GAMIST ADVICE FOR D&D (LONG)

Background
Our D&D group has mostly gamist tastes, but I sense some simulationist and illusionist tendencies in some of the others. For this particular game, I'm personally interested in gamist D&D only, so I'm trying to purify and refine our mode of play (rather than sneak up on or drift mode).

My past attempts to discuss theory or preferences with the others have failed, so I'm trying a new approach: Show, don't tell. Hence, the following list is for the most part just brainstorming for my own benefit. I hope to implement it when it's my turn to DM again.

My ideas are coined in D&D terms, but I think they can easily be applied to other games as well.

The list is still under construction and I'd love to get some feedback, especially as I have tested only a portion of this stuff so far.

(Lurking on the Forge, playing DIABLO on the PC and reading Robin D. Laws' RUNE are among the influences behind this list. I have read neither TUNNELS & TROLLS nor DONJON, but I hope to remedy this some day.)

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GAMIST ADVICE FOR D&D v0.1

1. Use aggressive scene framing to set up a challenge.
However, do not screw your players or their characters: Do not make them look dumb and compensate them for being set-up, if applicable. Better yet, have them start in a reasonably advantageous position.

Simply put, if you start out with the characters as sacrifices drugged and captured for a dark ritual, please (a) rule that they have escaped their bonds, stealthily slain the guards and found their equipment right before the guards come to fetch them, and (b) take the ugly situation (e.g. the drugs' after-effects) into account when calculating the encounter level and the rewards (see 4. and 5. for more on this).

2. Clearly delineate and define the challenge.
Lay out the victory conditions, the rewards, the terms of conflict and the consequences of losing as precisely as possible.

The idea is to really nail down the challenge and make everyone aware of the stakes.

3. Don't bother with boring fights.
The standard encounter should have an encounter level (EL) equal to Party Level (PL) plus four. However, avoid using enemies with access to effects the party can do nothing about yet (e.g. damage resistance which cannot be overcome).

YMMV, so you might want to go with EL = PL +3 or +5 or whatever. However, EL = PL is just pathetic and a waste of time.

4. Include a fight's circumstances in calculating its EL.
Terrain, reconnaissance and most of all last-minute preparations make a huge difference in D&D and should be accounted for when calculating ELs.

I suggest the following modifiers for starters:
# EL –1 if the party is ambushed
# EL –2 if the party is ambushed by a buffed-up enemy
# EL +1 if the party has prepared for an unspecified conflict
# EL +2 if the party has set up an ambush

Please note that player accomplishment outside the framed challenge does not count.

This requires some explanation: If the party goes on a dragon-hunt, it's a bad idea to decide on the dragon's CR ahead of time. Either it's going to be a push-over when ambushed or deadly when it has surprise on its side. Neither option is fun. (Here, more than anywhere else, YMMV.)

Instead, determine who gets the jump on whom (e.g. with appropriate skill rolls) and then adjust the dragon's CR to get the desired EL (see 3. above).

5. Give the players their due.
Base all rewards (i.e., XP and treasure) on EL, not CR.

(This logically follows from points 1. and 4. above.)

6. Don't pick on individual characters.
Decide on the enemy's tactics ahead of time and generally randomize and spread the pain. If the tactics are particularly ugly (e.g. attacking downed foes, concentrating on one target), adjust the EL by +1 or +2. Do the opposite for poor tactics.

This is more or less straight from RUNE.

7. Don't pull your punches.
Never fudge, whether it's die rolls, hit points or whatever. Don't have the enemy retreat, gloat, or otherwise give the characters a break (except if that's part of its write-up and included in the EL). Don't hesitate to kill the entire party (but see "Softening the blows" below).

Passions run high during a fight, so for the sake of tension and preventing a loss of trust, it's best to adopt rolling in the open as a general policy.

8. When in doubt, always decide in favour of the players.
If a rule call could go either way, rule in favour of the players. Always.

