Back to the RP
“But Colin! Roleplay doesn’t end when initiative begins! You can still make characterful decisions and drop action hero quips during the fight!”
Yes. Yes you can. And if you’re gaming with me, I’d appreciate it if you did. That is part of the hobby that I happen to enjoy. But if you find yourself adventuring alongside Handbook-World’s premiere diva, you know that isn’t what she’s talking about at all.
When a player like Wizard says “let’s get back to roleplay,” they don’t want to cast damaging spells or get in a few lines of dialogue between initiative passes. They want extended improvised conversations between characters, punctuated by only the most occasional of Diplomancy checks. That means roomfuls of maneuvering nobles at a costume ball. It means standing trial before a jury of giants and talking your way out of titanicide charges. It means riddling with Smaug rather than fighting him. Chances are that most players would enjoy any of these set-piece social encounters. But the problems come creeping in when one player wants every encounter to look that way.
If you’ve got one very-talky player at the table with combat monkeys, you’ve got problems. The mechanically-inclined sword swingers groan with boredom when the speechifying starts. The amateur thespian is on the phone and scrolling Reddit by the end of combat round 1. And the solution (for me anyway) has a lot to do with pacing.
Assuming a “standard game night” of four players, four hours, and dungeon fantasy, I can fit in an average of five big encounters per session. And within that setup, my rule of thumb is to include at least one combat and at least one RP encounter. I’ll admit that it’s not an especially complicated solution, but it does work for me. That’s because my goal is to serve all of my players, every time, at least a little. Even if they don’t love every moment of the session, they’ll always feel like they got at least a taste of their favorite flavor.
What about the rest of you guys though? When it comes time to balance your “I want RP” players against your “could we please kill something now?” players, how do you keep everyone entertained? For today’s discussion, tell us all about your own preferred combat/RP ratio, along with your strats to achieve it. With any luck, we’ll collectively discover the best ways to keep most folk happy most of the time. All clear? Then I’ll see you down in the comments!
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Pathfinder’s Intrigue splatbook has a whole section devoted to social combat / social encounters. Where arguments play out like a heated battle. I wonder how Wiz would like those.
I suspect that pausing to check the DC on Assessing Audience Bias, dividing relevant abilities by three to determine number of Edges, and looking up the correct formula for determining a verbal duelist’s Base Determination (the average [rounded down] of Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma modifiers [minimum 0] + total Hit Dice), is not the sort of gameplay that Wizard would like.
Cleric, on the other hand, has dilated pupils and is breathing heavily.
Wizard doesn’t always bathe in the blood of her enemies, but when she does, it’s written like George R.R. Martin writes about food.
Also, did a angry god of battle temporarily possess Wizard?
Nope. Just me. 😛
Also as a note for posterity, I find it endlessly fascinating how Laurel interprets these scripts and arrives at a composition.
TITLE: Back to the RP
TEXT: Know what you want out of the adventure. Then go get it.
PIC: Wizard stands victorious over a blasted battlefield. She looks like a warrior goddess: blood spattered and invincible over a pile of the slain. Fires and craters and scorch marks are everywhere. (I considered having Fighter looking slack jawed at the carnage, but it may be more effective to just have Wizard addressing an unseen audience.)
DIALOGUE:
Wizard: There. You have had your combat encounter. Now can we please get back to roleplaying?
SCROLLOVER: I mean, who’s going to tell her no? Although I suppose that argument could make for some good RP….
When I was in college, we affectionately referred to that as ‘animator’s brain.’
The condition is permanent and has no cure. However, it does grant a +1 to Wonder a circumstantial +2 to Perform: Comedy checks.
Pretty sure it’s just straight up magic.
Implying that the author/DM is not an angry god of battle.
Where’s my pteruges at?
While I’ve no objection to Wizard’s style of play, it does have the challenge that such scenes often end up dominated by one player/character.
