Making D&D (specifically) games more fun to hear about.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Aug 31, 2012 7:11 pm

I was originally going to make this thread about 'making D&D stories more fun to create' but that's sort of asking the wrong question -- I'm sure that the authors of Sailor Moon: American Kitsune and My Immortal enjoyed the stories before the audience turned on them.

I have a vague memory awhile back about K saying that while 3E D&D is a better-designed game, 2E D&D stories are more interesting to hear about. And I can sort of see where he's going with it. I've played and ran a lot of 3E and 4E D&D and while this just may be asymmetric jealousy I still think that the after-action report of a 4E D&D game needs to be heavily fictionalized or the session MTP'd to have a story that's worth telling. And the problem just isn't in the surprise and plot twist and danger department; something as simple as hearing about the ebb and flow of a typical 4E D&D combat often turns out as dull jRPG-ish disassociated movespam unless, again, the narrative gets dressed up.

A lot of solutions to this problem of increasing storytelling dullness come to mind, but it seems like there are so many that it's hard to know where to start. Personally, I think moving to a fully associated ruleset and having a badass default campaign setting would help out a ton. And of course having more shit for low-level characters to do is key -- I like playing as epic badasses and all, but in all honesty it's the experiences of the plebes and noobs that really define the setting. High-level Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Dragonlance are pretty similar; low-level play is where the rubber hits the road.

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Fri Aug 31, 2012 7:26 pm

I don't really have any content to add to this thread at this time, but this is a very worthy subject of discussion. Great post, Lago.

echo

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Aug 31, 2012 7:56 pm

I think this is an odd question. I've never felt my DnD stories fall any shorter than other people's stories when i tell them. My Vampire, Star wars, dark heresy stories are about as interesting as one another as far as I am concerned.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Fri Aug 31, 2012 9:02 pm

Shorter combat with greater space for improvisation.

Generally, you want sword-level characters to do Errol Flynn bullshit and hop around like the Prince of Persia. Swinging from the chandelier should be a viable option.

At the level where everyone has flight, you want to fudge distances and heights so that Santa Troll can jump out of his sleigh and impale his enemy with his claymore, sort of like in the following.

http://squinkyproductions.deviantart.co ... -140202381

That isn't to say that a sword guy should be a viable archetype in a game where everything flies, just that crazy improvised bullshit like high altitude angry red dragon surfing should be possible.

Third, dice should matter when it's important and they shouldn't matter when it isn't. You don't need to waste time and detail on random bullshit encounters. People love to hear about how you took down the Big Bad Evil Guy with a lucky crit. People don't give a fuck about how you critted faceless orc #74. The same goes for social interactions, purchases, and whatnot. Rolling for a random wench on the bar wench table is fun exactly once, and even then only if the wench is plot-relevant.

Fourth, assume that the PCs actions actually matter. A lot of published games fall into the trap of not letting the PCs actually change the world. This is for good reason, game publishers want to continue selling metaplot relevant supplements and that doesn't work if everyone gets to change the world. They can't adjust for every possible thing every adventuring party might do. But in an actual game you can't go that route. After a certain point, the PCs need to be able to do major and important stuff that changed the geopolitical landscape of the world.

Juton · Post by **Juton** » Sat Sep 01, 2012 12:32 am

I agree with Lago, hearing about someone's D&D game is usually as interesting as watching paint dry. I think a part of it is that fantasy RPGs are really familiar. I also think that as a system has more rules the stories become less interesting because there will be one or more obvious ways to solve a problem. Also one solution will probably be better mathematically too.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Sat Sep 01, 2012 6:12 am

For the most part, sessions are boring plots done by boring GMs with boring players interspersed with boring combat. A lot of these things seem boring because they are boring to people who weren't there; the average D&D sesh is like the "you had to be there" story.

That being said, weaving the mechanics into the narrative (or going full storygame and making the mechanics the narrative) might be the way to go here. The indie scene is going gaga for Apocalyptica (Apocalypse/Dungeon World and friends) because of this.

Winnah · Post by **Winnah** » Sat Sep 01, 2012 11:05 am

I'll have to think carefully before I can properly elaborate, but AD&D did provide some minor incentives to advancement that aided in collaberative storytelling.

I mean, playing as written, AD&D was pretty unfair, but once players realised I was using the optional rules for XP, which enabled them to get xp for using their class features, it made the game sort of interesting.

