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How do you perfect the craft of GMing or adventure writing?

December 17, 2009 in Design, GMing, Seeking Feedback by Fitz | 2 comments

Welcome back!

For me, “perfect” is an unreachable ideal. There is no perfect game, but we can work and strive for as close as possible. If everyone a) stays engaged, b) challenges each other and the GM, and c) has fun – it was a success. Without the interplay between players and between players and GMs, there is no game.

So I’m always looking for other perspectives on how to create good adventures. Recently I saw an article in Entertainment Weekly about John Lasseter of Pixar fame. In the article, he stated his team’s formula for making great Pixar movies:

1) Toil to perfect the story.
2) Tackle technical innovation.
3) Take creative leaps of faith.

Why couldn’t we take that approach and apply it to… roleplaying games? If you think of an adventure as an episode or a campaign as a movie series, why not see how they work with RPGs?

1) Toil to perfect the story.

This one for sure applies. Story is the backbone for getting and keeping player interest. Yes, I’ve played games where all you do is clean out dungeon after dungeon. But without a reason for doing that – a reason for taking that path – all you’re doing then is stumbling through the dark killing things that move and taking any loot you find.

Occasionally, sure. I like a good dungeon crawl as much as anybody. But without having a story to explain WHY your PCs should care about these little podunk towns, why they should rescue the damsels or find the lost treasure of Whosit… they’re just going through the motions. As GMs or designers, we need to keep story in mind from the very beginning.

So before designing dungeons or monsters or setting up encounters… Make sure you have a story first.

2) Tackle technical innovation.

Now this one I’m not too sure about. As a software engineer, I have to admit I’m always looking for the next great gadget or piece of software to make my life easier (99% fail in this regard, yet companies like Microsoft are still in business – go figure). But I tend to go old school with my gaming and leave the toys off the game table.

I’ve seen many interesting and detailed discussions about using new technologies like Netbooks or Google Wave, touch-sensitive displays, projectors, and so on. However, I’m most comfortable gaming with a few books, paper, pens/pencils, and real dice.

Some of you may like to go techie when gaming – but so far I’m not one of them.

So maybe this one doesn’t apply in all cases.

3) Take creative leaps of faith.

This one I can definitely get behind. With story, you have the beginnings of a latticework you can add plot, setting, and characters to. But without being creative in how you create and present the end result, even the best stories can fall flat.

One huge creative leap for me is trusting in your players to fill in the gaps. Without the PCs, there is no game. GMs are there to set the stage and the PCs have to give it life in my opinion. So involve them from the beginning – let them fill in the backstories for their characters, let them describe parts of the world their characters would know intimately – get them involved in the creative process.

Another huge creative leap of faith can simply be presenting a heck of an idea in the story. Mix and match things in new ways. Take the Chinese Menu approach – a few things from column A, a few from columns B and C, mix, smooth over the seams, and voila…

Will the Pixar/Lasseter three-rule approach help? It certainly can’t hurt by offering another perspective.

So what are the cardinal rules for you GMs or game designers out there?

Google Wave: we came, we saw, we played D&D (arstechnica.com)
Friday Links for October 2, 2009 (moebiusadventures.com)
Monster’s Den The Book of Dread: an addictive dungeon crawling time-waster (downloadsquad.com)
4 Surprising Google Wave Uses (mashable.com)

Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Tags: adventure, Design, Dungeon crawl, Entertainment Weekly, Game, Games, Google Wave, John Lasseter, Microsoft, Role-playing game, Roleplaying, RPGs

Need Feedback – Where do we go from here?

November 22, 2009 in Design, News, Rules, Seeking Feedback by Fitz | 1 comment

Sorry I’ve been a bit lacking in the posts arena lately. I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking about how to move forward.

Question Marks With the great, constructive feedback from the October 2009 playtest session of the Moebius Adventures system, it became painfully clear it was time to rethink things. Each player at that session had constructive criticisms of various aspects of the rules, from character generation and presentation to skill resolution and combat. Though we had a good time despite the rules, I was left wondering about the future of the game.

Moebius Adventures was born in the mid-1990s when a friend (Sean Bindel) and I took a hard look at the games we’d been playing.

Like many gamers, we’d played with a number of systems in college and before. We had a great time with a campaign set based loosely on the Temple of Elemental Evil from TSR, but we used the Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game as our system. Add in some serious time playing the d6 Star Wars RPG, Call of Cthulhu, Mechwarrior, and even a little Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, and that about summed it up. And after college, we were playing in a Vampire: The Masquerade game and decided we wanted to get back to the fantasy roots we both started with.

