Ben Finney wrote:
> Howdy all,
>
> After talking with some friends about getting a role-playing group
> started, and gathering a small group of interested players, I planned
> an adventure to introduce them all to the game and find out their play
> styles. The adventure was run today, in a single afternoon; it was
> proclaimed a success. I thought I'd write this message to share some
> details of how it worked out to help others in a similar situation.
>
> I used GURPS for this, and discuss some specifics in this text; but
> the bulk of it applies to anyone considering running an introductory
> session for players in any role-playing game system.
Either way, it's not as if GURPS is an at all "arcane" system.
> Asking among my friends I found many who weren't interested, but
> eventually came up with a group of three players: one who had played
> many sessions of various games years ago, one who had played only a
> single adventure that didn't go very well, and one who thought RPGs
> sounded geeky but was willing to try it out.
I think that first player was a great benefit to your intro session.
> Through describing the proposed game and style to these people, I
> found that the approach that worked best was to emphasise the
> collective, participatory nature of it, and downplay my role as GM. I
> used the "collaborative story telling" phrase that I've heard
> elsewhere[0]; that seemed to best give people an idea of how the game
> would take place.
My preference is for "competetive storytelling", since that's what is
actually going on between the denizens of the campaign world. Sauron
wants to tell a story about how he achieves world domination. Gandalf
wants to tell a story about how Middle Earth is saved from Evil(tm), and
so forth. Since we have disagreement, the characters must "game it out"
to see who wins and thus gets to tell the story he wants.
> Though I had in mind a campaign in a space empire setting, I received
> consistent advice from r.g.f.advocacy that, for a new group of
> roleplayers, some of whom had very little experience, I should start
> off with a canned, one-shot adventure using characters that I made for
> the purpose. I found some adventures that interested me, and presented
> one-sentence summaries of them to the players individually. The one
> that gained most interest was _Time of the Tyrants_, an adventure
> article from _Pyramid_ magazine. I prepped for that.
>
> The adventure and rules were fairly familiar to me, but I only had a
> week to prepare; it was either that or wait for a month or more, and I
> wanted instead to get these people while the interest was still
> fresh.
>
> I spent my time on the following preparation activities:
>
> * Character generation, including complete, action-hero characters,
Heh, that's similar to the work I'll have to do once the alpha version
of Modern Action RPG is complete. My current decision, although that may
change, is to only make "unfinished" characters, in the sense that I'll
spend 165-185 points, and then give the end user various suggestions for
how he can spend the remaininig 35-15 points, along with advice about
the consequences.
Something similar could be done in GURPS, or any other system with
point-based character creation.
> but also including many aspects of the character's personality,
> style, and outward appearance: things with zero game-rules effect,
> but which would be a source of creative material to help the
> players get into the role.
How many characters did you make? I'd say that with 3 players, offering
them a choice from 5 pre-gens would be the absolute minimum I'd find
acceptable, and I'd really prefer 7. I'd also say that more than 8 would
be overkill for a group of newbies, for only 3 players, although the
consequence of this might be to not offer certain character concepts or
archetypes, which would be regrettable.
Also, did you give the player group collective advice about combining to
make a viable party?
Years ago I wrote a list of "five basic ability types" which any fantasy
genre party should be sure to cover, and IIRC it got included in a
net-based "RPG survival guide".
Let's see if I can remember it: Combat, stealth, diplomacy, healing and
meta-magic, with the last entry meaning the ability to work with magic;
spells such as Detect Magic, Analyze Magic and Dispel Magic.
Obviously that list is not appropriate for non-fantasy genre campaigns,
and anyway I could do with a new list for Modern Action RPG.
So here goes (and keep in mind, this is grounded in traditional
roleplaying gaming, meaning fairly heavy in combat and other physical
action):
1. Combat. Specifically ranged combat and unarmed combat, because
sometimes engagements initiate at range, and sometimes you have your
weapons taken away. Melee weapon combat is useful, but much less so than
ranged and unarmed.
2. Stealth. Getting to and from places, meaning skills such as Hide,
Move Silently, Climbing and Lockpicking. Skills for dealing with traps
may also be useful, even in a modern setting.
3. Investigative skills. Highly useful to find out what's going on. This
deals not only with skills such as Acting and Disguise, and Research,
but also non-skill traits such as Contacts. Social skills also belong to
this category, both those skills that let you befriend people, and those
skills that lets you extract information from people (anything from
Language skills to Interrogation and Detect Lies).
