DRAGON #75
1. Don't let players push you around +
2. Be consistent +
3. Tell players how you've changed the rules before you start the game +
4. Don't stonewall +
5. Prepare before game time +
6. Maintain some semblance of order +
7. Be humorous, or open to humour +
8. Don't favor one player over another +
9. Don't pursue a vendetta against any particular player or players +
10. Don't give away information +

1. Your style is not for everyone +
2. Let the players gain abilities at the slowest rate which maintains interest in the game +
3. Don't pass the buck +
4. What's good for player characters is good for the monsters +
5. Err on the side of stinginess +
6. Don't try to stop the irresistible force or overthrow the immovable object +
7. Don't allow anachronisms +
8. Never let the players feel that their characters are invulnerable +
9. Avoid arbitrary keying +
10. Don't expect players to perceive a problem the way you do +

DRAGON #80
1. Continuity +
2. Character +
3. Competence +
4. Creativity +
5. Cooperation +

DRAGON #99
1. Feel free to fudge.
2. Just because it's in the module
doesn't mean it's so.
3. Be exceedingly stingy in handing
out magick items.
4. Don't let your players have a continuous
commune spell.
5. Do not allow a character to become
more powerful than a chugging locomotive.
6. If they wish for the moon, don't let
them have it.
7. No, you can't polymorph a henchman
into Odin.
8. Be careful playing with fireballs.
9. Be reasonable in awarding experience
points.
10. Go easy on the poor deities.
11. Beware the many-headed hydra.
12. Avoid an adversary relationship
with your players.

1. It's your campaign, first and foremost. Don't be railroaded into something you don't want.
2. Work with your players. A little time invested at the beginning will pay dividends in mutual enjoyment later on.
3. Keep it within the AD&D rules; and,
4. Have fun!

1. Do not consider the players as adversaries +
2. Never say "you can't do that." +
3. Don't overplan +
4. Keep adventures within reason +
5. Run the adventures in color, not in black && white +

6. Try for consistency && realism +
7. Don't let the players argue with the GM +
8. Enforce statements +
9. Encourage the players to play their characters +
10. Reward wit, quick thinking, and consistency +

 

Up on a Soapbox: Players don't need to know all the rules	Beyond the Rule Book: Procedure and style tips for good GMing
Five Keys to DMing Success: Make it easy on yourself and fun for the players	The Way We Really Play: The development of a DM is a three-step process
The Elements of Mystery: Limited information campaigns in role-playing games	Dungeon Etiquette: What to do when your wizard falls asleep, or: "You're dead. Shut up!"
-	-

Players don’t need to know all the rules
by Ed Greenwood

Anyone who has undertaken the task
of introducing non-gamers to the AD&D™
or D&D®
games (in a high school or
community program, for example) has
endured the “fun” of explaining totally
foreign concepts (saving throw, alignment, armor class, levels — four kinds!,
ongoing adventure vs. “the object of the
game is to win by...”) to completely mystified beginners. Conversely, almost
everyone who now plays either game
has fond memories of those earliest,
most exciting adventures where you did-n’t really understand what was going on,
but it was fascinating...

So why not leave the players in the
dark? (I’m assuming here that the reader
is a thoughtful, prepared, infallible, im-passionately fair DM — as, of course, all
DMs are.) Why clutter play
with the game mechanics, when the
play’s the thing? This approach frees
much more time for actual play, and
avoids a lot of needless confusion. As a
first-aid instructor of mine once said, “A
kiss is the best greeting: KISS — Keep It
Simple, Stupid.”

The question arises: How can one play
a game without knowing the rules? The
answer, as D&D players know, is role-play. As a player, state what you (the
character) are trying to do, and the refe-ree (who knows the rules) will tell you
what is actually happening. This ap-proach, used by a careful referee, works
admirably. It is by no means a new idea.
In 1876, Colonel von Verdy du Vernois,
a prominent German military instruc-tor, advocated the simplification of exist-ing wargames used in training German
officers. This simplification consisted, in
general terms, of removing dice and
most of the rules from the game and
replacing them with an umpire (a battle-

The players must learn the truth themselves and
think 'on their feet' while they fight, as true adventurers
must to survive and achieve success.

experienced officer). As Stephan B. Patrick puts it in "The
History of Wargaming" (Wargame Design,
New York: Simulations Publications Incorporated,
1977), page 4: "In effect, then, the
umpire would make up the rules and apply
them as he went along, and the players
would have the freedom to attempt things
that might or might not be allowed by the
umpire . . . the players were separated and
given only the information they could legitimately
possess." This game was termed
"free" Kriegspiel (Germain for war game),
in contrast to the traditional "hard-
rules" war game ("rigid" Kriegspiel).
Criticism of arbitrariness and problems of
complexity resulted in an eventual combination
of the two types of games, in which the
referee used charts && tables as an aid in
play. This was dubbed "semi-free" Kriegspiel.

"Free" Kriegspiel sounds something like the
D&D game, and "semi-free" Kriegspiel
sounds somewhat similar to the AD&D
game, but the approach is different,. If we
apply this approach to those games, play is
as follows:

Players know on that info which
is possessed by their character as a result of
upbringing, observation of surroundings,
and adventuring. The DM provides this,
initially in the form of a booklet or sheaf of
written information -- info carefully
tailored to reflect each character's background and native INT && WIS.
Such info, as in "real life,"
is often incorrect, oversimplified, or biased.
Experiene then takes on a real meaning for
the PC, as acquired knowledge
(hopefully) leads to better performance.

Players know their character's abilities
only approx. ("Well," saith the DM,
"you're fairly good-looking, if not sexy. You
seem to inspire confidence, people look up
to you . . . "), and this incl. HP
("You bleed easily") and damage taken in
combat ("You're pretty badly hurt . . . it's
painful -- you feel weak && sick, and it'll
hamper your fighting"). Players know
nothing of charts and tables, and have (at
first) only a vague idea of the effectiveness
of one weapon over another in a given
situation. Battling monsters truly becomes a
dangerous business when the beasts' characteristics
are unknown and it is a trial-and-error affair ("You can't seem to hit this
thing with your blades . . . it's coming
closer . . ."). This is not to say that every
monster will be an unknown horror whose
weaknesses must be found immed. or
the party perishes. Many monsters (like the
goblin races) will be familiar, and even
more reclusive races such as dwarves,
gnomes, and sprites will be readily recognizable
to human characters who have
never seen such creatures before, through
lejends and "fairy tales."

Much of this latter sort of info is,
of course, incorrect. There are often may
wild && contradictory tales && beliefs
concerning such lejendary creatures (two
"real life" examples: the vampire and the
dragon). The players must learn the truth
for themselves, listening attentively as the
DM graphically describes combat effects,
and think "on their fee" while they fight,
as true adventurers must to survive and
achieve success.

Since each player has only one character,
he or she knows nothing of the background
of other characters except from observation
as they trade or volunteer info, and
knows nothing initially of the specialized
abilities of other character classes. (This
may lead to a quite proper fear and distrust
of magic on the part of fighters!)

Inevitably, players learn something of the
rules as play progresses (for instance, the
number of times the DM tells a player his
or her character must seek out a new tutor
to further advance the character's skills may
tell the player the level of the character),
and this info should by no means be
jealously guarded. Perhaps players could be
individually introduced to the mechanics of
the game, one concept at a time (each time
their characters achieve a higher experience
level). This gradual process, by the way,
should produce some good DMs -- players
who have been through it all "rising from
the ranks" and know what to avoid as a referee.

There are drawbacks to this system. DMs
must do a lot of preparation; all the individual
character info must be written out in advance. Players are deprived of
some of the fun of planning which a full
knowledge of character abilities, weapon
damage, and so on would allow them, and
some of the fun of rolling dice to hit a monster . . .
but the advantages of such a system
(for novices, at least) outweigh the disadvantages.

These advantages are as follows: Magic retains
its mystery. None of this "A sword +1 (yawn) Put it in the bag, Fredolf." Or
worse, the lost uncertainty of: "A censer,
eh? Well, it either controls air elementals or
summons hostile ones, and either way it's
worth 25k gp to us . . . let Hopeless the
Henchman there have it. Either his XP
will go up 4k, or he'll be killed, in
which case that's one less way we have to
split the treasure." This problem of players
who know too much ruins the fun of play
like nothing else can, and extends even to
"ignorant barbarians" (as characters) who
can quote chapter and verse from the MM
(or worse, the DMG!). It is more than a "realism"
problem; it is a problem of game balance.
These "expert" players not only gain an
unfair advantage over monsters as well as
less experienced players, but also yawn their
way through encounters that should be
mysterious, and therefore both dangerous
and exciting.

The DM's usu. solution to the monster
(and magic item) "blahs" is to invent new
monsters (and magic items). Good new
ideas, however, don't grow on trees, and
the best sources (such as DRAGON Magazine)
are often perused by the players also.

Players with MU characters can
keep "real" spell books, writing down
whatever info the DM gives them
(obtained as a result of their discoveries or
research). mages can actually TRADE info
to get more. Fittingly, much of their
time && effort will actually be spent in
game research: locating reliable sources of
magical info, piecing together clues,
and experimenting. They will know many
spells only through lejends or by seeing the
effects, and can choose to follow up on those
in which they are interested. The DM can
given them a spell right out of the PH,
twist it a little bit for campaign purposes,
or delete it altogether without leaving
anyone feeling cheated.

As a hidden advantage, the heavy preparatory
workload for the DM tends to lead to
starting scenarios resembling this: "The
characters are youngest sons of local smith,
farmer, lord, priest, etc., in a small rural
valley, who are setting forth to make their
fortune." This keeps things at the outset
on a scale that everyone can handle. It provides
the characters with relevant secondary
skills and allows the DM to let them get
their feet wet with relatively weak opponents --
local bandits and the like. TSR,
Inc., has prepared an excellent "rural village"
module: T1, The Village of Hommlet
[now incl. in the T1-4, Temple of Elemental
Evil -- Editor], which serves as an admirable
model for the DM.

This approach is advanced for DMs
starting new campaigns, and for argument's
sake as well. Doubtless, it will be of use in
the latter manner; hopefully, it will be as
useful in the former.

Battling monsters truly becomes a
dangerous business when the beasts' characteristics
are unknown and it is a trial-and-error affair..

<
SUMMARY
1. players do not know their character's ability scores
2. players do not know their character's HP
3. players do not know their's character's level
4. players cannot access any rulebooks, incl. the DMG.
the DM must prepare 'knowledge booklets' for the players.
this can be easily done by copying and pasting the text from 1eOnline (1eo) into a blank Word (etc.) document, saving as .pdf, and then sending to the players.
>

- from Best of Dragon V
(original: Dragon 49)

Beyond the rule book
Procedure and style tips for good GMing
by Lew Pulsipher

Most FRPG rules
don't give much guidance to the prospec-tive gamesmaster (GM) about the proce-dural matters of GMing. I don't mean
mechanics, but matters such as the GM's
attitude toward rule changes and player
behavior. Moreover, most rules give the
novice GM precious little guidance about
establishing a coherent world and a con-sistent GMing style.
 

One could write a book about these
topics, but a limited set of guidelines is
more practical and will be as much as
most GMs need. Consequently, here are
offered twenty guidelines for being a
good GM, divided into ten about GMing
procedures and ten about creating a cam-paign and a gamesmastering style.

Another experienced GM would offer
somewhat different guidelines, of course,
but these suggestions should help any
inexperienced GM save time and learn
some useful lessons the easy way, rather
than through unhappy experiences.

GM PROCEDURE GUIDELINES

1: Don't let players push you around.

GMs must look out for the effects of
"Mortimer's Law" (as quoted by Jon
Pickens and modified by myself): "It is
often the goal of many players in a cam-paign to destroy it by the accumulation of
unearned advantages for their charac-ters." This is more often the case with
inexperienced and younger players than
with more experienced and mature role-players. Many players lack self-restraint;
only the GM can restrain them, and while
they may not out-and-out cheat, they
won't be too careful about how they fol-low the rules.

