5 Tips for the GM Who is Out of Ideas

Fellow GMs, we've all been there: you just got out of work or school, your gaming group is showing up in three hours, and you just realized you have nothing prepared.  Not only do you have nothing prepared, but you don't even know what to prepare - you are completely out of ideas.  Don't call everyone and cancel!  You can still save this.  There are a lot of things you can do to save this gaming session.  Every GM and every gaming group is different, so depending on your particular style some of these options may work better than others for you.

1. Read Random Sections of the Source Books
If you are the type of GM who is always finding little bits of inspiration and jotting them down in a journal or note-taking app, this might be the solution for you.  As GMs, we tend to store the information we use most often from the source books in our heads.  That's great - it lets us run games efficiently without stopping to look things up all the time.  But brains just aren't as good at retaining information as books are.  That's why books exist, after all.  By reading random sections of the source book, not only might you find that you are using some rules incorrectly, you also might discover rules or suggestions for things you don't normally use in your games.  This can create a nice change of pace for you and your gaming group.

The Pathfinder Core Rulebook or the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide (any edition) are generally chock-full of rules about random things an adventuring party might run into.  During one prep session I read the rules for fire and hot environments in the 3.5 DMG and I was inspired to create a house-fire encounter that played like a mini-dungeon, with areas of smoke that blocked sight and caused choking, areas of intense heat that did extra damage to the players, collapsing sections of the house that could act like traps, and a trapped homeowner who asked not only to be rescued, but to have the adventurers retrieve a valuable keepsake from an even more dangerous part of the burning building.

Monster books like the Pathfinder Bestiary or a D&D Monster Manual or Monstrous Compendium are also great sources of inspiration.  The descriptive text for a well-designed monster is full of hooks that hint to a GM how the monster might come into conflict with an adventuring party, making for a more organic encounter than just having a random monster show up out of the blue.  This is especially true of older editions of D&D, which tended to have smaller monster pictures and more paragraphs of text describing their ecology.  You might also discover something interesting about a monster you would have otherwise dismissed.  While flipping through Pathfinder Bestiary 2 looking for some undead monstrosities to populate a low-level haunted house dungeon, I chanced across the akata, a tentacled blue lion-like aberration.  I learned that akatas hibernate in silvery cocoons that degrade into fragments of strange metal in the presence of other lifeforms, their bites infect their prey with larvae, and those they kill rise again as twisted fast-zombies that lash out with their tongues.  Suddenly I had a much more interesting and cosmically creepy haunted house than just a building full of skeletons and ghouls.

2. Steal Your Plot from a TV Show
If you aren't so great at putting together exciting plots and encounters from little points of inspiration, try lifting whole plots and re-purposing them.  This obviously works best if your campaign is pretty freeform and you don't have to worry about messing up a planned story arc.  Get on Netflix of Hulu or Amazon Prime (or I guess the TV if you are into that) and watch and episode of a show.  It could be a show you are in the middle of watching or a show you've never seen before.  As you watch it, imagine your party taking the place of the main characters.  How would they react to the situations and problems the show's plot presents?

It doesn't have to be a fantasy show - in fact it probably shouldn't be.  While your group will definitely figure out what's going on if you run them through an episode of Game of Thrones, they will have a harder time recognizing a fantasy version of MASH or CSI: Miami or Agents of Shield.  If you can, tailor the show you pick to the type of campaign you are running.  If your players are high-level characters managing a kingdom, try The West Wing.  If they are used to investigating creepy goings on in random villages, watch Criminal Minds or Scooby Doo.

It can take a surprising amount of imagination to steal the whole plot of a TV show for a fantasy RPG.  Take the central conflict of the show, re-skin it for your fantasy world, and present it to your players as the next adventure hook.  The killer in that episode of Law and Order might become a devil-worshiping cultist.  The siblings squabbling over some petty thing in [insert Sitcom name here] might become childish noblemen fighting for the ducal seat.  Heck, maybe you'll pit your players against a mage guild leader who is based on Gus from Breaking Bad.  By the time it comes to the table, it might be completely unrecognizable.

For added fun (and to alleviate the guilt of stealing), tell your players what the adventure was based on after they complete it.

