the game

[Bravesteel]

no. my idea was not to say "ok here it is" but rather for them to operate within the game setting. that it wasn't easy, that they'd have to work, that they'd have to gather information, that they'd have to use their skills.

Totally agree with that, thanks for clarifying.

when the last two players set out to find a derelict ship they just set out willy-nilly. I was prepared to let them find the utility boat on a roll of 12 (at minimum I wanted the entire game group present for the zho ship find) but that didn't occur. I explained to them that space is big - here's your sensor range (made a fist), here's the star (stand in one side of the room), here's caloran (take a few steps) and where you're looking is outside the library and across the street and over in the park. you're going to have to have some kind of idea where to look. so they said ok and went to get the data. the marine colonel did the research, and when he shared it with the navigator I referenced her skillset to point out that he had no skillset to properly identify what to look for and that she'd have to look it up herself. so she did (she had navigation 2* and comms 2*), and I was quite prepared to let them find it next session when the full group returned. such was my thinking and approach.

I recognize the fact that I wasn't there, and I wasn't the one having to referee, and I heartily congratulate you for going out there and getting a game going.

However, I feel like I would have simply been honest with the players, "Hey, I really want to wait until the whole group is here to find the Zhodani wreck," in the meantime you could have let them find something nasty like a crazy magnetic mine that has attached to their ship and they need to disarm it. I don't know, but sitting around watching the proverbial paint dry on the newly acquired ship is still thus.

Conversely, you could have simply let them find the Zhodani wreck. The other players upset? Maybe they should show up and they won't miss out? (Obviously phrased less passive aggressive than that!)

 

[Whipsnade]

We're all Monday morning quarterbacks here, myself especially.

Look at what Fly accomplished. He approached total strangers, successfully pitched them Traveller, successfully started a campaign with them, played in a store, played in Denny's(!!!), played in a library, had players bring their friends, had people show up out of the blue, and kept a very chaotic gaming experience going for several sessions.

And what am I doing? Picking nits like the knucklehead I am.

Fly, that whole experience was a FREAKIN' WIN by any rational measure.

You are to be admired and applauded. That's the only post mortem which matters.

Well done, Fly, well done.

 

[creativehum]

Look, not only what you point out Whipsnade, but the changing venues, the changing players...

Perserving in this situation was a crazy win in and of itself.

 

[flykiller]

He was waiting until Arden to let his hair down?

when after the first session he asked, "what's the point of this game? what's our assignment?", and I responded, "whatever you want", this took him back quite a bit, I presume because of the pre-supplied pre-determined game style he's used to, but he rose to the occasion very well. as the campaign started I decided to split the difference - a combined assignment/freeform game. "go here and accomplish this purpose, how you do it is up to you". perhaps that was a mistake. during the trip he exhibited little curiosity about the game setting or the worlds passed, and none about the ship itself or any of the npc's. I suppose he expected the action to start at arden - like being dropped into a video game and open fire.

when I started to explain to the two players that "space is big", they insisted on commencing the search anyway, and persisted in this. when it proved fruitless for so long, they were looking at me like, "what is going on? what are you doing?" I think they were acting in accordance with their typical gaming environment of, "ok, we're here, bring on the action."

the first sessions were successful I think because they were one-offs - here you are, get to it. as the game transitioned to a campaign, they seemed to dislike the campaign, willing to tolerate it only until the action started. like I was saying to Blue Ghost earlier, d&d is a series of one-offs - kill the monster, steal his treasure, use it to become a better killer, repeat. I believe one reason the initial and ad-hoc sessions were successful was because those sessions followed that pattern, and the campaign was unsuccessful because it didn't.

 

[kilemall]

Back in the 80s I found some friends did not like the overly logical Imperium I tended to run then. I got a lot of feedback saying they wanted to do what they wanted to do and not have a thoroughly working system imposing it's will on them.

As a direct reaction, one of the players reffed his own world, Mercenary World.

MercWorld was an isolated overpopulated planet. As a population reduction method, systematic bloody wars were waged, and the survivors parked in merc reservations pending their call up to the next war.

The adventures revolved around the reservations, VERY much a LL-0 environment, with bar fights that began and ended with grenades, etc.

The same fellow also ran amuck in another ref's adventures, famously wielding his samsonite briefcase as a cudgel whacking his way through a communist fortress.

Had not run into this with running D&D, but then again D&D was normally very much an exercise in Id gaming, acting on impulses and desires and far away from any enforcement mechanisms beyond the harsh actions of enemies or would-be victims.

