Whipstitch wrote:TheCreatorOfADOM wrote:I'm sorry for your bad Game Master and all the time you lost.
FWIW, when designers say balance just gets in the way and are dismissive of poor performing GMs that really kinda makes me wonder what exactly it is they think they are offering with their products. I say this because I would think that by all rights "bad" GMs should be your target audience! After all, if your definition of a great GM is someone who can create settings whole cloth and seamlessly adjudicate things on the fly in a way that slides right past any bullshit detectors present then virtually by definition you're describing the sort of gamer who doesn't particularly need you to begin with.
I think that the real irony about "this game is for 'good' GMs who can run entire campaigns on the fly without consulting a rulebook ever at all (or hell, even DICE, or Character Sheets, Monster manuals, or rulebooks)" is that I wasn't able to reach that point of game refereeing until
after I had digested a very solid & balanced version of D&D in the form of Kieth & Frank's [Tome] D&D.
The truth of the "totally on the fly" gaming experience where the entirety of gameplay is managed by players describing their intent; and the game referee doing a combination of narration/production-editorializing; can really only be achieved when the game referee not only knows the game rules inside & out, but can figure out the likeliest possible results from any dice rolls
in their head.
That's what I'd call a "great" DM, a DM who knows the rules well enough that they can do away with rolling dice for trivial RNG checks like low-threat combat, combat encounters that are heavily reliant upon deeply layered PC tactics that don't require dice rolls, or low-pressure NPC interactions.
Granted, sometimes there's a situation where a Randomized Number Generator is necessary; but modified Rock-Paper-Scissors can help if something is truly an unknown to the referee.
Thus, the only way a GM can really improve their ability to referee a game, is for them to become adept at using a very well designed game system in the first place. A well balanced game that's well designed will give a game referee sufficient context of game mechanics that are intellectually appealing; as well as provide a frame of reference from which they can create wholly new rules that are consistent with the rest of the game played thus far.
e.g.
In my "crazier characters" group of PCs who were running through the 3.5e D&D MEATGRINDER campaign, Red Hand of Doom; one of the players wanted to be an elf wizard (fine, the campaign had an other such character, so I can just use that character sheet if anything needs to be looked up in a session).
However an other had these specific descriptions of their character:
"They're a wizard (sorcerer), who's turned into a sweater; and the sweater is always too big for whoever wears it"
Now, for the typical 2e DM; that's basically a
non-starter b/c most 2e DMs are boring pseudo-grognards with no imagination who think D&D is supposed to be Lord of the Rings fantasy and not Barsoom Chronicles sword & planet fantasy.
However, I hadby thie point put in a lot of time dealing with the results of encouraging players to challenge me with their character concepts ever since I started using [Tome] in & around 2006-2007. In [Tome] there is a solution: spellcasting, xor intelligent, magic items
are best treated as Sorcerors. So the sweater was a magic item, who was also a PC. Now, the next matter: how to accomplish this players
ridiculous aesthetic requirements?
Fortunately, the mechanics of magic items in 3e; as well as the PC's (uh...) creature type; provided a solution.
1. Magic Items
resize to fit a wearer of the same size category as they were originally designed for.
2. The spell
Enlarge Person,
also makes all of their equipment grow larger
Which combine with a lesson that's be used several times in 3e/3.Xe D&D games:
3. So long as
mechanics are unaltered; one can make the
aesthetics of anything in a game different, no one will have a ground for complaints of unbalanced gameplay
So the solution was: the 'sorcerer sweater' will always resize to fit its wearer; but the sorcerer
in the sweater is a massive troll, and expends one of its uses of Enlarge Person on the wearer. However, this only
aesthetically affects the sweater, and the character wearing the sweater seems to be lost in a larger sized pile of sweater (increasing their size & lowering their AC as per the spell's effects), and find that their weapons are statically-clung to their sleeves (granting them the appropriate amount of reach & damage boost to weapon attacks).
Originally the player wanted to have their character be a bit funny, but with
careful understanding of the rules I was able to make it ridiculously absurd. While not breaking any part of the game balance at all.
If your game engine isn't able to handle
deliberately* difficult to create characters on the fly; why even bother learning it when there's game systems that can handle crazy fantasy kitchensink concepts like [Tome] D&D which not only can; but provide sufficient rules which act as a framework to make more homebrew content at the table, and is free to boot?
*:Werecockroach Lancer-Bard Bloodmage Triple-General? Shoggoths that change into any monster (of the same or lesser power) in the monster manual? Evil jewelery that steals the bodies of creatures it can draw Line-of-Sight to? A human fighter who pretents to be a wizard/cleric?