Wednesday, May 13, 2009

The Pregame: New Game Tips

Starting off a new game is a pretty exciting time for both players and GMs alike. Players get to roll up some new persona to adopt and the GM gets to actually build a new story or even a world...good times all around. However, after the initial excitement wears off in a game or two you have to have something good for the players or your game is going to start bogging down. Here are some tips to keep this from happening before your group even begins to start playing your game.

1) Theme! Have some kind of a theme or genre for your game. Whether it is high adventure, comic, horror or whatever, having an idea of what feel or mood you want for your game makes it far easier for you to make decisions about it. We'll talk about how to create a mood for your particular genre later, but just deciding on what you want out of your game is an excellent first step.

2) Story arcs. I've played in many games that just kind of meandered around without a serious purpose or goal--one side adventure after another. While this is fine for a session or two, players really want to be moving toward something. There's nothing wrong with having an overarching goal that is the ultimate direction the game is going toward (throwing a magic ring into a volcano, for example); however, there is a lot of ground to cover prior to getting there and simply floating along this general storyline isn't going to stay very exciting. So, storyarcs are a great way to go even from the get-go. Smaller goals that take somewhere between three and five sessions to accomplish keep the players moving toward your overall goal while still giving them a sense of accomplishment somewhat frequently.

3) Too much work. I once had a GM who calculated the exact altitude of the landscape in the world he put us in, decided what kind of gems were located in which set of mountains determined by the geology of the area, figured out what the wind patterns and ocean currents were and other minute details...nope, not kidding. The amount of detail he would put into games was incredible to say the least. Of course, the real issue came in when he decided that we all would actually need to know any of this to play. As a player, I was completely uninterested in what kind of rocks a mountain range on the other side of the world primarily consisted of and all of that kind of thing was included in the reams of information he would give us prior to playing.

Keep things simple. Just focus on where your players will begin play, what they would know and what you need to know in order to run the game--figure out the rest on the fly. Coming up with things off the cuff has some hidden benefits: it tends to be more organic and often leads you in directions you didn't think to go down. So, certainly, do the work you need to do but don't go too much beyond that as it tends to bog down your game.

4) Not enough work. The reverse of the above is that you don't do enough background work and end up with a game in which you don't know what is going on in the grand scheme of things or even right where your players are. So, figure out enough to keep yourself from floundering around and trying to figure out every single detail as you go along. This does the exact same thing that you wanted to avoid by not overly detailing things.

Although these are pretty self-evident tips, they are certainly still worth keeping in mind before you start crafting your new game.

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