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Deltasquid posted:one of the usual PC's is feeling sick and stays at home or something. It's always diarrhea.
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Mar 27, 2014 23:52
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MagnesiumB posted:A question for y'all about GMPC's. I get the general impression from forums reading that GMPC's in a party usually don't work out and I've read plenty of horror stories in different bad gaming experiences thread about really terrible ones. Have you ever seen it work out okay? The reason people are so down on GMPCs is that they are a trap for the inexperienced GM. They can be done well, but it requires an immense amount of work, effort, caution, and experience. So the first question to ask is, "do you trust your GM enough to run the game - to play their 'GMPC' as an asset to everyone else's fun instead of a way for them to have their own - respectfully and intelligently and in a way that everyone has a good time?" If the answer is not yes - and it is almost never yes, even the best GMs will fail with their GMPCs - then tell him thanks but no thanks. See, the way a GMPC usually works out is that the GM gets so wrapped up in "their" character that the fun of everyone else gets eclipsed; scenes are written so that "their" character can shine, traps are created that "their" character can easily overcome, and so forth. The GMPC may have originally been intended as support for the main PCs, but inevitably the PCs end up as support for the GMPC. It doesn't have to work that way - the best GMs can separate 'my character' from 'the game I run for people who aren't me' - but it's such an easy trap to fall into.
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Mar 28, 2014 00:09
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Wanted to thank everyone for the warzone advice. I ended up having the party take out a key dude and rescue another and everything went flawlessly. Another quick question (apologies if it's too vague. A player of mine uses the forums and I don't want him finding anything out.) If a group has a npc working for them that used to be an enemy how good of an idea is it to stab them in the backs? It's not a matter of "What can I do to destroy my player's fun" and more a matter of "This dude got in contact with this dude who hired him since dude1 is trusted by the players" Sorry if that doesn't make sense.
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Mar 28, 2014 01:10
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Do any of you run Dungeon World online in some fashion or another? I want to use it, but I want to at least see a game run with it first. If you don't have a slot open, that's okay, I'm perfectly happy just tuning in and being a fly on the wall.
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Mar 28, 2014 01:21
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Cant Ride A Bus posted:Wanted to thank everyone for the warzone advice. I ended up having the party take out a key dude and rescue another and everything went flawlessly. Yeah, do it. As long as the motivations are clear the players shouldn't mind. They will really, really hate that NPC from now on, though - so if you want him to get away then develop his plan for doing so and if the pcs can foil it legitimately then let them. The only huge mistake you could make is having him escape by DM fiat. Don't have any future DM plans that rely on your npc surviving his double (triple?) cross.
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Mar 28, 2014 01:58
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Cant Ride A Bus posted:Wanted to thank everyone for the warzone advice. I ended up having the party take out a key dude and rescue another and everything went flawlessly. It's fine as long as the PCs can do something about it. If, upon realizing they've been betrayed, they can go out and enact revenge or what have you. It's not fine if the PCs can't do anything about it; for instance, the old "ah hah you thought you performed the ritual to kill the Dread Lord correctly but the instructions were switched and now he's even more powerful than before" trick. It's definitely not fine if the PCs have been testing the guy's loyalty or what have you and he's passed every time, allowing you to establish his loyalty through GM fiat. All of which is a long-winded way of saying "it's a fine idea as long as you respect player agency."
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Mar 28, 2014 02:03
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:It's definitely not fine if the PCs have been testing the guy's loyalty or what have you and he's passed every time, allowing you to establish his loyalty through GM fiat. All of which is a long-winded way of saying "it's a fine idea as long as you respect player agency." Good thing they haven't really been testing loyalty of anyone they meet, then. I figured it wasn't a bad idea, just wanted to make sure that when they're angry they'll be angry for the right reasons.
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Mar 28, 2014 04:25
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HatfulOfHollow posted:Every experience I've had with a GM run NPC that sticks around for any length of time has been horrible. They become a sort of favored son of the GM and end up carrying the PCs through adventures. I think it's really weak and I'd rather not see them as part of the party. You can have them show up for short periods of time but the party should be the focus. Sometimes it works. I gave my party a Mimir. She had really high knowledge, but wouldn't usually give it until asked. Everyone loved Wende. Another way it works, is to give them a boss that doesn't travel with the party. If they need steering give them a way to communicate over a distance. A cell phone, a spell or a messenger pigeon, depending on the setting.
