[D&D] Hot elves, morality, and the missing initiative roll

[Meramec]

b]Thought the first:  Bregens McDrinkerton and the hot elf<Thought the second:. Yes, lizardfolk children can burn.<Thought the second:. Yes, lizardfolk children can burn.<

[Callan S.]

Hi John, that's a good account you gave!

With the burning lizard children, it doesn't sound like the other players were judging the characters choice, it sounded like they were trying to indicate to the player he had played the game wrong and should not play that way again? That's how the account strikes me. It doesn't sound like they judged the player a bit, it sounded like they judged him alot and that's all they judged. Personally I think it was a challenging moral moment and interesting and I'm wondering if you have some players who want nothing like that? Which causes a...schism, really.

Also, which player set them alight? The one who had invented the holt elf and lazy dwarf?

It's pretty tidy that you did all that in five hours!

[Ar Kayon]

I would have immolated the lizard folk too.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

First, holy shit, what a great game, and what a great play account. Welcome to the Forge, too!

My brief responses, which I hope you're interested in discussing ...

1. Regarding the hot elf, it seems to me as if it wasn't only the player who let the ball drop with the low roll. Nothing stopped you from including the character just because you liked her and looked forward to playing her. The roll meant she didn't easily become a hireling, and the player's cessation of play toward her means she didn't become a hireling at all, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't become an active NPC in the ensuing events. (The possibility that occurs to me is that she becomes the player-character's romantic stalker, but the range of options is practically endless.)

This leads to a bigger and more abstract issue regarding what a failed roll of this type means at all, but perhaps that can wait.

2. Did you utilize any alignment talk or rules whatsoever? It would be very interesting to me to know whether and how you've encountered that concept and set of rules in previous D&D play as well.

3. You know what you did with the combat rules? To a certain extent, you re-invented the Tunnels & Trolls combat system. If you'd pooled everyone's fight rolls into a total for each side (and still permitted individual actions as an alternative), then you'd have made it all the way.

Cool! I am so psyched to see this thread. Plus an old-school GURPS thread going on too? My cup is runny!

Best, Ron

[Tim C Koppang]

You just made me nostalgic.  The first thing you did when you grabbed old school D&D was mod it!  What's more, because you were light on "official" rulebooks, you added rules in the places where you wanted them, and started scaling back the rules where you wanted to streamline them (combat).  From the sounds of it, this all happened partly out of necessity, but all very naturally.  This mirrors my first experiences with D&D so closely that I thought I was having a flashback.

I'm also curious to hear how you used alignment rules, if at all.  When the one player burned the lizardmen, you made it sound like alignment was irrelevant and that everyone was suddenly aware that the guilty player had crossed some unspoken line.  These moments of out-of-character judgment cropped up a number of times in my own D&D games.  I always found them odd.  We'd be happily chugging along making crude comments and killing fictional kobolds.  But then, as if out of nowhere, the group would call out one player and say, "Too far!"  It was a weird bit of group regulation.

[JoyWriter]

Quote from: Meramec on February 01, 2010, 07:02:57 PM

kick the dog moment, as you already know the group consider that to be going too far.

In another sort of game, it could just get you arrested

[JoyWriter]

I gammy'd up the quote tags a bit there.

[NN]

Some thoughts on your thoughts

- the main thing seems to be get all the players into player-invention and "failiure can mean complication"

- Its B2 , right? because that adventure is deliberately underwritten.


1. hot elf hirelings
makes me wonder: what are hirelings actually for?

- to effectively be PCs (in which case, do recruitment 'rules' matter?)
- a resource to be managed (balance the extra resources you can win by having them vs. the resources they cost)
- redshirts to keep PC death down
- trusted henchmen to specifically help their PC employer (for games with high inter-character conflict)

i think this is murky in the original game, but your solution would depend on your choice.


2. consequences

-alignment problems as already mentioned

im not quite sure what a mechanical rules would help, as theyd get factored in to the decisions, and so maybe stop interesting stuff.

-reading your account, i had a vision of the party having to later prove their heroism in front of some powerful good npcs...and their audience is suddenly interrupted by a fire-scarred lizardwoman and a militant druid screaming "babyburners". Also I imagine Lizardius as a mammallian-supremacist-maniac who know thinks the party are fellow travellers.

..reminds me of a D&D game a played about 5 years ago. We were stomping around Basic modules - twisted a bit to fox those who'd read them - and we acted like a bunch of xp-obsessed thugs. I was a bit disappointed at the lack of consequences...but in fact the DM was craftily biding his time...we ended up having to defend the Keep On the Borderlands against a angry coalition of everyone we'd ever pissed off.

[Callan S.]

Hmm, yeah, just noticed with the combat that it's an opt-in system. Instead of going from player to player pedantically as if they are going to do some special action (when they are most likely just going to attack), everyone just rolls an attack unless they opt-in to a special action. That's alot more ergonomic! I'll tuck that idea away in my head, hehehe...

