Its the weekend, time to try something new!
In the last few months, I’ve taken a role of GM consulting through Gmail with readers and friends. One of the things I excel at is brainstorming and throwing ideas out. When I started getting great feedback for the ideas I gave out I started thinking maybe I should recuperate these discussions and make posts out of them. With their approval of course!
Let me know if you like that format.
Last week, I noticed on Twitter that one of the people I followed was having difficulty with prepping for his game. I offered to help and invited him on Gtalk.
Trabant is a teenager from Slovakia. He’s a GM who’s into Post Apocalyptic games.
Here’s an edited version of our discussions:
Trabant: Hello good sir. I believe you offered some of your services on the internets? Regarding setting up a game?
Chatty: So what’s the system/setting/situation then?
Trabant: Well, here’s the deal. The game is an offshoot from our latest campaign. It’s a one-shot, zombies on a boat style. Now first I was trying to recreate a map from a game. Objectives were pretty straightforward. Go there, pull lever, do x, run to y… Now this was not good with my group, so I added the aspect of survival.
Trabant: They’re stranded, after jumping off a sinking ship. They are armed with nothing more that their clothes and mediocre to bad combat skills. What more, there are very few weapons, in the map. So much to the setup. Now I have had a pretty good plan on how the game starts. So they have restrained ressources and need to survive/find a way out
Trabant: Players enter ship, look around. I guide them to the radio station on top of the bridge. At that point they already witness corpses and signs of combat.
Chatty: Making it creak and make noise while they explore the ship…
Trabant: Yes, yes. I thought of that. Even prepared muzak.
Trabant: Now, at the top, all hell breaks loose. Ol’ (Zombie) cap’n decides his harpoon ain’t bloody enough. Zombie 1st mate still has a loaded shotgun.
Trabant: Now at this point, the PCs should already have messaged the nearest shore. They’re not sure where they are, but the nearest port gives them directions to a map room, plus they’re obviously near Papua new Guinea (Where the responding port is).
Trabant: Now, after killing the cap’n and making contact, they should see that the ship is broken in two. Somehow, the back half is still up.
Trabant: What makes the situation funnier is that now something big is coming from the broken side. It’s pale. Its wet. Slithery.
Chatty: Ohhh! Monster!
Trabant: Hell yes. I have no idea how to put this into the story, but it’s aquatic, and quite hungry.
Chatty: If it’s big, dangerous and cool… who gives a (Bleep) what it’s doing there?
Trabant: Clever. The backstory of the zombies is some kind of stupid.
Chatty: And it might be a connoisseur of Rotten flesh! Or the ship’s super secret cargo that escaped.
Trabant: Sir you are brilliant.
Chatty: That’s what you (don’t) pay me for 🙂
Trabant: Retrospectively, it doesn’t even have to be linked to the zombies!
Chatty: It does not
Trabant: Now I got 2 supernatural forces screwing with the players 🙂
Chatty: Hell yeah!
Trabbant: Now, I already have a plan about how the battle is supposed to go. The thing is awfully fast. No time for proper barricades, and the thing is pretty resistant to bludgeoning.
Chatty: Add sharks around the boat to make it spicer and prevent players from diving from bridge to water 🙂
Trabant: Ooooh. No need. The thing is the shark.
Chatty: Vampire Shark?
Trabant: He he, almost. a humanoid, rotting vampire shark from the future.
Chatty: A Great Wight Shark! (Rimshot!)
Trabant: Now, after giving him a bit of fire, his weakness, it flees. The players now get to make a willpower test, and the weakest of them, or strongest, feels a moral urge to sink the ship before fleeing. This adds a nice twist. At this point, I’m kind of lost.
Chatty: Make the moral urge feel like something unholy resides in the ship’s structure.
Trabant: Nice.
Chatty: Like letting it intact will bring much worse in the world.
Trabant: Hell yes! We’re more the kind of rational/scientific bunch, but this will add a whole new dimension to the game. Good.
Trabant: Now here’s a part of my problem. After this, there are 2 ways to sink the ship, one by overloading the sanitary systems and letting the toilets flow over, the other by letting the reserve fuel go kaboom. The problem is, the lower level of the ship is extremely boring.
