Satine Phoenix DM Tips: The Beauty of Limitations

hello and welcome to GM tips the show are my friends and I share with you our thoughts and suggestions on how to game master your role-playing game I’m your host Satine Phoenix co-creator of mais Arcana and a guild addict for Dungeons & Dragons today’s theme is the beauty of limitations [Music] Gaming planning big picture epic stories weeks of preparation we’ve covered all that breaking rules one shot supplements and random generators yeah we’ve talked about that too today we have sex car on the show discussing one-page games but first I want to talk with you a bit about my process behind making and playing these kind of games from mostly a GM’s point of view but there’s also stuff for players in here too tip number one minimalism and the creative process one of the things you learn in art school is how beneficial limitations are your teacher says use these colors this material this time frame in this theme suddenly the possibilities of what you can make are lessened which is amazing because you can focus your creativity on those few items without limitations some storytellers get choice paralysis or go off on tangents limiting choices allows you to communicate more efficiently things like story are more clear I like to use this in my adventures players will overthink everything simplifying takes my prep time down as well let the players do a lot of the brain work I know that a pastry on the table is just a pastry the players think of all the horrible possibilities this pastry can be because their imagination is already at work tip number two improv we talked about this a lot but it’s more than just a skill actors work on improv is about responding to other people’s actions in improv everyone listens to one another in relation to playing at a table it’s not just the gamemaster listening to their players or the players listening to their game master it’s everyone listening and reacting and participating with each other and the GM improv panel at GenCon we play characters based on three or four items given to us on the spot class race proficiency and flaw we weren’t playing a specific fantasy game and yet we all understood each other stripped down the game is played with a d20 and the game master told the player when to roll based on what the GM thought was important we all had a lot of fun even though the game master had one minute max to read the entire scenario tip number three knowledge is power for players when you understand your character you’re better able to respond to others you can have tons of backstory or a basic character sheet but know how to navigate your character sheet know your actions your reaction bonus actions well and you’ll not only be able to respond to the scenarios your game master throws at you but you’ll also respond to what your fellow players are doing make a cheat sheet if that helps you react faster color coding or using index cards to make your modifiers and damage easier to see is welcomed you’re in a game with other players play with them as well as a game master for gems you don’t have to know the whole world and memorize all the NPC’s the players don’t know what you don’t know that’s an advantage you have trust yourself I repeat trust yourself trust that you’ve played enough games watch enough movies read enough books that you have inside of you a well of NPCs locations monsters guides or taverns to pull from what’s important to me as a GM is everyone has fun and gets a chance to make choices I’m there to set up a story with a goal the players choose a direction and I have the choice and navigate them back on track or play with them based on the ideas I get in the game that I didn’t think of I don’t need much to tell a story give me a sentence and a couple minutes and I’ll weave you through an experience you’ll never forget I could roll on but instead let’s talk to the showrunner for geek and sundry’s twitch channel writer and comedian sax man it’s so good show we work together for I think as much as 10 years 8 10 yeah actually long time your brain is amazing I hope so I had so much fun with you on the pre-interview and talking about one-shots I think is really important not one shots one page games yeah you can actually fit a lot of information on one page games I’m looking over there at honey hi yeah this is this is this is an RPG this is all the rules you need this is all the story this is everything honey heist in one page and this is it was literally handwritten and photocopied that’s how one page it is that’s beautiful before we talk about how many of them there are on there let’s talk about the importance of mechanics and understanding mechanics in order to develop games like this well there’s sort of a threshold that happens when it comes to rules right so when I started playing D&D in sixth grade in second edition we didn’t really understand the rules um and that was a good thing because we didn’t think we had to so at some point we just rolled dice and it kind of seemed to make sense and the game flowed very effectively but as I grew up and I read more and my collection of D&D books filled shelves I got so into the rules that I stopped trying to tell the story and sort of trying to essentially apply rule mechanics in a row and you you get so caught in the minutiae of the the rules of the game that you lose sometimes the world that you’re in so sometimes but it’s hard when you’ve taught been taught a rule to disregard it yeah so understanding what the mechanics are trying to do is the number one key to sort of smooth effective role playing and with a one page RPG you have one rule like I’ll show you my favorite this is roll for shoes this is literally this is the entire RPG and it’s played with these sixes so these are my lucky few sixes I carry them with me everywhere their their gravity dice and so they just roll really nice yeah please do well they’re there um so these are our lucky two sixes this is an entire RPG you can play with all your friends ten friends can play this waiting to get on a plane it’s very effective and because the