Dividing the Traditional GM Tasks

[TonyLB]

It work well, that is until a household pet decided to play with some of the puzzle while we ate dinner.  :^)

I feel your pain!  I too have had many miniatures scenarios unbalanced by the sudden introduction of the unplanned Indestructible Giant Cat monster.  I don't even know what sort of challenge rating to apply to that kind of thing.

[GreatWolf]

Andrew (Cooper),

First, congratulations!  I'm glad that your game is going much smoother because of these changes.

Reminds me of when I used to play Rolemaster, yea those many years ago.  There were three of us in the group, but we did a similar division of labor.  I was the GM, and I tracked wounds and damage and whatnot.  One of the other players manned the spell rulebook, and the other did all the weapon and critical lookups for us.  Off-loading some of the "processing" onto "co-processors" sped up gameplay a LOT, which increased our enjoyment of the game.

So, nifty for you!

[Andrew Cooper]

Okay.  I'm a little late getting back to this thread.  The holidays kicked my ass.

Kent - Yes, some of the changes I've made hurt what you call "the fog of war".  The question is whether that is a good thing or a bad thing or... just a thing?  On one hand the players now have more information than their character's would technically have.  However, recent play has seemed to support this as actually heightening tension and increasing anticipation rather than lessening it.  I'll give an example from my last session.

The big, nasty dwarven fighter who was without a doubt the most combat effective character failed his Saving Throw to resist a Fear effect in the first round of a combat.  I immediately told the player who was now in charge of keeping initiatives and game state variables that the Fighter would move at double movement away from the fight for the next 3 rounds.  It started a countdown.  Each round was a little more tense as the players examined the map and their options and tried to determine whether the remaining characters could "hold the line" for the remain time until the dwarf returned or whether they should retreat.  The dwarf player was still interested in what was going on because he knew that the effect wasn't terribly long and he was doing calculations to determine how long it would take him to get back to the battle and helping the other players plan on how to hold out for that long without him.

In similar situations in the past the dwarven player would have disengaged and the rest of the players probably would have simply retreated from the fight altogether because they didn't have the information needed to determine to stay and try to still win.  Is this "realistic"?  Probably not.  But this is D&D and not reality.  The fun (for this game at least) is in making the cool and effective tactical decisions.  To make those decisions, the players need information.  I give them that information.  It lets them have more fun and it makes it so I don't have to keep track of what information they know and what they don't know.

Mapping - I think I found a pretty good solution to the mapping issue.  I bought a large sheet of poster board.  I cut out a 3x3 inch square out of the center.  I taped the big dungeon map to the table and then placed the poster board over the map with the hole showing where the party actually was.  When a fight broke out, we pulled out the battlemat and drew the battle area on that and played out the encounter.  We didn't actually draw any maps unless a fight happened.

An interesting side effect of this method was that secret doors and certain room features were visible to the characters.  So, the players quit trying to find secret doors when there were no doors to find.  They only tried to find doors when they knew there was one.  So, I adopted the Burning Wheel "Let it Ride." rule.  This worked great!  No more sitting around for 20 minutes while players verified through massive amounts of rolling that there were no secret doors in a room.  They got one chance to find a door they knew was there and if they found it, great.  If not, then they just couldn't utilize that door until something significant changed in their situation. 

The other effect was that glowing runes, altars, portals, etc actually marked on the map.  They players could now actually see these things.  They would now look and say, "Hey, that room has a glowing thing in it.  We need to check it out."  This totally and utterly destroyed the character vs player knowledge divide but was totally and utterly a good thing.  Nothing was worse as a DM to know that there were these really cool rooms with really cool encounters in the dungeon but that the characters were pretty likely to not even go there because they didn't know the rooms existed or where they were.  These clues on the map actually guided them to the cool encounters.  Interestingly enough, because they knew the symbols meant something interesting was there but they had no idea what exactly it was, tension was actually higher than when 70% of the rooms they opened were pretty boring.

