T w e n t y S i d e d
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– Shamus, Friday Sep 22, 2006
I think thoroughly that I am in an entirely different D&D community than that of my father, or his time. I don’t know if times have changed, or if the queer neurospicy side of the community is different(maybe my table is weird). I can’t get my players to quit having an over-abundance of empathy. I will never forget the season that was completely eaten by a group of my players becoming enraptured by the culture of a NPC they’d never met. They just sat for a full four real life hours asking her to tell stories while she made them the custom tapestry they ordered.
That isn’t to say both types don’t have merit, though. My all-time favorite movie Dorkness Rising would be nothing at all if the players weren’t apathetic murder hobos.
This weeks French comic can be read here.
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Oh wow I feel losing four hours to stories from a random side NPC, and you can never gauge what exactly a table is going to latch onto and refuse to ever let go of.
I’m not sure what exactly the difference is, but I’ve played in groups that have had both types of player cultures you mentioned – none quite so extreme as the attitudes shown in the comic, but different levels of murderhobo and over-empathetic. The murderhobo type groups tended to have gotten their start while spending more time in spaces where older roleplayers were hanging out, so it might be a generational thing?
It’s hard to say, I’m curious what other peoples’ experiences on it are.
My diagnosis, having experienced both situations:
These players in the comic aren’t engaged with the world. It’s been nothing but meaningless lore dumps and arbitrary encounters. There’s too much detail for them to track, but not enough substance for them to care. Also, this RP scene is being foisted on them by a DM who still doesn’t understand his players.
Now, if the players felt part of the world – and part of the story – then they wouldn’t shut up. They’ll have conversations with strangers and open their hearts to known NPCs. Sure, a bit of that comes down to the player and their playstyle, but that’s not the deciding variable here. I doubt Dave/Frodo will write in-setting poetry but he could certainly do better than “thanks for the ring”.
If your players ask NPCs for information not directly related to their goals, congratulations. It means they live in your world. It’s a good problem to have.
I think that’s true in general.
However, to me the setup here isn’t even a question of the DM not understanding the players or the players feeling fully engaged in the world. This is just a dumb setup.
This is an ambush demand for empathy towards an NPC never previously encountered in gameplay. Maybe he’s in the backstory you handed the player with the character sheet, but it’s first time Bilbo has appeared or even been directly mentioned.
“Here – this is your adopted father and you love him. Go tell him that.” That’s some “some kid died! Feel bad!” level dumb.
Now, a better setup would have been “It’s your Uncle Bilbo! He’s traveled widely in the world, and he had the ring for decades. What would you like to ask him about?” This is an opportunity for intelligence gathering. Not “go tell him thanks for the ring.”
Related. Why the blue heck wouldn’t you have the hot points go up? Give a “peace of Rivendell” effect that gives plus 2 hit points and 1 gain to all health potions that lasts an in-game week. If you want players to care about a status effect, put it in the dang game, even if it’s something trivial. It’ll have them clamoring to feel the “peace of Lothlorian” when you get there.
In Lord of the Rings Online, you can get Hope bonuses if you’re around an NPC that is considered especially morale-boosting in the books. You might get something like +1 Hope while around Legolas. I think Rivendell has the highest Hope bonus in the gate at +5, and you get an increase to your Maximum Morale (i.e. Hit Points), damage, etc. while inspired in this way. Not that you actually get involved in any combat in Rivendell, but the effect is there just the same.
Well, there’s no pictures of Viggo Mortensen in this strip. That automatically loses it some hot points…
Not when it comes to the pictures of Viggo chosen for this comic!
I’d say, lore dumps, empty encounters, and the perception of railroad tracks. I’m specifically thinking of that Weathertop thing—very coercive, which then leads right into one of those “empty encounters”.
Small wonder that the players aren’t engaged!
“I think thoroughly that I am in an entirely different D&D community than that of my father, or his time.”
You aren’t. What your Father was engaging in here was hyperbolic comedy, ye olde “Why can’t my Players roleplay instead of rollplay?”† It’s been a ‘schism’ in the hobby since the first D&D pamphlet was published in 1974, it’s not a new phenomena that some groups prefer drama and dialogue to tactics and dice rolls, and that the “opposite end” of that spectrum prefers the later.
