Hot answers tagged gm-techniques
92
Reward him.
Your player is playing his character smart, not hard. He's being clever and resourceful. He's considering what his character would do in character. I wish I had players like the one playing your Bard.
He stops to think about what he can do, instead of just mindlessly deciding you expect him to attack and attacking. You can do so much more with ...
54
I don't think it's anything to really be dealt with, unless you object to the idea of torture in your games. Of course, there are detriments to using torture, which is why it's a case of last resort (or no resort) for many intelligence agencies. What detriments?
People will say anything to get out of pain. You end up with a lot of dross to sort through, ...
50
Railroading is forcing the characters into the prewritten story that the master created. It's generally frowned upon, because it disrupts the free-will oriented nature of roleplaying. In some cases however, some railroading is required.
A typical example is the following. Suppose the characters enter a city, and find a riot or similar event. The most ...
50
Sometimes, clever and creative players are a pain, because you planned for something very different. Yet, it is the clever and creative play that makes the game so rewarding. Instead of getting the player to adapt to your plans, I suggest you adapt your plans to the player.
Make going to the authorities interesting
If the authorities are always helpful, or ...
47
Never ask your players for a skill roll you don't want them to fail.
(Credit to @Rantar in the comments.) While passive perception isn't a skill roll, it is still a check against a skill.
Is there a reason to not spot the bird? Failure is boring when it does not advance the plot. Mechanically speaking, if we look at the rules of hidden club, the only time ...
46
There's a two step process needed here.
Say to your players what you just said to us
Then mind your own business
Have they not noticed that imbalanced loot is throwing off their party balance? Or is it that they don't care? If they do not care and are having fun, it is not a problem. If they haven't noticed, then just telling them "Hey gear is ...
45
A witchfire sometimes spawns upon the death of a hag, when one of
these savage crones dies with some terrible plot unfinished or simply
proves too maliciously tenacious to succumb to death’s grasp. (Source)
You say "TPK"; I say you have just been handed the perfect opportunity to invent a terrible unfinished plot that just so happens to require the ...
45
Probably the easiest way to avoid forgetting a few key things is to use a physical prop.
When you have an important bit of information or a "quest item," write it down on a notecard and physically hand it to the players.
You're not "giving away" anything if they've already identified the thing as important by themselves. But now they have a handy reminder ...
44
Combat needs to move. It's the most detail packed in the least in-game time most systems have to offer. And yet it's also (usually) supposed to feel fast-paced and action packed.
So yes, it's perfectly acceptable to hurry players along to the point of skipping a turn. It's even a rule in some systems. Here's an example from the Star Wars RPG (although I ...
44
You have the right answer in your choices.
Being a DM isn't about writing a script and continually nullifying player choices to keep them "on script". If you want to write a story without much outside input, then write fiction. Nothing wrong with that.
A DM is only one participant of the story when role-playing. Sure, typically the DM will set up the ...
44
I strongly advise you to at least involve the player whose character is temporarily to be replaced. There are at least two good reasons:
you betray the player in question by replacing his character with a replica just like that. He won't notice until the surprise and I wouldn't appreciate a revelation like .. and look, there is .. yes, you! And the ...
43
The Obvious Answer
The pat answer is that the player is clearly signalling that they aren't interested in simulating time spent in town with any degree of granularity. They want to show up, hit sell, and get on with the adventure.
The sense of time compression may be a result of their minimizing the importance of the tasks. It could be because they feel ...
42
The thing with science fiction settings is that when technology creates a problem for the PCs, it can also generally create a solution. Part of the heist genre is figuring out what the alarm systems are and getting your hands on the gadgets you need to neutralize them. Other valid tactics include social engineering tactics like bribing or impersonating the ...
41
Don't run a World X game. Run an alternate universe World X game.
Sure, your players are expecting a World X game. But you don't know enough details to run one. An alternate universe game lets the players enjoy the genre they want while you still retain control of the details.
Three basic steps:
Introduce some elements that are definitely wrong.
When ...
41
It sounds to me like an expectation problem. You should easily be able to resolve it by asking the player why they feel the need to say those things. Once you figure out why, you can do something about it. Although my suspicion is that the player is used to a GM vs Players style of gaming and thus covers all his bases because otherwise, they get picked on. ...
40
If you can get them to read novels in the setting, that's ideal. But it may take some time and I've never met a full group that would all read the same books, even when bribed with XP.