3. Create a New Big Bad Guy
If you don't mind throwing a wrench into the gears that are your ongoing campaign, stun your gaming group with the sudden introduction of a(nother) powerful force plotting their destruction.  Start the session by luring your players into a trap, and then spring it with a really tough encounter.  A tough encounter that your players will probably lose.  This new Big Bad should know just how to get to your adventuring party and counter all of their most common tactics.  The party should be left reeling from the blow they are dealt and barely able to escape from this worrying new threat.  With any luck, the tough battle will take up a good part of the session and the party will spend the rest of the session licking their wounds and trying to recover.

Creating this new threat will take some finesse and a good understanding of your party's capabilities and limits.  You don't want to underwhelm them with a quick and easy fight, and you don't want to kill them all off.  Killing your party because you are out of ideas is pretty high up there on the list of Things GMs Should Never Do.  But you should probably err on the side of making the big bad and their minions a little too powerful - you can always fudge things behind the screen to make sure things don't go completely tits-up.  Don't be afraid to let one of the characters die, but don't take it too far.

It is a trope of fantasy RPG plots that the party will occasionally butt heads with the main Big Bad and the Big Bad will barely lose and have some sort of trick up their sleeves to escape to fight another day.  In this scenario, you want to be sure your party knows that they are the ones who need to escape to fight another day.  Give your PCs an escape route and subtly mention it throughout the fight.  Maybe there is a swift-moving river they can jump into, or a portcullis they can slam as they flee.  Or, perhaps, give your new Big Bad motivation to defeat but not kill your party - maybe he wants them alive to witness the destruction of everything they have accomplished.

If possible, tie this into what has happened in the campaign so far.  Find some long-forgotten party that has been wronged by your adventurers (however indirectly) in the past and has had time to plot their revenge.  It could be the thieves' guild they tangled with when they were level three, or the brother of the evil priest they slew in their first dungeon.  If it is grounded in the story so far, it won't feel quite so out of the blue.

Try to set the confrontation somewhere significant to the characters, like their base of operations, a town they saved, or their favorite tavern.  Turning a familiar location with positive associations into a place of conflict and defeat will up the emotional ante and add some great roleplaying hooks into the mix.  As an added bonus, if the bad guy shows up in their home base, defeats them, and forces them out, you've got your next couple sessions covered as your party will inevitably want to re-take their base.

And don't be too worried about derailing your campaign.  Adding this new plot thread might just add a fresh breath of life to it.

4. Give Them a Roleplaying Prompt and Sit Back
This requires a specific kind of roleplaying group - one that knows their characters very well and actually role-plays more than rolling dice.  In fact, even if your group is more of the hack-and-slash type you might want to roll the (metaphorical) dice yourself and try this out with them.  Give your party a non-combat related roleplaying prompt disguised as a story hook.  Something that lets your players take control of the situation as they talk about their characters.  You might not even have to roll any dice!  And the best part - your players will probably love it!  As the story slows down to focus on the characters and their interactions, it will be the players shaping the flow of the session.  As a player, that is really cool.

This roleplaying prompt could be a social situation, a dilemma with no obvious right answer, or an invitation for storytelling.  In a social situation prompt, the party is introduced into a, well, a social situation and allowed to run free.  Maybe a nearby village is having a festival and they invite the adventurers as guests of honor.  Maybe a nobleman wants to gain prestige by associating with the adventurers, so he invites them to his feast-hall.  Maybe the party is trapped in an inn by a blizzard and they have to pass the time hanging out with the colorful locals trapped with them.  The characters can relax and interact with each other and with NPCs to their heart's content.  If you need to, you can fill time with detailed descriptions of sumptuous foods, rustic festival games, and colorful characters.  Create a painting for your players to inhabit.

For a dilemma, the party is presented with a choice or problem with no simple solution.  Maybe it is as simple as whether or not to trust a mysterious stranger.  Maybe they are dragged into resolving a dispute where neither side is clearly right or wrong.  For example, what would your party do in this situation: in a town suffering from a food shortage due to orc raids, a merchant who sold food at five times the market rate is tied up in the square accused of indirect murder, but he claims the added expense was warranted because of the extra security needed to defend against orcs.

An invitation to storytelling prompts the players to recount something about their characters, either about their backstory or about their adventures so far.  This can be easier early in a campaign, when maybe not everyone knows each other's backstories.  Perhaps the party shares a campfire with a  travelling tinker who asks for their stories in exchange for his cooking and mending services.  Maybe an aspiring bard is interviewing them about their adventures so she can immortalize them in verse.  Or a wealthy jarl is offering a great prize to whomever can tell him the greatest story.  The storytelling prompt should make sense in the game world, but appeal to the players' egos in the hopes of provoking some good roleplaying and character building.

