The Gaming Den

Say compared to 1 year ago, 5, 10?

For me...

10 years- I liked overly complex things for 'detail' like "combine two stats to get a derived stat that you use to add to your attack"

1 year- Pondering action economy and what kind of game it encourages. Instead of thinking in terms of 'best' it's in terms of 'best for ___ outcome'

I think ten years ago I cared about great mechanics and a big, dynamic system to cover all the bases.

Now I care about the table time taken and how easy it is to get a new player/gamer into a particular game. As you get older, your play time shortens and the pool of people you are willing to play with drops, so you can't do games with four-hour single events like battles that involve hundreds of pages of rules that might turn off a new player.

It doesn't matter how elegant your rules are if no one is playing with you.

Any game that wants to hide information on what they might face or leaves everything up to GM fiat is an automatic hard no for me now.

I want a game that gives enough choices that actually matter, that it allows for some level of interaction between the players and the base system.

The best games to GM are where you set up a puzzle, the players go find the strengths and weaknesses, and then attack the puzzle in (usually) unexpected ways.

K wrote:I think ten years ago I cared about great mechanics and a big, dynamic system to cover all the bases.

Now I care about the table time taken and how easy it is to get a new player/gamer into a particular game. As you get older, your play time shortens and the pool of people you are willing to play with drops, so you can't do games with four-hour single events like battles that involve hundreds of pages of rules that might turn off a new player.

It doesn't matter how elegant your rules are if no one is playing with you.

Yeah, this. I used to love fiddly and expansive rulesets like GURPS, BRP, etc. But in practice those usually equalled hours of chargen, hours engaging complex subsystems, and a lots of rules details that got us to interrupt play and search books. Don't have time for that anymore.

Game design: I put more thought into first principles. Not necessarily good principles, but thought.

Game play: I used to care more about building elaborate sandboxes for players. Now I'm free-rolling a dungeon according to a set of tables.

Design:
1: Don't invent rules for dice rolling if dice rolling doesn't enhance the experience. Use binary abilities where suited. No need to tell the player 'no' when the game doesn't benefit.

2: Keep things as connected and recognizable as possible. Try to use the same mechanics for as much of the game, and minigames therein, as you can.

3: Create mechanics that encourage the kind of gameplay I want to see. Seems obvious but for a long time my goal was 'be as much like 3.5 as possible'. So things I'd like to see players doing includes creating and developing 3 dimensional characters, having some input in the narrative beyond just 'being' their character, etc all while limiting things I don't want to see. Things like strict limits on companions/helpers/etc, de-emphasis on collecting truckloads of magic gear to stay relevant, less bonus hunting by having few kinds of bonuses and/or requiring that bonuses be gained by choices made inside relevant minigames instead of outside of them.

Gameplay: I'm more interested in personal character development and I run my games in a way where I try to create situations that have the players arguing or agonizing over choices for lengthy amounts of time. I enjoy these moments the most. I have fond memories of sitting back during a run of Kingmaker where the party spent over half an hour mulling over whether it was ok to let a friendly giant stay in their newly founded settlement or if they should respect the fear and paranoia it would likely cause the residents and then this drifted into a debate about what it means to choose a leader. Most of my games these days have moments like this mixed in with the drama. The more of dilemmas I can set up the better.

Something that I've learned in these past years is that if you, as a DM, make the outcome of failure as compelling as the outcome of success you'll be much less likely to fudge dice rolls, you'll have a much richer narrative and, in turn, a much better response from your players when they fail.

"Ok, we've failed. Now what? Let’s keep moving." Instead of “Ok, we’ve failed. Let’s roll new characters.”

I know this is old news for most people, but actually taking the dive and implementing the methodology properly took me a while.

I've become more and more pragmatic, and much less accepting of rules that get in the way of play and fun. I house rule aggressively, early and often.

I'm also less and less accepting of stupid decisions for "balance" and change things so that PCs will have an equal amount of narrative power in the story.

Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote:I've become more and more pragmatic, and much less accepting of rules that get in the way of play and fun. I house rule aggressively, early and often.

I am willing to, but I also want to know why a rule is a certain way, and what it interacts with. I have seen that sometimes re-reading a rule and trying it the way it was written works better than you expected. Plus, it's easier than redesigning chunks of a game.

Mostly, I just play less games. There's no time, and everyone wants to do improvisational theater or lurch from made up thing to made up thing to "see what happens." I feel like I'm the only person left looking for "a series of interesting decisions" in the TTRPG space.

Which is super weird, because everyone I associate with now is a big board gamer. I met all these people playing Netrunner, for chrissake. As soon as we're rolling dice and playing characters, all of those skills and penchant for analysis drips directly out of their heads.

