Over the last few years I've run Basic D&D sessions for my Korean elementary school students every once and a while and they're great guinea pigs for testing out different rules and styles of DMing since they come in with zero expectations. I think running sessions for them has improving my DMing more than anything else I've ever done. Here's what I've learned:
1. Dungeon Crawling is Amazingly Intuitive When I let the students choose their own equipment the first question I got was "can I have a hunting dog?" When I chose their equipment for them they immediate started using ten foot poles for everything. Without me teaching them anything, they immediately fell into so many classic dungeon crawling tactics with "don't split the party" being the first thing students who had played before told the newbies. Within an hour I had girls who like drawing ponies in their notebook feeding their pets to ghouls to keep them busy while they made a break for the exit with big grins on their faces.
2. Black Boxing it Works Since I was pressed for time I didn't teach them any rules, just basically go over things like "what does constitution mean?" They never even saw a dice (I used a dice rolling program) and it worked beautifully. Of course with veteran RPers going full black box is a bit extreme but these days I try to move more and more of the adjudication behind the DM screen so the PCs don't know exactly what rules I'm applying. I find it makes things run a lot faster.
3. Old School D&D is Amazingly Fast Or at least it's amazingly fast when you don't let things bog down. My record was the players going through 8 "encounters" in 40 minutes. That's extreme of course but I had a lot of groups going through a couple combats and plenty of dungeon exploration in less time than it took some adult groups I've seen to run through one 3.5ed combat. Keeping things entirely focused, helps a lot and I've carried that over to my sessions with adults. I've found that this is self-renforcing as fast resolution keeps players busy which makes resolution even faster.
4. Small Groups Work Best What was really interesting is a couple times I ran three students through a dungeon and then did the same dungeon with six student. In almost every case the three students did better, got more treasure and suffered fewer deaths than the six students despite having half of the firepower. Generally the small groups were well-oiled death machines (impressively so for ten year olds) while the six students were stumbling incompetent door-kicking cat herds. Success in Old School D&D depends on operating as a team and if you have each person do their own thing and wait for their turn to come up again the wheels start falling off.
Now that I'm thinking more about the issue, I find that the same thing often applies to my groups of adults. Pretty much every session I've run that didn't go as well as I hoped had a large party.
5. I'm Never Going Back to Individual Initiative I've fallen in love with side-based initiative. It not only speeds things up but makes the players think of themselves as a team, i.e. "what are we doing to do now guys, it our turn" rather than "it's my turn now, you guys wait while I decide what to do" which makes a massive amount of difference in actual play.
6. A Cliche is Worth a Thousand Words For one early session I was running a hacked version of In Search of the Unknown and a statue of a naked women fem that module was approaching them will ill intent. Since I wanted to keep things PG, I told them that it looked like a Greek goddess. What happened then was:
Kid: OK which Greek goddess?
Me: Um, what's you're Intelligence?
Player: 17.
Me: *rolls* *Thinks fast, rolls randomly to choose on Olympian goddess* It's Hera.
Player: She's the mean one, there no way we can talk to her. Let's smash her!
And they did thanks to a weaponized house cat and a bag full of hammers.
The amount of information I conveyed by saying "Hera" did more to illuminate the situation for them than a big fat paragraph of boxed text would have. While keeping things fresh is also important, never underestimate the power of cliches to impart a large amount of information in a very short amount of time and keep everyone on the same page and keep things running FAST.
7. Options Are the Death of Creativity For the first few sessions I printed the list of thief skills on the thief pre-gen character sheets. It was a disaster. I had smart and creative kids announcing things like "I will remove a trap" immediately upon walking into a room because it said so on their character sheet. Sure I could explain how things worked and tell them they had to find the traps first and that they should narrate what they`re doing to remove it but that just took up time and left them confused. Things worked massively better when I just printed up "you can do thief stuff" on their character sheets and adjudicated the thief skill percentages behind the screen without telling them what they could do. The massive increase of creativity on the part of the thief PCs when I did this shocked me.
8. Livestock Are Awesome Kids love pets and kept on bringing them. So what I did was give a couple different pregens a cow to see what happened. Those cows were awesome. I had players drop them on ghouls, use them as improvised terrain and send them into stirge caves so that the stirges gutted themselves on cow blood and become to bloated and sleepy to fly.
The thing with "cow" on your character sheet is you have to figure out how to use that cow as you can`t just walk into a room and tell the DM you want to use your cow, and that's exactly the sort of thing that gets players thinking in the right way. Character sheets should be full of things like cows and have as few things like "remove traps" as possible.
9. What Hit Points Are For The purpose of hit points is to communicate clearly to the players that they are fucked, that if they meet challenges head on and fight fair they will die horribly. Nothing gets the creative juices flowing like desperation and nothing breeds desperation like being down to 2 HP.
10. Cheaters Prosper No victory is sweeter than that gained by screwing someone else over in a completely unfair manner. I have never been prouder as a DM as when some of my older boys cast Command on a critter to "spin" so that it got dizzy and fell down on a patch of well-oiled caltrops that they then lit on fire. They then poked it with ten foot poles from just outside the area of the fire whenever it tried to get up. I`ve never seen players spend five minutes laughing uncontrollably after choosing a tactical option from a list on their character sheet.
Awesome. I've wondered often about how much information players need versus what they are provided or given and how that impacts play outside of my own group.
Quote from: Daztur;721090a weaponized house cat
That's mah hobby. :D
I need your notes on this. I'm in Japan teaching, and while I have huge high school groups, it is something that I could think about using for a club activity. It sounds great!
Quote from: Daztur;721090Character sheets should be full of things like cows and have as few things like "remove traps" as possible.
That's one the most entertaining pieces of D&D-related advice (which also happens to be valid) I've read in a long time. :lol:
Nice to see a school system that's (apparently) not as twitchy about pretend violence as in English-speaking countries.
