A really good reference for things like this is D&D's Dungeon Master's Guide. It collects a whole lot of advice about different parts of creating a world and story. It doesn't go deep, but it's a great reference.
Oddly enough, I find the DMG advice so specific to the type of gaming that sits in the general category of "D&D-type play" that I find it of pretty minor value in any other game at all.
Think of how much value the DMG brings to doing collab worldbuilding using "A Spark in Fate Core", as the prelude to a Fate Pathfinder game. Or even how much it brings to the Fate Pathfinder game.
When it comes to NPCs and stories, I find the NPC and Fronts guidance for Apocalypse World and Dungeon World to go much, much farther, and be much more generalizable. At least if you like sandbox D&D, versus railroad D&D.
We might be focusing on different parts of the DMG. The parts I focused on and remember well are the parts that have nothing to do with D&D. Take Chapter 4: Creating NPCs. The first half of it is about fleshing out memorable characters quickly, which is a skill useful for any tabletop game (or just general fiction writing). It advises you to flesh out occupation & history, appearance, abilities, talent, mannerism, interactions with others, useful knowledge, ideals, bonds, flaws and secrets, with sections of examples and tables for quick generation, as well as advice for what to focus on really quickly. Most of the rest of the chapter is the same for villains, with little D&D-specific bits filling the remainder.
Or the play style section in chapter 1, which is about how different people play for different reasons, and you should get to know whether which of your players are looking for hack and slash, versus immersive storytelling. That's even more important in other kinds of games than it is in D&D!
I haven't actually played D&D in a long time, but it's been very useful for me in other very different kinds of games, and even fiction writing. I'd recommend you take another look.
I think you may be half-right. I don't recollect the guidance on fleshing out NPCs quickly, so that's definitely something I should revisit.
> Or the play style section in chapter 1, which is about how different people play for different reasons, and you should get to know whether which of your players are looking for hack and slash, versus immersive storytelling. That's even more important in other kinds of games than it is in D&D!
I think other kinds of games these days take for granted, "this is what this game is about - you and your group should be on board for this style of play and, if not, you should definitely play a game that is suited to your tastes." Trying to use one RPG mechanical chassis for wildly disparate gaming styles is definitely part of what I think of as "classic D&D".
Agreed. There's tabletop outside of D&D and Adventure fantasy. Don't get me wrong: the genre is popular for a reason. Still, it's nice to give other worlds a try. One of my friends occasionally GMs a system of his own creation, which is pretty fun.
One example I'll shill is Erika Chappell's recent Flying Circus, which is about being a mercenary pilot in a postapocalyptic, Ghibli-esque world. It's quite good, and if I remember correctly, an airplane designer helped with a couple bits of the design.
I haven't read many other books on the topic, but the Fate Core guide book[0] is an amazing resource for this (and Fate is a great system in itself). It really goes into a bunch of detail about how to make the game fun for your players, e.g. it mentions that dying makes players feel bad, but the bigger problem is that death is boring, and it's much better to put your player in a situation where they have to be creative to escape.
I love the philosophy behind Fate, but in practice the mechanics left me cold. Writing good character aspects is trickier than it should be: there’s a sweet spot of specific enough to be limited and actionable, but broad enough to be useful in practice, and it’s hard to hit.
Then the game can be so interpretive and improvisational that it actually comes out the other side as less immersive than a crunchier game like D&D. Players spend less time role-playing and more time talmudically studying their character sheets for ways they can apply their aspects to a given situation.
In contrast, I’m a big fan of old(ish) school Call of Cthulhu (from Chaosium, not the d20 version). The mechanics are concrete, straightforward, and get the hell out of the way when you don’t need them. Character sheets embed a lot of info about who a character is without turning into a script for role-playing.
Obviously mileage will vary. Some groups will really grok Fate and love it; mine didn’t. Regardless of whether you even wind up playing the game, it’s a good read for any DM just for its take on things.
Edit to add: I’ve also used Fate’s character creation system to help make characters for short stories, and it worked really well. I’d never do that with something like a D&D character sheet.
Yeah, I think of FATE as the assembly language of RPGs. You can use it to build any experience you want but it's hard to setup on the first try. It definitely works better for short stories.
Another good resource is Graham Walmsley's "Play Unsafe: How to work less, player harder and add stories to your game". It's a short book about applying techniques from improv acting to your role-playing games to support player creativity and participation.
What I think is different between video games and tabletop RPGs is that video games have the additional constraint of packing as much as possible in the least amount of text.
With the possible exception of visual novels, no player likes walls of text, efficiency is key. In tabletop RPGs, detailed descriptions are often desireable, and not only that but GMs have to respond to players. For example, a PC may decide to rob the NPC, because why not. And now you have a whole lot of stuff to deal with: how rich the NPC is, how willing to fight, what are his relationships with other NPCs,... Video games simply won't let you do things that are not programmed.
In the article, dialog is limited to 3-4 lines. One of these tells you what your next quest is "I hear there’s a mirror in the Fire Mountains that can block its flames.". And another one mentions a red dragon. It means you only have two lines to establish a character, and if you can do it in one that's better.
Heh, I'm admittedly in the minority here, but this is part of morrowind's charm to me. No voice acting so they could have huge rich amounts of text. But I was a kid with infinitely more spare time then :-\
It depends, there are players that love learning all the lore details, the good games add additional dialog or letters/books/emails that are optional so players that are in a rush can skip them.
I think it depends on the quality of the text. Richly-detailed and well-written (read: well-edited) descriptions as well as quippy dialogue are all welcome, but the mountains of poorly-written copy you find in many visual novels are a chore. I think a lot of writers fall to lawyer-ism, which I define as the idea that you can convince someone of anything ("My characters are deep! Their relationships are meaningful! My world is complex and well-constructed!") so long as you just keep talking at them. It doesn't help that some are often translated from or imitating the Japanese expositional style, which can be long-winded.
Control, FFXIII, Fallout, Animal Crossing: Fun to read through all the extra text/dialogue!
{Vast majority of visual novels}, Mass Effect, Tales Series, {Vast majority of story-based gacha games}: Not so much!
It is your opinion, not all people are like you, but I think you can design a interface where people that want to skip this ca do it. even visual novels will give you a skip button and a log to go back if you need some information.
Not all things that seem bad to you are objectively bad, some people enjoy that, remember how you taste in books/music etc changed in time.
I agree with the idea and most of the examples, but I'd be interested to hear why you've put FFXIII in the good category and Mass Effect in the bad one. XIII has a ton of dubiously-written extra text, and I don't remember ME being too verbose or badly written (with some exceptions).
I think I’m in the middle. Play through quickly then if I enjoyed it, replay a little slower, enjoying the lore. Makes a little more sense that way too.
I generally agree and I don't like it either, except for Planescape Torment, because it has awesome characters and text.
> With the possible exception of visual novels
I never did understand visual novels. They aren't games, but they aren't good novels either. Plus I don't read Japanese, and judging by the (poor) translations out there, most "visual novels" consist of mostly pressing enter to skip tons of "..." dialogue.
I don't think I can be called a visual novel fan, only having played the most popular ones. But these most popular ones were all great.
The Danganronpa and Ace Attorney games have some really good detective stories in it - I think the overall story in those 2 series is pretty bad, but in each game, there is at least one individual case that is great; and Zero Escape is one of the only work of fiction where I thought time travel / parallel universes was done right, without loopholes I could think of.
