PAX made it to the East Coast, so we went to join the party. Each night, we recorded from our room in the Sheraton Hotel in Boston with our thoughts and experiences from that day.
- 1:25 Wil Wheaton’s keynote
- 4:52 Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on how gaming can save the world
- 8:45 The Compleat Strategist
- 8:54 Shock: Social Science Fiction
- 10:36 You can also hear this story from Joshua A.C. Newman’s perspective in the recap he wrote for his blog.
- 16:08 Rooster Teeth
- 16:39 Mike’s video of D&D on the Microsoft Surface at PAX East
- 17:41 Geek Chic
- 18:01 Dominion
- 18:29 I ran three demos of Mouse Guard
- 24:09 The “Action Castle Incident“
- 29:03 Masterplan
- 36:06 The audio quality on Sunday took a sudden nose-dive. We apologize; this can happen with on-site recording. If it doesn’t bother you, we have some good disucssion in there for those willing to listen. If not, we can’t blame you!
- 37:06 Shadows over Camelot
- 40:52 D&D “Save My Game!“
- 52:40 Burning Empires
- 57:29 The guys who do the Geek Nights podcast did a panel on Friday night called “Beyond Dungeons & Dragons”
This is the first episode of yours I listened to and I quite enjoyed it. I appreciate your reporting on PAX after all the buzz it has generated as well as your lengthier discussion on 4e. Nice production and musical bridges as well.
I have on point of contention and that is you are making a lot of assumptions about the way people play non-indie games. I see this dogma a lot on storygames and I’d love if we could move past it. I think it is important to make a distinction between the ruleset and how the group uses the ruleset. There are a lot of people who prefer a more traditional rules approach but who leave their campaigns wide open to player input (or even design the whole campaign with player input). I’ll listen to your earlier podcasts as you may address this issue in depth, but alarm bells went off for me when you seem to be making the assumption that every GM who plays in the traditional format and with a traditional ruleset is automatically thinking of a story path ahead of the players. That may be the case in your immediate community (when you mentioned how you had such a difficult time getting people to try something new in Pittsburgh made me think of this) but it certainly is not a universal truth.
Thanks for listening and keep up the good work!
Thanks for listening, Walker! I’ve actually made a point of not talking about the way individual groups play. I’ve roleplayed Super Smash Brothers, so I know firsthand, given the right people, you can roleplay just about anything.
Despite my preferences, we end up playing D&D more than anything else, and I try to make it as cooperative an experience as I can. But the game only lets me go so far. I can react to a certain extent, but the moment we get to the real meat of gameplay—a combat encounter—I need something pre-prepared. This is what I meant when I referred to laying track right ahead of the train; even in the very best-case scenario, at the very moment when we might get to really impromptu, reactive play, I’ll need to call a halt to the game in order to plan out the encounter that the PC’s just stumbled into—in other words, right when we reach the moment where the game might become truly reactive and in-the-moment, I need to stop so that I can plan out the next bit.
As I said, the right people can roleplaying just about anything, and with the right combination of time, effort and cleverness, you can have play that reacts to players’ choices, but you accomplish that by overcoming or sidestepping the system. Often, people who play games like D&D but aspire to more collaborative play will brag about how long they can play without touching the dice, or they’ll praise a ruleset because it “gets out of the way.” I used to say these things myself. The very fact that we say such things should tell us something, though. The game has become a burden for us, something that we need to overcome. What if we had games that, instead of making that collaborative play we want impossible (since as much as we strive towards it, we never really accomplish it in these games), we had games that actually promoted that kind of play? If we put the same amount of effort that we used to put into overcoming the system into improving play, how much better could our games become?
My feelings about games like D&D do not come from experiences with poor GM’s. On the contrary, I’ve had the blessing of many excellent GM’s. But I’ve also seen what they needed to do to fight the system into something fun, and I’ve experienced it myself as a GM who wants the game to respond to player input. The system fights you every step of the way, because of its most fundamental assumptions and structure. At one time, I accepted that as a necessary evil. Now that I’ve played games that not only don’t fight me, but actively help me, I no longer accept that as a necessity.
Thanks for listening. Glad you liked it.
