Recently I've been watching some RPG Blender actual play of Exalted 3E and I've noticed something about a few episodes or scenes - there was basically little of note happening in them! You could summarise entire scenes or hour long episodes down in a sentence or two and not lose much. As someone that is also a part of an actual play group I think there is something to be learned here.
It's time to talk about optimising air time!
Disclaimers
There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.
First of all, I understand this was a fan project and should be judged accordingly. I am thankful for the effort the cast has put into entertaining us with their stories, but there will be some criticism of the podcast present.
Secondly, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.
Thirdly, since I’m also a part of an RPG Actual Play Podcast that features Exalted games, I might be biased towards one interpretation and way of handling things in Exalted that might not agree with how others view and play the game, that’s to be expected. That and some might see criticising other podcasts a conflict of interest or something, so here is your disclaimer.
With that out of the way...
The offenders - idle chat, planning, combat and downtime
So here is an overview of the kind of situations I noticed are just "filler" in the episode, in a sense that you could cut them down or out without losing much of the story.
In Season 1 Episode 1 Welcome To Nexus the second half of the episode boils down to "buy supplies, go down a sewer pipe, dodge molten metal that barely does harm to you, find some tracks and follow them". This takes a good half an hour to get through. Sure, part of it is due to the group being new to the system (they only ever played a one-shot of the system, and Exalted 3E is a bit of a dense game), but the other part is everyone in the party interacting with the same tracks (looking at them, smelling them, tasting them) while mostly chatting idly and repeating what the GM told them.
In Season 1 Episode 11 Freedom For Arvia the second half of the episode consists almost entirely of the group planning what to do next, going over their options for where to turn in their quest basically.
Season 1 Episode 8, 9 and 10 are almost entirely made out of one extended fight.
In Season 1 Episode 13 Perchance to Dream the players describe how they spend a week of downtime, day after day, which boils down to "get paid, do a research in a library, talk about the dream they are having, steal some things, tail someone and do some training".
So let's go over the concepts one by one.
The idle chatter is a bit of a difficult one to avoid. You want your players to be talking to one another and engage with what is being presented, since that is a step up from players being rather passive and not filling the airtime. But on the other hand, if they are already good about creating enough content, you don't want everyone commenting on everything that's going on. If someone is focused on finding a trail, the spotlight is on them to lead the group to follow them. It's their time to shine and have the spotlight! Heck, Exalted 3E even incentivises you with a Role Bonus - you get XP for letting others have a spotlight and being cool according to their character concept:
Over-planning is one of those problems a number of more modern RPGs try to solve. It's a hard habit to break - players want to make optimal decisions and they want to anticipate problems that might arise, but that not only leads to overly-cautious play, but also a lot of air time devoted to chatting about the things you're going to do rather than doing them. Heck, in our Princes of the Universe game those things would even end in a deadlock because players couldn't agree on what to do, or didn't like what others wanted to do. It fostered an attitude of "just do what you want, since the group is more likely to forgive you after the fact since they won't care anymore than agree to let you do it in the first place"...
But at any rate, this kind of planning and deliberation not only takes a good deal of time in the game, it's also not that terribly engaging in comparison to the players actually doing something. It would be much more productive to develop some trust between the players and the GM and speed things along. Players shouldn't deliberate too much on what to do next, and the GM shouldn't punish them for acting without considering everything. Heck, it's more entertaining when not everything goes the way the players wanted and there is some obstacle to overcome, but those shouldn't be seen as a punishment but as a cool action scene you get to do.
Combat being slow is unfortunately the staple of Exalted 3E and many other systems, so it's kind of unavoidable. Heck, in one of our own episodes we spend like, 3 hours doing a fight that amounted to like one or two cool situations. There is a good deal of back and forth in Exalted combat, which is not helped by players being able to "stunt" their defence (cinematically describing how they counter an attack to get a boost to their defense). In a pre-recorded game, ideally you'd edit out a lot of the pauses, rolls, rules lookups and all that, but it can be a bit of a problem for streamed games.
Unfortunately, there isn't a great time saver to be had here unless you'd switch out what game you're using, which might not be the option for every group. Save that, maybe you could try optimising your game to speed things up a little. Maybe limiting the amount of combatants in a fight, maybe cutting down on some stunting (like, assume everyone gets a stunt so people don't have to describe how they parry a sword with their sword for the 20th time), etc.
Downtime, on the other hand, is something that can use a good deal of streamlining. Players should come into it with a purpose - what they want to accomplish. Based on that, everyone could get a scene where they do just that and focus on that being a cool moment, rather than switch between one player and the next every minute as they incrementally do what they set out to do. Give them some time slots. Heck, give the players a heads up that they will be doing a downtime and ask them to come up with interesting things they'd like to do ahead of the session so you'd come into this freeform time knowing what cool stuff will be going down!
Part of the downtime in RPG Blender that make it a little longer was also down to calling for some rolls that didn't need them. The big goal of that session was figuring out a vision the characters were having - where in the world is it located. That was accomplished by paying for a library access and two characters bunkering down to study it over the course of multiple rolls. The thing is, this was basically a start of a new quest for them, so from the narrative perspective, the players couldn't fail to find the location otherwise the entire quest couldn't begin. This makes it so strange why they were rolling to do the research, other than it taking up some time...
How other games streamline this
It's one thing to talk about some lofty theory on what to do and another to point out some systems that are already solving these issues. So let's talk about Fellowship!
Lesson one - supplies. In Fellowship you don't generally buy gear, your character comes with a gear list you pick from during character creation. The game knows you're an adventurer, so you have the basic supplies that don't matter for the story (something to sleep on, clothes, all that jazz). If you need a piece of gear to solve a problem (like a climbing rope, a ladder, some consumable tool, etc.) that's covered under Useful Gear:
So bam - no shopping is needed, if you want to come prepared make sure you have Useful items, no need to plan anything specific. Easy peasy, squeezed lemons.
Lesson two - working together. In Exalted, if multiple people are working together, first person rolls a check and the number of successes are added as dice to the next person's roll. Also, since this is Exalted, both of them will be stunting to describe how they are helping and so on and so on. That's like twice the amount of descriptions and rolls than you need. In Fellowship that's Bond That Bind Us:
People declare they are doing the same thing together, only one of them rolls, but adds an extra die to the roll and everything's easy. You don't have multiple people doing the same roll, but cooperation is still useful. Easy!
Lesson three - failing forward and investigation. Fellowship very much wants your game to progress, even if it is through failure. So when you are examining some clues or doing some research, you will always learn something, even if it backfires in some way. This ensures there is no gridlock in the game because the players roll badly and fail to get the clue they need to unlock the next step of the quest. This is done through Look Closely:
And of course, if you have other people helping you with the research, you use The Bonds That Bind Us so only one person rolls even if multiple people are contributing and so on. It's more efficient!
Lesson four - combat. In Fellowship, the combat isn't turn by turn, but more flowing. The spotlight is on you, you continue rolling until you fail and get into trouble, then the spotlight goes to someone else. If you're not saved from your consequences by the time the spotlight comes back to you, you have to deal with it yourself, usually by taking the hit. This basically means there will be less moving the combat beat by beat from player to player, but having more action scenes going down one after the other.
Lesson five - downtime. In Fellowship, this is a structured activity called A Little Downtime:
This covers doing research, training, having some other cool moments over the course of time passing and so on. It usually takes only minutes though, after which the group accomplishes what they need so they can get to their next objective. Sometimes to deal with a situation you have to "spend" enough scenes of the Downtime addressing the issue. It's still simple and efficient (and ties very neatly into a long rest, healing up, changing gear and how the BBEG progresses their evil plans, but that's a story for another time when we discuss Fellowship in more detail).
Conclusions
When you're creating an RPG stream or an actual play, you want to come into the game and every scene with a direction and a purpose. You want to entertain your audience and respect their time. Chatter for the sense of chatter shouldn't exist - you want to have scenes that further the plot, explore the characters, entertain, world build, etc.
And if you can pick games that streamline the game, or at least steal some good ideas from them to help you with your game, all the better ;).
Recently I ran into a post on reddit asking for advice on how to deal with a player having an emotional response and getting depressed over a death of an NPC they couldn't save. OP did want to remove them from the group not to ruin everyone else's fun, which a number of people chastised (and is one of the reasons I won't link it here). The whole situation did remind me of an idea we had in our podcasting group though about how to handle similar situations.
Draw boundaries
If you want to have a game where everyone is comfortable in playing, you ought to communicate both what you expect out of the game, as well as discussing boundaries. The latter is often overlooked since a lot of people just go off of what's been acceptable in their circle of friends and so on. A good deal of the time that's fine, but sometimes you do have to be more explicit since RPGs are prone to a lot more bleed than other games.
If you want to establish boundaries more explicitly, it might be handy to use #iHunt's Levels Worksheet:
It will help you make sure everyone is comfortable with various topics, scenes and so on, and know what things to avoid not to make someone uncomfortable. If the game you wanted to play would feature those elements (say, the problematic "romance" present in Curse of Stradth or Bluebeard's Bride), it would be a good time to discuss them and consider altering those elements, or picking something else to play entirely.
Establish genre conventions
Talking about the boundaries is not only about what a person is comfortable with, but it's also a good time to discuss genre conventions. There is a world of difference between MCU, The Tick, Watchmen and Invincible, even though they all fall under the "superhero" genre.
So establish your genre conventions! Talk about what kind of things you do and don't want to happen. Maybe you want to be a hero and make sure no innocent bystander would die. That is a valid way to play, and as long as everyone is on the same page, it can be fun.
Not every game has to have character or NPC death be the price of failure. Sure, if people want that, it's a valid way of playing, but sometimes you do want to get invested in various characters and stay with them. You can also get a bit more creative with things...
Breaking kayfabe
Kayfabe is a term from professional wrestling that focuses on portrayals of wrestling events as if they were real. Basically, wrestlers always have to stay in character in front of the general public even if they are not in the ring not to break the illusion of wrestling.
In the World Wide Wrestling RPG that part of the genre is emulated - the outcomes of matches are fixed and you're supposed to play into it most of the time. However, you can explicitly Break Kayfabe to change the script and get what you want, but that can risk bad things happening to you since you're going against the genre convention.
If you want to have fun with your game (and everyone at the table similarly are into this), you can play around with that idea of breaking kayfabe. Basically, as long as the players follow their role in the story, the GM similarly is bound by the rules of the genre convention and can't hurt them too much. But then the players can start bending and breaking the rules slowly shifting the overton window to get what they want, at the cost of losing the protection of the genre because they are breaking kayfabe. This could set up an interesting "fall from grace" story akin to:
So in conclusion, make sure you establish boundaries of what everyone at the table is comfortable with, have a chat about what kind of things you want to see within those boundaries, and if you're feeling like toying with those assumptions, see what comes when you tear them down methodically.
Recently, I've been watching some Dimension 20's Crown of Candy series, which was a somewhat ruthless game reminiscent of Game of Thrones wrapped in a sentient food aesthetic. Spoiler warning for the series - at the end of the series when the players won their decisive victory, they were faced with a dilemma - do they keep their fragile alliance, or do they backstab one another to have it all. This was an interesting example of the meta game of friendship you build around the table I'd like to discuss today.
The Crown of Candy trailer
Trust, friendships and bleed at the table
As discussed before, different tables will have a different level of trust built up over time of playing together for a while. If you're playing with randos online, chances are someone might turn out to be an asshole and backstab everyone at a drop of a hat. If you have a stable game going, usually you learn not to do that and respect one another's characters (unless everyone is into playing a backstab game of course, then all bets are off).
Along with that, you build friendships with the people you play, bonding over the many adventures you had together.
Every now and then, you also can experience bleed - mixing in-game and out-of-game feelings, grudges, etc. If someone hurt your character, you can feel personally hurt. It comes with the territory of being really invested in a game and a character.
Those three factors contribute to the meta game of friendship - when you play an RPG, you're not only playing the game, but also engaging with your fellow players at the table at the same time. Because of this, you tend to avoid doing something that might upset the other players, even if it would fit the narrative to do so (at least not without checking in with them first). If you don't, you might "win" something in the game, but lose someone's trust or friendship that would carry over to your future games.
This is kind of reminiscent of GeekNights' "Practical Game Theory" panel where they discuss threats and trust - if you play a game repeatedly, you can make credible threats that will affect the games you're playing. If you always punish anyone that messes with you to ensure they don't win even if you lose, eventually they will learn not to mess with you:
So the trust and betrayal in RPG would work similarly to game theory - by cooperating everyone gains something, but if you betray someone you break their trust and everyone is worse off in the long-term.
The Crown of Candy situation
The dilemma at the end of the Crown of Candy was like this - On one side you had Queen Saccharina, played by Emily Axford, daughter of King Amethar from his first marriage, abandoned by her mother at a church orphanage due to her magical prowess (non-cleric magic in the setting was heretical). She later became a queen of outlaws living at the edge of Candian society. After joining the game, she was crowned the Queen of Candia (after her father lost his claim to the throne), obtained a hatchling dragon and let it feed on the hearts of the priests to let it grow to an adult size by the time of the final battle. On the other side you had Princess Ruby, played by Siobhan Thompson, was a rogue princess, twin to Emily's previous character, Princess Jet, and half-sister to Saccharina. She didn't approve of Saccharina's ways and knew what kind of future her reign might bring.
Those two players were given an option to backstab one another at the end of the game. Ruby knew Saccharina would upend the status quo and go on a crusade to eradicate much of the church, and would probably be unfit to rule Candia. Saccharina was advised that the nobles look down on her due to her upbringing and would gladly kill her now that they don't need her to retake Candia.
So did either of them do it?
Watching the video, I had no doubt of the outcome. Siobhan and Emily have played through 5 series together, everyone at the table has been nice to each other, they have faced many hardships together in this series, playing inseparable twins that schemed together. They wouldn't backstab each other's characters, especially given that this was the end of the series - there was nothing for them to gain beyond a different epilogue. And yeah, shocking nobody, they decided to trust one another and have a happy ending together.
Last minute betrayal would certainly make for a shocking moment in the show, but would probably cause some strife between the caste members and some longer-term distrust. Sure, they are professionals, but if you watch the behind the scenes of the series they are jokingly dissing on the GM for backstabbing and killing their characters a few times in the series.
Backstabs in other actual plays
Thinking about it, I haven't really seen that many other actual plays that have the characters backstabbing one another. I've watched a number of other Dimension 20 shows, as well as various games by Arms of the Tide, A Pair of Dice Lost, RPG Clinic, etc. and played a lot of games on our very own podcast - Sponsored by Nobody. Sure, we had a number of "a character does whatever they want disregarding what others think" moments in Evicting Epistle, Princes of the Universe, Conspiracy at Krezk, etc. However, only one series had a genuine betrayal.