Between that and a consistently monorail destroying solution set for Bright Face no matter which group tried it, I learned a harsh lesson.

You give your players the kind of play they want, right quick, they don't necessarily expect a gimme win but do want to feel they are acting effectively, and don't have the police/Marines show up until after the adventure denouement/cleanup phase, if ever.

 

[Whipsnade]

You give your players the kind of play they want, right quick...

That's been my experience over the last decade or so, albeit in FLGS' one-off sessions.

If you don't start in media res, you might as well not start at all.

In Horde, I don't start with "You've just exited jump space in the Raschev system and an engineering casualty has occurred...". I don't even start with "You've been hanging around the port waiting for the parts you need to fix you ship when an official approaches you with a job offer..."

Instead, I start with "You've reached the clearing that contains the crashed ship the General wants you to identify."

Brightside starts when Streen is shot, not when he hires you. Mithril starts with the port warden waving goodbye as your ATV trundles off. Divine Intervention begins as you fly up to the floating palace.

Groups that have been playing together for a while can handle "housekeeping", "travel", and "tension building" sessions.

For most other groups, something, anything, has to happen now.

 

[creativehum]

Given that RPGs in general, and Traveller specifically, grew from the soil of adventure and action fiction, I see nothing wrong with all of this, by the way.

I mean this with utterly no embarrassment or equivocation. i mean this as someone who loves to see his players come up with clever plans, awesome maneuvers, and make death-defying die-rolls to see if their Player Characters survive one more day of adventure.

Given that Traveller -- out of the gate, even in only one subsector -- will over dozens of worlds, focusing play on conflict and desperate agendas gets everyone on the same page quickly and helps build a cohesive group out of the gate.

And to kilemall's point: too much "authority" in the setting that comes in and clamps down on this potential has always seems odd to me.

I know I'm about to fly my "Original LBBs 1-3" flag now, but...

This is why the original books were set up the way they were and the implied setting details were set up the way they were. Random encounters and potentially dangerous situations could happen at almost any time. The starship encounters in the 1977 edition suggests a relatively weak centralized government in the setting of play (if there is one at all). Many worlds will have limited populations, chaotic or overbearing governments, or little law to speak of. This is all by design.

When some of us harken back to the days of Proto-Traveller (or, in my case, the original Traveller found in LBBs 1-3), we are specifically trying to bring this more open ended, wild west, not fully civilized sensibility into play. This isn't to say there aren't worlds that are civilized and full of order. But these are the places the PCs come back to in order to restock, sell valuable goods they've acquired, and recover.

This kind of setting has the breathing room required for the kind of fiction that originally inspired Traveller -- and RPGs in general.

 

[whartung]

when I started to explain to the two players that "space is big", they insisted on commencing the search anyway, and persisted in this. when it proved fruitless for so long, they were looking at me like, "what is going on? what are you doing?" I think they were acting in accordance with their typical gaming environment of, "ok, we're here, bring on the action."

I have to say, I don't necessarily disagree with them.

Searching in vain is uninteresting. Its like playing Battleship against the Frigate on a 1000x1000 map. "AAA 789" "Miss" "BCF 342" "Miss"

It certainly represented the folly of their task, but that's not necessarily fun either. And it's all about the "fun". Teaching the party a Lesson isn't really fun.

As I told the GM of a (what would have been) Pathfinder game folks were trying to get me into: "I don't really care about the rules, I don't really care about the character. Not at this point. But if we're not killing monsters 15m after we sit down, I'm not going to bother showing up." I wanted some go go go action right away to engage me, loitering around watching the soda go flat while meticulously rolling up and detailing characters I care not a wit about, and then try to make sense of vague clues in an "inn" for several hours...no.

Me. Sword. Cave. Monsters. Dice. Go. The game is a mechanic in itself that I can use to learn it, and, in theory, then get more involved and interested in. But not day 1.

 

[flykiller]

Well done, Fly, well done.

if the players walk away then it wasn't well done.

Me. Sword. Cave. Monsters. Dice. Go.

seems to sum it up.

 

[Whipsnade]

if the players walk away then it wasn't well done.

Give yourself some credit for once. Sheesh.

seems to sum it up.

Gotta set the hook, Fly, then you can reel 'em in.

 

[atpollard]

if the players walk away then it wasn't well done.

Some of that is just the "luck of the dice". I know when I started the PbP game here on COTI, I really wanted to play, but I had been in SO MANY PbP games that just died out after a short while as players simply disappeared. So what you saw in a live game was not that different than I've seen in years of online games.

