I read some things this week. After the jump, you can read them, too.
Posted in Reading List
Tagged 5E, d&d, dnd, Dungeons and Dragons, Paranoia, Pathfinder, Reading List, Roll20
“Help! My players are bored in combat! How do I make my encounters more interesting?”
DMs ask this question all the time, and the usual answer is always a variation on the same theme: add new things to combat. New monsters (there’s a whole book of ’em!), new skill challenges (the tossing deck of a ship!), new tactical challenges (archers hidden in the trees!) The implication is the same: if your encounter is “You bust down the door and there is a monster in the room. It attacks you!” then it’s boring. If your encounter is “You bust down the door and the room is on fire and a monster attacks you and you step on a pressure plate and the party is sprayed with acid” then it isn’t.
More often than not, these DMs come back later with the same problem:
“Help! I’m doing X, Y, and Z, but my players are still bored in combat!”
It’s not that those wrinkles don’t make for more interesting combat, but that the DM has asked the wrong question. Unless you play D&D as a tactical miniatures game, encounters aren’t “more interesting” because you introduce skill checks or environmental challenges. That’s just a new set of variables and a few more dice rolls that get sorted out quickly and then metagamed in ensuing rounds. You run the risk, if you make the combat unpredictable, that the players feel cheated when they die, because they had no chance to figure out the new variables and metagame them appropriately. The players are left unsatisfied, and the DM doesn’t understand what he needs to do to fix it.
He needs to ask the right question:
“How do I make this combat more important?”
Posted in Mundangerous
Tagged 5E, dnd, Dungeons and Dragons, encounter building, encounters
The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don’t need any rules. -Gary Gygax
That quote from Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax has almost become axiomatic across the hobby, a mantra for the avid homebrewer, house ruler, and just about anyone who’s ever read a wonky rule and thought, “That could be better.” Unfortunately, while The Godfather nailed many things in his career, this quote wasn’t one of them.
Gygax’s point is intuitively pleasing: roleplaying is really just a form of shared storytelling, and no one needs rules to enjoy the less collaborative forms of narration, such as fiction writing. This view overlooks an important contribution of the rules, and perhaps the only one that matters: rules provide a way for the GM to kill players. Continue reading