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iamthegm · 1 year

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Rolling, Rolling, Rolling

Introduction:

The image of a die rolling is perhaps the most iconic aspect of tabletop games. We all live for that moment of uncertainty, right? Both players and GMs, if we didn’t we would just write books detailing our collaborative fiction. The dice roll introduces tension, it allows for us all to be surprised by what happens next. But I think we have all probably had moments where it feels like the dice roll didn’t actually matter, that the result had already been predetermined by our GM (or perhaps we were even the GM with the predetermined outcome). Maybe you’ve experienced the converse, where a dice roll mattered way more than you thought it would. Perhaps you thought the mob boss would be annoyed if you tried to haggle with him, but now there’s this failed Suasion roll and all of a sudden your character is dying from a knife in the gut. Perhaps you’ve run a game, and don’t quite feel like you have picked up when to call for a roll, maybe you feel like you’re engaging with uncertainty too much or too little. I think a near universal experience for GMs is having called for a roll, and gotten a failed check that ended in a narrative dead end.

So, when and how do we introduce uncertainty via a roll of some kind, how do we interpret the results, and how do we minimize the chances of players reacting with “I didn’t know shit was going to go this bad!” when a roll goes sideways? Here’s what I (by way of much more intelligent game designers and GMs) think about when I call for a roll, the conversations that happen around a roll, and how we interpret the results.

What’s in a Roll?

When do we know we’re heading towards rolling some die? I think it first starts with players declaring a goal they would like to achieve. The TTRPG Burning Wheel by Luke Crane calls this Intent. Intents are broad directions the players want their characters to move towards. They can be situation specific- something like “I want to kill the guard in front of me before his colleagues notice!” or they can be contextually broader like “We want to explore this dungeon!” The players take the fiction presented to them and decide what they want to work towards. When a GM is having trouble getting at player intent (because intent often gets confused with action) the GM might ask “What are you trying to get out of this?”

After intent is established, the next thing that needs to happen is for the GM to determine whether or not failure or danger introduced through this intent is narratively interesting. It's generally fairly obvious whether or not that is true- you think about something like “what happens if Maggie failed to kill this guard?” You might decide the guard lets out a shout and an alarm is raised, or that levies his pistol at Maggie. However, what do we do if there is nothing narratively interesting about having an obstacle in this situation? Burning Wheel gives us the phrase Say Yes, or Roll the Dice. Essentially, what Say Yes, or Roll the Dice means is that if failure is not narratively interesting, or the characters are assumed to be competent at the task, just let the players have the success. It's generally not narratively interesting for characters to fall down the stairs of the tavern. Don’t make them roll for it!

But what if failure is narratively interesting? I think we, as GMs, can fall back on my favorite question to ask players “What do you do?” Let’s look at it in context of the situation above. Matara, Maggie’s player, says “I want to kill this guard before the rest of his patrol finds out!” I, as the GM, have decided it's narratively interesting to introduce danger or a chance of failure. “Okay, you can definitely attempt that, but you hear the sounds of conversation getting closer. You think this guy's shift change is on the way. What do you want to do?”

Matara might decide that Maggie is going to sneak in with her knife and stab the guard. This is declaring what Burning Wheel calls a task. This is the other facet of what is needed to constitute a roll, alongside intent. Notice that I’m not calling for Maggie to sneak or to use her knife, Matara could have just as easily said that Maggie is running in screaming and brandishing her pistol. I’m countering what Blades in the Dark calls a bad habit which is calling for a specific action. I’m not telling Matara how Maggie needs to accomplish her intent, I’m letting her decide what Maggie’s task is. My role as the GM is to clearly illustrate to players how bad well or how bad the task could go, based on the roll, and I’m doing it before the die roll. In conversation this looks like saying “Okay, so Maggie is going to sneak up on this guard in order to kill him before his coworkers notice, right? Cool, if you succeed it's fairly simple, you’re able to kill him and stow his body away. If you fail however, you’re going to be caught by his shift change with his dead corpse cradled in your arms. Wanna go through with it?” Blades in the Dark calls this setting position and effect. I’m letting the player know what kind of complications they will run into if the roll goes poorly- the position, and what kind of success they can expect if the roll goes their way- the effect. The above quote is a good example of creating an opportunity for trouble through position, but what if I wanted instead to create a complication through effect? I might say something like “Yeah, you can definitely sneak up and stab this guy, but you can tell by the way he’s moving that this guard is wearing some pretty good armor under his uniform. You don’t think your knife is going to do it in one fell swoop. What do you want to do?”

