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Mass Combat
25 Plays13 days ago
This week Mark and Ben talk about mass combat--those great battles that decide the fates of great powers and make great stories memorable. We'll discuss methods to keep your focus on the player characters as well as interesting intersections with war games that let players play out grand strategies at scale. Although mass combat encounters can be complex, you can make it easier by abstracting the action into manageable sub-encounters, boss fights, or even meta-currencies that let your players feel like they're playing an important role in the chaos of battle. Join us for a discussion of one of the most challenging and rewarding kinds of encounters you can bring your players.
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Transcript
Epic Battle Quotes and Host Introduction
00:00:02
Speaker
Horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound in the deep one last time. Yes!
00:00:14
Speaker
Let this be the hour when we draw swords together.
00:00:30
Speaker
Now for ruin and the red dawn.
00:00:59
Speaker
Level up your fun. Tune up, your quest has now begun. Tune up, we'll show you how it's done.
00:01:19
Speaker
All right. It is time for another tabletop tune-up, friends. I'm your host, Ben Dyer, here with my co-host, Mark Lehman. Say hello, Mark. Hello. All right. Hey, we have a new episode today. Mark, have things been going with you? How's your games running?
00:01:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's things are going well. ah Games are are are moving. I can't complain. but about How about yourself? I got to tell you've been asking me every now and again, are you feeling the urge to come back? Are you going to be feeling the impulse and building something
New Cinematic Action Game Plans
00:01:48
Speaker
new? And i I think I'm starting to see my way to a new game that I'm gonna run. And I think I'm going do it without gun. I think I'm going make a new kind of cinematic modern action experience.
00:01:58
Speaker
Now, I know you had ah game a few nights ago. or Is that kind of the spark that you needed? I finished a game yesterday that was my last in a series with Broken Compass using their season one Golden Age setting. i think it was really good.
00:02:13
Speaker
We had a great finale. And I think... What was great about it was that once you kind of get your head wrapped around this game, as we've been saying, and you kind of realize you're you're doing a movie, huge tension, lots going on.
00:02:26
Speaker
i think especially in pulp, people are aware that you can
Game Series Finale Reflection
00:02:28
Speaker
die or apparently die. And you know at least at that point, they're going to be out of the game for a while. So we had a great time. it was a lot of fun and wrap that game up.
00:02:37
Speaker
So I'm probably going to run another game um in the sort of the 2.0, the outgun system we've talked about before, but I think it's going modern game. Yes. Yeah, it sounds great. I wish you all the success on that, but it's good to get you out it more importantly, it's good to get out of the slub.
00:02:53
Speaker
That's right. Well, i it's good to come back from a break refreshed. Let's say that. Yeah. Okay. Well, you weren't in a slump, yeah but you were not feeling the GM spirit at at the moment. That's right.
00:03:05
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. It's get back that moment. We're talking about today, Ben, because this will get you in the GM spirit right here.
Challenges of Tabletop Game Battles
00:03:12
Speaker
We're talking about mass combat. running those big, big, huge battles. Like at the opener, we had Helm's Deep there talking about.
00:03:20
Speaker
These are the scenes you often want to see at the table as a player. And they always seem to fall short, don't they? Yeah, it's it's true. I mean, i remember when I first started GMing, there were a lot of different approaches. You didn't really kind of know how to do this stuff. And so one approach that was kind of like, should I do it this way? Was like, do I get a whole bunch of like character sheets together for average soldiers and then try to run down these combats that have like 20 people on a side in addition to my player characters. Do I do that? Well, no, that kind of bogs things down and it's kind of a pain. And so today, friends, we're going to talk about different ways you can manage this within your game, make it fun, make it memorable, but also make it manageable. Something that you can actually do within a reasonable amount of time without doing a whole lot of bookkeeping.
00:04:09
Speaker
And folks, there are so many different ways to do this. Like there are so many ways. And the way that works for you is the right way. The way that works for your group is the right way. We just, we're going to give you a few ideas that have worked with us and some things that maybe have not worked with us.
