Roleplaying Tips Weekly E-Zine Issue #404
Creating Memorable Enemy Groups
Contents:
This Week's Tips Summarized
Creating Memorable Enemy Groups
- Creating Memorable Enemy Groups
Readers' Tips Summarized
- Removable Adhesive For Token Storage
- Dictionary Tip
- Sound Effects
- Military Hardware for Real-World Games
- The Big List of RPG Plots
Johnn Four's GM Guide Books
Hero Lab 2.0 Now Available
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character details - Hero Lab makes it all easy. Files are
available for d20, World of Darkness, and soon Mutants &
Masterminds!
Learn more at: www.Wolflair.com
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A Brief Word From Johnn
Iron Man is a Good Movie
If you are on the fence on whether to see the new Iron Man
movie, I recommend it. My wife and I both enjoyed it a lot.
It had a fast pace, so-so villains, lots of action, and a
neat home base. I recommend coming home after the movie and
doing a brain dump of ideas you get from it, regardless of
whether you run super hero or other genre games.
I'm looking forward to seeing the new Batman and Hulk movies
next. Indiana Jones - now that movie I'm on the fence about.
Is it any good?
Production Quality Disappoints
I purchased Keep on the Shadowfell last week from my FLGS.
It's a starter adventure for D&D 4th Edition. The quick
rules make it seem like the game has changed in a number of
ways, but changes would be minor to experienced D&D gamers.
Looking at the pre-statted characters supplied in the
module, the game feels even more complex than previous
editions. I'm holding off final judgement until I've got a
few sessions under my belt and have the rule books.
One huge quibble is the poor production quality. For 34
beans I got flimsy paper (though full colour), ink smudges
on your fingers, just 96 pages, staple bound (with no soft or
hard cover - it feels like a thick brochure). The module
also came with 3 battlemaps that are decent and of thicker
paper. I hope this production quality is not a sign of
things to come.
I'm still excited about D&D 4E though. I hope it brings
hordes of new gamers into the hobby and generates passionate
new GMs around the world. Whether these gamers stick with
D&D or move on to try the thousands of other RPGs out there,
it doesn't matter to me, as long as the RPG hobby continues
to thrive!
14 reviews, avg 3.5 @ Amazon.
Have a great week - full of gaming.
Cheers,
Johnn Four,
johnn@roleplayingtips.com
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Lose The Eraser With Turn Watcher
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handles delayed and readied actions in a snap. Use it to
perform secret Spot and Listen checks and even Will saves on
your players without them being the wiser. Download your
copy today!
www.turnwatcher.com
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Creating Memorable Enemy Groups
1. Creating Memorable Enemy Groups
By Danny East
Most campaigns have not one single enemy, like a Tekken or
Street Fighter video game, but have a boss enemy at the end.
Such boss type games are more akin to fighting King Bowser
after jumping on all the Goombas. Here are a few tips to
help make fighting the Goombas a little more interesting:
- Make them collectible, and inspire the group to catch them
all. If running a war campaign, have the foot soldiers,
squad leaders, platoon leaders, and so on, each have a
different, pilferable rank.
Rings, pins, hair beads or necklaces are easy to loot from a
corpse. These will act as proof of the party's victory, and
add an element of competitiveness to see who can get how
many of what. Having the higher ranks is worth more, and
having the entire set would be worth a fortune. Hang them up
above the mantelpiece when the character retires.
- Trying to prevent the mad wizard from rebuilding the Hell
Gate? Make the Goombas be the ones carrying the pieces. This
is easy to throw into a campaign. Take the item, cut it up,
and roll to see if the adventurers find it. If they never
find all the pieces, you can always toss the remaining parts
on a desk or under a Christmas tree for them to find.
- Give gangs cool gang names. There are a number of gang
name generators online. Use them for inspiration.
Also works great for naming your party or an adversarial
party. A few ideas to get you started: The Troll Breakers,
Churchyard Clerics Council, The Zombie Masters. It's a lot
of fun and really cranks things up when the DM can say
"Coming around the corner you see four of the Pistol Whips,
and they look pissed."
