The Game-Master discussion thread

...Because we need to stick together, yo.

swap ideas, trade stories, or just bullshit about the chronicles we happen to be running or thinking about doing so. This place needs more general discussion threads, dammit! :D

Agreed. To commence with the discussing: any tips on how to deal with individual players on hiatus? My default seems to be having their characters captured by slavers (or pulling a Face–Heel Turn if I don't think they're coming back).

I'm running Black Crusade so I just have them get lost on the 2 kilometer long cruiser the party is currently hitching a ride on.

The last game I ran was rather episodic, so having a player not show was no problem - they were just doing something else for the company this time, or continuing something important from between-mission downtime, etc. It sort of depends on what you left off doing last session - my current GM, having faced this problem twice now, the first time had the character fail a Will save and run off in a panic, and the second time had the person dragged through a portal to the elemental plane of water for several rounds until the party could rescue him.

What's the best way to tell a player, "No, that concept just isn't going to work in this game"?

Exactly like that, but try to preempt it. For example, when I was taking submissions for the Legend campaign, I explicitly banned anything remotely related to the Vigliante track because it has no business being in a High Fantasy / mildly Dungeon Punk setting

edited 13th Mar '12 11:21:13 PM by KyleJacobs

Yeah. Once they've made the character and played it a little, the player is going to be justifiably pissed if you say, "hey, you can't have your toy anymore." Setting the boundaries pre-play is best; if the character's been introduced, it's difficult to have an equitable solution. You can try to channel the concept into something a little more in line with the setting... You can try to bring it up directly, but it will seem heavy handed... Or you could quietly make a point of trying to murder the character in hopes that the next character will fit better. (It's evil, but it may be useful evil.)

@Aldheim: I'd be wary of whacking P Cs; in my experience players get pissed if they feel like the GM is out to get them, especially when they are right.

Setting the boundaries pre-play is often the best, as is being involved in character generation at every step. I make players submit concepts to me before they ever put pencil to paper, and give them a broad-spectrum overview of what the chronicle entails; this allows me to tell them "great idea, but not for this game" and have some reasons to back up my statements about how the concept won't work.

As to players being absent, I deal with this in several ways...

• Unless otherwise explicitly stated, players can assume that there will be some in-character "down time" between sessions; this allows me an opening to explain why a character isn't present because the player didn't show. Also, it allows characters to do things where the whole group need not be involved...this is critical for social-heavy characters to be able to shine, as most of what they do either hogs the GM's attention during game proper or gets reduced to a few die rolls and leaves the player feeling short-changed. Also, I've found players get more into their characters if given the chance to simply act them out once in a while without combat or Epic Awesome Shit getting in the way.
• If this is not possible, I assume the character is present but not doing much (my group refers to this as the "Link-Dance"). If the situation is such that the character would have to act (or it is crucial to party survival if they do -healers, take a bow-), I step in and act for the PC as needed. I reserve this as a last option, as players generally don't like it when their characters do things without being consulted.
• If I know a player or two won't be there and the structure of the session permits it, I run a "soft" session: the remaining P Cs do something less important, have a more RP-heavy night, etc. This way the missing player isn't cheated out of cool stuff.
• When a player is consistently absent, I'll use their character as a plot hook of some kind...you know, the age-old "Kidnapped in the night" routine. Usually the character suffers a bit in the process, but it lets the player know that I'm annoyed with them being absent. I only do this if the player has no good reason to be gone; if you've got to go to court or your work suddenly decided to call you in, I'm not going to fuck with you. If you just overslept for the third time in a row, your PC'd better bend over and grab their ankles.
• I pick players who I know can be counted on to show up unless they've got a good reason not to. This can be difficult, but I've told many a would-be player "sorry, you aren't reliable enough". They either get butt-hurt or get better about showing up.

edited 16th Mar '12 7:51:18 PM by drunkscriblerian

Whats the view on Vecna. I am thinking of using him in a game. (If he is going to have a major or minor role or feature at all I don't know.) but he seems interesting.

IIRC, the only body parts of Vecna that are official major artifacts are the Eye and the Hand - both of which require you to remove your own and put the mummified artifact in its place. So, naturally, there must be rumors of the Head of Vecna, thereby helping your campaign world dispose of the stupid and powerful adventurers.

Most of the time, Vecna shouldn't be involved directly. Instead, have the players run into Vecna-related villains periodically - maybe the lich whose tomb they're raiding is decorated with mystically preserved eyes and hands, or the assassin's guild they're clearing out is run by a cult of the Maimed God who send the assassins to eliminate their enemies, or the mysterious outbreak of blindness in the capital city is caused by a vitreous drinker (it's in the 3.5 Monster Manual 4 if you're interested)*. It's not until they're nearing, or at, epic levels that they come face-to-face with the God of Secrets and cast him down.

.*You can probably get a lot of creepy mileage out of the lurking spectral ravens.

From what I know of Vecna they should not even be able to do that. Being god of secrets he knows of any plot against him (As him dying would affect all of his fallowers) He knows any plot or secret as long as it effects at least 500 people. So its impossible to catch him off guard. Being the god of secrets I can take advantage of pretty much anything in the game by giving him all of my knowledge.

On the other hand, maybe Vecna plans to gain some benefit from the PC's attempting to kill him. Maybe he's fed up with them screwing with his plans and wants to revel in their deaths. Maybe, like in Die Vecna Die!, he has some kind of sinister plot to rearrange the multiverse to his specifications. Maybe they have something he wants, but since betrayal is in his nature, he doesn't trust any of his agents enough to feel they could reliably deliver it to him - or maybe it immolates any evil being less powerful than a god, necessitating that he kill them himself.

