Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jahydin" data-source="post: 8985329" data-attributes="member: 6984869">[USER=75787]@GrahamWills[/USER] Well said, thanks for taking the time to post.[USER=6747251]@Micah Sweet[/USER] It's not deciding in advance, it's deciding on the spot.Feel like everyone is making a ton of worst case projections concerning how, how often, and for what reasons people would change up combat. I'll try and throw out a few more examples so if people still want to be grumpy they can at least be grumpy for real reasons:Fighter rolls max damage on the goblin, smashing it to smithereens. The two goblins next to it freak out and begin to run away...No rules about morale, but makes the Fighter feel like a badass, gets the party laughing, and everyone is excited for what could happen next.Walking down a corridor, a wandering giant spider is rolled. It's quickly dispatched the first round, but everyone is on guard now. The Wizard player perks up about how he's reading his Fireball spell. This excites everyone at the table as I congratulate the Wizard on his quick thinking as the cluster of spiders make their way around the bend...There was only one spider, but the players engagement, excitement, and quick thinking made me change the random encounter on the fly. I make a note to roll on a random treasure table next time their in an empty room as well.A group of powerful wizards are escorting a prisoner to their tower. The low-level party is outraged and charge the wizards, despite a warning of the strong magic that fills the air. One wizard looks back and with a quick motion explodes the head of a random PC. The rest of the party scrambles away and proceeds to come up with a better plan to free that slave...No matter how well they rolled, this was going to be a TPK, which didn't really excite me as much as a gory, punchy narrative. Initiative and Save Rolls would have completely killed the momentum, so went right for the kill. Point was made, lessons were learned, and the game gets to keep moving along.These are all quick examples of manipulating combat off the top of my head. All have to be done with the right game and party in mind; for instance, the last one would fit right into LotFP during a Halloween one-shot. Also, it has to be done sparingly. Combat is already fun as is, all this does is add spice when it's really important. That takes experience on how to read a room, knowing your players, how to improvise, and how to bluff. Like a street magician, the bluffing is not to hide deception, but to keep players wondering when its happening.Which brings me to another thought: don't ever tell them! If you want to brag about how cool your improvised scene was, do that with your GM buddies! At the very least, wait until the end of the campaign. Maybe a "final session" where you just talk about the campaign and questions can be answered over beers. Hmmm, that sounds pretty fun actually...</blockquote>

Verification