Game-Mastering Experiences (with RPGs)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I have two annual gaming gatherings:
PlatteCon, which is the annual gaming convention at UW-Platteville (coming up soon). I will be running some games, but no RPGs.
And a gathering of some college friends (and thier friends / brothers). I ran a Shadowrun campain with two of the participants. But it is really hard when you gather only once a year.

Other than that, I’ve onlt DMed AD&D and that was decades ago.

I have a local friend who wants to run a AD&D game, but he is long on talk and short on follow-through.

There is a semi-loacl college that has a gaming group, but I have yet to visit.

Brian

42

Lookin at the Wall o’ Gaming to my right, I’ve GM’d AD&D (all three versions), Fantasy Hero, Dragonquest, Champions, and various bastardized combos thereof. I’ve also played a little Runequest, Twilight 2000 and GURPS.

Currently I’m running a D&D campaign set in the Forgotten Realms that has way too many players in it. I only figured out recently that all those nifty challenge ratings assume there’ll be four PC’s in the party, and I’ve got eight (nine if you count the two-headed dwarf twice, eleven if you count the druid’s animal companions, and fourteen if you count the familiars) (whimper…).

The players seem to be struggling pretty fiercely with the concept of alignment. Scenario from last Saturday: The party has been travelling across the High Moor. They know there are Evil, Neutral, and Good people out there on the moor. It’s 4 a.m. Most of the party is sleeping in the Leomund’s Secure Shelter. The druid and his bear and dire lion are on watch along with the wizard, at ground level. On the roof of the Shelter is a gnome wizard/rogue.

It’s current day, current weather, so it’s cold, with clear skies and a low ground fog which means there’s starlight to see things close by, but you can’t see more than 100 feet. The wizard hears something Out There. The druid and the dire lion start wandering off in that direction to investigate. The gnome sees the lion heading off thataway, takes a look, and sees vague shapes moving through the fog, about 150 feet away (she’s looking down into the fog, rather than through it, so she can see farther).

The gnome wants to light the area up so she can see what it is and runs afoul of the d20 rule that Light has no range (however, you can cast it on a rock and then chuck it where you want the light to be, but that would have her standing on the only roof in 100 miles holding a light rock in her hand, which she figured would be tactically disadvantageous). Her spell of choice for illuminating the shadowy figures (who turned to be not Evil)?

Fireball.

Followed by Pyrotechnics on the tree she lit on fire, because the druid hates it when you burn trees. Be thou amazed at the area of Pyrotechnics, by the way. 120’ radius.

The player (my lovely wife) doesn’t see how attacking people without finding out whether or not they’re Bad Guys first is Evil.

43

My favorite thing to run these days is various variations on the Superhero theme.

I’ve done Silver Age superheroics, Pulp superheroics, Modern Noir Superheroics, and Dystopian superheroics.

I just need more players that like superheroes! So many campaign ideas…

44

Very much so, as long as I don’t have to re-buy all new books. Mine are quite old.

45

One of my favorite campaigns. A bad guy won. You had a Champions “Dr. Doom” (whose name eludes me as I type this) in charge. Heros were hunted down. Villians who did not enjoy being under his yoke might be allies…or they might be trying to capture/kill you to curry favor. The resistance is disjointed; most people are afraid to even be helped by heroes (being saved by a hero is considered aiding and abetting, punishable by life imprisonment of hard labor).

It was fun trying to figure a megalomaniac’s motives once he’s won.

46

Well, the interesting thing for me about three of those was that they were the same world. I had a kind of overall arc between the Pulp/Silver Age/Dystopia campaigns. A couple of mad wizards had to perform a ritual three times, at certain intervals, to raise their Cthuloid masters.

They first performed it in 1934, then again in 1968, then again in 2002, raising the beasts for the big finale of the Dystopian game.

I loved those campaigns and how they fit together.

47

Um, yeah, I’ve been playing D&D in its various incarnations for awhile. Let’s just leave it at that.

One particular war story has always stuck out in my mind. A few buddies and I all happened to be home from college at around the same time. We hadn’t hung out, let alone played together, in two or three years. Hijinks ensued.

The dramatis personae included a hard-headed assassin, an eager halfling beast rider, a dumb but good intentioned jockish thug, a peg-legged wizard boy whore (please don’t ask), and a cowardly thief. The DM was your humble narrator. None of the characters had met each other before.

To make a long story short, the party was hired to steal a valuable item from someone’s house to sour an upcoming deal. The party cases the place, waits until nightfall, and takes to the rooftops. There is much skulking about. The assassin tosses a grapple at the window to be opened, and misses. The thief loses his nerve and calls for the authorities while lobbing bare bodkins at the clumsy assassin. She flees, the boy whore tumbles from the roof and dies, and the jock and the slow halfling are left holding the bag when the authorities come.

