Implementing the Draconic Method: Part 2

Last week I discussed some aspects of the Draconic Method that I was planning to incorporate into my game.  This week I’m going to discuss how I think that went.

Overall Friday’s session went really well, everyone had fun and some good progress was made.  We did decide to cut the session short though. The party was about to enter a mausoleum, they knew there was a trap on the door and the player who runs the rogue of the party was away sick.  Should he be away again next time they’ll have to bite the bullet and take a risk with the trap.

Who cares about Atlantean glyphs – The weird limbo stone, coupled with an encounter with a pair of reasonably powerful demons has galvanised the party into finding the Axiom. My challenge for the future is to be a bit more subtle about inserting these important story elements into the game while still making sure that they have an effect on the PCs that is great enough to ensure that they pay attention to them.

Building encounters – Last week I broadly described an upcoming encounter with a pair of demons that that had the twin goals of encouraging the party to search for the Axiom and also to set up a meeting with a new player character.  The extra work I put into describing the setting and what the demons were up to really helped the players understand what was going on.  We use dungeon tiles and miniatures for combat and my description allowed the players to set the tiles up with practically no supervision from me.  I'm definitely going to continue using the rule of three for future encounters.

The illusion of a lot going on – I think my description of the wooded lake shore has given the players an idea of how desolate the area is.  I also threw in an encounter with a pair of wardens (who are the law enforcement agents of the kingdom they are currently in) who were fleeing a large group of bandits. The players seemed to be quite interested in this little nugget of extraneous detail and went on to wipe out the bandits just to help the wardens out. With a little more effort I can apply this technique more widely within my game and enhance my players sense of immersion within the game world.

The saving grace of 33% – The party had to cross several miles of lake to get to the mausoleum I mentioned earlier. It was clearly too great a distance to countenance swimming and I had been expecting that they would find a boat to use (they had hired a fisherman previously who was waiting about one days walk south of their present position, so they could have gone back to him or borrowed a boat from a lakeside croft). The cleric suggested that he could cast water walking on everyone. I didn't make a roll to see if this could walk, instead I simply decided to fudge the distance to the island so that the spell would give the party just enough time to get there. In the past I have occasionally shot down ideas like this but forcing the party to spend time locating a boat wouldn't have added anything to the story and getting the party quickly across the lake has advanced things to a nice point. I'm sure that there will be times in the future where things aren't so cut and dried so I’ll keep the saving grace of 33% in mind.

Attack descriptions – At the beginning of the session I asked the players to try to make at least three attack descriptions during the session. This drew a mixed reaction with one player in particular scoffing at the idea.  However a couple of players really took to the idea and provided fantastic descriptions of what their characters were doing. One, the cleric, described the physical manifestation of his spells as he was casting them and the other, a ranger, rolled her attacks and then provided colour commentary of her character's actions once she knew the results. This encouraged the others to also describe the actions of their characters, and by the end of the session even that one guy had started to join in. I'm going to remind the players about this at the beginning of the next few sessions and hopefully it will become a habit for everyone.

I think that so far my implementation of the Draconic Method has been a success. I was especially impressed with how asking my players to provide attack descriptions has gotten my players to do more during combat than roll dice and ask ‘Is it dead yet?’.

Moving forward I will continue to do what I’ve started doing and will use How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss as a reference to keep improving my game. Thank you Mr. Satanis.