Sounds awesome, Daztur! :)
Wow. Great post. I definitely want to hear more.
Quote from: Daztur;7210903. Old School D&D is Amazingly Fast Or at least it's amazingly fast when you don't let things bog down.
This seems to be a well-kept secret. I've mostly played OD&D over the past few decades, but recently have taken an interest in some newer editions. I find that in the "good old days" we could explore a decent-sized dungeon in a day, but in newer editions we get through 3-4 encounters tops.
Quote from: Daztur;7210905. I'm Never Going Back to Individual Initiative I've fallen in love with side-based initiative. It not only speeds things up but makes the players think of themselves as a team, i.e. "what are we doing to do now guys, it our turn" rather than "it's my turn now, you guys wait while I decide what to do" which makes a massive amount of difference in actual play.
I used the old MB board game "HeroQuest" as an RPG tutorial for some new players a few years back. This game has a pre-set order of initiative and we found this to be really great because it gave the players the chance to set up some strategy. "Okay, the dwarf opens the door, the barbarian enters the room, and the mage is ready with spells."
My only problem with side-based is that the players have to determine who goes in which order. I'd rather base it on dexterity or something like that, and then once the order is fixed let them play from there.
Quote from: Daztur;7210907. Options Are the Death of Creativity Things worked massively better when I just printed up "you can do thief stuff" on their character sheets and adjudicated the thief skill percentages behind the screen without telling them what they could do. The massive increase of creativity on the part of the thief PCs when I did this shocked me.
This is why I ditched skill systems in my OD&D. When I tried to install one, I found my players spent the whole time trying to decide what they could attempt and limiting themselves to what was on their list. Without a skill system they would tend to just try things and I could reply with "okay, make a strength check" or something like that. Lists killed creativity.
In fact, I took things a step farther. I give spell lists without details so when a player wants to cast a spell he has a general idea of what it does but can be creative. I'm pretty sure Warp Wood isn't intended to allow a druid to bend a tree to capture a foe, but I let my druid do it becasue he was clever.
Quote from: finarvyn;721192My only problem with side-based is that the players have to determine who goes in which order. I'd rather base it on dexterity or something like that, and then once the order is fixed let them play from there.
I have been using no set order side based initiative in my OD&D game and it has worked great. There have been great instances of teamwork when players didn't have to wait for a turn in a certain order.
Quote from: finarvyn;721192This is why I ditched skill systems in my OD&D. When I tried to install one, I found my players spent the whole time trying to decide what they could attempt and limiting themselves to what was on their list. Without a skill system they would tend to just try things and I could reply with "okay, make a strength check" or something like that. Lists killed creativity.
I'm not using skills at all really. I am using backgrounds which act as a catch-all for doing things outside of class abilities. Many of them are things anyone can attempt but having the background means the character is just better at them.
Athlete, Thief, Healer, Ranger, Scholar, Explorer are all backgrounds without any accompanying detail. So when a character with the thief background performs actions that fall under that background, the chances of success are increased.
The player gets to choose an area of expertise for the character apart from class but is not restricted by a menu of action options.
Quote from: finarvyn;721192This is why I ditched skill systems in my OD&D. When I tried to install one, I found my players spent the whole time trying to decide what they could attempt and limiting themselves to what was on their list. Without a skill system they would tend to just try things and I could reply with "okay, make a strength check" or something like that. Lists killed creativity.
I found that if you are relentless in insisting in describing first, in natural terms, and rolling second. That the problem largely goes away even with certain mechanic heavy games like GURPS.
When I designed the ability system for the Majestic Wilderlands, I thought about giving the players the freedom to juggle bonuses around so that it is possible to have one burglar better at stealth than picking locks. But I opted instead for a fixed progression as being more in the spirit of OD&D
Finally thanks to Philotomy's Musings, theOld School Primer and other folks writing about OD&D, I made it explicit that any character can attempt any action.
In my campaigns, the combination of the above has generally led the players to talk about their options as if their characters are there. When it occurs the most common talk about mechanical effect is generally about spell area of effect.
I do think that if you plan on having classes that are good at things other than combat or magic there is no way around some type of ability/skill system.
Quote from: Silverlion;721101Awesome. I've wondered often about how much information players need versus what they are provided or given and how that impacts play outside of my own group.
Yes, the information flow is something that is really vital to a good game and small tweaks to it can really change game play. For example putting different things on a character sheet even if I'm doing resolution the same way really changed how the kids behaved. Playing with kids is a clearer way to see this than playing with adults since they're just going by what you show them, not previous experience.
Quote from: BarefootGaijin;721103I need your notes on this. I'm in Japan teaching, and while I have huge high school groups, it is something that I could think about using for a club activity. It sounds great!
Sure let me give more detailed information about how I ran this. For rules I started off with Holmes Basic and switched to Labyrinth Lord. I used either first or second level pregens (3d6 in order as the good lord intended) with the second level ones having one magical item rolled randomly from the 1ed DMG tables. I found that except for very small groups the first level ones worked a bit better as low hit point totals put salutary fear into them, but then I usually tweaked damage a bit low so that non magic-users could generally take one hit without dying and let emergency CLW or potion use save people who got killed if applied immediately.
For equipment I gave them basic weapons and armor, food, water, 5 gp and the either let them choose two extra pieces of equipment "anything that's not too big or too expensive" or rolled 1d30 twice for each pregen on the following table that I made up:
1 Bag of coins
2 Tiny diamond
3 Torches
4 Lantern and oil
5 Magic glow in the dark stone
6 Magic ultra-sharp knife (i.e. +1)
7 Extra weapon
8 Extra weapon
9 Two flasks of oil
10 Dog
11 Cat
12 Pony
13 Parrot
14 Monkey
15 An especially stinky dog
16 Caltrops
17 Rope
18 Ten foot pole
19 Healing potion
20 Climbing equipment
21 Lots of rope
22 Handcuffs and chain
23 Telescope
24 Your little brother
25 Chicken
26 Cart
27 Falcon
28 Fox skin
29 Goat
30 Cow
I made it animal heavy as I found that kids enjoy having pets. I got about equally good results with them choosing their own stuff or with random equipment, but random equipment is faster so I switched over to that after a few sessions.
