My current table group seems to have a penchant for "unbalanced" groups. In our last campaign, they were 3 casters, a bard, and a paladin. Now, in our current High Seas/Naval campaign, we have 4 melee types and a bard.
Obviously, more power to them and I'm more than willing to rock what they got, but I'd love some advice on how I can properly make sure everything stays interesting for them. We had our first session, and while the two combats were pretty melee-focused with enemies, I'm already a bit concerned on how I can keep combat from just becoming "I roll to hit".
Additionally, there's a bit of a ditch as far as skills are concerned. We have a thief and a lore-bard, so there's plenty of stuff handled, but I want to help make sure the tough guys feel engaged.
Party make up is (all level 3 right now): a dragonborn champion Fighter, an elven rogue, a dwarven bard, a dwarven barbarian, and a human paladin.
I find that one of the best ways to keep combat-focussed sessions interesting is to ensure that the battlefield has a rich terrain that rewards the players for their characters engaging with it.
With a High Seas campaign, this sounds especially thematic.
I'm talking about everything from a pile of crates, that can be toppled onto a foe to rigging ropes that can be swung on to attack a foe near the back of enemy lines without incurring attacks of opportunity.
It requires you and the players to be a bit more creative, but once they get the idea, it can be really cool.
You'll need to improvise rules a lot, but that's ok - just remember to err on the side of allowing something if it seems cool, rather than making it unrewarding or too difficult because it would actually be. In reality, swinging on a rope to attack foes would be pretty dumb, but it happens in movies/books all the time, so let them do that.
Allow them to use skills like athletics, sleight-of-hand and more.
There is no balanced or not. The conception of healer tank and skill monkey comes from video game. Id tell you to stop thinking that way first. Then id say... It is easy to make fights and each fights is different. Just put them in situations where melee is not an option and you will easily see them try to make it happen with creative thinking. Or just plain start using javelins.
Great terrain is a must. As was mentionned above. Even your "balanced" group would have problems. So just work on those problems and make fights that shows those weaknesses to the players and its up to them to deal with it.
Exemple of grog in critical role. He cant deal with flyers. But when given a throwing hammer that returns even with lower damage he took it with glee because it solved one of his downfall. So just emphasis encounters on weaknesses and then see the players deal with it. You will be surprised by the result.
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The conception of healer tank and skill monkey comes from video game.
Those party role concepts originate in AD&D (where adventures would say things like "The party should contain a balanced mixture of races and classes. Typical party composition would be tow or three fighters (or rangers or paladins), at least one cleric, a magic user, and possibly a druid.").
The video games which further established/evolved them, and which table-top games have taken further ideas from over the years, were all in one way or another based on AD&D.
Like i didnt know my history of d&d. I meant that mechanics related to those comes from video games who established that you must have balance to work. That is strickly not true in table top not even during ad&d which i played back then. Reason why they are not necessary is because we are not limited to mechanics or certain sentence and the game is not just roll and be done with it. Which is what video game are all about.
In video games lifting a table is only possible if the game was fesigned for it. Heres we design the game as things happen.
I call this the video game syndrome where people thinks mechanics are everything. My tanks could be skill monkeys back then so were anything healer. Because honestly... There was never any healers and everyone could use tactics like door jamming and all. So we didn't care about party balance because everyone could tactically take on peoples and wins.
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I meant that mechanics related to those comes from video games who established that you must have balance to work.
Then the words you chose were insufficient at conveying what you meant.
You have chosen to attribute things to video games that are not theirs alone, and it is more than a little uncool because it makes it sound like you are denigrating video games for these things without also denigrating the other sorts of games that share the same traits.
It's not "video game syndrome" for someone to think mechanics are the most important thing, because there are people that think the same thing and have never bothered with any video games - they picked up the trait from another source, such as board games, war games, or from a particular table-top RPG book that happened to be written in such a way as to enable the feeling that the mechanics were everything.