00:04:27
Speaker
And because we've been doing this for a long time and God, we've had some real failures and we've had some real successes. Yeah, there have been some highs and lows. Yeah.
00:04:37
Speaker
And I think it was one of those things too. The first time I came across this as a GM, I was like, i don't even know what to do. Like, I don't even know how this is going to supposed to look like.
00:04:49
Speaker
And I wasn't prepared. It didn't feel very good. The experience wasn't what i had in my head. And over years of doing this, it just got a little easier, a little easier.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yeah. Well, so I think let's take a minute and kind of think about our inspirations here. So when you think of like the great battles that you might want to see in a game, like what are some examples of those kinds of
Battle Inspirations from Iconic Movies
00:05:12
Speaker
things? Are they things from movies? Are they big, complex events? Like what is your kind of inspiration here?
00:05:19
Speaker
I mean, obviously, Lord of Kings, I mean, the intro there kind of says it all. That's what I want to feel. I want to feel that like oppressiveness of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
00:05:32
Speaker
You're staring them down at the wall of Minas Tirith. And that could be like in Game of Thrones. You got that big battle at the end. that You want that experience, right? There's a lot of different battles in Game of Thrones. Yeah.
00:05:48
Speaker
i mean, there's the Battle of the Bastards where, you know, Kit Harington's Jon Snow is, you know, looks like he's going be hemmed in and crowded and actually crushed into a big mob, you know, and and then things start to turn.
00:06:02
Speaker
We're going talk in a minute about how to kind of talk about the mood and things like that. But the point here, friends, is that there's a lot of different places you can go to ho for inspiration. If we're thinking about other kinds of games, obviously Star Wars has a lot of big fleet battles.
00:06:14
Speaker
You'll see some of that kind of stuff in Star Trek, too. The Expanse has some of that kind of stuff. These are great science fiction examples. And notice how the pacing of those things goes. Notice how the different sort of time works in the battles. You know, there's going to be moments when new forces enter the field. Other forces make movements that then put you under threat, you know. And so there's a lot of different dynamics that can occur in how fast or slow those things go, how decisive any that appears.
00:06:42
Speaker
All of that is a kind of a reflection of what kind of game you're playing and what kind of tone you want to set. So what kind of story do you want to tell?
Narrative Techniques in Battle Stories
00:06:51
Speaker
Essentially is what we're getting at. Do you want you tell a story about a a battle that was lost?
00:06:59
Speaker
Like I can like say Firefly in the beginning. what does What does failure look like if that's the case? Or do you want to have a maybe ah you're trying to tell a story where ah villain becomes a you know, a person becomes a villain, a friend becomes a villain.
00:07:16
Speaker
We've taken a couple different approaches to battles in games. Sometimes it's very much kind of more narrative and you're kind of just describing what happens in different points in this battle in different places.
00:07:28
Speaker
Other times you played a little bit more like a war game on a big map. That approach, I think, which of those two approaches you go with, you're still going to be telling a story. That's important. And also I think you want to know what your players are into.
00:07:41
Speaker
um I've actually tried to run a kind of war game style approach, but I had players who didn't really care to play war games. It was kind of a mixed group. One of one of the players was like, yeah, let's do that. And then the other players like, yeah, not so much.
00:07:54
Speaker
And so then the result was that it didn't really work well in that in that combat. And I think the the players that weren't so into the war game approach didn't like it. Other players may, your players out there, ah may like it or not. So you want kind of figure out what their interests are like.
00:08:10
Speaker
One other quick thing I'll say about this is that sometimes you're playing RPGs that are actually derived from war games, like Battletech, like Warhammer, and
War Games Versus RPG Dynamics
00:08:21
Speaker
those kinds of things. And so if you want, in some of those cases, it makes sense to, or it can make sense to actually play out the war game that they have already published. And you can play that, and then that can then reset the context.
00:08:34
Speaker
Again, if you've got players that have those kinds of impulses, they like to play those games, great. But if they don't, then you might want to go with a more of a story kind of abstract approach.
