jack

I decided that after the homebrew Turtle Archipeligo adventure I ran with the support bubble, I would next plan to run some roleplaying which requires no prep and is very much fun, impulsive and silly. And also that I could invite people to come play when I wasn't already running a long campaign :)

I want to run HONEY HEIST, a simple one-shot without a lot of rules, where you play bears who wear trench coats and big hats and badly disguise themselves as humans, and plan to steal a load of extra special honey from a honey convention. Every bear has a criminal professional, a personality, and a type of hat, each determined randomly with a d6. Every bear has only two stats: criminal (for things that are more like criminal than bear) and bear (for doing things more like bear than criminal) which go up and down over the game. It is designed to be silly and fun and encourage trying things out and not worrying about the overall success or failure of the "mission".

You can see the pdf here: https://www.docdroid.net/KJzmn5k/honey-heist-by-grant-howitt-pdf (the whole thing is two pages in a very large font) and the original author's page (with optional donation) here: https://gshowitt.itch.io/honey-heist

Is there anyone who would like to try Honey Heist over video chat?

ETA: Feel free to invite partners/housemates -- nice to play with people you know and there's little prep so it's easy to organise another session if there's accidentally too many people.

Do you like the way I said "what could still be improved", rather than "what went badly" as if doing creative things is an ongoing journey rather than a pass/fail test? I hope so because it's hard work making my brain do that, but I think the rewards are worth it.

I had to force myself to sit down and go through all the major pieces of prep I did and ask "would the session have gone as well without it" to get my list of "what went well" because my first instinct was to assume that all the things the players did awesomely would have happened anyway, even though when I looked closer, a lot of them wouldn't.

Invent not "Who Are They" But "What are They Trying to Do"

In roleplaying -- or linear narrative fiction like books, tv, computer games -- any interaction is more interesting if the participants are actually interacting. If the PCs have a clear goal for the scene which could succeed or fail. And the NPCs are not just passive, but are pushing in a direction -- be it "make the guests happy" or "make friends" or "do a street performance (without being interrupted)" or "don't let anyone past the bridge".

But I just verbalised that dichotomy now, despite reading a lot of similar advice (goals, "what's my motivation for this scene", every scene should be about resolving a conflict of potentially thwarted success, etc)

So in the past a lot of my worldbuilding was too static -- a status quo of "this person/animal/society usually does this" instead of "is currently trying to do that", like a painting instead of a "in media res". I will try to do the opposite!

And further, not just minor conflict, but I always empathise too much with NPCs, I need NPCs who want something unreasonable and aren't willing to compromise, and even NPCs who are just antagonistic, so there is significant conflict for the players to overcome!

FWIW, I think some mediums make the opposite mistake, e.g. art, fictional encyclopaedias, exploration games are much better suited to showing a snapshot than an unfolding narrative. The same applies to larger bodies of work: The Robin Hood or Arthurian legends, or the stories about a pantheon of gods usually paint a picture of what the characters are like much more than presenting a beginning-to-end story. I think Magic:The Gathering is much better suited to showing what a world IS like than by showing some great transition, and I wish they would take an approach more like greek myths and less like the MCU.

Have clear goal

Related to the above, I tried to have a clear goal "a demon has escaped from the spirit forest, find it and fix it". I even explicitly asked people to think about a few ways that scenario could end. But I think it wasn't immediate enough, and didn't build on people's existing awareness enough, so it felt very abstract and not like a clear goal.

I could have fast-forwarded to start the party in the ruin of a farmstead, with an immediate "help, help, stop it, it went that way" or similar.

Or I could have done a cut-away scene to show the spirit demon causing mayhem even if they didn't know that in character yet, so they had a strong motivation to stop it.

I tried to establish the important points by having the party encounter a lesser dangerous spirit immediately, to establish rules of "how to deal with dangerous spirits" and "what damage they could do" and that helped, but I don't think it did enough.

More minor scene-to-scene goals (e.g. convince X to let you take her boat, scale the cliffs at Y) would also give more stakes and opportunity for establishing trade-offs -- sometimes you fail that thing you wanted, without failing the whole mission, and that makes the whole thing more interesting.

Have meaningful action resolution

I hadn't realised I'd done this, but half the session was "find out about the mission, get in a boat, go there", which was great for getting people used to the setting and mechanics, but didn't have a lot of "Can I do X?" "OK, well, roll, and we'll see", simply because I tried to seed in obstacles to the campaign, but I didn't think of every interaction as one that might go either way, even when choosing an NPC's attitude differently might have turned the conversation from "she gives you a quest" to "you try to convince her you're up to it" or turned "you get in a boat" to "oh no, a character acted out one of their flaws and now the situation is harder, can you fix it?"

Timing

I knew with six people, two of whom are 9 and 12, it would be hard to fit things in, and I pared the plot down a lot to a simple "establish premise, dangerous encounter [with fish], some more role-playing to establish characters, climax confrontation", but even so, people were losing concentration after a couple of hours. So we had a good session, hopefully memorable (especially the bees and the fighting the fish), and people got used to the characters and mechanics, but I feel like I could have done better to make two hours thrilling from the start.

Cookie economy

Because there just wasn't enough difficult resolution, people had few opportunities to spend cookies, so they loved earning them, but they didn't matter often enough so there was no real chance of running out, or a sense of how close they were to losing a conflict over something. Partly, I need more opportunities to make actions that matter, maybe I need to reduce the number of cookies.

