Saving the world on a Sunday afternoon
Written down by Judith O., with help and advice from Dominic D., Warren J., Ruth S., Dave S. and others.
So, you’ve been to a few TL games, and now you have an idea for running a game of your own and the desire to give it a go. The good news is that while it is hard work, if you get it right it can be a deeply rewarding experience and a lot of fun; the bad news is that there’s a lot of things that can trip you up if you’re not expecting them.
This is not in any way a set of rules for running a Sunday afternoon LARP; it’s a set of guidelines, hints and tips collected from personal experiences both as a newbie GM and a newbie GM wrangler, tempered with Experienced GM experience. It will hopefully make your life as a Newbie GM easier, and make your progression to Experienced GM (if that’s your aim) a lot smoother for all involved. The important thing to remember is that you will, in time, find your own style that may be wildly different to what’s described here, and as long as everyone has fun that’s entirely okay.
If you’re already an Experienced GM, this acts as a refresher – and at the end there are tips and suggestions for extending your gaming know-how to cover high level games, splitting the party and other oddities best avoided when starting out. There’s also a set of guidelines for coming up with your own monsters outside of the GM Rules as they currently stand.
Presumably at the point you are reading this you have an idea for a plot and not much else. Before going any further, the most helpful thing you can do for yourself is put your plot to one side and co-GM for one or more Experienced GMs first. Normal monstering and playing doesn’t really convey the sheer amount of behind-the-scenes effort that needs to be put in, and even if you’re just sitting in on a plotting session or helping to wrangle monsters on the day this is the easiest and most comprehensive way to get a feel for how GMing works.
The simplest way to get to help out on a LARP is to ask; check the Event Calendar for non-campaign games in the pipeline, and ask the GM(s) if you can sit in or help out to get experience. You can ask campaign GMs, but bear in mind that they are usually horrendously busy and harassed. If you can help out with games run by different GMs, so much the better – you’ll get to pick up different skills from different people, and have a chance to weigh the pros and cons of different approaches.
To an extent, running out tabletops or larps in other systems can also help give you a feel for how it works, but bear in mind that a) no larp can match the scenery budget and sheer convenience of a tabletop and b) what works in one larp system doesn’t necessarily match to another (take the difference between LT and TL rituals for one).
In order to run a game as a Newbie GM, you need three things; an idea, a date and a co-GM. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
Start by writing down your idea as a brief plot synopsis. It doesn’t have to be complete at this point, although if what you’ve written down is “Wouldn’t it be cool if X happened?” or “Vampires!” then you may have a lot of work ahead of you. If you think you have a complete skeleton of a game with encounters, write that down as well. What this gives you is a starting point for talking to Experienced GMs to find one that will co-GM with you – and it gives you a chance to think whether the game will make vague sense and be interesting to other people.
Note: If you really have written “Wouldn’t it be cool if X?” or included any variant of the line “And then my character saves the day” be prepared to have a good rethink of your idea – the former can sometimes work with a lot of effort, the latter just annoys people.
You may also want to think about what rank bracket to aim the game at (low, middle, high or unranked), bearing in mind that lower rank brackets are significantly easier to stat around, and how many games your idea will take to run to its full conclusion, bearing in mind that one-shots are significantly less hassle to run and less likely to cause Problems for characters if circumstances mean you don’t get a chance to run the follow-up games.
An additional note on rank brackets1: Rank brackets exist so that everyone in the game has a reasonable shot at feeling as useful and challenged as everyone else in the game. Unranked tends to work for RP-heavy games or games where you can build in a party-split-by-rank mechanic, but as a general rule sensible brackets look something like the following.
5-20
15-30
20-40
30-60
45-75
60-90
70-100
80+
These are purely guidelines, and every one has some wiggle room depending on the game type and the characters involved.
Next up, scope out some possible dates for running the game. You need to give yourself plenty of time if it’s anything complicated, and you should try to avoid clashes with exams, coursework, moving house and any other major time and energy consuming event for the sake of your own sanity. There is nothing wrong with starting planning a game several months before you want to run it, and it’s a lot better than trying to cram into two weeks along with three essays and a midterm.
If you want to run a game for a specific character, check that the player is willing and what dates are suitable for them as well as for you. Do this in writing if possible (email) as then there is a record of what you’ve agreed. Try not to run games for a character when starting out though…and if you must, make sure that your plot can still work if the player is unexpectedly unable to show up on the day.
Now’s the time to take your idea and potential dates along to possible Experienced co-GMs. How you do this is up to you, so long as by the end of it you have an agreed date and a willing co-GM, but the most important thing is not asking when they’re in the middle of trying to do something else – an email or a chat in the pub/carpark are the most sensible options. Your potential co-GM will probably want to discuss your plan to a greater or lesser extent in order to get an idea of how feasible your idea is and how much work it will be; be polite, and remember that they’ve got more game-running experience than you so it’s worth listening to what they say. This doesn’t mean you have to change your game to suit them, but they may have a point – or it may be the wrong sort of game for them and it’s worth talking to a different Experienced co-GM (an advantage of helping co-GM other games is that you will have an idea for who you can work with and what they like to run in advance). Make sure also that they’re happy to assess you for Experienced GM status if that’s what you’re aiming for in the long-term.