For the character sheets I kept them as sparse as possible, remember I only have an hour to run this so I didn't have much time to teach them the rules so my goal was to get them through the dungeon door ten minutes into class. Just name, HPs, ability scores, equipment, and class specific stuff.
For thieves I found that not printing a thief skill list worked VASTLY better so I just put "Thief Abilities: you are good at doing sneaky and thief-style stuff and if you attack someone who doesn't know you’re there it hurts a lot."
For clerics and magic-users I randomly chose a number of first level spells equal to wisdom (clerics) or int (magic-users) minus ten and wrote up really short descriptions of each and let them choose which to memorize. For some reason I had a bunch of idiot magic-users with control normal fires as the best spell available. Shocking grasp, sleep, grease, command, protection from evil and cure light wounds were the most popular.
For adjudication I didn't teach them ANY rules EVER. I did all rolling on a dice rolling program and never told them anything I was rolling and why. I made one exception with one class as an experiment and found that they liked rolling dice but kept on asking why I was rolling dice for some things and why some dice should be high and others low and while they enjoyed getting some rules knowledge, just spending time to teach them wasn't really worth it in my opinion if you're just doing a one-shot.
In general I used ability score checks for a lot of stuff and used thief skills as sort of a "saving throw against being dumb," sort of a second chance if they would've failed otherwise.
The main sources of confusion were:
-Vocab for ability scores (easy to overcome).
-Why are my HPs so low!
-How many times each thing could be used, especially after I told them the very basics of Vancian magic (you can use each spell once!). I then had students ask me. "How many times can I use a sword?" "How many times can I use a rope?" Took a while to get through to them to just use common sense and run with it.
For the dungeons I used In Search of the Unknown and a pair of One Page Dungeon modules: http://www.onepagedungeon.info/one-page-dungeon-contest-2012 ("Tomb of Snowbite Pass" and "The First Casualty").
For running stuff I played it pretty free and loose and met the students half way when they came up with stuff. "You want to buy a flashlight for your equipment? Sure! "You want to tell you cat to launch itself at its face? Sure." *rolls charisma* *rolls cat attack roll* "Now the monster has too much facecat to see. Good job."
Again I can't emphasize enough how much hitting six or so students degraded the experience. The ONLY six-kid session that went well was one in which the party split in three and I could go back and forth between each group, which was cool since one group accidentally sent icicles falling on another group's face and whatnot but otherwise they just couldn't coordinate and it got to be a chore. 3-4s kids worked beautifully.
As for demographics almost all of the students were 5-6 grade (which is a bit older in Korea than in the states) and one group of middle school boys. Those two boys were awesome. They tore through a dungeon with 5 HPs between them. Interestingly enough, as long as the groups were small enough that the louder boys couldn't spotlight hog the girls tended to really get into it and on average display more Old School rat-bastard cunning than the boys. Probably my most cunning groups were the two middle school boys and a group of 2 outspoken girls and 1 shy boy who were a ruthless killing machine with great teamwork and everyone pitching in equally.
I'd love to take my classes through an encounter or two for extra credit - particularly classes that involve remedial English. I've used D&D for metaphors occasionally, but doing so is hardly ever successful. When I was teaching eighteen year olds a few of them would get it, but not enough to make it a worthwhile inclusion to lecture creation. Now that I'm teaching full adults (usually mid-forties), none of them seem to understand it when I bust out a reference to D&D (though one class last term did like my use of The Walking Dead as a way to discuss indeterminacy through metaphor).
Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;721134That's one the most entertaining pieces of D&D-related advice (which also happens to be valid) I've read in a long time. :lol:
Happy you liked it and I think it's really important. If your character sheet has a list of
solutions to problems then you start thinking about WHICH hammer to use to beat down every nail you run into. If your character sheet has a bunch of
tools to use to solve problems then you have to think about HOW to use them and you get a lot better responses.
If your character sheet says "remove trap" then you can just say "I remove a trap" but you can't say "I cow." And that makes all the difference. I've been brainstorming ways to make "cow good, remove trap bad" the core design rubric for an OSR hack. It's basically my old school moment of zen :)
Quote from: Roger the GS;721166Nice to see a school system that's (apparently) not as twitchy about pretend violence as in English-speaking countries.
Yeah here you get kids wumping each other all the time and the teachers just shrug although corporal punishment is getting more and more frowned upon with stuff like kids taking cell phone videos of teachers punching girls in the face and then posting it online getting in the news.
Some D&D violence doesn't really register...
Quote from: Spinachcat;721171Wow. Great post. I definitely want to hear more.
Hmmm, any other good war stories? It all blends together after a while. As I said in the last post girls a freaking awesome at dungeon crawling as long as you don't have a bunch of nosier boys dominating the planning.
Had the kids bring hot water bottles and pour them over ice critters, tell dogs to grab the bad guys' ankles to slow them down while dancing out of range with reach weapons, cunning use of lassos and ten foot poles, throwing oil and fire and spider webs rather than getting within reach of the giant spiders, bribe animals with food, bribe kobolds with gold, all pretty standard dungeon crawling tactics, nothing too surprising except the great speed with which they took to them.
Quote from: Géza Echs;721220I'd love to take my classes through an encounter or two for extra credit - particularly classes that involve remedial English. I've used D&D for metaphors occasionally, but doing so is hardly ever successful. When I was teaching eighteen year olds a few of them would get it, but not enough to make it a worthwhile inclusion to lecture creation. Now that I'm teaching full adults (usually mid-forties), none of them seem to understand it when I bust out a reference to D&D (though one class last term did like my use of The Walking Dead as a way to discuss indeterminacy through metaphor).
