Cross pollenate. For those times when you want to pile on ideas, stop at one or two mechanical ideas and then jump to story ideas. And the same with story ideas, if you pile up more than a couple cool things, try and introduce some mechanics to the encounter.

I guess I’m always afraid of trying to pile too many schticks on top of each other and having it turn out looking like some cheap corporate attention grab (think your average beer or car commercial or the Mortal Kombat movies).

Or to look at it another way, Darth Vader was cool because of 3 things. Even his own people were terrified of him, he was a cunning, intelligent opponent who’s just as willing to bring you over to the dark side as he is to blow up the moon you’re standing on and finally, he has some cool magic tricks and uses them with style. One of these is crunch, the other two are story elements. Other characters have one or two of these and aren’t half as interesting. The gestalt of all 3 is pretty awesome though.

So what I’ve been able to do is “stretch” out my ideas over multiple encounters. To do this I use just enough of a concept in an encounter to make it unique. Then I put my next idea into another encounter. That way I stretch out my ideas over several encounters. I tend to think over several encounters instead of a single one. This helps me to avoid putting all my best ideas into a single encounter.

So far this has worked well for me. I can prep enough interesting encounters to keep the players busy until my next bout of inspiration strikes.
.-= callin´s last blog ..Show How the Monster Works =-.

I do now know why the rest of the story would sound familiar. I just… uh… made it up. Yeah. Dojo. Casino. Its all in the mind.

@Greywulf: I nod in agreement. Just as good cannot exists without evil, cool cannot exist without the mundane.
.-= Eric Maziade´s last blog ..Revenge of the dailies =-.

@Claus: You are 100% right, many GMs don’t stop to think about ‘What if PC lose’ and the default conclusions when they do lose often feel cheap (you’re all dead) or a badly thought out asspull driven by fear of player revolt.

There’s a lot of room for posts on failure planning. You’ve given me good ideas. Thanks!

@Denubi: I fixed the 1st one, the others seem fine. Do note that some of my older posts (2007) were done on a different platform and the URLs weren’t updated when I imported them to the 1st WordPress blog I used.

Why is your DM whining? Because you’re giving him work? He’s going to hate us both now

@Charisma: You know that along with Denubi, you are among the first to tell me that they’re sending posts their DM’s way. Thanks for helping this one go viral That’s quite an honor, I appreciate.

Gave this article to my GM and um… he’s now whining at me.

Cool is not additive; once something is cool, adding more stuff doesn’t make it more cool – in fact you run the risk of tipping the cool-scale into the realms of parody, and that will never do.

I’d argue that not every encounter should have a cool element tacked on, especially not just for the sake of it. Sometimes a fight against Hobgoblins is just that – a fight against Hobgoblins. It doesn’t need for one of them to turn into a wereboar part way through, the ceiling to start descending or spikes to appear randomly up from the floor. Do it too often, and it stops being cool

That said, it’s worth remembering that it’s possible to add cool without resorting to rules mechanics every time. If one of the Hobgoblins points at a PC and shouts “Oi! That’s my old sword!” and spends the entire encounter targeting that hero then that’s cool – you’ve spotlighted a player and potentially woven another story thread into the game. Or maybe the Hobgoblins have burning eyes or blue horns. Mechanically it means nothing. But it’s cool.

Hey, even Orc and Pie can be cool. So long as it’s cherry pie.
.-= greywulf´s last blog ..Dear Wizards: Cease and Desist sending Cease and Desist letters =-.

One of the big problems of the proponents, and detractors, of the rule of cool, is that often, neither is thinking that “losing can be cool too”. It seems to me that one thing that doesn’t often go into prepping is “what happens if the players lose?” – and since it doesn’t go into prepping, the common default is “everyone dies, game over” – and a pure “game over – black screen” is usually un-cool.

I think a pretty easy way to make a game “cool” without handing it to the players in a gold platter, is to at least outline what happens in case of failure, and if possible try to make the result of failure interesting to the players as well.

All of this reminds me a bit of Chatty’s descriptions of “burning wheel”, where all the confrontations had two sides, each side trying to reach some sort of objective, which are not necessarily completely opposite to each other. Often people prepare encounters with the implicit assumption that the players will “win” the encounter, and don’t prepare a simple “what the monsters want”.

One example I’ll take from Chatty’s blog itself, was when he described that S&W game where the last living member of the party fled from the witch den, with goblins trying to grab him at every corner, and his former party members being sacrificed by the witch in the meanwhile.

Another example I had in my last 4E season, where due to lack of time I ran a delve from “dungeon delves” as a one shot. The party suffered a TPK from the Solo Necromancer at the end of the dungeon, and then were treated to a short epilogue describing how their corpses were risen again as undead by the necromancer and used to lay waste to the hamlet that had hired them to investigate the dungeon in the first place. Wicked cool, and it happened after the players failed to complete the encounter.
.-= Claus´s last blog ..Happy Food =-.

I also think you can actually stifle your player’s creativity by drowning them in too many options. A few cool options (as I read you doing most of the time) is amazing and actually stimulates. For a lot of players (me included), too many opened options means that whatever I choose, I’ll miss out one something cool the DM planned.

To my sense, the options are supposed to be unlimited because of player’s creativity.

That being said, I try to spec the sh*t out of my prepped campaigns, drown the scenario in campaign hooks and plot twists. Then I get nervous and make the so subtle the players don’t see the story or the hooks. Then, I thoughtfully panic, railroad them, draw them in a huge fight, fall asleep during a short break and stop playing for an undefined number of months.

I’m revising my strategy.
.-= Eric Maziade´s last blog ..Revenge of the dailies =-.

@Mike: Yeah, it will be a useful lesson for you I’m sure. There are ways to make Epic large scale fights, but it takes time to master that. We’ll sit down when next I go to Boston so we can discuss this. My buddy Yan excels at this stuff and he’ll be at Pax next year for sure.

@Chgowiz: It’s the Discipline that hard for me man! I know what you’re saying but the urge is strong. But I hear ya and yes, not overloading things leaves room for such things as making stuff at the whim of lady chance, like Nuclear Old School Lanterns.

Man, I’ll remember that game forever!

Just because you put all that stuff there doesn’t mean the players HAVE to find it or the monsters HAVE to use it. Think of it like hidden tricks to play if you need to have more fun with what you’re doing.

Consider this – the d30. It’s the ultimate wild card in my games and it opens the door for things like nuclear lanterns. Yet it’s not required, it’s just there.