Well, that's it for now.  Questions or comments are welcome. 

[Ricky Donato]

Andrew, those points you raise about increasing tension are really interesting. Thanks for that explanation.

Could you explain the "Let It Ride" rule? I've never played Burning Wheel.

[Andrew Cooper]

Ricky,

Essentially the Let It Ride rule states that a player (including the GM) will only roll once for any given task and the result stands until something significant changes to allow for a reroll.  Let's take an example from D&D.

A player wants his Ranger character to track some bandits.  He begins tracking in the forest and after all the modifiers are added the DC is determined to be a 15.  The player rolls and gets a 17 for a result.  Blam!  The Ranger tracks the bandits.  The GM cannot say... "Okay.  You track the bandit for an hour.  Reroll and see if you can continue to track him."  The Ranger suceeded at the Tracking roll and that's that.  The results "ride".  Now, to continue... The Ranger tracks the bandit to the edge of a bustling frontier town.  The DC of tracking through a busy city is a 20 and not a 15.  The Ranger loses the trail at the city without a roll.  His previous roll of 17 isn't good enough to succeed at a DC of 20.  Neither the GM nor the player can call for a reroll unless something changes significantly.  The Ranger gets a bloodhound to assist, goes up a level, gets magical help, etc would all be changing the situation significantly and allow a reroll.

What this does for things like searching for secret doors is it keeps the game from devolving into "I roll... hmm, failure.  Okay, I try again!"  The player (or GM) rolls once per task or conflict and the result rides.

The rule also protects the player from having the GM continually call for rolls until he gets the result he wants.

[Ricky Donato]

WOW. That rule is brilliant.

[David Artman]

The talk about mystery versus enablement is very interesting, and I'll chime in on that in a moment. I am mainly posting regarding the Map Issue... and I am rather surprised that no one else has posted this yet; it's the way we *always* played map-heavy games (ex: dungeon crawls) and I even think it was the "best practice" method advised in the DM Guide released for AD&D.

Make one of the players the travel mapper. The GM describes the room/area/road as best he can (or reads the description, in a module) and it's on the player(s) to accurately draw it. Keep in mind that this "re-mapping" is ONLY relevant if there are time pressures in the game situation; I have played in map-heavy games where "we return to the surface" was a completely valid assertion, and I have played in games where the travel time (and random encounters) would make or break some plot element. Furthermore, some dungeons are so intuitively laid out (ex: very linear or symmetrical design) that one really couldn't get lost in it, anyway, and so the travel map is moot. I mean, do you make a map of a mall you've never been to, to be sure you could find your way back to the entrance? Of course not, and it's because the layout is so intuitive and there are so many visual clues (stores) that you almost can't get lost, if you have any kind of decent memory.

A player mapper also has a chance for making mistakes, which can become very amusing (or tense) as they play out later. Draw a door on the wrong wall, and then later end up with an "overlapping" room? Whoops--good luck, Dr. Livingston. Or... does anyone remember Queen of the Demonweb Pit? There's a level of that dungeon which has, basically, "mobius paths" that go over and under each other without any perceivable slope. My players were near to crying, half way through that run (in a good way--no one was pissed off, just totally confused and running low on torches).

And I've even seen clever players make a symbolic map, to speed up their own mapping time. Ultimately, to find one's way around, it doesn't matter that the connecting corridors are ten feet or twenty feet wide, or that there's an S-bend in one--they'd just make a little box and write a room name, then make lines to connect rooms (corridors, etc); they made a flowchart, not a map, and it worked fine. Of course, that left me having to re-check distances in the module instead of having it right there in front of them, when calculating travel times and such.

Now, if I have totally missed your point, I'm sorry. Maybe you meant "drawing out the battle area" as you mention in your last post? In which case, yeah, it would be fastest to draw it yourself, to avoid the whole verbal layer of description and interpretation... and mistakes which wouldn't be "possible" given it's supposed to be a simulation of real space. See, it's OK to have mistakes on the *character's map* but it's not good to have them on a *simulated space*. Thus, I'd suggest you draw battle areas yourself, but leave it to the players to make their own travel map (or not).

