Some thoughts on table trust and introducing brand new RPG players to Shadowdark
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Very interesting! It does feel like you need an easier adventure for people who are trying out the hobby for the first time. One which rewards creative, skillful play, but doesn’t punish the lack of it too harshly. For example, monsters who want to capture or drive out rather than kill.
I don’t know how torch timers work in Shadowdark - I get the impression from your post that they are some kind of real world clock for ingame torch depletion?
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with skipping some of the resource tracking systems when teaching new players. My system has mechanics for tracking torches, fatigue, who’s on sentry, and then in wilderness mode getting lost and rations.
But for a new group I would probably skip all of that - just keep encounter checks for wilderness travel and dungeon exploration, as well as tracking HP, spells and equipment. There’s still plenty of interesting choice.
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I think you are right in many ways in the arguments you make, especially with regard to the discrepancy between knowing you are free to do anything and conceiving of what that actually means. It’s kind of like Neo seeing the matrix for the first time. I think it is the reason why 5e was such a success for onboarding so many players, it is familiar enough to video gamers (push a button and your character will do X) to grasp and get going and get excited about new “options”. From there it is a smaller stretch to homebrew, extend, question and abandon the rules rather than chucking someone in at the deep end of the pool. I’ve also found that art plays a HUGE roll, many players are much more enticed by colorful and stunning art of high budget productions rather than your grim dark traditional fantasy art that is not necessarily nostalgic for all.
Just to add some evidence, I am currently in 40 session deep SHadowdark campaign with completely new to RPGs players. It was super easy to get going because of the simplicity of the rules, but it’s hard to sustain the campaign because they find it hard to imagine what they could be doing with their freedom and growing power. If I put a system in front of them, they engage with it (eg stronghold), but they are frustrated by lack of cool stuff their characters can do at level ups, even though they are showered in amazing magic items with unique abilities. They still have this need to get their feet wet with 5e, because it is just what they see online. I think I’ll run a short thing for them so they can make up their own minds.
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Yeah I picked this adventure after a quick skim. I’ve seen it recommended a lot, and was reminded of it in the latest issue of Knock. It seemed like a good fit for a quick one-shot, and I do think it is. My takeaway was less that the adventure wasn’t the right fit, but more that the system/playstyle may have been a bit too punishing for newcomers. It asks for a lot of trust, and while they all trusted me as friends, as gamers they weren’t so easily trusting.
Yeah so actually only one person within this group had any idea what DND even was and that’s because he played Baldur’s Gate 3, and he really enjoyed the session. The rest came in with zero expectations. It really was a pickup game, decided on a whim. There wasn’t an expectation for long term commitment. It’s just interesting to see the reaction this playstyle gets out of brand new players. My long-time weekly group started exactly the same way and were introduced via Knave, but the adventure was converted from Mork Borg. They were hooked from day 1.
So I have a slightly different take - I think it’s helpful to set expectations so that the players know things are dangerous and both that PCs might die and that rolling up a new one is easy and expected.
The problem I’ve seen with players that are new to older style RPGs/D&D (5E players or totally unfamiliar) is that they have different expectations. They expect things to be videogame like - a tutorial level, and never a huge risk of dying or even the ability to do goofy things that test the boundaries of the world. I don’t know that it helps them get into the game to ignore a number of its essential aspects like supplies and such (though I don’t run wilderness stuff much and just elide most considerations like that assuming the party knows how much food to put on their mule for a 4 day trip along the high road or a river barge journey).
Instead I try to set different expectations - this is one reason I don’t use vanilla fantasy worlds. Gygaxian vernacular fantasy is now so tightly tied to newer systems and an entirely different style of play that it’s harder to get new players to adjust.
It’s like playing checkers for the first time with a chess set - sometimes it’s hard to forget that your horsey doesn’t move in an L shape anymore and it feels exasperating because the game seems much simpler (it might be, but it has its own rules and complexities that are going to be lost if one is stuck lamenting that it’s not chess).
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You may well be right! I will attempt to argue the contrary position, but please don’t hear the below with any heat.
Totally agreed. But I still think there’s room for adjusting difficulty. The OSR tends to have an abhorrence of “balance”, depending instead of presenting a range of challenges and allowing the party to engage with the ones they choose. However, I would argue balance is still used: If the 1st level of your megadungeon is statted for a party of levels 6 - 9 then the campaign will not begin (unless the players have a very high tolerance for challenge and failure).
Because player skill is an important part of OSR play, it’s not just about level 1 characters = 1 HD monsters. It is possible for a very beginner group of players to be against level-appropriate challenges that are nevertheless so far over their head that they cannot progress - every clumsy, tentative decision is met with such punishment that rather than being stimulated to learn from mistakes they simply grow discouraged and give up.
This is how I read @SullyTames situation. If that’s not so, then maybe my advice does not apply. But as a positive example: when running games for younger children people often recommend less deadly adventures - Ten Aces Games makes adventures for Mausritter that are dangerous, but still less so than I would expect for old school D&D. I think newbie roleplayers may sometimes need the same.
