Ideas to Steal from Video Games || D&D with Dael Kingsmill

how how am i how am i already sweating hello humans my name is dale kingsmill and i am on record as being someone who who feels like it's time tabletop rpgs started stealing back from video games video games have a long history particular rpgs in the video game world have borrowed so much from the tabletop legacy once they came but now that their their own whole big thing i think that there's plenty of stuff from video game rpgs that we can start taking and using in our tabletop rpgs it is worth noting that um video games versus ttrpgs when we're playing d d if you're running d d every single session you are making qualitative choices you are using your emotional and abstract human thought processes to make choices on the fly and respond in a very human way to the stimulus that your players give you every single session you're doing that the whole time video games um the big thing with video game rpgs is that uh ultimately everything has to come back down to the quantitative er everything has to boil down to numbers eventually even if it is disguised as a qualitative choice it will somewhere underneath it all be quantitative now that might sound robotic and like not what you want in your tabletop rpg because what what you're living for the table is that human back and forth it's that real freedom that uh that a computer could never give you but here's what is good about that stuff if you set aside just a couple of systems that um turn qualitative actions into quantitative data it frees up your brain a whole lot to focus on on the free form stuff that you really need to focus on so first up i've got a couple that uh that i think are particularly relevant given that we talked about travel and exploration in the last video if you haven't seen that video here's a link i i think it was a fun one first up let's talk about fast travel fast travel has been used in basically every game ever dragon age fable skyrim anything where you would be doing a lot of tracking about a large world the game often will just build in a function that lets you skip to the destination in my last video i talked about making the traveling and and or the exploration fun i've also mentioned that you can skip the travel if you don't enjoy the travel because that is fine and your players will be fine with it but something that a lot of video games do that i think is worthwhile is the first time you travel somewhere you have to do the hard yards you have to actually navigate there you have to actually survive the journey on the road but once you've been there once once you've made that journey you can fast travel there whenever you need to whenever you like your players have to make it to the capital city for the first time but once they've set up a home base there rather than forcing them to to fight every wolf along the way you can just say well it takes four days ride and you make it home because you kind of know the way there and the fastest and safest paths to take personally i like uh sprinkling a little bit of that middle earth rpg stuff in there where when they're fast traveling you just say to the players okay what is some some difficulty that you faced along the way and they say oh i don't know the the ford was flooded and the bridge was gone then you pick a different player and you say well how did you get across that river what resources did you use they say also and so you used a spell you know you you really boil it down to just this little like narrative snapshots kind of a montage sequence as fast travel instead of full-on full-blown travel that's number one number two that i think is relevant to last week uh is abstract carry capacity i've brought this one up before i think it's worth bringing up again i bet this system is used in a lot of video games but the one that comes to mind for me is deus ex or deus ex human revolution in these video games your inventory is basically a grid of squares and each item that you want to carry is worth a set number of squares and you have to sort of puzzle them in together you have to fit them into that grid you can fit them horizontally vertically you can try to sort of tetris them around each other to carry as much as you can but apart from super abstracting carry capacity so it's not a matter of like calculating how many pounds does a kite shield weigh well what about chalk chalk doesn't weigh a pound so how many pieces of chalk can you get you know what i mean it abstracts it a lot which i find much easier to sort of conceptualize and also um transmit to players it also kind of turns it into a fun little puzzle as well as incorporating the aspect that sometimes things aren't heavy they're just cumbersome or weird shapes and it kind of reflects the idea of like a backpack you have to pack a bag for this journey so it's not only a matter of how much can you physically carry with your strength it's a matter of how much can you fit in this bag again if if you're not into carrying capacity just don't do it but if that's something that you think is interesting or that that could be interesting in your game if you're doing an exploration heavy game where you really want that puzzle aspect of like how much can you take there how much can you take back i think this is a great way to do it because you can just hand each player you know alongside their character sheets you can just print off a grid make it i don't know like like 7 by 11 or something and for me i find it much easier to kind of assign a number of squares to an item on the fly than i do to guess at its weight i'm the weakest human being on the planet i don't lift things i don't know how much things weigh but i can look at a sword and think yeah that's probably like five long with a little crossbar of three up near the top or however you want to arrange your abstract things i i you could even boil it down i think at my most simplified level i like to to just sort it into small items are worth one square medium items i want two squares large items are worth three squares super abstract super easy to understand kind of makes a minigame out of carrying capacity and inventory and planning what to bring relationship scale uh as per the bioware games this one was actually because i was i've i've been writing a hack of the dragon age tabletop rpg i have a lot of affection for it uh but the age system also it's clunky in places where i don't want it to be clunky so i'm hacking it it's what i do in my free time i can't be stopped but one of the things i was implementing in my rewrite was uh the the relationship scale that is present within the video games of like dragon age and mass effect put it simply when you talk to npcs uh you can have just general conversations with them about the world but they kind of have predetermined opinions on these things and if you say something that they agree with they'll like you more if you disagree with one of their their closely held opinions they dislike you a little bit more so here's here's what i devised for that trying to work out which end will be which when you're watching it i think down here so it run it runs from negative 100 all the way up to positive 100 with zero in the middle as neutral in this this red zone down near negative 100 the npc is hostile towards you then it moves up to cold neutral they just don't care about you at all friendly close so what i do when i'm designing a major npc or when an npc becomes a major figure i jot down a list of three things one thing that they have some small level of investment in one thing that they have a vested interest or investment in and one thing that is majorly important to them about the world around them this can be a great way to to pull in political aspects to your game things like that you know maybe this character is is really vehemently against the ruling monarch so if you agree to work for the ruling monarch your relationship with this character is going to take a real hit with the small investment there's five points at stake on the scale like the positive or negative so if your actions or opinions or whatever align with theirs they're gonna gain five points if yours don't align uh they're going to lose five points the vested interest that's going to be 10 either way and the major interest is going to be 20 either way so just as your players play through