Those not inclined to cheat will search
for justifications in the rules, in fantasy
literature, or (worst) in articles printed in
game magazines, to support their
'demands' for all kinds of odd advan-tages, rule changes, special character
classes, and so on -- the 'unearned
advantages' mentioned above. You, as
GM, must be prepared to resist these
arguments, or any suggested arrange-ments such as
'You go easy on my char-acter in your campaign and I'll go easy
on yours in mine'.

No magazine article -- including this
one -- should ever change your mind
merely because it's the printed word. A
logical argument, or an explanation of a
heretofore unclear rule, might change
your mind, but it doesn't matter whether
this is printed in a magazine or pointed
out by a player. Justification can be
found for almost anything in the vast
body of heroic fantasy literature, so it
should not influence your judgement
except in the broadest matters. And most
games include ambiguous statements and
downright bad rules. Remember that
you're the ultimate authority, relying sen-sibly on the rules and on logic.
 
 

2: Be consistent.

Your rulings (and your rules) in your
world are like the laws of physics in the
real world. If they change frequently or
unpredictably, the inhabitants of the
world are lost in confusion. However
much you encourage role-play, it is still a
game; and the essence of any game (or,
for that matter, of life) is to make deci-sions based on available information, and
then predictions about the outcomes of
those decisions. If the 'natural laws' of
the world change frequently, how can
one make rational decisions? Or, to put it
another way, if the GM changes the rules
in mid-session, nobody in his right mind
will want to play with him -- unless the
rule changes and exceptions always favor
the players.

My favorite example of this transgres-sion is the GM who normally gives his
players plenty of time to think about
plans or to make decisions during a bat-tle. But when the going is really tough,
when those decisions are most important,
he switches to 'real time,' forcing players
to decide immediately or suffer by doing
nothing at all.

Or, if one day a lightning bolt extends and bounces in some
manner, but the next day it acts differ-ently, how can the players rationally
decide whether to use the spell? Wouldn't
you be exasperated if this sort of thing
happened to you? This guideline leads
directly to number three, which is . . .

3: Tell players how you've changed the rules before you start the game.

Virtually every GM changes some rules
of whatever game he runs. In some cases,
he may change so much that it will be
difficult to summarize the differences.
Nonetheless, nothing annoys a player so
much as to find out, after he's tried some-thing (spell, trick, whatever), that in this
world it doesn't work. For example, if
you play the AD&D game and you rule
(for some reason) that hit points of dam-age from a fireball are divided among the
victims, rather than inflicted in total on
each one, you'd better tell this to the
player-character magic-users before the
game begins.

4: Don't stonewall.

Some writers recommend that the GM
should never alter a ruling during the
game (except in matters of demonstrable
and accidental error -- e.g., misremem-bering the damage a monster inflicts).
The reason given is that this prevents all
argument and keeps the game going. But
I disagree. Granted, the GM cannot often
allow himself to be persuaded to change
his mind during a game, or he?ll find
himself unsure of anything, and the play-ers will disagree every chance they get.
But if the GM stonewalls, refusing to
change anything, he may find himself
permanently antagonizing players, if not
losing them altogether.

No GM is infallible, nor has any GM
devised a rule or determined a percentage
for every possible situation. Sometimes a
player may make a very reasonable sug-gestion, or think of some aspect of the
problem which escaped the GM. If you
are so unsure of yourself that you must
hide behind dogmatism, perhaps you
should give up GMing until you have
more playing experience.

5: Prepare before game time.

A few minutes of preparation before
the game can make the playing activity
run much more smoothly. The more pre-game preparation, the less aggravation
and delay during the game. Some GMs
write down every possible detail of every
place of adventure they construct. Others
jot down just a few notes, expecting to
find (or make) the time to generate the
additional details and such with dice rolls
during the adventure.

I don't recommend the ultra-thorough
method, for it results in much time
wasted on detail which is not used; on the
other hand, if you leave too much to the
last minute, you ruin the flow of the
adventure, and you may give away infor-mation to the players. Take the classic
example of the wandering/randomly
appearing monster. A GM who doesn't
determine the type, purpose, hit points,
etc., of wandering monsters before the
game starts is going to waste his players'
time. The information should be written
on an index card; if the adventurers avoid
a significant encounter this time, you can
use the card again in another session.

Some GMs like to roll to determine the
contents of a treasure after the adventur-ers have defeated the guardians of the
treasure. Not only does this waste time, it
has a tendency to result in treasures much
more valuable than the guardians
deserved to be guarding. It's hard for a
GM to decide fairly whether he should re-roll a treasure when he already knows
how difficult it was to obtain the treasure.

6: Maintain some semblance of order.

If one or more players are over-eager,
boisterous, or just plain unruly, don't let
him or them take over the game. Don't
allow one person to destroy the fun of the
other players. Don't be afraid to kill a
fool's character if his actions call for it.

Some players try to take advantage of
confusion. It's much easier to be a GM if
a certain amount of organization and self-control is evident in, or forced upon, the
players' actions. For example, if you let
players move their fingers around when-ever they want, you?ll find that they?ve
always moved themselves away from
danger (when they can see that you're
about to say or do something) -- they're
always somewhere else. (This sort of
'fudging' occurs even more often if you
don't use figures.)

The solution to this particular problem
is to not let anyone move until it's time
for everyone to move. (Free-for-all mov-ing can cause hard feelings between play-ers as well, when the less grabby people
find that their characters have been
moved, or that their protective line of
fighters has suddenly disappeared.) You
are under no obligation to tolerate a
player whose actions seriously annoy oth-ers, especially yourself. Let the player
know what you disapprove of and why.
Incorrigible offenders will probably quit
on their own before you have to ask them
not to play any longer.

7: Be humorous, or open to humor.

Typically, players think of many
things their characters might do or say
which would be humorous but quite
unhealthy. Much of the amusement of the
game is derived from these 'might-have-beens.' (In some groups, players actually
intend their characters to do such things,
forgetting about safety, but most of us
value our characters' lives more highly
than that.) Unfortunately, some GMs like
to occasionally, if not consistently, take
such jokes seriously and make the charac-ter do whatever the player said. Typically
this amuses the GM, but not the players.
It is a cheap trick, if nothing else, but
also stifles the humor in the group to the
detriment of fun, which is what the game
is all about. Normally the GM should ask
the player if he really wants to do or say
something, when he seems to be joking; if
he means it, he'll make it clear enough.

I can't imagine playing a six-hour FRP
session without some laughter. Humor
comes partly from the players, but also
from the GM. You don't even need to try
to arrange deliberately humorous encoun-ters -- in fact, slapstick destroys the sus-pension of disbelief which is vital to fan-tasy gaming. But you can throw out
wisecracks on the side, play the straight
man to the players (or to their characters),
and ham it up when you act out a non-player character role.
 

8: Don't favor one player over another.

Players, as a class, are pretty smart --
maybe as smart as you are. If you contin-ually favor one player's characters, the
others are going to recognize this, and
many of them may resent it. This depends
on the extent of the favoritism, of course.
Try to be impartial and fair, as much as
you can.

There may come a time when the dice
just aren't cooperating, when the players
have been wary, intelligent, and skillful,
yet the dice decree death. In this case you
may feel that, for the good of the cam-paign, the character(s) should live. If so,
try to devise some alternative which,
though undesirable in itself, will be less
final than death.

For example, if a character with 8 hit
points left is pushed into a pit, and you
roll 12 points of damage, you might
reduce the hit-point damage to 7 points,
but also say that a leg is broken. Only do
this sort of thing if you really feel the
character deserves a second chance. Or, if
a character is trapped (through no fault
of his own) in a dead-end corridor and
ten trolls 'just happen' to approach, the
character might 'just happen' to notice a
secret door through which he can escape
-- a secret door that you just decided to
put there. It is imperative that the players
do not realize you're doing this when you
do it, or they may begin to take foolish
chances because they think you?ll bail
them out.

Never favor the monsters. There is too
much temptation, once you allow this, to
constantly adjust numbers of monsters to
give the players a hard battle, regardless of how well they play.
Just accept that
occasionally your set-up isn't going to
give the players as much trouble as you
anticipated.
 
 

9: Don't pursue a vendetta against any
particular player or players.

Just as you shouldn't favor one player
over another, you shouldn't carry on a
vendetta against a player (or group),
regardless of how his brilliant stratagems
may foul up your scenarios. To rule
against someone's idea or scheme is part
of the rules of the game, but trying to kill
off his character is not.

If you've made a mistake, perhaps in
allowing the character to obtain an over-powerful magic item, you only com-pound your error by trying to kill the
character or steal the item. This sort of
retribution is not fair, nor is it likely to
endear you to the victim; from his point
of view, you will be a cheat.

There's a fine line between vendettas
which arise from situations among char-acters in the game (say, the non-player
character former owner of an item is try-ing to retrieve it) and those arising from
the outside (the GM's desire to 'get so-and-so'). The first is part of the campaign, but the second is not part of a
good campaign.

10: Don't give away information.

Some GMs take the idea of hoarding
information to an extreme, and prefer to
roll all the dice during the game. But
players feel a greater sense of participa-tion when they roll their own dice, and
for that reason I virtually never roll for
the players. In some cases, such as hiding
in cover, I have the players roll the dice so
that I can see the result but they can't.
Also, I have players make a few rolls of
d20 and d100 before the game starts, and I
write down those results to use as saving
throws or whatever in cases where the
character shouldn't know that something
unusual may be happening to him.
During an encounter, don't tell a
player more than his character would be
able to sense. For example, a character
won't be able to tell a normal wolf from a
werewolf by sight, or if he sees a serpen-tine form in the shadows he won't know
if it's a dragon, a wyvern, a giant snake,
or some other related creature.

Some GMs know more about their
players' characters than the players do,
but most of us don't have that kind of
memory. You should require the players
to make a list of ability numbers and
major magic items for you to consult dur-ing the game. Then you needn?t attract
attention to a character by asking (for
example) what his dexterity is, and the
players can't spring magic items on you
-- 'Oh, I forgot to mention that . . .' or
'Oh, I just happen to wear an amulet
which negates that attack. . . .' The sim-ple principle to bear in mind is: Don't
give a player more information than his
character would have.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

GM STYLE GUIDELINES

1: Your style is not for everyone.

There are many ways to play, and not
every player will enjoy your way no mat-ter how hard you try. You can?t satisfy
everyone, but you should be able to
gather a group of players you can satisfy.
Sometimes you may run a game for play-ers who prefer two different styles. In
such circumstances the game is likely to
end unhappily, not through your fault.

In other words, sometimes the chemis-try (or lack thereof) among players will
ruin the session, because they're looking
for different forms of recreation. For
example, players who get their kicks from
backstabbing and player-vs.-player com-petition will not get along with players
who enjoy cooperative or even regi-mented adventures. How could one GM
possibly satisfy both groups at once? Or,
players who like to have the GM tell
them a story, in effect, with their charac-ters as participants, will not get along
well with those who treat the game as
improvisational theater (the 'true role-players'). If you satisfy one group,
members of the other group will feel that
you?re doing a poor job. A really skilled
GM can alter his style to accommodate
different tastes, but only if he runs the
different groups in separate adventures.
Most GMs prefer one style of play, and
they look for players who like that style.

2: Let the players gain abilities at the
slowest rate which maintains their inter-est in the game.
 

As GM, you have the power to force
players to advance slowly. In the long run
they?ll thank you for doing it, and they'll
get more out of the game. If you're going
at a properly slow rate there will be com-plaints, but no one will quit. What is
slow for one group may be fast for
another. I've heard of groups in which
the player characters reached double-figure levels in a year -- almost certainly
too fast by any standard -- and of others
in which 100 adventures netted only seven
magic items, and correspondingly small
amounts of experience. A 'rate of gain'
that is too fast can disillusion players as
surely as one that is too slow.

Let's assume that you want to play fan-tasy role-playing games for as long as you
can enjoy the activity; in order to do so,
you must restrain the impulse to get to
what appears to be the 'exciting part' as
soon as possible. For example, the
AD&D game at any level is exciting,
when the adventure is played and run
properly, but there comes a time, when
player characters reach fairly high
(double-figure) levels of experience, when
the game becomes boring to all but the
wildest power-hungry fanatics, or it
becomes a lottery. The longer you can
put off this situation, the more enjoyment
you'll derive from the game.
 
