The most important ingredient…
The most important ingredient in any campaign is a skilled DM who has the time and the energy to carefully design and create his world, and the talent to communicate his setting effectively. The next most important ingredients are willing players who share common goals with the DM. Players interested in hack-and-slash adventures should not be matched a DM interested in careful plot structuring and detailed mystery solving.
Douglas Niles, The Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons,1986
Okay, hold your horses. Why didn’t I know about that book before? I mean, I bought the Wilderness Survival Guide (X-mas gift I wrapped for myself when I was 15-16) when it came out. I disliked it so much that I threw it away and never used it, disgusted that I would ask my players to roll percentiles EACH DAY for food and shelter.
After discarding the book, I automatically assumed that the DSG would be as bad and I promptly started looking at this new generic RPG by Steve Jackson Games.
This one paragraph from the DSG and the following 2 pages about player types (Adventurers, Problem-Solvers, Roleplayers) would have opened my eyes on many aspects of DMing I had no idea even existed! I think Robin Laws probably developed upon those in his seminal work “Robin Laws of Good Game Mastering“. Or Robin and Niles had a few beers together back then.
That assessment, which I discovered in the last 5 years is now one of my guiding principle as a DM. Yet, 25 years later, I know that many GMs still scoff at the importance that they need to actually understand and deliver what players actually seek in a RPG. The same goes for players.
What do you think about that? Do you agree and if so to what extent? If not, what constitute your references as being ‘most important” in a RPG game/campaign?
Do you feel that the door that Niles opened in that book was explored further during 2e’s era? I wasn’t there… I never actually read the 2e DMG, but I know that the game took a heavy Storytelling turn to keep it’s market share with White Wolf games. Did that shut the door to the adventurer and puzzle-solver players?
Let me know in the comments!
On Character Death
Now and then a player will die (sic) through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precautions, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time.
Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying (again, sic!), is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye, or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the player to lose a cared-for player character when they have played well.
When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall when they may…
Gary Gygax, Dungeon Masters Guide (p. 110), Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1979
Did I ever tell you that I learned reading English with Gygaxian prose? I mean I was reading Grade 8 “English as a second language” crap back then, but in the school bus on the way home, I was reading the DMG and trying to decipher what a bell curve was, or why it wasn’t okay to let your buddies bully you in playing a dragon character.
Oh man Gary, we so miss you! I really wish I could have met you earlier in our lives. I would have loved to kid you gently about killing players instead of PCs. I would also have paid you a few coffees or beer to argue that saying that “you can kill PCs because they kill your monsters” is the lamest argument I have ever heard. You’d probably have given me a ‘you kids think you know everything” look and sipped your drink quietly.
This densely written paragraph made me smile. It’s cool to see that even early in the game’s history, Gary expounded that the FUN part of the game had to come ahead of Lady Chance’s wiles.
I can imagine Gary look over his game screen (half-glasses and all) when one of his players missed a saving throw against poison while having taken all the steps to avoid it. As the player’s face falls and the rest of the party prepares for the ceremonial separation of loot, Uncle Gygax likely laughed in a low self-effacing way and went something like.
“Tell you what son, how about that poison coursed through the whole of your leg before that antitoxin you harped me about for hours takes effect. So instead of dying, you now have a shriveled, gangrened limb, all eaten up by the poison and chronic infection (insert cute made-on-the-spot Gygaxian subsystem to simulate diseased legs) and maybe, if you bug me about anti-poisons again, you may have to cut it off real fast or die. Be more careful where you step next time, you hear?”
Player (relieved to keep his level 4/3 Half-Orc Fighter/Cleric): Right, right! Thanks chief!
I think Gary was way less of a hard-ass than I initially imagined. I honestly think that he wrote Tombs of Horrors as a “Fine! I’ll make you a damn killer dungeon for the convention so you’ll all leave me alone about it from now on!”
The key difference of his game (AD&D) and hence, his style vs later versions, is that he kept the burden of the rules on his side of the screen. I think that as long as you didn’t bore him, he was really fair. Sadly, in the pre-internet era, the “Be fair first, a jackass second” school didn’t always take.
And Gary’s writing style was not the easiest to read. Many new DMs, probably never got to page 110.
So what do you think about Gary’s thoughts on PC death? I happen to be 100% okay with it… although I would rather inflict severe story penalties/constraints instead of physical… after all, failure needs to be fun, no?