Ideally, in any of these situations, the GM will be free to let the players fill the bulk of the time with their own creative energies, stepping in only to guide and enable.  A well-deserved rest for a hard-working GM.  But use this method with caution - if no one wants to tell their story, the session may fall flat.  But hey, if all else fails...

5. Play a Board Game
If you really can't get enough material together for a good roleplaying session, there's no reason to waste a perfectly good gathering of game-hungry friends.  Chances are if you are a GM, you probably have some excellent board games waiting to be played on your shelf as well.  To keep in the spirit of the gaming session, you might try to play a game with similar themes to your campaign.  If you haven't already, you might try:

• Tales of the Arabian Nights, an excellent board game that involves a lot of choose-your-own-adventure style gameplay and character-building elements.  
• Once Upon A Time, a collaborative fairytale storytelling card game.  
• Betrayal at House on the Hill, a horror game that will likely never play the same way twice.  
• Lords of Waterdeep, a game set in the city of Waterdeep in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.
• Munchkin, the competitive card game that famously parodies D&D. I would be shocked if you haven't already played it several hundred times.  

Of course, there are tons of other great tabletop games out there, not all of which share thematic elements with tabletop roleplaying games.  Failing that, you could even just hang out with your gaming group and talk like friends; that can be pretty fun too.  Just roll dice every once in a while to keep up appearances.

-your empty-headed d20 despot

4 Old D&D Design Principles That Are No Longer In Fashion

All modern roleplaying games, especially Pathfinder and 5th Edition D&D, owe a tremendous debt to 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which modified and codified the nascent rules of the game into (relatively) accessible hardcover books.  But that foundational work of fantasy roleplaying was built on design principles that are very different from - and often opposed to - those of modern D&D and Pathfinder.

I'm not just talking about THAC0, that infamously unintuitive system that had players and DMs consulting tables to see whether their roll could hit that powerful fighter with the mighty -8 AC.  THAC0 was just a mechanical system.  Below, I will talk about four design principles of 1st Edition AD&D that fundamentally shaped how player characters worked, why those decisions were made, and why they have since fallen by the wayside.

1. Average-Dude Character Stats

3d6 Probability Graph, via Jonathan Dobres

If you only started playing D&D this millennium, you've probably heard grognards talking about the rough old days when they had to roll just 3d6 in order (uphill both ways in knee-deep snow) for their character stats, none of this namby-pamby 4d6-drop-1 or even 5d6-drop-2.  "Back in my day," they might say, "if you got 11 Strength you'd give thanks to the dice gods, because at least you didn't roll a 6."

While there were certainly plenty of DMs who made their players roll 3d6 in order for their stats, and it seems to us to be a hallmark of such older editions of D&D, the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide actually discouraged this.  The four methods of rolling up presented therein are actually a lot more lenient than you might expect.  The first is the now-familiar 4d6-drop-1 method, with the scores "recorded and arranged in the order the player desires."  Method II has the player roll 3d6 twelve times and keep the six best scores.  Method III has 3d6 rolled six times for each ability score, keeping the best result, and Method IV has the player roll 3d6 in order for twelve characters and choose one of them to play.

So AD&D acknowledged that playing a character with 10s in every stat wasn't particularly exciting, but the game had other ways of enforcing mediocrity on the average character.  If you've only played 3rd Edition D&D and beyond, you might be surprised to learn that a 1st Edition character with 18 Strength got a measly +1 to hit and +2 to damage, compared to 3rd Edition's +4 for both.  In fact, a character only got a bonus to hit with a Strength of 17, and a bonus to damage with a Strength of 16. Characters who used missile weapons were granted +0 to hit with them whether their Dexterity was 6 or 15.  Characters received no bonus hit points from Constitution scores below 15.

Why?
Clearly some effort was made to help characters escape the mediocrity of the middle of the bell-curve, but why not just make the bell-curve less mediocre in the first place?  There are two ideas at work here.  One is that average should mean average, and there is no point rewarding mediocrity.  The other is that exceptional scores should be commensurately rewarded.  If only a 17 or 18 Strength can give you a +1 bonus to hit, you are going to feel pretty good about getting that +1 bonus.  This ensures that when a character has a great ability score, they will really stand out and feel heroic.