It's more fun (and far less frustrating) to fight a big monster and feel that the DM is on your side than fight a small monster and feel that the DM is on its side. Passions run high during a fight, so for the sake of fun and friendship, it's best to err in favour of the players. YMMV.

9. Take it like a man.
If your encounter isn't up to snuff or the players were lucky or competent, don't whine and never fudge. In fact, don't waste everybody's time with fleeing enemies or protracting the mopping-up phase. Just cede victory and hand out the rewards.

A DM often identifies with the enemy and views it as 'his' side. Well, don't. It just means losing all the time and will most likely make you act as a sore loser at some point.

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SOFTENING THE BLOWS

"Step on up" isn't everyone's cup of tea, but many players like the trappings of gamism, i.e. they love to win (ostensibly) tough challenges, earn (worthless) bragging rights and get (undeserved) rewards.

(Truth be told, I'm one of them most of the time.)

Here is a trio of suggestions to accommodate this style.

A. Grant personal life insurance.
If the players can't handle PC death, settle for another option and announce that the issue will be handled as follows:

When a character would normally die (e.g. by dropping below -9 hit points), the DM uses blatant fiat to save the character and take him out of the current fight for good. Also, the character will be "shaken" during the entire next challenge (but not in the meantime).

If a character fails his save against a disintegrate spell, the DM might rule that he reaches deep down into himself and shakes off the terrible energies, diverting them to the dungeon's ceiling. Which comes crashing down and buries the character, of course.

B. Guarantee the use of a deus ex machina.
If the players lose a challenge, use a deus ex machina to save their characters' asses.

The players can invoke a deus ex machina at any time, effectively ceding victory (and preventing characters who are still active from being "shaken" during the next challenge).

It's a good idea to think of a suitable deus ex machina ahead of time, but I wouldn't sweat the details too much. It's an ungainly and obvious plot device and nothing is going to change that.

C. Hand out consolation prizes.
If the party loses or the players cede victory, hand out half the XP reward anyway.

Continually gaining levels is one of D&D's main perks, so give your players some XP. Hopefully, they will approach further challenges with renewed vigour when their characters have just gone up a level.

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So...what do you guys think?

Regards

Hal

Hi Hal,

Great stuff. I tried a run of gamist D&D a year ago and stopped, and the poor gamist advice in the DM's Manual and the bad CR system played a significant part in it. I particularly like the idea of modifying ELs based on tactics.

Do you think that the Life Insurance & Deus Ex Machina are basically necessary to functional D&D play? Aside from the Sim use of it, it shows up universally in console rpgs in the form of resurrection spells/items and escape spells/items, and it's commonality seems to indicate its necessity for this kind of play.

Chris

Bankuei wrote: Do you think that the Life Insurance & Deus Ex Machina are basically necessary to functional D&D play? Aside from the Sim use of it, it shows up universally in console rpgs in the form of resurrection spells/items and escape spells/items, and it's commonality seems to indicate its necessity for this kind of play.

I think your advice applies to a particular sub-type of Gamist play.
Tactically focused rather than strategic.

For example, your point #4

If the party goes on a dragon-hunt, it's a bad idea to decide on the dragon's CR ahead of time. Either it's going to be a push-over when ambushed or deadly when it has surprise on its side. Neither option is fun.

Seems to me you are defining the Challenge as the final fight against the dragon. But one could define the Challenge as the entire dragon hunt.


[Or is my "strategic gamism" disguised sim?]

Myself I like everything that you have here but the Consolation prize; it just seems out of place with everything else. If you can already lose without dying and have fights end when the outcome can already be seen I say let them take any loses that they get without any rewards or less generous rewards then you offer.

I can see how a game run like this can be fun but as NN mentioned it focuses on individual fights rather then a procession of fights.
The usually EL=PL is usualy only good for multiple fights without time to recover between them. If the players can go back to town whenever they want to and recover everything they need like in Diablo then EL=PL fights are indeed a waste of time.
If you are giving them a fight that is PL+4 then they are not likely to be able to take more then one of these before needing to rest.

