Chapter 14: Gamemastering World Tree
So,
this chapter. It is all over the scale in terms of quality. Some of it is bad, some of it is meh, some of it is par. And some of it... is
really good. Seriously, some of the best articulations of the challenges of the GM role and how to meet them I have ever seen anywhere. When those come up, I'm going to boxquote them so they stand out more.
Character Creation
This section opens with a quote that is almost boxworthy: 'Gamemastering character creation is walking on a narrow edge. On the one hand, you don't want to stifle your players' creativity, or keep them from playing something that they desperately want to play. On the other hand, you need to keep true to the spirit of your campaign, and to prevent mistakes, abuses, and imbalances that will keep your player from having fun.' It loses points for implying the GMs possession of the campaign (and the player!), and for not acknowledging that what some people want is disruptive or contradictory. But the acknowledgement that the GM is a participant in chargen, of the conflict between individual vision and group consensus, of the reason behind mechanical concerns being 'fun,' that's all great stuff.
Artistic Vision: Theirs and Yours
Buried in some bland run-of-the-mill musing on character concepts are a few rough gems: 1) If a player is fascinated by something, do your best to facilitate it; 2) Don't be a slave to plausibility: most Sleeth live like werewolves on the outskirts of society, but there's no reason a PC can't be the first Sleeth to graduate from a university; 3) The will of the many prevails: if the players were sold on a 'best and brightest' game, 'slacker musician' is a disruptive concept that should be reworked or abandoned.
Game Balance
Some players take great joy in finding loopholes in the rules that let them be overly powerful. An easy part of your job is to catch the abuses. A hard part is to correct the abuses without making any players (especially the abuser) unhappy.
There are a couple of follow-up examples, one with a seriously min-maxed player, hilariously deficient at tasks they will never attempt; another a more gently min-maxed character, who makes at least a token investment in their deficient area.
The converse of preventing abuse is making sure that the characters are powerful enough.
There are
legions of games that ignore this side of things. The examples that follow are a guy who over-invested in dance as a characterization thing who was given a discount on a dance-enhancing advantage that was costed assuming it would be taken on a life-or-death skill, and a guy who made his character so comedically clumsy as to be effectively useless at ordinary adventuring activities.
Moments in Play
Rules Issues
There's some ordinary stuff about how the rules can't be comprehensive, so feel free to improvise as long as you aren't capricious or biased, followed by:
There are some situations where you ought to follow the rules carefully - not just because they're good rules, but because the players are counting on you to be impartial. Any time a character might die permanently or be evicted from the campaign, make sure that the player can do anything that the rules allow, and knows that you are not sending him unfairly to death.
There's an unfortunate parenthetical about how if you need to manipulate such a situation's outcome, do so in a way that the player's can't see, which undermines the above excellent sentiment, even if it isn't exactly
bad advice.
Then there's this amazing paragraph:
Some players are rule lawyers. They know the rules better than you do, and use every sentence to their advantage. It's dreadfully annoying. Unfortunately, they have a good point. The rules (as written, or as you have modified them) are all they have to go on. If the rules aren't solid, then all your players are lost and have every right to be upset with you.
Holy shit, right? The number of RPGs that would be improved by outright telling the GM that they are going to be rules-lawyered, and they are not going to like it, but the lawyer is right because social contract, is really close to
all of them.
Unfortunately, the follow-up paragraph is a total let-down, all about not letting the rule lawyers wreck your game (because the game is the property of the GM), and maybe letting them have their way
once before editing the rules. Or not, GM-as-monarch-style.
The rest of this section's subsections are about a few tricky bits of the rules, and a lot of them are about dealing with the insano initiative system and how frustrating it can be for players. It's not surprising that the system's foibles came up in playtesting, it's just surprising that they didn't
do anything about it.
World View
This has several sub-sections about how to maintain the flavor of the setting, like remembering that most of the population is just four species, that magic is common and won't amaze peasants, that there's basically no stone, etc.
Campaign Issues
A few minor notes on pegging rate of xp gain (useful, if standard) to expected campaign length and handling PCs learning new spells (meh).
Designing Stories
Setting
Four paragraphs that boil down to 'include plot hooks in your setting write-up; look at the ones in our sample city to see how we did it.'
Power Balance
Starts with an acknowledgement that the PCs are more powerful than most people around, but not all people around, and goes on to address the Elminster problem.
You have to design your stories so that (1) they interest the player-characters, and (2) they don't interest too many other people. If you threaten a city, the whole city will respond - the player-characters who live there, but also the sorcerers in the academies, the the city guard, nobles and their private guards, the healers and tree-mages and smiths - a veritable army of skilled and powerful people. If you're not extremely clever, the player-characters will get lost in the crowd. That's completely appropriate for World Tree, but will make a lousy evening of gaming.
It follows up with a couple of examples of putting the PCs center-stage even in a crowd. One is the PCs at a Cani party in a big house, who walk in on an assassination attempt - the PCs who are right there count for a lot more than the badasses who could show up too late. The other is the PCs attending the wedding of the Cani they saved, with two whole clans in attendance, all of whom are incapacitated by the Cani-specific spells used by the attackers, and by the time those wear off, the PCs have established dominance in the situation and even the Cani heads-of-house are deferring to them, offering the PCs the opportunity to direct some real bigwigs around for a while.