Chatty: Make it flooded… and have PCs do technical feats while needing to a) Hold Breath (Count time) and b) Not being able to talk to each other but coordinate tasks. I did it once… it worked great!
Trabant: Good thoughts… Here are my plans until now. I had thought of a puzzle for the toilets, basically, you had to use two valves in different rooms at the same time. This sounds good for an FPS, but horrid for an RPG. What are your thoughts?
Chatty: Puzzles in RPGs need to bring an alternate, non-bottleneck solution to a problem. I’d say make that same puzzle by putting valves in different rooms and one of them flooded.
Trabant: Good. I like that a lot. I already had planned to make the rooms even a level lower than the rest,.
Chatty: So now it becomes a communication and organization puzzle. Make a map and put tools that allow communications (Mirrors, pipes, Wrenches, morse code, etc)
Trabant: I thought the rooms would have one common wall, through which they would knock.
Chatty: Make it harder,… if your group is smart it will stimulate them to figure it out.
Trabant: Good thoughts, I hope I’ll not overload them.
Chatty: They can handle it… At worst, simplify on the fly…
Trabant: Well, the Explosion solution is very boring. Essentially, the thing consists of setting up a timer for a molotov cocktail-esque bomb, and dropping it into the upper level of the tank. I’m thinking combine “watch” + “cocktail”: Equals one time bomb. The only really challenging parts would be getting there and locking the tank up.
Chatty: Why don’t you make the ‘shark’ attack during the manipulation of the cocktail bomb?
Trabant: Yes that was supposed to be the second entry point for the shark:) I was hoping to model him after Nemesis, from Resident Evil.
Chatty: Not so boring when 2 tons of teeth attack when some players are yielding explosives.
Trabant: Strong approval. I think this makes it good enough for my group.
Chatty: Plus it brings in the Rule of C4
Trabant: Everything is better with explosives?
Chatty: 🙂
Trabant: If this was a face to face conversation we would be totally looking at each other like members of the same secret society.
Chatty: I’m happy to have helped
Chatty’s Conclusion:
Who said the new generation of gamers were not interested in tabletop Role Playing? Here’s a guy willing to share about his game and get better and he’s half my age!
Being in his mid-late teens, Trabant’s adventure ideas seem to be inspired by Survival Horror video games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. He does realize that you can’t transfer some of the challenges from one medium to the other successfully. Door and lever puzzles, when paced alone, are not the best challenges for a group… except when you add several complications to the puzzle.
You may also noticed that at no point I challenged his core ideas about the adventure nor commented on the parts that he called ‘boring’ and such. My self-appointed mandate was to prod his creative ‘muscle’ to push through his block, not challenge his concepts. I’m happy that it seems to have helped him.
I’ve found in the last few months that discussing about your game with another GM helps a lot in game prepping. One of the curses of the offline GM is that there are precious few people you can talk to to get help, most of the people who share your passions for RPGs are your players!
Even some of the Online venues, like some forums, are not that helpful, filled with people more interested in calling you a moron (or plain ignoring you) than giving genuine help. Finding someone you can bounce your ideas with is always a good thing.
If you liked the format, I may do others like that. If you need help with your game, you can try to reach me on Gtalk (phil.a.menard) and you may find your game discussed here if you want. I’ll make sure to post our discussions after your game if you want.
Credit: Charles Schultz (Image)
You should change the name of the column to “Uncle Chatty’s Rocking Chair”. I don’t know why I suggested that. Still, good idea, and quite gracious of you.
Wyatts last blog post..Monsters Of Eden: Heroic Tier
That’s it Wyatt, make me feel older than I already am.
Get off my freaking lawn!
🙂
I don’t want this to come across as the shameless plug it probably is, but reading that all I could think was “Chatty really needs to drop by my Weekly What the Heck feature every week.”
The current one is here
It looks like CommentLuv picked up the result of last week’s.
Gregor LeBlaques last blog post..Why, that’s a Toothnip!
Great conversation Phil! I definitely like seeing your interactions with other GM’s (other than me, that is) because it’s nice to see your creativity spurning other people to improve their games.
I actually found myself wanting to play in some parts of this adventure, specifically the flooded rooms and the puzzles down there. Sounds like a LOT of fun!