.† If we want to pretend that by “roleplay’ we mean the dialogue and drama‡ set and that the ‘rollplayers’ all want loot, power-ups, and min-maxing; which isn’t always the clean break as many imagine.
.‡ Putting the “D&D” back in D&D.
However… that said, your table is weird. Sitting for four hours not “getting on with it”? That’d drive me (and my bestie) mad… unless we were completely at a loss for what to do next and were stalling while we thought about it. But then’s also on the GM for not being able to motivate or enlighten the Players. Of course is all the Players and GM were happy to sit around listening to fantasy cultural stories, that’s perfectly fine.
I’ve been there a couple of times, where the players seem really engaged with what they’re doing instead of moving on, and you’re torn about letting them enjoy the moment and fully exercising narrative control, or trying to gently prod them to move on a bit. For the latter, the Role-playing situation could be one or two PCs really getting into it and the rest of the PCs just going along with it to humor them, or perhaps there’s a part (maybe an epic battle, a dramatic scene, or a choice of what to do next that will probably involve a lot of player debate) likely to come up shortly afterwards where there won’t just be enough time in the session and you’re faced with a potential awkward cliffhanger *.
After a decent bit of player interactions in these situations (maybe a bit’s going past 15-30 minutes (I can’t imagine 4 hours!), I will sometimes gently interject and say something to the effect of “You guys seem to be having a lot of fun here, but I just want to make sure everyone is on board with this part”, and you might have a couple people who were just being polite taking the opportunity to say, “Yeah, we should probably move on”.
* Reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHbvm1BDmh0
Yeah, DMotR is intentionally portraying a very dysfunctional table, where the GM wants to tell a very specific story and the players are all just along for the ride, the players have zero interest or engagement in that story, and nobody’s willing to compromise (or, apparently, just leave). My personal experience with tabletop roleplaying is limited, but from listening to friends, with real human players this table would have fallen apart around episode 2. I seem to recall Shamus’s commentary explicitly pointing that out later on, and it was definitely part of the motivation for the initial setup of spiritual successor Darths and Droids to take a similar set of characters, but with a much healthier dynamic.
I used to absolutely love Darths and Droids, until about Empire Strikes Back when it felt it was getting too full of itself and focusing more on “How can we subvert the reader’s understanding of the movies” and less on feeling like players in an RPG.
But on the subject of Darths and Droids, Pete’s Substitute DM scene in Episode 2 (Droid factory) seemed like the perfect setup for a Substitute DM session – Pete moved his character out of the action where they could be a safety bumper in case things went wrong, and it was a mechanical combat and puzzle challenge to shake things up and give a break from the talkiness of prior sessions and let people go wild with their combat skills, powers, feats, and traits. He even set it up so Sally’s character got a temporary combat boost to be able to contribute to the scene
A shame he let his grudge with Jim ruin it.
“…the initial setup of spiritual successor Darths and Droids to take a similar set of characters, but with a much healthier dynamic.”
Ah, but initially it really wasn’t. It was a push-over GM with a few differently minded Players, one of whom was a crunchy min-maxer, who was constantly trying to work to upset any attempts to get ‘back on the rails”. It did evolve into a healthier* table relationship over time, but that took a few movies and some stumbling, both on and off screen, along the way.
>* For various definitions of ‘healthier’, it was far healthier to start with as the Players and GM were all friends and weren’t at all as passive-aggressive or acerbically snarky as the portrayed group in DM of the Rings, and while there is ‘growth’ in the characters over the series, the crunchy min-maxer is stil a min-maxer, the impulsive action guy who ignores plot and details still ignores plot and details and prefers action over discussion, and the pure RPers are still pure RPers… mostly it’s the GM who has grown the skills to juggle them all and better keep them moving forward despite their best efforts to derail everything.
It’s those times that I whip out the Chess Titans and play some games, while my co-players engage in conversation with squirrels and other such unironic immersion.
I don’t know. Dumping an uncle with a huge intertwined backstory by surprise on a player – who by the look of things is not much of a “roleplayer” (rather than a “rollplayer”) – it seems a bit unfair to think he’s going to pull an Olivier-level scene out of his hat here.