Minor bits of prep

There were lots of minor things that would have helped. I planned to use physical counters for cookies but that was a bit risky with Ms Under One's inquisitive hands around, but I think they were much less resonant when they weren't being added and spent all the time. I wished I'd had a chance to prep my helpers a bit more specifically with like, this bit could be written small, this bit could be big so everyone can see, that are automatic if you're used to running games, but you don't necessarily know if you don't.

There were a few practical inconveniences like, how do I print out a few copies of the quick start rules and make it obvious at a glance which bits of paper are duplicates and which people should try to look at both of.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1125836.html

I put a lot of thought into how to make a game work where there were six players who want a variety of different things. I don't usually recommend that, but I wanted to play with all the support bubble! In particular, I wanted to avoid a system like DnD that defaults to "we kill it". But I also wanted to include some conflict along the lines of combat where you have a particular ability, and you use it, and get the thrill of rolling a dice and being effective.

Map

I predicted this and I was super right, that drawing a map of the area the PCs would go to would be incredibly useful. I got a lot of "ooh, what's that" and "can we go there" which was exactly what I hoped for -- it gave the players a meaningful sense of being familiar with the islands on these specific turtles, and immediately conveyed the general "how big is this" without me having to describe it verbally.

I drew a (very provisional) sketch of the whole turtlepeligo: one big miles-long grandma turtle with the spirit forest on her back, and a dozen young-to-middle-age turtles with villages, pastures, seaweed, etc, etc. And players were immediately invested in "where do I live" "what's the turtle like on my island".

And I drew the three islands the players were likely to visit, so they could rapidly see the status quo and decide where to go. It would have been well worth drawing some of the specific locations too.

It also forced me to realise specifics about layout I might not otherwise have thought of, like "there should always be a few boats drawn up on the beach, right?"

I didn't even expect to use the maps for trying to have people move around, which I think was the right approach. The main focus was giving the PCs handles to interact with the world. Although in a scuffle I might break out a map and PC/NPC standees, not to judge exact distances, but to see "who's fighting who"

Character sheets

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Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1125488.html

I feel like I've finally speculated and played enough I might be ready to run some of the other ideas I have in mind. Current forerunners, something set on Barrayar, and a swords-and-sorcery wander-the-landscape-fighting-dark-lords.

But I keep having further ideas for what can work well.

One is to borrow the idea from various places of a "reputation" track, where progress is measured in terms of how much, when NPCs meet you, they treat you as a famous wizard/scary badass/etc/etc. Or how much your standing with your personal god, or patron organisation, etc rises and how much support and lattitude they're willing to give you. Since having responsibility is fun, but only when it feels real.

The other is, that in order for players to relax and have fun, they have to be able to go into fights clowning about and it not being a big deal if they lose. Be able to play their character and have the scared one and the CHARGE one, etc, etc. But you only really get to that point if they can try things out and see what happens. Which is POSSIBLE if you have a "beaten up but victorious" mode (i.e. a big buffer of healing potions always). But maybe easier if you assume that losing means "embarrassingly driven back" or at worst "left for dead" not "throat slit". So I think I should try building that in from the start, both in terms of plot (i.e. have most enemies have a reason to skirmish and retreat, and fighting for a goal which can be lost without dying), and in terms of mechanics (i.e. make dying default to 'knocked out' not 'dead', and make more forgiving healing, but be more ready to provide informal consequences for losing, like just acting like it was a failure.)

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1113957.html

I know what the rules ARE, but it's taken me a long time to start to understand how apocalypse world action resolution differs from DnD.

DnD, you typically roll a d20, add relevant skills, and compare to a difficulty class set by the GM according to guidance about the sort of thing being done.

That has a bunch of features which aren't immediately obvious. For instance, all the characters vary in ability between "average human or slightly below" and "best you can be at this particular level". You could have a character who's world-class at something unrelated to adventuring, but you'd need ad-hoc rule to say what bonus they got for it. In most editions of DnD, adventurers can still be bad at things that aren't their competence, like the fun of a heist movie when the wrong character has to try to be stealthy or disguised, but in 4e, their skill is capped below more like a heroic adventure where everyone is fairly good at everything.

I still have a problem that if the characters are regularly doing things that normal human don't (even things that SOME humans do like "picking locks"), the GM is sort of behind the game at choosing an appropriate DC. Is this mostly impossible? Or really impossible? When characters do something impossible are they just that good or is it magic or something else? But everyone else seems ok with this.

In apocalypse world inspired systems, there's no difficulty class. You roll 2d6, and get a classic bell curve and 7+ is always "yes, but" and 10+ is always "woo, yes!"

That means, things you're good at, you get a +1 or a +3 (which matters a lot in a bell curve) you succeed at most of the time, and things you're bad at, you fail most of the time. Which sounds natural. But that implies, you only try things which are "average" difficulty for the sort of characters you are. Everything else has to be "the GM tells you you can just do it automatically or can't do it at all". Which is probably sensible. It probably SHOULD be like that. It guides the GM into "fun" resolutions. But I think I and many people find it confusing because it's never explained how that's important.

It's also to note that some systems the "things you're good at" are things like "being strong" or "being intelligent" and other systems it's things like "saving people" or "being dangerous". Which makes quite a difference. I think the system shines more with the more abstract/narrative abilities.

