/tg/ - Traditional Games

>>423216

I think a main quest can be fine, but it has to be a persistent aspect of the world. If you have an outline like:

>A then B then C then D

You run into a problem with railroading. On the other hand, if you work with individuals, and have it such that:

>X wants A

>Y wants B

>Z wants C

This create a nice rogues gallery of recurring NPCs (recurring until you kill them, at least) to run into, and lets you have things happen. Players can ignore it if the want, but it might come back to them. Assassins that show up every 1d4 months to cause problems, assholes stealing the same shit the PCs were after, and similar complications are all fun. Rival parties are really nice for this one.

>>423215

Having a story to tell at least works for me. The best campaings that I've run have started with an idea that I like, whereas when I don't, like it's only because I like the game setting, or I think "the players will think it's cool", the campaign usually falls flat. You have to trust your own vision.

Naturally you have to take into account that the players will manage to fuck up their plans on occasion, and sometimes fuck up your plans. Just roll with it. My second philosophy when it comes to GMing is to simulate a world fairly and believably. But it has to start with an idea I like.

To prevent "pollution" and railroading, you have to present the vision as a rough outline. Don't get too caught up on the details. I don't mean you have a strict guideline that in session 10 they rescue the princess from the hamster king, and in session 50 they fight the lich dragon on top of a burning castle. Since that won't ever work out.

>>423225

Yeah I plan like that more ot less. I have a final encounter planned and a vague outline of rogues, but the actual adventures Im planning as they come.

Of course I havent been able to introduce it quite yet because we're only three sessions in and the party's been gaining the favor of Goodsprings-- I mean Hernar village.

>Players can ignore it if the want, but it might come back to them. Assassins that show up every 1d4 months to cause problems, assholes stealing the same shit the PCs were after, and similar complications are all fun. Rival parties are really nice for this one.

Shit, now thats an idea...

>>423215

I think that's the ideal, but it depends on the players as much as the GM. Some players respond really well to being given a map of the world and a few ruins to explore, but I've played some games with players whose characters won't take a piss without being given a quest to do so - not because they want more reward for the tasks, it's just a lack of initiative.

Maybe it's because they come into RPGs carrying a lot of the wrong video game baggage, maybe they just can't picture the world in their minds, or maybe they're just retarded, but trying to run an improv hex crawl with people like that is an exercise in frustration, no matter how smoothly you can run the game. If you run games for more than a couple of groups it's best to have both story-driven and player-driven styles of GMing in your toolbox.

>>423249

My impression is that an old school sandbox adventure where PCs go around exploring, killing monsters and gaining loot appeals to younger players. At least in my experience as teenagers we used to do it more like that. Money was its own reward. Now I need a character motivation to go to a dungeon. Is it to find a magic carrot to kill the necromancer king, to save an important NPC? Especially adventuring to get loot is tedious by itself. Of course gaining money as a means to gain something else is a different affair. The assassins are after me? Get money to buy equipment to defend myself and the party. Or I really want to build that tavern with gnomish lapdancers. I'll need about a million gold to do it.

>>423251

What you're describing is still player driven activity, though. Your character has goals he wants to accomplish that aren't necessarily best served by raiding the Wight Barrows of Certain Death, but if left to his own devices he'll try and achieve those goals, which is fun in itself, especially when those goals don't necessarily align with the other players'. Some players just fall into stasis until a mysterious old man tells them that the Dark Lord is rising again, because they just don't want any creative input besides rolling to hit.

>>423249

Motivation is easy. GP=XP. Want XP, go get GP.

Players figure it out quite easily. If you really feel like adding in story elements, it also gives a good way to do that: Players want GP, some other asshole:

1) Has GP

2) Is competing for the same GP

3) Stole their GP!

For fantasy adventure just insert capitalism.

>>423252

Sure, PCs should have their own goals except simply Acquire Currecy. The GM should weave those motivations into his main plot. Perhaps they stumble onto the main plot while chasing their own goals and also become intetested in it.

Precisely because some players are passive, the GM should use some effort to make them part of a story.

>>423255

Hell no. I bet you're 15-17.

>>423291

I don't even know what you're rambling about.

Gygax's greatest contribution was alignment languages. And they're gone too.

>>423294

Lots of people have been playing roleplaying games for decades where "treasure based progression" is not a thing. White Wolf games are not about acquiring loot, for example. You make "Story-games" sound like it's some fringe idea that only a few crazy mavericks have tried.

>>423296

"40 years of gaming history" doesn't imply that's the only thing that's been practiced, only that it has been continually practiced. Games going in a different direction is earlier than White Wolf. But when we're talking about adventure games, specifically, that doesn't mean the idea actually works as well in practice.

