Running my first gestalt game...

[Quertus]

So, I'm looking to run a game for a group age 7-13. They all independently choose to create evil characters, and their concepts sounded like they would involve a lot of splat-diving to create... Until I considered using gestalt.

I've never run a gestalt game before, so any advice or wisdom would be appreciated.

Currently, we're looking at the following:

The Assassin: Elf Rogue // Fighter.

The Sorceress: Elf Warlock // Sorcerer.

The Unholy Warrior: Elf Crusader // Psion.

The Ogre: Ogre // ???.

The Sorceress has a unicorn-horn headband that acts as an Amulet of Emergency Healing, and an onyx focus to let them animate their dead cat.

The Ogre's player says that they want their ogre to "eat people", so any build ideas that will give them Swallow Whole?

The Assassin is planning to mix ranged and twf.

The Unholy Warrior is planning to back up melee with Suggestion.

The whole party may end up equipped with Elven Cloaks.

Any other thoughts for things that will help this party, or any individual members thereof? (EDIT: or, obviously, advice for me running the game?)

[Bronk]

So, I'm looking to run a game for a group age 7-13. They all independently choose to create evil characters, and their concepts sounded like they would involve a lot of splat-diving to create... Until I considered using gestalt.

I've never run a gestalt game before, so any advice or wisdom would be appreciated.

Currently, we're looking at the following:

The Assassin: Elf Rogue // Fighter.

The Sorceress: Elf Warlock // Sorcerer.

The Unholy Warrior: Elf Crusader // Psion.

The Ogre: Ogre // ???.

The Sorceress has a unicorn-horn headband that acts as an Amulet of Emergency Healing, and an onyx focus to let them animate their dead cat.

The Ogre's player says that they want their ogre to "eat people", so any build ideas that will give them Swallow Whole?

The Assassin is planning to mix ranged and twf.

The Unholy Warrior is planning to back up melee with Suggestion.

The whole party may end up equipped with Elven Cloaks.

Any other thoughts for things that will help this party, or any individual members thereof? (EDIT: or, obviously, advice for me running the game?)

Okay! Here's where I'm coming from:

Now, my friends and I played Shadowrun 2nd and 3rd editions in College, and we played Earthdawn for a few years just after college. It had been over a decade since we played any of either of them, but a couple of years ago my friend's wife contacted me and told me it would be cool to run a Shadowrun game for my other friend for his birthday, and all the people who used to play who are still living within driving distance would be there, as well as their kids. Would I run a game?

I agreed, and thought long and hard about what I would run. I looked at the rules, and realized I didn't remember anything but the bare basics. I read through them, and realized, that I still hadn't gotten everything back. If I was still having trouble after a few weeks, there was no way that anyone else would be able to follow along on game day. Heck, back in college, in full and fresh knowledge of the rules, people would spend a week making their characters!

Not only that, but when would we ever play again? I wanted this game to be the most Shadowrunny game ever.

So, I spent a month paring all the rules of Shadowrun down to one page.

Then, I constructed a story that would have minimal interactions with the rules.

Then I slowly made characters for everyone. I made sure that everything they could do was spelled out in easy chart form, bolded and highlighted.

Then took one of the characters and ran through a into story game with my wife as a shakedown.

On game day, after the first maybe 10 minutes for the adults to get the feel of it back, we were on our way.

So, that day, I was expecting to play with 3 out of 4 of the kids, two boys around 12 years old, and one girl around 14ish.

The first thing that happened, before the game, was that the older girl bagged out. NBD! There were still plenty of players, and I let her know that she could jump back in at any time (she declined). So be prepared for that sort of thing.

Out of all the characters I made, no one chose a magic user, so to my relief I was able to hand-wave any magic stuff that went on.

During the game, I noticed that both of the kids needed a bit more instant gratification than the adults. I was lucky, because for the most part their minds were blown by the game, which I'll admit, was totally awesome, but still. One kid really wanted his giant troll ganger to smash two guys heads together, but his dad was all 'settle down'. I made sure to put him in a position to do just that soon after, and his eyes went all big. It was totally awesome.

It was similar a year later with Earthdawn. Those rules are inscrutable, and I simplified them, then made everyone's characters (it wasn't a secret this time). It took a month or two again. One of the kids, now 13, wanted to play a blood elf wizard. Dang.

