Whenever a GM goes to run a game, one of the things that is pretty much a universal measure of success or failure is the amount of important NPC’s and their role in the game. Having no significant NPC’s means there’s no context for the players’ actions, while having too many will detract from the player characters’ abilities to stand on their own in the world. Similarly, it’s important that NPC’s be responsive and placed on the same level as the players, at least on a narrative scale. Continue reading “Table Reflection: Running Responsive Non-Player Characters”
Category: Table Reflection
Table Reflection: Handling Player Character Death
Most tabletop games take place in a world where death is a daily or weekly risk; they are glimpses of adventure, action, and risk rather than merely consisting of experiences with safety and security of an organized and regimented society. As such, characters tend to die, and many of these characters will be important. Some are meant to die, and others are not, but there’s a few general rules for the death of player characters that will keep GM’s and players happy. Continue reading “Table Reflection: Handling Player Character Death”
Table Reflection: Narrative Versus System
One of the major challenges that most GM’s will run into is the fact that tabletop roleplaying gaming has both mechanical and narrative elements, and while this is intended to be a resource for storytelling the two can often trample on top of each other and lead to a gaming experience which is frustrating and annoying for players and the GM alike, requiring careful intervention to save the narrative. Continue reading “Table Reflection: Narrative Versus System”
Table Reflection: So You Want to Play 3 (Building a Character)
One of the greatest issues that I’ve seen when novices start roleplaying is the fact that they don’t understand some of the basics about creating a character. Most frequently, they’re used to video games or stories that either have very powerful protagonists or even if they’re used to video games that utilize characters similar to those in tabletops (games meant for playing in a cooperative group often take this path), they don’t really know how to create one of these characters from the ground-up in a tabletop system. Continue reading “Table Reflection: So You Want to Play 3 (Building a Character)”
Table Reflection: So You Want to Play 2 (Finding a Group)
One of the biggest issues with playing tabletop games is finding a group who will enjoy and play the same games, and who won’t try to kill each other when they share a room for about three hours, which is what most sessions run, if not more. As a new player, you should almost always join a group that someone else is starting or has run for a while, but occasionally you’ll find a GM but need other players.
Continue reading “Table Reflection: So You Want to Play 2 (Finding a Group)”
Table Reflection: So You Want to Play 1 (Etiquette and Basics)
I can still remember a good deal of my formative tabletop roleplaying experiences, and since I essentially self-discovered the hobby they were pretty bumpy, and it wasn’t until much later that I actually read the sort of things that help with getting started playing. Today marks the beginning of my So You Want to Play series, intended to help beginners break into tabletop roleplaying with a minimum of inconvenience for both you and the group you join, primarily focusing on starting out as a player. Continue reading “Table Reflection: So You Want to Play 1 (Etiquette and Basics)”
Table Reflection: The Three Cores for Houseruling
When running a game, I find it handy to figure out what the goal of it is so that I can figure out how to adjust the rules to fit my group’s needs, and also in order to better derive my own explanations for things that fall outside of the rules but which may come up in play (for instance, if a certain roll result normally fails, but defense is an active skill, and both parties come up with a, what happens?). These are the sort of things that understanding helps create a more consistent response to, and consistency in rules interpretation is important. Continue reading “Table Reflection: The Three Cores for Houseruling”
Table Reflection: Managing a Campaign
One of the biggest things I hear players in a game I’m managing say to me runs along the lines of “Well, how do you actually set up one of these things?”. The truth of the matter is that it’s really highly flexible-some games require or encourage lots of bookkeeping (Traveller makes me shudder, but even D&D likes statblocks and numbers), while others are more fluid (Vampire the Masquerade, for instance, or a D6/Shadowrun styled system). However, there are some universal things that can help. Continue reading “Table Reflection: Managing a Campaign”
Table Reflection: Building Wonder
Wonder is hard to come by-we’ve explored most of our land mass, been to space, and answered more questions than most people ask in their lives. One of the challenges of running a tabletop game in the modern day is the need to compete with the extreme stimulation of mass media; it is crucial from an entertainment perspective to build upon the storytelling and setting of other media and bring them together into a conglomeration of all the elements that will go into your setting and descriptions.
Table Reflection: Teaching New Players
One of the best things to do with any friend is to introduce them to a hobby they’ll enjoy-I’ve personally introduced several people to tabletop gaming, and a few more to specific games such as Shadowrun or the like. However, there are a few things that really help before you start to get people involved in the hobby; most people my age play video games and know the basics of what goes on in a tabletop game from references or video games heavily based on a tabletop system, like Neverwinter Nights, but don’t really have a real clue about how things work-they know about rolling dice and comparing numbers, but they’ve been doing the equivalent trying to learn a language by listening to it, rather than being engaged in the core of what they are doing they are merely gleaning an occasional number or the number of sides on a die (this isn’t always the case; but games that both explain and fully implement tabletop systems are rare). Continue reading “Table Reflection: Teaching New Players”