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Building and Balancing Encounters
24 Plays3 months ago
In our last episode for 2024, we explore what makes a good encounter. Great encounters advance the story and characters, creating memorable moments with real stakes. Learn how to design encounters that resonate long after the game ends, and discover how to break down your adventure into impactful, story-driving scenes. Whether it’s combat, social interaction, or skill challenges, we discuss how to balance encounters, address pacing issues, and ensure every player stays engaged.
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Transcript
Negotiating Peace and Pop Culture Insights
00:00:00
Speaker
Look, I don't want to hurt you, ladies. So, how about we all just put our, um, swords down? But, you don't have a sword. Can I? Of course, why not. Keiko-chan, Katana! Yeah, but now she doesn't have a- You're just set on doing this, huh? Yes, we are.
00:00:44
Speaker
All right, Mark Lehman, I'm here to tell you one of the great gaps in my pop culture resume is Archer. And I think that was an Archer bit, wasn't it?
00:00:57
Speaker
It certainly was and you really need to fill that gap. that so yeah It doesn't sound right. it's a great It's a great show and if you love spy shows, you know James Bond, it's definitely right up your alley. I'm still working my way through and this sounds bad too. I'm still working my way through Venture Brothers.
00:01:20
Speaker
That is a great show, but it' it some of those seasons of Adventure Brothers is is a bit of a hard pill to swallow. okay like They're a bit rough. hey ah Ben, how are you doing? How are things in your
Holiday Traditions and Gaming Resolutions
00:01:32
Speaker
world? you know We're in the middle of the holidays now and there's so much great stuff going on. Going to see family catch up with people they haven't played games with for a while and play games with them.
00:01:44
Speaker
That's one of the things we do at my house is I go find all my old gaming buddies from back home and then we find a game to play together. and it's It's been fun. i mean you know You like that kind of abuse in your life, don't you? yeah I play games with some of your old buddies. i think That's true, but you know it's one of those things where I think we've all kind of grown and mellowed with age and we're starting to realize that like you don't treat the one shot over the holidays as your campaign game. You just kind of go along and have fun.
00:02:09
Speaker
That all depends on how much eggnog you drank. Well, right. I think the fights happen after the third, you know, Brandy, I guess. Who knows? Hey, so what, Ben, what are some of your New Year's resolutions come up here? It pertains to games. When is it pertains to games? So I think I want to try some games I haven't tried before. I may have mentioned before, I've got this game called Broken Compass. I'm really excited about giving a shot. Yeah, that looks good.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's got all kinds of kind of pulpy goodness and high adventure kinds of stuff to it. pope Think about pulp not so much as a ah setting in time like an Indiana Jones 1930s era, although that is, yeah I think, prime pulp. But think of it also as a style of storytelling, and you can find that going back in time to you know the Penny Dreadfuls, the Victorian stuff. Or Sin City, which is not even that old. Yeah. That's about as pulpy as you get, right?
00:03:02
Speaker
Yeah, that is some, that is some legit pulp there. How about you, Mark? What are some new year's resolutions? What are some games you want to play or run this year? Um, one of the things I want to do in 2025, I have a bunch of coworkers, Ben, who who've never played role playing games and they've been asking me to run.
00:03:22
Speaker
Dungeons and Dragons game for them and I've been putting it off and putting it off, but I I think I want to do it I think it'd be a lot of fun just to to run a game with some of the um folks at the office So, you know, I'm with you. I think I'm I'm gonna resolve mark this year I'm gonna start running a game or two for brand new players. I've never played before That's awesome. That's, you know, that's the Lord's work right there, buddy. Hey today, what are we talking about today? What are we doing today?
Engaging RPG Encounters: Key Elements
00:03:48
Speaker
We are talking about how to build and balance your encounters. How do we make those encounters great?
00:03:54
Speaker
Now we're not talking about building and balancing a campaign. We're talking about specifically an encounter, a scene as you will. Right. So yeah, I'm trying to think about what makes a good encounter. And when we talk about good encounters, we we kind of know them from cinema, but like at the table, what are we talking about?
