Posts Tagged by PC
| February 6, 2012 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
If you’ve been GMing for any length of time then you’ve probably allowed your characters to have something you soon regretted. Sometimes it’s handing a low-level character the +5 Holy Avenger, sometimes it’s letting the investigative psychic have the mind-reading power, and sometimes it’s letting the military characters acquire a lance of the most powerful mecha on the battlefield. When such things happen, it can be difficult to “take it back” without hurting feelings or impacting the campaign. In some cases, the rules work against you; the…
| October 6, 2011 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
How long is it okay to make a player wait to rejoin the game after losing a character? As I peruse RPG forums or read articles, I’m struck by the number of times I’ve come across some variant of this scenario: Rob Roleplayer finally gets to play in Mr. Legendary GM’s totally awesome campaign. Much fun was had by all and Rob Roleplayer remembers, with fondness, his character imprisoned for several sessions until the other PCs finally got around to rescuing him. Several sessions? Really?…
| September 12, 2011 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
At the beginning of my last game session I asked my players if any of them spent their experience points (this for WitchCraft, if it matters). Only one of them did, and he announced that he’d spent some points on improving his Martial Arts. That’s when I threw him a curve ball. I asked him to justify it. He looked stunned, primarily because it’s not something I normally ask. I did it on a lark, just to get the creative juices flowing (I didn’t intend…
| June 9, 2011 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
Have you ever killed a PC through fiat? A while back I was running a street-level superheroes game. Realism (in as much as any game is “realistic”) was emphasized, to the point that no one wore spandex and vigilante activity would get you arrested if caught. We also started with none of the PCs knowing each other, as relationships were supposed to be forged in game. In what was going to be our last session, sloppy play on the part of one PC, Ryder, turned him…
| September 20, 2010 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
While I rarely do this anymore I’ve found that it’s quite common in some games, especially those where each member of the team is absolutely vital to its success, for PCs to be run while their players aren’t at the session. Sometimes the absentee PC is given to another player; other times it’s NPC-ed. Still, I’ve heard a number of exchanges similar to this: GM: Sorry you couldn’t make it last session, Walt. We had a brutal last stand against the Chaos Horde that was…
| August 18, 2010 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
With Villains & Vigilantes back in action this summer, I thought I’d revisit a topic that had always bugged me about that system. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a great game at the time and actually found it rather elegant compared to some other contemporary supergames (and V&V‘s ads in Dragon Magazine actually included a fully statted hero or villain–how cool is that!?). But the one thing that really bugged me in the “crawl up my rear end and refuse to die” sorta…
| April 22, 2009 | Posted by John Arcadian |
Recently, I had a chance to play in a one-on-one game with a friend of mine who is just starting to get into Game Mastering. He has been world-building for a novel he is working on, but wanted to run some of his ideas as a game, in order to flesh out aspects of the world that don’t relate to his main plot. He’s been prepping and learning the system he wanted to run, and once he felt comfortable enough we sat down to play…
