Further Obvious Insights

The process of generating situations in the way that I described yesterday is much, much easier for me when the style of the game is a well-established sort of beast. It's stupidly easy in a bizarre mega-dungeon, and it's fairly easy when I'm imitating a game that I've played in myself. Right now, for instance, I'm running a game for Dangerfox that's based on the game I've been playing with Trollsmyth for years. The setting is based on the one that Trollsmyth uses, the situation is very similar to the one I've been playing in for years, and I know the kind of scenes that I want to achieve. Most importantly, I know the kinds of goals that Dangerfox's character needs to have to make those scenes interesting, and I have a rough idea of how to give him the opportunity to develop those goals. If he doesn't, I have some ideas for how to adapt the game to accommodate other sorts of motivations.

That's really what's important here: Player and character goals. I've been making the mistake, in a lot of these games, of trying to get my players to do my work for me -- of looking to them to define the game, on the thought that they'll enjoy it more and it'll be easier for me if it's based on "what they want." Which is absolutely and endlessly true, but it doesn't do me any good if I don't know what kinds of situations to present at the table. I just sit there throwing either random situations based on my notes (or thin air) at them, or "logical" (ish) responses to their own actions, and without any yardstick for what makes a "good" scene I just keep getting more and more nervous, without any idea of what's "right" or any foundation for moving my notes or ideas or whatever else it is I'm bringing to the table into the game. It doesn't really matter if those notes came from me or the players: they're not the point.

Goals, though. Goals are something that only the players can come up with, and that can provide me a firm foundation on which to build something that I know is interesting, and fun, and that I can properly referee. A situation can always be built on the foundation of "here is something the player's want, and here is an obstacle in their way." A more interesting scene can similarly be built out of "here are two things the players want, set up in some way that they can only have one of them." (Unless, of course, they are very clever.) If I know the players (and characters) goals, then I have the game. A lot of my communication with players has historically been about determining what their aims are in-game; lately, I've been thinking as well about how to give them the information that they need to devise interesting goals.

That's another problem with these recent games: I've just been throwing "stuff" at the players in the early sessions, and hoping that they come up with interesting ideas about what to do with it. It'd be much easier, for everyone involved, to come up with a proper adventure, with some pre-loaded goals, at the very beginning, and allow players to develop their own ideas from there, once we're properly into the game. Much less flailing about for everyone.

Probably the most important thought I've had along these lines is that there are certain situations that I just can't render with any fidelity. There are a lot of situations that I either don't know enough about, don't have enough interest in, or can't picture clearly enough in my mind to be able to describe well enough that the players have enough information to make decisions about, in a granular way. In response, I've been attempting to get more comfortable with and confident at abstracting these situations.

For instance: I know nothing about wilderness survival. My spatial imagination is similarly underdeveloped. (Seriously -- my attempts to draw maps of places I spend every day in go hilariously awry because I just can't picture them properly, never mind imaginary places I've never been.) So it's difficult for me to handle a party running around the woods from simply a map and a key. Considering that this is what Trollsmyth, in the Pathfinder game I've been running for him lately, is doing, this has been a bit of a problem. I've discovered, though, that a general idea of the terrain, a random encounter chart, and the Survival skill have been good enough for me to fake it. I can take a point on the map and a few rolls and say, "Okay, here's where & how you found that thing you were trying to get," or "Here's what the area immediately around you looks like, and here's a Problem." I don't have a damn clue what any of the stuff inbetween these little interludes looks like, really, ("You walk for 2 miles through...") but it's enough to run a game on.

A Blindingly Obvious Insight

On Friday I made mention of "figuring out my DMing style," in service to what was really another point entirely. What I was talking about, though, was something else that's been on my mind a lot: for the last couple of years, I haven't really enjoyed running games. Most of the sessions and campaigns I've run have been, to some degree or another, poorly-improvised anxiety-fests that I've found, at best, as least as nerve-wracking as they were fun. At worst, I've killed the session half an hour in because I honestly could not think of what to do next -- or even really think much at all.

This is vexing, because in high school I enjoyed DMing more than most other things. I don't think I'm alone here in saying that I'm pretty omnivorous in the things that I enjoy learning and the stuff that I've gotten good at over the years. DMing is one of the few activities that exercises all of it -- skills social, linguistic, creative, and mathematical, never mind a great deal of random accumulated knowledge -- and that furthermore demands that I be aware, present, and fully operational for any length of time. Particularly when I was in school, being repeatedly warned that I would find whatever fresh hell was waiting for me next year "challenging," and being repeatedly disappointed, this was a pretty vital as at least an occasional feature in my social and recreational life.

I've spent the last year threatening at least occasionally to quit DMing entirely, on the idea that I've grown out of it, or I've found other things to occupy my time, or maybe it just was never as fun as I thought. Fortunately or unfortunately, I find that I just can't quit thinking about the dang thing, so I appear to be stuck with it. So I've been trying to figure out a way to run games without allowing them to become a vehicle for anxiety, at least to the point of unpleasantness.

