It's the final day of BrigadeCon's daily RPG prompts! Check out their site to see the full list, sign up for the online convention, and donate to Child's Play. I only started doing the prompts on day 10, so I will continue to do them into September (though I might do more than one a day on occasion).
Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: best advice you were ever given for your game of choice. Strap in: this is a big and rambling one.
There are two concepts that changed the way I think about running games, and both of them come from D +Vincent Baker .
The first, from Dogs in the Vineyard, has spread widely: "say yes or roll the dice". Loads of intelligent people have written on this, and players with different philosophies have debated its merits and re- or mis-interpreted it. My own take on it is informed, I think, by trying to use the bloated skill systems of the 3rd ed d20 games.
I hope I'm not being hyperbolic when I say d20 had too many and too hyperspecific skills. It wasn't just stuff like Use Rope and Decipher Script, there were also skills with fill-in-the-blanks like Knowledge (_____) or Perform (_____) which effectively made the list simultaneously too specific -and- infinite. And the existence of these skills encourages their use, so even with advice like "use the Knowledge skills to drive the plot and give the players crucial information", you're basically telling players "roll to see if you get this information I want to give you". It's worse with the practical skills, because either they never come into play, or you're constantly rolling them (like perception or search checks in every. single. room.) so you're guaranteed to get a failure eventually; which again, ends up being "roll to see if you get this thing I want to give you".
Playing only within that paradigm, it took a hell of a mind twist to realize that I can just give the players things I want to give them. Whichever PC knows about the history of this region--they know the bit of trivia about this old ruin which could help them avoid a trap. They don't have to roll. The old sailor PC who would have 10 ranks in Use Rope? Why would they need to roll to see if they can moor a boat? PCs that are good at stuff should get to just do that stuff. This is just the "say yes" part of the advice! It was probably the most revelatory for me, as it blurred away this assumption that skills must always be rolled.
The "or roll the dice" part took much longer to grasp, and I'm still figuring it out. This post on the old forge forums goes a little way towards explaining why--I think this way of playing doesn't work in every situation. I argue the key factor is that the system, players, and setting must support characters attempting to do things that they have a chance of failing -and- allowing interesting consequences for failing. In other words, the attempt should have a chance of getting the PC into trouble. The advice becomes something like "say yes, or throw rocks". This is different from asking for rolls when you want to drive the story forward--it's the reverse: drive the story forward whenever the PCs try something worth rolling for. And it's only worth rolling for when it would be interesting to fail. The classic example is to avoid rolling to pick a lock when there's no time pressure and no trap set. Rolling the dice should significantly affect the game.
The other concept comes from Apocalypse World: "play to find out what happens". This one's a little looser and there's lots of ways to use it. It reminds me of +Justin Alexander 's classic post, Don't Prep Plots. By creating situations, tricky or complex or dangerous ones, and then throwing the PCs into them, not only do we avoid all the problems of trying to railroad players through a specific sequence of events, we let the players -and- the GM discover a story. The value of surprise seems pretty obvious for players--the GM springing plot twists and sudden monsters on unsuspecting PCs is a pretty classic way to play--but what about for GMs? Maybe random generators are fun partially because it means the GM doesn't know everything that will happen. Why not extend that further? Create a compelling situation, get the PCs in there, and play to find out what happens.
At this point, it's patently obvious that I have drunk, deeply, of the story games kool-aid. However, I think that these two bits of advice are applicable to any game and have the potential to improve the experience at your gaming table for everyone. Avoid making players do stuff that has no point and let them get on with what they're interested in rather than using them as pieces in "your story". This works in classic D&D just as well as the most pretentious Nordic LARP you can imagine, and games that bake it into the system (like Fate and Dungeon World) hit a real sweet spot of player- and character-driven gaming.
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