[PnP] General GM discussion

[Enric]

As I'm sure I've mentioned, I've been on a real RPG kick lately. I've been thinking a lot about playing games, but I've especially been thinking a lot about running games - how I run them, how I want to run them, and what I can do to improve the play experience as much as possible. I thought we could use this thread for general brainstorming and bullshitting about our thoughts as GMs and players and how we can make our games play as well as possible.

One thing I've been thinking about is how even though it's been a little over four years since Franco, Mikey, and I started playing D&D again, it's only since we started running these one-shot games together that I've started to really examine the things that work or don't work for me in a given design or a given session. In many ways, I feel like I have a lot of bad habits and less-than-useful assumptions that I developed when I ran games as a kid, and it takes a conscious effort to break myself of those things.

For example, I loved world creation as a kid, and still do. I delighted in creating alternate histories, populating towns, engineering political intrigue, etc. That stuff is pretty great, and I think it's really important to create game worlds that feel really vivid and lived-in, but what's most important is to remember that the really valuable stuff in a game should be happening at the table. That's where the story should be, and I'm trying really hard to keep that in mind when I'm putting adventures together.

Another thing I've been occupied with is the pacing of games. I've realized that there's a bunch of things that I'm prone to that can easily create a dead time in the middle of a session, and I'm trying to be conscious of how I can avoid that. I've got a bunch of examples. In an effort to tell a more complex story, it can be easy to split the players up, and that almost never seems to work. I'm also trying to skip over lengthy monotonous stretches of in-game time - tracking something across the wilderness, a long sea voyage - but I think it can be tricky to balance that against players' desire for autonomy. Or here's another one: success/failure situations where a failure results in the game coming to a screeching halt. It's only very recently that I've started to think about alternatives to that idea - successes with complications, varying degrees of success, etc.

Anyway, that's just some shit I've been thinking about lately. What about you guys?

[Rabbit]

My friend Lucas was asking about DnD last night. He has never played and was just curious about how it even works. We spent a while talking about Dungeon Masters. Since he knew so little about it I really had to spell out my views. The DM has lots of hats to wear; we are story tellers, referees, cheerleaders, and villains. We set the tone, we regulate the rules, we encourage the players when they need it, and we beat them down as necessary.

My self-test of a how I do is whether or not the players have fun. So when I develop sessions I try to consider what kind of things I would want in an adventure.

I like to see players have, “Ah ha!” moments. So putting in a few challenges that test the players rather than the characters are great tools. Riddles, mystery plot twists, etc.

Another trick I like to use is creating a situation where the players do not think they are not going to make it. Perhaps a challenge seems tougher than it is or doing just the right thing can mean life or death. When players say, “Oh no!” but have a smile on their face, I enjoy that. This trick cannot be used to often or it loses its gusto but when used sparingly it can keep players and characters on their toes.

…Like many DMs I also have problems with epic world building. My main problem with that is I will have this idea of an epic encounter for high levels, but I will want to start the players at low levels to make the encounter that much more meaningful. Unfortunately, what can happen instead is it gets too drawn out and the plot is flat or the campaign is dropped before the epic challenges. I am looking forward to running this one shot (potentially a one shot series) with a focus on each new session. It has been a little hard so far, but I am trying not to think too hard about what’s outside the valley. Yeah, I have general ideas but I want to take it slower than I have sometimes in the past.

One last thing I want to say is that major world building can be fun and I think it certainly has its place in DMing. We just need to know when to rein it in. Before running a game I like to have an hour or so earlier in the day to meditate on the game. Not the rules but the world and the NPCs. I do not always get the chance to do this but when I do I can feel the difference. I am better in synch with the NPCs as I play them and I deliver a crisper description of the world.

Or at least I think I do.

[Rabbit]

Thoughts on Pacing-
Excessive spot and listen checks can slow a game down which is why I like the casual perception designed for 4E, and may try to use a version of it for 3.5. Just let the players know that you will let them know if they over hear anything unless they actively roll a check.

Long journeys can also drag a game out. We have all been in a game when the troll’s cave (or whatever) is three days journey from the nearest town. Say the characters get beat up in an earlier encounter and want more supplies or healing before delving deeper in the cave. But the forest is orc infested and if they don’t stay on their guard they could get ambushed. Going back and forth, setting up night watches, and marching orders is a great way to lose the players’ attention. What is the best way to GM that?

I think helping the players through their first night and asking if that will be their default practices is a good start. Not just for this encounter/session but continuously going forward. Maybe the GM can even write it down to help everyone remember it. Then in future camping travel scenarios you just ask, ‘default setting?’ and you can roll some dice behind your screen and tell them all is well. If you don’t plan on attacking them the entire journey then just do a role for the first night. Or if you want to invoke an encounter (say someone is attacked on the third watch) just skip everyone else’s roles and get to the good stuff. “The party makes camp as usual in the regular way and you wordlessly take turns at night watch. You all sleep confident that your companions are looking out for you. All is well until just before sunrise when you, Ulgar hear the heavy tromping of boots and harsh voices speaking in the orc tongue. It is getting closer…what do you do?”