In response, I actually started the game with the expectation that it was going to be a solo game. If anybody showed up, I was going to be surprised. I got lucky twice, first I have had people show up and play for a while and move on (just like you experienced) and I found a couple of lunatics that want to play as much as I do. So the game goes on.

I think the best decision that I made was to adopt the mental attitude that I would play with whoever shows up. If that meant SOLO, then so be it, but however many or few, the goal was always to try to have fun with whoever was there.

PbP bought me a little more time to adjust than a face to face game where you don't know who will show up, so you had a tougher row to hoe than I do.

So Flykiller, based on YOUR experiences, what do you think that you would do differently next time?

 

[LiNeNoiSe]

this took him back quite a bit, I presume because of the pre-supplied pre-determined game style he's used to

Guys, you're overlooking the obvious here.

Traveller players are just much more intelligent and imaginative than D&D players

 

[rhialto]

if the players walk away then it wasn't well done.

How about a well done experiment, then? What did you learn from it? Plenty of excellent feedback here, and if (like me) you'd answer the "What are we supposed to do?" question with "Whatever you want." response then you can:

• Option 1: Let them flail away trying to figure out the new rules, new setting, new play style slowly, hoping they catch on and like it.
• Option 2: Let them succeed with complications, essentially meeting their play expectations part way.

For a concrete example of option 2: maybe the retired Marine Col. had a contact who could have helped them narrow down their search, or maybe you could have collapsed the time to do the data mining to "You spend several weeks poring over data, and finally determine this area (wave hand) is the likeliest area to start your search."

Then have them roll and, depending on how well they roll they succeed with more or fewer consequences. So a 2d6 roll of 2 is "succeed with the most complications/consequences" and a 12 is "succeed with the fewest complications/consequences". Basically move the game closer to what their play style appeared to be.

You had many factors working against you, the chief of which appear to be molding a new, non-cohesive group used to the "adventure path" playstyle into a cohesive group used to the "space sandbox" playstyle, and you just ran out of time, resources and chances to adapt.

 

[creativehum]

I want to clarify that I don't think every game has to be all action to get players invested.

I began my Lamentations of the Flame Princess game with the following:

1. An email I sent out to all the players about the general style of play and how we would be interacting. I wanted ground rules and expectation stated clearly so there'd be no disappointment or confusion. I knew three of the players well, one kind of well from a few RPG sessions at someone else house, and two would be strangers I had met through the Meetup I had created to gather players. The players range in age from late 20s to early 40s. (I'm the old guy in his 50s). (And so to be clear: The players did not all know each other; there would be no group cohesion except for the one I was creating at the table; we met for the first time and started play at our first session and have continued in a weekly fashion for a year and a half now.)

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is part of the Old School Renaissance of RPGs. A clean and sleek version of the early Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, the game focuses on exploration, danger, and weird fantasy. The setting will not be Tolkien-esque, but a warped 17th century Europe where the strange and magical is rare, inexplicable, and invasive.

OSR games in general, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess specifically, work from principles that are different than a lot of game in recent decades. In general…

• The Referee has environments and situations, not a pre-planned “story” of any kind
• Players drive things forward with their choices
• The game is dangerous. The Referee is not there to kill your characters, but neither is he there to protect them. Dice are rolled out in the open. Death is part of the game. (Luckily, new characters are easy to roll up!)
• The situations you encounter are not “balanced.” You might want to avoid encounters, you might want to flee encounters, and if you choose to engage them you’ll want to have the PCs manipulate the fiction toward your advantage (Short hand: Think of conflicts as asymmetrical warfare, not as engaging in a sport.)
• In this kind of play the Referee presents the players with an environment that is as solid as possible, that would continue existing if you weren’t there.

2. When we met for the first session they made characters and I gave them rumors. Each received one rumor for the Weird Fantasy Europe Europe I had sketched out, and one rumor specific to local area.

3. I began the game with a bit of narration: "Europe has been torn apart now for over a decade by religious war. All of you have been touched by it. Some of you have fought in this war as soldiers. Some have used your connection with god to bring comfort to those in pain. Some of you, who dabble in dark arts, are constantly on the run for fear your secrets will lead to your death. The war has brought ruin across all lands and for now you have had enough of it. More than that, each of you has had some brush with something weird -- some image or incident that has marked you as knowing there are dark forces in the world. You know there is something greater at stake then running men through with swords and you have, over several months, found each other and decided to strike out on your own, leaving the bloody ambitions of princes aside, and see what fortune you can make on your own..."

