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Man if anyone wanted to play a rapist in a game I was running they wouldn't find them selves invited next time, that's creepy as hell.
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May 14, 2013 02:01
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Mimir posted:Change "Golden Widget" to the eternally indescribable Sampo and I'm sold. IT IS ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED SIRE quote:In Finnish mythology, the Sampo or Sammas was a magical artifact of indeterminate type constructed by Ilmarinen that brought good fortune to its holder. When the Sampo was stolen, it is said that Ilmarinen's homeland fell upon hard times and sent an expedition to retrieve it, but in the ensuing battle it was smashed and lost at sea. (That is amazing, I've never heard of that before - thanks!) sebmojo fucked around with this message at 02:10 on May 14, 2013 |
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May 14, 2013 02:07
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Tendales posted:Try being less open ended. Your players just don't know how awesome making decisions is yet! Give them multiple choice questions at first. Don't ask 'What does your character want to do next?' but ask 'Does your character want to chase down Count Kevin, or go seek the Golden Widget, or something else?' Always include the 'or something else' and eventually your players will, hopefully, start thinking for themselves. Yeah, I've done stuff where I literally ask "pick one of these 5 options for The Thing We're Doing Next Session" and I get responses like "I don't know what the right answer is..?" Like,  if any of those answers were wrong I wouldn't even offer them as an option  is that not obvious?The more broad stuff has been "what would be a happy ending for your character?" and things like that. It's not particularly dependent on the setting or the plot, but some of them think it must be 
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May 14, 2013 02:57
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Right. The issue there might be as simple as giving them too much choice and how it's worded. phrasing it in the way of "this is what we're doing next session" can also be daunting because what if they do pick wrong of those five choices and they pick a choice that does not maximize the enjoyment they can get out of the game. The basic perspective is that given options pick the one which will yield a maximum return for the investment put into it. And a couple of hours a week is no small investment at 7.25 minimum wage most game sessions are worth at least two medium two-topping pizzas from dominoes.  The example of "what did the Contessa do to you that makes you want to ruin her life?" is a perfect hook to build a mod out of: It offers the players no choice whatsoever, while simultaneously making it all about what they want. However they answer that question does not change the two facts that a question like that hinges on. It does not change that the agency lies with the NPC, and it does not change that something is desired by the PC. I would suspect your players would still struggle with something that broad initially just from it being a new format: that's okay. if you have to target one player, maybe one that got the least attention that game (assuming they are interested in participating and not doing it as a nicety). Ask that one player the question to start; if more prompting is needed, give a quick overview of the contessa and the city. Still more prompting? use mad-libs as an allegory and tell her to make anything up that she wants.
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May 14, 2013 04:33
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I'm a fan of presenting 3 or 4 DW style "dangers" on the current "front" and letting the party RP out deciding which burning building to run into.
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May 14, 2013 04:53
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Paolomania posted:I'm a fan of presenting 3 or 4 DW style "dangers" on the current "front" and letting the party RP out deciding which burning building to run into. THINK FAST HOTSHOT! 1. the city is burning down! 2. the count is hunting you because you are pirates! 3. you need to find the ineffable Sampo! 4. the emperor's flagship is rounding the point! Throw in a sketch map of the city and a couple of encounters (flaming camels springs to mind for some reason) and I'd run that in a heartbeat.
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May 14, 2013 05:50
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No lie, I'm taking notes from this discussion for my upcoming Edge of the Empire game. Replace city with space station, replace flagship with star destroyer, and replace sampo with SM-P0 droid. Let's rock this.
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May 14, 2013 06:44
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After a long hiatus from RPGs I recently started DMing a 4E group, and now am trying to get the band back together and run a PBP game for the friends I started role-playing with back in high school years ago. The main problem being... where do I run it? I'm trying to find a free forum I can jump in and stumble through first time PBPing without getting eye damage from some horrible design/interface and struggling with that task so far.