Bartoneuss last blog post..RPG Bloggers Unite! GenCon Panel
@Wyatt The payment for a consultaton shall from now on be a package of Werthers Originals.
On a related note, seems I finally get to be ‘internet famose’. Gotta get me a blag too.
I’m happy about any conversation I can have with GMs, especially because there are none in the area that I’d know of. Chatty here did a hell of a job on filling the blank spots.
By starting out with a model of the map zpo_tanker form Zombie Panic: Source (shameless plug, great game) I kind of cornered myself and forced the scenario a bit into expectable FPS experiences. Soon I realized, I wasn’t making a tabletop session, I was drawing a map for a computer game.
First thing I thought was “let’s make ’em starve”. (You know, cos’ I like to talk to myself. In the royal ‘we’.)
In-game, that was a humonogous success. More on that later.
The upper level was dominated by a huge open deck, which ended abtruply on one side, revealing the boat being torn in half, and the side with the players being on being held the nicely horizontally only by careful/lucky bilging. The interior was a robust metal/rust, later revealed to be full of dead bodies.
The first underground level was quite assymetric, full of rooms and more rooms, and four-times the dark corners (yes, we all know what that means. (Zombies. (Just in case.))) mostly interesting was a kitchen, which was only accessible this way, and a few chunks of data on the ships tragic story.
The lower-lower level was straightforward, with little place to get lost, mostly the two important puzzle-valves and the tank.
If anyone cares about how the game went, here a brief summary (damn, need to get me that blag.):
The players arrived, one boring character with no love in the creation process, one wannabe-goth, classic Arnold Schwarzenegger-type, one Sheikh and his main wife. Now the Sheikh was a phony, he was a Belgian. Also, he robbed a bank. His wife was his accomplice. A male one. Now THAT’s a backstory.
The first analysis of the ship went upstairs. The players went straight for the top, to a locked door, so they slowly worked themselves down.
Not what I expected, but OK. They found, after some time, corpses, ran a bit around, found out that the ship wasn’t kosher, found 10 cans of coke (THE BEVERAGE) and a well-stocked bar, and hell broke loose. The “wife” tried to scam more of the beverage. Inter-party conflict at it’s best. I mean dammit, I htought I’d need to make sure they die. Instead, they we’re ready to bash their heads in, just for a cola. Wow. Talk about buddies in hard times.
They found a few more bodies, went then to the bridge, from the unlocked side. They had combat, but not what I expected.
For a group that had seen it’s fair share of zombie apocalypse, they we’re really great at roleplaying the “first contact” anxiety. The combat was long and tiresome, and I sadly didn’t get to make the first showdown with the Shark, because the battle with the Captain was getting a tad too long, more combat would have ruined the atmosphere. No big deal, the role of the Big Bad was already filled with something better than big jaws; people around you.
After the battle, I guided them slowly to the radio, and told them to stay put for 12 hours, so the rescue heli could arrive.
Now notice; the (computer) game only waits for a few minutes. I wanted them to stay there for a long and ugly time.
Then I got my evil face on, and with a smirk told them, “Growling stomachs mean -2 on all rolls”. Oh god, what a great feeling. At this point, they knew of a door to the cafeteria. “Oh sure, we’ll just go there and grab oursleves som-” “Locked.”
It was wonderful seeing the despair in their eyes. The only door thye didn;t check out yet was one at the far end of the deck, near the rip, one they knew was only illuminated by red emergency light, and making growling sounds, possibly the boats, but how could they be sure? They couldn’t…
At this point they split up, one guy with the goth who had taken temporal insanity on the bridge, expecting the unexpected, with the other ready to go into a rusty metallic claustrophobic dungeon. With guns. (A gun. As in single one gun. The other 2 guys had metal pipes. Hell yes.)
At this point it was evening and we all had to pack for work on monday. (We play sunday’s.)
The debrief of the player was fine, The things I screwed up as a GM we’re expected and I was fully aware of my shortcoming. A great game, plus a zombie game after a long time. Just can’t let loose of those evil, evil flesh-eaters.