00:08:46
Speaker
And Mark, I want to get into that sort of mode here for a moment too. When we're talking about that story approach, we're talking about the kind of tones you could set. ah You talked a minute ago about kind of like the tragic defeat. How do you do a tragic defeat kind of story. Tell me, walk me through what you're prepping and how you kind of pull that off in a game.
00:09:06
Speaker
You're going to prep it just as you would any other type outcome. Honestly, you you got to figure out like what you want to happen, how you want to happen, and then maybe come up with a few different alternatives of how this could happen because things might change on the battlefield that might change present themselves or un-present.
00:09:27
Speaker
You got to be flexible. You have to think about um the different outcomes and how those could change. But you really, you know, if you're going to have a tragic defeat, you definitely want to have the players not get the game end because of a defeat.
00:09:39
Speaker
You do have to have outs for them in some capacity and escape. Yeah. Defeat in battle doesn't necessarily mean the campaign is over. But it could if the player want to go down with the ship. you know Here's the thing.
00:09:51
Speaker
Players will oftentimes fight to the bitter end. So you got to it has to be kind of known that there is an out. So be prepared for that. for me, when I think about what I'm going to do to to set up a tragic defeat kind of battle, a lot of it's going to be related to what they're what they can lose. you know And if you think about big battles, they've always got objectives, right? the bat The objective is to break through the gate to the city, or the objective is to utterly defeat that guy and his army, or the objective is to recover the treasure or such and such, right? Whatever it might be,
00:10:26
Speaker
That's something that your players need to go in and feel like they've got a realistic chance of achieving their goal And they've got to fail at it. Well, it doesn't even have to be that they fail it. It could be that they've done their part in this overall battle. They might be able to achieve their goal, but the other people just didn't.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I mean is that the the the sides, right? You think about the sides, the player's side has to lose in a tragic defeat. And so you need to think about what that goal is that the player's side has.
00:10:55
Speaker
And then you're exactly right. you know like Even if the players have... all of the things turn their way and everything kind of comes out right. A tragic defeat is one where ultimately so something happens and victory is snatched away from them.
00:11:11
Speaker
And when you do that, like what, what is it that you're hoping to do for the players? Like, are you trying to energize them to go after the bad guy? Are you trying to, have a tragic moment that they then have to build back up from what, what what kind of, make it really could be anything. I mean, it could be just, mean, you've got the classic, you know, ah waving the flag to usher in the, the next wave of horsemen and those people turn from the field and leave, which is what we saw in Braveheart, which was not accurate, but that's what we saw in the film.
00:11:42
Speaker
Um, but like that, now you've got a villain. You know what Yeah. You got somebody they really want to stick it to. like that You get two yeah got the people who who are fighting against and the person who turned their back.
00:11:56
Speaker
And the traitors. So it just depends on where you want to go with this. It could be that you want to show what the stakes are for the loss of the war. Helm's deep...
00:12:08
Speaker
It was a loss in a sense. I mean, that that whole place was destroyed. They saved the people, but like, you got the feeling that like, oh, this is just one battle. And look what we gave up to to win this.
00:12:20
Speaker
Like it felt like a bit of a loss, even though they were, they survived. Yeah. It was a very narrow victory. So let's actually talk about victory for a moment.
Player Contributions to Victory
00:12:29
Speaker
So moving on from the, triumph from the tragic defeat, when you're doing a triumphant victory kind of a thing, what kinds of things do you do to emphasize the, the victorious quality of this? Is it just like another combat? And then the players are sort of walking through that normally or, or what?
00:12:44
Speaker
It's kind of similar. you know, the players are going to let you know what they want to do in victory. That's the interesting thing is they all, when they've achieved the victory, the players are going to want to do stuff. They're going to maybe want to have a speech. Maybe they want to route the enemy.
00:12:59
Speaker
Some might have different ideas, but just listen to your players and try to figure out what what they want to do and go that direction because that's their victory. So we talked about the player's side and the enemy side. Each side has a goal.
