T w e n t y S i d e d
– Shamus, Monday Nov 13, 2006
Our DM never gets that far, because we never stick to the pre-written part of the pre-written. I’d love to claim that’s because we’re just so fun and clever, but I think it’s just a lack of understanding clear and obvious clues. Repeated clear and obvious clues. Like, so many.
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Well, there are a few ‘cures’ for that.
One – Do as you’re doing, a GM who can run off the cuff and improv it is a true gem.
Two – Allow the GM to gently (or not so gently) guide you from ‘scene to scene’. This is the bulk of “adventure path’ play.
Three – get better adventures that telegraph the clues better, or get better at recognizing clues and not getting caught up in the side nonsense (or get GM that can, or train your GM to, trim the side nonsense down leaving only the clues and rails.
Personally I’m a Type 1 GM, I’ve never followed a script, I’ve never used a pre-genned adventure as it was written, so my Players have never (at least not at my table) experienced a pregenned adventure.
I take my hat off to you. Being type 1 is hard.
I hover between types 1 & 2, mostly because I no longer have the time to plan for sessions (people never realise quite how much time gm-ing takes!) but my improv game has never been strong enough to just go off the cuff!
I’ve been working on improving my “yes and…” approach recently, one of my groups is playing a detective set up and I’ve obviously messed something up because they keep missing the obvious clues so rather than stonewall them all the time, I’ve been trying to let the story move forward “somehow”.
It takes learning but we’ll see if it works better
I am someone who CANNOT for the life of me improvise. So what I typically end up doing is writing a whole bunch of pre-determined responses for my major NPCs based off what I know of my players and what they’re likely to say/ask. XD Thankfully, my players are also the type who enjoy a good mix of roleplaying, drama and action and thus let me have my moments when I do complex diplomatic adventures or when my villain stands up for his requisite evil monologue before starting the boss fight. ;)
My experience with most published adventurers (at least for D&D) is that they can be really, really bad as far as understanding what information has been clearly communicated to the PCs. I often find situations where information has been explained to the DM, and the module just kind of figures the players will pick that information up through osmosis or something.
My group just finished Rime of the Frostmaiden yesterday. Here are a couple of examples:
1. The group is expected to fight the titular goddess at some point in the module. No, not at level twenty or something, at level seven. How could the PCs possibly expect to take on a deity? Well, you see, she casts the Rime ritual each night, and it uses up almost all of her energy so the PCs would fight a very weakened version of her form. No, there is no mechanism in the module for the PCs to learn this fact.
2. The PCs are supposed to assault a well-secured fortress at some point. The front gate is (of course) barred, and impenetrable by the PCs. As written, there are no specific patrols going in and out (and in this part of the module, things are time-sensitive). How are the PCs supposed to get inside? Well, there aren’t actually any sentries watching the path up to the front gate (PCs wouldn’t know this until they got all the way up there), and there is a small window* that looks at the front gate itself, where there is a single sentry who looks out the window but he’s part of a rebel faction wanting to overthrow the main one so he will let them inside (no, the PCs don’t know this faction exists before this point).
*The suggested solution is for a character that has Misty Step to teleport through the window, and find a way to unlock the main gate. Of course, the PCs have no idea where the mechanism even is, so this is a very risky plan, even if the party has access to that spell, which they very well might not.
All in all, I’ve just seen a lot of situations where the adventure modules come up with a very limited and specific set of solutions for the challenges presented, but then don’t even give the characters sufficient hints to even think of some of these solutions.
”I often find situations where information has been explained to the DM, and the module just kind of figures the players will pick that information up through osmosis or something.”
Ah a fellow Piazo AP connoisseur. Yeah, a lot of adventures are just “And we expect you (the GM) to magically get the PCs from point A to Point H without us explaining how we think the PCs are supposed to figure this out”. This isn’t why I became an Improv GM (that’s a whole ‘nother story*) but this would have driven me up the wall if I wasn’t already ‘prepared’ to just chuck 90% of the adventure and do my own thang with the sparkling bits I dug out from the garbage heap of the adventure. All I can say is I tip my hat to any GM who runs Piazo APs and seamlessly herds their cats from scene to scene without the Players knowing they’ve been herded, with the Players thinking it was their own initiate and cleverness at every step. I’ve seen a few with this magic, they are even more impressive to me than Improv GMs.
My tips to GMs running Piazo APs (and other adventures which have “not enough clues” problems): Always read the whole adventure, from start to finish. DO NOT PICK UP CHAPTER ONE TO RUN IT WITHOUT HAVING READ THE REST, yes this means if it’s a Piazo AP, wait until it’s completely published. Sometimes something in Chapter 1 is super important in Chapter 5 and if your PCs miss it, skip, or throw it away, you might not know until you read the last chapter. Also, sometimes your Players will just go left instead of going right, but the map isn’t drawn over there yet…
Also, once you’ve read it all the way through, try to imagine you were playing it with the info the Players are given. Could you figure out the clues and twists? What info is GM Only on purpose and what is that way by accident of poor design?
