Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Roundtable #5: GMing Weakness

Another month, another GM Roundtable post.

The Game Masters' Roundtable of Doom is a meeting of the minds of tabletop RPG bloggers and GMs. We endeavor to transcend a particular system or game and discuss topics that are relevant to GMs and players of all roleplaying games.

If you'd like to submit a topic for our future discussions, or if you're a blogger who'd like to participate in the Game Master's Roundtable of Doom, send an email to Lex Starwalker at gamemastersjourney@gmail.com.

This month's topic comes to us courtesy of Marc Plourde:

There are many different skills that come together to make up a GM. The ability to think on the fly, knowledge of the rules, plotting, etc. What skill do you think is your weakest? What have you done to try and improve that skill? What advice do you have to offer others trying to improve that skill set?

I will start off my response to these questions by saying that I've been racking my brain trying to figure out exactly what my GMing skills are in the first place, let alone which ones I'm weak at. GMing is the intersection between improvisation, story telling, description, and referee/arbiter. These categories can then be unpacked into a myriad of subtopics (e.g. improvisation of names and/or dialogue).

I guess my biggest flaw as a GM is that I have a limited range when it comes to campaign, story, or adventure "types." I always tend to run grim campaigns, punctuated by fun, which revolve around players "following" a series of encounters. These tend to be fantasy or action games. I do not/have not run straight horror (e.g. Call of Cthullu), never touched a White Wolf game, and I've never run a "story game." Though I've played in a variety of games, I tend to GM only a narrow range of structure.

The major reason for this style stagnation is that I tend to avoid games or styles that I've never experienced before. This tends to exclude a lot of games from being considered. I think part of this is GMing preference; I've spent a lot of time figuring out my GMing role/duties for principally D&D-like RPGs, so games that really mess with the PC-GM relationship can be hard for me to wrap my head around completely. This leaves me only considering more traditional games like D&D-likes, Feng Shui, Dark Heresy, WFRP, etc.

I've tried to break this habit many times. I own and have read a few "story games," but I tend to worry that I won't be able to capture that games "experience" correctly. Which is a fairly absurd statement to make, as I consider all RPG experiences where everyone had fun are "correct." My standard reason for not playing the game is that "I want to play in a game first and see how someone else runs it." I've found this a lot harder than expected as it tends to be that if you've found a system you want to play, 9 times out of 10 you'll be the one who has to run it.

I should probably consider reading blogs and articles that deal specifically with how to run these types of games. Topics similar to describing the nature of prep, rules specific considerations for spotlight sharing, example GM table notes, and set-up/experience buy-ins. These are my biggest concerns as they represent the basic design constraints inherent in my games.

Maybe this should be my project for the next month+. Pick a more avant garde RPG, read the rules, read some advice articles/blog entries, and run a one-shot. I'm considering Primetime Adventures as I got my Kickstarter copy a few weeks ago, though I'd be open to more suggestions if people have them.

Here are some other blogs participating in the forum.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

A second encounter

A while ago the D&D Adventurer's League ran a contest for new writers. I did the excercise but never submitted my encounters. I figured I'd at least share my notes. They might not be that clear, but hopefully they provide a cool look into how I think about encounter design. This encounter is primarily based on experiences I had while on vacation in southern Italy. Here is the second of two.

Viterome's Potions and Poisons

The shop is nestled between the desert dunes on a solid rock platform. A few small wind eroded spires and crags rise from the rock. The shop abuts the crags, partially carved directly into the stone and partially built out of stone bricks and old, weathered wood. Two short flagpoles stand next to the entrance. Small, purple triangular flags hang lifeless from the poles. Two skeleton guards, spears in hand, stand motionless in front of the entrance.

Inside, a very old manticore lounges on a large red daybed with various gold, blue, and other colored pillows. It sits like a cat upon the bed, its bat wings folded, and its scorpion tail wrapped around itself. The stinger sits menacingly next to its massive front paws, gently swaying back and forth. Its multiple sets of razor sharp teeth glint obviously in the candle light. Grey tufts of fur are peppered through its otherwise red mane.