- How did the players know they were the Pistol Whips? By
their matching headbands, of course. Use tattoos, clothing,
belt buckles, etc. to identify gangs. Works well if the
party needs to infiltrate.
- Allow word to spread of your party's conquests. As they
gain notoriety, the lesser combatants will be afraid of them
and leave them alone. Maybe when they run away they'll lead
the heroes to the secret entrance. Being well known works
both ways, too. The greater combatants will want to be the
ones who took down your party.
- Little skeletons, goblins, and cheap droids are all easy
to kill. That's part of the fun, especially if you have
Great Cleave, or a hundred shots per round. But give the
Goombas power in numbers - so many skeletons you don't have
room to swing, too many goblin corpses to tell the living
from the dead (sneak attack), and droid parts acting as a
trip hazards are all fun.
- Make every encounter with the Goombas be fatalistically
important to the continuation of the game. If running a war
game, give the opposing forces a 1/3 chance to be carrying
the morphine that's allowing your gunner to stay alive and
moving. If working underground, Mines of Moria style, have a
1/3 chance that the Goomba is carrying a torch.
Fuel, ammunition, spell components, or gas mask filters make
good choices. Playing like this will leave players with a
"must go on" feeling. Dramatic, scary, and excellent for
role play when there's not enough for the entire party to
continue.
- Remember the draconians from the Dragonlance Chronicles?
They were as dangerous upon death as they were alive. Try
making droids with a self-destruct more powerful than their
attacks, or a plant monster that emits deadly poison if a
limb is severed. Make it so that killing the enemies is
worse than keeping them alive. The PCs will have to
negotiate or incapacitate. Be sure to give XP for defeating
enemies, not just for killing them.
- Try being creative with some of the enemies. They don't
have to be stronger or smarter or have deeper plot
relations, just be different enough to remember. Give
kobolds fleas. Or put some neighborhood graffiti on the
bunkers, cars, and robots. Zombies are already dead, right?
How about a zombie with a bear trap for a jaw, or hypodermic
fingers?
- Make your NPC Goombas have magic items just as random as
the ones your PCs have. Try giving a Deck of Illusions to a
goblin or a Frost Wand to a beggar. Maybe a rat in your
world ate a bunch of armor-modifying rings off of some dead
hand.
- Unless they've really got something to die for, let the
Goombas run away or beg for their lives when they're on
death's threshold. If you have any honor-bound characters in
your adventuring group you can pose a side-adventure
opportunity when the foot soldier or gang member or goblin
asks that their dying wish is granted. "Please, Strong
Adventurer, find my wife and kids. Tell them I love them and
that the family fortune can be found in Spring Canyon, by
the Old Oak Tree". What fun.
* * *
As a final note, remember that killing the general or the
emperor is a lot of fun, but smashing Goombas can be a
blast, too. Keep it fast-paced and your players will love
fighting for much more than XP.
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Johnn Recommends GM Aid: Group Dice Tray
Sometimes you want players to make public rolls, but they
can be a hassle. They roll off the table, roll where you
can't see the dice, roll into other player's stuff, or
tumble into carefully placed minis and other gaming aids to
cause havoc.
Not the worst problem in the world to have, for sure, but
one you can easily solve with a communal dice tray. Put a
dice tray in the middle of the table where everyone can
reach and see the results. The tray will keep (non-wild)
throws in check, and you can quickly move on to GMing and
telling the player what the dice results mean.
In addition, public rolls in dice trays add a bit of fun
drama. Everybody can focus on the dice roll. The rolling
player is the centre of attention. All eyes watch as the
dice come to rest....
Amazon has a couple of affordable trays. Check 'em out:
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Monthly Musing of the Chatty DM: The 10 Word Pitch
I once joked that I was a failed novelist who decided to
become a GM because it was easier. It's not...GMing needs
many more skills than writing - you just don't have to be as
good with them to be successful.
What is true, though, is that writing is at the heart of the
preparation phase of GMing. Even if you take a published
adventure and use it as is, chances are you will jot down a
few notes here and there to take into account the
peculiarities of your players' party.
Many GMs actually do the complete opposite and find
themselves writing numerous pages (if not whole binders) of
background, stories, NPC stats, and large quantities of
"what-ifs" when preparing a game.
