Dealing with Disconnects: Cautious Combatants
Sometimes when you’re running a game, you want to emulate a novel or movie. Being unscripted, though, a game is a different sort of animal: the gamemaster may be the main storyteller, but he doesn’t have control over the protagonists. This can lead to disconnects between the way heroes act in the “source” fiction and the way the PCs act in game. One of the most common examples of this disconnect appears in combat. In the novels and movies, the heroes charge bravely in, performing risky cinematic stunts. They take chances. They risk death in order to end a fight more quickly so they can get on to their ultimate goals. They’re not necessarily foolish, but they aren’t cautious by any realistic standard.
In a campaign, PCs often act the opposite way in combat. They proceed with great caution, looking for every possible piece of cover or other advantage. They don’t use maneuvers that would cause them too many penalties. They minimize risk in any way possible.
Categories: Advice | Comments (6)
Launching a Campaign: The Ground Rules Sheet
As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s important to inform your players about some of your assumptions before you begin your campaign. I find the easiest way of doing so is to provide a handout that summarizes some of the basic information about the campaign. A cheat sheet, if you will.
The sheet should cover the basic ground rules of the campaign in a reasonably compact form. The idea is to create something easily readable that conveys the basic information your players need in order to create their characters. You don’t want to rehash the character generation rules from the rulebook — just point out the specific variations you’re using, along with the general theme of the campaign.
The sheet can include anything you feel is important. Mine covers the following areas:
Categories: Advice, Launching a Campaign | Comments (0)
Launching a Campaign: Realism vs. Ease
As I prepare to launch a new campaign, I’m running into the early decisions that help shape one. They seem like useful candidates for blog posts, so today I’m going to consider one of those early decisions: How much should I emphasize realism (or verisimilitude, if you want to get semantic) in the game?
Most games will feature some degree of realism — their unreal elements will behave in a realistic manner. Magic will follow a reliable set of rules; super-science will mostly behave according to the laws of physics, and will break them consistently when it doesn’t. Even many humor games, like Paranoia, will build on a basic level of realism. (Toon, on the other hand, is one of the exceptions — it’s designed to favor cartoon illogic.) That’s not really what I’m talking about here, though.
The question is, rather, how much bookkeeping I, as a gamemaster, am willing to put up with in exchange for a greater sense of realism in various player activities. Do I track food and water, for instance, or do I just have the players deduct some cash from their characters now and then and assume they’re restocking when they can? Do I track ammunition? Encumbrance? Do I track supply and demand of given materials and change prices in various regions accordingly? Do I place craftsmen and other NPCs specifically across my map, or do I use the “say yes or roll the dice” method when a character goes looking for, say, a glassblower or a priest? Do I place all of my monsters, or do I rely partially on random tables? What about treasure? Do I map out all of my dungeons ahead of time, or do I just wing it if the characters go somewhere unexpected and stumble across one I hadn’t fully prepared yet? To what extent do I track weather? Do I draw up a timeline of events as they will happen unless the PCs intervene, or do I react on the fly?
Categories: Advice, Launching a Campaign, Philosophy and Rants | Comments (2)
4E from One Year In
4e PHB alternate cover image I had sitting around... from the German version, maybe?
Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons is a little over a year old now, and I’ve been playing or running it for almost exactly a year today. On the whole, I’m finding it a pretty robust system. It’s not my favorite system, or even my favorite D&D (that would be Cyclopedia D&D), but it’s become my favorite version of AD&D. A few of my favorite parts:
Philosophy
I’ve said before that I’ve been playing the same game since I first picked up basic D&D. That game is a cinematic game about daring heroic exploits with the fates of villages, nations, worlds hanging in the balance. Not every campaign has had the same elements, to be sure; many were high fantasy, but some were low fantasy, or even bizarre science fantasy. Some were set in mythic Asian locations, some in the Bronze Age, one memorable one in the prehistoric during an ice age. There were flirtations with dark fantasy and steampunk. But the game remained the same. With few exceptions, the characters were heroes and did heroic things (or died trying).
Categories: My Campaigns, Philosophy and Rants | Comments (7)
Action!
(Since I’m working on the back end of my blog, and that’s cutting into my writing time, I’ll be reposting an article a week over the next couple of weeks. The following article was originally posted on August 6, 2008.)
Action Points are one of the better additions to fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons. We’ve seen their like in many other roleplaying games, to be sure — I’d venture that they’re a part of more modern RPGs than not. This isn’t exactly innovation on D&D’s part. Officially including them is a first for D&D, though, and a welcome one. [Edit: Apparently it isn't, as they were included in a 3.5e supplement. This is still the first time they're part of the core system, though.] They serve their purpose — rewarding the party for pushing on in the adventure, and making up to some extent for the loss of expended resources. Better yet, they can have a dramatic effect on a combat.
But what if they could be more dramatic still? Chatty DM has put forth that question, and the various commenters have answered it by providing a wealth of ideas as to how else action points might be used. I’ve developed an addition to the system myself, which I present in more detail here.
Categories: Advice, Original Game Content | Comments (10)