the world and have conversations with people you can just you know keep track on the scale where their relationship with that npc is likely to be at at that given point and it'll change up and down as you play the whole time this obviously is something that you could you could do it without the scales without mechanizing it like that you could just keep track and think well this npc wouldn't like that at all and just keep that in mind for me i just find that it's really easy to um to save brain space for other things by mechanizing this so i can just keep a little tally of it on the side and reference it when it's important rather than having to actually keep it all in mind all the time number four shields then health again i'm sure lots of video games do this but the place that i first saw it happen halo combat evolved ah those were the days in the case of halo at least in the early days it was kind of part of the deal that master chief wasn't invincible but the myoneorama that he wore was really good so he's got the shields of his armor will keep out a lot of the bullets but once the shields are depleted then he's gonna start taking actual damage and the actual damage doesn't heal back on its own um it's it's very limited it runs out very quickly the reason i bring this up is because within d and d in particular but a lot of other tabletop rpgs the system of hit points is again it's an abstract representation and with hit points in particular you find a lot of a misalignment um with how people perceive it partly due to video games we're kind of used to thinking of hit points as like you are losing health you got cut by an enemy sword and so therefore you lose 18 hit points lost my voice but hit points aren't actually meant to directly represent your health because then of course you know you're getting cut up by swords an awful lot and then suddenly just falling down at the end so hit points are really meant to represent more of a mix of like you know your will to keep fighting um how how exhausted you are on the battlefield which kind of clashes with exhaustion now plus also physical damage that you're taking it's like literally how many how many peasant punching you so okay a punch in d d is it deals one hit points worth of damage unless you're a monk or like you've got all these bottom it deals one hit points worth of damage average peasant who punched you in the face would deal one damage so hit points is like how many peasant punches could you survive but it all just gets very confusing and bizarre so uh this thing might not this might not be a helpful thing to take from video games to just apply to your dnd game that is currently running but if you were into um game design if you were into writing your own rules for for your own game systems or hacking systems and the like you might consider this the idea of shields first then health you have to deplete the the armor first before you can start taking actual physical damage but once you start taking actual physical damage there's not very much of it and you'll go down pretty quickly just keep that in mind if you're writing your own game and finally recruit and influence missions assassin's creed revelations was such a betrayal to me personally i have so much love for the assassin's creed games and that was the first one that really just just stabbed me in the back but revelations did have a couple of really cool things going for it one of them was that it perfected the assassin recruit system so in a couple of the assassins creed games if you're unfamiliar you can kind of like rescue civilians who are in tough situations and have them like pledge allegiance to you and and become assassin apprentices under your guidance in assassin's creed revelations you could then like kit out these assassin apprentices and send them out on missions around the mediterranean to spy on enemies to spread your influence to um gather equipment and they would level up as they go as well i have had this in my brain ever since colville and mcdm started talking about retainers started talking about organizations that you can start think about applying this stuff to your your nightly order if you if you have the night background i made a video about this too night background alternative if you take on a squire you could you could use this system to have your little nightly order or your squires and train them as kind of a downtime minigame almost if if your players get to sort of this high level of play where they're really um you know running organizations and they have a lot of things that they have to keep in mind a lot of plates they have to keep spinning you as the dm can write down little little uh sort of mission summaries little mission prompts give them three of them at a time maybe one will catch the player's eye and they'll want to go off and do that particular mission to i don't know infiltrate the the lord of the the easter i don't know maybe your players will want to do that one but if you have these time sensitive things where they they're like well we need someone to do this as well they can pick a retainer they can they can use this as a place to um instead of just selling off all their old weapons or keeping them in their bag of hauling gathering dust never doing anything they can give their slightly outmoded magic weapons to their retainers to these recruits and they can send them on missions to do things for them you know maybe maybe plan like two to three roles that will be significant things that happen during that mission should it be chosen and make the players roll for that recruit who they've just sent off on that mission they don't know what the results are going to be until the mission is finished after a set amount of time that's actually another interesting thing about it is that if it really enforces the passage of time in the game that sometimes otherwise would slip under the radar structuring it in in a slightly more rigid slightly more video gamey way where you can you can pick different recruits and mix and match who goes on what mission and and what equipment they're gonna take with them like a little loadout screen on the side it becomes this really simple way of making sure that the the character party their influence is felt they can they can feel how far their reach has spread they can feel that they are at a higher level of play because they're they're sending underlings to do their bidding but you as the dm have a pretty easy time of it i really i i i miss the assassin recruits in revelations like i love that system almost enough to go back and play that game even though i hate that game all right opinion hour with dale is over i'm very sorry to all of the assassin's creed revelations apologists out there so that's it there's five ideas from video games that i think you could you could pull in and uh consider using in your tabletop rpg game get something back from the game form that got so much from tabletop even if these ideas weren't super your cup of tea i just want you to start thinking if you play video games just start thinking about different systems or concepts from video games that you really love and thinking about how you might be able to implement them in your game either to make your job easier or to make um evoke certain feelings in your players because because players have a lot of background experience with video games now often players are coming to d with kind of this backdrop of video game fantasy you know uh health potions are red mana potions are blue you can't really fight it you can't fight those kind of associations that have uh that have developed so you may as well start using them to your advantage apart from that uh what else do i have to tell you oh i was uh i got to be on dimension 20 adventuring academy sat down and had a had a nice discussion with brennan lee mulligan got some great questions in from from people on their discord i believe and just had a really it was just a great conversation i had a really good time if you haven't seen it go check it out really honestly thank you it's because of the continued support from all of you that i get to do cool stuff like this so thank you so much for supporting me means the world hot hands apart from that i do believe that's it i'm done uh email this to your grandma i bet she loves video games i will see you some other time so [Music]

