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10-27-2022, 07:45 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Jan 2008
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D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War
I'm excited about Eero Tuovinen's new book "Muster - A Primer for War. Advice for playing D&D the wargaming way!" (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/413382/Muster) and want to share my first impressions and ask for yours.
I'm not much of an art guy normally but the art immediately grabbed me. I may wind up printing this one out. I'm also impressed by the clarity of the layout/organization and by the fact that he immediately contextualizes it with Kriegspiel and open-ended conflict simulation. I can totally imagine myself printing out the Manifesto section to routinely hand to new players to inform them what my game is about, which of the 8 types of fun I intend to serve. I love how the work positions gaining insight as a core motivation for play: D&D is a roleplaying game that is also a wargame. Its philosophical basis is in conflict simulation gaming of the war-gaming tradition. The principles we insist upon here are only novel compared to other types of roleplaying games. Yes! A thousand times yes! I'm getting new ideas for my game already, just from pondering the manifesto. What if I made my Dungeon Fantasy dungeons (hexcrawls) increase in realism as you go deeper (northward), instead of increasing in difficulty? What if going deeper (northward) is how you give the DM permission to stop telegraphing danger, introducing monsters in small numbers before encountering them in large numbers, following the Three Clue rule, and avoiding effective-but-unfun traps and security protocols (like magical claymores that obliterate you with overkill, instead of just scaring you with medium damage)? What if player actions can signal the GM to stop doing the things that make it a fun game, and start doing the things to make it more of a realistic conflict simulator? Those are my first impressions. What are yours? Last edited by sjmdw45; 10-27-2022 at 07:50 AM. |
10-27-2022, 09:23 AM | #2 |
Join Date: Jan 2008
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Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War
Another idea I just had: if the GM's job at the end of the session is to "score" the players' actions by handing out character points (or XP)... then in some scenarios, I should hand out character points for retreating! If retreat is a wise course of action given what has just been learned about the opposition, I should reward that intelligent decision the same as any other intelligent decision.
This might also make it more interesting to GM, because you're taking on the role of critical reviewer/mentor instead of a neutral observer. Commenting on player decisions would be welcome and expected after the delve is over, instead of feeling like interference. I would still want to rotate GMs frequently though. Now I'm excited to try this as a method for awarding CP. I can't wait to plop down a spellcasting dragon and then reward the players for wisely hiding until it goes away. (Or killing it, if they manage to do so through other wise decisions, such as luring it into traps they found elsewhere or having meteoric iron bodkin arrows.) I have the soul of both a designer and a teacher, so the chance to design scenarios for people to learn from excites me. |
10-27-2022, 10:07 AM | #3 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War
As I understand it, the wargame/RPG boundary has now been re-colonised by games like Frostgrave (and whatever Junglegrave and Spacegrave are actually called) and Rangers of Shadowdeep.
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10-31-2022, 11:08 AM | #4 | |
Join Date: Jan 2022
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Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War
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For example, we have the three clue rule so that there's redundancy. "For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues". When you include less clues than that, the PCs often won't make those conclusions. If those conclusions are necessary to survival or progress, they die or don't progress. If that's the reality you're trying to simulate, you've done so successfully, but is that fun? Same with the magical claymore example. Some wizard puts a magical claymore somewhere. It goes off and obliterates a PC, who didn't know it was there because there weren't multiple ways to detect it (because we've purposefully ignored the three clue rule), and so now we've got a dead PC. What happens at the table? Is everyone happy that the game is designed this way and is this the game they want to be playing? If so, you're golden! |
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10-31-2022, 11:19 AM | #5 | ||
Join Date: Jan 2008
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Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War
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Expect players to run away more and/or adopt a more fatalistic attitude about infiltrating a wizard's tower in a world with magical claymore as opposed to "fun" traps. In real life, Navy SEALS don't go around assaulting [brutal dictator's] hideouts for fun; you need a reason before you hit a hard target. A realistic gameworld has less tropey play; but more player freedom, and is sometimes easier to DM intuitively. Pros and cons. Last edited by sjmdw45; 10-31-2022 at 11:22 AM. |
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10-31-2022, 12:30 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: Jan 2022
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Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War
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The first one feels awful imo - why invent sweet places for your players to go if you then immediately teach them that going there leads to death they can't control? The second one looks like reinventing the three clue rule. You'd inevitably end up making these claymores detectable in multiple ways (per-based traps, mage sight, etc) and then now you're back to the three clues. As for expecting players to run away - how do they know to run vs not run unless you're telegraphing that information? Further, if we're expecting players to be able to run, now the players (and the GM) need to make sure they actually *can* run. IE: in my rewrite of Logiheimli in Hall of Judgment, I change the skeleton's Move to 4 (from 8) in most circumstances where the players would fight them. This allows the players to actually run from the skeletons rather than seeing skeletons, seeing that they move significantly faster than the players, and deciding that this is "do or die". If this is the case, now we're not simulating war (if i understand the premise). War doesn't care for how fast the players can probably move, and then tuning the enemy move speeds around making sure that players can escape if they walked into a situation. Rather, we're creating a (fun) game that encourages exploration, retreat, planning, and regrouping. |
