PDA

View Full Version : RPG Lessons learned from recent media: Subnautica and Stranger Things



Pleh
2018-04-04, 04:16 PM
I don't intend the thread to be restricted to Subnautica or Stranger Things, but these products have impressed me with new concepts I want to apply to my TTRPG gaming experiences. Settle in if you will, because I've got a short essay about these ideas.

Let's start with Stranger Things. Clearly, the whole series is at least partially a love letter to D&D (and, by association, similar games). But for a franchise that so frequently references the game and clearly has some personal experience in its play, they break one of the most fundamental "rules" almost constantly: "Never Split the Party." In each season, there's only one or two times that all the players involved in the game happen to be working as a single group. It's usually just before the final push to resolve the primary conflict and it usually involves working together to assign different team members important tasks that give the group as a whole the best chances for success.

Stranger Things almost CONSTANTLY has the party split up all over the map (depending on how you define the Party in this case, if it's just the primary 4 boys + Eleven, or the whole main cast with the chief of police, family members, etc). The second season did this even more by even splitting the core group of 4 boys for most of the story. Somehow, through it all, the challenge was always exactly the level of difficulty MOST tables probably prefer: dangerous enough that survival is not guaranteed, even if you do everything right, but consistently and believably attainable if you do everything right. This had me thinking about, "how could I possibly prepare that level of exact difficulty matchup with party members constantly pairing off in various combinations?"

It got me thinking about WHY "Never Split the Party" became an integral rule of RPGs and it became clear rather quickly (and the answer is heavily reliant on the way D&D establishes relative difficulty in level based RPGs, so this might not be as important to other systems that don't rely on level based mechanics); the DM doesn't PLAN for the party to split up, so every prepared encounter is balanced for the party to use optimal amount of force for every obstacle (therefore, splitting the party is actually weighting the challenge against yourself as each encounter expected the power of the whole combined Party). Consider it from the other perspective: if the DM *did* plan for the party to split up, then the scenarios become far easier than intended if the party *doesn't* split up. Therefore, it is always preferable to players to never split the party. The only exception being if the DM sets up a Two Key Lock scenario that explicitly requires the party to split up to handle a task. But this falls under participationism, because the DM is communicating at Session 0 that the optimal strategy of keeping the party together has no chance to succeed.

All this painted a picture in my mind of how to create more games that can follow the Stranger Things thematic flair better than I had done in the past (I realize a TV Drama is trying to do something different than a TTRPG; full disclosure that I tend to fall more on the Cinematic/Theatrical/Narrative-Focused games). At particular milestones, the party unlocks information as to how to proceed in their objectives and introduce multiple options (all of which OUGHT to be taken simultaneously, but the Party ultimately decides which ones are pursued and how). Then I give them time to make their choices about which party members are pursuing which options, and then I take a break from the session to edit the encounters (I probably have an approximate idea about what each option requires of the players) to scale the difficulty exactly where I want it, compensating ahead of time for any unanticipated choices (because you should always expect to be outwitted from time to time). Play resumes after the options have been properly calibrated to make sure the game runs as intended on all fronts.

In my mind, this is largely a workaround for the inadequacies of D&D's Encounter Level and Challenge Rating mechanics and the way those rules tend to advise a DM to prepare their games. I know a lot of players (particularly on this forum) would balk at the idea of altering the game's difficulty to accommodate the player's tactics, but please understand that at this level, splitting the party would be expected and to a degree a lot of player decisions can be somewhat anticipated (players know that option A needs a Spellcaster to resolve, which implies THAT spellcaster won't be present at the other options, so editing only needs to happen if somehow they decide to try to resolve it without one). If done with adequate preparation, editing based on player choices should be pretty minimal (maybe if their choices would make things unreasonably difficult, modifying the circumstances to compensate, such as if the party sent people lacking Darkvision into the Cave with no lights, so you make sure there's a few torches available to them on the way). I'm not intending to suggest that I'd add monsters if the party sent too many people to one area rather than splitting them up more (especially if my players were wanting to feel the confidence and certainty that their investment in putting extra hands on a single option was going to pay out), but that I need to prepare for the areas being relatively neglected have to now account for the increased likelihood of resolving in a Players Fail state (such as possibly preparing more escape routes for the PCs than originally intended). This might result in plugging in a "minor success" outcome where the players might not have the strength to resolve it as originally planned, but they don't have to be committing to a game where a bad move means there was no chance for success before ever going in. After all, the problem was more on the end of my plans not be adequately prepared for their strategy, they shouldn't be penalized by unreasonable difficulty due to unanticipated choices even if I tell them the encounter was expecting more investment from the party. I feel I owe them the time it takes to evaluate how this encounter might go given the heroes they are throwing at it so they are presented a fair game even in spite of my inability to account for every possible choice they can make.

