A revealing video.
May. 10th, 2012 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI don't spend a lot of time watching vlogs or listening to podcasts compared to reading blogs, mostly because of the timeframe involved... I can take in a lot more information reading in the time it would take to listen to a half hour recording. This is also why I prefer reading the news to hearing or watching it.
But I was recently referred to a particular video posted by gaming-and-other-nerdery icon Spoony called "The Importance of Wearing Pants", that I found intriguing.
This video is about his experiences with a particular individual who will probably sound eerily familiar to anybody who's done enough tabletop gaming to have encountered That One Player, though the specific stories he has to tell about them are not the reason I'm posting it.
This particular incarnation of That One Player is referred to pseudonymously as "Gary", a name that I find amusingly fitting since his style of DMing, which Spoony refers to as a character meat grinder, reminds me of descriptions of the original D&D games that Gary Gygax would run, where player death was normal and not unexpected, and adventures could be completed with an entirely different cast of characters than began them.
The video goes on for 45 minutes and it eventually includes both the quoting of some racial slurs and some bending over backwards apologetics on behalf of the person who used the slurs, but you don't actually have to watch the whole video to get to the part that jumped out at me.
It's when Spoony is describing how his combat/encounter style differs from "Gary"'s that I found interesting. You can see this from just before the 3 minute mark to around the 11 minute mark. What he's describing is really in line with my thinking for A Wilder World.
For those who don't want to sift through the video for the nuggets:
1. Player character deaths should be a rare and dramatic occurrence. I get the feeling I'd go further in this line than Spoony would.
2. "Games need to have an arc in terms of difficulty... they don't all have to be epic encounters."
3. Spoony describes a D&D adventure as a war of attrition: the early fights, the players are trying to get through with as much HP (and spells and other expendable resources) as possible so they can be as strong as possible for the big boss battle.
4. The adventure itself escalates to a climactic encounter.
5. There's a difference between challenge and brutality... a challenging game should still give the players a chance to feel like they're doing really well.
6. You can't have a dramatic story arc if the protagonists are constantly being replaced by substitutes.
I'll be making a post later on today about monster and encounter design in A Wilder World, but really, this stretch of this video does a pretty good job of summing up a lot of my thinking. The point I have labeled as #6 above is pretty instrumental in my design of AWW from top to bottom... one of the reasons I favor D&D 4E's concept of heroic stature from level 1 is that nobody wants to read or watch the story of the people who were killed by the trolls before they even made it to Smaug's lair, so why would we want to play as them?
Basically, my approach in A Wilder World is to almost entirely throw out the idea of "encounter balance" in favor of the idea of "adventure balance". If there are never any low-risk, low-consequence battles, the players never have the feeling that their awesome wizards and warriors are capable of obliterating opponents... and there are also never any fights that the ninja can sneak around or the fast-talker can talk around without upsetting the balance of the adventure.
The low-stakes battles don't have to be no-stakes battles, especially if success or degree of success in them can have an impact on later encounters, of course. This idea should be reflected in both the baseline rules and in the design of the adventure.
So, this video didn't really change my mind or open my eyes about anything, but it did come into my life at an opportune moment to help me crystallize my thoughts on the subject.
But I was recently referred to a particular video posted by gaming-and-other-nerdery icon Spoony called "The Importance of Wearing Pants", that I found intriguing.
This video is about his experiences with a particular individual who will probably sound eerily familiar to anybody who's done enough tabletop gaming to have encountered That One Player, though the specific stories he has to tell about them are not the reason I'm posting it.
This particular incarnation of That One Player is referred to pseudonymously as "Gary", a name that I find amusingly fitting since his style of DMing, which Spoony refers to as a character meat grinder, reminds me of descriptions of the original D&D games that Gary Gygax would run, where player death was normal and not unexpected, and adventures could be completed with an entirely different cast of characters than began them.
The video goes on for 45 minutes and it eventually includes both the quoting of some racial slurs and some bending over backwards apologetics on behalf of the person who used the slurs, but you don't actually have to watch the whole video to get to the part that jumped out at me.
It's when Spoony is describing how his combat/encounter style differs from "Gary"'s that I found interesting. You can see this from just before the 3 minute mark to around the 11 minute mark. What he's describing is really in line with my thinking for A Wilder World.
For those who don't want to sift through the video for the nuggets:
1. Player character deaths should be a rare and dramatic occurrence. I get the feeling I'd go further in this line than Spoony would.
2. "Games need to have an arc in terms of difficulty... they don't all have to be epic encounters."
3. Spoony describes a D&D adventure as a war of attrition: the early fights, the players are trying to get through with as much HP (and spells and other expendable resources) as possible so they can be as strong as possible for the big boss battle.
4. The adventure itself escalates to a climactic encounter.
5. There's a difference between challenge and brutality... a challenging game should still give the players a chance to feel like they're doing really well.
6. You can't have a dramatic story arc if the protagonists are constantly being replaced by substitutes.
I'll be making a post later on today about monster and encounter design in A Wilder World, but really, this stretch of this video does a pretty good job of summing up a lot of my thinking. The point I have labeled as #6 above is pretty instrumental in my design of AWW from top to bottom... one of the reasons I favor D&D 4E's concept of heroic stature from level 1 is that nobody wants to read or watch the story of the people who were killed by the trolls before they even made it to Smaug's lair, so why would we want to play as them?
Basically, my approach in A Wilder World is to almost entirely throw out the idea of "encounter balance" in favor of the idea of "adventure balance". If there are never any low-risk, low-consequence battles, the players never have the feeling that their awesome wizards and warriors are capable of obliterating opponents... and there are also never any fights that the ninja can sneak around or the fast-talker can talk around without upsetting the balance of the adventure.
The low-stakes battles don't have to be no-stakes battles, especially if success or degree of success in them can have an impact on later encounters, of course. This idea should be reflected in both the baseline rules and in the design of the adventure.
So, this video didn't really change my mind or open my eyes about anything, but it did come into my life at an opportune moment to help me crystallize my thoughts on the subject.
no subject
on 2012-05-10 09:25 pm (UTC)Also thinking maybe George RR Martin could stand to watch this video, :-).