00:13:12
Speaker
So obviously the player side has to win in that goal. I would say for it to feel like a really triumphant victory, I think the players need to play a much more important role in and be more influential in how that comes about. yeah You know, it's the player's secret mission to open the gate so that the friendly army can get in. Or it's the player's secret mission to deploy the magical barrier that will keep the enemy's super spells off of their army.
00:13:41
Speaker
mean, there could be all kinds of different things you could do, but but the important point is that the players need to feel important to that. that is That's true. But hey, let's talk about some of the approaches. I mean, we we talked a bit a little bit about a war game type approach and how yeah how you could you could go that route.
00:13:56
Speaker
Because I've not had much success with a war game type approach because of the type of games I run. run kind of narrative heavy games. So I like to keep the camera focused on the players.
00:14:07
Speaker
what What are your thoughts on war game approach? How would you tackle such a thing, Ben? If you're going to try to do a war game style, first of all, you've to have the players that want to play that kind of game. But if you do, it can be a lot of fun because then not only do they have PCs that they're managing and who are kind of the special characters, they also get to manage all of the armies. You know, sometimes people who are really into war gaming type games,
00:14:30
Speaker
if you start doing the abstraction and then they don't actually get to kind of move the parts and pieces, it doesn't actually feel like a big, a big battle to them. It just feels like, oh, okay, well, this is just another set of kind of set dressing.
00:14:42
Speaker
You're, as you were saying earlier, and then they, you know, they're fine. They go through it, but sometimes they could feel like that was a missed opportunity. So here are some things that if you as a GM are thinking about doing a war game style approach, I would keep in mind. Number one, are you actually running a separate game or does the game you're playing have rules for mass combat?
00:15:00
Speaker
Some games do, some games don't.
War Game-Style Play vs Narrative Focus
00:15:02
Speaker
ah We talked earlier about playing games like Battletech or Warhammer as war games alongside the role-playing games that are attached to them. Those do have different rules. And so, you know, you might want to think about, do those rules take place on a different time scale? Do they mean that your characters are more or less vulnerable and so forth?
00:15:20
Speaker
Think about how influential the PCs are Think about whether or not your players have to actually learn an entirely separate set of rules in order to play it. That was one of the things that I struggled with when I tried to do a war game approach was all of a sudden we had to kind of think of some new things.
00:15:34
Speaker
Here's a moment where I actually do want to take a little side plug to Matt Colville's Strongholds and Followers. That's one that's thought through a lot of this stuff. And so I'd say, take a look at that. Even if you don't use it, the way he breaks that down is useful and interesting and might give you some ideas for things to try on your own. It's a good resource.
00:15:50
Speaker
I'll talk a little bit about the abstraction, but you know you mentioned something in your discussion about how abstraction you might give the players a little bit less feeling of like they're in control of the overall war, which let's come back to that after we get done done talking about actions, because we we kind of stumbled upon something in one of our games that kind of helped a little bit with that.
00:16:13
Speaker
When we're talking about abstraction, what we're doing is we're keeping the focus on the characters. Like if if you're ah a director in a movie, the camera is not leaving the main characters. We're not zooming out to the entire battle, at least not without the perspective of the players looking through their lens.
00:16:32
Speaker
So in this particular case, We're not treating it any different in ah an adventure. The only difference is you got a bunch of overtime elements around you. Explosions, more creatures, players can be thrown out those big AOEs, all that kind of stuff. and You're going to be treating this just like you would any other adventure, except the setting is just a battlefield or whatever the setting is this war.
00:16:59
Speaker
In this case, i think what works about this is it it doesn't make the game, it doesn't change the game. here If you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, it's still the same game you've been playing. You're not switching gears into another system.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, no new rules to learn necessarily. Yeah. Stakes are going to be really important, guys. And this is true for the war game approach. All the NPCs you've built up over the course of these games, you know, characters that you've gotten to know and the characters have gotten to know, those are what's at stake.
