Stephan Hornick
Community Goblin & Master of the Archive
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Borderland Explorer
Mission-Style Roleplaying – Part I
From JohnnFour | Published ??Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #223
Mission-Style Roleplaying
Combat in RPGs is a physical, tangible, visceral thing. In many games, combat stuff takes up 75% or more of a character sheet. When the fighting breaks out, you have concrete numbers, specific skills, exciting attacks, and pages and pages of rules. Damage lets everyone know how much they’ve dished out and how much they can take. It’s measurable, pleasurable, and definite.Roleplaying, on the other hand, is much more ephemeral and undefinable. It’s harder to quantify, which puts many players off. It can require real-life acting and speaking skills, depending on group play style. There’s often no clear winner or loser, and it’s harder to know how well you’re faring in the encounter.
In fact, in many styles of gaming, roleplaying is mostly about being in the moment. Players want to put on their PC’s shoes for awhile, escape reality, and be someone else. For others, it’s a chance to flex their acting skills, use their imaginations, or live out their favourite movie and book scenes.
Because roleplaying lacks the physicality of combat and is a highly social activity it makes many gamers uncomfortable. Board gamers, wargamers, and “gamists” sometimes get quite dissatisfied with roleplaying encounters and they pine for some action.
There is no right or wrong way to play. A dungeon crawl game format is just as valid as a roleplaying format where not a single die is cast. However, groups often consist of a mix of players and GMs who want one or the other style.
Hopefully, the following tips can make both sides happy some of the time by focusing on adding conflict and a “mission” style to roleplaying encounters and plots.
Add Conflict
One thing you can do to bridge the gap between role-players and roll-players is to add conflict. It’s not enough to just interact with each other in-character. For example, a tea party encounter with some influential nobles would make some players quite happy. Exchanging pleasantries and gossip, and using the words and body language that their characters, the game world, and the genre would use would be enough for a satisfying experience.Other players would start to yawn almost immediately though. A few players would even draw their weapons and start hacking!One solution is to add conflict. Make the encounter an “us vs. them” situation. This creates potential winners and losers and makes the encounter a bit more tangible for some gamers.This might also introduce some skill-based dice rolls, which will appease action-oriented players. Yet, the action will occur within a roleplaying context–conversation and in- character references–thus satisfying many roleplayers.
In addition, players who focus on character advancement and characterization will enjoy employing the game mechanics.
Adopt A Mission Style For Roleplaying
A roleplaying encounter often lacks focus. The party encounters an NPC (or several) and a conversation ensues. The encounter might be premeditated (i.e. the party is conducting an investigation), coincidental (i.e. a random encounter or the GM just planted the NPC for flavour), or predestined (i.e. it’s a planned GM encounter), but the roleplaying is unstructured and chaotic. The party isn’t 100% sure of what it’s doing or trying to accomplish. Several PCs are trying to talk to an NPC at once.The conditions of success, failure, and progress are unclear.This drives many players crazy. A fun solution is to adopt a mission style for roleplaying encounters some of the time. The players are given a “quest”, or a reason, to approach and parley with one or more NPCs.For example, one mission might be to discover a wealthy merchant’s greatest fear. This would require the party to roleplay discussions with those who know the merchant, the merchant’s family, and/or the merchant herself.
The PCs might pursue other forms of investigation, such as breaking into the merchant’s house hoping to find a diary or other clue, but eventually they’ll need to parley to get the information they seek (assuming you’ve designed things this way to encourage roleplaying, but perhaps there is a diary).With a roleplaying mission, the PCs have a unified purpose. Consequently, there is an implied condition of victory (mission success), and this style leaves plenty of room for “us vs. them” type missions as well as cooperative goals.
The increased tangibility will make many action oriented players happy. The conditions of success help players grasp what they’re supposed to do–reducing the chaos a bit–and whether they’re getting closer or further away to accomplishing their task.
At the GM level, roleplaying missions have numerous benefits:
- Closure. There is a “mission accomplished” feeling once the PCs have achieved their objective. This not only increases player satisfaction but yours as well.
- Pacing. Once the PCs have succeeded or failed, you have a solid cue for moving the game along. In encounters where the party is roleplaying just for the sake of it, it’s sometimes difficult knowing when to end things to keep the story progressing.
- Victory points. If your game rules use an experience or victory point system, having a tangible mission lets you evaluate difficulty level and, consequently, reward levels much easier. It also gives you something specific and discreet to evaluate.
- NPC preparation. A mission makes a good seed or hook to prepare and design NPCs around.
- Encounter design. A mission gives you a distinct purpose to design for. It creates boundaries and parameters to help you tweak things to be more entertaining.
Make The Mission Objective Clear
Make loud and clear what the players are supposed to accomplish. Feel free to experiment with different levels of subtlety, but you can never go wrong by explicitly informing the players what they’re goal is.Note that you’re only providing the goal, the purpose, the condition of victory. You do not have to tell the PCs how they’re supposed to accomplish their mission. That’s the fun part for them! So, you’re not spoiling anything by providing a clear objective.Some ways to make a mission objective clear:
- A NPC hires the PCs and describes exactly what he wants.
- An NPC, perhaps a friend, makes a perceptive comment about what the PCs are doing. He summarizes the PCs’ objective for them or describes them in a different way. “So, it sounds like all this boils down to finding out the merchant’s greatest fear!”
- Tell the group directly, player to GM. Though this might seem to be a clumsy method, but it sure beats GMing a confused or frustrated party.
- Player handout. Give the PCs a prop, such as a letter, that describes their mission.
Establish A Reward
Ensure the PCs know what’s in it for them. Establish what the reward will be for a successful mission. A reward will sometimes drive hack ‘n slashers to participate more in the roleplaying as well as give those players who crave action more patience during the encounter.Players who enjoy combat are used to immediate gratification. First, their PC survived–a small but important reward. Second, there’s usually a body to loot. Next, there’s often a lair to loot. Finally, there’s experience points to tally.For this type of player to go along with a roleplaying mission, they need to understand what the reward(s) will be. What do the PCs get if they’re successful? Now that you can actually say if the PCs were successful in their roleplaying encounter or not, you have an opportunity to provide a conditional reward.
- Experience points. When handing out experience or victory points, make sure you identify which ones (or how much) came from the roleplaying mission. That will help you generate buy-in for future roleplaying encounters as the players will know there’ll be a form of character advancement reward.
- Payment. Someone is willing to pay the PCs to perform the mission. Alternately, what is gained from the mission, such as information, has value and can be sold for profit.
- A link to treasure. If successful, the mission will bring the PCs closer to a valuable reward.
- Action. Completing the mission will bring the party closer to a stage boss battle or some other cool potential for action. Combat junkies love to feed the beast and will even suffer through roleplaying encounters to get their fix. LOL. Seriously though, if a player is motivated by dice and combat, a good reward for roleplaying is to bring the party closer to a combat encounter.