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Burley
2008-02-11, 01:06 PM
That's me. I'm gonna be the new DM.
Knowing my group, we'll be playing in Dawnforge, which will be easy enough since I have the published module, and the others don't. So, the first bits will be easy enough.

My plan is, after finishing the module, they somehow run themselves into the headquarters of The Circle (?), which is the Doppleganger's special-handshake club. It'll end up being a fight to the unconcious, they get captured and quasi-drafted. They'll be sent on some task to secure some relic or something.

Then, I plan on reviving some old characters from the last DF campaign we played: my old gnome shaper/packrat named Brick, and a centaur ranger/tempest who went by Rex. Brick came accross an intelligent sword (6th level character with a +18 enchanted sword...DM fiat for fantastic roleplaying) that started to control him. I'm gonna say that he is near becoming an immortal and it's the sword's fault that he's gone evil. Rex will end up recruiting the party to destroy the sword or Brick, whichever they can do first. (Big deal, since Brick and Rex were best friends in game, and Rex's player and I are best friends in real life. We had a fake rock band, and I wrote songs to sing in game about our adventures...LAME!)

Anyways, can I get some more ideas and some advice? I love the people on the boards and some of you are running FANTASTIC games from what I've read. Any help would be much obliged.

sonofzeal
2008-02-11, 01:36 PM
There are two schools of DMing, what I call the "strategic" and the "tactical".

Strategic DMs think in long-term campaign strategy. They know the plot the story is going to follow, they have fully statted out NPCs, and their gameworld is complex and richly developed. This is the style you generally hear about, and this is what almost every new DM tries for. The strength of this approach is richness and depth, but the weakness is that players will either manage to screw it up royally, find some loophole in the system, or just feel railroaded.

Tactical DMs fly by the seat of their pants, improvising and adapting even within a single "battle". They have a general idea what's going on and the key plot points, but adjust them as they go to fit the needs and actions of the group. This is my preferred play style, and has served me well. The strength is that the players get to feel more rewarded for the choices they make, and action can advance much more quickly, but the weakness is that you can often lose realism and detail.


I'll give you an example - I had this one mystery/adventure set in Eberron, involving a Tsochar plot to recover the Schema from the prepackaged adventure; the players don't know that the dude is inhabited, only that something strange is up. The first group I ran this for staked out the house, made friends with the butler (who I changed from an offhand reference to a significant plot point in the time it took them to say hello), and took things slow. The second group I ran it for went straight for the prize, breaking into the guy's house in the middle of the night... so I immediately (behind the screen of course) removed the butler and advanced the timeline a week or so, turning the once-pleasant house into a tomb of horrors in the time it took the PCs to get inside the door. Yes, I had a whole plan for a slow build, with the guy not even being possessed at first, but for that group it was more appropriate to jump straight to the endgame. So in the end I had the idea ("tsochar want the schema"), and the blueprint of the house, and a few character names and general personalities, but that's it. Everything else was adjusted on the fly based on what the PCs were doing.

batsofchaos
2008-02-11, 02:47 PM
I mostly agree with Sonofzeal, except I'd say that it's less like there are two types and more like there are polar extremes with plenty of shades of gray.

The extremes are "story based" and "event based." Opinions as to which is the better end of the spectrum can be fought until the end of time, but the truth is both extremes can either be exceptionally fun or exceptionally frustrating entirely dependent on a few important things to consider:

1) how the players expect the game to be run.

2) how the DM expects the players to play.

If people aren't on the same page, you can have some disasterous results.

For example: You have a very story-based DM. They devise a plot that has a scope of several years game-time, with an intricate series of events planned to fall as the PCs complete their quests. This doesn't NECESSARILY have to be rail-roading; these requirements can be as simple as when a certain NPC is killed or captured, and have a lucrative plot-hook entice the players to accomplish just that.

If the players are into this sort of game, the DM can craft a very rewarding story and fun game to play. The players might surprise him and make him need to think on his toes through a given adventure, but versatility like that is an important skill for DMs. The only alternative is overplanning everything, which can either be rewarding or frustrating, depending on the DM's personality.

Now imagine a set of players that, when presented with a trail of breadcrumbs, decide they want to go dungeon-delving instead. A bad DM is going to start up the steam engine on that train, and the players are going to get miffed. A good DM can plan out a quick dungeon and load up some monsters so the game doesn't come to a screeching halt, but that DM is still very frustrated. Nobody's happy.

On the reverse end of the spectrum, you have a DM that likes running dungeons and coming up with battle plans and tactics for monsters. The right set of players can smash through dungeon after dungeon to great effect, while the wrong set of players are getting frustrated by the lack of use for their fluff skills, and frustrating the DM with trying to talk to the orcs that he's strategically planned out the fight for twelve rounds in advance.

