D&D Summer Camp #1: The Great Watermelon Fake Out

ubarose wrote: Since your kids are playing magic users, you might want to also consider the D&D spell decks. It makes it easier to manage your magic. Plus, you can just hand the card to the DM and say, "I want to do this." All the necessary info is on the card, so there is no fumbling with books and papers.

I used spell cards with my 3.5 campaign. Whenever a spellcaster got access to a new level of spells, I would send them a pdf file of the spell cards for that level, in case they wanted to print them out and use them. Most of the players liked having the spell cards, though some just printed out the pdf sheets. And I had my own set of spell cards stored alphabetically in two recipe boxes that I kept next to my homemade DM screen. Part of my session prep was to pull spell cards for the enemy spellcasters that characters were likely to encounter that session, to decrease my search time during combat.

It's always funny seeing this conversations because it highlights how diverse the format of RPG can be, and how equally diverse our demands from that activity become.

When I think of the term RPG and what that experience looks and feels like to me, it's not a grid or dry erase markers or an overly complicated combat system with attacks of opportunity or whatever. To me it's world building, character development, dialogue, and the emotional journey. It's conflict and drama with very a loose structure.

I'd much rather play Dungeon World for instance than D&D with minis and a grid.

That experience is far different than what you get out of Descent or HeroQuest. There, I'm not concerned with shaping the story or collaborating on fiction with my buds. I'm focused on gaining skills and loot and applying it to a tactical game.

They're so far divorced in my thought process that "Why not just play D&D?" isn't really an applicable thought.

This is not me shitting on D&D or how others play or what RPGs mean to you. Just a funny observation as I try to broaden the conversation.

Oh yes, we have the Druid spell cards. Absolutely indispensable. They hit level 3 today so I just have to hand them the cards they can pick from.

The Wardlings are important because I wanted them to play children- not adults. They understand that the minis do not necessarily depict their characters in detail, but that took some explanation.

Charlie, you make a point about something I’ve been thinking over a lot lately as I’ve gravitated back to Warhammer, Magic, and now D&D. These core hobby brands all share one HUGE but subtle thing in common. They all offer the player a tremendous degree of freedom in creating a -bespoke- experience tailored to what suits them best. For some, D&D is the murder hobo thing with linear meat grinder dungeons while for others it’s all about building an intricate setting from the ground up. Some folks just collect Warhammer, others are into the optimal builds. Magic might mean a casual cube draft or playing in the pro tour.

All of these games, in contrast to any given board game, give you the opportunity to use it as you see fit or how it suits your groups. With board games, you kind of just have to pick another game.

But (again, pre-writing for next week) I think there is a big difference in a Knizia game that specifically uses the board game format to explore board game specific concepts and a dungeon crawl board game that seeks to simulate or emulate an RPG. The goals are really different. The catch is that for me, the former is irreplaceable. The latter remains a simulacra.

This whole story is state of the art awesome. I do believe you've inspired the next generation of board gamers and role-players, your own children. Soon, the Padawans will become the Masters. Kudos to you.

"It's alright man, we're halflings!" I nearly choked on my coffee upon reading that!

This was a fun write-up.

Charlie, from my perspective, I think the thing about D and D is that it supports both frames of looking at and playing RPGs, or any mix of the two, more adequately than many others. Which is really just what you're saying, but I'm gonna expound upon it.

The central difference between Dungeon World and D and D is that DW's authors codified good GMing in a way that D and D just couldn't, it being the more broad-based and flexible system. Yet well-codified or not, the rules for good GMing just don't change that much; on a poor roll, bad GMs just say "you fail" while good GMs describe the failure. 5e does nothing to interrupt that basic gameplay loop, and everything to support it.

Someone above mentioned that CHA rolls don't play much of a role in their D and D games, and that must certainly be true of grid-based sessions. But in our sessions, people are always trying to talk their way out of encounters. Charisma's our most used stat. Roll and describe. Some other very cerebral systems (like FATE or Blades in the Dark) make this a bargaining thing or some other mechanical bit of business that's supposed to distribute the GM's improvisational agency, but nothing really beats a GM who's a good improviser. In which case, you want a set of mechanisms, like those of 5e, which just invisibly mediate that improvisation.

Alternatively, should our group get in the mood for a tactical, board-game-like encounter (and, as a tired-ass GM, I am sometimes), 5e handles that better than any board game I can think of, something that "let's play a theater game" systems are just not geared towards (and in fact, are often actively snobbish about).

I hate to be the shill for the big system, but here I am. 5e's ubiquity, playstyle agnosticism, and flexibility makes any other RPG (and especially any other RPGish board game) a chore to learn and play. I would not have shilled for any other version of D and D, and can see why 3e, 3.5e and 4e spawned the development of so many ambitious systems which countered those system's gross munchkinisms with finger-wagging admonitions to "use your brains" and to "be a fan of the players." Yet too many of those systems use extraneous mechanisms and really bad world-building fluff to make their rather too-strenuous point. In hindsight, Dungeon World and other RPGs of that class and philosophy are dating themselves much more rapidly than D and D has done.

hotseatgames wrote: So are you using a grid map and minis at all?

