![]() The warlock’s there with his bugbear buddy, a goblin shaman, and a few goblin skirmishers. The party’s tromping along, arguing as they do, when they come around a blind curve into a cavern. The warlock’s bullied a bugbear into playing bodyguard and he’s teamed up with a goblin tribe. If the heroes kill the warlock and go through his pockets, it’ll establish the background plot. This is the first hint they’re gonna have that there’s an evil cult working behind the scenes and the warlock’s got evil letters from his evil boss talking about the evil cult’s evil plans because they’ve all read Villainy for Dummies. They don’t know there’s an evil cultist warlock exploring the same caves and looking for the same thing. So the party’s exploring this cave network, right, looking for a thing. Not a bad group, honestly, and it’s not like there are a lot of players who’ll put up with my shit and keep coming back. My players earn their wins and they’ve gotten good at it, even if they’re a bit impulsive at times. And some of you are gonna think I don’t know how to balance an encounter, but that’s just because you’re a bunch of sissies afraid to make your players sweat. The characters are around third level… I think. She and Adam often end up as party Mommy and Daddy if you know what I mean. But she ain’t doing it because it’s the default assumption she genuinely wants to play exactly what she’s playing and it shows. If they remade Nodwick as a serious, epic fantasy, she’d be Piffany. He’s the sort of guy who writes chaotic neutral if you tell him evil’s not allowed, but he’s a decent team player when push comes to shove, so I cut him some slack.ĭanielle’s playing a bog-standard cleric of light and goodness and all that crap. You can’t trust anything players say about their characters.Ĭhris is a smartass playing Cabe, a smartass halfling rogue. Beth insists she wants to play with illusions and enchantments, but her spell list is a hodgepodge and she turns into an impulsive blaster type as soon as the dice come out. Sword and board, noble, proud, all that crap.īeth’s an elf wizard named Beryllia. ![]() The Dramatic PersonagesĪdam’s playing Ardrick. And thus it’s a great example of how and when to slip into your system’s mechanical Initiative and Turn Order when you’ve got unaware combats and chaos. My players - Adam, Beth, Chris, and Danielle I’ve mentioned them before - ran into some trouble that turned into a double ambush. To show you how we True Game Masters manage combats, let me tell you about this fight I ran the other night. I don’t stop the flow from one round to the next and you shouldn’t either.Įnough preamble crap. It doesn’t care where rounds end and neither do I. The system I’m running uses a fairly standard cyclical initiative. I’m also going to separate the rounds with headings, but that’s more for readability and to give me a place to put graphics. Screenplay format’s nice for short examples, but not for a story several thousand words long. They do it all the time.Īlso note that I’m dropping the screenplay format I usually use for examples and going with narrative prose instead. Similarly, if you’re wondering why the players didn’t optimize their characters like you would or made tactical choices you wouldn’t, it’s because they’re playing their characters how they want to. And speaking of that, if you think you recognize the system I’m running in this example and think I got something wrong, that just makes the whole thing more authentic, doesn’t it? GMs get shit wrong and it doesn’t frigging matter. I’ll mention when I call for die rolls, but I’m not going to show you the math because the mechanics ain’t the point. This example’s about pacing, flow, and narration, not mechanics. And that’s what you’re getting today: a combat that looks and sounds like one I’d run. When I taught you how True Game Masters manage combat, I promised an extended example of what combats look and sound like at my table. Today, I’m telling you the story of a fight that never happened. For a complete list of True Game Mastery lessons, visit the True Game Mastery Course Index. This informal example is part of my long-running True Game Mastery course.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |