Reddit GM Advice Thread
How do you people make up the story?
Factions in a Tomb
Heartbreaking question: Will I be a bad DM?
How do you people make up the story?
I'm trying to hone my answer to this with resources and links that will eventually be expanded into an article of some kind.
I see several articles like this every week.
What would you include in your answer?
Factions in a Tomb
Sometimes it is just fun to brainstorm and make shit up. Even if someone else doesn't use it - I might.
I feel like there is a fun adventure in those factions.
Heartbreaking question: Will I be a bad DM?
I'm not sure my answer was perfect or that there is even a perfect answer out there.
The only way to learn is to get at that table with friends and let those dice hit the table.
That was last week's post; I'll post this week's post in the next few days.
I'd love to hear your POV on any of the above.
@Judd I don't really make up stories any more. I come up with a situation, a handful of factions or powerful individuals who all want something, reasons why letting those factions get what they want is bad (or, if it's good, why it will fail) and then a sort of overarching idea of how things will play out if the characters don't get involved.
Then the PCs arrive and everything goes to hell.
Same.
I don't use the word, story, about my prep (or at all, really) but didn't want to quibble about that with a new gamer. But maybe I should've done so. I get it.
Yup, your prep sounds familiar.
@Judd Yeah, if someone's new you don't want to drop on them with NO, YOU'RE WRONG, you want to frame it more gently than that. To boil down my prep still further, I think maybe the advice would be to work out what various people/groups want, and have them pursue that. If those goals are bad, that's something for the PCs to try and stop. If those goals are good, then there's bound to be an obstacle or two for the PCs to help clear. Voila, loads of stuff for PCs to do.
@Judd (And the secret technique, which is that if the goals have good *and* bad consequences, you can get plenty of roleplay out of working out who to support and who to oppose and why, as well as the gameplay of actually doing the thing.)
@Judd Honestly, I would start by asking them whether they really need to make up a story, and suggest that they instead need to make up a situation that is tense and unstable and ready to turn into a story when the players / PCs start interacting with it.
And then I would suggest asking the following questions, which I steal from Trollbabe: What's at stake? Who are the main NPCs involved? What do they want? What do they want from the PCs? What will happen if the PCs do nothing?
Yup, that conversation about the word, story, is probably too complex for a reddit interaction.
But I totally agree and dig your use of Trollbabe techniques.
@Judd I agree with your answer on reddit.
I try to differentiate between a prepped plot and the emergent story. I don't to the former. For the later, I list some rough Ideas, bullet points for where things could go, what I'd like to see. (I use your Context, Cool Shit & Consequences for that).
Most importantly though (for my GMing style), I prep a list of leading/loaded questions, to get a lot of input from my players. I combine this with my light prep and then let the story evolve from there.
(How....story?)@Judd I would say play with a subconscious attempt at discovering a story's theme, like feeling around for a yet unknown thing, in a dark room. And I'm fairly certain that most rpgs do a terrible job of story, in the traditional sense. I think a good attempt at a story is giving a player character or characters, a problem that can't be fixed right away for hopefully obvious reasons.
@Judd also, not falling back on dice to resolve conflict or generate conflict.
@Judd I mean it depends on the game, but story is about building tension then usually finally resolution, not tension/release/tension/release, which is more like joke telling, or music making. I guess I just haven't seen the whole juggling multiple stories thing done well. To answer your question, I use them as a crutch, pretty much why anyone else uses them. They're an innocuous arbitrator. Too small to really offend. I think dice work for games because they're a stand-in for complexity.
@Judd for games like rpgs, I haven't a clue what they're good at, other then being mostly inoffensive. I think you'd get better results through anonymous consensus.
@Judd So, I think games tend to abstract through making the big - small, and story abstracts(life)by making the small - big. I might be wrong?
@Judd and that "stand-in for complexity", is often where story would develop. Dice or random elements in any game, are a way to add the illusion of complexity, without bogging down play.
I'm going to just call them out as they occur to me. I might have different answers in a week.
I make up the story seed, and am open to players helping write the actual story. If I get too attached to my plot, I either nudge them (less interactivity), or flail when my ideas run out.
A good faction in a tomb would be the air freshener lobby. Got to get some of that Dracula money!
And if you run games, you will sometimes fall short. Just be open to learning, and you'll get better.