Posts Tagged ‘Role Playing Games’

The following notes come from the seminar at Dragonmeet (27^th November 2010) by Kenneth Hite, Robin D Laws, Simon Rogers and Gareth Hanrahan.  I didn’t record the talk so these are just notes that I took that give the gist of what was being said.  They’re also only the notes about investigative gaming.   I’m providing them as is without comment on my personal feelings about them and I hope I’m accurate in reflecting the spirit of what was said even if I’m not reporting word for word what was said.

A GM should decide if a piece of information is essential or if they only want to give it out on a 20% roll.

Investigative game structure – Opener followed by clues that offer multiple routes followed by finale.

Avoid creating scenarios where Player Characters are observers of Non-Player Character driven stories.

Avoid default skills – eg spot hidden in CoC – other skills should be useful for investigation.

Skills can signal players what is important in a game – so include skills that tell them what a game is about.

Players select their own spotlight through their choice of skills.

Scenes have to have a design purpose – not just be there to delay dinner.

There are clues that move players on.  There are clues that explain what is happening.

In Gumshoe point spending gives colourful extra clues.

Active or passive investigation – player seeking clue is active, GM pushing clue is passive.

It’s not clever [as a GM] not to give information out.  You get a richer gaming by giving information out.

Many players feel cheated if they think you [the GM] are making up the adventure as you’re going along.

The Armitage files shows how improvisational techniques can be used.

New Orleans Syndrome – lack of information sends player characters racing off to New Orleans punching Jazz musicians.

Tell players what is going on but not how to solve what is going on.  Doing the later would be railroading.  Doing the former is letting a game progress.

Avoid 30 minutes of faffing around because of bad dice rolls on spot or other investigation checks.

Players need to get from A to B.  May go the scenic route or charge in all guns blazing.  They’ve always followed some track if they get from A to B.

Free floating clues can be delivered by any NPC the PCs are talking to.

Clues A,B,C and D can be available in any order in a sandbox game.

If the PCs go off path a floating clue can be used to point them back on track.

Most gamers want fantasy in their games.

Red Herrings / Mistaken information can be clues if they get PCs to another scene.

Stuff in a game book should have stuff to play with (Ken Hite).

Update: Thanks to Angus for letting me know Gareth Hanrahan was the other person on the Pelgrane panel.

I was going through some very old gaming files from when I was at college and came across some notes on designing the difficulty of encounters in a tabletop role playing game. A few weeks ago I questioned if Role Playing Games Need XP and the notes reminded me that in a game with experience the characters can effectively not develop. That sounds like a contradiction but it can happen and it can be a problem. It happens when the difficulty faced by characters increases at the same rate as the characters improve and this can be frustrating for players.

In most table top RPGs experience, and character development happens between adventures characters’ capability develop something like this:

Character Capability against time (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

A game with linear encounter difficulty is one where as the characters abilities increase so does the difficulty of the encounters they face. The characters may gain some advantage; they may hit their enemies harder or more often and may have more hit points. Unfortunately their opponents also now hit harder, more often and have more hit points. In its purest form every encounter has the same chance of their succeeding, as the last for characters. In fact, apart from a little colour in their encounters, they might as well have not improved at all and their opponents could have remained at the same power too.

Linear Difficulty over time (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

So difficulty and capability always keep step with each other…

Capability and Linear Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Some games virtually encourage this style of adventure design by including charts or advice to allow referees to work out the ideal encounter for a group of X players of level Y to face. Charts and tables like that serve a useful purpose in helping new referees and those unfamiliar with a game to find their feet when designing encounters. The risk of building an encounter that will obliterate a group or underwhelm them is significantly reduced without having to resort to dice fudging or deus ex machina. There is a real risk of boredom if this type of difficulty progression is slavishly applied.

Others virtually rule out easy adversaries – I read one rulebook recently (forgive me I can’t remember which one) that said all “easy” encounters where the characters were guaranteed success should be role played rather than roll played. While I agree with that generally (although I hate the phrase roll play and its derivatives) doing this all the time means the players can never feel how powerful they are in a crunchy way.

I’m going to leave this here for now but I’ll be back soon with some other kinds of difficulty progression and some thoughts on one of the worst game I ever played in.

Update: Part 2 is now available Variations on the Difficulty Theme.