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Biggest problem with that is that it would more or less be an entire gaming session centered around the one guy, who the party more or less just met and don't really trust. Limited motivation to a group who has in past game been entirely self-serving. It would also destroy all of his racial abilities. I had an idea if he failed power checks to slowly introduce a curse of flesh, where he essentially became organic, but still looked the same. So a skeletal/muscle structure made of meat and bone that looked like a robot. Same as the body swap, only that he'd look like a mogoloid. Both render his backstory useless, unless he goes on to experiment with what he can and can't reproduce with. A path that would probably lead to requests for spells from the Book of Nymphology. Let's steer clear of that, I think.
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Jan 28, 2014 04:29
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Is it possible to make a meat-grinder meant to test the endurance of a party fun? I tried. Pathfinder rules. 2nd edition Ravenloft setting. It worked wonderfully when I ran the old titular Ravenloft module a year ago. When I designed my own for a higher level party, well, it wasn't a total flop but it ended up kinda mediocre. I even gave them a lot of really hard hitting creatures who were bloodied, to speed up combat. Any advice on how to test the limits of the players, giving them a large expanse to cross filled with hordes? Any tips on ways to make it awesome?
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Jan 28, 2014 11:23
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My group has been playing D&D 3.5 for a few months and as the campaign nears a close the current GM asked if anyone would like to run a campaign. I've stepped up, so I'm going to be running my first campaign (Pathfinder) in a few weeks and am having some trouble figuring out how to get started. The campaign we've been playing has involved a lot of roaming from place to place, following clues to lead us closer to defeating the big bad evil guy. For something different, I'd like to try running a campaign that revolves around one town the land surrounding it, and try to make it feel like a developing, living new home that the players care about when it's inevitably threatened. From our last campaign, I've observed most of our players enjoy combat, exploring, finding treasure and generally dungeon crawly experiences. Roleplay tends to be lighthearted and jokey - most of the players are newish to roleplaying and aren't yet very comfortable with getting over the silliness. With that in mind I want to build adventures like an earthquake cracked a nearby mountain and revealed that deeper inside it's rich in ore/gems/whatever but it's also teeming with kobolds, so the players can clear it out so that a mine can be built, which will later pay them back as the town advances visibly through their actions. I'd like to include rewards for the players in the form of town developments, such as their assistance making the place safer and more wealthy so more exotic merchants make their way to the town to sell them cool stuff, the opportunity to have their own guild hall erected where they can have a merchant trading all the crap they find on their behalf and so on. The general idea is that a new town is being built as a somewhat frontier outpost. Construction has been underway for a 6/7/something months so there are plenty of buildings, but the town isn’t finished being built. The town was under the protection of Some Neighbouring Lord who granted men-at-arms for a year to help them start up but he’s being attacked by Something Bad, so his men have withdrawn and the town is left with a small standing local militia. The PCs want to do all these different backgrounds and I don't want to railroad them on how they make their characters, so my first idea was that the players each receive a contract from some explorers / cartographers / adventurers guild to assist the town until construction is finished. The guild itself is contracted by the Merchant’s Guild, who are the primary funders for the town since it’s in a dangerous area with rare something and this and that. The problem with this is that in my mind just going "You're all hired by some rich guy / The King Says So" is barely one step above "You meet in a bar brawl", so how can I get them all in one place and working together? I think I'm coming up with plenty of ideas for how to make the area interesting once they're together, but I am really struggling to find a convincing reason for them to get started. Could you experienced GMs please advise? 
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Jan 28, 2014 15:17
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I highly advise reading Dungeon World and using it's methods for running campaigns. You basically break down your campaign into multiple big forces in the world rather than into specific story or plot arcs. You do this first on the campaign level and then again on the "adventure" level (in my mind I map campaign->adventure->session to the TV-esque series->season->episode). For each big force in the world you set up a sequence of events on their path to causing some horrible outcome for the world. In DW-speak, each level is a "Front" and each big force is a "Danger" with each horrible outcome being an "Impending Doom". Basically the players are going to hear about these dangers and the doom for each will happen unless they act to stop it. You are giving the players have a choice to prioritize which big forces they care about and how to deal with them and branching the story off from where their actions lead. I think this style can work great for a central town. You set up the town, the factions within the town, some external threats, and run it all like a simple state machine that is advancing every so often towards various dooms. This is very similar to how I've been running my Pathfinder campaign (which in general I run as Dungeon World in 3.X clothing). Also, if you are going to be heavy on the dungeon crawls, I'd advise banning ropetrick and respawning monsters if the players leave the dungeon.
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Jan 28, 2014 16:27
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There's always the option of having the town unknowingly built over an ancient and deep dungeon that you're players can clean out for fun and profit. Heck, maybe the town was founded to
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Jan 28, 2014 16:43
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VanSandman posted:There's always the option of having the town unknowingly built over an ancient and deep dungeon that you're players can clean out for fun and profit. Heck, maybe the town was founded to This is cheesy as hell - I love it, the players would love it. Thanks! It's quite similar to my original idea which was basically to rip off Etrian Odyssey - there's a big labyrinth by the town, go explore it and map it out. These trips would be interspersed with quests to go elsewhere for a short time, then return 'home'. I was trying to figure out a way that my PCs could actually get paid to make their own maps of the dungeon areas as I described them, but scrapped it as I figured it'd end up getting really tedious. I'll check Dungeon World out later, still stumped on how to bring them all together though.