When players are getting this kind of information and narrative feedback to what they are stating in their intent and task, they are encouraged to also negotiate their position and effect. Matara might decide that the risks aren’t worth the benefit. She might decide that Maggie is instead going to try and scale a wall to bypass the security checkpoint rather than confronting the guard directly. This gives us another opportunity to adjudicate a new intent and task with a different position and effect on the narrative. On the other hand, Maggie might decide that killing one guard isn’t enough, that instead she wants to throw caution to the wind and ambush both guards right as the shift change occurs to remove them both from play. GM and player get to negotiate position and effect based on the player’s intent and task. This conversation then gives the player the opportunity to refine their intent and task. All of this happens before the roll is made to make sure that everyone is operating on the same wavelength in regards to what is fictionally happening.

We’ve Rolled, Now What?

So, you’ve made the roll and now you need to interpret what the hell is going on. Let’s look at what we can do based on the kinds of results you can get! First though, no matter what, follow through on what you said would happen. Don’t cheap out on the players and not give them the success, or failure, that they earned. You all agreed to it while setting intent and task, position, and effect. On a success, the player gets the effect result you agreed on. Now, a common issue or trap for GMs to fall into is to keep players rolling again and again to accomplish the same task. This is really frustrating for players! Imagine, you’ve rolled a success and you expect to get the thing you want, but the GM decides that you actually only partially made it to your goal. Let’s look at this in context with the example I’ve been using. Maggie rolls to successfully sneak up on and stab the guard, but I as the GM decide that the guard isn’t actually quite dead yet and Maggie is going to have to keep stabbing him a few more times to put him down for good. That doesn’t feel quite fulfilling, right? Another helpful phrase from Burning Wheel is to Let It Ride. This means that the player’s success, or failure, carries through until the situation has changed significantly narratively.

So, with that, let’s look at what to do on a failure. First, we follow through with what we said would happen. “Okay Maggie, you’ve stabbed the guard, but now his partner has happened upon you with the body. What do you want to do?” Failure, just like success, should move the fiction forward. Powered by the Apocalypse games generally refer to this concept as failing forward. A failure should never look like “You failed to pick the lock to the only door deeper into the dungeon.” It's narratively boring! Perhaps instead failure is “You picked the lock, but in doing so your lockpicking tools broke. What do you want to do now?” or “You’re working on picking the lock, and it's taking more time than you initially thought it would, and you can hear the steps of some horrible monster drawing closer. What do you do now?” My best piece of advice for dealing with failure is to not always make it about not giving the player/character what they want, but how to offer it up with a drawback, cost, or complication.

Conclusion:

There is a lot of implicit conversation that happens around a die roll, that I think we’d be better served by making explicit. When we discuss how bad failure is, how good success looks like, and what a player really wants out of a situation, we end up creating a more clear fiction for everyone at the table. We bypass potentially negative surprises, and avoid outcomes that are not intentionally disappointing.

Questions for Consideration:

How does the game I’m playing frame the conversations around a roll

How might failing forward create more fulfilling fiction?

Where am I currently not following through on what I’m telling players?

#ttrpg #indie ttrpg #blades in the dark #burning wheel #gm #gming #dming #dm #dnd

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iamthegm · 1 year

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I Create Problems Not Solutions

The Perils of Solution Based Plot:

It’s three and a half hours into a game and you’ve spent the last 90 minutes on a puzzle that you thought it would take the players fifteen minutes to figure out the solution to. Have you had this experience? Or perhaps, you set up an encounter on the base floor of a dungeon where players were supposed to unlock a trapdoor while being on the lookout for wandering monsters. You had planned this big set piece, but your players want to bypass it by blowing up the locked door, rather than messing around with the lock. What do you do? Do you just tell them “that won’t work”? Do you set an absurdly high dice check so that you know they’ll fail and get back to what you wanted the party to do? How do we handle plot as it relates to obstacles?

I would contend that these issues come up because of mistakes we, as GMs, make in prepping for our game. We have decided on a route our group has to take. On a grand scale this looks like saying “the party must get the Eye of Wrengar to stop the evil Lich Farenthar.” On a more granular level it looks like “Once the party has boarded the enemy ship they will come across a computerized locking mechanism that they will need to hack.” Then, we’re caught off guard when they say “Fuck the Eye of Wrengar” or “What if we went through the ship’s vents to catch the captain unawares?”

