I'm curious what their response to your question was, cause if isn't "every damn session" they likely should take a turn on the other side of the table. It certainly was an eye-opener for me.
Yeah, they got it as soon as I brought it up. Both of them have DM'd a session at the table as filler because they wanted the chance. I think it was good to interject it out as a reminder of why TTRPGs aren't video games and vice versa. But of everything they had shared, that was the one thing I thought really would be a bad habit if brought to the table.
As an aside, we ended up spending the time having a session 0.5 because the guy who had been DMing moved out of state last week. We had previously had our send off for him the week before but had left it open ended what we would do next. At some point prior to his leaving he had mentioned wanting to play once in a while. The two youngest people at the table jumped at the chance to DM and then decided to each DM a session. The guy who hosts had ran a game I had played in a while back. So I'm the only one there who hasn't ran a game at that table or for this group. I enjoy the chance to play. But I had a couple of needs to be addressed so I called for the session 0. The first being my #1 commitment before I'll run or begin a game - the DM and players at the table have to commit to facilitating fun for everyone at the table. Can't commit to doing that? I just got five hours of my Saturday to do something else. And number 2: Don't be a dick. After that it's details. The younger guy who is now the DM and I chat about DMing a bit now on Facebook. I think he will become a good DM as even as a beginner he has good instincts. He is creative, wants everyone to have fun, and is pretty open. It will be fun to see him continue to develop his DM skills.
I touched on it a bit but I think the DM relationship is the biggest "shortcoming" of BG3 as an rpg experience. Yes the story is wildly expansive and I've been very impressed by all the different scenarios Larian planned for... but its still on rails. Of course all the lines are crisp and the deliveries impeccable, it's a script that you can't venture too far from. Nothing will ever truly compare to a DM that is vibing with their players and everyone is riffing off one another. I know it is so cliché but the "journey rather than the destination" really is the point of tabletop, in my opinion. Nothing compares to that satisfaction of building a truly one-of-a-kind moment where excellent preparation perfectly meets creative improvisation.
Absolutely makes sense. Peak gaming can be some of the most fun I've had in a group activity.
I brought up your completionist mindset comment to the group and I thought one of the members of the group made a great point. That being, the mindset is almost 100% self inflicted. You mention this item missed in an earlier act and earnestly I don't know if we've grabbed it or not. We're intentionally trying to play as "blind" as possible and so I know we've completed some side missions that likely will aid us in the long term but hard to tell if I know what the reference is.
The age of the internet is nice in a lot of ways but there is also generally just less mystery to gaming than there was before. With the collective minds of a community it is possible to nearly perfectly min/max all scenarios, look up the solution to any puzzle, perfectly prepare for every encounter. If that is how you like to play games I'm certainly not here to tell someone not to do it. But they might find they can extract more enjoyment and replayability from things if they can temper expectations, experience things as they're happening, and learn contentment with what they have.
Re-reading those last sentences I realize it sounds a bit pretentious but honestly it was mostly just meant as advice for myself.
He/Him
“If you consider what are called the virtues in mankind, you will find their growth is assisted by education and cultivation.”
― Xenophon
I haven't been a bit CRPG player; I've pretty much only played the "indy" games from Spiderweb Software, which still kind of look like state-of-the-art from the 1990s, so that they are to big current games almost as amateur theatre is to Hollywood blockbusters. At least on this smaller scale I have to plead guilty to completionism, though. I always wanted to find every last Easter egg.
I don't think I'd feel that way as a tabletop player, though, because in a one-shot campaign, things that don't happen don't seem like real things that you missed. You can't go back and re-do things to get them, so you don't feel bad for not doing that.
On the other hand, though, as a DM I really tried to avoid putting things into the campaign that the players might miss. Anything significant that they never found would be a cool idea that I had carefully described that ended up just being wasted. They might mess things up, and fail to gain maximum advantage, but they shouldn't just never see anything I'd invented. Like amateur theater, the game might not have been a great multimedia experience, but it was tailor-made for its specific live audience.
I did once misjudge my players by inserting a comic-relief encounter in a high-stakes endgame dungeon. They blasted that Care Bear to bits before it could heal them. But at least they did see it.
I brought up your completionist mindset comment to the group and I thought one of the members of the group made a great point. That being, the mindset is almost 100% self inflicted. You mention this item missed in an earlier act and earnestly I don't know if we've grabbed it or not. We're intentionally trying to play as "blind" as possible and so I know we've completed some side missions that likely will aid us in the long term but hard to tell if I know what the reference is.
The age of the internet is nice in a lot of ways but there is also generally just less mystery to gaming than there was before. With the collective minds of a community it is possible to nearly perfectly min/max all scenarios, look up the solution to any puzzle, perfectly prepare for every encounter. If that is how you like to play games I'm certainly not here to tell someone not to do it. But they might find they can extract more enjoyment and replayability from things if they can temper expectations, experience things as they're happening, and learn contentment with what they have.
Re-reading those last sentences I realize it sounds a bit pretentious but honestly it was mostly just meant as advice for myself.
You make good points. I'm old enough to remember playthrough guides being a thing for older console games. My friend group didn't put much effort into trying to clear games let alone S-tier complete them so they held little appeal. But I do recall one time our checking out the guide at the store because there was an area in a game we just couldn't get past. Don't recall the game, don't really remember what platform it was on. But I do wonder if we'd have been more interested in that aspect of video games had the internet been around. I guess for us video games were one of many things we did, and at that time they tended to be harder to do with more than a couple of people so we rarely focused on them as part of our group engagement. It wasn't until later when computer games like Starcraft made completing a solo game meaningful to us in large part because that was when we started to play online together and against others. Beating the game helped hone the skills needed to play online.
I've commented to others that the internet has made D&D a very different experience, too. Plenty of resources that can help DMs, media showing game play creating expectations as well as serving as tutorials for new DMs. Apps and programs, digital resources, virtual tabletops, expansive map resources,...the list of ways the internet age has both heightened and flattened the game could make for a book idea.
I haven't been a bit CRPG player; I've pretty much only played the "indy" games from Spiderweb Software, which still kind of look like state-of-the-art from the 1990s, so that they are to big current games almost as amateur theatre is to Hollywood blockbusters. At least on this smaller scale I have to plead guilty to completionism, though. I always wanted to find every last Easter egg.
I don't think I'd feel that way as a tabletop player, though, because in a one-shot campaign, things that don't happen don't seem like real things that you missed. You can't go back and re-do things to get them, so you don't feel bad for not doing that.
On the other hand, though, as a DM I really tried to avoid putting things into the campaign that the players might miss. Anything significant that they never found would be a cool idea that I had carefully described that ended up just being wasted. They might mess things up, and fail to gain maximum advantage, but they shouldn't just never see anything I'd invented. Like amateur theater, the game might not have been a great multimedia experience, but it was tailor-made for its specific live audience.
I did once misjudge my players by inserting a comic-relief encounter in a high-stakes endgame dungeon. They blasted that Care Bear to bits before it could heal them. But at least they did see it.
Also good points. I have become guilty of belief in the sandbox campaign model to the extent that almost every session has doors that will never be opened by the players, so to speak. I try to drop plot hooks in each session that aren't viable immediately but, if the players show interest, begin to be more fleshed out.
I'll also point out this map I made for a market place in the city serving as a hub to a group of players at the time. viewtopic.php?p=8507#p8507
Every single one of those buldings had atleast a couple of sentences I could go to if the PCs happened to go there. One of them, the Lord's Tuesday, had a single sentence in my notes stating it was called that because it offered access to vices not available at other establishments that were, to the wealthy elite of the city, just what one did on a Tuesday. The group rogue decided to go there one day out of the blue while he was supposed to be running a meaningful errand for the adventure. Yadda yadda yadda, the Pale Queen was invented, the party picked up Thad the ghost as part of their punishment for dabbling with greater forces, and a bit of worldbuilding lore grew out of this.
I tend to scatter seeds throughout sessions that, if a player waters one, then sprouts into more. There are hooks, information, and tidbits I cast out each session and some get abandoned if not watered while others I keep dormant in waiting in case the opportunity comes up.
But to do a 180 here, the type of completionism I find irksome is the kind where a player uses the metagame knowledge of a low roll to try and find other ways to see if there is more treasure in a room, attempts to grind out money from a situation I put in the game without thinking about how it would be abused, or trying to play all the adventure hooks available at once without committing to an action. To be fair, the latter usually happens when I didn't make the value of choosing an option more clear so the party could make a more informed choice. But it also is a problem with the group sizes I end up running with (6 - 7 players every campaign in the last three years) and there is some tension in the group's decision making.
Putting in hooks that might or might not get picked up is an interesting point. I can see where that would be a really great thing to do, but I don't think I managed it very much. I don't know that I ever tried to do it on purpose. Sometimes I'd intend something as just a cute detail and the players would dig into it, forcing me to improvise more content, but I found that this usually didn't go all that well. My inspiration would run out too quickly.
Part of my problem may have been that for most of my DMing career we were holding marathon 16- to 20-hour sessions once every month or two, rather than just a few hours each week. That was just the stage of life we were at. We started playing in high school, with a group of players that met through a city-wide club and who were too young to drive let alone own cars, so that physically getting together was a hurdle. We had plenty of time compared to adults, though, so it made sense to meet for longer, less frequently. Once people started moving away for college, it was even harder to get back together, but we were even more free to take off a whole weekend, so the pattern intensified.
I couldn't afford to leave a lot of open hooks, because they'd get picked up in the first couple of hours and then I'd have to be able to sustain them for another fourteen hours immediately. I tried to give the impression of an open world, but it wasn't really very open. There might be a scenic landscape with some random encounters but when you got to the great basalt pyramid, or whatever it was, the door usually closed up behind you. Fairly often the plot ran on rails. Or I'd have sandboxes full of detailed things, in which the players could wander around freely, but one way or another it was pretty much guaranteed that by the end of the session they'd have scoured the whole sandbox and dug up everything.
Part of that may just have been the players' expectations. That was how our games worked, and they knew it. If there was a block in the Thieves' Quarter that they just hadn't visited yet, they knew that they had to check it out because it would probably turn out to be important somehow. Or else it would be somehow clear from my descriptions that it was just filler and they could ignore it. There was a pretty clear implicit contract that the world had no long dead ends.
Players trying to search again because they rolled a 1—ah, fun times. I always tried to discourage this by interpreting the low roll as a real circumstance in the world that was not going to change. The 1 didn't mean that the elf just had a senior moment as his eyes drifted past the crack in the wall that time; it meant that this particular secret door had really fine cracks and had been well maintained. I was generally pretty good at improvising answers to player arguments and attempted exploits. With something to react to, I could improvise details all day; I just couldn't improvise a whole painting on a blank canvas.
It sounds like you are a better editor than I. I'm guilty of building the bridge as the party is running over it, then ending the session and figuring out the consequences of what happened in the big picture of the story. A long alley won't be a dead end even if there was nothing there when they started down it. But it makes work to ensure it isn't narratively disconnected. I'm not sure I could provide the feel of an open world without flying by the seat of my pants. The ability to manage the narrative options you describe sounds like a skill I could use more.
No, looking back at this now after all this years, your last post makes me think, "D'oh! That was what I was supposed to be doing. It would have been so much better!" It would have been easier, and it would have let the players provide more of the campaign's inspiration. That's probably the only good way to go with a group of adults, in fact.
Funny that I never really thought about it. Our infrequent but really long games were just weird, and not an ideal way to play. I guess we adapted well enough to our circumstances, but it's not the best way to do RPGs, if you have other options, I think.
Moving from the room with the coffin, Arctica and Xerxia were prepared to continue their search for the portrait in the building with the rotunda while the remainder of the party had reunited in the basement under the other building, about to enter a new room through a secret door that Annalee and Ellery had discovered. Suddenly, the mysterious plague doctor figure appeared and whisked first Rasxan and then Xerxia away, apologizing deeply but stating that they were needed for an emergency elsewhere. This left Arctica alone on the second floor of the main guildhouse building which she decided would not dissuade her from pushing forward in looking for the portrait. Arctica stealthily stepped over the squeaky boards of the vestibule room to the door that appeared to lead to the rotunda where she made an attempt to open it. Finding it locked, she was about to pick it when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs she and Xerxia had climbed only a short time before. She made an attempt to muscle her way through the door and rush into the room but failed to force it open. She heard a startled sound from inside the room followed by what sounded like someone giving a short callout, possibly of alarm as well. Bouncing off the door, she turned and dove back into the larger room with the coffin, taking cover behind a number of the crates to hide but making a small amount of noise while doing so. The footsteps coming up the stairs seemed to pause due to the noise she made. Then, watching the stairway, she was surprised to see the figure of Null step around the corner cautiously looking in the direction she had hidden herself. Or, at least it looked like Null but wearing common clothing rather than his normal armor and attire. “Null” attempted to signal to her, holding a finger to his mouth to keep quiet while waving to her to come over to him. Arctica was naturally skeptical of this, and tried to get him to answer a question which he shrugged off and again attempted to signal to her to keep quiet but come his way. Having none of this, Arctica then drew her bow and pointed an arrow at him which caused him to react with alarm and, in a voice decided not Nulls, began to call out that there were intruders in the guildhouse as he turned and ran back down the stairs.
Two floors below in the basement and another building over, the rest of the party members heard none of this and proceeded into the secret room where they found a number of crates and barrels designed to allow a person to ride hidden in relative comfort with cleverly disguised airtubes. Since each cell was separated by closed, locked metal gate doors, Annalee broke out her thieves tools, eager to put them into use but finding herself struggling to get the first cell door open. Keno chose to demonstrate concussive lock picking with his great axe, glancing the first blow off the handle but then recovering to cleave through cleaning with his follow-up blow. While exploring, the group also discovered a prisoner in a cell at the end of the area who, as a human, was unable to see well in the darkness of the unlit cells. The group learned he had been imprisoned by Rijal due to her catching him taking money to spy for the Velvet Glove, an upstart group of thieves trying to find a competitive foothold against the Sinners in the City. Dury answered what questions he could, confirming there had indeed been a vorpal sword brought in recently that Null had read about in Elix’ ledger, and that Gwish had taken a fancy to it so she had taken it to her quarters. But while he was aware of a number of paintings the Sinners had acquired as art theft could be lucrative, he was unaware of any magical artworks having arrived before he was put in the cell a few days ago. The party offered to free him which lead him to question who had attempted to pick the lock earlier since he had heard it and was skeptical that person would be able to open the door to his cell. Annalee was fueled by this general insult, deftly working the pins in the door to his cell almost quicker than a person with a key may have been able to do so. The party asked Dury to lead the way…which he proved willing to do but rather incompetently given he was unfamiliar with these secret rooms and lacked darkvision to be able to see without artificial light. Annalee again deftly picked the lock to the next room, seeming to surprise Dury slightly and proving the last attempt wasn’t just luck. The group then made your way into the next room after shouldering past Dury who had fumbled around in the dark once he entered the room where you discovered more crates and trunks which contained weapons as well as common dining ware. With some additional investigation, Null discovered a hidden compartment in one of the trunks that contained six pieces of theatrical jewelry worth maybe 30 GP combined. Ellery also discovered a secret compartment in another, finding a fine gold necklace with an beautiful black pearl set in the center which she guessed would be worth at least a few hundred gold pieces as well. Lastly, Keno discovered a third hidden compartment and retrieved a necklace with nine flickering beads that appears to contain magical fire within them. Annalee recognized this from one of her correspondence courses as a necklace of fireball, which Keno gladly put around his neck for later use. Members of the party picked out a couple of new crossbows and the party turned to the next closed door to continue on.
Back in the other building, Arctica made another attempt to get into the room but failed, then proceeded to successfully force open the double doors onto the balcony where she found the guard watching the front path to the guildhouse holding his crossbow. Acting quickly, she lowered her shoulder and slammed into him before he could adjust aim and get a shot off at her, forcing him over the balcony’s railings and down to the ground below, now injured and stunned with the wind knocked out of him. She drew her bow and nocked an arrow, sending it into the ground next to his head in her rush to get the shot off. She managed to hit him with a second shot while he was attempting to recover, leaving him still and an arrow protruding from his ribs. Arctica then used the sending stone she had to tell the other group where she was, that she had been discovered, and that the guards were pursuing her. Hearing footsteps and shouting likely heading into the storage room and her way, she then dove through a window facing onto the balcony from the adjacent room she had previously attempted to enter through a door. She parkoured the landing, rolling up to her feet where she discovered another guard at a desk who had been holding a crossbow aimed at the door and surprised by her unconventional entrance. The guard and Arctica exchanged bow and crossbow fire, both failing to hit the other, with Arctica ducking down behind a chair for cover. The guard recognized he was outmatched and rushed out the door in the direction of the shouting to find reinforcements. Arctica closed and locked the door behind him and was getting ready to attempt to open the opposite door into the rotunda when she heard voices from inside it and the sounds of someone approaching the door from the inside. She instead hid behind the desk where she was able to spy Rijal leave the room and head out into the storage room beyond without having noticed her. But just as Arctica thought she was in the clear and was ready to head into the rotunda through the door Rijal had left open, she heard the guard she had been exchanging fire with earlier shout out to Rijal that the intruder was in the room she had just left…
In the basement, the party moved into what appeared to be the last room which appeared to be without any second doors and largely empty except for a chest sitting in the corner next to a plate with a block of salted butter sitting on it. While the rest of the party puzzled over what to do next, Null immediately went for the block of butter whereupon the chest’s lid cracked open menacingly to reveal large sharp teeth as the chest snarled, “Let go of my butter!”. Keno recognized it as a Mimic, a sentient creature that can take the form of any inanimate object as camouflage in order to lure in prey. Armed with this knowledge that the creature could talk, Keno wisely opted for concussive diplomacy as he balled his hands into fists and prepared to punch it. Why not, since concussive lock picking had worked, right? With both Null and Keno attacking the creature, Annalee chose to leave the boys to their distractions and instead focused on looking around the room to see if she could find anything else that might help them in their goal of finding the portrait. Ellery pulled out her dulcimer and began to play a calming song in an attempt to diffuse the situation between the Mimic, Null, and Keno. Null ignored it but Keno found himself briefly dissuaded from attacking the creature by the soothing melody. Null swung at the mimic with his sword, striking it as well as channeling divine energy through the blow into the mimic. This apparently did some damage though it seemed to only anger the mimic more as it appeared fixated on Null. He also discovered the blade seemed to stick slightly to the creature as well though he was able to pull the blade back unhindered. The mimic extended it large, long tongue out and wrapped itself around Null, attempting to restrain the intruder who had stolen it’s butter. Keno recovered himself and, reassessing the situation, used his goliath strength to pull Null and the mimic apart and shoving them each away in opposite directions. Null suddenly unleashed a burst of disruptive divine energy as his eyes turned to pools of void-like darkness and two skeletal, ghostly black wings appeared to sprout from his back. (Imagine Galadriel in the Fellowship of the Rings as she described what would happen if she took the ring from Frodo… ) The mimic instantly became frightened of him and unable to now fight back against the home invader who had stolen its butter then attacked it. Meanwhile, Annalee had discovered there was yet another secret door in the room, and had opened it to reveal a narrow corridor leading to a wooden ladder up to a trap door in the ceiling. Ellery and Annalee moved down the corridor and up the ladder, followed by Keno and finally by Null. The group forced the trap door open and climbed up into a brightly lit parlor where a fire burned in the fireplace and cards and drink lay scattered on a table between a couch and chairs, suggesting just recently a small group had been here playing cards but had their game interrupted. The group moved into the room and Annalee tried the interior door and found it also locked which she guessed would lead to the rotunda. Null peeked around the corner and saw a group of four armed guards rushing up the stairs whereupon he leveled his newly acquired heavy crossbow and took a shot at the leading guard who also appeared the best equipped. The bolt struck true, getting the attention of the