If you want this in your game, maybe start with some hijinks in the Shire first – like the movie did? And if the players take a hard pass on that, try not to be disappointed, and don’t force that level of drama elsewhere.
Oh well, if we didn’t have beginner-level DMs we soon wouldn’t have any DMs at all.
While (as mentioned above) there is some hyperbole at play, I do think the broadening of the hobby has absolutely led to different types of people entering it.
To tell this week’s Kingmaker story, the party was asked by the owner of their home base to get a drake’s head for decoration. As they got closer, one of the players got super uncomfy with the fact that they were trophy hunting, and so they tried to find alternate ways to get a trophy.
Of course this group is also excited to have a great big cook-off next section, which could also be signs of a difference.
To me, the big change is having rule systems that are so much less math and rules lawyering focused than the previous generations. Rutskarn’s GM-inars series on this site somewhere handles the nuances way better than I can.
But In The Beginning, there were encounters, and rolling, and you needed a good grasp on the mechanics and details on weapons and attacks. Everything was probabilistic, and everything was pretty technical, everything meant rolling dice, and that’s the way it was and we LIKED it!
But it was all about the dice. I think Rutskarn has an example in the series above where an ironbellied dwarf can get drunk under the table by a tiny pixie bard because of an egregiously bad roll.
Newer systems have taken the dice from the center of the experience. Sure they’re usually the way (at the end of the day) certain facts get decided, but the games are much more about sensible plans, actions, and characters than about “This guy should be able to lop some limbs off even with some middling rolls.”
The wider variety of systems has certainly invited folks that would have previously been outside looking in. But I think it’s changed even how us dice rollers look at the hobby and what’s possible. My idea of what a good campaign looks like is certainly different than it used to be…
“While (as mentioned above) there is some hyperbole at play, I do think the broadening of the hobby has absolutely led to different types of people entering it.”
Nah, ‘we’ were already there at the beginning. What it* absolutely has done is bring a lot things that were mostly tucked away out in the open. The whole “Why are we invading people’s homes, killing them, and taking their stuff” versus “because they’re Orcs, not people” problem has been there since 1974.
I remember in 1980 snarkily suggesting we just give the Orcs plague blankets instead of murdering them, and it being a radical turning point for the GM’s plots (he went from using premade adventures to making his own).
Now, system-wise we’ve had a lot of waves of revolutionary designs over the years. Each decade has been it’s own new wave of how to do things, slowly incrementing roleplaying games further and further away from their purely tactical roots, but we were doing pure narrative rules-light back in the late 70s and early 80s. We just weren’t publishing our stuff, the internet has really opened that space up.
* By which I mean the internet. Increased communications and visibility brings stuff you might think was only “in your game” really out into the community as a whole, especially when you’re seeing “everyone else has these problems” or “everyone else is tinkering with these rules”, etc. The internet has been a great benefit for the game.
Yeah, modern RPGs seem to have gotten a lot more narrative/character-building heavy than classic D&D (although, in the most recent Fear the Boot, Dan makes an interesting observation that the supremely disjointed rules of AD&D appear to be the result of giving examples of how you might approach certain situations mechanically, if you’re not entirely certain you don’t just want to address the whole thing narratively).
Also, yes, Dorkness Rising! I recently (last year) went to the trouble of finding it again on YouTube, along with the first part, The Gamers, and there’s a sequel, too (The Gamers: Hands of Fate, mostly about a TCG) and a few other bits and pieces set in the same universe, as well as other RPG content by the same people. Look up Zombie Orpheus Entertainment and Dead Gentlemen Productions, the content is split between the channels a bit.
I watched the first three films without any of the followups, and it seems like the players involved just got more jerkish and creepy with every successive film. The first films has a group of geeky, somewhat socially inept geeks who are otherwise nice guys. In the second film, the (original) three players are a self-described dick, an abusive boss, and an individual with an unhealthy fascination with one of his instructors and a number of mental illness problems. In the third film, the abusive boss character is somewhat nicer, but the dick is the main character and drives the plot along because he’s just trying to get into a girl’s pants. Meanwhile, the mentally ill guy goes full on nuts and kidnaps a person in one of his delusional episodes because he’s upset at (checks notes)…his favorite television show being canceled.
