The Empty Room

Aka, Is the room actually empty though?

As a GM, you will find that no matter how much you tend to prepare and how well you manage to recollect every rehearsed dialogue and hints for your players to react to, there will be points in your game where you find yourself ill prepared for a situation. Why? Easy.
Because there are players involved in your perfectly crafted world.
(And honestly, over-prepping only leads to headaches and railroading, avoid it!)

Players tend to walk off the carefully placed path you’ve set out for them. They will miss hints and obvious (to yourself, perhaps) elements of your story in order to progress.
In which case, they will start to think outside the box and ‘mill around’, trying to find things to either progress the story, or line their own filthy, near bottomless pockets. (Bag of holding anyone?)

Hence, there will always be moments where you must improvise.

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Customisation – Houserules and Flavor

“You can play however you want and be whoever you want”

That’s how roleplaying games were once described to me. And to an extend that’s true. With the right GM you can play any sort of setting, from Game of Thrones with the serial numbers filed off to a setting where you can fly through space on the back of dragons shooting lasers at storm troopers.

And as a part of that, the players will work together to make create a world, intricate lore and compelling characters. However, what most people will do is use a standard set of rules and everything that comes with it. And that often results in a game that has an amazing backstory and awesome lore but whose mechanics have no way of representing that awesome lore.

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Dragons, Gods and Liches and why they can be fun to play

This post was inspired by a discussion I had with another GM on the topic of a player who seems to always want to either play a dragon or play something thematically close to a dragon.

I’ve had players in my groups that had similar fascinations, some with undead, some with dragons or a totally awesome character they saw in an anime or movie. And let’s be honest, we’ve all been there at some point. Hell, I had a pretty big fascination with playing a Deathknight when Exalted 2nd edition’s Abyssals supplement came out. (And can you blame me? They were both cool AND overpowered!)

So why make a post about something so common? Because there are many, many ways of dealing with it. Most GMs won’t indulge in these sorts of fantasies, citing reasons such as ‘Dragons are too powerful’ or ‘make up something original instead of playing another clone of Wolverine’ or ‘undead don’t fit into my setting’ (this one makes sense). I’ve been one of those GMs, getting snippy at players who, in my eyes, can’t come up with something original.

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