Once you’ve found a co-GM and agreed a game date, put in an application on the Event Calendar. It doesn’t need to be complicated; for a one-shot game, all you really need to say is who your co-GM is, what the rank bracket is and that it’s a one-shot (adjectives like “silly” or “dark” optional). If it’s running for a particular character or as a Halloween/Christmas/April Fools/other holiday game, include this as well, likewise if it’s a part x of y game.
Assuming your game request is approved, check the default game details are right and fill in the rest as appropriate – and remember to update them as you go if you need to, such as putting start time back due to races in front fields and the like.
Writing out a full game plot is a bit like writing a story – it has pacing, flow, and everything should make reasonable sense with hindsight by the end (which can be the end of the game or the end of the arc). As such, one of the most important questions when writing a plot is Why – why has this happened, why will the players do this to resolve it, and so on and so forth. Why also matters on a smaller scale, like ‘why are the bandits in this encounter attacking the party?’ and ‘why is this peasant here for the plot dump?’ Why gives you your monster motivations, your player controls, and the background to your plot. Much like if you were writing a novel, start with writing out just bullet points of all the key plot moments and evolve the details as you go.
Your Experienced co-GM is there to be leant on heavily for plotting, so use them as much as you can – it’s almost always worth having a second pair of eyes on a plot to ask difficult questions like “But what happens if they don’t do this here?” and “Why is this person doing this?” If there’s something in the plot that they’re fairly certain won’t work, part of their job is to suggest alternatives and ways to make the idea more feasible. For this reason, don’t hide details from your co-GM unnecessarily – even if you’re planning a multi-part game and you think they’ll want to play future parts, cover everything that’s needed to make this game make sense, and explain that missing bits are because of future games. If your game can’t stand up on its own, then it needs work.
Keeping the game fairly simple and straightforward is a good thing for starting off GMing – if you want to make it more interesting, twist the game trope (the McGuffin being retrieved has a mind of its own, for example) but keep the overall plot simple and coherent. Where possible, use existing monster types and existing castings in normal ways as this will make statting and running the game a whole lot easier. If you realise that your plot has turned into an “And then this cool monster shows up!” journey through the monster manual, scrap it and start again – likewise if all it does is showcase how cool one of your characters is.
Pacing preference is entirely subjective, but if you can end it on a high note (rescuing the hostage, liberating the McGuffin, thwarting the Big Bad etc) then do so – the ending, and the emotions caused, are one of the things that players will remember for a long time, and it adds to the overall enjoyment of the game considerably. This is especially important if you plan to have any encounters where the players are unable to react to bad-guy tauntings or beatings – if they don’t get the chance to kick back in a reasonable timescale, (end of game, following game if it’s the following weekend etc) they won’t enjoy the experience, but if they do then they probably will.
As a side-note, there are certain key concepts that will make a party plough through everything as fast as possible: children in danger, kidnap victims and the like tend to lead to headlong charges. If you use these, be aware that the players are likely to walk through roleplay encounters at least 80% of the time and be correspondingly more vicious in putting down enemies on the way.
When coming up with the details of your plot, be aware of two things: one, players and monsters are not telepathic, and two, no plot survives first contact with the players/monsters. What this means is that the players, and to a lesser extent the monsters, aren’t aware of all of the little details that are so clear in your head, and as such will do pesky things like talk their way through a fight or kill the NPC with the plot-dump. The trick is to plan out alternatives to obvious failure or problem points, and to be prepared to roll with the rest; plot-hammering and railroading will make players rather narked, but if you’ve done enough planning at this stage you can still make them follow your plot without making it obvious that their apparent choices aren’t entirely real. Having at least two or three ways to get around any key plot moments is big and clever, as you can’t guarantee the players will think of the ‘right’ option on the day without a lot of hinting, and there will always be someone whose default response is “I hit it with me axe.”
For planning individual encounters, remember to think about:
There is a map of the Bath site with basic descriptions of the standard areas available – it’s worth having to hand to get an idea of the game route and where things happen, but be aware that there are a lot more routes and interesting places to put things than are marked on the map. In terms of distance, a rule of thumb is avoid making people walk more than about 1.5 times the length of the forest (so there, back and there again) during the entire game – it’s further than you think, especially in heavy armour and having to stop and fight every few minutes – so if you can plan encounters to follow a particular route rather than jumping around then do so.
Lastly, props. Props can make or break a game, but don’t get carried away – someone is going to have to carry them when they’re not in use, so make them light, easy to move and no more than you absolutely need. Make-up, masks, sashes, tabards or other things that help players identify what they’re dealing with are always big and clever though – check the club stock to find out what you can be lent for the game, or else buy or make your own. Props can also include written material to give to the party, like extra creature information, maps, written orders etc.
