WotC articles on GMing

[S'mon]

I think I might have been a bit harsh in this thread. Feel free to think less of me.

 

[pemerton]

What are the "pretty standard tropes"

I'm thinking of things like the PC with the mysterious mentor; with the relatives/love interest/etc back home in the village; who escaped from slavery (or whose family have been sold into slavery); the hunter/tracker/ranger (often an elf or half-elf); the stalwart dwarf and/or paladin and/or cleric; etc. In 4e we could add the mysterious PC with a pace (an invoker, a tiefling, a warlock, perhaps a tiefling warlock-invoker!).

The characters that the system and the default world build naturally, without having to push against them.

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.

In my experience, though, on its own this tends to produce shallow NPCs with little investment on the part of the players.

And I think it is bad for the game if adventures are essentialy indisinguishable, except that the payoff for this one is rescuing Damsel A, and the payoff from this other one is thwarting evil mastermind B. As I read his article, Steve Townshend is talking about designing adventures where the actual content of the adventure, and not just the payoff that the GM narrates once the adventure is over, speaks to the conerns of the players as expressed via their PCs.

I would like to see more of an effort to incorporate this into 4e's adventure design. Thinking about the way common fantasy tropes can be seeded into adventures - not just as hooks but as central to the adventure and the way it unfolds - might be a start for this.

 

[TerraDave]

I think I might have been a bit harsh in this thread.

You weren't.

Perkins series (linked above) is the best DM advice one they have had on DDI. Nicelly drawn from his own interesting and innovate campaign. But he is the DM to the stars afterall.