RPGaDay 2024 #24 Acclaimed Advice

This one's another toughie. Not just because I'm not running anything right now and so I can't point to what advice I'm taking or offer anything that I've discovered as I'm running my current campaign.

It's also because as I've been gaming and GMing, I've changed pretty significantly. Referencing the Six Cultures of Play, I started out pretty Trad, but then my megadungeon campaign shifted me to the OSR, and my reading of a variety of games opened me up to Story Games, to the point that I spend a lot of effort trying to reconcile those two cultures.

It might be part of what's keeping me from GMing as much. Without a solid grounding, I don't really know how to prep or plan for a session. I've managed from time to time, devising a workable structure for my All Outta Candy Canes holiday adventure, and now for my optimistic apocalypse scenario. But both of those structures are not the same, so I can't say I've got it figured out yet.

What I do have are my Four Laws of Gaming.

1. Define the core activity

2. Put the players in the driver's seat

3. Never roll dice unless you're willing to abide by the results

4. Characters can have secrets, but players shouldn't

I've discussed the first 2 when I mulliganed on previous prompts this month, so maybe I'll take some time to talk about #3.

Most of it is just some advice from Spirit of the Century. Imagine success. Imagine failure. Only call for a roll if both possibilities are interesting.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, it works as a counter to a lot of bad advice out there.

One of the most annoying bits of advice I've heard is that if your players aren't paying attention, just start rolling dice behind the screen. They'll assume something is up and pay more attention. The problem is that every time you do that and nothing happens, you cheapen the move. Do it enough and the surprise becomes when something actually comes of your dice shenanigans.

It's fine if you're actually making checks or implementing a procedure behind the screen. That's what the screen is for. I used to make random encounter checks behind the screen all the time. Though I did sometimes have the players roll for me.

Which leads me to another issue. Engagement and Agency are not always the same thing. When I had my players roll the dice for a random encounter, or to determine the value of a piece of jewelry or gem that they had just recovered, they were engaged, rolling dice and announcing results, they had no agency. They were making no decisions or taking action as their character. I mostly did it to keep the accounting wrap-up at the end of the session less boring.

This was one of my big complaints in the Battle for Oz Plot Point campaign. There were Dramatic Tasks scattered throughout the scenarios that required the players to make multiple rolls to accomplish a larger objective. But looking at the adventure text, those rolls don't matter, because the task must succeed for the adventure to proceed. There's no risk of failure and any cost for failure must be minimized to avoid derailing the adventure. So you wind up with dice-rolling busywork.

And then there's the infamous roll to find clues. If you fail the roll, you miss the clue. The roll may have been intended as a formality and may have been set as super easy, but by making it a roll, you have now created the opportunity for failure that you probably didn't consider.

My preference in this situation is to hand them the information. If there's a roll involved, it's to determine something else. Were you seen meeting your contact? Were you able to preserve the clue for evidence?

There's clearly a lot to unpack regarding my opinion on dice, but I've got other prompts to tackle.