GM of 37+ years, do you need any advice? 7, 12, and ongoing thirty-seven year campaign going right now. You can ask me anything and I'll help to the best of my ability
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GM of 37+ years, do you need any advice? 7, 12, and ongoing thirty-seven year campaign going right now.
I have nothing to ask, but I would like to commend you for your accomplishments. Well done!
Yeah I have a question. Can you eat my ass? Because that's about as much use as you can be to me.
THE FUTURE IS NOW OLD MAN!
Nope. Eat your own ass, zoomie
Write your descriptions down ahead of time. Then re-write them again and again until they would satisfy you as a player. Good luck, it's not exactly easy
I'm running B/X D&D for my friends right now. How can I be consistent and evocative when describing dungeon rooms?
Post pic of old notes or you're a pathological liar who should be raped and hanged and raped again.
What are you mumbling there? Ohh, I've hurt your feelings? Well guess what I don't give a frick about your feelings and your mom feelings when she discovers that I have prolapsed your ass homie. Come to Northeast Houston and I'll frick you up.
Cry harder, no games b***h made homosexual
>ongoing thirty-seven year campaign going right now
What's the point of a story if you're never going to finish it?
Not OP, but stories are about the journey, not the destination.
>What's the point of a story if you're never going to finish it?
The game ends when the game session ends. The game begins anew when a game session commences. Thinking of a game as a story introduces some additional perhaps unwelcome notions.
t.antiSS'ing activist.
What's your favourite game?
Forgotten Realms by far
I've never GM'd before. Sometimes I think about it, but I don't think I can pull it off. I can be imaginative but I don't know if I can structure that imagination into a functional game. I don't do art so making assets is a crapshoot. I have no fricking idea how to deliver content that is enjoyable to engage with. I know that prepwork is good, and improv is good, but I don't know how to balance the two. And I worry that if I forced through all of this, sat down, got a game together, started playing, I'm afraid that I'd freeze up and realize I don't know what to do next.
How do you do it? How do you sit down at a table week in and week out and confidently think to yourself "This is what's going to happen today, it's going to work, and it's not going to suck"?
I'm not OP but I'm a 20 year GM.
>I don't know if I can structure that imagination into a functional game.
Maybe you can't yet. Luckily it's a learned skill. Read the GM section of your favourite game, maybe some supplementary books, and let that percolate.
>I don't do art so making assets is a crapshoot.
I'm literally disabled. It's fine. Theatre of the Mind is underrated and scratch maps at the table can be handed off to your most dextrous player for a small XP bribe.
>I have no fricking idea how to deliver content that is enjoyable to engage with.
The Alexandrian blog has good advice on this, but in general: set up houses of cards you'd enjoy knocking down as a player. That's the concept. No stories, just situations.
>I know that prepwork is good, and improv is good, but I don't know how to balance the two.
In a perfect world one would improvise everything and merely respond to everything a player asks. But it is not a perfect world and you would become overwhelmed. So what you must prepare is what you cannot improvise. This varies by person and system.
>And I worry that if I forced through all of this, sat down, got a game together, started playing, I'm afraid that I'd freeze up and realize I don't know what to do next.
Shit, I worry about that from time to time and I ran my first game around the time Metal Gear Solid was released.
>How do you do it? How do you sit down at a table week in and week out and confidently think to yourself "This is what's going to happen today, it's going to work, and it's not going to suck"?
You ever see Reservoir Dogs? That bit where Mr Orange gives himself a pep talk in the mirror.
Man, practice makes perfect. I would form a party of adventurers and walk them through whatever I was doing, bard's tale style. Visualize it from every class' viewpoint. You'll get there, promise
New GM here. How much redundancy should I build into my plans for sessions? I'm doing some "if skill check fails, compensate by doing X later" but that's got limits.
Can you give an example of what you mean?
Probably rotating cast.
>Can you give an example of what you mean?
Say me and my players are doing some RPing because I've set up a little murder mystery. Even more specifically, say the captain of the guard in a small town's been murdered by a hag who lives nearby because he caught onto her scheme to steal local children.
I want my players to find out what happened. Now, I'm going to try to work in some clues here and there, because clues are the foundation of any murder mystery. I've set up tracks to find, I've set up the state of the corpse, I've set up clues to the child stealing scheme if they ask one of the nearby constables.
And then they don't. I ask them to roll to track and they fail, or they just ask if the corpse's carrying some loot and don't bother investigating its wounds, or they don't really ask the constable if he's got any hints. Obviously, if you know your players, this isn't an issue because you know what they pay attention to, but I'm new.
So my question is, do I build in other ways for them to get the information? Do I let them miss out? Am I just trying to do too much?
Three clue rule. For every fact you want the players to discover, include three pre-established clues. Further, if the players consider an angle you hadn't but it seems reasonable then it should work. Your three clues are not the only three.
