Simplicity Encourages Imagination

I found a good video today by a fun channel. At 5:36 Sebastian says:

I feel the minimalistic nature of the old basic D&D rules nurtures creativity in both the players and the GM.

He goes on to elaborate not having character classes and races for every possible option, and not having rules for everything. The reference time for simplistic rules is reduced and making a die roll and ruling from ability scores is the way things are done. Watch the video and subscribe!

This statement brings up some thoughts.

In some games, your mage sees an ancient rune from a long lost empire of mages. The GM goes into quiz mode, "Does your character have the correct ancient cultures lore skill?" The answer is usually no. The players then feel they weren't told the information they needed during character creation, so they get blindsided.

In an OSR game, the question goes from, "Did the player screw up their 4-hour character design session?" to, "How should we handle this using what we have?' Let's use our imagination. Could the character know this? Well, if the character was a magic user, possibly yes. If the character came from a region once conquered by this empire, possibly yes again. We are using our imagination to make a ruling! Then, we do the same sort of thing to determine difficulty, pick an ability score, in this case INT, and d20 roll equal or under, modified, degree of success determines the information given.

Maybe the information given is colored by the experiences of the characters. The mage may get more cold, historical information, while the character with the once-subjugated culture may have information colored by the brutality of the regime.

We didn't need a book telling us this. We did not need to reference dozens of books, such as an Ultimate Backgrounds style book to see if we had the "recall specific historical details" feat. I kid with this example, but once you start down the ultra-detailed game design road, there is no stopping with how specific and minute in detail you can go while holding the book up and selling it as "even more options!"

In that case, more options really means more reference time, more limitations, and guaranteeing the player who bought Ultimate Backgrounds at my game table will use it to argue with another player at my table who didn't buy the book and wants his character to remember a specific historical detail without the feat. We will stop the game for 30 minutes to reference the book, try and please both sides, and come up with a ruling that makes nobody happy.

Back to B/X with another type of check. Does the party fall into raging rapids and need to make swimming checks to avoid being pulled under? STR check modified by the armor worn and weight of gear carried. Seems reasonable. Want to ditch the armor in the rapids? DEX check modified by how tough the armor is to remove. Need to keep treading water for a long time, or survive in cold water? CON check, modified by the same.

Done. We used our imagination to make those rulings, often the GM came up with the rule out in the open and the players agreed with the ruling - a communal ruling that involves players - and the ability score, modifiers, and consequences were agreed upon by all before the dice were rolled.

Perhaps a player came up with a better way to handle the check or ruling, and everyone agrees. Maybe one player comes up with a cool helpful suggestion for another player to get a bonus to a roll with a clever course of action. Maybe another says, ""But if you fail there should be a chance of this happening..."

The game becomes less about the GM and the game's designers, and more about the players and the group's shared interpretation of how to handle a situation. The rules, and making the rulings, are a part of playing the game, and constantly change depending on the group, adventure, players, and situation.

The rules and how different events should be handled should be made up on the spot for most situations in the game using creativity and the group coming up with a  fair ruling. In OSR, these creativity-based non-rules are the rules. It is a form of negative space game design that purposely leaves a lot up to the group, and thus the group is encouraged to use their imagination and fill the rest of the story - and even the rules - in themselves.

"Builds"

If you play enough MMOs you learn a couple things about character builds:

They are never really balanced.

They typically ship broken.

They get stale.

Successful MMOs follow an evergreen model for character builds, and things constantly change to maintain interest, and the changes create interest in playing the game. The style of play typically remains the same, this is the tank, this is the healer, this is the damage person, but the "of the moment" style of play and the power rotations (tailored for specific encounter types) never really stays the same.

Now, in B/X games, you typically only have one "build" - which is the class, which is why these things get play tested and worked over, and B/X tends to stick with what worked before and the character class is a tried and true thing that remains similar no matter what game you play: Old School Essentials, Basic Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and so on.

B/X builds are classes.

In the games derived from the D&D 3, 4, and 5 lineage, including Pathfinder, you start to notice some of the MMO character build tropes work their way into the game. You pick a class - but you are not done. You pick feats and special class features. You make choices every level to tweak your class. You get more feats. Your powers morph and change, and you are expected to know which choice is the best. Well, you could go to the Internet and copy someone else's build to min-max, and that is what happens in many cases too. The "best build" in many cases becomes a community choice, spread through online forums, and to be a good player you are expected to make the same choices and conform.

Why would you pick less-optimal choices?

Well, yes, roleplaying considerations, but don't you want to be a good player and the best at what you do? You see this in MMOs, you pick a class and power set that the current player base thinks "sucks" and good luck convincing anyone that you should be in their group. The world of pen-and-paper is a lot different, but there are times in my games I saw players walk into the game with a printout in hand and copied a forum build choice for choice and pretend they came up with the magic combination.

Trouble is, I read the same forums and pointed that broken build right out. Some players are fans of a game because they know how it is broken and can exploit the imbalance, I can't blame them - they want to do good and look good in front of others - but somehow I feel using the rules to your advantage isn't the way. We all use the rules to our advantage, that is life; but if that is the main reason you play a game, I feel something is missing.

There are times I want the rules out of the way and the players and story to shine through.

Many games ship in a broken state, and pen-and-paper games are no exception. I remember our run closely following D&D 4, and then getting errata for each of the dozens of books in that game weeks after the books release, having the online tools updated, and the book quickly became worthless except to record the broken state the game shipped in. You could still just play "by the book" but the game thrived on overwhelming you with choices, and the best and most broken choice was always quickly found by the community, abused in store play, and quickly nerfed in the errata.

Pathfinder did a better job by playtesting the heck out of their rules, which is why I was a fan of that game. Still, they had issues, and the D&D 3 model combined with the dozens of books approach made the game unwieldy and unplayable for us. They were fun to collect, but not to play.

The stale feeling is also interesting, because one could say that B/X never changes so is thus the most stale. At least with a new edition of a D&D or Pathfinder, things change up and the evergreen model applies. There are new things to learn. There is excitement. This is true, and this also appeals to a certain type of player. But there is also something to sticking with what works and focusing on the story, and not the character build and mechanics. Part of me loves B/X because really, anything I buy is mostly compatible with each other, every game plays the same with a couple small tweaks, and I can be a part of B/X communities and online discussion by really talking about any of the games.

B/X is like the Unix of RPGs. Boring, not slick and glamorous, provides basic functionality, but it pretty much well powers everything and runs the world. It is also extendible like crazy, and custom distributions of Linux and other variants can provide that excitement and rush of something new. Players of commercial RPGs look forward to new editions of the game that change everything. Players of B/X get the same game presented in different ways, with new ideas bolted on to a framework that is already working and proven.

The excitement in B/X is when someone takes the same thing and presents it in a compelling way that opens our eyes and excites us to the new possibilities.