In Princes of the Universe (spoilers), there was one situation that was almost that, and one that was a full-on "I'm the bad guy". The first one was when the party managed to find the Eye of Autochthon, an ancient relict of nigh-infinite power. They wanted to use it to wake up a titan, but not before everyone had a mexican standoff to make sure nobody else would steal it and use it for their own goals. My character was a Night Caste (a hero-thief essentially) and was the only one that could actually steal it without anyone having a counter to his powers, so the GM asked me if I do it. In the end I decided not to, since it would turn the game into PVP, and being 1v4 had really poor odds. Plus it would be an asshole thing to do.
The other situation came at the end of the whole game, where after fighting the Scarlet Empress, the ruler of the world, the party was faced with a secret foe that was pulling the strings all along. During that fight, one of the PCs, Longhorn Desertwolf, turned on the rest of the party and was revealed to have been working for that foe all along. The reason why that twist worked though was because of how that character entered the story.
See, while getting the Eye of Autochthon, the party went to a weird proto-dimension that was all weird and wonky. They met alternative versions of themselves from another part of the multiverse. One of the PCs, Longhorn Seawolf, was already on a hit list for two other PCs due to letting a number of their children die in a fight, so it was only a matter of time before he'd be killed. So instead, we decided to trade our Seawolf for their Desertwolf to solve the issue of a character needing to be gotten rid of and also to give the player a similar character they could wrap the series with. None of the NPCs believed what happened, but they learned not to question our crazy antics a long time ago. But at the end of the series it turned out they were right - we did inadvertently trade an ally for a wolf in sheep's clothing that turned out to be orchestrated by the big bad evil guy. So that betrayal and backstab felt alright, especially since in the end we managed to kick both of their asses and win. If Desertwolf would've turned out to be victorious, I know of one or two players that would've flipped the table and not forgiven it - it would've felt that the last two or so years the game was running was a complete waste.
So lesson learned - if you want to have someone betray and backstab the party, they should probably lose to make the game less unsatisfying...
Conclusions
While one character betraying another might be an interesting twist in a TV show, it's usually unsatisfying in an RPG if you're talking about two PCs. Unless the game is set up from the get-go to support it, or the player explicitly allow for such an ending to their character, it can be more damaging to the long-term relationships between the players than it is worth.
Recently, I've watched Dimension 20's Fantasy High Season 1, and the show's first two episodes really encapsulate why Dungeons & Dragons is awful for Actual Plays.
Some disclaimers and qualifiers before I get further. I'm not hating on Dimension 20 (I've seen a few of their shows and I do enjoy them for what they are), the people involved (I've enjoyed their performance through that show), or saying that you shouldn't play D&D (although there are so many better options...). I'm focusing precisely on Dungeons & Dragons as a framework for a gaming performance in the format of a video or audio Actual Play. I'm also speaking as someone that has 5 years of doing their own Actual Plays and as someone that has watched a few APs in their time.
So without further ado, let's talk about Fantasy High (spoiler warning for various episodes of the series, as well as some Escape from the Bloodkeep).
Fantasy High
Fantasy High is a show about a group of adventurers going to an adventuring academy, a fantasy high school where you learn how to be an adventurer, filled with all of the D&D races and classes. A pretty okay setup that gets elevated by the amount of colourful characters that populate the school and the nearby town. From an ice-cream djinn, through a chill werewolf guidance councillor, down to anarcho-socialist halfling family. The player characters are also a colourful cast - you have spoiled rich son of a pirate, a gentle half orc barbarian that doesn't want to hurt anyone, a rebellious tiefling bard going through some issues after her horns recently came in and her dad learned he has been cucked, etc. All in all, the characters are really interesting, the performance through the entire show has been great, I could listen to these things all day with glee. That is, if it wasn't for the second half.
Dimension 20 has a formula for their shows. You usually have two kinds of episode formats that keep alternating - a free form roleplaying with some light checks and conflicts, and then the big set piece fights. They are gorgeous to look at, featuring large customised areas, a lot of unique minis and so on:
The craft on display is phenomenal, there is no denying that. Dimension 20 has taken the D&D formula of "minis fighting" and made the best version of that I have seen. However, it still doesn't solve the issue of this being D&D that we're talking about. So let's set the scene:
It's episode 2 of Fantasy High. All the PCs got into detention for one reason or another. You could run it as your stereotypical "detention bad, the teacher running it is a warden, everything sucks", but no, Dimension 20 is better than that (heck, they even work with sensitivity consultants, kudos to them!), and the guidance councillor starts encouraging the PCs to talk about their feelings, whether they have trouble at home, etc. It's a tiny one minute of a show, but it showed potential, especially when one of the characters started opening up about their issue at home (it was the tiefling, now living alone with her mother who she's on a war path with since she won't tell her anything about her real father). But just as that's about to happen, we hear screams from the cafeteria and it's off to fight we go!
In the cafeteria we find a large cream corn monster, a possessed lunch lady, and a bunch of animated corn cobs, and we have ourselves a level 1 adventurer fight. What follows is a series of mishaps, bad rolls and just a lot of what could go wrong does go wrong. The tiefling gets knocked out cold at the start of the fight, and through the rest of the encounter, that player sits there and stews, unable to contribute anything but quips about how people should throw her body around (I don't hold anything against the player there, it did look frustrating!). A few others, including a swashbuckling jock son of a pirate repeatedly have problems climbing the tables and lose a good deal of health and turns because of that. Enemies start multiplying to the point they murder two player characters (and they do fail their death saving throws and actually die). A prissy elven wizard is reduced to bludgeoning the lunchlady to death with a magical spatula and her scepter (the lunchlady has been the tiefling's freshly adopted role model, since she was going through a rebellious spell and respected a blue collar worker for being the only honest person in the school), with her dying words telling the elf to remember that she killer her with her own hands.
I'm going to leave out the number of times people have been going in and out of many of the cream monster's buttholes, and just skip to the end where the heroes manage to defeat it. Since this is a show that's built on the characters that were just introduced and two of them have died, the GM has to pull out a deus ex resurrection to put the show back on the road. Not to make it consequence-free however, they have the quirky principal of the school (if Dumbledore was a bit more peppy but also a D&D character) murder the soft-spoken guidance councillor with a gun before committing a suicide and using a phoenix egg to resurrect the two PCs - a life for a life. At this moment the tiefling player still upset about having to sit in the time-out through the encounter wants to also commit suicide to bring back the lunchlady, but since they are unconscious they don't get their wish.
So all of that fight was a big clusterfuck, pretty much all due to D&D's rules. So let's start breaking things down.
Failures of D&D
Character death vs character-driven show
Dimension 20 is a pretty character-driven show. One of its core appears is that you can count on there being a cast of colourful characters at the table, portrayed by some very talented people, and through the show you get to have some of their problems, arcs and so on come to the forefront. For example, initially I disliked one of the PCs being your stereotypical born-again-bible-thumping-christian-coded girl that worshipped the Corn God. It felt too much like the proselytising type trope at the outset. However, through the serie she started reflecting on her life after having a brief death experience and realising the Corn God is a bit of a douche-bro and can't answer the problem of evil. Later she realises she has been raised in a fundamental family, been part of a religious extremist cult and discovers herself anew. It's really great.