Hey, :)

Wow. I'm gonna post links to this all over the place. Cool stuff! :)

Cheers,

J.

@Chris and xect:
My experience matches xect's: The vast majority of people I've gamed with enjoy the challenge and the adversity, but *not* high stakes.

Interesting that you should mention computer & video games, Chris:

As far as console RPGs are concerned, the problem is that if you died for good, you'd have to play the same levels all over again. Given that it usually takes between 20 and 60 hours to complete a game like FINAL FANTASY, those would be high stakes indeed.

In a pen & paper RPG, you'll either join the party with a new character or – in the case of a TPK – the DM comes up with a new adventure. However, the attachment to the character is far stronger.

Blizzard's MMORPG WORLD OF WARCRAFT has been universally lauded because it has done away with penalizing death. You lose neither XP nor equipment. The designers' achievement has been to take a step back and pose the question "Does penalizing death actually make the game more fun?" It doesn't, but apparently somebody had to cut the Gordian knot.

However, there are gamers in both pen & paper games and MMORPGs who like high stakes. I've played and DM'ed such games and there are, for instance, DIABLO servers without resurrection.

Personally, I prefer gamism with light stakes. (For the record, I should not have denigrated this style with attributes such as "worthless" or "undeserved". I got carried away with a triplet of bracketed adjectives.)

@NN:
You're absolutely right: It's entirely valid to frame challenges at a strategic, rather than tactical level.

In my experience though, the strategic level is much harder to resolve in an objective and transparent way. I'd have no problems engaging in this sort of play with a DM committed to gamism, but at least some of the DMs in my group have other tendencies. I'd fear that they'd give in to the temptation, say, of envisioning this really cool scene where the dragon surprised the party by charging out behind a small waterfall... Just imagine the spray of droplets, the blood in the water, the unique fighting conditions standing chest-high in the river! Wow! The only problem is that DM might manipulate the scouting process to arrive at *this* scene. *If* he had this vision, I'd rather have him frame it directly.

@tj333:
Consolation prizes just lower the stakes some more, obviously below the threshold you find interesting. This threshold is bound to vary from person to person.

I played in an extremely deadly Shadowrun campaign a long time ago and have to admit that the thrill of danger and victory (heck, even of mere survival!) was one of the most visceral experiences I've had in any RPG. But the level of frustration was also unparalleled, so at the end of the day, I may look back fondly on the experience, but would not want to repeat it.

You're correct that EL = PL can be interesting with multiple encounters. In fact, that's how I recently ran a module's dungeon: The villain had fled there in gaseous form and the party followed. Rather than run things by the book, I introduced a time limit. I told the players that there was an inscription on the ruins which revealed that a gate to the underworld (where they would not be able to follow) would open somewhere in the dungeon in three days' time. Read: You have to clear out the dungeon and nail the villain on three regeneration phases. This worked like a charm – the players pressed on even as their characters were low on resources. And post-game, they applauded the time limit.

Still, I personally prefer EL = PL +2 or more, because I find the first couple of EL = PL fights in a procession tiring. I don't find "How much resources are they going to spend?" particularly interesting.

By the book, EL = PL +4 is equivalent to an 'even' fight, e.g. against mirror images, where the chances of survival should be roughly 50/50. However, it's usually not quite as bad, because the players often have special advantages which are hard to quantify (e.g. intimate knowledge of their characters, four people wracking their brains about tactics instead of one etc.). Hence, EL = PL +4 slightly favours the players, but is still very deadly. A boss fight, as it were. Personally, I plan on moving to those exclusively, at least as an experiment.

Regards

Hal

Halzebier wrote: 1. Use aggressive scene framing to set up a challenge.
However, do not screw your players or their characters: Do not make them look dumb and compensate them for being set-up, if applicable. Better yet, have them start in a reasonably advantageous position.

7. Don't pull your punches.
Never fudge, whether it's die rolls, hit points or whatever. Don't have the enemy retreat, gloat, or otherwise give the characters a break (except if that's part of its write-up and included in the EL). Don't hesitate to kill the entire party (but see "Softening the blows" below).