In case it's not obvious, I am in favor of preserving the fog of war. Your points about "one-shot secret door checks" make some sense, but not if the game is heavily about resource management. For instance, a secret door check takes (IIRC) 1 minute per 10 sq.ft.; and that time expense is supposed to be the control that prevents "check for secret doors every ten feet" rolls. Likewise, with the "cool glowing bits"--odds are good that there's something in the module or plot that will drive the players to the cool bits; if not, that's the point of attack (IMO) rather than just letting the players see the cool bits and be drawn to their shininess. Make the cool bits attractive via allusions, plot hooks, fanciful descriptions (ex: the characters could be told they see a faint glow under one of the doors) and out-and-out railroading, if necessary. The "show it all" method just makes the module into more of a shopping catalog than an exploration fraught with risks and rewards. In my opinion.
David

[Andrew Cooper]

Make one of the players the travel mapper.

I've actually done this.  It has its upsides but it can be really, really frustrating for me as the DM when someone makes a mistake on the map and now the players are flailing around trying to find the next cool encounter.  Maybe this kind of play can be fun for some people but I tend to find it about as interesting as watching flies fuck.  I mean, the players (or 1 or 2 of them at least) are probably engaged trying to figure out where they screwed up the map and how to fix it but it ends up being 20 or 30 minutes of snore-fest for me, the DM.  Since I consider myself one of the people playing the game and I'm supposed to have fun too, this really isn't a great option except in special cases.  Most of the time I just want the players to get to the next cool encounter without too much fuss.  I've even considered removing the map completely... but that's a topic for another post.

And I've even seen clever players make a symbolic map, to speed up their own mapping time. Ultimately, to find one's way around, it doesn't matter that the connecting corridors are ten feet or twenty feet wide, or that there's an S-bend in one--they'd just make a little box and write a room name, then make lines to connect rooms (corridors, etc); they made a flowchart, not a map, and it worked fine. Of course, that left me having to re-check distances in the module instead of having it right there in front of them, when calculating travel times and such.

Now this is a cool idea that I've thought of before but never implemented.  I've also never seen it implemented.

The "show it all" method just makes the module into more of a shopping catalog than an exploration fraught with risks and rewards. In my opinion.

I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion.  Have you played the "show it all" way?  I have and my experience doesn't match your opinion.  The session didn't seem like a shopping catalog.  It was tense.  There were obvious and recognizable risks and their resultant rewards and/or consequences.  Can you give me any counter-examples from your own play?  If so, please, give them.  There might be situations where the "show it all" method doesn't work quite as well and I'd love to know about them before I actually run into them in play.

[David Artman]

It has its upsides but it can be really, really frustrating for me as the DM when someone makes a mistake on the map and now the players are flailing around trying to find the next cool encounter.

Interesting. See, in a game where resources matter, I'd see that as a great screw-down for tension building. Because, as far as I am concerned as a GM, the *characters* are lost, if the players make a bad map--that's a part of the game: exploration versus resource management. Usually, they can't fix it without going back to the spot they think is wrong and comparing against "reality" (i.e. my description is repeated). And that's more time gone, in a game where dungeon time is (supposed to be) constrained by food, water, illumination, and encumbrance.

But, sure, if those resource checks aren't your bag, of course it's dull to watch the characters suffer under a bad map. Then again... all those trips back and forth to the same spots, to fix the map, are BOUND to draw some curious monsters.... ;-)

I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion.  Have you played the "show it all" way?  I have and my experience doesn't match your opinion.  The session didn't seem like a shopping catalog.  It was tense.  There were obvious and recognizable risks and their resultant rewards and/or consequences.  Can you give me any counter-examples from your own play?  If so, please, give them.  There might be situations where the "show it all" method doesn't work quite as well and I'd love to know about them before I actually run into them in play.