Your turn!
2e never closed the doors to adventurers and puzzle solvers. The purpose of dnd was always to slay enemies, solve mysteries, and collect their loot. It was up to the DM to create exciting moments for each of their players. Entire adventures would sometimes be dedicated to figuring out a giant mansion puzzle like The White Boar of Kilfay, or a pure adventure like The Mud Sorcerers Tomb – or all of Darksun. The demographic has changed though, from reading books to playing Bayonetta, and storytelling changes with them I think. There’s still a place for storytelling, but it is up to the dm (and always has been).
Players should die. That’s what creates an emotional connection to the story. This is not a video game where you just load when you die, your choices change the outcome of the world, typically. The DM should protect the players when they are not in danger – there’s no reason to die from a thrown rock or an angry mother. But when the players willingly go to a place that has killed maybe a dozen similarly minded people before, they should face consequences. They’re adventurers. Without death they can never truly be in danger.
This would have been clearer if you’d said your Gygax quote was from page 110. I clicked on the “never made it to page 110” link thinking “Oh, what’s on page 110, this must be an image of page 110?” Only after some thought did I realize you meant to say “some people never got to the above quote about not killing players who play well.”
On the DSG and player types:
I completely agree with you, Phil. As a DM, I always try to anticipate what my players want in our games, as I think it contributes to better entertainment for everyone involved. I think most DMs have an idea of their player’s preferences, even if they don’t describe them as “method actors” or “power gamers.” We know which players are more interested in combat than exploration, or those who prefer roleplaying over everything else.
A few years ago, Sean K. Reynolds published a survey made by WotC in 1999 about player types. That was the first time I read something about this topic, before Robin D. Laws’s work, and I found it quite interesting:
http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html
On character death:
I agree with Gary up to a point. Some players may not see their actions as stupid, and thus may believe the DM is unfair by “saving” someone else. Were I to “save” a careful player who has had a case of really bad luck, I’d be careful not to show my hand 🙂
Keep up the great posts!
Great post, as ever.
I remember reading those paragraphs back in the day, and chuckling evilly at the idea of a player losing a limb too. The mental image of me pulling a cleaver from under the table uttering the words “well, the Rules as Written say…….” is a compelling one, even now. Ahem.
The thing is that the Dungeon Masters Guides have always existed as these secret repositories where the Role-Playing Magick is held (less so in the case of the 3e era, I’d say – DMG2 rectified that though). These are the tomes which contain Rule Zero (“Fun above aught else!”) and truly showed us what role-playing is all about. They talked about personalities and characterization as if it’s something that only the Dungeon Master could do, or something to be passed on to players through showing and doing, not telling. The Dungeon Master was the Story-Weaver, the Plotline Conjourer and the Wielder of Tales. Shared narrative? That’s for wusses. At least until the Players have learned the rules of the game.
It’s not surprising we GMs have such an air of arrogance about us 😀
Seriously though, that’s a bubble which White Wolf did a great job of bursting. Even so, the current 4e DMG contained much more great role-playing goodness than it’s Players Handbook counterpart. It should be mandated that every player read it at least once. They’ll learn much more about the game if they do.
.-= greywulf´s last blog ..Some Tribes chose a different path =-.
2e certainly continued the trend towards identifying types of gamers and games. There was some discussion about it in the 2e DMG (though, for the record, I found the 2e DMG almost thoroughly useless). There was quite a bit more discussion about it in various Dragon articles at the time. None of it was nearly as mature or structured as either Robin Laws’ material or Ron Edwards’ GNS theory. But, it was clear that people were starting to really think about the fact that “gaming” isn’t a single homogeneous hobby. Different gamers come to the table with different expectations and desires, and end up walking away with different experiences. And, most importantly, that’s okay.
I do wish I’d seen that bit by Gygax much earlier in my DMing career. However, as I pretty much never played 1e (going straight from BECMI to 2e), I didn’t have much cause to read that DMG. It’s not so much the bit on “don’t let the dice ruin your fun” that would have been eye-opening. Rather, it’s the concept that you could choose to maim the characters instead of killing them. The game avoids the consequence-free hack-fest that happens too often when DMs become afraid to kill characters. But, it also doesn’t cut stories short and frustrate players who feel like they’ve wasted the time investment in the character.
Hey everyone. It’s always cool to get up in the morning and see interesting and insightful comments in the inbox!