At this point, it’s a good idea to write out a plot doc that covers all the details of all the encounters to a point that is sufficient to run the game. This is for multiple reasons – it’s another chance to get it all clear in your head and you co-GM’s head, it means you’re less likely to forget anything when stressed and rushed on the day, and if you need to it makes it far easier to recruit a monster on the day to set up an encounter for you. The level of detail is up to you, but at least to start with more is better, and should include a list of what stats are needed for the monsters per encounter, what props are needed for each encounter, any specific information that monsters need to get out to players, and how to solve any puzzle encounters.
The aim of statting for any game with an element of risk is to force the players to have a med break no later than two-thirds of the way through the game and be out of power and almost out of life at the end of the final fight. Your Experienced co-GM should be able to guide you on this, but resist the temptation to get them to do all of it – at the very least, sit with them and ask questions while they do it so that you understand what they’re doing for next time. If you can get hold of the player stats in advance to know what the party is vaguely capable of, this will make your life easier, but be very wary of statting to beat the party – while you may want to negate a particular character’s abilities occasionally, if you do it in more than one encounter per character then it begs the question of why you’re letting them play in the first place.
If you’re using the standard existing monsters, the most straightforward way to stat while getting the hang of it is to pick a rank and work it out using the standard tables and Guilds as guided. Working out the approximate rank to stat to is the bit that takes experience, but in general a good starting point is the middle of the player party rank bracket – one-off monsters can go higher, spoddy monsters meant for grinding them down through numbers should go lower. If you’re not sure, or if the party looks squishy, drop the statting rank and be prepared to upstat on the day – or do two or three versions of the frequent monsters at different ranks if you have time. Just remember though, even if a monster is only doing a point of damage per hit and getting one or two hits in before they die it will add up in time with enough monsters… Once you get the hang of it, it is possible to stat on the “that looks about right” method, but this takes time and practice to get right.
Don’t forget that monsters need soft skills as well as combat and casting skills – monster scouts should have Rec Creature, monster healers should have Rec Wounds, monster casters should have Talisman or Holy Symbol and so on.
Because the costs for castings are based on casting levels rather than specific castings, it’s often tempting to shortcut with “School/Path to Level n” – however monsters will either not know the School or Path, which leads to faffing about giving them ideas, or will know it very well, which leads to unexpectedly powerful combinations of effects appearing. You’re generally better off picking two or three chains and giving the monsters a choice of which to take – otherwise, you may want to bring a copy of the casting tables you’re using.
You can have options on stats to give more variety/fit the available kit – so Dagger Mastery and Ambidex OR 1H Sword Spec and Medium Shield Spec, or Fire spells OR Air spells. It doesn’t matter if the numbers aren’t the same so long as overall it’s about right.
If you feel you need to stat a monster that isn’t in the existing rules, at the end of this guide is a section on how to do this – go take a look.
When you’re done, each monster type should have a set of stats that looks something like this:
Monster description – Rec Call
Props needed: Mask, make-up etc
Life: Current (Max if different)
Toughness: Current (Max if different)
Willpower: Current (Max if different)
Dexterity: Current (Max if different) MiA/ARS
Armour: Total (Armour Layer + Armour Layer + Toughness + Dexterity + Other)
Damage: Weapon Total (Skill + Strength + Other) Ambi
Other weapons using same pattern
Shield if applicable
Additional weapon skills – Backstab/Throat Slit
Standing: Current (Max if different)
Mana: Current (Max if different)
Miracles: List of miracles, or Ceremony level and miracles, only top of chain needed if continuous.
Spells: List of spells, or Ritual level and spells, only top of chain needed if continuous.
Innate: List of innate castings, only top of chain needed if continuous, include number of uses
Other: Talisman/Holy Symbol, Rec skills, Strength levels, Adept abilities, special/natural abilities etc – split these by skill type (Physical, Knowledge, Religious/Magic etc)
Where you can, order your stats by order of appearance in the game or group them by type as it will make finding them easier. You should also think about having a spoddy sort of faff-monster that can be thrown in between encounters if you need to slow the players down while you get the next one set up – ideally this is one of the monsters you already have statted for the game as this keeps it more consistent.
Your key words for the day are Relax and Communicate. The more you can relax, the easier it is to roll with the unexpected. The more you communicate, the less likely the unexpected is to happen…
With this is mind, make sure that by the weekend before you’ve made arrangements for any club weapons and props that you’re borrowing to be present for your game, and by the night before you’ve printed off everything you need to print (a copy of the plot doc and stats sheet per GM plus a spare, rec sheets, player information etc) and collected any of your own kit and props that you’re going to use – this means that on the morning of the game you’re not running around like a madman and realising you’ve lost a key plot item or your printer’s died.
If you have any big NPC roles that require a lot of briefing (going to be with the party all day, big talky role etc), where you can pick out a suitable monster and send the briefing to them a few days in advance – if all you have to do is answer any questions on the day, it’s a lot less time and effort. Otherwise, get to site with plenty of time, and take them to one side before main monster briefing to go through it.
Before the briefings, check through all of the kit including the weapons with your co-GM – this means you’ll both know where things are and if anything’s missing that needs working around.