Afterword: I toyed around with a new concept, essence. Unisystem handles it as a combo of hitpoint for your sanity and mana for the more mystically oriented games (not us). I made players suck it far more often than I used to, there was one “letting loose” of bodily functions, two screaming/running fits, one temporal coma paired with loss of speech. The players had stuff to roleplay. I don’t know where I read this, but in a WWII game, if your players have nothing to do, the best thing you can give them: ARTILLERY FIRE! The players can take great joy in playing their characters problems; not plain loss of HP: Make ’em lose an ear! Not just boring loss of sanity, screaming fit!
As to another point, possibly Unisystem is a tad broken, but we seriously had some futile rolls: I have never fired a shotgun before, but given one and having the target at arms reach, I can’t possibly think of how I would miss. Same goes for beating the undead with lead pipes. Seriously, how the hell does one miss an enemy with a dexterity of, well, a dead man?
I decided on a new concept for my games, that being that if the players describe their action nicely, they get a free success. If everyone agrees, this might be a great way to play, sadly without the dice-throwing. (Few exceptions, like when you calculate damage or so.)
Also; music. Yes, I know, it’s hard to look on the internet for atmospheric stuff, but you don’t really have to. I picked up the soundtrack from teh first two Fallout games; beautiful, slow scary, even nicely creaking like the ship was supposed to be. It was exactly what I wanted to have. My tip; game or movie soundtracks. I was even thinking of having one dead guy wear an mp3-player. “Ring of fire” by Johhny Cash. It even got featured in Silent Hill 4 I think. (Actually that was a lie, it was “Dear hearts and Gentle people”, but they never checked out the guy’s player so what the hell.)
Afterword addendum; Chatty, if you’re in the area, feel free to drop by and pick up your Werthers Originals.
The last post is now titled “I hope you like text”.
@Gregor: I’ll need to check that!
@Bart: Hey man, always happy to share. There’s something to a flooded dungeon that makes things more intense!
@Trabant: Holy wall of text! 🙂 Your adventure sounded great! I hope we’ll hear about the next part!
@Chatty: Actually, I’m not really planning to brign the game up until needed, I have now unofficially entered the stage of “GM burnout” after leading our group into firefights for say 9 months.
Now we’re having a young padawan think up session. He’s subbornly into steampunk, (have you possibly ever read something by Miéville?) sadly not displaying it too much in the games. He’s great about details, props and roleplaying but lacks perception for the thing as a whole.
Now while I’m metaphorically on the beaches of Hawaii, enjoying retirement, I’m cooking up side-projects; a hilarious game about techie-goblins blowing things up, (wushu meets science meets goblins,) Degenesis a pretty cool indie RPG, some V:tM is running around in my head for some time…
Basically I’m in a creative free-range right now; doing a bit of everything I want to under no pressure. (Though I’ve started to translate bits and peices of Degenesis for the players, there is some interest from both sides.)
Enjoy your retirement old man! 🙂
That being said, are all players in your group English-literate? That’s a lot of work translating RPGs in your language (Slovakian?)
@ChattyDM: Haha, no. Most people I know here have english skills better than people I met in the west. It’s more German-illiterate, Degenesis is a german thing.
German has a bad rep around here, moslty because of something historic, not sure. Also, the grammar rules are an impenetrable wall. (Seriously; “plusquamperfekt”? I bet Angela Merkel has no idea what that’s for.) Only if you’re able to make that one real bad sanity check and get REALLY far behind said wall you discover the beauty of the language.
On a related note, my players never really read rules. I always direct them to understandable formats but they plain refuse. I have to interpret them like some goddamn tribe-medicineman. Funny enough, this was about the 15th game we had in unisystem and the group was still confused by chargen. ()
To be fair though, the first time I read the crit hit/miss rules I interpreted the rerolls wrongly and produced wacky (margin of error: +/- 300%) results to this day. (Which was far funnier than the new way.)
This was informative and highly entertaining. Thanks for this. It’s been a few years since I’ve played anything, but it’s still fun to be an observer.
Chriss last blog post..Watch The Office Episode: Customer Survey
I love the idea of this post! I think it would be great if it became a weekly feature. What GM out there doesn’t need some creative firepower from time to time?
I very well may do so on a semi-regular basis then! It sure is fun to do and then to share!
You could even have different “Help” sections: roleplaying, storytelling, etc
Keep up the good work!