Game-Mastering Experiences (with RPGs)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

As part of having the best job in the World, I teach roleplaying (basically 1st edition AD+D, because I’ve been playing since 1979).

I use the village of Hommlet (from ‘The Temple of Elemental Evil’) as an introduction.
Most groups walk into the village, chat to the residents and look for advice.
One barbarian however (played by a 12 year old) decided to ‘make some money’ quickly. He ended up (after about 1 hours play) under arrest for:

  • breaking and entering
  • robbery
  • vandalism
  • kidnapping
  • fleeing the scene of a crime
  • resisting arrest

He looked quite confident at the trial (“I’m sure my tribe will be impressed by may bravery!”) until his clan-chief came in to the court and glared at him. Whereupon he pleaded guilty and now channels his aggression to help the party!

22

I’ve DM’d, but not in a long time

In order of gaming experienced.

D&D boxed sets (from the 80’s)

AD&D 2nd Edition

Shadowrun 2nd Edition and 3rd Edition
My Original character was an EVIL female elf.

My fav AD&D character was a male halfling thief.

My character of preference in Shadowrun tends to be: Big Dumb Troll

23

I have tried to GM in Abberant, Changeling: The Dreaming, and D&D 2nd. I’ve never thought I’m a very good GM, but my players have seemed to enjoy themselves, so who knows?

I’ve played: Star Wars (d6 version), Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling, Abberant, BESM, Paranoia, Shadowrun, Seventh Sea, Exalted, D&D 2nd, live-action Vampire, and a variety of homebrew stuff, both live-action and tabletop.

My biggest issue with RPGs now is finding a game. I’ve moved away from a lot of the guys I gamed with in college, and am a little hesitant to go the “gaming classifieds” route. Surprise suprise, a gamer with a bit of shyness? Who would have thought?

24

Mix of Vampire and Werewolf.

Does anyone else find themselves FAR more outgoing at the gaming table? I certainly do.

25

I have mastered Chrono Trigger on the Super-NES.

Carry on.

26

heh, that’s how we usually played it too.
I knew how to play werewolf and had my favorite character: Gretchen WyrmSlayer, Get of Fenris, Metis Ahroun.
So when the rest of the guys wanted to play Vampire or Mage, I whined until they allowed one Werewolf.
She had several flaws as a metis: Color Blind, Speech Impediment, & an Intolerance to Green.
sigh
I miss her.

27

raises hand I am exponentially more outgoing at the gaming table than at other times. Then again, I very seldom get to do things like, say, punt kobolds in my day-to-day life.

28

I DM a weekly D&D game. I’m not a very good dungeon master, but we have fun. They keep calling me and making sure we’re playing the following week, so I must be doing something right, eh?

29

I’ve GMed Shadowrun, Champions, GURPS, and Call of Cthulhu (both original and d20)

I’ve GMed more CoC than anything else. I love torturing the players (in an evil-but-fair way) and coming up with long-term puzzles and mysteries, where the players will realize after ten sessions that the strange events in the first episode all made perfect sense. My favorite game involved a tomb in egypt, a devious double-cross by unscrupulous archaeologists, a pharoah and his undead jackal army, and eventually Nyarlathotep showing up and personally claiming one of the PCs as a victim. Even the players whose characters got killed enjoyed it.

Unfortunately that takes a lot of work, and even more unfortunately I’ve been running some very small scale stop-gap games and thus pulling ideas out of my larger campaign plan for them.

In the near future I’m planning to run a pirate-themed game, but I’m struggling to find a ship combat system that I like. It has to be simple enough that combats can be run quickly and smoothly, but realistic enough that proper naval tactics are naturally encouraged. Does anyone have any recommendations?

30

If you find one, let me know. I’ve almost never seen a decent Ship or Siege scale combat system.

Actually, though, the d6 Star Wars RPG was pretty good for space combat.

My chief problem as a GM is too many ideas - I keep coming up with campaigns to run, but don’t have enough time and players to fill them out.

31

I’ve GM’d/DM’d just about every system out there, and am a fairly recent convert to the d20 system, largely because of the new Eberron Campaign Setting for it. Eberron is everything I wanted to build into my own, home-grown world, but was too lazy to do.

The game I am running now (later on tonight, actually) has been going really well. Eberron really adds a “noir” feel to the typical fantasy genre, and my players have really gotten paranoid about the differences between Eberron and the standard DND campaign worlds.

