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.