D&D Travel Edition (?)

it sounds like you just weren't able to find the proper frisson with the people you were playing with.

rpgs are what you make of them. straight "out of the box" any rpg could be a dice fest with multiple chart references and keeping track of the very last ounce of incumberence etc....
or it could be very laid back (rules-wise) and concentrating on story telling perhaps even to the point of no rules at all.

none of this has anything to do with the rules of the game as such since one of the cardinal rules is that if you don't like the rules either don't use them or change them to whatever works for your group.

d&d travel edition? i might call that storytelling 'round the campfire.

with elves...

I agree that it sounds like you haven't had a good group or a good DM. Good DMs do that kind of thing all the time, while still leaving as much of destiny as possible in the hands of the players.

-- Mathew

I would direct you, naturally, to RPG.NET and the Forge, which I'm sure you've been to.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewforum.php?f=4&sid=187890a78b88dba5800881e4...

http://forum.rpg.net/forumdisplay.php?forumid=11

You're definitely leaning toward narrative-storytelling rather than gamist or simulationist style in your RPGs and both those sites have just about 100x all you could want in discussion about various techniques, game creation, playing and gamemastering styles, recommended RPGs, etc.

The problem with the kind of thing you're talking about is that the GM is shouldered with the lion's share of the responsibility; HE has to make the game world run smooth, work out its basic reasoning, personalities, attitudes, events, ethics AND how it interacts with the player(s) - THEN, he has to be able to think on his feet and improvise due to player actions and ramifications.

So the problem with your idea is that you're saying basically "get rid of the dice, add more intrigue and storytelling and novel-like adventure" - this really would make the game LESS suited to travel since it really requires much more preperation and access to notes and other vital material and statistics which isn't convenient to port around - to have a good level of the kind of detail and character-centric involvement you're indicating would really call for a lot more thinking and planning and creative writing and strategy on the GMs part, which would require a LOT more of the GM sitting in a chair somewhere, quietly going "hmm" to himself while he thinks up new plots and twists and scenarios - to me, this definitely disqualifies it from "travel", since there is no way you and another person can just "jump in" the ol jalopy and right into a full-scale fantasy world of political backbiting and cosmic importance if neither of you has spent hours preparing the background info.

Here I'm not specifying your diceless game, but more your 'the DM should...' complaint. To an extent, you're right, in a 'standard' game like D&D, yes, the DM IS supposed to provide most of the background and environment for the players to wander around in - there ARE however, other games, including some free PDF downloads, which are even run AS storytelling ... activities, rather than games per se, as the players and GM (and sometimes there isn't one) tell a story by committee, creating the adventure with ALL the characters - all the players have a hand at shaping the world, etc.

If we have the D&D dice-fest over here with "oops, sorry you failed - you die" (though good GMs will NOT let the dice dominate if the result is bad for the story), and over here we have "we're not even playing a game - its storytelling by committee and no dice", then I am CERTAIN there is, or can be found or modified, *something* in between for you, which would qualify as your "Travel Edition".

There was a pretty neat RPG that WotC published many years ago, called Everway. It was billed as a story-telling based system. No dice, however, 'dice-type' decisions were resolved by the DM interpreting a flip of, essentially, a tarot card (fate cards I think they called them. The game came with it's own deck). So, this accomplished a fairly neat system of brainstorming results for the card for a creative DM, while still keeping a fairly random dice-roll result.

It seems that one could create a fairly simple and effective RPG by just using a standard Tarot deck as the main mechanism for resolving events, especially for a somewhat creative DM.

I wasn't. I commented on this in the "male vs female gamers" thread too. Fantasy role-playing evolved from wargames (I think everyone will admit that) and the tables came from there - Dungeons and Dragons was trying to be a decent "simulation".

Since that point the genre has clearly split into the two distinct branches: the "hack'n'slay" approach (which is so perfectly parodied in a playable form by "Hackmaster") and the "storytelling" approach (probably best exemplified by the White Wolf games, but there have been even more freeform games than that.)

But your example (the Detect Magic one) is exactly why role-players are role-playing rather than, say, reading a book! And it's the sort of scenario that I (as a GM) write all the time. Indeed, the paradox of GM'ing is wanting the players to uncover your plot, whilst doing everything you can to make sure they don't... And you also have the wonderful power to change your mind unexpectedly too, when you realise that the plot will go much better if you throw the party into jail and get to have a trial in which everything they have done can be revisited and painted in the most suspicious light possible :) Or that a jail-break allows you to introduce an NPC earlier than before. Or that one of the characters will have to reveal a secret to the rest of the party so that they can get out which may mean the party looking at that character in a different way for the rest of the game. That's why it's fun. Not rolling a d20 and adding various modifiers. I can do that in Neverwinter Nights...

It's the same principle as reading a book or watching a movie. If the author tells you everything that is going to happen, it somewhat undermines the enjoyment factor of the experience. But likewise if they suddenly produce some new evidence at the last minute that is totally inconsistent with what went before, then you feel cheated. What you as a GM have to do is to reward the players for picking up your carefully crafted clues (or even for short-circuiting the plot, as in your Detect Magic example) whilst keeping them on their toes as regards the outcomes - and making very sure that they don't feel cheated when your steel-trap snaps shut :) And this is a very difficult juggling act. After all, the players only have to react to the situation...

Role-playing is a collaborative story-telling exercise in which everyone participates; the GM by defining the situation and the players by reacting to that situation. A good GM then spins off from the players' actions by developing the story in different directions (and the really good ones make it difficult to tell if they had planned for those actions or not!) And good players play their characters by reacting in appropriate ways for those scenarios. This manifests itself both in combat situations (since the mage won't run into the middle of the fight swinging a sword) and in non-combat ones (the thief who stutters won't be haggling for goods, but may be round the back nicking it all while the loquacious one is diverting the merchant...)

Now this latter situation has probably been engineered entirely by the players, who may have realised that they need supplies but haven't got any money. So the GM often won't have a handy piece of paper telling them what the outcome of this scenario is (which is why, in general, playing a prewritten adventure for which the GM has not prepared properly will fall flat.)

The heart of the dilemma is how far the resolution is determined by a die roll (or several) or, rather, how far the roll is modified by circumstance. In some situations this is easy to define (which is why combat is frequently a dice-fest) and in others much less so. The problem is often that it is far easier as a GM and as a player to operate with nicely defined tables than it is to make reasonable assumptions (something that requires experience.) So you tend to find combat being a common solution but diplomacy being far less frequent.

Yes, sadly there is often one of those in every group. The question is whether it's worth the effort to try and teach them what they are doing wrong (without creating an unpleasant atmosphere in the process!), or whether to put up with it. If it distorts the game, then you've got problems. I have found that sometimes it is necessary to enforce some pretty draconian "in-character" and "out-of-characters" rules to minimise this sort of thing. Part of the GM's role, after all, is to ensure that people like that don't adversely affect the flow of the game (and, similarly, to ensure that the less "extrovert" players get fair time too.)