/pics/6594252769_1e9e6acbab.jpg
Zak has a GM Questionnaire up.
1. **If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?** To use Sandbox conventions and the Entourage Approach in my D&D 3.5 game. I finally realized that a lot of what I didn’t like about D&D 3.5 wasn’t set in stone.
2. **When was the last time you GMed?** Eight days ago.
3. **When was the last time you played?** Sixteen days ago.
4. **Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven’t run but would like to.** Find the lair of the green slime flask throwing, air shark riding orcs living in a cave near the river Styx and win them as allies in your assault against a mindflayer panzership.
5. **What do you do while you wait for players to do things?** Undecided players automatically *delay*. When there is nobody left wanting to go, I go. If there is no opposition I use the moment to introduce a color scene or non-player characters to interact with.
6. **What, if anything, do you eat while you play?** Players bring chips, cookies, chocolate, grapes, cherry tomatoes, mandarins, or pastry. Occasionally, I have offered bread and cheese.
7. **Do you find GMing physically exhausting?** No. When the game is over, however, I am often tired and don’t like to talk too much.
8. **What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?** My barbarian tied some shields together in preparation for a sled escape down a snow-covered mountain as frost giants were approaching our position.
9. **Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither?** No. There is a lot of joking, but when I’m unsure, I’ll ask “do you really say that?” All the sillyness happens out-of-game.
10. **What do you do with goblins?** They are a player race. Goblins are sexless and born out of warm mud kept underground; the earth magic does it (a form of spontaneous creation).
11. **What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?** Material from the Mesopotamian section of the Louvre, articles on Wikipedia on the Mesopotamian pantheon.
12. **What’s the funniest table moment you can remember right now?** A player character has a blast spore in his backpack and suspects that it might explode when pierced. He intends to destroy a magic-user spectre using it. As he sneaks into the treasure room, the spectre turns visible behind him and casts a spell on the rest of the party. He cries a warning, throws the backpack and fires a cross-bolt. The explosion causes 22 points of damage, save for half, and I decide he’s caught in it. The character has but 10 hit points. He also has a healing potion. At this point the player gets up and exitedly demonstrates how the character could throw the backpack, shoot the crossbow bolt *and* drink the potion “in one smooth move” by throwing his own shoulder bag across the living room and miming the entire scene in bullet time. We cried tears of laughter.
13. **What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?** I was looking for cool ideas in *ASE1: Anomalous Subsurface Environment* but it was very long and I got tired.
14. **Who’s your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?** At the moment I really like Kelvin Green.
15. **Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?** No.
16. **What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn’t write? (If ever)** The top levels of the megadungeon published in Fight On have been providing many funny sessions.
17. **What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?** I like my living room. It has a big table, it has benches, it’s comfortable, we don’t have kids or pets competing for our attention, we can laugh and shout without the neighbours complaining.
18. **If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?** I like both *Mountain Witch* and *Labyrinth Lord*.
19. **If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?** The *old school blogosphere* and the indie games I’ve been playing biweekly.
20. **As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?** Funny, friendly, polite, non-smelly, pro-active, cooperative, interesting people.
21. **What’s a real life experience you’ve translated into game terms?** A visit to the passage tomb of Newgrange inspired several burial mounds in my games.
22. **Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn’t?** I would like a return to parsimonious adventures. I used to like Paizo products until I realized that I wasn’t actually *reading* them. They were too damn long.
23. **Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn’t play? How do those conversations go?** I have a poster of Orcus and an explanation of what role-playing games up at the office and once or twice a co-worker asked me what this was about. I provided a short explanation, they nodded and moved on.
#RPG
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
You mention that you don’t read Paizo adventures because they’re too long. What do you do with them instead? Or rather, what parts do you take from them? I’m currently trying to run the *Rise of the Runelords* adventure path for my players and am too finding it extremely odious to read through the 100-page adventures.
– RichardBoyechko 2012-01-21 21:38 UTC
---
Aiye – I don’t have a good answer for you. I ran *Rise of the Runelords*. All the others have been shelved, unopened, unread, unused. A total waste. 🙁
As for the one adventure path I did run: I started skimming the text, looking for cool pictures, looking for bold text, picking encounters, improvising a lot by just looking at the maps. The result was a game that was packed with exciting locales and interesting fights – and not much more. I felt the invisible hand of *affordance* pushing me along. Moving to the next encounter was simply easier than actually empowering the players, giving them meaningful choices and letting them shape their own destinies. The adventure path turned into a gargantuan railroad from beginning to end. A joyless affair, and I blamed it on the D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder rules and on the adventure path. TL;DR – *too long, didn’t read*.
Now that I’ve played through *Legacy of Fire* using Pathfinder rules with DM James, now that I’ve been running a sandbox campaign using D&D 3.5 rules, now that I’ve been running another sandbox campaign using Labyrinth Lord rules, I have decided that I’m just not a good *adventure path* DM. I feel that decent preparation would require as much as time as writing my own.
Since I already own the books and they’re sitting on my shelf, unused, I sometimes promise myself that “one day” I will take them and simply add the stuff in the books to my sandbox campaigns. Players may or may not stumble accross the locales and enemies mentioned in the book, they can meet them in the wrong order, and if they decide not to meddle, I’ll just improvise whatever disaster the adventure path has in store for my campaign world.
Should I do that, however, I’ll rely on the same technique I have been using before: “skimming the text, looking for cool pictures, looking for bold text, picking encounters, improvising a lot by just looking at the maps.” The difference will be that the adventure path will be optional. It will provide sidequests and non-player characters, little dungeons, maps, names, *inspiration* instead of plot.
I guess I’m still looking for the best way of making use of all the material.
– Alex Schroeder 2012-01-21 22:01 UTC
