Knowing when to stop: a procedure for pacing (not playtested)

[Hemlock]

Inspired by https://mindstorm.blot.im/o-a-r-combat-objectives but different.

Before combat or other conflict can occur, there must be goals. In order for dice rolling to be needed, there must be uncertainty as to whether those goals can be achieved, which is especially likely if those goals are in conflict.

Unlike mindstorm I focus less on the moment of goal achievement than on removal of uncertainty.

Thus: before a potential conflict, both sides secretly write down their objectives and give them to the referee. (If one side is run by the referee they still write down the objectives.) The referee puts the objects in one of three piles: can, cannot, maybe. If nothing is in the maybe pile then players may resolve the scene by reading all objectives and narrating an outcome which satisfies all "can" objectives and no "cannot" objectives, or they may give the objectives to the referee to do. Otherwise, "maybe" objectives must be resolved into "can" or "cannot" objectives through game procedures such as reaction checks or combat. Whenever the referee decides an objective has changed status they will immediately move the objective into the correct pile.

Example encounter:

Dungeon desecrators seek entrance to a royal pyramid via a secret tunnel full of sleeping giant mutant bats. The bats' secret objective is written by the adventure designer: wake up and kill anyone who isn't a bat.

Players write down their objective, and the party druid adds a separate objective, and then the GM looks at all three objectives:

Bats: wake up and kill anyone who isn't a bat.

Desecrators: sneak through the area without being noticed by any bats

Druid: take control of as many bats as possible to use as minions inside the pyramid.

All three goals conflict to some extent so they all go in the maybe pile. The GM will use whatever procedures are built into the game they are playing (e.g. Stealth rolls in Dungeon Fantasy or D&D 5E; spellcasting or Control Animal rolls for the druid) to resolve uncertainty. If everyone rolls well then the GM will push the bat objective into "cannot" and the other objectives into "can" and then indicate to the players to read them all and narrate an outcome (or push the cards back to him if they prefer to remain 'in character'). If they roll poorly then combat likely begins and the desecrator objective moves to the "cannot" pile.

The written goals serve both as a motivator for the adventure writer or GM to explicitly provide motivations for monsters, and as an audit trail to help players learn more about the game world over the course of play.

 

[Beoric]

I'm not sure I understand what this mechanic is intended to accomplish. DM and players already have objectives, stated or implied; what is the benefit of writing them down?

 

[Hemlock]

I'm not sure I understand what this mechanic is intended to accomplish. DM and players already have objectives, stated or implied; what is the benefit of writing them down?

Primarily it's the last paragraph: <<The written goals serve both as a motivator for the adventure writer or GM to explicitly provide motivations for monsters, and as an audit trail to help players learn more about the game world over the course of play.>>

To a lesser extent it's to avoid accidentally skipping over stuff players find interesting (e.g. easy combats), but if it were just about that you could just ask the players verbally (and I have before).

Also to a lesser extent it's about clearly signaling to the players when *they* are empowered to finish off a scene, if your players are so inclined towards that kind of creativity.

Honestly my primary motivation for being interested in mindstorm's original proposal was the hope of providing extra information to the players about the gameworld in the form of that gradually-accumulating audit log. I'll playtest it locally but I'm also interested in your reaction, Beoric, and others. Maybe for most people this is a solution in search of a problem. (Maybe even for me!)

 

[squeen]

I have to say this is very weird. I guess I know my player pretty well so these seems unnecessary.

I guess I am more interested in hearing what the problem is you are having that your trying to solve.

 

[Beoric]

The written goals serve both as a motivator for the adventure writer or GM to explicitly provide motivations for monsters...

Seems like a lot of extra work to remember this one thing. I have a large random chart of "things the monsters are doing", which I use religiously, and which seems like a better reminder. I keep it in a spreadsheet with all of my dungeon-content-generating random generators, but a d100 table would work just as well.

... and as an audit trail to help players learn more about the game world over the course of play.