With Old School Essentials, do I have to box up all my old Labyrinth Lord books, expansions, and adventures? No, I don't. They all pretty much well work the same and the adventures are mostly compatible. I could play Barrowmaze with Dungeon Crawl Classics if I wanted to. I could convert Mutant Future over to play with Old School Essentials.

No, I am not interested in the evergreen model anymore outside of MMOs, and I feel a new edition of D&D coming soon since it feels like D&D 5 is in the "experimental expansions" phase where they break the game and try new things before tossing it all out and printing new books. Beyond the first three books we never really bought into D&D 5, and we didn't even buy Pathfinder 2 - but no shade thrown on those who love those games. They just weren't for us, and they are good games.

I just have a full shelf of Pathfinder 1st Edition books I will never use again and I am looking to sell off, and same with D&D 4. This is the legacy of an evergreen game, you get into this consumerist mentality where you need to keep buying books and then throwing them all away. To keep an evergreen game going, they constantly need to be throwing out the past. And oh yeah, you are going to need new adventures with that shiny new edition too, because, you know, everything has changed again.

With B/X it is the complete opposite. Everything I buy I can use for the most part with whatever cool new version of B/X that comes out next. Also, what works is what we know and understand. There isn't the excitement of chasing builds and new rules, but a settling into the story and world that B/X players tend to enjoy more than the mechanics of the current version of the game.

Player Narrative Control vs. Rules Complexity

It seems to me the more complicated the rules, the less control over the narrative a player possesses.

It is an interesting theory, and some in some games you don't have to look far to find examples of this. In the Pathfinder supplement Ultimate Intrigue, you needed a feat to call a truce during a combat. That feels like something a crafty player should be able to come up with, make an offer, and have the referee call for a CHR roll or ruling on the spot given NPC motivations and the adventure.

We throw down a bag of treasure and look at the attacking kobolds. We got a deal? We can make this mutually beneficial to both sides. Work with us and there could be...more...

In B/X, make a CHR roll if the referee thinks this has a chance of working, maybe raise the difficulty based on the offer. And then we are on our way. No social combat system needed. Those ability scores are good for something, after all.

But in general, the more rules players are beholden to, the less control they have over the world in general. Because there will always be a rule sitting out there somewhere saying you can't do something, when it should be up to improvisation and your skills and ability scores. Even a skill layer takes away options. Star Frontiers used a lot of base ability score checks for climbing, swimming, weight lifting, dodging, spotting hidden items, and other physical actions closely tied to ability scores - and there were no companion skills to punish the unskilled. This was pulp sci-fi, if your doctor was strong they could lift a heavy log off someone and play continued. Make a STR roll and let's keep playing!

The new edition of Traveller and the athletics skill comes to mind, which bothers me slightly. It essentially modifies what should be ability score rolls. To me, a skill is a specialty outside of an ability score - not a skill for using an ability score. Skills need education, training, and practice. Ability scores should be what comes naturally and need no skills to use. If I have a high STR, well, of course I can lift weights. There is a level of detail there I feel is not needed.

This is why games with long lists of skills feel like they destroy the usefulness of ability scores to me. What is your STR, just a modifier to STR skills or does it have any practical use on its own? Why even have a STR score if it does nothing without an attached skill? Games like this devalue the base ability score set and slow up play by forcing reference for every action attempted during play.

What is the skill for that?

A system like B/X, and especially one like Old School Essentials where B/X ability score checks are ruled into the game, and skills are not used in the system (or are optional) make that set of ability scores even more powerful. You have a high DEX? Well, that obviously includes some DEX skills like balance, knife throwing, jumping, and a bunch of other cool DEX things you learned through life. An ability score in a system without skills automatically comes with built in skills.

And you don't need to keep a huge list of them, calculate percentages, level them up, and use your ability scores as modifiers. Now, in B/X some activities (like thief skills) are special cases because they require special training, and that is understood when you begin play. But for everything else, a referee ruling and a creative player plan is all that is needed.

If the game had more rules to control every possible action? More reference, more flipping through the book, slower play, and the less things your character can do without making some choice to be good at one thing while not being good at others. There are times I like the complexity. There are others that say, I rolled a high DEX, let me do all these fun DEX things without punishing me with choosing which DEX things I want to do good versus not-so-good.

Let my high scores mean more, please, and save the skills for really specialized trainings, and not the everyday heroic things pulp heroes do.

Get Lamp

This is the classic text adventure documentary "Get Lamp." It is worth watching, as the text adventure genre is entangled with the early days of role-playing and shared storytelling. The film goes through the history of text – based adventures and speaks with many of the pioneers of the genre.

Randomness as Puzzle

What strikes me about this documentary and text adventures in general is the complete removal of randomness from the game. You will see concepts such as mazes and puzzles discussed here, concepts similar to dungeon based adventures in role-playing games that use dice. In general, players and designers of these games hate mazes and love puzzles. My tastes also agree with this generally.

One could say that randomness, character design, character builds, and combat strategy is merely a puzzle to figure out based in statistics. That is what I find fascinating about watching a documentary such as this and seeing the designers talk about puzzles and how they love them, and then taking this fact role-playing games and how pen and paper gamers love character design and combat strategy within the rules. It seems to me that "doing well" within a pen and paper game with dice and character design is just a puzzle to figure out. How do I improve the odds?

How do we survive in this impossible situation? What gives me as a character the best chances of winning? What gives us as a party of characters the best chance of winning, based on synergies and strategy?

The puzzles in today's are all based around statistics and rules design, and players eventually figure them out and find "best builds" that give them the greatest chance of succeeding against challenges and enemies. Once this puzzle is figured out players tend to lose interest, and the factor that holds them in the game the most is story. I get this feeling the same is true with text based games.

Freedom

There is a freedom in both text based games and pen and paper games that does not exist in normal videogames. The designers of text based games tried to make as much as possible able to be examined and manipulated by the player. You could pick up a brick and look at it, and it may or may not have a use later on in the story. A lot of items could be manipulated like this, more so than in normal videogames.

Of course in pen and paper gaming the interaction is only limited by the imagination of the referee. Text based games were still limited, but they had the freedom to do a lot more than a typical game that you would find on a video game console.What I find with text based games is that they approach the interaction ability of pen and paper games, at least the well-designed ones do. If a designer puts a lot of thought and work into a text based game you could have thousands of objects and interactions, with everything being able to be manipulated and examined by the player. It is almost an order of magnitude higher in the level of interaction between a player and the objects in the world than a videogame on a console.

The Fall and Rise

And the documentary chronicles their fall from grace, and limited rebirth. I get why people don't like text adventure games, they are fiddly bits of figure out the parser and type commands in while beating your head against a wall exercises of frustration - at first. Once you learn the rules of the road they apply to most text adventure games, how to examine, how to move, how to look, how to get, how to drop items, how to open up containers - all the basics. We get into implementation problems where the designer didn't account for everything, and the obvious to a player becomes an impossibility because the designer has not accounted for the interaction.

