The Blog of Roon

The best GMs I’ve had, I can completely bollix up their plans and they don’t wink an eye—they get even. I dunno how they do it. But that’s why they’re GMs and I’m not.

I am not good at figuring out when I’ve done the Wrong Thing. Insofar as I am a Robin Law “tactician,” I am one in the service of keeping well-loved characters from dying horribly. (This is why I rather like the trick in some recent indie RPGs of letting the player narrate what happens when his/her character gets hurt or fails, while the GM narrates character successes. I don’t mind my characters screwing up or being hurt, but I like to feel just a tiny bit in control of it.) I don’t, in other words, set out to dink with the GM’s mind.

I am told, however, that I do so with some frequency. So, I’m sorry. It isn’t intentional.

The best I can say is that it really isn’t that hard to keep my characters in line. They all have people and principles they care about. Threaten those. It’s that simple.

I can’t say I have a whole lot of experience with being railroaded. There was that GenCon campaign round, and there was the uber-munchkin GM from college—but even he just complained good-naturedly when we’d bollixed up his plans; he didn’t make us take back our brilliant idea or anything. (Fechan once… but that’s another story.)

I do think, though, that there’s a fine line between the characters having zero effect on the campaign world, and their having too much. The best GMs walk that line. The others either railroad their players or turn them into munchkins.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2003 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.