GM’s Guide: The Art of Rulings

Imperium RomanumLeave a comment

Art of Rulings

This is the most important part of the guide. That is not a setup for a running gag about every part of the guide being the most important part. This is the actual most important part of the guide. Making good rulings is being a good GM. Everything else is being an adventure writer/developer, a job which is sometimes, but not always, packaged together with being a GM. If you pay Paizo or Wizards of the Coast or whoever to be your adventure writer (by buying a published adventure), you are still the GM, because you still make rulings at the table.

So here’s what a ruling is: 1) You describe the environment and anything important in it, and resolve any relevant automatic checks (perception, knowledge, etc.). 2) The players say they’re going to do something, and you determine the PCs intention and approach. 3) You figure out what the mechanics for the action are (mostly what skill to roll and what the DC is), make sure the player understands what the mechanics are, and then you roll the dice. 4) Then you determine the consequences, and if appropriate, you let the results ride. In practice, you need each of these steps to be automatic and reflexive, and odds are many of them already are. If you have any gaps, pick one thing to work on at a time until it’s second nature. Then pick another thing to work on, until you have the entire process mastered.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: The Art of Rulings” →

GM’s Guide: Preface and Introduction

Imperium RomanumLeave a comment

Preface: When to Ignore the Advice in This Guide

Just about every GM’s guide, from the chapter on the subject in official books of major RPGs to the “how to GM” posts that get submitted to Reddit by someone who’s only been doing it for six months, will mention that the GM should change rules and ignore advice whenever it’s appropriate. Which is basically just the author completely sidestepping all responsibility for the actual quality of advice. “If you follow our advice and it turns out badly for you, that’s because you didn’t follow our advice to not follow our advice. Sometimes. Only don’t follow our advice when it wouldn’t help. Do follow our advice when it would help. So, tautologically, anytime you mess up it’s because you didn’t follow our advice.”

It’s obviously true that no guide can ever encompass the entirety of all situations faced by every GM who ever reads it, and despite being the length of a short novel, this one isn’t even getting close, so there will certainly be times when the advice in this guide does not apply to your specific situation and should be ignored. The question is, when? And the answer is, when you have a good reason to. That sounds tautological, but if you can explain to a hypothetical observer why the rule isn’t going to work for you, then you’re probably in a situation where it’s best to ignore it. All skills have a dogma to them, and true expertise always comes from understanding the limitations of the dogma and when the dogma doesn’t apply to your specific situation. “You have to understand the rules before you can break them” is a cliche because it’s true. If you have a reason to break a rule, and it’s not a shallow non-reason like “that’s not how we do things here” or “I like it better this other way,” then you’ve probably found a limitation of the rules and you should probably break that rule. This is true not just for the rules given in this guide, but for rules in general.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Preface and Introduction” →

The Bats

Imperium RomanumLeave a comment

This time in Vestitas we have the nest of a large swarm of bats who periodically ambush characters throughout the jungle hexes, and my deep wilderness, wildlife focused encounters continue to be the bare minimum of interesting I feel is allowable to make it onto the hex crawl at all. This encounter also makes reference to stat blocks that are only half-written, and those references may be revised when I go back and fully write the creature stats.

Continue reading “The Bats” →

The Fire Daemon

Imperium RomanumLeave a comment

Properly back into the swing of things now, here’s a Vestitas encounter all in one go with no missing parts at all. Today’s special guest is a daemon who you probably don’t want to fight with flamers, leaving the Ecclesiarchy scared and confused. Counting Brandt’s Landing, this is 25 hexes of Vestitas filled in, making the hexcrawl loosely one quarter complete. Of course, Grey Harbour and Imberkavitas will require a lot more effort than one-encounter hexes, even the big ones like the Living Dead. Although, on the other hand, my estimate does not include Echo Lake, which is a lake, and may or may not end up having anything interesting hiding in its murky depths.

Continue reading “The Fire Daemon” →

The Living Dead, Part 3

Imperium RomanumLeave a comment

This post on the Living Dead encounter for Vestitas is definitely us intentionally breaking up a large encounter into three parts, and not at all us completely forgetting to write up the rewards section for the encounter until the day after because it’s been two weeks since we wrote any encounters and we’re out of practice. The first one, for sure. Not the latter at all.