00:04:15
Speaker
I mean for me when I look at a good encounter both in design and execution it's gonna progress that story the the overall story and sauce gonna move those characters into that the next part of their path. Mark do you think of encounters being basically seen in a movie. Yeah quite a bit or a series of scenes then that kind of has a central theme to it.
00:04:38
Speaker
Another thing I would say, Ben, is a good encounter has stakes involved. like You kind of know what what the that what failure is going to mean, right? Right. So when we're getting into this scene, we're getting into this encounter, something some kind of clash is being brought to a head. There's some kind of fateful decision to be made, some kind of fateful conversation to be had. Whatever comes out of that, something important is going to change.
00:05:04
Speaker
Yeah, and when you talk about the stakes that are involved, they could actually be part of that encounter in the literal sense. You think about the character who's maybe hanging from a noose and you gotta shoot the rope. Like, the stakes are that person's going to choke. Right. you know So, um, if you get it right, what happens? I mean, obviously that the person saved, but then you have to deal with, you know, escaping or, or whatever that scene, whatever that scene entails, but that's just another element to that action scene are the stakes. So what are the stakes for this encounter and how do the players know about the stakes? Because if they don't, they should, because knowing what the stakes are, elevates that entire encounter to the next level.
00:05:48
Speaker
always start with why. Make sure everybody knows why they're there, what they're doing, what the reason is for paying attention to this thing or doing this thing right now. Yeah, and knowing what those stakes are allows you to push that encounter up to the next level. And that's where players will remember those scenes for years to come. you know These encounters, you want them to be memorable. they They're going to be these visual moments of where the story is intersecting with the action. And it's just all these things are happening that are just going to cement themselves into the player's minds as remember when,
00:06:24
Speaker
OK, I'm going to actually put this to the test for a moment, Mark. This is not in our notes, but I think this is a really good example of your principle here. Off the top of your head, what's the first encounter you can remember that you that that wasn't like in your last game? What's a really memorable encounter that Ben, you and I were in the game together, actually, and Steve was running it, curse of Strahd. We got into the scene where, was it the bones of St. Markova or something like that? Yeah, there's some some holy relics. Yeah, they they this okay for the people listening out there, somebody had stolen these sacred bones that were used to kind of protect this church from the evils in the dark of Strahd.
00:07:07
Speaker
and they They took him to this warehouse we can track them down to this house where this person was. And we knew there was going to be this long kind of like big battle scene that we were all getting prepared to do. There's gonna be a fight. Yeah. And at one point we're like, gosh, you know what, we haven't, we have an actual thespian in our group. One of the characters was playing an actor. And we're like, why don't you just go in there and ask for them. why Why don't you go in there and bluff your way through. Let's see if we can change this encounter up.
00:07:38
Speaker
Yeah, and the character walked in, said that Strahd sent me, I'm here to get the ah the bones, thank you for doing your job. And they put up a little bit of ah a fight, but then you know that's where the the dice rolls came in. A social fight, let's be clear. They were like, are you sure? And then the dice said, yeah, he's sure.
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah, so let's let's backtrack this a little bit. The stakes involved where these bones need to be returned to the rightful place. The protection of a whole town. Protection of the whole town. And then the stakes were also even raised a little bit more because individually that one player was going in alone. Oh yeah. which Which is a terrifying prospect in any game. It's a high-risk gamble.
00:08:20
Speaker
Yeah, it was a high risk gamble. Everybody in the group did what they could to support them, but the reality was that player had to make those dice rolls. Right. We were all sitting outside and that person was inside. So to me, that was like one of those encounters that we when we pulled it off. It took all of maybe 10 minutes, whereas the encounter would have taken three hours. Yeah, that was probably its own whole dungeon, I think.
00:08:46
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess the stakes also might have been three hours of rolling dice in a battle, which may or may not have been fun, but let's face it, we definitely got more mileage out of the story of that one player who went in and just asked for them and got them. Well, until your last point, like here we are talking about it now, it was super memorable and it was ah a lot of fun.