00:17:25
Speaker
And you got to make sure that they're in play and they're part of this experience. That's another way that you make the players feel vulnerable is is with the NPCs that are engaged in this thing and real harm could come to them. Correct.
00:17:36
Speaker
So what I'd like to talk about is bringing in some wild cards into this this game.
Creative Mechanics for Dynamic Battles
00:17:42
Speaker
you had a really interesting way of, of bringing in these other characters and other conditions, but without necessarily loading up whole charts full of NPCs and things like that. So tell us about what you did with these wild cards. They were actual cards.
00:17:58
Speaker
They were kind of like later actions. Think of, Okay. Players in this case were fighting on their home turf, NPCs and characters that they had been building up over the course of the campaign. We basically just made some lair actions.
00:18:09
Speaker
Each one of those lair actions had card and the players could once around play winter wild cards. So what you're saying is instead of in D&D, we have villains sometimes that get extra actions that are described as lair actions and they're sort of special things that have to do with the fact that you're in their home base. Yeah.
00:18:28
Speaker
You actually did that for the player characters. You created some specific actions that I think you could only do these like once per round each. or Once per round. It could also be as a reaction. There was one that was like a reaction card.
00:18:40
Speaker
I can't remember exactly how I broke it down because it was very me running by the seat of my pants trying something new, which kind of worked. I think if I had given a little bit more thought, I might elaborate on it more. But like, essentially, they could play these cards once round.
00:18:55
Speaker
And then I would say, tell me what happened. What did this NPC do? Say, so-and-so let charge that took down this this big flank of the army, or druids threw up a huge entangle slowing down this group.
00:19:10
Speaker
The player's got to decide that NPC did. And that gave them a feeling of like... hey, this is still a battle, but we got a little bit of control over this, right? Yeah. I think one of the things that's neat about that is that you didn't just make it about damage.
00:19:25
Speaker
There's a battlefield effect that comes from the fact that we've got this ally. And there's a different battlefield effect, for example, that can come from the fact that... we did these extra preparations before the battle, you know, and these traps came out or something like that. So what's neat is that these cards can really represent anything you want.
00:19:42
Speaker
And so friends, I'd recommend, think about what you could do for just kind of quick one-off effects that could be used to represent other advantages, battlefield units, other things like that, that the PCs could be interested in.
00:19:54
Speaker
You don't have to have a whole lot of, of, really articulation in the rules to do that, right? ah Mark, talk about, though, what kinds of villains these were acting on. You had some mobs, I think, in this context, didn't you? Yeah, I did broke down some of the mobs into groups.
00:20:09
Speaker
So I had like, on the virtual tabletop, had these single tokens, which encompassed 60, 70 little individual tokens that would move around and So I treated these mobs as their hit points as kind of like somewhat abstractions. I wanted to give them the feeling of like how many beans were out there that they're fighting against.
00:20:29
Speaker
Yeah, you know what's interesting is that I think the best thing to compare it to is, you know, when you see a swarm, they're made up of little tiny creatures, right? Like a swarm of bats or swarm of rats. Well, Mark, you basically blew that up to be a swarm of medium-sized creatures and it took a big amount of space.
00:20:45
Speaker
It was treated as one entity in the initiative stats. You did some interesting things with like area of effect. Like essentially, if you drop a fireball in the middle of this thing, There's not like a saving throw. It's going to hit and damage a lot of stuff, but then you kind of amped up their hit points to represent the fact that there's just a lot of bodies in there.
00:21:00
Speaker
You got to make it easier on yourself, guys. You could really get lost in the crunch. These just little shortcuts you can use. you know I'd love to hear some of the ideas that other people have too. I think I've seen various ways that people do this. I think the more successful ones have ah done something a little bit like what you've done where there were always metacurrencies. yeah i remember playing a Star Wars game that had a lot going on in it.
00:21:22
Speaker
And in that game, you know, you have the, the, the destiny points, I think they're called where you've got the light side and the dark side and you kind of flip them. yeah And so it was interesting as we were going through this whole thing, we were, we were kind of playing it a little bit as a montage escape from this star destroyer. How do you want to get through it? And we could, we could, if we want to just flip that light side point and just move.