And I don’t mean that in the sense that one player _always_ dominates, as Wizard tends to… but in any social-heavy scene, there tends to be a focus on one character, leaving other players as spectators. Combat scenes do tend to be more equitable, since while not all characters are equal, initiative ensures everyone gets a slice of the attention.
A GM can help here by having relevant NPCs remember to fold the bystander PCs back into the action. It’s not very systematic, but it does keep things fluid.
On one hand, I really like games where I can really get into character.
On the other hand, I’m really bad at talking to other people.
I like Play By Post games. You can talk as much as you want without interrupting other people or needing to think of whatever you want to say in 20 seconds.
Do you lose anything by stopping to think rather than improvising in the moment?
>how do you keep everyone entertained?
Change the group’s composition.
It’s nice of course to seek solutions and compromises. But when you’ve got both people that lean much more into RP and people who lean much more into combat in the same group, then you plain can’t make everyone happy. Not fully, at least.
Obviously it’s not as cut and dry as I make it sound, those tastes are on a spectrum. But sometimes the effort expanded to try and make everyone happy would probably be better spent making the subset of the group whose tastes match yours very happy and (if necessary) helping the others form their own group where they’ll also be happier, rather than try to fit a square peg and a triangle peg into a round hole at the same time.
If you have a group with balanced tastes though, then just talking it out and stating clearly what you prefer so the game can be balanced accordingly should always be the first step.
If that’s an option, it’s a good option. If it’s not an option, it’s super frustrating to hear people tell you to just find a new group, somehow.
More frustrating than trying desperately to make your group work when it *can’t*?
Again, I’m not talking about a group of people with mostly balanced tastes here. I’m talking about groups of people with incompatible tastes.
Yes, people telling you to do something that’s impossible in your situation as if it’s the easiest thing in the world is frustrating. I can’t say whether it’s more frustrating than trying to make an incompatible gaming group work, because I have never seen a gaming group that was as incompatible as you’re describing. I am, in fact, not sure they exist, outside the minds of people reading simplified accounts of others’ gaming stories.
I’ll echo the gold wyrm on this one. Finding a group of people that share all your tastes is a quick way to gaming nirvana. But that’s not exactly and easy task. More often, I’ve found that the group I’ve been dealt is the group I’ve been dealt, and the challenge is pleasing the diverse tastes of a social circle.
QotDA: We have one player that’s more hacky and slashy. But as time has gone on, that one player has seen some cool story moments. He’s the youngest member of the group, and he’s taking those steps into trying to do cool things. He’s a noob and sometimes it’s cringe, but I’m proud that the team tries to make his moments cool too. Be the change, right?
Story Time! RP in combat encounters specifically.
So I made werewolf Indiana Jones for a campaign I’m in. And one of the other players made an Oracle with that curse that makes them flip personalities. We were investigating ancient ruins and had found a magic orrery that imprinted upon those who used it symbols of power of those who had originally made it.
After the first use, the room showed signs of being structurally unsound, but it was holding. The other personality took over in the Oracle and DEMANDED to use the device. The party tried to stop her, but I interdicted (for lots of reasons, one being that I like other people to get big plot moments too) and told everyone else to get out; I’ll make sure we both get out.
The party makes their way out and is ambushed by our “guides” BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY ARE. Meanwhile, I’m back in the deep room with the oracle and the device, and it’s clear this second use is going to collapse the room on us. She gets out dazed and staggered for the next few rounds.
I put The Plan into motion. I grab the girl with my standard and carry her as far as I can get with my move. The back wall of the room collapses at the start of my turn, and I use a Run action to get us out of there. A second run action later, and I see our party fighting at the bottleneck of doors into the deeper ruins… so I make a huge Acrobatics check to dive through the raging battle, doing shoulder vaults and slide kicks through the enemy team, sticking the landing on the other side, and in a dancing, twirling flourish, set the girl down while drawing my blades.
..I’ve been dice cursed in that game. I think I might have hit someone in that encounter, but I don’t remember my combat rolls being anything of note there. But I sure as hell remember the dashing rescue that lead to an intercharacter romance between an exiled werewolf and “evil spirit” in our Oracle.