Is it video games that made leveling what it is yes they are. Before that people could take years to get to level 5. Now thanks to video games everyones wants end game contents. Back then murder hobos were much less prevalent then it is today. Again thanks to video games that showed no consequencesvin killing npc except for them to respawn minutes later. Any of those in your ttrpg or board games ? Again board games have strict ruling. Ttrpg does not. In fact it is written not to follow the mechanics. Try and do that on board games.
All in all... Think what you want its your right. But telling me im wrong in thinking this doesnt feel right. This is what i came to after playing for like 25 years. My point of view is... The game changed to be more like video games and that is a very bad thing. So yeah drop pre conception of rules and mechanic and expand instead of just adding more damage. After all ttrpg arent diablo games were all that matters is to kill everything.
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The game changed to be more like video games and that is a very bad thing.
You are being deliberately selective in your point of view - games emulated "the game", and then the game took what was generally thought of as improvements back into itself, and then video games emulated that, and repeat the cycle - but the cycle objectively starts with the things you are complaining about being part of "the game."
People could take years to get to level 5 - they could also level up faster than even 5th edition says is normal, since the treasure tables provided in the old DMG are set up in such a way as to cause the "Maunty Haul" sort of game unless you consistently ignore and second-guess them.
People have always wanted to see what playing the high-level characters are like - all it takes for them to want that is for there to be high levels in the books.
"murder hobos" are a symptom of DMing style - the letting the player get away with stuff, the not putting focus on anything but the adventure portion of their life - not something caused by video games. In video games, you literally can't just kill whoever you want, do whatever you want, and have zero consequences. Video games bleeding into table-top would give us things like everyone finding it perfectly acceptable for the DM to declare whatever NPCs they want to completely immune to any form of harm, as an analog to the code of the game either not including the option to attack the NPC, or their not having combat stats meaning they never run out of HP.
You've come to one view after playing for like 25 years, and I've come to another view in the same time - so what's the difference? What caused our different views? It seems as simple as it being this; I like video games - you don't, so you don't even realize that you are using them as a scapegoat for problems that have literally always been around.
first off, i'm a gamer, i literally grew with video games. still play them today. i really love role playing to the point where i literally becomes the characters i play. but that's the whole point of it all... how often most of you "gamers" actually becomes the character you play in video games ? or are you just watching the interactive story telling ? now compare that to TTRPG where we are supposed to collaborate together to make a story, not listen to the DM explain to us a story he has done. but hey continu to judge me wrongly.
Video Games have a singular story, a story you have no choice in. certain games did it right because of multiple endings based on what you did, but mostly you are stuck to those choices. most games have a single player story with only one ending, you basically play a story book you just read. sure you are the one playing the charcter but in the end you have no real choices. in the end you are just a spectator watching your story unfolds. skip to TTRPG where you can literally take a table, strap a gnome on it and throw it into the void because thats what passed thru your mind. cannot do that in video games because they are often just stories and this is too crazy for them. heck in most games the tables and chairs literally serve as walls and are literally bolted to the floor and made of indestructible wood that isn't even flammable. again games are designed to be story driven linear shit. and even if they try to go open world, in the end if you want a story you can't just have open world. because story is linear. that's the difference between story driven shows and improvised show. cannot improvise in a video game.
now story wise, in TTRPG if a player comes up with something much more interesting then my own story, i surely drop my own and push his. why would i not, it was more interesting to begin with. that's why its called collaborative story to begin with. sure the DM may be a dick about it and say the same shitty rules "my table my rules" but that is simply not true... not if you want players sticking around for your games.
murder hobos are still murder hobos, how often did you do consequences and yet the guy just continu to do it ? that's not the DMs fault that's just the player having problem with stories. they are the kind of person who just play GTA and not ever do the quest or story. they just run around with baseball bats because thats what they like. they can play it and steal cars all day long. that's a video game syndrome, not a TTRPG thing. the others that lived in TTRPG and bcame that didn't become it because of bad DMing, they became it because they think the DM is the bad guy and must be put to his place by breaking his rules all the time. that includes killing his NPCs killing the quest givers and just killing everything he does to begin with. that's a mentallity of many many gamers may they be in video games or TTRPGs. most murder hobos will just create numerous characters and if the consequences of their actions is killing them, do not care i can just create another character and continu on my way. because DMs don't just kill charcaters and TTRPG are never ending. aside fromt hat your only option is to eject them from your game, which is not a consequence of them being murder hobos, but consequences of them not fitting into your play style of being not utterly evil AF.