mechanics are so small you’re forced to do all the storytelling to sort of make make sense of it all and we can get into the brilliance that is roll for shoes later but when you when you’ve paired down RPG to essentially one role or one concept like in what is all at bubblegum in the game all in a bubblegum you have a number of gum if you want to kick ass you roll more than that if you want to do anything else chew gum you roll less than that that’s the whole game but you can build incredible stories and play together all night long and go through like ten six packs while you’re doing it and it’s really fun and but you understand what the mechanics are trying to get you to do they’re adding that little element of chance and they’re sort of pushing things along so when you go back to D&D you’re like oh I’d get it understand what this perception check is doing it’s not just some perfunctory thing that we all do perception checks are actually kind of a really cool way for you to pass the ball back to the player yeah so it’s like all right well when you are asking me what you see in the room and I ask you to roll a perception check I can also say what are you looking for and what do you think might be in this room and okay you’ve rolled your check really high oh oh now I can go even further with this and if you take every little mechanic that you’re going to use on the regular with any game and you understand how it pushes the story forward it makes for better play so do you like it when people when you have a big set of rules and some game masters just kind of like okay I’m not gonna use these mhm does that does do you like it well there’s sort of a player opt-in for rules so when I’m sitting down and I’ve got a stack of books next to me I’m sort of telling my players we’re gonna be playing by the rules so if you have a special mechanic or if you’ve worked out some sort of tweak of the rules and I do it myself I’m working right now on trying to figure out how to make a lizard man wrestler in fifth edition and I’m trying I’m going through all the rules to try and get exactly perfect and exploit every little change in nuance and weight of his bite is 1d6 what does that mean and and if I’m that kind of player and I’m at that kind of table I want to be able to do that but if we sit down and I’m like all right here’s my notebook let’s play D&D I’m essentially telling you the player I just want to make this fun for you and I’m the kind of I’m definitely kind of GM that it’s like all right well you want to jump out of this you want to jump off this hippo Grif and you want to catch on to this flying balloon and then you want to jump up in there and you want to fight the kobolds yeah that happens I don’t need to roll that that’s amazing like of course you’re gonna do that because if you fell ten thousand feet to your death the game would be over like and so like and if you if you come to your players and say listen we all know the rules they’re fun they’re great guideline the mechanics makes sense we know what rolling to attack is all about but at the end of the day I just wanted us to all collectively to tell a great story and I’m not looking to make it about like no lawyers here yeah then I think it works I think a good way to do that would be having if like a lot of people have pre being characters mhm so if you hand them a fully fleshed out character sheet that you print out multiple pages that says this is the game we’re gonna play or if you do like Keith Baker like here’s one page and here’s a handful of numbers and a couple questions that’s the kind of game gonna play so I think that’s a really good way to communicate to your players well I also think that you learn in playing different systems too so if you’re playing mean D all the time and people are all into the D and B rules then they can get very comfortable being like well the fireball does this and here’s how it does it but if you’re like well let’s play three other systems in a row and then come back to D and D that lack of familiarity is gonna force them to fall back into story which is the same thing that a 1-page RPG does you don’t have any rules to depend on so now you’ve got to tell me why it’s cool now you have to explain to me why you crack your whip this way because you’re not gonna you’re not going to go back to a couple rules and show me exactly what the result is we’re gonna decide the result together because we have only this to work off of and for me when you’re when you’re trying to get the best the game that feel most epic are often the ones where at the end if you said hey wait which one mechanics did we use today and everyone goes like did we open the book do we not open the book who knows that’s the game you want to be in that’s the one that feels like you’ve suddenly written a movie together those are the ones that you try to explain to your friends and they can’t get it because they weren’t there those are the ones where you lose track of what’s happening and if you know the mechanics really well like if you know D&D fifth edition absolutely every basic mechanic and the players handbook it can almost fade away and you’ll never know and a one-pager by gzz it’s two rules or one rule or three rules DNA is a little bit harder but if you’re like looking at something like I don’t know riffs like that’s never gonna let you be in that place so the cool thing about these is mechanics are simple the story you can navigate them through but there’s not a lot of lore I mean I’m looking at all the pages you have here it was like twelve games and they’re just like wait twelve pages there are there there are one page RPGs and here’s a couple of examples so here’s honey heist where your bears and you’re robbing honey con 2017 here’s big mother effing crab truckers where your truckers and your crabs this is tactical waifu one of my favorites this is where your japanese school kids your TT schoolgirls and the hottest boy in school got kidnapped and you’re gonna go rescue and lift some machine guns this one if everyone is John where you’re all the personalities inside a person’s head