Table Reflection: Dealing With Indecision

One of the things that can bring a campaign to a halt is when the players are all divided on their goals and cannot make a constructive decision to handle their progress through the campaign. It’s a problem that can plague even a good game, and it frustrates everyone in the group equally. Fortunately, someone who knows what to look for can navigate their path past indecision and continue the game constructively without causing hard feelings or ruining the narrative.

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Table Reflection: Allowing for Fun

One of the important balances a GM must strike at his table is the difference between a game that follows conventions and expectations, and one that is very spontaneous. As a narrative experience, tabletop roleplaying requires a particular mindset and flexibility, even when it focuses more on numbers than on people. An important element of this is to figure out what players will enjoy, and offer them an appropriate experience; games are not fun by default, they must be made fun through the events within them.

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Table Reflection: Avoiding False Choices

One of the things I notice a lot of GM’s doing when they’re making a game is providing false choices. That is, they assume that they know how every character will react in a context, and they fall into the trap of intentionally leading decisions. Unfortunately, this can backfire quickly; if a player gets stuck in the middle of a situation where there is no good choice left, they make “false choices” under duress, and then the whole process is likely to continue to spiral toward an increasingly dissatisfying experience. Continue reading “Table Reflection: Avoiding False Choices”

Table Reflection: Rewarding Judgment

One of the most difficult things to do as a Game Master is to make sure that you are treating players fairly; in an experience as interactive and open as tabletop roleplaying it is critical to ensure that there is still a degree of equity at the table; not necessarily of outcome but certainly of opportunity. Outcomes, however, cannot be equitable in mechanical and narrative practice all the time, because some players will make better decisions or contributions than others, and to attempt to balance the players’ standing too closely will result in a lack of reward for clever or prudent play. Continue reading “Table Reflection: Rewarding Judgment”

Table Reflection: Running Responsive Non-Player Characters

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”

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”

Thursday Review: The Game Master

Tobiah Q. Panshin’s The Game Master is an interesting book from front to back, one which is both wonderful and cringe-worthy at the same time. Of all things, perhaps its worst is its inconsistency; verging from academic-styled formal writing to wonderfully light informal prose, it does few things explicitly wrong but doesn’t seem to know where it is. Nonetheless, it’s something that I would recommend, with a caveat. Continue reading “Thursday Review: The Game Master”

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.

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