Falling out of love with the dedicated table

As far as I can tell, there are three structures for running a D&D-like game:

  1. Mini-Campaign. A small, temporary group runs through a single adventure over one or two sessions. Maybe six at most.
  2. Dedicated Table. A small, dedicated group explores a wide-open sandbox at a regular meeting time for a few months to a few years.
  3. Open Table. A large group of players explore either a megadungeon or a hexcrawl (“West Marches”), joining sessions as they are available. No one is expected to join every session.

I have a few thoughts.

Thought #1: On Levelling

I would rather have three separate games for each of these structures than trying to bend a single game to serve all three.

OD&D was designed for the open table. I think character levelling is the key example. In a large, community game, it helps a lot to have a “score” that instantly communicates how long you’ve been playing, how long you’ve survived, and how powerful your character is. The same principle is at work in MMORPGs.

What do character levels do for a dedicated table game? Not much—the group already knows how long you’ve been playing. Obsession with balance starts to creep into the game, because now the Fighter gets to compare their power curve with the Magic-User from session to session, and character sheets get weighed down with abilities to compensate.

I think the GLOG approaches the sweet spot for leveling in a dedicated table game. Four levels of cool abilities is about right to encourage players to buy in for a longer game without burying their heads in their character sheets or making PCs too complex to kill.

I don’t think mini-campaigns need a levelling system at all. I think the Into the Odd school of design makes the best games for mini-campaigns—fast, levelless, environment and item-focused. The FKR is also interesting.

Thought #2: On Constraints

I might be falling out of love with the dedicated table.

The problem is lack of constraints. A mini-campaign is confined to a single adventure. An open table is confined to a single megadungeon or wilderness area and, typically, a single town or city.

When a single party has your full attention for an extended period, they can go anywhere and do anything on a sizeable world map. That’s the expectation, at least.

That macro-level of freedom might be liberating for some people, but I think I’m more interested in the micro-level of freedom that RPGs can provide within a limited environment.

What attracts me to RPGs more than anything is the capacity to plan and execute something crazy. Break the rules and leave a mark on the world in a way none of us could have seen coming.

Crazy plans come from pressure, and a world where you can go anywhere and do anything is not a good start on that front. I think I would rather keep things within “a (mega)dungeon and a town,” or, at most, a miniature pointcrawl in the style of Electric Bastionland’s boroughs.

Thought #3: On Patterns

In a livestream of the videogame Spelunky, Chris McDowall raises the point that roguelike-style trial-and-error deaths don’t work in TTRPGs because the time from “learning a lesson” and being able to apply that lesson is too long.

If you are killed by a troll because it regenerated, it may be a very long time before you encounter another troll and get to apply what you learned, because the pattern of both mini-campaigns and dedicated table games is to present distinct content with every dungeon.

I consider this a problem. If the players can’t build up a body of knowledge about a consistent game world, how can you layer on complexity and challenge? If specific knowledge of one dungeon is not useful in the next, you might as well have a series of tutorials for unfinished games.

I am attracted to the “open-table megadungeon” format as the solution to this problem. I think it provides a real opportunity to establish a consistent vocabulary of mechanics that continue to be relevant throughout play.

Can I build a megadungeon with monsters that have very specific behaviors, which combine in interesting ways with the behaviors of other monsters and the environment? Time will tell. My current focus is refining and focusing Squires Errant to be the best mini-campaign game it can be.

Comments

  1. SpwackNovember 6, 2020 at 8:53 AM

    I have had some issues with the "learning the lesson" time. My current megadungeon has a very pro-metagame bent. The starting location has a table covered with maps, charts and notes, the diegetic representation of the "Discoveries and Goals" channel where everyone is expected to leave notes and ask questions etc. even if it doesn't *quite* make sense.

    It's interesting seeing the jump from "what have I learned this session" to "what have the several current (and potentially future) groups learned".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tim B.November 6, 2020 at 2:54 PM

      That's an element I hadn't considered! Community learning definitely takes on an interesting character. I'm excited to do more research into this style of play... It really did only hit me recently that it might serve what I like about RPGs best.

      Delete
    2. Dreaming DragonslayerJune 3, 2021 at 4:19 PM

      That point of sharing information makes me think of Ben Robbins' West Marches game: http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/79/grand-experiments-west-marches-part-2-sharing-info/

      Tim, I'm with you on the "no more dedicated table." Open table is the way to go. Best scenario: one GM running one game for several groups that are all a part of the same setting.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ruins & Rogues vs. Maze Rats

Image
So after years of trying to design my perfect game, I finally have it in my hands... And what do you know, it turns out it's very similar to Maze Rats . Hell, its name is even made up of synonyms for "Maze" and "Rats." I didn't consciously set out to write a Maze Rats hack. This is just where I ended up. But why did I end up here, and if what I wanted was so similar to Maze Rats, why did I make a new game instead of just playing Maze Rats? I don't see many people talking about the actual rules of Maze Rats, I mostly see them talking about the tables, so this should be an interesting exercise. Similarities Before we analyze differences, let's take a look at what these games have in common. Both games use "control-panel" layout and fit their core rules on a two-page spread. Both games only use six-sided dice. Both games have quick character creation based on rolling PCs randomly. Both games use side initiative: on your side's turn, you ca
Read more

LORE DUMP: On the Origin of Gods, Monsters, Magic, and More

Image
The following post is about lore I'm thinking of using for my next campaign world. If you think you'd like to play in a game of mine some day, perhaps you'd rather discover it in-game alongside your character, if it even comes up at all. (Personally, I don't think it's much of a spoiler, and a little out-of-character knowledge might give you context for how your character would understand the world.) I. Sapient species produce souls. This phenomenon is poorly understood, but what is known is that, unless the soul's host experienced some serious trauma , the soul sinks to the center of the planet and joins a mass of soul-stuff called the World Will. A select few, called "prophets," are born with the ability to encounter aspects of the World Will through their dreams. Through such encounters, the prophets come to categorize, personify, and interact with such aspects, which they conceive of as "gods" or "spirits." (In truth, the manifo
Read more

The Four Channels of Creative Constraints on RPGs

Image
I’ve come up with what I think is an interesting and useful way of thinking about RPGs, but the seeds of it were planted in my head by an unlikely source. I was watching this GDC talk by Mick Gordon about how he created the music for Doom (2016). In it, he describes how his main instrument for the game was a simple sine wave — what he describes as the purest form of sound — filtered through four channels of machines that distort the “pure” sound into something industrial, noisy, and full of character. In a previous post , I described all RPGs as the product of different kinds of “creative constraints” upon play-pretend, which you might call the “purest form” of RPG. I listed various kinds of constraints, but this GDC talk made me think — what if I reorganized those constraints into four channels of distortion? Four channels through which you distort and shape the raw energy of play-pretend into something with a particular character? It turns out it maps pretty well to four channels. S
Read more