When a potential client walks in, the manticore will lazily open its eyes and introduce itself as Viterome.

The back of the shop, partially covered by an opulent screen, is a small alchemical laboratory and shelves of various potions, oils, unguents, powders, solves, and all other manner of valuable wares. Three skeletons move around, tending to experiments and rearranging goods. These skeletons will also present the various goods offered for sale.

Standing next to the day bed is a skeleton holding a medium sized cage with a few rats inside. At his leisure, Viterome will occationally open the cage, take out a rat, and with a great flourish toss it into the air and catch it in his terrible mouth.

Two other skeletons stand to the left and right of Viterome's day bed, spears in hand, prepared to defend their master.

Negotiation is an important aspect of dealing with Viterome. To average customers, he presents a very standard yet heavily marked up product list. If the customer is able to impress or haggle with Viterome, he will present an additional list of rare and potentially illegal potions, unguents, poisons, and more. Additionally, his reaction to the PCs has major effects on price.

Negotiating with Viterome. Default check is Persuasion (Charisma), but player creativity should not be ignored. - DC 5: price x2, no special list. - DC 10: price x1.5, no special list. - DC 15: price x0, special list (no discount). - DC 20: price x0.5, special list (no discount).

Friday, April 10, 2015

Encounter at la Cattolica

A while ago the D&D Adventurer's League ran a contest for new writers. I did the excercise but never submitted my encounters. I figured I'd at least share my notes. They might not be that clear, but hopefully they provide a cool look into how I think about encounter design. This encounter is primarily based on experiences I had while on vacation in southern Italy. Here is the first of two.

la Cattolica

La Cattolica di Stilo, my major inspiration for this encounter.

A ruined temple is perched on a ridge that looks over a fishing village and the sea. The temple dates from when the sea level was much higher, reaching almost to the temple itself. It is one of several ruins that dot the hills along the coast. The temple is in a traditional cross-in-square design dividing the temple into nine bays. There is one entrance to the temple which faces the road to the west. There is a narrow ground level window on both the north and east sides. Three small windows face to the south, looking towards the fishing village. A dome covers each of the corner bays as well as the central bay. The walls are made of light brown-red bricks with white mortaring and is approximately 30ft per side.

Age and lack of repair has caused the temple is be partially collapsed: one of the bays has completely collapsed with rubble covering the ground and another bay is missing its dome. The four columns at the intersection of the different bays still stand strong. (Note: columns provide 1/2 cover).

Standing on a small raised platform in the middle of the central bay is a bronze statue of a human, approximately 7 feet tall. It is missing one of its arms.

Riace bronzes, my inspiration for the statue.

An overgrown path runs from the temple to a nearby road that cuts through the hills between the fishing village and another village specializing in olives. There is a clumsy spiked pit trap (passive Perception (Wisdom) DC 10) hidden on the path leading to the temple. Visible from a distance (Perception (Wisdom) DC 15) is a thin plume of smoke rising from both next to and from within the temple.

A group of orcs have set up camp in the ruins. Four orcs are sitting around a small camp fire, cleaning their weapons or cooking food. They are only passively keeping watch. While they are not actively looking for a fight, they will attack anything they perceive as a threat while calling for the group in the temple.

Inside the temple are 2 more orcs accompanying an Eye of Gruumsh. The original shrine in the temple has been converted to one of Gruumsh. A captured, unconscious elven noble is held prisoner by the Eye of Gruumsh.

If the temple is searched, a successful Perception (Wisdom) DC 10 reveals the broken arm of the statue in the rubble of the missing bay. It is holding a spear. Reattaching the arm to the statue causes a secret switch in the statue to be activated, causing a series of mechanical grinding noises. Slowly, one of the flag stone moves to the side revealing a secret passageway wide enough to fit a human. To find the secret door without the aid of the statue is a DC 20 Perception (Wisdom) check.

