but really interesting, and I think combat would be more interesting if it worked on similar principles. Here, there is a gamble, and you have to balance how powerful you want the item to be with the chance of actually getting it. But if you're just going for coolness, not raw system power, you can do cool stuff. By looting carefully, you choose how to outfit your character, what kinds of magic items he's carrying around.  You can search the body for something way cool and get it, but if you want something way cool and way powerful, you still have a chance but it's slim.

Donjon is the first game where I actually finally got to play a D&D Elf with a cloak and boots of elvenkind! I killed bad guys and searched for them until I got them, dammit, and it was way cool. Each one was only worth 1 die bonus because I just wanted to have them (again, exploration of nostalgia rather than concern about power). Do you know how hard it is in D&D to get these for your character if you have to depend on a) the random rolls for magic items or b) the DM to give 'em to you, other than going out and buying them (if that's allowed in the game)? Yeah, it's hard. In Donjon, man, you can get them fast if you don't want them to be too powerful. I was the coolest spell-slingin', bow-shootin', elven cloak wearin' D&D elf ever in that game. I even intentionally named the character after my own first D&D character, my basic D&D Elf Timmorn (And yeah, somebody out there probably knows where I stole that name from. Hey, I was like 10 years old, ok? :-) ). Another friend of mine, Ben Terry, got this from the moment we started playing. His character, Malek the Red-Eyed, a classic D&D Thief, searched body after body for "The Legendary Dagger of the Assassins." Which was way cool, but not way powerful. It had a reasonably minor bonus. And it took him forever to actually get it, but man when he did, the glee on his face.

This system works as a gamble and as a support for exploration of nostalgia. It's the cool. The immediate gratification of getting XP right after each battle is super cool too. And the battles can be fun if the players are working the narration angle rather than worrying about the dice off. I think it would be improved by any number of different ways of handling it, but the point is, you have to know that the combat isn't tactical so you can focus on getting the most out of the game play. Actually, I think that little sidebar about the "seriousness" dial should be a whole chapter about setting expectations that everyone is committed to sticking to. It's important.

Anyway, looking over this, it's long enough even though I have more to say. The main point is, we've played the game a number of times, and we were lucky – from our very first session of it, we were exploring nostalgia as much as looking for any kind of gamism. We found enough gamist-y fun in the gambling bits to make up for the lack of tactical and other step on up opportunities, and our exploration was facilitated effectively by the fact system, the cool character customization granted by the treasure rules, and the fact that we had a unified tone (tongue-in-cheek) and unified goal ("It's just like D&D!"). So I think you're right that the game doesn't do everything it says it does in the ways that it says it does them. It could use a revision based on more extensive feedback and the play its gotten since its release, but I'm not the right guy to be telling someone else to work on their RPG projects, given my own track record ;-)

Rich

[marcus]

Thanks, Paul, for the clarification of capture. I was worried that since a character had remained captured for a number of scenes that the rules were being broken, but your comments reassure me. I have indeed used the capture as an opportunity for overtures through gaol visits, as well as other developments such as a rescue attempt.

With regard to Donjon, what Rich says rings true. In relation to combat, I did attempt some simplifications to the combat rules to make them flow better. I can see how a group might take some time to rewrite these rules and produce a functional system. I have doubts as to whether the magic rules could be so easily rectified, however- on reading them they appear an elegant simplification of magic, but in play they just seem silly.

I agree that Exploration of Nostalgia must be a goal of Donjon, but so must Exploration of Parody. Using 1d20 is nostalgia; using 40d20 is parody. Given that the game is also supposed to be playable, there is this three-way tension between these three goals. The naming of the attributes is a good example of parody winning- nostalgia would dictate using the old D&D names, playability would also be served by D&D names or at least something simple, but the names actually chosen seem to have been picked for their amusement value in being as non-functional as possible.

Reflecting on the subject, it would have been hard omit the parody in Donjon to pursue pure nostalgia, as the best way to satisfy D&D nostalgia is simply to dust off your old AD&D books and play a game. Donjon's market is old-time D&D fans, but it sets itself the difficult task of making itself more appealing to those fans than the original game they purport to love, and this is where the parody comes in. Parody is a fairly shallow thing in a game, however, and although players may start playing in the name of parody, when the novelty wears off the parts of the game that facilitate parody are prone to simply get in the way.

Also, in order to sustain their loyalty past the initial play session, Donjon needs to give the players a game that does D&D better than D&D, which is a fairly tough ask. As Rich has pointed, there are some mechinsms in Donjon, like body-looting rules, that can be seen as improvements of the original D&D mechanism whilst still true to the D&D spirit, but many other mechanisms (like combat and magic) do things worse, whilst others lose too much of the D&D spirit. In the latter regard, I would have thought that having a big map of a dungeon for players to explore is fairly central to a D&D-style game, but Donjon makes such a map pointless as the players can modify geography as they see fit through successful perception rolls.

Marcus

[Bankuei]

Hi Rich,

I found from playing Donjon the key strategy lies in the use of facts.  Narrating facts that disable your opponent's ability to fight can quickly end a fight much better than trying to go for flesh wounds or attribute damage.  Case in point; fighting a giant demon that sat in a huge "cart", we narrated breaking the wheels(eliminating its ability to move), then set fire to it.

Chris

[Rich Forest]

Marcus,

I am interested in whether there were any specific breakdowns in play that were caused by problems with the magic system. I'm interested because the magic system is by far the single mechanical subsystem most often identified by people as problematic. It's been discussed quite a bit in the Anvilwerks forum. But interestingly, it's never caused any real problems for us in our games, and we have used it. So I'd be interested in hearing the specifics – it's very possible that our social contract has nipped potential magic problems in the bud in our own game play.