in the end, video games exists even before TTRPGs ever were created, if you look at the industry you will find out that gary gygax who invented the style derived it all from the one thing that murder hobos wants. and that is wargaming ! where guess what, the goal is to kill everything on sight without any consequences of your actions. video games existed way before computers were ever created, and like about 10 years before gygax arrived to the scene. again video games didn't have any stories back then, you could just play it and kill everything on sight, because no stories. so again, murder hobos come from the world where there was no consequences killing everything around and were shown that stories had no meaning. had you played those 25 years of video games you'd have seen that most story in video games were told in the manual. not in the game itself. a manual that next to nobody ever read. that's not mentionning the multiplayer games we have today that have strickly no story to begin with and are just people shooting each others to shit. look at how popular that is.
now back to my original point... video games have a specific mindset to each game styles. but more importanlty they have pretty strict mechanics. and these people looks only at mechanics and thus when they come to play TTRPG, they are stuck in a world where mechanics are impoirtant. they are the type of people who want to know everything before they jump, and if you start homebrewing your own stuff, they get lost because that's not how mechanics works in the player handbook. those people comes from the video game industry where you cannot homebrew your shit, you play very strickly reinforced mechanics. this is why most video game people liked 4e and those who were used to homebrewing didn't like 4e. the story to those people comes way behind the mechanics. this is what i cal the video game syndrome. video games are not improvised sessions or improvides story becaus hey mine is better then theirs. it is set an cannot be changed or altered and it plays with very specific mechanics. while most TTRPG are improvised between players and DM alike.
the video game syndrome to me is this in short... - kill everything in sight - don't care about story, only mechanics. - try to break the game doing stuff that you shouldn'T be doing
that's pretty much it. exemple of people stuck in video game worlds... my cousin had a player girl who was very shy and had trouble understanding the game. My cousin tryed to teach her the mechanics because thats what she wanted to know first. for her it was just a game like any other she had played, it didn't have story right fromt eh get go, because in her mind, it was just a game like any others. right away he told her it was like assassins creed where you can just run around and do your stuff and it was his job to describe what happens. and at that point she was like, ok cool, so i have blades in hand and hidden blades and i just can kill whoever i want in the streets. my cousin was like, well... there will be consequences for doing so, but yeah sure, why not... at this point his game has gone to hell, because she, as soon as he said assassins creed, thought she became altair not her home made character. she started running around climbing buildings and killing civilians because that's what she does in assassins creed. basically she's murder hobo in assassins creed.
sure the DM had his faults, my cousin is a new DM with great story telling but problems when it comes to preparation. he got stuck with her and trying to teach her the game. but she refused to see the game as it was, because she is used to being a murder hobo in video games. she likes stories, but once she done them, she just runs around killing everything. that's called replayability and thats the one thing video games don't have and because of it, it encourages her play style of murdering everything on sight.
this exemple is the perfect stuff for showing the video game syndrome and the pitfalls to which a DM shouldn't fall into.
you say i use video games as a scapegoat, but you are the one escaping the reality of gaming... before there was gygax, there was only war games. adventures were in books and movies only. this is why gygax was awesome to many people because he brought stories into a world of adventuring games. something that was totally missing before he did that. my only reason to cal it the video game syndrome, is that it became much much more prevalent once the video game industry picked up in the early 90ies. with games like duke nukem, doom and the likes where the only goal was to shoot and kill everything in sight without any story to drive you. it doesn't help that all war games became very very popular once people could play them via internet or lans. because games were faster then in real life. and tactical games were the shit back then. again goal of the games, kill everything in sight. mechanics were everything and story had taken a backseat. so what video games did was just show us even more that mechanics are important. and if you ask gamers now a days, all they talk about are mechanics. they dont care about good stories as long as as the mechanics are awesome. then comes the story. if anything it just showed us the true colors of people who just want to tactically shoot everything in the face.