My Experience

When I first encountered these games I shied away, mostly out of fear I would mess something up or "not get it." I had this almost instinctual reaction of "not for me can't figure out" and walked away. Or that the text-adventure game would "punish me for being stupid." You know the feeling, like a designer would walk an inexperienced player through obvious choices and then make them look like a fool for taking what was the obvious route to someone who didn't know better. You have died. Next time try smarter!

These days, I love exploring and reading, so my patience has adapted my tastes more for text adventures than when I was younger and wanted to be wow'ed by great graphics and tight controls. I do admit liking a certain style of game, one that doesn't punish you for mistakes, can be solved with enough careful effort, understands you may have difficulty with the concepts and puzzles, and gradually expands and changes based on where you are in the narrative. I don't want to map and get lost in a maze (unless that is the point and we know going in). I want to have unexpected results to my actions, and my clever manipulations to be rewarded.

Comparisons

And I fire up games like Grand Theft Auto or other open-world games and they feel empty. Despite the promise of an expansive, unlimited world, once you know how things work they do not seem to change. The pedestrians and people that inhabit the world are all the same. Nobody lives and works there, they just spawn in. People obey a very limited script. There isn't much you can do with the objects in the world except collide with them. Few items are interactive, but they typically have a very limited set of interaction associated with them.

Open world games probably highlight the most why the promise of "true interaction" has failed in the world of video games - one you know the envelope of how the world reacts, that is all you can do and expect from the world. I typically lose interest shortly after this moment and then wait for another open world game to see what they add to the formula.

The Future?

I see hope though. There are already interactive fiction games on the Amazon Echo and Alexa platforms, where the text-to-speech and speech-recognition functions narrate the world for you in speech and audio. I would love to see an Inform interpreter for Zork-style games on the Echo platform where you could just sit and explore through spoken commands to the device, and have it listen and take the place of the flashing command prompt. Perhaps this is the future the documentary was searching for, an experience beyond the command prompt and purely in the mind.

Maybe that interface layer has finally been broken and we just can't see it yet. Maybe we are entering another golden age of the text adventure. Perhaps this is a new path, unexplored, and we have not yet stepped into this deep and foreboding cavern - just through what we hear - and interacting with just what we say. While I still like reading, this offers another way forward and perhaps a new realm of adventures to explore.

You Play What Your Friends are Playing

One of the terms popularized during the D&D 3 heyday was "the network effect" - or, you play what your friends are playing. This is one of those "no duh" theories, but there is a lot of truth to this congealing force between players, groups, and what's hot.

There are groups that follow along with similar games, such as Savage Worlds or FATE, and finding a group for those two games is typically more difficult than Pathfinder or D&D 5. The Internet, of course, makes everything easier, and you can find a pick-up group for almost any game and any past version of it somewhere online. But that "walking into the hobby store" moment where you look around on a Saturday and see what people are playing? This is the Network Effect.

It's What's Hot

In a way, it's like having a smartphone that can run the game everyone's talking about versus having a flip phone. You are in, you can talk about the game, and you are a part of that 'water cooler' crowd that can talk about the game. Older versions of the game, or lesser played games? There's less of a discussion, and you may find yourself talking to a smaller and less-interested group.

You buy the game, and that gives you a 'golden ticket' to participate in the social interactions surrounding that game. In a way, it is why you pick up the new version, to be a part of the fun.

There are a couple things to consider, for example, with Tunnels and Trolls the version 5.5 of the game is the one most all of the solo adventures (over the last 20 years) were written to support, and the newer version 8.0 changes things. A lot of people online see 5.5 as the version they still want to play, since the solo adventures are still a huge attraction in playing the game. This may change if 8.0 takes off, but that many years of solo adventures is hard to walk away from in just a rules-compatibility standpoint. There are still holdout crowds like this with other games, such as Shadowrun 4th vs. 5th, and possibly about every version of Traveller ever published.

It's What You See People Playing

We walk into hobby stores, and people are playing D&D 5 and Pathfinder. A lot of people play Magic the Gathering and Warhammer as well, along with games like Warmachine. You see those games, and you want to join in the fun. It is harder to get people interested in a niche or smaller-fanbase game. You have to work harder at it, and there may be some cross-interest (such as old-school D&D groups forming around the current edition players).

I play with some stubborn players with strong opinions about games, and that is cool, but sometimes this limits your options. I have some players that refuse to play Pathfinder because of the complexity, and others that feel D&D 5 isn't for them. Some don't have the money to play some of the games I would like to play with them becuase of the cost to buy books. I think this is about the trickiest part of our hobby, we have a lot of players with strong opinions and it isn't always easy to get people together.

But It Isn't Always So

I ran a group once where it was tough to have the rules keep us together. We 'thought' the rules were the driving force behind keeping the group interested, but in the end, it turns out some of our home-brew ruled games were more compelling than the latest version of the D&D. For some players 'new and shiny' doesn't matter at all, and they are there for the interaction and the fun.

This was a D&D 4 game, and the rules here I feel let everyone down. When a computer program is needed to do things right you take away a lot of player interest and investment in learning the rules. It's part of our struggle with Pathfinder and HeroLab, part of me wants to go back to basics with that game and ignore a shelf worth of expansions, but another part of me says 'investment made' and use everything. Granted, sticking with a smaller set of Pathfinder books probably means a larger player-base as well, so there is that.

When a set of rules goes bust for a group, adjust quickly. This can even happen with the 'newest and latest' so the current version isn't always a sure thing. The latest version gets your foot in the door, but always when you deal with a group of people individual tastes change. Some players care, some champion their favorite version, and others will go along with everybody else thinks. You may have some players more involved with a totally separate genre than what is being played, we had a subset of that group that loved superhero gaming a lot and that resonated with them.

Know Your Group

The hobby is diverse, and the people who play tabletop games are even more so. The best advice is to know your group, and also to play games that you love and your group loves as well. In the best of all worlds, everyone could come together based on our common interests regardless of time and distance. In the real world, there are times when we have to make due with groups that may not play the things we like to play, and we have to make due - because playing something face-to-face is better than sitting at home in front of a computer or television.

You have to put yourself out there to find those people though, so sometimes a couple dull weeks playing at the hobby store is worth finding that group which brings magic to the table and your gaming life. Be a fan of everything, open to new things, and join groups which you may not think you would like, and things may eventually come your way.

The Slow Lie and the Triangle of Pain

Study this chart, because it will be used to sucker you into everything from cellphone contracts to MMOs. This is a visual representation of a "frog in a slow boiling pot", and it is also a key concept in game design theory.

It is the Slow Lie.

It starts out in a typical situation like this, let's take an MMO, for instance. You're level one, you suck. You struggle to do anything. Your character power is below the content difficulty line, and you wonder why everything is so hard.

But, you put some time into the game. Your character gains power. Things get easier! You start to watch your character get more powerful, and fights become easier. You are motivated to play more because you see that first point, just ahead, where you can start to blow things out. Oh, this is going to be good.