 

3: Don't pass the buck.

Your campaign is your responsibility,
no one else's What happens in it depends
ultimately on you. You cannot explain
away this responsibility by abdicating
your decision-making in favor of a com-mercial module, or in favor of a dice table
(especially one you've prepared yourself).
The classic example of buck-passing is
the GM who rolls dice to determine a
treasure guarded by 10 orcs. The result is,
say, a vorpal blade or a wand of fireballs,
and the GM flatly says, 'I rolled it, so it's
there.' In such a case, a competent GM
would exercise his judgement, take
responsibility, and re-roll the treasure,
because such a powerful item does not
belong in the hands of 10 orcs.

If the GM is using a dice table he
derived himself, the admonition against
buck-passing applies doubly. You won't
convince anyone if you say that 'the dice
rule all' or 'the dice are Fate.' If you
made up that table, whatever is in it is
your responsibility; if it gives an unbe-lievable result, or one which would de-stroy play balance, you had better change
that result before you use the table.

Finally, commercial modules are writ-ten by people like yourself, though per-haps with more experience. They are
devised with certain assumptions in mind
which might not apply to your cam-paign. If something in the module
clashes with your ideas of how the game
should be played, or with some assump-tions underlying your campaign, you
must change the module. If you pass the
buck, you may make your players angry
and ruin your campaign at the same time.

4: What's good for player characters is good for the monsters.

You might call this the Golden Rule of
Fantasy Role-Playing Games. The game,
whichever one you play, is already biased
in favor of the player characters (and
should be, or it wouldn't be much of a
game because the good guys would be
slaughtered 90% of the time). If you allow
players to do something that a non-player
should, by all logic, be able to do, but
which you do not allow, you are going
too far. Moreover, you're abandoning
your most useful argument against those
players who want as many advantages as
possible -- that if they are able to do
such-and-such, their human enemies (at
least) will be able to do the same.

For example, players may argue that
humanoid-type creatures should be virtu-ally unable to move when in a magic
web, even if they are quite strong. But if
you point out that the same thing could
happen to the player characters, the play-ers might be less insistent. Or, if you
allow player characters to learn align-ment languages other than their own,
non-player characters should be able to
do the same. The players are going to use
any magic item they have, so why should
a non-player human leave his magic item
in a treasure chest? This works both ways:
Non-player characters should not be able
to use magic which player characters of a
similar class cannot obtain.

This is not to say that you should
change the rules. For example, in the
AD&D game only humans and some
associated types, such as elves, can use
most magic items and many magic spells.
The idea, I think, is that it's the magic
which enables humans to dominate their
physically far more powerful rivals. If
you change the rules of your game so that
everyone from orcs to giants can use
magic items, you'll be changing the 'bal-ance of power' -- changing the entire
game, really. This is not a proper appli-cation of the Golden Rule.

5: Err on the side of stinginess.

If you're unsure whether to allow
player characters to obtain a powerful
magic item or large treasure, always
choose not to do it. If you're too stingy
you can always give more later, but it's
extremely hard to call back something
which is already in the characters? hands.
For beginning GMs, this guideline might
be restated as: 'Give only half as much
treasure as you think is fair.' Nothing
ruins a game more quickly than escala-tion and inflation of levels, wealth, and
magical power.

If players are accustomed to treasures
worth 500 gold pieces, a 5,000 g.p. trea-sure is fabulous; to those accustomed to
5,000 g.p. treasures, 5,000 is merely nor-mal -- you need to give 50,000 to reach
the 'fabulous' category. I have even
heard of games in which 100,000 g.p. was
a normal treasure. In any case, the players
become accustomed to the 'normal' trea-sure, regardless of the numbers. Why not,
therefore, make your normal treasure
value a small number, and keep abilities
and wealth under control. Your players
will be thrilled just as often by the occa-sional big treasure, but 'big' will mean
one thing to your group, another to the
'inflation gang.'

6: Don't try to stop the irresistible force
or overthrow the immovable object.

In most games there are certain spells,
magic items, or creatures which are sup-posed to be the ultimate. In the AD&D
game, for instance, things that fall into
this category are the gods, protection
from magic scrolls, perhaps the anti-magic protection of a paladin?s holy
sword, the undead-turning ability of cler-ics, the inability of MUs to use swords,
and the inscrutability of magical tomes.
The cohesion of the game depends on the
inviolability of such ultimates. A GM
should resist the temptation to add some-thing to the game in order to get around
the restrictions, because once he starts to
do there's no end in sight. In a way, it's
like starting an arms race.

For example, don't allow any magic-users, whether player or non-player char-acter, to research a spell which will work
through an anti-magic spell or shell.
Don't let someone devise a spell to deter-mine the nature of magical tomes. Don't
let characters kill gods! For that matter,
don't let characters become as powerful as
the gods, and don't let humans escape the
basic fact of their nature: their mortality.
Don't devise amulets which enable
undead to resist turning by clerics. Don't,
please don't, let magic-users use swords,
however magical and special they may be.
These kinds of things unbalance the
game at worst, and at best they offend
one's sense that the adventure is 'real.'

7: Don't allow anachronisms.

Fantasy role-playing is only a simula-tion (of sorts), not reality. Consequently,
the players can try to take advantage of
their knowledge of the real world-
knowledge their characters would not
have. Typically, a player might cause his
character to invent some extremely useful
device known in our world but not in the
campaign world, and from that he makes
a huge amount of gold; or perhaps, in
other cases, his inventions give him great
power (rather like the paratime traveller
who invents gunpowder, as in H. Beam
Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen). Such
seemingly foolproof schemes can ruin a
campaign, and in any case are contrary to
the spirit of the game. What can the GM
do to stop it?

Of course, the easy method is simply to
disallow any action which depends solely
on the players' knowledge of the real
world. Alternatively, if someone comes
up with a scheme which may ruin your
campaign, ask yourself why no NPC has ever done this. Per-haps some powerful lord is against this
kind of thing, or perhaps the culture or
dominant religion in the AREA prohibits
activities which aid this kind of scheme.
For example, maybe a character can
'invent' gunpowder, but could the dom-inant church in this world be opposed to
it, just as the Catholic Church outlawed
gunpowder weapons in the late Middle
Ages?

Or, as another alternative, ask yourself
what NPCs are going to
do when they see the player character
making money (or gaining power) hand
over fist. Will they try to set up a similar
scheme in competition? Will they try to
destroy his scheme, or destroy him? In
either case, the non-players won't neces-sarily resort directly to force. There are
subtle ways to influence events, through
rulers, bribes, other kinds of pressure on
employees, and so on.

8: Never let the players feel that their
characters are invulnerable.

Much of the excitement of role-playing
comes from the possibility that death may
meet 'you' around the corner. This
instills a healthy caution in most players
(though not in the few who don't think
of their characters as people). When play-ers become so powerful that they cannot
be harmed, they are initially on a big ego
trip but after a while they become bored.
That fighter with +5 armor and shield
and 18 dexterity can laugh at orcs and
ogres. Sure, you can throw tougher mon-sters against him, but you should also
rule that a roll of 20 against him is
always a hit. It's even easier to make sure
the fighter doesn't obtain that much pro-tection in the first place.

A game which is too predictable can
cause boredom as well. Throw the players
out of routine with, for example, a highly
intelligent giant spider, the infamous
mummy that doesn't burn, or a strange,
non-evil undead. But don't overdo it. If
too much is unpredictable, the game
degenerates into a lottery

9. Avoid arbitrary keying

Some GMs habitually put draconian,
dogmatic, or arbitrary directions in to
their dungeon || wilderness keys. For
example, the key might say 'there is no
way to avoid this trap' or 'nothing can
stop the statue except [some odd spell]?
or 'anyone who touches the object is
permanently dead, no saving throw,
wishes notwithstanding.' Typically, such
categorical statements are the mark of
poor design. The GM is not competent to
provide for the unexpected; therefore, he
legislates against it.

There should always be some chance of
getting away, of surviving, of using a
spell or item in a way no one has thought
of before. Your job as GM is to recognize
that this possibility exists and arrange the
place of adventure accordingly.

10: Don't expect players to perceive a
problem the way you do.

GMs must expect the unexpected. If
you get locked into a particular plot for
an adventure scenario, and the players
decide to try something other than the
obvious -- or what seems obvious to you
-- either your scenario may be ruined or
you must drastically interfere. The latter
is quite reprehensible, except in those
groups where players prefer to let the GM
control their overall course of action. The
former can be avoided by setting up the
adventure with attention to flexibility.

An example: A strong party, looking
for a reputedly very evil and powerful
creature, came upon a castle atop a 5,000-foot peak, with a single narrow access
road. The GM expected the party to blast
the guards with fireballs and barge in --
but the party wanted no part of a canal-ized assault over a mile of open, narrow
road. So they looked for a back entrance,
sneaked past an encamped orc army using
an invisibility spell, and met the chief
bad guy and his group of bodyguards
almost immediately, while the party was
still at full strength.

Obviously, this threw off the GM's
expectations (though he had provided the
back-door entrance), but he didn't try to
change the players' minds, nor did he
fudge his die rolls so that the party would
be detected before they reached the
entrance. His set-up was flexible enough
that even though the party killed the
boss, the underlings and the orc army
kept things interesting for several days.
The party perceived the problem differ-ently than the person who designed it,
but because the GM was not dogmatic or
inflexible, the adventure remained enjoy-able for all.
 

- from Dragon 75

Five keys to DMing success
Make it easy on yourself and fun for your players
by Mike Beeman

Dungeon Mastering, if you're good, is
not a hobby -- it's a career. The creation and
execution of a campaign that will com-pletely engross players and keep them
happy and eager to play more is a task on
par with finding the Holy Grail. It's too
much work. Besides, it's not exceedingly
profitable.

So what can we do about it? Quit our
jobs, leave school, and make the players
support us? Unfortunately, no. What we do
is find a way to skimp on the labor without
cutting down on the excitement and sus-pense we work so hard to build up. Every
good campaign has five basic elements:
continuity, character, competence, creativ-ity and cooperation. If you're able to main-tain all five in your campaign then you're
way ahead of most of us -- and you're
probably spending a lot of time dun-geoneering (or wishing you were). There
are shortcuts to achieving all five of the
basic campaign elements that take some of
the wear and tear off your overworked
graymatter. They are necessarily of a gen-eral nature ?--specific suggestions are obvi-ously impossible -- but astute application of
these principles can save loads of time and
lots of browbeating.

I. Continuity

Continuity in a campaign is a very com-plex thing. It is that in a campaign which
makes it more than just a series of dun-geons, and that which ties all of the dun-geons together into a cohesive whole. Many
DMs have trouble with continuity. It
requires more than a little preparation,
often mundane, that is not directly linked to
adventuring. A campaign consists of much
more than a group of bloodthirsty adventur-ers going out and killing things, stealing
their money and magic, then dropping by
the local village only to be off again in a few
days. There have to be solid reasons for
adventuring above and beyond the joys of
fighting and goldmongering. What about
revenge? Fear? Altruism? The trick here is
to make the characters? lives much more
than an episodic smattering of unrelated
activities, like some TV adventure series.
You need to give them the continuity and
uniformity of a good novel's protagonists.
This is all easier said than done. The
most important thing to do is to plan in sets
of actions rather than dungeon-by-dungeon.
Have your dungeons linked together, either
directly or indirectly. An excellent example
of this is the Against the Giants/Descent
into the Depths series of AD&D modules
from TSR, Inc. Each dungeon logically
follows its predecessor; the transitions are
smooth and the challenges widely varied.
Many of TSR's AD&D modules have been
published as sets, and this is not a bad
example to follow.