Pedantic wrote:Mostly, I just play less games. There's no time, and everyone wants to do improvisational theater or lurch from made up thing to made up thing to "see what happens." I feel like I'm the only person left looking for "a series of interesting decisions" in the TTRPG space.

Which is super weird, because everyone I associate with now is a big board gamer. I met all these people playing Netrunner, for chrissake. As soon as we're rolling dice and playing characters, all of those skills and penchant for analysis drips directly out of their heads.

Because board games do "a series of interesting decisions" better, faster and with more mechanical rigor than any TTRPG right now and possibly ever.

Magical teaparty Bear World bullshit is the main arena a TTRPG can cleanly beat a well-tuned board or card game.

Yesterday's Hero wrote:I know this is old news for most people, but actually taking the dive and implementing the methodology properly took me a while.

Could you point to any resources or lessons learned the hard way for implementing that methodology?

Pedantic wrote:Mostly, I just play less games. There's no time, and everyone wants to do improvisational theater or lurch from made up thing to made up thing to "see what happens." I feel like I'm the only person left looking for "a series of interesting decisions" in the TTRPG space.

Which is super weird, because everyone I associate with now is a big board gamer. I met all these people playing Netrunner, for chrissake. As soon as we're rolling dice and playing characters, all of those skills and penchant for analysis drips directly out of their heads.

This is what I've seen too. Many more board games and much less play time for anything. Having kids changes things.

Iduno wrote:

Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote:I've become more and more pragmatic, and much less accepting of rules that get in the way of play and fun. I house rule aggressively, early and often.

I am willing to, but I also want to know why a rule is a certain way, and what it interacts with. I have seen that sometimes re-reading a rule and trying it the way it was written works better than you expected. Plus, it's easier than redesigning chunks of a game.

Usually we are talking smaller scale rules (character generation) or simplifying an overly complex single power of some sort. I don't have time to rewrite game engines.

HTH wrote:I'm also less and less accepting of stupid decisions for "balance" and change things so that PCs will have an equal amount of narrative power in the story.

That sounds like a direct contradiction. You are less accepting of decisions made for balance reasons, and then you make decisions for balance reasons. The first half is communicating policy that is the direct opposite of the attitude towards policy professed in the early part of the sentence.

-Username17

brized wrote:

Yesterday's Hero wrote:I know this is old news for most people, but actually taking the dive and implementing the methodology properly took me a while.

Could you point to any resources or lessons learned the hard way for implementing that methodology?

I can think of 3 moments that led me down that path. I'll list them in the order that they happened to me.

1- Reading about the concept of the consequences of success and failure ("fail forward") on D&D 4e DMG Guide (yeah, I have a shitting RPG background, sue me. I'm trying to get better). I know the game is shit, but the DMG had a very long section about this with multiple examples. It's one of the few things about it that stuck with me and ended up being useful.

2- Having it happening to me on two occasions while playing videogames on "ironman difficulty". First on XCOM: Enemy Within. I was running a Normal Ironman game and had a disastrous turn multiple hours into the game where half my squad was wiped off. I composed myself, finished the stage and went on to win the run. The second time was during my early FLT runs. I used to reset really soon if things became dicey. Eventually I resolved to continue these runs to the very end, just to gather more mid/late game experience and it was on one such run that I got my first victory.

3- The final moment was when I first implemented the philosophy. I was running a fully sandbox, almost 90% improvised PF sandbox campaign and the PCs had gathered a bunch of ingredients to perform a ritual to contact the “spirit of the forest” and save it from the influence of an evil druid. They started the ritual and botched most rolls in such a spectacular way that I was tempted to call for a do over or end the campaign in a spectacular explosion right there. But, again, I composed myself and we moved on. “Not only you can’t contact the spirit, but you sever its connection with the forest in such a way that NO ONE can contact it”. It wasn’t a victory, far from it, but it gave them a chance to keep going. The evil druid lost some support and an opposing faction formed within the druidic circle. The PCs made allies with that faction and eventually faced the evil druid on the battlefield and were killed by him, since he was too much to handle in this state, but the iron grip he held on the circle was loosened. We had a blast.

I can see something like that working for a heist-type game, once. Team screws up, everyone gets caught. But, the next week you play out when they actually completed the mission beforehand, and then went and got caught later to make it look like the real mcguffin was still in place. It's not great when Ocean's Twelve (or whatever movie) does it, but it's interesting enough storytelling at the table, and nobody is going to be too bothered by getting a second chance.

10 years ago-- I basically got random ideas and tried to make them balanced, but tended to use a philosophy of "well, as long as everyone's got roughly the same power, that is technically balanced.