The trick seems to be -- based on some very limited success in the past few weeks -- as it is with many things, preparation. The best antidote for anxiety is confidence, and the best path to confidence is sufficient knowledge to support improvisation.

Which brings me back to my original point. When I say "what I want going into the game," I'm not talking about style or system or mood. When I say "preparation," I don't mean notes or characters or locations or any of the junk I've been writing up and thinking about and talking about for any of the games I've run in the past couple of years. What I mean is knowing two things:

1. Given where the last session ended (or the circumstances devised for the start of the game), what's a situation that will give the characters (and/or their players) and an interesting decision to make?

2. Given the range of likely or possible decisions that could be made, what's the next such situation likely after that? (And after that, and after that, and after that.)

In the second place, obviously, this means knowing the characters and the campaign in order to have a sort of feel for where things are likely to go, and to be able to come up with something even if and when the players don't match those expectations. This means knowing the who and the what of the situation in question well enough to make the situation feel "real" to me -- that is, to make the decision seem significant -- and knowing what information I need to communicate to the players to make it seem real to them.

As indicated in the title, this is pretty obvious. This, however, is what makes it important to me: It's important, it's necessary, and despite that I've been struggling with it, and a number of other issues that it implies and is implied by.

Omox, The Gold Planet

Omox is a strange planet, its geography dominated by great black and amber metallic plains and mountain ranges, scattered with both vast fields and isolated monoliths of living crystal. Its atmosphere is fine and clear in the highlands, but pools in yellowish, murky mists in the lowlands, and here is mildly toxic to creatures from most other worlds, though its residents have mostly adapted. Its ecology would be bizarre by earth standards, and largely revolves around the magical vibrations emitted by the planet's crystals. The human residents food supply is mainly artificially grown, though they do consume some native life forms as delicacies.

More than anything else the Gold Planet is known for the strange and fantastic powers to be found there. The world is often the best place to aquire strange magical and technological wonders, whether wrested from its ruins or devised in its laboratories, and many wizards and sorcerers journey here to study the strange magical effects of the world's crystal resonances. It is also famous for its colleges of wizardry; the world's particular specialities are divination, enchantment, and transmutation, but only illusionists and necromancers are more commonly trained elsewhere.

The grand city of Spire, Omox's only major settlement and the only Veklo settlement of any kind, is dominated by a caste system, with the Veklo nobility at the top, civilized Akkadi warriors just beneath them, the common mass of Veklo making up the majority of craftsmen and traders on the third rung, and the Satra at the bottom as common laborers. A significant portion of the planet's Akkadi live in settlements of their own, despising the weak city-dwellers who have let themselves become the Veklo's puppets, as do bat folk and ruby golems. Most gnomes live in Spire or another human settlement, but outside the social organization of men.

Very few members of foreign human races call Spire home. They exist entirely outside of the caste system, and are therefore only officially tolerated as ambassadors and traders; a small permanent mixed population of Meo, Mekheni, and Hrungir does the work that the Veklo consider too unclean even for the Satra.

The Akkadi are significantly less xenophobic, and for this reason the vast majority of the planet's non-gnome demihumans make their homes in Akkadi citadels and tent-cities. However, foreigners of any kind are not significantly more common among the Akkadi than with the Veklo; the Akkadi cleave tightly to their interpretation of their gods, so only those individuals who find Akkadi religion appealing last long among them. Curiously, the relatively atheistic elves are among the most successful at living among the Akkadi; those who embrace the Akkadi warrior culture find it easy to attend to the appropriate rituals, even if they have little use for the gods they are nominally devoted to.

The Veklo primarily worship Vortoth, as a deity of medicine, music, and writing, (Healing, Knowledge, Magic, Rune), Koth Anos, as a judge of both the dead and the living (Destruction, Death, Law), Kushrieth, as a mistress of fertility and agriculture (Animal, Plant, Community), Andor, as both a maintainer of machines and a minor trickster figure (Artifice, Charm, Protection), and Rashwidir, as their primary war goddess (Glory, Nobility, War). The Grand Temples of Spire train many clerics of these five deities, as well as some dedicated to their own Omox (Knowledge, Magic, Law, Sun), although the Lord of Narrow Lines plays only a very minor role in their own religion.

Omox is a much more central figure in the worship of the Akkadi, who see him as a god of noble conquest, and hold him up as the ultimate example for the Akkadi warrior to follow (Glory, Law, Nobility, Sun, War). They also hold Vortoth in high esteem as a sort of divine "support staff" for the conquering Omox (Healing, Magic, Travel, Trickery), Silvaria as a goddess of survival in the wastes (Sun, Travel, Water, Weather), and Koth Anos as a patron of assassins (Death, Destruction, Trickery). The wild Akkadi are one of the few places in the worlds of the Star Lords that play host to communities of paladins, devoted to Omox.

The Satra venerate Kushrieth as a goddess of the household, primarily through wild, days-long orgies (Healing, Charm, Madness, Plant). The bat folk worship the night sky and the west wind. If gnomes or ruby golems have any religion of their own, they keep it to themselves, though the gnomes do give offerings to the cults of the Veklo.