Ah, torturing players…

…I love being a DM! :smiley:

32

I’ve only DMed once, and quite thoroughly learned the truth of the old saying “no plan survives contact with the enemy”. Or, in this case, the party. I had planned out, among other beasties, a rather large and angry demon. According to the Plan, the party (all fourth level) was supposed to be very unlikely to meet it at all, instead fighting primarily against the two clerics he’d corrupted. And if they did by chance end up encountering it, there wasn’t supposed to be any possible way for them to defeat it. At that point, their options were supposed to be limited to hiding behind the twelfth-level high elf they were supposed to rescue, who could fairly easily defeat the demon.

Well, first, the party ends up split up, with the two rogues rescuing the prisoners, while the cleric and paladin lure/blackmail the evil cleric out to an ambush in the woods (they had stolen his spellbook, which of course he had no business having in the first place). Well, the evil cleric reaches the clearing, discovers that the spellbook has been ruined, and arrows start flying. His nice powerful weapon has also been stolen, by this point, and he’s desparate. So he uses his talisman to summon the demon, even without a pentacle. He figures he can probably talk the demon into attacking the heroes, and he’s probably right (he was very persuasive).

So, the demon appears in a puff of brimstone, and demands what the puny mortal has disturbed him for… And just then, the party’s cleric gets off a “Hold Person” on the cleric. Hearing no response, the demon proceeds to rip out the cleric’s throat, and heads towards town.

Meanwhile, the high elf (recently rescued) realizes what’s going on, casts Protection from Evil 10’ Radius on himself and the other Good Guys present, and heads to meet the demon. But he’s some distance away, and the demon meanwhile passes right under the tree where the paladin is hiding. By the time the rest of the party arrived on the scene, the paladin had jumped out of the tree right onto the demon’s back, and darned if that fourth-level paladin didn’t manage to single-handedly defeat a nine HD demon, without a scratch to himself.

In fact, the only injury at all to any of the party members that adventure was to one of the thieves, when she touched the evil cleric’s mace (a rather powerful and evil intelligent weapon) in the process of abstracting it. She was reduced to a single hitpoint by that touch, which was rather appropriate, since that character had somehow ended up as the Designated Victim in that campaign (killed and resurected in the first adventure, then brought to death’s door in the second).

33

The best experiences I’ve had at both GMing and playing RPGs were with Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu; mainly, I think, because you couldn’t really take either of the games seriously as a campaign (especially Paranoia.) Either you go insane, get eaten by some otherworldly creature, executed as a traitor, exposed for being a mutant, killed by a defective RD&MC prototype, or get stabbed in the back by a fellow PC. :smiley:

Heck, in CoC, just completing the adventure (and realizing the creature you were fighting has escaped into the greater world to wreck more havoc) and being rewarded by finding a bit of treasure (usually some human skin-covered tome of monsterour horror) often meant that your character underwent a psychic meltdown, and in Paranoia, succeeding at your assigned task was often proof of your treason. Often times, you didn’t even leave the briefing room or armory without having the entire cast replaced even once. Ah, the fun. :wink:

The Computer: “Citizen, how long since you last committed a treasonous act?”
Player Character: confused “But I haven’t committed any treasons, Friend Computer.”
The Computer: “Biothermal imaging indicates that you are lying, Citizen. Lying to The Computer is treason.”
Player Character: resigned “Aw, shit.”
Other PCs: ZapzapzapbashzapzapbangbangzapzapBOOM!.

I miss that game.

Stranger

34

My gaming group’s on a bit of a hiatus, but I’ve managed to run games of D&D/AD&D, Shadowrun, BattleTech/MechWarrior and some Champions. I’ve played a smattering of everyting, even Rolemaster, the orignal James Bond game and countless others. Hanging with the right people has even gotten me a writing gig for BattleTech.

I can’t say any of my GMing experiences have been all that much to write about, I’m a decent GM for a one-night one-shot, but I’m not very good at keeping a storyline going that entertains the masses.

I think the most interesting encounter of late was with a group of characters out of Oriental Adventures hunting down the Iajitsu master in my group. Of course, this takes place in a campaign where we are primarily stopping an undead threat, so I’m am fittingly a Gnome illusionist/rogue/arcane trickster. Well these folks have been hitting us one at a time, trying to kill our Iagitsu Master. They even succeeded a few times but much selling of stuff has brought him back through ressurections. Well, all these nasties hit us and it’s an ugly fight, but very even. At the end, everybody is either dead or KOed except for me and the opposing Singh Rager and some spell caster who can’t do much other than cast dispel magic. This fight has actually gone on long enough that the Rager’s rage has run out and he’s fatigued, so he can’t catch the gnome who is running out of spells and running in circles. Finally I manage to take him down with a storm of snowballs (Snilloc’s Snowball Swarm) at which point the other spell caster just gives up and leaves. Man, what a battle of attrition.