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Jan 28, 2014 17:02
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Monday Night Trip Report The improvised "Battle of Bayville" was a success. Everyone had a good time and I hit the marks I was looking to. Before the setup I jotted down six rough "phases" to the encounter in my notebook and next to each one wrote down a clock-time that I needed to hit to keep the epic battle to one session: phase 1: Parley (8:00pm) phase 2: Setup (8:30pm) phase 3: Approach/test (9:00pm) phase 4: Clash (9:30pm) phase 5: Twist (10:00pm) phase 6: Climax (10:30pm) done around 11:00pm In the Parley, the party decided to hear the envoy's offer of "leave our ancestral homeland or stay and be our slaves", then responded with a fireball and arrows in the back of any survivors. (Character moments: check!) I indeed set up a battle mat complete with terrain detail and unit markers. I went with 10 per marker - it at least gave them a visual for how outnumbered their 200 irregulars were against 500 organized into infantry, elite infantry, cavalry, support, etc. I made a good show of scribbling in my notebook as well.  For their Setup, first they insisted on replacing the miniature that I provided for their elven mech with a Gipsy Danger HeroClix. Then they prepared an ambush with three of the party hiding in the bay, submerged in their mech with one unit of infantry support nearby. The other two hid on a nearby farm on horseback with the 20 enemy defectors riding their undead bear mounts. They chose to put safety of the irregulars over the safety of the city and kept their infantry inside the wooden frontier-fort wall of Bayville. They took their time and had alot of fun discussing their setup. (Trade-offs and interesting choices: check!)  For the Approach, as the enemy began its advance, the party shunned subtlety. Once the army was close to town, they charged with their mech and flanked with their hidden cavalry. Half the enemy force turned to fight the mech, the other half advanced on the city. The right rear casters noticed the flanking cavalry and turned to engage.  As the armies Clashed, the mech cleaves large chunks out of the enemy cavalry, however its support infantry took immediate heavy losses from enemy archers and retreated. I paint a picture of fierce fighting on the other flank - black tentacles erupting, spells flying, bear-riders running down casters. The party members with the flanking cavalry decided to pull a dick move and abandon their unit so that they could hatch their master plan to attack the command unit (Character moments: check!).  The mech continued its rampage, decimating the enemy with each attack - mechanically I had the players in the mech describe their attack, then come up with a name for the move and all yell it together with they rolled easy Reflex Saves (yelling "ARBOR CLEAVE!" in unison is just how elven mechs work). The moves worked better or worse depending on how many of the co-pilots made their rolls. On the other front, the players unleashed their tactical surprise on me - and of course being 3.X it was a casting fiesta. While approaching the command unit, the Rogue/Magus cast Shocking Grasp and held the charge. From across the battlefield, the Wizard delivered a previously cast Greater Invisibility via his crow familiar on the R/M. The invisible R/M dives off his mount, runs into the command unit. Surprise, surprise! The big bad they are looking for is not there (if they had done any recon while the danger approached they might have known!). The R/M IDs the leader of the army and backstabs for massive damage. In the mean time, the rest of the enemy forces have reached the town gates and are battering it down while only taking light casualties from the poorly equipped irregulars.  Now the party seems to have everything under control. Perfect time for the Twist (absence of Big Bad being just the first). The mech is devastating the swarming infantry, however a clumsy attack by the mech leaves temporarily down in a three-point stance and the elite "blazing axe" infantry begin scaling the construct. The co-pilots begin freaking out. The others turn to help the defector cavalry, which is full of NPCs that the party hoped to build friendships with, to find that they have been mostly wiped out due to their aggressive strike at the command unit. The forward force of the enemy, unaware yet of the loss of their leader, has breached the gate and is digging into the irregulars - realizing the city fighting that makes using the mech difficult.  As we reach our Climax, the infantry is climbing ever closer to the mech cockpit. In a clumsy attempt to swat off the infantry the party smashes one of the mech's arms. The others desperately dig away at the rear casting unit in the hopes of saving the two remaining NPCs who are still overwhelmed. The enemy begins setting fire to the city walls and buildings as revenge for the earlier fireball welcome. The rear enemy units are becoming aware that the leader it dead and are beginning to retreat (you can see my circular "spheres of awareness" dotted on the map).  In a final act of desperation, the party performs a belly flop with their mech, crushing significant amounts of infantry and shaking a good number off. The others finish off the rear casting unit, managing to save a solitary defector NPC. The enemy retreat grows to encompass the advanced archers. More buildings in the city are set on fire and the irregulars take heavy losses.  At this point the party has essentially won the battle, but for some final fun, the cockpit of the mech is being breached by a group of infantry. The pilots disengage the controls and engage, fighting them off in a single stylish round (Character moments: check!). The others flee out of the path of retreating enemy forces. Awareness of the leader's death finally reaches the forward units and the retreat turns into a full rout. Overall the timing worked out well and we were done by 11:15. The group is still talking about it today and is totally stoked to go after big bad ASAP (Plot hook for the neglected Adventure Front Danger leading into Campaign Front Danger: check!)
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Jan 28, 2014 18:39
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Strange Horizon posted:My group has been playing D&D 3.5 for a few months and as the campaign nears a close the current GM asked if anyone would like to run a campaign. I've stepped up, so I'm going to be running my first campaign (Pathfinder) in a few weeks and am having some trouble figuring out how to get started. It would be a bit of work for you, but why not make a game out of building up the town? Have some non-money resource that they need to bring out, and depending on how much of the resource they bring they can fund someone to build an armory, or a stables, or tavern or militia. Difficult choices are always fun.
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Jan 28, 2014 21:22
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There's a Pathfinder Adventure Path regarding kingdom building, Kingmaker available that you may be able to co-opt with some changes of scale. The Kingmaker Player's Guide is a free PDF that has the actual kingdom building information: http://pathfinder.wikia.com/wiki/Kingmaker_Player%27s_Guide And it's free - you just need to get a Paizo.com account, add it to your account and download it after a link is generated (the PDFs are watermarked with your registration details), just as you would say RPGDT.
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Jan 29, 2014 04:03
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Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Jan 29, 2014 04:12
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Hey everyone, hoping for some encounter advice. I'm a relatively inexperienced GM although I've been doing it on and off for a couple years. I'm currently GMing a Modern-day Call of Cthulhu campaign primarily set in Scotland although the PCs are agents of an English esoteric society. We haven't played for a while and basically left things on a sort of cliffhanger, with the possibility of some very big poo poo going down, some of which the players aren't aware of, so I'd like some advice for how to make this next session fun and make sense. For reasons the characters are in Australia, they have just busted one of the PCs out of hospital after a big encounter with a monster of ShubNiggurath, the evil goddess of life. In this encounter a visiting-PC playing an undead character was infected by this monster, becoming an everliving, world-ending monster. The last session ended with them turning a corner and seeing him right outside the hospital and lurch towards them. Now basically this everliving monster is a red herring, he still has the mind of the old PC and so isn't harmful towards them, although may deal unwitting damage to them through his disgusting bulk. The REAL threat is the PC they busted out of the hospital, who was also infected and (due to already being possessed by Hastur, unbeknownst to the other players but not to him) instead of dying has become a carrier for a horrifying magical plague. I tried to hint at this by having him wake up in quarantine, having people die where he went etc. but left the players enough in the dark that they didn't notice because they were caught up in the escape. One of the PCs (played by my girlfriend, so this is srs bz) has been in plenty of physical contact with him at this point and so is logically infected and dying. The main structure of the encounter will be the players assembling with some other esoteric agents and formulating a plan to deal with the plague and the monster. At the moment I am going to have them roll research then give them some handouts of rituals and information. One ritual for destruction, the other for neutralizing a possession. The optimal outcome for the PCs is to recognise the true threat and use the neutralising ritual on the infected PC, which will entail traveling into his mind and dealing with the two old gods that have taken up residence in him, and making friends with or destroying the red-herring monster. The worst outcome would be not doing anything about the infected PC and the plague destroying mankind. So basically I want some advice: 1) How do I mitigate the threat of the infected PC to the players, or at least make it not seem too arbitrary and cruel if they all start dying horribly. 2) How do I make the process of figuring out the correct ritual and true threat fun or exciting? 3) Any cool ideas for a journey into someones mind? My current plan is to walk around his past and see a couple backstory things that I've thought up for him. Then the PCs resolve the possession by locking the two old gods in conflict with eachother.
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Jan 29, 2014 06:41
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Strange Horizon posted:The problem with this is that in my mind just going "You're all hired by some rich guy / The King Says So" is barely one step above "You meet in a bar brawl", so how can I get them all in one place and working together? If it's a frontier town, possibly the PCs are all convicts sent there for hard labour? It explains why they're all in bumfuck nowhere with crappy starting gear. nopantsjack posted:1) How do I mitigate the threat of the infected PC to the players, or at least make it not seem too arbitrary and cruel if they all start dying horribly. 1) I'd do this by giving everyone but the infected PC obvious symptoms that start out harmless - cosmetic stuff, rashes (maybe in the form of sigils given it's an unnatural plague), etc - and slowly have it escalate. Give them plenty of warning, and only have it effect stats towards the end. 2) I'm really not sure on this one - my main worry is that they'll instantly focus on the monster to the point where it'd feel like a massive 'gotcha' to then introduce the real threat. I'd try to downplay him as a combat threat straight away - maybe the police arrive, start firing into him, obviously doing no real damage. He picks up a car easily, but uses it as a shield while he tries to escape. That way you're signalling a) massively tough, and b) doesn't want to hurt people (even disposable NPCs) 3) I'd have representations of major people in the character's life (and if possible the PCs) as seen by them - think how they see the PCs, and really exaggerate them. Possibly the Old Gods appear in his head as twisted forms of himself, each reflecting that particular God? It might be worth playing up dreamlike aspects as well, such as doorways leading into completely different scenes, certain places seeming half-formed, that sorta thing.
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Jan 29, 2014 09:09
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Tip for DMs: make the players do all the work for you. I came up with the idea of running a new (to me) group of players through the post-apoc version of a setting I ran previously. They made their characters separately, and came up with 2 neutral, 2 evil, and 1 good character. They decided the good guy was the jailer on the prison ship they were all locked up in. They crashed on the lost continent and I rolled some dice to determine exactly where on the map they came ashore. Everyone had a hoot role playing it out, such as the jailer making them swear they wouldn't kill him if he let them out and other cool stuff. I'm actually pretty bummed we haven't been able to get together regularly since our first session, the players really seem to be looking forward to continuing.
