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In my live game in which we are all loving grownups, we put this gaming group together under a lot of time constraints from everybody. Eventually we settled on every other friday night, but it's still hard. One guy works long hours, another guy works weekends so he doesn't like to stay up too late, I have an hour-long drive to get to where we meet, and so forth. The guy who has a retail job has missed a couple of sessions because of having to fill in for someone on a Saturday morning. Another guy actually missed two months of gaming because he was training for the AIDS ride and didn't feel he had the time to devote to the game. We all have similar loot and identical XP and you know what? It's fine. One guy is gone because he just wasn't that interested and that's fine. The rest of us talk to each other and know that we all want to play, and when there's been things that people didn't like, we talked about it like loving grownups. When someone is gone their character just isn't there. They 'wander off for a while' or have some family commitment or just otherwise aren't around. We all level up at identical times anyway and you know what? It's fine! Because none of us want to have a party member who is behind. We need those daily powers! We need our striker to hit, and if he was down 5% in attack bonus because of being a level lower, that punishes all of us. XP is just a mechanic for measuring out how often the PCs level up, which is itself just a mechanic for describing how powerful they have become. Personally I don't even find them all that much of a reward, because I'd be pretty content to just permanently play at a given level... my interest in the game is 'adventuring' and you could play an unending stream of adventures, complete with a climactic campaign story, without ever leveling up. But if a DM told me that I was going to level up later than everyone else, permanently, because I had a social comittment or was sick or whatever once, I'd be done with the game right then and there. gently caress that. It'd be like having guys over to watch the football game once a month, but once a guy misses one he said he was going to attend to, from now on he gets the warmest beer. "Sorry mike, you knew the rules. We get cold beers and you get this one that just went in the fridge. It's because you missed the game four weeks ago." What all this boils down to is that we aren't kids in elementary school, 'perfect attendance rewards' are just pieces of paper that have no mechanical effect on a child's performance or test results or ability to get into college (and are goddamn stupid besides - why should the kid who got the flu and missed a week of school have to feel like he failed at something? It's not like fifth-graders cut school on purpose or anything), and rewarding everyone but the absentee is exactly the same as punishing the absentee. "My players are all happy about this and we're happy" is pretty irrelevant. I could secretly add 1 to every attack roll I make against a certain player who missed three sessions in the last four months, and he'd never know I was punishing him by him being more likely to be hit... but I'd still be doing it and it'd still be unnecessary and wrong. It'd hurt the whole party and it'd tell that player that I think I know better how he should manage his social calendar than he does (but I'm not willing to just tell him so), which is an insult. AAAAaaaaanyway, not that I think I deserve the last word on this or anything, but... What do you guys do when your party is making a lot of unanticipated mistakes? I mean anything from tactically poor decisions, to forgetting that certain skills exist, to approaching every problem from the exact same angle? There's always just telling them "hey guys you know that was a pretty poor move right there, see if you did this or this or this, you'd be in better shape" but I've got a really strong aversion to telling players how they should play their characters. If they do something really dangerously stupid, I do tend to say things like "so, your character realizes that that's pretty risky" or "are you sure? x or y or z could happen..." but even that to some degree can feel like taking away the challenge. I'd in particular like to hear anecdotes of your in-game or out-of-game approaches when your players were being consistently unwise in some way. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Jul 27, 2009 |
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Jul 27, 2009 05:54
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Well I think you should do what I did. -Picking players as well as characters. By that I mean, it's not enough for someone to have a great character concept; you need to evaluate them as a poster as well. You also need to put a lot of attention into the party whole - again, not character synergy, but player synergy. You want people who are communicative, thoughtful, and plainly willing to compromise for the sake of a good game. Key issues to watch for are lone-wolf characters, players who are too involved in too many other things, and players who just drop in and dump a character on the thread without being involved in the overall conversation. Drive-by submissions you might say. -Involve the players in the world creation. You may have a brilliant idea for your game but there's no way to really communicate that in advance to players. They don't know your posting style or how the game will go and if it's not quite what they had expected, they can get frustrated and wander off. The cure to that is to run some pre-game exercises while everyone is still excited and get them to start working with each other making decisions about the game (setting, plot, etc.) right away. It takes some of the load off of you as a GM as well, because it means you're not just off on your own, cooking things up and hoping that everyone likes what you did. -Keep the party small. I can't stress this enough. A big party means most of the time, a player can't expect to be in the spotlight, their voice is smaller, and they feel like the game needs them less. It also creates much more work for you. Every update takes longer, every encounter takes longer, and the odds that someone is a misfit (player or character) rise with every additional player. Personally