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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Another Himedere checking in. I love setting up situations where the players and/or the characters squirm in anguish about what to do.

    My favorite so far was an estranged princess living as a man and hostel owner. He had turned his back on the throne and wanted little to do with it. As a bonus he was the only child of the king’s only remaining child. Fast forward a bit and he needed a (legal) favor from the king. Went to court and met with his grandfather. The king would do it, no strings attached if a) he returned to court and resumed his duties as prince and b) sired an heir.

    There were a good thirty minutes of the players anguishing if he should accept while going deep into character motivations and the setting. During that game I don’t think I did as much concrete worldbuildning as during those thirty minutes. I loved it, the players loved it. Great time.







  • This brings us back to zones, a good middle ground. Draw rough map, or great map, and on it mark intresting combat zones. Some are separated with emptiness, others by obstacles.

    For example a tavern brawl. Zones could be the Bar, Kitchen, Common Room, Balconies, Private Rooms, Out Front and Out Back.

    Fighting on the Balconies could be tight, only one in width and with the risk of being thrown off it into the Commonroom. In the Kitchen there would be fire hazards, improvized weapons, knifes and the Stew. Not to forget other ways to spice things up in there. Around the Bar there would be some cover fighting someone on the other side, bottles to be broken and combatants to glide alond the bar for maximum mental damage.

    And so on. Make each zone memorable and with special features. Did I mention drawing it out really helps?



  • Depends on the system. Classical fantasy adventuring? Most if not all sessions. Adventure and Sword&Sorcery? Sometimes, half perhaps. Character drama? Very seldom.

    I look at how the system spends its page budget and use that as a guideline. If there is a chapter for combat, one for harm and recovery and one for combat magic then the system wants me to focus on those parts. Also I look at how the players/characters are rewarded and try to have each session hit several of those criteria. So if the only (reliable, non gm-fiat) way to earn rewards if through combat then you bet your sweet ass there will combats each session.











  • Both my favorite systems makes my GMing job easier and they do it in the same way - they give the players responsibility though their character’s goals to drive the game forward. And they have explicit rewards helping in this matter.

    Ironsworn (a PbtA) is the more direct of these. The characters swears vows and once they are fulfilled they get XP. Starforged, the SciFi version, adds more ways to earn XP through Bonds and Exploration. But we’ll stay with the base Ironsworn. The vows are essentially quests but what makes them different from just any random quest is the mechanics surrounding them. First a tracker to measure vow completion is created, then as progress is made it is filled depending on vow difficulty. Now this sounds fairly standard except the only way to mark progress is through triggering moves, primarily the move “Reach a Milestone”. Since Ironsworn is a PbtA the moves are player facing, it is the player through their character’s actions that triggers them. Second awesome part is those trackers, each being ten segments long. They aren’t automatically completed when they are filled instead there is move “Fulfil your vow” that states

    When you achieve what you believe to be the fulfillment of your vow, roll the challenge dice and compare to your progress.

    That is when the player thinks their character is in a position to have completed their vow they make a roll and see what comes out of it. It lets the player decide if their little work is enough (not much progress marked, high change of complications) or if they should work harder on it. Awesome pacing tool. Ironsworn is also made for GM-less play which gives so may tools to the GM they can almost go on autopilot.

    Burning Wheel has an awesome feedback loop called the Artha Cycle. The very short of it is

    • Player states their character’s beliefs (goals)
    • Player have their character try to achieve their beliefs possibly spending Artha (a player-facing currency used to manipulate rolls) to increse chance for success
    • Character earns progress in tested skills slowly increasing their proficiency in them
    • At regular intervals (often end-of-session) the players earn more Artha for their character’s progression on beliefs
    • Player states their character’s beliefs (goals)

    And so it goes on and on. Often all I have to do as a GM is to keep track of the world and put obstacles in the way of the characters, as in challenge their beliefs. With players working the system I often not only get stated what their character’s goal is but also what the obstacle is. Then all I have to do is play the world.