A Role Playing Games Blog
Category : Advice, Game Design, RPG, Random musings, Video
This time I want to share a video from the Neoncon 2009 GamesU with you. In this 51-minutes video Matthew Grau from WildFire LLC talks about the monomyth (aka the hero’s journey) and how it can be used in creating stories.
I have to admit that’s the first video in that series that I actually enjoyed watching. Perhaps because Matthew is talking about story and not the industry. What are you thoughts on Matthew’s talk?
Like a mailroom clerk with dreams of greatness, of getting that corner office with a view, I too picked up a gaming book long ago and embarked on this journey we call role playing games! Back in 1986 I began playing and since no one wanted to be the Game Master the responsibility fell on my shoulders and I have not looked back.
All this soul searching came about as a result of Questing GM’s Blog Carnival Topic: How to be a better GM? The Blog Carnival originated in the RPG Bloggers Network and now that Michael has so gracefully allowed me to post in this blog I figured the least I can do is add my contribution to the carnival. So here I go…
In all the time I’ve been playing RPGs there are many lessons I’ve learned. But I think the single best piece of advice I can give any DM, new or old, green or experienced, is be CONSISTENT. And I don’t mean just be consistent with your rulings, know your system of choice well enough to know when to make a ruling or when to say we’ll look it up after the game and keep things flowing. That’s not enough; NO I mean consistency beyond that. I mean be dependable, be reliable, and be constant.
My current gaming group has been playing once a week, with the occasional breaks due to vacations or the holidays once a week since 1993. Of the current six players, three of them have been with the group almost since the beginning. We’ve played various campaigns on the same homebrewed world, with different systems, but somehow we have stuck together and still manage to take out time of our schedules to get together once a week.
And why is that? I would like to say that it’s all because of my wonderful storytelling, the intricate plots, the dazzling challenges but I think deep down inside it is because we have made a habit of it. We get together and play, last week’s game might have been less than stellar, and sometimes at the end of the night you wonder why you do this, but week after week we come back and try our hand at it once more. In hindsight the fun far outweighs the bad things that seemed so terrible at the moment.
You’ve all heard the common advice given to aspiring writers. WRITE! I really think this also applies to Game Mastering. You have to do it and do it as much and as regularly as you can. Like any creative endeavor there will be trepidation and anxiety, sometimes you’ll feel that the adventure you crafted, the one you thought you had all figured out, was simply ignored by your players who just went off on that two sentence tangent you wrote down as window dressing. It’s easy to get discouraged and just say “Forget it!” and give up. But just like a writer working through writer’s block you need to work through those feelings and come back to the table.
I truly believe that the GM is not merely a rules arbiter and a facilitator of group storytelling The GM is the glue of a group, the driving force and many times the reason groups stick together. Being a GM is equal part coach, cheerleader and strict parent with a dash of event coordinator thrown in!
Despite all this attempts at being funny, let me give you one solid piece of advice. Be realistic and consider how often you can play, be it weekly, every other week, once a month, whatever. Doesn’t matter if this is a real life game, or a Play by Post, Play by e-mail or online. Set the date, invite people and stick to it. Not everybody will come at first, some of the initial group you invite will drop out, some game sessions it will be you and one player, but play anyway. Don’t get discouraged. Eventually people will realize that you are serious about this and you will attract like minded individuals who share your dedication and commitment to the game.
A good GM is hard to find, and a big part of being good is being consistent…
Thanks to Questing GM’s for hosting the Blog Carnival and giving me a reason to write this little rant. Hope it’s useful to some of you! Let us know how you think we can all be better GMs. Participate in the Carnival.
PS- If you remember the movie the title and first lines of this post refer to, well you might just be as old as me! For our younger readers it’s all about the movie Secret of my Success with Michael J. Fox, a 1987 cinematic masterpiece. I’ll leave you with the movies entry on the IMDB and the link to the music video by Night Ranger. That was the music playing as I wrote this post. That may explain a lot!
When I remember correctly I’ve always rolled behind the GM screen when I was running a game. My first GM did the same, as did most GMs I met in my life. Recently I had a talk on Skype with Philippe-Antoine Ménard and he mentioned that his rolls as a GM are always in the open.
