{"id":32498,"date":"2016-06-01T03:50:58","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T07:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=32498"},"modified":"2016-06-01T03:57:05","modified_gmt":"2016-06-01T07:57:05","slug":"rutskarns-gminars-ch5-foundations-continued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=32498","title":{"rendered":"Rutskarn’s GMinars CH5: Foundations, Continued"},"content":{"rendered":"

Designing Your Session<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I’ve mentioned, there’s no such thing as a “right” way to prepare a session. Some GMs like to plan down to the minute detail, some like to keep it broad and leave plenty of room for improvisation. I can’t tell you what’s going to work for you, but I can provide a couple broad genres of one-off gaming sessions and break down the most important elements of each. Then, in a future session, I’ll address these options in greater depth.<\/p>\n

Type 1: The Classic Line<\/strong><\/p>\n

Or: The players encounter a dangerous problem. To get what they want, whether that’s treasure or survival or the answers to a mystery, they need to solve that problem. Doing so means solving other problems, one after another, until they finally get what they want. <\/i><\/p>\n

The Classic Line is by far the most common and crowd-pleasing kind of adventure. It’s particularly well suited to old-school games like Dungeons and Dragons <\/em>which encourages players (through comparatively limited, combat-focused rules) not to think too far outside of the dungeon or puzzle room or battlefield they happen to have been led to.<\/p>\n

Examples:<\/strong> The party is attacked by assassins, discover the killers were hired by an evil wizard, and must defeat the wizard in his tower to stave off future attacks. The party is paid to discover how a wealthy inventor was murdered, and in the process will face hitmen and the full fury of a technocratic conspiracy. A mysterious buyer offers a reward for anyone who can navigate a labyrinth and bring back the jeweled scepter within.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Advantages:<\/strong> The Classic Line has a set beginning, middle, and end which you can plan out as carefully as you’d like. You can make sure you’ve got interesting challenges planned out and that you escalate and conclude the adventure in a satisfying fashion, an dance that can be difficult to improvise for inexperienced GMs. Pretty much all players like this structure–though some like it more than others, almost everybody is willing to entertain the occasional fun, linear session.<\/p>\n

Disadvantages:<\/strong> Remember that you are not writing a novel. No, you’re writing a story outline that your co-authors, the players, aren’t allowed to see. <\/em>You can plan the greatest scenes ever imagined by GMkind, but once the screen goes up and the music starts it’s up to the players to reach those scenes and navigate them successfully. You can attack them with assassins, you can tell them it was the wizard who wanted them dead, but if they decide it’s suicide to attack the tower and spend the rest of the session trying to figure out how to build a ninja-proof bunker, you need to be able to handle that gracefully. And even if they do attack the wizard’s tower–what if they can’t solve the riddle on the staircase? What if they go around the guard tower? What if someone tries to join up with the wizard instead? Because you’re focusing so much of your effort on planning a few scenes, you’re pretty much locking yourself into ensuring those scenes happen–or else you’ve got nothing prepared.<\/p>\n

Tricks: <\/strong>There’s all sorts of subtle ways to get players to follow your plans, but the safest way is always the direct approach. Instead of tantalizing players with a mystery, threaten them with direct and obvious force. If you want them to kill a wizard, don’t suggest they go raid his tower–lock them in his extraplanar dungeon tower with the promise of gruesome sacrifice. If you want them to find a killer, throw them on an airship with him, lock the controls, and drop away the biplanes. If you want them to navigate the labyrinth, put them in <\/em>the labyrinth with a minotaur. Not only do all of these make for dramatic attention-grabbing beginnings, they tend to focus the players somewhat–instead of deliberating on whether they should have the adventure at all, they’re pressed into action by impending doom. Alternately, do what many have done before you–come up with a level layout that doesn’t have any particular story or arc associated with it, then bake the assumption that players are going to explore it into your introduction.<\/p>\n

