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Nerdarchy > Game Master Tips  > Let players steer the ship! Trials and triumphs of a full-time nerd in a part-time world

Let players steer the ship! Trials and triumphs of a full-time nerd in a part-time world

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By listening to your players and giving them options and choices, you’re letting them direct the action and tell the story they want to. As a bonus, there’s less chance the GM will pigeon-hole themselves with their own narrative.

In the previous installment, I advised GMs to throw players directly into action to start off a new campaign. This is especially useful for groups without regular gaming sessions and/or groups that include new or lapsed gamers. Your goal is to hook the players by immersing them in the world and instilling the sense that their characters’ actions carry water and move the story forward.

By giving them agency from the get-go, the players will be more likely to look forward to the next gaming session. Before you know it, you’ll have a bonafide campaign on your hands, and the best part about it is the unfolding story will be directed by the players. What began with a desire to keep your gaming hobby alive by wrangling a few friends together and convincing them to give your game a shot will, if successful, become their hobby as well.

One way to keep this model going is by preparing multiple options for the characters to pursue. At the same time, it’s good business to keep the fledgling adventurers relatively isolated. This might sound like a dichotomy, as well as more work for the GM, but there are several tricks and tips you can employ to make this work. The objective here is to keep the players interested and invested after starting off with a bang in your first session.

Dungeons amd DragonsStart by identifying the primary villain for your adventure. From this, everything else will flow. Is it a dangerous beast terrorizing the region? A nefarious cult led by a powerful creature? An evil spellcaster whose magical experiments threaten the safety of the area? Whatever villain you choose, think about their motivations and goals. What have they already accomplished before the characters come along, and what is their endgame, if any? In the case of a dangerous beast, it might be that the beast is simply out of its element – a predator that acts on survival instincts when introduced to an unfamiliar environment. A cult might be working to subvert villagers. An evil spellcaster could be learning to use an ancient tome to create an army of skeletons and zombies.

At this step, imagine a few sessions ahead what the climactic encounter might be like for the characters. This is what you’ll be guiding them towards, and along the way allowing players the freedom to reach that goal through different pathways. To keep your players engaged enough to come back to the table a few more times, think about the steps the characters will have to take in order to uncover and reach their foe. Give the players a little tease of what lies ahead and a few clues to spur them into action. From there, let them inform you of the path they follow. Demonstrate to them that it’s not your story they’re merely walking through – it’s their story to tell, in the way they want to tell it.

Whatever the case may be, put some space between the villain and the characters. This could be physical space – their lair might be hidden, or in dangerous territory – or removed from their party through subterfuge. Until they gain the skills, knowledge and experience to venture a confrontation with the villain, keep the characters’ options relatively limited in scope.

Let the threat that the villain represents serve to isolate the characters to some extent. This way they’ll have some freedom to investigate things that intrigue them without going completely off the rails. The dangerous beast makes travel through the wilderness deadly dangerous. The cult employs magical barriers and monstrous allies to restrict escape. The spellcaster’s undead bar the way whenever people stray too far from town. None of these things make it impossible for characters to move beyond the bounds of your adventure. But they’re enough of an impediment to make that a risky proposition. If they want to press forward into danger, by all means they can certainly try.

Employ the Rule of Three

Rule of Three

Generating ideas in groups of three gives players multiple pathways to reach goals, with opportunity to approach scenarios in multiple ways.

The adventure you offer beyond the first session should have the potential to satisfy players’ desire for combat, exploration and social interaction in equal measure. Prepping for this could quickly spiral out of control and lead to a mountain of work for the GM, or a noticeable lack of preparation that will leave everyone at the table floundering – GM and players alike. To mitigate this, think small and keep your ideas loose. Don’t underestimate the value of improvising on the fly. This can sound daunting to GMs of any experience level, but a handful of notes can serve just as well or better than highly detailed maps with carefully designed encounters for each room or area.

Knowing your villain’s motivation and goals, come up with three short ideas for activities related to reaching those goals. For each of these ideas, consider options for the characters to engage with them that involve combat, exploration and social interaction. From there, let your players tell you what they’re doing. Depending on what they decide, you’ll have a good idea what the results of their actions will be.

