Deserts and Oases
August 9th, 2010
Hello everyone. You probably don’t know this, because we have yet to create a handy-dandy calendar or even a nifty alternate banner, but this is officially the first day of Desert Week, the theme week devoted to dry, barren wastelands and endless fields of sand.
And if talk of wastelands and deserts isn’t enough to get you excited, there’s more: regular readers of Dark Designs will recall that last week saw stats for Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, meaning that all of the Eldrazi are statted out. Through no design of my own, desert week kicks off the beginning of a sort of “Eldrazi draught.” Don’t worry: before long Dark Designs will have weekly stats or designs for something again, but I don’t know just yet what those designs are going to be. So, before we go any further, I might as well mention that if you can think of something you’d like to see take over the “Dark Design of the Week” slot, you might as well send me an e-mail at ariggs@necromancers-online.com, or post the suggestion in our forums. Who knows, maybe your idea for “My Little Pony of the Week” will be the one.
Now that that’s out of the way, it’s time to talk about deserts. On the surface, it’s hard to believe that deserts have all that much to do with game design, and as it turns out that continues basically all the way to the core: it could be there are some nifty metaphors that aren’t occurring to me, but generally the only way I can think of to connect “desert” with “game design” is that since our shift to focus more on articles, it’s been growing harder to keep Dark Designs to its original role as a design diary. And no one wants to hear a columnist whine about how he can’t think of anything to write.
Luckily, deserts do provide a nice metaphor in relation to DMing. No, really, I’m serious. More experienced DMs will have long since come to realize this, either academically or just intuitively, but newer DMs often have trouble with this seemingly simple concept: pen and paper RPGs really shouldn’t play like console RPGs.
What does this have to do with deserts, you ask? An excellent question, because on the surface it seems to have almost nothing to do with them. But, ultimately, most console RPGs play in a way very similar to wandering through the desert: you go for long stretches of hack-and-slash mindless monster killing and dungeon crawling, traversing maze-like passages and killing the same four monsters 42 times along the way. With a few exceptions, it’s dry, repetitive, and more than a little tedious. Once you finally make your way through to the end of the dungeon, you fight the boss, and are rewarded by a brief stretch of plot and story, which serves as a sort of “oasis,” refreshing you enough to trek through another long stretch of barren dungeon. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Because a lot of new DMs (especially young ones) have had console RPGs as their guideline, this pattern can often be carried over into games. And because most players are familiar with the pattern as well, they often accept it without complaint—or at least, without much complaint: after all, D&D is the game of kick down the door, kill the monsters, and take their stuff, right? It doesn’t really work if you move too far away from that formula.
Of course, that’s not really true. One of the beautiful things about the game (especially its third incarnation) is that it serves less as a specific “game” with well-defined goals and constructed restrictions, and more as an “engine” for simulating a fantasy world. Simply put, it’s a lot more flexible than what most people think of when they think of a “game.” For example, once you get past the age of 12 or so, when you’re playing Monopoly, you never think “Well, why can’t I take the railroad to get to the other side of the map?” or “Why can’t I just break out of jail?” It’s a game. Those are the rules. Sure, they’re artificial and don’t always make perfect sense, but that’s the nature of the puzzle which forms the heart of the game (ultimately most games are just complicated puzzles which occasionally also incorporate chance or non-logic skills as components… perhaps I’ll write an article on this another time).
Sorry, I guess I got a little side-tracked there. Flashbacks to college classes on logic puzzles and all of that. Anyway, D&D rarely even comes with a goal condition, and while it does contain a number of artificially constructed rules which keep the game running smoothly and make little sense from a flavor perspective (for example, level adjustments on monster PCs in 3rd edition, or the fact that you can’t use powers outside of combat in 4th edition), these tend to be far less obtrusive than in most things people would think of as games. It’s also true that you can find systems which are even more nebulous than D&D (it’s quite easy, actually), though you can also run the risk of becoming too nebulous (I’m looking at you, freeform roleplaying. Honestly, as far as I can tell this kind of roleplaying is never anything but “I kill you,” “Nuh-uh, I dodge,” “Nuh-uh, I anticipated your dodge and shot where you were going,” “Nuh-uh…” and so on), but each person’s comfort level with nebulousness and artificial rules will vary.
The point I was trying to make a few paragraphs ago, I think, is that D&D can handle going in directions that console RPGs really can’t (by the way I keep saying “console” RPGs because there are some RPGs for the PC which do a better job of avoiding this formula, or at least masking it. I’m thinking primarily of Japanese RPGs when I say “console” RPGs anyway—most Final Fantasy games are a good example, which isn’t to say that I don’t like Final Fantasy, mind, just that it doesn’t translate well to the tabletop). It’s entirely possible to run a game of D&D that doesn’t involve dungeon crawls at all, and in which fighting happens only rarely. Of course, then you run the risk of simply reversing the matter, especially for players who enjoy the mechanical aspects of the game—deserts of long, boring plot punctuated by oases of sweet, sweet combat.
The problem can be addressed easily enough without making such drastic alterations, though. The key is to make sure that combat is more than just something the PCs do on the way to the plotline. One way to do this is to avoid having a proper plotline, allowing the PCs to go where they want and drive the plot with their own actions. This is generally referred to as a “sandbox” game, and I know that, personally at least, I hear a lot of players extolling the virtues of such games, usually while wishing that their DM would run one. Personally, I’m not sure that purely sandbox games would do too well—as I said before, D&D is primarily a fantasy storytelling engine, and generally speaking stories tend to be better when they have a single author (a gross oversimplification, I know, but this issue is far too complex to discuss in today’s article. Another time, maybe). Certainly it would require the DM to be highly flexible and able to do a lot on the fly.
The real key, I think, is to make sure that players still feel that they can make choices and do “roleplaying,” even in the middle of combat. For some reason, as soon as players see a “monster” some part of their brain just shuts down and they become ruthless and uncaring killing machines because, after all, the monster is really only there to be killed. So, challenge that perception. Have monsters that are willing to parlay, or who surrender when reduced to ½ hit points. Or encourage your players to look through the Book of Exalted Deeds: if there’s one supplement that will have your players behaving differently from normal, it’s that one. I can’t even begin to count the number of quests that have been derailed by the strong moral stances of an exalted deeds character—“We can’t destroy those blueprints, they could be the salvation of the Dusol”; “We can’t take that artifact, it belongs to the cultists. We’ll have to bargain with them for it, I’m sure they’ll listen to reason”; “Ambush the troglodytes? Impossible! It would be dishonorable. We’ll do this the proper way,” and so on and so forth. Additionally, a few interesting dungeon features can go a long way towards engaging players.
And that’s it for today’s Dark Designs. For once, there’s no Eldrazi today, so, until next time, may you never have to go through the desert on a horse with no name.