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Harrow posted:Yeah, having a map will probably be helpful for both me and my players. Get Pirates of Drinax and steal the gently caress out of that poo poo. It's free, awesome, and full of great space game tidbits. Including a basically drag and drop haunted space station mission.
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Oct 7, 2014 09:15
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Usually I keep the majority of my DMing notes in my head, because I keep changing stuff without adapting the notes anyway. This time I decided to externalize every goddamn thing I have in mind for the immediate future and ended up with two pages of notes on locations and NPCs. Stats and maps don't even enter into that yet. I feel strangely empowered.
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Oct 7, 2014 17:45
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My Lovely Horse posted:Usually I keep the majority of my DMing notes in my head, because I keep changing stuff without adapting the notes anyway. This time I decided to externalize every goddamn thing I have in mind for the immediate future and ended up with two pages of notes on locations and NPCs. Stats and maps don't even enter into that yet. For my planned STALKER campaign I've created a weapon list that is still incomplete and at 111 pages. I haven't actually statted out the weapons; I just have it as a reference so I can pull out any interesting firearm (especially less well-known European stuff like the Orita submachine gun or variants on the AK-47 like the Zastava M70) without just recycling the same stuff from High-Tech and the computer games over and over for dozens of people. I'm likewise making documents detailing my interpretation of Zone culture, the various areas in the Zone, mutant stats, and the unique items and food you're likely to find.
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Oct 7, 2014 17:50
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Every player will now swear off guns, and obsess over knives, guaranteed. You might be hitting overkill a touch on the gunporn regardless.
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Oct 7, 2014 17:57
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petrol blue posted:Every player will now swear off guns, and obsess over knives, guaranteed. You might be hitting overkill a touch on the gunporn regardless. It's not really about the gun porn for the players. I just really like a lot of the stuff that comes out of Europe (especially Russian stuff; they have a ton of things that are pretty common over there but almost totally unknown in the West like traumatic pistols) and I find it more interesting to add little quirks to what people are carrying instead of just saying "He has a Makarov and an AK-74" over and over. Creating stats for them is really quick, so I'm not stopping gameplay for five minutes every time someone buys a gun. I'm putting the same amount of detail into every part of the setting, simply because I really like the potential the setting has and I don't think it's something that can be entirely expressed through computer games. It's a campaign for STALKER fans to play and sperg over, not just something I foist on random gamers who I expect to have the same interests as myself.
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Oct 7, 2014 18:07
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My Lovely Horse posted:Usually I keep the majority of my DMing notes in my head, because I keep changing stuff without adapting the notes anyway. This time I decided to externalize every goddamn thing I have in mind for the immediate future and ended up with two pages of notes on locations and NPCs. Stats and maps don't even enter into that yet. When I do anything like that, writing my poo poo down, it's a surefire way to get my players to unknowingly avoid everything that I've written down.
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Oct 7, 2014 18:09
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Got a whole two paragraphs titled "if party avoids all this bullshit"  Serious DMing tip regarding that: I got one "what's your character's goal" thing from every player specifically so I'll always have something they'll be sure to pursue. And that's how I explained the request to them as well.
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Oct 7, 2014 18:14
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My Lovely Horse posted:Got a whole two paragraphs titled "if party avoids all this bullshit" That's clever. You could also ask "what does your character love, and what do they fear?" for a similar effect (since goals will generally come from one or both of those).
