Cutscenes: One Simple Approach

Cutscenes are poweful tool in other media, so why not use them in roleplaying games? I’ve heard of GMs employing cutscenes in the way I’m about to describe, but never tried this myself; it sounds reasonable, though.

Just like a movie, an RPG cutscene would work like this: At a suitable stopping point, you cut away from the party — and the PCs — and the whole group plays out a scene with completely different characters. When the scene is over, you cut back.

To do this well, it seems like you’d need to sketch out the cutscene characters (focusing more on roleplaying elements than stats, but including stats as needed), and quickly brief each player on their character’s goals in the scene. Keep things simple, too.

In terms of the outcome, you could go two routes: let it be fluid, with your players’ actions as the sole determining factor (and then adjust the main story — the one with the PCs — accordingly), or stack the deck in favor of or against the cutscene characters (the ogre raiding party sacks a village, for example).

There’d also be the consideration that your players would need to compartmentalize the metagame knowledge they gained through playing out the cutscene, but with mature groups I don’t see that being too much of an issue.

What do you think — are those the basic elements you’d need to address to make this quick and dirty approach to using cutscenes work in your game? Have you tried this in your campaign? How did it go?

2007 ENnies Update: Tight Races

With less than a week left for voting, here’s an interesting 2007 ENnie Awards update from Michael Morris, EN World’s technical administrator (as of July 22nd):

“Most of the races are within 200 votes still, 5 are within 100 votes and one race is within 40 votes - so there’s still time to make a difference in the outcome. It is still possible for things to get down to the wire - two years ago we had a winner by a margin of 5 votes!”

As of just over one week into ENnie Awards voting, over 5,500 ballots had been cast — that’s as many votes as the 2006 ENnies saw during the entire two-week voting period!

Treasure Tables has been nominated for Best Fan Site, so the combination of a huge turnout and narrow margins is pretty nerve-wracking (although in a good way).

If you like TT, I hope you’ll take a moment to vote for Treasure Tables in the 2007 ENnies. You don’t need to vote in every category (though I hope you’ll vote in as many categories as you can), and it’s a quick process. Thank you for supporting TT!

Spicy Rules, Bland NPCs?

Shamus Young, author of the always-excellent DM of the Rings webcomic, made an interesting comment about paying equal attention to rules and roleplaying on strip LXX: The Needs of the Many.

The strip posits that if the scene in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers where members of the Fellowship escort peasants to Helm’s Deep took place in a stereotypical D&D campaign, Aragorn and company would have made them do a forced march, sacrificing the old and infirm for the sake of efficiency — because really, who cares about a bunch of peasants?

As always with DMotR, chances are that you’ll laugh while remembering times your players did something a lot like this. Shamus’s point, though, is that you can’t pin this behavior entirely — or even largely — on your players:

…you could make the case that stuff like this is the result of a DM who is strict about rules and lax about role-playing, which is about the surest form of self-sabotage a DM can do. If you adhere to the rules with meticulous authority and fill the world with generic NPCs, then soon enough you’ll have players treating your world like a place to mine treasure and farm experience, and not like a place where an epic story is taking place.

I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself, figuring that if I make sure we get the rules right, some of the other stuff (like good NPCs) will fall into place — even though in most cases, it doesn’t work that way at all.

Adherence to the rules should always take a backseat to providing your players with meaty, juicy steaks roleplaying opportunities, and one great way to do that is to design vibrant NPCs — and then drive those NPCs like a rental.

How Do You Craft the First Session of a New Campaign?

The Question: When you’re starting up a new campaign, how do you go about creating the first session? I’ve never had a knack for this myself, unfortunately. I don’t think there’s a magical formula for a great first session, but I’d love to be proved wrong!

I usually try to combine three elements: enough setup to carry the party into the next few sessions, enough introductory stuff to give my players a sense of all of the PCs in the party and at least one good action scene, usually fairly early on. This seems to me to be a fairly workmanlike approach — serviceable, but not nearly as good as it could be.

Do you have a formula you’ve used across multiple systems or genres? Do you vary your approach by campaign — and if so, are there any elements you don’t vary?

The PDF: I’d like to do something a bit different with this discussion post: use your answers to create a PDF about different approaches to crafting the first session of a campaign — along the lines of how Have You Ever Kicked Out a Player? led to How to Kick Out a Player and Respect Yourself in the Morning (one of TT’s top 25 posts). Maybe it’ll work, maybe not — but there’s only one way to find out, right?

By commenting on this post, you grant me the unlimited, non-exclusive right to use your comment (verbatim or conceptually) in a free Treasure Tables PDF on this topic. Please let me know how you would like to be credited in the finished PDF. If you prefer not to have your comment incorporated into a PDF, just let me know in your comment.