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May 14, 2013 07:18
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Hobbes posted:After a long hiatus from RPGs I recently started DMing a 4E group, and now am trying to get the band back together and run a PBP game for the friends I started role-playing with back in high school years ago. If you already know everyone (as opposed to posting a recruitment thread and seeing who bites) you might just want to do it via e-mail.
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May 14, 2013 09:00
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at the worst- zetaboards is super learnable. If you can't find anything else you can throw something up there, set the layout how you like with the plethora of design choices and you grab a die rolling script. Bam.
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May 14, 2013 09:01
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Tendales posted:No lie, I'm taking notes from this discussion for my upcoming Edge of the Empire game. Replace city with space station, replace flagship with star destroyer, and replace sampo with SM-P0 droid. Let's rock this. Yeah gently caress it I'm gonna have to work this into my Mongoose Traveller sandbox, Pirates of Drinax. I'll report back.
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May 14, 2013 09:18
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Hobbes posted:After a long hiatus from RPGs I recently started DMing a 4E group, and now am trying to get the band back together and run a PBP game for the friends I started role-playing with back in high school years ago. You could always make your own free forum. There are lots of sites out there that will give you a URL and a forum with all the basic functionality you'd need. Someone already mentioned Zetaboards up above. That's an option. So is Invisionfree (and god knows how many other services provide you with free Invision software). Worst you have to contend with there is some banner ads you don't have control over. They're rarely obnoxious.
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May 14, 2013 11:07
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So during our first session, things went pretty well, but I'm quickly realizing that I need a lot of work on accents for NPCs. During the game, however, when the players came across an injured female elf scientist, one of my players started repeating the lines I said back in what can only be described as 70's-era jive-talk. The rest of the table thought this was brilliant, and Ebenese-Elven Vernacular was born. I already have ogres who talk like incomprehensible Appalachian mountain-men and a planned kobold samurai who speaks only in flowery haiku, so this doesn't seem too difficult to pull off. Are there any resources I can look at for imitating accents in general or should I just look for Youtube videos to study?
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May 14, 2013 13:15
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How do you handle character actions that take several hours to complete? For example, my players are investigating a spooky house and they decide to split up, with two of them scoping out the house itself and the other two heading to the local municipality office to dig up any records available on the house. The group doing the research would make an Investigation roll and on a success spend three hours doing research. I'm not sure how to incorporate that time spent pouring over books into the game in a fun and engaging way. Doing a time skip and saying "after 3 hours you discover blah blah blah..." wouldn't mesh well I would think when the other players are just beginning to actually scope the house out, and doing a similar thing for the group checking out the house doesn't feel right to me because I actually want them to explore it and such; I don't want to gloss over things.
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May 14, 2013 19:36
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In the future, give your players more concrete clues to work from than "you can spend three hours of downtime to learn about this"; you're not going to make spending three hours in the library fun unless you distract them from actually doing what they went there to do. Spending three hours in the library isn't super exciting in real life, either. Otherwise, distract them from actually doing research. The guy at the records office, he's really fishy, he's really obstructive. He's kind of weird. A lot of these records are redacted. This isn't going to cut it. Did that guy just walk off with your laptop? Heart Attacks fucked around with this message at 19:49 on May 14, 2013 |
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May 14, 2013 19:46
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Upmarket Mango posted:How do you handle character actions that take several hours to complete? For example, my players are investigating a spooky house and they decide to split up, with two of them scoping out the house itself and the other two heading to the local municipality office to dig up any records available on the house. The group doing the research would make an Investigation roll and on a success spend three hours doing research. I'm not sure how to incorporate that time spent pouring over books into the game in a fun and engaging way. Doing a time skip and saying "after 3 hours you discover blah blah blah..." wouldn't mesh well I would think when the other players are just beginning to actually scope the house out, and doing a similar thing for the group checking out the house doesn't feel right to me because I actually want them to explore it and such; I don't want to gloss over things. Oooh that's a great question. Any time the party gets split is sort of a problem, but operating on different time scales is particularly annoying. One way of handling this kind of thing is to intersperse scenes of scoping out the house with individual facts gleamed from the research. This still isn't particularly engaging for the Team Research but it does let you juxtapose creepy facts about say, the