For my current group, I decided early on that they were stuck on a tropical island under a curse of winter that made travel to and from the island impossible. A cult led by a naga was corrupting villagers, and the island guards had barred anyone from leaving the village to explore the island wilderness for their own safety due to cult activity and monsters roaming the island. (For astute readers steeped in D&D lore, yes, this is essentially “Against the Cult of the Reptile God.”)

Rule of Three

This Venn diagram (consisting of three parts, natch) helps inform how different scenarios can play out.

The cult’s ultimate goal was to subvert the entire population of the island to satisfy the naga’s ego. The wintry curse’s purpose was twofold: outside interference was eliminated, and escape was prevented. If the cult’s goals were met, they would lift the curse and attempt to expand, starting at the nearest port city. Achieving their goals included corrupting the island village’s existing temple devoted to a sea god, kidnapping villagers and bringing them to the naga’s lair via a hidden passage at the village tavern where they would be dominated via magic, and eliminating the threat posed by the village’s wizard protector.

For each of these scenarios, I considered options that the players could employ to tackle them that hit the three pillars of play. If they chose to fight their way through a scenario, I had a list of creatures for them to encounter plus a special set piece battle. If instead they emphasized exploration, they’d run into more traps, puzzles and secret doors. And if they wanted to try and navigate the scenario through talking, they were more than welcome to give that a shot.

This isn’t to say that their choices of approach were explicitly stated, or that they were limited to only one approach to each scenario. Instead, I let the players discover the scenarios on their own. The key for me as GM was to observe and listen to the players talk amongst themselves. Based on what their perspective of a scenario was, I presented them accordingly. For example, they were very cautious about investigating the wizard’s home. Previously, they’d done a lot of fighting and it seemed they wanted to change gears. Checking out the place became an exploration encounter, and my notes indicated that in this case, the wizard was not home and the cultists had not yet infiltrated the place themselves.

I let the players set the tone, and they were paranoid the entire time. They spent about 30 minutes carefully climbing the wall surrounding the manor and looking around the grounds, checking windows and doors and watching from hiding for any dangers. Once inside they investigated various rooms, overcame several puzzles, uncovered lore both related to their quest and for flavor, and ultimately found a secret basement. The wizard kept a magical crystal down there protected by an arcane barrier they managed to disable. At that point, the cultists attacked. They’d been unsuccessful themselves of penetrating the wizard’s manor, so they waited until the adventurers did it for them.

If instead the group had been antsy for some combat, the cultists would have been inside the manor already, and the players would have fought them off, encountering less of the puzzles and traps. Likewise, if they were exhausted and expressed hopes for interaction with the wizard, they would have found him at home, needing their help with the arcane barrier, and fought off a cultist attack for a climax.

There is an out-of-session benefit to constructing adventures this way, too. Rather than write yourself into a box with the story you as GM are trying to tell, you’re leaving it open to endless possibilities that your players are empowered to create – and giving yourself time to react to these developments between sessions. Going into our second session, I didn’t know whether the wizard would be home or whether cultists would have discovered the secrets in the manor. I let the players dictate those outcomes. As a group, our collective imaginations fired and we held true the core concept of RPGs as a shared storytelling experience.

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For the players, the feeling that they are the directors of their characters’ destinies is powerfully reinforced. What began as a one-off D&D session intended to hook new players into the hobby had taken root and started to blossom into a campaign. Players sent me emails with stories about their characters and asked me when we could play next. They imagined their characters more fully. They asked me questions about the game itself and the hobby in general. They started watching live play like Acquisitions Incorporated and Critical Role. One player told me he’d mentioned our game to his teenage niece, who he discovered was also playing D&D with a druid character.

They were hooked.

Since then, I’ve employed the Rule of Three for all of our sessions. We’ve steered our game towards the players establishing an adventuring company, which is a fantastic option for groups that meet sporadically and with irregular party members. Between sessions, players give me a few ideas of what they’d like to do, and I use their feedback to come up with three options for them to pursue during our next session. Between-session communication is incredibly useful and, thanks to technology, super easy, which sounds like a great topic to explore next week.

Until then, stay nerdy!

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Doug Vehovec

Nerditor-in-Chief Doug Vehovec is a proud native of Cleveland, Ohio, with D&D in his blood since the early 80s. Fast forward to today and he’s still rolling those polyhedral dice. When he’s not DMing, worldbuilding or working on endeavors for Nerdarchy he enjoys cryptozoology trips and eating awesome food.

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