GMPCs: A Two-Edged GMing Tool

In the comments on Help Your Players Hone their PCs During Chargen, TT reader Telas suggested this topic: “Good vs bad GMPCs…” (Thanks, Telas!)

GMPC stands for Game Master Player Character, and most often refers to an NPC that is part of the party, and takes part in all or most adventures with the PCs. The difference being, of course, that this “PC” is played by you, the GM.

There’s a fine line between GMPCs and pet NPCs, but if you steer well clear of that line, GMPCs can be an awesome GMing tool.

Read more

GMing Advice from Peter Jackson

Reading his foreword to The Making of Star Wars, I was surprised to see that Peter Jackson was dispensing GMing advice (yep, that Peter Jackson):

“I think a lot of filmmakers fall into the trap of thinking, Well if it’s fantasy I can be more flamboyant. But the opposite is true. If you are bombarding the audience with images they’ve never seen before, you want to keep the camera as real and truthful as you can, as well as the performances of the actors.

Substitute “GMs” for “filmmakers” and “players” for “audience,” and that’s a solid piece of GMing advice: Even though you’re running a game full of fantastical elements, the characters in that world need have believable motivations, and they should act — on some level — like real people (even if they’re orcs, Vulcans, robots or whatever). And even though what happens in the game is outlandish and larger than life, the way you describe in-game events needs to have an element of plausibility to it as well.

I know there have been times when I’ve been so caught up in how cool an encounter, location or NPC was that I forgot that vital element of believability, and wound up with a two-dimensional character or a scene that fell flat because it just didn’t fit somehow. Peter’s comment is a good reminder to avoid falling into that trap.

Character Development, Campaign Tools and Spot Checks

Continuing the link roundup format I started using last week, here are three more excellent GMing links:

• Obsidian Portal: This new site is designed to help groups manage their tabletop campaigns, and it has an interesting focus: “Rather than trying to automate the playing of the game, Obsidian Portal provides tools to help facilitate the storytelling.” Here’s a sample of what a campaign being managed on OP looks like: Arkanapolis, which features an adventure log, a wiki and an NPC tracker, along with the community aspect of sharing ideas and resources with other groups. Obsidian Portal is nicely executed, and holds a lot of promise.

• Don’t Roll, Think: In this ars ludi post, Ben Robbins proposes ditching spot checks in non-combat situations, and having your players ask for more details based on your descriptions, instead. It’s an interesting perspective, but while I think over-reliance on die rolls can be a problem, spot checks (and other “Did I notice anything?”-type rolls) are a good thing in my book. On not concealing adventure-critical information behind spot checks, though, I couldn’t agree more. Check it out and see what you think.

• It’s About The Character, Not The Player - Serving Up Characterization Encounters, Part 1: This Roleplaying Tips article by Johnn Four offers a wealth of good player-oriented advice on sussing out PC motives, provoking tough choices, developing character backgrounds during play (my favorite section), the distinction between acting and representation (which was a light bulb moment for me) and more.

The article’s title doesn’t really do it justice — it’s essentially a grab-bag of tricks and tools for encouraging your players to think more about their characters, which is a foundation-level topic for GMs. Even if your players do this already, there are tips you might find useful — and if you’re new to GMing, or your group is heading away from a hack-and-slash style where PCs are just combat stats, this article makes a great starting point. If Johnn writes another GMing book (his first was GM Mastery: NPC Essentials), I hope he includes this article in it.

Go Ahead and Get it Wrong the First Time

I just started reading The Making of Star Wars (which, if you geek out for behind the scenes stuff, is fabulous), and was struck by how wrong most of the original concept art for the main cast actually was.

Take this guy on the right, for example. That’s Chewbacca.

Specifically, it’s a 30th anniversary figure based on Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art for Chewie from 1975. At that time, Luke was a girl and Han was a Jedi who looked suspiciously like George Lucas.

And Chewie, here? He looks awful. Not because Ralph’s not a gifted artist (which he is), or because it’s not a cool design for an alien creature (which it is, although it makes for a kind of goofy-looking action figure), but because it’s almost entirely wrong for Chewbacca. Can you imagine if Chewie looked like this in the films?

Which is where the GMing angle comes in. This struck me as a great reminder that, just as in writing, your first draft of anything for your game — campaign setting, region, encounter, NPC or lovable bowcaster-toting sidekick — doesn’t need to be perfect right out of the gate.

If you dislike something you’ve created, don’t stress about it. Move on to something else, or just take a break, and come back to it a little bit later.

You don’t need to endlessly rework every little thing you design, but it’s good to consider re-examining the major elements (and as many of the minor ones as you have time for) at least once before putting them into play — just in case you start out with ol’ bug-eyes here.

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