What is Felltower about?
"Felltower is all about safety." - Ulf
Well, that, and loot, exploration, and combat, in that order. The XP system rewards loot heavily, exploration second, and combat not at all. Combat is inherently set up in the game as an obstacle to gaining loot and exploration.
PC builds, though, are about combat, almost purely. Some of that is inherent in the game - Sean Punch made these templates combat machines for the most part. In a game where combat can end your paper man, players are incentivized to put their points into combat. That can leave a party a little less able to deal with anything that isn't combat.
Evaluating loot? Can't do that without surviving combat, so that's often set aside.
Finding hidden loot? 1-5 total points in this, if that. If See Secrets and Search rolls with a couple points in the skill don't do it, too bad, that's what we've got. Seek Earth is standard.
Exploration? Cartography gets an investment, sometimes, but not always. Otherwise, exploration is treated purely as a player-facing exercise.
Other ways of interacting with the world are all tertiary to this. If a spell doesn't kill, heal, or help you move in combat . . . it's basically considered a wasted point in a prereq.
I think because the game system gives you so many ways to deal with combat, it's also the way you most want to deal with the environment. Negotiation won't always work but combat always results in combat, so again, combat power gets emphasized.
I am not sure where I am going with this, just thinking that, even if the rewards system heavily prioritizes the results of an expedition over the how, a completely non-rewarded and costly method can dominate how you get there. Phase 1: Maximize combat power. Phase 3: Profit! It's not clear how you could go about changing the desire for combat (and the explantions, both totally correct and heavily rationalized, that drive it.) Putting XP on it sure didn't help D&D become about loot and exploration, and taking XP away for it would likely be counterproductive and unfair, at best. So how to make sure the game spends more time on exploration to find loot instead of combat to find loot?
I still don't know the answer to that.
When DF1 said "A party [...] may consist entirely of thieves", it lied. I haven't seen a published DF adventure that didn't have more melee combat than any other specific challenge. A scattering of locks & traps for the thief, a bit of parkour for the martial artist, maybe a ranged combat for the scouts, and so on for everything else but melee is the one thing the whole party can do (or can't avoid doing) so it gets the bulk of the scenes.
ReplyDeleteThat's a bit of an unfair ask, though, isn't it? Asking a published adventure to disregard the general advice of "have something for everyone to do" and just put down stuff only Thieves can do is a tough one. I don't know if a thief-only adventure would sell enough to justify the writing of one. I'd buy it, and I'd play it, but the smaller the subset of the already small GURPS audience you play to, the worse the chances of the book being worth the money expended to make it.
Delete"So how to make sure the game spends more time on exploration to find loot instead of combat to find loot?"
ReplyDeleteFor DF/RPG? Not possible. Okay, wait, let me expand on that.
DF/RPG is designed around the PCs all being combat machines. //All// of them (some more so than others, but all as designed by Template are competent at combat, and will grow to be more so).
DF/RPG wasn't designed to be anything more than "Orc and Pie".* I don't care how much Sean Punch complains about that comparison or says it's not true, DF/RPG is a small skirmish tactical combat RPG. The extreme lack of cohesive non-combat methods of conflict resolution available to the PCs is stark and well identifiable.
Take a look at the Templates skills, most Templates are spending 4 or more points only in combat or combat adjacent skills, this informs the Players that "these skills are the most important". So PCs will often neglect even Primary Skills if they start at 1 point because "that was good enough at start"...
Now, can you run DF/RPG with non-combat resolution games? Yes, certainly. But you need to tell the Players up front that they should favor non-combat skills during skill ups and do what I do: give out non-combat Lenses at chargen so the PCs can be designed to a bit more non-combat focused at jump... or just redesign the Templates to be less combat centric (that was too much like work for me - I find handing out 25 more points for "pumping up non-combat abilities" to just be easier).
Can you run a completely "thieves only" DF/RPG game? Yes. I know a few GMs who basically do this, but they aren't running published adventures or megadungeons designed to evoke the OSR feel, they're running megacity or hexcrawl games (where the hexcrawl is more focused on explore not 'kill monsters in the wilderness"). And yes, they do have to struggle a bit with the Templates not allowing for much "out of the box" thinking when the characters are 'young' (still at about 250-275 points). They have to tone down the non-combat problems and just let the PCs walk over enemies if or when combat breaks out.
* "Orc and Pie" might sound like an insult, and I do tend to say it that way... but, in this case it's aiming to explain the feel of DF/RPG as baked into the Template design choices. "Kick in door, kill Orc, take pie", very much a "back to the dungeon" mindset which was the ethos behind D&D 3e. A theme of "stop all this diplomacy and long dramatic overarching plotlines with fleshed out towns and political problems, just invade dungeons (aka underground living spaces), kill the denizens, and don't question why a group with no need for coinage has so many coins minted by the local ruling group who'd never do business with those 'evil monsters' in the first place. It was a push by WotC to reDiablo'ize D&D... because that was the D&D they'd played in their youth. I hated it, so yeah, there's a little heat in my tone when I call an adventure "Orc and Pie" or refer to a play style as "back to the dungeon", but that's because I personally do not like that style of play (even if I enjoy reading some one else's games set in that style, I wouldn't play it - which makes it an easier spectator 'sport' for me, I hate watching games I'd love to play).
Is there some way, then, in game mechanics, to make a game work better as "explore to find loot" than "fight things"?