Both systems also get bodged with a bunch of rules for when characters can help each other and when tools are useful, when that makes a task trivial, when it increases the chance of success without increasing the maximum possibly achieved, when it gets a flat bonus to the roll...

A lot of these things are things a GM can sensibly just wing as it goes along but I'd *like* a system that helps that sort of improvising, rather than just assuming the GM will know when to use the system and when to ignore the system.

I've been thinking about systems a lot recently but now I'm thinking about more lightweight roleplaying, the best way of coping if you want a "roll a die every half an hour" type situation, but without making character abilities irrelevant.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1110593.html

A few times I've noticed I seem to have a problem playing with inexperienced GMs. It feels like I shouldn't, I usually feel excited to engage with the bits they're good at, and happy to handwave rules away.

I think part of it is just, an inexperienced GM is just always going to have a bumpier game, and even less smooth with a bunch of players they're not already familiar with. But it feels like I get on worse than other people, and I wasn't sure why, so I did some introspecting.

I think my problem is, I'm happy to play with different rules, when they're something someone consciously knows, and can explain or be asked about. But I'm not good at situations where I don't know what I can do and what I can't. I'm the same with board games, or buying things in shops: I'm happy with any particular set of rules if I can work out what they are in advance and go along with them. But if I have a fireball spell, and the GM's never adjudicated one of those before, even if I have the spell description and a variety of "how people usually treat this in practice" at my fingertips, I still don't know, will the GM want to follow the rules literally, or go by GM's intuition for how many enemies it affects, etc, even before you get into edge cases like "do you target a square or a point". And I don't want to provide too much info and overwhelm the GM or make them feel like I'm rules-lawyering.

Or to put it another way, I'd be happy to play a game where we've explicitly said either "lets follow the move-attack-act-move rules exactly" or "lets not overthink it, don't complicate a turn basically do one attack and we'll handwave how much movement you get", but if we haven't said, I find it hard to "fit in" with what we've converged on.

Basically the right model is, "take simple actions, try to follow the more complicated rules once, if it gets bogged down, don't do it again". But my brain doesn't cope with that. It feels like, I shouldn't have got it "wrong" even once, even if "wrong" isn't against any agreement, just going too much by the book when no-one else was and it didn't really matter. And it feels wrong avoiding things which are "allowed" by the official rules, if we haven't explicitly agreed not to.

I have a similar problem with board games with people from different board game cultures: I'm happy to agree any variation to the printed rules, but I'm slow at picking up, "we never explicitly said so, but we just don't do that, it feels too mean" (even if I agree with it).

And now I SAY that, I don't know why I hesitate so much. I think I usually have a fair idea what someone else is going to think is reasonable. So I can go with that, and what happens is a little better or worse than I expect, that's fine, and sometimes I guess wrong what they considered reasonable and they think my proposed fireball isn't reasonable or is suicidal, I can say, "oh, ok, can I do something else, then".

I think the problem was, my head pretends like, I'm "entitled" to any amount of asking for clarification, but "oh, can I take that back" feels like asking for a favour I'm not entitled to. And I don't know why, because it's probably a lot more accurate to say, you're entitled to 1/N of the GM's time, whatever that ends up being taken up with, so get the most fun/effectiveness/whatever you can with that time. Which involves guessing "what interpretation is ok" and then rolling with whatever the GM says, and proposing differences only if it seems to really matter.

Basically, treating a social situation the way I (eventually) learned to treat any other uncertain situation, of accepting that I needed to take best guesses factoring in how much time I spent thinking, the way I (eventually) did with board games where the best strategy wasn't obvious from the start, or life where you have to guess as best you can what's most important when you can't ever have the time to know for sure.

Or in other words, I know the DnD social protocols ok, but I was missing a lot of "normal" social protocols...

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1109596.html

It's such a classic of exploration and adventure narratives, that the characters encounter some kind of puzzle or riddle as a break from combat. People actively want puzzles.

But it's hard to do satisfyingly in a roleplaying game. Or in a novel, for that matter, though that's a different question.

We know roughly what a bad puzzle looks like. The GM reads it out. The players discuss it a bit. The player best as puzzles talks it over with a GM and eventually proposes an answer. No-one is in character. The other players don't really do anything.

I talked about this before, but a few more puzzle rooms have come up in my Labyrinth campaign so I wanted to talk more about what worked and what didn't.

What makes a puzzle that works well?

Like other encounters, the session should move forward whether the party succeeds or fails. That means the puzzle either needs to be something they can get past even if they don't solve it. Or sometimes, not essential to the main quest so they can just leave, but even then, that's rather a letdown, it's more exciting if it's too risky to stay, not too boring. The puzzle should come to some sort of resolution. Ideally, even if they fail, they'll find out what they should have done in a natural way, so they feel like they tried and failed, rather than it just always being a mystery.

Ideally failure should look like, "oh no, they had a fight the golem" or "oh no, they lost the gold they had to wager" not "they didn't find out what the prize was, they just go away never knowing". The players going away without finding what's there is ok sometimes, but you need to build sufficient trust that their decisions about what's too dangerous actually matter for them to care and not just feel like it's completely random.

The party should interact with it, in character. Always with roleplaying situations, provide things for the party to do. Ideally there'll be an NPC there they can TALK to and find out more. Or they can get relevant information history rolls, or detect magic spells. Or the whole puzzle is in the middle of a fight, and they have to multitask. Or there's some other risk of taking damage, so there's always a cost.