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Oct 7, 2014 21:24
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Those are good questions and if you know the answers as a DM you can definitely use them to insert some hard choices or great moments, but to keep things going on a basic level I think they're a little abstract. When I say "goal" I mean I sat my guys down and said, the campaign is taking place in this kingdom, it's an entirely blank slate so far - what did you come to this kingdom for? Current example: one player came up with "I have a deal with this dragon that I keep selling him princes, but there was a revolution, and the last one escaped here." A few months into the campaign and the revolution has become a major background factor in the setting, and for the time being, I can point my party anywhere I like just by saying "the prince is there" because I know for a fact one of them will push for getting to the guy, and I can place all kinds of unrelated minor adventures on the way (or ones related to someone else's personal quest). For a group less concerned with keeping up appearances the question might as well be "so what's your MacGuffin?" e: this comes off as a little manipulative but in my experience with this lot, when I give them a sandbox they ask "what's in the sandbox" and if I'm gonna have to answer that it might as well be something they're actively interested in doing. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 21:45
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A friend and I are trying something as an experiment and it seems to be working so far, though it may be working too well. We are Co-GMing a 3.5 game as well as building a world for our players at the same time. When we write a full adventure. It can be single session or multi session. We are free to use plot points or characters from each others adventures as well. When the adventure is over, the other GM has the option to do another adventure or pass the torch to the other guy. It does end up being a bit episodic at times, but it has worked well for building an overall story. We are also playing with a drop in/drop out idea or characters. Most of us are having issues committing to a full time game. So we had the idea that we shouldn't try. Basically we are keeping levels equal across the board and players play when they can. So somebody who is from out of town can drop in every 4th or 5th game and still contribute without dragging the party down. If they have to stay home and watch the kid and miss a session or two, no big deal. Or if a friend wants to try the game out they can jump right in. When I say it has worked too well I mean we are now fairly consistently having a large group. A few nights we have the standard 4 players, most game nights thought are upwards of 8. This is the first time either of us has DM'd such a large group, and I more than him are having a harder time adjusting encounters appropriately. He tends to have more RP style of game play with very little combat. I tend to go more for the creepy mystery style with a lot of skill checks and combat. The problem I am running into is I am having to pull some punches because of mistakes I made while re-balancing the encounter i had planned. I guess the question I have is what is the best way to adjust encounters for large groups? Some of the encounters I can adjust by adding a few more monsters, but I have a final encounter planned with a solo boss that is going to be too easy with a group of 8, but if i bump its ECL up to what the party is at, it starts to get a few one shot abilities.
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Oct 8, 2014 16:45
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I would not do a solo boss for a party over 4. Add mooks, add summoned monsters, create havoc on the battlefield where only a portion of the party can access the boss to damage him at a time (pits, traps, break line of sight with walls, ongoing aoe effects (fogs of various kinds), darkness, etc). Give the boss defensive spells like mirror image, regeneration, or slight damage reduction. With some of my groups of 6 or 7 if I let the entire party get a shot off, especially if they can surprise the boss (which I only let happen due to some amazing stealth rolls) they can take out a boss far in excess of their level in one round. The boss almost took down one character but couldn't do anything else. The boss in that encounter was a dragon - I had it's mate swoop in and try to kill the party immediately after, and it died in two or three rounds. Basically be careful and be canny - large groups are deadly to your creatures, and far more so if that creature doesn't have allies to rely on or enough levels to deal with the party trivially - in which case why bother.
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Oct 8, 2014 20:08
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What I've found with solo bosses is that having them fight multiple party members tends to result in one of two things happening: 1. The party overwhelms it with concentrated fire and good tactics and turns it to mulch. 2. The GM, trying to prevent this, makes the boss so powerful that it starts to be a one-hit-kill threat and players need to avoid getting hit entirely.
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Oct 8, 2014 20:18
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What if the boss splits and is actually 2 bosses, one blue one that is tough to hurt, and a red one that hits hard. And/or they both wear amulets that regenerate the other? Or something? Only way to kill them is to kill them both at the same time. So once the bosses know the players know this, they run off in different directions, making the party split? Or make it so that a genie or whatever will allow 4 champions to fight this monster, but no more. If they figure out a way to bypass this and the boss is a pushover, hey, that's their reward. Great job, guys! But if they don't, still give the players on the "outside" a way to help or contribute. Have them come across some runes or heiroglyphics or puzzles that will tell them the boss's weakness. Then they have to convey that message to the fight team. These might be terrible ideas, but maybe interesting?
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Oct 8, 2014 20:31
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Another possibility is a multi-phase boss fight. Like after x number of hits (ignore damage) he runs off to a different arena with a new gimmick and possibly the boss attacks/takes damage in a different way, forcing the party to rethink its tactics. You can combine all of these, too.
