Killing Mister Cavern?

[K]

Ok, so I was brainstorming ideas for a RPG with no Mr. Cavern.

My first thought is that it'd have to look a lot like a cross between Arkham Horror and the random tables Gygax used to wank to, with maybe a bit of Zombies! thrown in. Basically, it'd be randomly generated plots with randomly generated locations with random plot twists coming up at plot points were beaten/lost. As the campaign progresses those locations can be sites of future hijinks.

NPC interactions would have to be handled by the players, with some advantage given to them for good play (and some system to prevent abuse).

Now, you'd lose a lot of what you get with a really good Mister Cavern in terms of story and plot, but you'd gain a lot more people playing because they wouldn't be stuck with MC. It would also eliminate a lot of the potential abuses of MC that drive people away.

Thoughts?

[Juton]

I'm not sure you can make a real 'RPG' out something like this. At least one that we'd recognize. Since you can't have the players knowing the plot it would have to be randomly generated on the fly, which might be amusing. Likewise all major NPC interaction has to be randomly determined, preprogrammed or you get situations where whichever player gets to run the King in the scenario royally fucking over all the other players.

I think having a system like Zombies, where Players win by screwing over the other people at the table. I'm not sure how something like this can be sustained over a campaign.

You could have two teams of players, say Orcs and Humans. Each team takes turns storming and defending outposts, transferring and advancing certain characters between scenarios. This gets us back closer to D&D's wargame roots, and some people who play D&D are still basically playing a wargame where 90% of the action is wargaming on a grid. There are ways to balance that, but just having siege after siege gets boring for most people without a little intrigue, I'm not sure how you can adjudicate that with this setup.

[Manxome]

If you want the game to remain open-ended (and I think most people would call it a board game rather than a tabletop RPG if it didn't), you're going to need to have some sort of process for resolving "everything else" that isn't explicitly covered. Even with detailed rules for locations, NPCs, items, etc., the MC is usually responsible for inventing DCs for weird actions (swinging on chandeliers), making up details of the setting that suddenly become relevent, etc.

There are lots of ways you could give shared responsibility to the players, with various pros and cons (bidding, voting, taking turns, randomized authority, etc.), but they all end up with every possible detail being systematically in the players' favor if it's a fully cooperative game and the players are trying to win.

A purely mechanical system for handling the exceptions would mean the system was, definitionally, not open-ended: every meaningful choice ultimately boils down to one of the explicit options in the book, even if some of those options are thematically vague. Maybe that's OK, if you invent a broad enough set of pre-defined options, but at that point we're fundamentally talking about a board game designed to feel like an RPG.

I don't see any other options without a referee.

[JonSetanta]

K, ever heard of or played Dungeoneer?

It's like a expansion-based card game version of D&D with no DM.

The map layout is turn-based built and the encounters are thrown at each other player, spending their "danger points" or whatever that accumulates with every new tile/card stepped upon.

The further you venture, the more danger and "good points" (was it called glory?) you grab, which are spent on killing you and buying cool random shit respectively.

[mean_liar]

There's Mythic, the GM Emulator:
http://www.mythic.wordpr.com/page14/page9/page9.html

Basically it boiled down to rolling d% at major decision points, with probability of success determined by group fiat.

[PhoneLobster]

The value in this sort of system is that while you do lose out on the benefits of a GOOD MC a well designed system could readily be better than a bad MC or even as a good as a mediocre MC.

So I can see it happening, but it potentially means either a somewhat narrowed scope of game play/story (to the point of resembling descent or arkham horror) or alternately a pretty vast set of tables and story generation/management rules.

Likewise all major NPC interaction has to be randomly determined, preprogrammed or you get situations where whichever player gets to run the King in the scenario royally fucking over all the other players.

But not only would you do randomized programmed NPCs in such a system the very nature of NPC interaction would be different. You aren't going to have a conversation with a guy who makes decisions like you can do with Mister Cavern. NPCs aren't complex things that "might decide to screw you over". NPCs are specific narrow generated obstacles or bonuses.

You don't chat with "the king" you would defeat obstacles named "The King Says No" or gain bonuses like "The King Favors Your Ass"

You could have two teams of players

Removing an MC does create some significantly increased potential for competitive style scenarios of various sorts.

"Intrigue" would be handled with varying possibly secret campaign/scenario goals for different players or teams.

Not grinding siege after siege could only be achieved by inserting differing encounter types into the system or a very complex and engaging between siege management/siege preparation game.

