Hot answers tagged story
18
Were either my expectations to "get started and wing it a bit in the beginning" or her expectations of "I want the whole backstory up front" wildly out of place?
Either one is reasonable, as long as it is understood up front. I tend to go with the "wing a whole lot of it" version personally, but I make sure the group knows that up front.
And yes, ...
17
The first part, seems like a classic miscommunication problem which can be solved by just talking about it after it first appear but before it becomes a major issue. It is all about expectation and disclosure of what the GM and player want. The first part of your question would superbly server as an example of what you are trying to do. Making sure that ...
17
Borrow from the story of Walter White wikipedia
Might I suggest watching the AMC TV series Breaking Bad? wikipedia It is the story of the transformation of a low-key high school chemistry teacher into a drug lord.
American author and essayist Chuck Klosterman said that Breaking Bad is "built on the uncomfortable premise that there's an irrefutable ...
17
I wrestle with this myself, see the related question How do you help players not focus on the rules?
There is a tendency among people to start Pharisaically treating any body of rules as the end in and of itself and not the means to the end. Combined with a sense of rules entitlement fostered by both computer gaming and RPG Organized Play campaigns, it can ...
17
First off, all of edgerunner's answers are great. But I wanted to add some Dungeon World specifics:
Check p.19 and you'll see that 6- isn't "failure" - it's "trouble". The GM will say what happens and the player will mark XP. You are attaching non-DW simulationist ideas to DW mechanics by your supposition that 6- means "failure."
These principles can apply ...
16
There is no reason to have the PC do anything interesting while captured. He may look at the walls or if he's lucky they give him a ball like Steve McQueen in the Great Escape. There is also no reason why the PC should know anything about the NPC staging his escape.
But there is no reason to have you player being bored 3 days just because his character is ...
15
This looks like a good spot to let them succeed with complications. Some ideas that come to mind are:
He climbs the chain but drops his weapon in the progress
The chain he climbed happened to be on the wrong side of the tower, so he must brave more of the tower's denizens to reach his goal.
The chain also happens to ground the tower's lightning rod, and ...
14
I set a limited numbers of must, might and should rules for character creation. Those generally look like:
Your character must agree to do X — plot of the game. For example, work for Black Mesa, help NPC X, need work because of repayment on space ship, yadda, yadda…
Your character must have Y — linked to theme of the game. For example, be a known hero, ...
14
The GM takes on more work than any individual player in making the world and the game come to life. Obviously a GM without players has nothing, but the lynchpin of the game is still the GM. Having played in many games and GMed many more, I come into any game with the understanding that because the GM has to do so much work just to get the game going, that ...
13
Tragic heroes can become villains when they decide the ends justify the means. As their willingness to do "whatever it takes" to achieve what they consider to be righteous goals grows, "whatever it takes" tends to become more and more terrible.
As with blackmail, these things start small and snowball: once you've lied to the king about how his lost son died ...
11
Your player should be able to do something, no matter the scenario, or it's not worth it putting him there. If you want to give him something to feel useful, I can think of a few off the top of my head:
Let him interact with other prisoners. He might get useful info, start planning an escape (if you don't want him to succeed make it something that's ...
11
Abandon your plans for the NPC's development and just skip straight to the scene where the next interesting thing happens to the PC (presumably freedom, or something leading to it).
Don't fret about your plans fizzling – keep the actual game (as opposed to the stuff hidden in your head that's only potential now) moving, and you will get another, better ...
7
I generally start my campaigns with one or two "common thread" requirements that all the PCs must incorporate. I usually pick one Location thread and one Experience thread. For example, I might say that 'You must be living in X town at the start of the campaign' and 'You have suffered greatly at the hands of the evil Y Empire.'
These threads are mandatory, ...
7
I've seen things like this done in most of the D&D games that I've played, actually. However, I've rarely seen it as any kind of hard-and-fast ruleset. There's a few systems that I've seen that are conducive to this:
The d20 Modern Mutations System. This system lets you mutate your character using mutation points. 5 mutation points is worth roughly ...
7
Maybe you can let your player play the NPC while it saves the PC? Make the character sheet, give the player all the necessary info but no more, and feel free to even give him a script for the parts that need to happen, or take control from him at this points (warn him before-hand, but explain that you are only doing this because it's not his character).
