Leonardus he/him Posted February 24, 2014 Posted February 24, 2014 (edited) I'm going to be running a MAG game with a couple of friends in a couple of days and I'm looking for help from the awesome folk here at the 17shard. I am going to be narrating, since I'm the only person who has read all of the novels, to be honest I have only played the world of darkness vampire RPG and that was a lot of fun (even if my characters ended up dying in hilarious ways) so I don't have a lot of experience playing role playing games. I have never ran a campaign, so primarily I am looking for help on how to go about making an entertaining story for my players: There's only 1 out of 4 people participating that has any inkling on the mistborn world so I will have to introduce them to the metals, the worlds, the cultures and the MAG's rules so If I could get a little bit of help doing that that would be great I'm also rather curious about how to handle difficulty as some of these players can be quite clever, so while at first I might send them against generic guards and whatnot, I don't want to send them out against say a mistborn or a steel inquisitor and get the entire group decimated. Edited February 24, 2014 by Leonardus
Claincy he/him Posted February 24, 2014 Posted February 24, 2014 Ok, I don't have time to write up a huge post just now so I'll paste in some things I've said previously and link to other potentially useful threads. This is copied from a message I wrote for the same purpose for someone else when they were planning to run their first game (a once off rather than a campaign.) Some of this is really just general narrating advice. I personally think that, relatively speaking, the MAG isn't as good at one-shots in comparison to longer campaigns as a lot of other RPG's due to its very heavy character and narrative focus. All the same, one-shots can work, they just have to be run a bit differently. In a normal campaign I give the players a lot of control. I am currently only running one campaign, but there are 5 crews in it Sometimes a crew will have an idea for a job they want to pull and I always try to encourage that. Most of the time I try to work in "prompts" that they will want to follow up on. How they follow up on them and which ones they focus on I leave up to them. I have an overall masterplan for the campaign but it isn't so much a discrete sequence of events as a large number of different forces and factions and their goals and aspirations as well as some plans of how they tie together. So it is kind of like an open-world playground, I don't know how a lot of things will turn out yet, it will depend on what they do. Unfortunately this level of player freedom and control doesn't really work for a one-shot. For that I would suggest having a relatively detailed plan for a single simple job, it could be raiding a manor or similar for example. Create a couple of NPC's who they could get information off, they might not use all of them, but that's fine. You could just have them roll influence and give them info directly. That is notably faster, but less interesting than framing it with an informant meeting or similar. Your choice. The planning and information gathering/introducing the job stage I would expect to take maybe 30mins. Any more than that and your players might get bored depending on the type of people they are. Some people like to plan and plan and plan and plan. With a one-shot you really need to make sure that the game keeps moving and that the players don't get bogged down on one thing. There should certainly be some planning, wouldn't feel right without it. But sooner or later they need to move on to the action. I'm going to use the manor raid example for a bit here, but the same general ideas should apply regardless of the specific job. Have a plan for the manor. It doesn't have to be a blueprint or anything. But you should at least have a rough idea of the important parts. Where is the objective? Where is the lord's chamber? Where is the guards chamber? etc. Come up with a couple of rough plans yourself for how they could accomplish the objective. For example: -run in and smash anything that gets in the way -sneak in and try to avoid detection -get hired on as a gardener or guard and then make the switch Plan out a number of challenges, some of these could effect multiple of these plans, some might effect only one. Just make sure that you have ideas for challenges for each of your plan ideas. Plan out a number of "twists", unexpected things that could go wrong or change the circumstances or the way players perceive the circumstances. Some relatives arrive late at night from a long journey while the crew is undertaking the raid. It turns out that the "objective" is actually a person that your employers want you to kidnap, or rescue as the case may be. Finally design a few NPC's. I normally design their character and give myself a rough idea of their place in the scheme of things then modify them and fill out their character as fits the situation. It's a lot easier to adjust a previously designed character to fit a role than to come up with one on the spot. So at this point you have: -an objective -ideas of how to accomplish it -source/s of information -challenges -twists -characters Another thing you may want to do is have a quick brainstorm in advance of ways to get the game out of a deadlock, a situation where the players are unable to agree what to do or cannot think of a way to continue. Some sort of gentle nudge that fits the situation can work wonders. With all of this you can actually get away with far less preparation than you appear to have had as you can adjust characters, challenges and twists to fit with their specific playstyle. If the players know you are doing this it hurts enjoyment as they feel like their choices don't really matter and they will be facing similar characters and similar obstacles and consequences regardless of their actions. Fortunately, they do not need to know about this If you are doing this a lot and they are unaware of it their enjoyment should be pretty unaffected. This approach gives you time to put a lot more detail into the challenges and characters you do plan as you can know that they will probably be involved. If you do this too much or blatantly the players will notice, but it is still very useful when used appropriately. (Of course if you do plan stuff that you don't end up using you can always save it for another time ) A few notes specifically from what you said (some are mentioned in the MAG book, but are very important so bear reiterating): -Don't introduce feruchemy or have any mistborn. If they don't know the setting it is too much at once. -Focus on the fun, don't get bogged down in an argument, make a decision and move on -You, as the narrator, have the final say on everything -If the players come up with an awesome idea, work with them to make it happen. -The rules are more like "guidelines" than actual rules, don't be afraid to ignore the rules where they get in the way. Some links: A discussion of how to solve some of the problems that plague groups new to the MAG. http://www.crafty-games.com/forum/index.php?topic=7487.0 A bunch of basic "newbie" questions and answers http://www.crafty-games.com/forum/index.php?topic=6359.0 Over on steelministry we have a short game going where we try to assassinate the lord ruler. It can be read without creating an account here: http://steelministry.com/viewforum.php?f=53 (It has the character sheets, the planning and the actual job, it is nearly over now.) There are a couple of links to recordings of sessions/narrator's notes on this thread: http://www.crafty-games.com/forum/index.php?topic=6843.0 In general, crafty games forums are a good place to ask questions and find answers. Hopefully some of that helps Good luck!
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