Nothing about what I posted posed story-games as a fringe idea, either - I specifically called out what makes them work, which is player-to-player interaction. There's a reason that games like Vampire translate well to large-scale LARPs, because they're directed by player action. The mechanics are designed specifically to support that. But when you look at how they're put together, they're not designed for the storyteller to actually "tell a story" - they're designed such that the storyteller provides a scenario, and the players work through it. One GM trying to "tell a story" to his players does not work - it just ends up being a guy sitting and talking, and hoping he's keeping the player's engaged. And hell, if he's good at it, he might even engage them. But he's not engaging them with the game - they have to engage themselves.

There's nothing wrong with games like that, but when we're talking about the problem of:

>lack of initiative

You cannot run a story-game unless the players have initiative, and actively want to engage in the story-building process. On the other hand, when running an adventure game, you can do nothing more than provide a mechanical incentive, and it corrects the problem.

Besides that, I assume going by the first half of your post that you're being willfully ignorant to the actual processes that went into 70s-era game-design, or just shit-posting. Assuming it's not that, but just being pedantic, I'll clarify to put your mind at ease: "Gygax and Arneson".

>>423023

I am in this camp as well. I've only been running this game around 2 months but so far the only issue I have run in to has been forgetting about some minor details and that's something the player doesn't see anyway, and is thus something I can work around.

The main continent on which my players spend most of their time is planned to the degree that

>every major city has a purpose

>every city's connection to the other cities makes sense in the world

>the continent has a history beyond the scope of the players as they started the campaign, and this history further explains the relationships of the major cities

and so on, until it all comes together in a cohesive way that I do not forget the details of due to its verisimilitude not to toot my own horn as it is far from great and the details are not very numerous.

All my NPCs have names and personalities ahead of time. If they last, I give them more than that.

All my villains have goals related to the world and their place in it (or their drive to carve out their place in it).

I have spent many hours, and they are hours well-spent because me and my players' enjoyment of the campaign is greater.

>>420515

Localise, localise, localise. You don't need a world to start with, you need a village. A tavern, a place of worship, a shop of some description, a few dwellings and a place of employment for the inhabitants. Could be a farm, a sawmill, a mine, whatever.

That's your nucleus. Come up with a few simple, memorable traits for the people living in the village. The parish priest has a stutter. The blacksmith fired his apprentice to replace them with a golem. The sheriff walks with a limp that plays up in the cold and still bears a grudge against dwarves like the one that gave it to him. Don't worry about geopolitics or how the economy works. Those are concerns for the elite. Right now your players are mingling with countryfolk who figure the council of elders (or whoever the fuck is in charge) can go to hell so long as they get the harvest in this year.

Next, dot the surrounding countryside with quest locations. Keep them remote but not too remote. A creepy manor on the hill owned by a reclusive nobleman. A herbalist's hovel in the woods who gets her groceries delivered from the village. Again, keep it local. You want everything within a day's journey of where the players start out. Travel should be difficult and rewarding. Don't give them a boat or an airship. At most let them have horses, but not enough for everyone, or have the horses be old or lame or sickly.

At some point they're going to strike out into the wider world. The longer that takes them, the more rewarding it will feel, and the more time you'll have to prepare. If you know a couple sessions ahead of schedule the rough direction of travel, you can figure out what they'll run into much easier than sketching out an entire continent which will mostly go to waste. Let them explore, but make them work for it, and use the time that gives you productively.>>420515

>>420567

YES AND

>>420567

Not sure if this helps or not with improvisation, but for me it's generally easy to run a long session without much planning if I build the groundwork first. Let's say the campaign (for the most part) takes place in city X. You design the major locations in the city first, the various important factions, characters. Once you know how the thing works "by itself" without interference from players, it's easier to adapt to what the players do.

>They blow up a bakery while fighting thugs

<The mafia owns the bakery, and react negatively to it

>They uncover a cache of ancient tomes and try to pawn them off

>The Society of Secrets takes an interest in them

Just a few examples.

Improvising new locations out of thin air is difficult as fuck, unless you're some genious. If you run a typical fantasy RPG where the PCs travel from wilderness locations, to cities, to mystical places, you can't make up the locations as you go. You have to have at least a few key words in your mind beforehand, even if the details are not fixed yet. Don't try to make something out of nothing. That's not how improvisation works if you're a mere mortal.

>>423403

Stage improv "yes, and" style only works if everyone at the table is throwing ideas in. If it's just the GM running things, that doesn't work at all.

>>423423

Wrong. Every action your players take is something you can "yes, and."