Continue reading “The Living Dead, Part 3” →

Dark Lord: Fey Queen and Black Prince

Imperium RomanumLeave a comment

The final posting (until I have a more complete game to discuss, anyway) on Dark Lord. One thing that people who have 3d6 probabilities memorized (or who bothered to look them up) may have noticed is that the odds of rolling up a lieutenant are so slow that you could very roll two new minions per session for forty sessions and still never roll up a single lieutenant for any of the overlords who got played during those forty sessions. This is because lieutenants are endgame minions who can only realistically spawn once the overlord has built several buildings in their domain which give bonuses to the stats of all their minions. With their domain maxed out, an overlord can have a +4 to one stat, a +2 to two others, and a +1 to the remaining three. As an example, the Lich King would probably have a +4 to CON since so many of his units require it as their high stat, a +2 to CHA for vampires and a +2 to INT for necromancers, and then a +1 to STR, DEX, and WIS, neither of which are very consistently useful.

This build isn’t quite optimized for lieutenant spawning – a Lich King trying to do that would swap the +2 INT for STR, but it brings the lieutenant’s spawn rates up to about 6%. That’s still rather low, but in the face of sufficient attrition it’s reasonably likely to happen anyway. On the other hand, elites are spawning nearly as often as troops and fodder spawn almost not at all, and while fodder are expected to die within the same session that they’re rolled and troops are expected to die before reaching level 5, an elite is reasonably likely to make it to level 5, which is quite a bit of gameplay. With so many elites and so little fodder, the rate at which new characters are being rolled goes down by quite a bit, so lieutenants remain rare and special even in the endgame. This only gives an overlord more incentive to hang onto one if they do get one. A lieutenant is not only significantly more powerful than an elite, they’re also significantly more rare, rare enough that odds are only one or two overlords will have one (unless the game last a long time and the lieutenants neither die nor retire), which means having a lieutenant-tier minion becomes a status symbol.

Anyways, here’s the Fey Queen and the Black Prince, the last of the six archetypes I designed for the unfinished game Dark Lord.

Continue reading “Dark Lord: Fey Queen and Black Prince” →

Dark Lord: Troll King and Ice Queen

Imperium RomanumLeave a comment

More unit-by-unit overviews of various dark lords and their minions from the half-finished RPG Dark Lord. We discussed yesterday how fodder can either try to get themselves killed ASAP in order to reroll as something better, or they can try and hang on to level 5 for a major reward. Elites and especially lieutenants face a different conundrum. They’re fairly powerful, in the lieutenant’s case about as powerful as a dark lord themselves, and this means that their dark lord doesn’t want them to retire and collect their bonus Fate. In order to discourage them from doing this, a dark lord gets a certain amount of Favor each quest that he must distribute amongst his minions over the course of a quest. Every surviving minion can then convert their Favor into Fate. If a lieutenant makes themselves useful, their dark lord may lavish them with Favor, especially after they’ve reached level 5 and could retire, in order to try and keep them on. The benefit from retirement is fairly low for a lieutenant, especially compared to constantly sucking up Favor quest after quest.

The problem is, by the time a lieutenant spawns (and it while it’s not as rare as it seems based on the stat requirements alone, it can definitely take a while), the other minions are probably all used to getting some Favor of their own, since the dark lord must distribute all favor by the end of each quest. Some players might be pursuing a strategy of grinding through fodder and troops until they spawn an elite, and then use that elite to soak up as much Favor as possible rather than retiring. An elite, or especially several, might conspire to assassinate a lieutenant in order to get the favor flowing towards them again. If their overlord finds out it was them, they may find themselves executed for their impudence, but if there are several potential culprits, the overlord might never have to know. An overlord can try to placate all his minions by distributing Favor evenly, but then lieutenants have much less incentive not to take a retirement bonus after they reach level 5.

I haven’t done any actual play playtesting of Dark Lord yet, so I don’t know if these incentives will work the way I want them to, but I’d be eager to find out. Unfortunately, I haven’t actually finished the game yet, which makes that a tad difficult, doesn’t it. Anyway, here’s the Troll King and the Ice Queen.

Continue reading “Dark Lord: Troll King and Ice Queen” →

Dark Lord: Lich King and Lord of the Damned

Imperium RomanumLeave a comment

And now we’ll have an overview of the units for a couple of our Dark Lord archetypes. Each player currently playing a minion rolls 3d6 in order and can qualify for certain character classes depending on which dark lord’s army they’re playing in at the moment and what stats they roll. Minion levels go from 1-5, and at level 5 minions can retire. Retiring gives bonus Fate points to to the player playing that minion, which they can then spend on their own dark lord. The reason why this is important is that less powerful minions get bigger prizes if they live to retirement, so while playing suicidally aggressive is a reasonable response to rolling up fodder, there’s a big reward for managing to keep that sucker alive clear to level 5.

 

Continue reading “Dark Lord: Lich King and Lord of the Damned” →