Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 36 - The Big GM Secret

Episode Date: August 30, 2020

In one of is rare DM-only episodes, Jeremy discusses the secret to ratcheting up the tension for the players to make them feel their characters' lives are on the line.  

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode 36, The Big GM Secret. Today's sponsor is Car Batteries. Hey, when's the last time you checked yours? If it's been a while, have a mechanic check yours today. Please head over to Taking20Podcast.com and send us some feedback at feedback at Taking20Podcast.com. I'd love to hear from you. I've never said this before, but if you're a player and not a GM, and you want to keep the magic of the RPG alive, turn back now.

If that's at all important to you, please turn off this podcast and go listen to something else. We're at a point on the map that says, here there be dragons for players. We're at a point on the map that says, here there be dragons for players. Last warning. Further listening to this episode may take away an aspect of fun for an RPG player, so if you don't GM, please turn it off in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Now that the scurvy players are gone,

hello fellow DMs. Players, am I right? We DMs and GMs ought to form our own little group and rotate running a series of one-shots for each other. That way we get to play a little more, meet some of our peers, learn from each other. If anyone knows of a group like that, please message me at feedback at taking20podcast.com. Sorry for the distraction. Back to the show. If you've listened to other episodes, you've heard my theories on what makes a good GM. Fun is more important than story, which is more important than the rules. RPGs are a collaborative storytelling game. Your preparation and adjudication of the rules, player choices, along with the fickle fate of the dice tell the story

of the characters and their adventures through your world. DMs are not in an adversarial relationship with the players. You play the players' adversaries, but you aren't actively working against the players. It's a fine line difference, but it's very important. That being said, your job is to put the PCs in dangerous situations and let them figure out how to get out of it. You might have to give them a little nudge every now and then towards the correct solution if they get stuck. Now here's the secret, and if any non-GMs are still listening, you brought this shit on yourself. In almost every combat, the player should feel like their likelihood of survival is 50-50, maybe 60-40. The PC should

be saying things like, but in reality, their chance of survival should be closer to 95%. The player should feel like their characters are in danger. The players should feel overwhelmed, outmatched, outgunned in about half or more of the situations they're in. For most players, the threat of death makes the characters feel like heroes. The players should feel like that for their characters to survive, they need to make smart decisions, work together, maybe get lucky with some of their die rolls. work together, maybe get lucky with some of their die rolls. The reality is the players need to not be stupid, have a modicum of tactics, and don't get cut off from the rest of the party. So my suggestion, the big GM secret,

is that you should modify the encounter behind the screen so they're not actually in as dire straits as they appear to be. Am I saying you should give the bad guys nerf weapons and make them no threat? Absolutely not. Should you deflect every potential killing blow behind the screen against the player so they miss? No, I'm not saying that either. But should you adjust the difficulty slider in your head depending on the importance of the fight? Absolutely. Most gaming systems have an approximation of how difficult encounters and monsters are. Examples include encounter level or EL, challenge rating or CR, experience point, XP pools, dice pools, etc. They are just that, an estimate of how high level a party of four needs to be to successfully defeat this creature or encounter or trap. These levels are guidelines and they're not hard and fast rules.

Difficulty of a combat or an encounter really depends on party makeup and their capabilities. Encounters could be much more difficult or easier than what's listed on the piece of paper. In 5th edition, werewolves are listed as a challenge 3, which means they should be a typical fight for a group of 3rd level characters. However, werewolves are immune to non-silvered, non-magical weapons. What if you had a group of fifth-level characters who didn't have any magic weapons, had no silver weapons, and limited damaging spells available to them? They're going to have a much harder time of it, even though they're above third level. In Pathfinder, shadows are listed as challenge rating 2,

but they can be lethal to parties that don't have magic weapons. The point is, you can't just go by a single number when it comes to judging difficulty your party will have with an encounter. Sometimes parties will have a lot more trouble with an encounter than you expected when you were planning. More and more than the numbers that are in the default stat block is your estimation of how hard a fight should be. As you're creating adventures or challenges for your players, start thinking about how hard this fight will be for the players around