Why Not?
Rewarding exceptional ability scores is great, but if you give hardly anything to less exceptional scores then it is only worthwhile to be exceptional.  It also means most of what you can do is because of the bonuses granted by your class, level, and equipment rather than your own physical attributes.  The linear progression of ability score bonuses introduced in 3rd Edition - whereby 10-11 grants a +0, 12-13 a +1, and so on - is a far more elegant game mechanic that rewards exceptional scores without neglecting the middle-range.

2. High Character Mortality

Giant Toad by David C. Sutherland III, Monster Manual (1977)

AD&D was a deadly, unforgiving game.  It owes some of this reputation to classic tournament dungeons like The Tomb of Horrors and The Temple of Elemental Evil which were designed to be particularly deadly and not an example of typical gameplay.  It is often said that dropping below 0 hp meant death in older editions of D&D, but the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide actually includes the familiar pocket of unconsciousness running from 0 to -9 hp, with death coming at -10.  Even so, between deadly traps, poisons, and monsters, a regular campaign would often see plenty of character death, especially at lower levels.

Why?
The goal of a good DM has never been to kill their characters, so we shouldn't think that AD&D was designed specifically to be deadly.  It simply seems deadlier in comparison to later editions of D&D, with all their safety buffers meant to keep characters alive.  But death, or the threat of death, is an important part of these games.  Without death there can be only minor failures, actions are robbed of consequences, and combat is devoid of tension.

Why Not?
It turns out death was a little too common.  When low-level dungeons all but guarantee at least one character death, it can be hard to become attached to your character, and if you aren't attached to your character it's not much of a roleplaying game.  4th and 5th editions have implemented a "3 strikes" death save system for characters below 0 hp.  In general, the game designers have decided that it is better to have built-in safety systems to make the rules inherently less deadly, letting individual DMs decide whether or not to ramp up the difficulty for extra danger.

3. Race and Class Restrictions

by David C. Sutherland III, via dungeonsmaster

One of the biggest differences a 3rd, 4th, or 5th edition player will notice looking back at 1st edition are the race and class restrictions.  You had to meet certain ability score requirements to become any non-human race.  Most classes had ability score requirements as well.  Plus, each non-human race was restricted to only a few classes, and they often could not advance fully through all the class levels.

Let's say you want to play a dwarf fighter - a fairly reasonable request.  To be a dwarf, you first have to have at least 8 Strength and 12 Constitution.  To be a fighter, you need at least 9 Strength and 7 Constitution.  Furthermore, dwarves can only advance to 9th level in the fighter class, and then only if they have 18 Strength; if they have 17 Strength they can advance to 8th level, or 7th if they have a score of 16 or less.  If your dwarf wants to be anything other than a fighter, that's tough luck.  Dwarves cannot be druids, paladins, rangers, magic-users, illusionists, or monks, and only npc dwarves can be clerics.  The only other classes open to dwarves are assassin (up to level 9) and thief (strangely the only class a dwarf can level up fully in).  The other races face similar restrictions - only humans are unrestricted in class and ability scores.

Why?
Part of the reasoning behind these restrictions had to do with game balance (of a sort), and part had to do with preconceived notions.  Rather than attempting to make the races or classes balanced against each other, Gary Gygax chose to restrict access to them.  In some cases, this was to prevent "overpowered" character builds - presumably a dwarf who could reach 10th level as a fighter would overshadow other races'  10th level fighters, so that had to be restricted.  In other cases, this created balance by rarity - the paladin was a particularly powerful class, so only a human could become one, and then only if they had at least 12 Strength, 9 Intelligence, 13 Wisdom, 9 Constitution, and 17 Charisma.

Preconceived notions of these fantasy races and classes, often tied to the writing of Tolkien and derivative works, also fed into the class restrictions.  Fantasy was still a young and underdeveloped genre, and it seemed laughable at the time to think of a dwarf wizard, a halfling assassin, or a half-orc paladin.  These restrictions helped to shape the world that these games could take place in.

