Tight focus versus a sprawling playground

[Mailanka]

I offer for your consideration two very different books: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and GURPS Fantasy. In the former, we have a tight mechanical focus: You go into dungeons, kill things, and take their stuff. I'm sure people who have played DF extensively often get into other things such as romance and intrigue, but the actual mechanics of the game doesn't revolve around this. In the latter, we have a set of templates and mechanics that assume very little about the game. The templates found in GURPS Fantasy will explicitly support anything from dungeon crawls to romance to intrigue and everything in between.

In your opinion, in your experience, which is superior?

It seems to me that the former's tighter focus makes the game simpler. The players know what to expect when it comes to building and advancing their characters, and they know what to expect. You can stray from that path, but when you do, everyone is equally ill-equipped to deal with the new situation. That is, everyone is equally well-equipped to kill monsters and take their stuff, and to deal with the politics at a king's court, therefore, everyone can participate equally in the current story. On the other hand, you risk the game falling into a rut as everything becomes so much fluff around the "real purpose" of the game (ie Dungeon Crawling).

The latter explicitly supports greater flexibility. One player might be a great warrior, another a great politician, a third a master of mysteries. This allows the players to explore the elements they find more interesting and ensures that each player can shine during "his scene," but it also means that players who aren't equipped for the current scenario can barely participate.

I've run GURPS games both ways, with one game centered entirely on soldiers (so every character could fight in a military scenario), and another where characters were scattered all over the spectrum from great warriors to great beauties to great politicians (though even here, I do tend to find I pick at least a few things to focus on). I'm looking to start a new campaign, and I can't quite decide which it should be. On the one hand, my instincts tell me that focus is better, that I can build complexity atop a simplistic foundation. On the other hand, I like the rich sense of possibility that a more flexible set-up brings.

So I thought I'd ask the Hive Mind. Do you prefer tightly focused games like Monster Hunters, Action and Dungeon Fantasy, or do you prefer more broadly focused games, like Fantasy, Space and Horror?

[weby]

As a player I normally like more focused ones, be it ready made like DF or custom built by the GM.

I want there to be enough details both in the character options and the world to get a grip of what is expected. Too many differences like the "One player might be a great warrior, another a great politician, a third a master of mysteries" simply has never worked in any games I have been in.

As a GM I would never use anything too narrow focus like DF without some major tinkering. In gact my current game is defiitely DF inspired, with a lot of elements taken from there, but with a quite different focus and scope.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

So I thought I'd ask the Hive Mind. Do you prefer tightly focused games like Monster Hunters, Action and Dungeon Fantasy, or do you prefer more broadly focused games, like Fantasy, Space and Horror?

I'm not likely to run campaigns of the sort you're calling "tightly focused," but it's not because of the tightness of focus as such. I'm perfectly willing to run a campaign where I specify in advance that all player characters must be on a given mission or quest and must have certain qualifications for it. I'm just not very given to a pure action focus in any of my campaigns.

I remember some years ago discussing campaign styles with Peter Dell'Orto, and referring to one of my high-action campaigns, which had a serious fight roughly every other session. Peter's comment was that he would call that a low-action campaign. So there you go.

The thing with dungeon fantasy, in particular, is that the setting is a dungeon plus some peripheral stuff—places to sell loot, buy gear, recover from wounds, and be "from." The only part of the world that needs to be fully realized is the dungeon, and it exists as a place for the adventurers to go to kill things and acquire loot; its sole purpose is as an arena of combat. And I just can't see the fun in running something like that. The fun for me is creating a world and seeing how the adventurers engage with it.

Bill Stoddard

[Phaelen Bleux]

For my group (me included as primary GM), we tend to be the world-building type. While the GM may roughly direct the scenario from session to session, many times the end of a session becomes "what do you plan to do next (as a group) so I (the GM) can be ready for it."

We have a long-standing world (Arnur Soghal), in which we have had numerous campaigns with various foci. . .some of them GM designed and some of them player inspired. It is not unknown for a player and the GM to kabitz out-of-game to direct the focus of the next session(s). Player-generated goals are often more important than GM (or pre-generated module) "railroading;" hence, we like a large world to rattle around in.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Phaelen Bleux

For my group (me included as primary GM), we tend to be the world-building type. While the GM may roughly direct the scenario from session to session, many times the end of a session becomes "what do you plan to do next (as a group) so I (the GM) can be ready for it."

We have a long-standing world (Arnur Soghal), in which we have had numerous campaigns with various foci. . .some of them GM designed and some of them player inspired. It is not unknown for a player and the GM to kabitz out-of-game to direct the focus of the next session(s). Player-generated goals are often more important than GM (or pre-generated module) "railroading;" hence, we like a large world to rattle around in.

