Category Archives: GM Advice

RPGs are all about making choices. Players love being given agency and autonomy. This is the core draw of a table top RPG.

It may also be the reason very few people play them.

Continuing the thought from yesterday, letting your players have control of what they will do is the holy grail of good GMing. Give them what they want, let them be awesome, never say no.

This philosophy is poisoning RPGs. How can I say this? You probably have used these mantras and had your games become more enjoyable. They became more enjoyable for you, but what about that guy that tried out sitting in on the game to see if he’d like it and then didn’t come back? He’s the majority. He didn’t enjoy it and we assume he didn’t “get it.” You probably asked him why he didn’t like playing and he probably shrugged, not knowing what to say.

A lot of people see us sitting around the table and think “That’s really nerdy.” Take the same group of people and have them play a board game and people don’t think “nerdy” they think “They’re having fun.” Why?

Let’s decode this language. “Nerdy” means that the people involved are putting in more mental effort into a task than most people would. That means people are looking at people playing RPGs and saying “That’s really hard.” They don’t always want to admit that to you or themselves so they disparage it with “Nerdy”.

So why are RPGs hard? We have one page RPGs, on the level of game complexity and reading they’re simpler than most board games. If keeping track of a fantasy world is too much mental effort, there are plenty of one shot adventures, no memorization required. In all the games, no matter how simple or complex rule wise one thing that makes all of them mentally challenging.

Choice

Choice is great when you know what you want. It lets you get what you’re after. We assume that given choice people will decide on what they want. It would seem the reasonable thing wouldn’t it?

The problem is that people don’t often know what they want to do. In the context of a game, we imagine that throwing out infinite possibilities makes the game more enjoyable, and it does, for a select group of people who know what they want. For the rest of the people in the world, they sit down to a game and want to be entertained. They don’t particularly care how but having to work hard at making choices is not entertainment and they see RPGs as having to work hard.

I now recognize that this is where I’m going wrong with some of my players. I have some that know what they want out of the game. Others, just want to have fun, they’re not personally after a goal. They’ll go after a goal if you set it in front of them and it looks like it’ll be fun getting there. They wouldn’t have picked it for themselves out of the air though.

This isn’t just RPGs, it’s everything. I think this is one place that Apple Computer has really gotten things right. You offer one or two options, if you have an option that costs more (the white one) then people feel really good about themselves for choosing it.

Barry Schwartz wrote a book the Paradox of Choice. Heres a video of him talking about it.

If you don’t want the lead up skip to about 8 min to get to the core ideas.

This is also the biggest difficulty in this. Some players will enjoy the choice, others do not. Choice has to be offered to the players that do want it and the players that want to be guided need to have fewer choices. It’s not a one size fits all proposition and that makes GMing much harder. Tomorrow I’m going to try and come up with some ideas for how to handle players that want choice and players that don’t.

I’ve been mulling over how to get more people interested in RPGs. This isn’t anything new for this blog but I haven’t talked about it in a little bit. So lets get back into it.

Things Like RPGs

Video Game RPGs are common enough and most video gamers wouldn’t hesitate to play one if you plopped one down in front of them. Board games in some ways are like RPGs and are commonly accepted as a family fun kind of game. I was thinking about these two categories of games and mentally comparing them to RPGs.

One of my first theories was that a boardgame is more acceptable to the average person because it is less complex. That sounds pretty compelling when comparing a 200 page book to a board and a three page pamphlet. You might think “Aha! RPGs need to be less complicated and then they will be acceptable.” That however has already been done. There are plenty of one page RPGs out there. If the solution was lowered complexity, we’d be there already.

Then I thought about video game RPGs. Even though they’re called RPGs, they’re usually more “Adventure Game With Some Choice” (AGWSC?) and I think that’s the difference. When you play an video game RPG, some really have very little choice if you want to progress through the game. You have to do what the king or old man wants you to do or you won’t progress. Even MMOs are a series of hand holding steps. They tell the player exactly what their next step is. The player’s enjoyment comes from having the skill to perform those actions using the game controls. In some situations the player is challenged by the strategy or having the dexterity to accomplish the task.