Ok. So it’s 2:00 am in a Berlin techno club, and I followed maybe 37% of that. All I’ll say is that characterful choices matter A LOT when they lead to big moments. If they are “just” for character development in a literary sense, however, I find that they’re less impactful.
“But if you find yourself adventuring alongside Handbook-World’s premiere diva, you know that isn’t what she’s talking about at all.”
And Wizard is one of the problem players (though I suppose every Handbook character is problem of a differing sort*). Ye Olde School “But I just made a speech why am I rolling //dice//?” said with a sneer at the end.
As though because you can make impromptu speeches that means either everyone should or they should never dare sully a “social character” with their grubby unsocial mitts.
* Except Cleric. He’s alright, no problems there. Every group needs a well educated rules lore master. /ignoringthemirrorintensifies.jpg
“When it comes time to balance your “I want RP” players against your “could we please kill something now?” players, how do you keep everyone entertained?”
By doing both and requiring skills rolls in social combat. And mental combat – investigations, puzzles, riddles, battles or wit and skill, etc.
And running a system that can handle social and mental challenges, though not as tactically as it can handle physical challenges. I have to give a hand to FATE, by making all challenges equal mechanically, they really leveled the playing field in that regard.
Now if I could only people to play it or someone to run it…
Do you ever find that you lose some of the spontanaity of RP when you rely 100% on rolling skill checks to adjudicate social encounter outcomes? I mean, surely the content of the RP affects the mechanics on some level, perhaps by offering a circumstance bonus or lowering a DC?
No. I have a principle that I call “The Dice Get a Screenwriting Credit.” The players roll the dice, and then they RP the situation that brought about the result the dice have decreed. A) It places some boundaries on the roleplaying, as the player knows what outcome they’re going for, and B) it removes the need for the play to guess at what I, as the GM, feel might work.
The general reason why I don’t allow RP to supplant, or even influence the mechanics is that it really easily slides into “If I RP this well, I can take narrative control of this other character,” and that always leads to problems. Besides, even in improv, the audience has input into what’s happening. Generally, I reward good roleplaying with story points, bonuses to be spent later, et cetera.
^^ This, the first paragraph anyway. They don’t make a stellar speech and then blow the roll and somehow everyone hates their speech. They make the roll and then they can make the speech fit the roll, or just wing it with paraphrasing if they aren’t spoony bards in real life.
“Do you ever find that you lose some of the spontanaity of RP when you rely 100% on rolling skill checks to adjudicate social encounter outcomes?”
No. Do allow non-roll stuff to adjudicate physical actions? Then why allow non-roll stuff to adjudicate social actions? Or mental actions.
“I mean, surely the content of the RP affects the mechanics on some level, perhaps by offering a circumstance bonus or lowering a DC?”
Nope. Do you also give bonuses to sword-swinging if the Fighter’s Player can swing swords really well in real life?
If not, maybe recheck your biases, because the tongue-tied jock-geek wants to know why his ‘spoony bard’ character never gets to pull of crazy speech checks like the drama-geek’s ‘spoony bard’. Why do the drama kids get bonuses to their rolls when us jock kids don’t get commiserate bonuses to what we do well in real life?
This is something I’m glad began to go away with 3e, I’m just sad so many narrativist games seem eager to bring to bring it back.
Come up with a novel way to use the environment in your favor, get a bonus to the combat roll. Come up with a novel way to use the emotional environment in your favor, get a bonus on the persuasion roll. “You wouldn’t make me swing a sword” is a distraction: **Your approach affects the outcome.**
You can see my stance on this one, as well as elaborations in the comments: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/strong-silent-type
How do you deal with the plots and plans and tactics? Surely a clever approach affects the outcome?
For a 5e example, suppose I toss a chunk of meat to some wolves before rolling Animal Handling. Surely that grants me advantage (or even an automatic success) on the check. If I toss the verbal equivalent of meat at an NPC (“Your boss is plotting to kill you, and I have proof right here!”) that grants advantage (or even automatic success) on the Persuasion check.