Well, no, I can't give you AP reports on a method which I have never used. I am, admittedly, imagining the nature of such play in comparison to the way I have always played in games where mystery and accurate records mattered. So I imagined my usual gaming group....
-----
Imagined Example
The party is in a room. There are three doors in the room.

Describe and Let Them Map: There is no clear reason to feel safer or more at risk, to choose the "best" door to open first. That wooden door looks like all the others; you don't know it opens into a huge ritual chamber until you take the time (and chances) opening it. The choice of which door to open *matters* because time's a-wastin'.

Show It All: The map clearly shows one door leads to a little closet, one goes to a long corridor and a new zone, and the third opens on a large, ornately detailed room. Of course the party opens that door first (or maybe does a quick check on the closet, as they can see it's small and probably insignificant, then go to The Good Door).
-----
And that is why, in my opinion, I would not just drop the map on the table and go with it--assuming there's any resource management element to the adventure, of course (otherwise, who cares how much fictional time the party spends "lost" in the dungeon, and so why even bother with re-mapping?). In my opinion, the "efficiency" gains you enjoy from having full player knowledge are less interesting than the "mystery gains" that come when any and every door could be doom. To me. In that style of game (D&D). If played as written in the rules. With my play group. (Sufficiently qualified, yet, to be accepted as an opinion?)

David

[Andrew Cooper]

WOW. That rule is brilliant.

Yes.  It is.  I highly recommend Burning Wheel.

[Andrew Cooper]

David,

There is a resource management element to my game.  The party does have limited supplies, spells, etc.  I just haven't found that the management of those resources becomes any easier with my method of just showing chunks of the map.  In fact, the party is getting into more encounters and fights in a shorter amount of time and thus running through their resources at a faster rate.  So, while they might gain resources at a faster rate they are also burning them faster too.

In any event, I'm not dissing your opinion.  I just wondered if you had perhaps tried this kind of thing before and run into any concrete problems with it that was informing your opinion.

[dreamborn]

Andrew, those points you raise about increasing tension are really interesting.  But I have found a similar increase in tension or more so using the fog of war.    Take your example of the Dwarf with fear.  First off rather than just saying you failed your role for fear you could describe the effect and then indicate to him that his character has to run away.  Each round you could inform him that his feelings have not changed and he must continue running away as fast as possible.    From his point of view he may or may not have concluded he is under the fear spell.  You are just describing the effect.  He also doesn't know how long it will last, could he run into something worse all by himself?

For the other players they might only know that the dwarf takes off down the hallway.  They might not know why.  As the rounds go by they realize he may not come back, should they do a fighting retreat and attempt to join up.  They don't know the whole picture.  I would suggest that handled (GM'd) properly the fog of war would increase realism and tension within the game.

In similar situations in the past the dwarven player would have disengaged and the rest of the players probably would have simply retreated from the fight altogether because they didn't have the information needed to determine to stay and try to still win.

But that would be their choice.  They are basing their decision based on the knowledge they would have.  You have not proven your case that they have had more fun.  I think you really want to say, You as the DM had more fun.  yes?  That is ok, I am not attacking that point, just trying to make things clear.

They only tried to find doors when they knew there was one.  So, I adopted the Burning Wheel "Let it Ride." rule.  This worked great!  No more sitting around for 20 minutes while players verified through massive amounts of rolling that there were no secret doors in a room.  They got one chance to find a door they knew was there and if they found it, great.  If not, then they just couldn't utilize that door until something significant changed in their situation.

Once again why should it take 20 minutes real-time?  You could make a single roll per character, let them know what they discover.  They don't know if the roll was bad or not.  Time taken during play about 1 minute maximum.  You could say that the characters took 20 minutes to come to this conclusion, but it won't slow the game down.