Throughout the day, make sure that you talk to your co-GM and they talk to you; in general you’ll probably have one of you with the player party to keep an eye on them and feed them information, and one of you with the monster crew setting up the next encounter or three, so at the absolute minimum during battleboards or any time something urgent happens take a few minutes to update each other on what’s going on. You may find it easier to keep one on the players and one on the monsters all day, you may prefer to swap over as you go, this is up to you. If you can borrow radios, do so, as being able to communicate over distance without running is a godsend.
You also need to communicate with your players and monsters – partly because they will have questions or want to do strange things that aren’t in the plot, and partly because things will come up that they need to know both IC and OOC. If it’s something everyone needs to know, like a terrain problem or a timing or a description, call a Time Stop and explain it en masse, it will make your life a lot easier.
Most importantly, make sure you finish one job before you move onto the next, and if necessary delegate further jobs to your co-GM or an experienced monster.
Briefings are generally split into three – player, monster, and everybody. The everybody briefings are there to cover OOC topics such as site risks, safety concerns, and individual health issues. You may want to check with the insurance responsible people and the first aiders in case anything has happened in recent games that needs flagging up. It can also be for letting people know about any odd IC effects going out that need explaining to everyone.
The best way for a monster briefing to start is “Once upon a time…” Tell them a story and they will listen and understand; jump around, and they’ll get bored and stop paying attention. You don’t need to go into massive detail on everything, just enough for the monsters to be able to follow the narrative for the day – you’ll be telling them the details later, and if you waffle now they will stop listening. Also, don’t be so loud the players can hear you, or so quiet the monsters can’t…
As for player briefings, what you tell them doesn’t have to have anything to do with what will actually happen – but be aware that players will ask questions (especially when you don’t have answers) or forge ahead blindly (when you’ve got crucial plot and you’re just waiting for someone to ask the right question). If you have a briefing monster played by someone else, brief them just before they give the player briefing (or give them a written briefing) and be prepared to stay with them in case of difficult questions.
There is no rule that says missions have to be lead by the Defenders – you can play with the feel of the mission and make people work in different ways by changing which Guild or locale is running the show. You also have the choice of assigning a whole command structure, assigning just the commander, or assigning no one and letting them sort themselves out – pick whatever makes sense in context of the initial brief.
Don’t forget to check your watch before starting the player briefing! You need to know this for working out base points later! And don’t forget to assign a player and a monster first aider!
Things will always go wrong, or the players will come up with ways to circumvent or avoid plot that you haven’t even considered. Don’t panic! Unless it’s absolutely necessary X happens, congratulate them on finding a way around it and move on. If it is crucial X happens, find another way for it to happen – but think hard about whether X is actually crucial or just something you think is cool.
If you need to stop the players going past a certain point because you don’t have monsters ready for them for whatever reason, faff them or otherwise make it clear that for Narrative Reason X they can’t go any further. You do need to make it clear to everyone though, or monsters will run through your invisible boundary with the players close behind. How much of a problem this is depends on location; for obvious reasons, it’s much easier to control player direction in the Valley than it is in Back Field.
Never be afraid to tell the players no if they ask if something is available or possible. No matter what you think they’re going to do with it, they’ll always surprise you… On the other hand, if you feel that a player has roleplayed sufficiently well, you can always answer character’s prayers/give them a Clue/have them turn up something useful etc. if the situation calls for it.
Sometimes, the players lose. Sometimes, the players lose really badly. It happens. Giving them the prize anyway cheapens it and makes it less fun – part of the game is the challenge, after all. At the absolute worst, you’ll need to find time (or a willing other GM) to run a game to put things right. The corollary is that as GM you want the players to beat you – your win should be the players winning and everyone having fun while doing so – so they must at least have a fair chance to win, or to achieve a reasonable portion of your win scenario.
Try and keep your monsters entertained, happy monsters lead to better games and less stress. At the same time, don’t let your monsters ignore you or start throwing random stupid or unhelpful ideas at you. You’re in charge, and you have to stay in charge – they can help, but if they start wandering off or chattering you have to make them stop and behave, no matter who they are. For statting sessions, tell the monsters what you want and make them stand quietly in groups by type if they don’t automatically do it. If you’re using props like tabards, armour markers etc, you can speed things up by designating one person who isn’t in the encounter to find and hand out props. Likewise, you can make Rec Creature calls smoother by designating one monster of each type to do the actual response and have all others put their hand up.
As much as possible, don’t take roles off the monster crew. It’s sometimes necessary if you have a massive plot-dump in the offing (the briefing is a good example), but you’re far more use being a GM than being a monster, especially if there’s a Narrative Time Stop or other complicated description you need to do. This goes double if you haven’t told your co-GM everything because they might not be able to step into the breech for you. You can throw yourself into the occasional role if you have time or if it’s the final fight and nothing wibbly is going to happen, but on the whole be prepared to stay in yellow all day.