Both involve clever ideas. It’s just that the latter happens to resemble speaking because the game itself has a verbal interface.
In other words, performance doesn’t get rewarded. The approach does.
I follow a similar mix to yours: (1) mixed group mob, (1) boss, (1) trap/hazard/challenge, (1) RP, (1) DM’s choice– and in varying order.
The real fun comes in scaling/flavoring/rearranging the encounters within a narrative so that it never feels like a reskin of an old mission.
My biggest challenge right now is that my primary player likes to save everyone, but likes the stakes high and the margin of victory narrow. I want to keep him happy, but the Potential TPK meter keeps red-lining. All it takes is one bad night with the dice…
You might get some benefit of having specific objectives in encounters which players want to achieve, but where failure doesn’t spell TPK.
Are you familiar with the “five room dungeon?’ I nearly included it in today’s blog as an example of varied session design.
You know how dissapointed i will be if you tell me that familicide isn’t on Wizard’s spell book? 🙂
Her name is Wizard, not Vaarsuvius. 😛
Name: Wizard
Race: Elf
Class: Vaarsuvius 😛
XD
When I DMed a longer campaign I had gotten really into Fire Emblem 3 Houses, and it showed in how I structured the campaign: The party would have stretches of downtime and then a lead on the plot would show up and the party would pursue that. Towards the last third of the campaign I gave the party an airship so instead of doing Tolkien-style trekking to and from the adventure they got into hijinks on the airship such as the Warforged trying to cook despite not having a sense of smell or taste.
Here’s a surprisingly significant question. Did you decide what these ship-based encounters would look like, or were they based on PC shenanigans and then adapted into encounters?
This is probably one of the great struggles PbP has. Given the slower (often MUCH slower) pacing, you can be stuck in one kind of scene or the other for a good while.
Now the roleplaying thing tends to not be a huge issue. Because people either engage with it or, hopefully at least, say they’ve got nothing for the moment and let others continue on.
But combats will go at the speed of the slowest to respond person in the group does. Sometimes people will RP in combat and other times they won’t. (There’s often only so many times in the same combat you can describe “I cast firebolt and don’t move.” or the like. Or you’ve just hit combat fatigue and everyone is just trying to get the fight over with.)
This can get a lot worse in combat heavy games. And unfortunately I’ve seen a lot of GMs in PbP games really struggle to properly allow for RP time between combat/strictly plot scenes. Maybe in an effort to rush things along so the game doesn’t stagnate or maybe because they just don’t understand some of their players would like to have RP scenes that quite frankly might not involve the GM very much or at all. In general, this just seems to often be a trickier task in PbP. (And often seems as much dependent on skill of players/GM as it does with luck of the current in game scene managing to successfully stimulate the roleplaying imaginations/work with the characters involved.)
I remain regretful that I could never work PBP into my schedule. It is such a different paradigm to my default “in person, four players, found hours” paradigm. I feel like it could be really useful to experience.
I don’t see why you can’t fit 15 minutes every few days into your schedule. That’s about what being a Player in a PbP is like, it’s a lot more as a GM.
I recommend starting as a Player, see if you like it (writers tend to go ape-shit for PbP), and then if you really want the time sink of running a game*, do it.
.* “Time sink” is subjective. I don’t type particularly fast (30ish WPM) and I reread what I wrote about four times with a 30 minute break between 3rd and 4th passes for a ‘brain reset’. So a significantly long scene opening can tack me a few solid hours to type up. But if you’re a blazingly fast typist, and don’t need ye olde ‘four pass’ check, you can significantly reduce that.
https://r.rpol.net/ is where I prefer to do my PbP, it’s got a different feel than the “corporate” boards, and there are a lot of games being run there, even Blades in the Dark (though most times finding a non-D&D 5e or Freeform game feels impossible).
— I write a webcomic.
— I’m working on my dissertation.
— I’m employed.
