Here’s the time for another Perspective on Weekend Wizards post by PM. This week our boy has started to contemplate something that may very well break his spirit and steal his soul. Enjoy!
In my previous post, my inner closet half-orc was last seen running in the hills and howling at the moon after enjoying a successful McWoD session.
Unsurprisingly, this taste of RPG goodness developped a craving for more. As any repressed imaginary personality would do, my alter ego is planning something that may very well be bigger can he can chew.
He’s thinking of trading-in his claws for a rulebook and act as a DM for a session (Chatty DM: Or a few? DMing can be very addictive…).
I think this is a common reaction for new players who have a streak of Storyteller in them, but I’m not naive enough to think it won’t be without pain, yet I’m just confident enough to believe I might pull it off.
Also, as I comment on my experience as a player, I want to be able to comment on DM practices with a least a hint of personal experience; see how it looks from that end.
The first thing I identified as a roadblock in this incredibly steep learning curve is my poor knowledge of the rules. In the innumerable four games I witnessed, we had a couple of instances where we had to refer to some source material to shed light on an obscure rule. However, usually, the players at the table were knowledgeable enough to deal with everything on their own.
Combined with one of the basic statements of World of Darkness (The only rulebook I own and have read) which reads something like “The DM can decide to use or not use a specific rule in order to run his game”, it creates a lever that may allow me to lift this roadblock.
My plan is to construct an adventure where I won’t need to use complex rules to perform my actions. I also plan to let the players come up with the rules or mechanics, from the books they need, to resolve their own encounters.
I can see the control freak DMs in the back squirming in their seats. Many others are also raising their hands thinking that the players might take advantage of my naiveté and stage a coup (Chatty DM: Not so much a coup as Fast Talk the dice out of your hands boy-o).
However, I have an Ace up my sleeve to address this issue. I plan to DM this session with a small group of experienced players. Players whom I can trust for a number of reasons:
First, none of them are known to act as griefers and won’t try to sabotage my plans. (Chatty DM: True)
Secondly, I think they’re just the right mix of control freaks, detail-oriented maniacs and enough-let-me-kill-something players to balance each other out.
If the control freak tries something, chances are good the detail-oriented maniac will call him on it and the enough-let-me-kill-something player will give us a cue when the arguments have lasted long enough. Which leaves me as the final arbiter with a high priority for pacing.
Sounds too good to be possible? Yep.. I think there’s a 70% chance that my lever will nudge the roadblock which will promptly roll down the learning curve and squash me and my big mouth. But I’m the kind of guy who likes to play those odds. 🙂
In reality, I think I will need to following to pull this off.
- Buy-in from my targeted lab rats players. (I want to discuss that lab rat slip-up of mine in a future post)
- A solid read-through of the rules for the system I will choose so that I have an understanding of the basic “day to day” rules.
- Design an adventure that will be all about pacing and that will limit the ways I’m setting myself up for a rule fest. (I think I’ll talk more about this in another post as well since designing my own adventure instead of running a published one may compound the risks of a lousy game)
- Help setting up the challenge in the adventure in crunchy terms. (I’ll have to check if there are any available Crunch Overlords in the neighborhood to help me out.) (Chatty DM: I’ll see if I can find any…. lol!)
For those interested, I’m sure we can find someone around here to take bets on the outcome of this personal challenge.
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The one thing I would have liked to know when first GMing is: Never assume the players will do anything.
Don’t assume they will grab your plot hook, unless you ask them to, or someone is being helpful and stealth-GMing the game to success. Start the game so that the plot hook has already been accepted.
If the game is new WoD mortals, a start like “you have all been hired or are part of [organisation] and are investigating [gruesome murders or whatever]. Let players explain why their character is involved.
Second useful guideline: Don’t roll the dice unless failure is a viable outcome. Rolling athletics to cross a chasm is all well and good, but someone may fail. Likewise finding the clue/hidden door, detecting lies, not detecting lies, …
Never assume the players will succeed unless it is absolutely certain. Never assume they will not succeed, either, even if it is absolutely certain.
Also: Never assume clues will be pieced togther in the intended way.
Hey Tommi,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I’ll let PM answer, but I must say that in my 25 years of DMing, this is possibly the most useful and concise set of advice I’ve seen.
Hey! Good luck on your endeavor! My advice: Need to look up a rule, but don’t know where? Make up a temporary rule for the situation and look it up after the game. It’s great for pacing. I do it all the time.
Excellent tips…
I will be fleshing out my plan for my scenario in a future post but it’s sure to adhere to your first advice.
The PCs will not be “free agents” but members of an organization with its own purpose.
And regarding rolling dices only when failure is an option, it actually brings up a question I had forgotten about.
AD&D lore always presents the DM as playing behind a panel but I have yet to see this iconic arrangement. Wouldn’t a DM be able to create a level of suspense by rolling behind his panel, disregarding the result at his whim (in cases where failure is not an option for example)
Rolling “behind the screen” can be good for effect. Not just when you need to fudge the rolls, but to keep players honest.
I roll a lot and look interested even when nothing is going on. This desensitizes the players to my dice rolls. That way, when I *do* roll a secret Will save, they don’t go all paranoid.
Of course, you have to make sure you don’t overdo the fudging in either direction. You can make it too easy for players or for a particular player or two. That’s not fun. Or, if the bad guy always gets away, that’s not fun, either.
Everything in moderation is a good motto.
The usefulness of the DM screen is great for fudging rolls, but I actually never use one.
Some players like to have the DM roll in the open. And while fudging can be useful at times, it should be used sparingly. (Additionally, you can always fudge the target number or the modifiers you added instead of the roll, so fudging doesn’t stop just because the roll is visible.)
