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.

Implementing the Draconic Method: Part 1

Recently I read and reviewed ‘How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss’ by Venger Satanis. I enjoyed reading the book and decided that I’d try to make a deliberate effort to implement at least some of the Draconic Method and possibly get a little bit closer to game mastering like a fucking boss. This is the record of my efforts.

The Draconic Method consists of a lot of moving parts so to start with I've picked five tips that I think will go a long way towards improving my game.  I'm not going to stop with this five though, adapting and improving my game mastery style will be an ongoing, and probably lifelong, process.

Who cares about Atlantean glyphs (p.14) – This piece of advice is all about getting the players to pay attention to exposition that doesn't necessarily have an immediate bearing on their characters but that will be important in the future by having it directly affect their characters now.  If you want to incorporate foreshadowing into your game you need your players to pay attention to this stuff.

I had an issue where I wanted the party to realise that they needed an item called the Axiom, which had been created in times long past by a guy named Euz, in order to successfully deal with a demon invasion. I started dropping Euz’s name into the game long before they needed to find the Axiom in an attempt to establish him as an important historical figure, and someone whom researching might lead to solutions to their problems. Unfortunately, the one player whom I could depend upon to pick up on and remember this stuff kept missing the sessions where I was doing most of this history building. 

In order to solve this issue I've given one of the characters a weird stone from Limbo that acts as a power source for the Axiom along with a persistent urge that is pulling them towards an encounter that will hopefully nudge the party in the right direction.

Building encounters (p.15) – When creating an encounter I think it is quite common for a game master to have a strong mental image of the situation but then fail to adequately convey it to the players. The Draconic method recommends breaking the encounter down into at least three elements and giving each element three descriptive aspects. If a given aspect is important it can be given three further characteristics.

This tip has prompted me to add more description to encounters and to think a bit more about why the encounter is happening and what should be achieved by it.

As an example, I knew that in the upcoming session of my game that the players would almost certainly encounter a pair of demons on the shore of a lake. I also have to introduce a new PC to the party. So for this encounter I have the elements of the demons, a ritual and the lakeside. The demons have a physical description (borrowed from the Bestiary), an activity (crazy dancing around their sacrifice), and a sound (a caterwauling cacophony). The ritual has a purpose (breaking the protective magic of a nearby tomb), a method (sacrifice the new character) and physical manifestation (the sacrifice stretched over a slab of stone surrounded by burning driftwood). The lakeside has the water (freezing cold, lapping gently against the shore, and dark and foreboding), the shore (a stony beach, bordered by light woods and a light mist hampering long distance vision).

Creating an encounter this way takes a little more thought and a little more time, but I think it will pay off in the playing.

The illusion of a lot going on (p.18) – Venger Satanis suggests giving a moderately large number of things a brief mention rather than dwelling in great detail on one or two items. I think this works in a couple of ways.  Firstly, as Venger suggests, it makes the world seem full, secondly, if as the game master you’re mentioning lots of things, the players will have to pay that much more attention if they’re to realise which ones are important.

I've prepared a description of a trek through the woods bordering the previously mentioned that mentions game trails, bird song (or lack thereof), the occasional croft and a remarkable lack of humanoid inhabitants. Hopefully it will give the players a mental image of their environment that is a bit closer to my own.

The saving grace of 33% (p.30) – When situation arises that requires a decision, and where there could be a sensible, logical outcome but where you have an idea for something a bit left field.  Roll a d6 (or percentile) and if the chosen 33% comes up, go with the odd.

I don’t have a particular situation prepared for this one, but I want to keep the concept in mind for when the players have a weird idea. I won't want to run with their idea all the time but I reckon that 33% will help to keep them all entertained and engaged.

Attack descriptions (p.34) – This tip suggests aiming for three attack descriptions per combat; I try to provide attack descriptions during combat, particularly for critical hits and killing blows. However, I do sometimes feel like I'm the only one at the table making any effort at this. It's not unusual for a player to say ‘I attack him’ and I then have to ask what kind of attack they are making just to understand if I need to apply any special rules such as those for cover or concealment.

I'm going to ask my players to try to provide three descriptive attacks per combat and see how it goes.  Hopefully it will add a little spice to a process that can devolve into just taking turns to roll the dice.

If I can get these five pieces of the Draconic Method to stick I think my game will be improved and I can confidently move on to adopting other components of the system. My next game is this coming Friday so I’ll follow up next week with how I think things went.

