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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9357741" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Many of your questions already dive at the basic best practices, so I'll cover a side that's a bit more advanced but very important for long-term game stability: Mastering "yes, and...", "yes, but...", and "no, but...""Yes, and" builds on a foundation the player established, enhancing it further. As a canned example, a Fighter from a noble background establishes that her house has fallen on hard times and she wishes to restore it's good name; a "yes, and..." thing to do here is to make those hard times be the result of betrayal or sabotage from a rival noble house. Or, a player loves cooking IRL and likes being the party chef, and you build on this with cultural traditions that emphasize dining and meals as crucial forms of diplomacy (and make poisoning a scandalous offense against common decency)."Yes, but..." is the art of adding complications. Player wants to swing from a chandelier because he's playing a dashing Errol Flynn swashbuckler? Great! But there are reasonable risks associated with such feats. The key is "reasonable," and that usually cashes out as problems or setbacks which make more story, rather than problems which derail or impede progress. Think of it like water, flowing down a new path (maybe a glacial dam broke and now it's finding it's way to the ocean). If water hits a rock wall, it's not just gonna sit there. It will beat against that wall and push to the sides. Maybe it forms a lake there, but sooner or later it exceeds the barrier and keeps going. The story should be like the river, never standing stock still, always flowing in some direction, just maybe not the direction anyone originally expected/intended.Finally, "no, but..." is the art of digging down to find what players really care about, and making that happen, so long as it's appropriate. Some requests, at face value, are not acceptable for any of a zillion reasons. Maybe they contradict established lore, or badly break the tone of the game, or whatever. Instead of just putting a foot down and moving on, "no, but..." means listening to what the player asks for, asking questions, and trying to pry out the kernel of desire, because that can probably be fulfilled in other ways. As a real example I once had, a player once wanted to use a playbook that had a pet, but they (tacitly) felt the rules encouraged the GM to screw over the player, so they (explicitly) invoked a (perfectly valid) option to try to have a necromancer ghoul instead. Now...we had already established that necromancy is SUPER not okay in this setting. So I said "no, but..." by digging down and finding out what the player's real concern was. I made a promise not to do the things they feared the rules encouraged. Ultimately, the player chose a different option instead, but this was a major learning experience for me.Mastering these three techniques goes a long way to making "neo-trad" fun and engaging for both GMs and players.Yes. A full Session Zero is very important for this style. I argue Session Zero is good for every style, but it's especially important for this one, as it helps lay ground work and gives the GM lots of material to work with.Further, get interesting "weaknesses" in the literary sense. A weakness does not need to be a place where a character sucks at something. Instead, it is something that can be leveraged against them. Superman from the DCAU has several weaknesses, despite being as fast as the Flash, invulnerable (except near kryptonite or red sun radiation), having heat vision, etc.: he doesn't really trust other people to get jobs done because he knows how fragile everyone else is, he never trusts Lex Luthor, he has to help someone in need even if he knows it's bait, etc.Yes, keyword "some." Tension and needing to persuade your allies can be great, but being too fractious can really drag down the mood. Best to think of it like a team of friends; friends disagree quite often, but if they're barely getting along and often at each other's throats, then they aren't really friends anymore.You can also do other stuff too, things that you fancy. This is part of the importance of Session Zero: the GM has stuff they want to see in the game too, and that shapes player responses. Best way to think of it is, make scenes that you think would be cool to see, and that weave in stuff that would excite the players. Some of that will be stuff they told you. But some won't. My players still talk about the "scrollem" (spell scroll golem) that was their first major challenge in Jewel of the Desert, six years ago now. Nobody asked for such a golem, nor an ancient alchemy lab carved out of obsidian that absorbs blood. But they loved being there.If you wish to have more plot, you can. I tend to thread the needle on this and prepare situations, which the party can address or not address as they like. Always just a little more than they can tackle all at once. This ensures that some threats grow in magnitude while others get dealt with, and that way, there's a diegetic reason why the Cultists are harder to deal with than the Gangers (because the players slapped down the Gangs, but couldn't simultaneously harm the Cult, which was able to advance its plans to a new stage.) Gotta be light touch with this though; go too far and players can feel punished for the crime of not being able to play three adventures simultaneously.Sounds like a good foundation to me.</blockquote>

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