Legends In Their Own Minds

Archive for April, 2010

Action Now! Time is almost up!

I just ended what I think of as a highly successful “season” guest GMing my homebrew D&D variant in the Rambling Bumblers group. One thing I think I mastered, almost accidentally, by the end of the season, was time management. There were very heavy pacing constraints. I could visit about once a month. The RB’s won’t bumble on an empty stomach, and they ramble away promptly at 10, leaving about 2 hours of play per session. That meant the season had to be about 16 hours total.

Our new motto for the group is “Get to the F***ing Monkey”. That means, to me, “If you build something up, have it happen while there’s time to fully appreciate it and resolve it.” The trick is to do this without railroading. The point is that the Monkey is what the players are most interested in about the scenario. If the player doesn’t care that the villain is her character’s mother, or would rather bypass the cool monster guarding the mine entrance, then that wasn’t the monkey. But if they are spending all their time plotting against what you thought of as a minor character, then he just became King Kong.

Although I won’t control what characters do, or make their decisions moot, I do take an active roll in getting them to the monkey. Anything can happen, except nothing. Especially in a time pressured game, I’ll intervene to make sure that something significant happens every session. For example, in the middle of the second-to-last session, the party was uncertain about what to do about a dragon who was an indirect cause of the problem they were facing. I had the dragon send them a message (carved on an ally) demanding a meeting. This was a reasonable action on the dragon’s part, but “realistically” it would have happened several days later. But we had just enough time for a scene with the dragon; any later, and the monkey would just be in the closing credits…

I shouldn’t make out that the players are always the delayers, and the GM is always fighting them to get a move on. Often, the GM wants the players to work to find the adventure. That I think is a mistake, especially when time is tight. Give them the clues that point to the main issue at the speed they can absorb exposition (which is not too fast). You don’t have to give them the clues that give them a tactical advantage, unless they earn them, but they need to be able to find Skull Island.

I have a policy of not having combats or other conflicts take longer than they need to resolve the main issue. If the king is safe, I don’t care to figure out if the PC bodyguard takes non-fatal poison damage from the assassin. But I often forget my policy in the heat of battle. A useful tool to remind me started as a joke. Josh predicted that just showing a card saying “You Win” would make players happy, so I passed him such a card in the game. But he began to use it to inform me when the players had already won, and I should just begin narrating their victory terms. Sometimes I would argue that they had won a partial victory, rather than a complete one, and that by flashing the card early, they were settling for a few enemies escaping. This was surprisingly useful, and yes, I think it was a morale boost.

Pacing for time constraints still is a challenge, but I’m beginning to feel more confident about meeting it

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