Our mistake is that we have created plots based around solutions. We’re giving the players obstacles with prescribed ways to solve them in order to move the narrative forward. Then, when our players think differently than we do, we stonewall them- “The computerized locking mechanism extends into the vents, if you want to use the vents you’ll have to hack the locking mechanism.” or we make sure all roads lead where we need them to plot wise- “Your ally, the Troll King, has commissioned a replica of the Eye of Wrengar, but you’ll need to go into this dungeon to grab a gem that can hold the arcane power necessary for it to work” and neither option feels narratively satisfying!

The Solution to Solution Based Plot:

So, what’s our alternative to solution based plot? I think anyone who has played or read a Powered by the Apocalypse game (a game based on the engine created by Vincent Baker for Apocalypse World) has heard the phrase Play to Find Out What Happens. Playing to find out what happens is a part of the GM’s agenda in Apocalypse World and any other PBTA game I have ever played has included it as well. For it to be a part of the GM’s agenda, it means that it is a goal for the GM. According to Baker everything you say should be in service to playing to find out what happens (along with two other points of the GM agenda we’re not going to get into here). This is not GMing advice, or a suggestion. In Apocalypse World playing to find out what happens is a rule. When you don’t engage with that, you are stepping outside the bounds of the game as written.

So, we know playing to find out what happens is important, but what the hell does it mean? Here’s a quote from Apocalypse World 2e that explicitly describes what it means to play to find out what happens.

“Play to find out: there’s a certain discipline you need in order to MC Apocalypse World. You have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters. You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside.” (Apocalypse World 2e, pg. 80)

So, why do this? I think it offers a few different benefits. One, you are no longer the sole arbiter for how a problem can be solved which means your players don’t need to download your brain in order to find the specific resolution that you have set forward which will make your narratives flow smoother. Secondly, player input becomes much more important when they can actually contribute to overcoming an obstacle in a creative fashion, rather than trying to find the right combination of words that will satisfy their GM. Finally (and perhaps most importantly to me) GMs can now be surprised by the way the narrative goes! What you thought would be an obstacle overcome by technical expertise has instead become a stealth encounter! How will the players overcome the Dread Lord Farenthar without this artifact? Can they think of or design something else? How will the world continue to slip into entropy? Let’s play to find out what happens!

What This Looks Like At The Table:

So now, we have the theory, but what does playing to find out what happens look like practically? Let’s start with how we prep our obstacles when we move away from solution based prep. Instead of prepping solutions, I prep alongside the lines of John Harper’s Opportunities as described in Blades in the Dark on page 189. An opportunity consists of the following:

A target

A location

A situation

One obvious vector for a plan

So, let’s take the Stars Without Number game I’m running as an example. The players have taken on a bounty to hunt down a dangerous psychic. That’s our target, feral psychic Pran “Hex” Almier. Our location is where she is currently at- the planet Inonar. Our situation? Hex is currently in the midst of an assassination spree, taking out her former professors that work at the psychic academy.

Now, the obvious vector for a plan is where this gets interesting. This is where you are thinking about what most logically comes up for you as the GM. Then you offer it up to the players with a drawback or cost. They don’t need to spend hours trying to figure out your solution, you offer it to them upfront. For my Stars Without Number game it looked like this: “Hex is currently holding a couple of news anchors hostage, live and on-air demanding that her last professor be brought to her so she can execute him, or else. You could probably storm the gates of this TV station, but it's not likely that the news anchors would make it out alive. What do you do?”

Offering up an obvious solution with a cost allows for players to bypass trying to guess what’s going on in your head, while also encouraging them to think about more optimal solutions that perhaps you haven’t even imagined. If they put in the legwork to uncover even more information you could give them some of the following:

Connected factions: Maybe your players learn that the psychic academy is really a front for psychic experimentation and research put up by a clandestine arm of the Imperial government. “They’d love to keep that secret, and perhaps would pay extra credits to hush you up, or maybe you’ll sell that information to the resistance coalition being put together! Any ideas on what you want to do next?”

