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 ...
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 ...
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
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
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 ...
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. ...
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, ...
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
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 ...
34
Look, the two of you are going to need to coordinate and manage expectations here.
Tricking the GM into giving you a kingdom? AWESOME. But the game still needs to run, and both of you need to take that into account. You want to give him what he wants, to have the game be fun for him - but if what he wants is to be an omnipotent monarch and do his ...
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 ...
32
Other answers (including my own comment above) address possible reasons your players are doing this, and possible solutions to mitigate it. But you're not asking for value judgements or how to stop their behavior, so here's my best shot at a neutral analysis of how a D&D type setting could respond to the behavior.
These are some responses I've used, or ...
31
As with any motivational approaches, there's the carrot and the stick. You have to be careful to not simply be permissive of the late behavior, or else you won't incentivize the people who are showing up on time to do so.
Start at a known time and allow a buffer. On our group we have a "doors open" time and a "game" time, to allow for people to show up ...
31
It depends. What are you trying to achieve?
As the author of the campaign, you have a tremendous amount of freedom to create whatever world you wish to. You don't have to stick with the world created in the books any more than you want to. In many years of playing I have spent far more time playing in "generic fantasy world populated from the Monster ...
31
Give them options, or a hiding place perhaps. Trying to tell them out of game to run is (unfortunately) well into the realm of railroading. On that note, there is one option: Show them in-game that running is their best option. This can be accomplished by having a known-powerful NPC friend defeated by said baddie, or an appropriate knowledge check about them ...
31
I'm working on the assumption that D&D alignment is an objective mechanic: in a world where alignments can grant magical power and create planes of existence, and a spell can tell the difference between a man who saves babies for Pelor and a man who eats babies for Pelor, alignment must be objective and intent counts for very little.
This is a social ...
29
I see several options here:
Get over it
Embrace it
Talk about it
Change it
Most likely you will have to implement several of these methods to come up with a true solution, but here are my recommendations for each:
Get Over It As a player (but more a GM) you're putting yourself out there a bit. Yes it'd be nice if your players respected your NPCs a bit ...
29
Deputize Him
If the character is breaking the game context by going to the authorities, make him into the authority. Have the duke/mayor/whatever declare the party to be an "elite troubleshooting squad," give them fancy badges and the authority to do things. Now they can recruit people into militias and buy better swords out of the petty cash, but they ...
29
Run that dungeon with the weird clockwork. If the players like it, treat that dungeon as foreshadowing and continue with your clockwork invasion theme plans. If they don't like it, relegate that dungeon to a one-time "weird old place" and throw that theme away.
Trying subtle things and observing how the players react is a valuable skill for a GM who wants ...
29
Kick him out. No, really, kick him out. Just because he says he wants to play doesn't mean he wants to play the same game you all want to.
You are being too kind to him. He is doing to three people exactly what you are trying to avoid doing to one person. He is:
Preventing your group from enjoying the game.
Being selfish and wrecking a game when he ...
28
As I understand your question: sending a basic Assassin to kill the players seems unfair, but not being able to send Assassins seems unfair too.
Why do Assassins seem unfair?
Yes, sending an assassin to murder the PCs in their sleep is kind of a jerk move. Because you are using a challenge that your characters can't overcome.
However, this is not limited ...
27
Tell your player to suck it.
Your world works how you want it to.
Neither of the critiques you cited from your powergamer make a bit of sense at all. "That's a 1e monster it wouldn't be in a 3.5e world" makes me doubt his sanity - people have ported absolutely every monster forward, and what edition they have rules for is totally separate from whether ...
27
I think a good question should be "why are they going off-map?". You're running a sandbox campaign, so you're generally waiting for the characters' own motivations to lead to the next adventure. These motivations can be one of several things: they can be hunger for adventure, gold or power - in which, case, you're in control, since you determine where these ...
27
Pacing
The key to a good horror game/movie is the pacing; if the characters are constantly in peril and exposed to horrific things then it will become bland. From my Cthulhu games I've found keys to this are:
Build up Slowly lead the players into somewhere dangerous, use mundane things to build tension like smashed glass, scrawled notes, lightning blasted ...
27
Questions will be asked when it's clear there are answers to be had.
There are a lot of ways to do this, but the whole thing boils down to letting them know that questions can and will be answered. You can do this in-game or at the table, subtly or blatantly, amusingly or seriously, but if your players trust answers are possible then the questions will ...
27
Stop dealing with the 98% of the population. If they're so rich, they are now peers of the 2% of the population who rule in various ways. Peasants may have little to offer in reward (perhaps fealty?), but queens, nobles, generals, and the heads of merchant empires will want to either control or ally with such powerful figures – before their rivals do.
As a ...
27
First and foremost, whether or not the in-character consequences come across as out-of-character punishments will depend on how you as the GM portray the situation. Tone of voice and body language speak volumes, and if you act gleeful or malicious while enacting the in-character consequences, the player will feel like he is being reprimanded rather than the ...
27
Tell them the consequences of the standing order, and ask if they really want that.
For extreme and unreasonable ones, they might go like this:
You're always on high alert, always searching for secret doors? Each piece of wall and floor takes ten minutes to search, so that means your progress will be very, very slow.
Also, you will eventually ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