Continually gaining levels is one of D&D's main perks, so give your players some XP. Hopefully, they will approach further challenges with renewed vigour when their characters have just gone up a level.

NOTE: This is a draft of one of the posts which got lost in the attack on the server. I'm not sure if this sort of re-posting is a good idea, not least because I am quoting missing posts. Still, I was hoping for some more discussion and never got a chance to read all the replies to my post or the thread.

@Callan:

Noon wrote: Even better, simply throw down the gauntlet along with directorial power. Explicitely say in advance that when you throw down the gauntlet and say "Can you handle this?" your also handing over directorial power. So feel free to just say they've escaped their bonds but are equipmentless. Then it's up to them to adjust that with directors stance. Some might say they find their gear in a nearby room. Others might say they don't, but do find sacrificial daggers nearby and weild those, along with some makeshift shields.

Noon wrote: [Don't pull your punches, kill the characters.]I'm not sure about this one. Although we haven't explicitely stated it in our group, if the monsters retreat when they could press the advantage or gloat or such, the message is 'You lost!'. We don't need dead characters to indicate this...everyone knows that really they are dead, [...]

bankuei wrote: In a videogame, if you had to start over, you'd at least be armed with foreknowledge of how to approach it better the second time through.

[...]

Its probably safe to say that folks enjoy the strategic challenge but not the high stakes for the type of play you're talking about. Actually- given high stakes play and no drift, I can't imagine how anyone would get to, or get beyond 10th level.

M.J. Young wrote: An entire layer of their tactical planning has been rendered meaningless by one shift in the rules.

M.J. Young wrote: Of course, if you're talking about players who don't want to think strategically or tactically but want to feel like they did, you're probably on to something.

If everybody is on the same page, no problem. But in my experience, this approach blurs the line all too easily.
Let's face it, the DM rarely says "The Warlock has a heart attack." Instead, he comes up with something which is more believable, less disruptive to the dream, less visible. So he says "The Warlock casts flesh to stone at the fighter." rather than "The Warlock casts flesh to stone at the rogue. IOW, the DM uses poor tactics on purpose to give the players a break. And at that point, you can't determine if the players won or lost.

For instance, if you set the "encounter level" at "party level + 4" and frame it accordingly, the fight will be exactly as tough as you want it to be, i.e. hopefully guaranteed to be interesting. If the strategic level is allowed to bleed into the tactical level, the latter's challenges may become moot.

An ambush is incredibly deadly in D&D, particularly at high levels. Hence, if you set the dragon's level ahead of time, you may end up with an execution. If the dragon's power is such that the PCs can only overcome it if they scout successfully, you'll have to execute them if they fail at that. Similarly, if the dragon's power is such that the PCs could overcome it even if surprised, it will be an easy kill if ambushed.

Noon wrote: If that's too much of a hit on the dream, your probably not that interested in gamism to begin with. Proper win/loss notifications are always meta game...which is a good thing.

Noon wrote: I think your wandering into illusionist simulationism here. When the idea of each conflict is that they effect a greater strategic level by changing the plus added to PL in a future challenge, but you then just use PL+4 anyway, what was the point of those previous challenges?

Noon wrote: In other words, no one will cheer me for fights that aren't important...if I'm not getting cheers (not even from myself, because I know I'm not having a strategic effect, which is the intent), the only other way to enjoy it is just to watch what goes on.

Noon wrote: I'd really think you should use PL+4, dropped by one point if they suceed at the previous challenge. Your still adjusting so it's always a difficult/interesting fight, but there is still an effect happening. It doesn't matter what level the challenge is in the end...as long as it's modified for previous challenges, then those challenges are strategically tied to it.

It'd be illusionist if I did not cut out the strategic level completely, so there are no "previous challenges" (i.e., no challenges connected to the present one).