den, while Team Explore starts poking around the den. Another is by contract - just don't allow it. If you want all 4 people to explore the house at once, tell them you want them to explore it all at once. Probably the most jarring approach, but what I'd do in a one-shot. In this case, consider waiting until the research is complete, but compress the time so people don't feel like as much IG time has been eaten up. Another way is to interrupt Team Research before their research is complete - preferably just as they reach something juicy. Sure, maybe you didn't originally plan for Corrupt Cop to come harass Team Research at the library, but it might be a good way to let them know they're getting on to something while also pushing them towards Team Explore and keeping them engaged. I guess what I'm saying is that the answer varies a lot from situation to situation. e: ^^ In practice rules for, "Spend 3 hours, learn answers" are actually really boring and I don't know why RPGs include them. They're a quick and dirty way to unveil the Plot Device but it's really dull without some conflict involved.
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May 14, 2013 19:52
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Upmarket Mango posted:How do you handle character actions that take several hours to complete? For example, my players are investigating a spooky house and they decide to split up, with two of them scoping out the house itself and the other two heading to the local municipality office to dig up any records available on the house. The group doing the research would make an Investigation roll and on a success spend three hours doing research. I'm not sure how to incorporate that time spent pouring over books into the game in a fun and engaging way. Doing a time skip and saying "after 3 hours you discover blah blah blah..." wouldn't mesh well I would think when the other players are just beginning to actually scope the house out, and doing a similar thing for the group checking out the house doesn't feel right to me because I actually want them to explore it and such; I don't want to gloss over things. Have something happen at the office. I have an insane librarian who gives the party history dumps on things they want to look up (and recently gave them drugs). The information filing system he uses, that only makes sense to him, is also why the party can't just go rooting for things themselves. And explains that if they roll low, but later get a chance to investigate a similar topic and roll high, why they suddenly get this new information. For example, send the exploration party out of the room, and have the research party see how long it takes them to discover $horrible_secret about the house that might result in death or harm to the explorers. Trip to office + research time + flying back to spooky house = time it will take before they can warn their fellows. The two players exploring then encounter lots of things that might activate the bad things related to $horrible_secret, watch the investigation party get aneurysms as they can't warn their fellows about what's coming. For example, maybe there is the ghost of a librarian who lived in the house. So the exploration party encounters lots of things that make noise. Or there is a weakened spirit that feeds on blood, so lots of sharp things everywhere.
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May 14, 2013 20:05
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P.S. STILL COMPLETELY DEVOID OF MERIT
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Upmarket Mango posted:How do you handle character actions that take several hours to complete? This is where you have to take some creative license in order to balance out the focus of gameplay, which is tough whenever you have a party that insists on splitting up all the time. It is a sucky GM move to summarize one group's investigation by a single roll then cut to another group for an elaborate encounter that takes an hour of real-world time. When my parties split up, I try to make both branches as interesting as eachother and do fairly rapid cuts between the parallel scenes to keep everyone involved in the game. The secondary scene doesn't even have to be all that tense and can perhaps clash in tone with the overlapping action elsewhere (for instance it could be a farcical comedy of errors). The important thing is that it is keeping players activated and creating opportunities for memorable moments. In your case, this might mean turning the research portion into an encounter with some NPCs that you pull out of your rear end combined some form of search-the-stacks mini game. After the explorer group clears a room and move towards opening the next door, jump-cut with a "meanwhile, back at the musty library ..." and have some quirky NPC confront the players, or have them roll a die and make up positive/negative results to go with. With the rapid scene cuts you can easily mete out research clues at a pace that matches the investigation of the house. Another awesome thing you can do with this technique is to cut after a character in one scene has committed to an action, jump to the other scene to reveal something dangerous about that action, then jump back and have the character complete their action / roll dice, etc. The trick is you want an information leak that increases the tension for the players in the opposite scene (by revealing danger) after the decision point where they could have avoided the danger (and without an information leak that gives them knowledge about how to handle the danger). For instance, player A declares "I open the green box!", GM interjects "As you reach in towards the box, we cut back to the library ... character B is scanning through some tomes when you come across a passage relating details about the emerald enclosure of enigma, player B roll to see which nasty effects you discover about its curse.", player B rolls some dice and picks some nasty consequences from some options given by the GM, GM returns to player A "back in the house, character A grasps the lid of the box and cracks it open ... player A rolls for nasty effects!"
