From D&D3e to The Pool

[Psycho42]

Hi everybody,

time to finally stop lurkling ;-) I'm not sure if this belongs here or into the Random Order Creations forum...

Yesterday, I had my first experience with The Pool, I read about it a few month ago here at the Forge and instantly liked it. I play and master in a weekly D&D3e campaign where we took the Planescape setting and converted it to 3e. I became bored with the d20 rules so I convinced the others that I would try The Pool when it became my turn to run the game again...

Character Creation:
Because we had experienced characters, we decided to use 100 words and 40 dice to divide among the traits... The trait lists looked a little bit like the proficencies from d20, but I guess that was to be expected, because we converted existing characters...

The Game:
I ran an encounter from "En Route" where a spirit of a drunken halfling takes over a character and doesn't realize he's not in his own body. This happens in their regular tavern, but before the characters get there, two of the characters, two half-orcs, decide to go into the cage... There is already a number of people who don't like them so they are stopped by 8 thugs. The half-orcs react like normal half-orcs and just try to rush through and succeed... This was a situation, I wanted to avoid in the first session, because I didn't know how to handle combat. I felt like they should be beaten up by the gang, so I feared that when they succeeded their roll that they'll use their MOV to tell how they beat up the gang, but they used it to describe how they rush by and get away. Nice move by the players, IMHO...

The two other party members reach the tavern and on of them is taken over by the ghost. This started the main encouter (the two orcs join them later) with a lot of roleplaying. We rolled dice only a few times, so I guess at this point, it didn't matter, if we used The Pool or any other system.

Most of the time the players took the MOV but didn't use it to bring "something new into the game". The used it to described their actions and nothing more - I hope this will change in the next few sessions.

Overall, I felt like everybody was enjoying the test and we'll continue with The Pool next week. We agreed that every GM may decide, which rules to use, so perhaps we'll swith back to D&D later, but who knows...

A few thing I'd like to know:
- How do you handle combat?
 Do you view the whole combat as one conflict or do you split it up into multiple conflicts?
- How do you handle magic?

Frank

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Frank,

Welcome to the Forge, and I'm glad to see this topic. I'm a Pool fanatic as well as an admirer of the Planescape setting.

My answers only represent my own choices about the game, and so anyone else should chime in as well.

1) I let the players set the pace of how much of the combat they want to resolve. Of course, if they don't take the Monologues of Victory (preferring to boost their Pools), then the pace is under my control because I can say just how much of their stated action gets done (or rather, how much more gets done). If they do take their Monologues, then it's up to them. If they want to solve this fight in one roll, let'em go for it (which of course means they might lose the fight in that roll too).

2) Magic actions are treated just like any other action. The character should be using a Trait, of course, and it should be described as something neat and setting-based like "Elysium Charms," not "magic" or "illusionism" or anything remotely D&D-rules-category related.

Don't worry about spells per day or any other constraints. In my game, I use the GM-dice ("gift" dice) pretty flexibly, so if the player says something like "I'm enspelling the dragon so he thinks we're his buddies," then I'll probably not give any gift dice at all, which means the player has to rely on Trait dice and Pool dice. Whereas if he says something like "I'm enspelling the bartender so he thinks we're his buddies," then hell, I'll toss in three gift dice, why not.

I think one of the most difficult things about doing D&D stuff in The Pool, though, is that the GM has to get over the idea that the players can do stuff like charm dragons. There's no spell list saying what spells can or can't do, so the GM can't rest assured that the dragon will not let the adventurers past it. "Brick wall" GMing doesn't work well in the Pool.

Best,
Ron

[Ben Morgan]

I think it was mentioned somewhere else recently that in The Pool, it's quite well within the rules to roll, get an MOV, and use it to say, "I kill the dragon with one hit", but it completely misses the point of the kind of play The Pool is designed to generate.