That got me thinking. Why do we roll in secret? Probably because we want to fudge the rolls. I guess that most GMs will fudge rolls in the players’ favor when things go rough. That’s at least what I do. But I also understand that this can cause some strange situations. Imagine a fight that’s turning bad for the characters. And suddenly the attacker start to miss, horribly fumble their rolls or suddenly fail their morale test and run. This may very well break immersion. For some players the sense of disbelief goes out of the window then. And that’s something any GM should avoid, at least in my opinion.
For Philippe’s group it’s perfectly normal that he rolls openly. There a trust between players and GM and when things go bad, the GM knows that he did mess up the balance of the encounter. In a game where you roll secretly as a GM things often go out of hand, but since nobody notices when you fudge the rolls, you get away with it. There’s no way to improve your GMing skills that way – at least not that aspect of the game.
Another interesting point: we expect players not to fudge rolls, when they lie to the GM about what they rolled, things usually go downhill fast. But lying about what they rolled is accepted or even encouraged when GMs are concerned. And this may lead to a real problem at the game table. When a player fails a roll, he knows it was because of the dice. When the GM tells that one of the NPCs failed (or succeeded) at any task, players tend to think this didn’t happen because of the dice but because of the GM. That makes it harder for the GM to act as some kind of neutral arbitrator.
I think in my next game I will try to do all rolls in the open. I am sure this will be a new experience for me and my players. But I think it actually might improve the game. So, how do you handle rolls as a GM? Do you roll in the open, or do you prefer to have the ability to fudge rolls behind the GM screen?
P.S.: I want to thank Philippe aka ChattyDM for inspiring me to write this post! Thanks!
Category : Advice, D&D4e, Feature, Just my two cents, RPG, Random musings
Some of you might have gotten the idea from a previous post that I don’t like Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition. Nothing could be further from the truth. I played the game for the better part of a year and had fun with it. Ultimately my players and I sat down to talk about it and decided to play something else, in this case Pathfinder. But I think 4th edition had many things to teach, lessons I’m applying to my current Pathfinder campaign, and will benefit others systems I play in the future. Let’s look at them…
1. The biggest lesson was to let go of my fear of “breaking” the game and get creative. When D&D 3rd edition came about the system codified so many different elements, everything was so closely interconnected that sometimes I feared eliminating a certain part of the system without worrying about the cascading effect it would have on the game. Thought years of playing I felt pretty comfortable with winging things, but making sweeping changes to the rules was something I was reluctant to do! D&D 4th edition’s simplicity meant I felt free to create modify and wing just about anything I could imagine. This gave me the confidence to look back at 3rd edition, and now at Pathfinder, and shake off the false sense of strict adherence to the rules and feel freer to create, modify and learn from my mistakes. I now approach games with a more experimental outlook!
2. Reskinning, just taking the math and abilities of one creature and making up a new one from the foundations of that other creature, the whole idea is so simple I am amazed it took me so long to consciously do it. I owned tons of monsters book, a creature for every purpose. Now I can do so much with just one book just by describing a monster differently. I had fiddled with the details of monsters before, but now I just redress them and describe the effect differently, adding an ability here or feat there.
3. Making characters just a little bit tougher… Here is something I have tried to do for a long time, make those first levels more survivable and taking some cues form 4th edition I now make characters a little bit harder to kill allowing them to survive longer and face tougher challenges.
4. Making terrain an integral part of combat! I’ve always drawn detailed maps, and even had an adventure where the party fought in floating pillars above an underground lake, but these instances were the exception not the rule. After playing D&D 4th edition I now plan my combats and challenges with an eye for how terrain can be integral to the situation, hindering or helping combatants as they interact with the terrain. I think this has been the change that has caused the biggest shock to some of my players. It adds another wrinkle to the tactical element of combat that some who are more interested in just getting their character close to the monster and beating it down resent. Still I think it creates a much richer and diverse combat experience.
5. Diagonal movement… Here is something I embraced when they changed the rules from D&D 3.0 to 3.5 but added unnecessary complexity to the game. If I’m willing to forego things like facing or other “realistic” elements why insist on this? Now calculating effects and movement is quicker, true it changes the rules, but hey it’s my game, I learned that lesson!
Theses are just five examples, but there were many little things I learned form playing D&D 4th edition. I still read reviews and rules for the system and talk with friends that play the game so I may learn more and keep growing as a gamer and a Game Master.
What have you learned for playing this or other games? Let us know…
Initiative tracking is very important when it comes to running a Dungeons & Dragons game. Gamers all over the internet have come up with some unique and creative ways for tracking initiative. I thought I would take a moment to talk about a few of my favorite initiative tracking tools.
