Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 42 Part 3 - Ask the DM with Johnn Four

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

In the finale of the 3-part interview, Johnn and Jeremy discuss garnering emotional responses from your players and a weird question about the Stone to Flesh spell.

without any ado whatsoever let's get into the finale of our dm discussion with john four of roleplayingtips.com uh let's see so i've got teresia who asks um how do you handle decisions you don't expect your players to make and keep it from feeling railroaded railroading to me is about you remove choices from the players so that there is no choice there's an article i read one time where no matter which route the characters took they met with an impenetrable forest until they took the route that led to the adventure site like they just said no trees but there's this i saw the map and it was it was labeled like impenetrable forest and then on the western side of the map it was um forest of

doom and whatnot and then you just see this one narrow path that leads straight to the ruins the gotcha i think that people who are worried about railroading is that you eventually have to make a decision about what happened and you should feel really unencumbered about doing that you're supposed to make these decisions so that the players understand what their next opportunity is. Okay, first, don't worry about the railroad aspect. If they make an action, then put consequences to that action in the game and then let them make actions against that. Repeat. Your thing is done in a way. In a sandbox campaign, you are done. There's no railroading there. And I think as a GM, you should be a guide so that, okay, I have an end in mind. Like this would be an epic ending if it worked out that way. So I'm going to lean things, guide the game towards that without forcing it to be that way.

Therefore, what I describe, what choices they have next time and what is happening in the game are all going to be about that. And that's not railroading. The players can still make choices within that framework. Yeah, you're shaking your head too. Like what's your take on railroading before we get back to the main question? I agree with you 100%. I mean, that example of impenetrable forest, impenetrable forest, and one path through is a definition of railroading. And I think honestly, it makes for a poor adventure because the players feel like, well, it doesn't matter what we do, we're going

to wind up at the same spot. Now, the thing you always have to do with players is you have to give them a choice and make sure their choice matters. Nice. Yes. Behind the scenes, you may actually be reshuffling the Lego blocks using the example that I talked about earlier, reusing this dungeon that you had planned to use for level four characters. And then, oh, well, they didn't go that direction. Stick that in your notebook because you never know when they're level six, all of a sudden they're going to say, we need to go search for the sword of perpetual gaseousness or whatever.

And then you can kind of just pull that one dungeon out and just change a few of the monsters inside of it and you can reuse that Lego block. You're not railroading them into using the dungeon that you've made. That's just a tool that's in your toolbox that you can pull out as needed. Agreed.

Yeah. I will admit, I love it when my players catch me completely crossways. The example that I've cited on my podcast before, again, on Galarian, last wall, they were basically getting ready for an invasion of orcs. And one of them said, hey, let's go house shopping. You're going house shopping?'re you you want to you're going house shopping and what did i immediately do open up my notebook stick a couple of sheets back in it's like okay let's let's let's go house shopping let's see what's there and i wound up making this

gnome real estate agent in a yellow coat it went completely bonkers and and they had a good time and that's that's the important thing yeah. I didn't want to railroad them into, hey, yeah, you need to go talk to this silver dragon who is going to give you this piece of information. Those are just Lego pieces that I just put to the side and I knew I would pull them out eventually. It was just a matter of, is it the old wise woman Griselda

that nudges them along that route? Or is it King Olfen mentions this to them in a conversation about the silver dragon Sylvara off in the distance? My advice is like you, don't worry about the railroading aspect. Just prepare the Lego blocks, the social encounters, the combats, whatever, and then pull them out as needed. Yeah, excellent. As far as handling decisions that players make that are unexpected, to me, it's about reacting in a way that feels real in the world. There's two kinds of unexpected moments that players can have.

One, let's go house shopping. Okay, completely unexpected, but all right, let's do this. And two, I stab the mayor in the face. This is not where this adventure was going, but okay, there's nine guards in the room. Let's roll initiative. Let's make this happen. Just make the reactions and make the consequences of the room. Let's roll initiative. Let's make this happen. Just make the reactions and make the consequences of the choice

the players make feel real. I repeatedly say it's not a video game. You can't stab the mayor in the face, leave the town, and the town unloads from memory so that when you come back, everything is regenerated the way it was. New face, everything.