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Oct 8, 2014 20:41
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chitoryu12 posted:For my planned STALKER campaign I've created a weapon list that is still incomplete and at 111 pages. I haven't actually statted out the weapons; I just have it as a reference so I can pull out any interesting firearm (especially less well-known European stuff like the Orita submachine gun or variants on the AK-47 like the Zastava M70) without just recycling the same stuff from High-Tech and the computer games over and over for dozens of people. How do you come up with 111 pages of weapons? I assume you're using GURPS High Tech to start off with (which has 123 pages devoted to weapons from 1730 to the present day), but where do you go from there? I saw that you mentioned that there's some unknown fire arms in the game and in that area, but 111 pages? That seems like a lot.
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Oct 8, 2014 20:43
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DocBubonic posted:How do you come up with 111 pages of weapons? I assume you're using GURPS High Tech to start off with (which has 123 pages devoted to weapons from 1730 to the present day), but where do you go from there? I saw that you mentioned that there's some unknown fire arms in the game and in that area, but 111 pages? That seems like a lot. I think he just printed out a list of every possible gun you can get in Borderlands.
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Oct 8, 2014 20:47
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Hmm. Current fight is with a vampire. Maybe add some dominated townsfolk that have a few class levels. Or could add some spiders ir other vermin. Edit: I like the idea of a multi-staged encounter, ill have to play with that blackswordca fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 21:03
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DocBubonic posted:How do you come up with 111 pages of weapons? I assume you're using GURPS High Tech to start off with (which has 123 pages devoted to weapons from 1730 to the present day), but where do you go from there? I saw that you mentioned that there's some unknown fire arms in the game and in that area, but 111 pages? That seems like a lot. I didn't just make up a list of guns and call it a day. While I didn't do up full stats for everything, each gun gets about a paragraph of information that sometimes lists very similar variants that aren't dissimilar enough to be worth a separate entry (like for the AK-47 its entry also includes stuff like the Type 56 and Romanian AIMS as throwaway lines, but the Zastava M70 has enough differences and is prominent enough to justify giving it more detail). It also indicates the rough chances of finding each one and suggestions of which factions you could expect to be using them (like Duty and Freedom, being major paramilitary organizations, are more likely to have modern assault rifles and support weapons like machine guns and rocket launchers while the random Loners wandering around are more partial to inexpensive .32 to 9x18mm pistols and hunting rifles/shotguns). A few of them are also specified (as a GM note) as being unique to the Zone and existing effectively as a special loot item, like a particular Duty officer having an MP412 REX revolver that never entered mass production. The list isn't finished, mainly because it's just something I've been working on in my spare time instead of dedicating hours to the project. It also excludes a lot of weapons that are well-known but would never plausibly be in the area (like a Vickers machine gun is pretty famous but you're not gonna see one and it'll probably be unloaded if it even appeared) in favor of stuff that was mass produced in Eastern Europe but is virtually unknown elsewhere, like traumatic pistols (I did do up damage calculations for the 9mm replicas) and various military arms unique to former USSR/Warsaw Pact countries like the Polish AK variants. I'm changing the weapon balance from how it is in the game to favor what I find to be a more interesting and realistic list, with locally produced arms taking precedence. I've generally excluded prototypes and really rare or obscure stuff, and I've dumped anything uninteresting (like I don't have an endless list of every cheap .22 pistol that you could get illegally for fifty bucks). chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 21:33
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chitoryu12 posted:I didn't just make up a list of guns and call it a day. While I didn't do up full stats for everything, each gun gets about a paragraph of information that sometimes lists very similar variants that aren't dissimilar enough to be worth a separate entry (like for the AK-47 its entry also includes stuff like the Type 56 and Romanian AIMS as throwaway lines, but the Zastava M70 has enough differences and is prominent enough to justify giving it more detail). It also indicates the rough chances of finding each one and suggestions of which factions you could expect to be using them (like Duty and Freedom, being major paramilitary organizations, are more likely to have modern assault rifles and support weapons like machine guns and rocket launchers while the random Loners wandering around are more partial to inexpensive .32 to 9x18mm pistols and hunting rifles/shotguns). A few of them are also specified (as a GM note) as being unique to the Zone and existing effectively as a special loot item, like a particular Duty officer having an MP412 REX revolver that never entered mass production. Are all of these guns really distinctly different enough in a game that isn't using GURPS Tactical Shooting to warrant 150 pages of write up? I mean, I am in no position to tell you what to do with your spare time, but a lot of this could easily be handled by a simple list of campaign available weapons with links to their wikipedia entries.