last bit of story about myself... back when i started it was all about the story. this is why i took the DM seat for all these years, i just love a good story. but i also played in a ton of games, and once i came to 2e i started becoming more focused on mechanics. and became what most people call a min maxer, because the mentality of myself at the time was that all problems could be solved with an axe. and even as of today and the number of games i did, that logic as stuck around. closed door, break it with an axe. bunch of globlins with slaves, axe. hidden sniper in a tree, axe. there is a reason why most people comes to conflict when it comes to solving puzzles and stuff. as a DM what are you gonna say... you can't because it ruins my game if you do so ? sure in the end you can break their axes, but they will just buy new ones and continu on. so i became a min maxer starting in 3e. which was much more oriented toward video games. i learned the mechanics of the game a ton and was at a lost when a DM started to homebrew. but i dealt with it, learned his homebrew and broke it too. i literally was every characters indestructible guy who could solve everything and literally solo play the game of the DM. my tactics and my gameplay literally made me power level the other players who were newer to the game. when i got enough of playing the abusive characters at the end of 3.5e. i started going back to concept. that meant playing races that didn'T have what it takes to play their classes. but even doing that can't stop my mind from trying to min max. even in todays 5e i can show people how broken the game is, and how useless it is to have 20 levels of a class.
Mind you this story comes from a kid who literally started programming its own games at the age of 7 on his old TRS-80 with tape cassettes in GW-Basics. so my mind was very logical back then. perhaps the reason why i was so strongly attached to stories. because thats what was missing from my mind. but hey... to each its own apparently.
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Don't try to claim I'm the one doing the judging when you are the one implying I'm not a real enough gamer to not need scare-quotes around the word.
And while you may have used the most words, you haven't made the most sense - you are still blaming video games for traits that video games are not the cause of. You'd be better off spending your time figuring out how to deal with the actual causes of those traits so that said traits don't hinder your fun while playing a game, than spending it on any further attempts to convince whoever it is you are trying to convince that video games and table-top games (of all varieties, including role-playing) have anything but a beneficial effect upon each other.
where did i ever say you weren't a gamer ? seriously man after all this talk i think you just interpret things i say badly because somewhow you think i'm rage talking here when i am not.
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where did i ever say you weren't a gamer ? seriously man after all this talk i think you just interpret things i say badly because somewhow you think i'm rage talking here when i am not.
When you said the following:
...how often most of you "gamers"...
What was your intended purpose of putting quotes around the word gamers? That is a thing which is often done as a means to say that word used doesn't actually apply to someone that is identifying as it, and that is the exact reason why I interpreted what you said badly.
Anywhooo, so steering this away from heated debate...
I appreciate the feedback on some ways to spice up encounters with the terrain! Ropes, crates, etc seem cool on providing the melee folks with some variety. I'm also planning on doing more stuff with underwater combat (Have a sea troll that's been preying on kelp harvesters planned for this week).
How else can I/others (I'm interested in keeping this open for other DMs with a melee party too!) spice up our encounters with some ways to avoid the doldrums of circling and smashing? I've liked the idea of playing a bit loose with pushing/moving PCs to have a bit more mobility, like if a really strong monster dragged a PC across the terrain or something.
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"Mankind have been created for the sake of one another. Either instruct them, therefore, or endure them." -Marcus Aurelius
Anywhooo, so steering this away from heated debate...
I appreciate the feedback on some ways to spice up encounters with the terrain! Ropes, crates, etc seem cool on providing the melee folks with some variety. I'm also planning on doing more stuff with underwater combat (Have a sea troll that's been preying on kelp harvesters planned for this week).
How else can I/others (I'm interested in keeping this open for other DMs with a melee party too!) spice up our encounters with some ways to avoid the doldrums of circling and smashing? I've liked the idea of playing a bit loose with pushing/moving PCs to have a bit more mobility, like if a really strong monster dragged a PC across the terrain or something.
