To be more clear - I’m aware of the generalities of how it works, I’ve played and enjoyed single player CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Planescape Torment, but I don’t understand how the face to face aspect works.
Specifically, I’ve seen people tell stories on the Dope about how they double crossed the other players during a session or whatever. But how could you do that if you have to announce your actions to everyone? Is the “character” double crossed but the players understand what’s going on (and must act as if they don’t know they’ve been double crossed in game)? Or do people pass notes to the person running the game?
And I guess more generally - if you’ve played D&D before - just a general rundown of how a session usually goes, how the mechanics work out. Is there constant die-rolling and arguing over mechanics, or is it more role play or does it just depend or <other option I haven’t even considered>
Bingo. Note passing is a fun and common way to do this. Or, if your group is made up of good, mature players, you can just keep in-character and out-of-character knowledge separate. A fun way to do this is for the DM to ask everyone for a spot check before they enter the room, even if there’s nothing to spot. He tells the players they don’t see anything, then cackles evilly as they agonize over the fact that they have to go ahead into the room if that’s what their characters would do!
There’s constant die rolls, yes. Even during role playing. Let’s say you save the king’s kingdom and he offers you a large reward, but you want more. Asking for more is done by roleplay, but the outcome is (usually and partially) determined by a diplomacy check. In combat, the dice roll all the time. Especially when a level 20 wizard casts Delayed Blast Fireball and rolls 20 6 sided dice at once!
Ok that makes sense. Although I think no matter how mature I was, if I knew something out-of-character that was definitely going to affect the character in game - it’d be hard to keep that completely separate, consciously or not
In fact, even if I saw someone passing notes to the DM(?) I think I’d be rather suspicious of the player passing them.
This is why I prefer play-by-post games via message board, over tabletop play. It’s easy for some players to have knowledge the other players don’t have, with PMs and stuff. The Fighting Ignorants thread was the first rpg play-by-post game I remember on the dope, with a few others popping up more recently. Right now the SDMB Shadowrun campaign and the Shadows of Arcady campaign are both (imho) excellent current examples of games-in-progress where you can see for yourself just how it works.
I tried reading along with a few play-by-post games here before - but I think there’s a certain amount of forcedness (probably not the right word but the best I can come up with) that I wouldn’t be able to get over. Like in a real face to face game, it might be easier to ad-lib lines or whatnot, but over a necessarily time lapsy environment like a message board? I could see getting swept up in a game for an hour, but to try and get involved in a game for 10 minutes at a time disconnectedly over the course of months seems more difficult. Or at least more difficult to me anyway.
There are a large number of different Character Classes these days. Clerics (priests), Wizards, Assassins, Rogues (sneaky types), Fighters, Bards, etc.
Basically on your turn in combat, you have three ‘actions’ you can take. A ‘Standard’ action (usually an attack, but not always), a ‘Move’ action (usually a move, but again, not always) and a ‘minor’ action (such as sheathing a weapon, drinking a potion, healing someone, etc). Everyone, including the bad guys, goes in a sequence called ‘initiative’. I go, then you go, then Monster A goes, then Fred goes, etc, until that round is over and we start the order again.
Some ‘effects’ (Dazed, Immobilized, Deaf, etc) last until the end of the person who did it’s next turn, some last until you ‘save’ against them by rolling 11 or more on a d20 (20 sided die) at the end of your turn.
In 4e (4th edition), you have At-Will powers (that you can do all day long on your turn), Encounter powers (that you can use once (usually) in each encounter) and Daily powers (that you can only use once per day, naturally!) Most characters have only two At-Will powers, and then you start with one Encounter and one Daily. Oh yeah, there are also Utility powers that can be either Daily or Encounter depending on how powerful they are.
For an example, in Living Forgotten Realms, I’m playing an 8th level Bard. I have the following powers;
At-Will: Jinx Shot +14 to hit vs AC (Armor) for d10+7 damage. If the guy I hit misses his next attack before the end of my next turn, he falls prone.
At-Will: Staggering Note +12 vs Will defense for 5 damage, pushes the target 2 squares (10 feet) and an ally of mine gets to make a free basic attack against them.
