I brainstormed with Karen for 250 miles. We thought of a couple of ideas to aid game play. First, during game play, resolve parts of the battle as mini encounters within the overall initiative order. Hank acts, then the troll he's fighting, then Perry against the same troll, then Fighting Eagle against his, Vjarne against his, their troll, and so on. It's not a big thing, but it might help keep the flow more focused during game play.
Secondly, I wondered about using a Boggle timer. Roll initiative, set up the battle map with everyone in position, then flip the timer. This should give 3 minutes for everyone to look through their sheets, read one their powers, suggest flanking maneuvers, strategy, etc. and decide on what they want to do. Then, when the timer runs out, all the powers have been chosen, and the round is resolved according to initiative. Oliver goes first, he's already decided to use Lance of Faith, so he moves his guy and casts. Then when it's Fighting Eagle's turn, he uses his chosen power with Oliver's bonus added in, and so on. As we played this week, each player in turn stopped to review his options, bringing the round to a halt. What the Boggle timer does is collect this time into one period at the start of each round to allow quicker resolution of the round itself. This should have the added benefit of keeping everyone focused on the game board during the resolution, and allow the chance to role play more as things unfold.
WE need something - it does bog down. The big problems I see are two - first, that trying to keep track of simultaneous actions is going to be very difficult, especially without a dedicated game master. Though a way around that might be one of the things we talked about up there, dividing up the monsters as well as the characters. Whether that makes things clearer or not remains to be seen, but I think the more people are directly involved in the action, the better. Running the monsters and my characters, I don't really notice the lagtime as much (until people stop things cold to look up a power...).
ReplyDeleteThe other problem, especially with using a timer for the whole round, is that the game is very sequential. Oliver acts - the troll acts - Fighting Eagle acts - another troll acts - Vjarne acts - and actions in the middle of the round can, sometimes, make it impossible to choose actions at the beginning. If those two trolls are next to one another at the beginning of the round, but head in different directions, Vjarne's fireball might not make sense anymore. It's easy enough for the characters to work out their actions in concert, though never perfect - and might bring in issues of communication, etc. - but it will always be a problem coordinating this with the monsters. It might still be helpful to put a timer on people - either individually, or like this, at the beginning of the round, but there's probably no way to avoid having to change things in the middle.
It does make you wonder if the game would be more interesting with something like simultaneous movement - using a time tracker, with timed actions (like Swashbuckler has, or some other games.) Might make it infinitely complicated, but definitely tends to keep everyone engaged, especially if it's flexible enough to allow for changing actions as things go...
The timer isn't meant to be that restrictive, more to encourage everyone to spend a constrained period of time researching their moves. I think it would help the flow of the game to have everyone checking their options and discussing tactics at once, then the actual ordered round would keep everyone focused on the encounter, and get resolved more quickly. Ideally, we'll all get familiar with our characters in time, and not need to constantly go over them, but that will take time.
ReplyDeleteI think the big delay comes from not keeping everyone's attention. It's too easy for everyone not acting at the moment to wander off, physically or mentally, and the round to lurch forward. I think a lot of the problems with sequential actions could be resolved by better role playing. If there was coordination of action, those issues could be resolved. As for changing actions during the round, that's always going to be necessary, but it shouldn't mean stopping again to research another power.
I wonder too if trying to keep a player or two ahead of the play would help. If Perry acts last and I know what he's going to do, why not roll the dice and note the results. Then when its his turn, its only a matter of checking the roll and adjusting AT and Dam according to current conditions. That might not be possible, though, since that kind of planning would take care of the current stop and start problems we're seeing now.
I think a more traditional game structure with a better defined game master would help, but if we're only playing two or three times a year, we're not likely to get past the urge to play multiple characters per person, and play while running the game. The closest we're likely to come is splitting duties from one encounter to the next. You run the first, me the second, David the third, etc.
It wouldn't be a perfect solution, but would allow everyone taking a turn at the helm an equal distraction during the play. I don't think there's any way to split up an individual encounter and improve play. It would work in the abstract to have mini encounters going on, but with so much crossover between playing characters and monsters, we'd only end up complicating things further with me running monsters against Karen and David, while David and Thomas run characters against your monsters, and so on.
It's worth noting, that running the monsters and the game, as well as characters, I am never bored, and not particularly annoyed by delays - there's always something to keep you busy. The more involved you are in the game, the better. That and knowing your characters - I noticed how slow the first encounter we played was, the first time we'd looked at the cards since last christmas - after that, I don't remember either of us slowing down the game except in a couple exceptional moments... That's certainly an advantage to playing the same character all the time (the same 2 characters, who are mirror images of one another, for that matter) - I know them very well, and once I've reacquainted myself with the mechanics, they tend to move smoothly - I know what I want them to do, usually how I am going to get them to do it, and so on...