Why Not?
More recent editions seek to balance the classes in comparison to each other so that no single class can be too powerful.  More effort has also been put into giving humans some special bonuses so that they don't feel boring compared to other races.  And, critically, player choice is now king.  The restrictions on what races can play what classes have been lifted, and the rules now encourage creativity in character creation.  Want to play a gnomish paladin or an elven monk?  Go ahead, it's your character.

4. Uneven Experience Point Gain

AD&D Player's Handbook

If you've never played AD&D, you might be surprised to learn that common experience point progression is a relatively new development.  In 1st and 2nd editions, each class leveled up at different experience point thresholds.  In 1st edition, the thief reached level 10 at 160,001 experience points, compared to 500,001 for fighters.  Experience points were determined in general by how powerful the monsters were that the group killed and how many gold pieces they gained in loot.  Specifically, there were a bunch of complex formulas that make my eyes glaze over.  Here is a 'helpful example' from the text:

An ancient spell-using red dragon of huge size with 88 hit points has a BXPV of 1300, XP/HP total of 1408, SAXPB of 2800 (armor class + special defense + high intelligence + saving throw bonus due to h.p./die), and an EAXPA of 2550 (major breath weapon + spell use + attack damage of 3-30/bite) - totalling [sic] 7758 x.p.

2nd edition tried to simplify things with group experience points awards for achieving quest goals and individual xp awards for doing things related to their class.  A priest could earn 100xp per spell level if they cast a spell, but only if it was cast in such a way that "support the beliefs and attitudes of his mythos."  A rogue, meanwhile, gained 2xp per gp value of treasure they obtain and 200xp per successful use of a special ability (like detecting a trap or climbing a wall).  Since thieves still benefited from a very low xp requirement to level up, 2nd edition was particularly good for thieves.

Why?
This was another attempt at balance that didn't involve actually balancing the classes.  Wizards are powerful, so they take more xp to level up.  Thieves aren't as powerful, so they don't need as much xp.  It's a sloppy fix, but easier than balancing the classes.  As for class-based individual xp awards, this makes it so you earn xp for doing things related to your class, which sounds pretty intuitive.

Why Not?
As it turns out, this system is stupid complicated and involves way too much math, even for D&D.  If you get your classes even mostly balanced, it is so much easier to have them all level up at the same xp thresholds.  Even the simplified system that 3rd edition D&D implemented pales in comparison to the much easier to use xp system that Pathfinder developed.  Unfortunately, these systems are so simplified that they put the focus exclusively on killing monsters (and disarming traps).  There are suggestions for quest completion xp rewards, but if the only actual xp rules involve monsters and traps, that's how most GMs will use them.  For some groups, this can put too much emphasis on combat, while non-combat triumphs go unrewarded.  Maybe we should bring back those class-based individual xp rewards in some form...  But that sounds like a subject for a later post.

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Modern D&D is built on the bones of AD&D, and these old design principles that we have since mostly abandoned still leave an impression on our gameplay experiences.  Our characters continue to dungeon-delve under the shadow of these old systems.  In some cases, players and GMs alike will try to hearken back to 'the old ways' in search of the magic that these early RPGs held.  Nostalgia for this gaming legacy permeates the game, even for those who never played the old editions.  Taking a look at where we come from can help us understand where we are now.

-your unintuitive d20 despot

5 Videogame Lessons for the Tabletop

This won't come as a surprise to most of you, but videogames and tabletop roleplaying games are two different things.  As such, they end up doing things rather differently.  But that doesn't mean they can't take lessons from each other.  As roleplaying videogame series like WoW, Fallout, Mass Effect, and The Witcher have grown more popular, RPG-like elements have begun to invade other genres of videogames, to the point where players of popular first-person shooters find themselves spending skill points and leveling up their characters between matches.  Videogame elements can work their way into tabletop RPGs as well, especially as more players enter the tabletop realm through the gateway drug of videogames.  This can have mixed results - some say 4th Edition D&D was an attempt to make D&D more videogamey, and it ended up being the most controversial and shortest-lived edition since the 70s.  But while there are many elements of videogames that would translate poorly to the tabletop, there are lessons from videogames that we can safely bring to the table.

Tutorials

Call of Duty 2

Most videogames have a tutorial level - a soft introduction meant to allow new players to learn the basic rules and gameplay mechanics.  Sometimes this takes the form of a literal training exercise, as in the above screenshot from Call of Duty 2, where Pvt. Vasili Koslov is practicing his grenade potato tossing.  But sometimes it is a short, low-stakes in-game mission that happens to lead the player through many of the common situations they will encounter in the game.