Now, having said that, there ARE times when it's appropriate to do just that. There's a bit in Roger Zelazny's novel Nine Princes in Amber, that illustrates this perfectly (in fact, it was even mentioned in the Amber Diceless RPG as well):

The main character Corwin has gathered an army together to storm Castle Amber because he wants to reclaim the throne from his brother Eric. Along the way, he's fighting his way up this giant staircase that goes up the side of the mountain from the city to the castle at the top. And Roger Zelazny condenses this down to just a few lines "...and they died, and they died." Conversely, elsewhere in the book, Corwin is fighting one-on-one with Eric in the Castle library, and the exchange is laid out over many pages, with much detail and witty banter.

So, the answer regarding the combat thing is: it depends. In the end, the issue becomes more about pacing than anything else. The idea you have to try and convey to your players is "how important is this conflict to the overall story?" If they're just dicing through nameless guards, let 'em resolve it in one roll. If they're fighting a duel with their sworn nemesis at the top of an erupting volcano, they should drag it out and make it as dramatic as possible.

[James V. West]

Planescape with The Pool? Cool as hell.

I can't really state it any better than Ron and Ben have already done. The key to The Pool is that everyone needs to understand how much input they can have and that their input is not in any way limited to task resolution.

As Ron was saying and as I neglect to go into in the rules, dealing with magic is like dealing with anything else. You need to be very specific in your Trait descriptions of magic (and of course in your Story). You wouldn't put down "ability +3" as a Trait, so "magic +3" is just as stupid. "Ice Wizard of the Lower Waste +3" is much more appropriate and lets everyone know immediately what kind of magic this character is going to be doing.

I like the fact that your players got away from the gang and didn't just kill them all. Shows they have a care for game consistency. Nice.

[rafial]

In the end, the issue becomes more about pacing than anything else. The idea you have to try and convey to your players is "how important is this conflict to the overall story?" If they're just dicing through nameless guards, let 'em resolve it in one roll. If they're fighting a duel with their sworn nemesis at the top of an erupting volcano, they should drag it out and make it as dramatic as possible.

Being the gamist running dog that I am, this causes me to think (as a player) "What's in it for me?"  If I'm an ueberduel with an archvillian on unsafe terrain, the GM has probably declared the roll possibly fatal, so if I win and take a MOV, why should I drag things out.  I'm only going to have to roll again and possibly lose.  I can narrate all the goings on I want in my MOV with no risk.  If I need to build up my pool and take dice instead, then of course the GM is free to drag out the resolution.

I guess what I am seeing here is that in the structure of the Pool, the only one with resources at risk is the player rolling.  There is no concept of "whittling down" the opposition.  One thought I have is that the GM could declare "metafacts" such as that players must be successful three times against the arch villian before they can take him/her/it out.  Sort of like the Importance concept from Universalis.  Some aspects of the world are more resistant to change than others.  Or require a double success in a single roll for a take down, (single success means you have the upper hand, but still haven't won) which means the players would have a motivation to build up alot of dice before moving in for the kill.

Of course, now you are getting away from the wonderful purity that is the Pool.  I'm actually not so sure that one roll, win or lose is a bad thing, if you have players that are willing to talk up the result.

[Psycho42]

Being the gamist running dog that I am, this causes me to think (as a player) "What's in it for me?"  If I'm an ueberduel with an archvillian on unsafe terrain, the GM has probably declared the roll possibly fatal, so if I win and take a MOV, why should I drag things out.  I'm only going to have to roll again and possibly lose.  I can narrate all the goings on I want in my MOV with no risk.  If I need to build up my pool and take dice instead, then of course the GM is free to drag out the resolution.

I guess it's a question of trust between the players and the GM. If a player would take the MOV and NOT kill the archvillain at once, but injured him/disarm him/... he could be pretty sure that I would not kill the character at the next opportunity. I think/hope the players will realize the importance of an encounter and act reasonable...

cheers
Frank

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

One of the reasons I consider The Pool to be a Narrativist game is mainly through a process of elimination that nonetheless provides one solid island.