ReplyDeleteAnyway - I think splitting up duties - with monsters, or even the secretarial duties (maybe especially the secretarial duties) - is the most promising approach. If you're keeping track of hit points for the party, you can't really wander off. It focuses your attention, which seems to be the main issue. Splitting up monsters would have lots of benefits (I mean, from one encounter to the next), from spreading the work, involving more people, to making tactics and such less predictable... I think assigning overall record keeping to different people - or even keeping a big public record - a whiteboard or something, and assigning someone to it - would do even more to keep everyone attentive.
And finally - more role playing, even in fights, would definitely help. A session at the start of the round is a very good idea - to reiterate conditions and such - to lay out a broad view of what we are planning to do - and to start working in more characterization. Even in fights - so far, we've tended to just pick our powers and go, all of us alone - but this is not very realistic, often seems to undermine the action (Perry does something clever that assumes the cooperation of Fighting Eagle, but FE heads off to attack the other troll, or something) - and lacks the, shall we say, potential for interparty dynamic. No one is trying to boss the party, at least not in character - no one, in character anyway, is expressing opinions on what anyone else does. I suppose too much of that ends with Eugene vs. Timothy, or, even worse, one person running all 8 characters - but more of it gets you better battle tactics, and more engagement with the characters. A 3 minute session at the start of every round sounds like a good place to start...
An even nerdier note - I noticed a difference between the full character printouts you all use and the index cards I use. For characters you know, mine have an advantage - you have all the powers right there, in one list, everything together. If you know what they do, it's very easy to pick them. I notice people leafing back and forth through the printouts looking for WHAT they are going to do - which I don't have to do... On the other hand - trying to play a character you AREN'T familiar with off a 4x6 card is a recipe for disaster - no matter what you have written, you have to keep going back to the book for every power...
ReplyDeleteI've always preferred the 4x6 cards because everything is right there in front of you in an easily used size. The new system is catered toward powers, though which can't be properly summarized in that kind of space. Ideally, that with a deck of power cards like Monopoly properties would work best. Look at your list, choose your power, grab the card you need, and set it aside.
ReplyDeleteIn game, I've noticed we both track condition. A whiteboard would make a lot of sense as a way to have one visible record of where the battle is at. It would help keep a better grasp on Healing as well if you can just glance at a board and see where you are. We sometimes get in trouble waiting too long to act, then spend a round cringing and hoping no one hits. It would also be good for in-round conditions, like being bloodied, dazed, slowed, etc. It might trigger better use of powers and abilities.
I think a cheat sheet of party/monster stats is a good idea to keep on paper, since they should carry over from encounter to encounter. It would also leave the whiteboard free for charting less info - initiative order, damage, powers used, condition. It would mean a little extra work at the start, but it might make sense to list the party's powers out like we do with defenses and AC, at least those other than at will. We could better track what gets used, and which spells are learned (since Wizards have to pick one of two for the day on some types of power).
Again, it's more preliminary work, but should speed play up in the encounter. I think a lot of it could be put in a computer too, which could be kept from adventure to adventure, and updated easily for leveling up and retraining. I've actually got a FileMaker DB set up that can do that. It would just require typing in data on the characters of the day. Eventually, all characters would be summarized in it, and that initial delay would be gone.
Maybe we should take an afternoon or gaming session just to set ourselves up. Build preliminary lists, talk about settings and role-playing and skill challenges (what to use, how to incorporate). Rather than expect to sit down at session one and play, plan to sit down at session one and prepare everything for play with session two. If we're lucky, they'll flow into each other quickly. This way we could create cards, encounter stat lists.
Anything that helps the actual play to flow as play, with input from all sides at all points through the round will be good.
Things would definitely go better if we use prep time to prepare - we kind of did this last time, though mostly on the monsters and battle maps side - with that stuff a bit more out of the way this time, we could use it to collect the data we want for playing, put it in the computers or on paper, etc. As well as work out maps for the world, towns and countries and terrain and such... We usually talk about it enough, but we need to spend some time getting the talking onto paper (or bits)... As for playing - I don't know quite how to work computers into it, in a practical way - it would be very helpful probably to keep a lot of that info in Excel or Filemaker, but I don't know how distracting it would be, while we're actually playing.
ReplyDeleteA white board, though, I think would be invaluable. Not only could we get more people engaged in the mechanics of the game, recruit Thomas to do it, say - but having all that info where everyone can see it, and confirm it, is very useful. It's hard to keep track of it all - we need a place to see, quickly, what powers people have used, what they have, how much healing they've used, all the rest. I think a semi-permanent party order is good to keep there - carrying powers and healing and such between encounters - with encounter specific info (initiative order, monster stats, if we wanted to publicize that) changing...