Three D&D Tips I Learned From Dragon Age
February 1st, 2010 by Mike SheaQuite a few D&D players and DMs have been all about the Dragon Age these past couple of months. While not a perfect game, it shows just how far computer and console RPGs can go. There’s a lot to love in Dragon Age and a lot to learn as well. Today we’re going to discuss three interesting ideas DMs might take away from this popular computer RPG.
Meaningful Choices on the Rails
There’s piles of discussions on the net discussing the benefits and disadvantages of games run on the rails versus games run in a sandbox. Dragon Age shows us how a game can essentially follow a single storyline from point A to point B to point C and so on without feeling like it’s on the rails. There are tons of decisions to make in Dragon Age, with many of them feeling like they will have a heavy impact on the story. In reality, however, you’ll see the same general situations regardless of what choices you make.
Learning how to do this in our own game can make an on-the-rails plot driven game feel like a sandbox game. We can do this by placing decision trees throughout our games that don’t necessarily impact the overall plot direction but change how the players get THROUGH that plot direction. It’s a hard lesson to learn but very valuable when learned. It can make any single-focused campaign feel like a rich and deep world full of choices and opportunities.
Build Generic Environments for Random Encounters
I’ve generally avoided random encounters in my D&D 4e games. They always felt like filler to me, simply ways to kill time. However, completely avoiding random encounters has removed some of the spice from my game. Dragon Age shows us how we can design encounter environments and re-use them for a variety of random encounters. Use your dungeon tiles to build a generic street scene, a wilderness scene, a dungeon scene, and a cavern scene. Use and re-use these encounter environments for random encounters throughout your game just like they re-use the street scenes and battlefield encounter environments in Dragon Age.
Combat Doesn’t have to be to the death
As a DM we might often develop a rich villain only to have him quickly killed without hardly saying a word. Dragon Age often has situations where the final blow isn’t truly final. Instead of having the final blow kill your villain, have it be a mortal wound or stunning blow that puts the enemy at the mercy of the PCs. This can become an opportunity for those choices we talked about earlier. Should the PCs finish him off or let him live? Are there dangerous repercussions if he dies? Preventing a final blow from killing your boss villains can add rich new storytelling opportunities into your game.
These are only a few tips a DM might pick up by playing Dragon Age. For more interesting tips, check out Hannah Lipskey’s Roleplaying Tips article, “9 Things Dragon Age Taught Me About Running a Better Game“.
Like this article? Consider using these links to purchase Dragon Age: Origins from Amazon for the PC, Xbox 360, or Playstation 3.
February 1st, 2010 at 6:58 am
Very well put. Those are three single tips we veteran DMs have learned over the years, but forgot ‘em at some point along the path. Isn’t it funny that a computer game remembers us of those good ol’ ideas? To me, specially number three is a very good reminder that the Big Bad Guy ins’t only there to be killed.
February 1st, 2010 at 8:26 am
Very good points here. Personally, I love “random” encounters – although I do mine a bit backward. I decide if there is going to be an encounter or two as my adventurers travel in a particular area, but then let the random part be to determine when the party will encounters it. It’s random, but also planned.
Great blog… I’m gonna add it to my “news ticker” this morning.
February 6th, 2010 at 1:23 am
That’s cool. I especially like the first one, how you can let the players have an impact on their own path, even if the outcome is the same. It can also (if done right) make them feel like part of a bigger story, one bigger than them, which is kinda cool, I think.
February 15th, 2010 at 4:38 am
Good advice.
One of my favourite pathed computer games is Panzer General 2, where success in prior missions has a big effect on the direction of the campaign – whether you end the game fighting to take the Oak Ridge nuclear reactor from the Americans, or fighting to defend Berlin from the Red Army, is up to how you did previously: relative failure does not have to end the campaign, it can open up interesting new directions.
By contrast, there’s a cutscene in the computer game Heavy Gear where the protagonist’s traitorous girlfriend tries to seduce him away to the other side. In the cutscene the hero rejects her advances and the final battle is him dueling her to the death. I felt it would have been a lot cooler if they had just included a simple yes/no ption in the game where you could choose whether or not to go with her, going over to the other side would then open up a different scenario where you eg led the final assault on your old comrades.
IMO any decent RPG campaign should be able to accommodate some branching paths based on both player success/failure and the decisions they make.
“Use your dungeon tiles to build a generic street scene, a wilderness scene, a dungeon scene, and a cavern scene”
I find that the predrawn Paizo flip-mats are ideal for this, especially the wilderness scenes. They don’t have a generic street scene one, that’d be nice to have for urban campaigns.