RPGs Are, Well, GAMES
Sly Flourish’s newsletter is worth a sub. He’s always posting thought-provoking content. The last one really made me think.
The question he was dealing with is:
How Many Rounds of Combat Are Ideal?
I really appreciated his take, which amounts to “As many as the story needs.”
You don’t want a battle with two bandits outside of a hideout to take three rounds. That encounter can be over in the same amount of time it’d take you to roll initiative. You also don’t want your massive three-phase pinnacle boss battle to be over in three rounds. Climactic multi-phase battles might go six or nine rounds.
I don’t think it’s useful to worry about how many rounds combat takes. Instead, I think it’s better to focus on the feeling, the pacing, and the beats of your game. Keep your hands on the dials. Know when monsters have overstayed their welcome and turn that hit point dial to 1. Don’t just “call it right here.”
GMs tend to worry too much about aspects of the game that really don’t matter to the fun and story of the game.
That is great advice, but even though he’s using the word “game”, he ignores something vital: that it is a game. Matter of fact, when he starts talking about feeling, pacing, and beats, he’s not talking about the game, he’s talking about the story. In that mindset, the game is clearly a really faint second fiddle to the story; it’s a bit hyperbolic, but I think it’s fair to say that the game has very little importance.
Referring to the art of collaborative storytelling as “the game” is a mistake. “The game” has precious little, if anything at all, to do with feeling, pacing, and beats, except that when the game takes over, it pauses on the story. In RPG terms, combat and other uncertainty in the story is where the story stops and the game takes over.
“The game” is crunch, mechanics, discrete rules that govern how the meeples act on the board. That’s how the uncertainty resolves. In a movie, the action sequences are basically when the game takes over in an RPG session. Chasing the bad guys, or being chased by them. Trying not to trigger the trap, then when the trap is triggered, trying not to get squished by the big rolling stone ball. Fighting the evil sorcerer emperor in his throne room.
Most importantly for my respectful partial disagreement with Mike, for a whole lot of people, that crunch is what draws them to the table. They enjoy the game more than the story. They don’t care about the romantic relationship. They want to play out the Nazis getting punched.
For every player who doesn’t care about the game, who just wants to improvise a deeply-developed character in a collaborative storytelling exercise, there’s a player with a fighter named “Bob III” who can’t wait until the RP is over so they can roll initiative and start measuring squares for their multiple longbow attacks.
That’s why I find Mike’s take too myopic to take as gospel. It demands GMs treat the game as an afterthought, to be endured, indeed ignored if the story demands a different outcome. When you start treating game play as an afterthought, you alienate the players who show up to roll dice and engage with the game.
Does that seem right to you?
