Friday Mar 2, 2007<\/span><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\n
Hah, one post after I pose Diablo as a good example for a mechanic he poses it as a bad one. there’s some irony for you.<\/p>\n
Laughs aside, he was right. There’s a certain place for war games, and if that’s what you and your players want then power to you. But metagaming really saps the fun out of anything other than pure strategy. Whether it’s one person or the whole party.\u00a0 Of course balancing mechanics and roleplay to encourage a good table is easier said than done. As is making interesting NPCs.<\/p>\n
My first instinct has always been to say that you just have to learn these things as you go, but that’s not really fair. I remember that’s always been a pretty discouraging mantra to me. Looking for new DM advice and just seeing ‘You’re going to suck and people won’t have as much fun until you get better’ is a bit of a rough way to start your game. And it’s not really true, either. There’s a lot of ways to start off on the right foot. Like starting small, for one thing. A few little quests to figure out how you and your friends like to play, and then work on the bigger stuff. Admittedly that’s a lot easier said than done. It feels frustrating to be trying to confine yourself to the kiddie pool, especially when you can see so many people having fun in the deep end. I know when I first tried to DM I did one small game, and then tried to skip right to the big stuff. And almost immediately got overwhelmed by trying to track balance and mechanics alongside the epic story I was trying to tell. It fell apart in a few months, and I had a miserable time doing it.<\/p>\n
In the end i’ve learned that the real key is to start small with a purpose. Whatever it is you want to work on. Testing worldbuilding, a cool homebrew mechanic you saw online, pre-establishing pc relationships. Something that feels like it’s taking you towards whatever you want to do in the end. What really got me comfortable DMing was a oneshot I did several years after the disaster that was my first attempt to run a game.\u00a0 My main goal was to test a homebrew character creation idea i’d been playing with (based on a culture and species alternative ruleset i’d seen online. I couldn’t afford the book, so I made my own system. Which has been going really well actually) and to try and mess with the worldbuilding I had set up to go with it. I knew neither were full-game ready, but I wanted to see what needed changed. Me and my friends had fun, I got a confidence boost, and the system was much better prepared for for when I actually started a more ambitious game another year or so afterwards. I’m definitely not perfect by any means, but I have a much easier time managing a group.<\/p>\n
Npcs are a different beast of course. Everyone has a different idea of what constitutes interesting and likeable. But a very solid piece of advice my beloved sibling has given me on how to make an interesting NPC is to give them a collection. Nothing makes a little weirdo stand out like a collection. Buttons, stamps, names, teeth. Doesn’t matter. It’s a good way to flesh out what kind of character they are in figuring out why they like the items they collect, and what they do with them. While also giving the players more opportunity to engage with the character through either talking about the items or collecting them for the NPC. Additionally it creates an association to the NPC with the item they collect. They see a giants tooth or a novelty marble set and go ‘ah, that reminds me of that weird guy who collects teeth and marbles’. And from there you can build around the traits your players seem to like best to make a character they can be invested in interacting with.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is exactly the sort of behavior you get when players stop role-playing. Metagame thinking is poison. I played this for a joke, but from my own experiences and from comments others have made I know this isn\u2019t that far-fetched. I\u2019m beating up on the players here, but you could make the case that stuff […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[631],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dm-of-the-rings-remaster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57481","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\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57481"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57485,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57481\/revisions\/57485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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