Serially ordered dungeons are not always
feasible, however, so there remains the
problem of overall continuity. There are
three tricks you can use here. The first is to
throw in some mundane personality, event,
or item that keeps cropping up when the
character makes it back home, such as a
wife, an ill mother, robberies in the charac-ter's home, etc. Make the player realize that
his character has to live in a world where
life goes on even when he isn't around;
even the above-all-the-little-things-in-life
heroes have little things going on in their
lives. There is also the 'old enemy,' that
scoundrel who pops in occasionally between
adventures to make life difficult for charac-ters. Players love old grudges. One party
met up with a nasty fellow called Ollog
when everyone was at first level -- and they
were seventh level before Ollog finally
ceased to be a nuisance. Unlike the anti-hero, which we'll discuss a bit later, the old
enemy is not part of actual adventuring. He
is, rather, a byproduct of it who always
manages to escape at the last minute.
The third trick is especially tricky. I call it
'the hub of all activity.' You come up with
something, be it a magic item, prophecy, or
personage, that is the center and cause of a
party's activity throughout most of their
adventures. The 'hub' of one campaign is
a mage called Amathar. The poor adventur-ers keep running into magic items of his
creation, agents in his pay, old acolytes of
his -- and even the Archmage himself on
occasion. They all hate him, but their most
powerful magic was created by Amathar for
Amathar: he is the hub of all activity. It is
very important to keep up a thick veil of
mystery about the hub. The interconnec-tions between various adventures should be
vague at best, and the players may not
realize each piece of the puzzle is related to
the whole until several adventures later. Be
careful that the hub doesn?t escape your
control, because once you start it, it will
quickly develop a life of its own. The party
must be spiralled toward the hub gradually,
over a period of years, and you should let it
be known (if necessary) in no uncertain
terms that a more direct path to the answer
is one leading to sure destruction.

All three of these devices will spark conti-nuity in the campaign; they let the charac-ters know that their past really affects them
as ours does us, and gives the impression of
a whole to a life consisting only of frag-ments. Without that, players find it very
difficult to relate to and maintain their
characters, and the whole campaign falls
apart.

II. Character

Everybody has to be somebody. Good
players will usually freely develop and faith-fully play a character's personality in a role-playing game, complete with idiotic
idiosyncracies and inexplicable personal
preferences. Even so, a good DM will give
every character a focal point for his life, or
something that will make him feel impor-tant or special.
There are several ways of doing this, but
in whichever method you choose, be
extremely careful not to force the player
into anything. If he feels you're trying to
script the character's life, the player will
lose interest in the game almost immedi-ately. This is a major cause of character
demise or 'player dropout' in AD&D
gaming. Many players are perfectly content
to role-play a hero's companion, and when
you try to make them become heroes, those
players get upset. Players have been known
to build their characters' personae around
the fact that the characters always tried to
be heroes but failed, and then the heroes
came gallantly to their rescue. That's okay;
it's the players' game. Let them play it as
they will.

For those fledgling heroes, though, it is a
great help to have something to grasp and
mold their personalities around. Four
options are immediately apparent:
the quest,
the magic item,
the anti-hero and
the destiny;

The quest is by far the least desirable of
these options. There are several reasons for
this, not the least of which is a quest's tem-poral nature. Quests should be accom-plished fairly quickly; if not, they become
tedious and boring. There is also the ques-tion of free will. If a character is quested, he
loses much of his free will. His destiny is
dictated by the quest and he is powerless to
change it, which irritates the player to no
end.

The other options are much more attrac-tive.

The magic item is the best. It offers
the greatest variety of adventures that can
be built around it and at the same time
increases rather than restricts a player char-acter's freedom. One of Amathar's creations
in the previously described campaign served
quite handily in this regard. An elven
magic-user character was in a party with
three paladins, and was getting something
of an inferiority complex. He didn't fight
well, and by the time he got his spells off the
paladins had either destroyed or subdued
whatever it was he was magicking. Well, he
came into the possession of an item called
the Strange of Amathar, which changed all
that. He is now the most powerful member
of the party (and, accordingly, the most
beset with problems) and has saved the
entire group on numerous occasions.
It is necessary that the item be an original
creation, with a background and potential
befitting an artifact, so be very wary of its
potential for upsetting the game balance.
The item might increase or decrease in
power as the character rises in level, or
make its usage nigh as costly to the wielder
as the victim. Charged items usually won?t
work for this purpose; they're too tempo-rary, making them very ineffective unless
they have absorption capabilities (e.g. staff of the magi) that recharge them.

The anti-hero is especially effective
against fighters, although in my campaign
two rival magic-users once destroyed half a
city. You can create an incredibly nasty
NPC that, without apparent provocation,
devotes his life to making a player character
miserable. The anti-hero torments, chides,
and humiliates the character with a constant
stream of affronts that may include assault-ing and kidnapping family members and
retainers, laying traps for the PC, spreading
rumors about the PC, and so on. Unlike the
'old enemy' described above, this nemesis'
offenses are constant and precede any actual
adventuring to the land in which the anti-hero resides. It should be several game
years before the character can effectively
challenge his adversary, and the hatred
between characters should be very real and
very intense on both parts. Remember not
to get carried away, which it is very easy to
do. Make the character's pride the primary
target, but don't humiliate the PC to the
point where the player simply quits. Allow
the character some retribution occasionally
to keep him going.

The destiny is the hardest of all to DM,
the most complex to prepare for, and the
hardest to justify. But players love it. Basi-cally, the DM creates a set of prophecies
surrounding a character or an item that
character possesses, and then administrates
its fulfillment. The prophecies must be
vague and leave plenty of room for error
because ' I guarantee it ' someone will
do something that threatens to invalidate
the entire thing. Once upon a time a PC in
my campaign was prophesied to slay a pit
fiend in an epic battle. He had to be a pala-din, right? Wrong. He was a magic-user
with a measly 28 hit points who, suddenly
and with much bravado, leapt upon the
devil and magic jarred it, magic resistance
and saving throw notwithstanding. A good
variation on the destiny theme is the 'eter-nal champion' concept in which a great
hero is continually reborn in new bodies ?
one of them a PC. What player wouldn't
love being compared with Elric,
Hawkmoon, Corum, and their ilk? You
need to be very careful with this kind of
character history manipulation. One slip
can take all the mystery out of the cam-paign, and players love finding that one
tiny hole in your plans.

III. Competence

If you feel inclined to DM,
there are only two things you really need to
be a pretty good one, aside from an active
imagination. The first, of infinite import, is
a working knowledge of the rules. You don't
have to be a 'textpert' capable of rattling
off the stats of every single monster in both
the Monster Manual and the FIEND
FOLIO Tome: just know enough so that
you know what you're doing. A player at
OrcCon last year boasted of killing six
Tiamats and three Bahamuts. Anyone who
has read the books knows this is impossible.
The second requirement of a competent
DM is a sense of the dramatic. A Dungeon
Master has to know, often instinctively, how
to build suspense and climax it for maxi-mum effect. He has to lend variety and
substance to as many as a hundred NPCs,
perhaps more, in every session. A DM is
basically a playright for characters in need
of a play. If the play is found lacking, the
players will take their characters elsewhere.
This is not to say that only good actors and
good writers can be good DMs. We've all
read enough and seen enough movies to
have developed some sense of drama, but it
takes time and practice to mature any tal-ent. Simply keep the game moving at all
times while you're at the playing table;
don't let frequent digressions or breaks to
look up the rules bore your players. If
you're desperately unsure of something,
then look it up, but don?t be afraid to make
some snap rulings. If you?re wrong, there?s
usually no harm done. You should always
have vital statistics (i.e. HP, AC, #At, etc.)
written into the key. If, as play continues,
you find an 'official' rule inconvenient or
awkward, then by all means develop your
own way of handling the situation. Remem-ber that 'the play's the thing.' No one
grades your adherence to the rule books --
in fact, I know of one group that plays
AD&D adventures without dice.
If anything at all helps to keep the game
moving and saves work, it is the efficient
and frequent use of playing aids. You'd be
surprised (or would you?) how many people
spend money on aids and then don't use
them. If you've got it, use it. A DM design-ing a campaign needs all the help he can
get. Published modules are invaluable as
both time-savers and gap-fillers, but never
run a module straight off the shelf. Adapt it
to fit your party's personality. Most mod-ules can stand (and some need) great
amounts of revision. For example, TSR's
module L1, The Secret of Bone Hill, has as
its primary mission the cleaning out of a
mansion infested with humanoids and
undead. The party I ran it on spent scant
minutes in the mansion: their primary mis-sion was to assassinate the Duke of Resten-ford. Although the module was excellently
written, it didn't fit the personality of the
party. Never be afraid to alter anything if
you think it'll work better than the original
presentation.

For those AD&D gamers just getting
started, some playing aids are indispensible.
Nothing will speed up a game more than a
set of DM screens, be they homemade or
storebought. You may want to make a sup-plemental screen for thief abilities, equip-ment cost, and spell charts, and
wandering-monster tables. If you need a
world to DM, there are many available at
gaming shops. You'll also need a city.
Judges Guild has several on the market; for
general use City State of the World Emperor is the best. If you operate out of a
particularly unruly campaign land, you
may opt for City State of the Invincible Overlord, wherein trolls and rangers share
tables in taverns. Without these, or compa-rable works of your own design, your cam-paign will be a pale shadow of what it could
be.

IV. Creativity

Creativity is the cornerstone of AD&D
gaming. If a campaign is to survive, it can?t
be a repetitive series of hack-and-slay forays
into the underworld. There must be a wide
variety of settings, goals, and obstacles to
maintain player interest. A good hack-and-slay dungeon is by far the most popular
type -- I know a ninth-level paladin who
endures his expeditions into the Nine Hells
only if he can go off fighting orcs back home
-- but these dungeons can get very dull
very fast.

How can you make it easier to be crea-tive? That's simple: plagiarize. Plagiarism
is perhaps the DM's most
valuable tool next to his own imagination. I
do not mean you should take your favorite
fantasy book and convert it into a dungeon,
which is very easy and appallingly common.
All that will result is a lifeless rerun or an
unmitigated disaster. Players never do what
you expect them to do, and if you try to
force them into a plot of your own devising,
they'll do everything they can to make life
for you unliveable. They won't do it on
purpose, of course, but they'll manage.
When you feel the need to plagiarize,
only glean a few of the best ideas from the
book or movie, and work them into an
original or modified setting or plot. This is
called 'creative plagiarism.' Your job is to
set up the general setting and plot, not
dictate all the action. A series of campaign
adventures can be a plagiarist's paradise --
one I know of took its basic plot and setting
from Stephen Donaldson's first Covenant
series with a few items from the movie The
Vikings and Roger Zelazny's Dilvish the Damned to confuse things.
Players love
romping in places and with people they've
read about, but you have to maintain
enough mystery and suspense to keep them
guessing about what is going to happen
next. Even though several players in the
above campaign were familiar with
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, they
never found an easy solution to their prob-lems. Keeping the challenge alive is the key
to good plagiarism. Your own original crea-tion will often be your best, and you should
never be content to let others do most of the
work. Keep the juices flowing, but when
you do run into dry spells, don't worry
about tapping another's imagination.

V. Cooperation

This is it, folks: the ultimate work-saver.
Share the chores with somebody else. You
can't do it all alone, believe me. If your
players call every day to ask, 'Can we play
today?' and if you have as much trouble
saying 'no' as I do, then you'll soon be
DMing completely off the top of your head,
trying to referee half-formed adventures,
and eventually spoiling the hard-won conti-nuity of your campaign. Sharing the work
will take a lot of pressure off you, both as
creator and administrator. It'll give you a
chance to play, and you do need to play to
evolve properly as a DM. When one of two
or more participants serves as Dungeon
Master for a certain session, it?ll give the
other(s) a little time to relax and prepare
what comes next.

There are two ways to accomplish this.
You and the other DMs can each run cam-paigns independent of one another that
occur in different time-space continuums,
or you can share the same campaign. The
first option allows unlimited freedom for all
DMs. They can alter the laws and features
of their respective universes at will without
endangering the other's work. The problem
is in the human element. The players will
undoubtedly prefer one campaign to the
other and want to play it more and more
frequently. This may lead to a group split,
which is something no one wants.

The other option allows more interaction
and idea-swapping between the DMs, but it has problems of its own that
fit neatly under the heading of consistency.
It is imperative that consistency in the
obstacle/reward ratio be kept. If one of you
has a penchant for giving away megamagic
and other DMs prefer the judicious and
considered use of magic, then there will be a
few problems, to put it mildly, The two (or
more) of you should work to become accli-mated to each others? gaming style and
preference, so that problems will eventually
work themselves out.