I absolutely loved the first Gamers movie! Even though I haven’t watched it in years, I can still quote parts of it!
I watched the sequel and I remember liking it OK, but I don’t remember anything else about – just that I likee the original better. I started watching the third movie, but I bounced off of it (although I don’t recall why).
I think the original has a much more focused sense of humor. About 90% of the jokes are “Look how absurd this game play action/narrative would appear if we could see it in real life”. The sequels have this a bit, but go for jokes in all kind of directions in a “Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” kind of way.
My analysis, and the reason I continue to like the whole series (YYMV, of course):
Most of the differences with the first film are because it was a student film, done with a camcorder, at a dorm for the irl parts; whereas the second one is an indie film trying for (simple, hopefully funny) characters while letting the DM and his girlfriend have actual character arcs. The third one… Is very different; I think partly because it’s about a TCG instead of a TTRPG, and also because it’s trying to give the jerk an arc (it starts with him trying to get into a girl’s pants, but it turns into a D&D-only guy getting super into the politics of a plot-heavy TCG and helping shape the future of the game) while turning what were the serious characters of the second into joke characters, because the framing device for the whole series seems to be that only one or two characters get serious arcs at a time, plus only the jerk character was actually playing the core game. The game and the way the in-game plot intersects with the real-world plot is actually pretty awesome in the third one. Though, yeah, making the weird guy into an outright psycho was an odd choice. The other bits (there’s a few one-shots and live shows, plus a series of related shorts) seem to indicate
1. that they’re not really trying for a unified canon so much as a series of stories that can be told with the same basic characters, with only vague references to events of previous installments,
2. that the characters are basically cartoon characters, which both reinforces 1 and gives them some leeway for ridiculousness (see especially the Shadowrun one-shot),
3. that at some point they wanted to set up a sequel that took into account the original ending, with the D&D characters barging into the dorm lounge (there’s a series of shorts covering the years since they got stuck in the real world), which may have been meant to account for a certain amount of cartoonishness, although I’m not sure we’ll ever really know at this point, because
4. The creators have spent decades honing their craft since creating that original student film, and now The Gamers series also serves as a way to introduce people to such amazing works as Journey Quest, Demon Hunters, and Strowlers, not related to The Gamers in any way but still obviously by people who love gaming culture and making great films.
That’s my read, anyway; the differences between installments are big enough that I certainly don’t blame anyone who only likes one or two of them (but I still recommend everyone give the Shadowrun one a shot). And I also recommend the (unrelated) one about people from a D&D world playing an RPG about modern people in the suburbs called Humans & Households.
EDIT: after a brief lookup to confirm the title Humans & Households, I can also say that the title of the Shadowrun one is Natural One.
I was talking to a novice DM the other day about an adventure he was running and how the players weren’t doing quite what the book said. I told him that he could go off track if that was where the party wanted to go and he said “You can do that?!?”
The original D&D rules were very much “This is how you >could< resolve this", since each table was quite different. Remember this was long before the internet. Snail mail campaigns were not unknown.
It’s fun thinking about how your dad would have set up this scene. I of course only know him through his writing, but my headcannon is he would have done something like the following, taking the campaign to date into account…
He would have set up that there’s a council being held tomorrow to discuss what to do about the ring, and it’s been waiting for Frodo to recover to be held.
The conversation with Bilbo would have been set up more like “Your Uncle Bilbo has travelled the world like few hobbits before him. He is more familiar with the ring than anyone, and understands Gandalf and Elrond well. What would you ask of him?” This would have been an entirely optional conversation, but could have been used to drop GM hints that would be a lead-in to the council if Frodo engaged in the conversation. Examples of things to learn:
* The power of the ring is an almost irresistable temptaion. Hobbits are immune, Elves are strong against it but not immune, dwarves somewhat tempted, humans very weak. The ringbearer is highly tempted, but the companions also tempted.
* If the ring is lost (for example in the sea), Sauron cannot be defeated by any known means.
* Sauron can be overthrown by a mortal wielding the ring. However, the wielder would be almost unbearably corrupted in the attempt, and would then have to be defeated in turn after Sauron fell.