Grinding XP from potentially unfair combats (no CR, inexperiened DM) made it somewhat tedious to advance levels, when you required thousands of xp to advance and low level citters only gave 7, 15 or 35 xp each.

When a caster would get 50-100xp per spell level cast and rogues would get double xp for gold obtained, low levels became less about being a murder-hobo and more about interacting with the campaign world; using spells to help out around the village, setting up a gambling ring or conducting a bloodless heist. All that shit helped lay some groundwork for later in the campaign. When attracting a henchman, the player would not just ask me to provide some random dude, but would try and recruit the blacksmiths son they cured of the sniffles, or some dwarf smuggler they helped avoid heavy alcohol taxes. I also had to think about the implications of shit like a cleric laying Glyphs of Warding at the town gates and other less destructive uses of class abilities.

Don't get me wrong, in many ways I enjoyed 3rd edition games more. Perhaps I am just suffering nostalgia from my first experiences with roleplaying and running a game.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat Sep 01, 2012 12:27 pm

A group of players still talk fondly about the joys of AceGame, the D&D game I ran that started as "The situation where Ukraine was stealing Russian gas/oil and people in Europe would die" and ended as "a game about Touhous".

That one makes for good stories, it seems, and I'd put it down to:
[*]Fights were lightning fast
[*]The battlefield was dynamic in a silly way - a Strength check to launch a snowball into a snow-boulder to attack enemies in a line effect.
[*]The PCs had a deep investment in each other and in NPCs
[*]The PCs were such oddballs that people like hearing about them to begin with*
[*]Tea parties and magical hats

Actually I think it might be that people just like hearing about costume dress-up and tea parties. Which is why Magical Tea Party games sound more interesting to outsiders than D&D. Oh, and hearing about how they went on a search to find sweets/tea ingredients, and the other silly things.

That said, the "dynamic battlefield" thing can actually help. You probably do want mechanical incentives for swinging on chandeliers, flipping tables over to use as shields, combat in the rigging of ships with people getting knocked loose and the lucky ones getting caught in the wind and hurled back into the fight, rocky ground collapsing into lava, and all that other dramatic stuff. And that's the thing: the rules basically need to say you get a bonus for using the terrain in some way, and preferably give examples. Better still for pre-planned combats to include good terrain and various dot-points for how combatants can utilise them.

*Compare Chiruno with Redgar. EYE AM THE STRONGEST!

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Sep 01, 2012 3:36 pm

Juton wrote:I agree with Lago, hearing about someone's D&D game is usually as interesting as watching paint dry.

The only time I find them interesting is if I've played the same adventure as someone else and we're comparing war stories (e.g. How did you handle the mind flayer and the octopins in "Hall of Harsh Reflections"?).

Krusk · Post by **Krusk** » Sun Sep 02, 2012 2:44 pm

I enjoy hearing about them as long as they don't start telling me about their numbers.

I don't care that you totally had +14 to hit at level3, and your awesome straight 18 stats you rolled. Then you used this awesome sword that got +4 vs dragons, so you crit the dragon for like 400 damage.

I'd enjoy if you said "We had an epic fight against a dragon, we were all getting battered around almost dead. In fact it had the mage pinned down and was probably going to eat him next round, but then the barbarian jumped from across the room and finished it in a massive blow, cutting the head clean off. We used the dragons scales and bones to make our cart wicked awesome, and the heart was for part of a ritual that reversed the curse on the princess."

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Sun Sep 02, 2012 4:27 pm

The long and short of it seems to be a good gaming story is a good story in general; something with an interesting hook, dynamic narrative movement, interesting characters and a connection between them, the players, and the world.

So ladies and gents, how do you propose we bake that into a system?

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Sun Sep 02, 2012 4:30 pm

The long and short of it seems to be a good gaming story is a good story in general; something with an interesting hook, dynamic narrative movement, interesting characters and a connection between them, the players, and the world.

So ladies and gents, how do you propose we bake that into a system?

8headeddragon · Post by **8headeddragon** » Mon Sep 03, 2012 3:42 am

Mask_De_H wrote:The long and short of it seems to be a good gaming story is a good story in general; something with an interesting hook, dynamic narrative movement, interesting characters and a connection between them, the players, and the world.

So ladies and gents, how do you propose we bake that into a system?

