After game I asked the players for some immediate feedback.\u00c2\u00a0 Different parts of the game worked for different people.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s fine, it’s something I was expecting.\u00c2\u00a0 One of the GM’s biggest tasks is managing entertainment so that everyone gets what they like a fair share of the time.\u00c2\u00a0 But the one thing they all agreed on was my beginning.\u00c2\u00a0 It sucked.<\/p>\n
This came as no surprise.\u00c2\u00a0 Historically I’ve had trouble with the beginning of games.\u00c2\u00a0 While I’m mostly over my originality issues, I still can’t bear to start the game in a tavern with a herald’s proclamation.\u00c2\u00a0 So I go for something unique and original.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I even find a beginning that sounds good on paper.\u00c2\u00a0 When I began my thieves guild game, the players were all independently contacted by a guild recruiter and told to meet up in a warehouse where he’d welcome them to the guild.\u00c2\u00a0 The players arrived, but the recruiter did not.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s start the game out with the characters being awkward and suspicious of each other.\u00c2\u00a0 Some other GMs I spoke to thought the idea was hilarious.\u00c2\u00a0 Playing it out, the players felt awkward and suspicious.\u00c2\u00a0 Duh.<\/p>\n
Actually I think they thought I was too lazy to write an intro.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s also a fair assumption.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I made the opposite mistake with my recent intro.\u00c2\u00a0 It was overwritten to hell.\u00c2\u00a0 I was playing with the trope of adventurers in this game.\u00c2\u00a0 I like that idea that in a D&D world, adventurer is a known profession.\u00c2\u00a0 Given how the world works, it’s just one of those things that people do.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 So an adventurer by the name of Lucien recruited the PCs.\u00c2\u00a0 He was vaguely suspicious but very enthusiastic.\u00c2\u00a0 The players were a little frightened by his get rich scheme ideas for adventuring, but I’d given them all individual reasons to go along with the guy.<\/p>\n
In session two, Lucien died.<\/p>\n
In session three, the players went through Lucien’s belongings and found a book entitled “Lucien’s Outstanding<\/strong><\/em> Debts.”\u00c2\u00a0 It listed all the shady organizations and characters from whom he’d borrowed money to fund his adventures.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 At this point I reminded the players that Lucien had introduced them to his investors when they first set out.\u00c2\u00a0 The PCs figured out on their own, that they’d probably be the ones held responsible for Lucien’s debts, which were truly outstanding.<\/p>\n From a GMing standpoint, this sounded like a fantastic beginning.\u00c2\u00a0 I was counting on the players offering their adventuring services to pay off the debts.\u00c2\u00a0 I just gave the players a book full of adventure hooks.\u00c2\u00a0 And some of the hooks would conflict with each other.\u00c2\u00a0 So they’d have to manage pissing off the church to help the gnome mafia, while placating the thieves guild and promising they’d get paid next week.\u00c2\u00a0 I figured I’d written up adventure hooks for the first 10 levels of the game.<\/p>\n But it didn’t work for the PCs.\u00c2\u00a0 They felt too frustrated by it.\u00c2\u00a0 Only one of the characters wanted to try to pay off the investors.\u00c2\u00a0 The rest wanted to bolt.\u00c2\u00a0 Worst of all, they wanted to bolt in separate directions.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh and the doppelganger PC could bolt very, very easily.\u00c2\u00a0 I honestly don’t remember how I convinced them to stick it out.\u00c2\u00a0 They did though, and I rushed a plot that united the group against a common enemy.\u00c2\u00a0 At least now they wouldn’t run in separate directions.<\/p>\n So why didn’t this intro work?\u00c2\u00a0 First off it was a railroad.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually it was more of a roller coaster.\u00c2\u00a0 The kind that locks you in place and physically restrains you until the ride is over, even if you get some doubts and want off.\u00c2\u00a0 A little bit of a railroad can be a necessity at game start, just to give the players some forward momentum, but this was too much.<\/p>\n The real problem though is that it was generic.\u00c2\u00a0 I wrote an intro that didn’t take into account who the PCs were.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact I wrote the intro before the players had even come up with their PCs.\u00c2\u00a0 I suppose it might have worked out with a more typical group, but this group was totally atypical.\u00c2\u00a0 I told a story that wasn’t about their characters.\u00c2\u00a0 They didn’t have fun playing those characters in that story.\u00c2\u00a0 Whose fault is that?<\/p>\n Anyway, the conclusion I’ve reached isn’t that I shouldn’t write intros.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s that if I’m going to write them in this fashion, where the intro is set in stone before the characters are written, I should let the players take advantage of that when they make the characters.<\/p>\n Next time I run a game, here’s the plan.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m going to write the intro to the adventure.\u00c2\u00a0 Then I’m going to email it to the players.\u00c2\u00a0 They will be responsible for choosing a character that wants to go on that adventure.\u00c2\u00a0 Or choosing a hapless bystander of a character who gets sucked into that adventure.\u00c2\u00a0 Or whatever else they can come up with.\u00c2\u00a0 Bottom line is I’m going to let my players pick characters who will be appropriate for the adventure and I’m giving them the narrative responsibility of inserting those characters into the story.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not sure how it’ll work, but it’s got to be an improvement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After game I asked the players for some immediate feedback.\u00c2\u00a0 Different parts of the game worked for different people.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s fine, it’s something I was expecting.\u00c2\u00a0 One of the GM’s biggest tasks is managing entertainment so that everyone gets what they like a fair share of the time.\u00c2\u00a0 But the one thing they all agreed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,8,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dnd4e","category-observations","category-self-improvement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions\/261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}