MetaPoints: RPGs Need These

Courtesy of Jeff Rients comes this comment on Mike Mearls’s LJ:

I want to have my cake and eat it too. Give me a system where the default puts the onus of clue-deciphering and people-influencing on the player, but give that player some sort of scarce resource they can spend to make the issue mechanical. “Listen, Mr. DM, I’m sick of trying to figure your damn riddle out. I’m just gonna spend a MetaPoint to turn the problem into a Knowledge (History) check.”

Independent of the fruitful and interesting discussion of another way to handle mental stats in D&D, Jeff’s comment jumped out at me because I think many RPGs — and gaming groups — need a mechanic like this.

I’ve been on both sides of this one: watching my players beat their heads against a problem and wishing there was something I could do as a GM that didn’t feel like a cop-out, and descending into drooling boredom while trying to figure out a puzzle as a player. Both problems could be neatly solved, or very nearly solved, by this simple rules tweak.

What do you think?

Three Reasons Art in RPG Books Matters to GMs

As a GM, I care about having good art in my RPG books for three reasons.

1. Good art tells me about the setting, and about the tone of the game. White Wolf books are a classic example of this kind of art: moody, atmospheric, almost universally excellent. One flip-through, and I know roughly what kind of game the designers had in mind.

2. Quality art gets my players into the setting. Similarly, evocative art that’s matched well to the game gives my players lots of cues about what to expect, and helps get them in the mood to play.

3. I can show things to my players. This is crucial for monster books — I can describe a beastie, then show it to my players to cement that image, ensuring that we’re all on the same page. Ditto with locations, NPC portraits and the like.

(There’s a fourth reason, too, of course: good art is more fun to look at. That’s not GM-specific in any way, though, so I left it off the list.)

For these three reasons, bad artwork can keep me from buying a gaming book. With monster books (which I love), poor or limited artwork will keep me from buying them, period. In setting books or other sourcebooks, bad or limited (low quantity) art won’t necessarily keep me from snagging a book, but it’s definitely a factor.

Where do you stand on this one? And are there other reasons why art in gaming books matters to GMs?

Step Out of Your Genre Groove

Assuming you have a favorite genre (fantasy, pulp, four-color supers, etc.), and at least one genre you don’t like, there’s a fertile middle ground: genres you haven’t tried yet.

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Do You Buy Published Adventures?

There’s a discussion in the TT forums about the end of Paizo’s run on Dungeon and Dragon Magazines, and it’s currently drifted towards the topic of published adventures in general.

“Adventures don’t sell” seems to the party line that many publishers toe, but I don’t think this tells the whole story.

Good adventures seem to sell just fine — along with Dungeon itself, Paizo’s Shackled City hardcover has apparently done very well. Ditto with the entire line of Dungeon Crawl Classics from Goodman Games. So-so adventures, unsurprisingly, don’t do so hot (and there are a lot of those) — but clearly somebody must be buying the good ones.

So how about it: Do you buy adventures for any of the systems that you GM?

How important is it to you that RPG publishers provide adventures for their games? Do you buy the shitty ones too, just to have the material? Why do you think the “Adventures don’t sell” mantra is out there?

Reaper Prepainted Minis: First Photo

Reaper Miniatures is throwing ReaperCon right now, and one of the attendees snapped an excellent picture of some of the first few releases: Legendary Encounters preview photo.

By way of Jeff’s Gameblog (where I first saw the above photo — thanks, Jeff!) comes this extra tidbit: “The next 2 sets of Legendary Encounters Releases will include Goblins, Zombies, A Gnoll[s], An Ettin, A Demoness, Kobolds, A Bathalian, Ghosts, A Succubus, and A Giant Worm.”

When I first posted about Reaper’s upcoming prepainted, non-random plastic minis here on TT, lots of readers (myself included!) were very excited about the prospect. Having now seen this photo, all I can say is: Fuck. Yeah.

Do You Limit Character Options?

TT reader and RPG freelancer Walt Ciechanowski (Walt C. in the comments) is full of good questions (his last one was Do you give bonuses/penalties to skill checks for roleplaying?). Via email, here’s another question from Walt (thanks, Walt!):

When you start a campaign, do you limit character options?

Not as in “You can’t use that splatbook,” but in the sense of “No gnomes,” “Everyone needs to have a connection to law enforcement,” and the like.

Scenario-Writing Tips from Craft (Adventures)

In the Worldwide Adventure Writing Month forum here on TT, Roger linked up five articles full of scenario-writing tips (thanks, Roger!).

He said, “These articles are some of the best advice I’ve ever read on writing adventures, and hardly anyone has seen them.”

All five articles Roger recommends come from the Andy Collins’s “Craft (Adventures)” column, and he’s right about them being well-hidden on WotC’s site. Here they are:

They’re written with RPGA game masters (and therefore, D&D) in mind, but there’s plenty of good advice for GMs of all stripes. Whether you’re writing a con scenario for the first time (and if you are, don’t miss I Was a Virgin Convention GM) or putting an adventure together for WoAdWriMo, these articles are worth a read.

Relax and Have Fun: Notes from a Clueless GM

Thinking about GMing in the car (you know you do it too), it hit me just how clueless I was for the first several years. Oh, I figured plenty of stuff out on my own, and I developed aspects of my GMing style that persist today, but by and large I had no idea what I was doing. (There’s still tons of stuff I don’t know, but that’s another post…)

Social contracts, player feedback, the encounter formula, what not to do, what makes running solo campaigns different, spotting player likes and dislikes, the flashlight — I could fill pages with all the stuff I know now and didn’t know back then (and I have).

The funny thing is that even with all of these gaps — shit, gulfs — in my GMing knowledge, we had fun much more often than not, and in some ways that fun seemed easier to achieve. When you don’t know what you don’t know, you’re less afraid to make mistakes, and more likely to just roll with things and see what happens.

What I took away from that little bout of reminiscing was these two points:

  1. Don’t get so bogged down in learning every last thing about being an awesome GM.
  2. Just relax and have fun.

The irony of writing this post on a site dedicated to helping, teaching and inspiring GMs isn’t lost on me, but I also don’t see a conflict between wanting to improve and needing to remember to just go with the flow sometimes. GMing advice, like just about everything else, should be taken in moderation.

That’s easy to forget, at least for me, but now I know what to do when I feel like there’s just too many aspects of GMing I still need to work on: relax, dive in, and just have fun.

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