— My next writing project has been on hiatus since winter break.
— I run four different games and play in two more.
— My IRL social life (including my marriage) is important to me.
— I require sleep.
God I love Battle Goddess Wizard…
I’ve always been partial to Malibu Wizard myself.
I’ll be honest, I’m more on the RP side of the equation, although an interesting fight is good every so often.
The reason for me is the following: my combat itch is being more than satisfied by video games. It’s a sad fact that, no matter how well a tabletop does combat, there is a video game that does it better.
You like medieval swordfighting ? Witcher, Soul Calibur and Dark Souls do it better.
Gunplay ? Allow me to introduce you to Doom, Halo, Shadow Warrior….
You like Exalted like stylish fights against supernatural foes ? Devil May Cry and Bayonetta has you covered.
Even the classic Dungeon Crawling experience has been overtaken by the Diablo, Dark Souls and Darkest Dungeon series.
Another advantage is you don’t need to wait an eternity and a half for the other players to decide what to do during their turns.
So what do tabletops do better than video games ? Flexible social encounters and a long running cooperatively written story between GM and players. Even the most flexible and well written RPGs from Obsidian and CDProjeckt Red can’t reach what can be accomplished when a GM and players get their grove on.
But I recognize you need a mix of both so my one important rule is:
Pacing. Pacing. Pacing.
Do not allow an encounter, fighting,social, riddle… to bog down. That may sometimes require some prodding from the gm onto the players to, as the Monty Python quote goes ‘Get on with it’. I have this rule as a gm that time goes on while players are making a decision. So you have 10 seconds to decide what to do in a combat turn (and then the time required to do/roll the action) and dialogues are real time so if the player spends 5 minutes thinking what to say, the npcs are going to wonder why the character is standing there slack jawed.
I take issue with the idea that video games “do combat better.” I don’t think it’s productive to compare media directly in that way. Usually you’ll get more insight (and less argument from beard-stroking academics like me) if you phrase it as, “I prefer combat in a video game setting for X reason.” There you might hear words like “intensity,” “visual interface,” or “immediate payoff.” But if those translate to “better” is a matter of opinion.
Take your Exalted example. I know that Laurel would object to the idea that Devil May Cry (a visually impressive fast-twitch button masher) could compare to Exalted stunting (imaginative descriptions of over-the-top combat). You’re getting very different things out of the experience, even if you’re ostensibly simulating the same supernatural combat.
As for pacing in combat… It’s been a while. We sort of did it back here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dithering
But I don’t know that I’ve ever tackled “analysis paralysis” or “slow play” specifically. One for the “scripts in development” page I guess. Thanks for the idea. 🙂
I realize I hindsight I phrased this slightly wrong. I did mean this as a personal preference rather than a stone cold fact although I get the feeling it might not be an uncommon preference.
I’ve always treated dice rolling and stats as a necessary evil in rpgs rather than a strength. (mainly because me and the rng have an antagonistic relation) That’s why I enjoy the combat in later Fallouts better than combat in the older ones (although the plot/dialogues of the old games is miles ahead with the exception of New Vegas that has the best of both worlds)
Here’s a thought experiment: What do you lose when you get rid of the dice and the by-hand stat keeping? You might also ask, “What happens if we forgive TRPGs for not being the holodeck, and instead enjoy them for what they are?”
I don’t know why, but I imagine Wizard’s tone here being quite reminiscent of another disgruntled wizard…
“Now can we PLEASE resume saving the world?”
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0595.html
We all put our stories together from the same pile of tropes, don’t we? lol
As a long-term campaign’s DM, I was heavily influenced by Fire Emblem 3 Houses, and the campaign’s structure reflected that: the party would have periods of inactivity, and then a new plot point would emerge for them to investigate. In the latter third of the campaign, I gave the party an airship so that they wouldn’t have to perform Tolkien-style trudging to and from the adventure, and they ended up getting into all sorts of mischief on board, including the Warforged attempting to cook despite their lack of a sense of smell or taste.