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Jan 29, 2014 09:38
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petrol blue posted:
All good ideas but this especially I love, thanks!
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Jan 29, 2014 13:36
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nopantsjack posted:lovecraftian stuff How much of this are the players themselves privy to and how much is just your plans? I'd be cautious about making the flow of the story too dependant on the players picking up on subtle hints which you may think are blatantly obvious by the players themselves might be missing. Players will take what you present to them as a matter of fact - the everliving monster, for instance, will be taken by them with all the gravity of a Big Bad and they will treat it as such even though you secretly know that it has no bad intent. Be careful of being too writerly and pre-planning everywhere the plot is "supposed" to go. Every GM does it from time to time, but you should strive to let the game go where the players lead it. With regards to your specific advice: 1) You have written yourself into a corner with the infected PC twist. There is no way out without using plot armor or being inconsistent with your genre. I would go with plot armor rather than have the world work inconsistently - somewhere along the line each of the other PCs were without their knowledge blessed or innoculated against this infection. Preferably make it the consequence of some encounter they had together so they can go "omg! that weird supernatural thing was actually THIS! dang the GM was planning this all along." 2) A long trail of information breadcrumbs barricaded by dice rolls is not fun - it is just a tedious form of exposition. You either need to cut-to-the-drama and blow by the exposition to get to the place where players are making choices, or you need to let the player's choices decide the nature of the ritual. The interesting choice here seems to be not in how to do the rituals but in which ritual to perform, however you have hidden the information that the characters need to make this decision. How do you expect the players to "recognize the true threat" when you've got what appears to be a Big Bad apparently presenting an immediate threat - a threat that they have no doubt been planning to deal with since you set up the previous cliff hanger? You will need to act fast to get them information to act upon or else your players are going to do the obvious thing and try to destroy the red-herring that is in their face.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:18
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nopantsjack posted:Call of Cthulhu The information breadcrumbs are okay, but make sure that if the PCs go way off the mark, you're still prepared to have something happen. Even if it happens on the other side of town, make sure they definitely know it happened and was super gross. The last CoC campaign I was in, we got 10 hours in- TEN HOURS, of detective work, red herrings, and non-information. Nothing cool happened, and when something cool did happen, it was still sufficiently grounded in normal reality for my character to solve the problem by repeatedly headbutting it. We all rage-quit this dude's campaign shortly after it turned out the dude we'd been detective-stalking was, instead of a horrifying skinwalker or a werewolf or something, actually just a dude who was now in the hospital with grievous PC-inflicted headwounds. This guy kicked my character's office door off the hinges, punched the gun out of his hand, and still went down in 2 headbutts. ...I had put ranks in headbutt. Anyway, the short of it is that it's okay to make the PCs work for their information, but make the little revelations weird enough to keep it interesting. Nobody has fun with a long series of dead ends and weird debates over how much it costs to make a long distance phone call in the late 1960s.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:53
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nopantsjack posted:1) How do I mitigate the threat of the infected PC to the players, or at least make it not seem too arbitrary and cruel if they all start dying horribly. poo poo. All this Cthulhu talk is making me want to dive back into my romance story set in a mental asylum between a doctor going mad and the figment of his imagination... 1) Do the PCs have any idea at all that they're infected? If not, the drug idea from point 2 could have side-effects that mitigate the disease? Or at least parts of it. Depends on your level of cruelty here, really. If they do know they're infected or if they start showing symptoms, possibly work a time element into their investigations? Knowing that you're dying, and that somehow forcing the showdown is your only hope of survival is a pretty good motivator. 2)In Call of Cthulhu? Dreams. Possibly esoteric drugs. Keep dice rolls secret if you can. You don't want them failing too hard if it can be helped. Maybe have a Page 751-type scenario from The Dunwich Horror. You could even start the dreamscape here and have it jump minds as clues are discovered, jumping into the infected player last as a big reveal if they haven't guessed. 3) Dreamscapes are fantastic fun. Do you have backstory on your PCs? Stick them in a familiar setting that they're comfortable (Or terrified)in from their past, but warp it. Maybe it's a memory of a time when they were powerless to do something, but in their dreams they have the means to fix the situation? Exaggerating the PCs based on perception is great flavor. Side note, do the players know who both of the two old gods are possessing? Subtle hints that escalate are a good way to build some atmosphere until the encounter. Not sure on your game-style, but possibly use a PC or trusted NPC's mind for the showdown to take place in. Having the party survive at the cost of destroying a friend's mind in a cosmic psychic battle, or even stalemate, makes for a good consequence. Elevorot fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Jan 30, 2014 |
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Jan 30, 2014 07:17
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So, I'm going to be running a 3.5e campaign with a couple of friends in a few weeks. Two of them are relatively experienced with it, but one of them isn't in the slightest. To help him get to grips with it, I was thinking of making the initial stuff relatively simple so it could easily be handled however they see fit without confusing the beginner and helping me gauge how they handle most things; one of them I imagine will be more inclined to think things through, one to smash heads first ask questions never and the third could go either way depending on what kind of character she makes. I was especially thinking of making the combat stuff, if it is handled in a "fight way through", really easy to manage at first (with an in-game excuse of the initial mooks who attack being paid actors to "test" the party), but I'm not sure how well that'd really come across. If I made it too easy he might not really learn anything, and it might be a bit patronising if I explain that in advance. I don't want to make it too complicated out of the gate, but at the same time I'm not sure at what point it becomes too easy.
