WotC articles on GMing

[KidSnide]

I don't think there is 'one true' way to gm, so if these ideas work for tge writer and his group that is great. But personally the tricks he describes don't appeal to me as a player or GM.

...

As a GM i have no problem with pcs veering off in a wild direction or characters dying at an inconvenient moment. That is all part of the fun.

I'll agree with you that there is no "one true way" to GM, and I'll also agree with you that a good GM won't fudge to keep the story going in the particular way the GM envisioned.

That having been said, I think it's worth providing a contrary view for purposes of threat balance, if nothing else. In the games I prefer to play, a GM might decide to fudge the dice (or, better, the decisions of the NPCs) to prevent a PC from permanently dying when the player didn't do anything to put his character in an unusually risky situation. I don't favor PCs (or, worse, NPCs!) having total plot immunity, but I think it's important for the game to feel fair, as opposed to arbitrary and random. At least for me, the feeling of fairness sometimes requires human intervention.

To create a hypothetical example, you could add a rule to D&D that says: "Every time you sit down at the table, you roll four d10s. If they all come up zero, you die." (This rule would be a little less stupid if you were playing in a world under constant meteor bombardment.) That rule is fair, in the sense that it is applied even-handedly, but many players would think it felt unfair if it happened to a character in which they had invested several years of gaming.

There's nothing wrong with running a "life is cheap" game, but it's also reasonable to want an alternative, in which PC death only really takes place if the player decided to take an unusual risk to accomplish an important goal.

-KS

 

[S'mon]

You may have misread, er, the entire explanation. It didn't fail after 3 sessions - they "played for a while, long enough for the characters to hit 3rd level"... which, given they had 1-2 hour lunchtime sessions, one would assume took more than 3 sessions alone.

Similarly, the failure was not in the advice or the planning or, from the sounds of it, anything other than scheduling alone. A one hour session at lunchtime was hard to make work, especially in a campaign more focused on character goals and background.

But... sure, feel free to mock him for the campaign falling apart and make assumptions about his GMing skills and players, that seems a much better attitude.

Even if you're right (and I expect you are), he spent many months designing a campaign that wasn't even intended to get to the meat of it (Gates of Firestorm Peak adaptation, AIR) until Paragon tier, and the very lengthy descriptions of this was presented as a how-to guide for other DMs, so to have it fold at 3rd is pretty shocking. The campaign was a failure, he said so himself, and I stand by my view that that whole series actually exemplifies how not to prepare for a campaign.

He did put some good DMing advice taken from the 3.5e Dungeons & Dragons for Dummies in the 4e DMG, though.

 

[Janx]

Actually, I've seen adventures from WoTC that actually are decently written adventures that run off in multiple directions. I actually picked up the 3.5E Shadowdale book because its premise was one where you were trying to incite a riot to overthrow an occupation by doing activities to actually gain infamy in the city itself. It was open ended in the regard that what you did to actually gain favor was up to the party.

I suspect, from a sandbox perspective "its premise was one where you were trying to " is a bad thing.

a correcter form would be "Shadowdale is being occupied. What do you want to do?"

I like me stories and plots. But ultimately, I trust making a plot and expectation of PC action made up by me as I know my PCs, than buying something off the shelf and getting stuck with it requiring something about my players motivations that does not exist.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Actually, I've seen adventures from WoTC that actually are decently written adventures that run off in multiple directions. I actually picked up the 3.5E Shadowdale book because its premise was one where you were trying to incite a riot to overthrow an occupation by doing activities to actually gain infamy in the city itself. It was open ended in the regard that what you did to actually gain favor was up to the party.

I notice you didn't quote my second paragraph. HS1 is exactly the way you describe. You have a goal - and a lot of ways of achieving it. What isn't and has a lot of trouble trying to be is an adventure path. War of the Burning Sky and Zeitgeist give it a good try but even they fail short. (Kingmaker is, when push comes to shove, simply a reskinned six level megadungeon.)

 

[pemerton]

Make up a damn good location/s, and weave the POTENTIAL for many different stories in that location. Instead there seems to be this unwritten rule that a story must be presented from beginning to end in a fair to enormous amount of detail and the players merely connect the dots going from place to place, all the while having the DM work overtime to make it SEEM like it's * not* a game of connect the dots.

You've just described the difference between a sandbox and an adventure path.

<snip>

you're looking for settings and small open ended modules and then things spiralling off.

I think there are options for adventure design other than campaign setting to be sandboxed, and adventure path to be railroaded. And I think Steve Townshend is pointing towards this sort of possibility in some of the remarks I quoted in the OP.

In particular, what he is talking about adding to a location, and its inhabitants, are conflicts into which the PCs are hooked from the get-go; the module would then support the GM in using the resolution of those conflicts to drive towards some sort of crescendo, although what that crescendo would be would depend on how the players had engaged the module (ie no "connecting the dots" to a predetermined ending).

Some of the Penumbra modules for 3E (In the Belly of the Beast, The Last Dance, The Ebon Mirror) show how you might approach D&D adventure design in this sort of way, but in the case of a 4e adventure the skill challenge mechanics suggest new ways of trying to structure the adventure and give the players, rather than the GM, greater control over the way it resolves.