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Oct 8, 2014 23:06
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You like this in and of itself, yeah? If you like it that much, put that much effort into it, and your players are into it too, you should make it the centerpiece of your game. Open a store in the Zone. Sell guns to stalkers, buy artifacts and salvage, take commissions from outsiders and hire stalkers for jobs. Basically, be all Recettear in the Zone. "Capitalism, ho!"
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Oct 9, 2014 01:28
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8one6 posted:Are all of these guns really distinctly different enough in a game that isn't using GURPS Tactical Shooting to warrant 150 pages of write up? I mean, I am in no position to tell you what to do with your spare time, but a lot of this could easily be handled by a simple list of campaign available weapons with links to their wikipedia entries. The lists (not only weapons but also things like anomalies, artifacts, mutants, items, the setting info, etc.) are basically GM's notes to use as a guide. The players themselves are handed much less information that's only relevant to what they need right now. Like for character creation, I ask them what they're looking to start off with and I give them suggestions from there. If they go shopping for new stuff, they only get some info on what the merchant has to offer. They're not going to be handed 120+ pages and told to peruse it before we begin. quote:You like this in and of itself, yeah? If you like it that much, put that much effort into it, and your players are into it too, you should make it the centerpiece of your game. This is the important part here. It's not exactly a campaign that I'm going to spring on a bunch of random gaming nerds and expecting them to go with it. It's a campaign to play with people who expect to play a crunchy, gritty, and difficult experience with a focus on detail and plenty of options for customization and world building.
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Oct 9, 2014 02:55
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Have you already decided on a system? If nothing else, you should look into Twilight 2000 for more ideas in this vein because it's basically checking off all the points; Eastern Europe, check; post-nuclear apocalypse, check; long weapons lists, double-plus super check. They had several splats full of weapons. There was even a Halloween splatbook full of more sci-fi campaign ideas. As for gritty, well, supplies and disease are big problems, but on the other hand if you rolled really well during chargen, you could start as an ex-special forces Colonel with enough nerve gas to wipe out the rest of Poland.
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Oct 9, 2014 04:08
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Rockopolis posted:Have you already decided on a system? If nothing else, you should look into Twilight 2000 for more ideas in this vein because it's basically checking off all the points; Eastern Europe, check; post-nuclear apocalypse, check; long weapons lists, double-plus super check. They had several splats full of weapons. There was even a Halloween splatbook full of more sci-fi campaign ideas. I was planning on using GURPS, as I'm really familiar with the system and thus it's easy for me to quickly work with.
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Oct 9, 2014 13:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:Thanks for all the token/counter advice, guys! I bought my washers yesterday, gonna try making some of them this week. By and large I use the Adventure Fractal. If Doctor Princess is nailing those medicine rolls, that just means she's passing boosts over to other people because she's succeeding by so much.
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Oct 9, 2014 19:55
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Glazius posted:By and large I use the Adventure Fractal. I'm really happy you posted this. This is a much more elegant way of doing this than I have been trying to do. Thanks 
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Oct 9, 2014 20:46
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I am using the FATE build of Dresden Files for a bunch of really experienced players who don't terribly love the system much. We built the city, characters are under construction, the whole thing has a very Lovecraftian feel. What are the common pitfalls of FATE?
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Oct 9, 2014 22:44
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When I ran it, it took me ages to get used to compelling the pc's aspects regularly - having a cheat sheet of everyone's aspects somewhere obvious helps a lot.
