Gaming Table When I read Opening Your Game Table by Justin Alexander, I started thinking about DM Peter’s Grenzmarken campaign that tries to follow a West Marches model. I played in Season 1 of that campaign and enjoyed it very much. In Season 2 character goals got introduced. Going on adventures in pursuit of those goals during the game earns you an experience point bonus. Writing about your character on the wiki also earns you experience points.
I decided to share Justin’s article on Google Buzz and some comments were made that got me thinking about running a campaign with a changing pool of players. This page tries to summarize the discussion on Google Buzz.
share Justin’s article on Google Buzz
Justin basically advocates that expeditions into a mega-dungeon enable this sort of play. He also says that there are probably other ways of achieving it, but he didn’t know of any.
I argued that I’ve been doing something along these lines by having a big pool of players both for my Monday and my Sunday games. At one point I had seven regular players! Some of these players showed up for every single session, other players had to skip sessions every now and then.
There were two drawbacks to this very simple method:
1. There was no sign-up process and thus no preventing of all seven players showing up for the game. Since we were using D&D 3.5 rules, that slowed things down. A bit.
2. I had to embrace the metaphor of the editing mistake in movies. As people miss sessions, their characters just plop out of the story and return when their players return.
Turning a blind eye to editing errors works well enough if the players are willing to accept the somewhat lame excuses. In some instances, this can even add to the game world in that players will post on the wiki a sentence or two explaining what their characters have been up to. But Justin nails it on the head when he comments that “it can also be very dissatisfying; and if you’re seeing complete player turn-over (nobody here this week was here last week) then the effect can be completely disjointed.”
Some time ago the Triple Secret Random Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom by Jeff Rients inspired the OSR. It essential forced characters back into a *safe haven* at the end of the session. I guess something similar could be cooked up with a wilderness map. One of the remaining problems would be explaining the presence of characters that ended their last games in different save havens. I haven’t tried using the table because I’m afraid my players wouldn’t like it. But I can’t forget it either.
Triple Secret Random Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom
Thus, while I think this episodic play with a changing cast of players is already possible outside a megadungeon, finding more techniques to enable it would be cool.
Lior commented on the fact that maybe we needed to structure our sessions differently. He suggested that each sesssion “has an end that can be reached within 4-6 hours of play.” I think he wanted *achievable ends* in every session.
How to achieve a simple structure without also falling back to formulaic adventures? Set a scene, small fight, scene, big fight, loot, epilogue? You can spice it up with offline contributions on a campaign wiki, character goals, but in essence you’re recreating the format of TV series where at the end of the session the status quo has been regained. This problem gets worse if you only have three hours per session during the week.
Burning Empires Trying to think of orthogonal methods of solving the problem I thought of Burning Empires. This Luke Crane game is mostly similar to Burning Wheel with the addition of a competitive players vs. game master plot of planetary conquest. The campaign is split into three phases (infiltration, ursupation and invasion) consisting of six sessions each on average (assuming 4-5h per session according to page 15 of the rule book). And now the interesting part: Every session consists of one or two maneuvers. These are the adventures, and the moves in the strategic game. “Players strategize about maneuvers before diving into the scenes.” There are different kinds of scenes: color scenes to set the scene, building scenes to set up favorable conditions for the real conflict, and conflict scenes where things are resolved. Every player should have their spotlight scene, every side should have their conflict scene. In Burning Wheel, this is then factored into a roll to see who “won” the maneuver, disposition is lost (sort of hit-points per side), and the conflict proceeds to the next maneuver (page 612 f). There’s more discussion of this in the Getting Past the First Turn series of articles on the wiki.)
So, what tools does Luke Crane offer?
1. non-player characters are the opposition, not monsters, locations, or environment
2. each side as an equal amount of scenes available to achieve goals
3. scenes are character centric, not location centric
Trying to transpose this to the starting adventure of our current Labyrinth Lord campaign, I’d do the following:
Opposition characters: the alchemist is trying to purchase glass wares and cheat players into debt; the sheriff wants to find some allies (already I see a first difference: the other characters in the starting town did not play a big role in our last session; I’d treat the inn-keeper as a minor ally that can be “circled up” using Burning Wheel terminology), the bandits want to rob travelers, the elves in exile want to retake the palace of Seithor.
First maneuver: Characters want the job, the alchemist wants to give them the job and trick them. Second maneuver: Characters want to travel to other village and secure glass wares, bandits try to find and rob them.
