This is a continuation of my initial (and quickly abandoned) "make failure interesting" point. I'm probably wrong, but you're players may only get excited when the dice come out because a goodly chunk of the creative input they have lies in the numbers on their character sheets and how those numbers inform die rolls. Regardless of why it's what your players want, make it so that every time the dice come out, you're excited, too.
The solution might not be to shy away from D&D's mechanical crunch, but to make the crunch more meaningful. The consequences shouldn't be whether or not they "find the tracks," or "climb this wall," or "beat up these monsters." How about good tracking lets the party set up an ambush and bad tracking means the kidnapped youth they're trying to rescue has been injured, as evidenced by the bloody scarf they find (I don't own Burning Wheel, but this may be an example straight from the book)? Give the dice teeth, let them shake things up a bit; you're not a machine so your story can change (in my opinion, it's best if it does, though that's another subject. Yet another subject is that fact that I almost put my use of the word your connected to story there in scare quotes).
Mm, an interesting point, and certainly one that's easier to adopt mid-campaign. I've found myself doing that naturally to some extent, just in coming up with flavor for the results of their rolls. Over the course of their first battle (which was just with a few cultist thugs that were not really a match for them), the enemies rolled consistently superbly, and as such have slowly morphed into much more dedicated and fanatical cultists than they started out. The necromancer, who has put much effort into making her magic difficult to resist, is convinced they must be warded from it, because they've made every difficult save she's thrown at them. It's getting harder to find meaningful flavor for what is essentially incredible luck, though. The answer is clearly "it's not luck", but I haven't come up with something more interesting yet.
I'm also still finding my own story-telling style. I use pre-written D&D modules to jumpstart my stories, which gives the advantage of getting a lot of details done for me, but has the downside of making it harder to think outside the box I'm working with. I am currently writing the next story I want to run, from scratch, but I won't have time to start it up until the summer. It's gonna be good, though. :-)
As far as "my" story, I'd hope to think that that's not a difficulty I suffer from (though I of course may be wrong). I think of the world as a pool table, .03 seconds after break - balls rolling everywhere. The players are like the cue ball - they can influence things, but if they don't, things will still keep happening without them. So they can choose to do whatever they want, but the world will still progress meaningfully when they're not interacting with it, which will change their story if they do something unexpected.
The solution might not be to shy away from D&D's mechanical crunch, but to make the crunch more meaningful. The consequences shouldn't be whether or not they "find the tracks," or "climb this wall," or "beat up these monsters." How about good tracking lets the party set up an ambush and bad tracking means the kidnapped youth they're trying to rescue has been injured, as evidenced by the bloody scarf they find (I don't own Burning Wheel, but this may be an example straight from the book)? Give the dice teeth, let them shake things up a bit; you're not a machine so your story can change (in my opinion, it's best if it does, though that's another subject. Yet another subject is that fact that I almost put my use of the word your connected to story there in scare quotes).
Reply
I'm also still finding my own story-telling style. I use pre-written D&D modules to jumpstart my stories, which gives the advantage of getting a lot of details done for me, but has the downside of making it harder to think outside the box I'm working with. I am currently writing the next story I want to run, from scratch, but I won't have time to start it up until the summer. It's gonna be good, though. :-)
As far as "my" story, I'd hope to think that that's not a difficulty I suffer from (though I of course may be wrong). I think of the world as a pool table, .03 seconds after break - balls rolling everywhere. The players are like the cue ball - they can influence things, but if they don't, things will still keep happening without them. So they can choose to do whatever they want, but the world will still progress meaningfully when they're not interacting with it, which will change their story if they do something unexpected.
Reply
Leave a comment