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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6049423" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 298: August 2002part 8/10DM's toolbox: Here's some advice we've seen before. If you want to improvise, make sure you have lots of general stuff prepared. Players are more likely to follow along and enjoy the game if you're playing the RPG equivalent of the blues, rather than atonal free jazz. This is why those old school modules have things like wandering monster encounters, rules for getting lost, and maps which extend outwards a fair way, so when the players wander a bit, they'll still run into something interesting, if not what you expected. As is the fashion, they have more specific bits of advice and directions on where to go and what to steal from than last time in issue 226, but they're also terser, and the approach here is somewhat more autocratic, seeing is the DM's responsibility to come up with stuff themselves rather than bouncing off the players. Overall, I think this is a case where multiple perspectives help you get a bigger picture, so I'm not complaining. The play's the thing: Robin continues on from last time, with a whole bunch of specific examples of how not to do it, and why they will probably cause problems at the gaming table. Characters getting too much or too little attention is the main one, showing up in quite a few different forms. This applies to the NPC's as well, with DMPC's once again firmly warned against. Also starting to be a problem is the ability in 3e of some character builds to be better than another at what they do and more flexible as well on top of that. (although that can certainly be a problem in the likes of GURPS as well) Finally, expectation gaps are the kind of thing that you can't really predict, unlike the other things here, and can only be solved by talking things out. While system can be an issue, the amount of enjoyment you get out of RPG'ing is far more dependent on the other people than the trappings. The big lesson seems to be that sharing is caring, which we should all remember from children's programs really, but so often forget. Fun is not a zero sum game. It can be created and destroyed, sharing it can mean you wind up with more each, it does not automatically increase in entropy in a closed system. Trying to treat the social sciences like hard ones is an approach doomed to failure. Are we crystal clear yet? Now play nice with each other, it's for your own good. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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