4. I offered that they had heard rumors of strange meteorites that had landed in southern Bavaria and were headed toward them. (Keep in mind they had other rumors they could choose to pursue. I brought this up to get them in motion with a focus. They could choose to pursue this or not, but even ignoring it would be an active choice, which is all I cared about. Choices. I believe RPG play is about the Player Characters making choices.)

5. It is a dark and rainy night as their cart creaks along the muddy road. I had each player describe his or her character and where they stood in relation to each other. When this was finished I related that their lantern light falls upon what seems to be a foot of a body half-hidden in the bushes off the side of the road. The PCs invested (carefully), finding a murdered corpse. After some deliberation they decided to take the body with them to the next inn they find (they all wish to settle in for the night) and leave it of the authorities.

6. They find an inn. The inn keeper has them place the corpse in his barn and will send word first thing in the morning for the authorities. The PCs settle in for some food and warmth around the hearth. They hear the footsteps of another guest coming down the stairs. They look up... and see a man who looks just like the corpse they placed in the barn.

And we were off and running.

Not because any sword had been swung yet. But because a tangible mystery that they already had a stake in (they found the body) and was a true mystery they could grasp as a mystery right away ("wait a minute, we just saw this guy dead!") and a possible threat (they knew this was a world of supernatural mystery) could come after them at any moment.

The session continued from there, with lots of guess work and trying to figure out what was going on. Eventually weapons were drawn. (Changelings from another world had landed in the area and were taking people over to monitor the behavior of humans.)

We had six solid months of sessions. (I'm on a break now because of work load. But the other players rotate in to GM if I need a break.)

I bring all this up to point out a couple of things:

• It doesn't have be violence that brings a group together.
• The referee can go a long way to establishing baseline rules, tone, and expectation even before play begins.
• None of this is easy stuff. For some reason a lot of us thing, "I have the rules, I have dice, now we just play." But I don't think this is true. People arrive at a gaming table with all sorts of expectations. I believe part of the Referee's job is to set the expectations at this table that everyone is about to play at now.
• There is nothing wrong with focus to help kick things off. I began with the rumors I offered the players, as well as the pursuit of the mysteries of the meteorites. I then sidelined those elements with the discovery of the corpse while traveling, and then the dopplegnager of the corpse at the inn. I gave the Players many specific, concrete handholds for actions and choices. (They could have bolted from the inn and continues south toward the meteorites. Or headed off in pursuit of one of the other rumors I had offered. Or anything else. I had no expectations as to what they would do.)
• I don't think Players, especially in the early sessions, are helped out by big concepts and endless choices. Players need specific, concrete things their PCs can interact with and make choices about. While I had no expectations about what the PCs would end up doing I did offer concrete places, people, and things for them to choose among to deal with (meteorites to the south, the corpse along the road, the doppleganger in the inn, the other people in the inn).

If we look at the original pilot of Firefly (a show which was one of the reference points for flykiller establishing his game) the crew of Serenity is performing a salvage job on an abandoned startship wreck out of the gate. There are complications with the salvage itself. (Mal discovers they are salvaging property belonging to the Alliance. Did their employer fail to mention this? Or not know?) This demands choices to be made. And further complications when an Alliance cruiser approaches to investigate. More choices! The characters deal with this cleverly (a stand up fight would have been a bad idea). They escape, but "fail their roll" to escape clean and a bulletin is put out by the Alliance that a Firefly class ships has escaped with stolen goods.

All of this would have made a terrific first hour or two of a first session of play. And there would have been no shame in simply saying, "Your crew has a job to do an illegal salvage. You're desperate for money. You took it." And then roll out the moments of play, letting the Players come up with clever ideas and rolling when required, and seeing where things go.

In the RPG game they might escape, or be ID'd, or be captured, or whatnot. The point is, this is Firefly: the crew, on the brink of financial ruin, taking an off the books job, with authorities nearby, trying to keep their heads down and make enough money to keep going. Things are already in motion. Danger and stress is already present. Choices are being made. Nothing would have to be pre-planned or canned. (I certainly wouldn't run it that way.) And then, if they escaped with the cargo, they could be heading off into all the other troubles and choices the pilot offers (employers that don't want to pay the money because the Alliance is on your tail now, passengers that might be too hot to handle, and so on.)

These all would serve as concrete, specific people, places, and things the PCs could interact with and make decisions about. Not vague mysteries that might be sorted out later, but immediate mysteries and dangers that demand some sort of response now... and with fallout and complications in the future because of decisions made now.

 

[creativehum]

Also, I want to add, I'm not lecturing flykiller with the above. I'm talking to myself as much as him, reminding myself of things I've learned.

