Herding Cats - Part 5

Well, we're back for 2011 after the Christmas/New Year break, and an unfortunate bout of severe laryngitis combined with a nasty chest infection!

The second Deathwatch session for the year took place three weeks ago as a result, and we are well and truly into the current storyline now. I managed to go - much to the dismay of some players! - two and a half sessions without a single dice rolled in combat, but the natural order of the WH40K universe was finally restored in this chapter, i.e. lots of fighting.

(Also of interest - as I write this, FFG (Fantasy Flight Games - the good people behind the Deathwatch RPG) have just announced 'Black Crusade'! Roleplaying for Chaos in the 41st Millennium!)

This post promised however to deal with our third psychographic, commonly found among roleplaying groups around the world - 'the cruncher'.

(Please see 'Herding Cats - Part 4' for 'the social player' and 'the Mal')

The cruncher is perhaps THE most immediately familiar player profile to most roleplayers/gamers, but even among crunchers there is stratification. I tend to group them into two separate types.*

'Type I crunchers' choose to treat games and game systems as mathematical problems to be solved, and these spreadsheet warriors are usually the product of too much MMORPG or simply math geeks.

Tell-tale signs at your gaming table include any player who ever utters the abbreviation 'DPS' or keeps a calculator/phone in close reach during combat - watch out for this guy. Chances are his mind is more focused on the next purple item waiting for him back home in WoW than it is on your current storyline! Ultimately though, his numbers are only as good as the tools you provide him with...

'Type II crunchers' are less concerned with the numbers, but will usually do their best to abuse other game mechanics/rules to the point where a number of things can/will happen, for example:

i. Their character becomes indestructible.

ii. Their character becomes un-hittable.

iii. One of your characters (NPC's), and ultimately all of your characters are reduced to the point of such inefficacy that you need to make a house rule.

Of course the severity of what sort of damage this type of cruncher can inflict depends heavily on both the game system in use and the leniency of the GM, but you get the idea. This type is usually harder to deal with too, since their first argument is guaranteed to be something along the lines of

'But it's in the rules!'

For inexperienced GM's, this can be extremely frustrating. After running a few games however and finding your comfort zone, you'll soon find yourself distinguishing which rules can be left untouched or which others might need to be adjusted in 'the spirit of the game'.

If in doubt, go play some more games under a GM who knows what he's doing. I consider myself lucky to have played under some pretty good ones, and this is the best way to learn what and what not to do!

In closing, DW is on again this week on Thursday evening. I can't wait.

:-)

* For those of you keeping score, I would say my current group probably includes two of the first type and one of the second type. I leave it to the reader to assign blame ;-)