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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8451738" data-attributes="member: 6790260">One thing that helps is that, of my initial players, three were long-term friends of many years, and two were more recent but about as close as we could be for the couple of years we'd known each other. Having a good familiarity with their preferences (and all of us being fans of FFXIV), I can draw on a common pool of references and information.Another is that, while I did pitch the initial base idea ("Arabian Nights" adventures), I specifically worked with each player to draw out their interests and perceptions of various things. So the Wizard was a bit of a philosopher (player has a classics degree) who wanted to divine the higher mysteries. I've mentioned the Bard player many times, an anthropologist who finds religious topics distant but fascinating, so I made them personal and "uncomfortable," not in a "this is bad" way but in a "I don't know how to respond" way--meaning any choices made would necessarily be a revelation for character and player both. (It also meant I've kept an intentionally vague hand with most answers: this is a world where faith is ultimately always required, because the true answers to many deep questions are simply not accessible to inviolate, independent verification.) Our Ranger gave me an excellent, thematic story for why a half-orc would have a troubled family history without any of the usual ick, and brought in a vastly interesting tension between different lifestyles and evolving social groups, so I fed back into that with the temptations of city life for the man of the wild, and life-upending changes of moral behavior among family members. Etc.Mostly, I've just been very lucky that I can make use of a lot of random facts I already know, or have just enough basic knowledge. Then at most a quick Google search during sessions (we play voice-only over Discord as we're all over the US) can get me the superficial expertise I need to make a vibrant situation.One of the best things, though, is that I've been very blessed that my players really like the NPCs I've included. I had had fears that, for example, the "secretly a gold dragon" NPC they met would get a poor reception, e.g. DMPC type stuff. Instead he's a trusted mentor and powerful but secret ally, and his fiancee--a talented Wizard, linguist, and artificer, but no adventurer--is a vital source of help to the party. I don't do too many distinct voices, but I do try to give different characters some subtle shades of inflection, cadence, and diction--like the time I gave a Jinnistani nobleman a "30s New York businessman" accent and the party instantly took a shine to him.Hopefully these examples can prove useful for your own games. Finding themes and concepts that your players value and exploring how they could be teased out in perhaps-surprising, and hopefully enlightening, ways is the key to my success. Well, that and apparently being pretty good at making likeable ally NPCs and hate-worthy arch-nemeses.</blockquote>

Verification