When to Role, When to Rule and When to Roll

One point, left dangling from my recent series, I'd like to address: When should a DM use an analog mode of task resolution based on player descriptions of actions in role and your rulings on them, and when should he or she use a digital mode, rolling dice against set skills and difficulties?

There's a great benefit to seeing the physical environment of an adventure for what it is, rather than an abstract map dotted with "trap" and "secret" symbols. A lot of task resolutions then become simple. Is there a naked, unworked stone corridor? Then any tripwires or pressure plates or door seams will be evident to anyone with two good eyes, even in flickering torchlight, when proceeding forward at the glacial pace of dungeon exploration. I mean, try not noticing everything there is to notice while taking a minute or more to examine a 12' stretch of corridor, 1st Edition AD&D style.

What if the task is more difficult? Say there's a gossamer-thin tripwire spun by dark elves, or a seam of uncanny dwarven construction. Say there's a complicated bas-relief that could be hiding any number of buttons or holes, or a cracked floor with any number of outlines possible. For these, I would say that a long and close inspection would reveal the hidden feature. In player terms, they would have to give me a detailed description of what they are doing, and repeat that each time they are doing it.

Player attention, in other words, is a resource, drained by repetition and boredom. But forget what I said about trying to model this with limits on character attention. It's a player thing, not character. And player things, too, are analog.

If you want to reach the heights of immersion and intellectual challenge that come from an analog game, you have to trust your players to respect their time and enjoyment. You have to trust them not to abuse your system by giving long descriptions of detailed searches  at all times. If you're playing with dopey kids or grown-up asshats or hyper-task-focused fun-murderers, use a more rules- and dice-bound system - please!

You also have to resolve not to let them cheat their way into this resource, using crappy min-maxer crutches like the standing-order instruction sheet (see under "excel spreadsheet" anecdote there).This is just one of those times where you have to know what your group is like. Don't assume the worst right away. But don't think that the right system can substitute for mutual consent to have fun. Good players will fret about the possibility that an asshat could ruin the game, or even the possibility that they could be that asshat. But they won't actually do it.

Eventually, the environment will channel their attention. They'll zoom along a blank corridor or room in real time, because they know that any danger there will be spotted by their cautious in-game progress. They'll stop and check out mosaic floors, complex sculptures or patterns ... if they're wise. Your naturalistic, analog signaling of opportunities for complication will guide their attention. "Dwarven craftsmanship" or "illusionist's castle", of course, should spur them to new and temporary heights of paranoia.

Now, when do you roll? Yes, my game has a "notice detail" skill. And I use it for the same purpose as saving throws in James M's classic analysis. It gives players a digital chance when their analog skills don't quite meet the challenge. Even if you're running down a corridor, you might notice the tripwire that your slow advance would make obvious. Even if you're just standing next to a bookcase casting idle eyes on it, you might notice the odd jointwork that sends you looking for an opening device.

There's one caution, though: I haven't yet had players get up to the point where their skill in notice detail becomes near-automatic. In my system a rogue could get there by level 4, though at the cost of everything else roguely. With more even development they're likely to max out the Notice skill around level 8.

I'm not sure whether the greater chance of success at those heights is a just reward for sticking it through, or a blow to the fun in analog gaming. Perhaps the balancing factor is this: At higher levels, you're more likely to face complex, brain-challenging mechanisms and effects, so that the challenge is not whether you see them, but what you do once you see them.

Iron God: Taking Secret Doors Beyond the Letter S

Level 2 of the Tomb of the Iron God module is the actual burial place of the corpses consigned there, and it has more secret doors than a season of Scooby Doo cartoons. There are other things that aren't ideal about it and I tried to fix ... which I'll get to in the last post of this review. But the secret doors were the toughest thing to work out on the fly.

(This post is not as spoilery as the last one, so no cut.)