What You Should Plan: <\/strong>The whole point of this kind of game is that you get to put a lot of work into planning the individual scenes–the clues, the combats, the puzzles, the reveals. Spend as much time on these highlights as possible, as they’re both the fun parts and the parts players are likely to remember. While you’re at it, try to imagine any other course of action your players might want to take that you haven’t considered and figure out what you’ll do if things don’t go quite <\/em>according to plan–because most times, they don’t.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Type 2: The Open-Ended Scenario<\/strong><\/p>\n

Or: The players encounter a dangerous problem. To get what they want, whether that’s treasure or survival or the answer to a mystery, they need to solve that problem…by any means necessary.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Open-Ended Scenario is the cousin to the Classic Line. In some ways it’s simpler than the Classic Line–certainly, it’s easier to plan. Instead of designing a bunch of scenarios in between your Intro and Conclusion, you come up with a really good problem for the Intro, plus a few ways for the problem to get worse, and let the players figure out the rest.<\/p>\n

Examples: <\/strong>The players are trapped in a snowy lodge with a pack of werewolves trying to get in. The players need to defend a village against thirty bandits and have ten days to prepare. The players need to kill the queen before the lunar eclipse.<\/p>\n

Advantages: <\/strong>Classic Lines are memorable because they’re meticulously planned experiences. Open-Ended Scenarios are memorable because they represent spontaneity and ingenuity on the part of the players, who often find it exhilarating to know that their fate is very much in their own hands. This kind of session is a big part of what separates tabletop RPGs from their computer-based counterparts; no two Open-Ended Scenarios play out the same way.<\/p>\n

Disadvantages: <\/strong>Firstly, the players need to be willing and able to make plans, think outside the box, and come up with their own solutions within the abstract game-space you’ve created. This is not always a given. Secondly, if you’re playing with a complicated rules system, your players might not understand it well enough to plan confidently. Thirdly, your players are going to be asking tons <\/em>of questions you didn’t anticipate. “How thick are the doors?” “Does the count have any relatives?” “Has gunpowder been invented?” “What do I know about trepanation?” “How does grappling work if you’re covered in butter?” You’re going to have to think fast–or at the very least, think persuasively.<\/p>\n

Tricks: <\/strong>Once the game’s begun, don’t try to “outsmart” the players by making their solutions fail because they’re too effective or convenient for your liking. However, don’t provide all of the complications at once. Leave a few escalations in your back pocket to ramp up tension if the players get ahead of the game. Let’s say you’ve got three hours to game–if the players beat the werewolves in three hours, great, that’s a session. If they beat the werewolves in two hours, the sick man downstairs turns and attacks. If they beat the werewolves and <\/em>the sick man in two hours? Wolf king sets the house on fire in a snowstorm. What now.<\/em><\/p>\n

What You Should Plan: <\/strong>Having some obvious answers (how big a space is, what the names of your principal NPCs are, whether or not there’s any silver in the house, etc) is a good idea. Having those aforementioned backup threats is an even better one. Go ahead and think through a few possible solutions, and if any of them are too simple for your liking, now’s your chance to clearly and visibly block those off. Clever solutions are great, but make your players earn their victory.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Type 3: The Premade Module<\/strong><\/p>\n

Don’t feel embarrassed using premade adventures, either commercially distributed or fanmade. You’ll gain valuable experience, you’ll figure out what you do and don’t like, and you’ll have some help figuring out the rules of the game. Just don’t expect to save any time–it takes a while to study a module. I guarantee it’s less time-consuming than creating any but the most meticulously-planned adventures; since you’re the one who planned the adventure, you’ll have the answers to a lot of fiddly little questions that in the case of a module you’d have to look up.<\/p>\n

NEXT WEEK: SPECIAL KINDS OF ONE-SHOTS<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Designing Your Session As I’ve mentioned, there’s no such thing as a “right” way to prepare a session. Some GMs like to plan down to the minute detail, some like to keep it broad and leave plenty of room for improvisation. I can’t tell you what’s going to work for you, but I can provide […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}