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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2097830" data-attributes="member: 5171">Oh, and to answer your questions:1) The new players usually stand and trade shots, but it only takes a few lost characters before they realize how relatively fragile they are -- a regular guy (non-combat-specialist) can trade shots with a regular guy for awhile, but if you're up against someone with a big gun or a lot of feats, you're toast real fast.After that, people usually go for cover, firing around corners or from behind car doors -- and the more real-world stuff you can put into the game, the more than encourages them.  Being in a parking lot is good, but being in a parking lot next to a big green minivan and a blue SUV with oversized tires, with everything looking weirdly orange because of the buzzing parking lot light is even better.  It gives people a real picture of the world that they can use, and they tend to come up with more of their own ideas.  My players started saying things like, "Oh, yeah, parking lot -- is there an abandoned shopping cart nearby?" and then using the cart (which I made up on the spot, since they were being creative) to ram the bad guys or create a distraction.  Or they'd come up with good ideas for cover -- most hotel hallways have indentations and extruded columns to break up the monotony, so they ducked behind those after asking me if they existed.2) Non-combat stuff has been nice.  I've come up with some good mysteries, and the PCs have put things together rather handily.  To make something interesting, I try to come up with a crime scene that has some easy-to-find stuff, some hard-to-find stuff, and some stuff that only becomes findable if you have the right ranks in some other skill.  Then I allow Investigate checks with increasing bonuses for finding more evidence, and better results give more information.The only tough thing has been computers.  I've got geeks for players, and so they were initially trying to do things that didn't seem entirely covered by the rules with their Computer Use checks.  Since one guy has max'd his ranks, though, I'm inclined not to be a jerk about it.  I pretty much ask "How do you think that should be covered under the rules?", and trust his judgment, and then we roll.  The nice thing is that this scales with player ability.  Someone who doesn't know computers can just "hack in and get the password", while someone like my player says "I'm going to see if he's got Spyware that's been recording keystrokes and tie that in timewise with the cached images of the local bank website to see if I can determine what his password is.  (rolls absurdly well) Orrrr I'll just go to the bank website right now and see if he was one of those dummies who had "always remember my password for this website" selected on his computer.  Yep.  We're in."</blockquote>

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