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Jan 30, 2014 09:05
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Dragonatrix posted:I don't want to make it too complicated out of the gate, but at the same time I'm not sure at what point it becomes too easy. So long as it serves to advance the plot, nothing is too easy. Portray it through the character of the henchmen. Cocky when they come in to fight, and, once they see their friends/themselves bloodied to a pulp, have them flee/surrender/cower in fear. This will boost the confidence of the party and lay the groundwork for harder foes. If you're worried about scaling an encounter in general hide your dice. Keep a running tally of their HP. If you think you've made an encounter too hard or too easy, don't be afraid to fudge the numbers, in or against their favor. Elevorot fucked around with this message at 11:11 on Jan 30, 2014 |
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Jan 30, 2014 10:30
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My players are currently in a psionics themed country, and one of the players is a psionist. I've had them encounter some of the locals using "PsiCrystals" as generic little tools for things, and they've encountered traps that trigger PsiCrystals to attack them. All just stuff to set the theme for the area. But my psion player is REALLY getting into it, and wants to learn how to make these PsiCrystals, even spending a feat for the purpose, and now I need rules where I was just handwaving before. Any suggestions?
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Jan 30, 2014 16:28
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Iunnrais posted:My players are currently in a psionics themed country, and one of the players is a psionist. I've had them encounter some of the locals using "PsiCrystals" as generic little tools for things, and they've encountered traps that trigger PsiCrystals to attack them. All just stuff to set the theme for the area. But my psion player is REALLY getting into it, and wants to learn how to make these PsiCrystals, even spending a feat for the purpose, and now I need rules where I was just handwaving before. How powerful are they? Is this 3.5 ed/Pathfinder, where you could potentially roll it into a Craft Skill? It sounds like they are more or less a reskin of traps and/or alchemical items. Maybe "Craft Psionic Crystal" and "Craft Psionic Device", and then eyeball prices and times based on the mundane goods versions of those skills.
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Jan 30, 2014 16:42
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Making stuff isn't as much of a problem as figuring out what the limitations are. There are crafting feats already, which basically amount to "you can spend gp as if at a shop to make stuff in the wilderness". The problem is that these psicrystals I've been using have so far been background fluff without any rule crunch behind them, and now I need rules. I'm not going to sit down and make up several dozen specific magic items that the player can choose from, I need something more generic, like "A crystal can activate an X level character power for Y amount of gp". I'm just not sure how to set those things.
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Jan 30, 2014 17:01
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One time, I was running a game where the players were on a quest to activate these elemental nodes around the world in order to do A Thing™. As part of that process, they would pass through the node and gain some of its powers, which they could then put skill points into as they leveled up (this was back with D&D 3.0.) Instead of trying to figure out some hard and fast rule system, you know what I did? I said: "You can do things with that power. When you do a thing, you tell me what you want to do, you make a skill check, and I'll make a totally subjective judgment call on how hard it is." It was the best decision I ever made. Nobody complained when they could or could not do something, because they knew it was exceedingly wishy-washy and was just there for fun, and to let them do things they couldn't normally do. And if I wanted to make a thing become easier because the player kept trying to do it and would practice and such, that was fine, too. One guy learned to sorta fly eventually by controlling the flows of air around him. The players loved it and had a ton of fun, I loved it and didn't have to sweat the details. It was fantastic. My point is, why not just continue to wing it? Explain to your player(s) that so far, this has been a fluff item, and if they're willing to play ball, it'll remain so but they'll be able to use it.
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Jan 30, 2014 17:08
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Iunnrais posted:Making stuff isn't as much of a problem as figuring out what the limitations are. There are crafting feats already, which basically amount to "you can spend gp as if at a shop to make stuff in the wilderness". If you are not going to keep it as limited to cantrips or hand-wavy GM fiat as Bad Munki recommended, the only tractable way for you to do this as an individual is to reuse the existing magic item creation rules and treat these psycrystals as something like a reskinned rod or staff for psionics. The alternative that you are asking is for either yourself or someone else to reinvent a similar system, which is not a trivial task if you want it to consider balance of resource consumption, action economy, effect magnitudes, etc.
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Jan 30, 2014 17:28
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Strange Horizon posted:This is cheesy as hell - I love it, the players would love it. Thanks! It's quite similar to my original idea which was basically to rip off Etrian Odyssey - there's a big labyrinth by the town, go explore it and map it out. These trips would be interspersed with quests to go elsewhere for a short time, then return 'home'. I was trying to figure out a way that my PCs could actually get paid to make their own maps of the dungeon areas as I described them, but scrapped it as I figured it'd end up getting really tedious. Just wanted to jump back a bit and address the idea of "I don't want to railroad the character creation process to fit my story" idea. I think, to some extent, it's ok to give the players some restrictions on their character creation. If not to the extent of "No, you can't be a Warforged" (which I also think is ok to do, but opinions vary), then at least to the extent of "You can play whatever, but you have to explain to me why that character would be in this city at the start of the campaign (and maybe even why he'd be motivated to help the city grow". I think most players would even be ok with "You grew up in this town", as long as you're willing to work with them on halfway-plausible reasons why their Shardmind Psion or whatever was more or less native to the town (miners excavated him from a cave-in in the mountains about 50 years ago and he's been helping around the town since, because he doesn't remember anything about his past life, or something. He's since become a kind of mascot to the townsfolk, and the other players grew up with him being a normal part of every day life). Most of the people I've played with would be fine with hearing a breakdown of the kind of game you want to play ("Build up a city and help it expand its influence to the area around it"), and making their characters fit into it. If you work with the players and talk about each others expectations of the type of game you want to play, everyone can have fun with it, rather than making it feel like you're artificially restricting choice. It helps if your central location has more of a "melting pot" feel to it, as opposed to a "human-dominated farming village on the rise" kind of thing.