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May 14, 2013 20:05
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So basically introduce some form of conflict for Team Research to keep them actively engaged. That seems so simple I can't believe I didn't think of it myself! A corrupt police officer would work wonderfully as well. The story involves a cult doing dirty deeds in the house and having a member of said cult acting as a mole on the police force would certainly add an interesting layer to it all and could create interesting conflicts for the group as a whole. The quirky librarian and jump cuts between the two groups are also great ideas that I will most certainly make use of. I'm new to this GM thing so for the most part I'm doing things by the book as I get a feel for it so I minimize my chances of messing up horribly but this was really helpful and great advice. You guys rock 
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May 14, 2013 20:25
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Whenever possible, cut the scenes together. Last night I ran two heavily split-the-party style encounters. One was our party's steamboat vs a pirate ship, and I had the following intersections occur: *The Artificer spotted the enemy ship too late; its cannons blew open the Storm Mage's cabin. The Artificer then used a magnetic-field glove to draw the anchor on the enemy ship, slowing it down before it rammed the player's boat. *The Doctor stormed the boat, intent on grabbing the helm. This caused counter-boarding (where the Artificer and Markswoman teamed up). *The Ranger swashbuckled her way onto the deck, but only partially succeeded, knocking over team's Doctor. (The doctor had bellyflopped onto the deck after flubbing her own roll). *The Storm Mage created a huge gust of wind, knocking the down pirate ship into the waves...nearly knocking the ship over. This caused the doctor and ranger to almost slide below deck...The Doctor tied a rope around the ranger's ankle. The ranger would have her cat cut her loose, then flip acrobatically to the floor below. *The Storm Mage was ambushed by her arch rival, who she eventually smashed backwards, through the railing of the steamboat...and onto the gunnery level, landing right at the feet of the ranger. --- Later on, the party was infiltrating an office building. The Markswoman met her long lost love (the receptionist) and flipped out; the rest of the party snuck into an elevator. At the 26th floor, they spotted their adversary, but argued one of them should get to escape and confront him before he pushed the down button. The one who rolled the highest was the morally nebulous Doctor. The villain promised her a lab, corpses, and a bag of platinum to ignore the party, and she did. Meanwhile, the Markswoman and the receptionist made out in an elevator, slamming into all the buttons. They stopped at every floor and spied the villain. The rest of the party (who never exited the elevator) found the line had been cut. The party was split three ways, but I made sure to cut between them rapidly. *The Markswoman saw the Doctor supposedly betraying the party *The party and the Markswoman decided to try the stairwell, since the elevators weren't safe *The Ranger discovered a plot point while the Artificer and Mage searched elsewhere *Everyone saw the Markswoman's old flame as he was thrown down the center of the stairwell...
