Info and Improv: An Epiphany

I had a talk with my friend and to a great extent mento John Davis about interacting with Non-Player Characters in D&D.  I was mightily surprised that his strategy was usually to either ignore or eliminate them as sources of unreliable information and more than a little peril.  It floored me a little, until I realized that magic in d20 makes one thing easy: getting the truth from people.  This made me very, very angry.  It forces the DM to give players information.  They didn't earn it except by possibly beating a few mooks to get it, and it has absolutely no RP value except to lead them by the nose to the next part of the adventure; they don't have to worry about people lying to them or leading them into traps, because the rules nicely say that the subject of their interrogation is now incapable of doing so.  I envision the world of d20 to have very smooth inquisitions and coups; you bring in any wannabe wizard who can cast Charm Person, or any sap of a cleric to cast Speak with Dead after you've publicly executed the pour soul, right?

After I calmed down, I took a look through the SRD.  Yes, there are some spells that allow for some guarantees of truth.  That's the nature of magic in d20: past a certain character level, most normal situations have specific magical solutions.  How, in the face of these, do we preserve roleplaying?  The answer I finally came up with made me feel a little dim; it once again comes down to preparing the right material.

To best describe what I'm talking about, I'm going to quote one of Murphy's Laws(he had several; they are lolsome)  "If you percieve that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop."  Unlike BioWare games, where everything your PCs can do is restricted to one of on-average four numbered responses, there are dozens if not hundreds of mechanical ways for a PC to react to any situation, not to mention the near-infinite variables of real human thought.  Even better, most of the mechanics and reactions are not "plot interesting," and will reduce your witty, perilous encounter with Dr. Evil to a bulleted list of information.

"But that's not interesting roleplaying!" was my shocked response to a system that had just trashed about a dozen encounter ideas.  Well, it isn't, but that's my fault, not Wizards of the Coast.  The problem is that players can't read your mind.  If your adventure relies on them finding a specific way to resolve a situation, the entire encounter has a good chance of either becoming a maddening game of role-playing charades, or a completely wasted batch of preparation when the players kill Dr. Evil and use Speak With Dead to get the Spark Notes version of his Evil Plan.  As I described in my last post, I've had PCs find a reasonable way around massive amounts of preparation.  I have also heard of campaigns where the players finally had their characters self-destruct in frustration at an inflexible DM.  Both cases are not what I'd call enjoyable dungeoncraft.

Where does this leave you?  The answer there is simple, and something I should have realized after the Incident of the Avoided Kobolds I described last post; Improvise.  Unlike writing fiction, where the core of the story is the thread of events that runs from trigger to conclusion, your job as a DM is to merely provide a set of situations for the player. Give the PCs a scenario, let them play it out and then process what they've given you to create the next scenario.  Under this system, the information I was trying so hard to protect becomes less of a sticking point or challenge, and more another kind of treasure; make the story of how they use it interesting, not the story of how they got it.

This is great.  What I've just described is the traditional set of 8x8 rooms and one-paragraph flavor blurbs that make up the most basic dungeon.  How then, is a DM expected to present anything beyond a combat heavy mechanics-bash if they can't plan for complex plot?  The answer: quite easily.  Have your NPCs come alive by reacting to your players.  Instead of creating complexity by having Dr. Evil force the characters to live through his Evil Plan, give the PCs an opponent who reacts to their presence reasonably (or, for the sake of comedy, unreasonably).  With you reacting to your players and them reacting to you, both sides of the screen get to play out the scenario as they imagine it.  Although I've only tried this strategy in a very limited manner; it has already proven rewarding.

The funny thing is, I should have realized this all along.  I am terrible at reading a prepared speech; I invariably wind up chucking the note cards over my shoulder a few lines after the intro, because what I've come up with at the moment sounds better.  Applying this to d20 will be a challenge, but if I'm right, it will be worth it.

The First Rule of Dungeoncraft: Proficiency(Chekhov)

Hello, Blogsphere!  I'd like to kick off my inaugural post with some description of my purpose in writing.  I've loved fantasy for as long as I can remember.  There wasn't any real table-top game community or niche for one in my highschool, so most of my experience up until recently has been through video games.  My actual experience with Dungeons and Dragons started with BioWare's Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights titles.  While this did give me an introduction to the mechanics of AD&D, D&D 3.0 and 3.5, it wasn't until college that I played my first actual game.   I've always enjoyed fiction writing, and so I've taken it upon myself to learn the art of dungeoncraft.  This blog is a place where I'm going to lay out my rough thoughts and impressions, with the vague hope that they'll eventually spell out words of power.