Three Encounter powers, one of which is : Focused Sound +12 vs Reflex defense for d10+7 damage, until the end of my next turn my allies can Crit (max damage and then some) on a roll of 18-20 on their d20 attack roll.
Two Dailies, one of which is: Stirring Shout +12 vs Will for 2d6+7 damage, until the end of the entire encounter, any of my allies who hit this same guy HEAL 5 hit points. Very useful for targetting the big bad guy and giving my allies an incentive to hit him.
Majestic Word: Healing myself or an ally, can do twice each combat.
Two Utilities, of which one is; Words of Protective Fate (daily), until the end of the encounter, any time the bad guys roll a crit on one of my allies, I get to save against it. If I roll an 11 or better, it is not a crit.
There are literally hundreds of powers of different ‘level’ and you gain access to more of them as you go up in level. They’re class specific, so my Bard cannot gain Wizard powers for example, unless I take some multi-classing feats (another story in it’s own right).
The bottom line is that you play characters ranging from wimpy to badass, and you go around killing things and taking their stuff. Hopefully for good reasons, but not necessarily so.
That’s a major part of the game, even setting aside party conflicts. For example, most people in the real world probably know who Medusa was, just from popular culture. But a first level fighter fresh off the farm in a fantasy world doesn’t necessarily have that knowledge: he’s never seen Clash of the Titans or studied Greek myth in middle school, and while medusas exist in his world, they’re just one of thousands and thousands of different kinds of bizarre monsters, most of whom he’s never heard of. So when your character first spies a scaly woman with snakes for hair, you as the player might know to be careful of her petrifying vision, but your character probably doesn’t know anything about that.
That I did not know actually - in general is Moving an “action” all the time or just in combat? My perception of tabletop D&D is that it’s sort of complete role play with the exception of the odd diplomacy/spellcraft/intimidate check until it gets to combat, and then everyone breaks out the dice and and rulebooks and starts arguing. (I keed!) Probably because that’s how it basically works in the computer games I’ve played which are basically my entire experience of D&D.
On average - how much of a game is combat & whatnot and how much is roleplay? (I’m sure it changes from group to group and game to game but I’m just looking for personal experience). I enjoy things like working out the best way to attack & strategy’s for exploiting a weakness but I don’t think I’d be good at roleplaying really.
There’s different types of games. There’s Hack & Slash games, where the DM says “You come upon a dungeon. There’s monsters in it” and that’s pretty much it. There’s more roleplay-focused games, where the only fight in an entire session might be the duel NPC Sir Henry challenges PC Lord Gregory to over a woman. Most games are in between. For example: in a campaign I recently ran, the players found a town where a bunch of people were sick. They spent about 30 minutes talking to people and trying to figure out what was causing the sickness, and figured out that someone was poisoning the water supply from a nearby mine. They went up to the mine, killed a bunch of goblins, found the goblin leader, negotiated with him, and then found the gnoll shaman that was behind the poisoning. They fought him. The next session, they went back to town, roleplayed a bunch, and finally left town, had some fights in a forest, found a fort that was infested by orcs and cleared it out, etc. So during the travel portion, there wasn’t much RP going on, but lots of fighting. I decided they needed a little more RP, so they came upon a bigger town. They only wanted to stay for one night, but someone got murdered in the inn they were at. So they investigated and spent a session or two with barely any combat, just figuring stuff out. Finally, they realized that the murderer was a vampire, so they tracked him down and had a big fight scene.
Oh, and moving is always an action. But if your players are in a bar, you don’t need to track the scene round by round (I spend a standard action opening my bottle of beer. Here’s a strength check. Alright, now a move action to drink the beer. And a free action to put it down on the table.) That would just be boring. So you only go into round-by-round during fights, or sometimes puzzles.
For the record, I have almost never been in a game where players screw each other over unless it was made clear up front that it was an evil game, and I’ve only played in those twice. I don’t care for that game style and I generally announce that I won’t tolerate it (in non-evil games). If it is made clear to me that the GM and/or the majority of the players want to do that (and that has NEVER happened in my 33 years of playing D&D), I’ll gladly take a walk.