I'd daresay you can't.* You could have a handful of prepared arcs that can possibly pop up during the adventure. You could do the mad libs deal where you roll dice or draw cards to generate a story. You can have little additions to the rules specific to events in them as many D&D adventures do, or you can get a little looser about rules in the name of storytelling as Mouseguard would. But I think that the DM's ability to present the story plays a big part of it, and unusual circumstances that crop up play another big part.

In my experience the good gaming stories have come of clever DMs/players, DMs that were good storytellers, or situations that simply got very strange. Witty and crafty people at your table can't really be imitated by rules, and situations that get strange tend to require some immersion or suspension of disbelief to set up correctly. If you randomly generate an absurd scenario, it will either be dismissed as nonsense or treated as comic relief. But if the story has lead the party into the absurd scenario, everything gets quite a bit more interesting as the players start using their heads in ways that builds strangeness upon strangeness.

Edit: * Either it can't be done, or it's been done already, I should say. Setting the stage for a good experience with a tale to tell has been the aim of many tabletop games for a long time now, and I'd be very, very surprised if there was something that hasn't already been tried.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Mon Sep 03, 2012 3:59 am

There's a reason they call storygames storygames, Eight. I know it's been done before.

I wanted to see how Denizens would do it, since we don't really do storygame shit when we develop systems.

Pedantic · Post by **Pedantic** » Mon Sep 03, 2012 8:35 pm

Would it be easier to create some system to apply dramatic pacing to game events after the fact? Something you could feed combat data into, that then highlights a few lines in red and encourages more description there and there and pushes you to gloss over the rest.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 12:36 am

Seriously: more awesome/quirky PCs (and NPCs they care about), and explosive terrain interactive battlefields. Fuck, someone should sell Paizo a pdf idea of "Ten awesome locations for your fights, complete with maps and special rules for a dozen things on each map". That would probably both sell and result in more interesting stories (with the downside of stupid people directly associating Pathfailure with interesting stories).

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 12:40 am

@Topic.
My own perception of it is that 2nd edition has a couple of advantages there. First that thing about how manipulating the rules in your favour gets talked about quite a lot. The players are supposed to learn to bullshit the DM so hard that they forget to say no, despite the constant reminders in the DMG to say no to everything.

Players have to make up a really entertaining and logical story to do anything different. Magic Tea Party all the way, but memorably so. It'd be like if 4e daily powers were something you had to beg the DM for while manipulating a stunt system, be creatively interesting with your tumble check and get a +2W attack with a push and prone, or whatever the DM decides it's worth.

Only 2nd edition would add massive downsides to failure with impossible penalties on the roll to make it all even more "special", because the DM's supposed to be "creatively aggressive" too. Bah humbug.

Secondly the combat engine itself supports that trend. Players have to declare their actions before initiative (and long before they actually move), so they learn to be quite open and flexible in what they're trying to do, and avoid using any strict game terms. Players have to cooperate to let each other's actions happen at all, especially to have the casters get any big spells off.

So I guess if you're trying to have the game churn out better work stories, you want a cooperative declaration phase (or something) in combat where players have to talk with each other about their immediate goals all the time, and a subsystem that numerically rewards creative use of the scenery during that talk in a limited fashion (and where the scenery can also fuck you up for failing to be sufficiently creative now and then).

It may not be easy to do any of that with the character empowerment of later editions. Having concrete outcomes for everything on your sheet (or power deck) would seem to inherently limit any discussion.

TLDR: players will talk about the game more if the game itself involves talking about the imagined action within the game, rather than reading out game mechanics. Those will be "better" stories when such things earn greater reward during the game.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 1:51 am

The only problem with pushing for creativity is that it encourages ad-hoc on-the-spot MTP effects. See how 5E is fucking that up? Or indeed that joke playtest thing where "you make a skill check or something and say you're going to do something cool and they then just let you attack two guys"?

Creativity is of course good, but it's okay to just front-load a lot of it - for powers, list a bunch of creative uses and their effects ("Because this effect creates fire, check out the section on 'Fire-Creation'" followed by the things you can do with fire like explicitly melting ice, creating light and all that, point out that using electric effects in water can be dangerousawesome, make sure people know that wind can clear smoke away). For enemies, specify what happens when people do stuff you might expect people to want to do (climbing onto the giant's head, grabbing the dragon's wing when it swoops).