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May 14, 2013 20:42
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Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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May 15, 2013 01:45
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Well the campaign takes place in Massachusetts at the tail end of 1920. The players are hired by the Massachusetts Historical Society to investigate a Spooky House with a long history of death and disappearances. The house was purchased by the Society with the hope of turning it into a tourist attraction, given the history behind it. The Society had originally sent one of their scholars to go through the records at the house and to oversee renovations, but two members of the construction crew were murdered and the scholar disappeared. Now under scrutiny, the Society hires the players to go to the house and figure out what had happened. The house is indeed haunted by ghosts, who are trapped there by a cult that is using the misery of the ghosts in an attempt to summon a dark eldritch god to the mortal plane. I hadn't planned on it but I could go full on Shadow Over Innsmouth and bring the whole town in on it. That would certainly open things up and create all sorts of potential conflict should the players decide to split up and explore separately.
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May 15, 2013 02:46
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Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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May 15, 2013 19:25
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Sorry to pester the thread again with questions: Has anyone ever had any success using puzzles in their games? I'd really like to know what worked and what didn't. Every time I try I run into the block of the puzzle not being obvious enough and my players just being utterly stumped. Though I've usually done handout style puzzles with number squares and cryptograms, which may be an indicator that I am in fact a bad GM.  Maybe I'm just not tricking their minds into puzzle mode?
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May 16, 2013 00:11
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Quantumfate posted:Sorry to pester the thread again with questions: Has anyone ever had any success using puzzles in their games? I'd really like to know what worked and what didn't. Every time I try I run into the block of the puzzle not being obvious enough and my players just being utterly stumped. Though I've usually done handout style puzzles with number squares and cryptograms, which may be an indicator that I am in fact a bad GM. Don't come up with a solution to your puzzle. Give the players a situation, and let them work their way out of it. If there's only one solution then they have to play "Guess what the GM was thinking," but if you don't have a direct solution you can take what they come up with and run with it.
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May 16, 2013 00:14
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TheAnomaly posted:Don't come up with a solution to your puzzle. Give the players a situation, and let them work their way out of it. If there's only one solution then they have to play "Guess what the GM was thinking," but if you don't have a direct solution you can take what they come up with and run with it. Putting the players into situations and watching how they get out of them is fun. That's the best type of puzzle. But little direct puzzles are fine too, and add a nice change up to a game. I've done a few that have worked out well for my game. A good example of indirect puzzles is I gave the party a greater cursed item called the Robe of Impracticality. Everything in the robe is basically a graphic adventure puzzle-solving item. None of the items are mandatory, but using the items creatively can save the party a lot of hassle. For example, there is a ring of the roach king that summons a swarm of roaches, the players used it get rid of evidence. The trick is to not actually have anything they MUST use at a specific time. There needs to be multiple ways around something. Direct puzzle-wise, I ran a library where every door was a puzzle. But the puzzles were things like dots on a sheet of paper, which were arranged properly to be musical notes. So they had to whistle the tune. Another was "Under the door are the letters arranged ab ab cd cd ee, there are ten underscores beside each letter, the odd letters have a small up arrow over the blank space. They figured out it was a rhyme scheme and wrote a sonnet. Other things that worked out well were simple puzzles like Simon. Quickly name a bunch of different colors and open the door if they succeed, have them take a dice or two worth of damage if they fail. A sentence long code that can be configured using cut up letters worked well for me too. What you want to avoid, I've found, is video-game type puzzles, where different things need to be moved into a certain order and buttons need to be pressed in an order. Those really bog the game down, and are confusing to all parties when you have no image to work with, only words. For other direct puzzles, the poem in Tomb of Horrors is pretty brilliant. Just adjust the severity of failing a puzzle to whatever type of game you are playing. Spheres of Annihilation and Soul Trap aren't really acceptable by modern RPG standards. God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 01:04 on May 16, 2013 |
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May 16, 2013 01:00
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Unless your players enjoy puzzles, I'd just avoid them. Or give them another (more difficult/dangerous) way through.
