03.05
Lots of schoolwork lately, and preparing for a Shadowrun campaign, so sorry for the lack of updates! -_- Here is the continuation of my series of DMing tips for first-time D&D Dungeon Masters (as sent to my friend who’s running a game):
STORY & WORLD-BUILDING
* Building a campaign world is the greatest part of being a DM. This is the part of the game that’s like designing a computer game, directing a movie or writing a novel, only more artistically worthy. Remember that all the really good RPGs (not counting experimental artsy high-concept “storytelling games” based on things like “the Portuguese-American immigrant experience” or “the 1980 Gdansk shipyard strike” :P ), are based around *worlds*. THE WORLD is the heart of gaming, and each world waits for the individual DM to provide story and the players to provide characters. Like chlodnik, chilled beet soup, a campaign world may chill overnight, or indefinitely, until the players and DM are ready to breathe the breath of life into it.
* When you’re making your campaign world, feel free to base it on whatever you like. Any fantasy or science fiction or historical movie or any book, or pieces thereof, might be useful source material. Roleplaying games naturally rely on a Creative Commons philosophy. . (Just be sure that the world has all the types of races & classes that your players want to play… you *could* create a world that has no elves, but it might annoy your players if they want to play elves. -_- But you can come up with whatever backstory for elves that you want… maybe they are the long-eared spawn of the demon god or something.)
* Creating maps is lots of fun, if your game is set in the real world, googlemaps and similar services can provide instant verisimilitude for locations.
* Campaigns are best when structured around a series of branching paths. For instance, the simplest method is a choice of quests that the PCs can take – the old “bulletin board at the inn” or “craigslist for adventurers” method. If the PCs don’t want to take one quest, then there should be another quest waiting for them. Or, the direction of a campaign can hinge on other stuff:
(1) the outcome of a fight (for example, the PCs come upon monsters attacking a NPC. If they can defeat the monsters and save the NPC, the NPC can give them a clue to set them onto a quest. If they can’t defeat the monsters, they don’t get to go on that quest.)
(2) the outcome of a skill challenge. “Skill challenges” in 4e may sound confusing, but they are basically just arbitrary ways to make the plot go in one direction or another based on the PCs making as many successful skill rolls as you think is appropriate. For instance, if the players make enough Bluff or Diplomacy or Intimidate rolls, maybe they can convince the bandits not to attack the town, or even to join up with the PCs. If they don’t make enough rolls, they get attacked by the bandits.
(3) and of course the PCs’ decisions… maybe you give them a choice between an adventure set in a dungeon and an adventure on a faraway island, for example.
* When the story involves lore or mysteries, it can be useful to write down what information the PCs might know based on certain die rolls in certain skills (like Dungeoneering, Nature, Religion, Arcana, History).
* If the PCs don’t want to play the good guys (like if they want to rob townspeople, refuse to take quests, etc.) it’s probably best not to force them to be ‘good’. The DM must give the players free will. If you think they’re borderline evil, you can give them moral tests to see if they will choose the good path (like having desperate townspeople plead them for help with this sad story about being oppressed by evil monsters). If they choose the dark path, you can just give them quests which aren’t based on good or evil, like raiding a dungeon just for treasure… or even raiding the baron’s castle. Maybe the baron is also evil, too, so then you get a dark campaign where pretty much everybody is evil, both the PCs and the NPCs. Arguably this is realistic.
* Some of the most aggravating story moments in D&D can come when one person really wants to play a ‘good’ character, but the other people act evil all the time. But usually, since everybody wants to be friends out-of-character, the ‘good’ PCs won’t actually fight the evil PCs, which would be the logical solution. I even had a player once try to play two characters simultaneously, a paladin and an assassin, who kept murdering NPCs while the paladin looked the other way. >_< The game ended with both characters dying a horrible death pinned on one another's blades, which I have to admit provided a nice sense of closure.
* Sometimes things really slow down when people want to buy new equipment. unless you have some special reason to want to roleplay it out (like having the storekeeper give them a clue), I just let them choose their equipment in the book and pay for it with their gold without roleplaying out these scenes in great deal. You have to know when to summarize and when to act every scene out in detail. It is the DM's responsibility to control time as well as the other aspects of the world, like when time stops in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Secret Miracle.”