I meant what I said above: this stuff is tricky. For some reason we think gathering with people with a shared goal and creative energy should be easy and just happen. I can only point everyone to the act of making a movie, designing a lunar landing module, or running a team in any kind of sports league. This shit is often hard and complicated.

This is a hobby, and the stakes lower and the activity less complicated. But the same issues come up. This is why I focused on what I focused on above: By providing focus, concrete details for the PCs to interact with, and offering choices for the PCs to make, a lot of the complexity falls away and the issues at hand become limited and manageable. But that is all for me as much as anyone else.

 

[flykiller]

How about a well done experiment, then?

I wasn't experimenting, I thought it was a good game and I was carrying on with it. when the pilot character offered to buy the 16-year-old's flintlock and the entire group dissolved into laughter, and were still grinning even as we were leaving, I was thinking, "that's it, they're in." but it turned out to be the last full game session.

What did you learn from it?

what seems most prominent is that they and I had completely different expectations and assumptions.

So Flykiller, based on YOUR experiences, what do you think that you would do differently next time?

...

well the straightforward gung-ho! answer would be 1) forget initiating a campaign until the group is formed and all personality differences worked out, and 2) just run a series of one-off "Me. Sword. Cave. Monsters. Dice. Go." sessions, testing game styles and player responses and developing group cohesion. new characters, new setting, new tasking each time. merc, scout/rescue, disaster, trading, nobility, admiralty/shipcombat, each lasting maybe two sessions three max. if/when the group regularly forms and if/when they reach a decision about game rules and milieu and character preferences then branch off, either from a session or brand new, into a campaign.

but while thinking about this a few things occurred to me, and a more fundamental issue is indicated. I'll try to formulate it correctly and type it up later.

 

[Bravesteel]

Something I have always tried to do, which wasn't immediately possible in your situation, is to have a Session Zero where expectations are hashed out and laid down into the campaign foundation.

I've had some instances where I or another person has made a character, a pirate let's say, but then the campaign immediately moves away from the starting seaside city and never returns. On the reverse, I've had a really great campaign arc written out, but my group didn't want to play ball, or simply weren't as interested in the subject matter as I was.

 

[mike wightman]

Just about every sci-fi campaign I run starts with a variation on the Death Station adventure.

The players roll their characters and I look at what they have; the adventure itself has stuff for:
a ship crew (to get them to wherever I have plonked the station, it may be in-system or it may involve a jump or two)
a 'security' contingent (to find out how the monsters on the station work)
general adventurer type to poke around

The patron could be anything from the megacorporation/government that owns the station, a rival corporation/government, relatives of the missing station crew, a shady middle man who wants the station investigated for 'reasons' etc.

No two games have been the same past the initial set up, the players make stuff up (and sometimes I use their conjecture and fears against them), by the end of the scenario the group has either come together or a follow up adventure is necessary (sometimes with one of the alternate characters they have generated due to death/injury).

 

[whartung]

2) just run a series of one-off "Me. Sword. Cave. Monsters. Dice. Go."

I think there's a lot of value to this, frankly.

For me, I hadn't played a sit down RPG is decades. So, I didn't even know if it was going to be compelling at all. But I can guarantee it wasn't if we were going to be fighting mechanics, rules, and "campaign bureaucracy" ("You're at an inn, drinking. What do you want to do?" "Find a hole in the ground, kill the inhabitants and take their treasure! Can we start there instead of this inn??!?") for several hours.

I wasn't going to read pages and pages of rules, because I shouldn't need to, not to start out. The Ref can tell me the basic points of how to do things, when to roll stuff, and what to roll.

Having some "one off" scenarios to engage the players in the environment, in the mechanics, in the group, and, frankly, you, as the referee, is all positive contact that can help ensure that when they invest in a longer period campaign with a more significant time commitment than a few hours on an afternoon, it'll, in the end, be worth their while.

A rule set does not make the game, the people make the game.

Simply, why should I invest in a game I don't know with people I don't know. But a pick up game helps lower both barriers and build a better long term relationship.

 

[aramis]

A rule set does not make the game, the people make the game.

Simply, why should I invest in a game I don't know with people I don't know. But a pick up game helps lower both barriers and build a better long term relationship.

While true that the ruleset doesn't make the game good, it can easily break the game if it is either poorly designed or poorly handled. GM comfort with the rules is important.

As for investing in a game with people you don't know? because sometimes, it's the way one finds a game at all, or develops a new circle of friends and acquaintances, especially after a move.