The Veklo are habitually suspicious of most cults of Silvaria and Andor, because Spire serves as one of the great centers of the spheres' slave trade. The Veklo tend to purchase slaves for functional reasons: there are occasionally jobs that are beneath noble Veklo, but cannot be trusted to free Satra, or which require more intelligence than the Veklo consider the Satra capable. They also occasionally purchase slaves as subjects for experimentation, and while the Veklo claim to despise the ends to which slaves are used on planets like Vortoth and Merrikerr, the depraved tastes with which they characterize the Red and Violet planets are not unkown among them. Furthermore, the Veklo are reknowned for their skill at training slaves, and many a slaver brings his most valuable prizes to the Gold Planet for a time before eventual sale elsewhere.

The Akkadi own slaves as well, though they are more likely to capture their own. They tend to choose slaves for aesthetic reasons, and most Akkadi captains own at least a small harem. The bat folk occasionally keep slaves, mainly as tools to interact with humans through. Ruby golems, on the other hand, have very little use for other races in any capacity. Gnomes vary greatly in their adoption of the practice: some appear to have trouble understanding the concept, while others own far more than even the most aquisitive Veklo.

Player/GM collaboration?

How much do you talk with the GM about the kind of game you want? Or to your players about the kind of game they want you to run? Do you prefer a "this is my game, take it or leave" approach from the GM, or do you build the whole premise collaboratively from the ground up? Or somewhere in between?

Does the way you handle this issue vary depending on whether you're playing or game-mastering? That is to say, do you prefer a collaborative approach when you're a player even if you're pretty much "take it or leave it" when you GM yourself? Or do you encourage player participation in the premise when you GM, even if you're happy to leave that work to your GM when you play?

Does it matter if you're putting together a brand new group or running for a group you've had for ages? When you're starting a new group, do you decide on the premise and then recruit players for that, or recruit players and then work on a premise together? When you're coming up with a new game for an old group, is it usually built on conversations you've with them over the course of the last game, or are you more likely to pitch them an idea of your own more-or-less cold?

The Next Game

So it's coming up on a year since I last ran a campaign, even a short one. And I'm pretty happy with that, honestly. Playing 2-3 times a week continues to be pretty rad. Being a player is just fun, and it's given me a lot to think about in terms of how I'm going to run the next game. I'm also enjoying the opportunity to get some time to really think about what I'm going to run next, and for whom.

I still really, really want to run my own chat game. The format really clicks with me, as a player, and I'm not going to master it until I run my own game. I've got the player base. And I've got some ideas and inclinations that wouldn't really work except in chat. I know that if I were to run a tabletop game, I'd spend at least some of my time thinking, "Man, if this were chat, then we could..."

And yet, I've got this gentle, persistent nudging that my next game should not be the intimate, 1-3 player online chat that I'm really digging right now, but open, anyone-who-shows-up tabletop. Some kind of crazed LL/S&W/LotfP WFRPG/"you want to play a centaur? sure!" megadungeon sandboxy thing, just to get that all out of my system. The game itself wouldn't be quite as good, not quite what I'm grooving on at the moment, but the game isn't everything.

In short: My social life revolves around gaming. A lot of this is just because people I have other things in common with tend to be gaming-curious; partly it's because I make a conscious effort to be "out" about my gaming, and to bring my non-gaming friends into the fold. The overall effect is that, since seventh grade, about 90% of the people I voluntarily interact with on a regular basis (as opposed to classmates and such) have been people who I'm actively gaming with, or people who I'd gamed with in the past but for various reasons wasn't at the moment. Which means that, at the moment, a great deal of my social life is online.

I should probably be more worried about that than I am, but I'm actually pretty happy with that right now. Skype is an awesome thing, I'm weird enough that "mostly online" means "fits my strange niche interests," and a lot of it is that I'm using the 'net to keep in touch with the people I hang out with at college, now that we're scattered across the state.

However, what mostly gaming online does mean is that I don't have a whole lot of influence on my local social scene, and that's going to be even more true once I get back to college. I'd like for there to be a little more communication between the different groups of gamers I'm in touch with at school. I'd like for there to be a reliable group of people around for me to hang out with, who understand how to socialize without getting as drunk as they possibly can, as quickly as they can. I worry about some of my friends who, when I'm busy with my online gaming, often end up hanging out with people who drink more than said friends are really comfortable with. Running a game isn't necessarily going to have the effect that I want, and it's obviously not the only way to create that kind of environment, but it's a tool that I'm comfortable with, and fairly good at using.

So there's that. Plus, like I mentioned before, the kind of "anyone can show up!" old school exploration game I've been curious about running for a while is going to be a lot easier to wrangle while I'm still at college, and have a handful of people bugging me about running some variety of old school D&D already, than it will be once I graduate and have to start over cold in a social environment. I'm not quite convinced that's the kind of game I want to run, but it's enough that I've started (once again) scribbling down notes and maps for something of the kind.

Ever Used Disease In Your Game?

I've used a disease in my game exactly once. Some kind of plague carried by space rats. This was d20 Modern, and I'm pretty sure the PCs made all their Fort rolls, so it never came up. It was never intended to be a continuing scenario in itself, anyway. Just a hazard of the encounter.