Some monsters work better in some roles than others. It’s always worth watching what people choose to do and how well they do it when you’re monstering/playing so you can fit them to the roles you have in mind. Whoever plays the role, give them enough briefing to understand what it is they’re trying to achieve – at the very least cover what they are, why they’re doing it and any information you definitely want the players to know, and make it clear how much freedom they have with the rest. it’s worth getting any talky NPCs to debrief you on what happened in the encounter when it’s done so that you can pick up and run with anything they’ve accidentally caused.
A very rough guide to up or down stating monsters on the fly – to make things harder increase armour and/or life, to make things easier lower their damage. If you want to increase damage to the warriors without necessarily insta-killing the squishies, give your monsters power damage. If you want to make a fight harder, add more monsters, if you want to make it easier take monsters away.
Even with the best will in the world things can and do go wrong. Mostly the fix is creativity – your Experienced co-GM should have been through most of the common issues already and have experience in how to deal with them, and if they don’t someone in the monster crew almost certainly will have done. Here are some of the most common ones with suggestions on how to fix them, but you generally can’t go too wrong asking your co-GM and monsters for ideas.
The ‘standard’ fix for most problems is work out if it was due to player idiocy, monster enthusiasm or GM mischance first, then apply an appropriate level of flange/deus ex machina.
For example, if the players have chosen to leave no one on watch during a prayer/meditate session and a monster manages to get in and interrupt the primary healer, that’s largely a player idiocy issue – however, to make the game more playable, you may choose as GM to have the healer’s deity hear their prayers in the final encounter and give them a free chunk of standing to save the party with in exchange for a future favour/quest.
Likewise, if the monsters have managed to Destroy the entire party’s collection of weapons and armour and they have no way to mend it, you may choose to let the players find the bandit’s cache of weapons and armour instead as it keeps the game going – but if it’s down to party power management they might not be very good weapons and armour, or if it’s down to the party not having Mend or protective castings to hand then there may be some really good stuff amongst the cache (or if you’re evil there may be be some good stuff with downsides…).
If it’s an OOC problem – cheating, metagaming, unsafe fighting etc. – the person gets two warnings, and after that you are within your rights as GM to pull them off the game for everyone else’s sake with the caveat that you will need to take it to the Committee as soon after the game as is feasible to explain the situation.
This one largely depends on how wedded you are to the plot, how essential the missing thing is and how creative you are in finding ways around it. If you have enough advance notice that you’re going to be missing a key type of character, there is always the option of asking people you know have the right sort of character in rank to put in to play to fill in the gaps.
The healing issue is generally the biggest problem; Endurance and Lay On Hands can be used instead, so check for Earth casters and Paladins, or you can throw in an NPC healer as an all-day or as an encounter, or you can be very careful with your stats and just let the party tough it out.
If your monsters can only be hurt with power damage and there’s no power damage (or only a dart mage) in the party? You’re going to need to make the monsters at least a little vulnerable to normal damage, or throw in a buff NPC somewhere.
Plot can only be resolved by someone with sufficient tracking skills? Rework so that it can be resolved by accident (or at least by non-scouts running around and looking), or add an NPC.
No warriors in the party? Either adjust your stats, or make avoidance techniques a feasible option for the party to take.
It’s up to you to make it feasible for the player party that you have to be able to win the game, but there’s nothing that says it has to be easy…
Don’t panic, this happens more often than you’d think.
If you’ve got a co-GM with the other group, and you’ve got some way to contact them (radio, phone etc) this is definitely the first thing to try. It may not always work (because the site in Bath is made of Bath Stone which blocks everything) but at the very least you might manage to get them to realise you’re trying to get their attention. You can also try contacting anyone else in the other party that you know carries a phone.
If you have one of the groups with you, don’t let them all go running off. If you have a rough idea of where the other group should be, pick one or two sensible people (ideally with some form of communication device) and send them along the alternative routes with a specific “go to this point then come back if you haven’t found them” instruction while the rest stay put while you check the expected route. Try to avoid going further than five minutes away because people will inevitably start wandering off…
If this still hasn’t worked (because when you’ve said ‘go to the field’ they’ve gone to back field while you’ve gone to front field’) or if you really have no idea where someone is, it really does boil down to wandering along and shouting – again, keep the number of people doing the wandering relatively small so you don’t lose anyone else.
If you’ve managed to lose both parties somehow, make your way to the nearest obvious meet-up point (the Bowl, the Triangle, anywhere that’s on the planned route that makes sense) and stay put – at this point, you’re the one who’s technically lost, and it makes more sense for them to find you than the other way around…
If you have a dead character through entirely legitimate means, you normally have three choices:
1. A party member or NPC brings them back. This is probably the flange option in most cases if the party can’t do it without help, but can be interesting in terms of debts accrued etc.
2. The party carries the body around. The player stays with the party, but doesn’t interact with anyone except as a dead weight.
3. The party takes the head or stashes the body for safekeeping. The player joins the monster crew for the rest of the day.
