Category Archives: GM Advice

In a good many RPGs, character history is left up to the player to imagine. By character history I mean a player character’s life before they started adventuring. The problem is that players tend to really overdo it or ignore character history. I’ve seen some games that give the players a hand in outlining what happened in their life before and the results can go from subtle to profound. I’d argue though that even a subtle effect is an important one.

Who Are You?

Think about it for a minute, when you start a new job, people are aware that you existed before you started on the job. It’s only when people get to learn who you were before the job that they get to know YOU. Really, how could it be any different with a character?

Your everyday actions are informed by what happened to you when you were little. Were you popular? Were you bullied? Did you have that one friend that stuck with you through the years? Even if you don’t think about them consciously, those kinds of things alter how we approach people and our outlook on the world.

The problem is that some players are afraid to set these things down as the character’s history because a blank slate is easier to play. You can do anything you want and it’s apparently the character’s personality because they just did it.

Other players will try to insert things into their story that they see as getting them more power in the story. Things like “really a prince raised by peasants”.

How To Fix It

None of us pick all the conditions of our past, so why not flash forward roleplay them? The GM starts off the situation by looking at the basic chargen for the character and starts out.

Looking at the character’s Beauty, “You weren’t a very good looking youth. It even got you picked on in school more often than not.”

Looking at their Strength, “But as you got older and bigger than the kids around you, they stopped picking on you as much but still didn’t respect you.”

Now it’s the players turn, “Well I didn’t want to be a bully but it was useful to occasionally throw my weight around, I did try to limit it though and was always nice to the other kids that weren’t accepted.”

And that could go back and fourth until the character has reached the point where they start adventuring. It’s just one more way to inform the player of how to role play.

There are a lot of complicated things about RPGs. There are complicated rules, sometimes complicated math, complicated worlds, etc. These all feed into a world that is not just a flat boring place. Some people thrive on complex challenges others won’t touch it with a ten foot pole. Complicated can easily be taken too far.

So how far is too far? As a GM how is it your job to manage complexity?

Sometimes recognizing complexity is easy. The player throws up their hands and says “This is too hard!” At other times complexity is more subtle. The player may be trying to keep up but is secretly struggling. Maybe the other players are more experienced or it just clicks with them for some reason and the player that’s struggling doesn’t want to admit it. If you watch their reaction time to a situation you’ll be able to identify a player that’s swamped. If they normally make reasonably quick decisions and are now taking longer and longer to decide on actions, they’re mentally taxed and it’s probably because they don’t know how to use the story or system to get out of the situation they’re in.

How to fix it

Sometimes taking a break can help. My players have often used even brief breaks to discuss the situation and develop a strategy. When the players that are comfortable start outlining how they want to resolve a situation, it often makes the rest of the situation clearer.

In some situations it’s the flood of rules to handle a situation that is too much for a player to memorize. In situations like this it’s generally the GM’s job to handle the rules and walk the players through. For some players this is a temporary thing, for others the handholding will continue as long as they play. Some people just don’t memorize these things (yeah I know it’s weird but you’ll have to get used to it).

What if everyone in the group is lost? Offer a short circuit solution. Give them the solution that has a piece missing that can be inserted by them handling a situation they can understand. Can’t figure out the clues to shut down the reactor? Hey look, there’s someone trapped by some rubble, he looks like he might work here. Can work wonders, the players are back in their element, they know how to solve their problem.

There seems to be an unwritten code among GMs that they can only challenge a PC with a scenario that they should be good at. A fighter fights and a thief sneaks around and that’s all you can challenge them on. My question is why? When I was playing more than GMing, I would min/max a character to death and I was always surprised that no GM ever hit me on my min side. I mean my characters were great at what they were meant to do and I had fun being great at it but I almost never saw the downside of min/maxing.

Almost all characters are min/maxers to one extent or the other. They’re usually geared to do one job and do it well. A GM struggles to keep up with the player’s ability to trounce their opponent. So why fight on their terms? Why not hit a techie with a social conflict? Why not make a thug have to pick a lock? If you are having a hard time challenging an advanced character, you’re not looking in the right place.

I’m not saying you should always hit their soft underbelly. To keep things fun, let them trounce a few challenges and then hit them with a blindside. Or go the classic route and have them get beaten twice before giving them the tools they need to set up the last challenge on their own terms. They’ll really savor that victory.

