Ravenous Role Playing

I apologize for missing the Tales from the Table and Adventure Hooks for the past couple of weeks. Life has seriously caught up to me, and I’ll honestly say that this blog is the lowest of all of my priorities. I hope that things will lighten up in the near future to allow me to return to my regular posting duties here.

Without any further delay, here’s my Friday Five for this week:

6 D&D Convention Tips for Players
6 D&D Convention Tips for DMs

These two links go together because, well, they just do. Here are 12 great tips (6 per side of the GM screen) on how to be a better player/GM at a convention. Honestly, I think all of these tips apply to all RPG situations, not just the helter-skelter-paced gaming sessions you find at conventions.

Couple of neat finds…

NewbieDM was kind enough to find some precious gems on the ‘Net for all of us to use, and I felt like they should game more exposure through linking to them. Go check his site for the neatness that he found.

World Building 101: Here There be Dragons…

I love the series of articles about world building that D20 Source has been publishing and I hope they continue. This one is about mapping and the logistics involved in creating quality maps. I’m not talking about artistic ability, using a CAD-based piece of software or a hex-mapper. I’m talking about how to logically place things next to each other and in relation to one another. No mountain (other than maybe a magically created one) stands alone and is there just because it is. There are always reasons for mountains to exist, and those reasons usually change the surrounding terrain for hundreds of miles.

Ashes to Ashes, Death to Life

Scott Wallace has some interesting thoughts on bringing characters back to life and how it’s usually done in a fantasy setting. I found the read quite enjoyable and I think you will to. Go check it out.

What? You want to Sleep here?

As a player, I have to say that it’s been really, really rare that I’ve wanted to build a campsite in the middle of a dungeon. I’m always the advocate of a careful retreat to a safer place in order to setup camp and get some much needed rest for my character. Of course, not everyone follows this rule, and make camp in some of the strangest (and maybe even dumbest) places. Check out what ChattyDM has to say on how to mess with players that pick poor spots to camp out and get their beauty rest.

Hack and Slash vs. Titanic Struggles, or the Goblin Massacre and Giant Slaying Approaches

I love this post because it breaks down combat into fighting lots of little guys (goblin massacre) or one large, tough opponent (giant slaying.) The maxims outlined in this post are so very true to almost every RPG combat session. It’s challenged me to change the way I approach setting up encounters to see if I can come up with some alternate and more exciting methods for throwing Bad Guys at the PCs.

World Building 101: Organizing your Organizations

Where would people be if they had no place to hang out and no one out there with common interests to hang out with? Probably at home watching American Idol. Organizations are the heart and soul of every great nation, and without them the world would be very flat and boring. Use the knowledge freely given by Brandan over at d20 Source and make your worlds a more lively place!

Uniqueizing Your Campaign

I’ve rarely liked it when a GM uses goblin stats and changes the name of the monster to “Snarglepuffs” or something like that. I link to this post, so that I may give my dissenting opinion. There are classic tropes in fantasy, science fiction, horror and every other genre. When you use a common item and decide to make it “unique” by giving it a strange name, you’re really doing nothing more than lying to your players about what they are facing. Yes, I know that they shouldn’t be meta gaming, but there are other, and better, ways to fix meta gaming problems other than to lie to your players and give them false names for the monsters. If you’re really so desperate for uniqueness in your game, then start making new monsters that you can give your own names to. This is much more preferable to renaming a standard goblin to something else.

The Almighty Player

Muahahaha… Every rookie GM thinks they are in control of the game, but they rarely realize (until it’s too late) that the players are really the ones that are in control of where the game goes. I had a GM for a single session that tried to railroad the entire group into a castle to force us to fight our way out. He was so heavy handed about it, that I fled to the sewers and hid from the goblin invasion there. He was so miffed that I found a way out that he simply declared, “You catch a disease in the sewers and die a few hours later before you can do anything else.” I shrugged, packed my dice, went home and never went back to that particular game. He thought he had taken my vast control of the game away from me and was shocked when I refused to return next week with a new character. Another anecdote along these lines. We talked Nat into running a game once, and she ran a fine game for a few sessions. Then she suddenly stopped and said she was amazed at how little control a GM really has and she didn’t like it at all. GM’ing isn’t for everyone (but I still asset that everyone should do it at least once.)

The circus has come to town along with all of its animals, clowns, jugglers, acrobats and other performers. Unfortunately for the town several of the more dangerous animals have escaped from captivity and are now roaming the town. The ringmaster of the circus hires the PCs to gather the animals and return them to their cages. Of course, the circus wants them back alive. Meanwhile, the town has put a bounty out on the animals that are wreaking havoc in the town and wants them dead. The PCs are in a race against others to capture the critters before they are slain.