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Jan 30, 2014 20:37
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So I've been DM/GMing for over a decade and I've run a lot of games spanning from year long epic adventures to stupid one shots and there is one thing that has always been beyond me. Is there a good way to have fights that feel epic but don't takes forever and a half to play through? I've tried a number of different approaches and it always winds up being either way too easy and the players feel disappointed that the enemy wasn't all that they were hyped up to be or it winds up taking forever and they complain that the fight is too big? I'm mostly running into the problem in DnD 3.5 and Gurps. Is there a way to run a large scale combat in these systems without screwing it up?
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Jan 30, 2014 22:51
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Define your parameters - more specifically what do you consider to be "takes forever"? Do you want a fight that takes one hour of play? Four hours? Thirty minutes?
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Jan 30, 2014 22:54
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Generally speaking anything past an hour leads to complaints from my players so the target number is generally going to be less than that for a given fight. Though a chain of related fights could easily make up an encounter without too many complaints. Mostly I'm just looking for a way to speed up combats without just saying gently caress it to the rules.
Badgersmasher fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Jan 30, 2014 |
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Jan 30, 2014 22:55
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The things combat length boil down to are: how many player turns it takes to down the big bad and how long it takes each player to take a turn. If you are dealing with crunchier combat systems, players can take a long time to make decisions just by having to weigh their options and do mental math. On top of the mental math, if you have gone full crunch the resolution of a single decision might take a while to do all the rolling and looking up tables. The implication is then, if you are using a crunchy system where players take 5 minutes to take a turn, your combat can only last about 3 rounds in order to stay under an hour. Unfortunately, encounters with fewer total actions tend to feel like less happened and thus feel less "epic". This is why in crunchy systems, epic fights tend to explode to 2+ hours. If you want shorter epic encounters without throwing out the rules, IMO you are going to have to abandon crunchy systems and go with a FATE or Apocalypse Engine style game where the rules themselves are just lighter weight. Individual player turns go much faster, so you can fit more overall action and flow of battle into less time. A more narrative oriented system will also give you the wiggle room to make sure things get more dramatic as the fight goes on.
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Jan 30, 2014 23:11
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The way I'd approach it is to look at epic boss fights from computer games, and see what they do: I'm a big fan of puzzle-solving bosses (like in Portal) and Big Bads having stages - rather than 'one thing, keep doing it till they fall down', have the boss change behaviour at certain points. That way, it's mechanically more like a few back-to-back fights, which should stop things getting stale. I'd really recommend watching some of the World of Warcraft raid tutorials - they've made a business out of what are basically strings of boss fights, and a walkthrough is amazing idea-fodder (showing what a tank/ranged dps/healer's role would be). One possible solution for sticking with crunchier systems might be that they can't even initiate combat till they figure out how to get at the boss (who's protected by armour with only a specific weakness, or whatever) - so instead of going straight into the fight-mechanics, they're first puzzle-solving while 'in combat' as the boss throws attacks while laughing at their pitiful, etc. e: But I'd agree with Paolomania that a lighter rule system would give you an easier time of it. Might not be what you want, though.
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Jan 31, 2014 00:52
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Definitely agree with the "this isn't even my final form" method of creating an epic battle. My favorite "epic boss fight" I ran was something like the following: Bad Guy is running a ritual to bring back Worse Guy. Ritual has an apparent time limit to force rapidly addressing the situation (every so often, something would happen to make Worse Guy clearly closer to being back.) Bad Guy's ritual has an impenetrable bubble around him. Impenetrable bubble is created by five runestones. Runestones are driven by five Lesser Guys, from outside the bubble. Lesser guys are protected by two Very Large Guys. Very Large Guys are controlled by two Sneaky Dudes. So the group could dive right at Lesser Guys protecting Bad Guy, but they'd be crushed by Very Large Guys. They could take on Very Large Guys and address them directly, but they'd be wasting time, then, since they were basically damage sponges. Instead, they had to ignore ALL THAT OTHER FUN STUFF and go straight for the unimpressive Sneaky Dudes in the corners. Once they were down, they could focus on the Very Large Guys, who went down much more easily. Then they could focus on the Lesser Guys running the bubble, and finally they could move in and take out Bad Guy himself. It made for a really nice progressive battle where they COULD skip phases but the cost for doing so could be very grave. It also meant that as the fight progressed, there were very clear signs of progression, instead of just numbers of enemies going down. They had to use different tactics for the different targets, and everyone was important throughout the fight. It kept the fight lively and the phase-based progression kept things from getting stale. And when they finally beat down Bad Guy and chucked him down the extra dimensional well-portal-thing he was summoning Worse Guy from, it felt like they'd really accomplished something and won a hard-earned, epic battle. Campaign arc, actually, since that was the culmination of a lot of adventuring. It was an absolutely wonderful end to that story arc. And then I royally hosed up the campaign and dumped them into another world with no warning or direction and I basically ruined all of it 
Bad Munki fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Jan 31, 2014 |
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Jan 31, 2014 01:05
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Okay, okay. So, my group and I, despite our thousands of books between us and never-ending discussions, have settled on a back-up game when the Pathfinder game isn't being run. It's Atomic Highway, played fairly straight, and based in the remains of Texas. I've lined up a few plot hooks for mini-adventures, but will mostly give them free reign, and just drop the hooks in every so often in towns and mix it up - if they don't pick it up in one, I can always re-use it in another. Ideas so far: Help a small town spring their valuable Doctor and truck-driver from a nearby bartertown gaol - pay the bond, do a job, or break him out. Doc tells them he overheard a drunk get dragged in one night, babbling about chupacabras taking his goats - the farmer will pay in goods for investigating it. While on the farm, they'll come across goats sucked dry, until one night a farmhand gets found, also sucked dry. It will in actuality be a colony of mutant vampire bats preying on his stock. Somewhere along the line they will be offered information regarding a floating hulk - basically a cargo ship that's been found nearby or run aground and a valuable salvage opportunity. They need boats to get there, and the informant knows just the raider crew to steal some from... I've got a few other ideas brewing that are easy enough to slot in that the players can overhear in bars, or find a dead body with a courier note or something similar, so I'm not worried about minor activities to keep them busy, but I have struggled to expand on the larger game world campaign 'story' as it were. I've got narcotraficantes, remnant cartels, militant separatists of the provisional Texan government. But what story can I draw the players into to get them involved in more than just a 'drive between places for your own survival' game?