---

Subnautica. Somewhere between Minecraft and Metroidvania in my heart, Subnautica showed me that you can build a Metroidvania game with zero (or close to zero) walls. Before playing, I would have considered Survival Horror and Metroidvania to be totally antithetical aesthetics and genres, but the game has shown me the error of my thinking. Metroidvania is essentially an interactive Maze/Puzzle Map, but few Walls are so limiting as mechanics for Survival can be. You have to explore to progress, but the limits of your exploration are set by your need to continually consume resources to survive. There is nothing essentially preventing you from just swimming straight to the end of the game except that you will not have enough air for the length of the trip if you don't bring either a submarine or a mecha suit (and you probably wouldn't survive the heat of the final area of the game without an advanced swimsuit to begin with). Of course, even these vehicles need upgrades to reach those depths and the time it will take you to gather the plans and resources to fabricate such tools will deplete your food and water needs several times. Essentially, you can go as far as your current resource management system allows (which makes it imperative in any venture to reserve enough resources for an emergency return trip). Unlike in Metroidvania, you literally create your own keys to success based on natural obstacles and barriers. You can make a risky dive on barely enough resources to attain success early, or you can take your time and gradually stockpile resources until you reach whatever level of safety you please before pursuing the next most challenging step of progression.

Before this, I had always looked at Survival Games in a TTRPG setting as a very unique niche of the game. Removing almost all (if not actually ALL) the entire set of Social Interaction, removing the securities of replenishing resources in the nearest town, ramping up the dangers of natural hazards, all that always felt like it was largely aimless before. A beautiful canvas, but very blank. After all, when Survival is the focus, why and how can a Wizards Tower be a primary plot arc (unless it's abandoned in the apocalypse)? Who are the adventurers questing for (clearly themselves, but what are their motives)? It's like the ultimate sandbox to pit the heroes against survival, and that made it always seem limitless to me. Subnautica reminded me that travel in Survival is not assured, and that without civilization constantly maintaining safe passage routes such as building roads and securing territory by eradicating dangerous species, overland travel can require a constant search for resources to keep the movement going. But particularly, there needs to be a reason to go anywhere at all. In Subnautica, civilization wasn't eradicated, just out of reach. Heroes in a survival game might be able to see the city lights at night and gradually work their way across the landscape trying to make it back home.

Some magic makes Survival rather superfluous. Even if you get strict about Material Component accessibility, Teleport has only Verbal components. It DOES beg the question where the survivalist gained this knowledge in the first place, whether there are ruins with lootable secrets that can enhance their skill and power, or if they are just rebuilding these techniques from scratch the way they were discovered originally. But, going back to the Metroidvania style, that is an excellent kind of thing to make a hidden collectible in a hard to reach area with a few clues around it to indicate that something really valuable could be inside.

Delta
2018-04-04, 04:33 PM
It got me thinking about WHY "Never Split the Party" became an integral rule of RPGs and it became clear rather quickly (and the answer is heavily reliant on the way D&D establishes relative difficulty in level based RPGs, so this might not be as important to other systems that don't rely on level based mechanics); the DM doesn't PLAN for the party to split up, so every prepared encounter is balanced for the party to use optimal amount of force for every obstacle (therefore, splitting the party is actually weighting the challenge against yourself as each encounter expected the power of the whole combined Party). Consider it from the other perspective: if the DM *did* plan for the party to split up, then the scenarios become far easier than intended if the party *doesn't* split up. Therefore, it is always preferable to players to never split the party. The only exception being if the DM sets up a Two Key Lock scenario that explicitly requires the party to split up to handle a task. But this falls under participationism, because the DM is communicating at Session 0 that the optimal strategy of keeping the party together has no chance to succeed.