- There's nothing to compete about, or if you want to state it differently, there's no element of player strategy in the Gamble mechanic. It can only reflect player priority regarding this conflict as opposed to the next conflict. So Gamism's not getting rewarded.

- Nothing at all in-game is modeled in the mechanics, except perhaps for the Traits. And since a Trait is nothing but a die or dice (rather than differences among skills or spells in most games), differences among Traits really doesn't mean much difference among characters.

- Then we're left with two things:

A) The player directs the actions of the character according to how he or she feels or cares about the conflict at hand.

B) And The Pool permits those protagonist-actions to become significant to the overall setting and situation, if necessary through the Monologues.

So The Pool tends to generate Premise among the players through their decisions and interests during play, and then they get to address it. There really isn't anything else to do.

Best,
Ron

[rafial]

there's no element of player strategy in the Gamble mechanic. It can only reflect player priority regarding this conflict as opposed to the next conflict. So Gamism's not getting rewarded.

I'll agree that the element of strategy is low, but it is not non-existant.  For example, if I'm feeling in need of dice, I can seek out conflicts where my characters traits are emphasized, so that any dice I gamble have a relatively high probability of paying off.  Now there is definately something narrativist going on here since I'm being encouraged to move my character in a direction in accord with their story, but there is a small smackarel of gamist satisfaction to be found here, at least for me.

We gamist running dogs are very persistent :)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rafial,

Indeed y'all are, and I don't think that's a bad thing at all.

I am looking forward to your response to my big essay on Gamism which I'm working up. It primarily concerns the mode's memetic power, which is to say, how easily and entertainingly Gamism can enter and dominate other modes of play, as well as how it and the other modes can (sometimes) get along.

Best,
Ron

[James V. West]

Well, there is a bit of Gamist in me too as well as a tad of Sim. In fact, when I wrote this game I had only just heard of GNS (probably a week or two prior...can't remember) and based on my very limited and somewhat skewed understanding of it, I considered The Pool to be Gamist because of the gambling. I still think there's a nice dash of Gamism there ;-)

And I even considered what you're saying once or twice, Rafial. I considered the idea of requiring more than one MoV to kill a major bad guy or some other equivalent challenge. But, of course, it runs totally counter to the game's spirit, which is cooperative, collaborative story-based role-playing. In other words, you have to flick off or at least crank down the Gamist switch if you want the game to run at its best.

[Robert Ahrens]

This thread is of interest to me as I'm currently using The Pool to run a 2 session "break" from my regular 7th Sea game.  Two players are out at the moment (one permanently, having moved, and one in Hawaii visiting his mom) and so I'm running the remaining three through a "flashback" to their knights' ill-spent youth in college in the fictional pseudo-Paris, Charouse.  

I've found The Pool to be good for this.  Players creating younger versions of their characters were quite easy, but I noticed that the players wanted to approach things trait first, that is to say that they made a list of traits that they wanted to buy with their character points and then used those to generate a 50-word description.  This is maybe "my fault" in that I asked them to start with a 50 word description but didn't tell them that they were going to do trait extraction on it, so in many cases the necessary turn of phrase was absent.

Since the point of the session was to game, not just to shakedown The Pool, I ignored this problem and we pressed on.

The game was pretty good, but coming from the very standard 7th Sea to The Pool was a definite shift for players.  (When I say standard, I actually think 7S is one of the better fantasy games available in the mainstream.  Nonetheless, it has a classic initiative cycle, attack and defense rolls, damage and soak, wound levels, etc.  All of the building blocks we expect to find in every game under the sun nowadays - well every "mainstream" game....)  