Another thing to watch for is rule uni-formity. The most logical thing to do is stick
to the books: no new character classes, no
newly revised combat procedures, no new
weapon proficiency rules, however 'offi-cial' they may be, without the consent of
the other DM or DMs and your players. If
all of them fully understand the changes,
then go ahead and use them. Don't make
any major changes in procedure without
consulting your comrades. If you keep up a
consistent approach to the game, you?ll find
the transitions between DMs
perfectly natural.

Since cooperation is such a vital part of
any successful campaign, here's a word of
advice. Only play in campaigns with people
you like. This does not mean people you
can tolerate -- tolerance wears thin in the
heat of the game. If you genuinely like the
people you play with, everything will be
that much easier. Of course, playing with
new people is a great way to make friends
(especially at tournaments and conven-tions), but for day-to-day campaign play,
keep it close.

Cutting down on your work load does not
compromise your ability or your effective-ness as a Dungeon Master. The purpose of
AD&D gaming is enjoyment and escapist
entertainment. Let it stay that way. DMing
can easily slip from the realm of gaming to
the all-too-real world of work, and when
that happens it's easier than not to forget
the whole thing. You obviously take pride in
what you do, or you wouldn't do it. The
feeling you get when characters barely make
it out of your labyrinth alive, struggling to
haul up their just rewards, is unequalled in
all of gaming, and that feeling can only be
achieved if you practice these five principles
in your campaign. That is never easy to do.
The tricks of the trade offered here do not
free you from the responsibilities of crea-tion. Used properly, they will make creation
much easier and emancipate you from
much of the tedium and needless drudgery
that accompanies creation. The success of
your campaign rests entirely on your shoul-ders; it just shouldn't take so much work.
After all, playing games is supposed to be
fun,  right?

- from Dragon 80
 

The way we really play
Development of a DM is a three-stage process
by Tom Armstrong

I would venture to guess that perhaps 5%
of all AD&D® game players actually follow
all the rules, use only officially approved
character classes, and permit only sensible,
balanced magical items in their campaigns.
Actually, the figure should be more like 2%,
if that's not too high, and they are probably
members of the group that I call the -- letter
of the law bunch, -- about which I'll say
more later.

I should know. I've played in every type
of game from those run by Monty Hauls,
where a 1st-level character can come back
with 10,000 gp and six magic items after
stomping on a dozen orcs, to campaigns in
which the DM was so stingy
that it was a red-letter day when the party
came back from a fight against hundreds of
monsters (literally!) with 1,000 gp and a
ring of water walking!  I've also refereed
both styles and many in between. I don?t
feel guilty about any of this. At the time
each game was played, it was the style with
which I felt most comfortable.

I've noticed that almost all people who
become good DMs go through at least three
distinct stages in their development. It's a
safe bet that, if a DM has been running a
Monty Haul campaign for a long while, he
is not developing his skills. Rather, he is
probably stagnating as a DM. As with all
'rules,' this one has its exceptions, but it is
accurate enough.

These three stages of development are
discussed below, with a couple of examples
from my own experiences as a DM.

Stage 1: This is the 'Monty Haul' cam-paign. The novice DM is frequently so
worried about keeping his players happy
with the game that other methods of accom-plishing this end do not occur to him. In-stead, he takes the most obvious route of
supplying tons of treasure, scores of magic
items, and easy ways to advance in level
and in skills to hold the players' interest.
The new DM has usually not realized that
the main attraction of AD&D gaming is not
necessarily the collection of gobs of goodies
for relatively minor accomplishments. If
you or your DM utilize this style now,
don't lose heart. Three of the best DMs I've
ever gamed with began with this style.

Stage 2: This step begins with the realiza -
tion that the campaign has gotten out of
hand. The characters can buy and sell most ter by altering a die roll. The player had
kingdoms before breakfast. They can walk
up to Odin, kick him in the shins,
away with it. They've killed off all the
archdevils and demon princes, and they are
starting on the deities, beginning with the
first page of the DDG volume.
("Hey, George, we get Bast next time! I've
been waiting to get even with her!")

The DM reasons, "I must be doing this
all wrong." There quickly ensues a sudden
180-degree change of course to strict adher-ence to The Rules. DMs of this sort are the
ones I call the 'letter of the law bunch.'
Their creed is: "If it ain't in The Books, it
ain't so!" They regard the written word as
a set of Holy Laws, and death to the infidel!
Fortunately, this stage is generally short-lived and ends quite abruptly, either with all
the players quitting in disgust ("What do
you mean, I've got to add in my weapon
speed? My cleric's been trying to swing his
mace for the past ten minutes!") or with the
DM losing his cool at the countless times
he's consulted tables and made die rolls.
This latter stage is frequently achieved amid
loud and often profane screams of frustra-tion and anger, usually accompanied by
endless sheets of paper sent flying through
the air like so many weird, rectangular
butterflies.

Stage 3: This is what I call the 'normal'
style of refereeing, as it is by far the most
common style and is the easiest to referee.
It is a blend of the official AD&D rules, the
individual DM's unofficial rules, and com-mon sense. While this method will usually
not be seen in official tournament play, it is
the form most frequently found in the aver-age neighborhood get-together. Since it
doesn?t require constant reference to the
many tables, it permits smoothness and
speed of play, as well as allowing the DM to
insert his own results, should he feel it
necessary.

A DM using the 'normal' method still
needs a solid grounding in the actual rules
of the game, but he is no longer bound by
the inflexible results of a die. Provided the
DM's altered results do not unbalance the
campaign, and are consistent with its goals,
he can feel free to reward or punish the
characters' actions without making a die
roll. He must still remember that no one
appreciates a DM who plays favorites, is
inconsistent, or who makes decisions with-out regard to balance or merit.

I've made off-the-cuff rulings in both
directions at times. Once I killed a charac- shown total disregard for the rules, altered
 and get his character's ability scores, and cheated
 all the on his die rolls (come on, no one rolls 19's
and 20's twelve times in a row!). He was
rude to the other players, disregarded his
character's alignment when it suited him,
and was generally a pain in the neck. But
my dice were as idiotic as he was; they
refused to give a result that would legally
allow me to cream his character, so I arbi-trarily killed his character within the frame-work of the scenario.

On the other side of the coin, one poor
young paladin of my acquaintance had done
everything right and had worked hard at it.
He gave half of his winnings to the church
or the poor. If this fellow had 3 hp left and a
party member was in trouble, he dove in to
help, usually managing to save the day. He
prayed to his deity as required and gave
sacrifices to him. Unfortunately, my dice
hated him! So, on the next treasure roll, I
supplied a lawful good ring of limited
wishes. Nearly all the wishes were later used
to benefit other party members.

The DM must keep in mind the probable
consequences of his 'playing god.' Does
some character deserve a special award or
penalty? Is the character well-played within
the restrictions of his class, race, and alignment? Will these results have unbalancing
consequences? If all is to your satisfaction,
go for it. It's your game, and you alone are
responsible for it. Don't allow the players to
pull the lawyer routine on you. If you are
fortunate enough to have players who real-ize that this is your campaign, and that you
are the one who determines what its goals
are and how best to achieve them, you will
get no static from them about whatever you
do. But you must be consistent and fair. If
you have done your homework, studied the
books (and once through them is not
enough ? I've refereed for almost ten years
now, and I still don't remember it all, but I
have read it all several times), and planned
out what you want to happen, you will have
no insurmountable problems.
 

Example 1: When I first began refereeing
D&D® games, I, too, ran a Monty Haul
campaign. I was having fun and the players
seemed to enjoy themselves. Before each
gathering, I just couldn't wait for the play-ers to discover my newest monsters, tricks,
and magic items.

One day, however, I received a shock.
The characters had just wiped out some
horrible, nasty monster and were dividing
up its treasures. One of them picked up my
newest artifact, the staff of instant death,
and another found a sword I had especially
placed for him. The sword-finder's subse-
quent actions showed that all was not well
in River City. He took the sword to a high-level magic-user, who could identify almost
anything, and found out that he was the
proud owner of the best and most powerful
sword ever created by the dwarves under
the mountain. He then informed me that he
was placing the sword in his extra-large bag
of holding, then dumping both into his
sphere of annihilation!

I was dumbfounded. That sword was a
work of art! What did he mean by throwing
it away like that? I had created it expressly
for his character! He further told me that he
would give away all his magic items except
for his mace +4, plate mail +3, and his
boots of speed, and would then give all his
wealth to the church and become a cleric of
Odin!

After the game, I cornered him and asked
why he'd done all that. All he said was: "It
isnt any fun to play like that any more."

I thought about that all week. At our next
session, for which I was a player, I pre-sented the DM for the session with a brand-new character, rolled strictly by the rules.
He was nothing great, but was above aver-age in some respects. In the following
weeks, I played him entirely within his
alignment, class, and abilities. I allowed
him no more magic or money than he could
reasonably be expected to have by the rules.
I found that my friend was right! It was
more fun to play a character who ran into
problems once in a while and had to use his
head, rather than one who got whatever he
wanted due to his unlimited power and
possessions.

Example 2: Two years ago, I decided that
my campaign was getting out of hand from
my allowing characters into play from other
campaigns. I didn't want to trash the whole
thing and have to redraw all my maps,
random encounter tables, etc. Besides, I
didn't particularly want to DM a whole
party of 1st-level characters again.

So, I made a list of the rules I wanted to
stick by from then on, including those offi-cial rules which had not been previously
used but which would not greatly slow
down game play. I also set down in writing
the limits for abilities and powers that I
would allow the characters. Then I waited
for the next session.

After everyone sat down around the game
table, I asked for all the character sheets to
refamiliarize myself with the characters. At
the same time, I told the players to write
down three things they thought their char-acters deserved or needed.

While they were writing, I began to
revise the characters. All statistics above 18
were dropped to 17 or less unless I specifi-cally remembered that it had been a legiti-mate gain in my game. Such super-high
scores were generally dropped by 1-6
points, unless it was a primary score for that
character class, in which case I allowed an
18 to stand.

Magic items not found in the DMG or issues of DRAGON®
Magazine, or that I regarded as overly
powerful or unbalancing to the game, were
sharply downgraded or removed entirely.
Hit points, alignments (except for evil
ones), mundane possessions, monetary
treasure, and physical attributes such as
height, weight, etc., were untouched.
Throughout the process, I kept in mind
how well or how badly the character had
been played in regard to his alignment,
character class, race, etc.

I then asked for the 'wish sheets' and
compared them to the revised characters. A
few requests were entirely reasonable, and
these were granted, but most were greedy,
selfish, or just plain silly. (A couple fitted all
three of these categories.)

One player, whose fighter had been con-sistently unlucky in finding any kind of
magical armor beyond ring mail +1,  asked
for some kind of protection. He received a
suit of chain mail +3 that happened to be
available on loan from his temple.

On the other hand, another player
thought his LG character deserved
a ring that would instantly and automati-cally kill or paralyze, by touch, any chaotic
or evil creature. His 'wish' also was
granted, but he never did figure out just
why all subsequent chaotic or evil creatures
he met either fought him from a distance or
were immune to magic. He had terrible
luck with saving throws, too. . . .

After I handed back the character sheets,
and after the predictable hue and cry had
died down to relatively calm sulking, I
explained why the changes had been made.
I handed out the copies of the new house
rules, and we discussed them. A couple of
these rules were subsequently discarded,
but a number of new ones were added. This
surprised me; I hadn't thought to ask the
players what kind of campaign they wanted.

The resultant campaign worked very
well, and we established a cooperative rela-tionship. I kept the magic and power in the
campaign to a low level. The players
thought about more than killing and collect-ing, and the campaign became great fun for
everyone.

DMs should try working
with their players instead of for or against
them; players have good ideas, too. If the
rules are getting too cumbersome or compli-cated for your group?s style of play, think
about what you and your players really
want and need in your campaign.