Honestly, I think this is a very minor factor behind that rule, I'd hardly consider it important at all.

The reason is even more simple: The fun for most players from playing RPGs is playing their character. If you split the party, part of the players will not be able to contribute to the game at any time. This can work for a time in certain situations, sometimes scenes are interesting enough that just watching for a while can still be loads of fun, but in the end, splitting the party turns some players from being, well, players into just being specators. That's it, that's the main, I'd argue pretty much only relevant reason why splitting the party is most often a bad idea.

Quertus
2018-04-04, 04:52 PM
Wow, that's a lot to digest. Let me see if I can tear off a piece at a time, and chew on that.

I generally prefer to not have a series of level-appropriate challenges. I prefer a more CaW approach of what's there is what's there, deal with it. But let's say that I decided to buy into that gamist CaS mentality. Then, yeah, split the party + refactor encounters (or, rather, create encounters once the party split had been determined) sounds like an excellent approach.

Now, this is heavily centralized on combat encounters. If, say, how easy the king was to convince was based on how good a diplomat the party chose to send? That removes player agency and reeks of rails. But "the bad diplomat can see the king; for the good diplomat, they need to sneak into the king's chambers to talk to him" to make this scene an equal level of challenge? That gets tricky, and has different styles of consequences.

Now, if the players are defining the scene, given X difficulty and Y level of consequences, and choosing what makes it that difficult and what they want the consequences to be? That's... interesting. As the GM doing it whole cloth, without an underlying system, it'll doubtless lead to the kind of subconscious favoritism I hate. And by "favoritism", I mean any behaviors that are not evenly or logically distributed.

Before I post more, does what I wrote sound like I understood you, or do I need to stay here until we're on the same page on this bit?

EDIT 2: what in trying to say is, I'm not very familiar with (and, in an RPG setting, usually opposed to) CaS mentality. But, as a board game balance (like in Arkham Horror how # of monsters or portals to cause X depends on the # of players), it sounds brilliant, but... I'm concerned how to handle it outside of combat in a way that doesn't invalidate player build choices. What difference does it make how many skill points / build points / resources I put in diplomacy / research / whatever if the DC of the challenge will just be, "whatever it takes to make sure you need to roll a 15 or higher". But perhaps that's not actually a valid concern, and simply my lack of "participatiomism" (or whatever the corresponding word is for buy-in to CaS).

EDIT: and, yes, I completely second the "don't split the party" is primarily to avoid Shadowrun thumb twiddling, and to make life easier on the GM; concerns for "balance" were a distant second likely an afterthought, if they were considered at all.

Pleh
2018-04-04, 06:31 PM
Honestly, I think this is a very minor factor behind that rule, I'd hardly consider it important at all.

The reason is even more simple: The fun for most players from playing RPGs is playing their character. If you split the party, part of the players will not be able to contribute to the game at any time. This can work for a time in certain situations, sometimes scenes are interesting enough that just watching for a while can still be loads of fun, but in the end, splitting the party turns some players from being, well, players into just being specators. That's it, that's the main, I'd argue pretty much only relevant reason why splitting the party is most often a bad idea.

Well, most of the time I hear the phrase invoked, it has that air of ominous foreboding, as if those fools that attempt such a mistake will inevitably meet with unfortunate consequences.

This makes more sense when the reason is the balance disparity, less when it's just inconvenient for players.

My old group used to have upwards of 9 to 10 players (DM not included). Splitting the party was nearly unavoidable, but we found a nice balance in it by popcorning between smaller groups of players of 2 or 4. Actually, receiving a break in the action for your character can give you a much appreciated moment to mentally work through a small cognitive rut, where in a single group such decision making can stall the action. By switching to another group waiting their turn, it gives a player who wants more time to consider their options and maybe create some new solutions exactly that. (Such as for Quertus' notion of "negotiating with the King," such a diversion might by the diplomat character time to think about how they want to phrase their wording).

I've never played Shadowrun, but it sounds like the real problem there is that the System is routinely dictating when people have to sit back and take turns, rather than the game itself naturally lending itself to different characters choosing activities that would take large amounts of time and require very little supervision by the players (we roll the dice and see how they fare in their attempt 4 hours later). Meanwhile, what are the other characters doing with their 4 hours?


