The Dungeon Master vs. The Writer, part 2

[marycatelli]

Or -- more reasons why playing role-playing games may damage your writings skills. (Part I here.)

For instance, monsters in a D&D world are often an omnium gatherium lacking any rhyme or reason. Why do you have ghosts and mummies and ghouls and vampires? Because they are in the rule book and can be used, and what the players want is adventure, not rhyme or reason. It makes the world weaker.

Not to mention that the D&D approach toward creatures is distinctly combat oriented. The famous joke about the characters who go to kill the gazebo is classic for a reason. You get such things as the attack of the banshee, because the original banshee is hard to make significant in the game; lamenting the dead, and because she has foresight, lamenting them the day before they die, can be dramatic in a novel, but doesn't work so well in a game for many players -- if only because they don't have a role to act upon.

I mentioned last time that you need to focus on the player characters evenly and not let a non-player character steal the show, but this time I want to recommend Order of the Stick and Rusty & Co. as examples thereof.  Both webcomics are actually set in worlds where the characters know they are in role playing games, but both have a focal character in the party that gets more attention than the rest -- and non-player characters who not only do really cool things but often do them when the player characters are off-stage.

I did not mention last time the beginning issue of teams:  how to get the characters together.  Quag Keep brings this into focus because what Andre Norton did was import a group of players into the D&D world.  Rusty and Co and Order of the Stick have parody origins that go basically like a kludged together excuse (You All Meet In An Inn!). Convincing groups need more. A random group of people, caught in the inn, would have to forced to go on an adventure together -- magic or trickery to bind them together -- because they need some motive.

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I would say that the kind of game where you just walk along and there are monsters out of a book for no particular reason and the players only ever fight the monsters because that's what the rules allow for, is a weaker game than the one where the GM and characters take a more writerly role.

As a player, I DO want rhyme and reason, I want my character to have a believable reason to be with the party and a motivation to stay there. The best games involve all the characters creating their own in-character stories which come together with the overall plot and make sense from start to finish.

I get the impression that's not how Gygax played, but then that was a long time ago! Fighting a constant stream of monsters with no rhyme or reason behind them is not really much more interesting in a game than it is in a book, and players v GM gaming is just tedious to me.

I remain forever proud of the moment when my character, an unwarriorly political type with enormous skills of persuasion, faced a raging Shoggoth ... and talked it into joining the party as an NPC. :-D

But gaming with an overall plot arc requires skilled improvisational GM-ing, since the characters cannot know the plot, and don't want to feel railroaded. But I can't see why you shouldn't have a banshee to add significance if you want one.

[marycatelli]

Of course, that heavily depends on the players -- and Shoggoth being out of Cthulhu, it sounds like you still had the mixed-up sort of bestiary.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

He fitted in context: that game had actually started as a Traveller game, but then our GM decided he would love to run the Call of Cthulhu adventure Beyond the Mountains of Madness, so he did - with Traveller rules and the same characters, time-travelled through the intervention of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings to AU 30's Earth.

We did a dungeon crawl too, although it was rather a scifi/Cthulhu one with giant penguins, rather than strictly a D&D one. :-D

[marycatelli]

The intervention of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings is a dangerous plot device, at that.