It’s no secret that I love telling a good story. Maybe you heard I’m writing a book? I believe roleplaying campaigns are an opportunity for a group of people to tell a good story together. Sure, as the narrator or game master, I have a lot of opportunities to guide the story, but ultimately we’re telling the story together.
Without conflict, you really don’t have a story, and you definitely don’t have a compelling campaign. Every game deals with conflict differently. D&D has its origins in strategic wargaming conflicts played with miniatures. No one makes you paint miniatures or use a grid and worry about the exact placement of opponents, but it’s all there in the rules.
Many other systems, Legend in the Mist included, emphasise theatre of the mind play. Here, there’s no grid, no miniatures, just pictures made with words.
If my goal is to tell a story when we’re gaming, I’m interested in the tools that help me do that the best. A good writer knows every story is made up of scenes. And a scene has to contain conflict. When I judge a system, I ask myself: would I want to film this scene?
There’s a really important difference in gameplay between Legend in the Mist (LitM) and D&D that I want to get out of the way first. In LitM, the narrator never rolls dice. The narrator poses challenges that will happen if the players don’t avoid or cancel them. However, in D&D, the GM plays for the monsters (aka challenges) and will roll for their attacks and saving throws. I’ll write at a later date about how this dramatically changes the way the games play.
In LitM when a player receives the spotlight (equivalent to it being their turn in D&D), the narrator sets the scene. If the barbarian has just received the spotlight, the narrator might set the following scene:
You’re twenty feet away and across a small stream from the action. Your buddy the wizard is currently paralysed with fear. Immediately in front of him, a shambling corpse swings back its arm to strike. A few feet behind the attacking shambling corpse, another shambling corpse is dragging itself closer to your friend.
What do you do?
As the barbarian, the scene should make the stakes clear without you needing to know anything about the shambling corpse. If you do nothing, your friend the wizard will get whacked immediately and grabbed soon. Not good.
Let’s compare the preceding scene with the similar flow in D&D. Given its origins in wargaming with miniatures, the scene is less dynamic, but still contains the same elements.
You’re twenty feet away and across a small stream from the action. A corpse rising out of the underbrush beside them has surprised the wizard; they won’t be able to act this round. A second corpse is dragging itself towards the wizard.
What do you do?
It’s a subtle difference, but the first scene feels dynamic: things are happening and you better act now. The second scene feels perfect for miniatures: everything is placed, there’s no hurry, maybe we should have a snack before we figure this out. There’s no tension in the second scene.
I would film the first scene, but not the second.
Of course, your D&D DM might be incredibly cinematic — I try to be — and set an amazing scene for each player’s turn, but there’s just no getting around the fact that during the barbarian’s turn nothing is happening. Things have happened. The barbarian will do something. Then other things will happen. But nothing is happening now.
With LitM, the narrator must re-set the scene with each turn, and because it’s the only way challenges must act, there must be tension. The shambling corpses don’t get a turn after the barbarian acts. They act only if the barbarian fails to prevent them from acting. If the narrator doesn’t tell you the shambling corpse is rearing back to attack, it can’t. It’d be like an unexplained explosion in a movie.
You can think of D&D as more implicit: you have zombies, maybe you should do something. And LitM as more explicit: the zombie with the dangling eye is swinging, and the zombie with the plaid shirt is trying to grab your ankle.
But let’s change up the challenge a bit and set the scene differently:
The shambling corpse ahead of you rears back its arm and prepares to strike you. On the ground five feet away, another corpse drags itself towards you. What do you do?
We’re all accustomed to swinging an axe or throwing a fireball to “solve” this problem, but what if you’re playing a farmer or non-combat oriented character?
I duck and roll backward out of the way. I add my nimble and a lover, not a fighter tags.
For the shambling corpse, a success would mean you have enough to give yourself Escape-2 status and be out of the corpse’s range. A partial success allows you to get out of range, but you might take some consequence of the strike from the corpse. While a failure could be hilarious. This keeps the cinematic feel that excites me.
But consider the same non-combatant in D&D:
There’s a shambling corpse standing in front of you. On the ground five feet away, another corpse drags itself towards you. What do you do?
The shambling corpse is just standing there.
I disengage and move thirty feet away.
Yep. That works. Boring, but it works.
Of course, D&D allows players to get fancy and also duck and roll. But even as a player that loves being creative, why would I do that? Why risk failure when I have the option of guaranteed success?
In the end, it’s all about telling stories. Are you telling stories with your friends that excite you? Last Wednesday, my players were surrounded by Floral Ropers after killing a nastier sprouted version. Our botanist dug into her backpack and constructed an improvised flamethrower using bugspray and a match. Thanks to a few additional tags, she could apply the Scare-3 status to all the encroaching Floral Ropers. Frankly, it was amazing.
I would absolutely have filmed that.