Writing up the section of GM advice for Hundred Dungeons. Thought I’d post here to share. Some significant overlap with Principia Apocrypha, but I’ve tried to drill down just a bit more. Needs an editing pass, so this is still a WIP.
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Every GM has their own style. While there’s plenty to learn from one another, no one has cracked the code on how all GMs should run a game. Experience, observation, and careful listening will teach you. The goal of becoming a great GM is a long-term pursuit, but there’s no better time to start than now.
Your game is your own. The tools in this volume can help you with tips and tricks, and point you to the wider world of creative and inspired GM advice, but in the end, you should embrace what brings the most fun to you and your players. The conversation on how to GM roleplaying games is an ever-flowing river — so let’s get swimming.
USING RULES
Rules guide your players’ expectations and help you maintain consistency. Many GMs refer to “rule zero,” a reminder that you can agree to change any rule that’s interfering with the fun of the group. You may want to give the game a try as designed, but I’m not your boss.
The rules should serve your goals. You don’t serve theirs. Throwing rules out can be the right choice when they’re disrupting a smooth game, spoiling an effect or tone you want, or damaging relationships. As we said at the beginning of Volume 1, you can reduce the rules down to players describing actions and the GM describing consequences, and the game still works.
Some rules are really tools in diguise, presenting opportunities for players or GM to create and interpret new elements. Examples include traits, conditions, spells, crafting, investing gold, called shots, and more. Use these tools to enshrine how the player characters reshape the world around them.
In Hundred Dungeons, we want players to think creatively, try things that no one else would think of, and express their characters’ personalities. To accomplish this, you need to get their minds off the rules and into the fiction of the game.
Lead with the Fiction
The number one thing you can do to create a sense of immersion and engagement is to lead with the fiction.
Whenever you or a player describes something that happens in the game, start by describing what happens in the fiction: what they do that the others see, hear, feel, smell, or taste. Describe your spell components and how you use them. Describe the way you leap or swing a weapon or open a lock.
Once you’ve described what happens in the fiction, then you can clarify what’s happening in the game rules, such as declaring which spell you cast. This may take practice to remember, but it will get your players invested and thinking from their characters’ point of view.
Use Traits to Inspire Action
When they don’t know what to do, players will sometimes look to their character sheet for help. When this happens, encourage them to focus on their traits, which provide clues to who they are and what they do. These traits are interpretable, which is far more useful for creativity than seeing what exploits and spells will let them do. Traits from NPCs and the area being explored offer similar opportunities.
USING STORY
A roleplaying game creates a narrative, but it isn’t a “storytelling game,” at least not in the sense that players are recounting stories. The story in your game emerges organically from character choices. Don’t dwell too much on pre-written or pre-planned stories. Let the game be decided one turn, one description at a time. That’s your story, and it belongs to everyone at the table.
To that end, the GM shouldn’t plan a list of scenes that happen in a prescribed order. Let the players lead by deciding where to go and what to engage with. When they come up with strange ideas, reward and embrace them.
USING PREPARATION
So how do you know what to prepare if the players get to decide where to go and what to do?
Prepare Situations
If you prepare a pre-determined story, you’re making assumptions about where the players want to go, what they’ll do, and in what order. You might not be wrong, but as soon as they make a choice you didn’t expect, your plans are broken. There’s a lot of opportunity for that in a prescribed linear story. It’s brittle.
A rewarding game isn’t about players guessing where you want them to go so their story can play out. Instead, we want to prepare a flexible, resilient scenario where choices can change the course of events and nothing is set in stone.
The best way to create these scenarios is to prepare a situation filled with opportunity. It has boundaries that keep your preparation manageable, but the players have agency to move and act as they want within them. This is often called a sandbox.
In this metaphor, the sand represents the map key, where descriptions of each location can be found. But a sandbox usually wants more than that. You need some sand toys, which represent NPCs, items, mysteries, events, factions, and other tools for you and players to move around the map and smash into each other.
Manage the Scope
You control the scope of the scenario you’ve prepared, and thus the amount of your preparation. For contained scenarios of one or two sessions, keep it to one major location surrounded by some interesting but brief things to discover. These sites or encounters should directly tie into the major location.
Surprise Yourself
Dynamic scenarios use tools that can respond to what the players do. Empty locations or ones with static contents are at risk of being boring. The chaos of the unexpected brings uniqueness, surprise, and fun because it requires creativity and interpretation.
Randomness introduces chaos and delight to your game. If that appeals to you, most of the tables in Hundred Dungeons are numbered, so you can use them for table rolls for a little extra randomness in your scenario. Experiencing surprise as the GM is a rewarding way to keep up your own engagement. You’re a player too, after all.