Have you ever done something similar? Is this ‘Breaking the rules?’

Players have their characters to boast about, GMs usually boast about the great games that they officiated over. What about those games that you had something great planned and you knew it was going to be a legendary story arc and then the characters lose the trail or there’s a TPK?

This is a picture of some of ours. Some of them were really something that I planned to do something with, others were the results of stupid things I said as GM but the players latched onto and wouldn’t let go of.

First we have good ol’ Votusk. A brilliant scientist that was driven to make a sword for his ruler, made a device that contained all his hate for the ruler and imprinted on anyone that used the sword, then put his consciousness into a robot (Kerdi) to prevent anyone from using it. It’s even more complicated than that, my players destroyed the sword instead of ever trying to use it and took Votusk along with them.

Then we have the cure for cancer, the players couldn’t figure out what the device did (since none of them had cancer) and because it was taking up cargo space, left it in an uninhabited wilderness. It’s not like they didn’t know it was important, they were offered a lot of money to bring it back but their other loot was viewed as more valuable.

There’s the Chocari, or what’s left of the Chocari. A massive building sized creature that literally crashed into the surface of the planet, was mostly vaporized by a Chezbah orbital cannon except for a few chunks that rearranged it’s cells to make an autonomous creature. It kept asking the PCs where it’s brain was (after learning english), meaning it’s main brain mass that was blown to bits. They didn’t have the heart to break the news to it. Or maybe it was that it had six limbs that had rows of razor sharp teeth and they didn’t know if it would freak out.

There’s the super computer, far more advanced than anything they had ever seen except they couldn’t get it to do anything except sing what sounded like whale song. Well they did get it to do one thing. They got a Chezbah Hound to connect to it and the hound became intelligent. They named her Sandy.

They found a legendary sword of Lee. And cut up a lot of stuff with it.

The other things are weird little things that I said something goofy and it stuck.

One time the character’s were requesting extra equipment and the CO told them he didn’t have anything else he could give them. They pressed him over and over “Nothing? You don’t have anything?” So he responded “Look, I have this broken half of a lawnmower wheel, you can have that.” They carried that broken lawnmower wheel around with them everywhere.

One time the PCs were ransacking a Kelrath home and I was struggling to come up with things they would find. I told them they found a vial that was labeled “Burn bumps.” They didn’t know if the stuff in the vial caused or cured burn bumps. Or even what burn bumps was that it should be cured or caused.

Then there was the Bucket O’ Rocks. The PCs chased off some Geetin workers and they left a shovel and a bucket of rocks. One of the players said “I’m going to dump out the rocks.”  I responded “OK.” To which he asked “Does the bucket empty?” It was such an odd question (why wouldn’t it) I answered “No, for as long as you tip the bucket over, pebbles and rocks keep falling out. It’s an infinite bucket of rocks.” They hung onto that bucket for forever, never finding a good use for it (open a gravel pit?).

Anyway, those are some of mine, do you have any great/weird story threads that were abandoned?

I’ve wrote about this before and I was thinking about it again after watching the difference between the difference of how boys and girls play.

There is a little game that I see kids play, the particulars of it are not important but I have had to stop the game when boys are involved. Girls never have a problem playing. The reason the boys have to be stopped is because they push the game too far and they could hurt themselves. Girls don’t have that problem and as I saw the game being played I realized that they were in it for the experience, the feeling the game gives them. The boys want to push the boundaries of the game to see who can be the best.

I don’t know if this is a learned behavior or if it’s something intrinsic to the difference between genders. I am fairly certain you can train a boy or a girl to play in a way that I would naturally see the opposite gender playing. Especially when you tell the boys they can’t play because they’re going to hurt themselves. They quickly settle for playing the girl’s way.

Why do kids fall into this behavior? That’s a bigger subject than I can answer but it plays into something I’ve wrote about before. Girls traditionally haven’t played roleplaying games in the same numbers as boys. This has changed as the hobby has matured and the same can be said for video games. That leaves me to wonder if it’s that the boys are learning how to play in a way that doesn’t annoy the girls. As roleplay has moved away from number crunching and strategy where you can prove who’s the “best” and toward narrative and story, there have been more women getting into the hobby.

Is that a causal relationship or simply a coincidence? It would seem like there is something there to the connection because when girls have gamed with us (okay that’s 95% of the time) they’re not interested in being the “best” mechanically. They seem more interested in the story.