And just, there should be a bunch of stuff there. Not just a big empty space and a riddle carved somewhere. But decoration. A bunch of levers to pull. Some sort of emotional stakes. The more the party interact with it, the more they'll care. Ideally the party are invested in each step. If bad things come directly from the party's actions, they can feel like, "at least where figuring it out", whereas if they occur randomly the party can just be confused.

But also, while Character abilities should help, make sure they don't usually instantly solve the puzzle. Like other encounters, it's good that they can sometimes completely bypass it with one good use of a spell or ability -- that rewards them for having it. But ideally it will let them find the answer, not just ignore the puzzle.

If you have players who enjoy puzzles, they probably want to understand it. That means, not just get past it, but understand why/how a solution is correct. Make sure that you have answers. Likewise ask "why is this there" because your players might ask. "A mad wizard did it", is fine, but have in mind what sort of thing. What sort of mistakes might they have made? What would they care about? Understand how it works, mechanically, or magically, and if it's been triggered before or not, and the story behind it. The players might surprise you with a way of finding out, and then you'll have something helpful ready-made to give them.

An ideal puzzle might:

* Have a lot of interesting parts
* Tie into the lore of the world somehow
* Have a clear reason for being there (either set up as a puzzle on purpose, or that the players need to figure out an unlabelled device)
* It's clear how it works. The characters don't HAVE to play by the puzzle's rules if they can bypass it somehow
* But they shouldn't be able to do so routinely
* Clever approaches can solve part or all of the puzzle, but "finding out the answer through cleverness" is more satisfying than "not needing to find the answer"
* There should be tactical trade offs affected by the character's abilities and personalities, e.g. who's going to take the risky position? Which position is most risky?
* As much as possible, have something where the players can experiment, but there's a cost, and smart players will get the answer quickly and slower or unlucky players will get there a little later, but not never. E.g. less "if you get it wrong, you fail forever", more "you can have as many tries as you like, but each wrong answer you get zapped/have to fight something".

It's also good to allow a safety-valve, i.e. if the players get frustrated or confused, have some "official" way of letting them get hints, maybe at a cost. Or just to go away and research and come back. Some positive course of action other than "we don't know".

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1108550.html

Some spoilers for both groups of players (telling you stuff the other group found out, and confirming which of your guesses were right.) If you're interested in what went on behind the scenes, please ask me and I can talk through a non-spoiler version (or if you read this by accident, let me know, it's not a big deal as long as I know).

I talked about the puzzle rooms before, but I'm going to go through in more detail, to compare the amount of type of prep I did to that of other GMs reading.

What I wrote down

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I don't usually write up in this level of detail because obviously, it takes a lot longer than it did to write the planning! But it's interesting to do sometimes, so I can consciously notice what I was doing explicitly, and what I was implicitly doing in the background.

When I was less experienced, I would have needed to write down a lot of the specific things that here I just kept in my mind. Or if I was writing an adventure for someone else to run, I would have to spell out the extra detail I only verbalised now, because a lot of the good things about the encounter were the general idea of how it should play out, not the specifics.

Although even then, a lot of what went well was because I knew the players and know how to slot appropriate connections in as I went along. A published adventure can't easily do that. The best you could do is list the treasure as what was definitely there, and then offer the GM to fill in whatever felt appropriate, with some specific examples for them to use if they didn't have a better idea. Things like, here's some prompts (for things connected with the room, for things with an interesting backstory, for things that are of particular interest to the players somehow)

In terms of "puzzles" I think the most important thing is to give the players some experience of "trying different approaches and seeing what works", but make sure that the encounter being satisfying doesn't rely on them being able to figure it out logically. And single-answer puzzles are usually bad for this, unless you build an adventure about them with going asking different NPCs what they think the answer might be, etc. In this case, because I wanted a like-Labyrinth-film feel, I went as close to "single answer puzzle" as I could.

I think I learned how to do it better in future. Partly by using puzzles sparingly, but mostly, how to do it well when it comes up. Now I think of it, some of it is sleight of hand: it's giving the *experience* of solving a puzzle, but actually, having a fallback so it matters less whether you SUCCEED or not, as long as you give it a fair try.

Of course, that's for *most* DnD games where the PCs are supposed to be reasonably successful. Sometimes you want to play a gritty deadly tomb of horrors dark souls game, in which case you can go for "they may never solve it and that's ok, it's up to them if they want to push their luck or not" approach.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1101966.html

PLOT DEVELOPMENTS

Both groups learned some significant facts about the background of the world. The way the labyrinth sometimes connects different places in time, and the kobold legion they encountered had taken advantage of this to flee a post-apocalyptic future into the past, in the hopes of setting up an endlessly looping permanent kobold civilisation without the "and then the world expires and all is blackness until the beginning comes round again" bit.

And which gods think approve of this and which don't.

And both had some more extended contact with the kobolds (in reluctant negotiations or capture-and-interrogate ways). And both found some of the macguffins they'd been looking for.

PACING

The last couple of sessions have been pretty fun and satisfying (a few previously-mentioned frustrations aside), but I feel like, not quite as satisfying as I'd hoped. The one with the "investigating how the fungus creatures got in to massacre the mines" I think was still the best, I think because it had a lot of intermediate goals, but the more recent sessions have all been reasonably good, even if not perfect.

This is my first longer campaign, really. I wrote myself into a corner a bit. I originally hoped the players would just find hooks and challenges in the labyrinth, and explore off their own bat, finding new areas and getting money and levelling up being the rewards. But it didn't work out like that.