>>423429

I don't think you understand what "improv" means in this context. Responding to player actions is standard GMing. The "yes and" game is something you do where anything established is accepted and proceeded without contradiction or questioning. This requires the players to be narrating in tandem with the GM, and also for the GM to run with anything the players throw out.

>>420515

>what about theology

>what about politics

>what about economy

>what about guilds

<Forgotten Realms instead

You know if you go with Forgotten Realms then you're using a setting that's basically passed up on worldbuilding to begin with and is a hodgepodge of shit with no coherence or thought put into it, so you're just as well off making your own setting and not worrying too much about the details. You're just as well off as if you'd used Forgotten Realms. Probably better off because your shit will start off less bloated.

>>420515

Anon I can tell you how to be a good GM.

Don't tell a player they can't do something unless its literally impossible.

Learn to think on your feet.

Don't be afraid to tell a player to go fuck themselves if they try to cheat or pull a fast one on you.

Heres a big one: Don't try to come up with some grand story bullshit. Remember, you're a referee not a storyteller. You should be thinking about how the game should appropriately respond to the players actions rather than what the players should do next, that's for the players to decide.

Don't worry about making some huge world. You're players shouldn't be going to the other side of the planet very quickly anyway. Just start out with a town and a few guilds, a few npcs, and enough gods to cover the alignments if any and expand from there as the game progresses.

Also if you're playing a good edition of D&D ie 2nd and earlier then make sure you use the gold = xp rule. Its extremely important. If you're playing any other edition then just do whatever.

>>424128

>Also if you're playing a good edition of D&D ie 2nd and earlier

Man, why do you have to go and try and start edition wars in some completely unrelated thread?

>>424129

>Man, why do you have to go and try and start edition wars in some completely unrelated thread?

NAYRT but he does bring up a good point - the system you're running plays a big part in encouraging or discouraging good behaviors while running the game. Running post-TSR games (though 2E is where a lot of these things started) encourages a lot of terrible behaviors, like rolling to bypass social interactions instead of role-playing, thinking of the game in terms of combat encounters instead of favoring negotiation and avoidance, and encouraging railroading.

These are all things hard-baked into the core assumptions. Game systems aren't create equally. FATAL might be a hyperbole to use, but it serves well enough to defeat the straw-man "all games can be good, the only thing that matters is the players".

>>424128

>make sure you use the gold = xp rule

make sure they understand the gold = xp rule too

the idea is that you would spend the gold to train, not trade endlessly with a merchant for mutual level ups

>>424128

>make sure you use the gold = xp rule

This is just really stupid.

>>424267

The way I explain it is that your character is not just a fighter or a cleric or whatever but also an adventurer as well. So it makes sense that you should get a bit of xp for being a good adventurer.

And of course the best metric of how good an adventurer you are is how much loot you can haul out of a dungeon without dying!

>>424269

It's only stupid if you operate outside the paradigm of "kill shit and loot shit".

>>424282

>It's only stupid if you operate outside the paradigm of "kill shit and loot shit".

While GP=XP actively encourages the second, it does the exact opposite pertaining to the second. Killing shit means fighting shit, and fighting shit means possibly dying - meaning it's almost always better to negotiate or avoid combat.

The incentive to "kill shit" first and think second starts first with PCs getting dramatically buffed sometime around AD&D (and other games that started to come out at the time), swells when you remove GP=XP and minimize reaction mechanics (or equivalents) and move to tournament module-based games (i.e. all monsters are almost immediately hostile), reaches its breaking point around 2E making XP for killing monsters the dominant mechanism of advancing, and finally shatters apart once you get to WotC era.

In terms of creating a game where characters in a fantasy setting go adventuring in search of fame and fortune it's the best way to pull it off, and generally minimizes the casualties. This assumes you're actually making a living, breathing world, and not just running modules other people wrote and calling yourself a DM.

>>424270

>that edit

Anyone who needed those 2 red circles should probably not laugh about the image.

>>420515

Sandbox & steal stuff. Moradin exists in many settings for example, might exist in yours. Rest is "when it becomes relevant".

>>424397

It was in original, B/X, holmes , and 1st edition. For 2nd edition it only applied to the rogue with it applying to all classes being an optional rule in the dmg.

>>424397

Te rule is that characters gain 1 experience point for each gold piece worth of treasure they successfully bring home from the dungeon.

>>424404

Class specific experience awards in the DMG were a core rule in 2nd-ed, Nobody I ever gamed with used them. It was either DMs like me who doled XP the B/X style, or just doing XP for monsters and "story" awards.

>>420521

>Nobody really cares about how cool your history or geography is outside of how it's relevant to THEM or THEIR CHARACTER.