Wow, that's a lot to digest. Let me see if I can tear off a piece at a time, and chew on that.

Yeah, I've been stewing on these ideas for a couple weeks now.


Now, this is heavily centralized on combat encounters. If, say, how easy the king was to convince was based on how good a diplomat the party chose to send? That removes player agency and reeks of rails. But "the bad diplomat can see the king; for the good diplomat, they need to sneak into the king's chambers to talk to him" to make this scene an equal level of challenge? That gets tricky, and has different styles of consequences.

I dunno. Since my model is based on Stranger Things, I think I'd have to say it's not as big a hurdle as it might seem.

First of all, I see your point as a double edged argument. If I make it so that any character has roughly the same chances of persuading the King regardless their skill in Diplomacy, doesn't that rather invalidate the Diplomat's character choices? I try to picture what the Chief of Police might do in "talking to the Feds" vs what one of the boys might do in the same situation. The Chief knows how to play politics and force their hand, while the boys might as well be voiceless before their authority, so instead they just recognize that talking their way out of that situation just isn't going to work and they have to change the game to avoiding getting caught. This should play into Player expectation of their own character's ability. If I hear them making plans that involve something that clearly shouldn't work and any character present should be aware of such a fact, a DM isn't out of line to drop that information to the players (in fact, they might be out of line to omit it in many cases).

I feel like the problem you're coming up with is that you're too narrowly constraining the conditions for the players. In a "persuade the King" scenario, the real problem is the King's interference, which must be handled by one means or another. Players have to have a backup plan in case Diplomacy doesn't work even WITH the Diplomat (they could still roll poorly at a critical moment), so there has to be an option for bad diplomat characters to not have to rely on diplomacy.

It swings into Combat as well. Dustin was able to befriend a monster near the end of Season 2 and it allowed them to resolve a normally combat encounter without the use of combat.

More later. I've run out of time for the moment.

Mechalich
2018-04-04, 08:32 PM
Delta is completely correct that 'don't split the party' is almost entirely an out-of-character issue. It creates difficulties for the GM to manage multiple scenes at one time and forces players to sit around doing nothing at the game table often with the specific incentive that the should not be paying attention lest the player learn information their character isn't supposed to know. Despite this, many published gaming books and numerous published modules are written with the expectation that the party will be split at least semi-regularly. This is suitably extensive that in many systems it is possible to metagame during character generation (often by dumping the equivalent of Intelligence or Charisma to unplayable low levels for bonus points) because the designers assumed players would want to have a secondary option available but the players know this will never be required.

D&D, especially 3.X, actually has mechanics designed to facilitate splitting the party. All classes are ostensibly equal, meaning that if you split the party it is hypothetically a very simple piece of arithmetic to calculate what kinds of combat challenges - the primary form of encounter in the game - they are capable of facing. This is untrue in practice, because the power levels of the classes and in fact individual builds vary so widely (as do the power levels of monsters at various CRs), but that was the intent.


Before this, I had always looked at Survival Games in a TTRPG setting as a very unique niche of the game.

Survival games are a very small table-top niche, because they map very poorly onto actual tabletop play. Survival scenarios require tracking a variety of status impacts in an ongoing fashion. For instance, dehydration, hunger, and fatigue. Video games have developed various metering systems to handle this, but tracking such things in a table-top setting is cumbersome, frustrating, and likely to get ignored. Very few tables even bother to play with D&D style encumbrance rules, and survival games demand significantly more detail.

D&D tried to incorporate survival elements into the Dark Sun setting, but it never worked very well and there are many workarounds - for instance just being a Thri-Kreen makes the survival requirements of the setting largely laughable.

Knaight
2018-04-04, 09:36 PM
I'm all for splitting the party - rolling with that well and having parties split all over the place is one of my distinguishing GM skills, and my players have realized this and take full advantage. You have to be a bit more careful with scene balance (because choosing who to focus on at any one time is very much a metagame directing type of thing, as is choosing exactly when to jump from character to character), but it works fine.

Pleh
2018-04-04, 11:08 PM
Ok. A bit more time now.