Actually, I think this might work. Setting the scene in the inn, finding an ally, finding henchmen, final negotiations… Then skipping the forest and taking the boat, doing stuff, fighting the bandits on the way back… Maybe I just need to make the scene economy and maneuver structure more obvious?
We’d need to think of a common goal uniting all the characters into one “side” of the conflict such that every subset of characters depending on the players present is interested in doing “maneuvers” to win against the opposition.
I’ll have to think about this some more.
#RPG
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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Do you want to continue the discussion here or on buzz?
– Harald Wagener 2011-01-15 20:56 UTC
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Wherever you feel more comfortable. Posting my thoughts on my blog is part of my remembering things I said and being able to go back. In that sense a discussion face to face, a game played at the table, a discussion on some other blog page, or on Google Buzz is where I get my inspiration from, but my blog is where I do my record keeping (see RecordKeeper, haha). I also think that Lior doesn’t read my blog, so that’d be an argument for keeping the discussion on Google Buzz (and at the gaming table – if only we had more time).
– Alex Schroeder 2011-01-15 23:46 UTC
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I’d love to expand my campaigns to this level. I also know that DM Peter would love to find a much bigger pool of people for his Grenzmarken campaign.
– Alex Schroeder
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On the commitment side, complex rule systems with long term rewards for continuous play also feed into this.
– Harald
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This is pretty much the exact reason why I think it is important to play in short, “loosely bound” sessions. I think putting many such ons/two-session chapters into a larger, continuous context is the way to have the best of both play-styles.
– Lior
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In Peter’s Grenzmarken campaign, however, this turned out to be tricky when sessions did not involve simple dungeon delves. When the adventure involves overland travel and exploration, sessions sometimes seemed formulaic: travel, small fight, reach destination, big fight, loot, skip travel home.
Actually, this reminds me of another random table I’ve seen in recent years: Table of Despair – other variations exist online. http://jrients.blogspot.com/2008/11/dungeons-dawn-patrol.html
http://jrients.blogspot.com/2008/11/dungeons-dawn-patrol.html
Maybe something similar could be devised for overland travel. You need to end every session in a safe haven.
– Alex Schroeder
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Overland travel can become a moot issue over time if characters pick allies and abilities wisely. Another solution is the nearby megadungeon which forfeits the overland travel part for the “adventure proper”.
– Harald
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I think it goes even further: the idea that campaigns are planned as basically without consideration for the concept of a “session” is just wrong. Its one of those things that cause the designer’s dreams to clash with the actual play or with players “real-worldness”.
I have a suggestion for a different mode of organization. Instead of having bases of operations (aka safe havens aka towns) from which the basically same group of PCs make long but formulaic expeditions we should have unique chapters:
I think I’m in broad agreement, here. What I did in my Alder King campaign was to give up the idea of a home town or safe haven, and instead I embraced the metaphor of the editing mistake in movies. As people miss sessions, their characters just plop out of the story and return when their players return. This works well enough if the players are willing to accept somewhat lame excuses. In some instances, this can even add to the game world in that players will post on the wiki a sentence or two explaining what their characters have been up to.
To recap:
different set of PCs? Yes, if a player is there, their character is there.
achievable ends per session? Hopefully. This is something to strive for, but during the week I just have three hours available for a session. Traditionally, I have not played RPGs this way. So either I need some indie rules to replace the traditional RPGs, or we discover that it’s just a question of play style.
continues changes to the setting? Hopefully. I would not want to plan for it, because then I’m setting myself up for some heavy handed railroading, but I want to cultivate the state of mind that enables and invites changes to the setting by the players.
splitting groups? Yes. As I explained, if the players are understanding, this is no problem at all. There are methods to keep suspension of disbelief up, such as writing about your character on the wiki, or going on adventures off camera.
creating story during play? I’m not sure. Some people subscribe to the idea that story is what happens as you look back on the seemingly disconnected events. Others believe that using techniques from improv theatre (Play Unsafe, say Yes, Yes And, or at least No But) provide enough player empowerment in order to meaningfully add to the story or setting.
In short, I think this is already possible. Find more techniques to enable episodic play would be cool.
– Alex Schroeder
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The real trick is determining “achievable ends”. I’m absolutely lousy at predicting at how long X, Y, or Z will keep the players occupied and/or frustrated. A couple sessions ago I had prepped 12 pages of material in which the PCs were going to investigate every church in town. One of them transformed into a bird, went to a random church, and flew through exactly the right window to determine that, yup, this was the church they were looking for.