Mostly this is because up until a year or two ago I only ran d20 games regularly, and d20's disease system isn't particularly inspiring. Add in cure disease, and, well, there didn't seem to be all that much point to the adventure. (I'd love, by the way, to be proven wrong about this. Anyone got some awesome 3e/3.5/d20 system disease stories?)

As an aside, this is one thing that I really like about 4e. The disease track is just a whole lot more compelling. More tension, and more opportunity for interesting effects.

Still. You'd think that at some point I'd have jumped on another way to make my players' characters' lives miserable. Or that some enterprising DM would do the same to me. Hasn't happened yet. I've never even had a game where something like this happened to an NPC. I can understand that there might be logistical issues getting in the way of giving PCs certain diseases (some kinds of games would handle it really well, I think, but a really pulp/action/adventure game might seize up a bit) but there are plenty of things I've avoided doing to PCs for the hassle of it (I tend not to have villains capture just part of the party, for one) that I'll happily inflict on an NPC they like.

Boy, do I ever love abusing NPCs. There's all kinds of things you can do to them that would be a huge headache for the PCs, but are pretty much excellent with them. I try not to abuse them as a plot hook too much, but there's a certain kind of player who will get really attached to NPCs and then get really excited when they get a chance to save them from some hideous fate. And I always like to make my players happy.

Anyway, what makes this really weird is that I tend to love weird afflictions of various kinds in other media. Illness and injury come up with a decent amount of frequency in the fiction I write. In a way, even things like werewolves and the Hulk are just really dramatic examples of "disease," and that kind of dramatic, supernatural affliction is category I really dig. But even that has never really come up in one of my games.

The way I'm putting together the setting I'm working on right now, there's a good chance that this'll come up in a big way in the next game I run, so that should be interesting. But considering the issue has gotten me curious. Any of you folks ever used disease in a game? Was it a one-off thing, or is it part of your regular threat routine? How'd you handle it mechanically? Did it work out well, or are you never touching it again?

My Biggest Game Master Mistake

It's kind of ironic, for me, that Johnn Four picked Game Master Mistakes as the topic of this month's RPG Blog Carnival. Roleplaying Tips and Campaign Mastery are both great resources, and his GMing advice is, in general, solid. But Roleplaying Tips was also a major part of my most important game mastering mistake.

See, I've got this perfectionist streak. It's under control now, but it used to be a pretty vicious one. There was a period in high school when I would fail entire classes from simply not doing the work, and while that can't all be laid on that tendency, a big part of it was just that my idea of what would be "good enough" was so overwhelming that I didn't want to start at all. Naturally, that was about the same time I started game mastering.

So I went through this stage where I was obsessed with game mastering advice. I pored over the 3e DMG, read the "running the game" section in every roleplaying book I could get my hands on, and combed the net for articles on technique and style. That's where Roleplaying Tips comes in: at the time, it was the major source of game mastering advice on the web, at least that I could find.

And despite all that, the games I ran were terrible. The advice had nothing to do with it; though the quality varied depending on the source, on the whole it was fairly good. But I put more effort into "doing it right" than into just running a fun game. It took me a long time to figure out that it didn't matter how nicely my notes were organized if there was nothing for the players to do.

My Next Campaign Is A Long Way Off

I've been thinking a little more lately about running a game again. I don't have time right now (and that's not entirely bad, because the main reason I don't is the amount of gaming I'm already doing) but I've started thinking about it regularly again, sketching out ideas here and there, and figuring out when I might next have the opportunity. I'm determined to get back into it slowly: it'll be next semester at the earliest, and I very well might put it off until next summer or even later. But I'm considering it.

Part of the reason I'm taking it slow, beyond just the time constraints, is that I'm still not sure why the last few games I've run didn't work. I had fun, and the players had fun, but neither the Traveller game nor Is This Foul? ever clicked for me. They were both chores to prep for, and I didn't always look forward to game night. I'm starting to get a better idea about why that was, but I don't want to put the effort into running a regular game again until I've got, at the least, a new tack to take.

I'm also thinking I might actually prep for the game a bit before start up this time around. Normally, there's a pretty short time between idea and execution when it comes to my campaigns; it's normal for me to run a game within just a week or two of coming up with the concept. The trick there is that the two times that technique's been really successful, I was running a pre-existing world; in one case a published campaign setting (in this case, the Diamond Throne), in the other, the setting from a (terrible) novel I'd written several years prior. I'm thinking about giving that world-building thing a try again, so that suggests spending a bit more time on the game than usual.

I'm hesitant to make any dramatic statements about what exactly I'm going to run, because it's so far off that I'm almost guaranteed to change my mind twelve times before it hits the table. But at least for now, I'm thinking it's going to be a fantasy, location-based, sandbox-y thing, because I've been wanting to run something like that since I came to college and it keeps getting pushed back in favor of other ideas. That, in turn, means I want to use either Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord, with plenty of house rules and bits and pieces from other things.