leader of the small group who turned around and shouted that they had gotten behind them! They then appeared to be ready to rush back down the stairs and after the group when Keno stepped around the corner as well and tossed one of his recently discovered beads from the necklace up the stairs at the leader of the group. A low roar erupted from the point of impact as the fireball erupted out and engulfed the four guards. Two of them managed to contort themselves into some shape that mitigated the damage to some extent while the other two took the full brunt of the flame. Keno stood at the bottom of the stairs of the flames rushed towards him and then dissipated before reaching him, as a wave of hot air washed over bringing the scent of burned hair, flesh, cloths, and something akin to kerosine with a note of magic to it. Keno stepped back into the room where he and Null readied themselves to hold the door. The leader of the band made it to them first, swinging at them multiple times with his sword. Ellery channeled her connection to the spirits and whispered a dissonant melody only he could hear that wracked him with horrible pain and caused him to immediately rush away from the door which allowed both Keno and Null to take swings at him. Finally, Annalee picked the lock into the lower floor of the rotunda where she discovered a spiraling set of stairs that led up to the second floor which she moved towards in preparation of rushing up towards Arctica…
On the floor above, Arctica braced a chair up against the door to the study and rushed through the open door on the opposite side into the room from which Rijal had just came, again closing and locking the door. This room of the rotunda proved to be Rijal’s quarters with stairs spiraling both up and down into the first and third floors of the rotunda. A large bed on an opposite side of the room was occupied by a handsome bare-chested half-elf, sitting up in the bed with his lower body covered in a sheet, propped against a pillow and smoking a pipe. As Arctica entered, he greeted her without initially looking up saying, “Well that didn’t take that long…” before realizing the person coming into the room was not Rijal. He gave up his name, Dartinal, and that the painting was up the stairs since it was obvious that Arctica would easily discover it without his telling her its location. But, he warned her that Rijal loved the painting and would not just let her take it so it didn’t matter that Arctica knew where it was. Hearing the door into the adjacent room forced open with a crash, Arctica rushed up the stairs to find the painting prominently displayed in an alcove at the top of the stairs and lit by a chandelier in the middle of the room hanging from the cone-shaped roof of the rotunda. The painting spoke to her in her mind using telepathy, asking what she intended to do with it, if Rijal was dead or alive, and conceding that it wasn’t going to try and stop her from taking it. Arctica removed it from the wall and turned to face the room just in time to see Rijal appear to step out of thin air, almost as if she had moved in the space between spaces is the impression it made on Arctica. Rijal, red hair loose over her dark cloak, held a short sword up and pointed at Arctica, intoning in a husky voice, “Don’t believe for a moment you’ll leave here with him. Put it down, and perhaps I’ll let you leave with your life”…
Funny that I never really thought about it. Our infrequent but really long games were just weird, and not an ideal way to play. I guess we adapted well enough to our circumstances, but it's not the best way to do RPGs, if you have other options, I think.
As a DM I don't think I could keep up for 20 hours, so hats off to you for managing it at all. It really does sound exhausting.
My friend group moved away from long campaign - style TTRPGs around the time we started driving. Up to then we seemed able to use our free time to play in addition to all the other things we wanted to do. Small town, getting our licenses changed the dynamic such that we moved our game play to either wargames or other TTRPGs that we could play as one-offs. Some of those became marathon sessions. In particular, we played a Marvel universe game that used a d100 system and our version of a team like the X-Men or Avengers. Any session we played involved pitting the team against the villain of the week, so to speak. At least a few of those sessions turned into 16 hour or more games. It was the closest thing we did that was a campaign at the time since any team member who survived stayed on to the next time, but we had hero deaths aplenty in that game. No real narrative continuity, either. They didn't really involve Game Mastering, just one of us taking a turn building and running the villain team, usually with input from everyone involved since it was more of a, "What if so and so fought so and so?". set up. We drew maps as a group on the fly.
The wargames also often took a long time to play through, often with lengthy setup periods, too. Plenty of Axis and Allies, and a series of games called Renegade Legion, lots of Battletech...many a memory of very late nights trying to calculate the velocity and consequences of a grav tank being hit by a round as it was climbing up hill and turning at high speeds with an injured pilot at 3 AM...funny how absolutely nerdy some of those games were. And how often we gave each other grief for resorting to using a calculator? Nerds. But at some point when it got late enough it stopped being taboo and more or less essential.
That sounds exhausting.