I naturally built up the things that were going well and sidelined the things that weren't clicking, so that made the game go a lot better. But that meant a lot more NPCs, plot, etc than I originally intended. Which is good, because it went well. And has mostly settled down to needing "not much prep". But partly it means that I'm crafting more of a story and less of a sandbox, which the original design is less suited to.

And partly, it means we've got lots of different story hooks or goals and not enough clear player-bought-into goals. If I did this again, I'd try to find a way to make clear progress towards goals (either with explicit missions with subgoals like "follow the clues" or "search areas to find", or with explicit goals for exploration like "level up when you find X thousand gold pieces").

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1101816.html

Both of my parties found the location of one of the MacGuffins, each hidden in a "challenge" room, i.e. a chamber in the dungeon designed in-character and out-of-character to present an interesting challenge and reward to the players.

One was a not-library filled with wooden boxes, which shocked you when you opened one, and a guide who partially answered questions about them, with the aim of finding the MacGuffin in one.

The other was a set of altars, bowls, and knives, with instructions to let a drop of blood into the cup on the altar, which produced various magical effects, and the aim of figuring out what was the "right" way to do that.

I'd really wanted to include things like this, as it's very appropriate to the underlabyrinth setting -- I was partly inspired by things like the Labyrinth film -- and a big DnD tradition.

I knew I was taking a risk because both the first two challenges were at the puzzle end of the spectrum, and this sort of puzzle is actually really hard to do well in a roleplaying game.

The problem is, if it relies on figuring something out, it's not really a roleplaying game, it reduces to the players pausing the game and figuring it out.

I think it works well when the puzzle connects to things in the world, where there's a puzzle to be solved, but the individual steps involve small relevant in-world decisions, like combat, or needing to successfully use a skill, or losing or gaining health.

I sketched these particular rooms out ages ago and then just pulled them out when the party found them, and was very pleasantly surprised how my off-the-cuff details worked out.

Both parties successfully navigated most of the puzzle. Gp 1 retreated when they were running low on health, but paid attention to the specifics and know exactly what they're trying next time. I really loved that they had a little chart correctly reconstructing most of my notes. Gp 2 got rather frustrated when it kept seeming they were getting closer but still not getting there.

I think there were some things I sort of did but could still have done better. I should have explicitly thought, "If they get stuck, what options are open to them? Is there an in-world way of getting hints for a sufficient cost? Or will going away and returning help?" And I deliberately tried to allow many indirect approaches to get useful information, but not instantly bypass the puzzle, but I could have been more explicit about what sort of things they might find out, so more of the things they tried I could have a helpful-but-not-insta-win answer ready.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1101400.html

Lots of roleplaying isn't about making characters with powerful abilities, but some parts are.

And there's a stereotype that a player who has a character with a lot of abilities from expansion books is going to be much more powerful. Why is that? The expansion book choices aren't inherently more powerful. But firstly, because of normal variation, some of them will be more powerful than average and some less so, a player looking to make a character effective will be drawn to the powerful one. And secondly, there'll be something that has exactly the right combination of abilities that are worth the most to this character, a lot more than they would be worth to an average character.

This is also what I observe about the human variant race. In theory "+1 to any two ability scores" might not be worth more than "+1 to str and cha". But it IS, because there's only so many races in the core book, and they won't necessarily be a race that excels in the abilities that a particular character benefits from the most. So "+1 to any two" is worth more than "+1 to these particular two", because it lets you mix and match the parts worth the most to you.

I struggled for a while with how to cope with this with players with a range of optimisation options. If all the players play "My character uses a dagger because it's in character, I know a sword would be better in every way" or all the players play "not the MOST powerful character, but I took all the obvious improvements I could" then it's fine, but how do I cope when there's some of each?

If the game's not combat focused it doesn't matter, but if it is, it's usually not satisfying to have some characters be just better than others. I eventually realised, I could mentally chart HOW optimised characters were, on a scale from "just picked options that sounded in character with no care for effectiveness at all" to "picked options that make sense together, but didn't try to optimise" to "made the obvious choices of choosing the most useful weapon and armour available and focusing on the stats most useful to my character" to "seeking out specific options which work well with my build". And I could recognise, given the player preferences, where on the scale made the most sense. And guide people to that point, either by giving them bonuses or suggesting tweaks, if they were less optimised. And suggesting they deliberately forgo some more effective choices in exchange for some more fun but less effective ones if they were more optimised than that. And that *should* work.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1099548.html

There's a joke about a GM preparing an ogre lair, and asking the party which way they want to go, but whatever they go, the GM decides the ogre lair is that way.

I think that's an expected part of planning to a greater or lesser extent. It's only a problem when the GM treats everything like that

But what I wondered was, is there an advantage is preparing something approximating a single reality at all? Or should the GM default to winging it, to adjusting reality and difficulty on the fly to create the desired impression?

Well, there should be a lot of adjusting on the fly. Or, indeed, just improvising when you deliberately didn't prep the specifics, you wrote "pit trap", and decided to improv how difficult it was when it came up.

But I also think, there should be things you DO plan in advance and DO stick to more often than not.