The next thing that happens is you blow out the content difficulty. You feel like a god. Your character is the master of every challenge, and your power is unparalleled. You are having fun. You feel great. You love this game. Your character power is high, and you are on this artificial high of having that fantasy fulfilled and you feel like a sword-swinging and spell-slinging hero of the land.

But then something happens. Things get difficult. You keep playing because you THINK this is just another phase, just another plateau to overcome and you will persevere and your character power will be even greater than before. Right? But it never will. You drop below the line. The game design theory of the Slow Lie will never allow for it. You are entering the triangle of pain, and the great paywall lies ahead. Some players enjoy playing in the triangle of pain, but it only gets worse.

Your character power drops steadily. You need groups to do things. You need more effort and better tactics to get by. Some players like this phase, because they feel they are "mastering" the game by being an "expert" but that too, is a lie. Even their character power will drop. Every "power player" strategy will be relegated to how you are expected to play. Larger groups and raids will be needed as character power drops to where even five people cannot overcome a challenge.

You find yourself saying "I need help!"

And they got you.

Well, that is where the great paywall lies. If you pay, your character power will go up. If you don't, you will either stop here or suffer even further. You see this design in pen-and-paper roleplaying games with splat books that seemingly give you great power that blows out the original classes of the game. It's not that these classes are overpowered, its that the original classes in the game were never designed to get beyond the paywall at level X, and the designers are forcing you to buy this book just to play at higher levels.

The paywall can be a "pay a monthly fee to play beyond level X" in MMOs. You had incredible fun up to level X, and you are tricked into paying thinking your power will return to the pre-paywall era. But it never will. They got you, your character power steadily diminishes, and you are that frog in the boiling pot with every level your character gets, getting weaker all the time. Your "numbers" may be going up, like DPS and hit points, but in comparison to the difficulty of the game content, you are losing ground at a faster and faster rate with every level.

It is the Slow Lie. Even though your "numbers" go up, the game content is always pulling away from you. With each level you get weaker, not stronger. The longer you play, the more time you invest, and the more you fool yourself into thinking "the next level will make it easier" - but it never will. The game designers need to keep you inside the paywall, they need to keep you in the system. They will promise bigger numbers in the next expansion or next level, and the old content will seem easy, but where you need to be will always require more time, more money, and a larger expenditure of your life.

They don't want to drop off too steeply, which is why the end of the graph levels out, but keeps going down. There is a happy medium where they have addicted the long-term users, and they can keep content difficulty to character power at a certain level. The 25-man raid, the 5 person "heroic" and all those ratios are known and fine-tuned by the game designers of the Slow Lie. They need to keep the long-term players happy. They need to keep things feeling like they are getting better, and your power is going up. But at this point, the numbers and ratios are going to remain the same. You will never be as powerful as you were before the paywall, and the game design is engineered to make you enjoy being weak, but with larger and larger numbers than ever before.

Nothing changes past a certain point. The monsters are difficulty X, and the characters will be of power Y. This X will always be a "good fight" for Y, and when the X+1 monsters show up, the Y+1 characters will have another "good fight." You may notice the content difficulty line goes down along with character power. Things never really get much harder past a certain point, and the content becomes mechanical and scripted. If you know the MMO raid pattern or the pen-and-paper exploit to maximize damage (or turn denial), it all becomes easy pickings. This isn't a game you aren't supposed to win, like Space Invaders, so that content difficulty line never goes up or gets too far out of ratio with character power.

They keep you just relatively powerful enough so you don't quit.

But you will never feel epic, that is, unless you go back to earlier content, but that isn't where you need to be anyways. There are no rewards for you there. You are wasting your time there. You need to be up there on the bleeding edge, pushing yourself. Or feeling like you are pushing yourself. You will never escape that curve.

But the game will trick you into feeling like you are of "pre paywall" power. You will be an epic hero. You will have gear and trappings better than any king. You will be a legend. They will speak of you as a character of great power and influence! Your legendary power in terms of content difficulty will only be lip-service though, because you will be relatively weaker the higher you go compared to your pre-paywall selves.

And yes, when you hit that "I need help" moment where the game asks you to subscribe, or the pen-and-paper game tries to sell you another book with overpowered class options, you may be a little wiser to what they are trying to do. They are promising things will be better if you spend a little more money with them. If you felt great when that blue line was above the red one, and that is why you played, you will probably not be happy with how things go once you lay down some cash. Either you will blow things out for a while until you hit another paywall, or you will pay and things will steadily grow worse anyways as they settle you into the "final ratio" of character power to group size to content difficulty.

They are selling you "the Slow Lie" and while the game may be fun and the community worth it for a while, you will understand what sort of road that is laid out for you. And of course, how they are making you think paying is making the game more fun when the deck will always be stacked against you.

MMO Games versus Social Games

I tell you, our discussions about game design as super interesting. I ran yesterday's article about "escalating hit points" by DarkgarX the other day, and he predictably had the same reaction, "Escalating hit point systems suck!"

So we talked about it for a while, and we managed to come to an interesting conclusion:

• Some pen-and-paper games are more MMO Roleplaying games
• Some pen-and-paper games are more Social Roleplaying games

Eureka! I thought, and we had this interesting discussion on what makes something more an MMO game than a Social Roleplaying game. I suppose we need some definitions first:

Social RPG: A roleplaying game where social interactions are the primary determining factor in determining success. Combat is a social interaction or the end thereof, and conflict is balanced on one-to-one fights.

MMO RPG (or Party-Based RPG): A roleplaying game where combat is the primary determining factor in determining success. Combat is balanced on many-to-one fights, where a party works together to defeat a foe or group of foes. Combat is a group-based gameplay function and less of a social interaction.

It is an interesting definition, because a lot of things start to make sense. In a game where a PC plays "Dirty Harry", the character's weapon needs to be powerful and a tool of social interaction. Combat needs to be quick and deadly, because how is a single character supposed to make a threat and hold someone off? This is a Social RPG, and weapons and combat in these sorts of games tend to be quick and deadly, and one character can defeat a foe in one blow because that threat needs to exist when violence is used as a tool of interaction between characters and bad guys.

In a MMO RPG, weapons need to be balanced for the party's contributions. Your longsword does 1d8+2, or an average of 7 points of damage. The big boss monster has 60 hit points. Is the boss monster afraid of one sword blow? Probably not. But your 5 person party is doing 7 points each per turn, so that's 35 points of damage potentially in the first volley. That is a threat. The party is the social threat, not one person. Your character is weaker socially with a singular one-on-one threat of violence, but your party is the social group making the interaction with violence here.

In a MMO, that one-on-one social contract many players assume is there with a Dirty Harry "make my day" threat does not exist. That is for the party to say, "make our day." It is a strange way to view things, but it works. Some games cater to the one-on-one interactions, and make violence and combat powerful enough for those one-on-one threats to hold water. These are Social RPGs, where they can be played between two people, a single character feels like they have the power to make threats and changes because a single character matters.