* If the players aren’t moving along fast enough (maybe they’re hanging out at the inn or they’re just distracted by stuff out-of-character, or maybe they are about to start an in-character PvP fight for some reason), an easy way to get things going is: have monsters attack. -_- Have some NPC start a fight at the tavern. Have monsters invade the town. Have a monster/NPC try to assassinate the PCs. Whatever works. Just get them paying attention to the game again! Alternately, have someone suddenly start coughing up internal organs for no reason like in the middle of an episode of “House”! You want eyeballs! (The players’ or the PCs’)
* When you come to the end of a session, it can be fun to try to end it on a cliffhanger – like, some mysterious NPC comes up and is going to tell something to the PCs, or a fight is just about to start, or there is some ‘bad omen’ or something unexpected that might lead in to the next session (like a dragon flying overhead, or the PCs return to the home base town but find that it has been set on fire by enemies).
* In general – always try to split up your time between all the PCs and give them all enough ’story time’ and personal time to satisfy them. Peoples’ tastes are different… some people LOVE to talk to every NPC and will always keep talking and talking and hogging attention, other people like to stay more in the background and just read the rulebooks or whatever. It’s up to you how to divide your time between everyone so that everyone feels involved. One general technique is, when people aren’t saying much, to specifically ask them what they want to do (or what their character is doing). Or to have NPCs talk to those people to try to ‘get them out of their shell’, etc. (’Realistically’, NPCs should want to talk more to people with higher Charisma…) You don’t want one person to dominate the entire game by talking too much… on the other hand, some people just like to be quiet. So you’ve got to balance and know the players.
(to be continued…)
Yeah, when starting a new campaign, I really try to NOT write more than a sentence or two about the world, and instead let all the world details come out in the game. Of course, since I started playing Burning Wheel, I now build the world /with/ the players, starting with a one or two sentence “Big Thing,” letting them build their characters around it, and then determining a few spare details and folk that are involved. I find it really helps folk immerse into things, even in D&D.
Also, first session actually playing (if it doesn’t happen on the first session due to character/campaign creation takes up the full first session), I just start the characters knee deep in whatever starting dungeon/situation I have planned, let them figure out why their individual characters signed up for this mission, and then continue from there.
This all really ties in to the Dungeoneering, History, etc checks too. I take a page out of Burning Wheel’s wises, Circles and such and instead of just giving the players information, I let them present me with information, set them a DC for it to be true, and give them a general idea of what failure entails. If it’s really juicy, and the failure needs to be similarly juicy, I’ll write down the failure, seal it in an envelope, and keep it secret until the failure comes up, and I do this right in front of the players so they know that I’m not just messing with them and they know what their getting into.
Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, I (and the groups I tend to inspire) tend to have a very different look on RPGs anyway.
I completely agree on equipment purchases. Unless there’s some big reason to limit what’s available or RP out the scene (and I find there’s rarely a reason), I just let folk do their thing, let me and the table know what they got, and continue with our day.
On Evil PCs and party cohesion, I try to not encourage it. If someone really wants to play an anti-hero, or have a more morally ambiguous game, cool by me, but especially in D&D I up-front tell my players, “You are an adventuring party, for whatever your own reasons are, you work together, and for whatever your needs, you help people. You /aren’t/ villains.” If anyone disagrees, I give them the DM chair.
Anyway, that’s my two cents on all of that. Cheers til next time :D
Thanks for the great post! ^^ I’m surprised that you don’t do more world/backstory-building before starting a campaign. I guess the only time I would take this approach would be when I wasn’t sure if the campaign was going to be able to run long (and perhaps you never really know…). In that case, I would do something similar to what you do (I think?), and let the details of the world come out of the individual adventures and player contributions. If you don’t know how long the game will run, after all, you have to focus on the small pleasures — “carpe ludem”, I guess. ^_^
The “in media res” beginning for an adventure also sounds cool. I have done a couple of things like that, but only for one-shots. I love your idea for putting the consequences of failure in an envelope so the players know you’re serious! That’s awesome! I think it would be even better if it were some kind of themed container, like a scroll sealed with wax, or perhaps a lockbox, safe or small chest. Or one of those African orisha idols which has nails driven through it…. you could bundle up the piece of paper with the consequences and drive a nail through it… this has a particularly scary/exciting voodoo doll aspect as well. There’s a thousand ways to do this, very inspiring!
It’s hard to get PCs to want to “help people” in games, in my experience. Usually the players want their PCs to survive above all, so they won’t jump into obviously dangerous situations just for the sake of being good guys. >_< Maybe I am putting them through more extreme scenarios and making them jump through more risky moral hoops? Or, alternately, the players will just say "*sigh* I guess we'll go help the hapless villagers, even though we're obviously falling into a trap…" I do like to run games set in a 'harsh' world, more Warhammer than D&Dish, so maybe this is one reason why the players aren't willing to put themselves out on a limb for the sake of heroism.