Hi Frodiddly,
A good way to use terrain is to make it scary. In your high seas campaign you might have an encounter with a giant octopus. Have it attack a NPC crew member and drag the poor soul overboard to his death. Hit and run tactics with difficult terrain can put the PCs on edge. A storm could blow up quickly and there is always a chance to fall overboard, in plate mail! Give the PCs something else to do at the sometime they have to fight. Maybe a fire based attack on their ship, they would have to defeat the monster and save the ship. Pirates capture the party! Arr! ;)
If you haven't already, consider introducing NPCs in the party, either as henchmen, hirelings or companions. This can help balance the party in regards to classes. It also gives cannon fodder to the DM. No DM wants to kill off a PC every other session. Having 'red shirts' around can make combat more exciting. The PCs may have to make decisions about whether to rescue NPCs or not. It also introduces a chance of betrayal, changing a winning battle into a dire fight for your life. Don't use this too often.
cheers,
Jocanuck
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My current table group seems to have a penchant for "unbalanced" groups. In our last campaign, they were 3 casters, a bard, and a paladin. Now, in our current High Seas/Naval campaign, we have 4 melee types and a bard.
Obviously, more power to them and I'm more than willing to rock what they got, but I'd love some advice on how I can properly make sure everything stays interesting for them. We had our first session, and while the two combats were pretty melee-focused with enemies, I'm already a bit concerned on how I can keep combat from just becoming "I roll to hit".
Additionally, there's a bit of a ditch as far as skills are concerned. We have a thief and a lore-bard, so there's plenty of stuff handled, but I want to help make sure the tough guys feel engaged.
Party make up is (all level 3 right now): a dragonborn champion Fighter, an elven rogue, a dwarven bard, a dwarven barbarian, and a human paladin.
Thanks for any advice I can get!
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D&D Beyond FoundersI find that one of the best ways to keep combat-focussed sessions interesting is to ensure that the battlefield has a rich terrain that rewards the players for their characters engaging with it.
With a High Seas campaign, this sounds especially thematic.
I'm talking about everything from a pile of crates, that can be toppled onto a foe to rigging ropes that can be swung on to attack a foe near the back of enemy lines without incurring attacks of opportunity.
It requires you and the players to be a bit more creative, but once they get the idea, it can be really cool.
You'll need to improvise rules a lot, but that's ok - just remember to err on the side of allowing something if it seems cool, rather than making it unrewarding or too difficult because it would actually be. In reality, swinging on a rope to attack foes would be pretty dumb, but it happens in movies/books all the time, so let them do that.
Allow them to use skills like athletics, sleight-of-hand and more.
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There is no balanced or not. The conception of healer tank and skill monkey comes from video game. Id tell you to stop thinking that way first. Then id say... It is easy to make fights and each fights is different. Just put them in situations where melee is not an option and you will easily see them try to make it happen with creative thinking. Or just plain start using javelins.
Great terrain is a must. As was mentionned above. Even your "balanced" group would have problems. So just work on those problems and make fights that shows those weaknesses to the players and its up to them to deal with it.
Exemple of grog in critical role. He cant deal with flyers. But when given a throwing hammer that returns even with lower damage he took it with glee because it solved one of his downfall. So just emphasis encounters on weaknesses and then see the players deal with it. You will be surprised by the result.
DM of two gaming groups.
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Those party role concepts originate in AD&D (where adventures would say things like "The party should contain a balanced mixture of races and classes. Typical party composition would be tow or three fighters (or rangers or paladins), at least one cleric, a magic user, and possibly a druid.").
The video games which further established/evolved them, and which table-top games have taken further ideas from over the years, were all in one way or another based on AD&D.
Like i didnt know my history of d&d. I meant that mechanics related to those comes from video games who established that you must have balance to work. That is strickly not true in table top not even during ad&d which i played back then. Reason why they are not necessary is because we are not limited to mechanics or certain sentence and the game is not just roll and be done with it. Which is what video game are all about.
In video games lifting a table is only possible if the game was fesigned for it. Heres we design the game as things happen.
I call this the video game syndrome where people thinks mechanics are everything. My tanks could be skill monkeys back then so were anything healer. Because honestly... There was never any healers and everyone could use tactics like door jamming and all. So we didn't care about party balance because everyone could tactically take on peoples and wins.