[Meramec]

Wow, thanks for all the responses!   The welcomes and thoughtful posts are much appreciated.  Reading them and writing the following has really helped me put more of a name to some of the issues that were tickling my brain during the session described in my play account.

Callan: <Ron:<JoyWriter:<Tim:

[Meramec]

NN:

[Daniel B]

Hello John,

loved your account!     Hope this thread isn't over, because I have questions for you, on something you wrote in response to Callan. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm putting you on the spot; I'm genuinely curious.

Callan: <

You mentioned that having two players at the table playing different games (e.g. one taking moral questions seriously and the other treating it more video-gamey) is not necessarily a bad thing. I happen to agree with you, though I wouldn't want to make it explicit to the players (as it would be like someone standing up during a movie and yelling "You're watching a movie!") It sounds to me like you're actively going about confronting the issue of player-buy-in as a GM but that, in the past, you have dealt with it only during the game as it's come up. This is as opposed to wondering about it in hindsight.

My questions are: How have you been dealing with it? How successful has it been? After this actual play post, with everyone else's responses, will you be making any changes in the future?

Next, I just wanted to point something else out: you also expressed a wish that the players could generate the really juicy in-game situations on their own, but I think you answered that wish in the same response.

I would again want to make these situations creep into the game subtly, so as not to ruin the experience. Obviously the players are going to be aware of stuff they introduce themselves, and even of the potential for conflict, but what they won't see is the precise manner in which things will go so, so badly. How to make this happen? I think the trick is to motivate the players to introduce "damaged" but "substantial" content into the game, because such content will invariably lead to some interesting conflicts in the game. Bregens McDrinkerton. Why in god's name did they choose him?! Clearly a tactically bad choice, and yet.. a far more interesting one, as your post demonstrates.

If this "substance" is worked into the game currency and made cheaper than "tactics", you'll get a more interesting game in the long run. (I'm actually building a game .. I've been trying to keep this principle in mind, but your post has reminded me I've gone off-track a bit.)

Thanks again for your post.

Daniel B

[Meramec]

[Callan S.]

Perhaps you could just assign a budget for each act? And each time you introduce element based on their seedy or goody two shoes past, you spend some of your budget. How much is each point of budget worth? I'd probably leave that to A: trying to be consistant as GM in this, B: Watching the audience and if they think you got too much for too little and use up a few more points of budget if so and C: Keep in mind gamist players will still look a little pouty if it gives them even a chance of reducing budget/their obstacle/the thing in the way of them winning.

Another thing might be to make budget bitter sweet - yes, it brings adversity in, but make it that each point used also grants players XP. That way they don't quite know whether to hate it or love it (ha, cop that, players!)

Finally, to avoid 'John is doing his own thing and assigning himself whatever budget he wants' per act it'd be interesting to have a scaling chance of zero budget, based on how much budget you assign the act. So you have a tiny percentile chance of getting no budget at all, and the more budget you declare for the act, the higher that percentile roll gets.

Also that, to me, makes for a sometimes chilling world, where you burn the children and...there are no consequences...this challenges the GM as well, as sometimes inside he might be screaming that there should be consequence, but there is not. What to make of such a world, eh?

[athornton]

My response is, "but dude, a good DM DID make this awesome."

Let me unpack that a little:

1) if you want rules that tell you what should have happened when you set noncombatants on fire to get some loot, then OD&D is the wrong game system for you.  D&D 3+ is probably a better fit.  (there are ways to cheat: like, use Microlite 20/74, which gives you a very fast-and-loose experience, but, hey, it's still d20, which is to say 3E, which is to say, feel free to drag whatever you want back in).  But, really, if you want to play a rules-light system, then, well, yeah, you don't get to complain if the rules don't help you with your rulings.  That said, hey, you rolled with it and you did fine.  So why sweat it?

2) So, you got something to happen that your players were talking about.  That's kinda the point.  Your job is to facilitate the players' having fun.  Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of that--especially if you get wrapped up in conceptions of how the story arc *should* go, or where this set of encounters must go in order to make the philosophical point you're going for or in order to drive the plot to the Big Uber-Conclusion you're looking for.  But really, you're there to create a space for people to have fun (which can itself sometimes be memorable--and it's GREAT to hear people say "hey, remember that time when..." *decades* later).

3) Players make their own fun.  Sometimes, really, you're just there to roll dice and nod.  I had a great example of this last week in my own game, when a random item I'd never meant for anything other than minor dungeon dressing, plus a random bit of description to add color to the game session, led to a way for 3d-level characters to defeat a massively-more-powerful vampire.  I was in no position to deny the power of the story one of my players created out of random scenery, because *her story was way more compelling than mine*.  So sometimes you just sit back and let the narrative win.  The description of that session is at: http://athornton.dreamwidth.org/3930.html