The Gamemaster Is Satan

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Deathlyphil

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craddoke said:
As a variant of the tiered Enemy who gains power gradually, you can also have the tiered Enemy Organization. Basically, the greatest fear of all mid-level managers is that a problem they can't handle will be referred up the executive chain of command and they will lose their job. The same thing would be true of an Evil mid-level manager (although that's kind of a redundant title). No one who knows about the party of adventurers and their early successes would want to tell the Evil CEO about them - hence, he/she doesn't find out about them until they're a somewhat credible threat - at which point a whole bunch of (surviving) Evil mid-level managers will find themselves summarily terminated. Of course, once the Evil CEO learns this information it only makes sense if he comes down like a hammer on the party of adventurers - but this is fine since it creates a natural third act to the adventure plot (e.g., 1. humble but promising beginning [Tatooine]; 2. First major triumph [Death Star I]; 3. Horrible setback [Cloud City]; 4. Ultimate triumph [Teddy Bear Jamboree]).
This is more the concept that I would run for. While the Players are important, they aren't the centre of gaming world (usually). If the big bad is a King or Duke with the ultimate aim of conquering whole nations, then they probably aren't going to be bothered by that group of peasants making a little bit of noise of the edges of their territories. Perhaps later, once those peasants are a little famous, our are even trying to build their own army, that's when the king might notice them and send someone to deal with them.

The other argument is, why does there have to be a specific baddie? The only games I've ever played that featured a Boss were one-offs, with a fairly rigid story-structure.

It seems these last two articles are at odds with each other. What happens if the Players decide to join forces with "the evil one"? That would certainly derail most plots. Would you force them to always be good, even if they didn't want to? On the other hand, what if the Players decide to ditch everything and run away to a safer place, and never bother "the evil one" again? Would they get dragged kicking and screaming back in?
 

Tolerant Fanboy

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This is quickly becoming a Bible of how to GM effectively and entertainingly. Thank you, Mr. Macris.

There is, of course, another option for high-powered adversaries to not immediately off nascent threats: Because they'd be bored otherwise. Yes, I directly cribbed this one from Order of the Stick, but it certainly works for any long-lived, immortal, or otherwise timeless being. Without challengers, they are undisputed tyrants of the world, and that can get old awfully quickly. This is far more entertaining, and those adversaries may even, like the DM playing them, want the heroes to win. Forever is a long time, and, like Nicholas Flamel in the first Harry Potter, these foes may eventually want to just stop.
 

Falseprophet

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That's some good advice, thanks!

I remember an old (2nd ed-era) Dragon Magazine article on roleplaying villains with high Intelligence and Wisdom. I remember for Genius and Super-genius NPCs (Int 17-20, which was damn high in 2nd ed), the article assumed most DMs wouldn't be geniuses themselves. It suggested a genius intellect would be able to predict the kind of powers that would be levelled against it. Basically it said a genius villain would be prepared for just about anything the PCs could throw at it, so make them earn their victory.

Fightgarr said:
I think I only have one major disagreement, if you think The Wheel of Time did anything beautifully... well I'll leave it at that.
I'd generally agree with your sentiment about the Waste of Time series, although I think Alexander makes a good point with this. Though I'll counter by noting that most Tolkien-wannabe fantasy epics have the Dark Lord crippled in some fashion at the beginning, and all he needs is to get some artifact or to kill The Hero to come into his full power. Wheel of Time just staggers this out more like an 80s/90s adventure cartoon show (like Conan the Adventurer or Pirates of Dark Water), where the heroes have to stop the villains from collecting a set of artifacts, so Jordan & Tor could sell 12 books instead of just 3.
 

Callate

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If you're running a game with a power level like D&D, and your arch-villains don't deal with your player characters in a similarly quick and convenient manner, you owe it to yourself and your players to explain why. There are only two basic explanations available to you:

? The adversaries are stupid.
? The adversaries don't have the power to dispatch the PCs.
You're oversimplifying massively, again. And there are numerous examples in the above comments about why this is not the case. I would enjoy these articles a lot more if I didn't feel like they keep falling into the category of "Massive assumption, explanation"- all the while you're explaining, I'm biting my fist at the error(s) in the massive assumption that renders all the explanation moot.
 