If you are not particularly happy with the
direction in which your campaign is head-ing, or if you are an aspiring DM, try these
methods. Remember:

1. It's your campaign, first and foremost.
Don't be railroaded into something you
don't want;
2. Work with your players. A little time
invested at the beginning will pay dividends
in mutual enjoyment later on;
3. Keep it within the AD&D rules; and,
4. Have fun!
 

- from Dragon 106

The Elements of Mystery:
Limited information campaigns in role-playing games

by Robert Plamondon

Remember the first time you played a
D&D® or AD&D® game? You were con-fused, you were nervous, and you didn?t
have any idea what was going on. It was
glorious.

Now, after months or years of play, the
thrill is gone. You and your friends remi-nisce about the "good old days" when
everything was new and exciting. Then
the final blow lands: You realize that your
campaign is just as dull as the others.

Is there still hope?

You hear a lot about a "sense of wonder"
in role-playing games. For example, you
marveled at the realism and depth of the
game when you first began to play --
that's the sense of wonder. For experi-enced players, this is a goal more elusive
than the Holy Grail. Therefore, let us state
a simple rule about this sense of wonder:
The less you know, the more you wonder.

Mystery is the key to creating and main-taining a sense of wonder. Ignorance is the
key to the sense of mystery. If a DM wants
his players to believe in his campaign, he
mustn't tell them too much. To illustrate
the point, let's examine a bad example:

Fred is putting together an AD&D game
campaign. He and his friends have been
playing the AD&D game for years. They
know all the volumes by heart. Fred is
pleased by this; if he forgets a statistic, a
player is often able to help him out.

The campaign starts out in a village
(there's a white signboard outside town
that says "Village" in black-stenciled let-ters. The first scene is in the generic bar;
herein, the players' characters form a
generic party to loot a generic dungeon.
Whenever a monster is met, there's little
or no excitement. Why should there be?
The players have killed this same sort of
monster 500 times before. They use their
generic tactics, kill the generic monster,
and come home with some generic trea-sure. The high point of the adventure is
the fight over who gets to keep
the generic magic item.

The problem here is that the players
know as much about the campaign as does
the DM. It is virtually impossible to
excite them; they've seen everything a
hundred times before. If the players know
what's going to happen and they know
they're going to win, why should they
bother doing so. Lots of campaigns have
died because the DM ran out of surprises.
The basic solutions are to hide information
from the players and always keep a sur-prise up your sleeve -- i.e., create a
limited-information campaign.

A limited-information campaign is one in
which the players have to find out most
things for themselves. Memorizing the
rulebooks doesn't work, because the
players don't know what the rules are.
A limited-information campaign is easy
to set up:

1. Start the campaign with 1st-level
characters;

 2. Tell the players that they aren't sup-posed to use any information that their
characters don't know, and that their
characters are inexperienced and know
very little about monsters, traps, potions,
and so on;

3. Keep your players honest by making
their memorized information useless,
varying elements of the game to keep
them on their toes; and,

4. Make the players role-play their
SEARCH for information, forcing them to
visit nonplayer characters to discover
things. Sometimes the NPCs know, some-times they don't. Sometimes NPCs lie. Most
of the time, they don't have the whole
truth.

Campaign background
    To make this work, the DM must first
have some information to hide. There are
plenty of campaigns with no secrets be-sides the dungeon contents; everything
else is either well-known or completely
undefined. A DM needs to add a lot of
background material to his campaign, then
tell the players only a small fraction of it.
These items are generally not laid out in
detail until they're needed in play. For
example, deciding that the Duke of Froz-bozz is secretly a werewolf is all the DM
needs to know at first.

Some of the things that should be set up
follow:

1. The social and governmental struc-tures in the campaign. People in high
places make a lot of the news, and you
need to have names && titles ready.

2. The important magicians, their spe-cialties, and their ambitions. Some of the
magicians might be in hiding, some might
have secret ambitions, and groups of them
may form secret societies. They sometimes
kill each other, too, or are killed by their
own experiments.

3. Major monsters. Every campaign
needs some really nasty monsters that are
all but impossible to kill. These should be
relatively well-known to the PCs, so they
won't blunder into them unless the char-acters are really stupid. These monsters
are used in rumors ("Did you hear about
Smaug? He burned Dale to the ground last
month!"), in major events, and as plot
hooks.

4. Powerful heroes && villains. Like the
monsters, these guys should be extremely
tough (12th level and up). They aren?t
there to be cut down by the PCs; they?re
there to create interesting happenings in
the campaign.

5. "Accidents waiting to happen." De-mons bound by spells that are giving out,
magicians dabbling in extremely danger-ous magic, kings who disband their huge
orc armies because they can no longer pay
them, etc.: all are potential sources of
adventure (and disaster).

6. Lejends, lost kingdoms, vanished
magic items, and bits of history. All of
these contribute to the flavor of the cam-paign and add to its mystery as well.

Whispers and rumors
    News often reaches the PCs by way of
rumors. They hear about local events
quickly, but news from distant places
comes slowly and gets more distorted as it
passes from person to person. This makes
it important to find someone who was
actually near the event when it occured to
get accurate reports.

Rumors should be a major way of start-ing adventures. Always present the play-ers with alternatives; they should always
know of several possible adventures.
Rather than forcing them to pick the one
you think is best for them, let them make
the decisions. While this means that the
DM has to have several scenarios ready, it
also means that he doesn't have to worry
about balanced adventures. If the players
hear a rumor about a gigantic dragon
hoard and don't realize there's no way
they can kill that dragon, that's their prob-lem; they should have investigated the
situation more thoroughly. The only word
of caution is that there should be clues to
the strength of the opposition, so the
players can bail out before committing
their characters to battle. If they ignore
the signs, it's their tough luck, not yours.

On the brighter side, players should be
able to find any number of low-risk, low-gain adventures -- ones that are easy to
live through but provide little loot: collect-ing taxes from kobolds, for instance. The
real trick -- the thing that should drive the
players nuts -- is identifying the few really
lucrative adventures that their characters
can survive. This is crucial to a limited-information campaign. If the PCs get their
facts screwed up or if they're overconfi-dent, they're going to get burned. If the
DM warns the players about this possibil-ity, they won't resent it when they dis-cover that an adventure is more than they
can handle. By that time, they'll be so
paranoid that they'll expect it to be a
challenge.

Towns and trouble
    Towns are almost entirely ignored in the
game books, except in random-encounter
tables. The charm of towns, though, is
that they aren't like dungeons; the charac-ters' problems usually can?t be solved by
swinging a sword. Player characters like
to gain the advantages of living in town
while avoiding the headaches, so they're
usually happy -- assuming town life is
serene and trouble-free. This trouble-free
life, however, leads to complacency, and
we can't have that! Some interesting
events and situations that occur in towns
include:

1. Tax time. Don't just hand characters a
tax assessment; have a nasty little man
come to their door and demand payment.

2. Crime and punishment. If they don't
pay the nasty little man, the characters
will be arrested and fined. If they kill the
nasty little tax man, they will be arrested
and executed. Scenarios in which the PCs
are hunted by the town militia can be
remarkably exciting.

3. Bank failures and bank robberies.

4. Protection rackets.

5. Corrupt government.

6. Theft of valuables.

7. Epidemics.

8. Famine.

9. War.

10. Pogroms (sudden fear and persecu-tion of foreigners). These can triggered by
some nasty event, like PCs pretending to
be royalty from another realm and creat-ing havoc as a result.

11. Scandal. The baron's daughter is
pregnant and claims a certain PC is
responsible!

12. Market fluctuations. "Oh, gee, we'd
like to buy your magic weapons, but a
bunch of dwarves came through last week
and sold us all we could use at incredibly
low prices."

13. Rumors.

If you want to make your players really
paranoid, have some of the towns enact
the equivalent of gun control -- no weap-ons ||| armor are allowed inside the town.
These items must be then left in the care
of the local officials.

These same principles can be applied to
different situations, though the actual
problems may be different. Living in the
forest protects the PCs from tax collectors,
but instead gives them trouble with mon-sters and raiders, and forces them to
protect their home at all times.

Nonplayer characters
    There are all kinds of people in the
campaign world, and lumping them all
into a single category tends to obscure
things. Still, there are some basic facts
about NPCs that are often overlooked. One
such oversight is that NPCs are individ-uals. Although they?re only on stage when
they encounter the players, NPCs should
live out full lives in the campaign. They
love and hate, have virtues and vices, and
are unique. The DM has to think of his
NPCs as individuals to pull off a limited-information campaign. One way to do this
is to have some friends who don't play in
your campaign run major NPCs as charac-ters. Give a friend a list of the local duke?s
income, assets, enemies, and so on, and
have him decide what to do with these
resources. These players will do things
you would never have dreamed of.

When players don't understand why
NPCs do the things they do, or if the play-ers are too trusting, weird things can
happen. A silly example of this instance
follows:

The local magician is related to a man
who wants to become mayor. The magi-cian wants the current mayor to look bad,
so he tries to get the PCs to play a trick on
him. The magician won't tell the PCs his
reasons (it would make him look bad if
word got out), so he lies: "The Mayor is
possessed by Demogorgon's brother-in-law, and the only way to save him is to
grab him at midnight, strip him, paint him
pink, and tie him to the slave block in the
square. Do this, get out of town, and I'll
pay you each 30 gold pieces."

The possibilities are endless. The PCs
may be dumb enough to believe the wiz-ard: "Come on, Mr. Mayor, this is for your
own good. You don't want to be possessed
by Demogorgon's brother-in-law, do you?"
On the other hand, they may decide that
the wizard is lying, but that the job is such
fun that they don't care. Or, they may go
to the mayor and tell him the story, hoping
that his reward will be larger than the
magician's offer.

If the PCs pull off the job, the mayor will
be their enemy for life. If the wizard has
second thoughts after he sobers up, he
may be too embarrassed to want anything
more to do with them. The mayor may put
out a warrant for their arrest, and send
out a posse to bring them in for trial. All
sorts of fun things might (and rightly
should) happen.

Illicit happenings aren't the only reason
for hiding motives, however. An NPC may
hide altruistic motives because he thinks
the PCs are too crass to appreciate them.
Others will lie to hide their sources of
information.

Withholding information should be even
more prevalent than lying. Information is
valuable, after all, so NPCs aren't going to
be free with it. Don't think this means that
all NPCs need to be liars or cheats. A hard-working group of PCs may find several
NPCs who tell them useful bits of informa-tion on a regular basis. Don't forget that
there are zillions of people in the cam-paign world who know nothing of interest
but want to talk anyway. The bars are full
of gossips and bores.

Your NPCs shouldn't sit around waiting
for the player characters to blunder into
them, either; they should be doing things
all the time. Every few game weeks, the
DM should decide what all the NPCs are
doing, and what the effects of their actions
are. If a hero kills one of the biggest
dragons in the world and hauls the treasure into a city, magical-item prices may
be depressed for years, and inflation may
shoot up by 10% or more. On the other
hand, if a war cuts off the major sources
of magical items, the prices will skyrocket.

Variable monsters
Generic monsters are boring. Everyone
has the MM memorized, so
nothing therein is likely to surprise any-one. The other sources for monsters (the
FIEND FOLIO® Tome, Monster Manual II,
and DRAGON® Magazine) have the same
limitations, since players can memorize
them, too. The solution is variation. So
what if orcs are supposed to have one hit
die? Those are natural orcs ? your orcs
are different! They have a better diet, so
they're tougher. Maybe they're different in
other ways, too ? they learned stealth
from a thief or were converted to Mithra-ism by a demented priest.

This idea applies to all kinds of mon-sters. Go through the MM and
pencil in changes for each kind of monster
you expect to use. Change their statistics,
their appearance, and their habits, and
make up some little piece of history to
explain these "abnormalities."
But don't tell the players the details. Tell
them only what their characters would
know: what the more common monsters
look like, vague descriptions of some of
the rare ones, and rough estimates of their
fighting ability. Let the players use their
Monster Manuals, if they want; it will not
save them. Some examples follow.

Dragons: You can drive the players into
convulsions of paranoia by making dragon
colors inconsistent. You could decide that
the color associated with a dragon is only
the most common color, so 75% of all
chlorine-breathing dragons are green, but
10% are red, 10% are black, and 5% are
yellow with pink spots.

