11 Great Dungeon Master Tips Revealed at Winter Fantasy 2020
I found some of these tips very helpful advice. Some new, some reminders of best practices. Here are a few of those:
1. When you have to deliver background, have players roll for it so it feels like a reward.
That's nice; it's a good way to pass out information. My rumors are like this, as is information about monsters, etc.
I still struggle a bit with what information to pass out - running a very player-knowledge heavy game clashes with a system that has very character-knowledge oriented skills. The players end up wanting the best of both - what I know, plus what my character knows, instead of either/or. But those same skills make useful ways to determine who gets what information and to ensure information that drives play and reduce table time wastage.
2. Try to award every attempt to gather information with something.
This approach is also really nice - it drives brief descriptions by the GM and careful investigation by the players.
3. Show the written names of key non-player characters. Pictures are even better.
And minis beat pictures.
8. Add, don’t subtract.
When I next run AD&D, I think I'll try counting up the HP instead of counting down. Perhaps I'll have the PCs keep track of damage inflicted on the monsters and just put them down when their HP reaches 0.
10. Every time you ask for a check, you write a check.
Roll for success only when failure is meaningful and success isn't required to have fun. That should be on the inside of a GM's eyelids.
I won't follow all of the advice. Much doesn't apply to my sort of games. But those tips are really good ones in my opinion, and evoked thoughts of better ways to run my game.
The comments section is, of course, rife with people explaining how the tips are wrong. Heh.
Never thought of adding damage, instead of subtracting it from monster HP. That's kind of cool.
ReplyDeleteFrom the beginning of gaming I've alternated between tracking damage and tracking health from game to game. It seemed obvious from day 1 that they are equivalent and sometimes one feels easier to me.
DeleteI started adding up damage years ago when I had a player who was so good he could reliably tell what I was writing on my scratch paper by the motions of my pencil. After one too many "I think it's got 12 hp left", I started adding up damage instead. Then it didn't matter if he knew the number because he didn't know where it would end.
ReplyDeleteEarthdawn adds damage up so I'm used to it, I find it particularly useful in GURPS since GURPS deals heavy in positive and negative HP and just adding is easier
ReplyDeleteHmm. Because GURPS makes negatives so important I always subtract. I can't see how it would be easier to deal with, say 12 HP and adding up to 24 and saying, okay, that's a death check. Or 9 points of injury and saying that's below 1/3 HP.
DeleteI find it more intuitive to say a Rock Troll automatically bites the dust at 102 total damage than at -85 HP starting at 17
DeleteKeeping all things one sign is easier
Subtracting works better for D&D since once you get to the negatives who cares your dead Jim
It just feels like work dividing HP down and then adding them up, since I need to know fractions, breakpoints based on HP (-1 x HP is now 34 out of 102, not -17 from 17), etc. I suppose I could try it but it feels clunky just thinking about it. In AD&D it just feels elegant mentally.
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