Now, if the players are defining the scene, given X difficulty and Y level of consequences, and choosing what makes it that difficult and what they want the consequences to be? That's... interesting. As the GM doing it whole cloth, without an underlying system, it'll doubtless lead to the kind of subconscious favoritism I hate. And by "favoritism", I mean any behaviors that are not evenly or logically distributed.

I would genuinely appreciate if you could elaborate on the favoritism you are concerned with. I feel like I can see your point, but I'd like to be more certain. I feel like you are describing a potential pitfall, which is very much a thing I'd want to highlight as I'm formalizing the tools in my mind.


What difference does it make how many skill points / build points / resources I put in diplomacy / research / whatever if the DC of the challenge will just be, "whatever it takes to make sure you need to roll a 15 or higher". But perhaps that's not actually a valid concern, and simply my lack of "participatiomism" (or whatever the corresponding word is for buy-in to CaS).

No, it's a valid concern. The structure you describe may be on point, but lacking sufficient complexity.

Suppose they need to persuade the King (or, more generally, resolve the problem of his interference by whatever preferred means, even if persuasion is the primary intended path). Because it's the solution I intended, I'd give bonuses for correctly interpreting my clues. If they do what I consider a standard implementation of the tactic I anticipated would succeed, a 15 in that check should be more than sufficient, 10 might mean a partial success, and 5 or less is a botched attempt (whether they can retry depends on what went wrong).

If they choose an alternative diplomacy than anticipated (using Bluff or Intimidate in place of Diplomacy), I might require an 18-20 for total success, 15 for partial, and 12 or higher to botch, and 6 or less means things turn ugly.

Another alternative diplomacy that might work is haggling, just trading the king something. At that point they can boost their diplomacy check by how much coin they add.

If they decided to switch to combat and take the king hostage, they make different checks, but have tremendously different consequences as even succeeding at acquiring the King's cooperation now will likely only last so long as the players maintain control.

But really the way to avoid the "diplomacy railroad" is to carefully present the general problem, not the solution. In this scenario, the problem is neutralizing the King's interference. Players can choose to send a diplomat to negotiate, an assassin to throw the monarchy into chaos, a wizard to bewitch his senses, a saboteur to non lethally disrupt the court (maybe setting a fire), a con artist to pose as a distraction, a cleric to appeal to his morals, or any other thing. Yes, I believe the difficulty ought to reflect the player's actual chances based on the skills, powers, and equipment brought to bear.

How is this different than, "this is the world is, deal with it"? Well, I suspect if they're done well, CaS and CaW will end up looking very similar. It seems to me more a style than a substance, like solving geometry in either cartesean or polar coordinates. They can both describe any geometric shape just as accurately, but the math us easier for some shapes in one vs the other.

In Stranger Things, each character kind of has a realm of expertise and a clearly defined motivation. Deciding who needed to be handling what was very much a part of the dramatic tension.

Perhaps, if we need to look at CaW dynamics and War Games (this is a guess since I think I'm firmly in the other camp), it comes down to having military divisions and allowing segments to specialize. It is important to not need your whole force in one place at all times. The strategy for how you divide the labor is critical to success (if for no other reason than to prevent leaving a single target for your enemies to focus on). You don't send your medics on the tip of the spearhead or your generals on the front lines (unless you've run out of alternatives). They have other functions equally essential to the mission.

But for games with a narrative focus, it really is a bit more about making sure the players have a fighting chance. If it doesn't seem to make sense that they should have a chance, it's time to start dropping hints or even tactical advantages to the players to help them avoid an untimely train wreck.

I feel I'm starting to ramble, so I should stop talking and take a turn to listen.

Florian
2018-04-05, 02:45 AM
@pleh:

Shadowrun is a good example for the ups and downs of niche protection. On the up side, only specialists can do their stuff, like entering astral space and the matrix, on the down side, the actual run is done by the whole party together, making the concept mood somehow for the physical world specialists, like street samurai. If you have read and remember Neuromancer and how the "runs" there work, they failed to emulate this.
You might take a look at the Leverage RPG, Marvel Heroic RPG and also read the "Heist" chapter in Pathfinder Ultimate Intrigue.

Survival (and often Mystery) games often break down due to the nature of RPGs. Something is a challenge as long as you haven't found a hard counter to it. Chopping wood is hard until you get an axe, then it´s rather easy. D&D stye magic makes the whole thing into a walk in the park.