The most I’ve run into is the cliche “Wizard who doesn’t mind dropping spells on his allies in order to hit the bad guys” or the “Thief who steals from his friends”. I refer to them both as ‘cliche’, because they are really really stupid D&D cliches. In every instance I’ve seen people try it or talk about doing it in other games, they’re smiling and giggling like the morons they usually are. “Haha, my character is going to hurt you and steal your stuff and you can’t do anything about it!” (wanna bet?) My response is to announce that I will freely attack them for doing this, even in the middle of combat, and then drop out of the game.
In Living Forgotten Realms, you cannot do anything to harm another player’s character without that player’s permission.
As for your question about Movement and Actions: The only time you have turns and actions is in combat. If you’re just roleplaying or moving from place to place, you don’t worry about such things.
Well, that’s why if you’re the sneaky type you learn to constantly pass notes to the DM (blank ones if need be), until it becomes so routine an occurrence that nobody even pays attention to it any more :D.
But that’s quite meta-gamey. As others have said, for the most part narrative RPGs* are just a very involved and structured games of “let’s pretend”. So let’s pretend you don’t know I just double-crossed you ! Unless your character has a way of sussing me out (and a reason to suspect moi), maybe we should roll for it to see what we should pretend happens ?
I actually made that Wizard once, but it was a bit different in execution since the group was in on it and it made sense in character. What happened was I got some fireball spells (and I think a necklace of fireballs), we had one character with a fire resist aura (I think my character multiclassed into Gold Dragon Shaman for it or something) and a couple of magical items that decreased fire damage. So one of our main strategies when we got swarmed was to use the melee characters to corral the mobs, and then toss a fireball (or burning hands etc as the case may be) on the melee. Our guys would take ~2-3 damage on average and the enemies would get absolutely trashed. We even got bonus XP the first time due to cleverness, and a couple other times for finding creative ways to corral the mobs in order to pull it off.
ETA: I know you’re talking about the assholes that just throw spells willy nilly, I just really liked that tactic and had to share.
Once I had a game where due to various circumstances there were only three of us, a DM and two players, and we had the players play two characters each.
We actually introduced a new PC once by having him assassinate the OLD PC. I didn’t know this was going to happen at all. It’s… interesting to watch PCs betray, murder, etc PCs played by the same person.
You might want to check out actual examples of people playing. One of the famous ones lately was the Penny Arcade and PvP dudes playing. The podcasts are collected at Wizards of the Coast
Oh yes. I’ve passed my fair share of blank notes, or notes with jokes on them so that the DM laughs and gives me a thumbs up. This usually worries the other players, for some reason.
A big part of a meatspace game is the personal interaction. This just can’t be duplicated on a computer, no matter how skillful the programmers are. There’s nothing quite like coming up with a solution to a problem that the DM hadn’t anticipated. If you do this in a computer game, well, you can’t do what you want. But if you can convince the DM that yes, you DO want to raise that anti-paladin that you’ve killed, if he’ll agree to a Geas to restore his paladin status, then it’s an incredible ego boost. And probably also an incredible XP boost as well. Plus the Good and Lawful aligned gods in that world will look more favorably upon you (very important if you’re a Good cleric).
The way I look at it, and the way I get my tabletop players to look at it, is that we’re all cooperating in telling a story. We aren’t a team of puppeteers guiding our characters in their best interests, we’re a team of actors all attempting to play the characters as if they were real and making them do the things that they’d do. Thankfully everyone in my group is on the same page and there’s no worry that anyone will steer their character’s behavior based on OOC (out-of-character) knowledge. I’ve had plenty of players knowingly guide their characters down a doomed path because it’s what those characters would do. This is dramatic irony and it provides all the same suspense and excitement as when a character in your favorite movie goes into the mansion that the audience knows to be haunted.
I’ve been playing since 1978 and it really does depend on the DM and the group. Most are probably happy playing D&D as a tactical combat fantasy game with just enough plot to string encounters together. Others enjoy being bit players in a storytelling GMs game often times without much use of dice or combat mat/figures.
My favorite kind of GM is the world builder that provides the crank to turn event clocks and determines the major forces and directions they take in the world. As a player, it’s awesome to develop in that world and eventually become powerful enough to change “destiny”.
And yes, there can be all levels of party conflict, from simple treasure division all the way to handling a character that is acting against the party’s interest.