It really boils down to what the party wants to do and is capable of doing, and what the dead player prefers to do. The only slightly tricky one is 3 – it may be preferable to ask the player to nip back to the carpark and de-kit if feasible, or else clean off make-up and throw a tabard on them for the day to avoid confusion.
If you have a dead character down to cheating, a player failing to fall over at the right time or similar, it’s your call on how much GM flange to apply – talk to your co-GM and the player. The common options, depending on the circumstances, are to ‘take back’ the last blow (for triple Backstabs and the like – discount the damage of the last hit) or discounting all damage from the point that the character should have dropped – but some players prefer to take the death, and if it happens a lot to a particular player it may not be fair to keep discounting.
Of the plot that’s left, how much of it is key plot and how much is fluff/filler/entertainment? Cut out as much as possible, and rearrange locations of encounters to suit. Smaller encounters tend to go faster than bigger ones, so if it’s viable you can cut down on monster numbers to get things moving – this has the advantage of making it easier to roll encounters without faffing. Puzzle encounters should be cut out or simplified as much as possible.
If you’ve attempted to cut down the game and realised it’s not possible to do it in any useful way, can you instead find a suitable stopping point before the planned end? If you can, it’s probably worth splitting the game into two and doing the second part at the next available game slot.
At a very rough estimate, once you start going past 8pm you really do need to work to the conclusion as swiftly as you can, especially if it’s cold or wet – you can get away with longer if it’s summer and the weather’s nice, but bear in mind that people have work in the morning and by this point are likely to be pretty tired.
Again, mostly what you can do from this is learn for next time – it’s all very well to plan 32 encounters, but unless you get an early start and keep things moving you’re going to run out of time before you run out of game.
First question – why are they all dead? It is possible that it’s because the players have been excessively dumb, at which point there’s not much you can do about it – check with your monsters and co-GM and even the players rather than relying purely on your own judgement though, as it’s easy to convince yourself it’s their fault when it isn’t (or your fault when it is). If this has happened, it’s up to you to decide how ‘nice’ you want to be about it, and whether it’s fair to have some sort of reset/fix.
Second question – is it viable to flange/insert a deus ex machina of some form? If someone in the party has survived and escaped, can they meet up with enough someones with healing or Raise Dead/Resurrection fast enough to start getting players back on their feet? If the party healer is still up but out of power and everyone else is on the floor, can their deity decide to intervene in exchange for a favour/quest later – it can logically be any member of the party with a relevant sort of deity and the willingness to roleplay praying vigorously at them. Can the bad guys decide to patch them all up as hostages and have the game go in a completely new direction? If it really is a case of over-enthusiastic statting and monster numbers, is it fairer to reset the encounter a little and have everyone on badly-paggered-but-alive-and-conscious?
As the GM, you ultimately have control over how the party can get out of or back from unwinnable situations, and it’s largely a matter of personal preference for the details – the important bit is learning from the experience and toning it down next time if it’s applicable. If the players messed up, they need to learn not to do it again as well.
We do our best to avoid it but accidents and injuries happen. The First Aider on duty basically takes control of the game at this point; if the incident is serious enough to warrant it you may have to flange reasons for a player suddenly being missing, swap in a monster to play the stats (generally only for healers) or even end the game early to allow the player or monster to get medical treatment. Real life is more important.
On Time Out – End of Game, check your watch and work out the length of the game. Players get a base of one point per half hour of play (rounded to the nearest half hour), monsters get one point per hour of play (rounded to the nearest hour).
If you’ve borrowed kit, make sure it gets back to its owner clean and in a good condition – and thank them for lending it. This includes checking that you’ve brought back all of the club weapons and kit before you leave the carpark, as if you have left anything in the woods then you’ve got the best chance of finding it again if you look straight away.
If you’ve left any dangling plot effects or strange ongoing items in play, make sure that both the players concerned and the Character Refs know exactly what’s going on. The Character Refs need to know everything, the players need to know enough to be able to play that character on other games without needing your input every time.
If any rules queries came up during the game, get them asked on the Rules Queries board to make sure they get properly clarified and recorded for future games.
Make sure that even if you’re not trying for Experienced GM status you get some sort of feedback from your co-GM. A quick chat covering what’s good, what’s bad, what needs improvement shouldn’t take long, and means you’ll know what’s what for next time – you are not obliged to agree with everything people tell you. If you are trying for Experienced GM status, make sure your co-GM gets your feedback written down and sent to the archive in good time.
Just as importantly, pat yourself on the back if people enjoyed it, and try not to worry too much if they didn’t – and in either case, get some feedback from the players and monsters as well, as they will see things your co-GM didn’t.
How you write a debrief is a matter of personal preference – if you can, write something about everyone, or else confine it to a general thank you and a comment for anyone deserving a bonus or negative point or a special mention (donated kit etc). You are obliged to try to get at least the skeleton points debrief out within two weeks of the game (or one if there’s a follow-up the next week) subject to emergencies, illness etc to avoid messing up characters, but it’s a good idea to start the debrief the night of the game to make sure that you get the lists of players and monsters and the base points right while you can still remember them.