This latter type of tutorial is a great way to introduce new players to the game mechanics.  Send them on a simple mission that exposes them to a simple combat, a skill challenge, and some diplomacy.  For most people, it is a lot easier to learn through gameplay like this than to have the rules explained to them or to read it in a book.

How to Avoid Common Mistakes as a New GM

Crossing over to the other side of the Game Master's screen is exciting, but it can also be intimidating.  Your gaming group is now counting on you to describe the whole world around them, provide them with a story, and adjudicate the rules.  You are basically acting as a human gaming system for a group of gamers.  When the spotlight is on you, the pressure to perform is intense, and it is easy to make mistakes.  

Most of the time these mistakes are small.  They won't break the game or send your group running for the hills.  But everyone wants their first time to go well, and the more mistakes you can avoid the better it will be for everybody.  

1. Read, Read, Read

It happens to every GM.  At some point, you forget a monster rule that totally messes up a fight, or you misunderstand part of the adventure module you are running and cause problems for yourself down the line, or at the very least you forget a rule and have to stop the game and go flipping through a bunch of books trying to find it.  

This may seem obvious, but the hands-down best way you can prepare for your first stint as a GM is to read all the material cover-to-cover beforehand.  Read the main rulebooks for the system you are using.  If you are running a pre-made adventure, read the module all the way through.  Before a fight, read the monster stat blocks to make sure you understand everything it can do.  Even if you've read the rulebooks before, back when you were a player, read them again.  You pick up on different things when you are reading them to learn how to play than when you are reading them to learn how to GM.  You might even find that your regular GM has been misinterpreting a crucial rule!

Not only is this great preparation work, but it is also a good way to come up with new ideas.  You might come across a set of rules that doesn't get used much in your group and decide to build an encounter around it.  When I was reading through the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide while preparing for my first time as a GM, I got really inspired by the section on fire and heat hazards and decided to add a house fire into the scenario.  The result was an exciting non-combat encounter that gave a new player an opportunity to feel like a hero.  

Worldbuilding - How to Steal from History

I've said it before and I'll say it again: a good GM has to know how to steal.  This is never more true than when you are creating your campaign setting.  Even Tolkien, the father of fantasy worldbuilding, stole the language and culture of the Rohirrim from the historical Anglo-Saxons, with the twist that they are horse people of the plains rather than an infantry-heavy insular people.

It may be satisfying to create a whole continent of kingdoms and city-states and emirates from scratch, but it is even more time consuming and difficult.  Plus, you'll have to spend just as much time explaining your world to your players as you did creating it.  Worse still, you run the risk of creating a bland and unengaging world full of shallow, interchangeable kingdoms.  Pilfering ingredients from history makes your world easier to create and more accessible for players.  Once you've decided, for instance, than Kingdom X is going to be based on Charlemagne's empire, you can use pseudo-French and pseudo-German names to lend your kingdom a consistent overall character.

Immersion requires a sense of verisimilitude, which is just a big word that means realism.  Verisimilitude helps players become invested in your world, lose themselves in it, and have great roleplaying experiences.  For that, you need a world that seems real, that makes sense on a human level, and that is readily accessible.  There is no better source for realism than the pages of history itself.  You have ten thousand years of human history at your disposal, displaying a bewildering variety of societies, governments, religions, warriors, and architectural styles.  Steal something from here, something from there, mix and match them, add a twist of your own, and you've got something.  Even the more obscure historical civilizations will add that verisimilitudinous flavor to your campaign setting because they are inherently human, and on some level we understand them.

So go get an entry-level history book from your local library or used book store, read about history on wikipedia, watch some documentaries on Netflix (or the History Channel, if you can find anything that's not about aliens or Templar conspiracies or pawn brokers).  Even just dipping your toes in the waters of history will improve your worldbuilding.

Now, let's take a look at how we can apply what we've stolen to our campaign setting.

Traps 103 with Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.

Paramount Pictures

Welcome back, class! I know it's been a while since our last two sessions, so I hope you took good notes.

Today I'll be talking about how a GM can make detecting and disarming traps more interesting in-game.  I won't be using so many examples from the Indiana Jones movies this time around, because I can only think of one time Indy makes a Disable Device check.  When he is approaching the Breath of God trap in Last Crusade, he ducks, grabs a rope, and hooks it onto a spinning wheel, causing the trap to grind to a halt.