The Moebius Adventures system started out as an exercise in discovering what qualities we wanted to see in a RPG rules system. We modeled it a bit after the Palladium FRPG (1st edition) and Dungeons & Dragons and set to work adding our own spin. The result was first published in 1997 and then in revised form in 2007. And it was the edition from 2007 that we playtested in October of this year.

Though painful, I would say it was incredibly valuable to have seen the game through fresh eyes with this recent playtest session. Almost immediately after, I started working on a slimmed down set of rules that would provide (1) quick character creation, (2) quicker skill and combat resolution, and (3) enough freedom to do all that I was looking at for a cross-genre universal system.

I believe I’ve met that goal and hope to do some playtesting in the next few months as I get more details written up and considered.

My problem now is deciding what to do about this predicament. I have a ton of ideas for free-form magic, super-hero abilities, as well as ways to integrate technology for modern and futuristic settings. And I have three entire settings from which to pull potential setting or adventure products from. But without a simple, consistent, and open system to use, I’m at a bit of an impasse. In my mind, I can’t create system-less modules or settings without having some way of modeling a consistent way to describe NPCs, monsters, items, and so on.

Am I simply over-thinking this? Obviously there are many companies and writers coming up with great RPG materials and I’m not the only one who’s run into this.

Can anyone point out some companies that are doing this already and how they’ve overcome this hurdle (that’s most likely entirely in my head)? Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

The RPG Course – Lecture Seven from Worlds in a Handful of Dice (nitessine.wordpress.com)
You Want to Do What? The Art of Improvisation in GMing (Part 1) from Dungeon Mastering (dungeonmastering.com)

Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Tags: Call of Cthulhu, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Game, Games, Non-player character, Role-playing game, Roleplaying, RPGs, Rules, supplements, systems, Temple of Elemental Evil

Magazine Review: Kobold Quarterly Fall 2009 Issue 11

November 12, 2009 in Uncategorized by Fitz | 2 comments

Hi all!

Along with many other folks, I had an opportunity to check out the Fall 2009 issue of Kobold Quarterly in October… And I’m just now getting back to writing up the review. But here I am!

I have to admit that I’d only seen one other issue of the magazine a couple of years ago and though I was impressed, I wasn’t blown away. This time it hit me more like the old Dungeon or Dragon magazines of yore and from the cover on I was hooked. Not only does it have great art to capture your attention, but the content covers everything from vampires to the myth of the Philosopher’s Stone and far beyond.

As with many magazines, there are quite a few ads – but I’m guessing KQ (like many other magazines) uses ad- and subscription-revenues to keep providing us great content every quarter. On the plus side, most of the ads are well designed, colorful, and definitely meant for the target audience (of which I’m definitely a member).

The issue starts off with “A Broken Mind – Sanity and Mental Disorders” by Scott Gable – and I love the idea of merging in sanity rules with D&D. Ever since I played Call of Cthulhu in college, I’ve been fascinated by usually slow (sometimes quick) slide to madness that can occasionally overcome a character. Gable’s mechanic of adding “Mind” as a 7th ability score and a pool of sanity works great to bring in the dark overtones of a world where mortals are not meant to experience everything the world might throw at them… And I just love describing a character’s sanity points as “the currency of madness”… [insert evil laughter here]

Gable’s article presents not only the base mechanic for sanity, but how to use it (and lose it) as the character reacts to the bizarre things an evil GM might throw at his or her players. Having lost my sanity in CoC long ago, I remember going Berserk and killing the rest of my party, so I was pleased to see that slip into the list of “Temporary Insanities”. And among the “Indefinite Insanities” you have things like Fear, Obsession, and Paranoia – a trifecta of mental illness sure to cause a player to stretch some roleplaying skills!

Another great article is “Howling Werebeasts – How to Play Lycanthropes as PCs” by John E. Ling, Jr., which covers a bit of the history of Lycanthropy and how to integrate it into a game. Unless you’re playing White Wolf’s Werewolf, I think the templates covered presents both sides of the were-beast picture. As a player, you must take the bad with the good. It hurts to change. People will react to you differently. And it requires a it of work on your part. As a GM, it offers logical responses to how to work it into a game without throwing the balance off.