The same can be said for mundane travel. Maybe give the players a day to explore the ship, train, or NPCs available then move on to the next scene. In general scenes during which a player can start looking around the room or leave the table because they think it is going to take a while should be avoided.

[edit] And players who

start looking around the room or leave the table because they think it is going to take a while

should also be avoided.

[michael]

One thing I've thought about is a campaign that's entirely based in a city. Maybe it's under attack, maybe the guards are evil, something like that. I think it would be a lot easier to keep the pacing right and add variety in that setting than it would in a dungeon.

I also imagined creating a branching path, where there are a lot of different routes to your objective, or maybe even several different objectives, but you can only take one. It could be built so that failure in one task would actually be a failure, and that path is now closed to you, but it also leads directly into your new path. Each path could be tailored to different skill sets. (Again, this is probably way easier in a populated area.) In a lot of cases, just the illusion of this is all that's even necessary, really. Success and failure can lead to the exact same result, but if the player doesn't know it then it doesn't matter. You just need to make it feel like they have autonomy.

I agree that those "Oh no!" moments when you think you're in a lot of trouble are really fun. I think it's always satisfying to fight something way stronger than you should be fighting, and win. For low levels, an encounter with some horribly injured and weakened dragon, or a tarrasque that just hatched five minutes ago could make things really interesting. (You could even make "get to the tarrasque egg and destroy it before it hatches" a little mini quest, and if you fail, you fight it.)

Anyway, those are a few thoughts I had.

[Enric]

Who are you quoting?

Yeah, I definitely feel like travel is one of the places where things can slow down a lot. If nothing's going to be happening, I think these days I'm okay with skipping over that stuff entirely - I feel like the tension of "I wonder if anything will happen" tends to be more than countered by the monotony of Spot and Listen checks and whatnot. I like your idea about setting a sort of default arrangement, though. Incidentally, what did you think about that whole skill challenge mechanic from 4E? It's definitely more abstract than I'm used to, but I like that it's a quick way of resolving stuff like that while still have some play value and allowance for differing outcomes.

[Enric]

Michael - Franco and Mikey and I actually played an all-city game once with our old group. It was a while ago, and I'm not sure what they thought of it, but I enjoyed it. And yeah, I definitely think allowing players as much latitude as possible for approaching things is one of the most important parts of running a game, but also sometimes the most difficult - for a lot of systems, the more options you present, the more you'll have to prepare beforehand.

[michael]

Yeah, I just re-read my post. That was incredibly generic, wasn't it? I kinda meant to go into more detail, give examples as they related to the games I've been a part of, et cetera. I wrote it while I was on the phone with someone, so that's my excuse for half-assing it.

[Rabbit]

I like city games and could see the fun in another one. They provide a lot of avenues to persue, but it can get complicated when players start questioning all the thing their characters can and can't do. For some reason being out in the wilds come across in a more straight forward way.

And Harry, I was quoting myself from the last line of the last paragraph in that post. A failed attempt at clever on my part.

[Enric]

Oops. Sorry, I should've caught that. I'm reading this stuff in a hurry on my breaks.

[reefwood]

I've played in city games run by Enric and Rabbit, and there are aspects of these settings that I really enjoyed.

One thing that I liked was knowing the lay of the land (once we got a session into it) and where to find what we need/want, and it all being relatively nearby.

Another thing that made it fun (but can be good or bad depending on how it plays out) was that when we did something, it had longer lasting repercussions because we were still going to be in the same place the next day and next week and so forth... so doing something awesome that people liked could get us longterm praise and reward, while screwing up could result in having to lay low and possibly close off certain avenues.

As for overall GMing, I agree that finding negative repercussions that don't negatively effect gameplay (i.e. PCs are punished but the game isn't) can be tricky, and you just never know exactly what players are going to do.

One problem that came up in the "hunting party" one-shot I ran was the gnolls. There were two main ways to handle them: 1) Pay them off, or 2) Fight them, and maybe there could have been other options if someone came up with a clever idea. Even though everyone was a hunter, the adventure was more about hunting-finding someone than killing things and the less combat the PCs got dragged into, the better off they would be. One risk with fighting the gnolls, in addition to injury, was that they could sound the alarm to warn other gnolls of the PC intruders.

The intended negative repercussion of the alarm being sounded was that when the PCs were crossing a dangerous, shoddy bridge, the gnoll reinforcements would arrive and force the PCs to either hurry across the bridge or fight on it (either of which could result in them falling through the bridge). However, the players figured out that more gnolls were coming and hunkered down waiting for them, so I think it just resulted in an extra combat right away as well as other unintended happenings down the line.