Here's more of a quick and dirty method. A few games ago I gave the players cheat sheets about the city they were in. I limited them to a page each because the more I give ...
38
When I think of noir, I think about the following elements: crime, betrayal, temptation (often sexual), urban settings, pessimism, cynicism, and no-win situations. There's also a host of cinematic techniques that don't translate precisely into non-visual mediums, so I'll leave those aside for now.
Shadowrun has crime and urban settings covered, so that's ...
38
Here's a technique I've used. When I invite people to a game I tell them that the game we're playing is a homebrew system called "Valadil's Game" which is loosely based on D&D.
This does a couple things. Firstly, it scares off rules lawyers who want to play RAW. I figure those players aren't compatible with my games anyway and I'd rather just nip ...
38
Play more. Read more. Watch more. Expand your library of tropes. Once you have dozens of different innkeepers bouncing around in your head, your next innkeeper will probably be a collage of these tropes.
Another idea is to take a page from creative writing exercises. Take a bunch of adjectives - tall, fat, jolly, glum, one-eyed, nervous, red-haired, ...
37
Weather affects the overall atmosphere in the game. To make it relevant, work it into the descriptions of places the PCs visit, people they meet, and challenges they face. Here are just some examples:
Rain
A street peddler offers them umbrellas
Flash-flooding forces a detour, or makes the party wagon get stuck
Most flying and land-dwelling animals seek ...
35
Let's say I have a campaign where I
want to put the players in a
challenging spot by putting them in a
no win situation and having them
captured and stripped of their
equipment (assuming they might get it
back as they make their escape, so as
not to complete make the players mad.)
If this is not a natural consequence of previous actions ...
35
Unless this makes the game boring for you as a GM, don't make it a goal in itself to have the players vary their characters. The players won't like being forced into roles they don't want to play, and the game can be a lot of fun even with a homogeneous group.
Draw your inspiration from westerns and other action movies where all of the characters are ...
35
I've run a variety of tones of campaigns over time and some could be considered "evil"; in fact currently I'm running a three-year long Pathfinder campaign where the PCs are pirates - not all of them are technically evilly aligned, but murder, torture, rape, slavery, etc. have all come up in the game. Here's how you make it work.
Decide on Limits, Within ...
34
I think this all depends on your group(I'd say this is the biggest factor), the game you're playing, and the tone you've had since the beginning of the game.
Group - I know the players in my group get very attached to their characters. Weeks of building personality and backstory, and then it can be gone because of a streak of bad rolls? All groups are ...
34
The goal of the "close" is to bring the game to an end and prepare them for next week. This is a reflective period.
I have had success using these techniques:
In Game
Signal that this segment of the story is ending. "You've cleared the villains out of the warehouse. No more enemies remain."
Get the characters to a safe place. Look to the Hero's Journey ...
34
Since he was wrongly convicted, you could use that to your advantage. Have the group argue the PC's innocence (in the flashback), and better yet, give them plenty of time to prepare the defense. Let them totally outshine the prosecutor. Then have the (corrupt?) "Judge" say something like, "well, we can't let him go because then it would encourage everyone ...
34
Ask more generally about their comfort boundaries
Tell the party that you have some ideas you think might be crossing the line, and ask them where they'd like the line to be drawn. In that context you might even give examples and include something similar to your idea as just one of several.
Throw in a scaled-down version as a test
Use the general concept ...
33
Speaking as a Rules Lawyer (I try to think of myself as a good guy, i.e. "how can the rules let you do what you want to do"?) and the occasional TD, I've found a couple simple rules work out.
No checking the rules on your turn. Look it up while you're waiting.
That includes the DM - if you ask the DM if you can do something, you get their best guess; we're ...
33
I've used several techniques to make my improv a bit more random; these are:
Preparation names always get me so I always make several pages of names with personalities, brief schick or quirk, basically a whole page of one line NPCs, the names are randomly generated along with the description, I just add in the quirks onto the page.
Cross the streams ...
32
What, Are You a Terrorist?
Think of all the things the TSA won't let you bring on planes. Now imagine a higher-tech world where dangerous things are even easier to make out of seemingly-innocuous items. Why can you have a medkit with A but not B? Because someone figured out how to use B to weaponize ebola, or cause apparently natural heart attacks from 50 ...
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