Being a Better GM part 2: Feeling and Thinking

The titles are a bit cutesy but they fit with the theme I've got going on here (and besides, one of my son's favorite books is Bug House, Snug House). The next two parts of coming up with plots for your game are what I like to call Feeling and Thinking. More accurately it would be connections and re-thinking. Let me explain.


Feeling
This one is really about the connections between your NPCs and your PCs, as well as connections between the various NPCs and factions thereof. Most games seem to leave this completely in the imagination of the GM, but there are a handful of games that handle this very well. Spirit of the Century is one that handles connections between players and villains extremely well. These are set up during character creation, which is built into the campaign as a complete session. Another game that does this well is Dresden Files, which sets up factions in the city vying for power and running their own agendas. In my opinion the game that does this best is Technoir, which is a cyberpunk game. Technoir uses a relationship chart that the GM rolls on to set up the beginning of the plot. This relationship chart includes factions, events, things, and people (rather reminiscent of Fiasco). To get started the GM can roll on the chart and pick a couple of relationships (maybe the relationship is between a gun and a powerful NPC.) During character creation the players form relationships with NPCs as they ask them for favors or borrow money.

When you know this information, generating plots is easy. In my Technoir example, if we know that a powerful NPC has a connection with a gun we just have to figure out what that connection is and go from there. Maybe the gun was used in a crime that the NPC wants covered up and the plot revolves around the party solving it. To flip it around, maybe the NPC plans on using the gun to kill someone and the party is hired as protection detail.

Then there's my very first blog entry which describes a way of setting up relationships using a deck of cards.


Thinking
This one is really re-thinking. It's taking something that you see and asking questions about it. The item could be a piece of art or a photo or something that grabs your attention on the street. My favorite things to use are photos and historical events. Some examples:

Take this image. It's all sorts of evocative. The trick is to start asking questions about it. Where is this tunnel at? Is it in a building or some sort of underground complex? What was in that building or complex? What's behind the doors? Is the photo from the point of view of the jailer (assuming the doors are cell doors), or the party? Why is the party in this tunnel?

For this example I'd say that the most important questions are 1.) What was/is in the building. 2.) What or who is behind the doors? Once you know the answers to those two questions the plot reveals itself. Of course the type of game you're running is really important in answering the questions. Let's say I'm running a Hunter: The Vigil game. Immediately that tells me that the focus of any session is going to be investigation and monster hunting, which right away tells me that what's behind the doors is some sort of monster. I'm going to say that the party has stumbled upon an underground lab/prison where humans are being genetically tested to create monsters. Real monsters are being kept next to the humans so that the owners of the complex can test their results. The complex is going to be in an industrial city (I like the idea of playing it in industrial Detroit), underneath an abandoned car factory. Now you have the basics of the plot.


The other part of re-thinking is to pay attention to weird news stories (or even not-so-weird ones) and adapt them to your game. This is a news story that I stumbled across some time back but haven't had a chance to use yet:



The Hum

"Residents of Woodland, in County Durham, claim that every night a noise permeates the air similar to the throb of a car engine.

It is sometimes so strong that it even shakes the bed of one of the householders.

But no matter how hard they look, the community cannot find the source of the problem and, at their wits end, have called in the council to investigate."

I don't think I need to lay out the many ways to turn this into a plot do I?

Being a Better GM part 1: Stealing and Skinning

One of the things I hear a great deal when I ask people to GM is "I don't have any good ideas for a campaign/session." My response to them always comes in two parts. First I tell them that plot ideas for gaming sessions don't have to be good, just fun. Secondly I give them some advice on how I come up with plot ideas. My advice might not work for everybody, but I figure I'd pass it along anyway (because really, this blog is about me, right?).

The things I do to come up with plot ideas generally fall into four broad categories. Steal it, Skin it, Feel It, Think it.

Steal It:
This is as basic as it sounds. Simply steal an idea from an existing story and use it in your own game. TV shows make excellent fodder for plots because of the serialized nature of them. Books can work great, though the larger overarching plots of most of them don't tend to work quite as well for new GMs. I find short-story collections work great for this kind of thing. Here are some examples of what I mean.

My first GM experience ever was with D&D 3.5. My gaming group had decided that it was time for me to spread my wings and run a game. I was slightly nervous. I had a week to prepare and spent a lot of time thinking about what I was going to do, coming up with scenarios and then rejecting them. Finally inspiration struck and I turned to my bookshelves, looking for tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Fritz Leiber's duo are a classic sword & sorcery combo, so their adventures work well. I pulled out Swords Against Deviltry, the second of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books and used the short story "The Howling Tower". The climax of this story concludes in a wizard's tower where Fafhrd had been driven to escape the elements. He meets an odd character and even odder building, but there's a jewel that's heavy enough to make Fafhrd have trouble hanging on to it.

To quote from the story itself:

The tower. The tower! It was falling. It was falling toward him. It was dipping at him over the dome. But there were no fractures along its length. It was not breaking. It was not falling. It was bending. Fafhrd's hand jerked back, clutching the great, strangely faceted jewel, so heavy that he had difficulty in keeping his hold upon it.

If you haven't read the adventures of Fafhrd and the Mouser yet, you really need to. You'll find lots of inspiration for any fantasy themed campaign you're running, especially if your campaign is of the dungeon crawl or sword & sorcery type. (I actually think that the characters in the great 80s film Ladyhawke were modeled on Fafhrd and the Mouser, with Matthew Broderick's character even being called Mouse.)

I threw in a couple of encounters before the tower, but the tower was the main focus as the players had to figure out how to avoid getting crushed by the tower while still managing to get away with the loot.



Skin It:
Technically this should be "reskin", but I like the way Skin It rolls off the tongue better. What do I mean by this? Take a story from another genre and make it work in your campaign and genre. TV and movies do this all the time. The Magnificent Seven took the plot of The Seven Samurai and didn't even bothering changing it, simply transplanting it into the Old West. Let's say I wanted to take a Firefly episode and recast it for Shadowrun. One of my favorite episodes is The Train Job. Mal and the crew are hired to steal some Federation supplies for a ruthless crime lord, only the discover that the supplies are actually medicine for a dying town. In the show they given the towns people the medicine and then deal with the consequences. 

For a Shadowrun game you could keep some of the elements and discard some of the others. Here's how I'd do it. I'd keep the crime lord, since that is how characters in Shadowrun get jobs. I'd even keep the medicine, but I'd switch it up to high-tech nanobots. Instead of a mining town that's dying, let's make it an orphanage or a hospital. What happened is that the inhabitants of this orphanage/hospital (maybe it's both) were subjected to some illegal testing by one of the pharmaceutical giants. This company was testing for a few things, one of them being a pathogen that only targets magic users. They kind of succeeded, only the pathogen actually infects anyone who is not fully human. This includes all the demi-humans, magic users, and modified humans. In other words 90% of the world. If the anti-dote isn't delivered in time the virus will spread, wiping out vast amounts of the population. 

The crime lord wants the anti-dote so he can hold it for ransom. This is a great scenario because it sets up lots of follow-up episodes. Does the party deliver the anti-dote to the crime lord? Then perhaps they're now targeted by the pharmaceutical company. Do they deliver it and then realize what happened? Now they can perhaps go in and try to steal the anti-dote back. Do they not deliver it to the crime lord? Well now they have an enemy. 

This one plot is good for a whole bunch more plots, as well as developing connections that could be used even more down the road.

Creating NPCs with depth

More and more I've come to the conclusion that the best possible plot generator for a campaign is fully fleshed out non-player characters. Knowing who the major players are and what their relationships are to each other informs the next stop of the process which is plot generation. 


The traditional method of developing characters is to fully flesh out everything before hand. This requires a great deal of work by the GM, and in my view it's boring. I like "discovering" relationships just as much as players do (probably more). In other words I'm more of a "connect the dots" kind of guy. To help out with this method of character generation I created a way of setting up relationships between NPCs by using a deck of poker cards and playing a hand of Texas Hold 'Em with yourself.