Focus on the newbies

I run games in constant fear of boring my players, especially some of the veterans in my group who aren't all that enthused by game elements that might interest newer, less experienced players. I find myself catering to the veterans more frequently by giving them whatever "red meat" pushes their buttons—that might be in-depth roleplaying opportunities or epic battle scenes or scenarios that test their personal codes of honor.

But I need to get over that tendency, because it's more important to focus on the new players for whom roleplaying is a fresh, wonderful endeavor. They're the ones who peruse equipment charts with starry-eyed wonder and take careful notes about what sort of stone the dungeon walls are made out of. They're very likely in the midst of the same "lighting in a bottle" phase that veteran players (me included) find so hard to re-capture.

My fellow player Ben, himself a veteran of countless RPGs, drove this point home recently in an email. Experienced RPGers, he said, can find ways to have fun and get their kicks out of virtually any well-run game. But newer players, when presented with the vast, open-endedness of most RPG settings, might be looking for a few specific things right off the bat. Maybe a nice, succinct dungeon delve, or a way to cast themselves as heroes (or villains) in a sleepy frontier town.

It's a good GM who can recognize this and help encourage their growth. That's something I'm going to do more of in the future.

The end of equipment lists

In my unending quest to find (and use!) cool new game mechanics, I’ve happened upon a real gem from the Gumshoe System. This ruleset, dreamed up by Robin D. Laws and implemented in Fear Itself, The Esoterrorists and Trail of Cthulhu, is designed for investigative campaigns — not hack-n-slash battlemap adventures. As such, the system strips out a lot of the crunchier record-keeping elements, including the notion of equipment lists. Instead, each player has the Preparedness skill; this single stat reflects his or her ability to show up equipped with the right tool for the job.

So if a player needs a chemical torch to illuminate a dark, underwater grotto (as happened in a recent Fear Itself adventure I played), it’s just a die roll away. Clearly, the more complex and/or inappropriate the tool, the tougher the die roll will be, thus countering situations where a highly Prepared player might produce a seemingly endless array of useful, situation-specific gadgets from his or her pocket, just in time to save the group, ad nauseum: the “rocket launcher in your pants” effect, if you’ll permit me to coin a term.

And as much as I like equipment lists and all the bean counting that goes into them, I also really like the Preparedness stat — mainly because it encourages improvisation on the part of both player and GM. A mousy librarian facing down a flesh-eating zombie might not be able to roll high enough to pull a loaded revolver out of her purse — but she stands a pretty good chance of finding an oversized letter opener perfect for skewering an undead abomination.

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In other news, I talked myself out of buying Little Fears, a wonderful little horror game I played back in 2003, at the used book store, by arguing that I've got so many books on my shelf and it would just sit there and ... it's a really cool game and ... maybe it'll still be there if I go back tomorrow ...