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MyLovelyHorse, I had a group that had a tendency to devolve into Subgroup B behavior as well. The best way I found to break them out of it was to put them in situations that were much more immediate. By this I mean, "OK, you guys can sit here and discuss all of the ramifications of X and Y plans, but while you're doing that, the bad guys aren't waiting for you." It only takes one or two times of the opposition beating the players to the punch (and thus changing the situation and making things MUCH harder for the PCs) before they start acting on their initiatives rather than discussing them ad nauseum.
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Sep 1, 2015 18:00
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Baronjutter posted:I played a terrible D&D game like 15 years ago...
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Sep 3, 2015 03:07
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You're planning way too much detail in advance. Chances are good that your players wil gently caress something up about a quarter of the way in and all of your prep will be for naught.
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Sep 4, 2015 03:11
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Yeah, I guess it just feels like a stretch to go from, "let's kill this loving pirate bitch once and for all" to "poo poo yeah, we're hopping through dimensional portals to places that have technology with which we have zero familiarity in order to launch rockets from loving mecha! Boy howdy!" But as you say, you probably have your players pegged. I imagine it will be epic regardless.
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Sep 4, 2015 05:03
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Oh, well, gently caress yeah demons playing slayer! Carry on.
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Sep 4, 2015 05:13
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One of the best RP sessions I ever encountered as a player was in a Dark Conspiracy game a friend of mine ran in college. Given that it was Dark Conspiracy, everything was bizarro and we were all paranoid. But as the session progressed, our "routine" handling of the paranormal poo poo we'd been sent to mop up got progressively more and more strange, and my teammates (the other PCs) got more and more hinky. By the end of the session I was pretty sure at least two of the other PCs were actively trying to get me killed, culminating in one of them basically revealing himself to be a demon. That was when the GM said, "And that's the point at which you wake up in a cold sweat" - at which point I was dumbstruck. Yup, the whole session was all my character's freaky nightmare, and every other player in the game had been in on it from the get-go. And it had all sorts of prophetic foreshadowing in it as well, which made it doubly cool. "It was all just a dream" is a pretty loving tired fictional trope for when an author has written him or herself into an untenable corner, but to have it used so intentionally and brilliantly in an RPG was pretty 
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Oct 10, 2015 06:47
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So the party made a hell of a mess in the tunnels, eh? And guards came pouring in from all over, you say? Where do you suppose those guards came from? Could some of them reasonably have come from the prison? If so, then maybe that's just the opportunity the imprisoned mage was looking for. So start the session like this: "Yesterday, you woke up in prison. The people who are holding you are clearly used to holding mages captive because they have taken X precautions to prevent you from using magic to escape. But being clever and patient, you have almost managed to defeat X. Then all hell breaks loose, and someone comes in shouting for re-inforcements. The vast majority of the guards grab weapons and pour out. The guy in the cell next to you looks at you wide-eyed and says, 'I'm making a break. Are you with me?!?'" Make the next few minutes of play-time revolve around the mage escaping, covered by the distraction of all the guards rushing to try to kill the rest of the party. This frees your mage and introduces and NPC who might give your players clues to the missing "strategic puzzle" they're trying to solve. Once the mage is re-united with the party (figure he knows where they're likely to be, maybe), then the next chapter of the session is about springing their condemned compatriot. Or go with the pirate idea, that's pretty rad too.
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Nov 9, 2015 23:51
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LLSix posted:To get the real book experience at least one important
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Nov 24, 2015 16:42
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Another thing to look at as a useful skill is screenwriting. A good source I've heard recommended (that is on my wish-list but that I've not yet read) is "Save the Cat" by Blake Snyder. The construction and pacing of a good scene is (IMO) way more important than a tightly-written plot, simply because it is virtually inevitable that your players will take the first unanticipated left-turn they can when given even the littlest opportunity, throwing your lovingly-authored plot completely on its ear. So true is this maxim that I don't even really bother writing plots anymore. I just give the players enough rope and let them go nuts.
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Dec 5, 2015 23:14
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Baronjutter posted:As a GM how much do you guys leave to the dice?