Having some amount of up-front stuff helps inspire people (and also serves to cover things that aren't so much creative as iconic and fun to hear about), and also gives guidelines as to what creative things should more-or-less do. Which helps avoid the problem of "I don't think you should be able to use an At Will to solve a problem" or "Well look, I know you SAY science works like that and the room should explode and stuff, but it's a three dot power you just pulled out of your ass, so what happens is now the floor is a different type of solid that people can just walk on."

Winnah · Post by **Winnah** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 2:36 am

Noone gives a shit about the blow-by-blow account when a combat is being described to a 3rd party. Exceptions for dramatic recoveries, collossal fuck ups and critical strikes, even then, you can only hear so many stories of rocket launcher tag or monsters becoming mentally impaired and letting the PC's win a fight, before that shit gets stale.

If you want a good story, you need more than just a string of combats. A game needs to provide an actual incentive for players to aspire to achieve more than a body count during a campaign. Mechanics providing a reward schedule for engaging in things besides combat would be a start.

Of course, that would further highlight the inadequecies of Punchy McFuckface, the fighting everyman, so no D&D grognard worth his neckbeard will ever entertain the idea.

Whatever · Post by **Whatever** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 2:55 am

Tales of Wyre remains the only D&D campaign writeup that I actually read through and made an effort to keep following. Evidently, I'm not the only one, so it might be useful here.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 3:06 am

Whatever wrote:Tales of Wyre remains the only D&D campaign writeup that I actually read through and made an effort to keep following. Evidently, I'm not the only one, so it might be useful here.

Reading about a game and hearing about a game are somewhat different, IMO (long form vs. short form).

One campaign journal I follow is Velcro Zipper's World's Largest Dungeon, partly out of morbid curiosity as to how the World's Largest Dungeon actually plays in practice.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 5:41 am

I've found that RIFTS stories are always fun to hear about, usually involving juicers, dragons, or giant robots hurling things at other things.

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 5:56 am

From a storytelling perspective, combat by itself is empty and meaningless. Conflict needs context in order to engage the audience. We only care about combats because of what victory or defeat means for the characters that we empathize with. Even outside of combat, any conflict or competition is only made accessible to an otherwise uninterested third party (the audience) when you introduce humanizing context. How many people don't watch boxing but love Rocky? It's because Rocky's fights are highly contextualized; we know just what this fight means for the characters. Many students passionately support their school's sports teams, but don't really much care for the game otherwise, because they feel a connection to the players as representing them.

So, to make D&D campaigns more interesting, I think the focus has to be on the stakes; when success and failure have a significant impact on the narrative, not just "you get to keep playing" or "you die, new game," respectively. It's hard to string along too many random encounters like this. Dungeon crawls for treasure also have next to no significance for an outside audience.

To actually make combats more cinematic and fun to re-tell, the resource management aspects probably need to be toned down and the focus needs to be on associated, round-by-round decisions.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 11:37 am

Stubbazubba wrote:From a storytelling perspective, combat by itself is empty and meaningless. Conflict needs context in order to engage the audience.

I agree that any story needs some context, but if I'm comparing war stories with another player (e.g. how did your party survive fighting Xanesha?) the details of the combat are I'm interested in.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 12:49 pm

Koumei wrote:The only problem with pushing for creativity is that it encourages ad-hoc on-the-spot MTP effects. See how 5E is fucking that up? Or indeed that joke playtest thing where "you make a skill check or something and say you're going to do something cool and they then just let you attack two guys"?

Counter-intuitively, in order to have a system where creativity is encouraged or even possible you need to have a buttoned down, tightly associated set of rules. Whle MTP technically allows you to do anything, it doesn't actually feel like you accomplished anything even if the DM goes along with it.

Like in the various Pathfinder threads, we discuss our characters doing weird shit like attaching pistols to wrist cords or having pocket familiars cast spells on their master. People don't even seem to realize how odd it is discussing game elements like that as a matter of course -- at least compared to most systems.

In 3E D&D, casting darkness on a rock and putting it in your mouth like a ball gag is a weird but technically acceptable tactic. In 4E D&D similar tactic would be straight-up MTP. Same trick, but the former is more intuitively satisfying. The funny thing about all this is that most people push dissociated rules precisely because they're under the mistaken impression that it encourages creativity.