of Dice and Dragons

I was weeding through the comments posted a couple of days ago (I had a big influx of visitors thanks to Twitter) and a post that I had made back in 2006 came up - Improving Your Storytelling - Provide Choices - the comment was from Leet_Master_Ace:

Could you provide an example? I’m guilty of the “steering” game to some extent. I tell the PCs “You can go wherever you like, except I don’t have stuff prepared for every location open to you.”

Any tips?

I won’t rewrite the whole post here but the general idea is that you don’t want to create a situation where your players feel they’re being forced to do something which seems easy enough on the surface but in the thick of the session might not be so easy. To avoid this I suggest taking a flow-chart approach to the design of the encounter - the 5 Room Dungeon Model that Johnn Four wrote about a while ago over at Roleplaying Tips is a prime example of just such an idea.

In a nutshell you create a framework for what you want the party to do, in this case you have five rooms/encounters you want the party to adventure through:

Room One: Entrance and Guardian
Room Two: Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge
Room Three: Trick or Setback
Room Four: Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict
Room Five: Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist

Now on the initial look this sure feels like a railroad situation as I have five items that I want the party to encounter is a specific order - now take a second look and see if you can see where I’m coming from.

Can you see it?

There’s nothing there that says you have to have the five elements lined up one behind the other. There’s nothing there that says you can’t have something take place between these different elements.

What Johnn did was provide a framework, not a road map, in fact you can use the framework for a non-dungeon environment as well.

Here’s a quick example that centers around a role-play situation.

Room One - The party enters a local pub and settles in. Shortly after their meal arrives some of the patrons start to get a bit rowdy and eventually a brawl breaks out (yes it’s a bit cliche but hey, it works).

Room Two - The local law enforcement shows up and brings things under control. The party has to try and talk their way out - no steel, no magic, just their ability to use their wit and tongues. As I mentioned some time ago with rolling for search checks don’t reach for the dice here, make them role-play it out.

Room Three - Following the investigation after the fight the party will be in one of two positions, they’re either in jail awaiting the trial or they talked their way out but they’re not off the hook as they still need to appear in court to testify to what they saw.

The “room” here is one of two - the cell and those inmates the party needs to interact with and the stories they’ll tell about how no one every gets off if Judge Jacob gets your case. The other is the entire town as the party moves about and finds themselves being trailed constantly, the looks of “we know you started it and got off,” and even the possibility of a law enforcement officer harassing them as time passes.

The point is to keep the players off-guard, make them think that whether they are innocent or not, were involved or not, they have a real possibility of being punished for just being in the location of the fight.

Room Four - The courtroom, yes actually role-play out the court scene. Need some help? Just flip on the television and watch an episode or two of Law & Order and you’ll be able to handle it. Remember, the players have to role-play this not roll-play - have some fun, get into character.

What you need to understand is that the results of the case just don’t matter. Remember we’re not looking to force the party’s hands, but we do have a specific goal in mind on the other side. If you want the players to “win” the case then let them, if you want them to lose, find a way to trump their arguments and beat them (however I would recommend the former not the latter).

Room Five - Now here’s the reward, a hook to the next adventure. If the party is found guilty they can complete the adventure instead of serving time (and boring everyone).

If the party is found not-guilty or prove themselves to be fine upstanding citizens by testifying truthfully (or at least appear to) well, “we hope you can help us out here, we need someone of your find standing to . . . .”

I hope that helps - the trick is to set a framework you can hang your story on and not write a script you have to follow.

As always I welcome your thoughts and comments.

May your dice roll well.

Comments(3)

About a month ago the folks at Gnome Stew had an interesting post entitled I Love My Tiny Notebook which talked about the fact that as a gamer (particular those of us that GM) we frequently have ideas pop into our heads and by having a notebook with us we can write them down for future use.

Now there were quite a few comments to the post and a fairly good rundown of the different moleskin notebooks out there as they seem to be the tool of choice. Personally I’ve never owned one and don’t plan to buy one as I prefer to use index cards.

I know, I know, I’ve mentioned a number of uses for index cards before but let’s face it they’re cheap (I can get 250 for $1US), fit in your pocket (I typically carry a couple of dozen held by a binder clip) and come in a variety of colors if you choose to color code your notes. For me when I use them, I write down my note and when I transcribe it into my campaign or session planning notes I toss the card out - one less piece of paper and since I’m moving towards an all electronic gaming setup I only have one central repository of information to glean from.

So you have the pen to write with, the paper or index card to write on, so what’s up with the cell phone?

Recently I’ve started using an online service called Jott which allows me to dictate and send myself an email for reminders of action items that I need to accomplish at work, or when I log back online when I get home but then it dawned on me (cue the climatic music) why not use it for gaming notes?

Jott isn’t really intended for long notes but for a short, couple sentence in length, note about a new campaign idea, character personality to play, location to develop, or anything else it’s great. I dial up the service, tell it who I want to Jott, dictate and the email arrives shortly after. Quick, easy, safe for use while driving and best of all it’s already on the computer where I’m going to end up putting it anyway.

You can use the service to send emails to other members of your group, individually or as a group (you can post to your Yahoo group if you use that service as well) which makes it easy to get the word out to everyone of changes of venue or cancellations.

On the whole it’s a pretty useful tool that’s available for free (yes, you read that right, free) and may just get you to “jott” down those notes that you say you’ll remember later but then never do.

Take Jott for a test drive, I’d be interested to know what you think.

May your dice roll well.

Comments(2)

This past weekend just before the gaming group arrived at my house for a rousing session we lost power. Ok, since we game with pencil and paper no big deal right?

Wrong.

My group is slowly becoming more and more electronic in nature. Myself and one other player keep our characters on the laptops we have at the table, the GM keeps his campaign information on his. We have campaign notes on Google Docs, use dice rollers both on and off line, access the SRD (we’re still playing D&D 3.5), routinely perform Google searches for relevant facts and information, the list goes on and on.

Without power, there’s no Internet, no printing of information if needed and after a couple of hours, no laptops. Gaming would grind to a halt.

Now, I know that if you’re using a computer for gaming you’ve got a backup of that material somewhere (you do have a backup don’t you?) but that really doesn’t help if you have no power so I would recommend that you include in your “disaster planning” at least the following:

1. A hard copy of your character sheet
2. A hard copy of campaign notes and information
3. The rule books for your gaming system
4. Dice!
5. Cell phone numbers/corded phone - most wireless phones do not work without power

I know that’s not a complete list but you get the idea. I also know you can’t plan for everything in this life but taking a couple of minutes to print out a character sheet at each level was something I hadn’t really thought about. Of course after I dealt with the questions from my kids on why they couldn’t play the Wii anymore and realizing that game time was a mere two hours away my thought process changed.

Luckily the power did come back on (about 15 minutes before the first arrival) so the power outage didn’t impact the session but it did cause me to start thinking about my own disaster planning.

Do you have back ups in place? Do you have a contingency plan for an event like this? Please share.

May your dice roll well.

Comments(4)