So anyway, I see the potential here, but it has limits and side effects and junk and the biggest notable thing of all is that all in all it's a potentially pretty narrow field of appeal falling somewhere in between so simple it may as well just be Arkham horror, and so complex it would be better implemented as a computer game.

[K]

I guess I'm coming from the point of view that after reading literally hundreds of Dungeon adventures while I was camping some stuff in an MMO, it seems that actual plot twists are vanishingly rare. I mean, the dungeon crawl is as basic as it gets, and while really great dungeon crawls are fantastic the mediocre ones are as common as dirt.

Most published adventures are really quite railroaded anyway, so building a randomizer into the game actually makes it more open than standard RPGing. I mean, as far as I can tell the number of MCs who can create actual sandbox settings on the fly are vanishingly small (I mean, I've only met one... Frank). Most MCs come up with an adventure, stat it up, and then force whatever the PCs are doing into that adventure.

I'd imagine you could even make published adventures that get added to the tables. You really could say "we are doing Tomb of Horrors this week" and have it come with it's own tables and sub-plots, but on a random Saturday you could say "hey, Steven and Dave are out of town, so let's just run a 3 man adventure" and have that work out.

I mean, I've never seen anyone cheat at Arkham Horror and that's complete co-op.

[Manxome]

By "open-ended", I mean that there are actions the players can conceivably take that don't have explicit rules. The number of twists in the plot is a completely unrelated issue.

Outright cheating isn't the problem. But how many people do you know who get the "draw 2 cards and choose 1" powers in Arkham Horror and then pick the worse card? When you ask the player to make a choice between several possibilities, you can really only ask him to choose the option that he prefers, or by some objective rule. Asking him to choose the "most reasonable" option or even the "worst" option doesn't really work.

So if a player suddenly thinks it would be useful to use ray of frost to extinguish a torch or rearm a pressure plate with a different weight threshold, and the game doesn't have rules that specifically cover that action, what happens? If you ask the player attempting it to decide whether it should be possible and what the DC is, you're technically granting him unlimited power--the next time he's in a hopeless situation, he can invent some fantastically implausible strategem and then declare that it works. And even if a player tries not to abuse it, I'd still expect substantial unconscious bias.

Alternately, if you say that the player cannot under any circumstances take any game-affecting action unless said action is specifically covered by the rules...then it's a board game.

It's certainly possible (even desirable) to create a co-op dungeon-crawling board game, with or without randomized plots. But that isn't so much "killing mister cavern" as "creating the next Arkham Horror or Castle Ravenloft board game." I just want to be clear about what the goal is.

If the goal really is something more like D&D than Arkham Horror, then maybe you should consider a model where you let players and/or randomizers create some of the plots, locations, etc., to spread out the power and responsibility of the MC, while still having a single designated neutral referee to oversee the game.

[Vebyast]

Sorry for the rambling post. I'm doing some math homework and tweaking this as thoughts come.

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I think that the key to killing Mister Cavern is finding some new way to generate conflict. A few ways to do this: randomize or automate obstacles (Arkham Horror), replace conflict with creativity (Microscope, see below), have the players provide the conflict themselves (evil-aligned parties, board games).

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I'm reminded of Microscope, a competitive fractal worldbuilding RPG. The rules were in closed beta last I checked, but they publish highly detailed playtests regularly enough that you can figure out how the game goes. Basically, you get everybody around a table, and then you go around the table recursively brainstorming the world. When the group recurses down to individual characters or can't figure something out, the group possesses some characters and plays them through the event in a very, very rules-lite system reminiscent of Donjon.

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It would be fun to try to design a set of plotbuilding rules that players could use to generate conflict "cooperatively". As much as you can cooperate when the goal is to not cooperate, I mean. For example, one of my friends was once in a really great evil-party DND campaign. The players were so busy scheming that all the MC had to do was hand out macguffins and XP. The players took care of almost literally everything else. "Random" encounters were usually carefully-disguised assassination attempts, and I'm pretty sure that most of the sessions' plots were the work of devious party members.

Formalizing a process that results in that sort of crazy every-man-for-himself campaign would be awesome.

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You need an objective conflict-resolution system. Microscope uses voting, for example; when the group can't decide whether the Big Red Button opens the airlock or not, everybody votes and the scene continues as voted. When conflicts come up in my DND session, we do more or less the same thing, with the DM getting an extra vote or two depending on the situation. Other parties I've heard of tally votes and roll dice against probabilities weighted by the number of votes per outcome.