The most obvious example is, a combat where the GM repeatedly fudges the dice rolls. Obviously, it's possible that the monsters happen to roll badly just when it saves the party from being totally wiped out. But if it happens even once, with several rolls involved, the players get the idea it's likely that the GM fudged the results. And then, they assume that they're never really in danger, because the GM will fudge things so it turns out ok. That's good for some styles of game, but bad for others. In fact, GMs commonly aim to avoid it because it's too obvious, whether or not they think it's ok in principle, and find some other adjustment instead.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1099347.html

Admin

We ended up adding two new players, Liv and someone from the interested group, when a couple of players weren't sure if they could come. This ended up pretty well, and we had a really good session. I was really glad I'd been able to play with Liv, because I'd been hoping I would be able to and I wasn't sure.

The week leading up to the session I'd ended up a bit stressed by the logistics. I'd tried to structure things so it was fine if I didn't know exactly who would be there and I didn't need to worry about it until Monday, but it didn't work out that way. I kept wanting to do prep to make sure I was ready for any of the players, and to make sure I didn't have too many players if I invited more, but that meant players vanishing into various crises affected the planning more than I'd hoped.

What Went Well

I did too much prep, but I think it was the right sort of things that helped build the campaign.

We started off with a little war council of the players and a couple of NPCs. This took a little long, but everyone got a good sense of what mission they were planning, what the alternatives were, what they hoped to achieve, etc, and I don't think I could have cut it much shorter. Everyone had good intel on possible alternate missions.

Several characters brought up possible clues which they'd had in session 1 and I'd been prepared to remind them of if needed, and several characters followed up on things I'd expected to come up like "did we get a more full translation of that inscription"?

They chose the mission I expected, and weren't as on board as I hoped, but I think they were reasonably happy with it. This was, "collect bounties for track down fungus creature who'd invaded the mines and killed miners, and the traitors who'd let them in". I'd only imperfectly managed a balance between establishing a status quo and keeping events moving, so the mission didn't feel as important to them as I'd hoped, but I think it at least had reasonably clear rewards, both tangible and intangible.

They also had several other quests they were quite eager to work on, exploring the river, looking for most lost civilisation, looking for the remains of the navigation device, plus a few private ones, so I hope that might come up next.

The new navigation rules didn't come up much, but seemed to work well. I hope as people get more familiar with them, they'll make the players feel more able to make sensible trade-offs about which routes to take.

Several things I'd been trying to bring up came up, like J's character Lucke getting to use his spellthief ability. The party revisited the square where they were first ambushed by rock bears, and were attacked by a lone rock bear who was totally outclassed. They're getting used to always looking up, I'll need to give them some more competence moments, and then maybe some curveballs :)

C's character Sammy did several awesome combat stunts, using his amazing dexterity to drop from the ceiling impaling the rock bear, and leaping onto the back of a fungus-zombie ogre. And using his parrot to scout.

And AGAIN he used thunderwave to completely take out a small squad of kobolds, because it's area of effect, and guarantee of doing a small amount of damage to everyone in a group, is perfect for taking them out. I loved this so much: I couldn't have arranged it better, and it's really satisfying.

( What I could have planned better )

ETA

Talking it over with Liv, I realised two important things. One was, there was an awful lot that went well that I'd started to take for granted as part of running a session at all, but that's still quite good, even if I feel like I want to consistently do better.

The other was, when I was offering warnings, my voice is often a bit tongue in cheek, and this came across as sarcastic, like I was telling the players, "not this" or "something like this, but not". That's a shame, but it's actually really good: it's nice and specific so it's hopefully easy to avoid.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1098077.html

I started the campaign with the second group.

Despite being more people I hadn't known previously, they were also really nice, and also had really nice character ideas. We had more tiny machiavellian mastermind pcs, and more stabby stabby PCs, and more giant nerd PCs, and was generally fun :)

The session benefited from all the hooks I'd been strewing about in keeping up with group 1, and in bringing in the backstories from group 2 into the world, so other than the immediate goal of "delve for treasure", they had some reasonable suggestions for the them to actively choose between, following the bounties issued for the fungus creatures who invaded the mines, or following up more clues to a lost civilisation suggested by things group 1 found, or several other possible hooks.

And I managed to bring their characters together, first them, and then a couple of recurring NPCs, to have a chance to chat and get familiar with their characters, so stuff started off with more momentum than group 1 had.

Over-prep

But I'm still suffering from ending up with much too much prep. Partly because I'm figuring out the system, not the rules, but the way I want to run the campaign, so lots of notes about "this PC ties into this detail" etc, get muddled together, until I found a sensible way of organising everything. And partly because I just get over-invested in doing all the cool things I've thought of.

I *hope* that this does in fact help produce a cool campaign. I think it will, but now the PCs have caught up where I hoped in terms of interacting with the world, I need to step back and relax a bit more, and let stuff I've already thought of play out without constantly rejigging things.

The Labyrinth concept

I still really love the idea of the "undeground labyrinth", and after some false starts I really like the exploring mechanic I have for having the PCs able to explore unknown parts, map locations and follow routes, without physically mapping an actual world-wide labyrinth, but feeling like it varies from "reasonably straightforward" in the routes they're familiar with, to "dangerous" exploring unknown areas where you might legitimately get lost.

And I love that it lets me mix together two different groups in the same world, and rely on its magical weirdness to cover over "hey, wouldn't we have been here BEFORE group 2" moments, if things get out of sync.

And I love a lot of the worldbuilding I've come up with, and the players reactions when they uncover it.