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Dec 10, 2015 03:34
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I go back and forth on it. Sometimes I want a serious game, sometimes I want a beer-and-pretzels game where the cracking of jokes happens in-character rather than out. What's important is that everyone's on the same page. Nothing divides a group faster than having four people come up with serious characters and one guy playing Butt McSquigglypenis and doing dumb poo poo all the time for lolz.
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Dec 31, 2015 19:55
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Everblight posted:I know the implied setting is opium dens and eastern bloc hellholes, but I would feel more comfortable having my players tromp around domestic places like Louisiana backwaters, gang-controlled Detroit enclaves and northern California militia compounds that still have an unruled element to them
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Jan 5, 2016 03:15
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You cannot go wrong with Apocalypse World.
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Jan 8, 2016 02:44
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Iceclaw posted:You actually can. The whole "sex move" mechanic can be awkward to explain.
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Jan 9, 2016 00:58
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Iceclaw posted:Considering it's supposed to be for demoing roleplaying for complete newbies, it's still a bit of an elephant in the room for a good first imoression: "Yeah, roleplayers aren't actually crazy, unable to dicern game from reality or enacting creepy fantasies. Let's play a Mad Max like game! Here's your character sheet, this one is harder to kill when fighting naked, and all characters have a special power that trigger when they gently caress."
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Jan 9, 2016 05:54
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Rohan Kishibe posted:...Peasant Dirtfarmer Sim 1989...
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Jan 11, 2016 21:08
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hyphz posted:Sure, but then how do I avoid The Pest Show problem where the other players are frustrated because too much of the game sessions is being taken up with working around the fact that Pest can't climb? Or you could put the party in situations where "shooting" is not the most obvious (or best) solution, and actually, you know, give experience for something other than killing stuff. Or better yet, play a different game, one where min-maxing isn't a thing.
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Jan 17, 2016 21:31
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Ominous Jazz posted:I feel like most DMS, myself included, are too committed to their ~grand narratives~ and sometimes should just throw some bullshit and see what happens.
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Mar 9, 2016 17:17
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Jesus, you're not in Louisiana, are you? because that sounds exactly like a dude I used to know.
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Jun 25, 2016 18:56
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Have one (or more) of the guests at the party recognize them. A Fixer they've worked with before ("Jesus, this is a kidnapping isn't it? gently caress. Who are you after? I'd ask you who hired you, but you'd just lie to me. At least do me the professional courtesy of giving me the high-sign before the shooting starts."), or maybe an enemy, a rival, or a former victim ("Mr. Host, I don't mean to alarm you, but I'm pretty sure that waiter over there robbed our corporate drug lab last month.")
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Jul 8, 2016 15:28
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Alternatively, you can have some kind of token that gets passed around the table, to signify who is taking center stage.  This is all good advice, and you should follow it.
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Jul 20, 2016 22:54
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Also, if you're going to invent a town, decide how it developed. Virtually all major towns on earth are located by a body of navigable water (i.e. a river or the ocean - or where a river meets the ocean). And that's because 1) people need to drink water, and 2) for pretty much all of human history (and modern times are no exception) it was cheaper to transport goods by water than by any other means. So give your city water at a minimum. Then, who originally settled your city and why? And what social/economic/political factors led to its growth and/or decline?
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Aug 24, 2016 23:47
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I mostly think about buildings I've been in, lived in, or worked in. Make sure you add a couple of oddities or weird architectural details for a touch of realism, and wing it as you go.
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Aug 24, 2016 23:57
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Zereth posted:Of course, if the answer to the later question is they settled it recently and you're on modern-day earth, people can overcome "not near water" by technology and do dumbass poo poo like building a city in the middle of the loving desert. (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, LA AND VEGAS)
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Aug 25, 2016 03:15
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Duckbag posted:In the US, you can tell which cities were built after the invention of the automobile simply by looking at the width of their streets. Duckbag posted:...so it's not uncommon in real cities to see a medieval cathedral sitting across the street from some modern glass-and-steel monstrosity.