your table right now. I tend to chop my encounters up into four different categories. Easy, Normal, Tough, and the Boss Battle. About 10% of the fights are easy. 40-50% are normal, 40-50% are tough, and then the rare boss battle that's really tough. So let's talk about those categories briefly. Easy fights. Don't worry about it. Give the players their easy win. The party is Alabama football team and the opponents are some directional school like Southwest Grapefruit Tech or Our Lady of the 7 Second 40-Yard Dashes. Fight should be entirely in their favor. It makes the characters feel like the badasses that they are. Set the baddies up for the party to use their powerful abilities if they

choose. Example, the party is 9th level and they've stumbled upon a group of six EL-1 skeletons in a forest on the way back to town. The skeletons in this case are absolutely no match for the party, and at worst, the PCs will suffer an unlucky hit or two. Trying to ramp up tension on easy fights like this will just be comical and will cheapen any tension you try to raise in other fights. The skeleton approaches, rusty scimitar in hand, eyes glowing with menace. You roll the dice. He swings and misses. What do you do?

Oh, well, I rolled a hit the skeleton with my mace. Natural 19, so I get AC 30 for 21 points of damage. Okay, the bones shatter and fly off into the trees. Kaleus, how you survive this imminent threat to your life? Um, I channel positive energy for 15 points of damage to all the skeletons within 30 feet. Right, that's the end of combat. No point in trying to ramp up tension. There isn't any to ramp up.

The party's going to win. They're going to curb stomp the opponents. It's going to be a quick fight. So give them their win. Don't worry about trying to ramp up the tension there. With normal fights, which make up the large percentage of the types of fights that they will have. With normal fights, there should be a minor threat of characters being knocked down or out. A very minor threat of death.

The fight might have an ooooh moment where there's one good roll against the party that does a significant amount of damage, or the baddie pulls out an ability or effect that was more powerful than the party expected. Someone from the party says, oh, it's like that, is it? It's on now. The party proceeds to play more tactically and make short work of the opponents. Very little threat outside of a couple of moments. You can bring a little tension into those moments,

but mostly there's not a lot to make the party feel like they're really threatened. For tougher fights, again, 40 to 50% of the fights. Push the characters more. Emphasize the risk and increase the tension. Make the baddies use good tactics and plans. They take advantage of the terrain. They flank. They use a darkness to their advantage. They use fog or a limited visibility to their advantage. If they have senses that the party doesn't, they use those senses to their advantage. They use spells intelligently. The baddies may have

healers in their party. These are the fights where around the table someone says well hang on let's think about this for a minute once again i want to plug keith amon's the monsters know what they're doing both the blog www.themonstersknow.com and the book i get nothing for plugging these books by the way i just think it's a fantastic resource even if you don't dm fifth edition i received that book as a gift months ago, and when I first read it, it really made me rethink monster tactics. Highly recommended. The book won a 2020 gold any and the blog won a 2020 silver any. So highly, highly recommended. Go check that out. Now let's get to boss fights. These are the fights where you push characters to their limit. Threats should be emphasized and the players should feel all sorts

of stress. A lot more on this in a future episode, but bosses should rarely be alone. They should fight with every advantage. They should have support, healing, items to counter certain abilities. These are bosses that have been alpha monsters for a number of years. They're the strongest for a reason, so play them that way. Boss fights as a DM are the ones you need to sit down and plan. How will this monster fight? What will it do? What's the party going to do if they come in from this side of the map? How would this monster be prepared? Your job as a DM isn't to kill PCs. You shouldn't be trying to stack corpses of PCs up like cordwood or make a wall of dead

bards. Much love, by the way, to the makers of the movie The Gamers for that reference. As an aside, my brother-in-law years ago ran a campaign where characters were trapped in a demiplane that rebooted every morning. Think the movie Edge of Tomorrow meets Groundhog Day. He told us that we would die a lot in this adventure. The party embraced it. We had a blast. It was the ultimate fuck it. We're going to die anyway. Let's do these crazy things we've always wanted to do. The ghost screams at my face.

