Key Our Cars

It’s been brought home to me recently again just how much better your custom content can be if you spend just a little time each day between sessions thinking about what you have going on in the world, past, present and future.
I can’t stress enough really that if you’re going to be creating your own content you really don’t ignore it until game day.

As much as everyone gives lip service to a ‘sandbox’ world, “OMG you’re railroading them!”, etc. as a DM you, IMO, HAVE to railroad to some extent in order to give them the best possible gaming experience you can.  Mature, complex, interesting campaigns have a hard time finding fertile ground in a sandbox.  Sand just isn’t conducive to growth.

A sandbox is “Hey peasant, where’s the nearest dungeon?  No we already cleared that one, where’s the next one.” typically.  Or out of character, “Okay guys I have three modules for your level, which one do you want to do?”.  These can certainly be entertaining at the player level, social dynamics, the mechanics of the fights etc. But they’re hard to engage the characters.

I can improv aka play in a sandbox as good as many, better than most I think but I can certainly tell a difference in the quality of experience I can give the players by just spending a few minutes each day thinking on how things are going in the world.

By devoting a few minutes going over current events (assuming you’re doing more than dungeon crawling, a fine past time in and of itself) and putting yourself in the shoes of your NPC’s and their interactions with the PC’s you can come up with some pretty cool stuff I believe. Â  As an example, Biminey has transcribed details of their trip through Darkmith and sold it to the Temple of Eris (god of knowledge). As I was documenting his payment (125gold for the curious) on the campaign sheet for Biminey’s character I thought about one of the high priests reading these descriptions and realized from my one line personality note I’d scribbled out on him weeks ago that this could have a profound effect on the man. Â  And that effect is now going to flavor and color multiple interactions  that deal with the PC’s in specific and the NPC’s in general that might be affected.  And flavor and color add a LOT to a session.  No one likes bland white toast all the time.

Your own content also really really has to be flexible. Case in point the group in our last session derailed my story arc by getting captured. [Through all fault of their own. ]

Luckily this happened at the end of our session or it might have either resulted in less interesting events than I think it will now or I’d of had two options. Either called a time out while I rapidly regrouped or improv out the remainder of the session, the first has the advantage of better results, the later of keeping the flow of the game going.

Drastic events like the party getting captured by the bad guys when you’re not expecting it can certainly throw a kink in things. Or perhaps you have one key character in the group that your story arc is founded upon and that character dies. Do you have a backup plan to keep the story on track? Or do you toss out what you have and work out another arc? Do you sink to the level of “A wandering healer comes across the scene and agrees to resurrect the poor man if only you’ll go fetch him 10 belts from the orc tribes in the next canyon.”?

You have to consider these things when you’re working on your storylines. And you cannot possibly consider everything that a group of players might do or things they might simply not figure out, or figure out wrong and be unable to see other clues as result of their wrong conclusion.  But by taking the time to build up this gestalt image of your world between sessions you have a much better stronger tapestry that you can reweave around snags in the thread that might occur.

That’s not to say though that as a DM you don’t have to be prepared to lose work, some things you’ve worked so hard for just can’t be salvaged after the party goes off on a tangent. And that’s okay. There’ll be other times, other places, other campaigns if needed for those events to happen.

Look at every side trek, every derail not as an issue, but as  an opportunity to weave a stronger storyline that integrates the characters’ actions into your world. And integration is something that will involve your players.  This issue with the players being captured in my personal campaign is going to I think really expand some NPC’s in an interesting way, create at least a couple of memorable encounters and has sparked an idea that will have a domino effect that might see wrack and ruin in the region from yet another possible source than those already planned and that might actually cause a redirection of a regional force into a force of while not good, at least not evil.

All this because the players split up like so many chickens with a weasel dropped in their midst during a fight and got taken out by a group they should have been able to beat.  Players definitely get a ‘we always win’ complex and as a result not really take tactics or even thought into consideration.  It’s nice to throw them a curve like this and drive home the fact that they’re not always going to win and there are going to be consequences to losing even if it was unintentional. Â  In this case they’ve lost 1000′s of golds worth of magical gear, not to mention their basic gear that will have to be replaced from very limited funds.

Improving though with 4th edition can be hard, especially if you lack experience with the system in specific or gamemastering in general. With older editions it was pretty easy to ‘fake it’ with monsters you had to add at a certain point. You just needed a to hit number, a defense and some damage. Monsters were boring, the vast majority of them simply swung, bit or clawed at the players for ex damage in a Flinstones Boxing methodology (aka stand there taking turns swinging till someone died) And those were very easily faked, especially if you had any experience with older editions as faking things is mandatory for a DM as the math was so broken overall.

But 4th edition improv is harder. Sure you can come up with a basic creature fairly easily, just use the basic monster value formulas and you’ll have balanced monsters quickly. They’ll just be a bit boring until you have enough experience under your belt to knock them out.  And remember battles that contain a single creature type can also contribute to boring battles so you have to knock out, print out, look up several creatures per battle.

As a result of the more interesting monsters in 4th, it helps if you have some basic creatures printed out of an appropriate level range for you group, pick a couple of of each type, then just ‘reskin’ them as needed. A level 3 orc can just as easily be a level 3 guard, a war dog, an undead abomination, whatever. Just print out a few in preparation just in case.

So to wrap this up, remember, think about your campaign when you’re not playing it, just a few minutes a day can work wonders.  Think about your NPC’s and what they might want and their reactions to the actions of the PC’s.  And be flexible, be prepared for the party to jump the tracks by having a good idea of the world in general and being prepared with materials as filler/stop gap to give you time to work the derailment into your campaign and make it stronger as a result.

A derailment doesn’t always have to mean a train wreck….

Image Credits