A Not-So-Obvious Vector for a Plan: “While you're studying Hex’s history and dossier, you notice that her family once owned a shitty run-down apartment complex on a neighboring planet. Perhaps that’s where she hides out in between killings? What do you want to do with that information”

Interesting Secrets that Link to Alternate Opportunities: “You learn from your imperial liaison that if you capture Hex alive, the Empire is likely to send her to the prison planet Anagris. Hey Petey, isn’t your friend Rory being held there? Maybe Hex could help out as a person on the inside… What do you wanna do?”

You can already see how this kind of prep gives multiple avenues for achieving something, or even turns what it means to achieve something upside down. This kind of prep encourages players to think more intently about opportunities and how they can be leveraged to their advantage narratively and mechanically. Notice that at the end of each of the pieces of dialogue I’m asking the players what they want to do. This question serves to put the impetus for solution and action on the players, rather than on me as the GM. This can also change how you frame obstacles in the moment to moment of play. Rather than telling a player “So, the mountain face your climbing crumbles as the dragon lands on it, causing a rockslide. I need you to make a dex save to determine whether or not you are able to hold on through the turmoil”, you can instead say “Okay, the mountain is crumbling around you and you can feel your grip begin to slip, you can attempt to hold on but if it goes poorly you’ll probably take some serious damage, what do you do?” It's a small change, but it puts the player in the driver’s seat of overcoming obstacles, rather than you as the GM. The players could very well decide that they want to try to white knuckle it through the rockslide, or they might decide they want to swing into a cavern below, or pull out their ring of flight.

I invite you to try this method of opportunity preparation and reframing how you present obstacles at the table. Maybe try giving your solution with a cost, and amongst a variety of other options for resolution, rather than waiting for players to stumble upon the one golden solution.

Questions for Consideration:

How does the way I prepare my obstacles influence problem solving at the table?

How can I give my players more agency and what do I gain or lose by doing that?

How might using Opportunities as described above supplement my GMing toolset?

#ttrpg #indie ttrpg #blades in the dark #stars without number #apocalypse world #gm #gming #dm #dming #dnd

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iamthegm · 1 year

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Super useful for constructing dungeons quickly

#tabletop roleplaying #tabletop gaming #ttrpg #pbta #tabletop games #roleplaying games #osr #indie ttrpg #gming

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iamthegm · 1 year

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Tower of the Time Wizard

My penultimate winning entry in the 2016 One Page Dungeon Contest.

Located here in PDF.

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iamthegm · 1 year

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Why I Love XP in RPGs

Most anyone who has engaged with a tabletop RPG is familiar with the concept of earning experience points (XP) in order to mechanically improve your characters. Over time, I have really come to appreciate RPGs that use their XP system as a vehicle to encourage playing to the genre or kind of media that the RPG is trying to emulate. Conversely I’ve also grown frustrated with games that say they are about one thing, but only give XP for doing another. For instance, dndbeyond.com says that “In Dungeons & Dragons, the players form an adventuring party who explore fantasy worlds together, embark on epic quests, and level up.” However, in 5e Rules-As-Written you earn XP for “completing combat challenges” according to the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide. Do you see the dissonance there between what the game says it is about and what the players are actually rewarded for doing? Let me give you an example of a game that I think does XP well as a counterexample.

For instance, the tabletop RPG Blades in the Dark advertises itself as being “A tabletop role-playing game about a crew of daring scoundrels seeking their fortunes on the haunted streets of an industrial-fantasy city. There are heists, chases, occult mysteries, dangerous bargains, bloody skirmishes, and above all, riches to be had– if you’re bold enough to seize them.” When we check out the XP system for the game, we see that type of play supported. In Blades you earn XP as a character for doing a couple different things:

You get to mark XP if you expressed your beliefs, drives, heritage, or background: So we know you earn XP for playing your character in a way that shows these things off- so Blades is a game about roleplaying characters who display these four characteristics regularly.

You get to mark XP if you struggled with issues from your vice or trauma: So, now we know that if your character’s personality flaws (which are mechanical things in Blades) cause them trouble, they get to mark XP. That seems right for a crew of scoundrels!

Additionally in Blades, you get XP for a character specific XP trigger. For instance the Cutter, a character class focused on being a dangerous and intimidating fighter:

You earn XP when you address a challenge with violence or coercion: I think that pretty immediately tells you how the Cutter is supposed to be played! You are playing a character that is about using violence and coercion to get what they want.

In Blades, your crew also earns XP for doing things like contending with other gangs that eclipse their own, bolstering your crew’s reputation, or for displaying the inner nature or conflict inherent to your crew. All things we would want to see in a game about playing criminals!