* Hobbits are almost never seen east of Rivendell. If hobbits travel with the party, they will be remarked on in any major town or settlement they pass.
* Bilbo might give Frodo his mithril shirt during this encounter if we assume he doesn’t already have it.
* Etc. The point is to drop optional but useful lore, hint at what the GM wants the party to decide in the council, and maybe give some treasure. Give the player some reason to like, trust, and relate to Bilbo.
The next day is the council of Elrond, at which Shamus would likely set up a few major options for the players to choose between.
* Destroy the ring. This will have been hinted at as the best option heavily.
* Use the ring. This would be a very different campaign, obviously, but he might offer the choice.
* Maybe some others (Hide the ring? Pick off the Nazgul one at a time?)
Assuming the players are convinced to destroy the ring, I think Shamus would offer some options (a la the multiple ways to imprison the lich in the DnD campaign that started the site):
* Mount Doom is known to work (since it’s where the ring came from), but it’s incredibly difficult to get to.
* Maybe have some other magical forge at Orthanc, but to use it we have to fight and kill and evil wizard, while also staying ahead of the Nazgul chasing us (who will have an easier time following us on the roads going South)
* Maybe allow the ring to be taken to the Grey Havens and ask the Valar to destroy it? Maybe this is more of a hide-and-seek running campaign, so maybe too different.
Also, critically, the players would be asked to pick the party.
* Bigger parties need more supplies and are easier to spot, but are better in a fight.
* Most of the available fighters are humans, but humans are tempted by the ring. Beyond Aragorn (who we’ll call critical) player can take or leave Boromir and maybe a number of other humans. The humans would all have some kind of special relationship/ability to make them worth it (like Boromir being the son of the Steward of Gondor). Might have a Rohrrim captani here, or some folks with special skills.
* Gandalf can be taken or not. The advantage of Gandalf is obviously a high-level wizard, but the disadvantage is that Sauron can (imperfectly) sense him, and so we’ll see more encounters.
* Hobbits make great ring bearers, but will be remarked on if spotted. Just take one? Two? This also playes into “strategy” below.
* Weakness in how I set this up is there’s no reason not to take as many elves as fit in the party, and there should be a bunch around…
Finally, the players will have their choice of path and strategy.
* Move on horseback will be faster, but tie players to major roads, meaning going through settlements. More patrolling enemy groups, greater chance of being spotted.
* Travelling on foot will be slower, but allow staying more off the grid. More wilderness camping, so more chance of random mod encounters, but less ambush by organized enemy groups.
* A smart move might be to split the party – Aragorn, 2 hobbits, any elves and dwarves head out on foot, while Galdalf, the other 2 hobbits, Boromir, and some other humans ride in a different direction as a decoy. It’s hard to split a playing party, so maybe this party is all NPC’s.
Obviously, this setup will almost certainly deviate from the books immediately after the council, but that’s fine – the point is to stay mostly within the major events and places of the world. The details of individual battles and events will always be up to the players and the dice.
I have no idea if Shamus would actually do some/all of these things, but somewhat consistent with how I’d read his approach elsewhere.
nice work
” there’s no reason not to take as many elves as fit in the party, and there should be a bunch around…”
How many of these elves are actually willing to join?
Legolas is the only one in the end, and he’s a “wood elf”, who’s never been over the seas. Elrond’s house is mostly empty from all the others who previously left, and more keep leaving during the events of the movies.
You could try to persuade one to join, but do you really want a party member who’s divided in their mind?
Yeah. Maybe this is a beef I have with the original books as well – it’s weird to me that, on a quest to save the world, there are so few potential party members. Glorfindel would certainly be useful fighting the Nazgul, for example.
I recall them justifying it somehow, but it’s not entirely satisfying that the Gandalf is a member of the party and more elves are not. Especially given a large number of who I believe are these same elves will show up at Helm’s Deep.