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Mar 28, 2014 04:57
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I keep getting contacted by non-goon friends new to GMing about where to get info, but I pretty much just ask my pro-GM friends and here. Someone wants to run a game in a large, first world city, preferably London, but knows very little about it. Is there somewhere I can point him to read up and get an idea of the city, in terms of public transport, design, important things of note to pad out the campaign setting? It doesn't need to be spot-on, just to give the right tone and feeling to the game, and allow him to use city maps.
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Mar 28, 2014 05:15
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I ran Buffy-style monster hunters game that was set in Philadelphia and just used Wikipedia and Google Image Search as starting points.
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Mar 28, 2014 05:26
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crowtribe posted:I keep getting contacted by non-goon friends new to GMing about where to get info, but I pretty much just ask my pro-GM friends and here. The Library?
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Mar 28, 2014 09:23
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:The reason people are so down on GMPCs is that they are a trap for the inexperienced GM. They can be done well, but it requires an immense amount of work, effort, caution, and experience. I've always been really careful with DMPCs in D&D. The trick is to strike a balance between likability and utility, and always keep them in the background. I had a 2nd Edition party with no healer one time, so I threw in a DMPC cleric. He was preaching for the god of Carpentry, and when he cast his spells to help the party out, they were always accompanied by a dumb, carpentry-related hymn. He stuck to the background mostly, except when he had to pull somebody back from the brink or buff the party, and players loved him because it forced me to sing a verse from a (bad) made-up song for them. Otherwise, I try to go the route of "unremarkable civilian except for one useful skill". So, a character who only exists to provide exposition, in the event that nobody took knowledge skills, for example. Sometimes players get fixated on a seemingly random NPC. My group last year hired a random half-orc peasant to carry their banner for 1 silver piece a day. They really latched onto her as an entity in the game world, though, and a lot of the wilderness encounters turned into, "Oh poo poo we need to protect Blurtha from these wights," which kept things interesting. I guess what I'm saying is, if you're gonna do a DMPC, just be careful not to fall into the trap of making it your Mary Sue, and you'll probably be ok.
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Mar 28, 2014 13:15
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Right now my IRL dungeon world game only has two PCs, a fighter (multiclassed into clock mage) and a cleric. They are both extremely talented roleplayers that are stellar at giving me lots of material to work with, but only having two PCs doesn't give them a huge amount of tactical versatility in solving problems. So whenever they meet an NPC that they get along with in-character I give them an opportunity to pick them up as a hireling before they go into a dungeon. How I handle these is like this - I roleplay them in noncombat scenarios and say their "lines" in combat, but for the purposes of fighting things and solving problems using the NPC's skill set, they have total control over where he goes and what he does. Also, I take special care to a) make sure that these hirelings are inferior in combat ability to the PCs, and b) give them problems that their hireling can help them solve. This gives them more problem-solving flexibility, holds them accountable for the safety of their fictional friends, but still keeps them the stars of the proverbial show. Remember that as a GM in Dungeon World, you never roll dice, and your agenda is to be the world around the PCs. So I guess that was a really long-winded way of going about agreeing with the dude above me who recommended looking into the hireling rules.
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Mar 28, 2014 19:33
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deadly_pudding posted:Sometimes players get fixated on a seemingly random NPC. My group last year hired a random half-orc peasant to carry their banner for 1 silver piece a day. They really latched onto her as an entity in the game world, though, and a lot of the wilderness encounters turned into, "Oh poo poo we need to protect Blurtha from these wights," which kept things interesting. (this is less 'things I wanted to tell deadly_pudding' and more 'things I wanted to tell everyone that deadly_pudding's comment reminded me of') NPCs that players decide are interesting for no good reason are the best NPCs - and those are the ones it's most fun to flesh out more. If the players love their half-orc standard bearer, that's when you start giving the half-orc standard-bearer backstory and personality. When you focus on the NPCs that the players are already interested in, you ensure that you're not taking up their time with NPCs they aren't interested in.
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Mar 28, 2014 22:02
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Sade posted:How I handle these is like this - I roleplay them in noncombat scenarios and say their "lines" in combat, but for the purposes of fighting things and solving problems using the NPC's skill set, they have total control over where he goes and what he does. That's what I also do for my 4E d&d game. I also "assign" melee hirelings to ranged characters and vice-versa to offer some new options. However, every hireling you add is still an action that the players didn't pick at character creation themselves, so even if they are in control it's not always the best option. But that's more of a problem in D&D than DW I guess.