D&D, however, is not a game that promotes that. Rules as written, the characters can die pretty much during any fight and you're not really meant to get too attached to them. Heck, one of the reason why "grognard" is associated with the game is because it's kind of like going to a ruthless war - what's the point of getting attached to the new level 1 guy if he's going to bite the dust during the first fight. Nobody cares about your backstory until you're level 3 and can survive an encounter with a rat.
Sure, that can be okay to play if you're into that, and the more recent editions of the game have softened the danger a little bit, but trying to do a character-centric game in D&D is still a liability if you don't fudge things or have some convenient way of bringing the characters back.
And for those that think that a story without the stake of character death is meaningless or the like - watch any popular movie. You know going into like, any Marvel movie that no character there will randomly die without a proper payoff and definitely not before their arc is over. You know Thor won't be Ragnarok'ed and will be there for the next movie. You still get invested.
Incompetence, coolness and stunting
D&D is awful when it comes to character competency due to its linear rolls. Chances are whatever you try doing at level 1 you will fail. It's not a game that wants you to be a cool badass, it's a game that wants to watch you faceplant into the floor whenever you try something.
Part of it is its approach to how it handles cool actions. When you declare that you will do something cool, like swinging down a chandelier and leaping from one table to the next before backflipping over the enemy to stab them in the back, the game expects your GM to make you roll to see if you pull it off and tell you "no" if you fail a roll. If you do the most boring action though ("I move forward and attack"), you don't have to roll anything special.
The thing is, you do want the characters to show off how cool they are. It makes the game more interesting, and definitely more fun to listen to! So don't penalise them, don't make them roll and fail, heck, give them bonuses for being cool! That's one of the things I enjoyed about Exalted - stunting. Basically, the cooler you described your action the bigger bonus you got. A lot of the players in Fantasy High could easily do really cool stunts and the game would've been even more cool for it (as it stands, it's only so cool with a pirate jock riding a hellbeast motocycle onto a stone golem to do a cool stunt on its back's half-pipe to throw it into a pit of acid...).
Rolls are boring, damage is mostly meaningless
When playing D&D, you spend a lot of time rolling dice, especially in combat. Add situations where those rolls get more complicated, such as with the use of inspiration (and if you take a shot each time someone on the show gets an inspiration you will get pretty drunk...), and you spend a lot of time rolling your math rocks.
Sure, this is fun when you're actually doing it yourself, but for a viewer, the rolls are only interesting if they are high-stakes, or someone ends up rolling a botch or a crit. Sooner than later individual rolls stop mattering, since a character suffering 5 points of damage out of their 80HP pool is just noise.
Once again, Dimension 20 does the best with what they have. They put visuals up to illustrate people's health as it changes and make the process as engaging as possible, which is commendable, but such edits are someone's job there. It would be quite a bit of extra work for anyone that is not doing this as a full-time job.
In general, it's much more interesting to play a game like D&D than to actually watch the game being played - passive vs active engagement and all that. You will have to put in a lot more work to get some interesting content.
Fights and rolls create funny moments, not interesting stories
A good RPG system helps you create interesting stories and character moments. Unfortunately, D&D combat isn't that great for it. Sure, it can create funny moments, and sometimes cool moments, but they are rarely interesting stories, despite how much time you're devoting to it.
For perhaps the best illustration of it, I'll have to turn to Dimension 20's other show, Escape from the Bloodkeep. It's a show where the PCs are knockoff evil characters from knockoff Lord of the Rings fighting the heroes. Many times in that show the Witch-king of Angmar would face off against Samwise Gamgee, who was armed only with a frying pan and a whole heap of enthusiasm. The thing is, the hobbit had such high stats that he would routinely stand his ground against the Witch-king and batter him pretty handily with that frying pan, turning their fights into some slapstick Bugs Bunny skit, all because the Witch-King couldn't kill this one halfing. Was it funny? Yes. Was it an interesting story? Not really. It was slapstick. Unfortunately, that's about as much as D&D gives you.
Sure, everyone has an awesome story about how one roll change the course of their game's history, or how they rolled an impossible roll and just dominated some situation. However, those are often stories about a single cool moment, not big interesting stories. Sure, it can be a fun entertainment to see your enemy roll nat 20 and then you matching it with your own nat 20 and the table exploding with emotions, but it's kind of like action for action's sake in a movie - entertainment without a deeper meaning.
Sitting in the death roll penalty box
Many times during the Fantasy High run the characters ended up at death's door, having to roll their death saving throws and not getting to do much. Again, the worst offender was Episode 2 where the tiefling player pretty much had to sit out the entire fight in the penalty box just because they got KOd early and nobody could heal her. You could see and hear the player's frustration with the system and being an unconscious deadweight in the corner of the room. Again, I don't fault the player for any of that - it's the system that creates these scenarios.
When you play a game, you don't want to have to sit and do nothing. Being forced to skip your turns is one of the least fun things because you don't even get to have to focus on coming up with strategies on how to not lose. And if you are doing a show professionally and have some actual actors on your show, you don't want them to sit by the table and not act out their character. It's not fun for them, and you're paying them some good money to sit and do nothing.
Ideally, you'd have a system where characters don't go down that easily and can always contribute something. Fellowship does that pretty well for example - it takes a lot of beating to put someone down (most of the game focuses instead on a death by a thousand cuts, so you know it's coming), and even if you are badly hurt you still have pretty good odds at doing something to contribute to the game.
Regularly scheduled murderhobos
D&D is a game that's focused on combat and murdering enemies. Countless people have pointed out the problematic colonial issues with that, and how Gygax essentially says Paladins would be okay with the Sand Creek Massacre. So how do you square that with a fantasy 50s americana setting of Fantasy High? The answer apparently is - you don't.
While you can gloss over killing of corn cuties and other monsters, the things get problematic when you are fighting humanoid NPCs, especially when they are a part of the same school the PCs go to. Unfortunately, Dimension 20 being a D&D show and one with an episode structure of there being a fight every second episode, there are some times when things get really iffy if you think about them.
In Episode 3 the PCs learn of Johnny Spells, a greaser teen that likes to hit on high school girls despite not going to the school. They get some cryptic message telling them to investigate him to try finding some lost girls. At the end of the episode they find him in his greaser joint with his buddies doing some aggressive dance routines. Overall, the character came off as a cross between someone cool and kind of creepy, but it's never really been established by that point that he was a scumbag or anything.
But oh no, the clock is ticking and it's almost the end of the talking and investigation episode, and you know what that means, it's time to start your regularly scheduled fight. The format must remain unchanged, and a lot of people have put in a lot of hard work to make some cool minis, so instead of confronting Johnny and trying to figure out what his deal is, or even getting the magic mcguffin they came in here for, the team decides to steal the mcguffin and the keys to Johnny's car and book it.
Episode 4 is a street race fight, where the PCs fight Johnny and his gang that are trying to get his car back. This being D&D of course involves a good deal of violence, since the mechanics inform the playstyle. So the PCs murder a group of teens after stealing their ride really for no reason at all, other than this is a Dimension 20 show and the episode number is even, so we have to fight.
And again, I'm not saying that Dimension 20 did a bad job at making the fight itself entertaining to watch, or that the minis weren't cool to look at, it's just that the script being so rigid and you having to have a fight every second episode will inevitably lead to the PCs being murderhobos. I would love to instead see a system where you have different resolution systems so you can have competitions that aren't just murdering each other. Or a system or setting where it's okay to fight one another since the people don't get murdered at the end (make it like a campy Transformers episode or something, where people shoot one another but that's okay, there will be there to shoot one another many times more). But no, this is D&D and violence is always an option.
