Another lesson from MIG rears its head. That game was plagued by a recurring social contract issue – differing levels of rules-savvy and risk tolerance among the group. We ranged from Kathy – who’s at best minimally competent with the rules, and likes to take wild risks in order to make things more exciting, secure in the expectation that I’ll generally make sure that stakes for any action are fun win/lose – to L, who’s an old hand D&D expert whose cleric was a melee powerhouse with carefully chosen feats and spells, but who is quite willing to make suboptimal decisions in service to character – to T, who’s fairly rules-knowledgeable (a bit of a rules-lawyer, even) and extremely risk-averse, preferring to avoid encounters entirely or win through superior planning and resource management and gets quite irked when other people deviate from The Plan.

If I “embrace the hack”, am I also embracing the far end of that spectrum? Risk-averse, rules-mastery-focused, optimization-centered? Am I asking for people like Kathy to be perpetually the “dead weight” at the table?

Well…. I don’t think so. I think that’s a particular manifestation of “hack” D&D – one that’s crunch-focused almost to the exclusion of everything else. I’ve certainly seen plenty of good, crunchy, challenge-driven D&D that didn’t demand perfect builds and perfect execution. Partly, that’s a matter of social contract, partly, of ( culture of play )I want a table full of people more in the moderate level of crunch-focus, and without T’s strong aversion to risk – willing to embrace the gamble as well as the crunch, but also willing – and this is crucial – to embrace stakes that are less extreme. Kathy’s reckless stunts are a lot more fun for the group if social contract accepts the notion she tends to assume: that the stakes of risk are rarely loss-of-character, but more frequently complications, embarrassment, temporary incapacity. On the other hand, she needs to accept the idea that every character must be designed to be able to reliably fulfill a needed role in the party – that a base level of rules-skill and optimization are every player’s responsibility, and that recklessness should be confined to lower-stakes situations.

So… I will need to select for people comfortable with the kind of game I plan to run. They need to be rules-comfortable, but not hardcore optimizers. On the other hand, they need to NOT be rules-averse – I’m not planning on running a talky-talky roleplaying-centric kind of game, so knowing how your Feats work and what your bonuses are is important. They need to be okay with fun taking precedence over “realism”, and they need to find Killing Things and Taking Their Stuff fun.

There’s just a few drawbacks to this whole D&D thing. The comments thread on my last post foreshadowed one of them, which I'll get to in a later post, but there's an even more basic one.

Here’s what I wrote as I was evaluating the MIG back in Spring ’06:

“One thing I've definitely learned in my last year of playing a fair bit of D&D is that while I can see the fun there, it's not really my fun - at least as GM. I like the worldbuilding and the nifties and all the color a whole lot. I find the work of providing a set of carefully balanced, challenging-but-not-too-hard fights with appropriately tailored cash & prizes to be a bit of a pain. I particularly find it a pain when exploration of setting, situation, and character are constantly getting pushed into the back seat in favor of the grail of challenge.

I feel kinda dorky when I'm engaged in heavy prep-work and use of technique not to make things dramatic, not to enrich exploration, not to push towards conflict, but to ensure that a steady diet of set-piece encounters get fed into the maw of the party. Actually playing the encounters? FUN. The amount of work that goes into providing them? Not Fun.”

At the time, that seemed like a solid evaluation. On reflection, though, I missed my own point. It wasn’t that the fighty being foreground wasn’t fun. It was the level of prep that was un-fun, plus the sense that the world-buildy, character-developy stuff was getting short shrift on account of the amount of work that went into ( prep )

The more I look at it, the more I feel that I can get a good experience as DM by relying much more on tailoring published adventures/encounters and by deemphasizing setting detail and “originality” in favor of a few carefully-chosen details and a strong reliance on the shared library of “D&D-isms” among the group.

That’s led to the first portion of my new idea: I’ll run a setting-light, vanilla-D&D game based almost exclusively on adapted modules and setpieces. The focus will be on hack, D&D nostalgia/celebration, and social bonding among players. Plot and setting will take distant back seats.

I mentioned in the last post that I’m trying to put together a new D&D group. ( Why go back to the dungeon? )

So I’m drifting back into the notion of playing a “trad”-ish game that I enjoy. There’s vanishingly few of them, but D&D has several things to recommend it.

Network effects: Everybody plays it. Non-gamers have heard of it. A lot of people in my social circles don’t play now, but they did when they were kids, and it has a bunch of nostalgia value.

Core Story: Everybody gets it. You pretend to be a dwarf. You go into a dungeon. You kill monsters and take their stuff. You level up and get new cool powers. You can love it or you can hate it, but you can’t say you don’t understand it.

Pretty coherent: D&D these days is much less “all things to all people”, drift until happy, handwave everything, messy incoherence. It has proper rules, and the rules mostly do what they say they do. It has a default playstyle that basically works, and the secondary agendas are resolutely left secondary in most of the WotC material. I don’t feel like I’m fighting against the game unless I try to foreground something that’s not rules-supported, and when I do foreground Kill/Take/Power Up, it is reliably fun and well-supported. I'm also getting neat hints of better support for situation creation from more and more of the stuff that's coming out.

Nostalgia: I really do love this stuff. Iconic monsters, classic dungeons, wacky magic. It’s in my geeky DNA.

Things that I think of when I think of "Pulp Space Opera"

Planets with just one climate/terrain type: Jungle, Desert, Ice, Rock, City, Water
“Furry” aliens
“Head-Bump” aliens
Sexy aliens
“Chinese/Russian/Roman/Aztec/etc.” aliens/"lost colonies"
Space Pirates
Smugglers
Ancient superweapons
Berserkers
Planet Smashers
Fleet actions
Space fighters
Energy swords
Personal force fields
Telepaths
Asteroid fields
Lost planets
Nebulas
Colonists
Prison moons
Special Agents
Inflexible Computers
Killer Robots
Technomages
Alien Drugs
Space Monsters
Armored Marines
Mecha
Cloud Cities
Interstellar merchants
Con artists
“Your primitive human intellect…”
The Ancients
Grungy spaceports
Crime lords
Spaceliners
Hypno-beams
The Punishment Chamber
Hotshot pilots
Stowaways
Robinson Crusoe… IN SPACE!
Energy beings
Dimension X
Handwavium
"She can nae take anymore, captain!"
Falling out of your chair when the ship is hit

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