Debriefs are also a good place to follow up on what happened to any NPCs the players have ‘adopted’ during the game, throw in hints if you’re running out a plotarc or a follow-up game (but try to avoid anything that’s going to cause meta issues in future) and to fix things that the players have broken. If players have let you know their plans, it’s worth adding those to the debrief as well, especially if it’s something that everyone in the party will know about.
In general, it’s extremely rare for a Sunday game to merit more than two bonus or negative points per person. Get recommendations off your players and monsters where you can and apply them appropriately; the base criteria are usefulness, fulfilling class/Guild restrictions and roleplay. Your Experienced co-GM should be able to give you pointers on what’s sensible, and be aware that if something complicated (i.e. not directly on the Code of Conduct but still worthy of a negative) comes up you will need to discuss it with the player and potentially the Committee/Character Refs as well. IC actions should be resolved through IC consequences rather than bonus/negative points where possible.
If, for whatever reason, you want to give any or all of the players something special in addition to/instead of danger pay, remember to check it with the Character Refs first. There is world balance to consider, and it’s extremely easy to get carried away. As a rule of thumb, low level daily or permanent abilities (a level 0 or 1 casting or a point of power armour or similar) are more likely to get approved than an item, a low-level item is more likely than anything over level 4 or equivalent, and something that already exists in the rules is more likely than something wibbly unless it has enough downsides to balance it out.
The main difference between Newbie and Experienced GMing is that an Experienced GM is deemed capable of running out a basic game without too many avoidable snafus. What this mostly means is that you’re suddenly allowed to start trying to do all sorts of crazy things that are much harder to pull off – but so worth it when you do. Based on prior experience, here are some further tips and suggestions for common game extensions and problems.
The thing that will help you most with ongoing arcs is good documentation. At the end of each game, make sure you have enough notes on who did what and who was what NPC and the like that when you run the next game – no matter how long the gap – it still all makes sense.
Don’t be surprised if people want to poke your plot outside of games; it’s up to you to decide how much they can do and find out, but be aware that the more that happens in downtime and the more you need to know of the entire arc to know what’s going on the less likely people are going to want to join in your arc midway through. This is less important if it’s a short or self-contained arc, but becomes a growing problem as time goes on and existing characters die or players drop out.
Most importantly, know when to stop. The arc should have a narrative, just like the individual games, and there should be a point that is a definitive ending – ideally before the players start going “oh, not again!” when they see the next game up. It helps to have the overall narrative planned out before you start in a very rough fashion, but don’t be afraid to tweak or add/remove elements as you go – respond to what the players do in uptime.
The problem with High Level characters isn’t that they can do all the Low Level things but better. It’s a mix of three problems:
1. High Level characters can put out effects you’ve never heard of or would normally never see/expect from a player.
2. High Level characters have generally acquired (especially if they’re from the very early days) a mix of looted items and hero abilities that leave GMs wondering what the hell just happened.
3. Guild and class divergence suddenly means that if the party don’t spread buffs around you’ll have tanks in 20 armour and 90+ life, second-liners in maybe half that, and casters in maybe 4 armour and 30 life all in the same party.
There is no easy way to deal with any of this; the best thing you can do for yourself is get stats expected for the day off your players (so you know in advance what they can theoretically do), aim your stats to challenge your second-liners, mix up your encounter types so everyone gets a chance to feel useful at some point, and hope that the party can work together in a vaguely coherent fashion.
While it’s less likely as a Newbie GM, once you are an Experienced GM you are more likely to come across the Huge Party Problem. Commonly a phenomenon of residentials, this is the point where your player and/or monster party becomes too big for the game and site to easily handle (usually once you get over 10+ people on each side on the Bath site). The downsides of this are that it’s really hard to find ways to engage everyone all day, you tend to have a lot more squishies than warriors to protect them, the game slows down just because battleboarding and moving everyone from place to place is a nightmare, and the likelihood of people dying to bruises (both IC and OOC) goes up rapidly.
If you have enough GMs and monsters, splitting a game or part of a game into two (or more) patrols is a way around the Huge Party Problem. The easiest way is to have two completely separate games going on in different parts of site, and the players only get to meet up at the end; the hardest is to run as a sandbox game where everyone is scattered everywhere.
Once again, the key is communication – for the former, both lots of GMs as a minimum need to know the plan and know when they’re due to meet up again, while for the latter every single monster needs to know the plan and pre-arranged return time and location and, to an extent, where the players currently are. Radios or mobile phones are invaluable for this sort of thing, or failing that some sort of bullhorn or other loud noise to call everyone back together.
Giving the party narrative visions is fun, and a good way to get them more involved in the plot. Big, non-specific group visions are easy; call a Time Stop, read the vision out, and go for it.
The more specific the visions are, the more time you need to give yourself to write them. If you need player feedback in order to write them, it’s worth freezing the player list a fortnight to a week before the game to give yourself plenty of time – and be aware that when asked for feedback players can be remarkably flaky (for example, when asked for a character’s hopes and fears for the future for one game, one player responded with “allergic to custard”).