This time, making their characters took much, much longer. I started everyone at 7th circle, because the first few circles are always bupkiss, resulting in boring, hours long slogs against hopped up ostriches and the like... that's one of the big reasons we kept getting bored of the game way back when, and again I wanted to make this game as Earthdawny as humanly possible. You know how hard it is to balance Earthdawn characters? It's insane! Melee types usually get maybe two attacks and a shield bash if they're lucky, but beastmasters might have 7 or 8 super frenzy attacks! And of course (awesomely, don't get me wrong here) the 4th kid, a girl who was probably 11, wanted to play this time, and as a windling beastmaster with a cat. It took a while to make they were all mostly evened out with attacks and damage and so on... I had to bend a bunch of rules to do it, and make a new class, move some talents around from other classes, but it had to be done.

Then came the wizard! If you've ever played Earthdawn, you'll know that magic is just the worst. You have to keep track of spell matrices, normal ones and various special ones, and if you ever want to cast something, you have to hunt it down in a book, roll to tie a thread to your spell matrix, hope you pass, then roll to cast, and hope you pass again. Playing what should have been a fun spellcasting class is what drove this kid's mom away from the game! So, presuming correctly that he hadn't actually read how to play or read any of the spells, I made sure his character had a shortened spell list that fit on one page, then made certain he had enough talents and magic items to give him enough spell matrices to cast all of his combat spells in one round instead of two or three.

Then, on game day, I powered through the equivalent of two full campaigns... which was great, because of the 3 kids who played, one was fine, one was super sick and only played the first half of the first game and the second half of the second game, and one was at dance class and only caught the second part. I reworked the plot so it all made sense, and it worked great. I avoided a meltdown with the younger girl when she decided she didn't like that she ended up with non-matching dice, but in the nick of time I remembered that I had my new DnD My Little Pony dice with me, and it all worked out.

Okay! So, here's my advice for running the game, based on a couple of games I ran that included both kids and their parents. The games were Shadowrun and Earthdawn, but they both went well, and I think the advice would transfer.

Because these are kids, and in some cases very little kids, I suggest making the characters for them... take their input, but you should do 100% of the work. Not just because they're kids though - everyone's different, I'm sure - but because they will have slim to no grasp of the rules, because even if they do you're going gestalt which even confuses people on these boards all the time, and because it'll eat into your game time leaving none left to play. You can also make it so that they all have fun, flavorful, and useful characters to play.

By all means, start them out with cool magic items, but not during play, that'll just confuse them or at least slow the game down. Let them know what they have, tell them that they're already incorporated into their characters, and give them a list of their powers. If they have any at will type powers, put those in bold.

When you give them their character sheets, make sure to highlight and generally list out all their major options.

Now for the ogre character. For a regular player who wants to eat his enemies, I'd say they could either go Dusk Giant or Barghest to get big benefits out of it, or they could take the Snatch Trophy feat, which lets them cut pieces off of their enemies upon defeat, which could then be eaten, but you know what? Wouldn't that horrify at least one of the kids? Or worse in some ways, their parents? My advice is to just tell them that they can eat them up after combat and leave it to their imaginations. Besides, the Dusk Giant and Barghest monsters would have to continually mess with their character sheets, which you won't want. Also, if the kid does go ogre, then just have their other side be a simple fighter for some easy feat based static bonuses so they don't get confused.

For dealing with the game, I'd suggest not ever letting it get bogged down. If they get bored, your game will lose players. Keep reminding them of what their options are. If one kid wants to wander off in the middle of battle, maybe have them find interesting things that'll end up helping (like being able to trigger a long forgotten trap or something).

Remembering the rules won't be an issue for you, but at least at first they'll just see a bunch of meaningless dice and numbers floating around. I'd keep it as simple as possible. Be ready to help them with their dice rolls, and even finding dice of the proper size. The ogre could be ready with sets of dice, his d20 and his damage dice. Keep the magic user's spell list simple, with a lot of save or dies and so on, and simplified explanations.

Let them mow through lots of level 1 mooks before focusing on a boss fight, so they have fun 'winning' for a while before a slightly tougher fight. If things get bogged down, just have their attacks hit and be effective.