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Aug 25, 2016 04:39
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chitoryu12 posted:A loving awesome effortpost about NYC
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Aug 25, 2016 16:23
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Duckbag posted:From there, you can use your own experiences (or simple imagination) to figure out which neighborhoods have the rich people and which ones have the poor people (this will vary by time and place)...
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Aug 26, 2016 23:26
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Also: if you want to go the easy route and get cool fantasy cities with awesome maps, great descriptions, internecine politics, and lots of adventure hooks, you cannot go wrong with the "Cities of Harn" from Columbia Games. Transparency disclosure - I write freelance for Columbia Games, so I am by nature biased. But all the stuff that's being discussed in this thread about how cities develop and why they're there and how they're fed and what their industries are and how their neighborhoods vary - that's all stuff that was very much kept in the forefront of the mind of the original creator (N. Robin Crossby, now sadly deceased) and which those of us on the writing team still consider very strongly when writing source material. My personal mantra for figuring out the hows and whys is usually "follow the money," so I put a lot of thought into guild politics and corruption and such (and therefore the effects they have on how the city developed in the past and how it functions now). The cities are of medievally appropriate size (5,000 - 20,000 inhabitants generally) and each has its own unique character. A few years back CGI started re-releasing all of the old, out of print material and took the opportunity to really expand and add tons of detail and adventure hooks, really fleshing out the feel of the places. The expanded module for the City of Coranan (the largest of Harn's cities) just released in June, I think. FWIW, I GM'ed a long-running RPG campaign set in Coranan where all of the PCs were related (i.e. brothers and cousins and such) members of the same Thieves' Guild, and it was a ridiculous amount of fun. Think "The Sopranos" meets "Rome" and you're not far off from the tenor of this campaign. There's so much good stuff there that in the 5 years that the campaign ran (playing every other Thursday night like clockwork), I think we had maybe a grand total of 8 or 10 sessions that took place outside the city. Being reprehensible thieves, the politics were brutal and personal and the smaller geographic scale of the game meant that the place and the NPCs in it took on a very organic, tightly-knit, almost familiar feel. And even if you don't end up using the politics or the religions or whatever as-is, I think they're worth it for the inspiration/idea/plot-hook value and the maps alone. Give it a look: http://www.columbiagames.com/cgi-bin/query/harn/cfg/single.cfg?product_id=5771-PDF FAKE EDIT: Hmm, the sample PDF (the first 4 pages of the module) seem to be low-res versions. I'll notify the webmaster and get that fixed. REAL EDIT: BTW, the "player map" of the city is available as a free PDF: http://www.columbiagames.com/cgi-bin/query/harn/cfg/single.cfg?product_id=5771map-PDF Ilor fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Aug 27, 2016 |
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Aug 27, 2016 06:21
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Tenser just wanted a way to reliably skip leg day.
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Aug 30, 2016 18:02
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Mendrian posted:Is anybody willing to share a page out of their game-prep notes? I'd be really curious to see how much other people write. Sure: ... There. That was pretty much it. I run a lot of Apocalypse World/PbtA games with some really creative players. It forces me to improvise basically everything. Even maps and stuff usually get sketched at the table. About the only time I'll do any kind of "prep" is if I'm adding a custom move to the setting that I want the players to know about/have access to, but that usually goes up on our forum or wiki. Over the years, I've found that I have much less time to do prep (I used to write tons of source material for my settings), and if I do, my crazy players will find some way to go completely off the reservation - which is super cool - but means you've just lost a bunch of time/effort. I know that's probably not super helpful, but trust me - full-time job, kids, home-ownership. All that poo poo eats your time like crazy, so when you do get the time free, you want to just GAME!