00:09:07
Speaker
OK, so yeah let's talk about how we build these things, how we build encounters. And the first thing I want to do is help us get a little bit of a ah size footprint here. You know, we talked about encounters as scenes. So the first thing I would say is an encounter isn't the same as like a game session. It can be larger than a game session. We've all had encounters where they were a couple of game sessions long or more. I wouldn't stretch it out past two or maybe at top three, just depending, because you know that can start to you know You can start to run into pacing problems. Maybe people get bored or kind of restless. Encounters, though, of course, can be very short. And players, funny enough to that example, Mark, they can short circuit your encounter designs. They can find ways to take shortcuts to the end of them really quickly. So so don't think of encounters necessarily as as whole sessions. They can be multiple encounters to a session or multiple sessions to encounter. They just don't map on. Just you know keep that in mind.
00:10:02
Speaker
They're scenes. You know you want them to to play out like a scene. And how they play out, whether that's how the gym wants or how the players want, ideally the scene will unfold in the manner that's the best for the story.
00:10:14
Speaker
That's right. This is, in a sense, you guys the kind of the atomic unit of the adventure design situation we were talking about. right So you have your campaign at the top level. You have your adventures, which are longer segments of your campaign, but they're sort of subparts. And then these adventures are all composed of encounters. And then the encounters are essentially your stepping stones to the adventure's big moments and milestones.
00:10:39
Speaker
and how you organize them in sessions that can vary. But the point is, start thinking about that sequence of encounters. Start thinking about what the milestones are that you need in your campaign. Where do you start when you're thinking about an encounter? When I'm thinking about an encounter, I'm thinking about it as a part of a sequence that's going to achieve something that gets me to the end of whatever the adventure is. Let's just take an example of a adventure where we need to go and We used this example before, like the Forge of Fury, we were going to like liberate Kunderkar, right? Now let's imagine that
00:11:15
Speaker
There's a lot of things we as GMs may want to do to set up the players to do that. What do we know about Kunderkar? How do we learn about Kunderkar? Do we need any special approaches, weapons, disguises? How do we want to do that? The first thing we did when we were playing, we've talked about this before, is we had a kind of a party of dwarves going around the countryside trying to get support so that that somebody could go back in and help them liberate their home.
00:11:40
Speaker
And if you remember from past episodes right under cars this dwarven home that they've been dispossessed. By a ah band of works that's there and so then these doors are kind of homeless and they're running around trying to retake their home but they don't have any money so they're raising support and so that was how the players are gonna learn about that so what kind of encounters that well.
00:12:00
Speaker
It could be a few different kinds of encounters. And you have choices as GM. You could make that a combat encounter. Maybe you meet these dwarves on the road and they're under attack. Maybe they're actually fleeing from the band of orcs that took their home. Maybe it's that soon. Or the way we did it was it was kind of a social encounter. They go to the inn and then there's these dwarves who are there like playing instruments. They're kind of the evening's entertainment. But then they kind of wrap up with a little bit of a kind of a telethon style, you know, like, hey, everybody, we're struggling here.
00:12:28
Speaker
But one thing you're thinking about, even and like in an encounter, let's say the encounter is the dwarves. What you're thinking about essentially is what's what's the end game of this encounter? like right what is it that How do I want to have that ending of this encounter progress the next step of the game? Right. So for the dwarves in that section of that adventure, the whole point is just information. We need the players to know that that's there. We need the players to get hooked in when we talked about how we hooked them into the adventure.
00:12:54
Speaker
last time because one of the player characters in that case was also a dwarf who had clan relations to these dispossessed dwarves. However you're going to do it, right it's it's a way of setting the hooks, understanding the character's motivations for being in that scene, for being in that encounter. What they need to achieve to get out of it, it could be information, or later on it's, I need to actually like conquer and take the top level of this place, where the gates are. right That was a later series of encounters.
00:13:22
Speaker
So those who are listening at home, the idea is when you're building these encounters, know kind of how you want to leave them, how you want them to end and where they're going to end is going to lead to the next stage of the game.