Armor classes: The MM lists
typical armor classes for creatures. You
can certainly change this for your cam-paign. There's nothing to keep an orc from
stealing plate mail from a dead fighter, for
instance, and people who hire merce-naries often give them new gear. It's un-nerving to run into an ogre in field plate.

Frequency: Most of the monsters you
see listed are rare or very rare, and should
seldom be seen in your campaign. As a
matter of fact, many of the very rare
monsters should be completely unknown
in your campaign (none of the NPCs have
ever heard of them), and many others
should be "known to be extinct." "Known
to be extinct" means that the local experts
think these creatures are extinct. The
experts should be wrong on occasion. It's
very pleasant to hear a once-jaded player
scream in horror, "It can't be a dragon!
Dragons have been extinct for a hundred
years!" There's also a chance that mon-sters will cross the hills or leave the
swamps, repopulating an area that hasn't
seen them for many a year.

On the flip side of the coin, the Monster
Manual puts encounters with common
monsters at 65% of the total. This would
work fine if anybody paid attention to it.
The problem is that everyone overuses
exotic monsters. Most encounters should
be with common "monsters," such as
wolves, orcs, beggars, and peasants. This
provides contrast when a really nasty
monster shows up. It can also drive the
players nuts. Orcs and wolves can cause a
lot of trouble, even in the case of "nui-sance" encounters. But, even if often seen
and fought, common monster types can
prove quite uncommon in their equip-ment, their tactics, their motivations, their
personalities, etc.

A DM should spend some time fleshing
out the human and humanoid societies in
his campaign. Orcs are an especially inter-esting example, since they have so little
going for them. Some of the characteris-tics that can be attributed to orcs are:

1. They can't compete effectively with
humans, because they're not creative and
they fight too much among themselves. In
my campaign, orcs live in abject poverty in
rotten parts of the country -- eating tur-nips, acorns, and fish, for the most part. Is
it any wonder they're obnoxious?

2. Orcs love to fight, but only if they're
assured of victory. They prefer raids and
ambushes to fair fights, and run away the
instant they start to lose. There are two
exceptions to this rule. Orcs fight to the
death to protect their women and young,
and they can be whipped into a berserk
frenzy by those who know how. Some
human wizards might know the secret.

3. Most orc tribes have some contact
with humans, which show up in their
daily activities. Many have picked up bits
and pieces of human customs and fighting
techniques.

4. Some orc tribes have human chief-tains. These are usually the most danger-ous tribes of all.

None of this information contradicts the
MM, but my orcs have a lot of
surprises for players who are used to
generic orcs. The changes keep the play-ers interested and the campaign going.

The uses of magic
    The simplest way to create a sense of
wonder about magic is to make magic
spells hard to get. The AD&D game rules
already support this. Follow the rules in
the DMG about acquir-ing spells (page 39). The DM may want to
make some of the higher-level spells se-cret; the characters may know the spells
exist, but no NPC admits to knowing them.

For example, the fireball  spell is power-ful enough to kill any mage. No mage in
his right mind will give this spell to anyone
he doesn't trust, and adventurers don?t
appear trustworthy ("They say they got
that loot from a monster, but how do we
know they didn't rob a monastery?")
Magical research makes it possible to
add new spells to the lists. The DM should
make a secret list of new spells that exist
in the campaign world, and keep track of
who knows them. Many of these "new"
spells should be variants of old spells. A
fireball with greater range would be very
valuable, and one with a smaller blast
radius would be safer to use in dungeon
and corridor fights. Most common spells
could have two or three variants that
would be favored by different groups of
magicians.

Having new and variant spells keeps the
players on their toes and adds lots of new
spells to collect without greatly altering
game balance. Before creating these vari-ants, read the DMG, pages 115-116, re-garding spell research. The simplest
variants are ones that trade an advantage
for a disadvantage. A safe assumption is
that the "normal" spell is optimal, and the
disadvantages of any variant outweigh its
advantages. For example, to double the
range of a fireball, more than half of
something else would have to be given up,
such as doubling range at one-third dam-age, or doubling range with both damage
and blast radius reduced by half. Such a
spell would still be effective in some cir-cumstances, such as one-on-one magical
duels.

Mages from different regions, factions,
or ethnic groups should have different
spell lists. Elven mages might favor long-range fireballs, while Nordic mages might
prefer double-damage fireballs with such
short ranges that their whiskers get
singed. Variants should extend throughout
the spell levels, with a certain preference
for variations of first-level spells, such as:

Find familiar with different animals as
familiars.

Cure light wounds with a high minimum
healing rate, such as d6 + 1 or d4 + 2.
Both these variants have the same average
healing of the normal (d8) spell, but the
minimum healing is better, and the maxi-mum healing is worse. With d6 + 1, a
player character is guaranteed 2 hp
healed; with d4 + 2, he?s guaranteed 3 hp.
Another variant is a second- or third-level
spell with 1½ dice of healing (d8 + 4,
d6 + 3, or d4 + 2 points).

Magic missile with greater range but
lessened damage, or vice versa.

Tenser's floating disk in a variety of
sizes, shapes, and colors. Ones that look
like monsters would be particularly useful,
although one can always drape a monster
costume over a regular floating disk.

Oral histories
Players tend to forget things fairly
quickly or get mixed up about time &&
place. (DMs do, too, but they're supposed
to be keeping notes.) The players can
become quite confused, going on long
adventures to the wrong dungeon because
they misconstrued a cue, or blaming the
wrong NPC for something because the
players forgot how it really happened.
This is a good thing. Don't correct players
when they make wildly inaccurate state-ments; it's their own fault, and it can lead
to a whole series of wild adventures. Play-ers can avoid this trouble by keeping notes
-- but if they don't, why complain?

Conclusions
    Putting these ideas into action is simple.
A few changed statistics, bits of local his-tory, and a few well-characterized NPCs
are all that is necessary to start. Unlike
other prescriptions for long-lived cam-paigns, it isn't necessary to design thou-sands of towns and NPCs before starting.
It's enough to stay one jump ahead of the
players. Improvisation works in limited-information games, so long as the DM
writes these tangent thoughts down to
make certain they'll be there next time.
Running a limited-information campaign
gives players a new set of challenges,
allowing the sense of wonder to rush back
into an ailing campaign. Create some
mysteries today and see.
 

- from Dragon 117

THE GM'S TEN COMMANDMENTS
Ten do's and don'ts for game masters everywhere

by Rig Volný

To fully enjoy role-playing gaming,
everyone must play by the rules. Perhaps
one major flaw of role-playing games is
that the most important player sometimes
forgets that he has certain rules that must
be obeyed. The Game Master, DM, Administrator, Fate, or whatever
you call him, is the most important element
in the game. For that special someone
in a campaign, these Ten Commandments
are presented as a guide for
improving everyone’s enjoyment.
 

I. Do not consider the players as
adversaries.

This is the most common problem
among starting GMs. The GM often spends
long hours designing ingenious traps and
encounters for the players to stumble
upon. If the players quickly neutralize or
bypass these clever entrapments, the GM
often has the feeling that he has been
beaten, and thus feels the need to “get
back” at the players. In role-playing, the
situation is not one of GM vs. players: It
isn’t a fair fight. To keep throwing bigger
monsters at a party until the score has
been “evened” is no challenge for the GM.
Likewise, it is no fun for the players.

Learn to enjoy the successes of the players’
party by creating NPCs that travel
with them for a short time and share in
their adventures. Most GMs provide a
guide or some such person for the players
at one point or another in the game, but
very few of these guides take an active
role in the campaign. Don’t take charge of
a group of PCs via the guide, but do give
the NPC his or her own distinct personality.
If a group of players intends to shortchange
the guide on some loot, put up a
fight. For the short time the guide is with
that group, be a part of the adventure.

Another way to enjoy an adventuring
party is to help them. When a tired and
severely wounded party runs into a giant,
it’s time for a little good luck. Say the giant
is allergic to the halfling’s feet and can’t
stop sneezing. Not only will the GM have
created an entertaining and unusual
encounter, but both the GM and players
are allowed to enjoy the game more.

Just rolling dice until helpless players
are killed is pretty dull. This does not
mean, however, that every adventure
should be made easy for the players. Nevertheless,
if the GM puts his players in an
impossible situation (one they could not
avoid), then he had better help them out.
 

II. Never say “You can’t do that.”

Don’t just tell someone their character
can’t do something and give no explanation.
Find other ways to enforce reason in
the game. If a player does something
which is out of character, fine him experience
points. If a player attempts a difficult
task, have him make a difficult die roll. If a
player attempts a clearly impossible task,
give him a clearly impossible die roll.
Consider the following example:

Player (a 4'-tall halfling): I jump and
catch the top of the wall (a height of 25’).
GM: Roll a 7 on 1d6.

If a Good character attacks an innocent
person, don’t tell him he just doesn’t do
that sort of thing: Let the local constabulary
enforce his conscience. That same
player will think twice before doing anything
of the sort again. By the same token,
don’t overpunish for minor infractions of
morality or the law. Don’t have a character
summarily executed because he didn’t
curb his dog. If a player tries something
unusual, let him do it. If it’s not in the
rules, make up a reasonable interpretation
of his actions.

Player (just knocked to his knees): I
throw sand in his face.
GM: Hmmmm.
There is a long pause, after which the
GM rolls to see if the player is kneeling on
sand or rock.
GM: OK. His head is quite a bit above
you. Roll your dice to hit at –2.
Player: I made it!
GM: OK. He’s blinded for the next turn
as if he were in total darkness.

The point of this commandment is that it
gives the players a degree of control in the
game -- one that adds desirable unpredictability.
This makes the GM “play” the
adventure rather than just direct a prewritten
script. If this rule is obeyed, relationships
with the players will be better
than if the GM denies them the right to
control the actions of their characters.

III. Don’t overplan.

Avoiding this sin allows the GM to avoid
many of the problems already discussed.
For example, the GM spends 12 hours
designing a temple complex so that the
PCs will have an opportunity to kill a high
priest with whom they keep crossing
swords. The players, instead of sneaking
into the temple as the GM anticipated,
start a rumor campaign that ends with the
king beheading the priest in question, The
GM has clearly overplanned. The result is
that the GM tries to think of every possible
objection to an ingenious propaganda
campaign -- a campaign that even includes
proof of treason. Failing this, the GM may
try to “get even” with the players for all
his wasted work. Several players will
recognize this unfortunate experience.

If a GM avoids overplanning, he is less
likely to run aground on Commandment
II. If the GM prepares extensively for the
players to do A, B, or C, and they do D
instead, he is faced with the temptation to
dismiss a good plan as irrelevant to play.

The bottom line is that overplanning
prevents the GM from meeting the actions
of the players with flexibility and interferes
with spontaneous creativity. It
should be easy to run an evening’s adventure
from a page of notes and a small map
or two. This style of Game Mastering
forces the GM to use the same kind of
rapid-fire thinking that is expected of the
players. It also improves the GM’s enjoyment
of the game.

IV. Keep adventures within reason.

Keep a tight rein on the players and the
adventures. When a beginning party starts
to collect scores of magical items, the
members begin to obtain a degree of
strength that is often out of proportion
with their level. Powerful items mean that
the players sometimes muscle their way
out of situations that should require them
to think their way out. This means that
the GM must use creatures and situations
to challenge the players — creatures that
might normally be reserved for higher
level characters. Don’t give in to the temptation
of excess when rewarding the players.
Don’t overindulge when setting up the
challenges that the players must face. The
GM must maintain control. The following
are a few specific examples.

1. Not every campaign is the ultimate
battle between good and evil.

2. Not every hillock has a dungeon in it.

3. Sometimes, the enemy is as noble and
decent a fellow as any of the PCs (bad
guys with style are fun).

4. Hacking monsters is OK, but people
should be the major nemesis of the players.
After all, people have higher motivations
than a hungry ogre.

5. Nobody’s perfect. The characters that
are the most fun to play are the ones with
faults. They lisp, have bad feet, are nearsighted,
and sometimes behave in a cowardly
manner. These characters are
unique, entertaining, and challenging to
play. Just watch The Wizard of Oz for
examples of entertaining faults.