USING CHALLENGES
A game of Hundred Dungeons should offer more than trivial challenges and unnoticed consequences. This is a game of facing danger, after all. But challenge isn’t just about difficulty level. “Roll X on your die to keep going” repeated thirty times over the course of an evening isn’t what roleplaying games are about.
Opportunities, not Barriers
The challenges in your game should present choices with equally interesting ramifications. If failure means the game can’t continue, you’ve fallen into one of the classic blunders of scenario design.
Part of this involves not determining in advance what the players need to choose. If there’s a big “boss fight” in one location, and that boss never moves or takes action, then you’re already putting players in the position of needing to find where you’ve hidden their fun.
Similarly, don’t lock crucial items, rewards, or characters behind binary pass-or-fail rolls. The secret door should hide optional content. Failing to pick a lock shouldn’t end all progress toward the characters’ goals.
Keep Solutions Open
Don’t decide in advance on a single solution to a challenge. Monsters can be bribed or distracted. Locked doors can be blasted or circumnavigated. The unexpected answer is often creative and more fun, so stay open to oddball solutions. Similarly, try challenges to which you haven’t thought of any answer. Just be sure to keep another path available.
Combat is not the “Real” Game
Because a number of rules in the game apply to combat situations, it can be easy to think of a scenario as a string of enemies that need to be killed in order to get at the rewards. Video games have in many cases exacerbated this misconception.
Consider the deadly risk of combat, and that XP is awarded not for killing enemies, but for accomplishing goals and investing treasure in important causes. In light of this, using trickery, persuasion, or careful planning to avoid combat is often a wiser course.
Don’t fall into the trap of treating Combat as the phase where the “real” game takes place, and reducing other activities to noninteractive “cutscenes.” The real game is pursuing character goals through whatever means introduce the greatest chance of success.
Don’t Balance Threats, Telegraph Them
Imagine a GM announcing that no challenge will ever overcome the player characters, and that risk of failure is zero. All the tension and drama of adventure would be gone. Your job is to adjudicate consequences to player choices, and that involves allowing them to experience the chance of failure.
The most enjoyable series of challenges has variety. Some are easy, some are serious. When players choose, they will often end up in deadly situations, or situations in which success is nearly impossible. Of course, that can be frustrating.
Rather than painstakingly balance every challenge, offer chances to gather clues and discover information about the nature of the threats the characters face. Especially where risk of death appears, giving players hints and warnings preserves their agency.
None of the above is to say that it’s wrong to adjust challenge level during play. Often published scenarios assume things like character level, number of players, or player expertise. If you feel you’re putting too much hurt on your players, or that the challenges have become too trivial, adjust. We’ll discuss ways to adjust challenge level during play in the next chapter.
USING ALLIES AND ENEMIES
Fantasy games are filled with bizarre and wondrous creatures. The specific statistics for various creatures you can use to populate your scenarios is found in Ch. 2: Allies and Enemies. Each creature has a stat block, which distills the creature to essential information you’ll need on hand to use it in the game.
A creature’s stat block is only a starting point. You’re free to choose optional features from its entry, change its level, add traits, and give it equipment and resources. The real impact these creatures have, however, is their relationship to the world and how they help or hinder the player characters in their own pursuits.
A monarch doesn’t need a high Strength score to rule with an iron fist. A merchant might be weak, without weapons or magic, but connections to a dangerous faction might make them entirely unassailable.
USING THE ENVIRONMENT
The world is moving. This principle extends from the widest scope of the campaign map to the smallest area of the dungeon. Area traits are an excellent way to create an active element within the environment the players are exploring.
When your scenario doesn’t provide a description that works as an area trait, make one up! Place a slippery grease puddle, a broken lever, a heap of clay jars, a leftover illusion, a friendly ghost haunting, a forgotten ring, a ring of mushrooms, a bloody spoon, a mysterious device, or a dark chasm. Especially if you don’t know what it’s for, these traits add interaction to the environment and encourage players (or your NPCs) to hatch creative plans.
USING MAGIC
This is a game of swords and sorcery. The swords are provided by the players, but in many instances the sorcery is provided by the setting and the environment. Strange residual magic, perilous entities from other planes of existence, and ancient enchanted artifacts should fill your scenario to the brim.
Player characters in Hundred Dungeons, are by design anchored in reality. They discover, collect, and learn magic, but it’s rarely part of their nature. To achieve the sense of genre that this game aspires to, you must intrude on that reality with the environment.
When describing a location, push toward extremes. Create magical effects that are specific, surprising, unique, and not simply mathematically powerful.
As we established, the magic detailed in the Player’s Guide isn’t the extent of the magic that exists in the world. You can and should add new items, spells, crafting formulae, and places of power to your scenarios to lend a sense of depth and infinite possibility to magic.