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RagnarokAngel posted:I used to be bad about it, I would fool on my laptop during 3e games because during battles there were long stretches of nothing to do. Laptops remind me of my new idea to stop having books at the tables and instead roll with a laptop having relevant pdf's. The first session went off very well, since no one actually ever wants to look up any rules and I make my players print out stuff they need (like spells and special abilities) and I can concentrate on the game instead of looking up rules clarifications which in 95% of the cases turn out to be irrelevant.
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Jul 7, 2009 09:34
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Annakie posted:I've cautioned everyone to think about picking up at least one healing potion, made sure at least one person has the heal skill, have already talked to everyone about remembering to use their Second Wind, any other ideas to help keep the party alive once the Warlord's used his Inspiring Word twice in a long encounter? Make sure that the Warlord has his tiny lil' heal-at will. I can't remember the exact name, Encouraging Words or something. Also a big party being light on healing is not a big deal really, as long as the encounters are balanced reasonably. The amount of tactical flexibility the party gets from their numbers is a much bigger factor in combat than lack of healing.
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Jul 7, 2009 15:50
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ripped0ff posted:How the gently caress do you decide when someone wants to play your precious game enough? Semper Fi DnD, motherfuckers. I can't even imagine being a big enough dick to lecture someone on how committed they are to playing DnD. It's no different from any other activity that's dependent on the participation of other people. I mean, you might get pissed if you're supposed to go bowling with five other guys and two people don't show up and one is stoned out of his gourd. For any group activity, it's reasonable enough to ask people to commit at least to some degree.
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Jul 27, 2009 01:04
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One thing I've never really seen a GM advice section in a book mention: the plot doesn't have to be about the players. I always thought that getting the players caught up in the plots of other people is just as good, as long as the players have a role to play in the plot. This give you a number of other narrative structures than the basic ones where the players go around and do stuff and stuff happens. When stuff happens regardless of the involvement of the players, it's much easier to pace the game. The concept of everything being about the player characters just seems antiquated for me.
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Aug 23, 2009 00:16
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Ulta posted:Having the plot not be about the players kills the whole collaborative storytelling part of the game. It makes it about you, and not us. I ran a game a couple of weeks back which was basically Die Hard 3 set in Sharn (Eberron D&D). The story was about the players, but the plot wasn't about them, like the plot in Die Hard 3 wasn't really about John McClane. Not having the characters being at the center of the plot also allows partial victories: they stopped the bank robber, but the terrorist threat against the city was successful in creating chaos. Now they will have to deal with the fallout of the situation, reap the rewards of their victory and now movers and shakers in the world will notice the players.
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Aug 23, 2009 20:57
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I've been working for a long time now with a military sci-fi campaign set into the Star Wars universe, where the players are the high command of a separatist group during the OT era and beyond. Going to use ORE to run it just simply because ORE owns. One thing I've been thinking is that when the player characters have wildly disparate fields of expertise, a lot of the time it just doesn't make sense to every central character to get involved. So, how does this sound: I make baseline barebones stats for crewmen, officers and such. At any time, the players can take over an NPC to do stuff if their main character is not involved. For example, if there is a space battle, and at the moment there is nothing to do for the guy playing the Intelligence Agency boss, he can take over the sensors operator, comm officer, gunnery chief, the flagship's captain or XO. If one of these generic-type characters actually manage to accomplish Something Significant, like managing to punch a comm message through Imperial jamming, take command of the damage control team during a crisis or whatever, the generic characters get special status and become supporting actor, whereafter i stat them out a bit more.
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Dec 11, 2010 13:45
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Alasdair Crawfish posted:i would really recommend against splitting the party. it almost always results in one of the groups sitting there bored while the other one gets to have all the fun I did a thing once in a Call of Cthulhu game with two players, where in one session the other player character disappeared into Carcosa and the other guy had to find him. To keep him from being bored, I ruled that the other guy heard him whispering in his head, giving suggestions and advice, so effectively they both played the same character for one session.
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Dec 14, 2010 13:06
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