Nazrel

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I always had the opposite problem from having my adversary's to powerful. I had primarily been using the BESM system, and kept giving the PC's to much leeway in choosing there powers. I had to make my adversary's immortal to pose any threat what so ever, but usually that just ended with them (the adversary) being horribly mutilated, over and over again.
 

Archon

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Callate said:
There are only two basic explanations available to you:
? The adversaries are stupid.
? The adversaries don't have the power to dispatch the PCs.
You're oversimplifying massively, again... I'm biting my fist at the error(s) in the massive assumption that renders all the explanation moot.
First off, of course I'm oversimplifying. :) I'm writing a series of introductory 2,000 word or less articles. Accusing me of over-simplification is like criticizing the For Dummies guides for being written for dummies.

Second, for each assumption I make, I provide a common example of a case where the assumption holds true generally. Yes, many very intelligent posters have responded here to explain why, in such-and-such special case, my assumptions are incorrect. But one does not create a primer by attempting to flesh out and answer every special case in which the standard, common assumptions are wrong.

To justify my "adversaries are stupid" example, I cited the example of the Dragonlance series' main villain as a case where he is specifically given 18 Wisdom and 33 character levels, and then fails because he's "overconfident" i.e. stupid. Dragonlance was the best-selling module series in TSR history, launched the entire storytelling revolution in RPGs, and spun-off into countless books, so I'm not exactly attacking a straw man.

Whether you care or not, I don't know, but I'd personally find your feedback more valuable if you'd stop trying to attack my assumptions and instead consider whether or not you agree with my ideas, given my assumptions!
 

Archon

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Deathlyphil said:
The other argument is, why does there have to be a specific baddie? The only games I've ever played that featured a Boss were one-offs, with a fairly rigid story-structure.

It seems these last two articles are at odds with each other. What happens if the Players decide to join forces with "the evil one"? That would certainly derail most plots. Would you force them to always be good, even if they didn't want to? On the other hand, what if the Players decide to ditch everything and run away to a safer place, and never bother "the evil one" again? Would they get dragged kicking and screaming back in?
That's a wonderful point - so let me clarify. Where I was coming from when I wrote it is that even a story arc / sandbox tends to have a few "major villains", and that it's likely the party will eventually encounter them.

Also, while we're on the topic, limiting powers like teleportation and scry are exceptionally valuable in running an open world campaign as well. Teleportation makes the world *so open* that the task becomes impossible for the GM.

Perhaps I should have been more explicit as to this. As it stands, the editor (Hi Susan!) already suggested the article was too long. I'll try to wrestle back to this in a later article.
 

Archon

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craddoke said:
As a variant of the tiered Enemy who gains power gradually, you can also have the tiered Enemy Organization. Basically, the greatest fear of all mid-level managers is that a problem they can't handle will be referred up the executive chain of command and they will lose their job. The same thing would be true of an Evil mid-level manager (although that's kind of a redundant title).
Craddoke, this post made my day. I will be introducing evil mid-level managers into my next campaign, and their motivation for not bringing in the evil overlord will be to avoid getting "fired".

You win the evil overlord award of the day, sir.
 

Archon

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Fightgarr said:
I think I only have one major disagreement, if you think The Wheel of Time did anything beautifully... well I'll leave it at that.
To be fair, I did specifically say the early books of Wheel of Time! :)
 

aegios187

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Personally, I never used a published NPC stats necessarily as the ultimate guide to their personality etc. That's more of a game mechanic tool than anything else. I mean I can cite the example of the mage with 20 intelligence, sure he's a genius by all standards, but his "genius" is by no means universally applicable to every situation which might dictate "intelligence" or better yet "common sense" which I consider intelligence learned not in a book but through experience.

However, I do agree that falling back on a arch-enemy being stupid is a well-worn crutch. I've found you only really need to be able to reconcile why the big baddie didn't do X, Y and Z with yourself in less you plan on making it relevant to the story or otherwise have it revealed to the characters. Otherwise, it's as easy as telling your players that not everything that can happen in terms of "magic" can be meta-gamed to a specific page in a specific book.