Even after years of playing the ladies that game with us have a basic understanding of the mechanics of the game, where the guys are picking up mechanical tricks to improve their character’s effectiveness. The girls are there for the experience and see how far the feeling it gives them can go. The boys immediately want to see how far the experience can be pushed mechanically.

Over time, guys will start to reach back and start testing out all the nuance that they rushed past before. Is it at this point that the ladies decide that the guys are worth hanging around?

I’m currently reading The Lost World and a while ago finished reading a marathon of all the Sherlock Holmes books. Something that struck me is his characters are purposeful contradictions so I thought it would be good to examine why it creates interesting characters.

When Doyle makes the characters, it seems that he forms them the way he’d make them. It starts off with the necessary business of why the character exists explaining the points you would expect from the person. For example, a cantankerous professor, scorned by his peers. And then proceeds to why this character is not “just” that description. He’s not just a cantankerous professor, he also has a violent nature. Not only does he have a violent nature he’s got broad shoulders, a barrel chest and a virile beard to boot! But then Doyle tones the character down. If he didn’t the character would start to take on unbelievable proportions. Professor Challenger stands up and we discover that he is a short man. He still shows his muscle on a number of occasions but he has been prevented from reaching Olympian status.

There is a proverb of four blind men that meet an elephant. One touches the tail of the elephant, another the ear, one touches the tusk and the last one the leg. When they are asked later what an elephant is each has a different reply. “An elephant is like a rope.” says the first. “No, an elephant is more like a large leaf.” the second says. “You are both very wrong, an elephant is like a stone.” the third replies. The fourth says “No indeed, it is most like a tree!”

All are right according to their perception, the problem is that each one’s perception was limited. In the same way, I feel that all of us have failed to understand what an RPG truly is. In every attempt to properly define a table top RPG as a game, there are elements that people disagree on. More tellingly, there are important qualities to an RPG that exist and are accepted as existing that don’t get included in the overall description. Continue reading →

You don’t have to share, hopefully it was recent and we’ll leave it at that.

The reason I bring it up is I just got back from camping in the deep woods. This isn’t camping at a camp site, this is camping with no electricity, no running water (‘cept in that muddy creek). There is no road to where we camped, so we had to carry everything that we ate or drank in and back out with us. We were out there for four days. The only thing that saved us is that we smelled more of campfire smoke than anything else.

This wasn’t the most hard core camping I’ve ever done but it did make me think about what it’s like to go without a shower for a few days. It’s made me realize that PCs, at least in the games we run, would be going without for days on end and seriously, they’d want a shower bad. If you’re not running a modern campaign players may be used to going for months without a shower or bath but if we had a large enough body of water to jump in, we would have done it. This isn’t a huge revelation, I think you probably know you want a shower after a day or so.

So what can you do with that? Normally here I’m suggesting a mechanic. Unless I was trying to tempt the PCs into showering in some sacred springs, I don’t think there’s a way to quantify the feeling of funk. It’s not going to kill you. Maybe it would make you more likely to catch a disease but that’s debatable, we actually shower too often for our skin to be healthy. It could lower the character’s charisma because they stink but that’s not a huge deal.

What I’d suggest here is to just role play it. Especially if the characters are used to a civilized environment. Every once in a while, mentioning that it’s getting really hard to stay clean. That their fingernails have dirt under them no matter how often they clean them. It’s weird, but there’s a very low level panic that you start to get when you haven’t showered. I wondered if it’s safe to touch my food with my hands even though I’d cleaned them with disinfectant. I think that’s best simulated by mentioning little things that suggest it’s time to bathe to the characters. They’ll start to wonder if you’re going to hit them with a disease or make it really count in the game somehow. Some players are just plain unnerved by being told their characters smell. Some will laugh off the first round of mentioning the smell. Saying it twice won’t really make any more of an impact though. It has to be something different each time to really get the players bothered by it. Like their skin is feeling really oily after sweating all day. I could keep going but it’s just not pleasant reading but that’s the point. You want the players to imagine feeling nasty.

So why would you go through this? For one, it’s real, so as a simulation the game feels more real. More importantly, it will engage more of the player’s senses and that gets them imagining the world around them, make it more vivid. Engaging the sense of touch makes a situation more memorable and smell has the strongest connection to emotion and memory of any sense. This is just one tactic to bring out those senses and involve them in your games.