6. There isn’t gold under every rock.

7. The good guys don’t always win.
Sometimes, they aren’t even in the right.

These examples show two areas where
GMs should tread warily. Don’t engage in
stereotyped situations and don’t cheapen
magic, gold, or fantastic creatures by
making them too common. Instead of 40
chests of gold and jewels in that treasure
trove, why not have a couple of statues,
some paintings, and a chest or two of
silver with a small bag of gold inside? This
makes gold that much more valuable
when it is found.
 

V. Run the adventures in{color},
not in black && white.
 

Player: We ask around to see if there’s a
tavern in the town.
GM: There’s one a mile up the road.

Talk about boring! This is about as exciting
as the Congressional Record. {Spice} up
the dialogue a bit:

Player: We ask around to see if there’s a
tavern in the town.
GM: Here comes a peasant you can ask.
Player: Hallo! You there, is there a tavern
nearby?
GM (bowing profusely and speaking with
a thick accent): Good morrow to you, fine
sirs! Is it a tavern you be lookin’ to? Well,
there’s one not fit for such fine gentlefolk
up the road a ways. Just keep on until you
come to a gibbet and go left at the fork.
(The peasant holds out his hand and clears
his throat.)

For the expenditure of a few extra seconds,
the GM has added a unique flavor
and texture to his world. Every area
should have unique customs, dress, laws,
and people. If the GM isn’t up to creating
such a complete society, there are a number
of helpful gaming supplements that
are available. Remember to react to the
players as an NPC might, not as the GM.

The point here is to allow the action to
occur on the character-vs.-monster level
rather than on the conversational (or
argumentative) player-vs.-GM level.

VI. Try for consistency and realism.

Realism! Did he really say realism? Playing
role-playing games to escape from
realism means that players (and GMs) have
missed an important point. The reason the
game is enjoyable is because it is a work of
fiction which the players have a hand in
writing. If a fictional work has inconsistencies
or is unrealistic, then it does not
entertain the reader. If a thief is plying his
trade with no visible means of support and
isn’t sharing a portion of his income with
some principal of the local government,
realism is sacrificed and the game suffers.
If a character is an extremely high-level
wizard at age 22, even the credibility of a
fantasy world is stretched. If a troop of
100 armored men march 25 miles a day
for a week and are still fit for battle, realism
(i.e., game playability) is going straight
to the nether reaches of the Ethereal
Plane. The player who has to wrestle with
the realistic problems of being a general is
liable to develop a faster wit and better
gaming skills. This player learns to enjoy
the game more because he has accomplished
something by his own doing.
 

VII. Don’t let the players argue with
the GM .

This one is a cardinal rule in Game Mastering.
Still, when a player brings up a
valid point, listen to him. Don’t dismiss
what he considers an important factor as
an irrelevant point. Explain why a decision
is made. When the situation has been
discussed and weighed out carefully, stick
to it. If the GM is fair, rulings will cause no
friction.
 

VIII. Enforce statements

When a player says his character tries
something, that character tries it. Remember
our jumping halfling friend and the
25’ wall? That character should lose one
melee round trying to jump the wall.

Player: I cut the prisoner’s throat and
SEARCH the body. No, wait! I want to ask
him some questions.
GM: Unfortunately, the prisoner is
already quite dead.

This rule insures that players think
about their actions and also lets the nonleader
PC have a degree of spontaneous
autonomy that can lead to some hilarious
scenes.
 

IX. Encourage the players to play
their characters.

Role-playing is acting. The GM is most
successful when the players are the characters.
Keep the conversation around the
table between the characters. Use those
NPCs. Don’t say more than needs to be
said. Give out XP for good
role-playing and let the other players
know why that character is getting extra
points. If a player asks a question about
game mechanics, that’s fine. But if he
wants to know something about the setting
in which the action takes place, his PC
will have to question an NPC, not the GM.
 

X. Reward wit, quick thinking, and
consistency.

All games have a standard for the
awarding of points when it comes to hacking
and slashing or chucking a spell across
the room. But all too often, the sneaky
little guy that fast-talked the party out of a
big mess with the hill giants is left unrewarded.
Experience points should be
awarded whenever a player has successfully
exercised his gray matter. Both rapid
thinking and long-term strategy should be
rewarded. Also, small numbers of experience
points should be given for such activities
as commanding a body of men, falling
in love, or fouling up completely. People
learn from their mistakes.

More important than the awarding of
experience is letting the players actually
use stratagems and ploys. If a player
thinks of a way to reduce the morale of an
enemy troop, let that gambit have a direct
affect on the outcome of combat. Don’t
dole out 20 XP and ignore
the effects of reduced morale; there’s no
need to make it too easy for the players.
But when someone comes up with a reasonable
tactic other than the standard
attack-or-die scenario, let them give it a go.
Just sit back and wait for an opportunity
to enforce Murphy’s Law. Remember: The
more complicated the plan, the more likely
it is that Murphy exerts himself. Even if
the players try a stratagem and it fails,
gaming pleasure will be enhanced by the
effort.
 

A quick review of this article reveals the
extensive use of words such as “pleasure,”
“enjoy,” and “entertaining” The purpose of
playing the game is to have a good time. If
these Ten Commandments are followed,
Game Mastering may not be made any
easier, but it will surely be more rewarding
for all concerned.
 

- from Dragon 122

A picture is worth a thousand words (Dragon #224)
 
 

Dungeon Etiquette:
What to do when your wizard falls asleep, or: "You're dead. Shut up!"
by Jody Lynn Nye

Sooner or later, every DM has to deal
with the fact that all facets of his world
must yield to the world outside -- the one
calling his illusionist home for supper, or
his warlord to a one o'clock dental ap-pointment. It is, of course, the Dungeon
Master's whim (a phenomenon with which
any player is familiar) as to what he will
do with an errant player's character,
which we assume must now run around
the magical kingdom without a soul or
other guiding force. An aspiring DM will
usually have to work something out with
his players regarding their physical (or
mental) departure from the game by the
end of the first session he runs.

In the 11 years I've been playing D&D®
and other role-playing games, the solutions
my assorted DMs have come up with to
solve this problem have been varied, if not
to say fair. I wouldn't call any DM fair who
had that kind of gleam in his eyes. Solu-tions I have seen included:

1. Instant death. The character who is
withdrawn from a game in the midst of
combat is now dead. Generally, this elicits
protests from the player, who will soon be
late for his appointment because of argu-ing with the DM. If arguing doesn?t work,
there is usually more delay while the
player negotiates (using "spirit talk") with
one of the other players to carry his char-acter's body to a temple, roll for resurrec-tion or reincarnation, and in some cases
arrange probate for the character's estate.
At this point, a danger of real death awaits
the player, whose parents or spouse have
been fuming in the car while waiting for
him all this time.

2. Unconsciousness. The character
lapses into unconsciousness and cannot be
hurt (except by large objects falling on
him). It is up to the DM whether the char-acter, in the player?s absence, must be
carried home or comes out of it in time to
transport himself.

3. Teleportation to an inn. As soon as the
front door slams shut behind the player,
his player character vanishes in a puff of
magic from his friends' view and reap-pears in front of a brimming brew in his
favorite inn's common room. His hit
points, experience points, and gold pieces
are intact (except for his bar bill) from the
point at which he left the adventure.

4. Banishment to Limbo. The DM we had
who sent the characters of departed play-ers instantly into Limbo, no saving throw,
lasted precisely three weeks in his posi-tion. No one could get characters above
1st level, and after rerolling characters
three times running, no one wanted to try.
Then there are the difficulties resulting
when the body of the player is still there,
but the mind is not. For example, sessions
used to run rather long in the first
dungeon campaign in which I played. I
was not used to staying up past 1:00 A.M.,
and the games would grind on till then
from the early afternoon. I enjoyed the
games tremendously, and I didn't want to
miss a moment? but by the witching
hour of 13 o'clock, my metabolism would
have thrown a sleep spell on me, and I'd
sink into incoherence and slumber. What
does the perfect DM do?

The basic question should be: How does
this person wake up? Is he inclined to be
violent? Clear-minded? If the answer to the
former is no and to the latter yes, you can
kick him awake every time you need him
to do something. If the opposite is true,
you may play his character for him or use
one of the methods described above for
players who leave the game. Do whatever
is safer and healthier for the continued
happiness of yourself and the player.
In the long sessions mentioned above,
my own DM allowed a combination of
those methods. When I fell asleep, my
wizard character was run by one of my
colleagues, who initially woke me up to get
a list of my character's remaining spells,
then nudged me out of it when it was time
to go home. The DM also took an incrimi-nating picture of me curled up with his
cat, but you do not need to do that. Some
people are allergic to cats.

So what do you do when your paladin's
player discovers that you have cable televi-sion, and Star Wars is on during the
course of the game? The player ensconces
himself before the tube, happily reciting
every line right along with the characters,
laughing with the droids, and looking
distant and noble when Luke stares
bravely out at the setting suns on Tatooine.
Appeals to him to come back and play like
a paladin do not work. When your players
cry, "Jonathon! There's a dragon attack-ing!" they get a response of: "Ain't like
dustin' crops, boy."

This example is simply deliberate deser-tion. The player is no more aware of what
is going on back in the game than is the
aforementioned sleeping player. However,
since the latter condition depends on
physiology, and the former on inclination
and the presence of a TV, the DM
may feel that he can be a little harsher
with the former. After all, the paladin's
player came to play a D&D game, and not
to enroll in the Jedi academy, right?

Then there is unavoidable desertion, as
when the volume of Coca-Cola and Orange
Crush your player has been ingesting
finally exceeds the capacity of his bladder.
If you ever intend to rotate the DM's posi-tion and play in a campaign run by one of
your players, it is wise to understand that
such things happen. Don't call nastily
through the bathroom door, "There was a
balrog, and your wizard got crisped!" This
is shooting at a helpless target. If the
player remembers this when it's his time
to run the game, you'll be sorry. Revenge
never allows saving throws. It's better to
pause until nature has run its course (it
tends to go in cycles, so allow for it), then
resume the adventure.

Another point the DM needs to make
with his players early on is whether or not
the characters can hear "spirit voices."
This phenomenon usually occurs when
the party splits up, through death or dis-tance, when there is no earthly (or un-earthly) way that the character could
actually have heard his companions talk-ing to him. Thud the Fighter wanders all
by himself into the room with 17 doors on
the north wall. The disembodied voices of
his friends two levels down (who have
already passed through) advise him to pick
the middle one. Does the DM allow it?
Worse yet, what happens to Nebraska
Smith, sole survivor of an expedition, who
is getting lots of help from. his deceased
counterparts in solving a cryptic puzzle
that will save his life -- and incidentally,
the party's treasure?

Some DMs honestly don't care if their
players cross the lines of dungeon reality,
but some get really bent out of shape over
infractions. Depending on how fiendish
his trap is, and how long he's been work-ing on it, your DM will exact appropriately
weighted punishment for spirit-voice aid,
especially if someone blurts out that the
Great Machine God is really Voyager 6,
and you can escape by throwing Duracell
batteries at it.

Admittedly, spirit voices are lots of help
if the players aren't too experienced. The
group members need to work more
closely together to learn game mechanics.
But, from the DM's point of view, spirit
voices can be a pain in the neck, and the
DM should say so if he feels that way. He
might not allow the active character to
benefit from the commission of what is in
his eyes a crime.

A DM may well have other laws in-tended to make game play move faster. Is
he allergic to puns (a common and insidi-ous disease found in dungeoneering
groups) and so forbids them except at
meal breaks? Does he count down, then
subtract hit points from a character for
every clock minute that a player describes
a previous adventure?

The DM is trusting his players to play
fair That means everything from not
cheating on your number of available
spells, to keeping mum about a dopple-ganger in your midst. It's more fun to win
while sticking by the house rules. You
can't play D&D games without cooperat-ing with each other. By participating as a
player, you have made an unspoken agree-ment to abide by the DM's directions,
however silly. By accepting a player, you
have agreed to be as fair to him as you are
to all your other players. It makes more
sense than playing a D&D game all alone.
Otherwise, chances are very good that
the next time you go to the bathroom, a
balrog will crisp your wizard.

- from Dragon 130