00:13:36
Speaker
right And that will tell you what you need to know about how to work backwards. So when you know how they're supposed to end, you've got lots of ways you can get there. Your players will find lots of ways to get there yeah and just have a very clear sense of what's all happening in that encounter. And like I said, depending on your players, you could do variations. ah You can get the same information out of a combat encounter yeah or a social encounter. We also have skill encounters, other kinds of things. We'll talk about that in a little bit. so Just going back to that example we gave of ah Steve's Curse of Strahd game where, you know, Steve as a GM, his end goal for the encounter was to get the bones back. Right. And we, of course, came up with some wild and crazy way to get those bones back. And he was gracious enough that he just was like, you know, I didn't expect this, but you know what? I'm going to go with it because the end result is the same, essentially.
00:14:31
Speaker
That's right. And that's a really good note here for all of you GMs out there. If your players come up with something that kind of sidesteps, this is a kind of a classic moment to be gracious as our GM Steve was and to roll with it like fine. So they got it. Now what happens? Let's move on. You know, and if that means that they never. We talked about this before in talking about adventure design. That means that they never take that one road that takes them down into that dungeon that you were expecting them to go into. Well, hang on to it. That dungeon will be useful later. Don't sweat it.
00:15:01
Speaker
Yeah. So one of the things I would do is I'd start working backwards, make a simple list of moments that your overall adventure needs, and then start building encounters around those moments. And then think about, what do I need to do to get from moment to moment to moment to moment? What are the necessary things that need to happen? Do people need information? Do they need an item? Do they need to meet an NPC? Do they need to rescue somebody? Whatever it might be, start thinking about all the different moments, the milestones that you need to start with as you're encounter endpoints. And then you can think of lots of things to do from there. And Ben, when you say think about these things, I like to use the term visualization because I i actually spend time visualizing these types of things. You really sit in your head. Yeah, like I want to i want to be thinking about it. i don't I want to be thoughtfully thinking about it. I don't want to just you know be you know on the periphery. I visualize these encounters. I like to let imagine where
00:15:58
Speaker
players might go. And so when you talk about these items, this information, I think about the different ways they can get that information of items so that when players do kind of go in different directions, I'm able to go with them because I know number one, like you mentioned, I know the end goal. So I know how maybe I could navigate to get back to what is the end goal. And then the players can take whatever route they want to get there. And I'm OK with that. I can go along that journey with them.
00:16:28
Speaker
yeah I mean, you visualize a lot of stuff. You visualize not just kind of all the possible ways the encounter could go, but you're also thinking about the environment that they're in. and You're thinking about interesting stuff. Mark, say a bit more about when you're visualizing, like I think because you've got such a visual imagination, you're probably really seeing movie scenes in your head. Are you are you imagining the flora and the fauna? Are you imagining the architecture? you Can you feel the written dirt on your fingernails, that kind of thing. ah Some of it, but a lot of it is because I allow my imagination to visualize some of these scenes, particularly as relating to longer term visualization of the story. I'm able to maybe grab things from the future.
00:17:10
Speaker
or grab things from the past and plant those in those moments. Because my mind is thinking about these storylines, both close, zoomed in, and afar. And I can't do that if I haven't been thinking about it prior. So this will allow me to maybe pull something a little nugget from the future and throw it into a spot because somebody rolled a 20 on an insight check or a communion with their deity or something like that. I'm able to kind of grab something that may be further down the road and that's you know how visualization can really enhance your scenes. Ben, we we talk about encounters.
Diverse RPG Encounters and Combat Balance
00:17:51
Speaker
What kind of forms can encounters take? Because we're not just talking about action scenes. right
00:17:56
Speaker
This kind of gets to your point about visualization, right? And all the different ways in which you can achieve these milestones. um Encounters can be combat encounters, most obviously. and We're used to thinking about those in every pretty much every RPG I've ever played. Combat is like its own chapter of stuff, and everybody's got a how you hit and how you do damage and how you heal and all that kind of stuff. But there's also social encounters. So social encounters, these are some of the ones that we've talked about, for example, when we were thinking about our villains episodes, right? And you have to have that awkward dinner with your villain that you can't go directly at. Or they could be social encounters with you the new members of your guild and you need to become a strong leader or you need to influence policy with the king or with the local planetary governor or take your pick, right? Social encounters are a way of exercising soft power as the diplomacy section likes to say, right? it's
00:18:48
Speaker
It's where you learn things. It's where your characters become influential. And then the third category, I think, and I can't think of more than these three. So I'm really curious if you listeners have other categories here, but I would say skill challenges are the third case. And so yeah how are your characters solving a problem that's not being sort of an active opposition from characters. It's actually that they're having to navigate a difficult environment or solve a puzzle or something like that.
00:19:15
Speaker
Yeah, ah puzzle solving is is a classic example in games. Maybe it's a riddle or just something a little bit more national treasure-esque. Yeah, I think there's something really fun about those kinds of encounters too. Some games tend to be a lot more skill heavy and i'm I'm looking at you, Call of Cthulhu and Traveler. You know, there's a lot that you can do there and and a lot of the action of the game takes place in the way that you use skills to bring out information.
00:19:42
Speaker
Yeah, and those skill checks do progress and tell a story on their own. Sometimes, particularly, ah you you talk about Traveler. Traveler has an interesting thing. ah What do they call that? Chained skill? Yeah, a task chain. Task chain, okay. So, you know, players' success leads to another player's bonuses to their role. And the simple act of that in a sense can kind of tell a story and and you as GM have kind of like weave those together into like, oh, here's how it worked. Yeah. And that's storytelling. Well, and I also like about that game that if one player's task fails, you still keep going on the task chain. But that failure is something that just imposes a negative modifier on the next person. Yeah. So what's fun is failure in a skill challenge like that doesn't have to be the end of the story. It can be
00:20:33
Speaker
just something that interestingly creates complications and so on. So encounters do take many forms. You'll want to visualize the kind of encounters that might work to create those milestones you need. And as we say, these are scenes. So think about what kinds of things are going to go into those scenes. Think about the kinds of things that writers put into scenes, characters, locations, specific kinds of interesting stuff there. Then let's talk about, you know, you had mentioned these social combat and skill challenges, how do you balance some of these encounters? Is is balancing an encounter for like, let's say a social encounter, is that even even a thing?
00:21:09
Speaker
You know, that's really interesting because it's not like how many hit points do I have on one side or another? How much damage does this or that weapon do? What's interesting about balancing a social encounter is you've got to balance the power in the room or the level of influence people have or who they've got or how much information people have, right? So you got to think of it a little bit more in soap opera terms, right? Who has the secrets? Who has the influence? And I think in those cases, you know, that makes it a lot more interesting. It does take a little bit of you know, thinking about things in non...
00:21:42
Speaker
You know, violence, physical kinds of ways, you know, you got to think about it in terms of of whose reputation is at stake. You talk about stakes again, right? Like, what are the stakes in a social encounter? If this or that secret gets out, whose reputation is ruined? Or what exactly is the import of that? Will the whole room galvanize around the the big thing? Some of our favorite encounters, Mark, have been social encounters because they've been the moments where our heroes step forward. They raise the clarion cry that we now must go, friends, and do the thing. and If you've set that up well, then the payoff can be really amazing. Matter of fact, we just did that in our recent game with Traveler where we we had the human beings meet these Vitruvians and befriend them as kind of the first alien race they'd ever connected to. Yeah, it was fully a social encounter.
00:22:28
Speaker
You know, I ah do enjoy a social encounter, Ben, but I also do love a combat encounter. I do love the thrill of battle and the agony of defeat. So balancing a combat encounter can be quite difficult, particularly if you're you're new and you're learning things. So how do you know when your your combat encounters aren't very well balanced? Well, it's pretty easy to see when things aren't working too well. The players are bored. If they're kind of just going through and wiping through things, you realize Maybe you need to amp up those encounters. And if, on the opposite side, is if you're you know your player characters, your characters are just getting wiped out, they're getting beat up so bad, there maybe your encounter was a little too too harsh.
00:23:14
Speaker
So these things are easy to spot when they start to happen and and just be thoughtful about how you can get out of those situations before they get out of control. If they're underwhelmed, send in wave number two. Well, well them once again. That's right. If they're, if they're feeling a little bit over whelmed where they're getting beat up so bad. If they're getting really demoralized, I've seen that I've done that.