I think 5 is an absolute maximum and 4 is probably better. I've seen (and been in) lots of games that started with 6 or more players and in most cases I've come to regard that as having been a mistake. -Your plans for the game should be modest. Plan for what will happen in the first adventure. That's going to take (seriously) a year. There is absolutely no reason to plan beyond that, because by the time a year goes by, too much will have changed - players come and go, the characters evolve, your life changes, and of course if you're playing a current game, tons of supplements and such come out that will give your players loads of cool new ideas that they'll want to run with. -This is a non-verbal medium. It's mostly non-visual as well, although you can do a lot with a well-placed picture. That means you must be an expert in the written form. If you write well, you'll keep people interested. If your writing is poor (in any respect - grammar, creativity, clarity, length) you'll lose people. They won't even know why, necessarily... but I've seen plenty of PbP games go to poo poo because the GM could not effectively communicate the setting, NPCs, and plot to the players in an interesting way. When in doubt, write more. I personally err on the side of excessive content and massive posts, but I think that's better than small, brief updates that maybe move the game along but don't contain much to draw or maintain interest. -Remember that the game is not about you, it's about your players. Pander to them. The worst thing you can do is crush a player's cool idea. In a live game, people can come up with a cool idea every 10 minutes, and so there's much more tolerance for "oh, that didn't work, lets try something else". In a PbP game, things take forever - one cool idea tried out might cost a week of real-life time. If it ends in a disappointment, that's terrible for player morale. And, I'm not saying that means you have to let them get away with any BS justification for overpowered actions - it just means you should watch carefully for anything a player posts that everyone would agree is a :masterstroke: and be very careful not to accidentally just squash that. -Do not take it personally when things fall apart. As has been said, players have other interests and demands on their time. Sometimes you can be running a great game, and someone decides it just wasn't right for them - or they no longer feel they have the time to devote to it. (Watch out for over-extended players when making character selection! The people who are in 10 games and running 3 more are the ones that burn out and disappear completely... if they get 3 days behind on posting, they face a daunting, all-day task to catch up.) If someone can't manage it any more, work them out of the story and work in someone else. -The corollary to that is, of course, that you should prioritize the game you're running. Personally I cut back from around 6 to 8 games I had characters in, to more like 4, when I decided I was going to GM a game here. And I run one game at a time, and will do so for the foreseeable future. It might seem like at some point your game has settled in and is running smoothly and you've got a cool idea and so you could easily start up another game... but the first time you have to write two huge updates simultaneously and repeatedly for a week, you might suddenly realize that no, you don't always have 4 hours a day to devote to running your games. As areyoucontagious well knows, even one game can suffer a weeklong interruption if you find yourself unable to put together 2+ hours on any single day for a while. Let that happen too often, and the game is doomed. -Run a system that lends itself to PbP. 4th edition D&D, with its host of online resources and the ability to use a grid-based map and turn-based combat, is nearly ideal. Plenty of other systems can be made to work, but there are some that just don't do well in PbP. Any game that relies very heavily on inter-player communication is going to be difficult to make work unless you pick players who you know can be in a chatroom, at the same time as each other, on a nearly-daily basis. Finally, a bit of advice on how to handle sudden character absence: just ask the other players to suggest actions, and then make an executive decision (overrule them if what they suggest is suicidally stupid or makes an irreversible change to the character, but generally go with what they suggest if it is at all reasonable).
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Oct 30, 2009 00:17
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Gr3y posted:I'm DMing a 4e campaign and I've been asking my players what they want to see. So far the only request has been to get them the hell out of heroic as fast as possible. Lots of folks gave you good ways to accelerate the pace of your game, but, have you considered simply playing a Paragon game? By which I mean, if the players want a Paragon-level game, have them make level 11 characters and start from there. It can be more challenging because of the higher number of interrupting abilities and interacting, layering stuff the PCs are capable of, so it'll definitely keep you on your toes... but if all the players agree that what they're interested in is Paragon-level play, I can't see any reason to force them to work through a Heroic-level campaign first. On the other hand, if you don't feel you're ready to run a Paragon-level game, maybe sit down with the players and explain this, clearly, and then ask them for advice. I've found that a lot of DMs take the "I'm in charge of the game" role too far; beyond the role of referee, and into the position of taking responsibility for everyone else's fun, plus planning gaming nights, plus keeping the players organized, and so on. You don't have to accept that - you can throw it back on the others to help. Knock over the DMs screen for a few minutes and lay it out to them; running a campaign means planning and you want it to be fun and so can they work with you to make a fun game you're ready and able to run? ...or do what the other folks said, if what's really going on is your players just love leveling up more than anything else in the world.
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Mar 26, 2010 20:24
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