Yeah, I haven't ever done it with high school kids and could imagine it failing with middle school kids who are a bit more jaded but pre-teens who love Marvel movies, Maple Story and Greek Myths? It's just as much crack to them as it was for kids in the 80's (again, as long as you keep the group size small). Had them begging me for months and months to play it again before I broke down.
Amazing post! Thanks for sharing. :)
Quote from: finarvyn;721192This seems to be a well-kept secret. I've mostly played OD&D over the past few decades, but recently have taken an interest in some newer editions. I find that in the "good old days" we could explore a decent-sized dungeon in a day, but in newer editions we get through 3-4 encounters tops.
I used the old MB board game "HeroQuest" as an RPG tutorial for some new players a few years back. This game has a pre-set order of initiative and we found this to be really great because it gave the players the chance to set up some strategy. "Okay, the dwarf opens the door, the barbarian enters the room, and the mage is ready with spells."
My only problem with side-based is that the players have to determine who goes in which order. I'd rather base it on dexterity or something like that, and then once the order is fixed let them play from there.
This is why I ditched skill systems in my OD&D. When I tried to install one, I found my players spent the whole time trying to decide what they could attempt and limiting themselves to what was on their list. Without a skill system they would tend to just try things and I could reply with "okay, make a strength check" or something like that. Lists killed creativity.
In fact, I took things a step farther. I give spell lists without details so when a player wants to cast a spell he has a general idea of what it does but can be creative. I'm pretty sure Warp Wood isn't intended to allow a druid to bend a tree to capture a foe, but I let my druid do it becasue he was clever.
Hitting your points:
-Agreed completely about speed. It's amazing that "does it run FAST?" doesn't come up more often when people are talking about game systems. I find that if the game runs twice as fast you can get three times as much stuff done as it's much easier for everyone to stay focused and not quote Monty Python if things are going at blazing speed.
-For initiative, my kids were a bit younger so you often had a bunch of people throwing out ideas at once. Often you had two kids coordinating and another wanting to do something separate. After giving them a bit of time to plan I wanted to get things moving FAST so I generally went in the order of nosiest first so that the noisy one would be quiet and let the others plan. For the quieter more efficient groups they came up with plans together so there was no need for a set order. Loved HeroQuest as a kid. Pretty easy if you don't split the party though.
-Agreed completely about things like that harming creativity. What I'm looking for is to make up lists of things that you can put on a character sheet that don't harm creativity. After all having things like "bag of holding" on your character sheet generally lead to a massive uptick of creativity. This is something I'm really turning over in my brain a lot these days as even ability checks can get annoying if the players think they can succeed on most anything they can tie to that ability if they have a high score and start using it as a blunt instrument.
QuoteI'm not using skills at all really. I am using backgrounds which act as a catch-all for doing things outside of class abilities. Many of them are things anyone can attempt but having the background means the character is just better at them.
That's what I'm doing for my Dwarf Fortress game with adults. I had them roll for a random Dwarf Fortress dwarf profession and that's it.
Quote from: estar;721202I found that if you are relentless in insisting in describing first, in natural terms, and rolling second. That the problem largely goes away even with certain mechanic heavy games like GURPS.
I think that should work well in general but with pure newbie kids who you want to push through the dungeon door within ten minutes getting them to the point where they can understand all that just takes too long, especially when you have to explain that, yes, they can use a sword more than once and that, no, they can't buy a tank.
I think OG once said that thief skills are an OK system but they're the D&D rule that Gygax wrote that's the easiest to misinterpret (or something along those lines), which I find is very much true. They work fine as an adjudication system (used them by the book just black box style so the players didn't know what I was using) and they worked beautifully but it's so easy for players and DMs to get the wrong idea about them or have thinking about them in the wrong way screw up play, so my ideal person D&D would probably have another type of skill system, but they're a hell of a lot better than juggling skill points across a list of skills as long as your arm or what have you (although thinking that over the CoC skills make you juggle skill points across a list as long as you arm and those always worked out better than 3.5ed skills, hmmmm...).
I did this a few years back with some non native English speakers as well, kids of various ages. As most kids in developed or semideveloped countries have a videogame background, the concept of ability scores are not that hard to explain nor are the basic mechanics of the game. We played C&C and the then new 4e, with C&C being better for theatre of the mind style, and 4e better for maps style.
If you do it correctly, the kids might even want to start reading the books (which some did)!
I have heard CoC is better for older students/adults.
Cheers
This flies in the face of my feelings about aspects in FATE. OR the Ladder for that matter.
I think this is how something like FATE should work, but doesn't or at least hasn't with my group as they are stuck in "What button lets me do what" mode from the character sheets of other games and too long playing D20/Feat-based games.
Other games (CoC?) may instil the same kind of play YMMV...
Quote from: Teazia;721479I did this a few years back with some non native English speakers as well, kids of various ages. As most kids in developed or semideveloped countries have a videogame background, the concept of ability scores are not that hard to explain nor are the basic mechanics of the game. We played C&C and the then new 4e, with C&C being better for theatre of the mind style, and 4e better for maps style.
If you do it correctly, the kids might even want to start reading the books (which some did)!
I have heard CoC is better for older students/adults.
Cheers
Yeah the kids who liked it the very most really wanted to dig into the rules and figure out what I was doing. That was a small minority but I guess they're the ones that I'd have tried to turn into DMs if I was still working there.
I think CoC could work well for older people, good thinking, I might try that with my adult classes. I just worry about keeping them focused as "here's a dungeon, go explore" it is a lot simpler. Any ideas for good CoC outlines for adults?
Quote from: BarefootGaijin;721487This flies in the face of my feelings about aspects in FATE. OR the Ladder for that matter.
I think this is how something like FATE should work, but doesn't or at least hasn't with my group as they are stuck in "What button lets me do what" mode from the character sheets of other games and too long playing D20/Feat-based games.