DM of two gaming groups.
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Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses
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Then the words you chose were insufficient at conveying what you meant.
You have chosen to attribute things to video games that are not theirs alone, and it is more than a little uncool because it makes it sound like you are denigrating video games for these things without also denigrating the other sorts of games that share the same traits.
It's not "video game syndrome" for someone to think mechanics are the most important thing, because there are people that think the same thing and have never bothered with any video games - they picked up the trait from another source, such as board games, war games, or from a particular table-top RPG book that happened to be written in such a way as to enable the feeling that the mechanics were everything.
Is it video games that made leveling what it is yes they are. Before that people could take years to get to level 5. Now thanks to video games everyones wants end game contents. Back then murder hobos were much less prevalent then it is today. Again thanks to video games that showed no consequencesvin killing npc except for them to respawn minutes later. Any of those in your ttrpg or board games ? Again board games have strict ruling. Ttrpg does not. In fact it is written not to follow the mechanics. Try and do that on board games.
All in all... Think what you want its your right. But telling me im wrong in thinking this doesnt feel right. This is what i came to after playing for like 25 years. My point of view is... The game changed to be more like video games and that is a very bad thing. So yeah drop pre conception of rules and mechanic and expand instead of just adding more damage. After all ttrpg arent diablo games were all that matters is to kill everything.
DM of two gaming groups.
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Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses
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You are being deliberately selective in your point of view - games emulated "the game", and then the game took what was generally thought of as improvements back into itself, and then video games emulated that, and repeat the cycle - but the cycle objectively starts with the things you are complaining about being part of "the game."
People could take years to get to level 5 - they could also level up faster than even 5th edition says is normal, since the treasure tables provided in the old DMG are set up in such a way as to cause the "Maunty Haul" sort of game unless you consistently ignore and second-guess them.
People have always wanted to see what playing the high-level characters are like - all it takes for them to want that is for there to be high levels in the books.
"murder hobos" are a symptom of DMing style - the letting the player get away with stuff, the not putting focus on anything but the adventure portion of their life - not something caused by video games. In video games, you literally can't just kill whoever you want, do whatever you want, and have zero consequences. Video games bleeding into table-top would give us things like everyone finding it perfectly acceptable for the DM to declare whatever NPCs they want to completely immune to any form of harm, as an analog to the code of the game either not including the option to attack the NPC, or their not having combat stats meaning they never run out of HP.
You've come to one view after playing for like 25 years, and I've come to another view in the same time - so what's the difference? What caused our different views? It seems as simple as it being this; I like video games - you don't, so you don't even realize that you are using them as a scapegoat for problems that have literally always been around.
Oh wow, so much judging in your post...
first off, i'm a gamer, i literally grew with video games. still play them today. i really love role playing to the point where i literally becomes the characters i play. but that's the whole point of it all... how often most of you "gamers" actually becomes the character you play in video games ? or are you just watching the interactive story telling ? now compare that to TTRPG where we are supposed to collaborate together to make a story, not listen to the DM explain to us a story he has done. but hey continu to judge me wrongly.
Video Games have a singular story, a story you have no choice in. certain games did it right because of multiple endings based on what you did, but mostly you are stuck to those choices. most games have a single player story with only one ending, you basically play a story book you just read. sure you are the one playing the charcter but in the end you have no real choices. in the end you are just a spectator watching your story unfolds. skip to TTRPG where you can literally take a table, strap a gnome on it and throw it into the void because thats what passed thru your mind. cannot do that in video games because they are often just stories and this is too crazy for them. heck in most games the tables and chairs literally serve as walls and are literally bolted to the floor and made of indestructible wood that isn't even flammable. again games are designed to be story driven linear shit. and even if they try to go open world, in the end if you want a story you can't just have open world. because story is linear. that's the difference between story driven shows and improvised show. cannot improvise in a video game.
now story wise, in TTRPG if a player comes up with something much more interesting then my own story, i surely drop my own and push his. why would i not, it was more interesting to begin with. that's why its called collaborative story to begin with. sure the DM may be a dick about it and say the same shitty rules "my table my rules" but that is simply not true... not if you want players sticking around for your games.
