Welcome to another installment of The Gamemaster. You can read past columns in this series here.
I’m finding through my still-too-brief experience as a Gamemaster that it’s important to vary your sessions and try new things every time. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.
It’s no fun to have every single session feel the same way. Crawling layer through layer of a dungeon and every bit of roleplaying being consumed by combat situation after combat situation can get boring. The best sessions I’ve had so far mix combat, roleplaying, mystery, puzzles, hard decisions for the characters. Finding the right mix for your group is like a form of alchemy and the only way to get that perfect mixture is trial and error.
A couple of sessions ago, I opened up the game with a puzzle for the players to solve. I designed enough clues and intrigue to get them through the puzzle, offering them to take rolls for hints if needed. The players worked together in character to determine how to make the door in the room they were locked in appear and move forward. I had no idea how that game mechanic would play out with these players, but it worked wonderfully. Since this group of players like those sorts of challenges, I’ve been looking for ways to incorporate more of those problem solving situations. I haven’t found one yet, but I know that if the opportunity presents itself, it won’t be wasted on these players.
In the last session I GMd, I was excited to try out yet another new game mechanic, confident that it would work really well. I knew the characters would be on the hunt for the man they’ve been working with to form the resistance, who had been abducted by a Captain of the Guard. They took a number of unexpected turns before finally deciding to bite that particular plot thread, but once they did, I knew there would be a chase when they finally stumbled on the place he was being held. Once they tripped the alarm, the guards would knock out their captured compatriot and run with him covered in a burlap sack.
Then, once that chase began, another pair of guards with a similar sack would light off in another direction, and another would do the same. This was to serve to split the party in three different directions and add an element of the unknown, since they weren’t sure which group to follow.
I had purchased Paizo’s Chase Deck which builds on the alternate rules for chases that were presented in the Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide. Basically, you plot out the chase in advance, creating skill checks on every card for players to pass before they can move to the next card. Instead of playing it out on a massive swath of map, you can place characters on the backs of these cards, each representing about 40 feet of space.
I thought it was going to add a layer of dynamic action to the chase that would aid in keeping the story pace up.
I was wrong. For one, I’m not sure I adequately explained how the chase would work, which was a failing on my part and made a couple of the players confused. Additionally, since there were moderate to difficult checks on every card, there wasn’t much chasing, there was a whole lot of rolling.
Though I wasn’t happy with how this specific game mechanic worked the first time I tried running it, I’m very glad that I tried it. Having tried it, I understood that if I introduce a new mechanic to my players, I need to first explain how it’s going to work thoroughly. And I know that if I want to use cards to recreate a chase, I should have plenty of blank cards in between the harder checks to keep the characters moving forward and add that sense of tension to the chase and like their quarries would get away. I also know that I need to not lose the stat block I’d originally created for the guards, and use stats for some random guard picked out of the NPC codex. The statchecks I’d assembled on the Chase cards were easily passed through by my players, but the guard NPCs had negatives to every check and didn’t really move anywhere at all.
But I’m not going to let myself be discouraged from having tried these new things. I’ve learned a lot, my players have learned a lot, and we’ve evolved one step further as a group telling a collaborative story.
I can’t emphasize that enough: vary the sessions and try new things. It’s the only way to grow.
Be sure to check out other columns in the Gamemaster series!