If they kill the mayor and make a break for it, they're going to be wanted at minimum in this town, if not the nation as a whole. To me, it's about making the unexpected choices feel real. And there's nothing wrong with a DM, especially a new DM, saying, this is what happens. And at that point, while the players are discussing what they want to do, taking a few minutes, writing down some quick notes,

if that happened, then this happened, and this other thing happened, and this other thing would happen. And now you've got kind of a framework, a skeleton on which that you can connect the rest of the adventure. Agreed. In my murder hobo campaign, the rogue stabbed the mayor in the back. The mayor had some money, 500 gold pieces in a chest that the rogue wanted. So yeah, the mayor came back as a ghost and now haunts the rogue. He takes all the rogues arrows out of his quiver in the middle of a battle. He tips things over. He creates noises so that foes are no longer caught by surprise. Yeah.

You can have fun with that. So I agree. Taking a break is fantastic. And that would be my first tip. So just call a quick break and get your thoughts together. However, you might be a person like me who oddly can think on the spot sometimes, though you've not seen evidence of that today, but it's kind of like a blank page

syndrome or something when I'm in the middle of a session. So if I take a break, I actually cannot collect my thought. I cannot, like, it's got to be like a 15 or a half a minute break and I have to get out of the room or something if I'm able to do that. So if you're like me, where it's a break doesn't help, then here's my two hacks. The first is I have pocket encounters. So I have at least a couple of encounters without any dependencies that I can just drop in to buy some time. And so usually by time to the end of the session or, or change things like sometimes players can be distracted and I can lead them away from wanting to buy a house for at least a few minutes. So have some of these canned encounters that in your back pocket that you can just drop in while you're kind of reacting. And then the other one is I create a

list based on the campaign of obstacles. So anytime the players do something expected, all you need to do is put an obstacle in their path. And that's ultimately how you plot an adventure in a campaign. Because if there's no obstacles, there's no challenge, there's no game, there's no fun. So everything is about putting obstacles in the player's path. I call it my itinerant encounter table. I take things from my campaign that could manifest in most situations. And then that becomes a new obstacle in the character's path for example my villain has resources anytime the characters do something unexpected i just have the villain

make a move the villain decides to start a fire to kidnap to extort to rob a bank to move the orc army in the way whatever the villain is doing and so i just have a list of things that the villain's doing i also have a list of obstacles of things like traps hazards and opposing forces like other factions and so it's supposed to be like a wandering monster table but to me a wandering monster table is about a static table you create at the beginning of an adventure based on like wilderness areas and whatnot to me this itinerant table means every session you update this table with new things that could make the character's lives difficult. Most of these you're able to put in just about any situation because they're generally not in an encounter. I'm not dropping an encounter.

I don't have a table of encounters. I just have a table of friction against the players. And it's like story cubes or something. You can skin them any way that you want to create a story on the spot. That would be my two hacks. And then the break thing, if you can take breaks and collect your thoughts and come up with some great ideas. And the events, the random encounters, for lack of a better term, the itinerant event table, never when you drop one of those in, pre-select how the party has to respond to it. Perfect. yeah. It's an obstacle in front of them. They can go over, they can go under, they can go around. You could drop a snowstorm on them. They're heading north, way into the far frozen wasteland,

and snowstorms there aren't minor inconveniences they can kill. Yeah, perfect. A lot of times they'll start asking probing questions. Is there a convenient house right here? No. What would you guys want to do? You guys solve the problem. That's the only thing I would add on. Give them the opportunity to have multiple possible solutions to this. Don't force a fight. Now, they're going to catch you by

surprise. I had an encounter where I was completely planning on this to be a negotiation. I had an overwhelming enemy force that had them surrounded and they were backed up to a waterfall. Rather than talk to the big bad evil guy, and I had this whole reveal planned about this guy actually winds up being one of the leaders in the town and he's working against the yada, yada, yada. Nope. Instead, the cleric took a 200-foot leap off the waterfall to avoid even talking to this group. Immediately, my brain takes this nice Lego piece future of the campaign and shatters it into a million pieces and says, okay. Instead of them finding out that information that way, one of the bandits attempted to jump in after them foolishly and wound up dying from the event. And he has information on him so that at least the Lego pieces can be recycled and used later on. Yeah, exactly.