Don't kill their characters, I think that's a good way to turn them off the game forever.

Do your best to reign in gross descriptions - even if they don't mind, their parents might and might not let them play again. Plus, even if they don't mind at the time, descriptions that might not bother a jaded older player might give the kid nightmares later.

DM a game that plays to each of their strengths, so that they get what they came for. But, be ready for some of the players to not show up or not want to play on game day. Not much to be done, you just have to be prepared!

Hope this helps!

[Quertus]

@Bronk - wow, that's a lot of really good advice! This isn't my first rodeo running a game for kids, but it's good to hear some of these things again. One if the biggest mistakes I've made in the past is trying to force too much authorship on young players. I'm fully prepared to just build their characters for them this time around, but the Assassin has requested access to the books to do the work himself. He even commented that he is likely to minmax his character, which will make him more reliant on the party. I was rather impressed with his self- and metagame- awareness - especially since this will be the first RPG any of them have played.

But, while I've run games for kids, I've never run a gestalt game before, so that's where my focus was on creating this thread. Well, that, and a few specific build questions. Because, like you said, minimizing gore is a plus, and so I figured "swallow whole" would be the cleanest (and coolest!) way for the Ogre to "eat people".

[Florian]

Oh, well, Gestalt rules. Ok, three things to watch out for:

1) Using Gestalt rules can alter the class balance and functions you might be used to from your regular games. Active/Passive combat get stronger, Active/Active combos stay at their level, Passive/Passive combos get weaker and there're dysfunctional combos that manage to shut themselves down by actually blocking down abilities (think full caster and barbarian).

2) The Economy of Actions is even more important. Active/Active combos have to switch and can rarely use both at the same time. Your Warlock//Sorcerer will be able to either cast or blast, that's basically it. If you'd use Pathfinder, you'd find such nightmare combos like Paladin//Summoner or Cleric//Spiritualist, both dedicated pet classes, which break the economy of actions hard. Apparently, not the case with your kids.

3) Adjusting CR. That one is tricky. Gestalt classes are tougher and more versatile, but their math still scales to the regular class levels. Instead of scaling CR up, apply a simple template fix on critters so they have +1hp per HD and +2 on to hit/damage and saves.

[Bronk]

@Bronk - wow, that's a lot of really good advice! This isn't my first rodeo running a game for kids, but it's good to hear some of these things again. One if the biggest mistakes I've made in the past is trying to force too much authorship on young players. I'm fully prepared to just build their characters for them this time around, but the Assassin has requested access to the books to do the work himself. He even commented that he is likely to minmax his character, which will make him more reliant on the party. I was rather impressed with his self- and metagame- awareness - especially since this will be the first RPG any of them have played.


Thanks! It's cool too that your assassin player is so interested in the bits and pieces of the game. Perhaps a future DM in the making?

For the ogre... you could give them a template to make them dragon type, a bite attack, and huge size, then give them the Snatch/Improved Snatch/Snatch and Swallow feat chain from Draconomicon which would be RAW. It would probably be easier to make a template up for them, maybe 'half purple worm'? It's one feature could be that everything counts as 'delicious' to you (a reverse of the commoner flaw from Dragon 330 that makes you a size smaller for the purposes of being swallowed). Or you could just grant Swallow Whole as a special feat, and say it's only an easy thing to do against small critters. They might have fun making special rolls to try to swallow bigger and bigger things...

And if I forgot to say any one thing up in my first post, it would have been 'err towards leniency', but it sounds like you've got this.



But, while I've run games for kids, I've never run a gestalt game before, so that's where my focus was on creating this thread. Well, that, and a few specific build questions. Because, like you said, minimizing gore is a plus, and so I figured "swallow whole" would be the cleanest (and coolest!) way for the Ogre to "eat people".


Oh, well, Gestalt rules. Ok, three things to watch out for: (All great observations)

I've run gestalt games, but so far it's either been a case of players toughening up a weak but interesting class with a more boring but tougher one (or the other way around), or wanting to be more self sufficient, so trying to get magic, healing, and melee together. It's all worked out for me so far. With you doing most of the character creation, you can just make sure they have more fun things to do and are harder for you to accidentally kill.

It'll be interesting to see what the assassin player comes up with though! With the ogre already being one side of a gestalt, he might just start template stacking...