And of course, he might be too arrogant to truly appreciate the threat these PC's pose to his plans, or his continued existence...

I love it when my players pick up on my plot hooks / forgive my occasionally insane degree of railroading / run with it when I completely blindside them with something!

This last session was the first of several character-centric episodes I'm planning. In this case, the character was our monk, who'd asked me several sessions back if it would be possible to stop by his monastery to pick up a few books while the party was leaving the mountains. About a week after he asked me that, I decided I wanted more detail on his character's backstory - specifically, his relationship with his father, a Barbarian clan leader. We spent a few minutes PM-ing back and forth and managed to get a rough sketch - enough for me to assemble an NPC, and enough for him to react to that NPC.

However, most of our planning for this session had completely ignored that in favor of dealing with a completely different NPC. So when we finally got started and ended up in the monastery, I came out of the gate with what I sincerely hope was a complete surprise to everyone involved - a scenario specifically designed to punch every single one of the monk's (several) Berserk Buttons at the same time. His father was in the courtyard of the monastery getting drunk with several dozen soldiers while forcing his fellow monks to fight each other and burning an enormous pile of books. They picked it up and ran with it, and things ended up going exactly the way I'd hoped they would with almost no prodding from me. The monk was able to figure out that I was attempting to set up single combat between him and his father and added in that the stakes were leadership of the clan, while Envyus here was able to figure out that I'd intended for them to use the severed goblin head they'd picked up two sessions ago (long story) in order to prove certain assertions.

The railroading comes from the fact that the monk's player had a last-minute conflict that resulted in him being two hours late and forcing me to use his character as a mouthpiece to shout "GO TO THE MONASTERY" until he showed up.

One inspiration and I don't have an idea on how to pan it out. First, I was planning for the mysterious employer to set them up after sending them after some Chekhov's guns (like a box full of explosives), but now I'm seeing I messed up the pacing. Second, yesterday I got another idea: Hollywood con-man and crime lord that doesn't bow even to the Mafia. The guy can't be taken out in one go, has goons, pimps, dealers and ears at his disposal, so he knows what's going on in town and makes money.

I do love it when players work together well.

Tonight in my Changeling The Lost chronicle, they had to rescue one of their number who had gotten herself kidnapped by Loyalists. Their plan to get her back was pretty solid and they pulled it off well. A couple of lucky die rolls helped, but for the most part their success was due to good planning and not being stupid. I even let them out-think the bad guys a couple times, because they asked the right questions and acted on the information they were given.

They by no means got away clean, however; two characters were a half-step from death when they retreated, and only one of them escaped unscathed. Considering that the party member they were rescuing was their medic no one's going to die, but they've got some serious healing to do.

I think it is important when you are G Ming to let the players have a resounding victory when they do the work and deserve it, even when you might have had other plans. *

Besides, the course they took gives me plenty of other ways to screw with them.

edited 19th Apr '12 12:13:10 AM by drunkscriblerian

Damnit Kyle, get out of this thread-if you're here, I can't discuss the awesomeness of TGD in this thread!

Does anyone else often feel the need to offer sped up healing in certain systems when the players are out of immediate danger? Its kind of hard to plot around a single PC getting shot once, stabilizing/staunching/disinfecting the wound without incident, completing the mission but then having to spend a week in a hospital bed to recover all their HP.

Having them "rest in an inn" isn't very realistic but, unless the injury has plot relevance or long term impact, I just don't see the value in long rest times.

I play Dn D, which has overnight full healing. Heh.

Fairly new, not particularly skilled GM here. I'm about to start up a GURPS Superhero game, currently working out the first adventure.

Just curious, how quickly do most groups usually play? I remember when I ran a dungeon crawl, it could take us two five hour sessions just to get through one floor. Is this normal? And if not, any advice on how to move things along faster?

Also, getting them to shut the fuck up and play can be annoying. Tips on that?

x3 I suppose it depends on the game you're running. If it's supposed to be a more heroic or fantasy game, there's no real reason not to do overnight healing. For something more realistic, you can make sure to allow them sufficient downtime to be fully healed, or be extra difficult and have something important enough come up that they have to head out despite not being fully healed.

The biggest way to keep the game moving is to not continue with the off-topicness derailing the game.*

edited 21st Apr '12 9:04:16 PM by BlueNinja0

All about the railroad express! CHOO CHOO!

My last game before current one lasted 7 months. One game per week, about 3 hours per game. No combat. Only dice once per sesion or less.

Time in game? Ten or twelve days.

I would have needed twenty year or more to finish the history. We dont even reach the McGuffin of the first act. I planned three.

It was awesome, my best game. But I feel a little bad about it. I dont record anything so the history it´s lost. Im writting everything in the new one.

I will release a pdf.

@Post 17: I use the times the group is healing/resting as places where characters who aren't totally incapacitated can do stuff between sessions. This is a time for the not-combat-monster to shine, really.

I usually ask players what their characters are up to during "down time", and if a short scene needs to be run, then its run. Again, social characters benefit from this kind of thing. And this way, their actions don't cause the rest of the group to be sidetracked too much.

Non-combat?!? Disgusting!

Honestly, some of my favorite moments have come from letting the characters shoot the breeze. The funniest would be our rogue spontaneously deciding that our necromancer banged a ghoul during a two-week time skip, and my personal favorite so far would be a long conversation / fight between our monk and his Barbarian clan leader father.

Speaking of that incident, how much do you generally try to work with your players outside of the game to develop the plot and the setting, and how much do you handle on your own?