I'd also like it to be a chat game. I've been having a lot of fun playing in the two Trollsmyth's got going right now, and I want to try my hand at setting one up myself. I also like the idea of pulling in players from my entire player base, which is currently pretty scattered geographically. It'd be fun to play some new combinations of people off each other, and starting with a larger pool gives me a better shot at getting a group all willing to put up with romantic shenanigans.

So that's where I'm at as far as running a continuing campaign goes. I might run some one-shots before I get that started (Vampire, Mage, and Promethean will probably get that treatment, since I can't see running a full campaign for any of them soon, but the reason I got them in the first place was to use them) but for now, it's going to be planning, and playing.

Writing as a Player

So. Posting. It's been light lately. Trollsmyth's already covered a big part of why pretty well, pointing out that the solo game we're doing has recently veered into social, setting-heavy territory that makes it even more difficult to discuss intelligently than most campaigns. I've also just moved back to college, and I'm still adjusting to the changes in my schedule and social life associated with that. But I'm also still figuring out how to write about being a player, and how to think about it in a way that I can write about.

It's pretty easy for me to write about DMing, because when I DM, I'm thinking a lot about what I'm doing and the technique I'm using and so on. I'm naturally in an analytical mode, because I want to improve what I'm doing. As a player, I'm mostly thinking about what my character's doing and how she's going to react. It's much less about technique and much more about the game itself, which runs me right into the problem that Trollsmyth discussed.

When I do think about technique during a game that I'm playing in, it's usually in reference to something that the DM seems to be doing. Lately, for instance, I've been thinking a lot about player failure, since my character in the solo game has been doing a lot of pretty serious failing, and I've been having all kinds of fun doing it. Part of the reason for that is that even when things go spectacularly wrong in the game, they often end up working out in her favor in some way. Things don't always work out exactly well, and there's usually some fairly significant fallout along the way, but she's also gotten a number of rewards -- and a few allies -- by taking advantage of the consequences of failed die rolls.

The trouble with writing about that from a technique standpoint is that I don't really know what the DM is doing, since I'm not the one doing it. It's even possible that this pattern I've noticed is completely unintentional. I've gotten some ideas from it for how I'm going to run things in the future, but that doesn't help much because to focus strictly on what I "would" do makes the discussion a little too hypothetical to be of much interest to me.

On the other hand, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of looking at my reaction as a player to various DMing techniques, so despite the problems with that format it can be worthwhile. But I haven't been playing exclusively all that long, so I'm still figuring it out.

My Absolute Favorite Thing

There's a point in a campaign when things have been running pretty smoothly for a while, and I've been spinning out a situation long enough for things to really start getting interesting. The players have a few things in the game that they care about, and are going after their own goals. They've started to pick up non-mechanical resources. There's a fun intra-party dynamic going on. I've got a few folks I've established as nasty-scary-bad, and if things are really going well they've got a serious hate-on for a villain or two.

And usually, at this point in a campaign, one day I sit down to prep for a session and I find an opportunity: a few dominoes that have all been set up already, or a set that just need a few adjustments to really go somewhere fun. I think to myself, "If I move this thing over here, and this NPC does that, the players will totally flip out." So I polish it up, come up with a plan, and get ready.

Then, if I pull it off right, if most of my assumptions about the players and the characters turn out to be true, the ones that don't turn out in my favor anyway, and all the timing works out, there's a moment. The players realize just what it is that's happened, and they're all looking at me, and they can't decide if it's insanely evil or the most awesome thing they've ever heard of. The characters at this point are usually pissed off, often terrified, and always ready to go pound someone into the dirt. But the players are having a blast. Because when it works out just right, I've given them a goal that they could never have come up with on their own, but is still utterly perfect for their characters.

And then I've got 'em. A villain who they'll follow to the ends of the earth. A problem they'll argue about amongst each other and come up with all kinds of schemes to solve. A brilliant set-up for, at the very least, a few weeks of high-stakes, high-intensity gaming, and sometimes something that will come to define the entire campaign. When everything works out right, it's about as close to perfect as gaming gets.

Lessons from a Campaign Ended

I ended Is This Foul? on Friday. The gang still got together and hung out, we just played Apples to Apples and 1000 Blank White Cards instead. (Note to those interested: Captain Kirk makes any 1000 Blank White Cards game 243% more awesome. Especially when people start thinking up cool ways to steal him.) We've got plans to get together next week, and I'll probably run a little megadungeon. But that campaign wasn't working.

The exact reasons behind that are probably beyond my powers of analysis. Mostly, it just never quite clicked. But I learned a couple things from it that I'm pretty sure will improve my chances with future campaigns. At the very least, it can't hurt.

Don't overload a short campaign. In a game with an indefinite time-span, sure, I can throw in as many plot threads as I want. The players will pick up on some, ignore others, and invent their own. They've got time. But in a game like this, with a definite end-date? My attempts at giving the players "choice" just ended up bogging them down with option-overload. They had too much stuff to get done, and too many looming loose ends. A short game doesn't need a whole lot of choice, because it's short. There's not as much chance of people getting bored, and they can get their self-determination kicks from figuring out how to handled whatever handful of problems I do present to them.