DM’s Tracker by kbarapps
DM’s Tracker is my favorite tool to use when tracking Initiative, but I am somewhat wary to talk about it. DM’s Tracker is an initiative tracker for your iPhone/iTouch. The application allows you to set up players, monsters, and encounters. You can also use it to track each player’s condition. Whether they are bloodied, stunned, dazed, and so on. My wariness to talk about this app is because of how buggy it is. I have used it long enough that I am pretty aware of the bugs and how to avoid them or work with them. According to kbarapps twitter page the program is undergoing a rewrite and when the update gets published all the existing bugs should be squished and new features added. I am really looking forward to the update.
Printable DM
My second favorite option is the Printable DM created by Nephilim. Just download the PDF, print off the sheet and you instantly have a way of tracking Initiative order as well as conditions.
Index Cards
This is a cheep and easy method for tracking player Initiative and it certainly fits under the “keep it simple, stupid” methodology. Pull out some index cards for your players and your monsters. On the top left label each cards write the names of a different player or monster till you have enough for your encounter. On the top right of each card write down their HP and Bloodied numbers. Underneath the Characters name write down their AC, Fort, … On the bottom right of each card write down their initiative number order. (ie: 1, 2, 3…) That way if you drop your cards you can easily put them back in the right order. It’s also easy to track conditions.
What is your preferred way to track initiative? I want to know.
Dice are a very important part of most role playing games. Without out a good set of dice you would not be able to roll up your character, let alone slay a dragon. They are just as important to people who play roll playing games as the story they are playing through. Some people take this very seriously. I remember reading a story some time back about a player who buried his dice in the back yard after a bad roll that resulted in the death of his character. Yet others are more than willing to share their game dice with a new player. It all depends on the person.
As important as dice are to players, the way they roll their dice is just as important. Some people give them a quick shake in the hand and let them fly. Others will spin their dice high into the air and let them drop down right in front of them. Yet, others will blow on their dice casino style before they roll. Each person is hopping that these little rituals they do with their game dice will improve the out come of what they roll. You can witness this first hand by watching Chris Perkins and the writers from robot chicken playing Dungeons & Dragons. Each person (most of which are new to roll playing and have never touched a d20 before) has their own roll style.
When I was looking at getting into Dungeons & Dragons last year I started by picking up the Dungeons & Dragons Foruth Edition RPG Starter Set. When I got home and opened the box one of the first things that poured out into my hands was my first set of dice. Up till this moment I had never owned my own set of dice. With the six multi-colored dice in my hand my mind exploded with possibilities of the other kinds of cool dice I could get. I think I spent hours that first night searching the internet for dice. That should show you how important dice are to me.
After looking though all the Steel, Bone, Hematite, Opaque, Translucent, Glitter, Speckled dice the internet had to offer I settled on a set of Green opaque dice with white numbers. Green being my favorite color and opaque making it easy to read the white numbers. Sometimes settling on the simplicity of just being able to read quickly what you have rolled is more important and time-saving then getting a crazy translucent yellow dice with elvish print that takes you way to long to read after it’s stopped rolling. That’s just my preference. Everyone has their own and that is what makes this topic so fascinating to me.
Recently my views on dice all came crashing to the ground thanks to a company called Game Science. One of the things Game Science states about their own dice is:
“My company makes polyhedral dice closer to casino specifications” (casino dice must be exact to a tolerance of .005″ – Gamescience dice have been measured with a side to side variation of .002″ to .006″)
So with a sharp edge on the Game Science Dice, your roll is truly random since their are no curvature variations. The sharp edges also allow for better stopping power.
Now, is all this true? I honestly don’t know. I think casino’s have have sharp edge dice for a reason and I think that holds some weight. Game Science has two videos on their website with the owner talking about his dice and why they are better then all other roll playing dice on the market. After watching the videos the guy lays down a pretty convincing argument. But he is such a good salesmen I also think he could sell sand to a guy living in the desert.
After watching these videos it’s hard for me to know if one brand of dice is truly better then any other brand on the market. I just don’t have enough validated facts to say one way or the other. As important as dice are to me and to roll playing games in general the biggest reason I play D&D is to have time set aside in my week to meet up with my friends and socialize. I don’t need casino grade dice to do that.
With all that said I drank the Kool-Aid and ordered a set of Lime Green Game Science dice.
You know…
So I can review them…