[K]

So if a player suddenly thinks it would be useful to use ray of frost to extinguish a torch or rearm a pressure plate with a different weight threshold, and the game doesn't have rules that specifically cover that action, what happens? If you ask the player attempting it to decide whether it should be possible and what the DC is, you're technically granting him unlimited power--the next time he's in a hopeless situation, he can invent some fantastically implausible strategem and then declare that it works. And even if a player tries not to abuse it, I'd still expect substantial unconscious bias.

Alternately, if you say that the player cannot under any circumstances take any game-affecting action unless said action is specifically covered by the rules...then it's a board game.

I find that most games are honor system anyway. I mean, the games I've been in usually have the party having a discussion whenever a rules problem comes up.

Some of my worse Mister Cavern moments have been where the party had to convince the DM that a rule can't work the way he thinks it does or else it'll be a TPK.

You are right that PCs need to do cool stuff. The flip side is that there needs to be some mechanic for NPCs and monsters doing game effecting things to balance out the things that PCs do for the simple reason it's not a fun game if only the PCs do cool stuff.

[ubernoob]

This is sounding rather similar to Munchkin.

[Sashi]

In normal play, the players ask if they can do something and Mister Cavern comes up with a difficulty for that action. I think removing MC has to invert this process: whenever an obstacle comes up, determine the difficulty randomly (draw a card/roll a die) and then a player determines what the obstacle is.

[Username17]

Cards have the advantage of being viscerally feelable quality which makes them pretty nice for the experience. Tables are much easier to extend, since you can put them on an iPhone and not have to worry about different print runs and shit.

Arkham Horror is a very good model. LA Horror works and works well, so the game is clearly portable to other RP genres. If I had it to do over again, I would get rid of the kludgy final battle mechanic and just have end-game quests show up with completion timers. But it could totally work.

The thing you have to fight is the tendency some people have to skip to the "effects" line of the encounter cards. Because if you're setting it up as a role playing game, those flavor sections are like the entire point. So I think you need some apples to apples component, where players are asked to justify the connectedness of two cards or table entries and the table decides which is "best" and that becomes what happened and that player gets some sort of minor benefit (or a chance at a minor benefit, to keep things from getting hard to track).

So, like playing Arkham Horror plus Baron Münchhausen. In a fantasy setting.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

There's a game called Fiasco that I haven't played yet, but manages to eliminate Mister Cavern.

You roll on a handful of charts to get a basic idea of the plot, and then people sit down and storytell scenes their characters are in. If they get to have good stuff happen to them, they get good dice. Bad stuff? Bad dice. At the turn of the story (the midpoint), everything goes to hell in a handbasket. However, the crappier your lot during the story, the better you tend to turn out at the end of the game. (The concept is to come up with shit like Fargo and A Simple Plan)

It's a one-off game, not something that people could necessarily run a continuing game, but it does eliminate the guiding effort entirely from the game and makes it focus on the story.

As I said, I haven't played it, so I don't know if it works. But it is one way to address losing out on Mister Cavern: every time you get your way, something bad has to happen to you.

[hogarth]

Now, you'd lose a lot of what you get with a really good Mister Cavern in terms of story and plot, but you'd gain a lot more people playing because they wouldn't be stuck with MC. It would also eliminate a lot of the potential abuses of MC that drive people away.

Thoughts?

I like a story in my game; it doesn't have to be a particularly novel or unique story, but a satisfactory story nonetheless. And, on average, I suspect a satisfactory story would not be improved by a bunch of random changes, Mad Libs-style.

If I want to play a game that doesn't have a GM, I play a computer game, and there's nothing wrong with that. It almost sounds like you're trying to simulate on paper something that would be more properly done as a computer game.

[Orion]

Vincent Baker does this kind of thing with some regularity.

He wrote a game called "Matchmaker," for instance, in which the four players played "the man" "the woman" "the cupid" and "everyone else in the world." The Cupid has fiat control over plot and setting in a very MC-ish way, but I still wouldn't call him a Mister Cavern, considering that someone else is playing all the NPCs.

[Username17]

Standard Mister Cavern style gaming is Mad Libs style storytelling. Whatever Mister Cavern has in mind, the story has to adapt to whatever is shouted out by the various people around the table, who in turn cannot see what is on Mister Cavern's side of the screen. It's seriously exactly Mad Libs. And it gets utility out of Mister Cavern because the guy reading the Mad Libs to you can adapt them slightly to more unexpected inputs in real time.