A model I follow for some of my larger adventure plots is to create a "enemy" like a organization or corporation. At the top is the big baddie CEO, below him, not so big baddie VPs so on and so forth down the chain. This allows characters to slowly work on the enemy's corporate chain and at first be "off the radar" leaving various mid level bosses to deal with the party. This works especially well if that organization is rather large consisting of multiple factions/divisions with a larger umbrella, like a multi-national company with multiple business units. This really can stretch the content that can be created by a single enemy organization.
 

Firia

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Our group has seldom played high level D&D campains, simply because of the crazy power the players wield. We all figure lvl 10s are pretty big deal characters in the world, and anything higher is stand out rare examples of power. (We don't play in the Forgotten Realms world.) We've played one high level game, and that was brutal with the power the npcs wielded-- and we knew they had the power. We all had high enough skill levels to look them up in the DMG and look over what they were capable of. Death Magic? We'd be surprised if they didn't try it. So they did. And people died.

We like mid level games, for the most part. High level games, that's another bag altogether.
 

Firia

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Nejira said:
its interesting to see how the rules themselves get in the way of telling a story in many RPGs, but especially DnD.
When I first got my hands on DnD 3rd edition yonks ago, I was fairly pleased with how detailed the rules to magic to play just streamed out. It felt like the designers had intentionally gone over every scenario to detail their rules just perfectly so. It seemed so great! :)

Then I started DMing the game, and certain things in the rules started to get in the way. Moreso, the guys in my group would hover over their PHBs like a gorram bible. It stopped being about the story, and started being about the mechanical cogs of the rule logic working its way through.

This is where I flex that one paragraph that's in the header of nearly ALL gaming GM books out there; if it conflicts with the game, change it. The GM has the power. And I make sure my players know this. Speed of Plot is a term for me.

I utilize the rules as a guideline. They serve to keep the game stable, fair, and strategic. The fire demon is still immune to fire, and weak to, mm, I'm going to go with water. A 20 on a d20 is a crit hit on anything with vitals. An 18 is still the highest a character (even an npc) can go without magical enhancement. These are all truths of the game. :) But when the story lore calls for something tremendous being created out of the WISH spell (lvl9 wiz/sorc spell), and a player points to their phb and tells me that the spell cannot do that as per the rules, I tell them to STFU, and close their law books.

Sometimes, Lawful alignment is not the best alignment to play a game by. Because then it stops being about story and fun, and starts being about the mechanics of the the rules.

tl:dr) I agree with what you said. :)
 

Vortigar

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How about no adversary at all?

I'm currently running a campaign where the party has to decide about the fate of a One Ring style McGuffin and various factions want a say in that. It's been running for a few months and they're putting together clues as to the how and what of the thing.

Of course I've got a few nasty pieces of various sorts lined up they're going to encounter depending on where they decide to go but there's no real center villain.
 

Callate

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Archon said:
First off, of course I'm oversimplifying. :) I'm writing a series of introductory 2,000 word or less articles. Accusing me of over-simplification is like criticizing the For Dummies guides for being written for dummies.
I recognize that. I also realize that as someone who's been playing these games for nearly thirty years, I am in some ways not your target audience. And even that, in the short run, much of what you offer may be very helpful to new and inexperienced GMs. I just worry that in the long run, some of what you write might create roadblocks in a GM's thinking when they take various things as a given.

Second, for each assumption I make, I provide a common example of a case where the assumption holds true generally. Yes, many very intelligent posters have responded here to explain why, in such-and-such special case, my assumptions are incorrect. But one does not create a primer by attempting to flesh out and answer every special case in which the standard, common assumptions are wrong.
But are the cases all that special? Yes, an eighteenth level wizard in D&D- pretty much any version of D&D- is an incredibly powerful opponent. Once spells like Wish become available, it becomes quite difficult to even envision a single opponent or group of opponents taking them on. However, what are the chances of an evil wizard making it to eighteenth level without accruing some (similarly) powerful enemies? Whatever sort of influence The Adversary is attempting to wield, it undoubtedly comes with its own series of headaches. Arguably, Sauron's "fatal flaw" is that he refined his power towards dealing with a specific kind of opposition, and then was blindsided by what actually led to his downfall- that doesn't necessarily make Sauron "stupid".