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Oct 10, 2014 01:48
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I've found the trickiest thing about Fate to be explaining that you should decide what you want to do, and then make a roll. I love Fate, but it's been challenging getting my players to think in more abstract terms. Mostly because my players look to the things explicitly stated on their sheets for what to do next (D&D, GURPS, I'm looking at you). Also it may be possible to overapply the Bronze Rule, that anything can be represented as a character. There are good examples of what should be given the character treatment somewhere around the Fate megathread. fake edit: The Fate Point economy takes some getting used to, having a tug-of-war between sweet Invokes and
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Oct 10, 2014 01:56
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petrol blue posted:When I ran it, it took me ages to get used to compelling the pc's aspects regularly - having a cheat sheet of everyone's aspects somewhere obvious helps a lot. This is my common issue, as well. Zephirum posted:I've found the trickiest thing about Fate to be explaining that you should decide what you want to do, and then make a roll. I love Fate, but it's been challenging getting my players to think in more abstract terms. Mostly because my players look to the things explicitly stated on their sheets for what to do next (D&D, GURPS, I'm looking at you). This is also a thing I've noticed. D&D veterans will often want to brute-force problems, where FATE really wants them to take a step back and make a plan first. I have a guy in my game right now whose character has a Contacts-related problem, and a really poor Contacts skill level. He doesn't try to set up any Advantages between attempts or really even apply his own Aspects by way of Invokes at the time. He just makes his Contacts roll, fails by like 3, and shrugs. Like, repeatedly. I wonder if I should give him a deadline. In general, it's sometimes difficult to get players to think in game terms, especially outside the current moment. They might not want to probe for Advantages when they could just be taking immediate action, or they might want to horde their Fate Tokens. Both of these result in frustration when they can't overcome things you set up to be challenging without suffering some pretty dire setbacks. I think that, so far, the best moment of the campaign was when I forced them to make some preparations by using a setpiece Challenge. In order to progress at one point, they had to cross a ravine. I told them that they could talk out a plan with each other, and then we could break the plan down into several steps. Then, each player could take one action toward each step. They ended up hotwiring an abandoned vehicle, building a makeshift ramp from a nearby fallen billboard, and then tried to Dukes of Hazzard across the ravine. Due to the results of their various rolls along those 3 actions, they made it across the gap, but then had to struggle to safely escape their vehicle, which was teetering over the edge on the other side upon landing. It was a really good scene, with some tension and action, and overall a successful outcome.
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Oct 10, 2014 13:49
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fosborb posted:Oh I'm dumb. The correct answer is a modern retelling of Algernon Blackwood's The Wendigo. Duh. This was the correct answer, FYI. It was my first time running Dread -- I've been trying to get this damned game on the table for 4 years and the stars finally aligned last night. The premise: old college buddies drift apart and 10 years later get together again for an adventure camping trip in Minnesota's Boundary Waters in early October (off season). They awake on the forth night to the screams of their guide being mauled. I lifted significantly from Beneath the Full Moon. I adjusted the age of the characters, the setting, and the creature feature. The themes were survival, keeping the guide alive, and the Wendigo hunting them. The Wendigo was great because it's not a very well known myth. Lots of room to adjust "powers" and descriptions on the fly without making players feel cheated by red herrings. I did more prep than I usually do. In part because it was a new system, and also a new genre for me. Questionnaires. Lots of room for notes on these but they were hardly even glanced at once completed. I think that's the power of the questionnaires; you can get into a character's head quickly and not need to refer back to a sheet. I'd keep the autopsy diagrams though -- I think they helped set the mood that not everyone was going to get out alive. Beneath the Northern Lights. The second column of the first page was reserved for all of my notes on the characters. I did refer to these constantly. When a player hands you "My greatest fear is dying alone" you have to remember that 2 hours later when they're tired, frayed, a little drunk, and the only one on watch in a blizzard and they see something move at the edge of their vision. Scenes marked with a star were key scenes that I had to hit. Other scenes were more circumstantial or could be cut for time. Cold, blustery wind became a central feature of the Wendigo's foreshadowing, so the Snowstorm scene became essential. By the final confrontation it was complete white out conditions. If you ever need wilderness maps, PaddlePlanner is kick rear end. This was the area characters were in. I did more mood setting than I've ever done for a game. Cats were locked up (for obvious tower-related reasons), we took down the standard folding tables and had