Monday, April 6, 2015

PCs and the killing there of

So recently I started participating in the GM Roundtable of Doom blog ring/discussion. In it, a bunch of blogs all post about the same topic around the same time in order to understand the breadth of experiences people have had and new ideas on how to better run your own games.

The Game Masters’ Roundtable of Doom is a meeting of the minds of tabletop RPG bloggers and GMs. We endeavor to transcend a particular system or game and discuss topics that are relevant to GMs and players of all roleplaying games.

If you’d like to submit a topic for our future discussions, or if you’re a blogger who’d like to participate in the Game Master’s Roundtable of Doom, send an email to Lex Starwalker at gamemastersjourney@gmail.com.

This month's topic comes to us courtesy of Lex Starwalker.

There is a wide spectrum of lethality in RPGs, and there are GMs who fall on every possible point within it. These range from GMs who run campaigns where PCs can never die to the other extreme—GMs who delight in killing PCs. Where do you fall on this spectrum? How lethal are your games and
why? How do you handle PC death if and when it happens?

Over the years, my games have grown a reputation of being deadly, grim, and taking place in be-shitten worlds. And for the most part, I'm inclined to agree with this.

I'll just go back as far as mid-way through undergrad, so about 7 years ago. I was running an episodic Iron Kingdoms game where the players were undergoing a perilous quest to save the world from some existential threat. The catch being that they all had to sacrifice themselves in order to truly imprison the horror for another long period of time. The campaign wasn't deadly but instead created a very dark and grim attitude where death was inevitable. I consider that campaign my first major foray into my current style.

Subsequent campaigns have slowly ratcheted up the deadliness. I remember that I started almost gleefully killing PCs in my RAW tactical minis/rogue-like Fantasy Craft game, Myths and Legends: the story of the Pimps at Sea. It was a really glorious campaign, where player death created the roleplaying tensions mid-combat. The players were heroes fighting against almost impossible odds in order to shape the world to their liking. They raised armies, united the races in a region under a single confederacy, became pirate kings, and invaded and conquered another sovereign state with an army of brass automatons, pirates, and orcs!

One of the many ridiculous battles from Myths and Legends: the story of the Pimps at Sea

Effectively, the true possibility of death made the players always feel like they were earning their victories. This worked particularity well in a system like Fantasy Craft because it is rules heavy with an emphasis on multiple kinds of damage and resistances interacting together with the PC's large set of abilities. I don't really play this style of rules system any more, but I would really enjoy bringing this larger than life experience back to the table. Possibly with Barbarians of Lemuria/Heroes of Hellas.

Another over the top battle up the steps of the enemy capital (Myths and Legends).

Henchmen are my secret for increasing the lethality of the campaign without ever killing the PCs. I like to make up weird and silly henchmen, give them personalities, make them fun for the players to interact with. Then I kill the henchmen. Brutally and mercilessly . And I describe it. This way death is always real and lurking around the corner. No PC may actually need to die, but beings they knew and cared about did and they felt it. One of the best examples recently was in Planeatary Express when I killed the PCs' employer Balial. I was hearing grief about it from my players for weeks! It was awesome.

In terms of dealing with actual character death in a game, I like to make sure there is an "in world" plausible reason for adventures/scoundrels/couriers/etc. to exist. I attribute a lot of the success of my Planeatary Express campaign to that. The PCs had jobs that required that they were adventurers.

Similarity, one of my most lethal campaigns Dungeonship the premise was that the players were all people traveling to a new colony across the sea in order to strike it rich/escape something/see the new land. New adventurers were constantly arriving from the home country and the main town was set up with an Adventurer's Guild and all the basic adventuring needs. This helped with introducing new PCs on the fly. For example, the new character might already be in the dungeon or is new in the tavern 'cause they just arrived off the boat. This also meant that it was really easy to hire henchmen.