I'm going to stab it right in its incorporeal face. That adventure was a rare exception where dying was the norm. In the vast majority of adventures out there, there's no DM room of honor with the heads of PCs that you've killed. No other good DM is going to shake your hand over your most recent total party kill or TPK where you killed off all the PCs. The vast majority of players aren't playing to have their characters killed left, right, and sideways. They're playing to have fun and feel like big damn heroes.

They're overcoming a challenge, saving a town, rescuing a prince. It's your job to give characters appropriate sense of the encounter's danger level. When appropriate, like in boss fights, make them feel like their life is threatened, make them concerned that this could be it, even if the PCs really are not in all that much danger. So how do you do this as a DM? There's two strategies to embrace. One, make the danger feel inflated with the words that you use. Two, if necessary, and only if necessary,

deflate actual danger behind the screen. So how do you inflate the danger? How do you make it seem bigger? Making the danger seem bigger can start before combat even begins. It's the way you describe the monster you're fighting. Oh, you're fighting a minotaur. That's one thing. That doesn't really feel like the party's in danger. Oh, they may know vaguely what a minotaur is. Instead, you say, you see a human's strong legs joined to a broad, furred chest with

huge arms holding a wicked-looking greataxe. It snorts and lowered its horned bullhead menacingly. Roll for initiative. Starting a combat by saying, oh, you see a stone golem. Roll for initiative. Instead, unexpectedly, the statue steps down from its pedestal with thunderous echoing steps and brandishes an enormous stone battleaxe in your direction. Its eyes glow a menacing jaundiced color. Roll for initiative. The first, a minotaur or stone golem, is an abstract thing. The descriptions of them like that feel like potentially fierce opponents. One of my players once said, oh he's using more words to describe

the monster. Oh shit, this one must be tough. The words you use to describe the opponents matter. For tougher fights, be more descriptive of the difficulty of the combat. Another thing you can do is play up the damage done. In a standard fight, you may just say, oh, the hill giant hits you for 17 points of damage. If this is the first time they fought a hill giant, and they are really threatened by it, and it's a tough fight, instead you can say something like, the great sword cleaves through your armor and you feel it bite into your left shoulder past the carbon fiber pauldron. Something warm oozes into your under padding. You take 17 points of damage. The first one is this abstract

matter-of-fact thing. The second one makes them feel like it's an actual threat. Another way you can make the danger feel more present and more real is to remind the characters what's at stake, and there's a number of ways you can do this. Messages from people that they're helping. Flashbacks when appropriate, especially if they're struck close to zero hit points. Flashbacks and role-playing moments between combats. Give opportunities for the characters to voice their concerns to each other during downtimes. Maybe hints off in the distance that things are getting worse. The party is trying to avert a war and off in the distance they see smoke rising from the town that they were heading towards. Little things like that

drive home the fact that they are in real danger and the world keeps moving. You can also have the bad guys taunt the PCs in the tougher fights. I mean, these are tough creatures that they're fighting with or tough people that they're fighting with. The baddies have lived this long probably because they're smart, they're tough, or both. They've bested other opponents that look tougher than the PCs. They simply look at them and say, I've got chunks of things tougher than you in my stool. So they're confident they'll beat the PCs too. They've beaten tougher things. Why won't they be able to beat these four morons? Have them tell the PCs what they'll do when the PCs lose. I'm going to use your skull as a toilet. Okay. Your body will be

tossed into the castle as a warning to anyone else who would rise up against us. Okay, it's turning serious now, boys. So inflate the feeling of danger with the words that you use and the descriptions that you make. But Jeremy, I'm not good at coming up with these things on the fly. Okay, well then let's throw in one quick phrase you could learn. The damage you did doesn't appear to affect the creature much. You see blood, but that's about it. But that was 14 damage with a sword. Yep, doesn't appear to have slowed it down at all. Behind the screen, you subtract 14 hit points from the creature and move to the next part of the round.