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Jan 31, 2014 03:45
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Apocalypse World. Even if you don't use the ruleset (why wouldn't you?!), enjoy an entire thread answering that question. Aside from that: See the good ol' hierarchy of needs, threaten or take one of them away, and ask the players how they're going to deal with it. e: quote:chupacabras taking his goats - the farmer will pay in goods for investigating it. While on the farm, they'll come across goats sucked dry, until one night a farmhand gets found, also sucked dry. It will in actuality be a colony of mutant vampire bats preying on his stock.  Your players will be royally pissed off if you offer el chupacabra and only deliver bats.
petrol blue fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Jan 31, 2014 |
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Jan 31, 2014 07:23
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Paolomania posted:How much of this are the players themselves privy to and how much is just your plans? I'd be cautious about making the flow of the story too dependant on the players picking up on subtle hints which you may think are blatantly obvious by the players themselves might be missing. I have actually confided in one of the players, who was absent from the previous session and would have probably picked this up straight away. He recently acquired a sort of magical familiar so I am going to have this familiar warn him to back this up RP-wise, which I was planning on anyway. As for the rest of the players, this isn't a planned secret, its just a consequence of a battle they had in the session immediately prior to the last that I don't think they have picked up on. quote:1) You have written yourself into a corner with the infected PC twist. There is no way out without using plot armor or being inconsistent with your genre. I would go with plot armor rather than have the world work inconsistently - somewhere along the line each of the other PCs were without their knowledge blessed or innoculated against this infection. I tend to plan my games only loosely and then use cause and effect on the fly to figure out what happens next, I did not plan for any of this to happen it just did. I know the structures and personalities behind the scenes but the story is largely generated on the fly session to session based on what happened last session. As for plot armour I could actually do that, and almost certainly will if things get inappropriately bad, there are at least one or two things I could use here. The PCs have a pretty wide (for cthulhu) set of powers and fancy things, which I offset by having the game be lethal when it is logical. quote:2) A long trail of information breadcrumbs barricaded by dice rolls is not fun - it is just a tedious form of exposition. You either need to cut-to-the-drama and blow by the exposition to get to the place where players are making choices, or you need to let the player's choices decide the nature of the ritual. The interesting choice here seems to be not in how to do the rituals but in which ritual to perform, however you have hidden the information that the characters need to make this decision. How do you expect the players to "recognize the true threat" when you've got what appears to be a Big Bad apparently presenting an immediate threat - a threat that they have no doubt been planning to deal with since you set up the previous cliff hanger? You will need to act fast to get them information to act upon or else your players are going to do the obvious thing and try to destroy the red-herring that is in their face. I have a couple ideas for how to deal with this, including having the one PC with some knowledge about this who I will be beginning the session following as he makes his way back to the party, where he will meet up with some NPCs who are themselves figuring this out with varying success. Also I was thinking of using a returning NPC from two sessions back who recognises the infected PC as a greater threat but wants to destroy him rather than neutralise him. Although I suppose then I run the risk of them taking that as gospel and killing the PC because they quite like this particular NPC. Although I think I can, like you say, quite quickly make it about the decision between rituals rather than them not knowing anything about the rituals, there are helpful NPCs present that can point out the rituals available in a way that isn't out of character. deadly_pudding posted:The information breadcrumbs are okay, but make sure that if the PCs go way off the mark, you're still prepared to have something happen. Even if it happens on the other side of town, make sure they definitely know it happened and was super gross. This is a good point too, guaranteed -something- will happen. Like I say, this isn't my grand plan that these plebes haven't figured out and I always try to have some backups which I'm now thinking a little more about after this comment. They also more or less declared war on the USA esoteric society (which is named after but only loosely based on Delta Green)so even if they all decide to just bugger off there can be some excitement there as they try and make their way back home. Even if the party gets the megafail option and the plague spreads, I'll still carry on the campaign just as a sort of Cthulhu Last of Us/The Stand. I prefer a more improvisational way of GMing, sort of setting up a world then allowing the players to shape it and guide the story themselves by cause and effect, just cause this is the type of GMing I find easier and so far the players seem to be really enjoying it. However this does lead me to these kind of "written yourself into a corner" situations where I need to have a good think about how to portray and handle the new direction. One of the reasons I like CoC as a breath of fresh air compared to DnD is that I can let the ball roll without worrying if it crushes a PC or two, and so far that threat has kept everyone very engaged even though so far only one player has had to reroll a new PC. I just also want player deaths to feel like a legitimate consequence or a heroic act. (e.g. the PC who died shot at a monster who forces physical attackers to turn their attacks on their allies instead, he was given a choice of his two very high damage shots landing on whoever he want, and heroically chose his own character and died) Thanks for all this by the way, it is very handy!
