Well. The hamsters would seem to have eaten my interesting and well-thought out, properly formatted and spell-checked posting.
Y’all get this one instead. q;}
For those who wish to get involved behind-the-scenes, here’s what I’m talking about. The rest of you, skip this post.
Really. You don’t wanna be tempted to peek.
Right. Now that they’re gone (sure we are) (shh he’ll hear you) let’s get to the nittygritty.
Being a GameMaster, DungeonMaster, GameHost, whatever you wanna call it, consists of imagining an entire world, and trying to predict the actions of the characters who inhabit it.
Some of this is easy:
Orc. Orc in forest. Orc see adventurers. Orc try to kill adventurers. Not much in the way of higher cognitive ability in an orc, you see.
Other is more difficult:
King Lawrence of Mirondar has a personal vendetta against the demons attacking his city, but knows that he must not be hasty or all those in his care will be lost. Now there’s this group of people who wanna help… how does he react? What is his motivation, what does he think about the way the characters present themselves, etc etc etc. That’s the tough part. It has to be done on the fly, at the time, and there’s really not much getting around it.
Then there’s the stuff in the middle…
The orc has treasure on him… what kinds of treasure would an orc carry here? What kind of JUNK would an orc carry around? What other things might that orc have been doing before he spotted the adventurers? Etc etc etc.
Ok, I know you’re there, players, quit readin’ I tell ya! Skip ahead!
Fine. Spoiler box time.
One Specific Example of What I’d Like Brainstorming Help With:
The Cake Golem Puzzle
In an underground room, one of many, lies a series of buttons, one of which must be pressed to unlock a door which is the destination.
This room is painted on the walls and ceiling in a remarkably lifelike fashion, so as to appear to be a tranquil outdoor garden scene, suitable for the room’s contents.
There is a gigantic picnic table in the room, with six gigantic chairs arranged around it.
The buttons lie in a pentacle engraved into the table, so to get to the buttons at all, the players must climb or fly or something.
On the pentacle sits a very large vase with eight (or more?) very large flowers, each of which is both animated and has a special attack form or two, and is angrily determined to keep the characters from pressing any button.
On the table sits a gigantic cake, decorated with icing roses, vines, and a pair of cupid figures, bride and groom perhaps.
When the characters get onto the table, the cupids fire flaming arrows and throw exploding frosting roses at them. The cake rises up and attacks with frosting gobs and frosting vine tentacles and other cakely monsterly nastyness.
IF the characters (and they will, eventually) manage to defeat these obstacles, they can press one or more of the buttons. They will probably try to press at these buttons during combat, in hopes of leaving quickly.
ONE of these 20-something buttons is the “key” button. The others do various interesting and hopefully nasty things to the characters, as a trap of sorts. Or perhaps just the light switch. Who knows? Not the characters, that’s for sure.
Nor, for that matter, do I.
Ok, I know what a couple do… and I have ideas about what the rest do. But, like all good DM’s, I prefer to ad-lib stuff. It tends to help the flow better than to try to stick to a script. The players don’t have the script; I can hardly expect them to follow it. So I make stuff up.
So, one time in the cake golem room, someone pressed the “Moon” button. That wasn’t the “key” I had in mind, so I came up with something for that button to do: It turned off the lights. In particular, it changed the paint on the wall from displaying a daytime to a nighttime, outdoor garden scene.
Other buttons summoned a rainstorm, some rats, ants and insects, and other types of similarly-themed events.
Most buttons were never pressed.
Nobody ever pressed the “Tesseract” button in this room, as one example, so I have no specific idea in mind for what that particular button does yet.
This is what I want y’all for… help me brainstorm ideas for various ‘fiddly bits’ in the game like this, that I can jot down and use if I need to.
To have some people to bounce ideas off of, which SPOIL the game if I try to bounce them off the players.
To have other minds I can explain my puzzles to, who can tell me when they’re too obtuse or complex, or simply unfair, and whom I can then ignore and do it anyway. q;}
And, most of all, Not to Spoil! This means you, players, I know you couldn’t resist a spoiler box!
So, what do you think?
This will be done mostly by my posting various information on a ‘secret’ section of the Mirondar information site, for developers only. I’ll have a section with updates, links to more detailed info on various ideas I’ve had, and some sort of Q&A/feedback spot.
Then Y’all will send me emails with your ideas, maybe we’ll chat in IMs or what have you, and while it’s not as good as playing it should still be a whole heckuvalottafun!
That’s how you can help, folks. Gonna call it a blank slate, post again if you’re still interested in helping.
And the rest of you, keep those character ideas coming. We’ve still got plenty of room… so far!