and you fight for the one control of one body swords and scrolls is kind of like a mini D&D which is kind of nice it’s very simple I think it probably borrowed art I hope they hope they license that and then here is this is leiserson feelings which is basically Star Trek the RPG in one page and then this is all in a bubble gun which we talked about earlier which is basically kicking ass and chewing gum and just one set of rules none of these really have a lot of lore around them you’re sort of forced to build the world around them but there are also rules light or heavy RPGs which are you know it’s a whole book of the world and then the last page is literally like and here’s how you play the game I guess if you want to you know and another one that is sort of fun mechanics is like goblin quest goblin quest is a whole book and where each person plays five goblins because goblins are so death prone that any mistake you do you die so you have to have five and that that’s a big book and has a lot of Lord and as a lot of alternate rules and everything but it’s basically the same mechanic it’s one page at the end of the day and you can even look at stuff like fiasco Fiasco is essentially a rules rule simple world heavy RPG it may not be in a page but it works kind of like that and so you have to build the world world around them which is great too because you can play all at a bubblegum you can play all the bubblegum like you know sort of them scenario like the movie it’s clearly based on you can play sabi RPG it’s a space RPG it’s a bunch of kids sort of you know stranger things style it’s you’re on a plane that just got hijacked like whatever you want to do all the bubblegum is there because the rules are the rules yeah but are you making it all up or do you like how do you allow the players to be involved in that well I always like to imagine all roleplay as collective storytelling and with you know when you look at someone like Matt Mercer and the amazing world he builds around it it’s hard to see exactly where the collectiveness of that storytelling is it’s definitely there it’s the same percentage those players are adjusting that story the same way that he is he just has the pretty pretty words but but every time he says how do you want to do this he’s asking them to contribute to the story essentially right so in a in a one-page RPG you literally can just say okay what do you pick up in this room and they can pick up whatever they want because they just say it’s there you know what I mean and so you sort of you basically give the player a little more agency and it allows them to develop the universe around them or like with with dick and Johnson let’s show that we play here on geek and sundry where we use the all out of bubblegum rules I let those two characters literally hit anything so I’m like how do you want to get from here to Washington DC and if they say we tie eight fan votes together then that’s definitely how it works that games a comedy but you can do the same thing in a in a more serious RPG you know you when you say we did an RPG and all role for shoes was role pursuit it was a one-off role for shoes game that we played with the cast of Eric’s t-midi RPG and it was kind of a stranger things it sort of thing so I’m like alright which kids are you you know how you’re all kids what where do you live what’s going on what’s in your house and they told me the whole stories around them and in that they basically had a lot of control because if they’re like oh well I’m a sports champion well then okay sure now your character can do all those things and now you have all that equipment or if they said well my dad’s a cop well now there’s a gun in that house you know what I mean you know and and but but if they also if they said the same thing like if at the very beginning like well I’m pretty sure my parents on a gun can I go get it then yep sure what it’s not for me to tell you the universe if we’re playing on a two by five card you know or a three by five card like the standard people use never mind that’s actually interesting allowing the players to really build the world because you’re there to facilitate their fun and these are also playful these stories don’t seem serious at all like these one-pagers they can be it’s interesting that the mechanics certainly don’t need to be that you can facilitate any kind of game people want to play and and I can I can tell a lot of stories about very simple RPGs but but they tend to be more fun they tend to be more casual I actually think that they’re sort of a steam release for role players who get like real serious you know you’ve just rated the zombie key for the 90th time and you keep losing or you having trouble finding that table of players you like I want to play an RPG where I just have fun that’s that’s kind of what these can be but they can be serious and you can really craft great incredible stories you know what actually is it essentially could be considered a one-page RPG with a lot of lore thread it’s one mechanic it’s just the dread tower and everything else yeah and and of course an in that in that by creating your characters and saying what you’re doing and creating your backstory you’re telling the story back to the game master and so like that that’s that’s that’s a very serious experience so there’s a lot of ways that you can go in any direction but it’s really about saying okay what is in the room with you that you want to use I want to use it this way of course you can where do you wanna go with it of course you can go there it’s a lot of saying yes it’s a lot of crafting stories but also being ready to take what they give you and build that universe yes the goal is to be a lot less like those early video games where as you walked into a room you would like see the white cells around you’re slowly fading into the actual background as they load it in like you want to try and load quick you want to get ahead of them but you also want to let them go wherever they want I’m going to ask you three questions go ahead what is your pregame house role like all right well I