Improvised Background Stories and Forced Interactions

Every so often I get an idea of how to stimulate more role-playing in my games. Usually the implementation of these ideas reaches it's conclusion with my players offering threats to my general health and fertility should I ever try to use that particular idea again. (For instance, one of my favorites was when the players were about to meet the dwarven king, I had them all pass their character sheets around the table to the left and made them role-play whatever character they got. It was a ton of fun... for me at least.) This time, however, my idea actually went over really well.

I find that game mastering is a lot more fun when players actually have decent background stories for their characters. The players have more material to go off of when role-playing and I can tie elements from their background stories into the general plot of the game. However, if I just ask the players to write background stories, usually half the group never gets around to it. Furthermore, the quality of background stories varies greatly. One of my previous attempts to improve this was providing prompts for the players to fill out. What is your characters job, what is his or her family like, etc. Overall, I would consider that idea to be a success, though it required quite a bit of nagging on my part and I still had to write a background story more or less in it's entirety for one heavily writer's blocked player.

The particular game for which I came up with the idea this post is actually about was only intended to last 2-3 sessions, so I didn't want to be that demanding of the players. What I decided to do instead was to provide the players with prompts to answer during the first session, and have them improvise answers in front of the group. Since I wanted there to be some reason why this motley group was adventuring together, I decided to force interactions between players responses to the prompts. For instance, I asked one player what was the worst thing that had happened to him during his training at the Royal Magic Academy. His answer was that he had once accidentally summoned an enormous hydra that nearly killed him. The next player in line was playing a somewhat out of control alchemist, so I asked him how he was actually to blame for the accidental hydra summoning. Apparently, as a joke, he switched out some of the ingredients ahead of time and got a bit more than he bargained for. Then I went back to the first player and asked him how this had led to them becoming friends.

How to Be a Good Game Master, Lesson 3: How to Attack your PCs with Finesse

This will probably be the last in my series of "better games by making things difficult for the players" posts. This time I will deal with the dos and don’ts of direct assaults on player characters (PCs). This is actually one of the more difficult things to do as a game master; at least, it is one of the things I have seen many game masters, including myself, mess up regularly.

First of all, this is not a guide for eliminating an annoying PC. That should be simple enough to do. A giant robot picks them up and throws them into a pit of lava. This post is about using a direct assault on your player characters as either a combat encounter or a plot development.

How to Be a Good Game Master, Lesson 2: How to Assault Your Players' Stronghold

One criticism I received about my last “How to Be a Good Game Master” post was that it was too focused on combat and not enough on role-playing. This is true and I will attempt to do better in this post. Like most game masters, I tend to be a little heavy on the combat side, but also I would like to have more role-playing in my games. I think the reason why we tend to drift over to the combat side is that it’s easier for us to run. Most pen and paper RPG systems are written with plenty of support for combat. Mean while, the rules for a social engagement often boil down to “make some sort of skill roll.” This isn't much help for game master’s trying to come up with interesting social encounters for our players. Fortunately, much of the advice I’m giving in this blog for combat can be adapted for social encounters. The reason is that in social encounters the players have some goal they have to obtain and various obstacles, often including people who try to stop them, just as in physical encounters. I will attempt to make these correlations explicit later on.

In a lot of RPGs, the PCs' (Player Characters') are essentially nomads; they move from one location to another, over come whatever challenges you’ve prepared, and collect the loot. Other times, whether through your design, or because an enterprising player decides to stake a claim to some dungeon the PCs' just cleared of monsters (assuming they can get the blood out of the carpets…), the players have a strong hold to call their own. In either case, it is entirely logical for one of the PCs' enemies to try to take it away from them. This is a substantially different scenario than what game masters are use to running and, since the players have so much at stake, one that you have to make sure you do a good job with. In this post I will look at best practices when designing assaults against a stronghold belonging to the PCs.

How to Be a Good Game Master, Lesson 1: Make Things Hard

This is something I wrote for a friend a couple weeks ago. While I'm planning on doing further posts on "being a good game master," I thought this one should come first since some of the things I'm thinking about build from it. Note: I don't always do all these things, though I should. In fact, I thought of some of them as I wrote. But hey, trying to give good advice makes you think about these things:

One part of running an RPG that a lot of people have trouble with is getting the level of difficulty right.