These are the known intents, style, and musings by the Game Master (or Dungeon Master, GM, DM) of the campaign A Past and Future Secret. These musings derive most of the thoughts from the inspirations listed below.
Content
Mechanics and Style
- Dice rolls should not always be strictly followed. As appropriate, the DM may fudge the dice rolls so long as the players don't catch them doing so. An example of an appropriate scenario is to avoid a Total Party Kill where party revival/capture/imprisonment would not make any sense. This point is not always popular, but I'm not always good at estimating difficulty and so this is a fallback option.
- To prevent the party from stalling out in discussion, I'll add some timers. These timers could be real or not. One example of a fake timer is tapping dice or metallic objects together behind the DM screen in the rhythm of footsteps. One example of a real timer could be cries for help from an innocent NPC or a bureaucrat poking their nose into the party's business, depends on the session.
- Whenever a player starts losing interest in the current scene and the player starts doing some random actions on the side, I try to write it down. The consequences of the player's goofing around might come back to bite them later. This is also a hint to me that I need to get the scene moving forward.
- I'm not trying to create a quiz show where the players will be asking the NPCs questions. I am trying to create a talk show where the player characters are interacting with each other, sharing their viewpoints, and building a worldview based on what they have in common. Relatively little information should be required to spark a player character commentating panel.
- Monologuing NPCs and villains shouldn't give a lot of dense information. By the time the monologue is over, the players will have forgotten all but one idea from that speech. At most one or two ideas will remain after any speech, but all the audience will really remember is how you made them feel. Hopefully the villain strikes fear instead of boredom.
- I believe in that concept of multiple fail states. A character's failure should have multiple levels, and then subsequent actions can either decrease or increase the failed state. An example could be a failure by a firbolg to evade a grappling goblin. The goblin is unlikely to entirely restrain a firbolg, but perhaps the goblin is hanging off an arm rendering the arm useless in combat. The firbolg can try to shake the goblin off, but if the firbolg fails, perhaps the goblin climbs higher towards the firbolg's head. There are many ways that failure can happen, and so if there's possibilities between utter success and utter failure, try them out.
- I prefer to provide a more sandbox experience. Seldomly do I offer a more guided and "railroaded" session. If I'm on top of my game, I've already done something far better than tell the player they must go there, I will have told the player why they want to go there.
- I don't create pre-defined routes that the player must do. I prefer to put together a few elements and then see what the players come up with. The players always surprise me. See World Building below.
- I am more than happy to talk to the players about rules and rule clarification. If I got a rule wrong, sure, correct me and help me out. What I won't do, is engage in letting the players meta-game when their character is analyzing options, I'd prefer players to role-play out their options instead of treating this like a game of chess. We're trying to create a story and not trying to solve a wargame puzzle. For example, if a player has determined that a NPC is a wizard and then the wizard does something that isn't entirely allowed in wizard class rules, I'm not going to engage in a logical debate of why I'm wrong on the wizard class; I am usually aware of the choice that I have made when create a variety of NPCs. This entire point comes down to whether a player trusts my intent to keep the story going and whether I know basic rules or not.
NPCs
A NPC (Non-Player-Character) is how the Dungeon Master interacts with the players in game. The Dungeon Master plays each of these NPCs.
I have no reliable way to predict what NPCs that the players will love and will want to ally with or will hate and want to destroy. The best I can do is to try to make characters memorable, which brings me to the hardest part for me: my voice does not have a wide range. So instead of using voices to make a NPC memorable, I try to give them noticeable names, descriptions, mannerisms, catch-phrases, idiosyncrasies, and attitudes.
The NPCs I create are initially categorized into several variations: world-building flavor, deep-motive, and informant. The NPCs can then evolve or devolve into another variant as the players make choices.
- An informant NPC is a character that is there for the players to get information from. An example could be a character that gives a quest, a captured enemy, or an innkeeper.
- A world-building flavor NPC is a character that is there to give the players the impression that this world is real. An example could be a street vendor selling food, a farmer tilling his field, a kid playing in front of a house, or a random goblin in a cave.
