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Regarding overall party direction: I myself try to build a semi-sandbox world with 'mission points' al la GTA or something. Let's say there's a dragon eating villagers in the south, a lich harassing a castle town to the north, and rumors of odd lights and crystalline growths in the valley to the west. Each of these is a 'level 1' situation, much like the earlier doomsday clock but less overtly threatening. If the party takes care of one of these issue, the other two go to level 2. If the party ignores them all, they all go to level 2. As fallout from each of the three situations reaches the party's base town, they get more details and direct information along the lines of 'poo poo is getting out of control.' They clear two, third gets serious and they go there next, everything scaling up to match the newly leveled up party. What gets interesting is if they ignore one or more and refuse to deal with it. If the party goes whitewater rafting to the east and something got past 'level 3' then they will suddenly find undead sharks and spiky crystalline rocks in the rapids and may very well come home to their lodge razed (and the staff killed) by a dragon while they were rafting, which then stole all their loot that they may have left in their rooms while rafting. (I think I'm mixing up rafting and ski resorts BUT OH WELL) I try to plant any 'situation' in a game world like a seed. If it gets snuffed out and the party gets XP and loot, so be it. If they let it thrive, I get to work my brain about how this affects the overall game world. In a more overarching game I might include a hidden situation (oh no, there was an orc army forming in caves underneath the rapids resort all along!) that only some really good rolls/RP would have revealed before it got to 'level 4' and suddenly pirate orcs on surfboards are terrorizing riverfronts across the land. The one thing I try to stick to is never punishing the players severely for choices they make in good faith for non horrible reasons. That whole loot-stolen example? I am not going to make them fight a pack of beholders naked or anything. Maybe a rust monster (HEEHEE it tickles OH GOD MY FILLINGS!) but the whole 'get your poo poo back from dragon' makes an even more interesting time than 'let's kill a dragon.'
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Jun 17, 2009 07:21
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lighttigersoul posted:My personal DMing style is, as I said 'All Roads LEad Here'. All the flaws of the various game systems aside, this is exactly why I love White Wolf/Storyteller games. Sometimes, I get to decide on the fly how many dice hit the table for the baddies to attack and defend, and I get to call on the fly when they die, at the most entertaining possible point. Pre-built and statted monsters are just meat for the monster manual savants in my group, and properly designed custom NPC foes might go down way too slow or fast depending on how much gear the party has/how well they fight. D20 and some other games are not designed with that flexibility in mind.
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Jun 17, 2009 09:52
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