Other games (CoC?) may instil the same kind of play YMMV...
Which "this"? I've been rather verbose in this thread :)
For FATE, I don't think I'd try it with kids. Playing it with adults it seems that about 25% of people just can't wrap their heads around Aspects no matter how much you explain it and even if they play in a FATE campaign for a while they just end up not really engaging with the FATE point economy at all and trying to explain something as abstract as aspects to kids might be a bit hard as I want to be able to run a game without telling them ANY rules as that gets things off to a much faster start when I have limited time.
The only time I'd use FATE with kids would be with a very small group of very engaged kids as the crazy hijinks that make D&D fun tend to dry up if you have only one or two players and aspects are a good way of injecting crazy stuff into a game if it's not happening by itself.
As for the "what button lets me do what" I feel your pain there. My dream RPG would be designed around getting players out of that kind of thinking.
Quote from: Daztur;721229I think that should work well in general but with pure newbie kids who you want to push through the dungeon door within ten minutes getting them to the point where they can understand all that just takes too long, especially when you have to explain that, yes, they can use a sword more than once and that, no, they can't buy a tank.
You are right. With younger gamers many don't even know the tropes.
What I do is instruct them naturally as if I was standing there with them in the dungeon. This in addition to any instructions on mechanics. Seems to work perhaps too well as more than a few back out of dangerous situations in the game.
Quote from: Daztur;721229I think OG once said that thief skills are an OK system but they're the D&D rule that Gygax wrote that's the easiest to misinterpret (or something along those lines), which I find is very much true.
The crux of the problem if that you want to make a character better at things other than fighting or spell casting than other characters, you need some type of ability or skill system. There just no way around it.
This is not an issue in the short run over the course of one or two campaigns using the same setting. But it will come up at some point if you stick with the same setting over multiple campaigns. A player or players will want to run characters that are focused on the non-combat aspect of the setting.
A referee could say that "No that not the kind of game I run." Effectively saying no. And that fine.
As for me I always been a kitchen sink referee and if the players has an honest desire to play a certain character type I will work to make it happen in my setting. If the player being a prima donna, I have worked with that as well.
Quote from: Daztur;721229but it's so easy for players and DMs to get the wrong idea about them or have thinking about them in the wrong way screw up play,
After playing and referee multiple system my opinion that anytime you stop focusing on being a character in a setting that when the problems results. Whether it is trying win an RPG as wargame, or trying to manipulate the "story", it doesn't matter. It is the focus on things other than roleplaying a character that causes problems.
Which is why it not an issue whether I play GURPS, or OD&D because to me they are just tools. Yeah there are tools like to use but the purpose that I them use for remains the same. That is either to roleplay an imagined character or to adjudicate the action of players playing imagined characters around the table.
I am hammering this point a bit because the only thing that I found that is the most universal in creating good games and solving gaming problems. (not interpersonal problems) That is get everybody focused on the roleplaying first and the mechanics second.
Mind you I am not claiming this is a magic bullet. The only claim I make is that less issues will result by focusing on the roleplaying first and the mechanics second. And a lot of your ten points work to keep the roleplaying in forefront which I feel is one reason (among others) that they been successful for you.
Great article, especially the part about "fast play."
And I think skills are one of the worst things to happen to D&D. I assume my players' characters are as competent at general medieval living stuff as anybody living in the time... things like how to use a rope to tie up a horse, etc. And if you want to do something, just say so. If it seems unlikely, I may ask you why your character knows how to do that. On the other hand, if you say "I'm a 4th level fighter, I've been fighting from horseback since I was a boy, I'm going to jump off my horse and onto his," go for it!
Quote from: Daztur;7210905. I'm Never Going Back to Individual Initiative I've fallen in love with side-based initiative. It not only speeds things up but makes the players think of themselves as a team, i.e. "what are we doing to do now guys, it our turn" rather than "it's my turn now, you guys wait while I decide what to do" which makes a massive amount of difference in actual play.
I agree, I'm a big fan of team based initiative. Better still if it is rolled each turn, so that quite often you find on side acting twice in a row. I admit that makes things very unpredictable and the fortunes of the battle can swing wildly.
One proviso, this works best with your other condition: Small Groups Are Best. Team initiative with large groups can make concentrated fire overwhelming.
I am pleased to read this. It reaffirms my faith that kids, and people in general, like a bit of fun in that "spacious realm of choices"-imagination land. Sociable, less structured play is catchy, which is good for RPGs, especially if a lot of the system mastery is off screen.
That and now I know a few more people to call upon for Japan and Korean music imports, mwa ha ha ha!
:D
Outstanding post. I've had a similar experience while running Swords & Wizardry and Wushu for kids. For me, it gave some good insight into how I run games in general.
http://platonicsolid.blogspot.com/search/label/With%20Kids
Quote from: Soylent Green;721612One proviso, this works best with your other condition: Small Groups Are Best. Team initiative with large groups can make concentrated fire overwhelming.
For larger groups using side initiative, I'll often break it out by rough weapon length: Winning side spears go first. Losing side spears go next. Then winner swords, etc.
Very interesting OP.
Quote from: Daztur;721535For FATE, I don't think I'd try it with kids.
Adults only. They don't get FATE.
The "This" relates to doing stuff because the character would, or the situation suggests it rather than the numbers. People coming from places that use numbers to squeeze any and every opportunity out of a game session do this with FATE too. I think that's not the point of aspects, ladders, tags and compels per se. Or at least not that explicitly.
Quote from: Daztur;7210905. I'm Never Going Back to Individual Initiative I've fallen in love with side-based initiative. It not only speeds things up but makes the players think of themselves as a team, i.e. "what are we doing to do now guys, it our turn" rather than "it's my turn now, you guys wait while I decide what to do" which makes a massive amount of difference in actual play.
Who do you do this? How do people determine talking order, and action order?