Don't mix old characters with new. This is an issue that's pretty specific to sequel games, and maybe even specific to the structure of this game in general. (More on that in a minute.) In hindsight, I should have had them all make new characters, and kept the old guard around as helpful-but-distant NPCs. Instead, I was running a party that included three well-connected, politically powerful masters-of-the-city with a lot of shared history, and a couple of people who had just kind of shown up. The latter two had their own reasons for being in the game, and interesting stuff to do on their own, but they didn't have a whole lot of reason to hang around or help out the first three. That caused a few problems.

Don't run two vastly different but interconnected parties. The idea of having one group of high-level city leaders and ambassadors, and another of their mid-level children and minions, sounded cool on paper. In practice, it created situations where one character would suddenly stop talking because his player's other, much more important character had just entered the room, and generally caused a lot of "who's talking now?" type confusion. Add to that the massive player/character knowledge problems that started when people's characters started to align themselves on opposite political sides (Which, I'll add, my players handled masterfully, but it's still something that's better to avoid when you can.) and this idea was just a whole lot more trouble than it's worth.

Don't run a game that I'm not completely sure I want to run. I'd mentioned the idea, and thought it sounded kind of cool. My players loved the last campaign, and were way excited about the idea of another like it, which is always awesome. I knew there were some neat political shenanigans I could try, and it'd be an opportunity to play around with some ideas I hadn't used before. But I wasn't sure I could handle the system. I worried that it wouldn't measure up to the last campaign. And I didn't know if this was really the game that I wanted to run. DMing is hard enough even when it's a game that I am consistently, 100% committed to. This campaign couldn't quite make that standard.

Edited the last paragraph for clarity.

On Players

I've been lucky, as a game master. I've had good players. I had a good group of players when I started running games, and I've continued, with a few minor exceptions, to have good groups since.

I've had players who wrote positively epic character journals. Players who gave their characters family members and mentors and nemeses, not to mention goals that screamed adventure. I've had players who had players who happily moved on to the next idea when I told them no, that combo really is too ridiculous.

And most importantly for me, a GM who improvises a lot of her games, I've had players who come up with dumb ideas and then run with them. Who tell me what they're planning, so I don't have to guess what they're trying to do and can focus on coming up with my own crazy ideas. Who have that perfect mix of confidence, enthusiasm, and crazy inspiration that I will never be able to do without, no matter how good at game mastering I get.

I've had good players. I couldn't have run games that were as fun as they were without them.

Flying Blind

My novel is going surprisingly well, considering I have no idea what I'm doing. My last two NaNoWriMo novels, and most of the successful writing I've done in the past, have all been planned to some degree, even if it's just a general sketch of the starting situation and a rough idea of what I want the climax to look like. This time, I mostly intentionally decided I wanted to do something different, and see if I could write my novel without any idea of what I was doing or where I was going. (I was also really busy this October and working on other things, but that's beside the point.)

I shouldn't be surprised, really, that it's working (at least so far, we're not out of week one yet so there's still time for it to all go to hell) because I do stuff like this all the time when I GM. One of the best single sessions I ever ran was almost completely improvised: a one-shot, Gnome Town. I'd sketched out a little dungeon in the hour before I ran it, but I ditched that half-way through and just started riffing on whatever bizarre thing popped into my head and whatever crazy plan the players came up with. The players were pretty hot that night, so it worked out well.

That's the only session I've ever run completely on the spot, though I did improvise most of my one session of Feng Shui. More often, I'll have a general idea of the situation, but little or no idea what the players are going to do. That tends to be my default play style, and it can range anywhere from reasonable responses to character actions based on the pre-defined scenario, to completely making up major details of the game on the spot just because it would be cool.

When it works, it works. Going into the Infamous Wedding Incident, I didn't have a clear idea of what was going to happen, figuring that the players would come up with something. They didn't have a clear plan, because they figured something weird would happen that they could riff off of. My solution? Faen ninja terrorists. In hot air balloons, with long-spears and flaming catapults. The players grabbed hold of it and started doing their crazy thing, and pretty soon we were jamming. It was great.

Of course, the session could have been even better if I'd had better floor plans for the wedding, and a better map of the city, and a better idea of the "normal" order of events, what would have happened if the wedding hadn't been disrupted by a four foot tall version of the IRA and a cross between Mr. Freeze and Jack Sparrow. And part of why it turned out as well as it did was that I knew who a fair amount about the other people who ended up involved--the town guard and the main villain--and what their tactics and motivations were. Because the faen just got the fight started; what made that fight great was the combination of Faen, the villain's attempts to take advantage of the disruption, one of the player's attempts to take advantage of the disruption, and the rest of the party's efforts to keep order along with the city guard.

But being willing to make stuff up as I go along? Being confident in my ability to make stuff up as I go along? It's been key to whatever success I've had as a GM. And it's fun. Part of the reason I count those sessions among my major successes is what I great time I had during them. Which isn't everything, because the fun has to be there for the whole table, but it's important.

