PVP vs PVE

The Dungeon Master is a player too

I've been thinking more about the zero prep debate. It's no secret that I come down on the prep side of things, quite ardently at that. There are many reasons for this, but the one I want to discuss today is the difference in PVE and PVP.

When I sit down to run a game, I'm looking to challenge my players. Very explicitly I am looking to create situations that they must use their wits and guile to overcome. I'm not looking to beat them in the form of a TPK. But I am looking to hear muttered curses and hurried planning as they figure out how to over come something I've put in front of them. While I ultimately want them to win, it needs to be a thing fought for and earned. A major component of my enjoyment comes from the fact that the challenge comes, mostly, from me. In short I want to play with and against my players, in more than just battlefield tactics, and I cannot do that without prep.

But why is prep necessary? Cannot I, as the dungeon master, simply spawn in whatever I need? Well to answer that, we have to remember that Dungeons and Dragons is a game, shocking I know. Games have rules. Dungeons and Dragons is a specific type of game, an asymmetric one. One group of actors can interact in certain ways, while the other group interacts differently. In this case the groups are the players and the dungeon master. The dungeon master has functionally infinite power over the game. Killing or putting the players up against an impossible challenge is trivial. But every decent dungeon master knows that killing the players isn't really the goal. The goal is to give them a good game, and as stated previously, I want to give them a good game that comes from me matching wits against them. Which means I need a way to curtail my own power in the context of the game. My solution is prep and simulationism. I prep a world and drop the players into it. Then I play the world against my players. The way I curtail my powers as a dungeon master is by severely limiting my ability to spawn in new threats willy-nilly, while widening my ability to use the existing world to organically create threats as a reaction to the players.

Lets look at an example from one of my own games, that of Captain Buford (incorrectly called Barristan when I told this story on twitter), First Paladin of Aquanae. Captain Buford started life as the NPC captain of the guard in Dawnsport, a major military port on the mainland. The players (The pirate King Gov and crew) sauntered through town and made a mockery of him. Fast forward a few months and Gov's pirate crew is causing real havoc to the crown, and the crown petitions the church raise up a paladin to shut the players down. Buford was chosen due to his piousness and prior interaction with Gov. He was given a ship, crew and orders to track down the Reavers of the Shallow Sea and, if possible, where they got their mighty ship-borne bombard. He beelined for the dwarves, and while on this neutral ground, contracted to have his own bombard made and encountered Gov for the first time. In typical player fashion, they tricked Buford into wearing a Helm of Alignment Changing and then used his newfound lack of scruples to goad him into combat and kill him. All's well that ends well.

Behind the referee screen the chain of events was very deliberate. The players had been growing somewhat bored after acquiring the dwarven bombard. Nothing on the sea was really a threat, and their piracy fleet was profitable so money wasn't an issue at the moment. So I decided to throw them a curve ball, and the next time they checked in with the dwarves, Buford's ship and crew were there getting outfitted with a bombard of similar caliber. From there, the alignment change scheme happened. Buford was an NPC whose stats I rolled the first time the players interacted with him. He became a paladin because he had the stats for it (this was in Advanced OSE) and was already characterized in my notes as being pious and zealous. The important moral of this story, is that I as the referee was moving pieces already on my board. There were other pieces I could have moved to shake things up. I could have had some of the NPC pirates in Gov's fleet rebel, I could have had the on-again-off-again war between the Elves and Lizardmen go hot and affect the players. There are many many pieces on the board for me to use. And that is the point.

I call this the PVP mode of dungeon mastery. The world is run by me logically thinking through how a given faction, area, or NPC would react to the players and then following the rules to produce a threat. Now that I have moved over to running ACKs, this means that once I pick a market class VI for a town, that town can't suddenly spawn a huge army over night to mess with the players. I have to play by the same rules they do in the world. That means tracking movements of NPCs, it means caring about naval travel speed. It took Buford a full month to get to the Dwarven Stronghold and he was stuck there for another 6 weeks because I had established that's how long it took to have a bombard made and mounted when the players did it. He chose to take that risk instead of trying to find the hidden pirate port because he knew he was heavily outgunned without such modifications. This is all play and it happened during prep, not at the table. The session started with "you guys arrive at the stronghold. As you row your jolly boat to shore you see a royal navy ship in dry dock. It bears the symbol of the church and appears to be receiving similar modifications to its keel as yours did when you had the bombard installed. What do you do?" Had the players went to the strong hold earlier, nothing would have been there. If they had delayed another month, the same. Either way, I had moved my new NPC paladin into position the way I thought was strategically sound from his point of view. The players did the rest.

Let's contrast this with the PVE mode of dungeon mastery. In this mode, the dungeon master gives up his ability to prep for player actions or move pieces around strategically, leaving that to chance. However, he vastly increases his ability to spawn in new threats. These threats however, come in randomly off of encounter tables. There is a place for this style of play in game. Dungeons, wilderness travel, city encounters etc all need encounter tables to maintain the game. Ocean travel in the Flooded Realms is complicated by a truly massive encounter table. If the players randomly encounter a pleasure ship sailing into port as they leave, and then somehow that ship beats them to the middle of a squall in deep ocean, I don't have to explain how it manage to beat them there. There is good gameable material in unexpected outcomes like that, see Ryan Howard's post on why encounter tables need not be curated for an excellent write-up on what this style of play provides to a campaign. But it is a different style of content than what prepping can provide. This mode of play is fine, and you can run a series of successful games or even a good campaign with it. But it lacks a core engagement in the form of meaningful play for the dungeon master.

This lacking engagement is one of the major reasons I have disliked zero prep whenever I've run games under the paradigm. I think it works for one shots or short, highly dense campaigns. But it often fails to interest me personally as the dungeon master. I often feel as though I am simply interpreting table results and running encounters, not actually engaging in any sort of game. I stand by my position that prep is play and choosing to not engage in it actively robs a dungeon master of a vital part of the game.

That's all for now, expect news of my next campaign soonish. I've joined an in person 2e game as a player and will be starting an ACKs II game as soon as the books come in. Look forward to it, and Sail On!

-ShockTohp