What I really liked about the article was how it broke the Wererat, Werewolf, and Werebear into actual, playable characters. I don’t think I want to play one soon, but it might be something to consider as a NPC should I need to throw some PCs a curve ball. And once you’ve introduced it as an NPC it’s not too much of a stretch to see your PCs get infected… [insert more evil laughter here]

The other articles in the magazine are just as good, covering the “Ecology of the Vampire,” “Uvandir: The Pride of Craftsmen” (great details about dwarven life), “Running Across the Screen (A GM Roundtable)” (great roundtable interview with 16 GMs!), and more. The book reviews were also welcome, presenting a few fantasy and science-fiction titles that might inspire GMs and Players alike.

In 82 pages you get a bit of everything, which is awesome. Be sure to check it out at KoboldQuarterly.com today!

Looks like I’m going to have to break out my wallet and purchase a subscription just in time for the holidays.

–Fitz

NewbieDM Review: Kobold Quarterly 11 from www. Newbie DM .com (newbiedm.com)

Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Tags: Call of Cthulhu, Dragon, Dungeon, Game, gamemaster, Games, gaming, GMs, Kobold Quarterly, magazine, Mental disorder, Non-player character, Player character, players, Roleplaying, RPGs, White Wolf

Elemental Appearance – Should it depend on the environment?

November 9, 2009 in Articles, GMing, Inspiration, Magic, Resources by Fitz | 2 comments

While driving around during a recent snowstorm (not much snow, but lots of wind), I saw a “snow devil” as the wind whipped across the road and created a mini-tornado of snow and it got me thinking… How would elementals manifest themselves in different environments?

And after thinking about it for a bit, I’ve come to the conclusion that elementals most likely change when faced with different conditions. For example, an air elemental may manifest as a dust devil in a desert or arid climate, as a waterspout on a larger body of water, or as a blizzard or “snow” devil… Size would be determined by the materials available as well as by the power of the elemental itself… a minor elemental on a grassy plain might not be seen easily, whereas a supersized elemental in the desert might present itself as a monstrous sandstorm.

Man on Fire Putting aside how the elemental got there in the first place (summoned, naturally-occurring, accident, etc.), you end up with some different ways elementals might appear in a game.

I’ve already talked about air elementals… Let’s think about fire elementals…

A fire elemental is dependent on two things – the initial spark that brought it to life and the fuel it needs to survive. So why wouldn’t an enterprising wizard wishing to consult with or capture such an elemental go to a cold place with little fuel or a place where the wizard alone controls the fuel. How vicious would a fire elemental be in a small firepit in the arctic?

But someone seeking to give rise to a large, uncontrolled fire elemental might summon one in a forest to consume it in flames, in a fuel depot (oil for lamps, etc.), or a brewery (or other alcohol-rich depot). Imagine the devastation with such a wild creature loose consuming large amounts of fuel or tinder…

Or what about earth elementals? Far too often I think of the rock monster from Galaxy Quest as your usual earth elemental. What about one made entirely of sand in the desert? Or tiny stones? Or even the silt from the edge of a river or lake?

Water elementals are also very dependent on the immediate environment… An elemental summoned from a puddle would be tiny when compared to one from the ocean or a large lake. Or what happens when one of these has a constant supply of rushing water vs. a finite supply? Then consider the consequences of a slow-moving water elemental made of snow or ice as opposed to one made of freely flowing water…

Then consider battles between different types of elemental and how they might appear in the world. A blizzard may be the battle between a large air elemental and a water elemental or a forest fire raging out of control may actually be a fire elemental and an air elemental at odds with each other. Stormy seas could be air vs. water and tidal waves could be created by undersea battles between earth and water…

Really the combinations are as endless as Mother Nature herself.

So the next time you want to include an elemental in a session… Think about how to introduce it to the characters, what form it may take, and the effects such a creature would have on the surrounding environment.

I know I’ll be paying more attention to the weather.

Leave a comment and let others know how you use elementals in your campaigns – I know I’d like having more food for thought!

–Fitz

Dust storm in Australia (boston.com)
B.C. fire doubles in size overnight (canada.com)
Drought (slideshare.net)
Sydney Begins Clean Up After Red Dust Storm (news.sky.com)

Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Tags: Arid, Dust storm, elementals, environment, Games, gaming, Lake, monsters, Mother Nature, Roleplaying, RPGs, The Earth, Water

Moral and Ethical Ambiguity, Part 4 of 4 – Conclusions

October 22, 2009 in Articles, GMing, Inspiration, Rules by Fitz | No comments

So from the first three parts of this series (part 1, part 2, part 3), you hopefully have seen some of the thought that went into our slightly different take on alignment for Moebius Adventures. Again, this is totally portable and could be used with any system I think.