Wherein I Discuss Puzzles

Trollsmyth has some cool ideas about applications for the timed dungeon doors thing. This is one of the things I love about blogging. Bouncing ideas off of people, and ending up with things that are even crazier than what I come up with. And, of course, it gives me a good clue to what ideas are actually interesting.

The whole thing got me thinking about puzzles. The calendar/timed doors make pretty good RPG puzzles, as long as the GM is willing to keep track of them, and they don't end up making bottlenecks in the dungeon and stopping the session while one person solves them.

If I worked up a labelling system, and turn them into a cipher-type puzzle that gets easier to solve the more doors they solve, the puzzle people would be really happy. But I've also got a player who just likes to take notes, and keep track of things; even after the puzzle had been solved, she'd still get a kick out of being able to tell the rest of the group which door to go back to.

The best part about these sorts of puzzles is that they're fairly well integrated into the game part of the activity. A puzzle based off of the calendar the DM uses, that you can only solve by exploring the dungeon, and rewards you with even more dungeon, isn't the kind of thing you can pick up in a drug store. And of course, building a bit of world info into a puzzle, a challenge the players can solve, gives them a reason to actually pay attention to the background for once.

Even better, though, are puzzles that I think of as "environment puzzles." I give the players some not-immediately-obvious situation, say, some bit of treasure on a pillar in the middle of an underwater lake. I give them a sketch description of the area, maybe make some modifications if they ask a question that suggests a particularly interesting possibility, and they figure out some way to get to the treasure. The fun part, of course, comes with rolling the dice, because then their plans never go quite the way they want.

I figure most people are already doing this. I got a lot of it, originally, from Roleplaying Tips #5: How to Turn Brain Teasers Into Amazing Roleplaying Opportunities. But this is the kind of thing I didn't know, when I first started out, and I'm still trying to work out, after having been at it for a bit: how to play to the medium's strengths.

Players: Inspiration, Aid to Laziness

As much as I like being a game master and a novelist (sorta) it does get to be annoying sometimes. Because right now, when I'm gearing up for a game, and should be focusing my creative energies on that, I suddenly realize that the short story I was working on is not nearly as interesting as what's going on in the background, because there lie the seeds of an epic tale.

This is not the first time this has happened.

But for the most part, it's a good thing. The writing reminds me just how much less work gaming is, when I have the players there to protagonize for me. Though I know I must have done it when I was first starting out, I can't imagine railroading my players past "hey, here's where the game starts, think up some reason to get yourself involved," because then I'd be stuck making all the decisions, and who wants that kind of responsibilty?

Well, novelist-me, I guess.

Gnome Rodeo: Why It's Awesome

Gnome Stew has a new feature that I hope very much becomes a regular one (and that does look like the plan): Gnome Rodeo.

It's a big ol' list of links, mostly about GMing but with a few contests for flavor. Having a large, (and I think Gnome Stew aims to become a mighty force in the GMing blog-o-sphere) active, and consistently useful blog doing this is excellent.

If writing something clever about GMing will get you linked by Gnome Stew, that'll encourage people to write clever things about GMing. And everyone who reads Gnome Stew gets easier access to all those clever things people are writing about GMing, because Gnome Stew (and its readers) are out there, searching the web.

And Gnome Stew's multi-author, comment-encouraging, community driven set up makes it pretty close to the best possible forum for this endeavor.

I haven't gotten a chance yet (limited computer access, it's been a busy weekend) but as soon as I do I need to go through my own list of GMing resources. Can't be extolling the virtues of the program if I'm not going to contribute.

A Big Crazy Campaign

I'm sick of running short campaigns.

I want to run a campaign that lasts longer than six months. I want to run a campaign that goes from 1st level to 20th level. I want to run a campaign with more than one big villain, more than one big story, a campaign where the characters go from dirt-hugging nobodies to gods.

I'm not sure I'm going to have the chance to make that happen. I'm distractable; part of the reason I run short campaigns is that I like short campaigns, I like campaigns that can end when I get tired with them, let me start something new. I don't have a stable group, I'm not likely to get one, and even if I do there will be unavoidable breaks where we can't play.

I know it's possible to have a campaign pause and then pick up a couple months later, but am I going to want to do that? Or am I going to get some crazy new idea in the interim, and then get frustrated when I pick the old campaign back up, rather than being able to start on the new one?

Top Ten Campaigns

Going through my old notes got me into sort of a nostalgic mood, so I sat down and re-ranked my top ten campaigns. I've done it before, but I've played in a couple more games since then, and I had a sneaking suspicion a few things might have gotten moved around. Plus, I'm starting a new campaign through, and thought it'd be a good exercise, to re-evaluate my past gaming adventures.

Oh, and since I now have notes from all those old campaigns, I can now pin down with exactitude dates that were previously rough estimates.