By the same token as my frustration with systems that say they are about one thing and then mechanically reward another, I think milestone XP or XP for showing up is a missed opportunity. Milestone XP rewards you generally for completing significant narrative goals the GM has set out for you. Now this does provide an incentive, but, in my opinion, not a significantly clarified one. Instead of players knowing exactly how they ought to be playing and what actions they can take to earn XP, they instead are told that they will earn XP at the GM’s discretion, and if they comply with the narrative the GM has for them. Their only directive is to guess what the GM wants them to do. In the same way, getting XP for showing up provides a behavioral incentive, but it's rewarded at the beginning of a session rather than the end. By showing up for a session, a player has fulfilled what they needed to do to earn XP, and are left unclear of what they ought to actually be doing in session.

So, certain RPGs use XP to enhance the themes and narratives of the game at the table. Using milestone XP is a missed opportunity. How can I better implement an XP system at my own table? How can I decide what XP system to use in my game? I’ll give an example of my own thought process below.

For Example:

I am currently running a game of 2nd edition Stars Without Number, an old school renaissance (OSR) sci-fi hex crawl sandbox RPG designed to hearken back to the design principles of basic and advanced Dungeons and Dragons. This means that characters tend to be vulnerable even at high levels, that it is often better to find a way to make a combat encounter lopsided in your favor rather than fight fairly, and that the ruleset is more streamlined than later editions of D&D.

Generally, when I am beginning to run a game I think about the themes I want my players to engage with before I start creating the world (at least in a game where it is expected that the GM will do most, if not all of, the world building). I settled pretty early on wanting to engage with the ways in which empires use capitalism, monetary gain, and comfort to keep people compliant with their regime.

So then, I started to think about the kinds of situations I wanted to put my players in so that they would engage those themes. I knew I wanted to put the pressure on right away for them to start earning money and get them in the loop of taking jobs without really asking a ton of questions. I also knew, after talking to my players, that they were interested in playing freelancers, folks who own a ship and operate in a sort of gray area legally, taking on jobs on both sides of the law. Additionally, I wanted players to come to a point where they realized resisting those in powers is hard. I had a pretty good inkling that at some point my players would eventually want to be Big Damn Heroes, and overthrow the empire that would be aggressively expanding in universe. My goal, when it comes to that decision, is to say “Sure, you can run a resistance, but, uh, where’s the money coming in from?” I wanted them to engage with the concerns that come from opting out of the most prominent economic model. I wanted the crew to have to decide between their morals, and their own prosperity and growth.

This already gave me a ton to work with, and so I started thinking about our XP system, and how to encourage players to play folks who were caught up in needing to make cash quickly, and didn’t have the luxury to ask too many questions about the ethics of what they were doing. It is here I decided to lean on an OSR standby, using currency as XP. Using currency as XP means that roughly each unit of currency (gold in DND terms) is equivalent to one XP. In my Stars Without Number game, the book suggests that for a player to reach level 2 they would need to earn 5,000 credits, and then double it to 10,000 to reach level 3, and so one and so forth. I also really turned the screws by having them owe a monthly debt to the manufacturer of their ship, that if they do not pay there will be consequences.

I believe, by using currency as XP, I have incentivized my players to a certain mode of play, and it has borne results! Time and again, the crew of our little freelancer ship has decided to do unethical job after unethical job to earn credits quickly, either because a bill was breathing down their back or because they thought they might finally earn a little savings towards their next level. They’ve taken a big contract from the empire faction because they have learned it is the easiest way to make money. They’re just now starting to contend with the idea that they want to start a resistance to the empire faction, and they will really wrestle with how they will continue to survive without the guarantee of an imperial contract. I think this gets at my goal to show that compliance with unethical systems of power is often easier than resistance.

Conclusion:

XP is best used as a carrot to encourage certain modes of play. Making it clear to your players what they will earn XP for doing will help them understand what kind of game they are playing. You can use XP to underscore the themes of your game in a way that ties the narrative and mechanics more tightly together, producing a more well-designed experience.

Some questions to think about:

What kind of game is the current XP system I am using encouraging?

How can mechanics encourage narrative?

How can I begin to read games to see if they are designed to do the things they advertise themselves doing?

#gm #dm #tabletop rpg #ttrpg #indie ttrpg #dnd #blades in the dark #stars without number

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