We made the mistake of trying to integrate a selfish player into our campaign many years ago. He’d managed to manipulate the rules and gather enough power that his one character plus resources could bully the whole party. I happened to see a weakness in the basis for his strength and my character caused the death of his character plus resources. Everyone went home shaken from the encounter.
Basically you pick the DM and the players carefully and be ready to walk if something doesn’t suit you. Trying to force a poor mix just doesn’t work. A good game requires everyone’s participation.
One of the things I’ve learned from 33 years of playing is that sometimes, even the best of players and friends can suddenly take a radical turn and be a game spoiling dickhead out of the blue.
Had a good friend I’d played with for over 10 years suddenly tell me that all they wanted to do was walk back and forth, wait for things to attack them, and then track them to their lairs to get treasure. Something he would NEVER tolerate when he was DMing. Sorry, I’m not running a ‘random encounters’ game.
Had another guy who was simultaneously running another game that I was playing in, suddenly decide to play his character as a total child-minded fool - when he was the only decent player and IRL leader in the group - and tell me that I needed to run my game ‘on the easiest possible setting’. Something he certainly wasn’t doing in the game he was running, and something he didn’t ask for in a game we both played together in before that.
I guess the worst players I see groups having difficulty with are the cheaters. Few people are forward enough to deal directly with them and instead, allow them to linger in the name of minimizing conflict at the table and just having fun.
Min-Maxers can also be a headache. People who carefully craft their characters to exploit loopholes or unintended synergies so that their character is massively overpowered in certain ways. They can really dominate the game and make it a lot less fun for everyone else at the party unless the DM starts crafting encounters to exploit that characters weaknesses or minimize their strengths. Which can easily walk down the road into Adversarial DMing.
Speaking of which, that’s also a problem (Adversarial DMing - running the game as if it’s a competition between you and the players and you want to win), and we just had that come to a head in a game I’ve been playing for over 3 years. The DM decided nearly two years ago that in order to ‘challenge’ the strongest character in the group, he needed to craft severely over-powered combats. Then if they went badly for us, he’d start nerfing the bad guys. The problem was that we would get totally slaughtered in the first two rounds of a lot of fights (which is not at all fun) and then, seeing the energy level drop at the table and us being unhappy at the clear TPK coming up in round 3 or 4, he would start nerfing the bad guys. We’d watch him declare a monster with 300 hp (that the person next to him could see on his tally sheet) dead on the very next hit when it was never declared bloody, or they’d suddenly become minions, or most visibly, he’d ‘forget’ to have them move and attack on their turns.
Now that was a helluva fight between him and me, because he kept insisting that he ‘had to do this’ and complaining about how everyone was whining and unhappy about it, in the face of me pointing out that HELL YES, we are unhappy about it and the game was no longer fun to play.
But those are the downsides, and all in all, the game is a helluva lot of fun and that’s why I’ve been playing for 2/3 of my life.
The temptation to metagame (use out-of-game knowledge, especially of the game itself) can be overwhelming, and in some ways, it only gets worse with experience. More experienced players often develop enough genre savvy to be able to predict what’s coming up in the game, even though their characters have no way of knowing.
A fellow player and I demonstrated this to our DM once when he complained about us commenting on Inevitable Plot Twists and calling NPCs by their archetypes while out of character (“So, Sir Guywhohiredus and his buddy, Vizier Betrayer, said…”). We looked at each other, looked at him, and I said, “This is a low-level module. It’s a town adventure. The next one will be the dungeon crawl.” The other guy took the hand-off and added, “And the one after that will be a wilderness adventure.” The DM could only gawk at us, because we were right–the chances of him surprising us with something in a published module were effectively nil. He might have had a chance if he’d written his own. We did our best not to let it direct our characters, but we knew what was going on.
I have a tentative plan for my next campaign. Tech is now sufficiently ubiquitous that I’m going to try to have ongoing chat sessions with each player to handle note-passing type stuff. They will also be able to have one-to-one and group chat sessions for inter-character communication and stuff they don’t want me to hear. Of course, that’s for a science fiction RPG, rather than D&D, so it’s actually perfectly in-character, but if the system works, I’ll use it for D&D (or rather, Pathfinder) in the future.
