Why Saying Yes is the Secret to Great Games Mastery

Possibly the hardest lesson for a new Games Master to learn is how to say Yes.

The temptation to keep your players on the path of destiny you have spent many hours writing for them is very strong but belies a fundamental failing in your thinking.  RPGs are not books, they are not linear plotlines where you control every aspect of the story.  

Remember that RPGs are collaborative stories where the agency and actions of players help to create the storyline.  Once you say No to a player, once you remove player choice you remove player engagement and the fun goes out of the window.  This is commonly referred to as Railroading and will lead to far bigger problems further down the track.

The GM must always consider what the essential elements of your overarching plot are and ensure that you spend all your energy preparing multiple ways that the players might achieve them.

Essential elements of plots

I have written previously that my favourite way of writing plots is by using Nodal Design.  This approach is most commonly found in the Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks such as Fighting Fantasy or the Tunnels & Trolls solo games made popular in the 80s.

My approach is to break a plot line down into a series of encounters.  The most important of these are going to be the Must Happen encounters.  These are the events that have to happen to further the plot and the ones which you should spend the most time considering all the possible eventualities.  

You should always consider that: 

• the players might fight their way in and out of an encounter even against impossible odds.
• the players may run away
• the players may never find this encounter in the first place.

The rule of three

When considering these Must Happen encounters you should always have at least 3 ways that players can find or enter the encounter and 3 ways that they can exit it whilst furthering the plot.

Finding the encounter in Nodal Design is easy.  You just have to make sure that there are 3 connections to the encounter from three other encounters.  

Exiting the encounter is a little bit harder but not impossible.  In a typical conflict encounter there are the usual outcomes:

1. PCs win the fight - this is your everything goes according to plan exit
   
2. PCs lose and get captured 
3. PCs lose and escape or run away 
4. PCs stealthily go around or avoid the encounter

However, if the PCs need to acquire some object or information then outcomes 2,3 and 4 are going to pose you with a problem.  Careful consideration of the potential outcomes of your Must Happen encounter will lead you to preparing plausible solutions.

PCs lose and get captured

Getting captured can often be a blessing in disguise as the PCs might be taken inside the enemy stronghold.  Here they will learn much more about their enemies strengths and weaknesses, the location of the big bad guy, location of an uber artifact or they might meet other prisoners who can join them in their quest or help them escape.

You also get the additional free bonus breakout encounter which are always fun and stressfull for PCs.

PCs lose and escape or run away 

This outcome presents the greatest challenge in that they may not learn or aquire what they need to progress.  This is where the rule of 3 comes in.  For something to be an essential Must Happen there must be at least 3 ways of achieving it.  If it's information the players are after then this can be heard during scouting or in combat.  If it's an object then it might get lost by the enemy or found by the players during the confusion of melee.  Perhaps it gets dropped into the river and the players find it later whilst licking their wounds.

PCs stealthily go around or avoid the encounter 

Whilst this sounds like a worse case scenario from an encounter preparation perspective, it is often the easiest to compensate for in the planning stage.  Whilst going around the encounter they might overhear the vital piece of info they need, they might see or find the item they need unguarded.  

Evil minions tend to be left out out of the loop on the overarching plot, they get told the bare minimum to get by.  Guard that door, go get that box rather than what's behind the door or what's in the box.  Use this to your advantage and convey some info which is meaningless to minions but useful to your PCs.

Insurmountable odds and revealling the big bad guy too early

One of the fatal mistakes I have seen new GMs make is to introduce an encounter with the Big Bad Guy too early.  Big Bad Guys are usually way too powerful for the PCs to handle early on in the game and a critical element of RPGs is that PCs need to gain experience and become more powerful in order to defeat the Big Bad Guy.  

Pitching your heroes into a battle with the Big Bad Guy too early risks them getting killed or worse that they might damage your Big Bad Guy.  The temptation to say "No you can't do that" is great and leaves you needing to construct a plausible explanation as to why the PCs wouldn't be slaughtered in an instant.  This is just poor storytelling from an RPG standpoint and means you have unnecessarily backed yourself into a corner.  Time to look at other ways to let your players know about the Big Bad without them confronting him early on.

The third party reveal

In other types of fiction the power of the Big Bad Guy is often witnessed by third parties who get killed early on and their only role in life is to illustrate that power.  For example a Big Bad Guy might attack a village or sack a town and in a film or a book you might witness this encounter from the eyes of an NPC.  

The fate of the NPC is irrelevant as the object of the scene is to convey this information to you the viewer.  However, in RPGs it is more than acceptable for that NPC to live just long enough to share what they saw to the players before they die.  

Rumours are another great way to seed knowledge of some power sweeping across the land.  The PCs may encounter refugees fleeing a besieged city, a trader who just got through a checkpoint or left a neighbouring town before the horde arrived.

How you achieve the reveal is entirely down to you but my advice is to dribble the information out a little bit at a time.  Give your PCs enough time to grow as a party and as individual characters so that they are ready to face off against the big bad guy in the finale.   

