On Point-and-Click Exploration in Elfgames
Brief definition of what I mean when I say these terms.
Elfgames are fantasy tabletop roleplaying adventure games. D&D-likes, if you want.
Point-and-click exploration is when you explore a fictional space, usually a dungeon, using a procedure that looks like this:
- A player takes the token that represents her character, moves it from where it is, to where she wants it to be. She does this step by step, usually 5-foot-square by 5-foot-square, and makes a show of it so the referee can see exactly which path she's taking.
- If, on her path, the character crosses some threshold that the referee knows would interrupt her movement, the referee stops the player and describes what has happened or is about to happen. (Ex: "As you step here, you hear a faint click under your foot that suggests you've engaged a mechanism.")
- The player may be prompted to respond, or not. (Ex: "You take 4 damage as a dart trap concealed in the wall shoots you in the shoulder.")
- Usually, this will then allow the player to make their character stop moving ("hall's trapped, I'm gonna ward myself before proceeding"), or they might change their path, or continue unchanged.
- Repeat until they get where they were going.
I fucking hate this method.
Let's weigh the pros and cons.
PROS:
- A referee can, by enforcing this method, conceal until the right moment the presence of items which they would otherwise need to extradiegetically announce to the players ("there is a trap here, but your guy doesn't know that, unless you succeed on a roll").
- Play can proceed without the need to verbally communicate movement information. This opens up the verbal channel for other use, such as in-character discussion. In online play especially, the verbal channel can easily become cluttered, so this is especially desirable.
- There's no ambiguity in exactly what happened, because everyone saw it with their own eyes. This is useful because it makes the resolution of harmful unexpected events feel more fair: the referee didn't simply decide that you took the path that put you in danger, you chose to go that way.
- The method facilitates mutual understanding of the fictional space: Everyone is seeing the same space and the same movement path through it, so their descriptions and choices reinforce this shared understanding instead of confusing it. (This doesn't happen: "He lays the tower shield across the gap and steps carefully across." "Wait, wasn't the gap fifteen feet wide?")
CONS:
- It adds way too many checkpoints: For a character to walk to the end of a 20ft hallway, the player must check with the referee four times to see if anything has happened. This slows play tremendously.
- It gets messy with more than one character. Say you have a marching order, with Alice in front, Bob in the middle, and Charlie in the back. For this group to move down the same 20ft hallway, first Alice needs to check with the referee for the first 5ft. Then Bob needs to move behind her, and Bob's player also needs to check with the referee, because Bob is a different character. It usually won't matter, but Bob might weigh more than Alice, or perhaps Alice's passage changed something, or the event might only trigger for two characters, etc. So Bob checks also. Then Charlie moves, and Charlie also checks with the referee to see if anything's happened. To get to the end of the hall now requires twelve checks.
- Failing to keep up with the other players' movements means you're adding ambiguity to a method intended to reduce ambiguity. If you don't move your token until Alice finishes her movement, but you claim your character was right behind her, then you're skipping past the resolution of four theoretically-relevant event checks, and as we said before, forcing these checks every time, regardless of if it seems relevant, is one of the reasons we use the method. Otherwise we might give away extradiegetic information or require a post-facto agency denial.
- Therefore, every player needs to be locked in at all times when moving through a fictional space using this method. It is not acceptable to tune out or apply your focus elsewhere (perhaps on rearranging equipment or considering monster tactics), because doing so slows down play even more and risks the things we are trying to avoid by using this method. And God help you if you're the referee and you don't realize your players have started moving.
There are a couple of other shitty knock-on effects that I've experienced that I'm not confident categorizing as inherent to the method. Firstly, I've seen the stripping away of all movement details other than the grid movement. Without the point-and-click method, it might matter whether your character is "tip-toeing carefully down the hall, keeping his torch away from the wall in case there's flammable mold he can't see." But in the point-and-click method, it only matters that he's moving into this square, then this square, then that square. Secondly, I've seen it transform narration into a way more drab, function-first, and extradiegetic affair. Instead of hearing "Alice runs screaming down the hall," you hear "I go here." Instead of "Bob goes into the darkness..." you get "I'll move like this." If you get any words at all! By removing the need to use the verbal channel to communicate movement information, we seem to strip away our ability to use the verbal channel. It becomes perfunctory, so we stop doing it, and we rob ourselves of fun in the process.
I think this method naturally springs forth when you use highly representative maps on a virtual tabletop. You can fight it! It's not inevitable. But if you don't fight it, it will happen, I think.
It's my opinion that we should be using maps that are far less representative, and we should be interacting with them far less often. I want a shitty-looking scribble map, with a little arrow pointing to where the alchemical purifier is that says "alchemy thing." I want to sometimes have to point at a hallway and ask the referee, "how long would it take to cross that carefully?" And for the love of all that is good in this hobby, I want to get on with the game.