In MMO games, the group matters more than one-on-one interactions. This is why MMOs in general are more popular for groups of people, since it takes a party to get a goal done. You can do one-on-one roleplaying with an MMO RPG, but that social contract of the thief holding a dagger on someone needs to be specially considered with a coup de grace rule because the game is by default setup for a party to be contributing towards a goal, not a single person. One-on-one roleplaying exists in these games, but the social power comes from the "all for one" party and not the individual.

In a MMO RPG, you need escalating hit points. You need to balance things so the party as a contributing whole is the determining factor, instead of the one-on-one fights. The play of a battle matters, and things like boss monsters can exist. Because you don't want every fight at the table to end on turn one, things need to have some play to them and be tough. You can have a 40 hit point giant. You are a part of a team, and that team works together to solve threats and take action.

In a Social RPG, you can get away with using a flat system where weapon damages and hit points do not scale with character power. That 0.38 pistol will always be powerful and a threat. It needs to be because in a more social one-on-one interaction, you need those threats to hold water so you can roleplay them without your mind saying "OMG, that does a d6 damage! He has at least 50 hit points. Not a threat!" You can scale skill and the ability to defend or to-hit, but weapons powers should be high and fights should be deadly because that weapon represents the end-all of a threat made in a social context. That social interaction needs to have weight behind it. Combat needs to be balanced for the one-on-one and deadly.

It is an interesting difference between the style and play of these types of games, and these definitions clean up a lot of how we talk about games. Is this more of a social game? Is this mechanic more party-based and MMO-ish? Is this game's combat system more social-based, or does it assume the party is the driving force?

And a lot of our arguments about which game is better for what have cleared up between us because we can now say "this type of rule is better for social games," or, "this game is better for MMO or party-based play."

Sometimes a disagreement happens is because there is no common definition between the two sides.

Your 15 Minutes of Adventure Are Up

D&D 3E introduced us to this wonderful concept of the 15-minute adventuring day. It goes something like this:

"Hey guys, I used all my spells in that last encounter. Let's go back to town and rest."

Now, this existed before 3E to be fair, and this issue has really been seen more with D&D than other role playing games. Part of the problem is D&D itself, adventures are designed around a series of encounters with CRs that are supposed to balance play and use up resources at a predictable rate. This does not always work, and I feel CR misleads us in a number of ways:

• Randomness leads to greater or lesser resource usage
• The CR system is too simplistic to deal with the complexity of the game's classes and powers
• Players don't care about balanced fights and "burn down" every encounter

The first one is interesting, and yes, a series of bad rolls will double or use up your entire excursion's resources (spells, potions, powers) and you are stuck. Since the rest of the encounters in the dungeon were carefully balanced around you having some resources to deal with it, it's game over man, time to bug out. One encounter drops your party resources to zero, and if this is a "one time only" dungeon with an objective (like most should be), you have lost. That's it. Bad dice have let the bad guy get away with the princess, and that's the knocks of a story-based game.

Yes, the d20 with its wide variance is partially to blame here, it isn't the best die to use if you want a strong average, but with D&D it's what we got.

Another side note. D&D 4E tried to solve this problem with at-wills and encounter powers. the designers of D&D 4 were trying to solve a lot of problems, and this one they did a pretty good job at (tactical miniatures wise, not role playing wise). They introduced the concept of regenerating powers and healing surges, and that kept the party going into the next part of the story. For story-gaming, D&D 4 had a lot of nice improvements over D&D 1-3 and D&D 5. Mind you, the design of D&D 4 did not lend itself to roleplaying all that well, but as a tactical miniatures game where you played stories, it was interesting (counting the first 3 books or so before everything started going to the lower planes).

The second point is also interesting. In some ways I feel the CR system is overly simplistic and it does not take a lot of factors into account. One the other side, if it did the CR calculation system would be something as complex as calculus to figure out encounter balance. With Pathfinder, I have seen reports that modules designed against earlier versions of the game are now too easy with the power creep introduced in later books, and that encounters need to be toughened up to be a challenge again. Old CR does not equal the new CR, and the rating slips as time goes on.

Burn downs. This I have been waiting to talk about, because every player coming from an MMO knows about this one, and this is how most videogames train players nowadays. When you are in a MMO, in each encounter you 100% burn down all your powers and abilities in order to beat it. It does not matter if it is a hall fight or a boss fight, you keep pressing every button, keep hitting every power as its timer comes up, and maximize your damage output to 100% in every fight. In the old Everquest, this wasn't the case and you had to practice careful resource management through a zone. Past that, most modern MMOs make you burn down as fast as possible in order to get through a fight.

The reason? It's flashy! It's more exciting! It solves players from complaining the dungeon is too hard and filling up your customer service system with too many tickets.

So many videogame and MMO players are trained to burn down.

Now, many players get it when they begin playing pen-and-paper. They get the careful resource management game. The games fight this though, and try to make things easier on players by giving them infinite-use attack cantrips (D&D 5), or multi-shot built-in class attack powers (Pathfinder). D&D 4 had infinite-use at-will powers and auto-recharging encounter powers. Even 3E had a plethora of multi-use wands, scrolls, and other items that let you blast away with rechargable wands of magic missiles and fireball staffs. You see the burn-down starting to creep back in.

Player power has increased dramatically over the last 15 years of D&D to keep up with the MMO arms and expectation race.

Personally? I find burn downs boring and resource management more compelling. I like story-based play (a separate topic entirely), but I appreciate games that force you to make hard choices.

In old-school gaming like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord, giving a magic user infinite ranged attack cantrips would be unthinkable. Today, shooty and flashy are the new thing and the new norms. In the past, you didn't doll up with magic items and carry around enough rechargable magic items to blow through days of content. If your DM was stingy, you pulled the "go back to town" thing. If he wasn't, you loaded up for bear with enough magic to blow a hole in the side of White Plume Mountain.

In older editions of D&D and today's OGR games, the magic item economy is sparse, and you don't get into it as much. A wand of magic missiles is rare and special. A +1 sword is Excalibur. You survive on your wits and a player's ability to coax room descriptions out of the DM's head to avoid the trap of doom in the next room. Then again, the story in old-school games was a lot like today's 'sandbox" games. Do you survive? What do you do? Old-school games focused on the stories of the characters in that personal survival story, and not the DM's or module writer's story.

I blame Vampire: The Masquerade back in AD&D 2E days for this "module as story" stuff really. Vampire showed us a wonderful roleplaying game focused on personal stories, and AD&D had to follow suite and try to make dungeoning "story gaming" as well. Vampire did story gaming elegantly. AD&D had a lot more trouble making that leap because of the abstraction and resource management, and that theme of "story dungeoning" has stayed with us ever since, even across 3E's magic-card-if-i-cation of the rules.