Quote from: Mistwell;722884Who do you do this? How do people determine talking order, and action order?
What I mostly do with kids is alternate between "you guys go" and "monsters go" and have the kids form a plan together (decided against declaring actions and THEN rolling for initiative with kids, but like doing that with adults). If they work together they just all tell me together, if they're not so organized I just ask them randomly what they're doing one by one, often in the order of who seems to have already decided what they're doing or who is being noisy goes first.
If all of the players go and then all of the monsters go, it really doesn't matter that much which player goes first. It's MUCH more efficient than individual initiative in my experience since everyone gets engaged making a plan together rather than sitting waiting for their turn or if they're not so focused you can avoid having to wait while people decide what to do while having the people who already know what to do go first and the indecisive people go last, which also speeds things up.
This falls apart a bit with big groups of kids (is like herding cats with six kids). Which is why I don't like DMing for big groups. The amount the experience gets worse and the kids' style of dungeoncrawling changed from well oiled murder machine to Leroy Jenkins when I added a few more kids to the group was really shocking to me. Keep the groups small.
Quote from: Mistwell;722884Who do you do this? How do people determine talking order, and action order?
I have done group initiative in games before. It has it's advantages, but some players prefer it the other way. Basically let the players go as a group and they hash out who goes first, second, third, etc. It becomes more of a coordinated effort i find it also seems to speed things up. But it isn't for everyone.
Belated response to
estar:
Yes, introducing things to kids naturalistically like that works well, and you're right a few people try to back out of dangerous situations. What I've done sometimes is bloat up the potential rewards (your weight in gold!) as putting Monty Haul into a one shot doesn't have any real negative repercussions.
As for skill systems, you're right in that one is really needed if you want to focus on playing certain types of characters. I just find that having certain things printed on their character sheet tends to strangle the creativity of newbie kids so what I've done is use the skill system and ability checks but just not tell them how it works. It's a blunt solution but it works, at least in the short term, but I'm working on thinking up something that would work better for me.
"After playing and referee multiple system my opinion that anytime you stop focusing on being a character in a setting that when the problems results."
I agree with this very strongly. That's really the heart of the appeal of Old School RPGs to me. In a lot of other games the world can be twisted in order to serve the needs of the story, or play balance or whatever which makes the world seem like a flimsy sound stage. The single biggest thing I took from playing in Piestro's 1ed game was the attitude of "this is the world, it is what it is and doesn't care about you, make your effort to make your place in it or leave it kicking and screaming" which I've tried to carry over to my own DMing.
I agree that the most important thing is to just keep on focus on making the world primary. For example my good friend told me an episode from his Burning Wheel campaign. In that one the PCs received a letter about the results of a goblin siege of a human city. When a PC read it the contents (did the goblins succeed or not, due to Burning Wheel stakes-setting mechanics) hinged on the player's reading skill and he rolled high at reading so the goblins failed to take the city. He considered it the highlight of the session but it really made me cringe since he was basically saying that the fate of a huge chunk of the world was less important than the ability of a PC to read a letter.
So basically I agree utterly with what you're saying here and have been doing some thinking exactly along the lines you suggest: what sort of ways to play the game does the best job of making the players think in terms of the world first and foremost.
Quote from: Old Geezer;721582Great article, especially the part about "fast play."
And I think skills are one of the worst things to happen to D&D. I assume my players' characters are as competent at general medieval living stuff as anybody living in the time... things like how to use a rope to tie up a horse, etc. And if you want to do something, just say so. If it seems unlikely, I may ask you why your character knows how to do that. On the other hand, if you say "I'm a 4th level fighter, I've been fighting from horseback since I was a boy, I'm going to jump off my horse and onto his," go for it!
I agree with you that I've never seen a skill system for D&D that quite hit the right spot, although thief skills and NWPs do OK if you get the players into the right mental state they can be hit or miss, which is why I didn't tell the kids any of the rules after a while. However, I'm not sure that a system that wouldn't do the things that annoy you about the ones you seen can't exist. The Call of Cthulhu one for example does OK in play...
Quote from: Soylent Green;721612I agree, I'm a big fan of team based initiative. Better still if it is rolled each turn, so that quite often you find on side acting twice in a row. I admit that makes things very unpredictable and the fortunes of the battle can swing wildly.
One proviso, this works best with your other condition: Small Groups Are Best. Team initiative with large groups can make concentrated fire overwhelming.
Yes, adding more unpredictability to combat is always good.
Quote from: Opaopajr;721755I am pleased to read this. It reaffirms my faith that kids, and people in general, like a bit of fun in that "spacious realm of choices"-imagination land. Sociable, less structured play is catchy, which is good for RPGs, especially if a lot of the system mastery is off screen.
That and now I know a few more people to call upon for Japan and Korean music imports, mwa ha ha ha!
:D
If you remember our old discussion from a year ago about thief skills from a year ago: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=25364 your excellent posts helped shape my thinking and make these games a success. Many thanks.
Quote from: Eisenmann;721785Outstanding post. I've had a similar experience while running Swords & Wizardry and Wushu for kids. For me, it gave some good insight into how I run games in general.
http://platonicsolid.blogspot.com/search/label/With%20Kids
For larger groups using side initiative, I'll often break it out by rough weapon length: Winning side spears go first. Losing side spears go next. Then winner swords, etc.
The reach idea sounds good for breaking things down, I think I just am going to go with the solution of "run away screaming from the prospect of DMing a large group." :)
As for your blog posts, I'm not familiar at all with Wushu so hard to commend on that, for the White Box post, it makes me jealous as you are able to do a lot of stuff that I just can't because of time constraints. I want to see kids faces light up when they roll high on strength in character creation and exult in that but I just don't have time with my students. My sons are just barely five and two and a half now and I really look forward to being able to do what you did with your niece and nephew with them. Right now my older son is massively obsessed with DungeonQuest which seems to be old school dungeoneering with everything fun about doing that surgically excised and I'm really looking forward to his English vocabulary getting a bit broader so we can shift over to D&D and see the whole world open up beyond the cramped confines that DungeonQuest provides.
