Ravenous Role Playing

Ways You Can Help Your Players

There are many ways a DM can help their players without railroading them. Sometimes they get stuck going down the wrong path, or are just plain stuck without direction as to what to do next. Some DMs will just outright tell their players which direction to go, but the better ones will adopt new uses for old stand-by abilities and hint to the players at the alternate uses of their skills. NewbieDM has some great uses for some standard D&D 4e skills.

Make Your Character More Than Just Numbers

Have a player that is having a hard time breaking out of roll playing and you want them to do some role playing instead? Point them to this article and it’ll surely help the player come up with something outside the bounds of the numbers representing their character on the sheet.

DM’s Guide to Dealing With Treasure

I’m in the camp of random treasure is the best kind of treasure. It can sometimes point a game in new directions or give the players abilities outside their strengths, which will make them stronger characters. Having the players give a wish list to the GM for what they want to find just seems wrong to me. I realize that with D&D 4e this is almost a requirement because of the stated book rule that an item can only be sold for 20% of its full value. Instead of tossing out items that the players want the most as “treasure”, I’d rather see the 20% rule tossed and go back to the traditional 50% market value rule. Jonathan over at d20 Source has some other alternate systems that can be put into place to replace the “wish list syndrome” that drives me batty.

The Short Epic Tale

Not all games have to be multi-year epic tales. Honestly, most are not. It’s rare for a game to last long enough without some or most of the players losing interest. Sure, you may drop a game with the intention of “coming back to it later”, but how often do you really come back to a dropped game? Probably rarely, if ever. ChattyDM has some ideas and thoughts on the matter on how to more smoothly transition from one game to another and he writes about the problems of starting over with a new campaign and how to alleviate some of those issues.

Realms and Remembrance

I just found Jeff Grubb’s blog this week. I haven’t made my way through his archives yet, but his most recent post really made me smile… lots. Anyone that knows me, knows that I’m a Forgotten Realms whore. If TSR/Wizards ever published a book entitled, “This is the crappiest book ever, but it mentions FR”, I would be one of the first people to buy it. No. Seriously. I would. Jeff’s post about the insider information of the development and growth of FR really pleased me. It was like pulling back the curtain and looking at the wizard pulling the levers and pushing the buttons. Good stuff there.

A bored minor noble (or councilman or other government leader depending on your time period)  with too much time and money/gold/euros/credits on his hands hires a wide variety of groups of people to rescue his kidnapped daughter. There are some catches, though. First, his daughter is safe and sound at home; the entire thing is a ruse. Second, he doesn’t want the authorities involved for the usual kidnapping reasons. Thirdly, the group can’t expose the “secret of the kidnapping” to any third parties for fear they will go to the police. Lastly, each group hired (the PCs being on of the groups) does not know of the other groups and are given different hints and clues as to the last known location of the supposedly kidnapped daughter.

Each group is paid half the funds up front and will receive the other half when the daughter is found…

The noble with the “missing” daughter has agents setup all over town and reads/watches reports/videos from the agents at regular intervals and laughs at the hilarity of it all. Eventually, he’ll become bored again and will start dropping hints to some of the groups that other groups has his daughter. This will pit the groups (and the PCs) against each other until someone finally figures out what is going on and the survivors turn against the crazed, yet still bored, man.

Normally, I have some comments of my own about each link to give you my thoughts on the matter or some kind of enticement to get you to follow the link. No such thing this week. Sorry. I’m pressed for time and about to board my plane bound for home.

I promise to pick up the slack next week. Have a good weekend!

Laban Movement Types

Handling Small Gaming Groups

Tracking the players

The Tragic Imprint: Cursed Items in 4e

Always Have a Graceful Out

While I may miss my other posts during the week, I rarely miss out on a Friday Five post. I’m out of town on vacation this week (thus the lack of posts.) I have been keeping up on my RPG feeds, and have a list of 5 items compiled. I’ll be posted the links to them tomorrow just before my flight home.

See you all in the AM!