@Thomson: re: 2e. I won’t doubt you. Although I can attest that among the later 2e product, especially in the Planescape Campaign Guide (which I read last year), the storytelling type of play is encouraged and adventuring (at least the explore and collect treasures part) is actually described as a “less than optimal way of playing the game”… I won’t say that the apparent pretension didn’t offend me. 🙂
That being said, I’m glad to see that the philosophy that was so clearly stated in the DSG flourished in 2e.
Re character death. Ever since I started playing games where creating a good, interesting character (crunch and fluff combined) took more than one hour, I stopped believing that “players characters should die”… but recently, I’ve (re) discovered a more accurate definition of my belief on the subject:
“Player characters should fail… and, when it’s right for the game we play, failure can lead to death”
@Noumenon: I’ll clarify this after I comment here. Thanks.
@Blackwhisper: Oh yeah, I recall I was a regular reader of SKR’s website back then. That study was great and it was cool that Sean shared it with the web.
Re: death. Tempers will always flare at the table when a contentious call is made and I strongly believe that the DM should ‘NEVER’ say ‘well if you had done X instead and still died, I’d have been more lenient, but since you pulled a dumbass on us all, the character stays dead”
As Gary says, in the long run, apply the ‘you’re dead rule’. In 4e, death is harder to achieve unless your teammates actively want you to die (or let you melt at the bottom of a pit of acid)
However… I’d encourage DMs stuck with a PC dying ‘unfairly’ to stop for a second and maybe even openly muse about how we could make this more interesting than just a stupid death? He/she’d be surprised at the ‘severe consequences to avoid death’ that the group could come up with.
@greywulf: Ah my friend, you are like clockwork on these posts. Thanks for being such a great and consistent commenter.
Yes, the mid to late nineties show a clear divide where the rules were removed from the sole hands of the DM and given to the players so the DM could concentrate on other things like creating and running the actual game… with the assumption that the gaming group would establish common sense boundaries to prevent wholesale abuse… to various degrees of success.
I think it was a great move. As long as the DM kept a veto on what was approved as rules and options in the game… it freed my mind immensely to trust my friends to help me figure out how the game worked when necessary. The one thing that made it harder is that when you wanted to wing/ignore a rule to speed things up, you could see the game crash to a halt by players requesting to apply the rule as written (as it usually gave them an edge).
We resolved this in our own ways… others never could.
Now that 4e is based on templated exception-based rules and a lot easier to adjudicate than 3e, I’m much much happier.
@Lugh: One of the reason I pulled out this particular Gary quote (there are so many to choose from) is because I think it’s one of the earliest “make failure interesting” references I’ve seen. From this you can see how things would eventually develop in what Luke Crane did in Burning Wheel and later Mouseguard.
The roots of D&D are in miniatures wargaming. I have a friend that played armor miniatures on a sand table in Gary Gygax’s house before D&D was published.. So while it might not be fair to call GG a “hardass” DM, I think the roots were such that people weren’t so attached to their characters. When you do miniatures wargaming, your figures die all the time!!!
And there were those DMs who saw D&D as a sort of wargame, DM versus players. To them, that was the point of the game.
.-= Toldain´s last blog ..Another Sort of Wish Fulfillment =-.
@Toldain: Do note that I was careful to say that ‘I thought he was” because I started judging him through his work way before I had access to stories of his household games (which I do now with some of his children and old players). At the time, I had Tomb of Horrors, the lethality of Saving throws, and other elements that I could decipher with a French-Canadian teenager’s mind.
I quit AD&D when I was in my late teens and returned to 3e… only then did I start seeing Gary in a different light. A light I enjoy very much.
Thanks for the insight into the sand table game though. That must have been fun.
.-= ChattyDM´s last blog ..March Fo(u)rth for GM’s Day Sale 2010 =-.
Quote 1: I don’t remember ever seeing anything like this in my time playing and DMing 2ed. The first time I got a good look at it was in Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering. I subsequently heard a lot more about it on various podcasts I listen to. But in 2ed, no. Even the early 3rd ed. books didn’t have anything like this.
Quote 2: Character death is always a hot topic. One thing I’ve seen mentioned on Grognardia and a few other blogs is that OD&D makes character death much easier to handle by: 1) reducing the amount of time required for character creation and 2) encouraging people to have henchmen and followers. Thus, if your character died, you just picked up play as a henchman and went from there. Or, you rolled up a new character and you were back at the table within 5 minutes. AD&D and later editions had lengthy character creation processes and if you invest a few hours in creating your character, it really sucks to see all that work you’ve done go down the drain. Hence, the interest in avoiding “unfair” deaths.