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May 16, 2013 01:26
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I'm playing a D&D 4E campaign with airships and the party almost has enough gold to fix the Goblin Pirate Ship they captured and the Duke allowed them to keep. They got registered as the owners, have the right to trade everywhere in the Seven Duchies, etc. There is trouble brewing in the East, so they expect plenty of smuggling, taking soldiers on raids, boarding enemy ships while escaping Gnolls, etc. Does anyone know if there is a system with information on how to run such a ship? I want to give them the option to plate it with armor, install a harpoon or crossbow-like turret, maybe some shielded railings they can hide behind, etc. The ship is suppose to grow with them, but I can't really figure out how to balance it.
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May 17, 2013 09:06
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sebmojo posted:Unless your players enjoy puzzles, I'd just avoid them. Or give them another (more difficult/dangerous) way through. This, I think. Puzzles shouldn't be an encounter in and of themselves, they should be a way to make an encounter more interesting. There was a fun one I did where the tiles in a temple were trapped (but not lethally so), and the trapped ones were decorated with kings who had broken the religion's moral code (which they had learned earlier), and the safe ones showed good kings. A history roll let the players remember what a king did, but they had to figure for themselves if it was something the religion approved of. They had to cross the floor while fighting off temple guardians with ranged attacks and knockback.
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May 17, 2013 09:41
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One kind of puzzle that I felt I used successfully was an optional one which promised a reward. It was the kind that you find in a lot of Zelda games: push and pull a bunch of statues around a grid on the floor or align the mirrors to let the sun-beam (laser) bounce around and hit a target. The players liked it 'cause if they got frustrated or bored, they could just move on. Yes, very video-gamey and ruins "IMMERSION" but we've always been casual role-players and thus we gave no fucks.
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May 17, 2013 13:35
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I once ran a puzzle in 4e which I built an elaborate prop for; it was a series of combination locks with strange symbols and an associated riddle. It was required, in order to move forward; but getting more of the riddle correct before trying the door resulted in less punishment and eventually, reward, if enough was entered correctly. There were several relevant skill rolls that made the attempt easier (a hard Thievery check to immediately get one of the combinations correct, a Moderate History check to recall a variant on the same ritual from local text, etc.)
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May 17, 2013 14:37
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Mendrian posted:...There were several relevant skill rolls that made the attempt easier (a hard Thievery check to immediately get one of the combinations correct, a Moderate History check to recall a variant on the same ritual from local text, etc.) This part in particular is excellent advice! Not just for puzzles, but any sort of encounter: letting different skills do the job, but in different ways.
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May 17, 2013 15:16
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Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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May 18, 2013 03:35
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So here's a dumb/vague question. (D&D 4e) Any advice for integrating new PCs into an existing campaign? I started off with 9 players, currently have 3.5 of them left, and I have another 5 new people who have expressed interest, ready to jump in. Is it worth the effort, or should I just begin a new campaign? It seems like it might be fun to just form a party of new players, have them begin with their own starting point and then eventually conglomerate with the existing party, but I dunno how feasible that is. Does anyone have any anecdotes from a similar experience?
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May 20, 2013 09:29
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P.d0t posted:So here's a dumb/vague question. (D&D 4e) I cannot imagine running for 9 people in the first place. The time between turns must be staggering. Integrating new players isn't hard, though. Typically you'll want to start them out with the exactly the same amount of XP as the rest of the party to minimize headaches, or at the same level if you aren't using XP. There's some formula for starting items that should provide them with just enough money to keep up with the item curve. As far as shoehorning them into the story, I'd rather have a big, awkward plot kludge to get the party together ("I see your party is lacking a Mage. You seem trustworthy. Let us be the best of friends.") than risk the group dancing around the issue for several games. The party usually wants to be together, so they can start their grand adventure. One full game establishing relationships is usually more than enough.
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May 20, 2013 14:50
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Hell I can hardly imagine running for 5 people. If you're comfortable with that group size, more power to you of course. If the new players are new to RPGs or D&D, I'd consider running a separate session for them to get to grips with the system and learn basic concepts/strategies.
