Team Work makes the Game Work (?)

 

or Why I love the Fantasy Trip.

TL;DR. I’ve figured out that one of the reasons I run games is that I like to see groups of players working together to solve problems. And when a group is clicking, they will work at multiple levels, including the challenge in front of them and the story arc. And the story emerges from the individual character journeys.

Doom comes to the Monday Night game. Two weeks ago, I completely lost interest in my Monday night game. I’ve been running it for several months. I put a lot of effort into developing a setting that interested me—I like sandbox games where the players are free to develop the adventure according to their character’s interests and goals. I crafted a world that contained two classic OSR adventures, B2 Keep on the Borderland and B5 Horror on the Hill. I merged them with some really cool material from Raging Swan, and I ported everything to my favorite mechanics, D100 (I went with Mongoose Legend.) Then I added on the Sinister Secret of Saltmarch. The group did the haunted house, and we started the Caves of Chaos.

Along the way I realized I wasn’t enjoying running the game. Players were struggling with what I thought was a simple setting. No one wanted to play a character that was motivated for simple money, but no one could advance because they were always poor. We were just struggling.

And very few players had anything they wanted their characters to do.

And the fights were just boring.

The Problem. Now back in the day I could run games that were exciting, and everyone was on board with the action. A few players would drive the direction of the game and others would follow along because game play was always fun.

Tabletop roleplaying is constrained story telling. We’re not just sitting around building a group story. There are constraints imposed by the game system. In movie making there is something called cinematography. It has to do with what and how the visual images are presented on the screen. We might do a slow pan in on a pistol sitting on a desk. We draw the viewer’s attention to the pistol. Why? It must be important. At some point that pistol must play a role in the unfolding story.

In the same way, game mechanics—the physical rules of the game—act as cinematography for our unfolding story. They are a mathematical model that constrains what characters can do. I have 5 hit points. That’s not many. Will that be important to our story? The mechanics draw our attention to certain elements of the story and hide others.

If I used to be able to run games that interested me, but now I can’t, there are only a few places that things could have changed, the players, the GM, or the mechanics.

My players are as fine a group of players as I’ve ever had. So, they are not my problem.

I could have just lost whatever talent I had for GMing. It is possible. But I did put effort into this game, so I opted to focus on mechanics.  On where we focus the player’s attention. The first thing I did was look at reward structure for play. (But to be honest, at the end of a session, I was always so rushed that I didn’t do this well.)

Then I looked internally. I thought about what used to make my combats interesting and I realized that what had changed was the nature of fighting. The games that I play these days are built around the idea of heroic, or really super heroic, characters. Combat runs like a superhero movie. We focus on one character while they do a lot of things. Then we focus on the next character while they do their bit. Etc. But when your character is not in focus, everything is kind of boring.

So, I answered that with reintroducing interleaved combat. In this model of combat, everything is happening at the same time. No one gets the focus. Every character gets an action on each phase. What actions you can pick depend on the nature of your character, but everyone is potentially taking action at all times.

This worked great. It took a few weeks for the players to get the hang of it, but everyone agreed that combat was more fun. And I could clearly see that players were more engaged with the action.

So why did my interest suddenly die?

Realization. The answer was obvious. Once I recovered interesting combat, I realized that the game I had constructed focused on the wrong thing. The focus was on a series of combats—and we could pretty much map out what they would be. And at the end there will be a big, bad fight and the player characters will win or fail based on their preparation, luck, and die rolls.

And to me this was completely boring. It was missing a critical element, player character interactions...

Teamwork. I realized that once I had fixed the issue I was having with combat, suddenly I wanted characters that worked as a team. And I knew exactly how to do that. Basically, since I’ve been thinking about old school, Left-coast gaming so much recently (see for example here and here and here), suddenly I wanted that old-style of play were not only were characters constantly engaged with the action on the table, but all the characters had to act as a team in order to win. Characters have roles in the team, and the players need to build their characters to fit their role.

The Answer was in the labyrinth. Literally. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than play that old, Steve Jackson classic, The Fantasy Trip. In this game there are no random elements in character creation. You make the character you are going to play. But there are powerful constraints on what the characters can do. You can build a character to fit one role, front line fighter, ranged fighter, polearm-wielding second-rank fighter, support thief, sage, illusion-based wizard, and the like. If you are thoughtful, the character will be pretty good at their role, and if you really work at it, they can double in a second role.

But player characters are easy to make, and players are expected to keep a pool of characters around. For a given evening of play, they will pick the characters that they want to bring. They might want to build this fighter up, and they might feel that they need a scholar to tackle a specific problem, so for this game the player picks those two characters.

And in this game, all the players need to make characters that work together to accomplish the party’s goal. Failure to make a useful character is no one’s fault but yours. Experimenting is to be encouraged, but you made your character. If they are not working, make a new one.

For my campaign, I started with something simple. Everyone is on the island capital of the old empire, full of adventure. The empire was destroyed by powerful magic and outsiders are finally getting a chance to return. There is limited government and lots of opportunities to explore and gain wealth and power.

For each game session, the players get to pick one of three or so goals. There will be a known XP reward for each goal. Over time, I hope the players will propose their own goals. But to start with, the players can explore the edge of the mushroom forest for 100 XP, find a path to that castle over there for 125 XP, or explore what is behind that strange door for 50 XP + treasure.

Stories Emerge from the Actions of the Teams. Just as in other OSR games, the story will emerge from the series of actions that the group undertakes. It will not be something that I, as the GM, predetermined. Instead, certain players will like certain characters. They will pick adventures that those characters are good at. Overtime, the list of options for a given sessions adventures will come to be focused on what characters the players like to play, and a story will emerge.

And as the GM I will be able to watch this happen.

And that is what I like about running games. Not the banter between super powered characters, but rather the way a group of my friends drive the creation of a story, based on what elements of the setting they prefer to engage with the most.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this post, and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.