* My first real GM (I’d played once before for a pair of “make character” sessions with another GM years prior) was a mix of Improv and Run It By The Book. If he had published adventures, he ran them by the book, but he also made up his own adventures. This was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the mid-80s so there weren’t that many adventures to chose from (and our local book store didn’t even carry all of what little there was) so he had to improv when we ran out published adventures (no we didn’t just run them again like apparently so many did?).
I always liked his improv campaigns better than the published ones… and then I tried my hand at running a game, I was 10. I wasn’t particularly proficient at reading map legends and following number codes to rooms well, so I started to get the rooms and what things were mixed up… and was humiliated by the GM over it (yeah, the one time he was a dick, but it shaped my whole way of GMing… so… for the good?).
After that I just made up my own adventures, if I drew the map, I made up what went where, then I already know it, right? Worked fine, and by the time I was in high school I didn’t even write things down in advance any more (maps yes, player handouts, yes, everything else? Naaaah), I kept notes as I went of anything important. And that’s how I’ve run for the last thirty years.
Oh yeah, you get those in every system, but god Paizo’s APs are a whole other level of impressive on that. They can make interesting reads if you see them as serialized fiction, but when it comes to actually getting players to go through it they can be nightmares.
While I haven’t tried my hand at GMing yet, my ability to get my own character’s voice and actions down is still difficult sometimes and I doubt having to do a great deal of them would make it any easier, I’ve mostly played with very Improv heavy GMs. Early on it was a case of not really knowing much better, having the core rulebook and a DMG available and building adventures with that without knowing published adventure paths were even a thing, and later on by choice as they’d all gotten used to building their own settings and quests and worlds.
It’s interesting because I only recently started my first campaign with a GM using a published adventure, and it’s honestly night and day which sections are lifted from the book and which ones were made up as we went along. We had a whole questline dealing with a cult that apparently had no place in the book and was all added as we tugged at some other threads, and it was a great adventure from start to finish, then as we got back to the published material it was like slamming into a wall. It became very clear that scenes had a Designated End State, and while there was some freeform play in each scene, none of them could end until we had reached the Designated End State written by the authors. Sometimes it was waffling on decisions until we stumbled onto “correct” one, other times it was being rushed through dialogue or exposition to get us going onto the main track.
Which, ultimately, just gives me so much more respect for improv GMs, it’s more work but the end result is often so much more seamless in the moment.
There is a simple solution to this, and it’s “Playtest the damn module!”. No, not just with players, but take your written material and hand it to a GM who is not at all familiar with the module and see how they run it with ONLY the documents in their hands. You know, like the way your customers who buy the module are going to have to do.
I’ve often run into so many errors that should be immediately obvious to anyone who is attempting to run the module as written. It’s especially bad when the GM doesn’t even need to get to running the game at the table to immediately realize there is a problem. That indicates to me that someone wrote down adventure content on paper and said “Time to ship it!”.
GMs, don’t read pre written scripts, it’s SO boring! Just jot down the points you want to cover with the NPC, and talk like a person to your PCs.
I dunno. Depends on the group, the NPC, and the reason.
I sometimes write specific speeches that certain characters might deliver for very specific events. Sort of like the “boss conversations” in Deus Ex. I do it when there’s some specific reason why the party would care about the specific words used. Sometimes it’s because a specific turn of phrase might be relevant later (e.g. as a password or similar). Sometimes it’s because the NPC hints at knowing something they couldn’t know except in very specific circumstances (for example, if the king’s guard is aware that someone you thought you stealthily mirdered is dead). Sometimes it allows the pics to connect the dots on who the person referred to in some writing or prophesy is. Sometimes it’s to foreshadow some situation I plan to put the players into in the future.
Sure, I could do all this with an appropriate perception or wisdom check after they talk to the NPC, but it’s more fun for them to hear what the character actually said and figure it out. I pre-write these because, while I like improvising, if there’s one specific thing I want to hint at, I need to remember exactly what it is and how I want to say it without giving too much away.
I try to keep these somewhat optional (the password is for a side quest not main quest, or the “connecting the dots” is more along the lines of making a quest easier vs making it possible at all). And I never force it if they don’t encounter the NPC or don’t want to talk to them.
This strip, with Galadriel po-facedly reciting Gandalf’s lines to a very confused party, really tickled me for some reason.
This problem has another side; I’ve seen a player zone out just long enough to forget that the party were going undercover into the BBEG’s stronghold. When called upon to speak, their character announced himself by his true name and title, precipitating a stand-up fight which neither side was ready for, but due to a combination of luck, tactics, and a magic item which bent a rule, the BBEG ended up being lightning-bolted to ash in his own moat. Campaign ended in its second session, very unhappy GM, jubilant (and embarrassed) players.