Here's a list of other blogs in the GM Round table

Friday, April 3, 2015

Wrapping up campaigns

Planeatary Express recently wrapped up. The campaign lasted approximately one and a half years in real time, however we only met rarely for the last 6 months. The campaign had an episodic delivery service structure, where the players served as employees from the Planeatary Express courier company.

The adventures varied greatly, with the players visiting almost every Outer Plane or its corresponding Gate Town. It was a great voyage that tended to veer towards the silly or over the top, though with some amazingly powerful emotional turns surrounding the owner or Planeatary Express Balial and the mad scientist/murderer Valran. I consider it one of my more successful campaigns.

The last Planescape session. Notice the Acheron poster!

It is always strange to end a campaign. A lot of emotions and desires build up, and as a GM you're trying to deliver the perfect closing experience. It just comes up so rarely because most campaigns tend to die by about the third session.

I've been lucky and been able to successfully begin and end multiple campaign. A simple strategy I've used to get experience accomplishing a complete campaign is designing campaigns with limited life spans. For example, I would only run 10 week campaigns. This was exactly the length of a quarter at my undergrad university.

Because I tend to design episodic campaigns, I initially struggled with figuring out a satisfactory way of providing a satisfactory ending. What tends to end up happening is that I create a negotiation scenario with the PCs. Try and figure out something that bothered them about the world or their previous adventures that they wouldn't mind going deeper in to. Most of the time I can intuit what this is, but some times I have to ask the players to go along with me in order to actually end the campaign. The latter of these has really only happened when the campaigns had to end because I was moving countries.

Do you, reader, have any ideas about how to best end a campaign?

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Game Masters’ Roundtable of Doom: Evolution of GMing style

I'm taking a stab at the Game Masters' Roundtable of Doom. I'm not completely in the "circle" yet but my friend Darcy suggested I give it a shot.
The Game Masters' Roundtable of Doom is a meeting of the minds of tabletop RPG bloggers and GMs. Every GM has his or her favorite system, but in these articles we endeavor to transcend a particular system or game and discuss topics that are relevant to GMs and players of all roleplaying games.
If you are a blogger, and you'd like to participate in the Game Master's Roundtable of Doom, send an email to Lex Starwalker at gamemastersjourney@gmail.com and supply the URL of your blog.
This month's topic comes to us courtesy of Scott Robinson, who asks, "How has your gaming and/or GMing changed over time?"

To start off, let's cover my general gaming background. I feel that the games you've played in really impact both what you like to play in and what you like to run. Most of the PCing experiences were one-shots.
Timeline based on first appearance. It isn't the most impressive list, but it is mine. Also included is if I've ever PC'd or GM'd that game.

Advanced Fighting Fantasy (PC)
BECMI/Red Box (PC/GM)
3.X (PC/GM)
- Iron Heroes (GM)
- Iron Kingdoms (GM)
Feng Shui (GM)
Fantasy Craft (GM)
Lif's Children (friend's super "story"-style game; history, secrets, desires, fears, and trust type mechanics) (PC)
Dark Heresy (PC/GM)
Call of Cthulhu (PC)
Rogue Trader (PC)
Dark Dungeons (GM)
Star Wars Roleplaying 2nd Edition Revised and Expanded (GM)
Labyrinth Lord w/ advanced companion (GM)
Mountain Witch (PC)
Dungeon World (PC)
Pokemon Tabletop Roleplaying (PC)
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition (GM)
- Planescape
Numenera (PC)
Honor and Intrigue (PC)
Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition (GM)
Dark Heresy 2nd Edition (PC)
The Strange (PC)
Lamentations of the Flame Princess (GM)

Changes: how would I characterize how my GMing style has changed over time? Here are 5 general ways I can tell where I've experienced the most change.