5 years ago-- I basically tried for absolute comprehensive solidness in rules I wrote (which is of course impossible, but I tried to do my best), because I basically took the overall Den attitude as gospel. And I approached games and play with much the same attitude.

1 year ago-- I started losing my enchantment with that "things have to be as solid and comprehensive as possible" attitude and going back to an attitude of "is it fun? Does it work? Alright then." But I do retain a handful of attitudes I picked up here (notably towards PbtA, but that's supported by the system actually not being a good RPG)

(1) Echoing many other posters, I've come to value simplicity and ease of teaching rules a lot. Getting friends to play RPGs is a tough sell even when they're well designed, well known and accessible.

(2) Especially in service of 1, I'm much more willing to sacrifice detailed rules in favor of a broad brush and well defined ways to improvise. For example, as frustrating as advantage in 5e is in some ways (taking a long distance blind shot is just as easy as a short distance blind shot) I think it's a good mechanic that eases cognitive load and thereby makes the game much easier to run.

(3) I've become more insistent that the GM enhances players narrative agency by (3a) following the same rules as the players and (3b) modeling and/or responding to player abilities that help them influence the world.

I think I changed my mind on this when I was playing Shadowrun after many years of GMing and the GM responded to a test with "you don't detect any alarms on the windows." For years I'd used this technique thinking that the sentence raised tension, but it really stifled my willingness to act. I'd rather he'd said (and I now say) "you are pretty sure there are no alarms on the window: the security system looks pretty primitive."

(4) I've become increasingly obsessed with the statistics of these systems. Though I haven't made the writing/coding time to formalize it, I have come to believe that it's possible to make much better guidelines for skill tests, combats, etc. by viewing every RPG as a series of die rolls. For example: how many skill tests should comprise a heist in Shadowrun? I sort of hate this abstraction because I feel like it really takes me out of the mode I enjoy to play the games (getting lost in the moment), but I think most RPGs are pretty simple at heart. PbtA and Blades in the Dark are onto something with the way they model the overall conceit of RPGs even if they are probably worse than existing technology.

FrankTrollman wrote:

HTH wrote:I'm also less and less accepting of stupid decisions for "balance" and change things so that PCs will have an equal amount of narrative power in the story.

That sounds like a direct contradiction. You are less accepting of decisions made for balance reasons, and then you make decisions for balance reasons. The first half is communicating policy that is the direct opposite of the attitude towards policy professed in the early part of the sentence.

-Username17

Depends on the game - sometimes what the designers think is balanced is emphatically not balanced in play.

Also, what I meant by "balance" is power level, which has different meanings for different games. (i.e. Exalted starts PC's at about ~10-15th level D&D characters, depending on build). I'm tired of playing games that start people out too gimpy. I've done gimpy for 20 years. I'm done, it's old, it's over.

You've seen what I've posted about - Ars Magica, Mage, Exalted. I find these games fun in spite of being a hot mess. To make them more enjoyable, I house rule where necessary for speed of play and fun. Heck, even D&D 3.x and Pathfinder are full of doozies.

10 years ago: I used to think that the DM was absolute and ruled all, was completely unquestionable, and could basically do whatever the fuck they wanted because of rule 0. Characters could only be really competent within the last 5 levels of the game and all that.

5 years ago: I actually found The Den but mostly lurked around this time, didn't even have an account. I was doing my big search to fix 'the wizard problem' of 3.X and PF, and I stumbled upon the Tomes, thought they were overpowered and stupid, followed by dismissing them for not being official material. While I occasionally houseruled things, they were in the moment with no real analysis of the rules. I still thought competence and power happened after level 10/midway through and otherwise the characters couldn't even threaten a kingdom and tried to keep the players from doing such things. Always start at level 1, end at 20, build up to that threat.

1 year ago:Big TOME freak, big on trying to have rules for everything, started to realize I didn't want to do things past level 10 but didn't want to start at level 1. Thought every class concept could go to 20 if you try hard enough

Now: Currently writing 3.5 revision classes that only go to level 10 because I literally cannot be assed to write out 20 levels of content or pretend like some concepts go to 20. I won't really run a 1 to 20 game without payment or pressure, and will probably hard lock the game to 2 to 12 at the lowest and highest end. I prefer my high level players to fucking act like it and stop pretending that they care about what Johnny Noname the Bandit Lord is doing and go send some troops to deal with it. Will house rule and make rulings on the fly if they don't fit into the rules and expect players to also know the rules.

Will write down rulings for shit like dumping water on a grease fire (Makes a 10 foot radius 2d6 damage fireball with a DC 15 reflex save that will set people on fire) or what a dust explosion is, and use them later, especially so players can use the to problem solve without magic (like fluffing flower in a big area and using it to find an invisible creature). Disregard the shit out of WBL, use wish economy.