I'm almost always the DM, I rarely end up being the player in a campaign. But last Sunday I got the chance to play in a friend's one-off 4e game. I'm in his 1/month main 3.5 campaign but it's on temporary hiatus due to scheduling conflicts and childbirth (or some such lame excuse), so he's cobbled together some of the players from that game and a couple other random people to run short "prequel" sessions in the interim. The results of these games actually have a minor effect on the main game. Pretty cool. The characters were premade - I ended up with the human rogue (level 3) - and the plot simple: fetch an orb from the nearby caves once inhabited by cultists.
Because I'm fascinated by game design and want to be a better DM, I made some observations from the player's perspective. In this post I want to address the sad fact that players will notice your adventure's plot holes and/or realism deficiencies.
This is unavoidable. Don't feel bad. It's just part of the game. It doesn't matter how much effort you put into your story arc, there is always going to be at least one niggling little detail which makes as much sense as the Chewbacca Defense - in other words, none. And invariably someone will notice it.
If you have rats deep in a limestone cavern, someone will point out that we haven't found any organic matter in half a mile that could possibly support swarms of rats. There's a reason a rat infestation will be in your attic, floor, or elsewhere nearby - they live near their food, not an hour-long trek from it. If you run into a dragon as a random encounter (this happened, by the way), a player will invariably voice bewilderment that no one told them about the @$^%! dragon living 10 miles from town which, based on the size of both the dragon and its hoard, must have been feeding on cattle and travelers for quite some time.
This is a problem - suspension of disbelief is important to RPGs. The DMing lessons I learned from this are to never use truly random encounters and to listen to your players and think on your feet.
By "truly" random encounters, I mean when the DM decides the players have been
* pissing about aimlessly and becoming bored to the point that playing Wii Looney Tunes Acme Arsenals begins to sound good (Why do I have this game? Oh, that's right - the guy I bought the Wii from gave it to me for free. Then he gave the sign of the Cross, muttered "Our Father..." and slammed the door in my face. It's that bad.)
* making so much noise that some poor monster trying to get some sleep is going to stomp all the way across the dungeon to tell the party to STFU
* willfully avoiding the GM's carefully crafted plot so that he needs to smack them around a bit to remind them who's the boss
so that the GM rolls on a chart or picks a random mini to keep things moving and/or punish the players. It's the "random" part that I don't like. Because you might end up picking an encounter like, say, a Black Dragon. This happens to present some glaring realism issues ("Dude, how the %^@$& did the mayor forget to mention this?!?") and also plot inconsistencies ("So the mayor is in a tizzy about an orb that might possibly be recovered by a presumably destroyed evil cult who could eventually use it to raise an undead horde that might some day raze his village. He is not, however, concerned about the scaly winged death that could raze his village tomorrow &#^%@ morning. Either the orb is more powerful then the mayor lets on, or the village idiot and village mayor are one and the same.").
If I have enough prep time, I prefer to roll up random encounters in advance and put in a little forethought about how these fit into the story and setting, making changes as appropriate. The technique I use is "3x Why?". Ask yourself "Why?" three times before including anything in your game. If you can't, or your answers don't really work with the adventure, ditch the idea.
For example, just in case I need a random encounter for next week's game, I'm rolling one up now. I put together a short list of creatures based on level and environment and I just rolled... a Shadow Hound encounter. Why is there a Shadow Hound here? Um, it's prowling for food and picked up the party's scent. Why? It got here by slipping into the natural world from the Shadowfell and is lost and hungry. Why? Hmmm... Longshadow's Eve was a mere three days ago. A player with Arcana would know that Longshadow's Eve marks the cyclical occasion when the presence of the Shadowfell is stronger than normal and beings can sometimes cross over. It also explains why there were paper lanterns hanging around all over town - a superstition for warding off ill luck around this time of year.
At this point, I probably won't roll any more encounters at random, but instead choose ones related to the Shadowfell. By asking three Whys, I've shored up the encounter plausibility. More importantly, it's forced me to take the time to think about the encounter and hopefully identify any other issues. As I'm going through the 3 whys I'm checking for logical inconsistencies. And it's given me a new idea for my games - I kinda like the Longshadow's Eve idea and think I'll work that one into my current game...
Back to my other observation - listen to your players and think on your feet. Look, coming up with great ideas all by yourself is actually hard. You know how sometimes you can spend hours and hours racking your brains about a problem, and finally you'll mention it to your wife or someone, just venting not really expecting any help, and within 2 seconds she'll say something like "why don't you try it this way?" and it totally works.
Yeah. As a DM, that happens all the time. At least once per session, a player is going to look at a situation and interpret it in a way you never would have thought of. And frankly, it's often better than what you thought of. If you can think on your feet, it's sometimes a good idea to shift gears and run with what the players come up with.
In our game, the mayor became more and more suspect in the players' minds. The chamber with the orb was clearly not evil, the orb itself seemed to have benign powers, the orb was much better defended where it was than it would be in the hands of the village mayor, and of course there's the little issue of not mentioning the [expletive removed] Dragon living in the caves. For like, years. What's going on? Something's not making sense, so we of course start looking for in-game excuses (as opposed to out-of-game excuses, like it's a only one-session game so the DM didn't go crazy with hours of preparation, so just cut him some slack, shaddup, and roll with it).
Now, I believe the reality was the mayor was a perfectly nice plot-giver and not a villain. The orb is actually a dangerous device in the wrong hands, it's just the way it was described that accidentally made it seem so benign. But as we sat about the table discussing our quandary, we started making a good case for the mayor to actually be a villain. Thinking back to when he sought us out for the quest, we wondered was he being secretive out of fear the terror-- er, sorry -- cultists might overhear? Or was he being secretive because he was furtively executing his own plot? And he clearly knew that only a Dwarven priest of Moradin could recover the orb - anyone else touching it would awaken the undead defenders. What else did he know that he wasn't telling? In our mind, only half-jokingly, we began to think the mayor was actually a cultist and that he was unable to recover the orb himself. So he needed to dupe a dwarven cleric and friends to do it for him.
Maybe I just play too much Eberron, but I think that interpretation is so much cooler than the classic "the mayor asks you to fetch him a nosegay" adventure arc. If I were the DM, I would have seriously considered scrapping my ideas and running with the players' interpretations. I've done that before and, while it's sometimes tricky to think on your feet, it can make for great games.
As a player, I definitely learned the importance of cutting your GM some slack. It's hard work to come up with even a single-session adventure, even without worrying about the ecology of rodents. If something doesn't seem right, unless it's important, let it go. Don't be the Comic Book Guy nerdy complainer of your group.
Don't get me wrong, I had a great time in the game and the DM did a great job running it, especially how he played the monsters very true to their stats and background. He was able to keep things moving in a friendly, efficient way. This post is really more about playing "backseat DM" and wondering what techniques I would copy, and what I would do differently than criticism. It's a great exercise for every DM who gets a chance to see things from the other side of the DM screen.
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