AviLazar said:
The advantage of re titling creatures is that players can't use metagame knowledge. So even if I have the mm book out it does me no good if the creature matches the description of a dolgaunt but is actually a mind flayer.
now obviously if I make the knowledge chheck I should be told what's its abilities/weaknesses are but shil doesn't say" flip to page x".
All true, except near the end of the Guardian Angels campaign, where Nameless had a godawfully high Knowledge bonus in almost everything, so if the PCs encountered something from the standard MM, I told him he knew everything about it.
That's the prime reason I try to incorporate reskinning into my GM technique. Secondary, I like to have new creatures, but I don't have the mechanical intuition to always tell when one of my whole cloth creations is too easy or too difficult for my players' characters--and I'd rather not unintentionally TPK them. It's best to not duplicate work if I can avoid it, I say.
Luckily, I'm very good at working out mechanics (both in evaluating something at first glance and making up stuff on the fly), so I've rarely had occasions where I miscalculated how tough something would be to fight. That said, there's so much work in DMing that I try to keep extra time to a minimum, hence the use of existing material wherever possible.
Shil, you said you don't do much planning in advance--do you stop your sessions after your players make a big "choice" which affects what scenario you'd do next, and plan out that stretch of the adventure, or do you literally just have a stack of NPCs (enemies, allies, and indifferent) and make it all up on the fly?
Somewhere in between. I definitely don't make it all up on the fly, but since I'm big on PC/player choice driving direction and in certain situations (a lot of the time in Sharn, for example) I can't really predict where PCs will go next, I'm always ready to deal with things I haven't prepped for. In general, when I start a session I have a few encounters (not necessarily combat) planned which I think PCs might run into and some general information I think I might need, and that's about it. Anything I didn't include or plan for I just wing when needed.
I don't think I've ever ended a session purely because the PCs made a big choice I didn't plan for, and I've run a couple of combat encounters (though very few) where I had no stats ready whatsoever. Since I can crunch numbers pretty well in my head, I just picked AC, attacks, damage, saves, etc. which seemed reasonable (and in 3e you can get a very wide range, so I knew I was in the right ballpark) and ran with it. I've gathered after talking to my players that they never knew which one was planned and which one wasn't
I'm trying to determine how much advance planning I personally want to do for my campaign. I don't want to railroad the players too much because I have some folks I haven't played with before and so I don't know what the group's interests will be in the game. (I know I've already got some of them quaking because I informed them that I shall be using the sanity variant.)
I'm a big fan of trying to do a good mix of what works for the players and, of course, what suits you as a DM, so I'd get as much feedback as possible before and during the game. And be prepared for the fact that many people can't really articulate what they want.
And Shil seems like a veritable font of RBDM advice. :3
I aim to please
Let me know if you have any other questions.