Conclusion?

What if all our fears about giving the players the maximum amount of choice is wrong? What if compelling stories are with the players at the helm are the problem? What if, (and i’ve broached this subject before) if done in the right way Railroading is exactly what new players need to get comfortable. When I think about it, most of my new players, for the first few games are asking “What do I do now?” They’re not used to deciding for themselves. I think about my first games, when I was introduced to RPGs. There was very little choice. I was lead along, guided. Only later did I discover the value of choice.

What do you think? Is this train of thought madness? How were your first games?

I’m going to do what I can to build a template for a technobabble monster. Remember that the babble can be medical, technical or science based so ideally this would model most Sci-Fi show tech problems. The purpose of this tool is not to make the story process a mechanical one but to give a GM a structure to add an element to the story and keep it interesting.

Story Points

The first thing a Technobabble monster needs is a number of hit points. It would also be good to have some skills that take it down faster. To do this some successful skill tests might take down one point, others will take down two points and the right skill will take down three points. To match a TV show structure, you want three main attempts to take it down before it goes down so start with at least nine. There will also be a few random attempts during the game so add three extra for a total of twelve. Your monster can have more or less but it’s good to have a base number to work with. This number may have to be multiplied by the number of PCs that can help with the problem because if you have six sciencey PCs the problem will go down too fast. We’ll call these points, Story Points (because I’m starting to become fond of that term).

Take Down Skills

Next decide what skill should be the most effective skill to tackle this technical problem. If this is a medical problem so you’re going to pick a medical skill. If it’s a science task, pick an appropriate science skill. A successful roll of this main skill will take off three points. Related skills take off two points. So if the required skill is Surgery, then General Medicine could be a related skill. A GM could also rule that someone with a biology skill would also be a related skill. Basic intelligence (I.Q.) successes take off one point.

Second choose skills that the monster is resistant to or may actually help it. For example, if a PC walks up to the problem and decides to blast it, maybe it does nothing, maybe it makes the problem worse. These skills add three SP to the problem.

A PC can use skills as a probe, testing if it will be effective. Doing this takes time but if the roll is failed, it will not trigger a story transform.

Progression

Most technobabble monsters don’t just sit still. They grow more powerful as time goes on. At first they only have weak effects that seem to come out of nowhere. Slowly, they progress to ever more obvious and dangerous. At their earliest stages the players should notice something but probably not know what to do with the information or even if they should do anything. The GM should keep this in mind as they apply the story transforms.

Transforms

Next we get to the monster’s ability to fight back. In some cases the monster may be an actual creature that is growing in strength. In others it may just be an effect of the environment. In any case, an interesting monster will change up it’s tactics and defenses. For every 3 points of SP that are reduced the GM may choose or roll for a story transform.

Roll 1d6

If a player tries to fix the problem but fails their rolls, they trigger a different set of transforms.

Roll 1d10

Time

There should be a time limit to the problem. If it isn’t solved in a certain number of hours, the ship explodes or the infection spreads to two more people or a PC dies. Something dire, something that will motivate the PCs. If you have a particularly unmotivated bunch make the technical characters reliant on some more combat oriented characters but the combat characters need the techs to keep them alive.

Each attempt to fix the problem takes a block of time if the characters dilly dally they’ll run out and the hammer drops. Skill probe attempts may not take as long as the attempt to fix the problem but still take up a significant amount of time (say a half to a quarter of an actual attempt).

