The Gaming Den

Things like this d100 table of Break Clauses for Curses are why I read Playing D&D With Porn Stars.

I like the Alexandrian's Pacing & Three Clue Rule articles. I've been wanting to find more like this so bad.

20 GM Guidelines that have proven to be extremely effective in keeping a game fun.

virgil wrote:I like the Alexandrian's Pacing & Three Clue Rule articles. I've been wanting to find more like this so bad.

Three Clue Rule is pretty nice.

My approach was to to plot out the conspiracy/detail but keep the clues and the locations pretty vague when I planned them out. Then, I'd let the players go hog wild. They'd come up with the next step, and I'd try to plug a logical portion of the mystery into whatever they decided. The more creative and out there they got, the better I tried to make the clues to encourage creativity. I'd avoid dead ends as much as possible but inevitably they'd stray too far off the path and a dead end is more like a boarder in that case than a frustration (as in "okay we know the conspiracy doesn't go in this direction, that lets us focus on other things").

Also, sometimes the players would just hit a brick wall and need some spoonfeeding. This is okay. It happens all the time in mysteries: the lucky break. In Dark Heresy I'd usually attack them some how (not always with combat) and try to stop them as a team in their investigation. Why? Because the conspiracy wants them to fail, and the best point to fail at is when you hit a dead end: there's no more threads to pick up. So the road block they overcome usually ends up providing a new clue: one that I try to make go off in a totally new direction towards unraveling the conspiracy. It's a simple trick, but if you only use it once per mystery, the players won't mind it at all.

So I really wasn't running a breadcrumb trail- usually the evidence was presented severely out of order and had to be pieced together, but on the other hand it was a cloaked railroad. Some information they were going to absolutely get to put A & B & C together to get the general gist of the mystery/conspiracy. The rest? Well that's all flavoring and in some cases efficiency. Sometimes they'd miss big gaps in the plot and shrug and just leave that a mystery for the ages.

I guess you could say the tracks were laid down but the players chose the scenery.

Actually, this article is pretty much 90% how I ran a mystery campaign now that I"m reading through it more than just a skim.

Bihlbo wrote:20 GM Guidelines that have proven to be extremely effective in keeping a game fun.

That is good stuff.

I've been enjoying Inspiration Pad 3 lately. It's a simple program that you can write random generators in and keep them all together for easy reference. It's got helpful documentation, so even someone who's not versed in any sort of coding can hack together a serviceable generator pretty easily.

Bihlbo wrote:20 GM Guidelines that have proven to be extremely effective in keeping a game fun.

I'm not sure I like the cut scenes point (both in that I don't think this is the right medium for that and there are abilities in-game that do that), but I like most of the rest. I particularly like his willingness and desire to use the rules to help generate the game and interest.

RobbyPants wrote:

Bihlbo wrote:20 GM Guidelines that have proven to be extremely effective in keeping a game fun.

I'm not sure I like the cut scenes point (both in that I don't think this is the right medium for that and there are abilities in-game that do that), but I like most of the rest. I particularly like his willingness and desire to use the rules to help generate the game and interest.

The cut scenes work in some games and not at all in others. I've seen Kev run through half a dozen D&D sessions without one, and when he throws one in it concerns close allies of the PCs, like friends and family, and usually only to flesh out some situation that had already been decided but of which the rest of the party wasn't aware. However in a somewhat campy supers game, or in a balls-out Star Wars game it fits right in.

Incidentally I've been a player in over 200 games Kev has run. I'm one of a handful of people who can claim to be an expert at being a player in his games. If y'all want some player insight on that list of GM tips he wrote, I could pull that off.