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10-31-2022, 12:41 PM | #7 | ||||
Join Date: Jan 2022
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Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War
For what it's worth, there's a lot of stuff about the basic premise that I really like. I don't think the world should warp around the PCs, for example. In that same blog post, I write:
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Savvy players would realize that the optimal way to "win" is to purposefully make your characters good at social/exploration activities (where the difficulty is static), passable at combat, and then expect the GM to reduce the difficulty of the combat for them so that it's winnable but exciting. The mirror situation is that combat-optimized PCs have the difficulty of combat encounters raised so that they're winnable but exciting (when they should be breezing by them), but relatively struggle at exploration and social stuff. |
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10-31-2022, 01:03 PM | #8 | ||||||
Join Date: Jan 2008
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Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War
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Or maybe I'm not that curious and I prudently stay away until I have an excellent reason to go do otherwise. Quote:
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There are plenty of Move 8+ creatures in DFRPG already; I think players would generally be wise to prepare to deal with such creatures even in a slightly more standard, trope-filled game. For the record, I haven't run any wargamey adventures in a while. I do telegraph danger, follow the Three Clue Rule, find reasons to avoid realistically deadly traps in D&D in favor of "fun" traps (I invented Trap Gremlins to rationalize the existence of mildly-deadly traps, which are basically created to amuse the gremlins), etc. But I do kind of enjoy running tropeless adventures, i.e. adventures where the GM can just kick back and think about what's realistic instead of what's plausible-enough-and-fun-to-experience, and aside from the inevitable pacing problems I would enjoy running a tropeless adventure once in a while if the players were up for it. It would be very different. Quote:
TL;DR when you write in your blog that "This smells like design rot to me, and makes the player's choices less meaningful", I tend to agree, and I think the way I normally run adventures is one you would approve of. The tropeless, realism-oriented way of running adventures is not something you would approve of but also not the way I usually run them. It might possibly be my favorite kind of adventure to experience as a player though. I am really, really into "what would actually happen?" Last edited by sjmdw45; 10-31-2022 at 01:17 PM. |
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10-31-2022, 02:14 PM | #9 | |||
Join Date: Jan 2022
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Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War
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I would imagine the at-the-table automation eventually looks like "hey, can i execute delving routine C", which you calculate has some probability of succeeding and then we've reinvented carefully moving through a room from first principles. Quote:
I know that sometimes, extremely powerful dragons just fly over roads and decide that they want to eat delvers and don't want to talk about it. You, as the GM, can just decide that happens to your party. The dragon just roasts them and they're dead, time to spin up new PCs. Happens sometimes, which is realistic. I would also be pretty annoyed as a player if I was traveling to my next location, decided to not go in the trapped wizard tower, and the GM decided that we were the ancient dragon's next meal. That stuff happens to other delvers in most games. Dragons have to eat. The PCs delvers are the ones that didn't happen to, which isn't realistic in a sense; they have some degree of plot armor. I guess what I'm saying is that I think unless I'm totally misunderstanding the genre, going all in on the "what would actually happen" sounds miserable to me. The answer is "lots and lots of unfair, unavoidable death", as far I can imagine. For instance, how many encounters on the ose srd wilderness encounter generator before you get a straight up TPK? The GM can decide that the enemies aren't hostile, but they can also decide that they are; that they're hungry; that they chase you until they catch and kill. I would guess that if it's your favorite generate to play in, either your GM is fudging "what would actually happen" so that it's more bearable to play inside of or that my mental model for "what would actually happen" is wildly different than theirs. |
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10-31-2022, 03:10 PM | #10 | |||||||||
Join Date: Jan 2008
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Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War
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I could agree to "occasionally" as opposed to "very frequently". Quote:
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Also, there's a decent chance that dragon just dies with an arrow to the eye. I've already run that scenario more than once in simulations; to some extent it depends mainly on whether there's a scout with meteoric iron bodkin arrows in the party. (See above RE: optimal party, pros and cons of playing vs. not playing it. Related question is how often dragons will know Missile Shield and how often they spend the 25 FP necessary to cast it: meteoric iron may not even be necessary!) Quote:
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Last edited by sjmdw45; 10-31-2022 at 03:52 PM. |
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