On the other side of the screen, the player is already making plans for his next character. So you're making the danger feel bigger. Meanwhile, behind the screen, if necessary, be ready to deflate the actual danger. Suppose the fight should be fairly easy for the PCs, but it's getting away from them, and they've gotten unlucky with the dice rolls. The dice are just unfriendly that night. Adjust what you can to make it less lethal for them. Fudge the die rolls if you have to. See the DM cheating discussion. Lower spell saving throw DCs. Reduce the number and type of low-level baddies that they face. Take away monsters' healing support. But here's the important thing.

Only change things the players don't already know. If they know what the armor class of the monster is, that's set in stone. Can't really change that that easily. Or if you do need to tweak the AC down, just have the monster start making decisions that lower the AC. But what do you do when the players are completely outmatched and it could be a TPK? Give the players advantageous positioning. Make the bad guys not take advantage of positioning, exploit the player weaknesses, or so forth. The bad guys aren't seizing advantages caused by flaws in the PC tactics. Have the monsters not use their most powerful abilities. The baddies don't press their

advantage, they taunt instead. And if all else fails, you try all these things and still the PCs are beaten. Three out of the four are unconscious and the clerics left clutching our holy symbol and wondering if death is coming. If all else fails, give the characters the opportunity to surrender. Continue the campaign, just now they're prisoners of the Minotaur King. Now they're being ransomed by the bandits. Does every combat need to be descriptive and dangerous? No. If it's not a dangerous combat, most descriptions in my game go by the wayside.

Now that's 31 points of damage to the skeleton, and it is utterly destroyed. Kaleus, you're up. There's no threat there. There's nothing wrong with just R-O-L-L playing. But should important combats feel life-threatening? Absolutely. On the PC side of things, there's a thrill of facing down a foe who could kill your character. For many players, part of the fun of playing RPGs is that their character gets to be the big damn hero in ways that most of us will never be in real life. I mean, the chance that I will kill someone with a short sword today is relatively slim. Hi Curly, kill anyone today?

It ain't over yet. Most players love narration of their amazing feats. Some players love the opportunity to narrate their own amazing feats and give them the opportunity to do that. The dragon's claws rake over your armor and you feel its freezing breath raise the hairs on your neck. You hear the crackle of ice thawing on the wall behind you, a visible reminder of the beast's lethal breath weapon. The player says, I rolled a natural 19, that's a 34 to hit, 27 points of damage. You strike out with your greatsword, cleaving the head in twain as its last breath escapes in a gurgling gasp.

The townspeople gradually emerge from their homes, clutching their cloaks around them to protect from the cloying, icy wind. After long moments, a young halfling girl is the first to approach the four of you. She looks at you and then at the felled beast collapsed against the town mill. She picks up a loose tooth, half as tall as she is. Clutching her prize in one arm, she looks at Yenna with a beaming smile on her face and says, Can I keep this, ma'am? You saved us, that was amazing! And gives you a huge hug at your knee level. The street erupts with applause for you as you're mobbed by handshakes and hearty thanks. Someone shoves a

lamb shank in your hand and it's about then you realize your coin purse has gone missing. And the adventure continues. The party doesn't need to know that you reduced the damage of the breath weapon. A few of the dragon's misses were probably actually hits when you rolled the die. You specially designed the encounter to give the players plenty of spaces to hide from the dragon's area of effect spells, or the dragon didn't press every advantage she had. One or more of these may have made the combat deadly to one or more of the PCs. Now, by no means am I suggesting that you remove the capability to kill a character. Having a PC die is important for multiple reasons. It's an important story beat, it makes for great roleplaying, and it reminds the characters that there are consequences to actions. I'm just saying that killing PCs should not be your goal.

Don't be afraid to adjust things behind the screen to reduce or increase the threats the characters has needed. The threat of death should be there, but actual death should be rare. And most importantly, you should not reveal this secret to the players. Make them feel the danger, like death is imminent, even if behind the screen you're secretly taking care of them like little baby birds. Thank you so much for listening to Taking20 episode 36. Please rate us and subscribe to us if you haven't already. I would greatly appreciate it. And any feedback that you would want to provide, I would love to hear it.

Once again, I want to thank our sponsor, Car Batteries. If your battery doesn't turn over, it's no charge. Thank you again for listening to Taking 20, Episode 36, The Big GM Secret. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.