Beyond the Module

As a GM, I love running modules. It frees my creative juices up from plot, story and making encounters and allows me to concentrate on the interactions between the NPCs, PCs, environment and areas. However, there are times when the goals of the PCs do not coincide with the current adventure, or they take a left turn out of the module and things go wonky. Go check and see what Krystal has to say on the topic. Her writings echo my sentiments on the matter.

Ask The GMs: Penetrating the veil of mystery

Ever read a well written mystery and think it would be a great role playing session? Think again. It’s hard to do a mystery when there are 4-6 other people sitting around the table helping you mold the story. There are some tips and tricks to pulling it off, though. Go see what the GMs Mike and Johnn have to say on the matter.

Johnny’s Five – Five Tips For Tweaking Your Gaming Space (Plus one frigging awesome link)
Two years later…

Double-link goodness! Having a good gaming environment is crucial to keeping a session flowing smoothly. It has to be well lit, comfortable, have lots of table space, provide good seating and other factors. John, over at Gnome Stew, has five great tips on setting up a gaming environment. He also included a link (the second one above) to a forum posting with lots of images of what has to be, without argument, the best role playing environment ever. If you don’t have time for the Gnome Stew article, at least do yourself a favor and check out the images of the game room.

Savage Accessories

If you’re ever going to run Savage Worlds (or are currently running an SW game) then do yourself a favor and see what Telas over at Gnome Stew has to say on the prep, the play and the aftermath of a Savage Worlds game.

Beginner’s Guide To Homebrewing

This caught my eye because I do two types of homebrewing. The first is the beer kind, and I love it as a hobby. The second is the role playing kind, and I love creating my own systems, worlds, environments, maps, NPCs, organizations, cities, countries, etc. etc. etc. Scott has some great advice that I highly recommend for anyone attempting to start their own world instead of using a pre-published setting.

I just picked up a replacement copy of the core Twilight 2000 book at a used RPG shop last week and it got me to thinking about scenarios in which the system could be used. After thinking about and rejecting several ideas, I came back to a classic movie: Red Dawn. If you’re not sure what the movie is all about, then follow the link and read up on it. I’m sure you’ll find it very interesting.

As a twist on things, I would make the PCs as full-blown adults with military training cut off from their unit(s) and they encounter the Wolverines (the teenagers) as NPCs. I can see it being lots of fun with the “grizzled war vet” having to learn the local hidey holes and mountain routes from the “snot nosed kids” of the area. The role playing possibilities are endless from this point of view.

What do you guys think? Would Twilight 2000 (or its recent incarnation Twilight 2013) work well in the Red Dawn setting?

Back in the early 1990s, I had a couple of roommates, and one of them went back to California for a six week visit with his old friends and family. My other roommate and I decided to create our own role playing game and see what we could come up with while the other was out of town. We came up with some basic rules, basic stats, some spells many skills, and all of the other parts that go into making a role playing game. We thought we had done quite well, but we never had a chance to playtest it until the missing roommate came back into town.

We we broke out the notepads, pencils and dice we found quite a few flaws with the system. The list is really too long to go into here, but I’ll share the most hilarious one with you.

Some setup: There are hit locations in the system, and we decided that each location would have its own hit points to reflect the fact that an arm could be disabled before a person goes down for the count. We also decided that we didn’t want people to track overall HP along with locational HP. It just seemed too cumbersome. All good thoughts, but the end-result was, well, flawed. Any experienced gamer out there will see the problems right away, but we were too close to the project to notice.

The end result was a system in which a character could have their arms and legs cut off without suffering any form of death. Only if the torso or head were destroyed could someone die. Yeah. Not quite right. We didn’t give up, though. We went back to the drawing board and revamped the system to keep the hit locations, but make HP work more logically. In the end, we came up with a decent system that we actually played for about a year.

I’ve recently revisited the system on my own and totally rewritten it with a new method of approaching the dice rolls. I’ve put lots of time and math into the game to make sure it’s fair and balanced, and I think it’s a good one. I hope to get my current group into the game in the near future to see what they think of it.

Losing Control

Mike makes some great points in his post about rules, rulings, control of the situation and what it takes to have a little fun at the table. It’s hard to summarize what he said without repeating his words, so I’ll just encourage you to visit Sly Flourish and check it out.