Warstories: The imploding campaign

NewbieDM poses some great questions and thoughts about what causes campaigns to implode and self destruct. He has lots of great points in his post, and I suggest all DMs and players read his post in an effort to keep their current campaign from imploding… or detecting that it’s about to and it’s time to walk away from the game and start a new one. I know that I’d rather lose a current campaign over losing my current gaming group. The self destruction of a campaign can quickly lead to the same thing happening for a group.

No More Nation Building?

Ah, the days of PCs building their own nations, merchant guilds, church hierarchies and such seem to be long over. That’s too bad. For me, it always brought on a whole new level of challenges when my powerful warrior that could slay even the mightiest balrog with ease built a castle and took over some lands. Now he couldn’t slay the problematic peasants with disdain. He had to actually listen to their problems and find an amicable solution. Sure, he could slay the peasants, but then his taxes would dry up, and he’d no longer have funds to keep his castle staffed. Then he’d just end up a lonely old man sitting in his stone barricades waiting for the next adventuring party to come along and try to wipe him out. I miss those days. I wonder if there’s  a way to bring that back into modern gaming?

How to avoid developing a campaign that only appeals to you

Chgowiz has five points of advice that he’s freely given to every GM out there to encourage everyone to run a game that all (or most) players will enjoy gaming in. It’s a quick read, and I suggest everyone to take a gander.

World Building 101: Populating your Campaign World

NPCs are the backbone of every campaign. Period. Without NPCs there would not be shopkeepers, adventure hooks, villains to conquer and allies to side with. Brandan over at d20 Source has quite elegantly broken down NPCs into types according to the role they play in the campaign and how the GM should treat those NPCs in his preparation and during play time. I’ve added this link to my bookmarks (as well as highlighting it here) because it’s such great advice.

Oh I’m Sorry, Is It My Turn?

I’m guilty. I’ve done this. I hate doing this. I hate it when my players do this. I tend to blame the players when they lose track of their turn, but honestly, if I am not engaging them in the combat, then it’s mostly my fault. Yax has some great words for GMs and players alike to help them keep combat fun enough for all to enjoy.

Many thanks to Terry Brooks for inspiring today’s adventure hook… and apologies to him if he’s upset that I’ve blatantly stolen from one of his fine novels and adopted the idea for my use.

One of the PCs enters a contest to win a “Magic Kingdom” and has won the grand prize! The entrant decided there was no way to win an actual kingdom of magic, and just wrote it off as an advertising gimmick until a representative of the prize staff arrived with keys to the castle, a deed to the lands and directions on how to get there. The PC then calls up his favorite friends (presumably the other PCs in the game) and takes them on a grand adventure from the mundane world to a world filled with faeries, unicorns, magicians and more!

How will the modern-day men and women of the world handle being exposed to the magical creations of this other land? Do they have magical abilities of their own that are dormant in the mundane world? How will the people of the magical kingdom accept their new king and ruler?

What game system would work best for this hook? GURPS/Hero are the obvious answers. Any others? I may actually take this hook and develop a campaign based on it, but I don’t know if I could talk my players in playing themselves.

Back in high school, I ran a fairly length Top Secret S/I game. The game started out as your typical spies for Orion vs. spies for the W.E.B. and everything moved along quite well until I bought the counter terrorism source book. I don’t remember the title and I’m too lazy to run down to my office to pull it off the shelf. Regardless, it was a great supplement, but it was not a good fit for the current campaign. Well, I didn’t care. I had spent my hard earned money on the book, and I was damn well going to use it.

It lead to the end of the campaign through a TPK (total party kill). All my fault, too.

What happened was the terrorists in the source book were geared towards demolitions, combat and stealth and not much else. The Orion spies were equally potent, if not more so, but they had spread their skill selections out across things like driving, flying, diplomacy, carousing, stealth, B&E, combat and a multitude of other things. While the PCs were very powerful spies, they just didn’t have what it took to take out the Bad Guys that were solely built for killing people.

I’m still very happy to own the book (I actually own every book published for Top Secret S/I), but I wish I had saved it for a different campaign with different characters that were intentionally built to be the combat specialists required to do counter terrorism in the modern age. To the GMs out there, learn from my mistake. Just because you bought a book, you don’t have to whip it out midstream in a campaign and incorporate elements into the current game. Sure, you can do that, but do it with more intelligence than what I used back in my youth.