As far as D&D and games like them go, I think the point is that even when the DM plans an adventure with player input, it’s still ultimately the DM planning the adventure ahead of time. And if the PCs decide to go somewhere that the DM didn’t anticipate, it can cause problems. This is a problem I’ve heard other D&D players talk about too. In fact, the guys from Geek Nights brought this up in the “Beyond Dungeons & Dragons” panel we mentioned. What happens when the players say, “Forget this quest. We’re going to Westgate instead.” You can roll with that for a while, but the farther the PCs stray from what the DM has planned, the harder it’s going to be for him to come up with interesting material on the fly.
Contrast this to a lot of the independent games out there, in which there are mechanics built around generating story elements at the table. And in fact, a lot of them, like In a Wicked Age, would be pretty much impossible to plan out ahead of time because everything is generated randomly in play. So I think it’s a fair comparison to make, especially as the problem of railroading is one that we see D&D players run into again and again. A good DM can mitigate that, but it’s still something you always have to watch out for. Personally, I don’t think one type of game is “better” than the other in any kind of absolute terms. I think it’s just a matter of what you want to play. And I think a lot of the independent games specifically address problems that people have had with D&D.
Okay, I see Jason beat me to the punch. Doh!
Thanks for the responses. It seems as if you are conflating D&D with the broad range of games that don’t have any collaborative story elements built into the system (let’s say ‘trad’ games for the sake of this conversation). I agree for the most part that the stat-heavy nature of D&D often makes it necessary to have a lot of combat encounters pre-planned (though there are many D&D DMs who are able to whip stuff up on the fly, mainly because they already have a large database of pre-defined baddies at their fingertips that they can mix and match). But I think this is much more of a factor of the stat-heavy nature of D&D and not its lack of collaborative story elements. I don’t know if you guys have had experiences with lighter systems (from Savage Worlds to Barbarians of Lemuria to Risus) that also have no real collaborative story-building elements, but if the players ‘go off the rails’ so to speak, it is easy for the GM to adapt to the new situation on the fly. Savage Worlds, which is the crunchiest of the examples I gave above, requires no more than a couple of stats filled in if the situation actually comes to combat. Unknown Armies is another system that I’ve played in which is pretty trad and we were never on rails, au contraire actually, that game spiralled wildly (and positively) out of control, to the GMs constant amazement and pleasure. He took a few breaks to adjust for the new situation, but it was never for a need to prep some numbers.
What I’m trying to communicate is that story games, games with collaborative story-developing elements are an awesome approach to encouraging a group to move forward spontaneously and creatively through a session and to move beyond the railroady game. But they aren’t the only approach. There has been a tendency for some people who have found frustration with their long-standing practices (and it is quite often with D&D, I went through it myself) who then turn to story games to dismiss entirely their past practices, when there is actually still a lot of good there.
Hi, Walker. I quibble with the term “conflating” only because it seems to suggest something done unconsciously. In fact, I’ve made a conscious argument that such games have so much in common as to make game play almost indistinguishable, particularly compared to the full breadth of games available.
I haven’t run Barbarians of Lemuria, though Tim (whom you heard in the call in session #9) is a big fan of that. I have run Savage Worlds. I think it delivered very well on its motto: “Fast, furious fun.” Even so, I found that some forethought about the encounters, the setting, the mix of adversity, and so on, yielded a much better encounter. By the same token, I could probably put a level-appropriate D&D encounter on the table in a few moments if I really had to. But in both cases, in my experience anyway, what I put down has a particularly “rushed” characteristic. It lacks the interesting choices and setup that it might have had, if I’d had some time to think about it and plan it out. So yes, I suppose I agree, you can run any of these on the fly, since the amount of prep time is a function of familiarity and time. The more familiar you are with a system, the less time it will take you to prepare, but the less time you spend, the less good the encounter will tend to be. So a very experienced GM can put together an encounter pretty quickly, and it might even not have anything particularly wrong with it if he’s really good at it. But it probably won’t be his best encounter, either.
Certainly, a lot of fun can be had with this approach. You’ve had fun with it, I’ve had fun with it, and I imagine most people reading this have had fun with it, too. But I’d attribute that fun to the GM who had so much experience with the system that he could do that. In fact, the game didn’t really help him do that; on the contrary, the game provided a hurdle he needed to overcome in order to do that. I’m not saying that you can’t have fun that way. I’m asking, if this same GM spent that same time and energy mastering a system that helped him instead of overcoming a system that hindered him, how much better could that game get?