Measuring Success: How good is good enough?

[David C]

[JoyWriter]

It's good when it allows you to play an awesome game, it's better when it actively makes it even better! Good enough is barely in my game design vocab, but if your happy with it, I'd say it's good enough.

About making it better, I've been trying to work out how to move beyond the "kill switch" approach for a bit, and it would be awesome if a game could automatically give you "raider background" generators. But more broadly, I'd love to work out how to solve that classic problem, where players seize on the "not-important" bit and make it what they are here for.

The no prep style (no myth? not sure) is just to wing it and make up a new plot out of the events that have unfolded, although that is seriously high maintenance, and needs ideally lots of generative ways to make the players own actions provide the response, or I would just get swamped.

If you do want prep but just want to make it flexible, then it seems good to have generalised motivations or factions that are against the players, and then build the npcs from some elaboration of this, mixed with the character of the local area. Your always going to have to improv (unless your a genius or have predictable friends), but it would be nice to be able to limit this to adding depth rather than rejigging big wadges of your mental image.

I notice you say you broke your own rules, what encouraged you to do that, and do you think the same will happen to other people GMing your game?

[Daniel B]

It sounded like a great experience overall, but a few things in your post made me a little bit nervous. My comments have nothing to do with the design of your game itself, and all about how you might be approaching GMing.

When you told Eric that the probability of this one, particular person being a Pendric is really, really small and that he has no basis for rolling the "insight" check .. it smacks of a tiny bit of controlling his character. As much as we would love to imagine that people are able to separate metagame thoughts from in-character revelations, you MUST expect that there will be spillage. Although Pendric may be few and far between theoretically, given that they have the privilege of being a playable race, they will be far more common in practice (ie from the players' perspectives) and therefore I think it was perfectly valid for Eric to wonder. If that NPC really was a Pendric but you didn't want the players to find out yet, I would claim it's your fault for setting up a situation where they could be able and in your shoes I would have allowed the check.

That said, kudos for allowing the cleric an honest attempt to save the thugs committing suicide. Players do wacky, unexpected things and so I believe it is critically important to adapt to the players, instead of expecting any particular behaviour from them. When I DM games, I will try to set up what I think is an optimal solution to a problem, but also prepare for the .. oh .. less than optimal solutions that players come up with :-D  Some of the time, they don't hit the optimum but they get close enough, and that's superb. They advance in the game by their own means. More often, they get into really hideously bad trouble, or they come up with genius solutions that never even occurred to me. These are by far the most fun gaming sessions in my experience.


Dan Blain

[David C]

When you told Eric that the probability of this one, particular person being a Pendric is really, really small and that he has no basis for rolling the "insight" check .. it smacks of a tiny bit of controlling his character. As much as we would love to imagine that people are able to separate metagame thoughts from in-character revelations, you MUST expect that there will be spillage. Although Pendric may be few and far between theoretically, given that they have the privilege of being a playable race, they will be far more common in practice (ie from the players' perspectives) and therefore I think it was perfectly valid for Eric to wonder. If that NPC really was a Pendric but you didn't want the players to find out yet, I would claim it's your fault for setting up a situation where they could be able and in your shoes I would have allowed the check.

I might be more inclined to agree with you, but this literally happened almost immediately after I set the opening scene.  Also, my question is, "Am I controlling Eric's character, or am I protecting Mark's character?"  A lot of the appeal to playing a Pendric is that they have this secret, and beyond that, some people would kill them if they found out. 

About making it better, I've been trying to work out how to move beyond the "kill switch" approach for a bit, and it would be awesome if a game could automatically give you "raider background" generators. But more broadly, I'd love to work out how to solve that classic problem, where players seize on the "not-important" bit and make it what they are here fo

I think the problem here, is sometimes unrealistic expectations.  The players had this expectation that they bandits were part of some larger, evil-organization conspiracy, or something. The reality was that they just got offered some money by some people who they know nothing about.  I guess in hindsight, I could have given them the "meeting spot" where they would exchange for payment, but I didn't think of that.  I wanted to avoid that "interrogating prisoners" scene, when I didn't have anything interesting for the prisoners to say.  If I came up with something random, my past experience tells me it would just contribute to a schizophrenic story where the players were divided on what they wanted to do.

The no prep style (no myth? not sure) is just to wing it and make up a new plot out of the events that have unfolded, although that is seriously high maintenance, and needs ideally lots of generative ways to make the players own actions provide the response, or I would just get swamped.

I've done no prep, and really it has a neat quality to it and a bad quality to it.  The neat quality is that the players really can drive the game and a lot of unexpected stuff happens.  The bad quality is, the unpreparedness shows through, especially if you aren't feeling creative.  For tactical combat, it stinks. 

I notice you say you broke your own rules, what encouraged you to do that, and do you think the same will happen to other people GMing your game?

There's supposed to be two types of antagonists in my system, which exist to some distinction in every game, big bad leader-dudes and fodder. I made all the fodder using the big bad leader-dude, "rules."  At this level, there wasn't too much of a noticeable "threat" difference.  What was noticeable was that they were hard to hit and had a lot more HP than they should have had.  I think I did this because I plain forgot about the two separate generation rules.  (And when I say they're separate, I mean like, if you're making fodder you do steps 1, 2 and 3.  If you make a boss, you go on and do steps 4 and 5.) 

[JoyWriter]

Have you thought about shortcutting? Straight no-prep "They don't tell you anything interesting"! To an extent it reminds me of Shadow of Yesterday's simple actions; you don't care that much so you want to just say move on. If the players start pressing, then you could get either to some cool perspective where they start to look more and more paranoid for pinning this conspiracy on these random guys, getting the "unrealistic expectations" out there in game form, or you could have the players ask what kind of stuff they are looking for when they interrogate them. That is my standard rule for lowering GM prep; always accompany every knowledge check with a requirement to say what kind of thing they are looking for or might expect. This gives you fuel! What is more it constantly clues you into what the players perception of the world is, and allows you to tune stuff and make the world more them-ish, providing you don't skip all that and just tease them instead, which can be a temptation with really funny guesses.

Of course, all of this may just be due to people spotting the discrepancy you didn't, and assuming these guys must be big bads! In which case, it may be that your system already has a way to deal with this problem, it just that the signalling worked backwards this time.

[Erudite]