RPGBlogCarnivalLogocopy But does it work? The jury’s still out. Ultimately, this may not be a usable alignment system. But it provides some interesting flexibility that the traditional good/evil scheme may not. If nothing else, perhaps it offers some methods for fleshing out characters in addition to a traditional good/evil alignment.

I think that new players should focus on the basic alignment grid of Good, Neutral, and Evil. But more advanced players may want a bit more play in how they approach decisions for their characters in a given world.

When conflicts arise between different levels of morality, it definitely gets interesting.

Let’s say that someone is trapped in a burning building and your character has enough time to safely extract the individual from harm. A character with a light moral alignment (+6 to +10) would save the individual, since Man is more important than Nature (in order of moral codes). A character with a gray moral alignment (-5 to +5) may or may not aid the trapped person. Is the person a friend? Would there be a possibility of a reward? These things may tip the scale one way or another. A character with a dark moral alignment (-6 to -10) might have started the fire or help the fire burn other nearby buildings. Maybe they consider cities dirty, unnatural structures and seek to, like Nature, clear the area for new growth.

Considering these qualities of Morality and Virtue provide some interesting insights into how our characters deal with the world around them and the people in it.

Hopefully I haven’t put anyone to sleep with this series. I think it’s philosophically interesting to approach roleplaying from more abstract ways than the old “good vs. evil” scheme.

Thanks for your time!
–Fitz

[AD&D1e] Three-Teeth the Zealous, Half-Orc Cleric/Assassin from A character for every game (rpgcharacters.wordpress.com)
PC Wrecking Balls from Gothridge Manor (gothridgemanor.blogspot.com)
Dungeon: The Chaos Scar from Points of Light (daegames.blogspot.com)
Do You Do It Alone Or In A Group? (gnomestew.com)
All Men Are Created Equal… Except the Revenant from Dungeon’s Master (dungeonsmaster.com)
Pathfinder: Character Creation from Ravenous Role Playing (ravenousrpg.com)
Raise your game’s stakes with a rival party from The RPG Athenaeum (rpgathenaeum.wordpress.com)
Moral and Ethical Ambiguity, Part 1 of 4 – Intro (moebiusadventures.com)
Moral and Ethical Ambiguity, Part 2 of 4 – Morality (moebiusadventures.com)
Dancing with the Dark from Evil Machinations (rpggm.com)
Dragon Age’s moral choices will be ‘aggressively grey’ (destructoid.com)
Spoon-Fed Morality (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)

Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Tags: Alignment, Evil, Games, Light, Magic, Moebius Adventures, morality, Nature, Player character, Religion and Spirituality, Roleplaying, RPGs, Video Games, virtue

Review: Open Game Table: The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs, Volume 1 Edited by Jonathan Jacobs

October 21, 2009 in Books, GMing, Inspiration, Resources, Reviews by Fitz | 2 comments

Hi all…

As my contribution to the RPG Gamer Network’s Small Press Week, here’s my review of Open Game Table: The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs, Volume 1.

As a lifetime player and gamemaster of tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs), I’m constantly amazed at the amount of passion, knowledge, and depth of other members of this collective of people who play RPGs. There are players that might as well be actors with as deeply as they get immersed in their characters. There are gamemasters (GMs) who know not only the art of story construction, but how to keep campaigns alive for years by constantly changing things up.

And then there are people like me. I straddle between the two camps, or at least try to, gleaning what I can from experts on both sides of the divide. I try my hand at writing roleplaying games, playing myself, and hopefully soon starting to GM again.

So when I come across new resources such as Open Game Table: The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs, Volume 1, I am blown away by the creativity and imagination bound up within. There are countless roleplaying blogs now, and Open Game Table aims to collect some of the finest blog articles from 2008. The articles may have been dusted off, edited, and illustrated to make them shinier, but they are the same thoughts that appeared on the internet first.

Jonathan Jacobs runs a blog known as The Core Mechanic and participates in a network of roleplaying bloggers known as the RPG Bloggers Network. And it’s many of the writers from that network that grace the pages of this first volume of what I hope will be many.

Jacobs and the other editors have arranged the book into broad chapters – Play Style, Game Play, Characters & Players, Monsters & NPCs, and so on. Each chapter collects a number of articles on the broad themes for that chapter. I have to say that with the sheer number of authors, pages, articles, and words, there were bound to be a few typos here and there, but they were all extremely minor and never caused any issues.