So this pesky resource management game is getting in the way of completing tonight's story dungeon! Let's punt, take a mulligan, and head back to town to ignore this archaic D&D resource management system and continue on, shall we? If you are going to be in any way realistic about this dungeon master and reset the encounters, make us roll for wilderness encounters, or make us 'lose' the story for taking a break in the middle, then I guess you are a horrible dungeon master who hates well-told stories and famous module designers, right?

I am being sarcastic, but I have had those feelings come up at my table before so they are there.

There is an internal struggle here that I feel D&D has never gotten over. There is a simulation side to old-school D&D with the resource game, and if you have never played an old-school game, I recommend you do to see what I am talking about. It is a different game. Health does not auto-recharge. What you take in is it for possibly 100 rooms. The game is simple and deadly. Characters die frequently. You struggle. There is a mental game going on where you pry descriptions out of the DM, be clever, avoid fights, and survive.

3E and Pathfinder? Stuck in the middle of storytelling and resource management. Deck-building RPGs at heart.

4E and D&D 5E? Storytelling games at their heart and trying hard to shed old-school D&D's resource management game. Heavily MMO-influenced with recharging and infinite-use powers, with D&D 4 being the more MMO game, but D&D 5 shooting for the feel of 2E's story-dungeoning feel.

None of them are bad, and players love each for different reasons. This is not an argument one is better than another. You play what you love. But, you need to understand what each one brings, and where the conflicts are. If I ran D&D 5, I would go for more story than resource management, because that's what that game does best. I would adjust the story if players felt their party needed to take five, and advance the story in a logical way that reflects them having to take a breather. The show would go on. There wouldn't be a 15-minute adventuring day because the story reacts.

In old-school games? Yes, you can bet I would come down like a ton of bricks on a party that wasted its resources in wasteful burn-downs and had to retreat to town. Old school games are the Old Testament of resource management sims. Roll for wilderness encounters to and from the dungeon. Roll for wandering monsters all the way down to the point you left off. The dungeon's residents react and adapt to the last incursion, setting up traps, moving to rooms deeper (or to ones you thought you cleared), clearing out, or calling for reinforcements. You take a 15-minute day, and I will make you regret it for the next 15 days, but that is the old-school dungeon master's job.

The trouble comes when the game's designers try to please everybody, and tell you that the game is good for all types of play. It's cool marketing speak, but it isn't true. Some games do things better than others, and that's okay. Another problem arises when the game's designers put in systems geared to resource management when the game shines in story-based play. I can't blame them, the marketers said 'make it appeal to everybody' so sometimes you get systems in games better ignored than used. It happens, and game design isn't a perfect science.

Know what you like. Know what your players like. Most importantly, know what you expect from a game, and how a game shapes that experience.

You Just Save-or-Died My Story, Not Cool

One of the interesting things about the new D&D 5 edition is we are back to one-shotting players and taking characters out of the game. There are one-shot 'take you out of the game' spells, official podcasts with DM insta-kills, and the old-school feeling of deathtrap dungeons and random PC death is back big time. It is cool to see the old-school feeling back!

Right?

But, um, dude. What about my story?

What do you mean your story?

When I generated my character, there were these tables, and they were all like, hey, wow, you get a random story attached to your character when you spin him up. And I was like, cool, hey, that is pretty nifty, now I can be like those dudes from Lord of the Rings and all.

Then you made me make a save-or-die saving throw and insta-killed my guy.

Dude, not cool.

Hey, don't blame me, old-school is back. This isn't D&D 4, a game that goes out of its way to make sure nobody feels slighted or marginalized at the table, that everyone's contributions are important, and those "ruin the night for one player" moments were written out of the game. Those days are over. This is the return of the real, and we are back to the old way of doing this, so toughen up and get with us old-schoolers, right?

Dude, I liked my story. Why have a story on your guy if the game is telling you to run around and kill our player characters off like some psycho in a slasher flick?

Oh yeah, I forgot this isn't AD&D, or even a retro-clone like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord. In those games, some of the true old-school classics, your guy was just a couple 3d6 rolls and some hit points, and you didn't even get a story chart to roll on. Heck, you didn't even name your guy until he got to third level and was worth caring about.

Yeah, well. Dude, I grew up playing World of Warcraft, and I am pretty used to the idea that losing my guy warrants a call to customer service. He may be the same hero who saves the world along with 5.5 million other players, but that's my story, and I am entitled to it.

Well, we have to be fair here, would you be that angry if I, as DM, insta-killed your Pathfinder character?

Well, dude, yeah. I put a lot of time into that build!

As I recall, you copied that build from someone else's forum post.

Dude, not cool. Even though someone else came up with it, I punched it into Hero Lab. Plus the paper I used to print it out, and the toner. It's a lot of work.

So let me get this straight. You don't play the old-school games because player death is easy, the characters are too simple, and the story parts are more compelling than the mechanics?

If I am going to spend my Saturday playing a game, I want something out of it, dude. I want my character to be a part of something, to matter, and for my choices to mean something. Just 3d6 in six scores doesn't mean anything to me, I want to design my guy, and have those choices matter. I want there to be some story to play through, and for that story arc to be a part of character design.

What about the concept of 'you make your own story?' You know, where what you do in the face of impossible odds is the compelling narrative, and watching dozens fall before the one true hero rises is a part of the fun?

Dude, the first guy I spin up is the one true hero.

But D&D 5 has save-or-die!

The game also has built-in stories. Where is the fun in having my character get killed before his aunt finds out he is a thief? This is story-based game.

Story-based does not mean 'player protection' from bad decisions. Even story-based games are like that. You walk a tightrope here, if you make great decisions, you may get the satisfaction of advancing your personal story. Fair trade?

Not if it is save or die. Dude, even if I played this for the combat and tabletop side I would be pretty pissed if I failed a save-or-die saving throw. All that work, all those adventures, just game over. It's a pretty rotten thing taking a character off the board with one roll. If I fail, I want it to be because of my bad decisions, not a cheap "you lose, thank you for playing" 50-50 roll.

It's the cheap thrill of Russian roulette with my player character, not cool.

Where this Started

You know, sometime long ago these games used to be about the thrill of working through a simple rules system that was deadly and absolute, and working out a way to survive and profit despite the sheer impossibility of survival. Many characters did not make it, because they were just that, playing pieces in Monopoly where you laughed if one of them fell off a cliff and you chalked it up to "how the game works." They were easy to spin up because they were so disposable, and you weren't supposed to invest yourself in them all that much.

Nowadays, things have changed.

How so?

I agree that if you are playing a story based game, save-of-die sucks. I also think it sucks in a tactical game, because it robs you of your input, and it does feel like a Russian roulette mechanic for cheap tension. In a classic old-school game, I see its place though. Old school isn't about fair, and you stayed away from save-or-die monsters or situations, because you got XP directly from treasure, not the artificial challenge rating of monsters. Somewhere along the line someone introduced the concept of "if it is a good fight, players deserve XP" when that wasn't in the game.