Moreover, what does it do for the players' sense of "agency" if The Adversary is consistently at a par with the players? Surely part of the reason for giving players the sense that their decisions matter in the scope of the game world is allowing them a parallel sense that they are making progress towards their goals. Isn't having an enemy who is consistently at a predetermined threat level, no matter the Player Characters' power level, counterproductive to that goal? It seems that over the long term, this is likely to become a transparent and frustrating mechanic to the players.

In a well-realized world, the players are likely to encounter obstacles that have little to do with the character(s) the GM envisions as the players' ultimate adversary. Likewise, it is reasonable to assume The Adversary has goals which require more from them than simply crushing all opposition. It might be wise for a GM to consider how the world works if the players are absent from the equation. What would The Adversary be doing? And if the players are re-introduced, what causes The Adversary to cease doing that? (And if there are particular triggers, might a prudent GM not make certain that they weren't placed where the players could trip them when they're patently unprepared?)

There's a very reasonable question inherent to most "dungeons": if there were really something incredibly valuable there- and in the case of The Adversary, possibly something plan-ruining or life-ending- why isn't it just a series of incredibly fiendish deathtraps? The "Evil Overlord List" pushes this idea into high gear. From one perspective, the answer is obvious: having the players roll new characters every ten minutes isn't much fun. But more practically, there's a reason plenty of real-world organizations whose very existence is dedicated to information and security still find their information stolen and their security breached: having to jump through more than a certain number of hoops to access things you need on a regular basis is tiresome and inefficient.

I guess my over-all point is this: the more "gamey" the reasons for a set of conditions are, the more aware the players will be that their existence and experience is in the GM's hands, not their own. The most fulfilling experience is going to come out of plausible conditions of a plausible world, a world that the PCs are very much a part of, and very capable of having a significant impact upon, but which does not [appear to!] exist for little more reason than creating a series of scaling challenges. I simply worry that limiting villains' reasons for not destroying players to a lack of power or a lack of intelligence is a false dichotomy that may keep GMs from doing what is right and reasonable for their world and their players.

If we want to go back to the Bible, consider how many times kings unsuccessfully sent out their men to kill the Child Of Prophecy?...

I hope this is more useful, and I appreciate that you take the time to correspond with people who reply to your articles.
 

Archon

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Callate said:
I guess my over-all point is this: the more "gamey" the reasons for a set of conditions are, the more aware the players will be that their existence and experience is in the GM's hands, not their own. The most fulfilling experience is going to come out of plausible conditions of a plausible world, a world that the PCs are very much a part of, and very capable of having a significant impact upon, but which does not [appear to!] exist for little more reason than creating a series of scaling challenges. I simply worry that limiting villains' reasons for not destroying players to a lack of power or a lack of intelligence is a false dichotomy that may keep GMs from doing what is right and reasonable for their world and their players.

I hope this is more useful, and I appreciate that you take the time to correspond with people who reply to your articles.
Callate, thanks for the awesome response!

So, for what it's worth, I completely agree with this sentence: "The most fulfilling experience is going to come out of plausible conditions of a plausible world."

My interest in avoiding god-like villains has nothing to do with wanting to have some correct "challenge level" and everything with wanting to create a plausible world. The standard "RPG world" is harder to believe if the villain is god-like. The rules of many RPGs ask us to swallow implausible concepts like unlimited teleportation, scrying, and death spells with no saving throw, and yet somehow assume that "heroes will rise." If villains had those spells, the heroes would never rise...

I might analogize to nuclear weapons in the modern world. There are 201 countries on earth right now. Of those, only 8 are confirmed to have nuclear weapons. And of the 8 with nuclear weapons, 6 actively cooperate to make sure no one else gets them. When Iraq was beginning to go nuclear, for instance, Israel bombed its reactors to make sure it didn't happen. The only way countries are able to go nuclear today is if they do it in secret, or if they have a powerful patron that protects them. And even then, no nuclear state has ever allowed a new nuclear state to arise that could threaten its own predominance.