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Aug 31, 2016 00:09
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It's like anything else - the more you do it, the easier it gets. Here's something that helps: think of the game less in terms of the overall "plot" or story arc and more in terms of the scenes you want to portray. Break your story down to its core conflicts and build from those. And anything that's not a conflict? Chop it out. Keep your exposition limited, especially when setting a scene. Who, what, where, why. A sentence for each and start the interaction. There is presumably something the PCs want to accomplish and there is presumably someone or something there that wants to stop them. If not, it's probably not worthy of a scene. A lot of times it's easy to fall into the trap of doing "the thing that comes next." But it's totally OK to skip over that next thing if that next thing doesn't pose an interesting conflict. Example: Your PCs have been hired by the local authorities to figure out why goblins are sacking so many outlying farms and put a stop to it. Finally, at long last, your players have deciphered the root of the problem behind the growing goblin menace in the region, but realize they can't tackle it alone. "The next thing" is to go back to the baron's keep, tell him what's up, and get him to give them some men so they can go gently caress up some goblins. But if the baron is just going to agree with them and give them the men, skip that scene entirely. Go directly to the next scene and describe how the players are leading the baron's men in battle. Start that poo poo in medias res with half of the baron's men already dead and the party already desperately surrounded if you want. Just FFS don't role-play a long and tedious session where the players explain what's going on to an NPC in-character and at great length if there's no conflict involved. Now if there is going to be a conflict, then go for it, have that meeting with the baron. Maybe the baron's seneschal is a giant douche-bag who hates the PCs and is trying to convince the baron that they're just lying to him to get his men out of the keep so his enemies (for whom you meddling PCs are so obviously spies) can attack. Or maybe the "baron" is a 12-year-old kid and you need to convince the people who are really calling the shots. Or convince that little boy to man-up and hold the adults in the room to his decisions. That's sure to make you some "friends," which drives conflicts that can be used to fuel further scenes. Also, it's cool to rope your players into coming up with stuff too, especially when it comes to their characters' interactions with various NPCs. "Hey Gosturm, why do you hate gnomes so much?" or "So Noxumo, you're a wizard - why aren't you studying at the Collegium of Arcane Lore right now?" The more buy-in you have from the players, the more they'll be able to help you if you get stuck. Ilor fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 01:59
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RedMagus posted:Most of all, make sure you ask them questions, and smash-cut away to the next person often. Let roll results hang in the air, and weave in consequences with other players. Damage is always a good fallback, but it's usually the most boring consequence of an action.
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Sep 10, 2016 16:16
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Saturday Knight Fever.
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Oct 18, 2016 17:47
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Provide no explanation.
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Nov 6, 2016 22:48
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Hahaha, the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh trilogy is comedy gold. I love the look on players' faces when they finally figure out that maybe all those monsters they mindlessly slew were actually the good guys.
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Nov 21, 2016 22:31
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This concept of external threats having their own built-in timetables is something that Apocalypse World bakes in from the get-go. It's a very handy way for the GM to get constant reminders that the world doesn't stop for the PCs. It's also cool because the "countdowns" aren't tied to a hard time-scale (X happens, then three days later Y happens, a week after which Z happens), but are more fluid. And if the players manage to disrupt the timetable through their actions, the MC can re-calibrate, or just scrap it and start anew and different one. If you have several of these happening simultaneously, it lights a fire under people. It also makes them make some hard choices with their limited time/resources, which is fun. Yeah, sure, you can spend all summer rooting the Cult of Baal out of Kingstown; but that means you're doing gently caress-all about the Bandit Queen building up her army of gnolls and marauding the outlying farms. Good luck feeding Kingstown come winter, suckers.
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Dec 7, 2016 23:56
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Part of this is gained by setting up an environment where it's OK to fail. If failure always means dire consequences and/or instant death, people will always want to make the "optimum" decision. But if the GM uses failure as a way to drive the story (i.e. make failure interesting and cool), then players become much more willing to let themselves gently caress up - because it's funnier that way. Some games (such as the "Powered by the Apocalypse" games) live on this principle.
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Dec 19, 2016 12:56
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Apocalypse World. She'll be familiar with it from playing Dungeon World, and it is (IMO) even less crunchy and fares better with the improve mentality. For pacing, just have her pay attention to how Threats and Fronts work and she'll be fine.
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Dec 22, 2016 03:34
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PBtA games are aces for introducing new people to TTRPGs.
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Dec 26, 2016 01:58
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Often times I'll name the NPC, but ask the player for details about that person or their character's relationship with that person. "So 'Runty Steve' is pounding on your door, looking to be in a panic. Why do you suppose he's doing that?" Their answer is almost always better than what I had in mind anyway.
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Dec 27, 2016 02:26
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