Channel: MonarchsFactory

Views: 49,481

Rating: 4.9751258 out of 5

Keywords: MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill, Geek and Sundry, Geek, nerd, australian, Greek mythology, myths, mythology, Dale Kingsmill, story, storyteller, story teller, funny, dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dungeons, dragons, pathfinder, 5e, rpg, ttrpg, fairytales, grimm, dungeon master, dm, video games, gaming, gamer

Id: 2J4XFZdTfS0

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/snarpy]

Man, that inventory management sounds like a pain in the butt. Like, it's just easier if you give things and number and let your roll20 (or whatever) say TOO MUCH at some point.

[u/Raylen2]

The Shields / Health thing has been around for quite a while in the Palladium RPG line.

Armor as a second health pool is how Palladium has worked since the 80s from what I recall. Any strike above or equal to the Armor Rating hits you, any strike below the AR but above the miss rating hits your armor. Once your armor has had its hit points depleted it's destroyed.

SDC vs Hit Points also had a similar function. SDC is your "it's just a flesh wound" damage pool. It's a minor scrape or bruise but it's fine. Hit points is your "that look serious" damage pool.

MDC is a different beast that I won't go into here.

Now I'm not saying "ditch that 5E game and play this!" Oh, heck no. It's a train wreck into a dumpster fire overall. I just thought it was an interesting bit of trivia plus a sample implementation we can look at.

Okay, that implementation is pretty crunchy for 5E but a simplified and perhaps pure flavor approach might work fine. Ignoring armor health and putting more serious injuries at 4 + Con Mod might be fine. Whatever works for you and your table of course will always be the rule.

[u/Flipiwipy]

The idea of Shields/Health could be cool. Instead of Shields it could be stamina, and one could flesh out a "wound" system for when the actual health dropped. I guess it would require some fleshing out, though.

[u/thetensor]

Hit points as peasant punches is gold.

[u/MaxGabriel]

Some ideas I’m interested in adapting from video games:

Loot discovery in Diablo. I think a really fun thing is finding new loot and weighing trade offs between different pieces of gear. I’m not quite sure how to replicate this in D&D, which usually has much less gear, and fewer degrees of freedom for numeric tweaks. Still I think it’s worth trying out.

As mentioned in the YouTube comments, bosses telegraphing actions. Eg a wizard might have the walls in their room start to turn into giant hands, then their next turn the hands punch out. Players can easily avoid this, but forcing them to move keeps combat less static and might force them to clump for AOE attacks

Puzzle bosses, like Zelda style ones where you need to figure out some trick before you can hurt the boss.

Adapting certain game genres into encounters. I think a tower defense style could be applied to preparing a towns defenses, holding out for X rounds would carry over well, and escort missions (like for a caravan) would be cool.

(I’m sure all this stuff has been done plenty in d&d, but I just haven’t experienced it yet)