a little black Ikea end table in the middle of the room with the tower. There was indirect lighting from behind the seating area, and I had a camp lantern behind me (so I could see my notes, mostly). There was also a dying lantern next to the tower. It went fully out (completely coincidentally) at the end of narrative's first night. It wasn't dark, dark, but the room was dim and focused entirely on the tower. I ran two youtube videos together and on repeat for the entire night. An ambient horror track and howling wind. The volume was set fairly low, but after three hours it was really effective at catching the tension and not letting the players off even if they didn't want to look at the tower. Holy poo poo, Dread. By the time the session was over everyone was wound up very, very tight. Some players were refusing to even look at the tower while others pulled. With the narrative blizzard plus three hours of howling wind, two players were physically bundling up/feeling shivery cold. Two character deaths were heroic sacrifices by intentionally knocking over the tower. They did it because it "felt good." I think it was cathartic just to have that bit of control again even if it meant not being a part of the game going forward. Also, and this is in the book, but I cannot emphasize enough how effective it is to quietly remind the player what's on the line while they pull. We spent about 20 minutes after the game to talk through how it went just to give people a chance to unwind. On escalating the situation. Dread is paced differently than any other game I've ran. You look to the clock for general time concerns: does Act II need to be extended?, etc. But in terms of what scenes you throw at characters, you're really looking at the tower and players. Here was my guide: By the end of Act I, the tower should be rickety and players should start to intentionally fail pulls. By the end of Act II, someone should die and the tower needs to be reset. In Act III, do not throw a final confrontation/climax until the tower feels close to collapse. If every pull has a character's life on the line, the encounter itself will be a life or death situation. Very simple, but I'm not used to gunning for PC blood so I needed this to remind me to not let up.
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Oct 10, 2014 15:15
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My Lovely Horse posted:Usually I keep the majority of my DMing notes in my head, because I keep changing stuff without adapting the notes anyway. This time I decided to externalize every goddamn thing I have in mind for the immediate future and ended up with two pages of notes on locations and NPCs. Stats and maps don't even enter into that yet. Rotten Cookies posted:When I do anything like that, writing my poo poo down, it's a surefire way to get my players to unknowingly avoid everything that I've written down. Yeah, I wrote down an abandoned-space-stationcrawl for my Eclipse Phase group with the intent of editing and packaging it for mass consumption (Still haven't done that), and it felt great getting it all out on paper, but they completely ignored the section of the station with all the enemies in it. On an entirely different note, I feel like I'm having a problem with ruthlessness. My encounters feel too easy, like the PCs are just traipsing through. This is especially true with anything where a single skill check (diplomacy, hacking, occasionally a really good damage roll) winds up completely nullifying the greatest threat I envisioned in the encounter. To use the space station as an example, one encounter would, if forced into combat, make use of a number of combat-capable robots. During the course of the still-peaceful encounter, the hacker managed to completely subvert the robots without alerting the system to her presence, resulting in the only threat from the encounter now consisting of unarmed and untrained people. Too easy is definitely better than too hard, and my players all say I'm doing a fine job, but I feel like I should be providing more of a challenge.
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Oct 10, 2014 20:08
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Dareon posted:On an entirely different note, I feel like I'm having a problem with ruthlessness. My encounters feel too easy, like the PCs are just traipsing through. This is especially true with anything where a single skill check (diplomacy, hacking, occasionally a really good damage roll) winds up completely nullifying the greatest threat I envisioned in the encounter. To use the space station as an example, one encounter would, if forced into combat, make use of a number of combat-capable robots. During the course of the still-peaceful encounter, the hacker managed to completely subvert the robots without alerting the system to her presence, resulting in the only threat from the encounter now consisting of unarmed and untrained people.
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Oct 10, 2014 21:31
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Dareon posted:This is especially true with anything where a single skill check (diplomacy, hacking, occasionally a really good damage roll) winds up completely nullifying the greatest threat I envisioned in the encounter. I remember a recommendation from GURPS, a good adventure has both combat encounters that can be avoided, and unavoidable combat encounters. As for making things too easy, some encounters can feel more challenging to the players than the GM. I had a game recently where they came through the fight without serious injuries, but felt it challenging because of the lengths they had to go to to avoid serious harm.