Sure, you could argue that in that world it's okay to murder people, but late in the season the characters do go to jail for murdering people and the police do explicitly say it's not okay, so the text of the show doesn't support that argument.
So if you're planning on running a game where you don't murder everything as a way of resolving your conflicts by default, D&D doesn't have much to offer in this regard.
It's there to sell you toys
D&D is not only a game about fighting, it's also a game with deep roots in miniature wargaming that's owned by Hasbro, a toy company. If I was a cynic I would say that chances are a game pushed by a toy company will want to sell you toys, and I might not be far off. There are so many miniatures you can buy for the game it's crazy, and when you see a show like Dimension 20 playing with their cool minis your brain might go "boy, I want some of that plastic tosh to play with! Let me get my wallet!".
Luckily, I haven't seen Dimension 20 try to push their own line of minis in the merch store, but I'd kind of be weary of promoting a game in good conscious that kind of encourages you to buy overpriced plastic and a lot of books to be able to play "like the cool kids on TV".
This also means you can't really run D&D as an audio-only podcast without making it really dull to listen to or cutting a lot of boring content out. Not everyone has the budget to set up cameras for the crew, buy minis, paint them well, do some action shots during the fight and so on. Even running it virtually in some third party program to create a virtual arena you still have to have a good enough computer to record and render everything. This creates a much higher startup cost for anyone wanting to run the game than something that can be comfortably played in the theatre of the mind.
And again, this is more of a deeper discussion about whether it's okay to support a game that is not free of controversy and possibly creates a pressure for the show's audience to buy its merch through peer pressure of sorts. But that's a bit beyond our today's discussion.
The flip side
Of course, things can't really be clear cut. While D&D is really an awful game for an Actual Play when looked through its mechanics, that might not really be that important. D&D does being in a lot of eyes to the show because it's popular and people know it. A lot of people won't tune in to the show to see the Dimension 20 crew, they will tune in to see a high-production D&D unfortunately. So it's up to the show producers to weigh in the drawbacks of using a system they have to struggle with the benefits of a large audience and possibly a large corporation to boost their visibility.
Conclusions
Dimension 20 is probably the Actual Play with the highest production value I have seen. It executes its premise and works very hard within its constraints to bring perhaps the best version of what it sets out to do. It is unfortunate though, that what they have to work with is D&D.
D&D from a mechanical standpoint is a liability for any Actual Play show. It limits what kind of stories you can tell (everyone must be a murderhobo or an accessory to murderhobos), has a tendency of killing characters off prematurely, puts players in a timeout box when they do avoid death, and is something you have to have a good setup to record your minis, play areas and so on so your viewers don't get lost in the action.
In return the game rewards you with nothing but its BRAND. Sure, that might be good enough for a lot of people, but personally I'd love to see some more indie games getting the love and attention.
Of course, playing the game yourself is different from doing it as a performance. It is a different kind of engagement since you are in control of the action, rather than just witnessing what's happening. You can still enjoy a game even if it's not a good fit for an Actual Play.
And hey, if anyone from Dimension 20 want a pitch for a cool game, why not copy our Fellowship game in the Transformers universe. It's another Hasbro product, and it would be cool to see what you do by taking the existing toys and modding the heck out of them. The game can support someone playing Tripticon, a giant godzilla, while someone else is a tiny Mini-Con on their shoulder. Now design your show around that and it would be a spectacle just to see what your players could do with their cool, transforming, modded toys! ;)
Make this a game Dimension 20, I know it will be awesome!
A lot of players love getting attached to random NPCs, all of your Boblin the Goblins. Some games encourage that friend recruiting loop. However, once you get over a certain number of allies, they turn from potentially interesting people into faces in the crowd. It might be good to prepare for that ahead of time.
The one, the only, Boblin the Goblin!
Our group has played a lot of games across a lot of systems. Like many groups, we tend to hoard NPCs and add anyone with a name to our "friends pile". In our biggest game, Princes of the Universe, we had like 50 named important NPC alliess that were on PC's level (on top of a number of lesser named mooks). Unfortunately, as we realised, that number is too big for players to handle, and 95% of them pretty much remained as background characters nobody cared about as the same 3-4 NPCs were always at the forefront.
More recently, we started playing a lot of Fellowship. It's a flexible fantasy game where you can solve your problems in many ways, Undertale or Steven Universe hugs included. The system also encourages you to recruit a lot of a lot of NPCs since you can use them as boosts in future conflicts. At the same time the game expects you to keep track of those NPCs, their health and stats, as wel as how many friendship levels you have with them and what statements are tied to them. It can become a lot to keep track of when you can easily recruit a few Boblins each session.
Friendship acquired! Onto my sheet you go!
It's probably better to accept that most NPCs the players recruit won't be too important and anticipate that both from GM prep perspective, as well as game design perspective. If some NPC turns out to be more impactful, they can be fleshed out more between sessions and upgraded to a more prominent status.
From a game design perspective, you could have important NPCs with full stats and relationships, and minor NPCs that go together on a roster you can "spend" them from to get some appropriate bonus some limited number of times before they move on or fade from importance. Sure, nothing is stopping you from forming a small army of those NPCs, but that would probably fall under different rules than individual companions.
Even your roster of core NPCs will probably be small. From our experience players usually tend to care about one or two key NPCs at a time, and then having a few more in well-defined roles ("these are my two pet wargs", "here are my parents that I begrudgingly interact with as a teen") but are rarely important to draw too much attention to.
Of course this doesn't have to be a hard rule, I'm mostly sharing the observations we had while playing our games.
Conclusions
Players tend to recruit a lot of NPC allies, but often those allies tend not to contribute much to the party or the game afterwards. It's good to be able to place NPCs on an importance scale and handle them accordinly. Players will usually only focus on one or two NPC friends, while others will just become background. It's good for games to also be able to distinguish between important NPCs and the less important ones and don't treat both of them with the same granularity.
RPGs are an inherently collaborative medium. Often the GM will be put in the position of the authority to shape the world and direct how it responds to players' actions, but that doesn't strictly need to be the case. In Fellowship there is a clear distinction in who can Command Lore about various things, usually giving Players the control over the lore surrounding their people (so an Elf character Commands who elves are in the setting, whether they are pixies, aliens or what have you). While this approach might not be useful in all games (such as games with established lore, like Star Wars), you can still incorporate the players' creativity in how the world works on a smaller level.
In our lengthy Princes of the Universe Exalted campaign we ran into an interesting situation. My character wanted to unite the setting's dysfunctional bureaucratic heaven to work for our characters. To that end, I suggested the character would go on a quest to find an artefact, the Crown of Thunders, and use it as a symbol to rally the bickering gods. The Crown had an important symbolic meaning to the gods and the Exalts, but it wasn't a concrete "this crown makes you a ruler of the heaven and solves your issue" thing. As such, some other players dismissed the idea, but the GM rolled with it without hesitation, and even the various NPCs started reinforcing the idea soon after. It was a nice way of approaching problem solving in RPGs - a player's idea becomes a solution to the problem by the dint of player suggesting it as a solution.