00:23:40
Speaker
There's done that, but there's also things you could do to get them out of there. Maybe there's an escape plan, or maybe they've taken out just enough of them that they begin to flee. Because keep in mind, like we look at you know our characters, these the player characters are kind of these heroes, and if they're taking out more than half of the group of villains, they might just be like, I'm out of here, this ain't worth it.
00:24:03
Speaker
Yeah, your average henchman has no idea what the players still have left in reserve. And if the players are feeling, gosh, i'm I'm running on empty here, that does not mean that your average henchman or villain team knows that your players are at their limits. They might be looking at this, yeah this wall of violence that these characters are bringing to them and just going, I am not ready for that. Be really thoughtful about in your game system that you're running, whatever it is, think about like,
00:24:32
Speaker
things like their hit points, their attacks, their defenses. what What would you call this, Ben? I just think this is about doing the math. One of the things, one of my kind of formative experiences with encounter design was I had a player, this is a little bit more of a crunchy system. It was not D and&D, but it was a fantasy game. And I had not really kind of reckoned with how all the parts and pieces in this game worked. And so I brought these couple players in. This one player has a great big two-handed sword and he's ready to use it. I put him on the field and they kind of ran into an Ettin. And this Ettin is like a two-headed giant, right? And the Ettin
00:25:11
Speaker
in one shot basically like ended that player. I was like, Oh, hold on. Were you playing Pathfinder? No, I was not playing Pathfinder. I was actually playing a fantasy hero. Okay. And what was the the teachable moment for me in that was to do the math. If I'd spent some time actually looking about like, what was the difference between the attacks and defenses? What was the difference between the likelihoods each one of these people would hit that would have told me like, Oh, that player's margin of success is probably very low.
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah. You're like basically looking at it thinking, okay, so my carrot, my villain, my creature can do X amount of damage average on a hit. How many hits could this person take before they're dropped? Right. Exactly. And one of the things is you don't need to be a genius, right? But you start figuring out what averages look like. I think there's like even a website called any dice, which can help you figure out like if I'm rolling 10 D six, what's an average role for that? You know, and you're going to learn it's, I don't know, like 33 points or something like that.
00:26:10
Speaker
um I'd have to go look again. But the point is, is that teaches you not to be um surprised when it's a lot of damage or ah surprised when it's less damage than you thought. And then when you combine that with like hit percentages, you know, a lot of games will start with a very natural kind of look. If I'm unskilled and I'm going against somebody that's relatively equal to me, then I've got a 50-50 chance of hitting that person. And if you know that and you know kind of like how many hits you can take before you drop, you're going to start having a sense of Like what are the stakes in this combat? um The only other thing I'll say about doing the math is that keep in mind the difference between linear systems, like say a D20 in a D and&D system, it's not multiple dice you're rolling to determine if something happens, it's just one. So every one of those D20 results is equally probable. But if you're in like a, say a 3D6 system, right? The value is between three and 18, you're on a bell curve. And that means that
00:27:08
Speaker
something like a 10 or 11 is the most likely result you're gonna have in that. That helps you understand things like modifiers and just knowing that you're not gonna roll an 18 or a three as often as you roll a one or a 20. And can we save some of this math goodness for, I wanna do an episode on averages and what we call, what we call luck. Yeah, we need a math genius to come up with that. We're gonna get a math genius to come up. I may know a math genius, we'll see.
00:27:37
Speaker
I love it. So ah one last thing we're going we want to talk about, we want to talk about time balance and how some players might need more time. And there could be reasons for why why some players might need more time in these encounters versus like say others could just be that's the person out of the player, player just might need more time to to make up their mind on things. But sometimes they have characters that are more complex. That's right.
00:28:02
Speaker
I think about, in the classic sense, a summoner in a Dungeons and Dragons game or Pathfinder. They take up a lot of lot of game time. I wouldn't say the summoner takes a lot of time. I would say the summoner takes some time and the 10 things the summoner summoned also takes some time.
00:28:19
Speaker
Yes, yes. So think about that time imbalance and how that plays into the balancing of the encounter designs. Because you want to give everybody their due. And you want to be able to to let everybody express their character when it comes to their turn. And that is a big part of encounter design is letting the players express themselves. The time to solve, by the way, for that summoner challenge is ah not the moment when you're in the encounter.