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Mar 28, 2014 23:15
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Around this time last year I hosted, for the first time, a self-made D&D campaign for a month with some people who've never played the game before. After a small learning curve, everyone really got into it and my friends still discuss it to this day, so after a long break we're going to go back to it. I'm all kinds of excited to be getting back into it again, but I really want to streamline a lot of it. This is for D&D 3.5. Due to how fresh all the players were and it being my first time DMing a campaign, there was a lot of getting bogged down in looking up rules and figuring things out. I started getting a lot more streamlined towards the end with the patented "Make up a DC" and "gently caress are all these notes? Just make some bollocks up" method of DMing, but the biggest bugbear for me was combat. Combat is a slog but I'm unsure of how to streamline it. Most of my players enjoy fights, but there are one or two in the group that phase out incredibly quickly when it starts. Although I'm going to downplay it this time round, I still want combat to be a part of the game. Players never really became bored of it, but they lost focus very quickly when it wasn't their turn. I was considering just having people describe what action they want to do to their opponent, then giving them a difficulty % (Based on factors on the enemy that I would be tracking like AC, range, etc) that they could roll a d100 against to see if they were succesful, then roll for damage. This cuts out having to look up all the different stats for enemies, yet still allows them to roll some dice (Which they love doing), but there's probably some giant flaws in this method of combat, such as consistency (Particularly how combat would work when the enemy wants to retaliate: I'd have to use classic rules from my end or the players would complain the percentages are skewed) and how it'd work for casters, if at all. If there's any creative ways that people handle their combat to keep it simple I'd love to hear them. Just acting out battles would be cool but my players really love rolling dice, (Especially against each other) so I don't want to take that away from them. Songbearer fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Mar 29, 2014 |
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Mar 29, 2014 00:02
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:(this is less 'things I wanted to tell deadly_pudding' and more 'things I wanted to tell everyone that deadly_pudding's comment reminded me of') In my longest running D&D campaign, the breakaway hit NPC was a random jail guard whose only defining feature was a large mustache. He didn't even have a proper name; the players immediately dubbed him Corporal Molestache. His death in the opening adventure did more to galvanize the players against the Big Bad of the setting than any personal threat. They even tracked down Mrs. Molestache to make sure she heard the true story of her husband's heroic death in battle, and she ended up tagging along with the group to their new headquarters as a sort of den mother. PCs. What can you do.
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Mar 29, 2014 00:07
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They really do love to obsess or focus like laser on poo poo that you didn't even give second thought when preparing the adventure. It certainly keeps me on my toes.
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Mar 29, 2014 01:55
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The opposite side of the DMPC being the center of the story thing is when the players try to make the DMPC handle any social situation and make decisions for them. I don't know why they want this teenaged girl they're rescuing calling all the shots but there ya go.
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Mar 29, 2014 02:23
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Antti posted:They really do love to obsess or focus like laser on poo poo that you didn't even give second thought when preparing the adventure. It certainly keeps me on my toes. At first, my PCs were only going to use their characters for a one-off dungeon crawl. At the end, a local baker that they helped out gave them a cupcake. Unbeknownst to them, this cupcake would let them buff one of their stats by +1. One character gave his cupcake to a street dog. Whenever there is a lull in the game, the PCs start to think about what that insanely jacked dog is doing now. That dog has had some wild adventures. I'm thinking of having him come and save them at some point.
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Mar 29, 2014 16:13
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Antti posted:They really do love to obsess or focus like laser on poo poo that you didn't even give second thought when preparing the adventure. It certainly keeps me on my toes. My players do this same thing. They ended up questioning a guy working for the people they're trying to take down and after the interrogation they "hired" him to take care of their warehouse. Todd has since become one of their favorite people, so I've been fleshing out his character a bunch more.
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Mar 29, 2014 17:05
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Stupid phone and its double posting.
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Mar 29, 2014 17:07
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Writer Cath posted:I'm thinking of having him come and save them at some point. Do that as soon as you can. Or they have to save the dog in the middle of one of the dog's adventures.