But how do you prefer to play? Do you say "This is a strictly political game with mechanics that work so, so X, Y and Z skills are very important, and you shouldn't bother with A, B and C?" or do the players generally have free reign to take what they please, within the confines of the concepts of the world?

[Crakkerjakk]

I generally prefer a more focussed style. I generally set the type of game when I pitch the campaign, so I'll say something like "Set in the world of Eberron. PCs are a team involved in an archaeological expedition to abandoned hobgoblin ruins." I leave what particular character types they want to play up to them, but everyone knows what the game is going to "be about" so to speak ahead of time.

If they don't like that particular pitch, well, that's why I usually pitch about 18 campaigns at a time.

[Ulzgoroth]

I think it's confused to relate the focused vs. less focused game to the books. It's true that DF, MH, and Action are about relatively focused games, but Fantasy, Space and Horror aren't in any way opposed to that. From my reading of Horror, it seems to be mostly about fairly focused games in its own right. Fantasy and Space somewhat less so, being largely about building settings, but Fantasy includes DF type games, and Space includes space marine bug-hunts and such.

I do think any individual game is going to run into trouble without some kind of initial focus, otherwise you're at risk of winding up with one character set on playing a courtly romance game and another planning to stab at least one dragon in the face per week, and these people not having any good reason to play together. But focusing on just one kind of play or not...I'd go either way there.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I do think any individual game is going to run into trouble without some kind of initial focus, otherwise you're at risk of winding up with one character set on playing a courtly romance game and another planning to stab at least one dragon in the face per week, and these people not having any good reason to play together. But focusing on just one kind of play or not...I'd go either way there.

That's why I circulate prospectuses listing possible campaigns. Once I have a look at preferences, I can usually sort my players out into two or three campaigns that suit different types of players. I normally have a group that focuses on action and a group that focuses on dialogue and relationships or on world exploration.

But there are several ways you can have a common focus:

* All the characters have a shared mission
* All the characters are in the same physical location and will meet each other over and over
* All the characters have to deal with a common disaster or threat
* All the characters have a shared backstory
* All the characters are people of great power or importance who can't help meeting each other

And sometimes you can have two or three of these combined. For example, I had one campaign where all the characters had the common background of being avatars of God and Goddess and thus bestrode their world like colossi and kept running into each other.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

But how do you prefer to play? Do you say "This is a strictly political game with mechanics that work so, so X, Y and Z skills are very important, and you shouldn't bother with A, B and C?" or do the players generally have free reign to take what they please, within the confines of the concepts of the world?

It depends?

Often my writeup of a campaign specifies a particular common focus. But I have run campaigns where the agenda for the pre-session included "players will agree on the details of how their characters know each other and what they are doing together." In Gods and Monsters, for example, the stricture was that all the pcs would have superhuman abilities, but would use them secretively, rather than being public figures; but it was the players who chose to be the personnel of a secret British intelligence agency dedicated to containing supernatural and paranormal threats to the King, the Empire, and humanity.

Bill Stoddard

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I think it's confused to relate the focused vs. less focused game to the books. It's true that DF, MH, and Action are about relatively focused games, but Fantasy, Space and Horror aren't in any way opposed to that.

I don't want to interfere with people posting their experiences, because I'm just looking for input here, not really angling for one direction or the other, but I thought it might be useful for me to clarify my thoughts on the above matter because, as Ulzgoroth points out, it is confusing.

Compare and contrast the templates found in GURPS DF and GURPS Fantasy. Look first at GURPS Fantasy. If you handed that book to players and said "You can pick any template in this book, but you all have to work together to protect a kingdom from the evils that beset it," nothing would prevent one player from choosing to play as the True King, while another chose to play as an Assassin. Mechanically, they have almost nothing in common: the True King is almost entirely politically focused, while the Assassin is a combat character with great stealth ability. The True King isn't going to be very useful in storylines that focus on the Assassin, and vice versa. On the other hand, that doesn't mean they can't work together (the Assassin works to protect the True King from unseen threats and quietly eliminates his rivals while the True King works directly to improve the kingdom), and their two different focuses will add different dimensions to the game. A "sprawling playground."

On the other hand, if I handed people DF and said much the same thing, no matter what template the players chose, you'd get combat-capable dungeon delvers. No True Kings, unless someone figures out how to make a D&D-inspired Warlord type, because True Kings don't go dungeon delving. Every character will be able to contribute more or less equally to all the plots: In dungeon crawls, they're all optimized to kick butt, and they're all equally unconcerned with politics, romance or murder mysteries (which means the GM will improvise a lot if he wants to add any of those to the game).

You can really see this when you look at the racial templates: in Fantasy, elves have Unaging because elves are traditionally seen as immortal. In DF, they do not, because nobody cares about Unaging in a dungeon crawling game. It's just fluff.

That's why I chose to contrast the tightly focuses genre-emulation books with the more generic genre books. I want to get a sense for what people prefer and what they think of the two approaches.