So I'm the suckiest Gm that ever Gm'd suckily.
Well, perhaps not quite that bad but I do have a nasty tendency to slip into rolling dice and saying 'you take X damage' instead of saying 'The dragon's maw closes on your shield painfully and its claws rip through your armour as if it were paper. You take X damage' which I think is a rather better way of handling combat in my opinion. But as aware as I am of the flaw in my technique, I often find myself doing it out of habit, especially now with D20's emphasis on tactical combat.
However, I think I might have come upon a cure -- essentially, every time I don't describe an action in visual terms, the player who points this out to me gets some sort of minor reward which then serves as a reminder to me not to do it again (a bit like Pkitty's 'paying the pig' only for the Gm). As I like to use Swashbuckling cards in my game, I was thinking I might give one out every time I do it but a really minor XP reward or something like that might also work (what are Swashbucking cards? You may well ask. They're a mechanic invented by Barsoomcore and expanded by the good folk of these boards. Check the collected set out on http://barsoom.hyboria.net/Swash.html ).
Now, what I would like is what people think about doing this. Do you think it'd work? If you were a player, how would you feel if a Gm asked you to do this? Also, anyone got any other ways of fixing a habitual flaw in the way you run games?
Yours,
Altin
Well, perhaps not quite that bad but I do have a nasty tendency to slip into rolling dice and saying 'you take X damage' instead of saying 'The dragon's maw closes on your shield painfully and its claws rip through your armour as if it were paper. You take X damage' which I think is a rather better way of handling combat in my opinion. But as aware as I am of the flaw in my technique, I often find myself doing it out of habit, especially now with D20's emphasis on tactical combat.
However, I think I might have come upon a cure -- essentially, every time I don't describe an action in visual terms, the player who points this out to me gets some sort of minor reward which then serves as a reminder to me not to do it again (a bit like Pkitty's 'paying the pig' only for the Gm). As I like to use Swashbuckling cards in my game, I was thinking I might give one out every time I do it but a really minor XP reward or something like that might also work (what are Swashbucking cards? You may well ask. They're a mechanic invented by Barsoomcore and expanded by the good folk of these boards. Check the collected set out on http://barsoom.hyboria.net/Swash.html ).
Now, what I would like is what people think about doing this. Do you think it'd work? If you were a player, how would you feel if a Gm asked you to do this? Also, anyone got any other ways of fixing a habitual flaw in the way you run games?
Yours,
Altin
Personally i love saying "You take 38 points of damage. And you should be happy, i barely missed confirming that crit."