I think the MOV was quite challenging for them in that they weren't sure how far they could take it.  I started them in a bar and basically decided to just wing the whole thing for the first session and see where it went.  It's probably a natural instinct to hold back in those circumstances, as I think they were worried about trashing scenario continuity.  So after they got beat-down by some musketeers and thrown in the drunk tank, I tried to indicate that they should push things a little more.  With a little thought they discovered that the bars in the window were actually quite badly eroded and were able to batter one free and then use it as a lever to pry another loose.  Maybe not the most ingenious escape ever, but at least they were taking advantage of the rules a little more.

Something that I am really not sure about with The Pool is the "glass jaw" syndrome of the MOV.  I find that for my nickel you get a better build up of excitement in an extended contest.  This is probably the thinking behind the Hero Wars approach of Action Points (I'm guessing - I'm actually waiting for HQ to come out this summer, and not for Glorantha so much as that it'll let me finally run the Tale Of The Eternal Champion game that I've had in mind for so many years, but I digress....) comes from.  My point is that I think there is something to be said for a "Big Bad" who can take two or three player victories before he goes down.  Otherwise there is a danger that players get into the line of thinking that, well, I only have to try one stunt, no matter how silly, to put the baddy down.  Then they end up flicking mud in his eyes, he goes blind and they brain him with a bed-pan.  Appropriate for some moments but not, IMHO, conducive to the epic.  Hence, I have self-appointed myself 2 "overturns" per player that I can use to disrupt MOV's.  I have yet to use them, saving them for the Villain once I work out who he (or she) is.  In classic 7th Sea style of Drama Dice flowing from players to GM and back again, I will probably give extra Pool points to players when I play my overturns.  Not sure about this yet though.

Anyway.  I might write a more thoughtful Actual Play once the second session has happened.  And I'd be interested to know what other Pool tinkering is going on out there....

Cheers,

- Scorpio Rising.

[James V. West]

Hey scorpio

I don't think you need to worry about "big bad" encounters with The Pool. If your players cold-cock the major villain with one MoV, then they probably aren't grasping the game in some way. It is a narrative game, so the goals are different. If they encounter a, let's say, major villain and assume that their die roll is literally against him, then that's the problem right there--because it isn't.

The die roll is used to decide who describes events. If they really "get" the rules, then they'll use MoVs to add mucho coolness to the story, not win fights (well, not all the time). The idea of requiring mutliple successes would really derail The Pool into a gamist mode--and it isn't set up that way. It would suck, in my humble opinion.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Lots of ways to deal with this exist, certainly. Here's mine - to eliminate the idea of the Designated Major Villain from the outset. A whole bunch of scummy characters doing scummy things fits the bill instead; through the course of play, some are taken out easily and others really friggin' hose a player-character or two. By that process of elimination, some of the scum-NPCs are emotionally now defined as the Major Villains through play. And we take it from there.

Besides, I like playing scum-NPCs. Why stop at just one good one?

Best,
Ron

[Robert Ahrens]

Well there's a difference between what I would do in a long-term pool-playing experiment and what I will do in a two-shot fill-in for my 7th Sea game.  They are, by nature, different beasts.

So for the fill-in there is quite a strong requirement to have a conflict of some kind and to have some resolution of it.  I'm not sure if I'll actually need to use my "overturns" or not.  But my players are ... Gamist ... I suppose, and want some notion of conflict, antagonism and overcoming something.  That's part of the point for the way they roleplay.  I guess maybe what you're saying, James, is that The Pool isn't right for this style of gaming.  I'd be sorry to think that that were really true as I'm intrigued by the game and interested in using it in broader contexts.  Nonetheless, I think it is going to be unsatisfying at some level for players to use their MOV to say "I drive him back to the edge of the precipice and demand he surrenders," when they could just say I drive him back over the precipice."  Even if they're good storytellers and choose to do the former, I think knowing they could've done the latter will undermine it for them a bit because they're also gamers and they are going to have a hard time escaping from the conflict-based model on which most games are founded.

Hm.  Not sure if I "get this" or not.  I may come back and have more constructive things to say after tomorrow's game.

Cheers,

SR.