Anyway, we are not talking about dwarven or magical workmanship here. I ended up deciding that most of the doors could be seen; either in passing with a d6 skill check if you're on the same side as the door (exploration movement is slow going as it is, and most party members have a 1 or 2 in 6 chance), or automatically if you're giving that area special attention. No, you cannot give every area special attention - or at least I'm going to make that process player-boring, and eventually you as a player are going to make the choice that it's better to die a hero than live an obsessive grind. But an exception can be made for the niche-lined walls that parties have an interest in searching for loot.
 
The secret doors show as outlines of fine grooves in the limestone corridor walls. In the burial chambers, they appear as seams down the middle of a row of stacked niches, the halves sliding back both ways when opened. Niche doors usually open by pressing a button at the back of one of the niches, and these buttons also open the corridor doors, though they may be some distance away from their chosen door. Part of my map notes involved working out which niche button would open which secret door. There was a good moment when I combined one of those buttons with a poison needle trap that was already in the key. "Okay, you push the button in ... with your finger ..." Well, the dwarf had a great save and made it, but from then on, used his axe handle.

What was hard was squaring the many, many secret doors dividing the level into sections with the appearance of wandering skeletons and the need of nonintelligent monsters to rove around the dungeon. Some of it I just handwaved, other times there would be floor plates on the inside of a secret area that could let skeletons out. The players quickly grew paranoid and started whispering about a "skeleton factory."

As with pit traps, it's all-to-easy to answer "Why did the monks put so many secret doors in their burial ground?" with "Because it's a dungeon, duh!"  But if I had it to do over again I would have reduced the number of S'es on that level. Make some of them plastered-over concealed doors, which is more plausible if you're talking about a burial ground where some sections eventually get full. Just erase the unnecessary ones, like the ones that represent only a shortcut between two areas you can reach anyway, or the ones that hide one down-stair area from another.

This obsession with secret doors - on every level! by the half-dozen or more! - has apparently left its mark upon a whole generation. You see, as D&D players grow up, they get certain ideas about how their family lairs should be constructed ....

What do we want in a map? 3: DM Attention Markers

An adventure map can approach a high level of detail, offering an aerial view of every bed, box, barrel and biscuit in every area. This is obviously important if you're playing 21st century D&D, with its need to regulate everything in every 5 foot square that could affect combat.

Old school module maps, though, impress with their sparse design. Apart from the keyed columns, statues, doors and stairs, and maybe some important features like pools or lava flows, the rooms of old TSR modules for the most part look empty. If it's really important to know where the chest or the painting is, you might get a letter or a symbol somewhere.

Was this just lack of artistic talent or patience? Maybe, but I also wonder if the stripped-down maps might be a security through obscurity practice. Just as the original TSR module endpage maps were printed in their memorable light blue to foil photocopying, perhaps they were also sparsely detailed to foil peeking players, or to protect against a Wikileaks-level structural failure of the DM screen. You can see where the door goes from room 26, but not what's in there; that secret is in the close-set pages of the adventure key.

I also don't think it's that important to have what's in the room drawn on the map, unless you can make it all artistic and right purty. Unless you've got the dungeon all on one page, you're going to want to open your notes up to room 26 anyway when the players break through the door. And working from the notes, you can improvise more definite locations for things if you need to, or follow simple instructions in the key like "Chest against North wall."

But what I do need to know, when I look at the map, is what's in each of the four areas that 26 connects to. If there's a loud water-driven mechanism behind the door in 27, I want to be able to describe its muffled clunkings to players who've just busted into 26. If there's a rancid smell down the 30' hall to 29, that too. And most importantly, I want to be aware if there's a monster in 25 or 28 who'll wake up and join the party if they start trying to hack through that chest with axes and sledgehammers.

Most importantly, I want to know all those things about neighboring rooms without having to write them obsessively into the key for every adjacent room.

And so ...

Color is optional, but I think helpful. Anyway, these are the kinds of thing I always forget about in the adjacent room until they're halfway done exploring it. Then I have to tell my Plato's cave spelunkers "Oh yeah, if you look through that archway it goes 20' and then there's a flickering red light and smell of roasting flesh."

Hope these will help me remember all that when they first crash in ...