In my last job a 5E game was organized by a colleague and I joined in. The other players were intelligent (mathematically-minded academics) but new to TTRPGs. They found it very hard in the first two sessions to remember how HP worked, how to construct the modifiers to a basic check (Stat + Proficiency), how to roll damage. Again, this may not be @SullyTames experience. But with a group like that I would want to gradually expose them to mechanics as they had capacity to cope. (And the point of supplies, in my mind, is verisimilitude + time pressure, and I think encounters might provide enough time pressure to start with).
So a couple of thoughts here.
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OSR maxims may suggest it rejects “balance” but I agree that neither the original old school design or the present OSR and POSR design really does. They reject “balance” in the sense that contemporary traditional systems like 5E use the term. To me it’s a distinction between “level based” balance that uses dungeon level (traditionally) as a proxy for the type of dangers parties are likely to face and “encounter balance” that builds each encounter to the party’s level and abilities. The main aspect of this in play and the one that gives rise to the idea that OSR/POSR play doesn’t care about balance is the tendency to include “asymmetrical encounters”, ones that are far beyond the party’s ability to fight (though they can and even win sometimes with luck or the right scheme). This is to some extent a product of player expectations and partially a product of system and adventure design. But yes, there is balance in most old school adventures and always has been. It’s just not the one modern players tend to expect.
Alternatively when you look at many newer POSR systems you get the same approach to balance, but the expectation that the adventure is a one shot or that character level/power is unlikely to increase. Obviously in this case one doesn’t need to have much care for balance.
The third option is that there are a lot of badly written adventures - often by people that don’t really understand the OSR/Old School balance system or fail to play test. So run a good adventure to start. -
In an old school dungeon crawl I would be much more tempted to ignore PC class (use a funnel of 0-levels say) then I would to ignore supply and random encounters. The play style is focused on dungeon exploration (usually) and so it becomes essential to shaping future games and expectations that these mechanics are involved. Plus the systems tend to be exceedingly simple - take the that would be used in complex combat and apply it to exploration procedures … it’s not as if “your torch is burning out, do you have more?” is a difficult thing to grasp.
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Fair! I do like funnels…
Yeah this was very much a pickup game with a diverse mix of four players. I got different reactions from each. I didn’t see anyone give up, but I did notice a very obvious shock on all of them when they realized they could die on the first encounter. Shortly after though, they all got into the rhythm of it. Really the most important thing I said to them that evening was to just ask me questions. About everything.
I also gave them more information off the bat than I probably would to a more experienced group. Traps really just became puzzles. They all understood the kind of game they were playing by the end. With modern DND and its ilk I still find myself wondering what kind of game I am even playing no matter how many sessions I am in.
So overall I think this was a success in that introduced the old-school playstyle effectively. But its just not for everyone.
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funnily enough, i had the exact opposite experience.
i do a lot of pickup games with diverse groups of people because reasons, one of them being that i’m coming back to the hobby and i want to run as many games as i can.
i researched some of the “best” OSR/NSR introductory adventures, i said to my players multiple times that the game was very lethal, tried to set expectations about this style of play to make them not try to brute force everything… and they became huge cowards, because they thought everything could mean death (smart of them, but that 2 ft. worm was probably not a huge problem).
it was only after an almost inevitable combat with some minor enemies that they understood the extent of their powers (or lack thereof) and the game ran smoother after.
my point here – and something that i’m learning more and more at each new table – is that for people who are not regulars or do not know the general idea of those design/play philosophies, setting the correct expectations is HUGE, and it’s very hard to do this well when people are not working from the same baseline.
tl;dr: as much as I think no playstyle is the right playstyle for everyone, I do believe that this is something very very common in pickup games with people with little to no experience with these kinds of games, and injecting just the right amount of fear and curiosity is really hard even if you do these often.
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I don’t think we had opposite experiences in that case. Overall I think the game went well. What I was trying to get at in the post was more that while I did set expectations, it felt like the trust wasn’t really there for some of them, which is an essential part of OSR play. So for them, it took a while to adjust to the idea that I don’t have rules to cover every scenario and I will have to make a call based on what I feel is common sense. Some of the players were more than ok with this because they saw that I was letting them act freely without bringing the rules in all the time, others just weren’t used to a game being like this.
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yeah, what i wanted to say is that it seems we had the opposite sides of the same problem in a sense hahaha i think it gets a while to get used to it, no doubt, gotta say i’m still getting used to it as a gm
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The key element of the “level balance” approach, I think, is that the characters (players) get to decide if they want to take the level on. They’re free to leave and find somewhere else to be and not get tangled up someplace they think is too dangerous. So, an adventure touted as for level 4-6 PCs may be avoided by a party of 4th level PCs, though the party returns some time later with most PCs at 6th level to take it on (or come back with a few more bodies to help). There’s no expectation that the GM has to alter the adventure to balance it for the party.