ROLE-PLAYING GAMES
GOOD GAME MASTERING
If your calling in life is to inflict pain then should you chose to be a dentist or a game master?
A lot of poor players might hope that you chose the former profession. But if you are not the stereotype game master should you go to the other extreme in your gamesmastering and act as some sort of den mother that protects the player characters in your games from all possible harm and makes sure that no player ever loses a character?
It turns out that running a role-playing game forces us to make some tough choices.
There are even worse mixtures of the two extremes where the gamesmaster's favourite players have their characters protected from the worst that the game throws at them while less favored players have their characters die like flies.
The answer is of course balance, but what else can we do to offer a better game experience to our players?
Here are a few ideas that I have collected during my years of experience as a dungeon master, game master and game designer designing my own role-playing game.
The first thing to mention is that it is important to play to your strengths. I like to think that I am something of an artist, but on the other hand I have a very shaky understanding of maths. During games I would often come across situations where a player had rolled up or designed a hard to believe powerful character (especially in the Champions role-playing game). Often the players command of the rules and game design sheets was far in excess of mine.
I would solve this problem by asking on or more of the other players with a firmer grasp of such things to give any character sheet problems a once over.
I did however produce a newspaper reporting on what had happened the session before with illustrations of the super hero player characters game exploits and produced detailed and creative maps and adversaries.
Due to my less than perfect maths some of the bad guys encountered in the game were surprisingly week and some unusually strong, but I'm pretty sure my players forgave my weeknesses and enjoyed the artistic and creative strengths of my role-playing games sessions.