BG Crawls & Campaigns vs RPGs

Stolen from the What board games are you BUYING? thread because this is a topic I've been thinking about but don't have an answer to:

Dr Manhattan wrote:

charlest wrote: Just picked up Kingdom Death with a couple of Gen Con promos from a local seller. My PayPal account looks like it just went through that shower knife fight scene from Eastern Promises. But it's my birthday in two weeks so that's always a great excuse...right?

I get that the minis look great (but I mean there are lots of great minis "out there"), from everything I've read so far I cannot really get why I would shell out for Kingdom Monster as opposed to just playing a RPG. I don't doubt theres some "clever mechanics" in these combat stories everyone keeps talking about and rich narrative blah blah blah, but I reckon if thats your thing, any group interested in that can just sit down and play D&D or something, right?

Gary Sax wrote:

charlest wrote: Just picked up Kingdom Death with a couple of Gen Con promos from a local seller. My PayPal account looks like it just went through that shower knife fight scene from Eastern Promises. But it's my birthday in two weeks so that's always a great excuse...right?

Let us know how it is, please! I loved reading Frank's impressions.

Just to provide a contrast with the good Dr., I'd much rather spend an unusual amount of money on an unusual (good) game. Something that is trying to blaze some new ground and not being 100% successful rather than a great genre game in an established niche. The city/season thing sound cool and the roguelike aspect of being so hard to survive and permadeath is interesting.

I could do without the miniatures, but oh well.

Why or when do (or don't) you choose board games with a campaign system over an RPG? What does one experience bring for you that the other doesn't?

The most obvious difference is the absence of needing a game master.

Campaign board games remove the hours spent prepping RPG campaigns. Let's face it, GMs have a ton of work to do and not every play group has someone that wants to do the work (or is even that skilled at it.)

yeah that was a pretty good comeback actually, and stupid of me not to stop and think for a minute! I've seen so much commentary on KDM that just sounds like "fluff" based around role playing style narrative (and perhaps a certain amount of ner ner ner, we got it you dont have it), but you're absolutely right of course, with an RPG you are really in the hands of the person running the show (of course, if you're lucky enough to have someone good at that, well then you're quids in) I get what Gary is saying as well, I think for me though, I'd rather try and get an RPG experience or otherwise just stay away from games that try to provide that kind of experience by means of some kind of AI system, however convoluted it is. I've a lot of sympathy for the view of buying into something special, but I'm not always convinced that unusual/unique always equates to "worthy", a lot of the time these attempts have some great ideas but somehow the designer is almost forced to see it through and ends up adding more and more stuff, or rather is unable to cut away the fat, and for me, I'm finding that it's those kinds of games (Knizia/Sacksonesque)usually keep me coming back for more despite the lack of a gazillion features.

I think I feel the same way about RPGs actually. I've been flicking through my old Fighting Fantasy sorcery books recently (amazing art and setting, fantastic storyline actually for that genre), and realised its true even of RPG, I'd rather play a game based around a handful of d6 where a GM just assigns a number to succeed for pretty much anything, and a totally generic combat system, because the important bit is actually the narrative, and for that you don't need a thousand different rules. Quite the opposite.

there's a halfway as well: miniature games. You get the campaign rules, plus a great and interesting combat system, plus you get to choose which miniatures you want, plus you don't spend 300$ on it (always).

just my 2c

I can see the appeal but for me "interesting combat system and miniatures" inevitably just means focus on physically moving stuff round by measuring (or grid) and turning the experience into a mechanical puzzle. I'd rather take the 2d6 plus SKILL faceoff of Fighting Fantasy and do away with worrying about time impulses, facing, lines of sight and all that other stuff. That's probably just because for that kind of tactical puzzling I'd rather apply it to something like (Conflict of heroes?) a light wargame, which probably makes no sense. I like nice minis but I'm no painter, and I'm just as happy using whatever - for example a bagfull of AT43 minis or Haloclix minis is just as appealing to me as a professionally painted squad of space marines (even though I can appreciate the skill involved in doing those)

I've had some good fun with rpg one-shots, using rules light systems, that were fun enough to bloom into a campaign. There are also rpgs like the *World games and Mouse Guard that really work well if the GM has an idea of the setting and they don't require a ton of prep.

I think of the time I've put into campaign boardgames like Mice and Mystics or Descent 1e, and I don't feel they were less time-consuming or work than most rpgs. But I haven't DM'd.

I really admire the open-endedness of rpgs, and lately I've been itching to try my hand at DM. I'm starting to get a little weary of the programmed nature of boardgame campaigns. Especially in the ever-prevalent fantasy genre.

I'm tempted to buy into the new Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG kickstarter. I know I'd never get a campaign going, but I wonder if I'd get enough enjoyment just out of reading the book. I did play it once and it was pretty cool.

Being a player in someone else's game, especially when the R stands for Roll, not Role*, drives me crazy. At least with a game like Shadows of Brimstone I can make my own narrative.

*I don't like how this hex map travel & grid+minis combat approach became the norm. I know about the history of D&D coming from Chainmail- I had a great book about the history of RPGs that was published in 1981 with grainy photos of Ral Partha minis with cigarette smoke blown on them for "cool".

This is a great question and I think I'm in a good place to answer this, not just because my KDM post started this off, but because I was mainly an RPGer for 15 years before getting heavily into board games about 8 years ago.

I love RPGs. I was our GM most of the time although we played many Indie games, including GMless ones or ones where the GMs role was very light. The idea of someone running the game does not deter me and many of the Indie-RPG techniques I used (Bangs, and Improv specifically) required very little prep.

So here's some reasons why I'd rather play KDM than something like Burning Wheel or Sorcerer:

-Tactile comfort combined with brilliant aesthetic. KDM exudes atmosphere and minis feel like playing with toys. I love minis and I'm not ashamed to admit that they connect with my inner child. I embrace that. Bring on the awesome minis.

-We don't need the same group to continue playing. There appears to be somewhat of a linked narrative in KDM or other campaign games we play, but when we played Story-focused RPGs the narrative was the entire game. We can't continue our Burning Wheel campaign when a single person is missing, at least not at the quality level we want. With KDM we can have a group of survivors and if a person misses a session we run their character. Their character's background and standing in society doesn't really matter. Their motivations are just ancillary to what is going on. Our RPG campaigns don't work that way.

-It's easy to put a board game away and come back to it months or years later. We haven't played Myth in a year but we will be picking our campaign back up when the expansion content gets here. We don't have to remember a huge ongoing narrative or get back into character because it's a board game.

I think that about covers it.

Well, for me it's just that everything I need to play is in the box and ready to play. And it's playable with 2 players, my favorite type of gaming. I also think these games are simply more robust, while RPGs are more fragile since they depend more on the players.

In theory, I have nothing against boardgame campaigns. In actual practice, I've never seen a situation where players committed to regular play of a boardgame so that a campaign could actually be played. And boardgame campaigns always fall short of even average quality rpgs when it comes to creativity and narrative.

Admittedly, I have played a lot of rpgs over a long period of time. But I usually don't enjoy playing in an rpg, unless I'm running it. If I'm running the game, I can tactfully nudge players to keep things moving along at a more entertaining pace, or throw unexpected encounters into the mix if things are bogging down. As a player, I often find myself bored out of my mind during a long and unproductive discussion by the other players regarding The Plan. It's a good idea to do some advance planning when there is some advance knowledge of a tactical situation. But too many rpg players obsess over developing an elaborate plan that is likely to fall apart anyway, especially if the gamemaster is diabolical. And players who tend to obsess over The Plan also tend to get bogged down in discussions of loot.

Oddly enough, I tend to enjoy playing in one-shot games, especially at conventions. Usually there is a good intro to launch people right into the story, and players understand that there isn't a lot of time to waste on The Plan.

LARP is a weird subset of rpg. The live-action aspect can be very immersive, especially if you have some good role-players in the mix. But larp campaigns inevitably bog down in fairly repetitive player vs player intrigue, and larp combat resolution can be tedious compared to the usual dice-rolling of tabletop rpgs.

I don't get this at all. An RPG is a completely different beast from a campaign boardgame. I don't like RPGs because I hate playing make believe but I do enjoy seeing a story progress.

You might as well ask why you should play Dune when you could play Caylus.

They may be completely different to you, and that's fine. Where I am coming from is that most "RPG" sessions I've been able to get into have been so focused on moving the party on hex maps counting rations, then putting standees/minis on a square grid tactical map and playing the whole thing like a skirmish game. There's been next to no "role playing" in those sessions besides some cursory mission briefing and/or debriefing. In that respect, these board games are basically the same thing as D&D/Pathfinder without the hassle, and closer to those RPGs, played in those styles, than to any eurogame.

Any RPG where you're counting rations or number of hexes moved is failing at its primary goal -- cooperative story-telling. I stopped purchasing new versions of D&D because they kept trying to codify things that should be bullshitted on the spot. Non-weapon proficiencies in 2nd Edition were nothing but a hassle, and the hassle just grew from there. I've heard the most recent edition has returned more to the game's roots, but I'll tell you this -- I used to see the original AD&D books in great condition used for $8 online and in used bookstores. Their prices have gone up, so somebody is buying into the old system.

Descent feels very rigid to me. The game does the role-playing not me, and it doesn't help that I hate FFG's brown art. Don't like their characters. It's a board game, no story-weaving going on at all. I like that game, but I'll compare it to playing X-Wing, not D&D.

S.

JEM wrote: They may be completely different to you, and that's fine. Where I am coming from is that most "RPG" sessions I've been able to get into have been so focused on moving the party on hex maps counting rations, then putting standees/minis on a square grid tactical map and playing the whole thing like a skirmish game. There's been next to no "role playing" in those sessions besides some cursory mission briefing and/or debriefing. In that respect, these board games are basically the same thing as D&D/Pathfinder without the hassle, and closer to those RPGs, played in those styles, than to any eurogame.

I played RPGs every week for about 15 years and never ran a game like that. That sounds a bit miserable.