Sol Invictus giving Queen Merela the Crown of Thunders and establishing the Creation Ruling Mandate
While this might be a no-brainer for some people, it's an approach that I don't see mentioned in too many RPGs or adventure modules - you should be aiming to use players' ideas on how things should work in your game. They might miss hints or clues on how some adventure wants them to approach a problem, not know some part of the setting their character might know, or in general not be in the same mindset as the GM. That shouldn't stop them from suggesting how things should be. You don't need to roll with every single thing, but it's definitely a good conversation starter.
As Fellowship hints, the GM is there to create problems for the players to solve. If they were to create solutions, you would either run into GM-PCs that have the foresight given to them by reading the script, or else they might be forcing the players to figure out their moon logic to solve a problem the way they envisioned. Either solution wouldn't be good. Since you can't expect the players to come up with the same ideas as the GM, then of course you need to allow for some leeway in how things can be solved, how the world will react and so on.
You should be leaning into those ideas as a GM - not only asking your players what they want to do, but also what they want to accomplish with their actions. There is a difference between "I want to beat the guard up" and "I want to beat the guard up to rally the common people to storm the bastille with me" - one sounds like the combat is the end-point, while in the others the violence is a means to an end that might not be clear if it's not spelled out explicitly.
By talking about the desired outcomes you can set the correct expectations and let the players know if their actions won't have the desired outcome. It's best to be up-front about such things than to let players go goblin brain down a dead end. Sometimes that can be a "no", sometimes that can be a compromise ("if you beat this guard, that will work in your favour for convincing the people to rise up"), and sometimes it can lead to some different ideas being worked out ("maybe if you rally the people first and come in as a mob, the guards will actually join your just cause?").
Conclusions
Try to incorporate your player ideas into the game - you are here to create the story together, and it's good when the world conforms narratively to the player actions and ideas (whether that's reinforcing it, or fighting back against it in a satisfying way ("hey, would you want the system to try crushing you and throwing you in jail for daring to fight the guard to show how the government will oppress you, making your character a martyr?")). Just saying something "won't work" without offering some alternatives isn't as fun as championing even some wacky ideas.
Recently, I was playing a character in Exalted vs World of Darkness that was a Sidereal, a troubleshooter of Fate. Basically, his heroic job description was to right the things according to how Fate wills it - uncover secrets that should be revealed, end people that should be ended, bring joy to the people that need it, etc. However, that got me thinking - what decides those things anyway? Unlike in some systems and settings, Exalted's Sidereals are agents of Fate, which is something that exists outside the control of any deities or similar entities. But since it's not controlled by anyone with an agenda, what agenda does it serve? What does Fate really want in the end? What is it's agenda and morality? If that couldn't be established, should my character go along with it and trust in Fate, or should they try imposing their own morality on the world instead?
Sure, in meta terms, Fate is basically "plot" of an RPG - the story wants the characters to get from A to B and kill C, so the Sidereal gets to make leaps of logic to get them there like a Holistic Detective. Even the EvWoD book calls out Sidereals as being GM's best friend because they always have an excuse to get the right people to the right places for the plot to move on. That can be fun if you want to enjoy the ride and don't overthink it, but as writing goes a Sidereal following Fate is like saying people are following the Force to know where to go next - feels a bit like a cop out.
Dirk Gently the holistic detective is basically a Sidereal
If a character leans into following Fate too much, it can also start turning them into a lawful stupid, a puppet, or a Morty on a Death Crystal - basically an automaton that doesn't think much for themselves just follows orders - "this person is supposed to die? Oh boy, here I go killing again!".
Chosen of Endings without remorse
A comparison to D&D paladins and clerics isn't really that far off, although with those at least you know the deity you're following and their view on morality, so you know there is something that dictates that will. That just means you know what you're signing up for though, not that strict adherence to it will make you less of an extremist murderhobo.
Another popular manifestation of the same problem would be prophecies - should a character in a prophecy that they will do something or kill someone, or should they try to defy it? If they are "the chosen one", can they do no wrong because it's their destiny? Do they have a say in the matter, or are they a slave to the whims of Fate?
What all of those have in common is they tend to turn the characters into puppets of whatever they resign their character to. Whether it's a deity, a code of conduct, Fate, philosophy, etc., the characters can become less interesting for it. When you turn yourself into a hammer, you treat everything as nails or something...
Making it interesting - cutting the strings
Now that is all not to say you can't have interesting and thought provoking ideas some from those tropes, but you have to approach them the right way.
A character that follows some morality 100% of the time is a bit dull. Sure, RPGs encourage you to see how many problems you can solve with your hammer of choice ("I want to see how a good and naive person would fare in Ravenloft! That sounds like a fun game!"), but challenging the character's beliefs can lead to some powerful moments. Try focusing on that - start with the character believing one thing and then make them re-examine their stance when confronted with what Fate wants them to do - would they kill baby Hitler if they were Minority Report? Or would they re-evaluate their stance and vow not to kill people that are innocent save for that they might commit future-crime? Make your character have doubts and define their own morality consciously. Similarly, reward your players for doing so and don't punish them for not being lawful stupid. Screw what the gods might want from your paladin, a paladin with a crysis of fate is much more interesting than one that's an automaton! Don't punish them for it!
You could similarly involve the players in defining what is the will of the Fate. Don't hand them a script telling them what to do, whatever they end up doing might be exactly what Fate wants. To borrow a phrase from Fellowship - let them Command Lore about it and tell you what Fate wants of their character (with room for negotiation as with all things of course).
When it comes to prophecies specifically, they are probably best played as mundanely self-fulfilling - characters believing in them and putting stock in them are inevitably causing them to come true with their actions. A person believing themselves to be a hero rises up to the legend and becomes a hero. However, if you reject the prophecy, there is no other shoe that drops - there is no magic here, the prophecy was always just a fable and a guess. As long as both the players and the GM are on-board and aware of this, such prophecies might not take agency away from the characters and the game.
Finally, you could have the character's morality explicitly affect Fate - someone's fated to die not because the unknowable cosmic force willed it, but because the player character wants them dead and therefore they spin that Loom of Fate and make it a reality with their actions. This retains the character's agency and makes their actions and decisions have meaning in the game and the setting. They are no longer only the puppet, but also the puppet master.
Conclusions
Making your character beholden to an external system of morality or something else that dictates their choices can take away agency from the character, the player, and make the game a bit less interesting. On the other side, confronting the character's morality and making them actively engage with it can be more engaging. Embrace it.
My group and I have been playing some Fellowship recently. One of our characters was the Heir, a noble face of the group. Usually our GM plays most NPCs very respectfully since we don't like being mean to one another. However, when the Heir took a Move called "How Dare You", things had to change.
How Dare You lets the Hair do some cool stuff, but in order to trigger the Move, they have to be insulted to their face. This now meant that in order to facilitate the player being able to use their cool new Move, the GM had to have the NPCs insult them semi-regularly, not to be mean, but to let them use How Dare You and shine when they do it. This is a simple example of how character classes, builds and so on should shape the game.
Letting your players shine
One advice I don't see often brought up in books is the idea that you should help your players shine by tailoring the adventure to what their characters are good at. Sure, you hear it in the large sense of having player-driven games, but less so for sprinkling something for the characters to ace.
When you have a burglar character in your game, you want to give them locked doors to unlock more often than if you had a party without a burglar. If you have a character that invested heavily in linguistics, you want languages to be an important part of the game. If you have an Heir that has some cool Moves for when they get insulted, you want to insult them.
