Now that I’ve outlined the foundational taxonomies of fun, and gave some advice on how to discover them during session zero, let’s get to the fun part: judging people! Well, okay, if you want to be polite we’d call them case studies on why this method solves a lot of problems that don’t seem to be resolved by traditional session zeros. This is not to say that a “traditional” session zero is incapable of achieving the same effect: a sufficiently competent GM can achieve the same result with any method, because for them these things will be instinctual. It’s just that with certain methods make some things more obvious than others, and as a result some methods are more prone to avoidable mistakes than others.
I know this is an old post, but wouldn't the GF have been a problem player anyway? The stuff about illegibility is all true, but if what she needs in order to have fun is not "dealing a lot of damage", but rather "dealing more damage than any other PC", then maybe a team game is not for her.
I don't necessarily agree. In fact, in some cases, it would be much easier to fit her into a gaming group that way.
In this specific case I don't know - I don't remember exactly what their gaming group was, and I don't feel like re-reading the reddit post, but they have 4 players. That's just on the edge where I could still see it working, because it's critical that there aren't two different players who want to go for damage-heavy roles.
Basically, this has to do with combat meta and how team play works in games. In a lot of games - this depends on the rules in question - it's bad team play for all characters to do broadly the same things. Instead, you want people to specialize. For example, in World of Warcraft the classic trio is tank/healer/dps (in fact, I think that that's the game that popularized those terms. There was an excellent article about why that trinity is inevitable under some broad assumptions, but I can't find it right now). Combat in WoW is based on aggro - aggression - of the enemies. Broadly speaking, enemies have very simple AI that prioritizes attacking the target that dealt the most damage recently. Responses to this one mechanic form the classic trio. Tank draws aggression from enemies with specialized abilities designed to artificially inflate their attack priority and resists damage with abilities designed to, well, resist damage. DPS deals damage (DPS = Damage Per Second), safe because they don't generate more aggro than tank's abilities. Finally, healer keeps everyone alive and provides buffs.
DnD does not have the same meta, because it has no aggro mechanics for obvious reasons. Instead, best meta analysis I have seen comes from "The forge of combat" ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i5hWkHXHOetRlpLOmxbpoEWod77psN0JcwFvxClNrGc/edit ), with the three roles of anvil/hammer/arm. Here, anvil sets up the combat situation and controls the battlefield making victory possible, hammer delivers finishing blows (mostly, though not always, in the form of health damage), and arm brings anvil and hammer together, making them more effective (with various buffs, though there can be other methods too).
In WoW, a party of three players that is following the meta is going to be massively more effective than one that doesn't, for example by trying to make DPS/DPS/DPS composition work. Similarly, in DnD, a party that tries to keep damage of different players roughly "equal" is going to be much less effective than a party that specializes into distinct roles, making them work much better together. And obviously just like in WoW a DPS character will deal much more damage than a Tank (who deals little) or a Healer (who deals none), in DnD it's actually perfectly fine for one player to want to deal the most damage in the party in every combat, because they will naturally slot into a Hammer role. In fact, arguably, good team play in DnD will result in that sort of arrangement regardless.
I know this is an old post, but wouldn't the GF have been a problem player anyway? The stuff about illegibility is all true, but if what she needs in order to have fun is not "dealing a lot of damage", but rather "dealing more damage than any other PC", then maybe a team game is not for her.
I don't necessarily agree. In fact, in some cases, it would be much easier to fit her into a gaming group that way.
In this specific case I don't know - I don't remember exactly what their gaming group was, and I don't feel like re-reading the reddit post, but they have 4 players. That's just on the edge where I could still see it working, because it's critical that there aren't two different players who want to go for damage-heavy roles.
Basically, this has to do with combat meta and how team play works in games. In a lot of games - this depends on the rules in question - it's bad team play for all characters to do broadly the same things. Instead, you want people to specialize. For example, in World of Warcraft the classic trio is tank/healer/dps (in fact, I think that that's the game that popularized those terms. There was an excellent article about why that trinity is inevitable under some broad assumptions, but I can't find it right now). Combat in WoW is based on aggro - aggression - of the enemies. Broadly speaking, enemies have very simple AI that prioritizes attacking the target that dealt the most damage recently. Responses to this one mechanic form the classic trio. Tank draws aggression from enemies with specialized abilities designed to artificially inflate their attack priority and resists damage with abilities designed to, well, resist damage. DPS deals damage (DPS = Damage Per Second), safe because they don't generate more aggro than tank's abilities. Finally, healer keeps everyone alive and provides buffs.
DnD does not have the same meta, because it has no aggro mechanics for obvious reasons. Instead, best meta analysis I have seen comes from "The forge of combat" ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i5hWkHXHOetRlpLOmxbpoEWod77psN0JcwFvxClNrGc/edit ), with the three roles of anvil/hammer/arm. Here, anvil sets up the combat situation and controls the battlefield making victory possible, hammer delivers finishing blows (mostly, though not always, in the form of health damage), and arm brings anvil and hammer together, making them more effective (with various buffs, though there can be other methods too).
In WoW, a party of three players that is following the meta is going to be massively more effective than one that doesn't, for example by trying to make DPS/DPS/DPS composition work. Similarly, in DnD, a party that tries to keep damage of different players roughly "equal" is going to be much less effective than a party that specializes into distinct roles, making them work much better together. And obviously just like in WoW a DPS character will deal much more damage than a Tank (who deals little) or a Healer (who deals none), in DnD it's actually perfectly fine for one player to want to deal the most damage in the party in every combat, because they will naturally slot into a Hammer role. In fact, arguably, good team play in DnD will result in that sort of arrangement regardless.
A good read! The fact that the gf story had a session zero remains baffling to me