“Who will rid me of this foul monster? Who will rid me of this pernicious bandit, Gerulf?”
Thus began an evening of roleplaying fun played off-the-cuff with some really rather surprising results.
Recently we’ve been struggling to get the Friday Night Roleplay group together for a game. At first it was the erratic shift patterns of the various professionals who meet at our table – all of whom work uncanny hours. Last time it was my own pressures at work that led me to cancel. We’ve been working towards running an SF game too… but, although the players have kept up their end and created characters, it has been my own failure to prep that led to the situation last night.
We had no game. We had a full house.
What’s a GM to do?
Game on!
Step One: Let everyone know that, altthough the expected game can’t progress, you are ready to receive everyone who wants to come and roll some dice.
Step Two: Choose an easy-to-pick-up game system and get ready to improvise.
Step Three: Grab a random dungeon map, open a link to behindthename.com, think up a game premise (see the opening quotation), and ask everyone to bring some dice.
Step Four: Give everyone a characterisation sheet and a character sheet; run the quickest creation sequence you can.
Step Five: Run the opening scene and get the players moving.
Setting It Up
Going Old School
Fast and Loose
Random Map
Summing Up
- Forced improvisation. Clearly, I now realise, I GM better when I don’t have much to work with. Instead of ruffling through notes looking for the next description or detail, I spent my evening listening to and engaging with the players. I used their ideas as much as my own. We all had fun.
- Low-level Rules. C&C is easy to run. Yes, I did some page flipping to check three things (spell descriptions, damage and healing rules, and double-checking the assassin’s abilities), but it was actually unobtrusive and only necessary because I was running things for the very first time. Fewer rules leads to more description and better quality roleplay.
- Stolen Details. I stole a dungeon map. I nicked some Goblin stats from a module. I ransacked the player’s suggestions. Putting it together, we created our own tale of adventure. It felt good too.
- Willing Players. The guys wanted to play. They wanted a good night. They went with the flow. They didn’t moan about yet another character creation phase, or a change of system, or me letting them down with the planned game. They ran with it. They excelled. They made me laugh out loud with their enthusiastic play.
- Good Advice. The accumulated wisdom of several good GMs paid off for me. There’s Jamison’s guidance first. Added to that was a remembered comment from Matthew Finch about placing a time limit on the adventure and his quote, “rulings not rules”. There’s the advice given in Castles & Crusades about running the game. And the thoughts and advice from commentators here and on other blogs, especially Blood of Prokopius. Thanks are due to every one of these people.
Its nice to know that the player had clearly signalled that he wanted to stalk and kill this mage with his special ability. Gutwurt’s player risked stealing this dramatic moment when he charged the figure