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Mar 29, 2014 18:21
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RE: DMPCs The only time I've seen it work was in 4th ed D&D. And that's because it was a Lazylord reskinned as an elderly historian that needed "young bucks to clear out the riff raff" as he studied some ancient ruins. In combat the DM would just use stuff like Direct the Strike or Overwhelming Force Trap on people that were missing in combat. When another player came and rolled a Leader type the guy immediately retired to a college to do research. Most treasure hoards from then on included a random little trinket that the historian would take in exchange for quest hooks and gear upgrades("If you think this is good, there's a site up north that I hear has a giant uncrackable Dwarven Vault. Should be some good stuff there." "Some undergrad brought this +2 crossbow in from his field work. It's taking up too much space in my office.")
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Mar 29, 2014 18:42
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Yeah, LazyLords are pretty much the epitome of perfect DMPCs, (if that's not a contradiction in terms) in that they make the rest of the party significantly awesomer whilst fading into the background as much as necessary.
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Mar 29, 2014 20:51
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Under the vegetable posted:Do that as soon as you can. Or they have to save the dog in the middle of one of the dog's adventures. Do the second soon, then save the dog rescuing them (in a plausible way for a slightly enhanced dog: see Bolt for inspiration) for the climax. Seriously, your players will talk about that for years.
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Mar 29, 2014 22:26
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Songbearer posted:Around this time last year I hosted, for the first time, a self-made D&D campaign for a month with some people who've never played the game before. for casters, if at all. Buy Dungeon World. Only 2 dice to roll, and your job as the DM is simply to say "Yes!", "Yes, but..." and "Almost, but INSTEAD..." It's only ten bucks. You have ten bucks.
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Mar 30, 2014 00:28
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:(this is less 'things I wanted to tell deadly_pudding' and more 'things I wanted to tell everyone that deadly_pudding's comment reminded me of') The people I play with tend to focus on remarkably lucky animals, such as a dog in one campaign and a mule in the other (chosen by Pelor, hence the name "Pelly", frozen in stone for centuries along with my PC, and our quest went from "kill the dargon" to "Awaken the mule so it can become a Radiant Servant of Pelor" and our DM just rolled with it), who just visited ungodly amounts of violence and death upon our enemies while the melee classes just kind of flopped around ineffectually. So I was wondering if anyone had any great--nay, essential tools for for making a 3.5e campaign, because being a college student I just don't have as many hours to devote to meticulously drawing terrible maps and creating detailed encounters that I used to.
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Mar 30, 2014 00:40
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First Bass posted:So I was wondering if anyone had any great--nay, essential tools for for making a 3.5e campaign, because being a college student I just don't have as many hours to devote to meticulously drawing terrible maps and creating detailed encounters that I used to. Pre published modules can be a great source for maps. And you can remix them.
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Mar 30, 2014 01:02
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Golden Bee posted:Buy Dungeon World. Only 2 dice to roll, and your job as the DM is simply to say "Yes!", "Yes, but..." and "Almost, but INSTEAD..." Just read up on it and it does seem like a very nicely accessable ruleset. I'll give it a go! Thanks!
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Mar 31, 2014 01:20
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So I was discussing this with a friend to give a small quest to my players. The idea is that some goony guardsman is annoying a noblewoman by constantly calling her Milady and talking about how he's such a nice guy, and she asks the party to talk some sense into him. I foresee them murdering him within seconds. But this is the best part: his helmet is fedora-shaped and once belonged to Sir Neq Beird. The late knight passed away when, on his desperate search for intercourse, he tipped his helmet to a passing lady and fell off his
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Mar 31, 2014 10:44
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I just want to say thank you for the advice on my murder mystery Vampire one-shot. Much as Mr. Prokosch predicted, they came up with even more unreasonable (and cool) theories on the who and how of the murder, and I rolled with it fine!
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Mar 31, 2014 11:21
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Deltasquid posted:So I was discussing this with a friend to give a small quest to my players. The idea is that some goony guardsman is annoying a noblewoman by constantly calling her Milady and talking about how he's such a nice guy, and she asks the party to talk some sense into him. I foresee them murdering him within seconds. I'm stealing some of this for some part of my Fashion Paladin storyline. I hope you don't mind. Speaking of, does anyone have some really good repositories/sources of different kinds of puzzles? One of my players really really loves solving puzzles, and I don't want to keep throwing reflavored riddles, rune-based sudokus and the like. I did a simple logic puzzle last session that was to the effect of "there's three statues, and some dents in the statues. you have four stone weapons that seem to fit in the hands of the statues, and there's some colored gems that fit into the dents easily. here's some clues to figure out the right combo" that they enjoyed, but solved really quickly and in one try. That specific player is a Bard who doesn't roll well a lot in combat and tends to not land a lot of hits, which kind of makes her feel a little useless (even though she's good at providing appropriate healing and does way better in skill challenges). So I'd like to get her attention with more cool puzzle ideas. She also chose the "know 3 more languages" feat, so maybe I'll bust out the "figure out this cypher" puzzle I see a lot of.
