I have family visiting at the moment, so I’m sneaking a few minutes away from them to make this post. Just the links this time around since I don’t have time to comment.
Fighting an Opponent You Can’t Beat
Rethinking Kobolds
Character Creation: The Importance Of Planning Ahead
Play Boldly
World Building 101: Campaign Styles – Part One
Ages ago, I was running an AD&D 2e game in which we were using all of the core books, all of the gray books and all of the brown books. Life was good, though my bag was HEAVY with books, dice, pencils, paper, maps, minis, wet-erase battlemats and more. The group I ran was comprised of a goblin wizard (Sartak), a human fighter (Purlas) and an elven ranger (Killdash). The party ended up getting stopped at a door that was rusted shut. Of course, the fighter stepped up and tried to kick open the stuck door and ended up with a poor die roll. Fail. Next came the ranger with the same result. Sigh. The puny little goblin wizard then stepped up and rolled spectacularly. Success!
From that time forward, he was known as Sartak the Mighty Goblin and became the leader of the group. The human and elf, properly cowed by their failures, agreed to follow the goblin and went along with him.
Despite the success of the group and the need to get past the door, as a GM, this rubbed me a little bit the wrong way. If the big burly fighter couldn’t crack the door, then why would anyone think the weaker, smaller goblin wizard could accomplish the feat? I’ve seen this a great number of times in many different role playing situations. How do you, as GMs, put a stop to this kind of dice rolling behavior? Any advice other than to flat out stop the weaker characters from even attempting the die roll?
I’m 3 days late on this one since I’ve just crawled out of my NyQuil-induced haze from a nasty head cold. The cold is better and my consciousness has returned. Time to resume blogging!
Mailbag 1 – Character Contortion
I love this post by Chris because it illustrates the dangers of a race+class+feats=character formula of thinking. It locks people into certain stereotypes that they have a hard time getting out of. This is why I’m a huge fan of skill-based, classless systems like Hero and GURPS. My own system that I’ve created is a classless system, though I do have a section on “templates” that helps give a creative compass to those people that really need a class to define their character around. In the end, if you’re stuck in a class-based system and you want to play a thief with druidic powers, then by all means write “druid” down in the class slot, and then steal everything in sight that you can. There’s nothing stopping you from doing this… except your own imagination.
How to Protect Your Elite Villains
There are as many ways to protect a villain from exposure to the nastiness that a well prepared group of PCs can bring as there are villains out there. While this post is mainly D&D 4e centric, it can apply to any system in any genre. The trick for the GM is to find the power-points of the PCs and neutralize them for a short time, or for the duration of the fight against the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG.) It’s not hard to do, and I think that many players that wish to march their characters into a challenge will find the end result more rewarding for having overcome the larger obstacles.
We all care more about things that we are emotional about. This is why debates about deeply touching ideas are always the most heated. By giving your characters a greater emotional attachment to their goals, the players will become more involved. This is something the GM can foster, but in the end, this is something for the players to really do to improve the game. I really hadn’t thought to much about the topic, and I’m grateful to Chris for posting this. I think it will help me become a better gamer in the future.
Ahh… The great quandary of role playing. The rapid advancement of PCs over a short period of time can really mess things up for a GM’s world at large. Where the mighty emperor was once the greatest wizard in the lands, now he plays second fiddle to someone that just started out in adult life just a few scant months (or weeks!) ago. How very strange this can be. This is why I’m a fan of social promotion in addition to level advancement. Not only must the players increase in their power base through leveling, they must also share their exploits with civilization and increase their social status at the same time. I’m not too sure I’m a big fan of “no XP for you until you train” because then the players will do illogical things like leave half a goblin clan alive, so that they can “cash in” on the XP at a later date when it will really benefit them. I think a good balance to this one would be to allow the steady accumulation of experience points, but not of levels until a certain amount of money and time have been spent training and practicing the new skills they’ve learned in the field.
The Cultured GM: Clothes in Gaming
I think the saying goes, “Clothes make the man.” Next time you walk past a meeting at your office and you look through the window into the conference room, look at how people are dressed. If everyone is in T-shirts and jeans, except the one guy in the suit, you know that one guy is having a job interview with some engineers. If a GM includes these types of details in their world, then it will create that much more flavor and “buy in” from the players. This, in turn, will increase the players’ willingness to suspend their disbelief and pull them deeper into the setting the GM is trying to create. It’s something I’m going to try in my next game… we’ll see how it goes.
I’m picturing this being more of a cyberpunk adventure hook, but I’m sure it could be adopted to pretty much any genre or setting.
A large biker gang of Native Americans (from all sorts of tribes) have banded together and decided they will retake what was once properly theirs. They plan on reclaiming the entirety of North America. Their plans are broad and sweeping, but not all that well thought out. Unfortunately, the PCs are smack in the middle of the initial uprising and must either decide to join the biker gang or fight them. Unfortunately, the biker gang will only take someone with at least 1/8th Native American blood in them. They have a small lab setup and some scientists doing tests on DNA samples from volunteers to ensure this is the case. Anyone that volunteers to join, but does not pass the DNA test, is given a pass for 24 hours to leave the immediate area because of their good will toward the biker gang.
What will the PCs do against a relatively large and very well armed gang? Run? Fight? Join? Hide? Lots of fun options there.
The Friday Five for this week is a day late. I had a large mid-term paper come due, and all of my writing time went into that. Enough with the excuses…. It’s time for the Friday Five!
I love learning new system. They expand my horizons and help me play the games that I always seem to fall back to. However, picking up a new game with a foreign system is always a daunting task. The folks over at The Spirits of Eden have some great advice on how to learn a new system. I’m definitely going to apply their techniques on the next new system I pick up.
Going back and changing past events is usually the arena of authors rewriting and revising their novels and short stories. However, it can be done in a game, but it has to be done the right way. Go see what Johnn has to say on the matter.
How To Be An Effective Dungeon Master
Ahh… The wonderful words of the late, great Gygax. NewbieDM stumbled across some of his writings, and did us all the favor of sharing them. I would highly recommend seeing what Gygax thought of GMing back in the day. Much of what he has to say still holds true today.
You Don’t Have The Industry Without The Hobby
The industry of RPGs started out as a hobby and bloomed from there. The hobby of gaming is still the solid foundation of the industry. RPG Blog II has some great insight and wonderful words on the topic. I wholeheartedly agree with everything said there, and instead of repeating it all in my own words, I’ll just let you click the link and follow things up.
World Building 101: This One’s For the Players
It is true that a vast majority of the world building that has to be done is done by the GM. This is an immutable fact. However, the players outnumber the GMs (most of the time) and they have some level of responsibility in helping build the world. This can come in the form of well written character backgrounds, assisting the GM in building the world and making things up on the fly (with the GMs permission.) Some of the best games I have run in the past had a high level of player involvement.
Through a series of unfortunate events, one of the PCs and an NPC have crashed into each other (walking, driving, riding a horse, whatever) and in the crash both are rendered unconscious. When they awake, they learn that they have somehow swapped bodies. The mentality of the PC is in the NPCs body, and vice-versa. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how the characters look at things. However, the NPC turns this into a bad thing for the PC. The NPC (now in the PCs body) goes on a crime spree in hopes that the body-swap is a temporary thing. Of course, when things are returned to normal (if they ever are) the PC will be on the hook for all of the evil deeds done.
It’s up to the PC and his or her friends to keep the NPC’s actions in check while they try to find a way to reverse the situation and return things back to normal.
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