Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 149 - RPG Lessons from Video Games

Episode Date: November 6, 2022

Good ideas can come from anywhere:  movies, music, streaming series, and even video games.   You may think that I only mean RPG video games like Dragon Age or The Witcher.  Good ideas for characters, game mechanics, and even plots can be taken from video games of all kinds from Super Mario Brothers to Portal.  In this episode, you'll hear about tips for taking these ideas and using them at your game table   #DungeonsandDragons #DnD #Pathfinder #RPG #DMTips

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. There are some fights that if you stick it out to the bitter end, you will get your character's ass kicked and maybe have a TPK or total party kill. Do not be afraid to fall back and live to fight another day. It will give you the opportunity to be better prepared for the fight in the future. Hey. Hey, you. Yeah, the good-looking one listening to this podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in.

Episode 149, Lessons for our RPG that we can learn from video games. I'd like to thank this week's sponsor, Photographs. I've worked really hard to ruin family photographs, but now it's easy. I can do it with my eyes closed. If you're looking for gift ideas for the RPG lover in your life, head over to 3D Crafts and Curios on Etsy to buy a beautiful dice tower, dice jail, DM screen, or other RPG accessory, lovingly 3D printed and shipped to you by Brenton Galbraith.

There are dozens of options, dozens of color choices, and more 3D prints that you could possibly shake a stick at. So head over there and buy something for the RPG lover in your life. By the way, when I say RPG lover, of course I mean the person in your life who loves RPGs. I'm not talking about some lover you take in the video game like Abigail from Stardew Valley or Tali from Mass Effect. Yeah, I like purple, so what? Oh yeah, it's going to be one of those episodes. Contest, contest, contest. This is the last week to enter to win the beautiful Fairy Dice Tower. To enter, please send me a screenshot of your liking or following 3D Crafts and Curios on Facebook or Insta and you'll be entered to win.

You can message those to me on social media or send it to contest at taking20podcast.com. Deadline is November 19th, so get those in. Thank you again so much to Brenton from 3D Crafts and Curios for the giveaway. I really appreciate you sponsoring that dice tower for us. If you made a Venn diagram of people who love RPGs and people who love video games, I'm betting the overlap is 90%, maybe 99%. I mean, a lot of us love Dungeons & Dragons and Skyrim, or Pathfinder and Satisfactory, Blades in the Dark and Elden Ring. If you've listened to my episodes for any length of time,

you know one of the best lessons I think DMs and players can learn is borrow, borrow, borrow, steal, steal, steal. DMs, I encourage you to use plots, stories, characters, character arcs, twists, location ideas, and NPC personalities from famous movies, books, streaming series, and any other source you can get your grubby little DM mitts on. Players, I've said multiple times that there is nothing wrong with basing characters you roleplay on characters you find in other media. Want to use, I don't know, Han Solo, Hannibal Lecter, Victor Hargreaves, or hell, Courage the Cowardly Dog as the basis for your character? Go for it and have fun. Hell, I once played a Star Wars campaign where my character's attitude

was largely based on Jane from Firefly. Interestingly, when talking to other players and DMs about this very topic of borrowing ideas, one area that seems to be untapped is gaining inspiration from video games. Some of the video games straight are RPGs, you can lift entire storylines right out of the game, plop them down at your table, maybe change a few names here and there, voila. While RPGs are not video games, and they are different media with different types of limits, there are lots of lessons that we can learn from video games and apply them to our RPG table. When it comes to RPG lessons from video games, I'm going to give you eight tips to

remember and think about the next time you are clearing the level of Dungeons of Nihilbook or fighting that creature the size of an ocean liner in Elden Ring. Maybe some of those lessons you learn at the computer or Xbox or PS5 can be brought to your table. So let's start with the advice that can apply to both players and GMs. 1. Believable and realistic aren't as important as you think. This note, by the way, is just as much for me as for all of you who are listening. I need to hear this from time to time. I'm one that strives to have a smack of realism in my games. I tend not to put huge and gargantuan monsters in areas, for example,

that could only be reached via 5-foot mean, how the hell did they get there? Teleport? Gaseous form? Super powerful reduction spell that shrinks them to the size of a puppy till they got there? Also, if they're trapped in that room, what the hell do they eat? Anyway, I digress. The game is about fun, and providing unique experiences as a DM should be the gold standard to which we strive, with realism coming in a second or maybe third place if you add trying to kill all the animal companions off. DMs, your setting doesn't have to be realistic or even believable. Anybody out there played Bioshock or Bioshock Infinite? A city at the bottom of the ocean like Rapture or a floating city in the clouds like Columbia?

That's not realistic, especially given that the former takes place in 1959 and the latter in 1912. There is no way in Hades those cities could be built with the technology of today, much less back in those decades. Now that being said, are those games fun as hell? Thematic? Unique? With subtle jabs at certain belief systems? To quote the great Madeline Kahn, you bet your boots they are. They're amazing stories told in a fantastical location that suspends your disbelief because the game is fun and the story is good. In Subnautica, your starship crashes and you're dropped on a planet with some raw materials and a mystery to unravel. Are you telling me that no other person on that big-ass ship

that you can see off in the distance made it to the surface alive? Come on. Not realistic. But fun? Yes. Difficult? Absolutely. Can really trigger people with thalassophobia?

You bet. That game is amazing. More examples of fun trumping realism in games include, I don't know, Portal, Portal 2, Rocket League, Super Mega Baseball, Satisfactory, Assassin's Creed. If you want to know what's unrealistic about the Assassin's Creed franchise, the answer is yes, waving my hands at everything. All of this. So DMs, around your table, have that fight on a rickety rope bridge above flowing lava. But Jeremy, a rickety rope bridge over lava would burn down. Yeah? Maybe this one just hasn't yet. Or won't. Or maybe have it start burning just as the fights start. Players, realistic also isn't

important when it comes to your character's background, story, and class build. Obviously, listen to your GM if they suggest changes that will better fit into the campaign. But if you want your character to be the supposed chosen one of prophecy, the last survivor of a shipwreck, escaped from a mental asylum, be disfigured because of an unrelated case of space eczema, do it. Be disfigured because of an unrelated case of space eczema. Do it. If you want to be Thri-Kreen Monk who learned common because a spell jammer crashed and you befriended a dwarf, sure, hey, sounds fun. Embrace wacky character ideas and backgrounds.

One of the characters that I'm playing right now was obsessed with replacing its own body parts with body parts of creatures that came into his lab because he happened to be a mortician. He studied healing arts, arcane. He also studied alchemy in order to replace his own body parts with that of these other creatures. And eventually he died from the procedure and rose again as a mummy. So he's a flesh warp risen from the dead as a mummy. Is this realistic? Could you replace your own body parts? Probably not, but I love the idea for the character concept, and my GM loved it as well, and has leaned hard into it,

and we're enjoying that campaign. So players, embrace those wacky character ideas and backgrounds that you can come up with. It makes the game way more interesting than just having, for example, the way overdone barbarian from a nomadic tribe that was kicked out because they disgraced themselves in the middle of a big battle. I'm going to try to keep this moving because I have quite a few ideas. So, number two for players and GMs. Embrace failure as an opportunity to grow and improve. Players, in some RPG games, especially if the game world is built as a sandbox,

there are some fights that if you stick it out to the bitter end, you will get your character's ass kicked and maybe have a TPK or total party kill. Do not be afraid to fall back and live to fight another day. It will give you the opportunity to be better prepared for the fight in the future. Maybe the wizard prepared a ton of cold damaging spells and you run into a group of trolls whose regeneration can only be stopped with fire and acid. Rather than stick it out and make the fight 10 times harder than it needs to be, if there's an opportunity to tactically retreat, do it. Get out of dodge.

Go back to a safe area. Take a long rest, have the wizard choose different spells tomorrow, and then come back and mop the fucking floor with those gangly armed trolls. PCs will fail at parts of an adventure because they're not prepared sometimes. We can't prepare for everything. One party I'm playing in doesn't have a rogue. We really can't pick locks at all, so what do we have? A strong frontline fighter with a lot of hit points who calls the boot on his right leg, quote, the skeleton key, unquote.

And we have an alchemist that always has, like, acidic solutions ready to help open doors that are tougher than our fighter. Similarly, DMs, we're all going to fail sometimes, too. We didn't adequately prepare, we looked at the wrong monster stat block or we didn't look at the right one close enough. We didn't adjudicate a rule properly. Hey, it happens to every single one of us. If you stay behind the screen long enough, it'll happen fairly often. Do not, do not beat yourself up over it. Learn from it. For example, if the PCs do something I wasn't prepared for, I learned a long time ago because I tried to improv something and it turned into a disaster. Hey, let's take five minutes and I'll look up the monster stat block.

How did I learn to do that? By screwing up a Minotaur encounter years ago. I screwed it up so badly I lost sleep over it the next night. We all make these mistakes, and all we can do is learn and improve from them. Three, players and GMs, the journey is more important than the end. In games, seeing the end credits and the post-game cinematic is a satisfying moment. But don't lose sight of the fun that exists in the lead up to that moment. If a game is a long one, I'll catch myself taking on fewer and fewer side quests the closer I feel like I'm getting to the end. And a lot of times that means my character misses out on some important loot or important story beats.

Similarly, I've seen players around the RPG table do the exact same thing. They find out where the boss is and they make a beeline for that fight, missing out on some great information or resources that might make that boss fight easier. Yes, killing that final boss monster, delivering the MacGuffin back to Lord and Lady Muckety Muck is always satisfying. But don't rush to the end and miss the roses along the way. And by roses, I mean that sweet, sweet loot. Oh, and good roleplay moments, of course, and maybe paying off story beat setups and discovering more about the world's culture and

lore and history, but that staff of the Archmage? Come get you some, you big baddie. Four, players and DMs. In games like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Skyrim, and others, you have a choice of who you bring along with you on the adventure. Selecting the right squad mates that mesh in capability and temperament are important for your sense of fun. So players and DMs, if you've never sat down to a table with a difficult player, then gods love you. Unfortunately, sometimes you will get a player that doesn't mesh well with a group,

who doesn't set aside their personal glory for the good of the other players and characters, who demands that they get their way when it's time to split loop, or they're a complete asshole saying it's what my character would do. Sometimes we don't get a choice whom we play with at conventions or invitations to a friend's game or similar situations. Those bad situations can be reduced to a single game session as you politely leave and just not return to that group again. However, if you're going to be investing time in a long campaign, 10, 15, 20, 30 sessions or more,

make sure you have the right group to do it with. Also, if you're joining a party and they need a role filled like, I don't know, frontline fighter or healer, consider filling that role, even if you just got done playing that in the last campaign. Change it up. Maybe make it a damage-dealing cleric or a tanky cleric or debuffer cleric. You can heal, which meets the party needs, but you also get to do something fun for you. The example I'm going to pull from gaming is Overwatch. In the current Overwatch 2 game design, it's designed for five players, one tank, two DPS, and two support. If you ever queue

in like an open queue game where players can play whatever class they want, people jump to play DPS and nobody wants to play support and tank. Well, I get it. Support and tank means you have to put others' needs ahead of your own. Sometimes we got to do that around the RPG table too, because our party is better when we do it. DMs. In general, we can be a lot more picky about our tables than the players can. I mean, let's face it. Players outnumber DMs, I don't know how many times to one. 10? 20? We can be selective. If you advertise that you're getting a game together, chances are you're going to have a ton of people who want to play.

Set expectations for the potential players and give those potential players lots of information about the type of game you want to run. Make sure everybody's there for the same type of game so you don't have one murder hobo in the middle of what otherwise would be a political intrigue type game. So lastly, in the combined player-GM advice section, on the subject of parties, you will have more and faster success by working together as a team. In video games, many times you and your party will have abilities that synchronize well. My favorite example, by the way, would be the four, so far, Mass Effect games. One thing they have done very well since the first one is to reward combinations of weapons and abilities.

Your flamer sets a baddie on fire, while your warp ability makes the fire explode. In those games, there are tons of biotic, tech, weapon, and ammo combos that can make you and your teammates better in combat by timing your abilities just right. Your party at the RPG table should look for opportunities to do the same thing. Imagine your magus, witch, or sorcerer drops a cloud kill on an enemy which drops their constitution score and correspondingly their fortitude save. The rogue

waits for them to come coughing out of the room with poisoned arrows covered in giant wasp poison that requires, you guessed it, a Fort save to start avoiding dexterity damage caused by the poison. Even if the baddies survive, they will have a lower constitution, fewer hit points, weaker Fortitude save, lower armor class, and worse Reflex saves. All that combined makes them easier to kill. Similarly, there are feats that work well in combination, like teamwork feats in Pathfinder and spells that work together in a lot of game systems. One of my favorites that I ever remember when I was a DM was we had a high-level druid use Move Earth to make a trench, and when the baddies

fell into it, the arcane casters threw a lightning bolt right down the middle of it. There was nowhere for them to go, so I gave them a negative on their reflex saves. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Which is still a weird phrase. I know it comes from the days when fish were sold in market and packed tightly in barrels to maximize the amount of fish that you could bring to sell, but who the hell's shooting into that barrel? Anyway, I'm letting that rabbit go because I have some advice for my Dungeon Master brothers and sisters out there. DMs. Decisions should have consequences. I follow a large number of discussion boards, subreddits, discord servers, etc. that allow DMs and GMs to ask for advice, get help, get ideas, and help others.

Many of the questions asked include variants of, I can't stop my players from killing people, or my players just robbed an alchemist shop, or my characters just stole a police cruiser, or the party just infected a small town with a virulent disease, or punched a sheriff, insulted the king, they all refuse to wear pants or the druid keeps wild shaping into different animals and trying to get people to have sex with them. Whatever. And the question ends with, I don't know what to do now. I'll tell you what you should do.

Let them do those things. And then let them deal with the after effects of doing those things. Think about the town where you currently live. Even the smallest, friendliest town with the aw shucks police officer who has a heart of gold and a brain of oatmeal won't stand for violence that hurts others or theft of property. They robbed a place, punched a police officer, stole his motorcycle, sure thing.

Of course, they were probably witnessed or filmed or caught on camera doing it. People will report that to the rest of the authorities, and the appropriate authorities will respond. Here in the U.S., for example, we have police officers that deal with the day-to-day, but if a situation gets out of hand, that's when SWAT teams or National Guard are called into action. Why wouldn't the Kingdom of Zerobor have elite teams that can take down threats bigger than the town guard can handle? Divination magic to find stolen items or to find the party, and maybe well-armed fighters to confront that party, evokers that can blast them to ash. My point is, if the bard wants to get all horny all the time, go for it. Paternity suits and treatment for scale itch can get really

expensive. 7. Make games with hard choices. One of the things that makes a game, computer or tabletop, memorable is when the party is faced with a difficult decision. Do you save the king or the priest? Do you risk the life of a loved one for a chance to save the entire town? There aren't a lot of video games with hard choices and painful consequences to cite an example, but I'm going to bring up one, and it's impossible to do it without it being a spoiler. So if you ever want to play the original Life is Strange and haven't already, skip ahead about 30 seconds. Right. So most of the way through the game, you have the choice to save your best friend Chloe or the entire town of Arcadia Bay, but you can't do both.

Is the life of someone you love worth sacrificing hundreds or even thousands of other lives? But making RPGs with hard choices like that is extremely difficult. Your players have to buy into the character's feelings about events and NPCs in the game. One of the groups that I GM for, and don't get me wrong, I love them all like brothers and sisters, but they don't buy into games easy. It takes time to carefully craft attachment, and 9 out of 10 times, that attachment turns out to be a good thing for the PCs, since the NPC will usually, I don't know, help the party out some way.

But 1 out of those 10 times, that NPC might turn coat, or they might be captured, leaving the party with a decision. Do they save that one NPC that they love, or do they try to save maybe a greater group of people, but they don't really connect with them at all? Depending on your group, this could be an easy decision for them, so let's tie it to a mechanical benefit for the PCs. Two people have been kidnapped. The plucky, comedic halfling who has the charisma to keep spirits up at the PC's home base even when all hope seems lost. And a gruff half-orc who is strong, resistant to the big bad's

attempts to turn her, but really doesn't like the PCs either. The party has only resources to save one. The halfling has a story benefit, but the half-orc could be beneficial in the coming fights against the big bad and their forces. Could be a hard choice. Half-orc may help in the final battle, but it may not matter if half the personnel abandon the castle because they feel like all hope is lost. Last example would be for a choice that benefits the party versus a choice that benefits, say, the entire town or the story.

Do they keep the gold for themselves to make themselves rich, or do they donate it to the town to help it rebuild? Bonus points, by the way, if you write the campaign such that the generous option makes a future encounter easier. Moving on to my eighth and last point before I get lost in examples. Give shortcuts and reward players for clever use of skills and good role playing. Chances are your players are clever, and they may think of a solution that you haven't. Do not punish them for things that you didn't prepare,

and for things that are intelligent and powerful uses of existing resources that you didn't consider. Video games are chock-full of examples of this. Secret doors in Skyrim that let you bypass three-quarters of a dungeon. Clever and even hidden places to put portals in Portal 1 and 2. The Mario level where you can jump onto the bricks at the top of the screen and warp to other worlds. There are too many that I could possibly name here. I'm sure you're thinking of your own ideas. One time at an RPG table, I was a player at a high-level Pathfinder 2 e-game.

To make a long story short, half the party, including my poor, innocent, sweet druid, who only occasionally would transform into a dinosaur and tear people's fucking heads off, they were all bad. We were trapped by a roper hanging from the ceiling over a deep crevasse. If we killed the roper, we'd fall, probably to our deaths. Desperate, I told the GM I was casting Wall of Stone horizontally to stretch across the cavern beneath where we were dangling. My GM let me make a check and said it would work. I did the math, and it was very close as to whether the area of the spell would A, span the crevasse where we were,

and B, be solid enough to remain in place and take the weight of our fall. The GM, to his credit, said, I'm going to say it holds because that's good thinking and worth a hero point. Of course, my druid immediately dropped Wild Shape as the fighter finished killing the roper, so she landed on the bridge as a 150-pound human, not a 2,000-pound stegosaurus. So your players say that they want to use the tapestries as a makeshift swing to get across a room. They want to use dust and pebbles to throw at a particular square on the map, trying to reveal an invisible enemy. They want to look around to find something to form some sort of

rudimentary lathe. Let them at least try. Give them a roll for it and make plans in your head for what happens if it fails. But if it works and they can bypass traps or encounters, don't grumble. Be happy. Put that encounter or trap back in your notebook and use it again later. I have barely scratched the surface of what lessons video games can help teach us with regard to our RPG tables, but I'm already 23 minutes in. I can see coming back to this topic again in the near future. Ideas and inspiration for our tables can come from anywhere, from the Rings of Power series, to that fighter that you're playing that acts like your boss at work, to yes, that game mechanic from Faster Than Light of always being

on the move to stay ahead of danger. Always be on the lookout for these inspirations, bring them or variations of them to your RPG table, characters, or NPCs, and I'll bet you and your players will have fun doing it. Don't forget about that contest for the beautiful Fairy Dice Tower lovingly supplied by Brenton Galbraith of 3D Crafts and Curios. Get those entries in. Head to my social media accounts if you want to see pictures of it. Tune in next week, by the way, when we'll be episode 150. I have a lore episode planned about one of my favorite legends from Pathfinder,

Rovagug the Unmaker. It's terror, imprisonment, and inevitable return. But before I go, I once again want to thank this week's sponsor, Photographs. I can never get a good picture of the wheat field a few miles from my house. The photo always appears grainy. This has been episode 149, RPG Lessons We Can Learn From Video Games. My name is Jeremy Shelley,

and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube media production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.