Most of the time you're lucky if you can get them to care about that...

https://pastebin.com/BxjLPEi2

It's not all that technical, but this is my initial draft of How To Avoid That Guy.

>>425789

>muh tagaming

Okay, riddle me this: what the fuck does the ex-DM's 20 INT wizard with Nature proficiency do when he faces a troll and rolls poorly at identifying the monster? Does the character suddenly become dumb and you start rolling a d20 to check which random spell do you use to probe the monster's weaknesses? Can you make an informed guess such as "if the troll's blood coagulates instantly, maybe we should cauterize it"?

If your players have to lobotomize their characters so you can feel good about your security-by-obscurity encounter, then maybe you should consider not using the fucking Monster Manual verbatim. Reskin the monster or make up some new ones, but the metagaming hysteria has to go. I am tired of playing characters who know nothing about the world around them.

>>425811

Most monster lore checks tend to go like this:

>5

You recognize the name of the monster.

>10

You recognize the most well-known weaknesses or strengths of the monster. (For trolls, fire and regeneration respectively)

>15

If it's a variant, (let's say, an ice troll) you know the differences. Otherwise, you know if the common knowledge is a pile of lies or not.

Assuming you have 20 int, that means you auto-succeed on the first, and have to roll below a FIVE to fail the second, which I'd fluff as this being simply a hole in the character's knowledge - it never came up in studies, they weren't common where he did his work and grew up, etc.

If you've ranks in knowledge (Magical fauna), even more than one or two, you'd auto-succeed the second, and if it's 4e, you would ABSOLUTELY auto-succeed the second and probably have to roll, like, a two to fail the third, because of base level bonuses. It's up to the DM how obscure trolls and their abilities might be, though.

Essentially: Monster lore checks are kinda low anyway, this shoudn't be a problem

>>420515

Sure, you need to read lore or even invent a lot of your own.

From Whizzards, "Behind the Screen" articles: archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/bs

Also look for Greenwood's old articles. Aside of the style (he does LARGE HAM acting, but if you're not very good at it, it's not going to fly) there were tons of good tips.

For example: dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/when-stuff-happens-whats-dm-do

Many were lost when Whizzards fucked up their site, but someone saved them on googledrive.

There are also those, but mostly for 3.*: archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/sg

>>425789

>That guy who keeps making "hot and sexy" female characters that "use their sex as a weapon"

Could you tell me how is it an example of "that guy"? It seems a genuinely good idea, because it's an example of how female characters might have different roles and different approach than men.

Unless it's only about the magical realm, then I understand.

>>425888

Note the scare quotes - it's about magical realm. Session Zero isn't about restricting playstyles so much as it is about determining what play styles should be brought to the table for this game, specifically.

>>420515

Honestly, it's a matter of keeping to the dungeons really- you should establish a play area, and keep adventure expansive, but confined within that area.

The greatest issues arise when you know too much, and you have to keep the PC's from doing shit that will not just get them killed, but might destroy everything contextually within the gameworld. It depends how invasive and inquisitive players are to choice.

Now- in the supreme ideal world, D&D would have moved to an open-source online program in the vein of NWN, but actually complete.

>want to run a game

First question of all. Did you play before? if not the only advice I have is to learn when to adapt and when to railroad.

We do fuck things up constantly, the secret is to roll with it. I once created a god of war with a split personality, one LN, the other CN, and both wanted to kill the other, because I couldn't remember his fucking name.

>>425928

>And maybe get the hang of mechanics first?

That's a fucking given.

>>420515

Never tell a player that they cant do something unless their character cant actually physically do it.

Dont be afraid to kill player characters.

All barmaids and tavern wenches are ugly.

OP, do light notes at first since your plans can and will be derailed

1. start off with some vague story pieces

2. present them the problem as one of these pieces (but not the rest of them. the rest are spoilers)

3. see how they respond, where they go, and what they do

4. plan out your gameplay in response to the players

5. this includes making the BBEG and all relevent NPCs respond to the changes happening in the world, even if these edits remain offscreen and are (currently) unknown to the players

6. unless the players know about it, consider it malleable. if the players do know about it, then its set in stone and breaking it requires justification

>>425888

a type of town guard i sometimes scatter around in places is a plainclothes officer. a young, attractive woman, armed with concealed weapon

players go for seduction checks then have no idea they're already talking to the popo

I know I'm late, but I'd like to throw my two cents in.

Take notes during gameplay. I'm not the best at doing this myself, but when you have to make up random details about the setting on the fly, you should note them down for future reference. It's weird how pointless details I've made up previously would become relevant later.