murder hobos are still murder hobos, how often did you do consequences and yet the guy just continu to do it ? that's not the DMs fault that's just the player having problem with stories. they are the kind of person who just play GTA and not ever do the quest or story. they just run around with baseball bats because thats what they like. they can play it and steal cars all day long. that's a video game syndrome, not a TTRPG thing. the others that lived in TTRPG and bcame that didn't become it because of bad DMing, they became it because they think the DM is the bad guy and must be put to his place by breaking his rules all the time. that includes killing his NPCs killing the quest givers and just killing everything he does to begin with. that's a mentallity of many many gamers may they be in video games or TTRPGs. most murder hobos will just create numerous characters and if the consequences of their actions is killing them, do not care i can just create another character and continu on my way. because DMs don't just kill charcaters and TTRPG are never ending. aside fromt hat your only option is to eject them from your game, which is not a consequence of them being murder hobos, but consequences of them not fitting into your play style of being not utterly evil AF.
in the end, video games exists even before TTRPGs ever were created, if you look at the industry you will find out that gary gygax who invented the style derived it all from the one thing that murder hobos wants. and that is wargaming ! where guess what, the goal is to kill everything on sight without any consequences of your actions. video games existed way before computers were ever created, and like about 10 years before gygax arrived to the scene. again video games didn't have any stories back then, you could just play it and kill everything on sight, because no stories. so again, murder hobos come from the world where there was no consequences killing everything around and were shown that stories had no meaning. had you played those 25 years of video games you'd have seen that most story in video games were told in the manual. not in the game itself. a manual that next to nobody ever read. that's not mentionning the multiplayer games we have today that have strickly no story to begin with and are just people shooting each others to shit. look at how popular that is.
now back to my original point...
video games have a specific mindset to each game styles. but more importanlty they have pretty strict mechanics. and these people looks only at mechanics and thus when they come to play TTRPG, they are stuck in a world where mechanics are impoirtant. they are the type of people who want to know everything before they jump, and if you start homebrewing your own stuff, they get lost because that's not how mechanics works in the player handbook. those people comes from the video game industry where you cannot homebrew your shit, you play very strickly reinforced mechanics. this is why most video game people liked 4e and those who were used to homebrewing didn't like 4e. the story to those people comes way behind the mechanics. this is what i cal the video game syndrome. video games are not improvised sessions or improvides story becaus hey mine is better then theirs. it is set an cannot be changed or altered and it plays with very specific mechanics. while most TTRPG are improvised between players and DM alike.
the video game syndrome to me is this in short...
- kill everything in sight
- don't care about story, only mechanics.
- try to break the game doing stuff that you shouldn'T be doing
that's pretty much it.
exemple of people stuck in video game worlds...
my cousin had a player girl who was very shy and had trouble understanding the game. My cousin tryed to teach her the mechanics because thats what she wanted to know first. for her it was just a game like any other she had played, it didn't have story right fromt eh get go, because in her mind, it was just a game like any others. right away he told her it was like assassins creed where you can just run around and do your stuff and it was his job to describe what happens. and at that point she was like, ok cool, so i have blades in hand and hidden blades and i just can kill whoever i want in the streets. my cousin was like, well... there will be consequences for doing so, but yeah sure, why not... at this point his game has gone to hell, because she, as soon as he said assassins creed, thought she became altair not her home made character. she started running around climbing buildings and killing civilians because that's what she does in assassins creed. basically she's murder hobo in assassins creed.
sure the DM had his faults, my cousin is a new DM with great story telling but problems when it comes to preparation. he got stuck with her and trying to teach her the game. but she refused to see the game as it was, because she is used to being a murder hobo in video games. she likes stories, but once she done them, she just runs around killing everything. that's called replayability and thats the one thing video games don't have and because of it, it encourages her play style of murdering everything on sight.
this exemple is the perfect stuff for showing the video game syndrome and the pitfalls to which a DM shouldn't fall into.