EDIT:

ultimately, I trust making a plot and expectation of PC action made up by me as I know my PCs, than buying something off the shelf and getting stuck with it requiring something about my players motivations that does not exist.

This is the challenge. Steve Townshend talks about the difficulties in taking his approach out of a convention game with pregens and into a home game. But D&D - and the PCs that players come up with - covers some pretty standard tropes. I think a lot more could be done than currently is to build modules that hook onto the range of tropes that are common in D&D play.

 

[pemerton]

In the games I prefer to play, a GM might decide to fudge the dice (or, better, the decisions of the NPCs) to prevent a PC from permanently dying

In my view there is a big difference between fudging a die roll, and making a decision about NPC behaviour or motivation, where the mechanics expressly leave those matters in the hands of the GM.

That's why, in my OP, I expressed my disagreement with the fudging advice, but my agreement with the "changing the facts" advice - for example, I don't think there's anything wrong with retrospectively coming up with a reason for an NPC to take a PC prisoner, rather than kill him/her outright. In fact, in a lot of situations (depending on group playstyle preferences, mostly) that would be good GMing.

 

[Drammattex]

:mild rant: I think the module designers at WOTC really just don't get it, Regardless of edition.

They need to go back and look at classics like B4, X1, T1, I1, etc. Make up a damn good location/s, and weave the POTENTIAL for many different stories in that location. Instead there seems to be this unwritten rule that a story must be presented from beginning to end in a fair to enormous amount of detail and the players merely connect the dots going from place to place, all the while having the DM work overtime to make it SEEM like it's * not* a game of connect the dots. Frankly, the adventure paths from any company fall into this category.

Doesn't make any frakkin sense to my grognardy ways.

/mild rant

The Madness at Gardmore Abbey is precisely what you describe (old school location with potential, without merely being a sandbox).

The con adventure for PAX, The Siege of Gardmore Abbey, is the opposite (character, plot, and story based).

Though related, each takes a different approach to D&D adventuring. "Siege" more by necessity, being a 4-hour con experience, and for how it attempts to give context/perspective to the super-adventure. "Madness," on the other hand, takes the old school approach you desire; nevertheless, there's good solid story there for those that want/choose it.

My 2 cents: there are different kinds of adventures written for different types of audiences, and different audiences are going to prefer different types of adventures. It's important to know what kind of adventure you're writing--what you're trying to do with that adventure--when you start. Me, I prefer character and story, but I greatly prefer to improvise that stuff at home rather than try to make it work in print; nevertheless, I'll always try to make it work in print.

As mentioned above, Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale is essentially a sandbox and a monster manual rolled into one. I like it because the plots kind of write themselves from the seeds planted in the monster entries--but all those plots are going to be different depending on who's reading/interpreting the entry. As a homebrew guy, I love MVNV for that kind of utility. I don't mean to sound vain--I just really like that book.

 

[Janx]

This is the challenge. Steve Townshend talks about the difficulties in taking his approach out of a convention game with pregens and into a home game. But D&D - and the PCs that players come up with - covers some pretty standard tropes. I think a lot more could be done than currently is to build modules that hook onto the range of tropes that are common in D&D play.

Well, you do more reading of other people's articles than I do. What are the "pretty standard tropes"

I'd be curious to see if most GMs here, on seeing them would be able to say "yeah, if I had hooks for those tropes, my players would probably bite"

For instance, I avoid GMing for an evil party. I suspect sandbox play better suits them, as they are prone to do whatever the heck appeals to their whim.

Whereas, a good party is pretty easy to prepare some hooks for in comparison. all you need is a damsel in distress, and the Dudley Dorights show up. I'm exagerating, but the concept tends to pan out.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well, you do more reading of other people's articles than I do. What are the "pretty standard tropes"

I'd be curious to see if most GMs here, on seeing them would be able to say "yeah, if I had hooks for those tropes, my players would probably bite"

For instance, I avoid GMing for an evil party. I suspect sandbox play better suits them, as they are prone to do whatever the heck appeals to their whim.

Whereas, a good party is pretty easy to prepare some hooks for in comparison. all you need is a damsel in distress, and the Dudley Dorights show up. I'm exagerating, but the concept tends to pan out.

I gm lots of evil parties (usually in modern settings) and generally find I can use greed, prestige, ambition, etc as carrots. But really (whether the party is good or evil) i think it usually works best to tailor the hook (and the adventure) to the individual characters.

 

[Steel_Wind]

But then I don't think I've ever seen anything to indicate that Stephen Radney-MacFarland is actually a particularly good DM. I guess his players are happy, unlike that other WoTC writer who spent years on articles advising DMs how to create a campaign, only to eventually reveal that his own campaign had folded after 3 apathetic sessions!

Just a note: while Stephen used to be at WotC, he is now a full-time developer with Paizo. He has a pretty long history in this game now -- and whether you agree or don't agree with his article, his shares in "RPG Street Cred" were issued long ago and are fully paid. He's a nice guy, too.

His work on Living Greyhawk was greatly admired in the 3.xx era and there is nothing which Stephen has done or said to earn the implied scorn in your post for his DMing skills. Ease off man.