Will run Madness at Gardmore Abbey - "Siege" or other pre-story

[Drammattex]

*LAST* Question: when you first talked about whether PC's achieved their goals, I understand it as there would be a related consequence in Madness. With what you say here, it seems that the consequence in actually in Siege. Is this accurate? I will try to make the consequence relate to Madness as that is the world that the PC's will be spending most of their time in. But could you clarify this for me?

BTW, I'll be following your blog now too. Thanks for your input - I think others will find this stuff useful as well.

Yes indeed, buddhafrog. Here's Sir Nordan's consequences, since we've been talking about him.

Sir Nordan
You swore to protect the people of Nerath, no matter the cost. You achieve your goal by helping the refugees escape, whether by bloodying or slaying the dragon.
Success: Your honor restored, you are reunited with your family and accepted back into the ranks of the knights of Nerath. If you survived, you live out your days as a distinguished general in the king’s army. Regardless, your legend reaches every realm in the empire.
Failure: You have survived, but at what cost? The Nentir Vale will soon sink beneath an overwhelming tide of evil. You return to Nerath forgiven for past transgressions, but there is no peace for you there. Eventually you travel back to the Vale as a knight errant, the rest of your days dedicated to fighting the inexorable darkness.

Fame and fortune or doom and gloom!

I'm tempted to say that the best stuff on that blog is the stuff near the beginning, especially the Strongwood posts and the earlier RPG Philosophy posts. The longer the blog went on, the more I felt like I was repeating myself, and the later posts are probably more reflective/personal than strictly "game design from the perspective of the storyteller" type stuff. The blog began before I was freelancing for WotC (until about spring 2009).

Right now we're playing a hacked version of Star Frontiers, which gives me a lot of freedom to experiment with game design (we've changed the rules so much that it's now Star Frontiers in name only) and it's the most open game I've ever played in terms of group storytelling and players building the world--even in the midst of adventures. Once we get that rolling again I'll post more about it. Everything we're doing there is applicable to D&D.

 

[Drammattex]

You clearly have a wonderful grasp of that area of the game, I'll look forward to that. Also, for people who haven't read it, there's some good stuff in the later questions of this interview.

Ah, yes! Thanks, Jools. Dave passed me some great questions.

The most important one, imo, is the one about describing the action from the perspective of each character you're addressing. In a way that's where I was going with the "Siege" character write-ups, but it's a DM tool I find invaluable (when I remember to do it!). Oh yeah, the "3 things happen" bit too. I still live by that (again, when I can remember to do it). 3 is the magic number.

I learned the character narrative thing from Mike Kuciak, who used to write articles for Dragon/Dungeon. We used to wait tables together at Ed Debevic's. His success writing articles for the magazines inspired me to give it another shot myself. I'm not sure how much conscious thought Mike put into his DMing style. He certainly never addressed the fact that he DMed this way; I just noticed, after a time, that he always tried to point things out that only my character would notice, or tried to narrate from my perspective. The other thing he was good at was huge, cinematic action set pieces. No surprise that he moved to Los Angeles to pursue screenwriting.

Mike was as phenomenal a player as he was a DM. He (again without actually addressing it) showed me how to successfully play a Neutral Evil character in a game. Silas Kray was Mike's sociopathic rogue. He cared for no one but himself, and assassinated (or commanded the assassination of) anyone who stood in his way _except the other PCs_. Had those PCs been NPCs, they would have died swiftly and without mercy. But Mike made a conscious choice to set his role-playing parameters so that he never contradicted or fought with the other players/PCs. In this way, the other players were able to sort of appreciate and admire his horrible, horrible character without making the game about inter-party conflict.

Anyway, Mike doesn't get much into RPGs lately (except for a rare stint with Satine Phoenix last fall), but he's a great storyteller on both sides of the screen and I learned a lot from him.