Running Monsters
Mostly distinguishes between reasoning and unreasoning opposition, and encourages the GM to put themselves in the shoes of the reasoning opposition, to fight only reluctantly and after negotiation, to flee or surrender if things are going against them, etc.
Gods in Play
Gods are not easy to gamemaster. It's very tempting to run some amazing world-shaking story with the gods all over it. Unfortunately it's very hard to get those stories to be fun for your players.
Ancient awesome wizards are then put in the same basket as gods, and there is a note that it's possible to use these beings well, but it's hard and you should think twice about trying.
Artifacts
A note I happen to love is that a lot of the ancient historical magic items are hilariously obsolete at this point, because magic has come a long way since the dawn of time. The ancient swords of legendary kings tend to have more value as antiquities than as weapons. There are a few ancient items of great power, mostly because the gods made a lot more stuff back in the day; and there are also items that you can't get any more because they used techniques that have since been found to be hideously unsafe and abandoned.
Extraplanar Visitations and Other Horrors
A reminder that there is crazy shit from outside the universe, but given how much crazy shit there is from inside the universe, extraplanar things have some sharply limited valid uses, like suggesting that someone is abusing teleport gate technology, or a problem that elementals may need help with.
Playing Nonprimes
I covered this earlier: you can, it sucks.
On the Art of Gamemastery
The Prime Directive
Ultimately, you are a performer. Your success or failure is entirely in how you and your players, who are your audience, enjoy your game. If your players enjoy it, they'll be back for more. If they hate it, they won't be. All other considerations are secondary.
The following things encourage your players to have a good time in the long run:
Fairness: Your players are more comfortable if they know that the deck isn't stacked against them - or too blatantly in their favor.
Control: Your players should feel that they have a great deal of control of their destiny.
Action: Your players should feel that they've had the chance to do something.
Drama: Your players should feel that they've been characters in a good story.
So, know your players and their characters. Design your game with them in mind.
The above loses a couple points for referring to the players as 'your audience' instead of 'your co-authors and audience,' but not enough points to keep it out of the box.
Style of Game
Brief notes on how to run certain kinds and themes of games. Growth, Mystery, Adventure, Humor. Hilariously, they have a Punk/Gothic section, which they mention is not well-supported by the generally optimistic tone, but you can find unpleasant material with a little effort. Also, the section on Munchkin-style: 'There's a stereotype that clueless teenagers do this and older gamers outgrow it. Still, beating up gods is sometimes fun. If you play this way, you might want to keep it a secret, but that shouldn't stop your fun.'
Fairness
A reiteration of the great value of impartiality and also the seeming of impartiality.
Keep a mental record of who's gotten goodies recently. If someone's getting too few, make sure that a few show up for them. Taking goodies away from people who've had too many is a distinctly worse choice; it makes the person who lost things feel that life is unfair, and the people who never got anything are no happier either.
Gamemaster's Lovers and Friends
"You know it's gonna be a bad game when the GM's girlfriend sits in his lap while she's rolling up her character."
Notes on being especially careful when you are running a game for your significant other (or simply a good friend relative to lesser-known acquaintances), who will often have an edge just in reading your responses and persuading you quite apart from any conscious or unconscious edge you give them. Not phrased well enough to get a box, but really good as a frank handling of a subject that comes up a lot in relation to how often it's addressed in print.
Running Tense Scenes
Some notes on keeping things moving, particularly when there are natural dramatic peaks. One piece of especially poor advice is taking actions away from players who ask a lot of questions in time-pressure scenes. Yeah, pacing, but also very unfair.
Gamemaster Cheating
A couple of paragraphs on when to cheat, and how, and when cheating is pointless.
Planning a Game
On one horn, you have to plan games tightly. You are taking responsibility for entertaining people. If you don't plan things carefully, you run the risk of tripping up and doing boring or useless things all evening, alienating your players, and generally making everyone unhappy.
On the other horn, you have to plan games loosely. There's no way to predict what the players will do - certainly not in a given situation, and not always what they'll do in the long term.
So you absolutely must do it both ways.
That's followed by some brief but solid advice for doing just that.
Tricks and Traps
Basically a rejection of Grimtooth, laying out the in-setting and out-of-setting reasons why traps should be rare, plausible, and mostly nonlethal. Very refreshing.
Surprises by Your Players
A nice passage that conveys an anti-railroading sentiment, that the players will take the game in unexpected directions, and that's kind of the entire point.
Gamemaster Mistakes
A couple of common mistakes and how to address them. Letting players retcon their build if it was based on a misunderstanding, and dealing with treasure that turned out to be overly powerful (including 'deal with the new balance,' if it's not actually campaign-shattering).
Other Stuff
There's a pile of other subsections on when and when not to roll, how to round fractions, the usefulness of descriptive details, dice-light and dice-heavy scenes, and how you should (almost) never retcon your mistakes, but make it up to the wronged parties later.
That's all the real gold. What's left are campaign seeds and a few miscellaneous things, and I'll get to those next post.