Like you just GM the downstream effects of the waterfall. That's it. That's exactly it. They found footprints. They wind up following the footprints. They get the same information that they needed. You mentioned something there and I just wanted to bring up,

like I have this four point, I call it a QA or quality assurance because I'm kind of a software nerd. I have a four point like thinking checklist that I run through that might be of interest. And this has been on my mind a lot lately as I go through the adventure building course here's my hypothesis 80 to 90 percent of player decisions and player actions are predictable because I know they're going to choose one of four buckets or one of four categories of options and I don't need to know exactly what they're doing. I just need to categorize what they're doing,

and then I've already thought about that in advance, and so I already have an answer. For example, one of those things is avoid. If I have an encounter, and I don't do this during the game because I'm not smart enough and fast enough to think like this on my feet, but before the game for stuff I'm prepping,

if I have an encounter, I'll ask, okay, what will happen if the characters avoid the encounter? And I don't need to worry about if they avoid it because they fly away, they dig a hole and they jump off a waterfall. I just need to understand the logic of the adventure and how it will handle them avoiding this. Is my plot ruined because I accidentally put all of my gold pieces into one encounter that had to be unavoidable?

So that's the approach that I take. The other three categories are fight, trick, and parley, or talk. In the past, I've been caught by players making friends with supposed combat encounters, villains, and whatnot. I know that not every character or player action can be put into one of those four things, but as soon as I started thinking about my encounters and just running through after I create it, what will happen if they avoid, what will happen if they fight, what will happen if they trick and parley, then I started making my encounters more robust. My hypothesis is I'm capturing like 80% of their actions, which I still get caught off guard,

but it means the amount of times that happens is greatly reduced. That's a good point. That's a very good point. I actually got a group of similar questions that I want to kind of sum up. And it basically has to do with emotional response. Okay. How do you build an antagonist that perpetuates an emotional response out of the party?

Or how do you create emotional interest from the players? It's complex and it's simple. It's simple in that any story that the reader or watcher or player likes is going to create an emotional interest. And then you just need to follow a typical story structure, like the villain is going to to the characters or vice versa. The players will bond with that villain as an antagonist role. It's just hard-coded in our brain. Our brains are built to solve problems and we find problems everywhere, even sometimes where they don't exist. And so we'll vilify things and that becomes an archetype for our stories because that's how we're just biologically run. So a good story will instantly create emotional interest. And then personalizing things. If I insult a character, then usually I engage that player.

If I know what the players find fun, then I can pluck those strings. If I know what kind of treasure the players want, the characters need, and other things like rewards and whatnot, all of these are levers. The complexity comes from, I think you need a well-developed setting. And by well-developed, I mean that the characters have an understanding of choices that they can make and what's happening in the setting. If I just put them in the middle of a village, like I do pure bottom-up world building, and I put them in a village and say, okay, the village is run by a mayor and people are falling ill. He wants you to help out.

The players have no mental hook. Understand the world and to put themselves in the world, orient themselves and decide, put their imaginations to work and decide, okay, here's how we're going to address the problem or here's how we're going to interact and whatnot. So you need a good setting. And then your game is going to provide lots of hooks from a system perspective. Like you can attack the characters and have combats. You can steal magic items and things like that. And then the story, we just talked about the story structure. So the complexity I think comes from having all three of those facets active in the game, but it's simple because an adventure,

you'll automatically inherit a story. If you have a published world or a homebrew world, you automatically bring about the setting details. And then you've got the game system, an adventure, you'll automatically inherit a story. If you have a published world or a homebrew world, you'll automatically bring about the setting details. And then you've got the game system, which you'll know what you can do there, whether it's D&D or gumshoe or something else, there's going to be levers right away. And doing that is going to create an engagement with characters. So that's off the top of my head. How about you? First of all, I love the answer. The thing I would tie in as far as getting buy-in is emotional connections. Trying to find those things that you mentioned, like the treasure the players want. I would throw in the NPCs that the party likes, the things that they've connected with because of their backstory or because who they've interacted with. If I have this one