00:21:44
Speaker
But if we did that, of course, if you know the system, every time you flip a light side point, the opposite side of that is at a dark side point. And that was empowering the GM. So yeah, The further you went, the less you wanted to use that because the more power you were given to GM.
00:21:56
Speaker
And that was kind of an interesting thing to do. Guys, one thing to to think about too, um Ben, you've kind of done this and in some of the games you've run with some of the
Boss Showdowns in Battles
00:22:05
Speaker
large-scale events. You've always had like...
00:22:07
Speaker
maybe ah within the massive throng of things that was more like a boss. And I like those treated as a little bit separate. Players are going to be like, and want to take that guy down.
00:22:17
Speaker
You know what I mean? And as a GM, you also have to think about what happens when that leader gets destroyed. One of the things you don't see very often in the kinds of combats that most parties get into, which are again, admittedly like typically smaller combats. You're usually going to have, I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 at the most creatures in this. It's not a big battle, right? But especially in larger battles, morale matters. People don't necessarily know what's going on everywhere. And it's very easy to turn the tide of battle. If you can instill fear, if you can do some of those things, that's actually kind of another way to empower the players in those settings is to give them either a boss type character that they can do a duel with a kind of combat with, or to have to have some kind of dramatic effect. Wizards, especially are good at this kind of thing that creates a lot of fear on the battlefield and it creates a lot of chaos.
00:23:10
Speaker
These encounters, folks, push your imagination to high levels. I can't even express how chaotic they can be to run and fun to run, but they are exhausting.
Concluding Combat Scenarios
00:23:23
Speaker
Know when to end that combat. Don't drag these out. These encounters have a certain kind of... excitement and passion to them, drag it out for too long. You're going to lose that.
00:23:35
Speaker
It becomes a slog. Yeah. Notice just how like in these, you know, these movies that we're talking about, once Gandalf comes down from that hill and routes them, they want to get back to the players celebrating, the characters celebrating.
00:23:47
Speaker
Don't get drugged down by those last few hit points. Just to give people a feel for this, Mark, I think when you've done these kinds of ah mass battle encounters, these are like a session or two.
00:23:59
Speaker
I think a lot of people might think like, oh gosh, if you're going to do a war, a big, huge battle, if you're going to do a Helm's Deep or a Pelennor Fields or something like that, right? It's going to be weeks and weeks and weeks and months and might take... No, it doesn't, you guys.
00:24:11
Speaker
If you can tell the story and keep things moving quickly, you know the decisive number of battle encounters could be, you know, the same as you might do in a given dungeon.
00:24:23
Speaker
depends on the scale of this battle, how many are you going to want to do, and really how interesting each encounter can be. So think of it think of it small. I know it's big, but think of it a little bit smaller scale as far as organizational.
00:24:37
Speaker
Break down the things that the players need to achieve in order to get the outcome that they will want in this battle. Think about what kind of surprises the enemy is going to throw at them. And then, yeah, I especially love that point about finding who the big bosses are that can...
00:24:51
Speaker
really be the the special characters that they have to fight in this great war. Now I want to roll some dice and play in a big battle, man. Well, you know what? We've got something to do before we do that.
00:25:07
Speaker
All right,
Exploring Alternative RPG Systems
00:25:08
Speaker
friends. We have a tune-up today. And this tune-up comes from one of our one of our buddies who sent us something offline. And it takes the form of a challenge, Mark. My friend says...
00:25:19
Speaker
You should unburden yourself from the prison of classes, challenge ratings, levels, et cetera. He says, try GURPS or fantasy hero. Both are great for fantasy games. He says, GURPS leans hard into realism and hero has a more sort of cinematic heroism slant.
00:25:33
Speaker
And he recommends other kinds of games to try, Dragon Bane, Worlds of that Number. These are games that are fantasy focused, but they don't use a lot of conventions we see in D&D.
