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Alan_Shore posted:I hope this is OK! Yeah, you'll learn a lot by just winging it - you'll get a lot of rules wrong, but your group will have fun and eventually learn the right rules (or adopt things as your new house rules). My one big recommendation that makes life much easier is to make a list of a dozen or two quick NPCs. (You could do them on a sheet or two of paper, index cards, or something digital). You don't need stats or anything detailed, just a name (I'm terrible at making and remembering distinctive but not stupid names on the fly), a quick description, and a bit of their personality, plus some space to write down how you use them. While the module will have a bunch of major NPCs detailed, your players will inevitably want to talk to someone at a bar, or the store owner of a shop that's not explicitly listed, or the stablehand at the inn, or some other NPC that you have to make up on the fly. Having a name and quick description keeps you from getting writer's block in the moment without doing a ton of prep work, and makes it seem to your players like you've actually detailed a crazy amount of the world. If you use the space to note how you used them, they can become a recurring NPC if they work well.
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Nov 19, 2023 22:42
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tanglewood1420 posted:Don't feel forced to stick to the PCs perspective either. Sometimes I'll 'cut away' to the Big Bad in their secret base discussing their plans with a trusted lieutenant, or cursing the players as they foiled their last plot, or cackling as the players think they've foiled him but are actually playing right into his hands. And if just doing a 'cut away' doesn't work, you can use prophetic vision if there's magic, gods, psychic powers, or the like in the setting. It's pretty typical in fantasy settings for gods to be limited in their ability to intervene directly, but be able to send dreams or visions to guide people. I'm always amazed at how many DMs don't tap into this as a way to get the players information to move the campaign forward and give context to what's happening in the campaign.
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Feb 12, 2024 18:01
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Dameius posted:If you enjoy it, or think you will, then do it. Else, don't. I'm not good at voice acting, so I only do a little bit with accents and tone supplemented by description. Not every GM is going to be a Matt Mercer, and players are generally happy to roll with what you're able to do. Also some accents run into the problem of sounding really racist, so be aware of those. Kwyndig posted:Yeah you've already got a pile of bodies, no sense letting that go to waste, have it spawn 1d4 lower rank undead every turn or every other turn. Maybe your more religious minded PCs can spend a turn blessing them to stop it for a few turns until it can be consecrated or the necromancer is defeated. For 'big pile of messily animated bodies' in 5e, I like using the stats of a Giant Octopus with the appropriate undead modifiers tacked on (including a better move speed if it's not something like a bunch of bones in a pit). Giant Octopus is a big sack of hit points that grapples PCs but doesn't do a lot of damage, so it's good at being something the party has to spend some real effort to deal with without killing players in it's own right.
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Mar 11, 2024 23:10
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Golden Bee posted:If the characters would know, the players should know. Games are about choices, so your duty is to inform, not protect. IMO one thing to watch out for in this giving clues that make sense to you but not the players. I ran a pickup RIFTS game back in the 90s (when I was also much newer to DMing) and I had the players spot a Coalition armored company (Coalition are Nazis in the setting, so an obvious enemy for the PCs) out following a slow-moving robot homing beacon that was moving in a straight line and had been for some time. The idea for the adventure was that they'd see this huge force moving in a predictable pattern and try something like 'get ahead of them to investigate whatever they were headed to first', 'find out what people think is there' or 'talk to nearby settlements and get them to band together to stop them'. What I didn't expect was for them to directly talk to the soldiers (which was not a bad idea) and then decide that since the soldiers gave little information that they should just attack (very bad idea). I ended up ruling that the Company needed to preserve ammo so they fired a warning shot that took 5/6 of the health of the toughest PC and tried to drive the party off, and mentally marked that down as 'man, players will attack anything'. But in hindsight, it was my fault. The mistake I made was that I just named that they saw a 'Coalition Armored Company', assuming they'd realize how large a 'company' is either from the fact that it was described in the game books or from the size of a 'company' in modern militaries. I didn't actually say the number of people and vehicles involved though or give any description of them that would indicate they're massively out of the PC's league. If I was running that encounter again (as unlikely as it is I'd go back to RIFTS, lol) I'd make sure to make the size of the opposition clear in the description, like pointing out how they had to change formation to deal with small obstacles. And if the players did say they were going to attack, I'd pause and directly say something like "Well, one of these big mechs would be a risky fight for you, they have 8. A few of the flight suit guys would be a reasonable encounter, they have three dozen. One squad of infantry with their transport would be a reasonable fight for your party, they have a dozen squads and extra vehicles roaming around," as think the most likely cause of the players wanting to attack is that they just didn't get from my description how completely overmatched they are. Pantaloon Pontiff fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Apr 10, 2024 |
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Apr 10, 2024 16:34
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Dameius posted:Rifts was my very first ttrpg that I played in elementary school and somehow I still wanted to play more ttrpgs. I don't have anything constructive to add, it's just so rare to see it mentioned and it holds a soft spot in my heart despite the many, many, many warts. IMO Rifts is a great idea for an RPG setting and a lesson about running games. The setting of post-apocalypse earth where you've got magic, psi powers, and demons but also supertech like mecha and cyborgs lets you play around with a lot of fun toys, do a lot of exploration, and just generally go wild with things. But the system has so many fundamental problems that it really just screams 'if you want to run this, use the setting in another ruleset entirely'. And when I say fundamental, I don't mean the power creep in later supplements or even the clunkiness and weird contradictions in the Palladium ruleset, I mean relaly basic like the MDC vs HP/SDC mechanics which make a bunch of stats and equipment in the books pointless, and preclude running a lot of 'players are not in full combat setup but have to deal with an enemy' scenarios.
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Apr 13, 2024 18:41
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