.-= pworthen´s last blog ..Guns, Germs & Steel =-.
Wow, I can recall pouring over these books in Study Hall… Memories… Oh The Memories….
>> insert cute made-on-the-spot Gygaxian subsystem to simulate diseased legs
I think that’s the most useful thing that I learned from the early D&D and AD&D books, how to think on my feet quickly and how to improvise without players realizing that I had no idea what I was doing.
.-= Carson F. Ball´s last blog ..Dungeons and Dragons Online Review =-.
I’m only going to respond to the second quote. Both are great and worthwhile, but the second quote actually touches on some of the biggest questions and issues with game and rule design.
The feeling of achievement is in direct relation to the difficulty of the task. I totally agree that it is important to try to bend stuff when the pc’s are going to die when they have played realy well.
But on the other hand, I need to speak to what I think Gary’s about (and by extension, what everyone’s game then was about) . Gary Played with adults, wrote his rules for adults, and his original designs were based on adult gamers.
Later, as rules were written for different demographics and aimed at various groups, this was part of the change in the rules.
But lethality is a huge part of motivation…and demotivation.
.-= LordVreeg´s last blog ..edited Who is Guildschool =-.
Hey ChattyDM, thanks for dredging up these quotes. I have only recently seen some of these quotes floating about and I am surprised to discover how much of my own attitudes towards story, giving the player what they want, fudging dice rolls, and death were all covered in the 2nd edition rules. It makes me think that the DMG was hugely influential on some of the basic principles of modern DMing that subsequently led to the diversification of the hobby.
I think it’s really important to give the players what they want in a game, and I usually use the first few sessions of a new group working out exactly what style of play suits them. If they aren’t enjoying something then you need to change. I’ve often played with inexperienced players (there aren’t many gamers in Oz) and often this means you need to railroad them, at first at least, for example.
Regarding character death: I’m not a behaviouralist and i don’t think adults need to be “shown the consequences” of their actions to learn not to do them. A simple bit of advice usually puts them on the right path. I find it amusing that a lot of players say they play the game to escape real world responsibilities bu then want to import one of the real world’s most depressing facts – rash actions have bad consequences. That’s not heroic! I try to keep death a reasonably rare event, and I don’t believe that regular death discourages hack-and-slash. If anything, I think the opposite occurs – the more “disposable” your PCs, the more reckless you’ll behave. A player will go to great lengths to protect a cherished PC from death. So I think careful use of death, so that it becomes an existential threat rather than a regular event, tends to be better. But I played in Rolemaster, where the non-death consequences of mistakes are obvious and crippling.
Also I went through a similar development process to you – dropped D&D after 2nd edition and moved on to Rolemaster, then came back to D&D at 3rd ed (but haven’t gone on to 4th yet). Interesting…
Great Post!
.-= faustusnotes´s last blog ..Current reading: Tokyo Real =-.
Even beyond that little snippet the DSG is a treasure trove of ideas, if not mechanics for dungeon adventures.
I’m amazed that I missed the goodness of that book for more than 20 years. I’m so happy I bought it for 7,50$ in the used bin of a game store last year. I just never really got to reading it yet 🙂
I am a proud “owner” (barrowed from friend at school, which he barrowed from his dad) of a 1e AD&D PHB and a DMG. Exactly like the second picture. I love it and even in my great draconian wisdom I find it hard to comprehend, but that does not take one bit of the fun out of it. I expecialy like the random dungeon generation (even though it is !!SO!! hard to understand) I usually just skim through it and find what works and makes sense. I do like the section on monsters as players but, seeing as I am more often than not DM or if I do play my dragon, I play it fairly, or in moderation with respect of the other players. (I’m in the back of marching order, I attack last no matter my initiative, and I don’t take “all” the loot, or eat all the bodies (that makes me begin to look at my party mates with hungry eyes though)) Well, I have to get on my way. I’m going to take a short walk through the dessert in the moonlight. Hope I don’t run into any sand worms. (Think Dune, or Tremors. Two very good movie series)
Your “overgrown lizard” Friend,
Elderon Analas
PS. Oh Chatty, I think I will start hoarding your articles. Begin paying tribute or suffer. [toothy smirk]