When prepping your clues, it's good practice to vary the skills and abilities that can be used to gather them. If the players have the ability to ask for hints (inspiration, hero points, magic) you point them to a clue or give them another crack at a previous failed clue.
I'm not OP.
I don't make railroad games. I usually try to make it clear that the world goes on without the PCs. One the ways is multiple hooks where they can't follow both. If they didn't crack this case, they didn't. There's other things ready for them to do.
Your example is pretty solid other than the tracks, as in the example follows the three clues method. The tracks shouldn't count as a clue, but instead should be shortcut. In your case it's not a mystery, it's a crapshoot if it's RNG to solve. Trapped treasure chests are crapshoots; mysteries are where you look for ways to make people who are paying attention feel clever, or feel like taking notes pays off.
Once or twice a session I use skill gates to pick players who have skills no one else has and I ask them to lead the party for a bit. It's kinda fun to pick out a kid or a new player and say "okay, you're the expert, you're the only one with the skill for this, what should we do?" I do it deliberately to pull players in who are a bit quiet or losing interest. Sometimes I do this during an investigation.
I think the idea I follow is simulation is ever present, but it's not more important than the game being playable as a game.
You can never have too much redundancy but it is a pain to plan out every contingency and you will never be able to do that, anyway. Plan just enough that you're comfortable enough to have every major plan the players could come up with and be aware they WILL come up with things you would not have thought about and you'll be good
>thirty-seven year campaign
The hells is even going on in that? Is everyone just demi/gods at this point? 37 years of play must be at least 30+
We've got epic levels a couple of times and that's it. Those were fun games if you can get there. I myself had a 27 level paladin in 2e d&d that had the Dragonslayer kit who specialized in killing red dragons from day 1. It was really fun. That game still gets talked about from time to time
What kind of an advice? How many systems and settings are you familliar with?
> thirty-seven year campaign
Only a couple of years behind the longest one. Where is a video of you on YouTube?
What, capture the last ten years of it? It entertains us, that's all that matters to me
Any kind of advice, really. I run gurps, vtm (da specifically), shadowrun, rifts, d&d, marvel superhero roleplaying game, lejendary adventure, a few I can't even remember without a google search
Most of the time I've played with "gm of multiple decades" they ended up being shit, so it's probably you, not us who needs to be asking questions.
Well, that's pretty anecdotal so that's for your useless opinion. Congrats on being useless in the Internet. Big ups
Shit, how the frick do you make a campaign last for 37 years? I'm actually interested
Be consistent and be able to cater to your players wants
If they want to play a wemic, don't stop them
What are your tricks for making puzzles, traps, and dungeons in general?
Puzzles are easy to make when you take into account their environment. Don't make them too hard because I think as GM's we often overestimate our players ability to suss them out. But then there's always that one guy... Look out for him. He'll have your whole game figured out in an hour. Great players, tho! They're fun
I get ideas for traps from media all the time. A lot of them are lethal. That's probably the easiest way. Book and film kind of traps are easy to describe. I've got quite a few original traps made too that I can drop in at any time but those run the risk of your players being totally flummoxed ie TPK
Dungeons are pretty much my specialty at this point. A good concept will work wonders but I do want to point out one of the appendices from the 1e dmg has a random dungeon generator that's pretty solid for starting one. You'd be better off finishing it yourself because only you know what your players like and it won't hurt anything to cater to them a little. Not everyone wants to swim through an elder brain pool to get somewhere
1) How long has your longest-playing player been playing?
2) Has anyone, by some miracle, kept the same character from beginning to end?
3) How long has the longest-living character lived or has been played?
4) What exactly is the premise of your 37-year campaign?
About thirty five years
Nope. Every edition change necessitated character swaps, usually to take advantage of new options, races, classes
Generic FR that went through a ton of boxsets, some modules, and ofc homebrew. In the grand scheme of things, I would say it was a godwar, ultimately but when isn't it a godwar in FR
How frequently do you run a sessions?
Any tip to get everyone to show up regularly?
I used to run weekly, sometimes more than 1/week but now it's been bi-weekly for years. Two Saturdays a month seems reasonable to most ppl where 4 to 5 or more times a month is too much a commitment for most.
To get ppl to show up varied a lot but I would always frame my request like it was a party. "We're going to eat, hang out, and get to this temple of Tharizdun tonight finally!" Plus we'd smoke the biggest, fastest joints you have ever seen. It helps some ppl's imagination and ability to immerse themselves, no cap, as the kids are wont to say
>37 year campaign ongoing
>You can ask me anything
QRD the 37 year campaign as best you can, I will suspend my disbelief.
Pfft. Nothing I can say will convince you so why bother
How do you wrangle 5 people for a weekly game?
It's not easy and I've run through a gamut of players. Engage them every game, every encounter is at all possible
@ work but I'll be getting to your questions asap
37 year campaign is forgotten realms
The 7 was dragonlance
9 was homebrew
9 was meant to be 12, sorry about that