Paramount Pictures

Last time around, I closed by talking about making complex death traps that seem more like puzzles in how the players interact with them.  So why don't we expand that principle to all traps?

I've noticed that in my games, both as a player and as a GM, traps are not always well integrated into the play experience.  A typical trap encounter might go something like this:

Rogue: I open the chest!  Wait, first I should check for traps.

GM: Roll for it. 

Rogue: *rolling* 13... so that's a... 27 all together. 

GM: Alright, you're pretty sure that if you open the chest it will stick you with a poisoned needle. 

Rogue: *rolling* I got a... 31 to disarm. 

GM: Wow.  Okay, you stick your thieves' tools in there and disarm it.  

That's a pretty boring interaction.  Most of it is just calling out numbers, which is not something the in-game character would even be aware of.  This is a failing on my (the GM's) part.  When I include a trap encounter, I need to set it up through description.  To do that, we'll need to delve deeper:

Expect the Unexpected

One of the first things you learn as a GM is that the players will absolutely wreck all of your plans at the first opportunity.  You can never make a plan that takes into account every possible action by your players.  This is part of the beauty of tabletop roleplaying games.  This freedom is simultaneously one of the best things about being a player and one of the most difficult things about being a GM.  As a GM, how are you supposed to deal with it?  How can you expect the unexpected?  Today, we're going to look at just that.

We'll start with an anecdote:

My sister recently prepped and ran the first session of an urban adventure for two players.  The party's mission was to recover a valuable statue from the house of a wealthy merchant on behalf of its rightful owner.  She made it a very open-ended adventure with lots of room for the party to make and enact their own plans.  She expected the party might attempt to pull of a stealthy night-time burglary, try to bribe one of the guards, or simply rough up and intimidate the merchant.  She mapped out the merchant's house and came up with a system for determining where the guard would be at any given time during his nightly rounds, and where the merchant would be in town or in his house at any time throughout the day.  She made a list of DCs for all the different ways they might sneak into the house.  While carrying the statue, the DCs are increased by 5, and failure by 10 or more means the statue gets dropped.  All in all, it was a pretty solid set-up for a heist.

The players, of course, had different plans.  In broad daylight, they bluffed their way into the house to discuss tapestries, then cast a spell that let them search a room without being inside it and immediately found the safe in which the statue was hidden.  They bluffed their way into the study and accidentally disabled the alarm.  The skald summoned a dire rat in the streets as a distraction while the inquisitor disguised himself with magic, and they walked right out of the house with the statue.

I'm pretty sure adventurers would rule the world if they didn't have that nasty habit of getting eaten by dragons.

What can we humble, god-like GMs do in the face of creative PCs and their outside-the-box plans?

4 Rules You Probably Aren't Using Correctly (And Why You Should)

You know the problem with rulebooks?  There's just so many darn rules!  I know how it is - some rules are just too complicated or time consuming to enforce.  Maybe you were a new GM and you jettisoned those minor rules that just slowed things down.  Maybe you were running a game for some new players and you didn't want to scare them away with these extraneous rules.  And then you sort of let them slip away, because the game worked just perfectly without them.

Well... I think it's time to re-evaluate some of those rules.  I've played a fair amount of D&D in my time, and I've read of and heard a lot of other peoples' stories as well.  From the experiences of myself and others, I've identified a few rules that often get ignored (not all the time - very possibly not even in your games - but often).  Now, I totally understand why these rules don't always get used: I've neglected many of them myself.  But they were written for a reason, and I think they might benefit from a little extra love.

Traps 102 with Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.

Paramount Pictures

Last week, in Traps 101, I used Raiders of the Lost Ark to demonstrate a few basic things that traps can do in a dungeon.  I mean, besides maiming and killing.  This week, I'm also bringing in examples from Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, the only other Indiana Jones movies I recognize as canon (not that Crystal Skulls had any traps in it anyways).

Indiana Jones is an adventurer's adventurer, so it really makes sense that the temples and ruins he navigates are dungeons any GM would be happy to have created.  They have a cinematic quality to them (naturally) that boils the elements of a good dungeon down to a few tightly-implemented set-pieces.  For that reason, the Indiana Jones movies ring true as great D&D-style adventures despite the fact that there are no fantastical monsters and Indy himself doesn't wear armour or wield a sword.