This often leads to the GM spending more time prepping than
actually playing. That's not bad in itself, especially if
you enjoy writing, just don't forget to leave room for your
player decisions and narrative inputs.
Here's a writing tip I discovered last month that gave me a
new perspective in prepping.
The 10 Word Pitch
One way of focusing your idea before writing anything during
the planning phase of an RPG session or campaign is to try
to fit your whole idea into a single sentence.
A short while ago, I challenged the readers of my blog to
come up with an adventure synopsis using exactly 10 words.
Why 10 words? It's long enough to formulate a complex
sentence while being short enough to force you to choose
your words carefully and focus on what's important.
Also, it is similar to writing a Haiku, a form of Japanese
poetry, that many people worked on during English classes in
school.
As I read the hundreds of fascinating responses, I realized
this trick could be used in many more aspects of RPG
planning. Here are a few:
Campaign Design
Planning a campaign, especially a long term one, can be a
daunting task. But what it often boils down to is a core
plot in which you'll build or choose a series of adventures
for your players. Writing that core plot in exactly 10 words
and referring to it often can help you focus, and helps flex
your creative muscles. Alternatively, you can brainstorm for
ideas using that trick.
Examples:
- Gods cast out rebel godling into PC's world - stop him!
- Overlord discovers mind control drug, takes over world:
save it.
- King dies without official heir, PCs all wear same
birthmark.
What I really like about this concept is you can share your
10 word campaign pitch with your players so they get what
it's about from the 1st game onward.
Adventure Design
The trick is also useful for planning adventures or short
campaign arcs, especially for brainstorming purposes.
You just need to focus the pitch to a narrower premise (like
a five room dungeon).
Some examples:
- Dark elves kidnap children for unholy summoning of Spider
Goddess.
- Disease turns people into flesh eating zombies. Survive
the night!
- Cursed Temple holds legendary treasure. Can PCs get it
first?
Have a look here for hundreds of other examples:
Stealing a good idea: The 10 words adventure synopsis
NPCs description
One of the challenges I've often come up against was to find
a way to make an NPC stand out and be memorable without
spending too much time on it. The 10 word pitch is perfect
to package a unique description and maybe one interesting
hook for the NPC. Plus, it fits in just one line in your
notes!
Examples:
- Shifty, oily-haired friendly used-weapon merchant. Secret
demonic cultist.
- Goddess of love and fertility posing as albino cocktail
waitress.
- Bumbling old wizard is actually legendary Dragon God of
Good (with apologies to Weis and Hickman).
Player Character backgrounds
One of the clichés of RPGs is that players hate to actually
do any written creative work about the game. While not
always true, I've been a GM long enough to realize that most
players actually don't have the motivation to invest time to
do it.
That's where the 10 word pitch comes in. Ask your writing-
adverse players to create a 10 word description of their
PCs. It's kinda hard to tell your GM that writing a 10 word
sentence is too much work. Plus, respecting the word limit
is actually harder than it looks (but don't tell them that)
and will force the players to go directly for the
character's essence.
Examples:
- Dark, brooding holy warrior, prone to introspection and
whimsical sayings.
- Orphaned child abandoned in Monastery, rejects all forms
of authority.
- Smart Alec rogue prone to let rampant curiosity take over.
Other Uses
As shown, this little trick can be adapted to any aspect of
your game. Examples:
- Organizations (guilds, noble families, Criminal syndicates
and so on)
- Country, region and town descriptions
- Ancient artifact and legendary items
- NPC motivations and/or plans
- Historical events
- Relationships between two NPCs/organizations
- Character life paths
Give it a try. You'll probably end up making all your
sentences exactly 10 words long.
* * *
Chatty DM is the 'Nom de Plume' of Philippe-Antoine Menard,
a 35 year old geek with more than 25 years of experience
GMing various Roleplaying games. Chatty runs a GM-focused
RPG blog called Musings of the Chatty DM that's been growing
since the Summer of 2007. It focuses on the Craft of Game
Mastering (with a focus on D&D), Tropes, Player Advocacy and
Campaign Journals (from preparation to execution). It has a
rich and varied community, and it is rumoured to house an
Evil Overlord obsessed with the Crunchy bits of RPGs.
www.chattydm.net
Story Tips Contest
Help the Chatty DM's playing group in shoring up their
Story/Characterization skills. Submit simple tips to helping
create back stories and better party interactions for the
chance to win a near-mint copy of the Adv. D&D 2e Planescape
Campaign Setting. Contest ends June 7th.