The two of them are tossed in jail, whereupon they start to beg. The jock convinces the guards that the halfling is just his hirsute son, and that they were attacked by a bevy of bullies while taking an evening stroll. They gave a particularly lengthy and moving performance.

Meanwhile the furious assassin returned to the guest house where the party was staying and snuck into the stable. In a fit of rage, she jugulated the halfling’s bonded pony.

If anyone remembers the 2nd edition beast rider kit, if your mount is killed, you need to pass a system shock roll or take a bit of damage. Our halfling failed the roll, and the damage dice both came up sixes.

He was first level.

In the middle of a tear-jerking oratory about unfairness and injustice, the halfling keeled over, stone dead.

“MY SON! LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO MY SON!”

The jock was promptly released. He met up with the assassin, and together they tracked down the thief and hanged him.

The session ended with the two surviving PCs leading a herd of livestock through a nobleman’s house.

Please don’t ask.

48

Maeglin, sometimes you don’t even need a villian. Just let the PCs go at one another’s throats and don’t try to stop it (although not fudging the system shock roll was a little extreme to do to a first level character - always hide your damage rolls).

49

God, that reminds me of Knights of the Dinner Table. Your group would do well in Hackmaster, I think.

50

Heh. To be honest, even if he had passed his system shock roll, I probably would have fudged a failure. It was a pickup session, not a campaign, and the comic value was just too much to pass up. After all, it gave him the opportunity to play out one of the more bizarre death scenes we had ever contrived.

That was the last time I have ever played with those guys. Looking back, it is hard to believe that this game took place about eight years ago. Scary.

51

I played for ten years in an every Sunday game with five or more participants, generally one DM, although a few guest spots. We eventually all moved away, and I lost one of the most fun hobbies I ever had. “The Freeport Campaign” was a real wild and woolly game, growing out of “The Empire of the Petal Throne” and “Greyhawk” in the early days of Gygax and Arnesson.

But, we never played by those rules. We had our own “exceptions” to rules from the very beginning. By the end, I had drawn up tables for die values in every possible game scenario, and they were not all that similar, nor entirely different from AD&D, but mine were all on four pages, and clearly labeled, so everyone used mine.

The rules are so small a part of the game. Being willing to play the character’s probable actions, against game interest for the player is the sign of a true “roll player” in the game, and what makes the game more than a dice game. I remember moments that would take an hour to set up, but were hilarious, touching, heroic, and even sobering.

“I punt the brownie.”

“Would you keep kindling on your front porch, if you were a vampire?”

“Wait a minute, is this Good? I mean, is it ethics, or teams?”

“Yeah, right! The first time I ever decide to use weapons rather than spells, and this particular orc just happens to have a level-draining sword!”

“I use the wish. I wish my soul would become a light, that will shine forth forever here, in the Heart of Darkness.”

“Yes, I told them I was King of all Dwarves. Was I supposed to tell them I was the Last Dwarf?”

“No, your original skill is pig farming, and you suck at it. That’s why you went adventuring.”

I loved preparing for adventures, scenes, maps, and NPCs. I would get old National Geographic Survey maps, from the thirties, and have the adventure right in the town we were playing in, only with most of the roads and buildings gone. That way when someone said “We run over to Fairfax,” I could say, fine, see you in a couple of hours, and if they challenged that I could ask for a demonstration. I wrote a computer program in Ndos, that would give me NPC’s with hit points, armor class, and class and level in groups of 1 to 100. Made playing much faster. You can “roll up” a hoard of goblins in seconds.

Finally, I created the Village of Bath, with 1000 NPC’s including local residents, nearby townspeople, Noblemen, outlaws, farmers, hunters, and of course the legendary historic persons of note. That included Xarchos, and his infamous tomb. (A modularized dungeon with exactly enough XP to promote a party of ten level one single classed characters.) I ran that at the public library, one night a week, with another night a week for “Character generation.” Made those library kids roll their characters in front of me, with my dice. You roll him, you play him.

Haven’t played in ten years.

I really miss it.

Tris

“Shall we sit here yakking about it, or kick open the door, and kill monsters?” ~ Bloodstone, Bloodstone, Comrade of Ur, Champion of Wythome ~

52

One of my favorite sessions was about six years ago. My friends and I were in highschool at the time, and we were a few months into a new campaign I was DMing.

I had this nice dungeon for my palters to explore, and they were all excited because they just got some new, fun magic weapons, awesome spells,and strategies. What was in the dungeon? Not that many monsters, but a metric fuckton of puzzles. Almost every door had some kind of puzzle. The best parT? On some of the harder ones, I made each player write down what they thought the solution was. I then rolled an intelligence check for all of them, and if they failed, their character wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. Teh best part was I never told them if they were right or wrong, I jsut said “you’re too dumb to think of that… You can try again after guessing some other gueses.”