DeleteFrom your comment, it sounds like almost none of the games I've played would really do much except facilitate maximal killing with loot as a bonus - probably even OD&D, which (eventually) minimally rewarded combat and maximally rewarded loot.
If you really want to reduce the centrality of fighting, you need to make combat a bit of a protected silo. Do Swashbucklers get to help when the Cleric Exorcises? Can the Knight help the party get past an eternal Wall of Fire? Why should the Wizard be an important player in combat?
ReplyDeleteOnce that is accomplished (double the energy cost of all combat spells and nuke in dungeon energy recovery into oblivion maybe), you have to massively drop the difficulty of all but a very, very few set piece boss encounters, so that the Knights, Scouts, and Swashbucklers can roll over almost everything fairly trivially. Importantly, this change means that combats start consuming much less time, leaving more narrative space for other stuff.
At that point, it just remains to start adding environmental or diplomatic hazards that require puzzle solving or spells and hey-presto, the tone of the sessions changes. AD&D 1e modules might be a good study... lots of random throw-away combat encounters that modern adventure design would denigrate as a waste of space but which actually allow the Fighters to shine without having the casters spend valuable spell slots, allowing modules to assume that the casters loaded some utility spells.
Honestly, 1e and 2d AD&D, with their Vancian, slow recovery spell slots, are probably better matches for combat-light adventuring than GURPS, with its free-form casting. When players know from experience that a dungeon requires a variety of utility spells to traverse, and in-dungeon spell recovery is impossible, then utility-heavy/combat light spell loadouts result.
In short, then, make combat effectiveness suck even more for utility folks, and change the entire campaign to be combat-lighter? That seems like two unrelated fixes - in fact, if you just make combat less important and easier, it means that combat is potentially a much more useful way to solve problems. You don't have any incentive to avoid it, because it's potentially high cost but likely very easy. Making some templates less effective at it shouldn't change that - it should just give them more utility in combat, potentially, given a lower combat risk level. My gut feeling is that if you make combat easier, people resort to it more often, and if you make combat harder, people emphasize their ability to deal with it more. It's a difficult circle to square.
DeleteAD&D 1st - so, that was never my experience with 1st edition AD&D, though. AD&D magic was extremely effective in combat, and you got a lot of benefit from a spell slot used for a combat. We didn't play megadungeons, so maybe it was different there, but in module-based play and in narrative-heavy combat-lighter games, the standard loadout for a 5th level M-U was Fireball, Web, Stinking Cloud, and a mix of Sleep and Magic Missile. Or just Magic Missile x 3 . . . you couldn't recover magic during a session very often, but you could shape an entire fight with a timely offensive spell. No one in my experience passed that up.
AD&D is not a good example as you've played it and know it includes a plethora of combat focused spells. However, if you look at OD&D, particularly before Greyhawk, there were almost no offensive spells. Sleep, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Death Spell and Disintegrate were pretty much all you got. Adding Greyhawk gives Magic Missile, Web, Ice Storm, and the Monster Summoning spells. I found the most effective way to get more utility spell selection was to force it by taking a literal and unconventional reading of the rules which state "A spell used once may not be reused in the same day." (M&M19) This says "spell" not "spell slot" and the rules also refer to "memorize" and we all know you can't memorize something multiple times. So my solution is that any spell can only be selected once: no Magic Missile x 3, you need 3 different choices. This doesn't help you in GURPS which doesn't have memorization but a depletable mana resource, but I thought I'd share since the conversation went off track into AD&D mechanics.
DeleteComing late to this thread, but: It is a bit of a challenge, for a few reasons:
ReplyDelete1. Some players *really* like combat more than anything else.
2. We have gotten loot by solving puzzles, and for me, that was super satisfying (e.g., Hjalmarr figuring out the rotating statue puzzles). But part of the fun--for me as the player--is the figuring out of the puzzle. The reward is great, because we can take that money, make it less likely that our players will die by buying more stuff, and then get to explore more and solve more puzzles.
3. As a player, I love exploration and finding new things/new areas, etc. But if we find a few cool new areas but there's no loot, it's seen as a "wasted delve" (certainly from an XP standpoint) and so that's essentially discouraged (not actively by anyone).
In short--I don't know if there's a way to reward exploration with more XP, and perhaps downplay the loot XP, because that would arguably encourage more exploration. I mean, some of the delvers have decent money, but the reason they keep delving isn't always the money--it's the thrill, the curiosity satisfaction, solving puzzles, etc.
I'm not sure any of this helps! But from my perspective, if it was less loot-focused, I think it would change how people approach exploration.
I'll give this some thought. One thing about #1, though, is although it's true, people do complain about combats that are "too tough for us right now" blocking exploration - presumably for easier combats and better loot. Also, some of the same people do complain that they need more loot to get more XP before those combats are doable. On top of that, those same people will avoid fights that they don't think assuredly come with loot.
DeleteSo for all of the love of combat, the decision point seems to be "can we win this without it being too risky and get loot out of it." If not, it's generally not done. So I'm not sure how much the love of combat really is driving it. It might be the favorite way to get loot, but if combats are seen as a way of degrading your resources (they are) but they don't always get you loot (they don't) . . . then I can see where the people in #1 aren't terribly happy.
Adding loot to pretty much any combat is a way to address that, but I think it just feeds a play style that ultimately doesn't mesh well with a megadungeon as I've constructed it. We go from "get loot, by finding it or fighting for it" to "seek out combat, because that has better odds of coming with loot." That's a fine way to play, but it's not what the dungeon is designed to provide. That could just be a non-fixable divergence in play styles.