Last post I talked about problems that tend to crop up in a lot of tabletop RPGs. Today I want to look at some solutions.
Preferences
As mentioned previously, everyone has their own ideas of how the game should be played, whether it should be fun or epic, serious or comedic, war game or role play, and so on. How do we avoid the problems?
We can’t, at least not entirely. However, we can get around a lot of it.
First, have a session 0. Don’t expect to play at all. Plan to roll characters and discuss the campaign. You don’t need to give a lot of information, but you might want to let slip a bit like, “It’s a dungeon crawl”, or “It’s really intrigue intensive”. You may want to ask players for some additional information on their characters, like, “Give me two secrets about your character.”, or “What did you do to end up in prison?”
This also gives you a chance to let the players discuss how they want to approach the game.
Secondly, encourage compromise. If half the group wants to run a comedic campaign and get silly and the other half wants some RP intensive epic questing, consider the campaign and suggest that maybe the group run this campaign one way and the next one will be better suited for the other. If you’re running a campaign made of different modules, you might even consider letting the players change styles and characters at a certain point.
Personalities
D&D is not a video game. Of course there are D&D video games, but that’s not what I mean.
What I mean is that in most video games, players are able to play as a character who is able to be entirely self sufficient and accomplish everything singlehandedly. With rare exceptions, this is not the case in D&D.
The first thing players need to recognize if the campaign is going to be successful in the long term is:
It’s not all about you!!!
*Ahem* Sorry about that. I’m better now.
I’ve had players who boast about how their character is better than everyone else’s, should be the one in charge, should get all the cool magic gear, should get preferential treatment, should get healed first, and of course how that player always has the best ideas and everyone, without exception, should always listen to them.
I actually had a player once who almost brought a small castle down on the heads of the party, after he decided to take off and leave them to do the hard work by themselves because he thought it was unnecessary.
D&D is about the party. That doesn’t mean it has to be bland and everyone needs to exercise blind obedience to anyone, but the game needs to be about the group. If everyone focuses exclusively on themselves, the party will fail and the relationships at the table will follow suite.
As the DM, have characters share secrets, give them suggestions on how to work together, and allow them to collectively do cool stuff with crafting. I’ll try to touch on some of these things independently in later posts.
Communication
This is going to go in two directions: First – how the DM communicates with the party; Second – how the group communicates with each other.
As the DM, be clear about how things work. Not every group will be the same, but being open about certain things can go a long ways towards building trust with your group.
Be clear about the rules you intend to follow. If you’re going to homebrew something, let them know at the outset. If you’re going to alter a spell description or a game mechanic, let them know at the outset.
Show players that they can trust you with the dice. Some DMs roll openly in front of their players, I do this sometimes, but honestly, I fudge rolls to protect players more than the other way around.
Announcing DC for a saving throw isn’t necessary, but it lets players know beforehand what the standard is, and when you announce 12 and they roll 11, they can’t say that you shifted it from 10.
Work with players, not against them. When my players ask me if they can do something, I tell them that they can “try” anything, and for the most part I try to be consistent with that that. At the same time I encourage players to come to me with their ideas in advance, so if they want to do something out of the ordinary I have time to prepare it, or at least consider it, in advance.
With regards to player communication, a session 0 can again go a long way. Establish background for the group, or any characters who may have relationships before the campaign started. They should know certain things about each others history, maybe a secret or two, have some stories about their past together, and maybe even a secret tell of some sort.
Each character is going to express themselves in different ways, players will do the same. Make it a point to let players know that just because one character knows something doesn’t mean that the entire group knows. A scout needs to report what they’ve seen; a bard who succeeds on a religion check has to share what they know; a dwarf looking at faults in a stone bridge needs to let the party know; otherwise, the information is secret. Make it a habit for your players to share their character’s knowledge with each other.
My suggestion to most new DMs is to not allow evil characters in their first campaign. This is not to limit role play, but to give a new DM (and probably new players) a chance to learn the game with limited concern of being back stabbed or betrayed, and to learn the game a bit better before moving on to more advanced things.
There’s probably a lot more that I could say, but realistically, there’s always going to be something that I didn’t think of anyway.
I hope that this has given you a few good general tips on keeping the campaign running smooth.
I’ll be back again in a couple days with a new post.
In the meantime, keep it unreal. Keep it fun.