The Viking Hat GM

  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...

The Viking Hat Way 1. Bring snacks. 2. The dice are always right. 3. I master the game, the game does not master me. 4. Momentum over perfection. 5. The game must go on! You must bring snacks because gaming is social activity. In every culture and religion worldwide, sharing food is how people bond. You will observe that people who do not bring snacks tend not to contribute in other ways - especially if they never bring, but always take. As with snacks, so with everything else.  The dice are always right because nobody likes boxed text and being railroaded, and gaming like life is meaningless without the risk of failure and death. The dice enhance the creativity of player and gamemaster both.  I master the game, the game does not master me  because no collection of rules can ever anticipate everything that might happen at the game table, and the ideas and whims of players and gamemaster. In other words: " I am the GM, I wear the Viking Hat!"  Momentum over perfec...