But I think, it hasn't worked as well as I'd hoped as an old-school dungeon delve. Partly because the character and worldbuilding stuff was just more grabbing so that got a lot more focus, and partly because it's hard to balance encounters for a good learning experience where the PCs get to know what they can handle and not, when you don't want to hand-wave away accidental deaths. I think that will come more into focus as we play a little more, it's just that third level characters are already quite complicated!

But I think, I am much more excited by games with lots of npcs, plots, worldbuilding, etc, so if I do another big setting it will probably be a city.

I would still enjoy a small proportion of mechanics focused games -- basically the feeling of excitement when everything goes right and you win a fight. But I think they need to be structured slightly differently. You need more, "you fight a goblin, you fight some more goblins, you cross a chasm, you fight a goblin on a bridge across a chasm", where you experience elements which are easy individually but interesting in combination. That was how this campaign was SUPPOSED to work, but we ended up without enough of the easy stuff.

And the idea that "I wouldn't have to do much prep" hasn't been true, as I've been sucked into expanding... almost everything :) I hope it's a lot quieter from now on, now I'm familiar with all the characters. The plan was, most of the planning would be done once, and each session would be PCs just thrown into it and told "here's a top three hooks, go and explore", where everything already tied in interesting ways. But I ended up doing a lot to tie ongoing PC plots into events, and what I'd originally envisaged as a fairly slow growing background plot got more so, so keeping it all straight might have been easier if I'd just planned each session separately as "what are you doing this session" and not tried to maintain all the worldbuilding up to date so much.

But I am really enjoying it, I hope the games with these groups go well, and I hope I do run more variety of games in future.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1097789.html

Nothing specifically spectacular happened, but this session was really satisfying!

The players brought the rescued miners the rest of the way back to the main mines, on the way discovering a small Myconid outpost near the mines, and discovering the myconids had made a big attack on the mines, sadly wreaking quite a massacre. Further patient investigation discovered a contingent of guards had let the Myconids in, and absconded with some of the most valuable resources mined.

What worked out

I tried several things to make the session feel more satisfying, and I think they all worked:

* I looked at the overall arc of the campaign, which so far had mostly been "rescue trapped miners" and a few other hooks which we hadn't had time to explore, and worked out what would be natural next things to happen, and then made sure they happened *now*, not waiting on the players to "get there", even if I needed to jump a little to get there
* I worked out what the players were most likely to encounter and let my imagination run free fleshing it out, updating my overall notes accordingly. Some of that showed up in ways I expected and ways I didn't, so the prep is showing worthwhile even when it doesn't come up as expected
* I made an effort, in advance and during the session, to flesh out the NPCs the players meet. Even a little bit made the world feel a lot more alive, and began to snowball as I got used to the NPCs and more fell into place, even if I'd just got the players to make up a name and single personality trait to start with.
* Some "joining-the-dots", or just having stuff that the players would see during the session, but making sure it's uncovered successively by specific player action; even if it's only "ask the obvious questions in any order", it adds a lot more feeling that the players/characters are driving what happens, and it's easy to adjust (e.g. if I know what they're likely to discover, I can on the fly judge what actions might uncover what easily or only after some challenge they encounter)

In the end, I spent some time introspecting about *how* to plan this, which I'm pretty pleased with, and the actual prep ended up not taking long, mostly plugging a few ideas I had for what was likely to come up into the existing worldbuilding I already had, and some brainstorming. So hopefully I can keep doing that without a big investment of time.

It does mean, I can't yet quite do what I'd originally hoped of running a zero-prep session on the spot whenever I'd like. But if I work in some mini-plots into the worldbuilding/scenario/locations, I probably could start to do that just by picking up one of the ones I'd prepared. After a few sessions I should start to have a surplus of stuff like that anyway.

Also

We had enough time to revisit some things which had come up before, and discovering more about them made everyone feel like things had happened, and me feel like they were worthwhile including.

There wasn't that much combat, and that felt about right as we'd spent a fair bit of time on combat before and people are now reasonably familiar with what their characters can do, so being low on hit points was tense even when they didn't encounter significant opposition. It took a while to get to that point, when people don't initially have a good instinct for how much healing is available.

That also sped things up, but I don't think it needs to stay like that, the pendulum can also swing back. I think the important thing is to include the things that made the session feel like it made progress, but the "in between" bits that get to them can either be investigation, or combat, or navigation, or other character activity.

In future

Think this plan worked and I want to follow a similar model in future. In particular, I hope to recapture the "each session feels worthwhile individually" I'd originally intended. Despite connecting quite tightly to the previous session (starting in the middle of the labyrinth with trapped miners to escort home) and following session (following up on the events of this session), this session felt reasonably like it was satisfying by itself, with events established and resolved.

I also should continue to trust my gut on what the players are feeling reasonably on top of (basic combat, navigation checks), and keep them present but only touching on them briefly can be enough, and on what the players haven't enough chance for (agency, finding things out, progressing plot) and trying to make sure it has a chance to happen.

Ideally every session will be fun in different ways, but none will be the "mustn't miss" session.

I am also starting up a second group on alternate Mondays, so I will try to follow the same model and see how it goes. I'm excited to see how they interact in the same world.

I'm hoping that if I keep this up, I can get away from my completionism and come up with cool new ideas and do prep with only a small investment of time each week, and make more time for other things. We'll see how that goes :)

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1097512.html

What Went Well

Playing some DnD where building an effective character and achieving things effectively actually matters has been very nice. I don't want to play that style too much, it's a big investment of effort, but I was missing it.

