I’ve been saving this pretty one for a while now, but it needs to be discussed.
What’s railroading? That’s when the GM has clearly planned out what’s going to happen and then pushes the players to follow that plan. Personally, I hate it. It makes me the audience to GMs story. And you know what? That story isn’t really as engaging as the GMs think.
I know most fiction works like this, so its understandably tempting to make one character the main character in the campaign. However, it doesn’t work like that in practice. Your audience consists of a handful people in the form of your players. Each of them has a character and each of them feels particularly close to that character. So, for them, your chosen protagonist is just a nuisance that keeps their character from taking the spotlight. Nice job alienating most of your audience.
I used to play with a GM who used play a lot of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Mostly Murder Ballads. I might not like it as much as I like some other albums by them or as much as certain other people I know, but I like it. And there lies the problem.
Okay, this is a big one. Nothing like the previous two, but gladly this isn’t big in the sense that I would need a book’s worth of words for this.
What it boils down to is this: If you are willing, you can put a lot of the responsibility on the players and let them control much of the environment. So, of course, the question is, what happens when your players, who are gamers by definition and as such understand that this can give them an advantage, abuse the system? Well, first, lets recount all the instances this has happened since I’ve adopted this trusting style of GMing.
When your mother dies, what do you do? You have a funeral, you mourn, you’ll visit her grave. What do you do when a player character dies in an RPG? You hand them a new character sheet and leave them to fill it out.
Roleplaying communities in internet are a beautiful thing. Back in the day when we played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay I was really active on Strike-to-Stun. I quickly learned that if I had a problem or wanted to change ideas an international community of likeminded players was a great place to start. Now we haven’t played WFRP in ages but I still visit the communities because I want to keep up with the people there.
There are a lot of rpg communities all around the web. There are dedicated forums, publisher’s forums, Facebook and (my personal favorite) Google+ for example. Combine them and you have almost unlimited resources of information and ideas. Ask help and you will get it.
Most of the time.
Last week we managed to play the first prelude mission for our upcoming Uncharted Worlds campaign. We plan to start the campaign quite soonish. And since I already have a character concept in mind I decided to build it in advance. I have no idea if it is something that we will be able to use but we will see. In this post I will discuss the creation of the said character and include some thoughts behind the process.
Once again it’s time for the annual #mapvember! In essence #mapvember was started by Miska Fredman. It is challenge to create one map per day for the whole November. I clearly forgot this but will still try to spend this month with maps in mind.
I actually was almost on time since I found the Dungeon Builder Kickstarter last week. I posted in on our forum and downloaded the demo. But since it was weekend I kind of forgot all about it. Until yesterday evening when I spotted a new map at Miska’s Instagram. With that in mind I woke up and tried to Dungeon Builder demo and this is what I was able to produce in five minutes:
You know the situation. Your characters are facing a bunch of goblins you threw in there just to have a combat encounter, because you feel like you should have one here. And what happens? One of those apparently harmless goblins crits and would deal deadly amount of damage to one of the characters. So, what do you do? Well, okay, maybe you didn’t roll the maximum, maybe he just rolled poorly on damage instead…
You know, no-one’s ever going to know…
Short version: Uncharted Worlds is an Apocalypse World hack by Sean Gomes. It is a game for a space opera in the style of Firefly (amongst other things). It’s a complete game not requiring the understanding or ownership of the Apocalypse World by Vincent Baker. And it is a good hack with a lot going on.
Long version: After a number of times failing to get the group together we finally managed to sit down for a game of Uncharted Worlds. Sami (our GM) has been talking about this and has prepared for it by running the Out of the Abyss-campaign. He has even vowed to write about running it at one point. With 20+ sessions I would imagine he has quite a bit to say about it. Once he actually does it…
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