...about my love for pen & paper role-playing games, and my quest to find the perfect one.
One of my goals for this year is to make shorter blog posts. I feel that I’ve been rambling trying to make sure I explain everything, and that doesn’t necessarily make for an enjoyable read.
So when I wrote the Monsters Never Save post, I left some things unexplained. Then Zomus offered suggestions that I’d already considered. That makes me feel bad, like I wasted his time.
This week’s post is addressing his reply to that post. His reply is in italics.
This is the middle of one of my twelve day workweeks, so this post will be short.
Seven weeks ago, I posted a riddle of sorts.
Back in July, I wrote about a house rules where monsters never miss in combat. The logic was that the story is about the PCs, not the monsters. So instead of the monsters rolling to hit, the players would roll to defend.
A week later, I wrote about my magic casting variant where players have to make a successful roll in order to cast a spell.
As I was translating the spell book for the latter, it occurred to me that I have significantly “nerfed” the spell casters.
Back in July, I talked about the way that spell-casting is going to work in Crowfield. I like the system a lot, but it causes a few problems:
When I was young, members of the extended family would come to our house for a Christmas night snack. The dining room table would be filled with pies, pastries, and those little cookies that people only seem to make this time of year. There were rolls, and lunch meat, and sometimes even some torpedo stuff in the kitchen. One by one, people would filter into the house: my brother, my sisters, my cousins, and numerous aunts and uncles!
It would often be snowing that night, and I was always afraid that someone would get into an accident while driving to the house, and I was always relieved whenever the doorbell rang. It’s been many years since those days have gone by, but whenever I think of Christmas, these are the days I think of. In memory of those days I wrote this…
James and I look at gaming differently. This is one reason why I value his opinion.
One of the reasons for these differing viewpoints is that James is primarily a player, and I’m primarily a referee. Related to that reason is the fact that James has played under a lot more referees (good and bad) than I have.
James and I were “talking”1 the other day. There was a lull in the conversation and I filled it with “What should I write about in the next blog post?”
This was his reply:
Write about a high person in the town. Write about the little things that made him the man he is: a sister, a brother, the time he broke a leg, or when his sister fall into a well, or that time that he killed someone but no one knows.
That last phrase caught my attention. If no one knows, why would I write it? No one is supposed to know.
That sparkled a conversation between us. In short, James felt that letting the players in on secrets that their characters wouldn’t know makes the players more immersed in the game. My opinion was that it would make the player fell less immersed; instead of seeing the world through their characters’ eyes, it would feel like they were reading a story.
That was the heart of the difference. James’s experience has taught him that most GM’s are trying to tell a story to the players. My opinion is that the players are supposed to be in a story about them. Not on the outside, listening to a story about someone else. The GM shouldn’t make a story. That’s the player’s job. The GM sets the stage and gives the players the props. Then the players make the story, and the dice get the final edit.
James ended the conversation with these words:
I did feel that with your games. Not many DMs do that. They’re just running a train on the rails. You can’t even look to the left or right, just straight ahead.
Thank you, James. Those words mean the world to me.
We live over 300 miles apart, as the crow flies. When I say “talking,” I really mean that we were “typing” to each other.↩
Let’s talk about the humble gold piece. And the silver piece.
Before I sat down to write this I thought “Didn’t I already write about it?” I scanned the archives and found that I didn’t, but there was an unpublished draft post called “One is Silver and the Other Gold,” from February, 2015. Other than the title, and some notes, there wasn’t much in that draft. So let me steal the title and finish it, almost 6 years later.