mean it depends on the system obviously which I’m sure I’m not the first DM to say that but my number one thing when it comes to like pre prepping players my house rule is usually that I want people to do everything as much as they can in character if they if they possibly can because I think that’s how you get lost in games so and some people are not willing to at all they’re like my character who is on the sheet does the thing that I’m telling you and I’m gonna roll dice and that’s fine I’ll play with that person for the rest of my life and never be upset but if you can see like I jump on the table and I grab the thing you like you know and I remember once we played together with chloe dykstra yeah we won’t be like 360 thing and it was a great game and like the second it went to my character for the first like Rp moment and i dropped into character you could see everyone be like oh this is where we’re at yeah and what I try to do is do that with the characters with the players right away I’m like yeah be your character show us your character if you’re a lizard man talk like a lizard man let’s do it let’s have fun and and the more they get into it then again I’m looking for building epic stories for the bar after the game and the number one way to do that is they just be your character nice question number two favorite you a moment well this is actually one that people can look up I played role for shoes role for shoes is a really interesting system in that you start with one skit stat you start with do anything one and if you roll a six without doing whatever you did you get that stat so if you’re climbing a fence and you roll a six you get climb fence one and so that you can well then you roll two dice to climb fences and so on or the convents – whatever and then if you climb a fence again I roll a six then you can get like get over barbed wire three and so your character basically builds in a weird way like you do your character develops out around you you have to play it to sort of understand it and I played it with a bunch of really cool role players it was it was that same it sort of stranger things parody if you will that we did on in Eric’s TV RPG and you know normally in that game people traveled you know your character forces you into being very weird because you roll a bunch of dice and you end up being like I am Susan of the flaming beard and you’re like this but in this one it got serious it got interesting it got compelling and we had we had these four kids trapped in a house with a terrible monster and like they liked it there was a coming out story and there were like having these emotional turns and two characters kind of fell for each other and then after we wrapped it up and sort of dealt with the monster I let them sort of say where are you kids end up and just hearing them take what we had just essentially made together with no prep and build these epic stories of like growing up together I was like okay this I get it now I get how this card can be the most powerful role play tool I have and that’s on the VOD on Twitch you can check it out if you want to and you can watch these characters like get scared and whatever and again they’re playing with a pile of these sixes and some weird ideas and and a special mechanic I developed called kid logic which allowed them to basically do anything as long as it would make sense to kids and it was the one of the best games I’ve ever played question number three quick tip to the audience pass the ball as a DM I think it’s very easy to fall into the trap of trying to paint the world as much as you can trying to explain everything that’s going on I try and give it back to the players every chance I can anytime I can let them tell me what’s going on I want them to do it I know Keith Baker talks about how he you know asked them tell me which zombie is in this horde I’m the same way I want I want it if you if the if the players have handed you the agency hand it back to them it’s their it’s their world to build and you’re just facilitating it and it will always be a better game and at the end of the day no one’s going to accuse you of not having done the work because passing that ball can we hard sometimes getting characters out of their shell can be hard sometimes but every time somebody every time the players are like okay what’s in this room just sort of as best you can without being a jerk look back at them say I don’t know what is in this room and it will make a better story that’s our show for today thank you sax Burke for coming to my own problem where can we find you on the Internet aside from geek and sundry uh well the best place is probably saving throw show which is another twitch channel I used to be on I did Phoenix Don come in there for two seasons well for one season than sort of produced the next check it out it’s really worth it cool as always I’m Satine Phoenix at setting Phoenix you can ask me GM tip questions at hashtag ask Satine and find me every Sunday at noon on maser connoisseur phone echo on twitch.tv slash mais Arcana and every Tuesday night dungeon mastering on twitch.tv slash D and E thank you so much for watching us here on geek & sundry see you next time except for you would you please and GMOs out of here okay let’s make your honey heist bear yes you’re gonna need one of my lucky D sixes and go ahead and roll that once you are an incompetent Oh roll that one more time you are an incompetent black bear yeah and I’m gonna roll this d8 who is wearing a flat cap oh like mine and and also I’ll roll this one for you you are the thief alright so from there we can build the whole world of teams and honey Kahn has no idea what’s going to hit it so let’s get started and you can roll your bears at home and we’ll see what we can do we’re gonna steal that honey [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Sage Advice D&D

Questions on Dungeons & Dragons answered by designers

Widgets

Satine Phoenix DM Tips: The Beauty of Limitations

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Share this:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply