Ebberon - Episode 1

When not running a game for whatever reason one of the other players step in and run something.

Last night saw "Episode 1" of her latest idea. Pretty much the premise is the TV show Leverage set in the world of Eberron. The characters are all students at one of Sharn's prestigious schools. They threw around a hypothetical break-in plan over study group and decided to put themselves to the test.

The point of the game is to roleplay the planning, scouting and preparation of the heist. Now this is something that DnD 4e doesn't really cater for, the system itself is a combat system. Now this is true of a pretty large section of RPGs, the rules are there for players to use to beat up on hapless NPCs. This doesn't normally bother me, since it's easy enough for me to get players to actually roleplay.

But for some reason one of the players had a total RP breakdown last night. Usually this players is good at RP and loves coming up with creative ideas and colourful descriptions for his actions and whatnot. Cept last night he kept staring at his sheet, quoting numbers left and right instead of just playing his character in RP situations.

So what causes this? Why is it that people are more worried about numbers in DnD than in any other system? Is it that DnD is and always has been math heavy? Even so why does it feel that people [or my players at least] are more worried about numbers or... actually no... that's not it... it's a case of why are they afraid to play outside of the numbers?

I think I am more worried about this since I'm starting my Dark Sun campaign next week, which I plan to be more story than combat heavy. This means that if the people are expecting numbers and math they'll probably be disappointed.

I think I'll sit them all down and discuss my and their expectations from the game. And then make them do detailed character history and PC interaction. Have them interact with each other a bit and only then have them draw up their actual characters. Have them add some anecdotes about their characters, colourful descriptions, things that annoys the character. Detail the characters as much as possible and only then worry about actual crunch. I think I'll give that a go and see how it works out.