00:25:44
Speaker
So Mark, my question for you is, what do you consider got to have it elements of a fantasy game? Because here we've got somebody saying, You know, ah levels and classes and stuff like that isn't necessary to have a good fantasy game.
00:25:59
Speaker
Do you think that you do need that stuff because they're sort of D&D conventions? Or would you be interested in trying other roads, other flavors, other kinds of systems that don't necessarily take those conventions?
00:26:11
Speaker
What's the minimum to be a great fantasy game? Is this a fantasy tale you're telling? Does the game system work to tell the story you're going to tell? What I think they might be talking about is...
00:26:23
Speaker
Could you play a Conan the Barbarian game in Dungeons and Dragons? Maybe not. Maybe that's not the system for it. But it's still fantasy. it's You know what i mean? The story is fantasy.
00:26:36
Speaker
I mean, if with enough work and homebrewing, I'm sure you could make that game gritty as hell. But it might have to switch to a different system that might accommodate that little bit better. Maybe GURPS is that answer. i don't I don't know. I haven't played GURPS in many, many years.
00:26:52
Speaker
I'm sure it's not the same game as when I played it in college. Yeah. But fantasy is the is the story. Fantasy is the story you're telling at the table. It's not the system. Yeah, I definitely think people's expectations are shaped a lot by D&D.
00:27:05
Speaker
and i So when you think about things like how quickly people heal and in D&D, or you think about... um how effective people are in combat in D&D or what how magic works in D&D, right? Like there's fantasy novels and worlds out there where you have characters that could cast spells all the live long day. There's no such thing as slots.
00:27:25
Speaker
You have fantasy games where if you get wounded, you're going to be wounded for a while. You don't heal it overnight. So I think one of the things to do in those cases is to really like focus on what it is kind of to your point that that makes it a great fantasy story.
00:27:41
Speaker
And then i think if you're going to do game systems that people are less familiar with or that have very different assumptions from what a D&D style game would do, you better communicate those pretty quickly. Let them know what to expect, how this is going to be different from maybe the the games they started with.
00:27:56
Speaker
people play this game so differently than I think I did when I first started playing back in first and second edition. Like it's just a different type of experience when you're playing with young, young gamers and stuff like that. They're, they're really looking at storytelling stuff a lot more than we ever did, you know,
00:28:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think we expected the system and the dice to tell more of the story than they do. so yeah That's where the whole the whole idea of it it was gritty because the dice were, you know. Right. you know we i mean, we rolled characters. We just rolled straight 3D6 and that was what we just decided, okay, I think I got stats for ah a rogue players have kind of evolved in some some capacity.
00:28:38
Speaker
They're telling much more stories than i ever did. You know, I look around and see what people are playing I'm like, these are really fun stuff. Yeah, it's very creative. So I think friends, when you're thinking about what kinds of things are your sine qua non for a fantasy game, ah you know, as we always say, like talk about it, what kind of game people want to play, pitch that story. And ah yeah, I'd say try some new things every now and again, and just see if that sharpens your appetite.
00:29:04
Speaker
Did you just say Cinnabon for your players? What was that? I said, sine qua non, that without which not from Latin. I'd rather have a Cinnabon. Okay.
00:29:15
Speaker
Well, you go get a Cinnabon. I'll get to editing this episode and we can release it. And in a couple more weeks, we'll have another episode of Tabletop Tune Up for you, dear listeners. and Until then, keep those dice rolling.
00:29:53
Speaker
Level up your fun. Tune up, your quest has now begun. Tune up, we'll show you how it's done.
00:30:47
Speaker
Level up your fun. Tune up. Your quest has now begun. Tune We'll show you how it starts.
00:31:22
Speaker
Come get your tune-up, it's time for your tune-up Your game needs a tune-up Come get your tune-up, it's time for your tune-up Your game needs a tune-up
00:32:08
Speaker
Come get your tune it's time for your tune Your game needs a tune
00:32:20
Speaker
Come get your tune up, it's time for your tune up Your game needs tune up
00:33:14
Speaker
To love, to love, to love To love, to love To love, to love