Quote from: BarefootGaijin;722857Adults only. They don't get FATE.
The "This" relates to doing stuff because the character would, or the situation suggests it rather than the numbers. People coming from places that use numbers to squeeze any and every opportunity out of a game session do this with FATE too. I think that's not the point of aspects, ladders, tags and compels per se. Or at least not that explicitly.
Yeah, I think more than any other game FATE works well if you focus on the world and gets utterly ruined if you focus on the mechanics. The best thing about FATE is that all of the little details that are just color in a lot of games actually do stuff so a lot more of the world matters and does thing which can really bring the world into beautiful focus. But if you peer down too closely at how the sausage gets made things can start feeling very samey as every single conflict boils down to exactly the same thing mechanics-wise. I think there's a lot of be said for old school non-unified systems. They may be inelegant but making things that are different in the game world use completely different mechanics can make them feel different and make a big difference psychologically even if, say, critters making a saving throw when you shoot magic at them and you making an attack roll when you shoot arrows at them doesn't make much of a difference when you drill down to the actual probabilities at stake.
Quote from: Old Geezer;721582I think skills are one of the worst things to happen to D&D.
I agree; I think skills are a terrible addition to D&D's class/level approach.
(FWIW, I do enjoy some skill-based RPGs; I think an RPG that's designed around skills can work fine. But D&D isn't designed that way, and I find that it works better without grafted on skill systems.)
:o
Thanks for the compliment!
It sounds like you upped your game and learned a lot from these kids. :)
Just ran another session today, the first in a while, with three boys who were playing for the first time.
They enjoyed the hell out of it and were talking about it excitedly while waiting for the elevator after leaving class.
No especially exciting war stories, they approached it in a pretty kick down the door way but really got involved in the setting. It's really just a joy to have kids get honestly scared by simple things like monsters whispering threats at them in the darkness. What this really makes me think is treating the setting as a real thing is far more important than treating your character as a real person.
The thief was probably the MVP doing all kinds of tricks with the rope I gave him, although he did accidentally kill another PC while trying to shoot a giant spider off his head.
Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;723182I agree; I think skills are a terrible addition to D&D's class/level approach.
(FWIW, I do enjoy some skill-based RPGs; I think an RPG that's designed around skills can work fine. But D&D isn't designed that way, and I find that it works better without grafted on skill systems.)
Here's my current thinking on the issue:
Skill rolls are kind of like attack rolls. They're rules that provide a simple way of resolving something complicated. D&D combat is boring as all hell if all that happens if a back and forth slug fest of I roll to hit/I roll for damage/repeat and dealing with the environment is incredibly boring if it relies on a bunch of skill rolls (roll to find trap/roll to disarm trap/repeat/zzzzz).
What makes old school D&D combat fun (aside from the speed that keeps it from bogging down) is that you can't rely on your attack roll to make you win fights. If you just charge in and roll attack rolls against everything you meet you'll DIE and the game does a good job of communicating that to you ("oh crap, I only have two hit points left! we need to come up with a plan here..."). Basically combat rolls give you an even playing field against the monsters more or less, but an even playing field will get your character killed so you have to cheat at combat, and the cheating is the real fun part.
Black boxing it accomplishes the same thing: players can't rely on their skill rolls to save them so they have to cheat to win. But I don't think that's the only way to get to the same goal, maybe something like this:
-Don't roll for basic stuff, just hard stuff.
-Have a catch-all skill system a bit like Blood and Treasure or C&C but skew the default difficulties up high. That way players will think that they can't rely on their skill rolls to save them, just like smart players don't rely on their attack rolls to save them in combat.
-Seed the world with stuff that helps them cheat their way past obstacles.
Maybe something along these lines:
DM: There's an orc.
Player: OK, I sneak past him.
DM: Roll your Dex Save.
Player: Crap, I need to roll a 15 or higher to pass my Dex Save, screw that, now if I set a fire over there to distract the orcs so they're not watching, I should be able to sneak right through...
Same sort of logic as:
DM: There's two orcs.
Player: OK, I attack them...
DM: OK, roll to attack.
Player: Wait a second, crap, they each have the same number of hit dice as me and do the same damage and there's two of them, screw that. Now if I set them both on fire first, I should be able to kill them...
In my game with adults I've been using skill checks a lot and it works OK, but then you get players getting confident about their 15 Dex and basically expecting to beat obstacles down by smacking them with their high Dex and things like that. I can get them straightened out by asking "how?" and whatnot, but I think I can do better and it's more difficult to get adults to go along with black box DMing than is the case with kids.
Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;723182I agree; I think skills are a terrible addition to D&D's class/level approach.
(FWIW, I do enjoy some skill-based RPGs; I think an RPG that's designed around skills can work fine. But D&D isn't designed that way, and I find that it works better without grafted on skill systems.)
You know, I used to think this was the most batshit insane of OSR/grognard dogmas, but after ditching them in first Drums of War (due to time constraints) and then Hulks and Horrors, I've fallen in love with skill-less systems.
I love that in H&H, everyone is assumed to at least be competent, so everyone can always TRY. It actually leads to MORE teamwork IME, because group role becomes more flexible for players. No one's sitting around waiting for their turn to do 'their class thing'. They're just doing it.
Niche protection is fucking overrated and kinda awful in real social terms.
Quote from: Daztur;723394Here's my current thinking on the issue:
Skill rolls are kind of like attack rolls. They're rules that provide a simple way of resolving something complicated. D&D combat is boring as all hell if all that happens if a back and forth slug fest of I roll to hit/I roll for damage/repeat and dealing with the environment is incredibly boring if it relies on a bunch of skill rolls (roll to find trap/roll to disarm trap/repeat/zzzzz).
