Saturday Q&A (sep 9)

DM's Escritoire in Ohio writes:

I'm still salivating over the Streetvendor's Guide.  The two recent samples just kept whetting my appetite.  Any idea when you'll start to taking pre-orders.

I'm adopting the Henchman mechanic you discussed a decade ago.  Still using it?   How did you introduce the “new” characters?  How did they “end up” in different “campaigns?”  How do you decide which of YOUR campaigns you'll run in a given session?  Isn't the passage of time a royal PITA?

There are several good reasons to offer pre-orders, even if a work isn't finished.  For one, it provides the author with financial support.  Pre-orders can serve as a way to see if there's a demand.  Announcing pre-orders can create a sense of commitment, saying that I'll definitely finish the book; the announcement can also start buzz, drumming up potential readers.  Unfortunately, none of these things apply to mean.  I don't need the money to finish the book; I'm already quite clear about the demand, since I have zero footprint on the internet outside a small clique of people who already know my work; and for that reason there's no buzz to start, because I already know that next to no communication goes on around social media about me.  On top of that, the last time I took money ahead of time for an unfinished book, both my supporters and I got stung.  No thank you.

To give the described mechanic, renamed "henchfolk," a quick run-down, when player characters reach 5th level, and every two levels thereafter, their fame and physical presence becomes so strong that at the first opportunity, a 1st level NPC will approach the player and ask, "Please, I wish to commit my life to you with absolute devotion."  Whereupon the player rolls up the new henchfolk, exactly like rolling up a starting character; the henchfolk ceases to be an NPC and becomes part of the player's portfolio, being assumed to be fanatically loyal towards the player.  Thereafter, the player can either run his or her "main" character, or a henchfolk, or both.  As henchfolk accumulate, the player can take them all into battle.

The players can, if they wish, organise their henchfolk into separate parties.   Say, a group of 5th-6th level players, each with one henchfolk, decide that the latter are going to go off together to participate in a separate campaign.  This is done entirely at the behest of the players.  Arrangements can become tangled as the players acquire further henchfolk at 7th and 9th level ... and even more complicated when their henchfolk also reach 5th level, and get henchfolk of their own.  Thus a player can end up spawning multiple generations of henchfolk, requiring careful management of who belongs to who — especially when remembering that henchfolk will only follow their liege, and no one else.

For example, Aiden at 7th level has acquired two henchfolk, Bertrand at 5th and Caleb at 7th.  By this time, Bertrand has reached 5th himself and has acquired Danielle.  Now, if Aiden runs with Bertrand, Danielle can come along, and Caleb too.  But Danielle won't come along with Aiden without Bertrand, nor will she attend Caleb.  Bertrand and Caleb won't run together without Aiden.  Thus in making arrangements for who joins which campaign, the players must keep these limitations in mind.

I run the campaign the players choose.  In my present campaign, the players, between 8th and 12th, have divided themselves into essentially four parties.  Party A are the high levels.  Party B runs between 6th and 8th.   Party C, between 3rd and 6th.  The last group are stay-at-homes, who get exchanged out occasionally; the rest of the time they're watching over the party's estate.  I'm quite comfortable running any of the three campaigns when asked, but usually the players want to play an adventure out till the end, before switching or just starting another adventure with the same gang.  If two parties are in the same place at the same time, some change in the line-ups are usual.

No, I don't find the time frame a pain in the ass.  Adventures rarely last more than a week or two in game time, and I find it easy to keep track of how much time has passed in my head.

Maxwell in California writes:

I am curious to actually watch you DM. It’s a *situated* skill. The way cooking is, or driving, or a sport like football. Am I wrong to think that there are nuances that I could only learn by seeing a skilled practitioner in a real setting?

I know you’ve thought about recording yourself or your game sessions before and decided against it (for reasons I wrote about a little below). I could learn from seeing precisely how you perform tasks like conflict resolution between players, or Efficiently carrying out a tense and complicated tense combat. As something to aspire to, if nothing else!