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Mar 31, 2014 23:14
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SeraphSlaughter posted:I'm stealing some of this for some part of my Fashion Paladin storyline. I hope you don't mind. Not at all! Just tell us the results!
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Apr 1, 2014 16:21
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I always liked the puzzle of: Here are 10 gems/stones/whatevers. You need to make 5 lines of 4 gems/stones/whatevers with them. Sounds impossible right? That would require 20 stones? Unless they were arranged in some kind of order where they share stones... The answer being a star shape. A stone at every intersection - 1 at each point, and then where an imaginary line would cross. Excuse the use of an unrelated image for what I mean, with a gem/stone/whatever at each black dot (and one red): 
crowtribe fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Apr 2, 2014 |
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Apr 2, 2014 04:44
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On the topic of GMPCs brought up previously: I've been handling this in my Dungeon World campaign through our rotating GM system. Due to the setting requiring the party to donate a magical item to the guys running town every 3 days or get kicked out, we've been running a rotating system where I GM every third session or further if things go crazy and then we rotate the players in between running them. The players hijacked and operate a bar where they've been recruiting NPCs to hang out and work for them. For the player run sessions, I've been letting them pick one of the NPCs hanging around for me to PC. It's worked out perfectly fine so far.
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Apr 2, 2014 15:20
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Tendales posted:In my longest running D&D campaign, the breakaway hit NPC was a random jail guard whose only defining feature was a large mustache. He didn't even have a proper name; the players immediately dubbed him Corporal Molestache. His death in the opening adventure did more to galvanize the players against the Big Bad of the setting than any personal threat. They even tracked down Mrs. Molestache to make sure she heard the true story of her husband's heroic death in battle, and she ended up tagging along with the group to their new headquarters as a sort of den mother. I ran a pathfinder game last year that had a half-orc barbarian PC who coined what would be the most feared phrase in our party's experience. "HEY! WANNA JOIN MY ARMY?!" It didn't matter how the enemy responded. They were either joining up, or getting beaten down and press ganged. The rest of the party decided this was hilarious, and rolled with it, so soon were traipsing around the back of beyond with half a continent's worth of demihumans and a few outright monsters in ragtag uniforms, looting and pillaging the rear camps of an invading army that they were trying to track down and The game was -supposed- to be a quasi-Spartacus take on rebelling gladiators turned heroes, but instead they became the new big bad by accident. It was glorious. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Apr 2, 2014 |
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Apr 2, 2014 17:22
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Liquid Communism posted:I ran a pathfinder game last year that had a half-orc barbarian PC who coined what would be the most feared phrase in our party's experience. This is beautiful  Good for you for going along with it, because that sounds amazing.
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Apr 2, 2014 18:01
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This is an offshoot of "PCs do the darndest things" chat... How do you guys deal with PCs that just outright skip major events you had planned? The party I've been GMing for have been really good about investigating (and arguing about) everything. So I threw together an encounter that contained some pretty major clues to some things going on in the overall plot... and they completely ignored it. They walk into the room, see this crazy thing that's really weird and go "oh that's cool" and then leave. No investigation at all. They didn't even care. They still have some overall direction, but I feel like they're missing a major piece of the story right now. How do you guys handle this? Do you reinsert the details somewhere else or just say gently caress it and let them go along without ever discovering these details? It's not integral to them completing anything, but it's useful information that would help them understand more of what's going on behind the scenes.
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Apr 2, 2014 18:15
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HatfulOfHollow posted:How do you guys handle this? Do you reinsert the details somewhere else or just say gently caress it and let them go along without ever discovering these details? It's not integral to them completing anything, but it's useful information that would help them understand more of what's going on behind the scenes. Either make sure they find it if it's important or make sure it's not important when they choose to ignore it.
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Apr 2, 2014 18:22
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