The most basic challenge I've faced so far is most definitely The First Rule.  The First Rule was coined by Ray Winninger, author of the Dungeoncraft column in Dragon magazine back in the days of AD&D.   The rule is extremely simple:  "Never force yourself to create more than you must."  

It makes sense writers spend months if not years building a setting; you've got weeks or days to plan characters, setting, and plot (which is a unique challenge that deserves it's own paragraph or two).  That said, it's an extremely attractive exercise; if you're going to create a world for your players to interact with, why shouldn't it be a full and vibrant one?  I actually have to disagree with Ray Winneger's argument that over-prep results in wasted time; I've done most of my "big-picture" prep in what I'd consider free time as a kind of free-writing exercise, so it hasn't cost me anything in prep.  This lured me into a very false sense of security when designing my first serious campaign; I'm actually very proud of the setting I've created, and was eager to give it life.  It wasn't until I actually ran my setting- and plot-heavy sessions that I figured out just how much of a problem I'd caused myself.

The campaign in question is a homebrew adventure I'm running for one of my friends using a revised version of D&D 3.5 called Trailblazer.  I'm not trying anything revolutionary in terms of monsters or mechanics; the two combat encounters have been relatively successful.  Yup, you heard me.  two encounters in as many sessions.  The Dungeon Master's Guide recommends that characters can handle four encounters before having to break off from combat and regroup; one a session is just plain slow.   I blame the lack of pace on my failure to obey The First Rule.

The first session in the campaign established the background: the party was hired by Thearch Hadrian, a local Church official to clear out an abandoned stronghold.  They traveled to the site, gathered local lore, and fought off the surprise undead attack.  All that took about four hours to play out.  Why?  Because I included a large amount of background on just about everything; the church, the local politics, and general monster forecasts for the local area.  That's not to say the session didn't go well.  The role-playing aspects of the session went better than I thought they would; adding a bit of extra life to the non-player characters and locations made for some interesting interactions between the characters and their surroundings.  That said, it took a huge amount of time and memory to impart all the information I wanted my player to have.   Extra information is harmful not because it makes you 'waste' a weekend creating something that is useless; thinking about fluff can result in applicable ideas.   Its damage comes when you force your player to work through it; extra description forms dead space in a campaign.  Prep what you want your players to take away, and let the flavor text attend to itself.

This doesn't just apply to words and information, as I found out my second session.  Having learned something after my description marathon the time before, I wasn't going to make the mistake of presenting a lot of useless fluff.  The characters were going to enter the citadel, encounter kobolds and... encounter them.  Yup.  These little beggars could be talked to, fought, or snuck past, and I had plans for all of them.  Biiiig mistake.  I wound up having to prep not only the information I wanted the characters to get out of the kobolds, but also the little guys' combat and anti-stealth strategies.  I wound up using about a tenth of all that.  The characters chose to talk their way into the fortress, where they managed to befriend the kobolds in a far more logical way than the complex conversation mechanic I'd designed.  

That was a bit of a wakeup call for me.  I'm used to BioWare games, where conversation is in and of itself a puzzle of choosing a response and then seeing what the character's reaction is.  The burden of roleplaying is very much on the game designer in the land of video games.   Instead of playing the conversation game, my characters showed me what I consider true roleplaying; they made a suggestion, I figured out what the reaction would be, and then gave them a result they could use to figure out what to do next.  In this case, I believe my player's line was roughly "everyone likes a cleric, right?"  A few seconds later the dwarven cleric was exorcising possessed kobold who would later provide them with most of their information.  A happy ending for all involved, except that I now had nothing between the characters and the treasure except for grateful, smiling kobolds.  But that's a story for another post.

What did I get out of this?  I didn't realize how far so little information could go.  Instead of big elaborate stories and backstories, bare facts are all that you need to go in with.  Instead of attempting to make the combat itself memorable, give a memorable reason for why there was combat in the first place.  It actually embarrasses me to admit I'd forgotten this.  In high school, I was a devout follower of the great dramatist Anton Chekhov.  "If a gun is on the table in act one, it must be fired by the end of the play."  This is especially true of dungeoncraft.  It's easy to fill the mechanics with fluff at run-time, but only make yourself emphasize through planning what you want your characters to take note of.

I think I've covered less than the minimum observable fraction of this topic, but I know I'm going to have more encounters with it in the future.  May they all be of manageable CR.