I think a big part of the reason was keeping the party small to avoid detection. Elrond suggests something like “nine Walkers, against the nine Riders,” as a sort of symbolic thing, but it has a practical purpose too; stealth is basically the only option. Adding twenty elves would make it harder to keep the party’s travels secret, and wouldn’t be much use when Sauron picks up on it and sends all nine Ringwraiths with a thousand orcs to back them up. As to why there aren’t more potential party members…well, the elves all have a guaranteed Get Out of Middle Earth Free card, so if Sauron wins they can all just deplanet and go somewhere better (better, notably, even than if he loses, as even the retreats of Rivendell and Lothlorien will lose the preservative powers of the Rings that Elrond and Galadriel have with the One Ring’s destruction). There’s basically no upside for the elves no matter what happens as the Age of Men approaches, so there’s probably not a lot of motivation to help. Plus most elves are fantastically old at this point and pretty world-weary; even Legolas says he’s seen “many an oak grow from acorn to ruinous old age.” (Also, they only show up in the movie, they really weren’t all that interested in helping Men any more by this point.)
As for the rest of the party members, they were or less just there by “chance” (Boromir literally shows up that morning after questing for a hundred and ten days on his own based on a mysterious dream, for instance), they couldn’t exactly advertise the secret meeting to save the world without compromising it.
There’s also very much a “we can’t really do things until Sauron does things” balance of power vibe going on. It’s why Gandalf can’t just go all “holy angel” all the time, he has to remain hidden and judiciously use his abilities in small ways, because he can’t upset the balance (and needs to remain hidden from Sauron).
In the books, the number is deliberately Nine Walkers (to counteract the Nine Riders – symbolism has power). When they’re filling out the last two, Glorfindel is considered; Merry & Pippin object; Gandalf has sudden foresight and says, “Hey, maybe friendship is more important than sheer badassery, given that secrecy rather than brute force is our method”.
As far as Helm’s Deep, those are from Lothlorien rather than Rivendell, and are a movie-only invention.
Damn, now I want to DM something in middle earth
I got into a play-by-message-board campaign some years back that ran for ages. The DM fit a slightly customised AD&D (“first edition”) ruleset into a Middle-Earth setting about sixty years after the War of the Ring. We had a bunch of players who were mostly keen Tolkien geeks and the sheer amount and quality of the byplay was amazing.
My contribution was a Silvan Elf named “Gil-Gandel” (Sindarin for “Starharp”) who started out as an apprentice bard and became a real one later on after a period of tutoring from Tom Bombadil, no less. But even while he was still a fighter, the DM allowed him to have some flavour effect when he did something bardic, which started when he wrote a funeral ode for an NPC who’d just died in battle and went from there. I barely even knew I could *write* poetry, but with a little inspiration it’s surprising what you can do.
We visited Edoras a couple of times. The first time, GG sang a song about the Riddermark that led the aged King Eomer to say “Anything from my treasury is yours”, to which I naturally responded “noble King, the gift of your applause is reward enough”, but the bard revised his opinion slightly on learning that Eomer had a copy of the Halfling’s Book that he could read if he liked. Next time we were that way, Eomer had died, so it was time to uncork a proper funeral lament. Fun times.
Neurospicy is my word of the day.
This movie and Harry Potter are things I watched many times without being boring.
I remember the first time I read this comic (I binge read the whole series in one night).
“Hi Uncle Bilbo. Thanks for the Ring.” Made me laugh my ass off.
Honestly, why would I want to know about a culture my DM was making up off the top of his head.
I remember back when Shamus was on Spoiler Warning, Rutskarn told a story of how he told his group that there was a bookshelf filled with books in a room they were in. They asked about the books and Rutskarn gave a general description of what kinds of books were on the shelf. So someone grabbed a specific book and asked him what that book was and he had to make up a title and a summary of contents (it was a book of poetry). So the guy opened the book to a specific page and read, forcing Rutskarn to craft a poem off the top of his head. They were clearly trolling him.
That’s the only reason any group I was in would spend four hours questioning an NPC about their culture. And honestly, we’d get bored of trolling the DM long before that. I might be the one out of any such group to show any interest in that sort of thing but not nearly to the degree you’re describing.
Now if its something like the works of Tolkien, then yeah I’d be interested in reading stuff like that because I know how much thought he put into it and how much expertise he had to draw upon in crafting details like that. But not some random guy running our DnD adventure.