Don't forget the backstory

The PCs might also have acquired first hand knowledge of the Big Bad Guy through their backstory.  For example in the classic fantasy movie Conan The Barbarian (1982), the young Conan witnesses his tribe slaughtered and he is enslaved by the forces of Thulsa Doom.  It is only many years later once he has gained his freedom and become a mighty warrior that he faces off against the evil sorceror and avenges his family.

PCs need time to become a thorn in the big bad guy's side

A common trope among big bad guys is that they often overestimate their own power and underestimate their foe.  Many of the best fictional showdowns come after a long protracted series of small skirmishes and defeats for the big bad guy until he really does have to deal with the threat personally.  How many times have you heard them say...

"Do I have to do everything myself?"

Take Darth Vader for example, in Star Wars.  He takes charge and jumps in his TIE Fighter to personally see off the threat of the X-Wing attack on the Death Star.  Perhaps he senses the presence of Luke or perhaps he recognises that although the chance of success is remote in the face of overwhelming odds, the chance still exists.

Flipping this encounter on its head, the Death Star exploding is a Must Happen event and only a bad storyteller would have the bad guy he has spent the last hour and a half setting up die.  That happens to Snoke in Star Wars: The Last Jedi and we all know what we think of that movie.

Embrace Player Agency

One of the most frustrating but fun things in RPGs is that players often come up with creative solutions to the problems that you set them.  This is a fundamental aspect of RPGs and will necessitate that you change and modify your story to accomodate the players.  

Embrace this.  Learn to be fluid and to react to your players.  Be the Leaf on the Wind.  Let go and enjoy the unbridled chaos...

Inspired by Swedish Dicks?

A bit of a click-bait title I admit, but if you haven't seen the Netflix detective comedy Swedish Dicks then you are missing out.

Specifically I am referring to the plot of the episode "Floyd Cal Who" in which Ingmar (Peter Stomare) and Alex (Johan Glans) are hired by internet dating app millionaire Dave (Haley Joel Osment) to find the hitman he hired to kill him.  

Years earlier, before his dating app went viral, Dave was depressed and decided to end it all but couldn't face doing it himself, so he hired a hitman.  Now a succsessful tech entrepreneur he has millions of reasons to live so he wants the hit called off.

I thought this was a really interesting plot line and one particularly well suited to the sci-fi genre.  It would easily convert to any cyberpunk / modern game and promises interesting play on a number of fronts:

• Potential "hit attempt" encounters.
• Investigatory encounters
• Chase encounters 
• Lots of tension

Oh and I nearly forgot to mention that Swedish Dicks features both Peter Stormare and Keanu Reeves who were last seen together in John Wick 2 (2017) and one of my favourite movies Constantine (2005).

Ingmar (Peter Stormare) and Tex (Keanu Reeves)

The Encounter Ramp Goes Both Ways

The Encounter Ramp is a concept from scenario design which tries to match your parties experience with the strength of the monsters they are facing.  In D&D this is often referred to as the Challenge Rating.  As PCs gain more experience and become more powerful the strength of their opponents must increase to maintain the feeling of challenge.

Sometimes the stars align but more often than not they are never in the right bloody place at the right bloody time.  As a GM it is your job to make the adventure a heroic challenge.

I thought I had unwittingly led my players into an encounter that was going to result in a Total Party Kill (TPK) and an early bath for the GM. In my current campaign the party is relatively low level comprising of  

• 3 x Level 1, 
• 1 x Level 2, 
• 1 x Level 3 and 
• 1 x Level 4 PC

That's a total of 12 levels of experience between them but the scenario is designed for 5 to 8 Characters of Levels 7 to 9 (between 45 and 56 Levels). 

OK, I admit it, I fell in love with the scenario and didn't really worry too much about how the PCs were going to fare. I mean it's never supposed to be easy right?

To cut a long story short, their first big battle finds them fighting some pretty big guys, a Troll and 3 Bugbears, with a second wave in the room above being 1 Ogre and 5 Gnolls. As individual encounters these would be manageable, difficult but manageable. However, as a second wave these are not one hit minions, they are going to descend on the PCs like a hammer.

Oh and did I forget to mention that this is just the start. If I were playing this by the book they will still have to fight their way past 12 bugbears, 1 giant 2 headed troll, 2 hill giants, 2 giant trolls, 4 trolls, 8 ogres, 11 gnolls. That's a lot of hit dice they have to overcome.

The Solution?

Ramp it down a little. I always knew I was going to have to reduce the number of monsters to make it manageable for them.

Hit Point Reduction - make a few of them one hit wonders.  Give your PCs a free perception check to spot the ones that are limping or carrying a few fresh wounds from some recent war band pissing match.

The Call of Nature - There's always one bad guy who is in the middle of something else when they hear the battle cry or the bugle.  Having a Bugbear otherwise detained sitting on the khazi, asleep or drunk is perfectly legitimate and offers that added advantage of potential information gathering once the battle has ended.

Morale Fail - Often overlooked, but a perfectly legitimate excuse for a GM is to make the monsters flee rather than fight it out to the death. 