Idea Paralysis

The post over at The Spirits of Eden asks a great question, “How do you come up with your next campaign idea?” The post made me consider how I come up with my campaign ideas, and some of the comments to the very short post are worthy of checking out as well.

Dungeon Design 101

Daniel LeBlanc’s guest post over at Dungeon Mastering has a great system for coming up with dungeons and their designs. Yes, there are some random elements in there, but I’m OK with that. Usually, I have a point to each dungeon, and I design around that point, but I leave out the “extras” that could make things just that much more fun. This method will help introduce those extra elements and make things more fun for my players.

Worth More Than Gold

I’ve really never been a huge fan of the CP/SP/EP/GP/PP method of doing banking in D&D. I accept it because it’s an easy system. There are many better systems out there that more accurately reflect history and modern times. I won’t beat you over the head with the details here since the crew from The Bone Scroll has already done such a great job explaining different methods of doing coins.

The Evolution of the Dungeon Encounter

Wimwick’s opening “scene’ to this blog post made me laugh so hard my co-workers thought I had lost what little of my mind I have left. Even if you only read the italicized opening, do yourself a favor and head over to see what is said about designing better dungeon encounters.

I watched Zombieland on Monday night, and it really inspired me to run a game in that setting. I know that many people would see the iconic pose captures as a graphic novel snippet, but when I saw the various encounters the characters went through, I found them to be more role playing related than graphic novel related. The four main characters were definitely a role playing group drawn together by common goals, and they were so distinct and different that I could see individual influences on their creation, just like PCs in a typical role playing game.

There were a plethora of skills and backgrounds used in the movie. Most of the skill checks seemed to be combat related, which fit wonderfully with a role playing session. While we all enjoy making a group, interacting with NPCs (go Bill Murray!) and having those simple conversations while on long trips, most role playing sessions seem to revolve around the next fight. In the movie’s case, the fights were wonderfully done, and I wonder if there’s going to be a sequel to the movie. It was just done so perfectly that I could see a second one coming about in the near future.

Now, the quandary I have is this one: What system to use? I really don’t like d20. I never have. Not enough skills to pick from. D&D 4e is obviously out without massive modifications and at that point, you may as well make your own system. This leaves some modern and/or generic systems to use. I could see Top Secret S/I as a possible game system. GURPS and Hero are in the mix as well. I could even see MechWarrior being used, but retrofitted to make it work in a modern world. Twilight 2000 anyone? That would most certainly fit, I think.

What about the folks out there? Gaming system recommendations for Zombieland?

PS: I know this isn’t a true adventure hook, but I was so, well, hooked by the movie that it seemed to fit for a post along these lines. If you’re curious about the plot, scenes and world of the movie, I highly recommend going to see it. Just keep the children away from it. It’s way to gory, gritty, realistic and adult for the wee ones.

While running a Vampire: Dark Ages game many years ago, the group came across a mentally, emotionally and physically broken human child. The child had been part of a Baali conversion cult, but ended up being rejected as too weak to be claimed as a vampire. The boy became a vital clue to the group for tracking down the Baali culties and vampires. The characters managed to get the boy to talk and talk he did! I became so close to the boy’s psyche and brokenness in my preparations that when it came time to role play out the child’s anguish, pain, warped mentality and horrors he had seen and experienced that I actually broke down and cried while screaming in a high-pitched voice like the child did. My intent was to not get that far into character, but it just felt so natural to me that it flowed well. (Perhaps that says a little too much about me, eh?)

The players around the table actually got so concerned for me that they broke character and asked me if I was doing OK and used my real name in the process. It took me a few moments, but I snapped out of the broken and battered head of the boy and managed to compose myself. It was at that point that the players realized how powerful and evil the Baali were. They prepared extra carefully and applied additional caution when attacking the evil cultists on their home turf. Because of my method acting, I feel they were much better prepared for the encounters and, therefore, had a greater level of success against the Bad Guys than they would have otherwise.

It was also a great deal of fun to scare the bajeezus out of the players sitting around the table.