Outsmarting the Fun – part 3
by Stan Polson
GM… DM… I’m the guy with the screen.
So, here’s the question: How can a GM claim the pearls of wisdom from the dungeon of maturity without falling victim to its perils? In this article, I will attempt to give more concrete than esoteric advice, but who knows where this is going to go? I’m winging it – and that’s point #1. (Remember: this is about gaming like you used to, and you used to come unprepared.)
1) Wing it!
1.5) Ok, ok. So don’t wing all of it, necessarily – unless that’s your thing. But leave some blank spots on the map. Put a hallway in your dungeon and don’t draw the passages it leads toward. Have your players visit a town about which you only know the name. Be unprepared. You will amaze yourself. I promise.
2) Missing sucks. Make your bad guys easy to hit. Make important bad guys easy to hit, but hard to kill. That said, protect your main villain. I know this runs counter to most of the advice given on the podcast; but if you want to play like a kid again, shield your villain with the GM screen and do not let him die unless you absolutely cornered. Or it’s fun.
3) Throw in a liberal number of barrels of black powder, roofing tar, pitch, brandy, etc. When a player sees something flamable, there is a 10-in-10 chance that he will light it up and remember that session for the rest of his days. The temptation to blow things up is juvenile, sure – but it’s also awesome.
4) Give your warriors a chance to fight in an arena as gladiators. If you’re like me, this happened in every game when you were younger and was one of the first things to taper off as you grew up.
5) Trash your house rules that limit resurrections.
6) Two words: MAGIC CRYSTALS. As a prank once, one of my players said he was going to GM our game and started off telling us that Gandaldorf the Wizard wanted us to retrieve the Jewel of Magic from the Cave of Peril, lest evil shadows consume the land. Point being, it shouldn’t have been a prank. This is one area in which JRPGs have it right.
7) Go epic from the start. Make the PCs important. Let them meet with the King. Let them attain treasures far beyond their challenge rating. If all it takes to break your game is a longsword +5, I don’t know what to tell you.
8) Have a main bad guy. Have the party encounter him regularly. Have them foil his plans. And have him escape. Nevermind what the FtB guys say on the podcast – protect your villain with the GM screen. That’s what it’s there for.
And again, I want to invite you guys to speak up in the comments. What did you do as a young GM that you haven’t done lately? Give us some ridiculously bad, incredibly fun advice!
Gandaldorf! Hah!
Great article! I’ve been in a creative slump and slowly transforming into a misanthrope due to gamer mentality lately. Logic and efficiency seems to be replacing fun and intensity.
Now if only someone could clean the mud off of JRPG’s. But, to do that, we’d have to teach everyone how to evaluate a game before buying it and wasting 5 hours on it. Of course, that has nothing to do with pen and paper gaming, but………. it could!
This is exactly right! I don’t get to GM or play too much anymore, as I’m away from home, and don’t have access to all my friends, but this is what I try to do to make things fun for my players.
Many jokes are made about these Baron Von Badasses that are true, and I would never cheat my players out of a kill with one. But my players want to be fighting Baron Von Badass himself, and they want him to get away (albeit with his plans ruined, and him shaking his hands at them, screaming, “I’ll get you next time, Gadget!”)
Also, I love coming up with my own magical items (which can be game breaking if not careful). Such as “The Grimoire of Questionable Spells” which I gave my Wizard. It has 20 spells in it, and you roll to see if you can learn to cast one of them from the book on a given day (or you can roll a d20 and cast a spell at random). With spells like “Zone of Cotton” and “Induce Diarrhea,” it may not be the most adult type of adventure, but my players are all there for a good time.
I’m glad to hear that people are finally starting to look at all the “balance” and “rules” and realize that they should not hold people back from what could be a great game.
Now, I’d better get back to finding a new way to include some explosive barrels in my latest Star Wars campaign…
I am a Young DM and the mistakes that Iv noticed so far in my games is that I try to hard to make some grand story off the top of my head when I know D@&% well that “Keep it stupid simple” Is a very good rule to go by in Table Top RPGs. Its human nature to find patterns in everything even if there isn’t a pattern to be found they will figure something out to help them understand what is going on in their own way. Also I about killed myself the first time i wrote my own game trying to balance everything in dnd 3.5 and it was just boring so i tossed an army of evil dwarves attacking the town that they where in with powder rifles and thats when it got fun after the barbarian who thought magic(or vodo as he called it ) was evil and charged the “little men with vodo boomsticks” surviving only by the grace of the dm screen . That was when I found out that balance is important but not at the expense of fun
*Listens to podcast.*
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*Reads article*
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*Listens to podcast again*
…….. *headsplodeyfromcontradictinginformation*
If you didn’t already know, the various blog posts are put up by different authors than the podcast hosts. They often have a very different views / gaming styles.
That said, I understand what the author has been getting at the last few posts. To get back to that “classic” gaming feel, he posits that we need to turn our brain off and play the over-the-top hacky-slashy game we used played as kids/young adults to “put the fun back in”.
The problem (IMO) with this approach is that it really isn’t sustainable over the long term. A somewhat mindless kick-in-the-door dungeon crawl is ok from time to time, but even those will get old very quickly over time.
I don’t believe you have to remove role-playing or story depth from the game to make it fun. But, as the hosts of the podcasts have repeatedly emphasized, you have to know your own group to understand how much depth and how complicated a plot they like.
For a group that wants intrigue and story, this kind of off-the-cuff, who-cares-about-balance -or-story approach will turn them off very quickly. If you just have dungeon-crawlers in your group, this approach might be perfect.
The key here is probably somewhere in the middle. Have a story arc in mind, but don’t plot it out to the Nth degree. Have several sub-plots available so that the whim of the players will allow them to follow one, but ignore others. Leave yourself open to improvisation. Have the main villain be resourceful and feisty enough so that he may be able to escape your PCs (or be smart enough never to go toe-to-toe with them), but let the PCs kill him if they outplay/outwit him (or you, for that matter).
The difficulty for me is that a really good villain would likely be able to slaughter a party if played well… not because he’s so much more powerful, but that if a villain properly used the resources at his or her disposal, and concentrated on isolating and picking off party members one at a time instead of as a group, it would be real easy to TPK a party with an EL-appropriate bad guy. I’ve sometimes found that the bad guy almost has to pull punches to not constantly kill off party members. YMMV.
@Triggerhappy938 – Like Marty said, many of these posts are not written by hosts of the show. In fact, one of our intentions with the blog was to let people discuss viewpoints we either don’t mention or don’t personally hold to. Just another way of adding some diversity to the roundtable!
Marty, you’re absolutely right. The main point of these articles has not been that games should be dumber, exactly. Rather, my point has been that as we mature, we abandon a lot of options that were available to us when we were less self-conscious about our hobby.
Don’t wing the BIG stuff, i.e. we ae trying to get the magic crystal but the little things? Oh yes, and throw the little wings around with great abandon. Swords from the west are all reddish (don’t explain) or all mountain folk have bowl hair cuts. Keep doing this and after a while the players will telly you why these things are happening and guess what? They will tie it right into the plot and make it better.
‘Wing it’ is the best advice ever. (Even for the big stuff, Kugelblitz, unless your players don’t do anything without prodding) And you can do that AND have a great story, in fact, in my experience, it’s almost a requirement, provided your players are into story and not only the tactical side of things. What I do is I come up with themes, tropes, or characters to deal with, and just let the players deal with it their way. Makes the game fun. As a GM, I provide ‘story starters’ as it were, situations, environments, and a world. The players decide how to interact with it. I interpret how the world reacts to them within the framework of the rules, both the published ones and any house rules or rulings.