In the dragon hunt example, I'd just jump from the point where the party takes on the job to the point where they fight the dragon. I'd put in some flavor text ("You scout the mountains for two weeks, finally finding ample tracks in one of the canyons.") and then I'd aggressively frame the challenge of the fight.

That's a workable idea, as PL+3 is still quite tough.

However, it's not so easy to come up with a non-combat 'preliminary' challenge in D&D which...

(a) can be set up with clear victory conditions (to receive the bonus, i.e. "PL+3 in the next encounter, rather than PL+4") and

(b) takes more than one roll (e.g. a DC 20 Survival check) to resolve.

(Combat is right out, because I'm bored by anything less than PL+3.)

Regarding 'preliminary challenges', Noon wrote: Do they have to be non combat? I could easily imagine having a few tracking rolls and then the players run into some other monster/or group of monsters on the mountain.

Although I'm wondering if that might have a weird pacing effect...the players might find this prior challenge more difficult, depending on how things work out. Would that be a prob, do you think?

Again looking at the original post...new thoughts popping up.

Decide on the enemy's tactics ahead of time and generally randomize and spread the pain. If the tactics are particularly ugly (e.g. attacking downed foes, concentrating on one target), adjust the EL by +1 or +2. Do the opposite for poor tactics.

8. When in doubt, always decide in favour of the players.
If a rule call could go either way, rule in favour of the players. Always.

It's more fun (and far less frustrating) to fight a big monster and feel that the DM is on your side than fight a small monster and feel that the DM is on its side. Passions run high during a fight, so for the sake of fun and friendship, it's best to err in favour of the players. YMMV.

Even though we have not been playing illusionist, I think that some expectations from years and years of that may still be in place, i.e. the players are used to boss fights being close, on account of DMs manipulating them.

WRT spreading the pain:

My players have always been very satisfied with my "The rather stupid monster attacks whoever hurt it worst" tactic.

The way this usually works out, on the first round (when the rogue gets his sneak attack dice) the monster whomps him, taking him down a peg, but not totally flattening him. On second and subsequent rounds, the fighter is the one who gets whomped, but he's got good AC and HP so he can take it; finally, the wizard finishes the monster off with a big evocation. (before that, he limits his casting to buffs and little spells to avoid catching the monster's attention).

Of course, intelligent monsters act differently.

Regarding dividing a monster's attacks among PCs, Noon wrote:
I've always found this to be an instinctive thing to do, but wondered what it would do in terms to gamist play. I get the feeling that it doesn't matter in D&D too much, as all the party's HP are like a pool...as long as that pool is drained, it doesn't matter which individual(s) contributed the most or least to the drain. But I'm not certain.

I feel like I've been gone forever, as the site was down pretty much right up until I shut down to prepare for Ubercon, and now I'm catching up on everything as fast as I can but still took a day to get here. I hope my comments are still relevant.

Quoting Halzebier, Callan wrote:

(Combat is right out, because I'm bored by anything less than PL+3.)

Do they have to be non combat?

Later, Callan wrote: Do you or other people here spread attacks? So if the monster has three attacks and there are two PC's in front of it, you might lay one attack on each, then randomly distribute the third. If there were three PC's, then they each get one attack.

I've always found this to be an instinctive thing to do, but wondered what it would do in terms to gamist play. I get the feeling that it doesn't matter in D&D too much, as all the party's HP are like a pool...as long as that pool is drained, it doesn't matter which individual(s) contributed the most or least to the drain. But I'm not certain.

M. J. Young wrote: In the example of the dragon, my first idea was that the party approaching the dragon's lair encountered otyughs--those foul beasts that live on offal and carrion. Rather than make it "party must defeat otyughs to reach dragon" I would make it "party must prevent otyughs from alerting dragon, or dragon will be ready for them when they come". This inherently explains why the encounter level would be 3 if the party is successful with the previous encounter and 4 otherwise.

I really like your nine points of advice in general. I'd note though that a feature of 1e AD&D that 3e loses is that the 'wimpy' fights were actually a feature of 1e, where they are a total waste of time in 3e. This is because (a) healing was a lot rarer in 1e and (b) the narrower spread of armor classes meant foes say six hit dice down from you had a chance of getting in one or two hits. There was a serious 'war of attrition' effect you could get in a 1e adventure.