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May 20, 2013 15:07
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Yeah, only the first 2 sessions ran with 8 or 9 people; it's mostly been 4-6 people at a time, with everyone rotating in or out. We ran about 15 sessions so far, the last being a tutorial-ish non-story invested trial combat for a couple newbies. I like having a large pool of players because everyone is always "part time" so it makes it easier to flesh out a party every session when you have 1.5 or 2 parties worth of PCs to draw from. The downside is if you make a story hook or side quest specifically for 1 player and they aren't there for key parts of it, that tends to suck. I'm thinking I'll treat the new players as a pre-existing party (do some group "party identity" exercises as part of char-gen) and drop them in to rescue the (diminished) existing party from a deadly battle; I was planning to have an NPC party do the same thing, so I'd just be subbing them out. e: and yeah I'm starting all the new PCs at the same level as the existing ones, with items as per the DMG. Most of them will be using Inherent Bonuses, too P.d0t fucked around with this message at 01:26 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 01:21
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I'm fairly new to GMing, so I'd like to hear some thoughts on an idea I've been toying with. Lately I've been enjoying playing with Dungeon World, but I was thinking about a campaign where the PCs got to use their non-combat skills more frequently. Inspired by Crusader Kings II, The Tudors, and the more intrigue parts of ASOIAF, the players would be a few heroes who've been knighted for partaking in a grand campaign against a kingdom-wide threat. Instead of accepting land, the PCs have taken minor positions at the royal court. The players will decide the reason why, but I hope to see the kitchen sink of Renaissance plots: naked ambition, heresy-spreading, treason, wherever their creativity takes them. My first question is, what system should I use? I enjoy Dungeon World, but is it too adventure-driven? The physical stats won't play as prominent a role as the mental stats. A friend suggested I go systemless. It's an interesting idea, but I don't know if my storytelling chops are good enough to make the GM fiat seem coherent. Or I could use DW's general philosophy to make behind-the-scenes ad-hoc calculations for contests, keeping a personal list of variables while providing the players with qualitative assesments (eg. "Your presence at court is marginal." "You have blackmail material on the minister.") Any thoughts? Is it too ambitious a project to start from scratch?
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May 22, 2013 23:27
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Burning Wheel does social combat really well (I remember a Song of Fire And Ice game ran in it where I played an elderly nun schoolteacher. The character felt plenty 'powerful'). P .dot, the question of "Why are there so many adventurers" is important to address from a setting perspective. How many people become adventurers? How do they get quests? Who hires them? I decided that all PCs were members (or would soon become members) of the Adventurer's Guild. The Guild takes a cut of profits and handles overhead, gives out missions, and handles mail services for characters. (Once the players grew comfortable with that, I had other organizations manipulate and attack the Guild; but basically, if someone was wearing a Guild Pin, they meshed well with the party.) Another way to mesh is to use bonds: this isn't Random Adventurer #86, it's the Artificer's old schoolmate! They haven't seen each other in forever! Doing this gives a secondary benefit; the new player will have a built-in link to the party ("Hey man, remember when we used to throw rocks at ballywogs?" instead of "Uh, so what's being a wizard like?")
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May 22, 2013 23:56
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Caufman posted:I'm fairly new to GMing, so I'd like to hear some thoughts on an idea I've been toying with. Lately I've been enjoying playing with Dungeon World, but I was thinking about a campaign where the PCs got to use their non-combat skills more frequently. Inspired by Crusader Kings II, The Tudors, and the more intrigue parts of ASOIAF, the players would be a few heroes who've been knighted for partaking in a grand campaign against a kingdom-wide threat. Instead of accepting land, the PCs have taken minor positions at the royal court. The players will decide the reason why, but I hope to see the kitchen sink of Renaissance plots: naked ambition, heresy-spreading, treason, wherever their creativity takes them. REIGN, maybe! It's got a heavy emphasis on social stats, and managing nations or companies.
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May 23, 2013 00:07
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