Take Two Bites - PCs often overlook the adage "Run away and live to fight another day" or in otherwords run away and have a short rest, drink some healing potions and try again.  Dead bad guys are still going to be dead whereas PCs often have heroic recoveries.  Tactics can be re-evaluated, strategies can be re-examined and knowledge gained during the fight can be exploited.

Zach Kanin (The New Yorker)

 

RPGs and Inclusivity

First post of the New Year and it's time to say that I'm glad to see the back of 2014.

For a while I've been worried that the hobby (and to some degree popular media) was descending  into a a pit of bile and hatred. 

So I'm going to start off this year by reminding everyone that:

By this I mean that they are a framework around which you hang your shared experience with your friends.  They don't tell you:

Who can or can't play the game - Yes, the artwork contained inside the books may give off the same sort of vibe as 1980s Heavy Metal albums, but to be honest they're just visualisations to give you ideas of what one possible world may look like.  Frankly, I don't care if you're female, black or transgendered, I want to give you the opportunity to be part of my world and through the various challenges I set, collectively explore and change it.

What characters they can play or how they play them - Yes there are classes and races, but these are just framework suggestions.  As a DM with 30+ years of experience I don't want you to slavishly follow those, I've seen them a thousand times already.  I want you to choose what you want to be and add flavour to my world.

How to play the game - Yes, every rulebook contains an example of play demonstrating a game in progress, but you only learn how to play by interacting with the other players and DM.  There is no right or wrong way to play an RPG, but there are plenty of player behaviours which can make playing a game a horrible experience.  If you're a new player you might want to consider "rules" but the DM and players ultimately choose which ones to follow and which to ignore.  I've yet to play in a group that hasn't had at least a handful of house rules.  My own preference is that as long as things appear consistent then any rule can be chopped in favour of cinematic style.  

When the Bad Guys Win

When the Bad Guys Win is the December 2020 RPG Blog Carnival theme kindly hosted by Rising Phoenix Games.

Losing is a quintessential part of Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey in fiction. 

It's right there at the bottom of the circle.  Our hero must enter the Abyss or face a challenge in which he metaphorically is destroyed and reborn a hero.  It's something that every hero must go through. 

Some Cinematic Bad Guy Wins Scenarios

Judge Dredd (1995) - The bad guys win when Dredd is framed for the murder of journalist Vartis Hammond and his wife Lilly.  Incontravercial forensic evidence in the form of DNA encoded bullets is presented giving Dredd the death penalty.  Judge Fargo steps down and in his final act as Chief Justice commutes the sentence to life imprisonment in the Aspen Penal Colony.  He is on his way to the Abyss before a chain of events is set in motion by the notorious cursed earth cannibals the Angel Gang.  

The Lord of The Rings - There are quite a few moments during LoTR that are bad guy win scenarios but the one that always springs to mind is when Boromir falls to the

The Empire Strikes Back (1982) - Things look pretty bleak at the end of Empire.  Han is frozen in carbonite and on his way to Jabba the Hutt.  Luke has lost a hand and found out that his father is Darth Vader.  Lando has lost Cloud City and the rebel fleet are on the run.  Does it get any worse?

Rookie GM Mistakes

One of the worst mistakes you can make as a GM is to reveal your bad guy too soon.  Your heroes need to get a few wins under their belts against minions, they need to foil some minor schemes to bring them to the attention of the big bad.  They need to be filled with a false sense of their own abilities and greatness before you drop the hammer on them.

The hero's journey circle above is divided into two halves, the upper being the known world, the world that the heroes have familiarity and can exert some control over.  The second half is the unknown representing the world that the big bad has demense over.  The conflict with the threshold guardians is a pivotal moment in this crossing over to the unknown world where things are not in their control.

But hold on we aren't ready just yet.  You need to put their backs up against the wall, you need to take them to the edge.

NPCs are Destined to Die for a Reason

I always recommend having at least one NPC in a party for a number of reasons such as channeling DM hints, filling skills gaps or for introducing plot or story knowledge.  I particularly like using the NPC as a patron or leader who joins the party on their quest. 

However, one of their greatest uses is to be a casualty of war.  Having a beloved NPC die can be a pivotal moment in a story which makes it real for the players.  This is particularly effective if the NPC performed a vital function in the group, such as the healer or their guide.  Making the players genuinely feel a sense of loss is just one of the ways you can ramp up their stress levels and make their futures seem genuinely uncertain and perilous.

Death and Rebirth 

We've all been there rolling our death saves whilst the rest of the party finish off the ork horde.  How many times have you been healed from near death and just carried on as normal?

This is a great opportunity for the GM to impart some wisdom or knowledge to the "dead" player which will give them an advantage in the final battle.  How many times have you watched a death dream sequence?  It's a popular trope for a reason.  

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Thanks of course go to Of Dice and Dragons for continuing to promote the RPG Blog Carnival.  This is my 6th entry and you can read the rest by clicking the RPG Blog Carnival tag below.