The list, in its current form, stands as follows:

1. Is This Fair? Is It? Arcana Evolved (me) 2007
2. Space Tree GURPS 4th (quantumelfmage) 2007
3. Outlaws d20 Modern (me) 2003-2004
4. Star Wars Star Wars d20 (Artemis) 2005-2006
5. Desert Campaign D&D 3.5 (me) 2006
6. Drow/Evil Campaign D&D 3.5 (Karen) 2004
7. Evil God Dimension D&D 3.5 (quantumelfmage) 2004
8. Greek City States D&D 3.5 (saganatsu) 2007
9. Outlaws: Reloaded GURPS 3rd Revised (me) 2004
10. “UCF” Forum-brewed D&D 3.5 ("that guy") 2006

Two main things to keep in mind. One, this is not just my top ten campaigns, it's my complete gaming history. So the "UCF" is, without question, the worst game I've ever played in. Two, every other campaign on this list was, at some point, fun. The ones down at the bottom may have had fairly high pain/fun ratios, but they all had fairly high absolute levels of fun.

Organizing the campaigns like this gave rise to a couple of thoughts.

These were all really short. The longest, Outlaws and Is This Fair? were each about six months. Star Wars, Desert Campaign, Drow/Evil, Evil God Dimension, and Outlaws: Reloaded were each a couple of months. The others lasted four sessions or less. Is This Fair was planned as a six month campaign from the outset, one of the most successful technical aspects of that campaign was the neat execution of that timeframe. Drow/Evil and Outlaws also both had formal endings, but neither had the timing specifically planned ahead. The others just fell apart, mostly due to lack of player interest and/or GM frustration.

The other major factor was that, for the first part of my gaming career, my group had five members and four GMs. One guy tried it, but didn't like it; the rest of us all had games we wanted to run, so there was a lot of competition for game time. The reason Outlaws ended when it did was that Karen was ready to run her Underdark-based game with evil characters.

The top four campaigns are the ones that I consider really good. 5, 6, and even 7 were fun; after that the frustration index starts to really climb. But the top four were good. What's funny about that is that, at the time, Space Tree and Star Wars were sources of profound frustration.

Outlaws and Is This Fair too--both of them started to drift, in the third quarter; both of them were cut short to some degree to get into the end-game--but I was DMing. I knew exactly what and where the problems were, and it was in large part (though not, of course, entirely) within my power to correct them. Space Tree took ages to get going, character creation took weeks, and that, combined with the limited amount of time we had to play the game in, got me to thinking, "if I was running this game, we'd be playing right now." Whether that was actually true is immaterial; once we actually got the game going, I had a lot of fun.

Star Wars had a similar, though rather stupider, problem. It had been a while since I'd GMed, and I was starting to get tired of playing. So I was weird and distracted and generally a worse player than usual. Cleared up once I started running the Desert Campaign, for a different group, but I should have just gotten over it, because I had a lot of fun in the campaign once I started playing my character mostly sane.

Those games all had another major thing in common: crazy hi-jinks. I was happiest as a player when I was coming up with ridiculous lies, ramming judges at high speeds, and stealing carpet. I was happiest as a GM when the players were coming up with ridiculous lies, crashing weddings, and invading cities. The absolute best scenes, in all those campaigns, used the system to mediate some bizarre scheme that the players had come up with; the pure roleplaying encounters tended to run out of steam, the pure combats tended to be uninteresting, and the game was always more interesting when I was reacting to the players, rather than the other way around.

Finding old notes is Awesome

I just discovered that I have this huge mess o' roleplaying stuff on my hard drive. I went through a period where I thought I had to do massive write ups for campaigns, so I have all these (unfinished) documents detailing various aspects of campaigns that I never actually ran. And I still have all the material I prepared digitally, for the campaigns that I did actually end up running. So there's a rather larger number of documents in my "Old Roleplaying" folder than I expected to find when I opened it.

Some of it is pretentious and lame. Like how I went through a period--that only lasted for one campaign, thankfully--where I decided that the thing to do about the races was to give them all different names. Elves become akkan and so on. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea.

Some of it is . . . interesting. I'd forgotten that I'd once had the idea of running a campaign that revolved around empires run by characters with bloodlines. I got about halfway through the list, detailing the kinds of empires each had, or the role they played in other empires. I'm actually sort of intrigued by it, so much so that I might finish the rest of the entries, and touch up what's already there. I'll never get to run the campaign, but I find that campaign design can be a past time of its own.

Mostly it's just gotten me kind of nostalgic. I've got the notes for the first adventure I ever ran. The only one I ever made a flow chart for. It's 7 pages of notes, filled with science nonsense, acronyms I don't understand, and detailed encounter descriptions that, if memory serves, I completely ignored.

Back in the Gaming Groove

I've got a game again. Last Friday, I ran a short combat with three brand new (or close to it) gamers, to give them an idea of how Dungeons and Dragons works. Later this afternoon, we'll be doing character/party building, with hopefully a bit of scene setting to get everyone together.

This makes me happy.

And I was surprised just how much fun the extremely basic campaign I ran was. Two factors involved: I had new, easily excitable players, and I turned up the difficulty level. Instead of putting three first level PCs up against, say, two orcs, I threw a Worg at them. That turned out to be a little bit too tough, but this Worg happened to be a little on the low side of the hit point scale, so we got actual danger without total carnage.