The other day my former DM told me what I missed in the last session. He told me told it was two combats and two skill challengesas an example of how quick the session was moving. Hence why he’s my former DM. I know my new DM cares much more about having fun than winning D&D.
This seems to be a common thing as I lurk through forums. There is this tightened down focus on mechanics and dice rolls. Building a story seems to be very secondary to the fighting and dice rolling. Instead of dice being the little decider of ‘fate’ and the outcome of the protagonists’ attempts, it becomes the be all and end all of the game. If that’s what you want, that’s great, but I doubt it since you’re here at The Mad Adventurers Society.
Finding the Thread
I love the times when I can have experiences going in with my simple ideas for things to set in front of the players and the players surprise me with a narrative way around a problem, or attempt and fail wonderfully horribly. Creating the potential for other ways of doing things is the talent we as GMs are trying to create and refine.
The dice won’t create a scene for you, even if you use random tables. You still need to put the effort into setting up a scene and giving players an idea of what’s going on. A scene with a couple minis on the table can mean very little, or it can be amazingly climatic. It entirely depends on what you and your players invest in it. When the minis are invested with a way of acting and bring more to the gaming experience then they become useful. If you could just as easily replace the minis with quarters, the scene needs to be reworked.
The players are at your table because they need someone to think and react to what is going on from the antagonists’ side and create a unique experience for that time the adventure is run. This isn’t a flashpoint run in Star Wars: The Old Republic where the NPCs are programmed, the GM has influence over how the NPCs react and deal with the PCs tactics.
A GM who understands that goblins won’t react like kobolds and neither will they act like orcs is a great find for a player, but a long search is needed in many cases. Each of these monster types should play differently with thought given to why and how they do what they do. NPCs need to be more than stat blocks to be plugged in. They use the same talents to cause different effects that affect the players differently.
Looking to Make the Difference
Having a bugbear controlling the group of goblins by yelling and telling the little goblins where to go creates something more interesting; the silent battlefield is one that bores the players and the GM. In any setting where the players are dealing with a group of organized people there will be a leader, perhaps even two, at the table. There are some small exceptions to this, say two guards minding a doorway, but even then they will have received orders from someone off screen telling them how to act.
I like to run adventures map-less. This can have specific drawbacks, but I’ve countered most issues by making each group distinct. This allows for better tracking and identifying of the monsters. Just like many manufactured pop bands, you have specific personalities to categorize the monsters in different ways and allow the players to grasp which group is which.
It doesn’t matter if a player is seeing two monsters or a dozen; you need to be willing to put the effort in to describe the differences of your groups. On the table there should never be a faceless horde for the players. A while ago I talked about knowing why your NPCs are in the scene and this extends into how they act in the scene. Different monsters will act in a scene differently, they may be complementary but they aren’t the same.
Using tactics isn’t a bad thing, it helps make things memorable. Kobolds are nary a speed bump in any adventurers’ long list of being genocidal menaces unless the GM using them can give the kobolds tactics and use them beyond the stats on the page. Choosing a monster includes using the whole monster from its habits to its habitat and not just numbers on a page.
Slipping Sideways
A well rounded scene has everything in it, a reason for the NPCs to be there, a reason for the PCs to be there, a place for it to happen, and a way for the NPCs to operate. Using these four things you can have a scene that can react to almost anything the players can do and have an easier time when things go very sideways from what you have planned.
The number of combats or skill challenges you get through in a system isn’t an achievement as a GM, your players coming back for weeks on end and developing friendships with them is. How have you used the way groups act to distinguish them in a scene?