00:28:49
Speaker
And now you're obliged to kind of have all the players play out their various characters in the way you're talking about, Mark. The time to talk about that with the player that plays the summoner is like way before you start the game and say, oh, I see you wanted to do a summoner. OK, that's kind of... Impose some costs on the transaction time in the party. Let's talk about how we're going to manage that together. Let's have that discussion. Yeah. Hey, everybody. I hope you got some good information about how to balance your encounters, how to build your encounters and
Time Management and Expectations in RPGs
00:29:17
Speaker
what things you need to be thinking about as you're getting these these encounters ready for your game.
00:29:28
Speaker
That sound means it's time for our tune-up segment. what What the heck are we talking about today? Who's who we tuning up? We had one of our players send us a really I'm still wrapping my head around this question mark because we had a person who sent us ah a note and said hey how do I get my table or DM on board with i' mean I'm sorry friends I'm gonna use this word He says, with my shit house character, who is all flavor and no substance, like a Dorito. And his example is like a wizard barbarian who flies into a rage when he's out of spells, but so is half it useful at combat, has no charisma. And he knows there's a version of that character that you can make it work, but the craziness of that is the point. Mark, I'm still trying to imagine what this is like, a wizard barbarian. but
00:30:11
Speaker
I don't know but you are kind of a neatly kind of like this yeah there's there's some about it that's kind of carefree and fun and that right there. Could be a problem. There's a few things number one what kind of game are you gonna be running as a GM that's right like is this the type of character you want in your game. Maybe it's a comedic character. I'm assuming by this this character he's making, it's supposed to be kind of funny. Is that the kind of game game you want to run? I definitely think that you need to make sure that DM is good with whatever this is going to be. And if that doesn't work tonally, or if you know that's not the kind of game they're trying to run,
00:30:50
Speaker
like don't fight it. If you know it's already kind of weird and off on the margins, a lot of times what DMs are doing is they're building a game that there's going to be a number of characters that could be at the center of that game. And if you create a character that's kind of intentionally what would be at the weird periphery of Conceptually possible characters all it's doing is it's making it hard for the DM could be disruptive if the character is disruptive It may or may not be like I don't think this character is destructive as he described it though. Yeah, I just don't know I mean the thing is it's as you say it's so dependent on What kind of game is getting run and I think the players perceptive here and he says well How do I get this guy on board and in a certain sense? I think that's a little bit of the wrong question, you know, it's the GM who's responsible for creating the story in the world in the tone and
00:31:37
Speaker
Obviously he's gonna check with the players and say like are you guys cool with dark fantasy or with? Light-hearted sort of princess pride style fantasy or whatever it might be but once that's said if you're putting something in there That's just a weird wrench like what are you doing? Yeah So one of the things I do when I typically run a game, I let the players know what I'm gonna be running. that's right Like, hey, I'm running a dark fantasy or like this and that. And I let them know what I'm looking for. And if they come to me with a character that doesn't fit that mold, I'll be like, no, thank you. yeah yeah you'll Come again, try again. Now, if I'm playing like pickup games, when I would run ah pickup games for Dungeons and Dragons for a hobby group that I did,
00:32:21
Speaker
I did not care what character yeah characters people came with. And this kind of stuff would happen all the time. And guess what, people? It was a lot of fun. Like when players get a play what they want to play, it is a lot of fun. Can it be sustained for a campaign? Probably not. But I was not running a long campaign. I was running short sessions. Wise words, Mark.
00:32:43
Speaker
So ah just be thoughtful. ah Players also be thoughtful. Don't just throw Doritos at your game that's going to be you know wanting something a little more hybrid. That's a really good note. I mean, in some sense, the player side of the contract is, I'm going to create something that we together can tell this story with.
00:33:01
Speaker
Who sent this in, by the way? I want to know so I can blacklist them for my game. I'm just kidding. Yeah. This is Lance, isn't it? It could be. It could be. Lance. We're on to you. Thanks for doing the question today. We are on to you. That's right. All right. Wonderful. Well, you guys, this is our episode for this week. We are looking forward to a great new year in 2025. We will see you then. Until then, keep those dice rolling.