Structure: The way I brainstorm and plan my campaigns has gone through a lot of different phases. Early games were mostly built around a simple map and a missing or totally linear storyline that would be completely destroyed by my high school buddies. Then, I switched to concept campaigns that were really focused on producing a specific experience. This was part of my Fantasy Craft phase which involved rather constrained worlds. The story and roleplaying moments took place in the heat of combat or during the "cut-scenes" between different adventure options. The current phase is geared more towards sandbox-like games. Using a more pointcrawl/abstract approach to maps, I set up a bunch of 1 page adventures that are distributed in space. This way the players have a lot of options, but I'm always prepared while not having to describe every hex.
Rules: From the beginning I've always taken a mixed approach to the rules. Early on, the rules were more an interpretation of what was written down rather than what was actually written down. Over time, the raw rules became more and more important. This culminated with my Fantasy Craft campaigns, which were as RAW as possible with full on 3-D battle mats. After that, I've kept that general attitude though I've shifted to almost only running lighter rules systems which is reflected in my use of OSR systems. This way I actually use the rules, but there are so few rules that I don't have to ignore any of them. It is wonderful.
Tone: With each subsequent campaign, one thing has really started to take root and become the norm. In the beginning, my campaigns were obviously derivative. Slowly, I started trying to branch out. Now, in general, my campaigns are dark in tone but still lighthearted. This means that the world is terrible and beshitten and the PCs aren't going to be able to change that. Instead, they try to improve their personal position while telling a lot of jokes and having fun despite the horror of their surroundings.
System choice: As time has gone on, I've become more into changing systems with every game. This means that there isn't a standard system. I used to play only 3.X/OGL derivatives. This was partially because it was the only books I owned and because it made it very easy to find people to play with (a common story). With more and more time, I've just wanted to try more and more systems. System choice is a really important part of preparing for a new game.
Scene: In the beginning of my GMing tenure I started by planning whole campaigns with multi-adventure arcs. Now, I don't do that anymore. At all. Now, I just write a series of potential scenes or interacting parties. While at the table, I just riff off of these notes to try and get the PCs from scene to scene. I also like to bring a lot of random tables to the table. It makes the while thing more fun for me as the game is still a "game" for me. This also works very well with the pointcrawl/abstract style of sandbox design; each of the points is a written up scene or set of interacting NPCs. Hopefully I'll show some examples of this soon.

What do you all thing?
Here are some other blogs participating in the GM roundtable:

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Musings on future campaign ideas

As probably many of you do, I love to contemplate potential future campaign/one-shot set ups. Currently, I'm mulling about four different ideas. Two of which I've already made enough notes to run the first few sessions of. Here are the four different ones with their short elevator pitches.

Blacksand!: My tribute to 80's British RPGs. Drawing on having Advanced Fighting Fantasy being my first experience with RPGs, the game is set in Blacksand, the Pirate City. However, instead of Blacksand being in the AFF world, it is actually in the Wasteland/Boarder Princes/Old World from the Warhammer Fantasy IP. Uses Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition rules set.

Map of Port Blacksand. I've a large, laminated copy.

Purple Mists on the Sword Coast: Another concept/tribute campaign, this time to weird fantasy. This is a hybrid game between "standard D&D" and Narcosa. Set in the Forgotten Realms (Baldur's Gate specifically) using the 5th edition D&D rules. The Forgotten Realms and Narcosa planes are merging and the region is changing dramatically as Narcosan incursions start disrupting everything.

Blood on the Sand under a Dark Sun: Working title. Greek myth infused Dark Sun. Set in the city of Balic and using the Barbarians of Lemuria/Heroes of Hellas rules system. Slave armies, ship-to-ship battles on the silt sea (with maybe a Giant showing up), surviving the desert journeys. Really trying to capture that grim action adventure tone of Dark Sun.

Untitled Project #8: Love letter to the mega-dungeon. PCs were captured by an ancient monstrous dragon trying to steal from its treasure. Instead of eating them immediately, the dragon has stuck them deep within its labyrinth/cave network of secrets, traps, and danger. The players can go free if they can survive long enough to find their way out. No finished thoughts on system yet, but the imagery will draw heavily of Piranesi's Carceri series.

7th of 16 plates

What campaigns have you been planning?