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Oct 10, 2014 21:54
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Dareon posted:Too easy is definitely better than too hard, and my players all say I'm doing a fine job, but I feel like I should be providing more of a challenge. Jackard posted:Sensing the same problem with my last few sessions of 13th Age. Already using 150% encounter budget, and wondering if I should go even higher. I wouldn't worry too much as long as your players are having a good time. If they're getting bored (or frustrated) then you've got a problem. Push the difficulty up a little if you're getting bored, but be aware that what feels like "they steamrolled it" to the GM might feel super tense to the players. Talk to them about it. Just be explicit and say "I feel like the game isn't providing enough of a challenge". You'll get feedback that'll either surprise you (when they say "are you kidding?") or confirm what you think, and either way you'll have information to work with to make the game better. If you feel like you're making easy encounters and the players feel like they just scrape through everything, then congratulations - you're loving awesome at describing enemies in a way that makes them seem dangerous instead of "it's 3 mooks, you won't have a problem". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 23:18
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Announce that the game has been changed to run under the FATE Paranoia rules, which they will have been supplied a copy of if appropriate. Hand each player a different type of dice. Tell them to guard it with their lives, and use no other. Bonus points if you do the above in a language that none of the others speak.
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Oct 10, 2014 23:41
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Thinking maybe I can use Dungeon Pressure to shift encounters from Standard to Difficult... where reinforcements arrive on Escalation 2. Should be more flexible for the party, they can sneak around if things get too hot.
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Oct 11, 2014 01:13
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One of my players is building a goblin empire. What experiences have people had with mass combats and the minutiae of running a kingdom? I'm mostly keeping the whole clan war aspect as backdrop stuff and discussing with the player one-on-one about it, to keep from bogging down the game too much. It has led to me making a really rudimentary set of rules for mass-combat for D&D 5e, which is a fun thought exercise. Anyone have any good stories about this kind of poo poo?
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Oct 11, 2014 01:53
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Try to avoid situations that result in players sitting back and watching while the GM rolls a bunch of dice -- that can happen really easily when you end up with NPC commanders fighting each other. It's also good not to tie "be useful in mass combat" into a specific skill, if you want the entire party to be able to participate. Like, don't hinge it all on "leadership" rolls or something like that. Give everyone tools to chip in in order to contribute. Maybe the fighter can inspire the troops by leading on the front lines and kicking rear end, as an example. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert at mass combat mechanics or anything, I've just seen more than one of them fall into a couple pitfalls that don't lead to a fun time for everyone at the table.
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Oct 11, 2014 03:06
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Mass combat is something I picture as being similar to what you see in the LOTR movies where there's thousands of friendly mooks and enemy mooks swirling around the protagonists, but the camera is still focused Legolas and Gimli. I would run it like a normal combat, but continuously describe how the battle is going on around them, and like the Pirates! game, the progress of the larger battle is tied up with how the tactical combat is going - the players are either fighting champions, or the enemy general and his bodyguards, or they're making a push right down the center, or they're the flanking hammer to the rest of the army's anvil (think Alexander's Companion Cavalry working with a Phalanx). When the players actually wanted me to represent the progress of the mass combat in games, what I did was to throw a bunch of d6s for both sides - 5s and 6s are 'successes', and then I'd do things like adjust how many dice are left or which numbers count as successes to represent losses, inspiration, good terrain, and so on. The Adventurer Conqueror King System has a bunch of rules related to kingdom maintenance and upkeep that you might find useful.
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Oct 11, 2014 05:27
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 11:01 |
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Whenever I've run mass combat in a game, or had it run for me - be it in Pendragon or AD&D or Star Wars or Amber Diceless or Exalted or any other game - I've found the key is always, always, "Make sure everyone has something to do." Make sure each player feels like they're having an impact on the goings-on, whether it be by leading a single warband in the middle of the giant army or by making tactical decisions and issuing orders or by fighting a pitched duel with an enemy commander while the battle rages around them or by any means necessary. Nothing, but nothing, will kill a player's interest faster than the realization that their buddy's army would have rolled over the bad guys whether they showed up or not - so make the fact that they showed up matter. Launch enemy commando raids at the commander's position. Execute battle strategies that require the PCs to quickly issue orders to react. Take time out from the battle to run the rogue's raid on enemy supply lines. Whatever. Just make sure everyone has something to do - that every PC has some means of contributing. Otherwise it turns into a game of Player A saying "Okay I tell my army to charge" and players B, C, and D ordering pizza and firing up the Playstation because they've got nothing to do.
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Oct 11, 2014 05:44
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