Story Tips Contest
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Readers' Tips Of The Week:
Have some GM advice you'd like to share? E-mail it to johnn@roleplayingtips.com - thanks!
1. Removable Adhesive For Token Storage
From: Jamie Rivers
Johnn,
I thought you'd be interested in this idea. I used it in my
session this last Sunday and it worked beautifully. It goes
along with the Sticky Note token idea from David Walters in
Issue #402.
- Look in the paper craft or scrapbooking section of your
local craft shop for a removable adhesive dispenser like
this:
removable adhesive dispenser
- Apply to the back of your tokens.
- Affix tokens to your map, the back of your creature's
stat block, or wherever else you'd find handy.
The adhesive also works great for putting together pre-cut
map sections.
Hope that helps someone out.
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2. Dictionary Tip
From: Paul Cardwell
Regarding Hannah's tip in Issue #342 about using Greek for
names, I have a small collection of translating dictionaries
for this purpose. I have found the Serbo-Croatian and
Finnish ones particularly useful for place and character
names because neither is likely to be recognized by my
players.
Used book sources are particularly useful for these. I got
my S-C one for ten cents that way, but even at half price,
the paperback dictionaries are well worth the cost for this.
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3. Sound Effects
From: Giorgio "PaPeRoTTo" Vezzini
Hi Johnn, I'm a fan of Roleplaying Tips and I've read your
article in which you asked where you could find sound
effects. All right, let's see....
If you want to do things with great style (and with some
money) check out the "Historical Series" of Hollywood Edge.
I got it for my job and I assure you that they are
fantastic.
www.hollywoodedge.com
If you are on a budget, you should go sounddogs.com, in
which you'll find free lo-fi samples, and if you need, full
hi-fi film quality samples. You could just buy 1-2 effects.
www.sounddogs.com
Another site is Freesound Project, which is free, and all
samples are high quality.
freesound.iua.upf.edu
I organize all my sounds in folders (Window user) as SFX-
Animals/Water/Magic/Footsteps, and so on.
I like to create "layers of sounds," and I use Nuendo,
Goldwave, and Audacity to build complicated sounds. Example:
a thunder crack with a tree falling and the beginning of a
fire in the woods.
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4. Military Hardware For Real-World Games
From: Darren Blair
Looking for information about real-life military hardware
for that real-world campaign you're looking to run?
Below are some websites you can go to in order to do a
little bit of research.
- Modern Firearms and Ammunition
- information on small-arms and large-caliber weaponry, with
info on weapons from earlier in the 1900s. The site can be
accessed in either English or Russian.
- Sniper Central - all about
sniper rifles and related gear. Perfect for any character
who wants to be the next Carlos Hathcock
- Federation of American Scientists -
the website is mostly about science and how it shapes
matters, but the Strategic Security part of the site has
everything from MREs to heavy bomber aircraft. Note that the
two main category divisions are "United States" and
"Foreign," with the Foreign section simply containing a
sampling of vehicles and equipment items.
- Wikipedia - yes, *that*
Wikipedia. It might surprise you to discover just how much
they have in the way of military equipment, and there are
often links to other websites.
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5. The Big List of RPG Plots
From: Sébastien Boily
Hi Johnn,
I recently discovered an interesting list of general plots.
And here is a French translation.
Those are general plot ideas commonly used, but anyone doing
one of each type using some recurring baddies would have a
long campaign for sure.
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Johnn Four's GM Guide Books
In addition to writing and publishing this e-zine, I have
written several GM tips and advice books to inspire your
games and to make GMing easier and fun:
How to design, map, and GM fresh encounters for RPG's most
popular locales. Includes campaign and NPC advice as well,
plus several generators and tables
Advice and tips for designing compelling holidays that not
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Critically acclaimed and multiple award-winning guide to
crafting, roleplaying, and GMing three dimensional NPCs for
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