Most DMs and players are somewhere in-between. Good story and rewarding encounters that are both combat and non-combat. The most important thing to do is to decide what sort of game it's going to be with the players before you start. If you've DMed with the same group for years you can probably skip this step, but if your DMing for the first time, it's a very good idea to sit down and make sure everyone is on the same page regarding what they're expecting from you and what you're expecting from them.

After that, plan accordingly. If you have heavy RPers, they might be miffed if you put them in a position where they get drafted by the Doppelgangers without having a say in the matter. Or they might not even put themselves in the position to ever enter The Circle. Try to be flexible, have a couple contingency ideas in mind in case they don't take the bait on a given idea, and have fun!

sonofzeal
2008-02-11, 03:13 PM
I mostly agree with Sonofzeal, except I'd say that it's less like there are two types and more like there are polar extremes with plenty of shades of gray.

The extremes are "story based" and "event based." Opinions as to which is the better end of the spectrum can be fought until the end of time, but the truth is both extremes can either be exceptionally fun or exceptionally frustrating entirely dependent on a few important things to consider:
I agree that the two I mentioned were extremes, and there's plenty of room for compromise between them. You can even have both, or neither, but I find that they're hard to integrate. The more I plan, the more things become "set in stone" for me, and the harder it is for me to improvise. You're right though, the degree to which you can plan covers a whole range, and I merely described the extremes.

I'm not sure your "story"/"event" dichotomy is the same as what I'm talking about though. My adventure I described was what I'd call "story based", and yet I was running it in a very "tactical" manner. My current campaign, on the other hand, is a pure "event based" dungeoncrawl, and I'm planning the whole thing out very "strategically", with large amounts of notes and little improvisation. Personally, I'd put them as two different axis, like law/chaos vs good/evil.

Istari
2008-02-11, 03:19 PM
My advice is to try to plan at least a bit for thing that you dont expect to happen. As the player will always find a way to do something completly unexpected.

FlyMolo
2008-02-11, 03:40 PM
Hey fellow new DM. I suppose I fit into the tactical DM category, because my players are basically playing an thinly-disguised way for me to use the Gygaxian encounter tables in a way that makes sense. They've been recruited by a god wizard, and fight the forces of Asmodeus. Asmodeus and the wizard are playing a kind of distant relative of chess, but way more complicated. "Beyond your comprehension" complicated.

I tend to make up the mechanics for stuff like traps and rooms whenever the players touch them. Pedestals keyed to stone shape spells which open walls, and so on.

batsofchaos
2008-02-11, 03:43 PM
I agree that the two I mentioned were extremes, and there's plenty of room for compromise between them. You can even have both, or neither, but I find that they're hard to integrate. The more I plan, the more things become "set in stone" for me, and the harder it is for me to improvise. You're right though, the degree to which you can plan covers a whole range, and I merely described the extremes.

I'm not sure your "story"/"event" dichotomy is the same as what I'm talking about though. My adventure I described was what I'd call "story based", and yet I was running it in a very "tactical" manner. My current campaign, on the other hand, is a pure "event based" dungeoncrawl, and I'm planning the whole thing out very "strategically", with large amounts of notes and little improvisation. Personally, I'd put them as two different axis, like law/chaos vs good/evil.

I can definitely see where you're coming from regarding two axes, and I kinda was going there in my long, meandering post. You have story/event on one axis, and planned/improvised on the other.

If I had to classify my personal DMing style, I'd say I was fairly middle of the road on story/event, and that I'm leaning a little bit closer to improvised than planned. I'm currently in the construction phase of a new campaign, and I have a fairly detailed idea of an overarching plots and events that are going to happen, but I've only got some vague ideas on how we're all going to get there. Most of the adventures I've planned have only a basic skeleton figured out while I plan on running them on the fly. And of those adventures, it's almost a perfectly even mix of site-based adventures and plot-based adventures.

Burley
2008-02-11, 03:44 PM
Well, I've been toying with the idea of having a "Job Board" like the Quest Table from Fable, or the various pubs from FFTactics. That way, I could have plenty of stories, and the players would feel like they had a choice in the matter. I could vary the difficulties and the pay-off, while dropping clues into each job until they realize that there is a bigger picture to the whole thing, and give them the option to follow it or not.

Does that sound like a good idea? Any tips for making a Job Board that the characters won't take advantage of?

sonofzeal
2008-02-11, 03:47 PM
My advice is to try to plan at least a bit for thing that you dont expect to happen. As the player will always find a way to do something completly unexpected.
Unfortunately, while "expect the unexpected" is nice in theory, in my experience it requires mountains of work to do well, and the PCs are endlessly creative when it comes to finding things you never thought of ("hey guys, why don't we just burn the place to the ground and pick all the loot out of the wreckage?").