(Bad taste seal team flix joke incoming) He's using the STF maps to take out those tree hugging ecco-druids.

GorillaGrody wrote: This was a fun write-up.

Charlie, from my perspective, I think the thing about D and D is that it supports both frames of looking at and playing RPGs, or any mix of the two, more adequately than many others. Which is really just what you're saying, but I'm gonna expound upon it.

The central difference between Dungeon World and D and D is that DW's authors codified good GMing in a way that D and D just couldn't, it being the more broad-based and flexible system. Yet well-codified or not, the rules for good GMing just don't change that much; on a poor roll, bad GMs just say "you fail" while good GMs describe the failure. 5e does nothing to interrupt that basic gameplay loop, and everything to support it.

Someone above mentioned that CHA rolls don't play much of a role in their D and D games, and that must certainly be true of grid-based sessions. But in our sessions, people are always trying to talk their way out of encounters. Charisma's our most used stat. Roll and describe. Some other very cerebral systems (like FATE or Blades in the Dark) make this a bargaining thing or some other mechanical bit of business that's supposed to distribute the GM's improvisational agency, but nothing really beats a GM who's a good improviser. In which case, you want a set of mechanisms, like those of 5e, which just invisibly mediate that improvisation.

Alternatively, should our group get in the mood for a tactical, board-game-like encounter (and, as a tired-ass GM, I am sometimes), 5e handles that better than any board game I can think of, something that "let's play a theater game" systems are just not geared towards (and in fact, are often actively snobbish about).

I hate to be the shill for the big system, but here I am. 5e's ubiquity, playstyle agnosticism, and flexibility makes any other RPG (and especially any other RPGish board game) a chore to learn and play. I would not have shilled for any other version of D and D, and can see why 3e, 3.5e and 4e spawned the development of so many ambitious systems which countered those system's gross munchkinisms with finger-wagging admonitions to "use your brains" and to "be a fan of the players." Yet too many of those systems use extraneous mechanisms and really bad world-building fluff to make their rather too-strenuous point. In hindsight, Dungeon World and other RPGs of that class and philosophy are dating themselves much more rapidly than D and D has done.

There's a very interesting school of thought (and one I strongly agree with) that the openness and malleability of D&D is actually a weakness. This is the very spark that the Indie RPG scene sprang from - and why Dungeon World (really Apocalypse World) is so different than D&D. Most indie RPGs support a specific style of play, with the notion that they're better for it, as opposed to wanting to satisfy many different desires.

I have to admit that I kind of have a problem in wanting to turn any roleplaying discussion into a conversation on story gaming and Ron Edwards' big concepts, so I'm trying not to push too hard toward that here and take away from Michael's excellent article.

I love discussing this stuff and RPGs in general, perhaps mostly because I don't play them anymore and this is my version of the board gamer who only interacts with their hobby through acquisition and shelfies.

charlest wrote:
There's a very interesting school of thought (and one I strongly agree with) that the openness and malleability of D&D is actually a weakness.

Hey, I'd be super interested in a link or two.

My big caveat to what I wrote above is that the "mechanized empathy" nature of most indie RPGs protects against big, dominating, improvisatory personalities at the table, which can be a problem (and has probably been my own problem in the past).

GorillaGrody wrote:

charlest wrote:
There's a very interesting school of thought (and one I strongly agree with) that the openness and malleability of D&D is actually a weakness.

Hey, I'd be super interested in a link or two.

My big caveat to what I wrote above is that the "mechanized empathy" nature of most indie RPGs protects against big, dominating, improvisatory personalities at the table, which can be a problem (and has probably been my own problem in the past).

So, this is a big can of worms.

First of all, to really get to the deeper bits, we would need to agree that system does matter in RPGs. I think you clearly agree with that, but there is an excellent article from 2001 here with some great theory discussion: www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/system_does_matter.html

That article also posits that there are three player aims and we all seek different things when we sit down to roleplay.

One quote that's particularly important: "To sum up, I suggest a good system is one which knows its outlook and doesn't waste any mechanics on the other two outlooks."

Diving further into GNS theory (those three outlooks) is fascinating. This is one of the best RPG articles on the internet in my opinion: www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/

That provided the foundation or bible for the Forge, an internet forum that spawned the Indie RPG movement. It's responsible for cultivating Ron Edwards, Vincent Baker, Jason Morningstar, Luke Crane, et al.

The indie RPG scene produced a culture of game design that focused on addressing one of those stances, most commonly, narrativism.

When I discovered this stuff in 2004, it drastically changed my view on roleplaying and really altered my group's trajectory after years of AD&D and then 3.0.

We started asking questions such as:

"But WHY can't my druid summon a bunch of snakes or turn into a bear?"

"Because you haven't gained that ability/level yet.."

"Who cares? We're not competing, we're roleplaying and collaborating on a shared narrative, the story would be better and more interesting if I could."

Our view fundamentally shifted to one more aligned with "Yes, and..." . The rules we desired were more of how to shape the story as opposed to how to shape our power/stats.

charlest wrote:

GorillaGrody wrote:

charlest wrote:
There's a very interesting school of thought (and one I strongly agree with) that the openness and malleability of D&D is actually a weakness.