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Jan 31, 2014 08:42
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petrol blue posted:
Depends on the quality of the bats. I mean, if they're just like regular bats, just a bit more hazardous to livestock, then yeah. But if they're, say, giant mutant vampire bats the size of dogs...
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Jan 31, 2014 14:25
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JackMann posted:Depends on the quality of the bats. I mean, if they're just like regular bats, just a bit more hazardous to livestock, then yeah. But if they're, say, giant mutant vampire bats the size of dogs... 148 Vampire dog.
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Jan 31, 2014 14:42
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Badgersmasher posted:So I've been DM/GMing for over a decade and I've run a lot of games spanning from year long epic adventures to stupid one shots and there is one thing that has always been beyond me. Is there a good way to have fights that feel epic but don't takes forever and a half to play through? I've tried a number of different approaches and it always winds up being either way too easy and the players feel disappointed that the enemy wasn't all that they were hyped up to be or it winds up taking forever and they complain that the fight is too big? You have a problem similar to what I keep running into. It's one of those things where you have to meet your players halfway. I throw encounters out there sometimes that involve a giant, unusually powerful boss-type monster, or like especially numerous foot soldiers, where my original intent is "This monster is clearly supposed to distract us while the real enemy escapes down THAT TUNNEL RIGHT THERE," or, "Seriously there are like 30 heavily armed goblins over here, with like snipers and poo poo. Are we really going to deal with that?" My group charged into both of those encounters. That zombie dire bear wasn't intended to kill anybody, but down went the Crusader, who waded into the Druid's Entangle radius to go toe to toe with it for 10 straight rounds. The party wanted to kill every last one of those goblins, so we spent like almost 3 hours fighting a force that I mostly had put in as a "don't go there" note. Sometimes your players just really want to fight what's in front of them, because video games or something. If you want shorter combats, learn to do what I'm terrible at, and try and make it clear that the encounter has a different and more useful win condition than "kill everything on the mat that's not a PC", because, depending on your group, what you think is clearly not a "fight this thing right now" situation may still be regarded as one by the party.
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Jan 31, 2014 14:53
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JackMann posted:Depends on the quality of the bats. I mean, if they're just like regular bats, just a bit more hazardous to livestock, then yeah. But if they're, say, giant mutant vampire bats the size of dogs... Oh, let me be clear, these are some grade-A giant mutant vampire bats. 12 foot wingspans and all that jazz.
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Feb 2, 2014 09:09
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I think we have a winner.  
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Feb 2, 2014 12:14
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Hey there, thread. I'm a relatively new GM (ran three sessions so far, but I've got experience when it comes to the actual systems I run), and I'm at an impasse. My next session will have 5 guys I regularly game with, plus 3 new guys one of the regulars invited (her friends). The guys I always play with have just come out of a 4.0 game with a particularly inexperienced DM, whose brand of GMing made me just stop attending his sessions: * Didn't want to use the Monster Manual because "reading all that math was a chore", so he just made up stats for MM monsters. * Said no to plenty of great ideas, like "I want to ride a bear. Let me suplex that bear, and make it count as a diplomacy option" after he told that player his character could now ride creatures thanks to a magic book. * Relied on deus ex machina like crazy whenever he hosed up. "Oh yeah, this cave cures you 10 HP per every three turns because of a magic wind. But only you." * And other kinda lovely stuff ("Hey, you're now a tiefling. No, you don't get to be a human, you didn't come last session due to your girlfriend." Then he goes and kill the character anyway at the end of the session.) So I really wanted to be the DM, as you may understand. The issue here is, I've got new players who have never ever played RPGs, and they were told I was running D&D. I like to customize systems a lot. D&D 4e in particular, since it quenches my wargame-y thirst.  So in case the group wanted to play 4.0 (I was planning to run Iron Kingdoms myself, but oh well) I had a setting planned with some stuff added (a couple playable races, firearms) and some other removed (Halflings, Tieflings, Devas, etc), plus houserules (no fixed racial attribute bonuses, skills only use modifiers if they are untrained, adventurer packs which define your skills and starting equipment before you pick a class), etc.It doesn't feel "fair" to the new players if I alter the base experience like that, adding/removing races/rules and having to say "No, you can't play a Halfling because the setting has no halflings". As a DM, I really don't like to say "No". I don't really know what should I do - should I just run a "vanilla" game, or go full speed ahead with my setting?
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Feb 2, 2014 20:56
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