Arrgh! I Let the Moment Get Away!

[Zephrin the Lost]

I just made a mistake as a DM (Well, GM- it was D20 Past) that after a good 15 years of running games in various systems, I should have known better.

I couldn't run our regular campaign because we were missing two of our five players, but the four of us decided to get together for a little D20 past/Sidewinder action, which I was thrilled about because chances to play are rare. I had a good adventure set up, converting a 1989 Dungeon adventure that featured a diving bell a giant pike and some scrags into a Sidewinder adventure featuring a diving bell a giant pike and some mutated Indians. Stormborn had given me a good solution for Pike vs. Diving Bell resolution and we were ready to go.

The game had a slow start as one player needed to make up a character on the spot. Then things moved pretty well but for a variety of reasons the players didn't end up in the diving bell until nearly 10:00 pm (we have a strict 11:00 pm cut-off on weeknight games).

They weren't expecting a 20-foot long pike and certainly weren't expecting an water-breathing man, and when the attack on the bell came, they were suitably shaken, but not terrifically engaged. I had the aquatic Indian make a grab for one of the PC's who almost got knocked from the bell, then swim off. The PC's were able to get the bell raised w/o it being destroyed by the monster pike and the rest of the evening kind of just trickled out. The PC's made camp by the shore of the lake and the Indians raided them, but it wasn't exactly electric.

So here I was running a game we play once or twice a year and I'm trying to build tension - offering glimpses of the unnatural enemies and then having them fade away. Screw that, I should have had Indians swarming that bell, climbing up through the port in the bottom and attacking the PC's with knives or their bare hands, all while the Pike hammered on the bell and tried to eat the whole thing-- bell, PC's and Indians alike! That would have been a memorable, exciting episode. It would have snapped the players out of the low-energy mood that had settled over us from the slow start. I was running the first hour of Jaws when i should have been playing the T.Rex attack from Jurassic Park.

But I didn't and the evening was never more than interesting at best.

So that's my story, and I post it here as a warning to others: A huge, violent, close-quarters brawl in a possible sinking diving bell (or the equivalent) may not always save a slow night, but it's worth trying. I wish I'd tried it.

Any other stories of holding back when you wish you'd poured it on?

--Z

 

[Nellisir]

This just reinforces a lesson I'm still trying to learn - don't hold the good stuff back! Too many games are, if not ruined, at least made mediocre by a DM saving the -really- good stuff for "The Big Moment"...that never comes.

 

[Dr Simon]

Just to build on what Nellisir says - I think that sort of attitude, waiting for the Big Moment, is a holdover from the Era of Plot and is a potential negative to running an RP adventure using the same rules as writing a story. Not wanting to get into a plot vs. open argument here, but when people say that Plot Is Bad, this is one of the reasons. The flip-side is that your players overcome your planned exciting climactic encounter in two rounds with no lost hit points.

As for the OP, the one missed opportunity that I still regret, almost twenty years on (blimey!). It was RuneQuest game. Lots of threads were intertwined in a city-based adventure. One of them was the game of cat and mouse between the players and a vampire that had developed. The PCs, as part of a different thread, were at a party given by the local sultan. They were unarmed and unarmoured. They spot the vampire. Cue an exciting chase sequence with PCs armed with cutlery pursuing the vamp around the sultans palace, the vamp ambushing them in the orangery in his panther form, all manner of back and forth. Finally the PCs get the upper hand and as the vampire tries to escape in a boat they push him overboard. Running water plus vampire equals goodbye vampire.

One of the players has his character look over the side of the boat to check that vampire is gone.

What I *should* have done, according to all the laws of dramatics and cliche, is have the almost disintegrated semi-skeletal vampire burst from the water and try to drag the PC under with him in his death throes.

What actually happened: nothing.

It was a fun evening nonetheless, but it ought to have had that cherry on top!

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

One of the harder things to do (for me, anyway) is adjust DMing style between regular campaigns and one-shots (and recently, one-shots for gamedays). All three require a different mindset, I think. With a regular campaign, the ebb and flow is important, and I think the DM has the obligation to be a little more careful about throwing the party into excessively deadly situations. Not to imply that he shouldn't, just that it should be a conscious decision.

For one-shots with regular group folk, you can drop that mind-set and go all out. Worse comes to worse, a character they have no long-term investment in bites the dust, they make up another one, and keep going. It can be hard to make that mental adjustment on short notice.

For game-days, I think it requires a blend of the two. You don't want to kill someone off early (unless they do something really stupid), because no one wants to sit there for the next few hours fidgeting, and time is often too short to spend working new characters in. OTOH, when it gets to the climax, it should shift to all-out danger.

 

[talien]

I'm amazed by the number of adventures that are supposed to be "mysteries" and, in having the PCs try to solve crimes, end up having them witness all the exciting stuff after the fact.

Two examples:

1) If a bad guy is going to hold a city hostage by setting off bombs, those bombs had better go off in a way that affects the PCs -- either they actually get caught in the blast or someone they know is affected by it. Not, "a bomb just went off! You should care about that, right?"

2) An invasion of mysterious extraplanar bad guys. PCs don't want to have a conversation with a guard after the fact about the bad guys.

Too many investigation-type games struggle for slow dread and end up with the Boring, Boring, Boring, OOGABOOGAH! approach. In movies, the audience doesn't get bored because we get to witness the attacks and thereby viscerally experience it. So that keeps us interested, because for a brief moment we're in the victim's shoes.

In RPGs, the audience and the actors are one and the same. So letting things play out in the background just bores the heck out of the audience.

 

[Doug McCrae]

2) An invasion of mysterious extraplanar bad guys. PCs don't want to have a conversation with a guard after the fact about the bad guys.

I don't agree with you. Foreshadowing builds tension and adds variety. If every encounter is an in your face monster that will get boring too.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The worst one I did in this vein took me most of...OK...99% of a campaign to figure out.

I had an interesting campaign world, interesting PCs, and an interesting foe for them to fight- Demons (of my own design) known collectively as "the Dark" who were damaged by light of all kinds, so sought to extinguish it in the world...

Everything was in place, but somehow, "the Dark" just didn't live up to their reputation. They just weren't scary.

They should have been. They warped reality, they were hard to see, and thus, hard to fight. "The Dark" had a key ability- they could force you to make a Will save in order to use any kind of attack that shed light against them- fail, and you'd decide to do something else. And all the while, they would do ability drains.

The flaw was literally of my own making- the stat they were draining was Strength, not the more logical (considering their powers) Wisdom.

The result was that while the fighters became weaker, the mages and clerics soon shrugged off the Dark-inspired impulses to avoid light-producing attacks. Each round, each mass battle, instead of getting tougher, got easier.

The final epic battle was nearly a cakewalk.

Moral: Be VERY careful when you homebrew your BBEGs or key monsters.