The concept of XP for a good and balanced fight that you will most likely win comes from the admission that the game is mass-market entertainment. I feel it is a dumbing down of the concept, making the game more like a videogame, and putting in an artificial slot-machine constant-feedback reward system that keeps players coming back.

Save-or-die was in old-school games to discourage you from doing a straight-up fight with that medusa. It was better to sneak past her, find a way to deal with her other than combat. If you stole her 1,000 GP brooch, you got 1,000 XP. Any way you got it was fair game.

Nowadays, the medusa is engineered to be a fun encounter 'worth' the XP she is assigned. You get no XP for treasure, so you are forced to fight her for the XP. In a way, it is more bloodthirsty because you are putting a point value on a life (defeated however), rather than a goal or a treasure. This is a concept taken straight from videogames that reinforces the "kill for experience" sort of very basic and almost darkly sinister motivation for the game. Now, 'killing' means 'defeating in any way, knocking out, etc' in many games, but the points are 'owned' by the encounter.

There are also 'story XP' which is a system that attempts to cover story-players as well.

I do feel D&D's reward system has been messed up for a while, ever since AD&D 2nd Edition where they started the story award XP system formally, and also reset monster XP along those levels.

If the game wants to be story based, then remove XP for killing things.

If the game wants to be hack-and-slash, then remove story XP.

Reward Systems

Personally? I like story-based XP systems. I think XP for killing is a bit cold and bloodthirsty, like a genocidal bounty system. I liked the XP for GP thing of old-school play though, in a fun sort of way because it encourages creative play. The goal is to out-think the monsters and grab the loot. You are like this group of Ocean's 11 thieves looting and sneaking your way through dungeons, each person with a special ability (healing, fighting, sneaking, magic) but with only one goal - grabbing the loot the easiest way possible.

If the king wants to pay your party a "story award" of 10,000 GP for rescuing the princess, then pocketing 10,000 XP is also your motivation. The XP are nice, but really everybody, we are here for one reason and one reason only, shiny gold coins.

In this context and the original game's motivation of "XP for treasure" a save-or-die mechanic makes sense. You are a playing piece out to accumulate as many GP as possible. Yes, some monsters and traps are "save or die," but the balance is to not fight them or be stupid enough to step into them. You certainly don't get XP for the artificial reward of "beating" them, so trick, avoid, and circumvent these monsters as best you know how and the tools given to you will allow.

So, save-or-die is in there, but it is something to avoid?

Exactly. It is a different design and motivation for the entire game. Balance issues clear up because there is not an artificial reward tacked onto a creature, so there is no need for a CR system to rate difficulty. An owlbear is an owlbear. Fight it if you think you can, or avoid it if the dungeon designer was smart enough to put another way around. Save-or-die was a disincentive, not a game design mechanic someone needs to balance.

The definition of "railroading" in pen-and-paper games changed too. In the old days, railroading was that a module designer forced you to solve a problem one way, or forced you into a fight you could not avoid. When RPGs went story-based, railroading was forcing you to play the story the module designer's way. In the old definition, railroading was more about giving the players choices in how they wanted to approach a situation. It was about the freedom to approach a problem and allowing for that.

It is partly D&D's problem because of its heritage. D&D by its nature is a "big tent" game that takes inspiration from many fantasy sources. This means the reasons people play the game are just as varied, and the game has to support many types of reward systems. It needs videogame XP for hack-and-slashers. It needs story XP for roleplayers. It got rid of XP for GP, which I think is a mistake.

Understanding Fairness

But yes, understanding reward and motivation are key to understanding why save-or-die mechanics work in some games and not others. It is ultimately about that feeling of unfairness, but to decide if something is unfair, you need to understand both the motivation for play and how the reward system works. Some games have simple motivations, so judging what's fair is easy. Other games are more complicated, and you layer in characters that take hours to design, or story systems on top of bounty systems, and things get more complex.

Fairness is ultimately judging if a reward is worth the risks, and not feeling cheated should things not work out. In a way, fairness measures how you feel about defeats and successes, and the satisfaction of the proportionality of a reward given a risk.

"It's What the Cool Kids Play"

Let's go back in the day, when red-box Basic D&D was considered the simpler game for kids, and every teenager that wanted to be 'cool' played AD&D and had Rubik's Cube stickers stuck on their shirts. AD&D was more complex, it had more to it, it was arcane, it had so many rules, but it was cool because it was a lot more difficult to understand and required good players to invest in the game to do well.

Let's fast-forward to today, when D&D 5 is the simple game intended for casual players, and there is a group out there who like Pathfinder because it fills that AD&D role again. Pathfinder has Hero Lab, and you can literally spend an entire afternoon fiddling and playing with numbers designing the perfect character. Pathfinder keeps the Magic the Gathering vibe of card-like character design, and it has a strong D&D influenced focus on maps and tactical play. Pathfinder is today's AD&D as D&D 5's is to the old D&D Basic Set.

But are the cool kids playing it?

Nah, the cool kids are playing computer games. They are often playing them on Youtube and becoming social media stars.

It's not 1980. The Atari 2600 was an easy device to compete against in the theater of the mind, and pen-and-paper games could be anything and attract an audience. Today, a lot of people have moved on, and let's face it, electronic gaming is easy, it's on-demand fun. What don't computer games have?

One thing that pen-and-paper games do very well is this thing I have a scientific name for called, "tricking the bastard." When the DM is sitting there all smug with deathtrap in hand, it is so satisfying to be the play who figures it out and "tricks the bastard." Because let's face it, the dungeon master is the bastard who could get the entire killed at a whim, and figuring things out when his finger is on the doom-switch is just so gratifying.

In computer games, this is called "exploiting the system." It is not as satisfying, but it is the same gratification and pleasure at finding a way to cheat the system, rocket ahead, and beat the computer game because no one has tested or thought of what you are doing yet. In a sense, the bastard here is the programmer and QA team, and you just beat them at their own game.

Roleplaying games have institutionalized "tricking the bastard" - especially old-school games. The closer you get to modern designs, the more wargaming and figure battle you get, because somebody somewhere on a whiteboard said, "these games need figures to buy!" With figures comes balanced play, rules revisions, and the like. You won't find many board games that allow one player to say, "All the other Monopoly pieces fell into a pit and are dead. Game over."

No, that is the power a DM needs to be the bastard, and why it is so fun tricking him into letting you win. The DM needs to be able to separate The Bastard out from himself, Sports Referee, Shakespeare Guy, and Uncle Moneybags, but that is another article on being a good DM.

Part of what makes pen-and-paper games so difficult to sell is partly this reason. There are two types of people that say no to pen-and-paper because of this, people who don't like someone having that much control over them, and people who don't buy the whole concept of a dungeon master in the first place. A computer is so much more impartial and fair, right? I I do something, some person is not going to take away what I did because they are messing with me - it has to be that way because the rules say so, right?

Computers are so much more fair. Right?