That Cool Thing Your Character Does

When I create a character, I always examine the rules to see if I can find one or two things within the rules that I can do well. It could be exceptional movement, a special power, the right combination of skills/spells/feats/perks/flaws that make me special. I also, of course, come up with a character background that explains, among other things, why my character is so extra special in these areas. Sometimes the plan works, and sometimes it doesn’t. In a recent D&D 4e expedition, I ended up with an elven predator power druid that had a move of 8, which is fantastic. I also included many “shift enemy” powers that I thought would make me unique. It turns out that many of the other characters in the group had similar shift enemy powers, so I wasn’t extra special in that department. I didn’t have time to read all of the powers of all of the other classes, so where I thought I would be special a lot of research would have told me otherwise. I was disappointed at not being special in that regard, but that’s OK. I still had fun with the character for the short time that I played him.

Rolemaster, GURPS, and Using What You Need

RPG Blog II has some fantastic advice on using a minimalistic rule set when dealing with large, all-encompassing games like GURPS and Rolemaster. The next time I venture forth into GURPS land, I’ll have to take his advice. I’ve always swung the other direction in order to allow my players the most freedom possible in their character creation. It’s always come back to bite me in the rear. There are just too many rules in GURPS for me to memorize them all, so the game suffers as I look things up and make sure I “get it right” instead of just making a call on the fly and looking it up later. By using a scaled down rule set, I think I can run a better game.

Promises, Oathes And Pacts

I love it when my players make an oath, take a pact or undertake a promise. It gives me some level of power of their characters that they have willingly (if not knowingly) given me. It allows for great adventure hooks, increased interaction between the PCs and NPCs of the game, and gives the PCs actions some meaning other than to do the typical adventurer trope.

Using battlefields as adventure sites

I’ll admit that I’ve only been to one battlefield: Little Big Horn. While there, I was underwhelmed by the senses that I experienced since most of the battle took place away from where the tourist spot was at. While touring Europe in my youth, I did come across quite a few mass burial sites of various types (most of them from the Black Plague era) and the sensation of awe, wonder, respect, loss and grief that pervaded the area was incredible. In a fantasy setting, so much more can be found at ancient battlefields. Lost relics, undead (of course), ancient mysteries, magical items and so much more can be found littered about in the dirt. A GM of mine placed a large field of battle between us and our nearby goal at one point. I think we had more fun exploring the field of ancient dead (despite the constant harassment by the undead) than we did continuing on with our quest. Perhaps if we had made a promise or taken an oath to do otherwise….

Build Your Adventures in OD&D

It seems like most modern adventures are all about logically connecting monster A with room Y next to room Z that contains monsters B and C. Mike Mearls has some great advice on how to build a proper dungeon that will truly excite your players’ interests in moving forward through the crawl. It’s more than just monsters being turned into experience points. It’s more like challenging the players to think things through before they kick open the next door. I miss those days of true adventure instead of mindless hack and slash. Go see what Mr. Mearls has to say on the topic if you want to know more.

This is a purely science fiction adventure hook. As a matter of fact, it almost solidly lands in the space opera genre.

An unmanned cargo ship from the asteroid belt arrives at Earth’s moon to be offloaded for processing. However, it arrives completely empty. The ship’s logs show that it left with a full load of iron ore and no one docked with the ship between its departure and arrival. Any calls made to the mining operations will result in little information beyond the bewilderment of the shipping company’s employees. The PCs are hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of millions of dollars of iron ore.

What happened to the cargo? Are the ship’s logs accurate? How did the cargo magically disappear? What will the PCs find in the shipping lanes between the moon and the asteroid belt? If the PCs make it all the way to the belt, what will they find there?

When running my longest running Cyberpunk campaign for J.J., Vince, Ron and Justin back in the 1990s, Justin wanted to play an archer-type character. His character concept was one that despised guns, but he didn’t want to limit himself to just plain old arrows. Fancy, high-tech arrows didn’t exist in the game, so we came up with a handful of them. We had ones that used laser guidance from his cyber eye to give him an increased chance to hit. Others were tipped with explosives, acid vials, electrical shocks, EMP blasters and more. I remember having tons of fun with Justin in coming up with the arrows because he was very stern with himself at not destroying the game balance. There were a few that may have tipped the scales too far into his favor, but I like the concept behind the arrows. I would let him have the arrows, but at an outrageous price. I remember that he would save his Euros and NewYen in order to afford just one or two of these very powerful items.

My message to all players and GMs out there: work with each other.

As a GM allow your players to have fun with their characters, but don’t let a player use his character to overshadow everyone else. That drains the fun out of the game for the rest of the group, and this is a group effort after all.

As a player, ask for what will make your character more fun to play, but don’t try to steal the spotlight from everyone else. Yes, a character needs to shine, but he needs to do so alongside everyone else. If you come up with a great idea, try to ask for it in a manner that will not force the GM to say no, but don’t corner the GM and force him to say yes either.