you say i use video games as a scapegoat, but you are the one escaping the reality of gaming... before there was gygax, there was only war games. adventures were in books and movies only. this is why gygax was awesome to many people because he brought stories into a world of adventuring games. something that was totally missing before he did that. my only reason to cal it the video game syndrome, is that it became much much more prevalent once the video game industry picked up in the early 90ies. with games like duke nukem, doom and the likes where the only goal was to shoot and kill everything in sight without any story to drive you. it doesn't help that all war games became very very popular once people could play them via internet or lans. because games were faster then in real life. and tactical games were the shit back then. again goal of the games, kill everything in sight. mechanics were everything and story had taken a backseat. so what video games did was just show us even more that mechanics are important. and if you ask gamers now a days, all they talk about are mechanics. they dont care about good stories as long as as the mechanics are awesome. then comes the story. if anything it just showed us the true colors of people who just want to tactically shoot everything in the face.
last bit of story about myself...
back when i started it was all about the story. this is why i took the DM seat for all these years, i just love a good story. but i also played in a ton of games, and once i came to 2e i started becoming more focused on mechanics. and became what most people call a min maxer, because the mentality of myself at the time was that all problems could be solved with an axe. and even as of today and the number of games i did, that logic as stuck around. closed door, break it with an axe. bunch of globlins with slaves, axe. hidden sniper in a tree, axe. there is a reason why most people comes to conflict when it comes to solving puzzles and stuff. as a DM what are you gonna say... you can't because it ruins my game if you do so ? sure in the end you can break their axes, but they will just buy new ones and continu on. so i became a min maxer starting in 3e. which was much more oriented toward video games. i learned the mechanics of the game a ton and was at a lost when a DM started to homebrew. but i dealt with it, learned his homebrew and broke it too. i literally was every characters indestructible guy who could solve everything and literally solo play the game of the DM. my tactics and my gameplay literally made me power level the other players who were newer to the game. when i got enough of playing the abusive characters at the end of 3.5e. i started going back to concept. that meant playing races that didn'T have what it takes to play their classes. but even doing that can't stop my mind from trying to min max. even in todays 5e i can show people how broken the game is, and how useless it is to have 20 levels of a class.
Mind you this story comes from a kid who literally started programming its own games at the age of 7 on his old TRS-80 with tape cassettes in GW-Basics. so my mind was very logical back then. perhaps the reason why i was so strongly attached to stories. because thats what was missing from my mind. but hey... to each its own apparently.
DM of two gaming groups.
Likes to create stuff.
Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses
If you like --> Upvote, If you wanna comment --> Comment
Play by Post Games
--> One Shot Adventure - House of Artwood (DM) (Completed)
Don't try to claim I'm the one doing the judging when you are the one implying I'm not a real enough gamer to not need scare-quotes around the word.
And while you may have used the most words, you haven't made the most sense - you are still blaming video games for traits that video games are not the cause of. You'd be better off spending your time figuring out how to deal with the actual causes of those traits so that said traits don't hinder your fun while playing a game, than spending it on any further attempts to convince whoever it is you are trying to convince that video games and table-top games (of all varieties, including role-playing) have anything but a beneficial effect upon each other.
where did i ever say you weren't a gamer ?
seriously man after all this talk i think you just interpret things i say badly because somewhow you think i'm rage talking here when i am not.
DM of two gaming groups.
Likes to create stuff.
Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses
If you like --> Upvote, If you wanna comment --> Comment
Play by Post Games
--> One Shot Adventure - House of Artwood (DM) (Completed)
Anywhooo, so steering this away from heated debate...
I appreciate the feedback on some ways to spice up encounters with the terrain! Ropes, crates, etc seem cool on providing the melee folks with some variety. I'm also planning on doing more stuff with underwater combat (Have a sea troll that's been preying on kelp harvesters planned for this week).
How else can I/others (I'm interested in keeping this open for other DMs with a melee party too!) spice up our encounters with some ways to avoid the doldrums of circling and smashing? I've liked the idea of playing a bit loose with pushing/moving PCs to have a bit more mobility, like if a really strong monster dragged a PC across the terrain or something.
"Mankind have been created for the sake of one another. Either instruct them, therefore, or endure them."
-Marcus Aurelius