vaniver:

(This is a gaming post, not a politics / economics post.)

So the last D&D game that I ran hit a scheduling conflict, then another, and then stalled to a halt. And in the meantime I started up a Pandemic Legacy game (which goes much faster when you play 3 games per session and one session per week :P ), backed a game that’s reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon (The Iron Oath, 39 hours left in their KickStarter at time of writing), and a friend got into Massive Chalice.

All of which have me thinking about the difference between RPG management / strategy games and tactics games. For example, Massive Chalice has the XCOM flavor where there’s a strategic layer and a tactical layer, which reinforce each other; Darkest Dungeon is similar while the strategic layer feels more lightweight. And in Pandemic Legacy, the strategic layer is basically the durable changes to the board/character/rules.

I notice that when I’m playing D&D, I miss that, and so I often try to bolt something like that on. When DMing, rather than having a specific antagonist and a specific plot (”okay, this particular villain running an evil organization is trying to accomplish this specific goal that the party will now have to thwart”) I’d rather make a world with a bunch of competing organizations and let the party go nuts. (This sometimes has the downside of them picking a different faction than I had hoped–no, worship the Apollo stand-in, not the Thor stand-in!–but that seems better from a group satisfaction point of view.) And this is also typically the sort of thing that I want as a player–put me in charge of a company that’s trying to get rich and powerful and has a team of professional murderers to solve problems for it, rather than have me chase down some nut who’s out to destroy the world.

But, of course, D&D by default isn’t set up for that sort of thing. (I’m remembering the time when we had a mission to clear a magical disturbance out of a section of forest so it could be logged, and I wanted to buy up the land for cheap first, since we had several thousand gold sloshing around; the DM said “basically, sure you can do that, but you’re not going to get any richer than the wealth-by-level guidelines.” Which is a sensible position–the point of the wealth system in D&D is to give players a sense of reward and points with which to customize their abilities, and having the players turn into merchants / focus on financial schemes and arbitrage rather than dungeon delving is losing the plot / stressing the system seriously. (I mean, imagine if your maxed-Persuasion character decided to start a Ponzi scheme in a world both 1) not particularly financially literate, and thus not particularly resistant to that sort of thing and 2) where those sorts of exponential returns could in fact be delivered by an adventuring party robbing dragons or similar things.)

Another problem that often happens is that people like having lots of character designs. They’ll make a character, play with it for a few sessions, and then think of something else cool they’d like to be. Or perhaps the character will get tactically stale–sure, being an archer is fun, but do you really want to spend twenty sessions as an archer? “Oh, now I get to attack twice in a round!” This leads to a conflict between character arcs and attachment and novelty.

Somewhat connected, trying to get a group of adults to all be available at the same time is remarkably difficult. (Gone are the days when my friends all went to the same school and had vacations at the same time and we could just walk home together and play D&D on Fridays.) When the sessions are highly linked, or the party is traveling together, this leads to bizarre situations where characters are ghosted, absent, ill, or whatever. Some games solve this by being bizarre themselves (in RIFTS, for example, you could just say that a rift swallows a character for that session). But then does the character get experience? A cut of the treasure? If someone being run by the party dies, what happens, especially if it’s a permadeath game?

But if instead of a single party of four people, the players are running a guild of, say, a dozen people that only sends ~4 out on any particular mission, then this works out fine. (Basically any game with a roster works this way.) The number of people you can send depends on the number of people who show up that week (but, if people are comfortable running multiple characters, doesn’t have to be a hard cap). Also include assignments for the people not on the mission, and then when Bob is absent, Bob’s wizard is busy doing something off-screen, like studying or making potions or whatever.

So I expect the next game I run to embrace that aspect from the start. But there’s still a fairly deep uncertainty about what to try to build off of–if there isn’t anything built for this yet, there isn’t going to be anything balanced for this yet / I can’t rely on other people’s design work instead of my own.

The ramping of D&D feels mostly wrong (roughly linear power scaling means sending lvl5 chars on missions is hugely different from sending lvl2 chars on missions, whereas swapping a different character into a Pandemic Legacy game is only slightly different) and the characters seem to have way too much specialization for them to be easily handed off. In Pandemic Legacy, you only need to learn a new special ability to play a different character; in Darkest Dungeon, you only need to understand four abilities to play a different character, and a roughly similar thing is true for Massive Chalice.

Those suggest something like just using Darkest Dungeon’s rules, or a small team minis game like Warmachine or Mobile Frame Zero. (Other contenders: Massive Chalice, XCOM, Fallout Tactics, Renowned Explorers, The Curious Expedition.) The basic things you want from a character are (1) biographical / psychological details, (2) skill / out of combat abilities, and (3) in combat abilities, and ideally all of them together fit on an index card (but an index card for each third might be fine, and it’s also alright if it refers to off-card stuff that the players can be reasonably expected to memorize).

(For example, in Darkest Dungeon, those things are: (1) name/color, (2) traits, campfire abilities, inventory, and trap finding (3) traits, abilities, equipment, hp, and stress. Basically everything fits in class 3, and a similar thing will be true for XCOM and Massive Chalice and so on. For D&D, each of them is considerably deeper.)

Another thing that’s nice about putting it in a reference class with, say, Legacy games is that you can ‘unlock’ new mechanics as you go along or modify existing ones with less of an objection. “Alright, guys, now all characters have ‘stress’ to track along with hit points.” or “This particular spell works differently now.” It makes using a work-in-progress system much more palatable.

I love this. As I’ve been playing Traveller recently, I’ll add that Traveller would make a very good “Guild” game (the “Guild” is a small corporation that has *one* spaceship plus a stationary headquarters, so every session, a crew for that *one* spaceship is assembled and sent out. The fact that there’s only one ship justifies the fact that only a few people go out at a time.