Book review: How to game master like a fucking boss

When I first saw How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss by Venger Satanis I was interested in the book but somewhat put off by the title. What kind of cocky bastard gives a book a name like that? The really enthusiastic kind as it turns out.

The authors enthusiasm for Game Mastery is contagious, I got about ten pages in and decided that I would run my game on a week that I was planning to skip.

The intent of the author with this book is to present the 'Draconic Method', a system agnostic style of game mastering that has been developed over a period of three decades.

This book runs to 122 pages and consists of what I perceive as three main sections, game mastery tips, the checklist and assorted appendices.

Game mastery tips occupy roughly the first fifty pages of the book and are presented as bite sized chunks of advice, most of which are about half a page in length.

The first ten or so tips generally deal with what role playing and game mastering are, why we do them and ways to psyche oneself up to the task of running your game. As I mentioned above these serve to infuse the reader with a portion of Venger's enthusiasm for game mastery and these alone would make the book worth purchasing.

The remainder of the tips are practical in nature and pretty easy to implement in order to incrementally improve your game. Every aspect of role playing seems to receive attention, highlights for me which I'll expand on, included the authors advice on building encounters, positive affirmations and meditation. 

I always go into an encounter with a pretty good mental model of what is going on. Deliberately giving each encounter three elements and each element three aspects plus, optionally, three characteristics to each aspect is an excellent way to bring your mental model of the encounter out into the real world where your players can share it. I'm honestly surprised that I've never come across anything like this before. Revolutionary.

In my work I'm always using positive affirmations to encourage and reassure those I'm working with, and in hindsight it's surprising I never though to bring these to the gaming table.  You're sure to come across a number of tips in this book that are blindingly obvious in hindsight.

Rather than actual meditation, the author recommends spending some quiet time thinking.  This really resonated with me as I'm sure it will with many of you.  I've had insights into lots of things, not just game mastering while gardening or walking to the train station.

I did find some tips to be, perhaps, slightly odd. Despite having a matching dice set myself, I found the  recommendation to have matching dice curiously judgmental. Also, what to do about unwanted flirting seemed a bit irrelevant, but perhaps for those better looking than I it could be useful.

The tips don't seem to be presented in any particular order, for example 'unwanted flirting' is sandwiched between 'focus on one thing at a time' and 'have a backup adventure ready to go'; this has positive and negative aspects but on the whole I liked the approach as there is almost certainly something interesting on any random page even if it does make it slightly difficult to find any particular tip.

The Checklist is a list of ideas for things to include in your campaign.  It occupies roughly twenty pages, and at four or five items per page is a goldmine of game master inspiration. Not everything will be suitable for your game but most of it will be. As I was idly grazing through the checklist I pieced together an approximate solution to a campaign planning problem I've been grappling with for some time.

The appendices as I'm calling them consist of a selection of tables, a glossary for Viridian and some dungeon maps.

The tables could equally serve as inspiration while preparing your game or to fill in a blank that has arisen during play.  Those that stand out the most to me are one hundred questions to ask characters to find out a little more about them, a series of tables for creating a cult and a table of twenty unique NPCs.

The Viridian glossary allows a game master to deliver text or speech in a sinister sounding language the author has devised.  I haven't completely read this section but after a quick skim there appears to be a good selection of words that should allow wide range of phrases to be constructed.

Finally, at the very back of the book are three very different, unlabeled dungeon maps for those times when you need a bit of help coming up with the layout of that temple or thieves den or whatever. An excellent addition that the author could probably have gotten away without had he been less rigorous.

I have a digital copy of this book and it is professionally laid out in an easy to read two column format, although it could have done with more thorough proofreading. If my previous experience with DrivethruRPG is anything to go on, a physical copy should have good print and construction quality.

The cover image is gorgeous and evocative and there is plenty of art scattered through the book that will appeal to the thirteen year old boy in all of us.

The contents page actually stretches to a page and a half and unless you can remember the exact name of the section you're looking for you may have to search for a while to find just what you want.

How to game master like a fucking boss is a solid title with much to recommend it. If you run a game, you will almost certainly find a lot in this book to help you improve your game and to make you more enthusiastic about running it. I'm going to be implementing the Draconic Method in my game, I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Venger Satanis takes game mastery seriously, maybe you should too.

How to Game Master Like a Fucking Boss is available from DrivethruRPG.com