6
It's often easier (and generates more interesting stories) if there's some pre-design criteria designed to link the characters. However, it's not necessary, you can do "random folks" games fine.
There's often some element of metagaming to them - most traditional D&D campaigns started with various different people in an inn and some guy shows up ...
6
A lot of it depends on the particular world you are playing in. That said, most DMs are happy to add player-created details to the world.
In general there are no specific animosities between the two races. There are still points of possible conflict around their favoured (constructed and underground) environment. That can feed in to the relationship between ...
6
Give your player a reason to not even try to escape. Create some sort of subplot revolving around another prisoner, something that you know the PC would have to stick around for.
Maybe someone is in desperate trouble, or has information the really PC needs. They say that they can help the PC escape once their own mission is accomplished. (Maybe they're ...
5
There recently was a very good comic, Irredeemable that followed this story line (along with a transformation in the other direction, Incorruptible). I'd recommend that one- it has a pretty good twist for a Paragon-Type hero becoming the most despicable of villains.
Aside from that example, I'm actually taking a character through this currently- the hook ...
5
Cars have a number of uses without infrastructure, but not all of them are as good as others.
For one, it is essentially the same as any other wheeled cart in terms of the fact that they can be drawn by horses (so long as the tires stay intact, and even then it wouldn't be impossible to replace the rubber with other things. The resulting vehicle would not ...
4
Start with the seven deadly sins, my favorite being pride. Pride is a wonderful one, because you can have great heroes who start out selfless saviors who corrupt themselves. The praise. The rewards. The reputation.
Consider Shakespeare - such as Macbeth. Life was pretty good for MB at the beginning. Loved and praised by the king and his men. Victorious in ...
4
A hero that has to make an impossible choice can easily become a villain, as far as someone else is concerned.
For example, from a real game I played a few weeks ago, the idealistic Leonardo da Vinci brutally murdered the Pope to prevent the Spanish from gaining control of newly-unearthed Atlantean technology on the Canary Islands and using it to rule over ...
4
If your world is divided into a pretty objective good and evil and the hero becomes a villain by moving from good to evil then this is more difficult, because it's a big (and therefore improbable) change in personality. So it's pretty tough not to make it seem contrived, and not to completely repeat a cliche.
If the people in your world are like people in ...
4
How We Did It
When D&D 3e came out, our gaming group decided to go to a rotation model. I was one of our regular GMs and had bought the first fistful of 3e adventures that had come out, mostly from third parties - Death in Freeport, Sunless Citadel, NeMoren's Vault, Reign of Ninshalbur (sp?) etc. We all resolved that everyone should run one as part of ...
4
If your DM doesn't have any objections you could try something like this:
A long time ago, when the world was young, there once was a mighty and evil wizard. He wandered far, but settled down and built his tower in the same lands as two rival tribes, the Dwarves and the Minotaurs. Both groups were clever enough to know that a war between them both would ...
4
I see a lot of stuff here that's saying 'don't put the NPC above the PC' and while I agree with the general statement of it, sometime players rejoice at really cool NPC stuff, so I'm going to assume that you aren't in love with an NPC but instead want to add colour to your world and characters, so to give the players someone to care about because players ...
3
In addition to the back-story requirements others have written about, a method I use is to have an inciting event where characters no matter their background are drawn together for story purposes. The tavern they all just happen to be in is attacked by a bandits (rather than them just forming an adventuring party) and only the party and one noble is left ...
3
I think you could greatly benefit from using Adventure Fronts, as suggested in Dungeon World. Fronts are meant to be open-ended, in a way that actually prevents these kinds of situations.
When you realize you have met a dead end due to over-planning, I suggest starting from scratch by converting your adventure into a front.
An adventure front consist of ...
3
At the risk of invoking OSR gods, I think many GMs couch their games as story and then go on to emulate a linear storyline; that gets reinforced with how video games work.
Running a living world is more like an interactive simulator. If players go someplace else, kill the clue bearing NPC, then roll with it. If they are missing out on something happening in ...
3
It depends on the hero and how he/she is set up before the first step onto that slippery slope, as to what kind of a "hook" you will need to drag them through the muck and the mire, or if you even need a hook at all.
If you look at the original tragic hero, Oedipus, then he was destined from birth to do the things that he did, and everything that happened ...
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