In hindsight, perhaps a better penalty would have been simply making it so the PCs lost their ability to get a good night's rest because they'd be hounded by gnolls for the rest of their time in the area. This means they wouldn't be able to heal over night, and since their were spellcasters were divine, it wouldn't have stopped them from regaining spells, so it wouldn't have been a huge penalty, but maybe they would have had to spend more spells on healing, so it at least hurt them somewhat in that department too (and not not healing and having less spells works out kinda the same as having to fight more gnolls)... and for the sake of not making the game drag, no more gnoll combats would have actually been played out. Instead, I would have merely summed up the night as having had a few attacks which didn't hurt anyone but messed up their rest (i.e. low level gnolls doing hit & runs).

[icnivad]

It's been really interesting reading through these posts and hearing everyone's thoughts.

One thing that I've always had a hard time with is the balance between detailing things out ahead of time vs "winging it". On the one hand, a complex, well defined world and detailed story arc can be a lot of fun. Everybody likes to have a good story go along with their game, but sometimes having that story means sticking with a straight-ish plot line and can cause players to feel railroaded and perhaps equally dangerous: it can cause the DM to feel lost, or unprepared if the players decide to stray from the quest. Winging it can make the world feel more open, but usually considerably less complex. The players start noticing inconsistencies in the world ("wasn't his name Jamurel last time we visited here?"). I've always wondered how much the players really notice this, though, because for them, they don't know that there's nothing behind the door until they open it. They just see the door, and assume that there's something behind it.

I think the best session I ever DM'd was when one of the players couldn't make it at the last minute, so we had a little side quest. I winged the entire thing, and we ended up having a little slipping loose in time adventure involving ghosts, and reality(future, present, and past) changing based on decisions the players and the NPCs made. The adventure ended up being really fun to DM, and I think the players really enjoyed it. There was no way I could have sat down and planned out an adventure like that. I just had to start and see what came to me as we progressed. But I'm not sure this would work for an entire adventure as the players would probably get sick of the incoherency of it all, so the balance must be somewhere in between.

On to another topic: Something I've noticed since playing from 2.0 is that D&D has gotten a lot more "rule-y" than it used to be. This is great in battle, and can be nice to get common understanding and boundaries locked in, but I think that sometimes this distracts from the story telling. If the DM wants the players to see a pair of eyes watching them from the woods out of the corner of their eye -- but when they look, there's nothing there -- in order to creep the players out, I think that the DM should go ahead and have that happen without making the players roll for it. I love strategy games, but I think it's important to remember that D&D is a role playing game, rather than a strategy game. That means that the DM can do whatever he/she wants in order to build mood and move / create a story.

Gotta run to Smith Rock now. I'll blabber more and respond to some of the other posts later.
cheerio

[Enric]

Franco - That's great. I'm really interested in this idea of consequences that don't just boil down to more combat, and I like this idea of mechanical consequences that aren't strictly dictated by game rules. Losing a chance to heal because of a couple of low-level fights that aren't actually played out is terrific - actually playing through that stuff doesn't really add anything substantial to the story that we're telling together, so why not just skim over it?

On the topic of good versus bad consequences, I think what we should actually be looking for is interesting consequences. If something bad happening to my character makes the game's story more compelling, that's what I want to happen. In that sense, a city campaign where the PCs are constantly contending with the results of their actions, for good or ill, sounds excellent.

[Rabbit]

May 15, 2009 22:08:08 GMT -5 Enric said:

On the topic of good versus bad consequences, I think what we should actually be looking for is interesting consequences. If something bad happening to my character makes the game's story more compelling, that's what I want to happen. In that sense, a city campaign where the PCs are constantly contending with the results of their actions, for good or ill, sounds excellent.

I like making characters deal with notable consequences, too. If we end up playing more games based off the one-shot I am about to run I like the idea of sculpting future adventures based on how things are played out. Since you are in a small town in a small valley your fame or infamy wont take long to circulate.

*cough* I know this is a general discussion thread but I wanted to chime that in.

[icnivad]

yeah. I like the idea of unique consequences as well. A couple games ago I had a character get knocked out, and he ended up having a worthless trinket that had sentimental value stolen from him. It ended being a good plot hook as it gave a character driven goal to get it back.

-from my phone, excuse any spelling errors

[Enric]

May 15, 2009 21:00:33 GMT -5 icnivad said:

I love strategy games, but I think it's important to remember that D&D is a role playing game, rather than a strategy game. That means that the DM can do whatever he/she wants in order to build mood and move / create a story.

Yeah, I agree with this completely. There's a lot that I like about 3rd and 4th edition D&D, but they're definitely presented as more rigid systems in a lot of ways, which in turn discourages folks from bending the rules in ways that I think they felt free to with older editions.

This is a little off topic, but it wasn't until recently that I realized there was a small but very lively play community centered on original D&D and various mutations and clones that have sprung up under the OGL. I've been visiting sites like grognardia.blogspot.com/ pretty often lately, and it's fascinating to get this completely different scene that's very much based on celebrating the virtues of a system that otherwise seems to have almost completely fallen out of favor.