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There's a thing that sets traditional tabletop RPGs apart from basically every storytelling media that's not tabletop RPG, whether it's comic books, movies, books, TV shows, or video games, though video games are also slightly different.
And that is that in any other form of storytelling, everything is being controlled somehow by the same writer(s) or creative team, which means that everything can and will come together exactly the way they need to for the next thing to happen, next.
Whether the hero in any non-interactive story pulls off the million to one shot or dramatically fails is decided by the same person who is responsible for lining up all the other moving pieces (positions of enemies, layout of room, environmental conditions, etc.)
When a team of fire-forged, battle-hardened friends in a non-interactive medium fight back to back, they're able to use their rapport and a shared shorthand to pull off incredibly coordinated stunts together... because the same person is controlling all of them.
I've talked about this before, but that trope right there is why, when I'm running D&D or similar, I not only don't penalize players for tactical table talk during combat, I encourage them to engage in it. It's out of character. They can coordinate out of character.
I've seen other game runners respond to that with "No, because if they want those kinds of tactics, they can come up with them in advance, like the person in the story did, and have code words." But. The person in the story didn't come up with it in advance. The writer did.
And in "the real world" of the story, the people who have this kind of fighting rapport... they live every moment of their lives in their own skins in that world. They have time to come up with these things that players don't.
Now I mentioned that video games are different, because they are interactive, but even the most sandboxy video game is ultimately a bounded experience in some ways.
When you're playing a story-based game with designed environments and set goals, that environment has been crafted by designers who specifically made sure that things conspire to make the goals achievable.
Every obstacle in a video game that is an obstacle and not a boundary is surmountable. Every enemy you're supposed to defeat is defeatable. Every game that can be won is winnable. Every step required to win it is doable.
So it plays out differently in a video game because there's a second party (you) controlling the protagonist, to a greater or lesser extent (some games are really choose your own adventures at the story level, if they offer that much choice) and you can fail at things...
...although in whole broad swaths of electronic gaming, any critical failure is non-canonical. The game ends and restarts from a point where you had not yet failed, so that no matter what, when the story ends you DID do the thing.
I did not fully appreciate this when I was a child or young adult but this, to me, is the least satisfying thing about most tabletop games. Not that success is not guaranteed, but that the story does not tend to play out the way a lifetime of stories has prepared me for.
As I've been refining what I do with Dragons, And So On... I keep hearing echoes in my head of people (who mostly never even played it) sneering at 4E D&D as being "easy mode" or "god mode" because how random capricious character death was rarer in it.
Because the guidelines I write emphasize how, when you put an obstacle into the game, you should plan on the players overcoming it. Not that they will, but that they can. Otherwise it's not an obstacle, it's a boundary.
And combine that with a system in which character death or any other permanent change in a character's status is left to player agency and yeah, it does sound like "D&D in god mode", if you assume the goal is to be D&D.
And yeah, as the name Dragons, And So On... indicates, it's heavily D&D inspired. But my goal isn't "D&D but make it easy." It's "Tell stories set in a D&D-like world that more closely match the media that inspired D&D and has been inspired by D&D than any actual D&D game does."
And a big part of that is an attitude towards the game where it's understood that the game runner, as the lead storyteller, *is* on the players' side. Their job is to keep things interesting more than it is keeping them challenging (and fun more so than either of those).
Yeah. We just watched an episode of Um Actually where @BrennanLM (who can be a rules stickler) mentioned that when Sam declares he can't carry the ring but he can carry Frodo, you *don't* make him roll for Strength... https://twitter.com/veleda_k/status/1304847028145524736
...and I think an interesting way to handle that isn't to declare that rolls don't matter, but that sometimes, the roll isn't "Do you succeed?" but "Does the effort cost you, and how badly?"
And basically, as a matter of game design with the game design theory that you have mechanics that encourage the behavior you want to see, in Dragons, And So On..., if you've attempted something that is possible and you fail a roll, you decide if it's failure or a costly success.
It's not something the game runner imposes on you but a choice you make as the lead writer and creative advocate for your character's story, that *this* pivotal moment you built up in your head is do-or-die. And you decide after rolling so if you succeed anyway, you succeed.
Yeah, and even game runners who embrace collaboration, when running a D&D-ish game, tend to default to competitive when it comes to combat because "Well, the other side would try to win." https://twitter.com/Lotusprime/status/1304849559936315392
The combat guidelines I'm writing are explicit that it's a collaboration, not a competition, and while die rolls put limits on how much control each player has each round, the game runner doesn't even directly control the enemy NPCs, under this system.
Because again, if someone is writing/directing an awesome fight scene... the bad guys are going to hit their marks so the good guys can hit them.
If a player gets a high number of attack points for the round, the enemies aren't going to see them going on a rampage and take cover... the attack points they rolled indicates they have a lot of opportunities to score a hit.
The way a round is structured: players roll dice indicating how many points of offense and shenanigans (separate pools) they have for the round, and how much danger they're in.
Players then indicate how they're spending their attack and shenanigans points, ideally by narrating it. When they're finished, the game runner adds, "Yes, but when you did ____, ____ slipped a blow under your guard." to spend the player's danger points.
Each player gets one reaction per round that lets them "Yes, but" something that the game runner decrees.
Any changes to the state of play (somebody out of the fight from damage or inconvenienced by shenanigans) explicitly doesn't take effect until the next round, as everybody's "turn" is actually happening at the same time in whatever order it needs to.
As somebody who is super used to D&D competitive style tactical combat, even designing this system and knowing my own logic behind it I'm finding it hard to let go of things to just acknowledge that I'm explicitly letting players "co-write" a fight scene.
And it's still very much a system in which players can lose a fight due to poor choices and/or poor dice rolls. There's still both luck and strategy to it.
(But the game specifies that all battles have stakes without usually being life and death.)
(But the game specifies that all battles have stakes without usually being life and death.)
Like, I think one thing that hampers the ability of players to get off the kinds of really satisfying gambits that fictional heroes do? Not only is the game runner not collaborating with them, but even if they fully understand it's not a versus situation...
...but when they're evaluating if the guards would fall for it, if they would stand where they are vulnerable to the trick, etc., the game runner's only frame of reference is "Do I think *I* would fall for this? I do not. So it's not realistic."
(See related trope of people who, without being explicit that this is what they are doing, set their games in Metafiction Land, where no one stands within 30 feet of each other because they know 5th level wizards will come along and fireball them.)
Anyway.
Point of all this is that I think people who are really into the idea of tabletop and who love character creation come up with amazing ideas for characters and then, unless they get an awesome GM, never get close to the potential they imagine for that character.
Point of all this is that I think people who are really into the idea of tabletop and who love character creation come up with amazing ideas for characters and then, unless they get an awesome GM, never get close to the potential they imagine for that character.
And that's why I'm embracing as the core design mission for this project, a game where the player has the agency to write their character's own story to a higher degree, both on the longer scale and in the moment.