The mechanics for navigating an expansive underground maze worked almost perfectly. It really feels like feeling your way through routes you partially know but might shift any time. And generating a big batch of layout and bringing it up as people stumble across it has been very satisfying.

The characters and players are really great. The inquisitive, acquisitive, goblin. The impulsive, swashbuckling cat-bard. The dour blood hunter. The rogue with a mysterious history. The players have generally been great even though I didn't know them well before.

I've had lots of lovely ideas which have gone into sessions.

Playing a not-too-long session every too weeks has gone reasonably.

What Didn't Live up to Expectations

As always, my skills cat-herding players to turn up, and making sure everyone's clear on what's going on, have been a bit rusty.

The sessions have all been quite slow, partly because I've been getting used to the sort of prep that works well in this kind of campaign, and partly just because there's a lot of players, and everyone is still getting used to what their characters can do.

All the sessions left me feeling a bit like they were missing something but I wasn't sure what. That's not unexpected when I try to run a sort of game I haven't run before, but after some thought I think I got some idea.

One problem is, a dnd game is typically a stream of small decisions: explore the hut or the cave? talk or fight? search casually or thoroughly? Often not even decisions spelled out, but formed implicitly from what the players naturally do. In this game, my hope is that the choice of routes through the labyrinth would often serve in this role, but because progress has been slower than I hoped, most of the navigation decisions haven't really had a lot of decision to make.

Also, because I started off planning broadly, a lot of the individual things the characters encounter in one session are less well fleshed through than they might otherwise be, if I'd spent prep time thinking through what they were most likely to meet specifically. I've been doing more of this, even though it's more prep, but only needed to "top up" the places they're most likely going next, and hopefully can be reused if I use the same setting in future.

And there just haven't been enough NPCs who've often brought games to life. The idea was, NPCs in the castle would interact with the PCs in advance, through rumours and quests offered, and slowly build up a relationship. But so far, every delve has taken multiple sessions, and it's taken two sessions to complete what I intended as the original starter goal, so no-one has had time to pursue "extra" leads. I need some more of this to happen in session so people engage with it more, even if that takes time.

Dnd games that I've run well have always had fights designed well enough to be somewhat interesting, but have been brought to life by the ideas and npcs, the richness of the immediate setting as I've spent lots of prep time dwelling on it, and the characters have interacted with NPCs and environments in unexpected ways that have worked out because I've fleshed out characters and places to explore even if I wasn't sure if they'd be able to or not. I always used to think of myself as really analytical and less creative, so it's an adjustment to realise that's something that I can count as a success, and should expect to build up and rely on. But Liv's face when I talked about adding more NPCs made me realise it was well worth it.

Looking forward to

If possible, bringing more of the lore I worked out to the fore, it's been surprisingly hard to make it relevant, but it's come up a few times so I hope that works out.

Running a second group in the same setting, and seeing how they interact with the same spaces. And using the weirdness of the labyrinth to justify it if it seems like sometimes they leave somewhere in an impossible chronological order because of the order of the sessions :)

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1097270.html

http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1030046.html

OK, I'm going to assume everyone who wanted to think about the original problem unspoiled has probably done so, and assume comments have rot26 spoilers from here on.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1030153.html

OK, so before the bizarre misunderstandings in my previous post, I had been going to repost question which I thought was an interesting logic puzzle in its own right.

You have five bags of holding. One contains a fabulous treasure. Two contain liches who can't escape until you open the bag. Two contain nothing.

You have a spell which tells you something about the result of a course of action you propose. (This description is slightly altered from the functionality of the original spell to make the puzzle work, feel free to ask for clarification as needed.)

"Weal" for good result (eg. treasure, no liches)
"Woe" for bad result (eg. 1+ lich, no treasure)
"Weal and Woe" for a good and bad result (eg. treasure and also lich)
"Nothing" for a result of no particular good or bad (eg. open no bags or only open empty bags)

Puzzle

What's the minimum number of castings of the spell needed? (I think 3 is easy and 1 is impossible, so basically, can you do 2?)

Clarifications

The course of action has to be 30 minutes or less.

We don't have specifics on how you define the course of action, ask if it needs to be more explicit.

Assume you can include other results in the plan if they help, eg. "if this bad contains nothing, I stab myself in the leg", without necessarily needing to follow through. (This is slightly more generous than the original spell.)

Assume you don't include the castings of further divination spells within the scope of the course of action considered by casting the first spell.

Follow-ups (may be unnecessary depending on the best solution to the original)

If you only have one casting, what's the greatest chance you can give yourself of finding the treasure whilst finding no liches.

The original restrictions of the spell say that if you cast it four times in a day (ignored for the basic puzzle), the second, third and fourth times have a 25%, 50% and 75% chance of giving a random answer. What's the highest chance you can give yourself of finding the treasure and no liches in up to four castings with those failure chances.

Previously we assumed you couldn't create a paradox. If you *can*, and causing a paradox causes the spell to fail to give an answer in a way distinct from "nothing", can you reduce the number of castings?

If you *can* ask about a course of action including further divination spells, does that help?

Does the answer generalise to a larger number of bags (assuming 1 treasure, N liches and N nothing)

ETA: Fix formatting.

Crossposts: http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1030046.html

So... no-one else have an opinion on rules interpretation in http://jack.dreamwidth.org/1032556.html ?

I thought the answer was so obvious, but apparently not?

Crossposts: http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1027797.html

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