I'm not clear on how it does this, unless you keep the cards, which would get unwieldy fast if you are generating at least two cards for every encounter.
Even then, I'm not sure how it teaches players about the game world. I think the best way to teach players about the game world (and because I run Eberron, this comes up a lot) is to make sure you liberally use the tropes of your game world that are different from the baseline expectations.

For example, until they are familiar with how orcs fit into Eberron my new players will never encounter a stereotypical orc. They may encounter good or neutral orc barbarians, or an evil orc "inquisitive" (read: "noir detective"), but not an evil orc reaver. Likewise, if they encounter a chromatic dragon it will be good, and if they encounter a metallic dragon it will be evil, even though both can technically be either alignment in Eberron. Racial prejudices will be absent, but national prejudices will be on full display. Low level, labour-saving magic will be on casual display, and high level magic will be nearly absent. Groups of manual labourers will include at least one ogre, innkeepers and tavern keepers will be halflings, bankers will be dwarves, white collar professionals will be gnomes, couriers and blacksmiths will be human, mercenaries will be humans, hobgoblins or monsters. Treasure will include credit notes as well as gold pieces. You need to build your world's stereotypes before you can break them.

 

[Hemlock]

I have to say this is very weird. I guess I know my player pretty well so these seems unnecessary.

I guess I am more interested in hearing what the problem is you are having that your trying to solve.

Firstly I want to say, thank you Squeen and Beoric for your feedback.

The perennial problem that I am *always* trying to solve is the fact that I am not telepathic, so the players never get to inhabit the fantasy world they or I have in our heads but only the fantasy world throttled by the bandwidth of my mouth. A related issue is that my efforts to skip straight to the interesting decisions of any given scenario (i.e. pacing) can fail in two ways: either skipping over stuff that players were interested in, necessitating a rollback/flashback if discovered, or failing to skip over stuff that nobody is interested in, wasting time and everybody's energy/momentum.

So I'm always trying to give players more access to information about the gameworld, especially information that would be obvious to the characters. And I'm always trying to streamline games so that a 2-3 hour session is a good long chunk of gameplay, ideally a whole one-shot adventure (or expedition), and not just the first half of a one-shot.

That's why I found mindstorm's original article interesting: explicitly declaring goals seems like a good way to close scenes at the perfect time. I didn't like mindstorm's proposal of ending the scene as soon as ONE goal is achieved because it's too easy to think of scenarios where there are still interesting things that can happen after that point. Writing everyone's goals down seems like a good way to both manage the information flow (keeping secrets secret in the moment, revealing them after the fact) and to speed things up at the table (a gesture is quicker than a periodic Q&A between DM and players--think of a poker player folding his hand).

I know that you run much longer and more frequent games than I do, squeen, so maybe squeezing a whole, emotionally satisfying dungeon expedition into 3 hours isn't even a goal for you. Or maybe your AD&D games already achieve that. And maybe if I take a closer look at my own games I will find that the slow part really has nothing to do with goal-setting, and that I really do just need to speed up combat via better tooling (which I am also working on) and not by explicit pacing procedures. Or maybe this pacing stuff will become relevant only AFTER I do speed up combat enough that we can do six dungeon room combats in an hour.

I am still thinking it over, and talking it over with you guys in part to see if I should bother playtesting it or table the idea for now. Right now I think you guys have me at least halfway persuaded that it's not worth it, but that *could* just be a reflection of me having chosen a boring, simplistic example with the spiders, in which players don't find the monster agenda to have been interesting even once they learn it. Maybe if I do a better job at scenario design, a monster agenda like

1.) Demonstrate bravery in front of the other Spartans.

2.) Do as little work as possible, and let the helots do the dying in any military confrontation.

3.) Take the dwarven orichalcum mines and become rich.

might be a more compelling example where players would actually enjoy the payoff of flipping over the cards and narrating an ending. Especially if player goals were orthogonal to the monster goals, e.g. "find the murderer and avenge Gimli's death" (turns out to be a vampire helot preying on the Spartans) and "take home lots of gold and magic items."