Introducing new struggles
Just as some powers may introduce cool new ways for a character to shine, there are also character builds that may introduce new struggles into the game. A Fellowship Remnant can take the Move Boogeyman that's all about being a horror to anyone that's not in the light:
When a player takes that Move, they essentially communicate to the GM that light is now an important part of the game, and whether some encounter takes place at day or night can make a large amount of difference to them. This Move can be rather powerful, so there may be some push and pull between the GM and the Remnant as to whether the situation favours them or not, and how they can manipulate the environment to their advantage.
Similarly, the Heir may take Parry! Counter! Thrust!, which will make them really strong at one on one melee duels:
Now the player will want to engage in more duels, while the GM will want to push against that a bit to make it harder for them to get into duels than if they didn't have that Move so as not to make things too easy.
Of course, you do want Boogeyman and Parry! Counter! Thrust! to trigger every now and then to once again let the players shine, but because they are so strong you don't want them to be a default for every encounter, hence why the GM ought to do some pushback against them every now and then for the players to get their way.
Being mindful of their foibles
Just as various characters have their strong suites, they also have their foibles one should be mindful of when GMing. For example, if you want to stump Fellowship's Swamp Ogres, challenge them with fire:
Other foibles and weaknesses might be less explicit - maybe the party doesn't have a burglar, so presenting them with a locked door is enough to create an issue for them. Maybe a character doesn't have any strengths when it comes to talking with people, so you might want to Put Them On The Spot in some situation where they have to talk their way out of a situation.
Of course, you don't want to do this all the time. Being challenged with a weakness should be a way for the character to shine or maybe for someone else to step in and take the spotlight, it shouldn't be an excuse to do some arms race.
Keeping it all in mind
One of our takeaways from realising the above concepts in our Fellowship games was that it would be useful for the GM to have a handy spreadsheet listing everything the players need to shine, what struggles they are engaging in, as well as how to stump them as needed.
Of course some idealised version of a GM would always remember such things, but we are all human and everyone needs help sometimes managing their mental loads with handy references.
Conclusions
Keep in mind (or on a reference sheet) ways various characters in your games want to shine, what struggles they bring with them to the game, and how to stump a given character as needed. Refer to those things often, give your players opportunities and challenge them as appropriate to get the most out of the game you're playing.
Recently in our Star Wars Fellowship game we had a session filled with some roleplay encounters. We talked with a clone trooper conspiracy theorist that believed the Clone Wars were perpetrated by a shadowy presence, a phantom menace, working behind the scenes of both sides of the war. We had a vision of a possible future where we talked in some mummified ally. Finally, we learned why the Big Bad Evil Guy is carrying out his plan of destroying all life in the galaxy. While all of them were interesting scenes that were pure roleplay (like so many people argue you should just roleplay social encounters), talking them over after the session we realised they were hampered a bit by some perceived boundaries mostly made out of the players being too polite to force their way through and not wanting to resort to mechanical rolls to deal with not to lose that flow of conversation. In essence, we were stopped by velvet ropes that prevented the players from taking reign of those scenes.
Velvet ropes of perceived limits
The velvet ropes are the perceived limits of what players think they can do in a given scenario that in actually are soft boundaries - thing they can go around or overcome with some determination. They can be easily mistaken for walls or invisible walls - limits that cannot be overcomed that the GM communicates clearly ("this scenario is about investigating a murder on the Orient Express, you can't just leave the train at the first stop and not come back"), or indirectly ("you try to leave Barovia through the Mist, but you are turned back around"). Both velvet ropes and walls can also come from the system or player's assumption about the game or the system ("in Fellowship the BBEG will never win", "I don't see a rule for stealing someone else's things, I guess I can't do that...").
The biggest issues velvet ropes bring to the game is that at first glance they might appear as invisible walls to the players, and crossing them feels like a slight transgression. Because of that, if things aren't communicated clearly, the players will cut themselves out of exploring a given path the GM would welcome them exploring.
In our examples, the conspiracy theorist clone trooper couldn't be reasoned with, because he was filled with paranoia and conviction. That didn't mean they couldn't be convinced to join the party, stand down or the like, but just talking to him would just make him go in circles. At the same time, in Fellowship, NPC's Stats are only truths if they are undamaged. So you could talk them through things or even punch them, damaging their "I cannot be reasoned with" Stat and make him be able to be reasoned with. That, however, would require the player to stop talking with them and decide to change the reality of the fiction with rolls, which in the flow of the moment can be hard to remember.
In the future vision, the NPC jedi had a hazy recollection of the past and where he was in the "now" of the future. He gave the PC indirect answers - "where are we?", "I don't know, I think we're on a planet, it feels wet...". The player perceived that as an invisible wall, while the GM didn't intend it to be some unknowable truth that he was on Kamino. The player could've pushed the narrative, trying to use his own jedi investigative skills or talk the NPC through focusing to realise where he was and what was going on by rolling an investigative or social roll. But because the player decided to stick with the fiction and just roleplay talking the situation out, those velvet ropes didn't get crossed and the scene felt like a bit of an exposition from someone in a fugue state.
Finally, the talk with the BBEG was all about learning about his motivation and discovering the secret of his plan to wipe out all life in the galaxy to end all suffering. Because his motivation came more from grief of all the suffering he has witnessed as a wartime doctor and was fuelled by evil spirits that feed on suffering rather, you couldn't easily reason him out of that mindset. Doing so would in the terms of the system amount to a social conflict, which would be very dangerous to a solo player. However not engaging with the system meant that once again, the players could not change the mind of someone in a conversation because of those velvet ropes. The BBEG needs to remain irrational for the game to move forward, so you can't just roleplay him changing his mind, but at the same time if you want to change his mind the system has provisions for that, Moves you can use to start accomplishing that.
Overcoming the velvet ropes
The velvet ropes can be overcome, but they require a bit of mental reconditioning. Similarly to how big elephants can be tied down with small ropes, we need to realise that sometimes a perceived wall is as strong of a deterrent as a real wall. The GMs ought to be a bit clearer in communicating what is really a wall, the players need to condition themselves to challenge things that aren't walls, and we all need to learn to weave between roleplaying and using Moves / rolls more regularly when we want to accomplish something that is being softly denied with the velvet ropes.
We may often feel crossing those boundaries would be improper, impolite, or transgressive in some other way. We need to unlearn that while still maintaining friendlyness and respect around the table.
Velvet ropes are one of the reasons you can't just leave all social interactions out to pure roleplay - you need some rules the players can always call on to accomplish what they want and fall back on a concrete outcome. Without those, they may be stuck going in circles trying to reason with someone that can't be reasoned with.
Conclusions
Velvet ropes are weak boundaries and challenges meant to gently dissuade characters from crossing them without applying some conviction. They are not meant to be hard boundaries like walls of the game, but they may often feel like that to some players. It is important to communicate the difference between those at the table and encourage players to push against and cross those ropes to get what they really want out of a scene. Knowing you have some tools like mechanics to push aside those velvet ropes when they get in the way is also a way to help players not get stuck.
Recently while browsing /r/RPGdesign I stumbled on a post describing someone's monetary system in their work-in-progress RPG. It was rather bland - "100 copper is 1 silver, 100 silver is 1 gold", plus some stuff about who gets to use what kind of coin and so on. Then I thought to myself - I have a Master of Science in Cryptocurrency, I can put some interesting ideas together from various things I've read in the past. Well, here they are - a few ideas to adding some storytelling flavour to your game with money.