Some of my favorite content includes:

“Giving the Players a Reason to Enjoy the Campaign” by Brandon Daggerhart from Turtles all the Way Down – actually ASK the players about their characters and get them involved in the campaign earlier in a more interactive way.
“Extreme Makeover: Tavern Edition” by Stephen Dewey from Musings of the Chatty DM – so you’ve got a ratty old tavern in your campaign… maybe it needs some atmosphere, better descriptions of the food, or a gimmick?
“The Adventure Funnel” by Andrew Reyes from I Waste the Buddha with my Crossbow provides a stone simple way to focus your adventure ideas and funnel them into a complete experience – including the idea, obstacles, details, assistance and rewards

This is just a sampling of the many, many great, thought-provoking articles throughout this collection. What’s exciting about this is that it’s just volume 1! The potential is here to produce volumes of this sort of content as long as people are playing roleplaying games and blogging about them.

I have to commend Jacobs and the many authors and editors for putting together such a quality product. Open Game Table: The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs, Volume 1 should be on the “want list” of all gamers, whether you’re a player, a GM, or a writer. Order your copy from Lulu today as a hardcopy or PDF or check out RPGNow.com! (Jacobs also let me know that the book was picked up by Studio2Publishing, and is now in retail distribution so you should be able to pick up a copy from your friendly local gaming shop!

–Fitz

p.s. You can also order it from Amazon:

All I know about Tabletop RPGs, I learned from Video Games from Life and Times of a Philippine Gamer (philgamer.wordpress.com)
Nerd Watching: Are you a backseat GM? from Dungeon Mastering (dungeonmastering.com)
Geeks Next Door – The Wiz from Dungeon Mastering (dungeonmastering.com)
Being an impartial DM and a WIP Map from Chgowiz’s Old Guy RPG Blog (oldguyrpg.blogspot.com)

Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Tags: Books, Dungeon Master, Fantasy, Game, gamemaster, Games, gaming, Jonathan Jacobs, Lulu, Non-player character, Open Game Table, Role-playing game, Roleplaying, RPGs, Universal

Moral and Ethical Ambiguity, Part 3 of 4 – Virtue

October 16, 2009 in Articles, GMing, Inspiration, Rules by Fitz | No comments

Ok, so we’ve chatted a bit about Morality and moral codes (back in part 2). Now let’s change our focus to Virtue and bring some pain into the equation…

What is Virtue? Virtue represents the mortal drive to ease or cause pain and suffering in themselves and others. Someone’s virtue isn’t determined by how they perceive the pain they inflict or receive, but in how they deal with that pain.

RPGBlogCarnivalLogocopy Rules-wise, we use that same -10 to +10 scale. For Virtue Alignments, “Light” is 10 to 6, “Gray” is 5 to -5, and Dark is -6 to -10.

Let’s use the example of a gym teacher ridiculing a student for not being able to do enough push-ups. The teacher may feel that ridiculing the child in front of others will make them work that much harder at improving their performance. The adult teacher may truly feel he’s helping the child by forcing them to perform. However, the teacher’s behavior shows that their virtue is firmly set in the gray, not the light or dark areas of the scale. Regardless of whether the child’s performance improves, the teacher inflicting the pain is encouraging a potential change in behavior. Both may be changed by the process.

Not all pain is easily identified, but the result is the same – someone suffers. Some pain manifests in an individuals psyche or soul and may never be seen by others. Other pain is physical and more immediately apparent to others.

Prolonged exposure to the effects of pain and suffering may lead to permanent changes in a person’s mind, body, or soul. Physical pain may cause damage creating deformities, bodily weaknesses, or even death. Mental pain may manifest itself as insanity, depression, or an altered state of consciousness. And soulful changes may change a person’s faith in the divine, their will to live, or change how quickly they can recover from repeated abuses.

A Virtue Alignment reflects how a character views pain and suffering. Do they want to inflict pain or stop it? Virtue is more than just thinking about pain – it’s what a character will do when confronting a situation involving pain in themselves or others.

Characters with light virtues will attempt to ease the pain in others and not cause pain themselves. However, they may kill someone to ease the pain suffered from a terminal illness. And when interrogating a prisoner they might try to give the person hope of life without pain in exchange for information. They would never force an individual to watch others being tortured.

Characters with gray virtues might use torture to further a higher goal or achieve something important to them. They might watch a horde of barbarians enter a city and slaughter citizens, never raising a hand to stop the massacre. They aren’t necessarily inflicting the pain themselves, but they still have the ability to stop it or at least a portion of it if they choose.