Hey, I'd be super interested in a link or two.

My big caveat to what I wrote above is that the "mechanized empathy" nature of most indie RPGs protects against big, dominating, improvisatory personalities at the table, which can be a problem (and has probably been my own problem in the past).

So, this is a big can of worms.

First of all, to really get to the deeper bits, we would need to agree that system does matter in RPGs. I think you clearly agree with that, but there is an excellent article from 2001 here with some great theory discussion: www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/system_does_matter.html

That article also posits that there are three player aims and we all seek different things when we sit down to roleplay.

One quote that's particularly important: "To sum up, I suggest a good system is one which knows its outlook and doesn't waste any mechanics on the other two outlooks."

Diving further into GNS theory (those three outlooks) is fascinating. This is one of the best RPG articles on the internet in my opinion: www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/

That provided the foundation or bible for the Forge, an internet forum that spawned the Indie RPG movement. It's responsible for cultivating Ron Edwards, Vincent Baker, Jason Morningstar, Luke Crane, et al.

The indie RPG scene produced a culture of game design that focused on addressing one of those stances, most commonly, narrativism.

When I discovered this stuff in 2004, it drastically changed my view on roleplaying and really altered my group's trajectory after years of AD&D and then 3.0.

We started asking questions such as:

"But WHY can't my druid summon a bunch of snakes or turn into a bear?"

"Because you haven't gained that ability/level yet.."

"Who cares? We're not competing, we're roleplaying and collaborating on a shared narrative, the story would be better and more interesting if I could."

Our view fundamentally shifted to one more aligned with "Yes, and..." . The rules we desired were more of how to shape the story as opposed to how to shape our power/stats.

All of these arguments have filtered down to me from secondary sources, and from the RPG sourcebooks themselves, but it’s interesting to see them laid out like this.

I have really fundamental problems with the “Cartesian split” that Edwards forges between essential game elements, but I’ll have to chew on this a bit.

Those articles at the Forge are interesting, but the overly broad category of Simulationist feels vaguely hand-wavy and probably just a subset of Gamist. I've tried a lot of rpgs over the years, including many of the ones given as examples in the articles, but still don't grasp the exact idea of a Simulationist game as opposed to one of the other two types. Then again, I have only recently read Fiasco, though I have quite a bit of experience with diceless (and Narrativist) games like Amber and Lords of Olympus. All the rest of my rpg experience has been with more traditional Gamist rpgs, like D&D and Call of Cthulhu, with a lot of dabbling in more obscure games.

Shellhead wrote: Those articles at the Forge are interesting, but the overly broad category of Simulationist feels vaguely hand-wavy and probably just a subset of Gamist. I've tried a lot of rpgs over the years, including many of the ones given as examples in the articles, but still don't grasp the exact idea of a Simulationist game as opposed to one of the other two types. Then again, I have only recently read Fiasco, though I have quite a bit of experience with diceless (and Narrativist) games like Amber and Lords of Olympus. All the rest of my rpg experience has been with more traditional Gamist rpgs, like D&D and Call of Cthulhu, with a lot of dabbling in more obscure games.

I don't have any experience with a Simulationist focused RPG, but we definitely had a bunch of focus on it in early games of D&D I played.

I remember early in D&D 3.0 we got bogged down in how the group's horses would feed. I was the GM (and pretty young and stupid at the time) and we referenced the table in the player's handbook about how much grain they'd eat in a day. So the player's had to buy a wagon simply to haul grain so their horses could eat on long journeys.

Why the hell did we not just ignore that?

I don't know, but a better question is why the hell does the rulebook lead me in that direction?

A game centered around Simulationism would likely be a historical thing, such as a military RPG. Recon, the Vietnam RPG from Palladium is probably the closest thing I can think of. Calculating accuracy and damage was relatively nuanced and weapons had listed effective ranges and quirks. A lot of discussion during play was "What a squad really do that?" or "How many VC would really populate a village" and the game gives way to those elements of simulating the source material as opposed to telling a better story.

I mean, GURPS really tries to be simulationist. It’s what makes the sourcebooks a huge chore to read, and also what makes the setting books fascinating. GURPS Mysteries and GURPS Space are terrific reference books for genre writers.

This is a great read, and matches my experience. I had my son play the Fighter in Phandelver when he was 5, so slightly older kids can probably handle the spellcasters. In our second (or third) brief campaign, he decided to wrestle everyone with his barbarian and take their weapons. Soon adults were doing the same thing, wrestling minotaur skeletons and stone giants while in a rage, it was great.

Gary Sax wrote: I often wonder about WotC's conservative approach to 5th. It's very good for the game, but I can't help but wonder about the business of that strategy... which I hope works.

I can't speak for Hasborg big wigs, but in my experience running a store for a year, 5e core books, Volo's, Xanathar's and the starter set were constantly being re-ordered. We would always keep 1 of each of the module books too. That also means selling dice. And D&D players often dipped their toes into Magic or came on board game night too.