Vigilance

Alexis recently asked an excellent question: how realistic are the "standing orders" players give DMs about the attention and discipline of their characters in the game? The example he gave was when players claim that their characters keep to a perfect fighting formation during an eight-hour hike. But this could easily be extended to other common claims:

"By default, we are always checking carefully for traps ahead of us."
"Here is our standard procedure to deal with opening a door ..."
"Just to let you know, every time we stay in an inn we post watches, sleep in our armor, and spike the door."

But in reality, how good is human attention? Not that great. Psychologists have found that vigilance and self-control are limited resources, easily depleted. The tough part, though, is making this limited resource an interesting factor in an adventure game.

Some DMs just work with the standing order. Like DMs who overlook encumbrance, they eliminate player decisions about attention as a resource, in order to simplify play. This kind of game assumes a certain amount of vigilance at all times that's a baseline for trap detection rolls, surprise checks, and other such tests of passive perception. It also requires the DM to hold the line and not let players achieve any greater vigilance even if they swear up and down they are being extra-careful. That chance to be surprised, to miss a trap or a secret door, represents the weakness of the characters' attention, just as the chance to surprise represents the weakness of their foes' attention.

Some DMs use "player skill" to simulate character vigilance. "If you do it, you have to say it." This means that player boredom substitutes for character boredom. If the ritual of verbally checking every square foot of space becomes too tedious for the player, that simulates the character slipping up. Although consistent with the Old School dogma of substituting player skill for rules, I'm not convinced that this one meets the ultimate criterion of gaming - fun - in the same way that using player skill for problem solving and social interaction would. Taken to the extreme, this method puts optimal play for survival at odds with enjoyment and spontaneity. It is really only feasible, as I see it, under a regime where the DM avoids placing meaningless "zap traps" and hidden compartments everywhere. Player skill becomes more meaningful when there are clues to when players should be alert, and demonstrated safe or boring spaces where they don't have to be alert.

Player skill also becomes more meaningful when there are in-game choices to be made. Just requiring a "say it to do it" approach to attention doesn't really work because it trades an out-of-game resource (time and interest) for an in-game resource (safety). In computer games this kind of tradeoff is known as "grinding." What in-game resources, though, can be traded for vigilance?

The classic answer is "game time." Searching high and low as you proceed eats up time in the game, and there are many ways to make time count. Ticking scenario clocks, wandering monster checks, and rival parties are just a few of the most popular. Time pressure, in fact, is one of the most effective force multipliers for the bad guys, forcing risks that a smart party would not ordinarily take.

A more intriguing possibility, but one I've never seen implemented in any gaming system, is to treat attention as the limited resource it is. Optimal play of an adventure game typically places no value on the characters being able to relax in a space they consider safe, let alone any other creature comforts. As a result, power gamers run their characters as ascetic paranoiacs, always ready for battle, always "looking carefully for traps" even in the privy of the local tavern. In reality, someone with this attitude would be at risk for some kind of stress disorder.

A rough model for a mental resource game system might involve the following:

• Each character has 2 hours of sustained vigilance in them for any 4-hour waking period, plus or minus a half hour for each point of Wisdom bonus or penalty they have. 
• Vigilance is consumed by attending carefully in any given direction. If advancing while scanning for both near and far dangers (i.e. traps and potential foes ahead), it is consumed at double time. Players should keep records of whether their characters are vigilant or not, and the time consumed this way.
• Staying vigilant beyond the basic time is possible, but incurs a "debt" of negative hours - stress, if you will - which can only be recouped in an area seen as completely safe. So, if you are staying in an inn and posting watch overnight, that doesn't count because the party is not treating the area as safe. 
• Consequences of vigilance debt can include temporary loss of Intelligence, Dexteriy and Charisma - one point per point in debt - and perhaps even random insanity-like symptoms when the negative debt reaches an amount equal to the original number of hours.

I'll leave it to the comments and maybe another post to discuss the merits and flaws of such a system, and how exactly vigilance - however ruled or defined - might interact with randomly determined surprise.