In Dungeons and Dragons I was able to game my DM because we never went up against a group of NPCs that were smart enough to attack the real healer. Every single one of the NPC groups had an INT score high enough to go for the healer, I just made sure I wasn’t the first one to heal. They would never retarget after the other healer stopped and I started. This realization allowed me to win D&D. Winning any RPG is one of the most pyrrhic things I can think of doing. It’s boring and you should never let this happen to your group.
Instead of presenting a challenge that makes the player think their character is in mortal danger, some GMs put ‘challenges’ to the players that are little more than puzzles with no true danger to the characters on the table. This breeds stagnation on the GM and players’ part since there is no urgency in the situation. This stagnation usually starts to show up as player boredom and over-interest in their devices or books to keep them awake.
How do you counter?
Change the Tactics in the Next Encounter
If it’s part of a series of encounters, the first encounter should be informing the second and the two of them informing the third.
One thing that is routinely forgotten in most of the games I’ve played in is the role of ‘runner’ in a guard group. This is either a literal runner in a fantasy setting using a small, fast monster to run to the next group to get help, or, in more modern settings, they radio to the rest of the guards to alert them to trouble and that something is happening. This action allows for the second line to know that something is going on and sets a countdown for the players to deal with the current group of monsters.
A countdown adds a sense of urgency to the scene and allows the threat of a horde to press the players into bolder actions. Urgency is needed for any combat encounter, whether it’s sneaking up on a guard hut out in the middle of a bayou or working up to the top of a wizard’s tower to confront the maniacal soon to be despot. Far better than being so apathetic that they don’t care if they critically fail a roll that leaves them open to anything the ‘evil’ monsters are trying to do.
Having NPCs use the terrain and using some form of tactics can help break up what the players see and help teach the players how to play the game better. Showing that it is harder to hit from behind cover and that if they aim, they get a bonus. This allows for a soft way to teach the game and reinforce what the players aren’t getting from their own tactics.
A GM has to prepare the flow of the day’s session. To use what @Fiddleback and @Vladepsyker said in last week’s potelbat, if you aren’t planning ahead for what the players will likely do for the next session or two, you might as well get a white and black striped jersey, hand over the monster manual to the players and go get a grilled grilled sandwich. You don’t have to have full box text written up with named stat blocks all nicely arranged for each enemythat might come in to play.
A Basic Structure
For every encounter I expect to run, I lay it out in bullet point form. I make short notes about what I intend to use including basic tactics I want to try out on the players. I do this to make sure they aren’t seeing the same thing over, again and to reference back to the last session to see what I used. I have the essentials of what my characters skills and abilities are so I’m not flipping back and forth through pages in a monster section. Lastly, I have a few notes about motivations, why the antagonists are there and what their ‘win conditions’ are. This helps me to remember at a glance that most NPCs probably aren’t there to wind up with 3-5 dead bodies they have to call someone to deal with and then have a weeks’ worth of therapy and paper work.
Putting in 5-10 minutes before a session on each encounter will make them better and give you a chance to think of something that you wouldn’t normally be able to if you’re rushed. This is a great time to look back on last session and figure out what didn’t work well for you and think of solutions to use them in the future. Learning from what went well and what went poorly is why players are there with a GM and not playing World of Warcraft. It’s the personalized and unique reactions from one time to the next that people are roleplaying at a table for.
How do you keep from going stale at the table? What tales of “winning” do you have?