All this goes out with 3e though. Healing spells pop up like popcorn and big power asymmetries almost always lead to scratchless kills, plus casters have so many more spells and items that there's hardly any point attriting them. So your point #4 is sound for the current game but not for the early versions.

As far as the 'softening the blow' part goes, I understand intellectually that Step on Up occurs at the social level and you could still have a functional game with lots of resurrection spells, life insurance policies, no real risk, etc. However, my viscera tighten up and I want to take my +2 battleaxe and hack the shit out of every human being who plays that way when I read that passage. It's really abominable to me, like little kid sports leagues and contests where everyone gets a prize.

My friends and I stripped raise dead etc. spells out of the game already in grade school because we felt it made victory hollow. (Actually, that was only part of it - some of our actual reasons were IMO proto-narrativist, but all of our spoken justifications were gamist.) People who we caught playing killed characters in other people's games were let back into our games just long enough for us to tear the character sheet to pieces in front of the "cheater's" (as we saw them) eyes. This was kids mismanaging a social contract issue, as they do, but the feeling remains.

But this is me. I like there to be something at stake beyond self-esteem in the games I play: money, a chess rating, the ability to continue playing my character who I've lavished attention on, etc. I do look down on people who spend a lot of time on supposedly 'competitive' activities and brag about it but who only do so in that half-assed way. I know adults with jobs play nickel-ante poker and have fun too, but you wouldn't catch me dead at those games.

I want to say that people who play this way are playing wrong, but that's a moral stance on my part, and the vast popularity of video games which don't involve broader social competition and which allow you to save over and over until you get to the end of the puzzle suggests that there are - pardon my French - a lot of fucking wimps out there who enjoy that kind of bullshit, so it's probably good to give them advice on how to get the kind of play they want out of tabletop RPGs.

Sean wrote: My friends and I stripped raise dead etc.

I agree. You can be impressed with someone's math skills in nickel-ante poker, and you can be impressed with the quality of tactical and creative play in a D&D game where nobody ever loses their character to death no matter what they do. That's why I characterized my criticism as 'moral': I find these kinds of play pointless and vaguely offensive, but there is no a priori argument against them as functional forms of gamist play. For the weak and timid.

Although I do not quite feel the vitriol that Sean (cool name) apparently does for this kind of play, I will admit that any sort of softballing to me undercuts Step On Up completely. It also undercuts the GM / DM and relegates him/her to the Dominant whipping boy. For those familiar with BDSM terms you might consider it Topping from the Bottom. In this the "submissive" or "bottom" tells the "Top/Dom" exactly how he or she will be "dominating" the sub. Softballing is similar.

In any game, football and D&D alike, there are times when the referee does have to make a judgement call. However, he or she should do so with idea of making the decision based on the rules of the game and the intent of the game to the best of their ability. It should not be done with the idea of favouring the Players. Remember, like it or not the players are not going to cut the GM/DM any breaks, even if they play by the rules (which most do) and they have the advantage of group tactical planning.

I would also say that people should remember the GM/DM is there to have fun to and in these sorts of games they have a role to play. So let them play their role as judge and advesary to the best of their ability and the limit of the rules. Let the GM/DM have fun as well.

Final two points and I will shutup. First, as unpopular as this opinion is I am sure, D&D is NOT IMHO a Gamist system/game. D&D is dillusional Sim in that it wants you to focus on exploration but does so via hack and slash. I liken it to a reality tour of the middle ages, where you earn promotional miles by gutting the less fortunate while saying Thee and Thou.

Second, Step On Up has to include REAL risk and REAL challenge for it to be effective. How much of a winner can you be when you know the refs had the odds stacked in your favor?


Sean (not the same Sean though lol)

Sean wrote: but there is no a priori argument against them as functional forms of gamist play. For the weak and timid.