It's also funny that you mention the attribute names, which were the source of a bit of discussion at the beginning as well, if I remember correctly. I think you're right about them, by the way – Donjon does parody as well as get nostalgic about D&D, sure, and in some places the parody comes through stronger and in others the nostalgia. We played it with the D&D turned up, so we actually ended up using the D&D attribute names, since they map 1:1. To compare, the original version also had scores rated from 3-18, and the 1-6 rating was presented as a "bonus" based on your 3-18 score. It was purely a nod to D&D, where the "bonus" is the real attribute rating, in system terms. It was taken out because that's redundant, and inelegant. But I personally always liked the original. Actually, we first started playing with the early draft, and when the print copy came out we didn't change to the new, direct 1-6 ratings. It's basically cosmetic, but it does matter.

On the parody thing, I do think there's a middle road, or at least there has been for us. Humor that you're emotionally invested in. Here's where we've had success with a tongue-in-cheek tone for repeated play. Sure its parody to some extent, but it's also about characters you like, even come to care about. It's not just straight out parody – it's loving parody, and while on one level the characters take themselves seriously, and on another you're making fun of them for it, it's not bitter parody. So I do have to disagree with the idea that parody has to be shallow and dependent on novelty. If you're revisiting your old D&D haunts from a new perspective, some stuff is going to be funny, some is going to be straightforward, and some is going to be surprising. That's where the facts shine, something I suppose I haven't given them enough credit for so far – if everyone is grooving to the same plan, Donjon play is really, really rich with interesting, surprising, funny, and just cool D&D-ish moments. But it could be better tuned to this – some of the slowdown in combat and the competitive tone of the how to play text are contrary to this kind of thing.

It's interesting that you mention the map – we've used the donjon map, from game one. Not a pre-written one, but a group created one. Right at the beginning of each session, you slap down a big-ass blank piece of paper, and scatter colored pencils around. And when you narrate it, you put it to paper. It's a great way to revisit the classic D&D trope of having the party "mapper" but in a way that's appropriate to Donjon's mechanics.

Chris,

That stuff about facts in combat makes sense to me. I think you're right that it's the place you need to go if you want to get the most out of Donjon combat. But I think this is still strongest if the players and GM aren't really competing, and certainly not in the hardcore sense that the print version of the game text implies. Because as GM, the buck stops at me, and I can always keep the monster up and moving if I want to. I'd have to be working on the assumption that if the players do something cool and clever, it'll work, even if the beast has plenty of Health. Or I'd have to decide ahead of time what its weaknesses are, which would open up a whole bunch of other issues to decide/deal with. Otherwise, it's very easy to force the players to reduce the Health to zero in order to take out the enemy. "You set him on fire? Hah, he's a demon, he drinks fire!" And so on. In our play, we stuck to Health 0 as the only way to take out a monster, and we used the facts narration to mostly add color to the combat. But actually, since the rules say *either facts, or successes*, we didn't have many facts in combats. If we had, I can see the combat situation flowing in interesting ways. I think the slowness of combat is, however, also a real handling time problem as much as anything else, one that's compounded by the multiple rolls required to do any damage.

Rich

[Bankuei]

Hi Rich,

I'm with you 100% on the player vs. GM thing.  I've always come from the view point that the entire group(players and GM) are on the same goal to engage in challenging play(in Donjon, D&D, and T&T).  The GM's role then becomes to provided tactically challenging situations that are interesting and fun to play(aka, the pen and paper level designer) and the players role is to come up with innovative and fun strategies to work through the challenges presented.

Much like T&T's Saving Rolls, I've found Donjon strategy to be focused on "thinking outside the box" in regards to debilitating and eliminating threats.  Some very useful skills included stuff like, "Monster Lore"(Define weaknesses for monsters), my "Identify Hazard" and "Push foe into Hazard" combo, and similar things.  I've had the same issue with whiff hits, which is why I see the facts as being the powerhouse in the game, allowing you to set up situations to get those good hits in.

Chris

[marcus]

In answer to Rich's question about specifics of play breakdown in relation to magic, there wasn't much in the way of specifics, really, as we are talking about a single play session with only a limited amount of magic thrown about. I cannot recall the precise details, as the game was some months ago, but I remember someone casting a spell and the game just froze as I tried to make sense of the magic rules. After a few minutes of struggle, I think I concluded that the result was ridiculous in some fashion (I forget exactly how) and then just fudged the whole resolution to produce a reasonable result. I think the problem was that it was too ridiculously easy to get mammoth loads of spell dice, but my memory may be playing me false. If that was the problem, making power gathering rolls more difficult could perhaps have fixed the problem.

My concern with the magic rules was not so much about the problems that had already arisen in actual play, but rather when I started using the rules in actual play I could see all the flaws that would arise when the players started to have a better idea of how the system worked. The greatest flaw appear to me that both spellcasting abilities and spell difficulties were primarily based on the number of operative magic words, yet the power of a spell did not seem to me to be in any way related to the number of words incorporated- one word spells seemed potentially as powerful as eight word spells, so why take a penalty for using multiple words (and knowing multiple words seemed also of limited use).

I guess there are few rules flaws that cannot at least be ameliorated somewhat by group agreement not to exploit those flaws, but given that the introduction to Donjon says "this game is about winning", surely most players who take this philosophy seriously will at least attempt to exploit flaws to the greatest extent they deem possible without social censure. From Rich's description of his games, it seems that "winning" was pretty low priority, and there was a much greater emphasis on collective restraint so that weak rules systems would not break down. If I am correct in that assessment, I can see how that might have saved the game from some of its poorer features, but that is not a methodology that appeals greatly to yours truly.

Marcus