What makes old school D&D combat fun (aside from the speed that keeps it from bogging down) is that you can't rely on your attack roll to make you win fights. If you just charge in and roll attack rolls against everything you meet you'll DIE and the game does a good job of communicating that to you ("oh crap, I only have two hit points left! we need to come up with a plan here..."). Basically combat rolls give you an even playing field against the monsters more or less, but an even playing field will get your character killed so you have to cheat at combat, and the cheating is the real fun part.
Black boxing it accomplishes the same thing: players can't rely on their skill rolls to save them so they have to cheat to win. But I don't think that's the only way to get to the same goal, maybe something like this:
-Don't roll for basic stuff, just hard stuff.
-Have a catch-all skill system a bit like Blood and Treasure or C&C but skew the default difficulties up high. That way players will think that they can't rely on their skill rolls to save them, just like smart players don't rely on their attack rolls to save them in combat.
-Seed the world with stuff that helps them cheat their way past obstacles.
Maybe something along these lines:
DM: There's an orc.
Player: OK, I sneak past him.
DM: Roll your Dex Save.
Player: Crap, I need to roll a 15 or higher to pass my Dex Save, screw that, now if I set a fire over there to distract the orcs so they're not watching, I should be able to sneak right through...
Same sort of logic as:
DM: There's two orcs.
Player: OK, I attack them...
DM: OK, roll to attack.
Player: Wait a second, crap, they each have the same number of hit dice as me and do the same damage and there's two of them, screw that. Now if I set them both on fire first, I should be able to kill them...
In my game with adults I've been using skill checks a lot and it works OK, but then you get players getting confident about their 15 Dex and basically expecting to beat obstacles down by smacking them with their high Dex and things like that. I can get them straightened out by asking "how?" and whatnot, but I think I can do better and it's more difficult to get adults to go along with black box DMing than is the case with kids.
Hear hear!!
One of the most difficult things to pull off sometimes is to cattle prod adult players into using thier imaginations to problem solve in-game. What comes so easily to children is lost to adults who don't remember to exercise it.
Especially adults who have grown accustomed to everything in the game being overcome by rules constructs. Weaning indoctrinated WOTC victims off of target DC fixation can be hard work.
Rolling to-hit should be something that happens when plans fail.
Quote from: Exploderwizard;723419Hear hear!!
One of the most difficult things to pull off sometimes is to cattle prod adult players into using thier imaginations to problem solve in-game. What comes so easily to children is lost to adults who don't remember to exercise it.
Especially adults who have grown accustomed to everything in the game being overcome by rules constructs. Weaning indoctrinated WOTC victims off of target DC fixation can be hard work.
Rolling to-hit should be something that happens when plans fail.
Well, attack rolls are often an important part of a plan, usually the "and then we slaughter them like sheep!" part that happens because fair fights are for suckers. But yeah, strongly agree with the basic idea.
OK, let me try to expand my skills idea with the same basis as what Exploderwizard says about attack rolls: skills are what you roll when your plan goes wrong. Also I think that the other thing a skill system should do is give the players a clear idea of what their characters are capable of. The way 3.5ed edition skills always worked out for me in play was assign skill points, apply ability modifier, look up synergies, think about any situational modifiers, apply bonuses from magic items and temporary buffs and, oh yeah, racial modifiers and size-based modifiers and what you ate for breakfast last Tuesday modifiers and then roll again a DC that the DM just pulled out of his ass. All of the complication doesn't serve much purpose unless you have a clear idea what you're rolling against so it's a lot faster just to cut out the middleman and skip straight to the DM pulling something out of his ass. That's why I like stuff like open door rolls in 1ed, you know what your chances are and if you know what your character can do it's easier to make cunning plans based on that.
So let's try to cook up something that's transparent and encourages creative engagement with the world
To start off with the DM assumes that the characters aren't idiots and doesn't make them roll except for truly hard stuff.
Then there's a saving throw that corresponds to each ability score (a bit like the C&C SIEGE system but implemented differently) and which covers everything from "I jump out of the way" to "I sneak past the orc." These saving throws start out intimidatingly high so that smart players try to some up with cunning plans instead of relying on them, just like the number you need to hit with an attack roll starts out pretty high in TSR-D&D so that smart players come up with cunning plans instead of relying on them.
Then steal 5ed's disadvantage/advantage mechanics for situational stuff. Nice and simple, despite 5ed overusing them.
Then give players Proficiencies with the thief class getting big piles of them instead of traditional thief skills. Each would do one very specific thing that there's clear simple rules for. The idea is that they're so specific that they're more tools for players to use to come up with cunning plans rather than things that let you just roll and skip all the fun stuff. Some potential Proficiencies:
-Balance: never lose your balance.
-Light step: be able to walk across snow, mud, etc. like Legolas.
-Smell gold: you have a nose for gold and can smell any within thirty feet of you.
-Clockmaker: you're really good at fiddling with mechanics and can disarm mechanical traps easily, IF you can figure out how to get your hands on the mechanism without setting off the trap first.
-Lots and lots of the more specific 2ed NWP standbys like ventriloquism, lip reading, contortionism, etc.
-Maybe even a few that help out in social situations like Poker Face, but nothing that you can use to beat social situations into submission like a high Diplomacy modifier like in 3ed.
The idea is that most of these would give you an automatic benefit that you can count on but which is so specific that it's going to be an element of a plan rather than something that lets you not need to come up with a plan because you have skills. In cases in which a roll is needed the rules would be very clear about what roll you need to hit to do what (like a lot of Proficiencies in ACKS, that game did a good job of nailing them down for the most part).
The idea is that a high level thief isn't going to have a "stealth" skill but a bunch of little very very specific Proficiencies that he can use when coming up with cunning plans to sneak past stuff. Things like contortionism, ventriloquism, etc. etc. etc.
Sounds workable?