Wednesday, September 16, 2009
SHHH! The GM Is Listening!
Maybe I shouldn't have been so candid with my sharing of ideas on tricky combat encounters.
John is an old friend of mine (and a coworker), and a regular member of our Saturday Night gaming group. And he's a regular reader of this blog. He's scheduled to take over as DM (Pathfinder Rules) once our current campaign comes to an end, which will probably be around Thanksgiving. He DMed for us a lot back in the Neverwinter Nights days.
He's been very busy creating tools (in C#) for himself for allocation of loot and experience points and balancing encounters. He's been plotting out the first several adventures already. Yeah, he's excited to take the reigns of a pen-and-paper campaign.
And he thanked me Tuesday for all the WONDERFUL ideas I provided in the previous day's blog post. As if he hadn't already picked up a bunch of my evil "screw over the players" ideas over the years. Except he's organized enough to really take advantage of 'em.
We're doomed before the campaign starts. One day, I'll learn to keep my big mouth shut.
Labels: Roleplaying Games
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:06 AM (Permalink)
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That's rule zero... "Never give the GM ideas". It's right up there with saying you'll win the combat next round, saying "it can only do x damage and I have y hitpoints" (where y>x), or thinking the GM won't kill your character...
Bwaa ha ha ha! >:)
In the past I've gone a bit heavier on physical puzzles, but this round I'm going to shoot for a bigger social side and bring in some recurring bad guys for them to hate.
Seeing the same sort of trap or generic creature over and over is boring, but the guy who gets away over and over is interesting.
That all goes back to design goals. If you can pull the players in socially so they want to storm the castle to finally face their arch nemesis, you're better off than players wondering what room the loot is stored in and how to optimize the path to it.
In the past I've gone a bit heavier on physical puzzles, but this round I'm going to shoot for a bigger social side and bring in some recurring bad guys for them to hate.
Seeing the same sort of trap or generic creature over and over is boring, but the guy who gets away over and over is interesting.
That all goes back to design goals. If you can pull the players in socially so they want to storm the castle to finally face their arch nemesis, you're better off than players wondering what room the loot is stored in and how to optimize the path to it.
Yikes. Being the computer-only RPG geek that I am, it's very unsettling to see real life enemy AIs (also known as DMs) take in new information and adapt to changing circumstances. Somehow, my age-old complaints about tactically inept opponents and lousy path-finding seem like trifles compared with the sheer horror of being at the mercy of the evil mastermind himself... ;)
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