"You're strangely dressed for a knight..."                 Paramount Pictures

So what else can we learn about traps from the adventures of Professor Henry Jones, Jr.?

Traps 101 with Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.

Traps are an integral part of nearly every dungeon, but they are very easy to do wrong.  There are some GMs who seem to think that the goal of a trap is to kill your party in as devious and clever a way as possible.  If your goal as a GM is just to kill your players, kindly refrain from GMing.

From Grimtooth's Traps

Others decide to put traps on everything, turning the exploration of a dungeon into a never-ending paranoid sequence of skill checks.  Putting traps in a dungeon is like putting spice in a dish: the right spices in the right amounts can add flavour, but using too much or too overpowering of a spice can render it unpleasant or inedible.

So naturally, to illustrate how to do traps correctly, I am turning to the Indiana Jones film trilogy.  Not just because they are perfect movies, but because they use traps incredibly well.  In a well-put-together movie, every element should contribute to the whole.  If you just throw things in there for the heck of it, your movie will be an incoherent, tone-deaf mess.  But the three Indiana Jones films are well-constructed (the first and third admittedly more-so than the second), and each trap Indy encounters serves to move the plot along or tell us something more about the story or the characters.

When you are designing a dungeon, you are like the director of a movie that your players are about to watch/star in.  If you want it to be a good movie, keep the following tips in mind:

Debunking 6 Common Myths About D&D

D&D has been around for a long time now, and it is the subject of its fair share of myths and misunderstandings.  I feel it is my duty to debunk six of the more common myths right here, before your very eyes, using only this blog and the time I should be spending on my finals.

6. It's Antisocial

Warner Bros. via ofdiceandmen

I may have mentioned before that D&D is an inherently social game.  Either you're playing with a group of friends or you're meeting new people by playing with them.  D&D is basically the opposite of an antisocial activity; unlike, say, videogames, it forces you into social interaction.  And if you really get into it, it forces you into regular social interaction.

3 Undead Monsters More Deserving of Cultural Ubiquity than Zombies and Vampires

The Walking Dead - AMC, via A Geek Saga; Twilight - Summit Entertainment, via twilightsaga.wikia 

Modern pop culture is obsessed with the undead.  People on the bus are reading books about zombies and vampires.  Cinemas are playing movies about zombies and vampires.  The video game market is flooded with... um... zombies and vampires.  You can see where this is going.  Looking at our pop-culture, you'd think that there were only two types of undead monsters: the shambling, mindless, brain-eating kind and the immortal, blood-sucking, inexplicably effeminate kind.

Don't get me wrong; zombies and vampires can be very cool if used correctly and in moderation.  But what we have in our culture right now is an oversaturation.  Zombies and vampires are getting played out, and I'm pretty tired of them.  This jumbled graph - which I painstakingly assembled with my own two hands, Wikipedia, and Microsoft Excel - shows that, while vampires and zombies still remain popular, they might be on the decline.  I think that the general public may be slowly growing tired of these undead as well.

I tried counting up all the vampire books, too, but soon realized that it would be an impossible task.
Damn Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer.  

So what undead horrors are worthy of stepping into the cultural spotlight and filling the gaps left by vamps and zombs?  I've got a few ideas:

Treasure: 5 Tips and Tricks for Making Your Treasure Hoards More Memorable

The Fishpool Hoard: British Museum.  Photo: d20 Despot

Treasure.  It's a big part of playing D&D.  It is often one of the primary motivations for adventuring.  But how often is it truly memorable?  How often are your players as impressed by their haul as their characters should be?

So often, after a big fight, games of D&D turn into games of accounting.  "You find 2,500 gold pieces, 1,000 silver, and two rubies worth 500 gp each.  Also, everyone gets 1,200 XP."  While treasure and experience are both rewards for a job well done, they should not be treated in the same way.  XP is a numerical abstraction of your character's growth and skill - it is intangible to the character.  Treasure, however, is an in-game reward, and is very tangible to the character.  Yet too often, just as XP becomes a number that players use to invests in better powers, gp becomes just a number that players invest in better equipment.  Finding treasure should be a roleplaying opportunity, not a simple exercise in accounting.

Let's take a look at some tips and tricks to making treasure interesting, exciting, believable, and memorable.