35

Lemme think of my favorite DMing moments…

Okay. First one was a long time ago, in which the PCs have started investigating a murder, and the murderers hire a gang of thugs to strike back. They handily defeat the thugs, find out at what bar the thugs were hired, disguise themselves, and go to the bar, obviously trolling for rough work.

Sure enough, the murderers show up to hire some more mooks, and with some fancy roleplay, the PCs manage to get themselves hired to assassinate themselves. They go along with the murderers to a rooftop, where they set up an ambush for themselves, at which poitn they realize they hadn’t really figured out what to do once they were there; finally one of the PCs says, “Ah, screw it,” and starts shooting their employers. Their plan took me completely by surprise, and it was a great rooftop fight.

Moment two: From the same game, one player’s out-of-town boyfriend was in-town, so I wrote up a quick guest-appearance character for him to play, a city guard; and as a bit of throwaway character motivation, I gave him a daughter with scary and deforming birth defects that was hidden away in his house. I never expected it to come up in play at all, but rather would be something to motivate him to be an assiduous city guard so he could earn more money to take care of his daughter.

Instead, he tremulously asked the PC cleric if he could take a look at her, and we ended up having a very touching scene that ended with a PC giving the daughter a prized magic item–a hat of disguise–that she could wear in order to mask the deformities.

Three: One PC is, unknown to him, infected by a wererat; the PCs have also angered a mind-controlling demon who realizes that the infection has occurred. So he follows the PCs, and on the night of the PC’s transformation commits bloody murders and sends people enough bizarre visions that they can’t figure out who’s turned into a wererat or what’s going on.

So a couple of them go outside and pull out a regular dagger and slash their palms with it, on the theory that the wererat will heal up from the damage (they’re wrong, but I don’t tell them that). One by one they pass the knife and cut themselves to see what happens. Then the last PC comes out, and they hand him the knife and stare suspiciously at him, waiting. And he’s all, “What the hell is wrong with you psychos?!” and they’re all, “DO IT, MAN! JUST DO IT!” It was some of the best paranoia I’ve ever gotten.

Daniel

36

That’s hillarious!

37

anyone care to give consideration to some kind of Online campaign? Shadowrun would be cool, cuz it’s hard to find players…

38

So I am GM’ing a group of beginners from the local technical college.

They enter Hommlet and potter around learning about the World. (They are a mixture of good and neutral alignments.)

But then one of them (Terry) decides to be ambitious. He boasts in the pub that he has control of an invisible undead army. :cool: (I have no idea where he got the idea from, but imagination is good!)

As it happens there is a low-level evil spy in the pub. He approaches the party and says they can earn a lot of money. They agree to travel to the capital city and enter the evil Temple of Loki (the city allows all religions as long as there is no evidence of them breaking any laws).

The first cleric they speak to is intially sceptical, but gets over-excited by the possibilities. He lets slip to the party that this ‘army’ will be used for evil, so most of the party leave.
So there’s just two of them left: the imaginative Terry and a trusting character (Steve).
Terry is not impressed by the clerics of Loki and tells them he will take his ‘army’ elsewhere. They overpower the two characters and threaten to torture Steve’s.

Terry laughs in their faces.
Steve is looking wary, but still trusts Terry. :confused:
The clerics cut off one of Steve’s limbs.
Terry says he still won’t talk.
Steve tells Terry to tell them everything. :eek:
The clerics cut off another one of Steve’s limbs.
Terry says he still won’t talk.
Steve tells Terry to tell them everything. :frowning:
The clerics cut off another one of Steve’s limbs.
Finally Terry admits it’s all a joke.

I can still see the look Steve gave Terry! :smack:

39

Oh D&D how I love thee?

I actually didn’t play D&D until I was in middle school, but I remember it from my childhood as my two older brothers played it. jackelope doesn’t play at all anymore as far as I know, but I remember he used to play. And since my cool older brothers played it, as a kid, I knew I had to play it if I wanted to be as cool as they were.

If only I had known how dorky they were :wink:

I just recently agreed to DM weekly at the local game shop and last week was our first meeting and it went dashingly well. We’re playing in Wizard’s new campaign setting Eberron and I used the book’s campaign story to get them started, though I plan to deviate from it after this week cause I’m sure at least one player knows how it is going to go from here on.

I don’t really have any cool stories, except maybe when we snatched a princess off the back of a dragon and then orchestrated an escape. No I guess that isn’t that cool either. shrug Oh well.

40

I might be game—er, might be interested in that, though I have no RPG experience.