I do like Dean’s occasional rolling, even when nothing is happening. It keeps people paying attention to the game. But don’t worry about focusing on that until you’re confident running the game in general.
(As for secret Will saves, there never should be any. Unless otherwise stated, the target of a spell knows they were just targeted by a spell, even if they made their will save and nothing happened.)
Tommi has some great advice up there. Listen to it well. In fact, his blog has a post that expands on part of what he said very nicely.
Though, on the topic of rolling dice, I have to give some advice I received from… somewhere I don’t remember. 😛
When you’re stuck, roll some dice.
What this essentially means is that there will come times when the players choose to do something that you didn’t expect, and you have no idea whether they’ll succeed or not. So decide on a target number and an appropriate skill to roll, and roll some dice (better yet, get the players to roll the dice for you, to keep less-involved players in the game).
The act of rolling gives the players a sense of control over their characters’ destinies, and will always go over better than “No, you can’t do that.”
The most difficult part with this approach is deciding on DCs or target numbers. I’ve actually been teaching my fiance this, a bit, as she’s wanting to get into DMing as well. So here’s how you go about doing it.
First, remember that the DC doesn’t need to be exact. We can use a rough scale and the players will be happy. This also makes it easier to come up with on the fly.
So think about how difficult the action would be for an average person. What kind of skill would it require? Average Joe? Olympic athlete? Superman?
DC 5 – Easy, almost anyone can accomplish most of the time.
Example: a 5-foot running long jump, reaching out and touching a dragon while standing next to it.
DC 10 – Mediocre. Most people can do this without special training.
Example: the AC to hit an average human schmoe.
DC 15 – Not everyone can do this. Moderate skill required.
Example: binding someone’s wounds (first aid), tumbling past someone with no AoOs, climbing an unknotted rope, or pulling yourself up from hanging off a ledge.
DC 20 – Moderately difficult. Often only possibly with training and/or appropriate tools.
Example: picking even the simplest of locks, disarming a trap, catching a fly in your hand without hurting it, lifting a coin from a person’s pocket unnoticed.
DC 25 – Fairly difficult. A good amount of skill is required. For athletic checks, near-Olympic level skill.
Example: tumbling through an opponent’s square without provoking AoOs, a 25-foot running long jump, climbing up a brick wall or across a ceiling using only handholds.
For the most part, you won’t be DMing for any situations requiring higher DCs than 25 for a while. So just ask yourself “On a scale of 1 to 5, how difficult it the task?” and assign one of the above 5 numbers based on that.
Wow, that was long.
Two other short recommendations.
– Never be afraid to single out the regular DM for a ruling if there’s a rules dispute that you don’t know how to handle. Ask Phil for a ruling, and you’ll have a better idea for next time.
– I’d recommend running a published adventure first. Running a good published adventure can give you a lot of insight into how to write your own later, whereas writing one without having ran the game before can have you missing crucial things, and not being able to tell what they are.
At minimum, read a few good adventures thoroughly.
More good advice, thanks.
I’m thinking of running my own adventure mainly because I’m not really good at presenting other people’s material. I have to twist it and bend it to make it my own or it loses its fluidity.
I’ll go into more details in my next post…
Everyone has to twist pre-written adventures a bit. But I understand your reasons.
In any case, I know that Phil has his fair share of well-written adventures laying around. At minimum, I’d recommend reading through some of the better ones, for some tips on pacing and encounter design, if nothing else.
I’m not the right person to comment the usefulness of GM screen, never having used one. In addition, I always roll everything in the open, usually tell the target number/number of successes required to succeed and sometimes tell what failure will mean before players commit to the occasion.
Essentially, my playing style is very open. I embrace the metagame and expect my players to deal well with it.
This may or may not work with any given group, which is why I limited the advice given to the stuff that is useful pretty much regardless of playstyle.
As for suspense, I let the fiction generate that, together with the knowledge that every roll matters and is genuine.
Also, the advice Graham game about just eyeballing a difficulty and rolling the dice when in doubt is golden. I even use the exact same scale with d20.
I too play without a screen after we decided as a group to let the dice fall where they may.
I will waive stupid-low rolls once in a while when I realize it would cause significant damage to the story or the fun factor.
Today’s extremely interesting points brought up have given me a new insight. My take-home thing is definitively Tommi’s ‘Never play dice when failure is NOT an option’
Figures that even an old hand like me can and should learn new stuff all the time.
This is why I’m doing this blog!
Thanks all, and thank you PM for such a cool post.
I’ve started doing all rolls in the open, and love it. But I only started doing this when I lost my DM screen! I do miss all the quick reference tables that were on the back of it, but the players like having my rolls out in the open, and it frees up valuable table space for more dungeon tiles.
@Graham-
You’re absolutely correct. I should have used the secret FORT save for the poison in the wine…
Whether I play with a screen (which might not be a screen, I often play as a laptop DM, with lots of random generators and such) or not depends on the group and how they feel about things. The latest group I was in was a little less into the game, with most players being social, rather than real crunchers or fluffers. They were there to hang out with friends. I tend to be more secretive with them, allowing me to keep things going a little more easily.
With another group (where we share the DM responsibilities), we let stuff land where it may. Never count your people out, but it may be uncomfortable for a while, or in the future. But here, everything is on the table in front of everyone.
If you mess up, you can always make up for it later. Change things, add some treasure or other reward, or add in some other perk (a free feat/skill ranks is one of my favs). I think ChattyDM’s latest play reports show that he’s adjusted several times after the fact or on the fly when things just weren’t quite right.