Attention DM's : Something Fun

[wcpfish]

Just had to share something I did with my party this past weekend. They had a major overland journey to take in order to infiltrate a goblin compound. I (as the DM) typed up three random encounters and included notes on set-up, monster tactics, and made monster and terrain tiles and slightly "dumbed down" the monster stat-blocks. I then let each of my players run one of the encounters and I got to play by running their character.

This worked awesome for us as I am (and have been) a full-time DM since 1987, playing maybe five or six times in two decades, and this gave me a chance to play and my players a chance to throw some baddies at their fellow players.

BTW, the system was 4th edition D&D so I made sure that I used no dailies unless the player's PC I was running okayed it. It was an absolute blast and we'll be doing it again soon!

I'd love to hear about other groups doing something like this or if anyone has any other similar ideas they have done or plan to do!

 

[Wik]

That's actually a really cool idea. I may have to steal that. (I've yet to actually PLAY 4th edition!)

 

[weem]

Very interesting idea, and one that would let some of my new players dabble in running a small encounter without being overwhelmed with an entire adventure, etc.

I may give this a try this weekend and if so, I'll get back here and let you know how it went.

Great idea, thanks for sharing

 

[wcpfish]

thanks and note

Thanks for the "thumbs up" guys! I just wanted to add a sidenote regarding Weem's comment about his player's getting to DM a bit without being overwhelmed. That was a side issue that was great as well. A couple of my players have experience from back in our days of - the DM only had to draw a dungeon map on graph paper and then populate it with traps, treasure, and monsters and that was all there was to DMing

These guys were able to take a small step toward "regaining their DMing skills" and I had one player who is interested in actually running his own mini-campaign and this was a terrific way to give him the feel from the "other side of the screen".

 

[Cadfan]

That sounds pretty cool!

The only time I ever let a player take the reigns as DM so that I could play for a week, he added a tyranosaurus rex and gave everyone pet dragons after carefully engineering an encounter that could only be solved by the use of his character's spells. This was 3e at about level 6 in a campaign where the weirdest enemy we had ever fought was a wererat.

 

[CharlesRyan]

Neat idea; I may adopt it in my campaign!

I've done something sort of similar, though not involving combat. Once or twice over the past year of play, I've had a scene come up that involved a lot of exposition or NPC-to-NPC dialogue--the sort of thing that's irretrievably boring if simply read or told to the players. So I wrote up scripts for the various NPCs involved, then had the players take on the roles. In some cases the NPCs were strangers; in others, they were longstanding characters that the players knew well. I still moderated the scenes, commented on the NPCs actions, and kept them more or less on script (though I certainly allowed the players to put their own spin on things).

The scenes had a lot more life than if I'd simply described the whole things, and the players really enjoyed getting a chance to take on the roles of NPCs they knew well.