The Viking Hat GM

Musings with my players after the recent play session . In the previous play session, a thief had died - slain by the poison on the coins he rummaged through. He ignored my description of them as "glistening and wet." But from that dungeon the players had got some gold, a magical sword and armour, and a Robe of Blending (which acts basically like the Predator's cloaking/chameleon ability). The fighter claimed the sword and armour, the Robe of Blending was unassigned. When the player rolled up another thief, they offered it to him. The Robe of Blending is worth 3,500xp if you take it, or up to 35,000gp if you sell it. Being a 1st level thief with 1 hit point, he decided to take it - but not without some discussion first. This brought him to his xp cap of 1,250xp - but the party lacked the 1,500gp (or 3,000, if training alone) necessary for him to train to level up (likewise for the fighter with the magical sword and armour). So they continued adventurin, hoping to find eno...

The Weapons vs AC table in AD&D 1e is one of the many examples in gaming of a good idea executed badly. It was very obviously an afterthought, unplaytested and shoved in at the last minute because some gearhead player demanded it.  It is a good idea because on the face of it, weapons should have some variation between them other than the sheer amount of damage they do. After all, historically some weapons were developed to deal with certain armours, blunt weapons to deliver blows through armour which could not normally be pierced, hooked weapons to pull armoured knights off horses to fall on the ground, and so on.  It was poorly-executed because no player was going to write down their to-hit rolls vs various ACs on their character sheet, which meant more time in play looking up charts and adding up numbers, and people would of course argue about AC2 coming from plate mail and shield vs it coming from some other armour plus good Dexterity, and so on.  This is the reaso...

  Too often players and DM come to the game table imagining some solitary friendless hero who charges off by themselves. Should the DM not be soft, weak and useless and fudge the dice to save them from their foolhardiness, this would-be Rambo typically perishes horribly sooner rather than later. The wise player realises that they are part of a  party , a team of adventurers who work together to accomplish their goals of gold and glory. As the dwarves in  The Hobbit  put it, Far over the Misty Mountains cold To dungeons deep and caverns old We must away, ere break of day To seek our pale enchanted gold We  must away - not "I", but "we". In the early days of D&D, players often came from wargaming clubs, and so this could be taken for granted. Now when players are coming from watching movies with solitary heroes or playing first-person shooters, it cannot be taken for granted. This is a style forgotten by most, and so we bring in house rules which encourage s...

  Among my house rules is, Character generation : roll 3d6 down the line, choose from fighter, magic-user, cleric or thief. Regardless of rolls, characters may be of any of fighter, magic-user, cleric or thief, but will suffer a 10% malus to XP if they lack a prerequisite attribute. You character may not commit suicide, but if they happen to die, you can roll another character.  Remember that we have an open game table , which means we constantly have newbies coming - which we want to encourage. Any game has some combination of choice  and chance . Chess is all choice, snakes & ladders is entirely chance, roleplaying games are a mixture of the two. The more choice  you have the slower the game, as each choice takes time to make, with its own pros and cons and considerations and so on and so forth. If there are a large number of choices during character generation, then it takes a whole session to make a character, and casual players won't give it a go. Newbie pl...

The first of the house rules is to have an  open game table . Any player can come or go at any time. The reason for this is accessibility: if you want people to try your business, product, service or game, you must make it as accessible as possible. Many gamers hold an ideal in their minds of the same group of 4-6 best friends gaming together in some grand epic campaign over 10 years. This is cool, but rarely actually happens. Most commonly a group gets together, and about a third of the time they spend their first session generating characters and the group never meets again, the rest of the time they play for 12-18 sessions before enough players get bored and drift off and the game is suspended indefinitely.  Better to accept that players will come and go, and plan for it by having a constant supply of new players - you need accessibility .  Accessibility  means a few things, Advertising : Before anyone can come, they have to know about your game. When I first st...

In my campaigns, I use a few house rules designed to create a certain playstyle. I'll talk about each of them in detail in later posts, this is the summary. Open game table - anyone may come or go at any time Bring snacks Character generation : roll 3d6 down the line, choose from fighter, magic-user, cleric or thief. Regardless of rolls, characters may be of any of fighter, magic-user, cleric or thief, but will suffer a 10% malus to XP if they lack a prerequisite attribute. You character may not commit suicide, but if they happen to die, you can roll another character.  No backstory : The Dungeon Master will not test your patience with boxed text, we as a group ask that you return the favour. You don't begin with a story, you create one as a result of play. You will in the game experience a series of events, which you may later choose to tell as a story.  Weapon vs AC : a modified version of these rules are used.  Common Men have 1 weapon proficiency, noncombatants...

Gear needed for this article: snacks AD&D1e  Dungeon Master's Guide AD&D1e  Monster Manual Polyhedral dice Hex paper and notepad, or Laptop with internet connection Commonly GM guides will tell you to draw a world, then a continent, put in mountain ranges and so on. This "top-down" approach (as detailed very well by Bat in the Attic ) is lots of fun, because we all like to draw big maps. But it's less than useful for running a game, because you invariably get caught up in minor details that'll never see the light of play. On the principle of "the teacher only needs to be one chapter ahead of the students in the textbook," the GM only has to be a few hexes ahead of the players in the game world.  You only need a small scale. If you have a location service on your mobile phone you can review it and see that most of us only have three or four places we always go. Most medieval villagers never went more than twenty miles - a day's hard walk - fro...