It really annoyed one guy, who kept getting most of the answers right, but had a fighter with an intelligence of 7. It eventually got to the point where I DID tell him his answer was right, but his character still couldn’t come up with it.

53

I love when the players truly get enough into the game to have a visceral emotional reaction to an NPC.

There was, in my campaign, a certain steward. To get in to see the royals, one had to get by the steward - essentially, he was a doorman and bouncer.

He didn’t much like the PCs. And as I would reveal to them later, he was a traitor, and therefore delighted in throwing little wrenches in the operation of the kingdom when he could.

Which included forcing adventurers working for the crown suffer through interminable delays, while verbally abusing them all the while. There would be questions as to why they wanted to see the queen, there would be accusations that they were just wasting the queen’s time, comments that he hoped the matter was of more importance than their usual tripe…

One of my more quiet players - prone more to wry sarcastic comments in his rare moments of speech - had enough of the steward one day, to the effect the player just shouted out ‘G-d damn, I HATE this guy!’ when he blocked their passage on that particular visit.

54

Dr. Destroyer.

Count me in as interested in the SR campaign.

55

Currently GMing a huge D&D 3.5 campaign I call “Rise of the Lich King”. A bit of a misnomer- the Lich King has already taken over most of the continent, and the 6 players (started at first level, and have now just hit tenth) are doing their best to figure out a way to bring him down.

As for previous GMing experiences- all I can say is that if you want miniatures for Paranoia, nothing beats Play-Doh. Pre-color coded for convenience, and nothing makes a clone’s death more amusing than being able to re-enact it with kitchen utensils or gardening implements.

56

Would anyone be willing to give me tips on GMing a CoC D20 game?

57

Looking for anything in particular, or just general hints?

58

I’ve been playing various versions of D&D since I was in 4th grade. (20 years ago).

My first DMing experience was a disaster where the PC’s did everything possible to disrespect my “authori-TAH”, inlcuding having a horse crap on the baby prince they were supposed to restore to his normal age, and killing prostitutes and villagers like they were playing Grand Theft Horse-drawn Carraige.

Things got better the next time, when I rotated DM duties with two other friends in some of the silliest adventures I’ve ever seen (and that’s including playing Toon).

In high school, I ran a daily Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game at lunch. It wasn’t much more interesting than the TNMT running through their assorted enemies and kicking their asses, but it was fun.

Late in high-school, I took a chance on the Ravenloft boxed set, based on a friends recommendation, and was instantly hooked. I ran several Ravenloft modules as one-shots for this group of friends or that. It wasn’t until college when I first ran a “campaign,” with my roommates, but even that was just back-to-back modules with no rhyme or reason between them.

Now I’m running the serious long-term Ravenloft campaign I always dreamed of, and having a blast. The players seem to totally get the mood I’m aiming for, and yet constantly surprise me. Our (mis)adventures can be followed on my website: http://ravenloft.home.att.net

I’m a total perfectionist when it comes to planning this campaign. There’s nothing I enjoy more than planting an adventure seed three sessions in advance and having it come to fruition months later. Next session is this weekend, and I’m currently fretting over the last few details, so wish me luck.

59

I’ve been GM’ing a seafaring campaign (D&D) for almost three years now. In the process, I’ve collected a fair amount of the ship material that’s been published.

I’d be willing to share what I “gots”, if you’re interested.

you can reach me at my e-mail; eliphaletb at yahoo dot com.

60

Filmgeek, do you have specific questions?

The only general suggestions I’d have are thus:

Throw out the spell list. CoC is about the unknown, and the spells the enemy is throwing around shouldn’t be statted out and balanced and available for the players to read about. The spells should do whatever it is that best tells the story. Be very careful what spells become available to the PCs, and feel free to make them a little unpredictable.

Junk the monster list. Or, rather, the monster stats. The traditional Lovecraftian enemies are wonderful for flavor, but don’t feel you have to have an animated corpse have a particular number of hit points or damage dice or whatever.

Don’t ever let the game become a combat game. Reward thought, planning, and intelligence.

Start small. A haunted house, a strange man, etc – save the big guns for later. One of my games started with the PCs investigating a haunted house. They defeated the spirit, but it turned out he had belonged to a cult. So in futher adventures they looked into the cult, kidnapings, etc. And that led them later to find the last cultist, in a position of authority at the Alcatraz military prison, experimenting on prisoners, trying to make a shoggoth. Thus most of the game was against humans, and only near the end did the big monster make an appearance.

Eliphalet, I sent you an email. Thanks for offering to share your expertise.