That's essentially the situation that exists if the villains have god-like power. They have every incentive to make sure no one else reaches that level of power. And they have the power to keep the upstarts from rising. It would be even harder to hide in a fantasy world of scrying, teleporting power word killing foes.

True, god-like villains might not worry about annoying ant-like 1st-4th level characters. But around 9th-12th level, those PCs are beginning to look a bit atomic-powered, and they'll get taken out. So to my mind, if you want a plausible world with plausible conditions, you need to have an answer for why the PCs don't get killed the moment they start to look threatening to the great powers. The reasons really boil down to "good reasons" and "bad reasons". Bad reasons are all variety of stupid/foolish/short-sighted - they could, they should, but they didn't. Good reasons all boil down to "for some reason they actually cannot."

Now, I do know that there is an argument for saying "the villain doesn't take out the PCs for the same reason the US didn't take out North Korea," i.e. they have a powerful patron. That's certainly a viable strategy. The problem I have with this approach is that it's the converse of the "guaranteed epic hero."

Just like campaigns where the heroes are *necessarily* the epic heroes are less engaging for players, so too are campaigns where the heroes are *necessarily* NOT the epic heroes. Having the PC's existence be merely at the whim of their patron, i.e. the DM, is as far from agency as I can imagine.

So I look for other solutions, namely nerfing the most god-like powers, imprisoning the most powerful enemies in some way, etc. Not because I want to only have the players fight Challenge Level appropriate villains, but because the way I approach gamemastering, if my villains *could* and *should* destroy an imminent threat, they do. So as "God" when I design my "Satans" I make sure they aren't all-powerful. That way I can play the Adversary plausibly, and not break the world or the game.

I hope that makes sense and helps put my thoughts in the context of my earlier articles!
 

Crystalgate

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When it comes to detection spells (and actually all spells) I prefer to make a rule that magic isn't "intelligent" or "knows" things. You can use magic to check a specific location, but you can't have it locate a specific person who's moving around. The magic somehow has to find the person it's supposed to locate and since it doesn't "know" where the person is, it's up to the caster to figure out how to direct the magic so it accomplishes what it's supposed to do.
 

lomylithruldor

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Archon said:
True, god-like villains might not worry about annoying ant-like 1st-4th level characters. But around 9th-12th level, those PCs are beginning to look a bit atomic-powered, and they'll get taken out. So to my mind, if you want a plausible world with plausible conditions, you need to have an answer for why the PCs don't get killed the moment they start to look threatening to the great powers. The reasons really boil down to "good reasons" and "bad reasons". Bad reasons are all variety of stupid/foolish/short-sighted - they could, they should, but they didn't. Good reasons all boil down to "for some reason they actually cannot."
In Exalted, when a Solar dies, his essence (divine part that gives him his power) exits the body and go find another source. The "bad" sidereals designed a prison to keep them from reincarnated, but the Deathlords broke the prison to capture the essences and corrupt them. Half of the essences managed to escape.

During the time most of the essences were in prison, the sidereals used other bad guys (the Dragon-Blooded) to form the Wyld Hunt to hunt the reincarnating solars. They used astrology to know where and when the next solar will exalt. So we have the bad guys killing the good guys way before they become a threat. Now that the prison is broken, there's 250 solar essence instead of something like 10. Also, most Dragon-Blooded are more interested in taking the Throne to the Realm instead of participating in the Wyld Hunt.

In your nuclear example, if one country tries to build nuclear weapon, it won't work. If 100 countries try at the same time, some will be more successful just because there's too much to deal with.

So, I would add another good reason: They are dealing with the pests with a good success rate, but there's too much of them. The PC are the one lucky enough to be far on the list (and if those were near the beginning of the list, they would not be the characters being played because they would have no chance of defeating the Big Bad).
 

Uri

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hehe the comments are quickly again bigger than the article, anyway, good stuff again thanks.
 

Archon

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lomylithruldor said:
So, I would add another good reason: They are dealing with the pests with a good success rate, but there's too much of them. The PC are the one lucky enough to be far on the list (and if those were near the beginning of the list, they would not be the characters being played because they would have no chance of defeating the Big Bad).
Awesome point. I haven't had the opportunity to run Exalted, but its background and setting are really cool.