tavern worker who one of my party members has kind of taken a shine to and the big bad evil guy attacks this village and they find her bleeding out and dying or even you know already long dead that immediately kind of creates a it's it's one of those rare strings that you can pluck every now and then you can't go to that well too often if you use it in the exact right moment tying that into something that the characters enjoy. Same thing with tying into characters' backstories. In the previous example of an adventure that was kind of tied around the nation of Galt, I had one character who was from a new noble house,

kind of a nouveau riche, the recent revolution. They backed the right side. And so they are now a noble house very, very unexpectedly. And they were just blacksmiths six months ago. They sent him off to the big city to get educated. And he was adventuring there. Well, one of the things I was able to do was to have agents from that new nation of Galt reach out to him because they want him to provide intelligence about this that's going on and that's going on. And one, it makes the world feel real because that nation would certainly resort to using spies.

Number two, they would certainly use the seventh child of a newly named nobleman because if he winds up getting caught and executed, it's no skin off the government's nose at all. And three, all of a sudden that player started feeling pressure. You don't put them diametrically opposed to the party, but they have to accomplish what the party wants to get done. But they also have this other thing that they're trying to get done, this other piece of information they're trying to collect, automatically putting a little bit of additional pressure on that one particular party member.

He's very passionate about getting this one thing out of the museum. And all of a sudden the rest of the party now, pardon the term, their hackles went up and said, why is it so important to you to get this one scroll? And it immediately became this almost intra-party debate and argument about, I can't tell you why, I just need it. Don't question me, I just need it. A mystery. Created a little bit of tension in the group, but it also tension between the party and the rest of the world, even the things that they don't immediately see one foot in front of their face. So anything that the players interact with

is an opportunity for attachment. And then by proxy, you can fiddle with those things. So that's an excellent approach. This is the weirdest question I got asked. And being a weird person, it immediately jumped and caught my eye. Is the meat produced by the stone to flesh spell edible? Well, what I would do is ask the character to eat some, and then I would pick up a dice and I would let the dice make a decision if it was done in advance i could make that an entire plot hook that's a really cool idea what if it was temporary everybody's got rocks in their bellies in a while terrible how do we help us characters help us there's like a a design approach where i i don't know what you call it but basically old school has minimal rules

where when that question comes up, everybody expects the group or the game master, whatever your style is to come up with an answer. And then you move on. And the game is to come up with the best answer, most interesting answer, or an answer that opens up more gameplay and infinite game. And then another approach,

which I think is more like modern game design sometimes is we have to have a rule for that. And you have large rule books. You have 500-page player handbooks and things. So I think part of that is based on your style and what kind of a game that you're playing. But I think that's my favorite place to live as a game master is in these undefined questions where we could do what we want with. Make it funny it funny make it plot make it a character problem yeah really cool what i would like to do is uh stop it there because i've got a few more but the the questions uh i think those are the questions i really wanted to make sure i

got your uh got your take on sure but uh john i greatly appreciate this this has been this has been pure pleasure for me i really appreciate sitting around a talking shop. I love talking gaming. Exactly. What's the name of your website, John? Roleplayingtips.com. I have a free Game Master newsletter twice a month, and it has tips like the ones I rambled about and more in your inbox.

Plus that, and you also, like you mentioned, you've published some books. You've got the five-room dungeon book out there that you can go, and it has a whole bunch of five-room dungeon examples. Yeah. There's 88 five-room dungeons made by the community. And then there's a couple hundred pages of tips and articles about five-room dungeon building, five-room campaigns to extending the idea and whatnot. And that's available free PDF on my website as well. They just need to use the menu, find five-room dungeons, and they can grab that if they want. I think there's a print version on drive-thru at pretty close to cost. Excellent. John, thank you again. This has been fantastic. And parting comments, parting shots or anything? Nothing smart or wise, unfortunately. Me neither. Have more fun at every game. There you go. John,

I'll tell you what, I would love to do this again. Just let me know if you get some more reader questions. I would love to sit down and do this anytime again you'd like to. Sure. Thanks, Jeremy. All right. Thank you, John. Have a good one. I hope you got as much out of the interview episodes as I did making them. John, thank you again for your gracious giving of your time. As always, I'm Jeremy Shelley, and this has been Taking 20, Episode 42, Interview with John 4. I hope that your next game is your best game.

Thank you.