- A deep-motive NPC is a character that is there with the intent for the players to dig deeper into what the NPC wants. Clues should be given so that the players question what the character wants or is trying to do. I derive a mean joy from hearing the players come up with some hypothesis and then the character doing something else and making the players question their findings.
World Building
World building is a jigsaw puzzle for me. I have a lot of components that I piece together as appropriate.
I'm never really sure where my players are going next, and that makes it hard to have pre-built set pieces. To solve this I tend to break up my world into these components: names, professions, races, building environments, and history.
- Names: I have a list of names in my notebook. Some are earmarked as special pre-built characters I might introduce at any time if I feel like it. Many other character names have general feel of elvish, gnomish, goblin-esque, etc. Further other names are based around being appropriate for physical locations. The only thing that has a structured naming system is taverns, which no one has commented on that scheme yet. If I don't have a physical name that feels right, I'll name it after the owner character.
- Professions: Paladin archetypes, bureaucrats, or other things like that have some sort of extremely loose definition. I often homebrew and improvise some class.
- Races: I always have several fantasy creatures or races listed in my notebook. The latest one that appeared was named Bucca "Dwarf-bane" and is a demon fey bat. The players live in a city where all sorts of interesting people may be around every corner.
- Building environments: this one is the hardest, because any building could become a combat encounter. I have rough ideas of what they all look like in my head based off known architectural designs, but it really depends on my whims. If in doubt, I default to slovenly slums.
- History: I have lots of ideas for history, but I'm constantly rewriting history all the time so as to not cause paradoxes with improvised info a NPC may give out and to just make the history seem more consistent with the story so far. Instead of history being immovable, it's the story so far that's immovable. I try to morph undiscovered history to make the story more interesting if the players ever seek historical background.
Mix and matching any amount of premade components and of improvised lines gives me a wider range of options. I'm not usually at a loss when a player asks for some random's name. Fumbling for names is the easiest way to tell the player that this world isn't real and that the person they just talked to doesn't matter.
An entire world is operating around the players as they walk through it. Combining pieces from above might give the players a glimpse into it if they pay attention.
Combat Encounters
I've started following these rules for combat encounters as I go:
- I, the DM, should not be playing many NPCs on the players' side. The number of actions that the DM is making as allied NPCs should not exceed the players' actions. The DM is not here to fight the player's battles.
- The players cannot talk their way out of every battle because not every NPC is willing to change their ways. Just because some bard walks in doesn't mean years of life-values for a character are going to change.
- Most combat encounters should generally have less enemies than the player count and the enemies should be a greater level in order to balance the encounter. My motivation here is to limit the downtime between player's turns. By limiting the number of turns being taken each round, the entire encounter should be shorter and more content can be fit in a session. And by minimizing time between player's turns, the players should be kept more interested. As for balancing, see the "action economy": The economy of actions is the sum total of actions a group of PCs have compared to that of the monsters they face. -Sly Flourish
- If feasible, a physical or visual encounter map should be provided. Keeping a player's attention is easier if a visual and interactive display is before them.
- I prefer to give low armor to monsters. Players don't get a lot of turns in a typical encounter and so I want them to feel strong and powerful. If we're creating a story, missing over half of the attacks should be rare, and then when such failure happens it should be a noteworthy story event.
End Game Goal
Disregarding what my players may think, I do have an end game goal. In fact, I have several options for the players to work towards. What I don't do is force the players into a particular end game goal. I like the players to come up with their own reason for why they're doing something. This has a lot of room to backfire, because what if the players don't feel motivated to work towards an end game goal? If the players start wandering aimlessly, I'll start throwing encounters, situations, and ethical dilemmas at them. The particular choices for an end game goal for this campaign are not ones I'm going to spoil here for them.
Inspirations
- Matt Colville for his excellent thoughts about running games.
- Critical Role for getting our group into Dungeons & Dragons.
- The Monsters Know What They’re Doing for teaching me as a Dungeon Master how to add more variety into combat encounters.
- Sir Terry Pratchett for being one of my favorite authors and an absolute inspiration to much of this story world's ideas. And I sometimes panic and use names from the Discworld books when my players catch me with an unexpected need for a name.
- Sly Flourish for lots of miscellaneous thoughts and concepts.
- Puffin Forest for the entertainment and stories.