Coinage and taxation as political means
Anyone can create their own currency, but governments (and similar institutions of power) have a way of also forcing that money to circulate. By simply having the government print their own currency as well as require taxes to be collected specifically in that currency you can force the entire population to work towards the government's goals without having to coordinate everything.
If you want to maintain an army, pay them in those coins. If you want to build a monument, pay those workers. If you need to store grain, pay for the grain. Whatever the government Wants is where the money enters the system. Then by that invisible hand of the market everyone has to align themselves with that Want in order to pay their taxes.
If you pay the military, you will have people that feed them, clothe them, make their weapons. Those in turn will require other people to supply grain, cloth, iron and so on.
You could then tell some stories by twisting this formula. Maybe some region doesn't have many coins so everyone is desperate to sell their wares for cheap to get their dues before the taxes are due. Maybe the priorities shift and suddenly you have masons that are out of the job once the castle is done. Maybe you have the land be recently conquered and there is a frenzy to exchange the old currency for the new and re-establish oneself - something some merchants might want to capitalise on if they still do trading with the old rulers of the land.
This one might be subtle, but it serves as a nice shandification of your world.
Shandification of Fallout
("What do they eat?")
Multiple currencies and mercantile campaigns
Something that might not be for every group, but if you're into mercantile campaigns you might dig this - put multiple currencies in your world with no fixed exchange rate. This can be especially good for a campaign that involves a lot of travelling and trading - having currencies be worth different amounts based on the location and the political situation.
Maybe you have Dwarf Silver and Elven Silver that would be worth $1 in their home countries, $0.50 in one another's kingdoms, $0.90 in the human realm, but everything would also fluctuate by ~20% each season. This could encourage the players to plan ahead before they travel as to whether they want to keep cash in coin that might not be worth as much, or buy some goods for trade that should keep their value. Again, not for everyone, but something for people that love spreadsheets.
Then you can try spicing things up by letting players try doing market speculation akin to Spice and Wolf:
Spice and Wolf - an anime about fantasy capitalism
Maybe they earned a large cache of coins from a kingdom that's down on its luck. Now they would be invested in making that kingdom prosper in order to turn their profit into a small fortune. Or maybe they would just hype up the return of a king to power to drive up the demand for that currency only to dump it. Or maybe they buy war bonds of a losing army only to turn that around - it worked for Timothy Dexter...
This could be your party, for good or ill...
Best look at Suns of Gold for a neat way to fluctuate the value of goods and so on, which can apply to currencies as well.
Fiat and political control
In Exalted the most powerful kingdom of the land, the Realm, uses money as means of political control. Their money is based on jade, one of the magical elements of that world that's useful for making artefacts, magic, etc. However, most people will never handle a jade coin - instead, they use fiat banknotes issued by the Realm that are backed by jade. It's even a crime for a non-noble to be using actual jade coins.
By doing this the Realm makes itself indispensable - all the money is backed by it, and if you rebel against it, that will make your money worth less due to the shaken confidence. If you print your own money, that will be treason, if you try using a hard currency that will be a crime, so you have to play along.
Now you can start twisting the formula - what if the government turned a bit incompetent and started printing away the banknotes without the jade to back it? That's some way to get rich for a brief before the system becomes unsustainable in the long-term with fractional reserve banking.
What if jade was a key ingredients for running all magic and magical weapons? Then suddenly the government can start rationing how much power anyone can hold. You can't start a magitech rebellion if you don't have that key raw material to build your army since it was confiscated.
What if you still had to pay taxes in actual jade? That would mean it would have to be extracted from somewhere, bought from abroad or you'd need to go conquer some new lands to get some. Now you have a struggle for driving the big picture conflict.
So how do you rebel against someone that inflicts such control over your life? That's up for the players to tell you!
Moneyless societies
Not everyone in history used money or even barter (shocking, I know. Read Debt: The First 5000 Years to learn more). Now how would players interact with such societies?
First could be a smaller community that operates on doing favours for one another. One day I catch some fish so I give you some, other day your turnips are ready so you'll give me one, etc. The players might come into such village or town and be delighted that they don't need to pay for their food or lodging, only to find the next day the locals ask them for something of theirs - a broche, shoes, etc. Maybe they don't even realise that when someone says "that's a fine bow you have there" they mean "I would like you to give me the bow". Could be an interesting situation to throw your party into to see how they interact with a culture they might not understand.
Another one comes from our Crew Expendable campaign - what if the players found themselves on a planet that's true, functioning communism. Maybe one that uses money for trading with passing merchants, but also one where you can't bribe people because money has no meaning for them. I actually had one player try bribing a government official to let them skip a customs lockdown only for that to fail miserably since of course all the capitalist traders would try bribing them and not understanding their culture...
When you owe a bank a billion dollars...
There is another aspect to money that's not evident when you look at the small picture - money is deeply political. As the saying goes - "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.". The same can be true in your world.
You could have a kingdom that always pays its debts to whoever runs the iron bank, and one that's constantly in debt. When they go to war, you might expect the bank to side with the kingdom that has always paid back, but in reality they stand to gain a lot more by supporting the one that's their debtor. If that kingdom falls, they lose all that money. If it wins, they can exert their power to get that money back.
Similarly, if the ruler gives the power to print the money to a bank, they might be bowing down to them soon enough ("Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!"). Or maybe the trust in money comes from the royal lineage that's in decline so now the rich are scrambling to find a way to secure their position in the future - either by preserving the bloodline, or by changing their allegiances.
You can create a good deal of political intrigue by just focusing on who owed who how much, whether that's money or favours. After all, the creditor will want to make sure their investment gets repaid...
Choke on your gold
This one comes from a weird source. Back in the day in Poland someone released Play Dirty booklet. Then the same company released a few more booklets in the same series (but spoilet alert - John Wick did not write those, instead they were written by Ignacy Trzewiczek, a polish board game designer). In one of those books, he described a scenario for one of his Neuroshima campaigns (basically different take on Fallout): the players find a hoard of treasure that's immensely valuable (in that world old-world artefacts were valuable, so the treasure was a complete collection of Playboy magazines). The catch it - it's worth so much they will be hunted by everyone and not able to cash out their ill-gotten gains unless they find someone fabulously wealthy to buy it off of them. As soon as anyone would catch a whiff of this kind of wealth, they would be gunned down by raiders, bounty hunters, thieves, you name it.
So this is another way of storytelling with money - give players something so valuable they choke on it. Give them a priceless artefact they can't find anyone with enough gold to buy it, a shiny ship they can't pawn off, nor crew fully, etc. and challenge them to go nuts with it.
Working poor and #iHunt
As I already touched in "The game is not about that - iHunt, money, and mechanic as a metaphor" - lack of money can also be a statement for your game. It could be that money is only important in rough income brackets like in World of Darkness, or maybe it's only useful as a resource like in Fellowship, or it could be like #iHunt. In that game, you will always be a working poor. You will be doing gigs killing monsters and bringing in some dough, but money is fickle and it never sticks - there are always more debts to pay, more expenses that keep appearing, and you will be back to being broke and in debt in no time. Some might find that stressful, but because the game never tracks your money, it's liberating - you will always be broke, so don't worry. Life will always kick you when you're down, but you will always get back on your feet. It's an interesting twist on the idea of money in games, and it's also a good statement for the game.
Conclusions
There is a lot you can bring into an RPG world or session if you look at money more than just a way of keeping track of players' coffers. It can be a volatile tool, drenched in politics, influence and greed. If those stories work for your table or game - tell them!