Where computer games shine is actually in slavishly following a script. Final Fantasy is excellent at doing that. Better than a human Mr. Cavern, who might lose his place or forget something. The question being asked here is actually if you could distribute the interpretive duties to the players around the table, use random chance and table generation to replicate the facet of not knowing what is coming next in Mister Cavern's notes. And I think the answer to that is a resounding "yes".

The inclusion of a branching and additive quest structure could easily produce more possible quests than you will ever play or which you could even count. If there are ten facets of the Quest and each one can be filled by one of ten different entries, you have ten billion possible quests to deal with. Dealt with in the manner of Arkham Horror's Heralds, Rumors, and Environments, you could easily keep the adventure going forward without ever repeating yourself or having to fudge things.

The difficulties of static obstacles really don't need a Mister Cavern. Locks, Walls, and Holes can all have objective difficulties and players can look that shit up themselves. Having a Mister Cavern on hand to issue a final word isn't necessary at all if the things on the map are objectively generated and defined. Now, monsters is a more delicate issue. Because in a game without Mister Cavern, the monsters need either a rather comprehensive "program" for movement or the game needs the players to take turns moving the monsters around. Well defined monster movement programs work well in, for example, Arkham Horror and Talisman because the game is set at a fairly high field of view and you only really bother keeping track of what neighborhood a monster is in for any particular turn.

But 4e D&D already gives pretty comprehensive monster action programs. You could very nearly just take Mister Cavern away and run the monsters right out of the book. With some slightly simper positioning or an actual set of hate/moral mechanics, you could have the players move the monsters around on their turns without having to pretend to think against their own interests.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Ok, so I was brainstorming ideas for a RPG with no Mr. Cavern.

...

Thoughts?

The closest I've played is both Warhammer Quest and Betrayal at House on the Hill. Of course, both of these are boardgames, and both rely on randomly constructing a dungeon/haunted house by drawing cards from a deck as you explore rooms. I've also seen an old AD&D solo game that used a red plastic reader to slowly reveal the map and text so you wouldn't accidentally read ahead.

Both of these approaches rely on having a fairly simple AI setup for your NPCs and monsters. It's doable, but you'll have a fundamentally more simple game. You either have to keep people tight on the rails (like a boardgame) or find a way to adjudicate things that come up (which can lead to all sorts of abuse or fighting).

It could make for a fun beer and pretzels game.

[Koumei]

But 4e D&D already gives pretty comprehensive monster action programs. You could very nearly just take Mister Cavern away and run the monsters right out of the book. With some slightly simper positioning or an actual set of hate/moral mechanics, you could have the players move the monsters around on their turns without having to pretend to think against their own interests.

It's bad enough when the players can effectively say "I spam X over and over, here's my set of numbers" and go off to play Smash Brothers. That the DM can do it too is both hilarious and sad. Fuck, the whole group could regularly turn up to not play 4e, with the campaign actually being Smash Brothers.

Anyway, I love things that curb MC abuse/tell the MC to shut up and lose the god complex. But really, just playing with good MCs/punting them in the skull should fix that without needing to have a system that removes him.

Still, I suppose it'd be handy for the cases where no-one wants to be Mister Cavern. Which is apparently an issue in America.

Also, there need to be just a couple of silly things on those tables. Whether it's the potential for crazy-ass combinations ("A [Fire Giant] has set up a [Frost Tower]" or whatever) or the occasional actual silly hook on its own ("An evil wizard made a huge penis-like tower, so searched for a pair of giant balls for it. Turns out the perfect balls were Dragon Balls, and now all ___ and ___ dragons are constantly drawn to the area to attack everyone.")

Because random tables and cheap jokes go cock in hand. I mean, hand in hand.

[souran]

K, ever heard of or played Dungeoneer?

It's like a expansion-based card game version of D&D with no DM.

The map layout is turn-based built and the encounters are thrown at each other player, spending their "danger points" or whatever that accumulates with every new tile/card stepped upon.

The further you venture, the more danger and "good points" (was it called glory?) you grab, which are spent on killing you and buying cool random shit respectively.

Except Dungeoneer is a competative game with no roleplay elements.

It has optional rules for noncompeteative play and real roleplay elements...but to do so it uses an MC.

Seriously, if you want to see what a game without an MC is like play a video game

The computer is not an MC it is JUST an a fancy adjudication machine. It ALWAYS plays by EXACTLY the rules as written and it never improvises, or decides to do something arbitrary.

Additionally, I have seen people cheat at Arkham Horror and Betryal at hill house. When I was in college I discovered that most of the people I invted to join my D&D games were used to playing in games that were totally monty haul and had rotating DMs.

If you think that people won't cheat at cooperative play you have a much higher opinon of people than I do.

[Kaelik]

Every single idiot saying that computer game == game with no MC:

You are stupid and you should feel stupid.

Baldur's Gate II does have a MC, several in fact. It's called the content designers. They write up their notes, and tell the computer every possible way you can interact with their story, then leave, and the computer does what the MCs told it to do.

That's exactly like an MC, and it applies to every single computer game. The only difference is that the MC adjudicated every possible situation before it occurred, and so never has to do on the fly considerations.

That's not a game without an MC.

A Game without an MC is a game where everyone gets to make the story, not just from the PC's actions, but from other aspects as well.

In a Computer game, no one gets to do anything but PC actions.

[hogarth]

Standard Mister Cavern style gaming is Mad Libs style storytelling. Whatever Mister Cavern has in mind, the story has to adapt to whatever is shouted out by the various people around the table, who in turn cannot see what is on Mister Cavern's side of the screen. It's seriously exactly Mad Libs. And it gets utility out of Mister Cavern because the guy reading the Mad Libs to you can adapt them slightly to more unexpected inputs in real time.

I don't know what to tell you. 90% of the long-term games I've played in have been following a module (or series of modules) pretty much as is. The more that contributions from the players are incorporated, the sooner that games fall apart. I'm not saying that one causes the other, but there's a very high correlation in my experience. That's why I think there should be less random junk to shoehorn into the story, not more.

[Username17]

I don't know what to tell you. 90% of the long-term games I've played in have been following a module (or series of modules) pretty much as is. The more that contributions from the players are incorporated, the sooner that games fall apart. I'm not saying that one causes the other, but there's a very high correlation in my experience. That's why I think there should be less random junk to shoehorn into the story, not more.

Wow. That sounds so boring that I don't know why I would play. Integrating the contributions of the different people around the table is the entire reason that we play a cooperative storytelling game. If we didn't want to do that, we would write a book or go play chess.

An RPG is still an RPG without Mister Cavern. It's not an RPG without collaborative contribution to the story.

-Username17

[the_taken]

What a coincidence. I just skimmed through the MAID RPG for some ideas. All the character generation is randomized, and there's certain tables that players can spend points to generate a random event to keep the new story fresh.

The fact that MAID has a micro community may have to do with the fact that it's sample setting does very well creep everyone out, but I find that the random events tables (teamed up with the random setting, backdrop and character generation tables) is what would keep a game that could be a bit of a drone fun if it was just wangst over working as a maid every minute. There's things like ninjas showing up, or one the maids has sworn vengeance upon the master, or the Master declares that he wants to nuke the whales, and that's totally all random crap that happens from time to time, which is all on top of the regular harem anime tropes the characters will be trying to do.

Yes. Being able to generate random plots, adventures, locations, encounters and NPCs on the fly would be totally awesome.

[hogarth]

I don't know what to tell you. 90% of the long-term games I've played in have been following a module (or series of modules) pretty much as is. The more that contributions from the players are incorporated, the sooner that games fall apart. I'm not saying that one causes the other, but there's a very high correlation in my experience. That's why I think there should be less random junk to shoehorn into the story, not more.

Wow. That sounds so boring that I don't know why I would play. Integrating the contributions of the different people around the table is the entire reason that we play a cooperative storytelling game.

Some people (I daresay a lot of people) play D&D to kill monsters and get treasure and maybe hear an interesting story on the side. Ever since the beginning, D&D has centered around exploring dungeons (i.e. canned lists of monsters to fight and treasure to find).

Now I'm not saying that's a good thing. But my experience is this -- 90% of people suck at making shit up. That's why the remaining 10% get stuck being the GM (and sometimes the GM isn't even part of that 10%).

Now if you do get in the position where all the stars align and everyone in the group has something useful to contribute to the story, great! That'll produce something way more memorable than just grinding through Rise of the Runelords or the Temple of Elemental Evil. But the canned adventures are way, way better than a lot of the shit I've seen GMs try to pass off as entertainment.