With enough determination and effort, and a reasonably Lawful group, you can take care of most of that. Still, I find what works best for me is to plan less in general and only have the main points mapped out. Then, if the PCs do something off the wall, I can adjust the route between those main points accordingly. If I've already planned how I expect things to go, I find I have a much harder time changing gears and going some other way. That was what I was trying to get at in my post. YMMV, of course.

batsofchaos
2008-02-11, 03:58 PM
Well, I've been toying with the idea of having a "Job Board" like the Quest Table from Fable, or the various pubs from FFTactics. That way, I could have plenty of stories, and the players would feel like they had a choice in the matter. I could vary the difficulties and the pay-off, while dropping clues into each job until they realize that there is a bigger picture to the whole thing, and give them the option to follow it or not.

Does that sound like a good idea? Any tips for making a Job Board that the characters won't take advantage of?

If you're planning on something like that, there are some important elements that need to be considered that aren't touched on in games like Final Fantasy. Not that it's a bad idea, just that it needs tweaking for the ruleset.

1) levels. Easy if the jobs are fairly nondescript in terms of challenges, so of a list of jobs the level variation can go one or two levels in either direction, and the players aren't going to jump up in power between each by so much of a difference that you constantly have to rework them to prove challenging/beatable.

2) time. In a game like Final Fantasy, the dude who needs help with his Dire Rat problem is willing to wait any length of time for the party to help him because that's the way the game mechanics work; the party is SUPPOSED to help the dude eventually. In DnD, why would the dude wait for them? He's got a horrible rat problem that he's willing to pay gold to fix, and if the party opts to help the wizard find his missplaced spell-book, he's going to look other places to take care of his emergent problem. This can mean as much as they get back and the job has been taken care of by someone else, or as little as the delay has made the man more desperate and he's willing to pay more.

3) dynamic instead of static NPCs. This was touched on a little in number 2. DnD NPCs don't stand in the same place saying "*sigh* Times are tough..." If a job board is successful enough to warrant having one in all taverns, then there are plenty of NPCs interested in the jobs. That means competition over some of the jobs, and jobs being filled on a moments notice.

It's certainly doable and can be fairly rewarding for all parties involved, but it could be complicated to put together.

sonofzeal
2008-02-11, 04:06 PM
Well, I've been toying with the idea of having a "Job Board" like the Quest Table from Fable, or the various pubs from FFTactics. That way, I could have plenty of stories, and the players would feel like they had a choice in the matter. I could vary the difficulties and the pay-off, while dropping clues into each job until they realize that there is a bigger picture to the whole thing, and give them the option to follow it or not.

Does that sound like a good idea? Any tips for making a Job Board that the characters won't take advantage of?
I've done something similar, and it can work. The way I did it was to have them work through an agency which assigns the cases, which (if the agency does their job well) solves both level issues and plausibility issues, at the cost of a bit of railroading. Still, I found it to be a good method of giving the party some extra rewards, advice, and tie in new characters and information.

Jack Zander
2008-02-11, 11:10 PM
Be careful with any plans that involve taking the PCs down. Crafty ones will survive and escape no matter how well-thought out your plan was.

Mee
2008-02-11, 11:13 PM
Hey, a fellow new DM, granted I've actually DMed a few, but not many.

All I can add really, is good luck.:smallsmile:

CrowSpawn
2008-02-11, 11:50 PM
It'll end up being a fight to the unconcious, they get captured and quasi-drafted. They'll be sent on some task to secure some relic or something.

BIG warning here. Over the course of the years that I've DM'd I've found scenarios in which you must defeat the PC's can be very tricky, and possibly annoying for your PC's.

Some PC's (mine in particular) hate it when they feel like the outcome was scripted no matter what they could have done. Even if there is the smallest and most abysmal chance of success, they will probably be okay with whatever outcome. The illusion of choice, if you will.

Some PC's don't mind it if the story forces them into certain situations so long as they enjoy the story that follows (would be easier for me if mine did -.-; ) so it might just work out fine for you.

Jack Zander
2008-02-12, 12:00 AM
Usually when I do something like this, I'll have an ambush set up where there are a bunch of archers (at low levels) or a powerful wizard and/or cleric cast some sort of entrapping spell at them (at higher levels) and give them the "choice" to surrender. I've actually used a simple BBEG's mercenary guy with only 6 low level minions (all 7 of these guys had only a few fighter levels with the leader having 2 more fighter levels than the average party level) request the party's surrender and they thought long and hard on how tough the fight would be (it probably would have taxed them, but they could have won if they were resourceful).

but when doing anything like that, expect the players to do something like teleport away.