Hack and Slash Gaming: And Then There Was Fire

 

I’ve been a game-master and player of role playing games for some time now.  I’ve run the gambit of style from both sides of the judge’s screen and I have my personal favorites and my personal hatreds.  I find that in time my opinions have changed as I’ve matured as a gamer and that some of my pet peeves have evolved into tools that I use as necessary. 

A perfect example of this is hack and slash gaming.  You know the style I’m talking about, the one where there is little in the way of real role playing and an excessive amount of roll playing.  The characters are min/maxed to the hilt and their only interest is to proceed from one fight to the next, through castle, dungeon or some other simplistic setting.  I admit to the fact that I went through a hack and slash phase both as a GM and a player.  Once I had discovered the world of role playing games that involved complex story lines, consequences for actions and a decrease in the raw amount of killing that took place, I was ashamed of my past.  I quickly moved into the camp that scorned such simple playing styles.

I’ve been GMing for 17 years now and I’ve rediscovered the usefulness of hack and slash gaming.  One of the games I’m running is very much a hack and slash game, but there is a purpose to it.  The players are all novices, and have only a basic grasp on the rules and what it is to really role play a character.  The hack and slash environment is a fertile ground for beginning players and I believe that it is only a matter of time before the introduction of a genuine storyline and accompanying campaign will be welcomed and take hold of their interest.

Now I can already hear some people saying, “If the campaign is good enough and the GM is good enough, even a new player will prefer genuine role playing.” To these people I would suggest that they really search back through their memories and think of all of the new players who have come and gone.  I’m sure that at least a healthy portion left for a lack of interest.  New players like to see progress, see their characters excel, and defeat ever more powerful creatures.  Hack and slash gaming allows for all of these things and provides the critical element of a fast pace and lots of interaction by all people playing the game.  As an avid gamer, I can tell you that there are just not enough of us in this world.  We can’t afford to squander any opportunities we get.

Let’s assume for a moment that we have a good hack and slash game going and we want to work it in such a way that we’ll be able to convert it over to a serious role playing campaign at some time in the future.  What are the advantages to starting off this way and how do we work the game so as to emphasize the points we wish the players to learn?

The single most important benefit to starting this sort of game has everything to do with the rules.  Most role playing games have numerous books, full of complicated rules that the players will need to learn on some level.  A hack and slash game is good for teaching and reinforcing rules and game mechanics.  Players learn quickly enough what rules are important in combat and how the game mechanics work.  The trick to making this stick is to slowly introduce new elements of the game as it progresses so that the players are forced to learn something new.  An example would be holding off on traps until the players have reached a point where a trap might be debilitating, but not necessarily lethal.  Suddenly they all recognize the value of rogues and their ability to find traps.  Start with simple traps and work your way up towards more complicated ones.  Any player who uses a rogue character will have a better understanding of how important some of those thief skills are by the time they are done.  This same principle can be used in any situation for any character type.  Ultimately the players should be able to question your rulings and even be able to support their argument with text from one of the books.

 

The next benefit to the hack and slash game is diversity.  Hack and slash games have notoriously high mortality rates amongst characters, forcing players to create new ones fairly regularly.  If you, as a GM, can convince the player to try something a little different after every death they may expand their knowledge of character types and will avoid the age-old trap of single character type specialization.  Role playing games should be about expanding your horizons, and this certainly helps.  The danger with this high casualty approach is that if you don’t let the characters last long enough the players will not learn to appreciate the character type and you risk the players being frustrated and disliking the game.

 

The final benefit to this kind of playing is that it helps players feel confident in their ability to play the game and increase the chances of their characters surviving long enough to develop some attachment.  Players know what their characters should be able to do and what is over the top.  You decrease the chances that a party of low-level characters will try taking on a marauding dragon face to face.  A campaign can end in a flash if the characters foolishly try to accomplish tasks that are OBVIOUSLY outside of the realm of possibility.  Campaigning requires survivability. Survivability allows the GM to help develop storylines that involve and evolve with the characters.  Involved and evolved storylines and characters will create player sympathy with the character and helps to bring a little something personal to the game.

 

My hack and slash campaign is evolving nicely at this point.  The players are actually progressing faster than I had anticipated, and I’m currently working on adapting my hack and slash game into more of a campaign and the players are responding.  I’ve witnessed some genuine role playing in my group of novices and it looks like it will only become more prevalent.  Sometime soon I hope to challenge them with a choice between a simple dungeon crawl and something more important to the campaign in general.  I can only hope that their evolution as gamers has come along enough to make the right decision.