I really should be doing prep for my game tomorrow, but decided to drink cider and surf t' 'net. And blog about gaming, as I haven't really been doing well at the "write" resolution.
I've been making an effort to get interested in RPGs and GMing generally as I'd been running my D&D game for a bit now and mostly drifting...reading some books, yes, but nothing really beyond that. So I've tried to read more threads on RPGnet and found a blog on GMing which admittedly I've only really glanced at. I actually have no idea what I'm going to write here...was going to describe my game a bit but that might be boring. Well, I'll summarise.
My original idea was an Order of the Stick style game where the characters knew the rules and had some idea about how narrative drives events. As the Terror had been watching a lot of the '80s Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, I then went with the whole "ordinary people transported into world of fantasy idea". Which naturally led to the set-up of the PCs being players in their first ever 4th ed D&D game who ended up in the game world, inhabiting the bodies of their characters. Much confusion followed. Especially as two of my players decided to play old characters from previous (non-D&D) games and one decided to play one of the others. Or something. As it is, they're mostly tromping around doing usual adventurer-style stuff and I've failed to find a way to use the "Dungeonmaster" NPC to any effect - mostly due to a lack of plotting on my part. I really should be planning for tomorrow's session.
There are many things I feel I should be doing better as a GM. Sessions seem to drag - I never know what my NPCs are going to say, don't really have a grasp of the rules and occasionally forget that I'm allowed to just make an ad-hoc decision without looking stuff up. Players are distracted and getting them back on track is beyond me. Still have no idea if some of them are even enjoying it, beyond an excuse to hang out with friends. Maps, I am useless at, so combat tends to be a bit haphazard as we put together bits and pieces of map tiles and lego. Still haven't thought ahead very much about what treasure to give out, let alone how I'm going to throw enough encounters at them to progress at the rate I intended (seems a natural "story" is not quite a level's worth). I guess most of this will work out by itself in time, and if I actually could be bothered to think ahead a bit more and do more prep (which I really should be doing now) I might feel more in control. A lot of this is stuff I've struggled with right from the beginnings of my attempts to GM, and some (indecision, lack of characterisation and underwhelming NPCs) is a problem in my roleplaying as a whole.
As a player, I started off with simple, combat-focused characters, who mostly did nothing until a fight broke out and then attacked the nearest thing. And really, I haven't progressed much beyond that. Ok, with Bob - my ranger in J's Ravenloft campaign - I have had some ok roleplay. It's Ravenloft, he's gone crazy. He's currently an alcoholic who violently attacks his own reflection and trusts no-one except his companion wolf. But this means he still mostly just tags along with the rest of the party, occasionally doing ranger-y things, and getting drunk at every available opportunity. My attempts to be a more social-orientated character in a Weapons of the Gods game were...poor, frankly. Despite being surrounded only by friends of some years, I still get "stage-fright" about roleplaying and fail to think of the right things to say or do. Even in a "my character does X" way. The pressure is more intense when GMing, even though I'm sure most of my players would be happy if I just chucked hoard after hoard of zombies at them. Or dragons, or kobolds or whatever.
Again, I set my standards too high for myself. But there is no harm in trying to better. I just wish I knew how.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
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3 comments:
Oh dear, i thought it was going pretty well ;-)
Plot wise, you could always try putting us in an actual episode of Dungeons and Dragons :-) & see what happens.
It might be over quite quickly so don't worry about throwing some zombies/more bears(they were interestingly hard to fight efficiently) at us if it does. It also could take us months to go in the right direction :-P monsters could always re-spawn over time to push us along
*ducks*
http://sparklette.net/archives/635/side.jpg
I have a few ideas (some drawn from the cartoon), it's just turning those ideas into places, people, monsters, and (most importantly) encounters. And finding new ways to frame the combat encounters. And that's before I start thinking about balancing fights so each character has something useful they can do, or allotting treasure and magic items that you'll like and want to use.
So, some comments:
Firstly, in my experience of RPing (limited, I know) and of RPers (more extensive), the "hanging out with friends" is a large component of the entire experience, even if you're supposed to be playing a role when you're doing it. And, you know, most people aren't Awesome roleplaying gods - hack'n'slash dungeon crawls are fun precisely because they work while playing stereotypes.
(I get the "must check the correct rule for this" problem as well - perhaps the solution is to try to think of it more as collaborative storytelling than a rules-based game, as the diceless roleplaying games try to.)
If you're doing a meta-setting anyway, it might be interesting to explore the meta-ness of it a bit more. Are the players the *only* individuals in the world who "know" it's a game? The obvious approach is to set up a nemesis who also knows the things aren't "real" - that's why they don't feel bad about being Evil, since nothing here is real, it's not morally wrong... - but I'm fairly sure there's more interesting ideas that could be developed.
Of course, now I'm trying not to riff off of the Dungeons and Discourse strips from Dresden Codak, and the behaviour of Red Mage in 8-bit Theater...
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