We hardcore fans have read literally millions of your words about how you do this, we’ve bought your books, we’ve salivated over your Patreon updates for Streetvendor. But aside from a couple minutes of recordings you posted some six years ago to illustrate a point, we’ve never seen you actually perform the act. I don’t think I’m overthinking when I say that can’t help but feel like this situation is like an expert race car driver trying to teach me how to drive by writing me a comprehensive manual … but never offering to put me in the passenger seat of his rally car, or at least install a dash cam to create video he can later use as training material.

I understand there are issues of practicality with filming a game session: It’s a private affair between the DM and the players. The players may not want to have their audio or video posted on the web forever. And you’ve written before about how to really capture a game you would want a microphone for each player, you’d want multiple cameras — stuff like that.

I totally get those arguments, so I’m not expecting or asking you to pop out a recording for us. But I wonder whether you agree with the idea that there are aspects of the DM role that would benefit from “watching the tapes,” as athletes do.

I appreciate all that.  One of the reasons I began running campaigns in text was to demonstrate how I offer players agency and go with the flow when they change their minds about what to do.  But obviously text isn't actual DMing.  With text I could take an hour to think about the answer before writing a response ... and the effort only received a modest number of readers in any case.

I did post this one example of me DMing my offline party eight years ago.  I look so much younger and heavier than I am now.  The 11 minute video demonstrates a particular issue with filming a whole session, since six hours of gaming involves mostly this sort of generally vague chatter back and forth, as I try to convey what the party's seeing.  Vast parts of gaming are "dead air" as far as programming is concerned.  Much of the player's response is thinking, as they ponder each phrase they hear before having something to say in return.  I, in turn, field the question or comment of whatever player happens to get to a question first.  And when players aren't sure of their questions, and haven't readied themselves to commit, they mumble, or hedge, or only speak half the question or statement before stopping.  A DM has to intuitively guess what they were going to ask, and reply, and this makes it confusing for an outsider whose watching communication that can sometimes be a lot of body language.

This is one of the reasons why I continue to believe that shows like Critical Role are scripted, because there's very little of this thinking that holds up the game.  In the very least, it has to be considerably edited, with the pauses cut out.  I could make a cut video too, but with non-actor players not receiving residuals, even if they were individually miked the mumbling would make it a challenge.

Too, unlike someone like Mercer, most of the time when I'm speaking, I adopt a deadpan, give-nothing-away sort of tone as I describe things.  If the players enter a room, I'm not trying to make the room "exciting" for them.  I'm trying not to give away any special clues by providing an inflection to my voice that would give the game, or the surprise, away.  If you watch the linked video, nearly every line I say is tossed off in this throw-away style, as I'm trying to portray the scene as nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary, while the players try to puzzle out what to do.  This increases the surprise factor when something unusual does happen, where I can adjust the tone to express the change.  But even then, I can't get excited when I describe the huge ogre that suddenly appears (not on the recording), because I don't want to come off as gloating at the player's distress.  You can see me standing there, gaze jumping around as I listen to each player, my face deadpan and utterly uninvested.  That's not what's going on in my head, but the camera can't see my thoughts.

Real D&D makes bad programming.  Actually playing it, however, is a whole different experience.  So yeah, I think that you could learn something if you played in my game, Maxwell, but you'd have to play.   Chances are better that you'd learn more, however, if you ran the game and I played.

Thank you Maxwell and Escritoire for stepping up and making this Q&A possible.  For those who don't know, the comments option has been turned off.  If you wish to comment on anything I've written, I ask you to submit observations and questions to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  Feel free to address material on the authentic wiki, my books or any subject related to dungeons & dragons.  I encourage you to initiate subject material of your own, and to address your comment to others writing in this space.

Each Saturday, I'll publish what's interesting and relevant to advancing the value and imaginative spirit of good role-playing.