If you only knew the business and programmer stuff that went behind the games you play. I would rather trust a DM, at least there's someone you can understand the motivations of directly, To their face. And you don't have a marketer, someone from corporate, or some addiction specialist programming a system to make the game more desirable for you to stay logged into. Or a programmer rushed for a deadline and he doesn't really care what he puts in there. Or a system that keeps people apart intentionally (World of Warcraft and other MMOs).

It's social interaction, something our corporate-ized society pushes us away from because they want an electronic layer between us because the variables are easier to control. Why would you ever want a company controlling your free speech? Oh, yeah, that Facebook thing, I hear that's really popular.

Computers are a lot less fair than a living, breathing person you trust.

It's what us cool kids know.

"Why not play a dungeon?"

We are continuing our playtest of the Warhammer RPG, and an interesting question came up during play, "Why don't we just roll up a dungeon and play that?" Before I get to answering that, let me tell you how we got to that question.

Our Warhammer play through is focused on the traditional Warhammer style of adventure, a roaming, story-based adventure that changes locations, situations, and NPCs rapidly as the characters travel about the local land while trying to solve a big problem. It is definitely not a dungeon, like an OGL game would use, but more of a series of situations the characters are free to solve any way they would like, and the outcome determines what happens next.

Contrast this with an OGL game, where a simple dungeon map is good enough. That is the adventure, and the reason for playing is to gain loot and get XPs. This is a similar motivation of D&D4, it is simple, and that simplicity is its appeal.

Let's look at Pathfinder and also D&D3.5 circa Forgotten Realms. Here the adventure de-jour is a roaming story, much like our Warhammer play through, but with an emphasis on throwing in the occasional dungeon run. A great example of this adventure style is the Pathfinder adventure path. It is different than a pure roaming story adventure in two ways: you still have a strong loot motivation, and dungeon interludes are emphasized strongly.

"Why don't we roll up a dungeon and play that?" Is a valid question when playing anything, and the answers to this question are often more interesting than the question. With Warhammer, there is no strong loot motivation - the game is very character based, and the definition of success and failure is 100% on the story and the world. There are no huge lists of magic loot in the game (with the set we have), and the things to buy in the game are limited. Advancing your character is a goal, and solving the next problem is what lies ahead. Roaming around in a dungeon is pointless in the larger scheme of things.

With OGL or D&D4, the same question is valid, and the answer is, "Why not?" There are strong loot motivations in these games, and the motivation to go out in the world and accumulate 'great power' is often the primary motivation for playing. This is a shift, and we have saw many players more motivated by power than story - to them with power, any story is solvable. D&D4's power cars, item upgrades, and focus on the combat minigame focuses the accumulation of loot like a laser.

Pathfinder has a more story based focus, thanks to the legacy of its adventure path setup. We still have a strong loot motivation, even better loot that D&D4 in many cases, but the players the game attracts typically are balanced between power and story based gamers. It is a fine balance to keep the dungeons in the adventure paths feeling like they belong in a story-based adventure, when the party wants to move the story along and not get bogged down in a dungeon crawl.

"Why not play a dungeon?" Is a great question, and you can learn a lot by answering it. Even the negative responses can teach you a lot about a game, what the game's motivations are, how the game expects to be played, and how the designers focused game play. Understanding what a game rewards and the behaviors it discourages helps you understand a game better, and increases the enjoyment you get from it. Asa  game master, this understanding is critical to how much fun your players will have at the table.

The Network Effect: Dungeon Masters Run the Game

As I see it, referees run most every traditional pen-and-paper game. There should be a special website you can go to register to be a dungeon master for DnD, and you should get all of the books and materials needed to run the game for free. Before you laugh, stop and think about it. Would there be weekly pen-and-paper games anywhere without a referee?

It is a unique that most very pen-and-paper game has built in the dependency of having a referee in order for the game to be played at all. Let's take away the "referee as a playing participant" for a moment, and just use the referee as someone that runs the numbers, controls the monsters, and lets the players know what happens next in the module - sort of like a computer (much like DnD4's referees). It's like every computer game needing someone in the home office manually scrolling the Mario level, spawning monsters, and advancing the game to the next world.

Modern Boxed Games

Modern boxed adventure games do without a referee, and even have the players round-robin control of the monsters. There are rules set about how monsters attack, when goals are completed, and how the game works without a referee. Games like Magic the Gathering or Warhammer don't need referees either, although competitive games tend to be easier to run without one. Cooperative games without referees are gaining popularity, and many of the modern boxed games we review are like that.

This brings us to the 'network effect' another one of those terms introduced into the pen-and-paper lexicon back with DnD3's introduction. What the network effect means is this: you will play the game that most of your friends are playing, because it is hard to find a game otherwise. In the 50's this was called peer pressure, and of course you needed to have your officially licensed Davy Crockett musket and coon-skin cap, because all the other kids had one. It is a situation that lives in the dreams of marketers and product managers, for sure.

The Network Effect

What makes the 'network effect' so powerful is the previously discussed 'system lock in' - you can't find another game because people don't want to spend money on them or spend the time learning them. Combine this with the game literally being controlled by a select group of hard-core players, the referees, and you have setup a system that lives and dies by how many referees in the world that are willing to spend the time and money to learn and run your game. Referees should get the game for free, because you are asking so much of them, and one good referee can bring a whole group of players into the hobby.

It is a bit of a cynical view, I admit, but there is a lot of truth to the legacy that is setup around the DnD3 rules set and the descendants of those rules. The worst part about the OGL and the DnD3 ruleset is the lack of support in the license for anything other than tabletop play, so every game that comes from this hierarchy is limited in how it can be played - more on this in a later post. What is interesting is that the 'referee is required' mantra is being repeated in the next edition of the game, when a lot of the modern tabletop games are actually moving away from having a referee to play.

I will admit being a referee is one of the most enjoyable and satisfying parts of playing for me, but we need to think outside the rulebook when we do a true next-generation design. Every player at the table should be able to just pick-up-and-play, and referees should be an optional way of playing, and I dare even say they should not be the preferred way to play. Good game design can overcome this, to take a game to the next level.

Referees in Monopoly

Like roleplaying, a referee can be introduced into any game, even Monopoly. Technically speaking, a referee is someone who introduces story situations and out of the rules elements to the game, decides difficulty and success, and hands out optional rewards for completing those goals. In Monopoly, a referee could rule that everyone goes to Vegas, and the players get to bust out a deck of cards and play blackjack with the game's money for the next 15 minutes. This is incredibly fun, but the core assumption is the game still works when the referee is removed. The referee-less aspect of the game is preserved, and "no referee" is the default mode of play.

Boxed games covering fantasy and all types of adventure are re-discovering the magic in making everyone a player, and moving back to the Monopoly standard of play. The fun happens when you make having the referee optional, and the referee does not have to worry about the manual parts of the game (like moving around the board), and be the creative fae spirit introducing random stories and challenges to the game. Making a game play without a referee actually frees the referee up to work incredible magic.