Storyline Archives:

Sometimes having the GM use your comments as character speak can be advantageous, such as when you say one thing which causes the GM to make the NPCs react, and then have your character do another.

There is a lot of jumping in the Matrix movies.  I haven’t done a scientific study or anything, but I would bet at least one out of every three scenes includes jumping of some sort.

Did I mention that singing wasn’t allowed in our group?

LARP stands for Live Action Role-Playing.  It’s a curious phenomenon where roleplayers just aren’t satisfied in pretending to be a fantasy character for a few hours a week.  No, they take it a bit further and dress up as their fantasy character and play the game as if it were real.  Costumes, battle enactments and Jebus knows what else.  It’s like nightmare dinner theater ala Tim Burton.

 

Most of the time the line between player and character is blurred.  So blurred, in fact, that many times the GM has to specifically tell the player their character wouldn’t have knowledge of a certain situation. 

The road goes two ways, though.  There are many times as a GM that you know information about the players’ plans that the NPCs wouldn’t know, and can use that to tweak the NPC actions to better balance the game, give the players a break if they are way over their heads (or punish naughty players who get themselves into bad predicaments), or get the story back on the rails.  The major difference is that as the GM, you are running the game, so the majority of the time the players are never the wiser to your subtle manipulations.

Whoops.  I apologize for the comic being late today.  I was up until the wee hours of the morning and forgot all about posting it.  And my dog ate my homework. 

As a GM, you really have to be flexible.  In order to be a decent or good GM, you have to be the definition of flexible.  The ability to think on your feet at a moment’s notice is paramount.  More often than not, you will be totally ignoring the carefully thought out notes and plot that you spent hours on and instead winging it because one of your players got distracted by a shiny object.

Fighting in most pen and paper RPGs is the most time consuming element of the game.  Only character creation comes close to matching it.  Depending on the battle, it might take literally hours to conclude a five to ten minute brawl.  Of course, everything else in the RPG (setting, story/back-story, NPC interaction) for most players is just dungeon dressing to get to the next battle, as that’s where most of the experience points lie.

Singing, in our group, was a no-no.  None of us were any good at it, but if it started, the whole session was doomed.  We would be singing whatever came to mind all night long, making dogs howl and neighbors scramble for their phones. 

 

It’s always disheartening as a GM when the finely honed story and that you have spent countless hours on is derailed by a singular event.  It’s even more disheartening when the ad-hoc compensation you come up with to try and put everything back on track is taken down as easily as a house made out of Lincoln Logs. 

Here we get a glimpse of Chad’s character, Trinity, in action.  Chad is your typical min/maxer.  For those who aren’t familiar with the term "min/maxer", it’s a person that looks at a game and creates an optimized character based on the rules, loopholes and arcane majicks.  The result is typically a super character that the game designers never dreamed could be created.  Min/Maxers typically have an intimate knowledge of the rules of the game rivaling that of even the rules lawyer (which will be discussed in a future episode).

The fatal flaw to most min/max characters is that they are only really good at one aspect of the game, like combat (as seen here).  They may not be detect the sound of a freight train directly behind them, nor have the intelligence to find their ass with a map and both hands, but you point them toward the enemy and they are a one man army.

Yeah, there is one in almost every group.  The player who likes to fight the plot, get the party in all sorts of messes that could have easily been avoided, and actually turn party members against one another.  If there is one thing a GM needs in order to run a successful campaign, is flexibility.  That and the patience of a saint.

In the group that I was in (in which this comic is loosely based upon), we did actually pass notes instead of just stating our actions if we needed them to be secret, or a surprise.  If the group ever split up, many times the GM would require actions be sent in by notes.  This is because we commonly considered player knowledge the same as character knowledge.  There are several times the GM (including myself if I was running the campaign at the time) would call players out on it, but we tried to get away with it every chance we got.  Hence the GM requiring notes when we were split up. 

The reason behind this can be illustrated by the party almost wiping itself out in a dungeon once when we were split up.  We eventually traversed the dungeon (both groups) and actually came to adjoining rooms with a door in between.  There was a thief in group A along with a high level wizard and fighter, group B consisted of another high level wizard, fighter, ranger and cleric.  The thief heard noises in the next room, silently alerted his fellows and they hatched the plan to open the door and the wizard would cast fireball on the center of the room inside.  The door was locked, so the thief starts to pick it (after looking for traps, of course).  The GM alerts group B that the handle on the door on the opposite side of the room is rattling.  The wizard in group B informs the GM that once the door opens, he will send a fireball in through the door into the other room.  All of this was done through notes, which we had been doing more or less since we split up, so we weren’t aware that the other half of the party was on the other side, nor were we suspicious becuase the GM suddenly started making us send notes. 

Needless to say, once the door was open, chaos ensued.  Two fireballs from fairly high level wizards come careening past each other and explode in opposite rooms.  Most of us didn’t make our savings throws, so we took full damage, and that toasted many of us (we weren’t in top condition after battling some of the monsters in that dungeon).  It was the cleric making his that saved a lot of us from rolling up a new character.  He healed what he could with the spells and potions he had left.  One of the wizards outright died, and we had to carry him back to get ressurected.  Fun times.