On another occasion I had 1 paragraph written about an event that was going to be reported in the newsheets: An attempted assassination at the local tournament field. One of the PCs randomly decided to go to the tournament field on the same day and the anticipated 15 seconds of table time turned into 2 hours as the assassination attempt evolved into a running battle through the city streets and a siege of the Godskeep.
A willingness to turn a blind eye to “editing errors” regarding PCs who are present or absent can be a work-around for this. But it can also be very dissatisfying; and if you’re seeing complete player turn-over (nobody here this week was here last week) then the effect can be completely disjointed.
– Justin Alexander
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Maybe the problem of determining achievable ends is inherent in a traditional RPG setup. If characters are free to go wherever they want, and adventures are location based, then nobody can predict the exact developments. This can be a boon if you like being surprised and if you like improvising, or it can be a bane if all your prep goes to waste.
Trying to think of orthogonal methods of solving the problem I thought of Burning Empires. This Luke Crane game is mostly similar to Burning Wheel with the addition of a competitive players vs. game master plot of planetary conquest. The campaign is split into three phases (infiltration, ursupation and invasion) consisting of six sessions each on average (assuming 4-5h per session according to page 15 of the rule book). And now the interesting part: Every session consists of one or two maneuvers. These are the adventures, and the moves in the strategic game. “Players strategize about maneuvers before diving into the scenes.” There are different kinds of scenes: color scenes to set the scene, building scenes to set up favorable conditions for the real conflict, and conflict scenes where things are resolved. Every player should have their spotlight scene, every side should have their conflict scene. In Burning Wheel, this is then factored into a roll to see who “won” the maneuver, disposition is lost (sort of hit-points per side), and the conflict proceeds to the next maneuver (page 612 f).
What tools does Luke Crane offer:
1. non-player characters are the opposition, not monsters, locations, or environment
2. each side as an equal amount of scenes available to achieve goals
3. scenes are character centric, not location centric
Trying to transpose this to the starting adventure of our current Labyrinth Lord campaign, I’d do the following:
Opposition characters: the alchemist is trying to glass wares, and cheat players into debt; the sheriff wants to find some allies (already I see a first difference: the other characters in the starting town did not play a big role in our last session; I’d treat the inn-keeper as a minor ally that can be “circled up” using Burning Wheel terminology), the bandits want to rob travelers, the elves in exile want to retake the palace of Seithor.
First maneuver: Characters want the job, the alchemist wants to give them job and trick them. Second maneuver: Characters want to travel to other village and secure glass wares, bandits try to find and rob them.
Actually, I think this might work. Setting the scene in the inn, finding an ally, finding henchmen, final negotiations… Then skipping the forest and taking the boat, doing stuff, fighting the bandits on the way back… Maybe we just need to make the scene economy and maneuver structure more obvious?
We’d need to think of a common goal uniting all the characters into one “side” of the conflict such that every subset of characters depending on the players present is interested in doing “maneuvers” to win against the opposition.
I’ll have to think about this some more.
Links: http://www.burningempires.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_Scene_Economy_and_%E2%80%9CImmersion%E2%80%9D
http://www.burningempires.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_Scene_Economy_and_%E2%80%9CImmersion%E2%80%9D
– Alex Schroeder
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I am also thinking that there is some sort of affordance at work, here. D&D enables exploration of space and mechanisms or magic items, resource management. Those things will be lost if we pursue ’achievable ends’ and maneuvers since they seem inherently open ended even if maybe they are not always in real life at the table. This needs more thought.
– Alex Schroeder
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Another thing to consider is mentioned in the link: “Play faster. Five to 10 minutes for a scene, then move on!” You may remember my frustration when we were done with negotiating with the ruthless alchemist and another player wanted to look into other options …see http://burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?3832-Strategy-roleplaying-and-the-scene-economy&s=2624b77c45f23faa735b7044dc6811eb&p=35696#post35696 for a BE-bent discussion on playing faster.
– Harald
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Damn, now I want to play Burning Empires. 😄
– Alex Schroeder
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… yes. Let’s finish the Alder King. I’ll be GM.
– Harald
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The Sunday Alder King game is one of my favorite campaigns (I’d love to switch from D&D 3.5 to Labyrinth Lord, however). Perhaps you were referring to the Monday Rise of the Runelords campaign? If so, I agree with you. But I’d like to finish in style. Xin-Shalast has been reached, the end is nigh.
And when it ends, we’ll play something else on two Mondays per month! 😄
– Alex Schroeder
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Yes, I meant the Rise of the Runelords, sorry. You have too many games running …
– Harald