Pleh
2018-04-05, 08:07 AM
Survival (and often Mystery) games often break down due to the nature of RPGs. Something is a challenge as long as you haven't found a hard counter to it. Chopping wood is hard until you get an axe, then it´s rather easy. D&D stye magic makes the whole thing into a walk in the park.

That's something Subnautica rather disproves. The player is outright given a magic Fabricator that only needs power and material components (and you're given a small, consistent allowance of energy to get you started), but note that this only means that magic trivializes survival if you ignore all the plausible limitations.

If you are lost in the uninhabited rainforest and you need diamond dust for your spell, you might search for a cave to look for minerals, but there's little to no guarantee for success.

Magic can be just as limited by lack of resources as anything. Even a wizard lost in the woods will have limited access to expanding their spellbook (as there just wouldn't be any books to copy from unless there had been another wizard in the area). A DM can also houserule limitations on which spells are even on the table (which would probably be a good idea if you want to describe a survival scenario).

Be careful not to fall into Schrodinger's Wizard fallacy. A 20th level character trivializes any encounter, so survival at that level almost has to involve an apocalyptic multiverse to challenge them, so we probably are talking E6 or E10 if we're even considering mundane survival.

Quertus
2018-04-05, 09:03 AM
@pleh:

Shadowrun is a good example for the ups and downs of niche protection. On the up side, only specialists can do their stuff, like entering astral space and the matrix, on the down side, the actual run is done by the whole party together, making the concept mood somehow for the physical world specialists, like street samurai.

In early editions, it wasn't moot. The Street Samurai got to go first, and second, and maybe third, then everyone took an action, then the Street Samurai went again. Then you went to the next round, which looked just like that. The "the Street Samurai is the only character who really matters here" is slightly obfuscated, presumedly intentionally, because everyone loves pretending to participate in a fight.

I actually loved running a Street Samurai in earlier editions (despite my general love of playing mages in all systems), because they felt fast in a way no other system (including super hero systems!) has ever succeeded in making a character feel.

Knaight
2018-04-05, 02:39 PM
I actually loved running a Street Samurai in earlier editions (despite my general love of playing mages in all systems), because they felt fast in a way no other system (including super hero systems!) has ever succeeded in making a character feel.

You might enjoy playing martial characters in Qin: The Warring States. There are five attributes, one of which is just outright for fighting, and they range from 1-5. One of the effects of the attribute for fighting (Metal) is that it gives that many actions per round. Metal 5 characters are just nasty, particularly when Metal 2 is what you'd expect of the typical soldier.

Florian
2018-04-05, 02:55 PM
In early editions, it wasn't moot.

What´ya talking about? You know that the initiative conversion factor in 1E to 3E made that a moot point.

Point is that the system would work out if you split the party and don't handle the actual "run" as a dungeon.

Mechalich
2018-04-05, 07:39 PM
That's something Subnautica rather disproves. The player is outright given a magic Fabricator that only needs power and material components (and you're given a small, consistent allowance of energy to get you started), but note that this only means that magic trivializes survival if you ignore all the plausible limitations.


Actual survival in Subnautica is fairly trivial. You just need to catch like two different types of freely available fish on a regular basis to provide food and water and you will never die. It's advancement that is difficult and requires complex resources. This is common in survival video games. Keeping alive isn't especially challenging if that's all you do, it's acquiring new stuff and taking on more difficult challenges that requires more effort.

One of the difficulties of survival games is getting players to proactively seek out such challenges. In many survival type games players don't bother and spend their time doing completely different things - base-building in particular - for their own amusement.

Pleh
2018-04-05, 08:55 PM
Actual survival in Subnautica is fairly trivial. You just need to catch like two different types of freely available fish on a regular basis to provide food and water and you will never die. It's advancement that is difficult and requires complex resources. This is common in survival video games. Keeping alive isn't especially challenging if that's all you do, it's acquiring new stuff and taking on more difficult challenges that requires more effort.

One of the difficulties of survival games is getting players to proactively seek out such challenges. In many survival type games players don't bother and spend their time doing completely different things - base-building in particular - for their own amusement.

I think this is simply a breakdown between the definitions of survival as an activity as opposed to a genre.