Conclusion

Again, the idea here is to give some structure to the challenge of handling a task that the players can’t be expected to solve with their own knowledge. While a fighting character has something to do in most games, a technical or brainy character can be left twiddling their thumbs or relegated to strategy. If you need something story based to keep a technical character busy this could be a fun way to do it quickly. Ideally you’d want to come up with some kind of a technobabble explanation that they need to solve. I don’t think you need to hide the SP structure from the players. Knowing that there is a limit to the problem and a way to reach that limit will make the challenge more reasonable for the players. Some of the transforms would keep me on my toes if I were GM. Trying to figure out how to apply them may take some creative thinking. Any obvious transforms that I missed? Let me know in the comments and I’ll add them.

Tarnoc and I were talking Star Trek on Saturday and I was saying how hard it is to play a Star Trek RPG. I would also rope any attempt to play a Dr. Who RPG into this but I’ll stick with Trek for now.

It is very hard to play Star Trek and have the same kind of feeling as the TV shows. The structure of the shows tend to go something like this. There is some unusual effect that is slowly growing worse. The crew tries to fix the problem but it doesn’t work. Commercial. The crew regroups, comes up with a different plan but it still doesn’t work. Commercial. The crew uses their combined knowledge of the last two failures to solve the problem. Credits.

So what’s so hard about that? It’s because the problem and the solution are usually technobabble. If I tell you that “Something is causing a reverberation in the dilithium crystals and it’s building up a feedback wave in the warp core.” How do you fix that? Sure you can try to hold off the Klingons while you’re trying to come to a solution, you understand that part. How do you fix a technobabble problem?

The answer starts with not relying on what you know. Rely on what your characters know. This is the perfect time for intelligence rolls, warp drive skills and subspace harmonics specialties. Is that it though? A passed roll and the problem is solved? That doesn’t sound very fun, it also doesn’t follow the structure of the TV shows (assuming that’s what you’re after).

There are a few ways to handle this. I’ll hint at a few and go into my favorite. The simplest would be to have Technobabble waypoints. The PCs have to roll for their skills to come up with a plan, then they have to try it. If there is some kind of a logic behind the technobabble then they might get a clue to the logic when their first plan fails. Repeat. Repeat and solve.

That starts to approximate what happens in the show but it’s not very interesting. Play enough times and the games will probably get a little boring.

Another way to handle the problem is by giving the players more agency. Depending on how they do in their skill rolls the technobabble problem will do different things. If the rolls are bad, the problem could get worse or the symptoms might change entirely. For example, our heroic PCs try to dampen the reverberation in the dilithium and the problem gets worse until system after system in the ship starts shutting off. The problem symptoms may not seem like they have anything to do with each other and that’s part of the fun. Now if the players succeed in their roles the dampening seems to work but the PC that implemented it wakes up that night with their quarters filled with a poisonous gas. Again the problem seems unrelated but something is still going on.

To help the GM it would be good to have a number of story transforms in a list or a table so that they could roll on it and always have a fresh take on where the story will go.

On a failure

Problem gets worse
A second problem is created
Someone gets hurt
Attempt failed any more attempts require putting crew in danger

On Success

Problem fades but comes back growing stronger
Solution does nothing but give a clue to the PC as to real cause.
Problem is partly fixed

I’d have to sit down and watch a bunch of Star Treks to get more ideas for more story transforms. Hopefully you get the idea.

So those are kind of cool but my preferred way to model this is to really amp up player agency and make a technobabble monster! If you’ve looked at the Survival Games posts, apply the logic to this problem. The problem gets it’s own kind of Hit Points that the players have to use their skills to attack. Each technobabble monster is weak to a certain skill, like say Subspace Systems seems to be effective in harming it. Other skills may have some or no effect on it. Attacking it with some skills might even make it stronger.

Now the monster can’t be passive or this isn’t going to be interesting. What kind of attacks can a technobabble monster make? One would be the story transforms. Each time the monster is attacked, the GM throws a transform at the players. These may change the skill that the monster is vulnerable to. They may need physical actions like an obstacle course or a direct attack to be made.

I’m going to try constructing just such a monster that would work for most of these situations. It’s a pretty wide subject but it might be doable. I’ll post it if I can make something that works.

Any ideas for story transforms that you’d like to see?