I agree with your 1 roll for event until something changes(Let it ride rule).  In ORS this is what we call event driven sequencing.  Characters can only react to something if they are aware (5 senses) that there was a change in their environment.

Personally I have done it both ways.  I prefer the fog of war method.  But the wonderful thing is 'you can do it your way!'.

Kent Krumvieda
www.dreamborn.com

[AdAstraGames]

I like fog of war in miniatures games and wargames.  I like it less and less in RPGs, where (to me) the focus is on story, character development and plot.

In my opinion, trying to put Fog of War into an RPG is sort of like mandating tubas as required on-court gear in NBA games...

My classic example is running a mystery, where "Fog of War" is "Fog of Narrative".  Nothing is more excruciating to play than the "monkeys pulling random levers to get the next clue" mode of solving a mystery, because the players are disempowered - they know that it doesn't matter what clever ideas they come up with, the Mystery Trumps All, and it's all about getting the next clue ticket punched in the right order.

Even worse is when the characters have some power (Divination spells, usually) that SHOULD let them short circuit mysteries, but the GM has come up with cockamamie reasons for it not to work - which the players then spend time at the table trying to logic their way around and circumvent.

[dreamborn]

Even worse is when the characters have some power (Divination spells, usually) that SHOULD let them short circuit mysteries, but the GM has come up with cockamamie reasons for it not to work - which the players then spend time at the table trying to logic their way around and circumvent.

I agree, if the characters have some power, they should be able to short circuit a Monkey type riddle.  But if they do not then you can, as GM, assist them by understanding the players intellience is not the characters.  In otherwords if the character has extremely high mental faculties and the player is not figuring it out then you can introduce hints and tips keep the game flowing.

Kent Krumvieda
www.dreamborn.com

[Charrua]

The best thing about the term "fun," is that everyone can define it differently.

If people find the concept of "Fog of War" fun, then breaking up some of the GM roles is much much harder with rules intensive games, where they have to keep track of a lor of information.  Dreamborn has it right in some sense.  If you like FoW (fog of war), and the GM can't/doesn't want to manage the rules of your chosen game, then change the game.  However, if, in the case of the original poster (sorry, I lost track of who that was), wants to switch it up to make their lives easier, and (lo and behold) make the game run smoother, then all the power to them.  Also, to pinpoint a perpetual problem in RPGs, some of the issues mentione here refer to metagaming.  That is, knowing something that your character does not, and acting upon it.  Of course, I don't want to take this thread anywhere near the topic of metagaming, but it is inherently a problem when the GM divulges tasks to other people.  However, if you have metagaming issues BEFORE you divulge tasks and have not addressed them, well, this isn't going to change anything, will it?

I'd like to say how much I agree with the concept of NOT making the GM the proverbial parent of the group.  In my personal group of friends, we've come to realize that we need to pamper our GM, because they put in WAY more time than we, the players do in making the game work.  We've started to make the meetings times, running meals, and even chipping in for his food.  It's only fair. 

I also agree, the GM does NOT have to be the rules lawyer, judge, or anything else.  To put it in other terms, often times many role playing games force the GM-type person to be the arbitrator of the group, where they become the major deity of the group, so to speak.  And I agree that it is OK to let the GM merely be the moderator of the group, especially if it improves everyones gameplaying experience.  And heck, the GM at any point can say, "alright, for this portion of the game, I'm taking 'control' back, because it'll be more fun for you all."  Being in a group where the GM has done both, according to what works best for the gaming system he is using.. it is often much more fun to do what the GM finds more fun, because then they make YOUR gaming experience better.  My GM prefers, for example, to have me memorize all the rules, have someone else keep track of data, and then finagles the game circumstances when he deems is appropriate to make play flow better.

Finally, despite the nature of this thread, if you truly want to keep the nature of dramatic tension in the game by never knowing what's going on beyond your own character and the GM can't keep track of it all, then assign a herald, task-master, etc to manage the often overwhelming amounts of ad ministrivia many games can have (the co-GM thing idea).