NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5180602" data-attributes="member: 26473">That's actually a pretty good primer, Celebrim.A couple of points:Yes, they do.The <a href="http://www.mythic.wordpr.com/page14/page9/page9.html" target="_blank">Mythic Game Master Emulator</a> is a really exciting new approach to randomization in tabletop roleplaying games.I don't generate all of my random encounters on the spot; I'll use the various tables and such to prepare lists of encounters before or between game-nights, then simply pull from the list of prepared encounters. For example, for the Traveller game, I prepared a list of scout ship encounters; each time a random roll called for a scout ship, I'd just use the next one on the list, then replenish the list in the weeks between games. This keeps up the flow of the game, without breaks for lots of dice rolling, but still maintaining the stochastic nature of the game experience. The prepped material is the basis for improvising the actual encounter during the game, so in the case of a scout ship, a few different rolls give me some ideas about what it's doing and why, and I can ad lib from there.This also makes prep fun, at least for me. It delivers unexpected results, which keeps the game (and the referee) from getting stuck in a rut.I participated in <a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=506692" target="_blank">a lengthy thread</a> over at Big Purple a month or two ago about character backstories; in <a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=11921112&postcount=160" target="_blank">one of my posts</a>, I wrote, "A character backstory should place less emphasis to what your character's done and more emphasis to what your character's going to do." Ideally the adventurers are driving the action in pursuit of their goals, and if it all goes really well, you end up with this:That's my gaming-nirvana right there. It's the players taking initiative, thinking through how their characters get from where they are now to where they want to be, using both player and character skills and resources in developing strategy and tactics.Put another way, I'm not looking for player characters who want to uncover or join a conspiracy; I want them to be the conspirators.In some cases that's true; for my Traveller game, I was dealing with a setting which includes multiple worlds with tens of billions of people, so other than a few notes about high-ranking Imperial nobles and such most likely to be mentioned in a TAS newsfeed, NPC motivations were generated along with the encounters themselves.For <a href="http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/le-ballet-de-l-acier" target="_blank">my Flashing Blades game</a>, however, folding historical figures into the game means I know quite a bit about the motivations of quite a few of the NPCs, so I would call this one somewhat conditional.</blockquote>

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