If you want to give different people visions at different times, the easiest way is to put the narratives into individual envelopes marked by a number and a colour/shape/letter, and put codes on your encounter sheet for when people with a particular combination should stop and read them – whether this is in a Time Stop or not is up to you, so long as it is clear that the action is OOC. If it’s all at once, you can still hand them out in advance with an instruction to only read them when told – however, for any written down visions, give people plenty of time to read through and work out how to react once they ‘wake up’.
Wibbly effects outside of the normal rules can be fun to play with and guarantee a novel situation for the party to deal with. However, you should aim to write down exactly what happens for all wibbly effects before you start if you can, then make sure you have the piece of paper with you when it comes to time to explain them. It’s also worth discussing them with the Character Refs if you know one of the team won’t be playing to be sure you’re not throwing in anything too insane, but for a one-off game this is less of a problem.
If possible, explain the effect to the entire player party before the game starts; if not, make sure you explain en masse to the players at the earliest opportunity (battleboard, deliberate Time Out etc.) even if individual players get an individual briefing the first time it appears. This goes double if it’s a ranged rather than touch effect, and if it’s a Mass effect then just explain it to everyone at once for sanity’s sake.
If you have multiple GMs, make sure everyone knows exactly what the effect does, and has a copy of the written version – otherwise you’ll end up with the party thinking half a dozen different things, and it will all get horribly messy.
This is surprisingly good fun, and (assuming you pick someone they want back) an interesting roleplay challenge and motivator for the party. It can either be a whole game kidnap (they were taken before/as the game starts) or for a few encounters (monsters kidnap them during the encounter).
For it to work, the kidnapped player has to have something to do in the interim – either give them a monster and an environment to roleplay with, or if it’s going to be a whole day then ask them to DPC for the rescue and otherwise monster as normal. Even if it’s only for one encounter, telling the player “your character is unconscious, go sit over there and do nothing until told” isn’t much fun for the player.
The GMing Rules have a moderately good list of established monsters, but sometimes you just want to go off the map and come up with something new. What follows is the ‘best practice’ guide to creating a new monster from scratch.
There are a number of ‘standard’ monsters that appear in games but have little or no basis in the GMing Rules. If you want to use one of them, talk to the other Experienced GMs and find out what the ‘standard’ statting basis is for them, as where possible the basic build of a monster type should be consistent (even if the overlying details vary).
This includes:
This can be as simple as adding a couple of innate or natural abilities and weaknesses to a standard creature type, such as innate fire spells and weaknesses to water spells to Orcs to create Fire Orcs, or it can be translating an existing creature type to fit a new pattern – for example using the Demon statting rules with the Justice list to create extra-planar Justice avatars.
Even if the description of the monster type doesn’t fit what you want, it may be possible to effectively put a new body on an old chassis, so think more about what the underlying stats do than the monster visual details and descriptions – and don’t forget that there are the Large and Small Humanoid tables that can be tweaked with care to create a new race base table, and you can always take a ‘halfway between these tables’ approach.
A word of caution: Innate and Natural effects are very powerful, Natural even moreso than Innate. If you include them, keep the number of uses or the level of the effect limited, and make sure the monster is aware of the limit. This also applies to abilities such as Regeneration etc. The statting rules for Undead and Demons should gives you an idea of appropriate base costs to apply, but bear in mind that both Undead and Demons have some fairly major weaknesses to compensate so add some to your monster (vulnerable to particular types of casting, slow moving, react badly to loss of mana or standing, no willpower etc) as well.
If you’re working completely from scratch, it helps to have already hit the point where you feel comfortable with what an n level party can cope with. If you can’t do this, tread carefully and potentially find someone who can do it to give you guidance.
Think about your monster as a general concept first. Is it big or small? Is it people-shaped or animal-shaped or something random? Does it wear armour? Is it aggressive or territorial? If it’s based on a real-world myth, what are the attributes of that particular type of creature? If it’s something you’re making up, what themes does it have that you can build around?
Example: Wendigo – mythical human-shaped creature that lurks in the night, appears out of nowhere and chases down unwary travellers.
Attributes: Human-size, claws, no armour, fast, innate Shadow Walk/Shadow Merge, fears Light.
Example: Nightmare – horse-shaped creature that feeds on people’s fears.
Attributes: Horse-shaped, hair/fur natural armour, claws, innate Aura of Fear, innate Fear (one person at a time only).
Look at the stats of your party, and construct something that based on what they (or a hypothetical equivalent rank party) can do – they should have some way to damage it, a good chance of not being killed if they work together in a vaguely sensible fashion, and failing that some way to defeat it using the castings they have available (Weakness, Fear/Turn, Coma and Sleep usually being the main options).
Be very, very careful though – don’t only give the party one definitive way to deal with it, and be prepared for the monster playing it to work out a way to make themselves impossible to stop by exploiting loopholes of which you were not aware. Also, if it can in any way be called ‘gribbly’ be careful who you give it to, as some monsters by their OOC abilities are much harder to put down than they should be.
1 Added on 31/12/2014