 

[Beoric]

Ok, I think I understand. Are you revealing the monster motivations to the players? And then letting the players narrate how team monster succeeds or fails? So in your example, the Spartan is an NPC, and his motivation is revealed to the players at the end of the encounter? That is very different from my playstyle, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

If I have understood you correctly, then I think it works as a mechanic as far as it goes. The players receive the information, and have a better chance of retaining it because they have to process it enough to come up with a narrative.

 

[Beoric]

I'm really having a miserable time posting comments. This is continued from the previous post.

All that being said, I think you are violating the principle of show don't tell. I think it would be preferable to narrate the banter and behaviour of the NPCs during the battle in a way that reveals their motivation. So maybe the Spartan hangs back and orders the helots forward, unless he is called out or shamed by his comrades, and no Spartan will run away if there are any Spartans standing. This works particularly well if the players fight Spartans a lot, so they can see a pattern.

But not everyone has an easy time doing this, so your mechanic is a decent second choice.

As an aside, I think one of the great flaws of modern adventures is a push towards novelty in monsters, so players never have a chance to learn the ins and outs of a particular monster and get good at defeating them. Better to use common monsters relatively frequently, maybe differently armed and with different weapons, so players can have the fun of "figuring them out". This is one of the few really solid pieces of advice from Scott Rehm.

 

[Hemlock]

Ok, I think I understand. Are you revealing the monster motivations to the players? And then letting the players narrate how team monster succeeds or fails? So in your example, the Spartan is an NPC, and his motivation is revealed to the players at the end of the encounter? That is very different from my playstyle, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

If I have understood you correctly, then I think it works as a mechanic as far as it goes. The players receive the information, and have a better chance of retaining it because they have to process it enough to come up with a narrative.

Yes, the intention is to reveal all the info after there is no more uncertainty (towards end of encounter or later in/end of adventure, depending) and allow players to narrate an outcome consistent with all cans/can'ts if they want to. If they prefer to remain "in character" they just hand the cards back to the GM, who will do it in that case.

All that being said, I think you are violating the principle of show don't tell. I think it would be preferable to narrate the banter and behaviour of the NPCs during the battle in a way that reveals their motivation. So maybe the Spartan hangs back and orders the helots forward, unless he is called out or shamed by his comrades, and no Spartan will run away if there are any Spartans standing. This works particularly well if the players fight Spartans a lot, so they can see a pattern.

The hope is to do both: show, and then confirm, without having to spend lots of table time walking players through the epilogue to confirm that yes, Spartan society is really like that and what you thought was going on, was.

If they fight Spartans a lot then yeah, you might not need this, but that could take realtime months and I want to offer closure the same day.

Also if player decisions prevent you from showing anything (e.g. they just stay invisible and avoid the Spartans) I want a way to still leak info to the players.

As an aside, I think one of the great flaws of modern adventures is a push towards novelty in monsters, so players never have a chance to learn the ins and outs of a particular monster and get good at defeating them. Better to use common monsters relatively frequently, maybe differently armed and with different weapons, so players can have the fun of "figuring them out". This is one of the few really solid pieces of advice from Scott Rehm.

100% agree. You can have a ton of fun adventures just built around Githyankis, or hobgoblins. (Or Chryssalids!) The Adventures of Robin Hood center almost entirely on Robin's exploits against (basically) an army of orcs.

 

[Beoric]

The hope is to do both: show, and then confirm, without having to spend lots of table time walking players through the epilogue to confirm that yes, Spartan society is really like that and what you thought was going on, was.

If they fight Spartans a lot then yeah, you might not need this, but that could take realtime months and I want to offer closure the same day.

Also if player decisions prevent you from showing anything (e.g. they just stay invisible and avoid the Spartans) I want a way to still leak info to the players.

One thing I found is that if I don't overload my players they absorb a lot more, because they are always trying to find an edge, and knowing things about the world gives them that edge. They may figure stuff out sooner than you think.