Tuesday, December 22, 2020

New experience or new game - putting the CSG to work

Suppose you're a role-player. You've been playing the same game with the same gamemaster for a while, or maybe even with different GMs, and it's starting to bore you. You want to experience something new. What are your options?

Let's be more specific about your current position. Since you've been playing whatever ruleset your GM is running for you for a while, you're already familiar with its character sheet game (CSG). You've either spent a lot of time mastering it, or at the very least you know how to use it and tolerate it to a degree, depending on your proclivities. So the path of least resistance moving forward is to either ask your GM, or find another GM, willing to change things up in the rest of the RPG. 

If, until now, your GM has been satisfied implementing combat with theater of the mind, maybe they can start using miniatures on a map, and add constraints outside of your character sheet into combat - for example, drawing battlefields with interesting geometry, and having foes use that geometry for some clever tactics. Maybe wilderness travel has been dull, so they can run your given character, or a new character, through a sea-faring watercrawl. Maybe they can structure challenges using your skills in ways that have more depth, like building an investigation with node-based design. Moving beyond structure and information management, maybe your GM can spend more time on in-character play-acting of the non-player characters, and encourage you to do the same with your character.

There is a whole space of changes they can make here - a resourceful GM can take the same CSG and create a whole variety of experiences for the player. The player, in turn, simply has to play along. A GM struggling to develop ways to do this themselves can find many helpful guides: blogs, books on GMing, videos, even innovative adventure modules already adapted to their familiar ruleset.

A more arduous path is finding a GM who will run an entirely new game for you. For example, instead of them building structure around the Dungeons & Dragons 5E CSG to create a heist game, or running a module that does that for them, they can use a ruleset that is built from the character sheet up to support and encourage heists, like Blades in the Dark. But that requires not just a GM willing and able to run it, but for you to learn a new CSG. This could be daunting, either because just getting comfortable with the old CSG was enough of a hassle, or because you've already spent an inordinate amount of time optimizing your CSG builds for the current system, and find starting again from scratch unappealing; alternately, the design possibilities in the new CSG are uninspiring.

To give examples from my own limited experience, there are many ways that I've run wilderness adventures in my ongoing D&D 5E campaign, from very abstract theater of the mind, to point-crawl, to hex-crawl; NPC interactions have gone from somewhat loose playacting to a more structured attitude table framework and back; I've even had an individual battlefield, most of which ran as a zone-based theater of the mind, while the focal region of combat was grid-based. On a larger scale, the challenges my players` characters were faced with ranged from investigating a haunted house to mediating an alliance between initially very hostile factions. My players took to this variety with little problem and much aplomb. Which is to their credit, but also, I believe, because we were still playing with the same CSG.

Whether I would be able to convince this group to move to a different rule system like RuneQuest Classic is another matter entirely. It would depend on how easily I can become familiar with the ruleset, how easy it is to teach, how it runs at the table, and whether all of this can truly provide a sufficiently novel and enticing form of play. My more mechanically-inclined players would have to abandon an impressive list of interesting builds for the existing system. My not entirely comparable experience with playtesting Blood & Bronze with another player group suggests a serious challenge for all involved.

What is the operative conclusion of all this? I think that if I were trying to encourage people to play a new role-playing game ruleset that I have designed, I would spend some time making its character sheet game more accessible. Not just an easy way of generating new starting characters, not just a series of examples for each section of the character sheet, but an easy way to feel out how the strictly mechanical player-facing aspects of it work. Perhaps learning from solo games, I would use an oracle to generate encounters or challenges, and walk the reader through a few examples, before letting them loose on my system. I would make learning how to be a player into an engaging gameplay experience, as, for example, various versions of D&D's Basic Set did for dungeon masters.

From my novice point of view, there is still room to grow in the pedagogy of role-playing games, and focusing on making accessible solo variations of their character sheet games may be one path forward.

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