Characters with dark virtues will use pain readily. They might torture a prisoner before asking any questions simply because they feel the prisoner deserves it.

When you consider villains from the standpoint of Morality and Virtue, I find that you end up with much more realistic bad guys. Everyone has a story. So you have an evil wizard that wants to destroy a kingdom. Why? What happened to that person to make them willing to commit evil acts?

Is it that they were in conflict with Society or an individual? Perhaps severe mental or physical damage was done in the process?

–Fitz

Arousing Compassion (digitaldoorway.blogspot.com)
A World Without Pain (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
Treating frail elderly not always best: studies (cbc.ca)
Spoon-Fed Morality (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)

Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Tags: Conditions and Diseases, Death, Evil, gaming, Health, morality, pain, PCs, Roleplaying, RPGs, Soul, Suffering, Terminal illness, virtue

Now part of the RPG Bloggers Network!

September 17, 2009 in News by Fitz | 3 comments

Hi all…

RPG Bloggers Network Member 150x150 This is probably just the gamer geek in me, but I’m excited to announce that this blog is now part of the RPG Bloggers Network! I want to thank Dave at Critical Hits for adding me to the list.

I’ve been following posts on the network for what seems like years. It’s somewhat surreal to see my last post show up in the list along with all the other great posts that go up every day.

Thanks Dave! Looking forward to sharing my own odd perspective on gaming as well as news and info about Moebius Adventures!

–Fitz

Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Tags: gamers, Games, Geek, On the Web, Roleplaying, RPGs

Open-Ended Campaigns: Sandbox Trouble

September 15, 2009 in Advice, GMing by Fitz | 3 comments

In the various campaigns that I’ve run over the years, I have always tried to get close to the sandbox approach of storytelling. However, as all GMs who have tried it can probably attest, a wide open world has its issues. This is a cautionary tale to anyone looking to run their campaign wide open and simply follow the PCs. It has a few advantages, but wow can it go wrong fast.

Back in the mid-90s, I ran a campaign in my Immortals’ Wake world, which is a traditional fantasy world with some superhero elements thrown in for good measure. (More about the IW world will come out over time here eventually.) I was playing with Sean, the co-creator of Moebius Adventures and a couple of other guys.

I introduced what I thought of as a simple concept at the time… “Dust.” This Dust was only created by one particular event and thus very rare, but it was found to have an effect on people who inhaled it, much like cocaine. Yes, I was stupid enough to bring drugs into a fantasy roleplaying campaign.

Over time, I watched as a player took a low-powered character in the Thieves’ Guild and began to create his own drug and crime empire right under my nose. His friend became an enforcer/bodyguard type character and suddenly I found myself in the middle of a gang war. Thief vs. Thief. Guards vs. Thieves. And as it escalated, things got further and further out of hand. It was no longer my campaign – it was their campaign.

Before long, we ran into other issues with those two gamers and eventually we stopped gaming with them entirely. But the upside was that my in-game drug war went away.

And now, probably 12 years after that campaign, I understand what I did wrong… As others have pointed out recently in blog posts, you can’t just create a world and set the players loose. One of two things happens… either they get bored or they start causing trouble. Or perhaps it was the boredom leading to the trouble-making. Who knows?

The trick I think is to make sure that there are things going on that affect the players. In my next IW campaign, I want to start the players off getting comfortable in the setting and then pull the rug out from under them. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I have other evil things in mind. [Insert Evil Laughter Here]

And the other lesson? Don’t introduce a drug war in a fantasy campaign… Sort of like Vizzini in The Princess Bride…

“You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha… [thud]“

For another take on sandbox games, check out Gnome Stew here.

Any lessons about sandbox gaming you guys have learned over the years? Leave me a comment. Let’s get this conversation going!

Rating: +1 (from 1 vote)

Tags: Fantasy, gamemaster, Games, GM, Player character, Roleplaying, RPGs, sandbox

RPGs

How do you perfect the craft of GMing or adventure writing?

Need Feedback – Where do we go from here?

Magazine Review: Kobold Quarterly Fall 2009 Issue 11

Elemental Appearance – Should it depend on the environment?

Moral and Ethical Ambiguity, Part 4 of 4 – Conclusions

Review: Open Game Table: The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs, Volume 1 Edited by Jonathan Jacobs

Moral and Ethical Ambiguity, Part 3 of 4 – Virtue

Now part of the RPG Bloggers Network!

Open-Ended Campaigns: Sandbox Trouble

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