4. Medical, although this depends much on how useful medical skills are
in the chosen rules system. I try hard to make them useful in Modern
Action RPG, and it seems to me as if GURPS 4E also tries to make them at
least slightly useful. If nothing else, a Poisons skill can be good to
have.
.... I think that's it. Perhaps make it a list of five: Ranged Combat,
Unarmed Combat, Stealth/Intrusion, Investigation (and Medical if it's
game-mechanically useful, or if you know from experience that the GM
will *make* medical skills useful).
> * Lots of 70×120 mm index cards with adventure information, some
> summarised from the adventure text but mostly written by me.
Handwritten? That's something I can't do. My handwriting is very bad,
and I fatigue quickly.
> * One card for each scene, giving description of the scene,
> success result, failure result (both of which contain a way to
> proceed the story), and one thing that must happen somehow no
> matter how the scene plays out -- i.e. the point of the scene in
> the story.
Sounds like Dramatism to me, that last bit.
> * One card for each physical location in the adventure that a
> scene might occur in. A few words for each of: space, light
> level, climate, dominant colours, sights, sounds, smells, and
> texture.
I'd be more interested in a pre-made hex map of the places where the GM
anticipates combat. I expect that well-designed battle fields will do
much to make combat fun, although of course that's probably truer for
Modern Action RPG (with its great emphasis on physical movement) than in
systems such as GURPS.
> * One card for each NPC: one side giving a compact character
> sheet, and the other giving outward appearance: height, weight,
> age, features, face, dress, motion, voice, demeanour, and a
> typical quote.
There's a tricky ability in Modern Action RPG, that I'm not entirely
sure how to GM, but which I'd never in a million years not include in
the system: Sherlockian Gaze.
It's used to get extra information in people, based on the first
impression, very much in the style of Sherlock Holmes (or Adrian Monk to
a slightly lesser extent).
I guess my main concern is with PCs using such an ability on minor NPCs.
As for major NPCs, the possibility of player's characters having
Sherlockian Gaze will serve a gainful didactic purpose, in teaching GMs
to create their NPCs in advance (or, alternatively, becomes real good at
improvising real fast).
> * One card for each of the types of dinosaur (the adventure
> features lots of them), with just the character-sheet side
> filled in.
>
> * One card for each PC, giving the outward-appearance information
> in the same format, and the other side giving background points,
> significant relations, and motivations.
>
> * A single card giving recent events in the 1930s, to get the
> players quickly into the feel of the era. _GURPS Cliffhangers_
> was invaluable for this.
Yeah, that section of the book is really, really neat. There's GURPS
Timeline, and there's a section for the 1950s in GURPS Atomic Horror,
and there's an absolutely ginormous "timeline" chapter in Pulp Hero,
divided by subject, but I like the presentation in GURPS Cliffhangers
the best.
There's also an old Hero System supplement, Danger International, with a
few pages on the mid 1980s (which I guess would be my favourite era for
Modern Action RPG campaigns). I wouldn't recommend anyone to pay more
than 5-6 dollars for that book, because most of the material is
bog-standard Hero System rules which everyone is already familiar with,
but I was able to borrow the book from a friend and then use another
friend's scanner, to get myself a primer on the international situation
of the mid 1980s.
Also, in general, the trick of "recent historical" roleplaying gaming,
which probably means anything more than 12 years ago, is in "doing the
time machine" well. I don't have a whole lot of ideas yet, but I know
I'll need to include a section on it in the Modern Action RPG GMing
advice chapter. How to take the players back into the near past, and
convey to them the feel of the setting, the attitudes and the most
im****tant issues.
> * A couple of cards giving weapon statistics for every weapon the
> PCs were likely to have.
>
> * Photos and images for every creature, PC, NPC, and location. For
> the dinosaurs, I scanned my cards from the _Dino Hunt_ card game,
> and freely substituted one dinosaur picture for a similar dinosaur
> description if I didn't have a direct match. For the characters, I
> spent hours on IMDb getting actor ****tfolio photos. For locations,
> there is a lot of tagged photography on Flickr or Google Images.
Sounds useful. I'm not very visual, so I think I'd be happy with just
getting a bunch of (to scale!) pics of the most common modern weapons.
Or, failing that, silhouttes in the style of Feng Shui.
> * _One Page GURPS_ handout for every player: a quick summary of the
> game mechanics, and the meaning of the main points of interest for
> interpreting the character sheet.
I looked briefly at that do***ent of yours, quite some time ago, but I
didn't read it. My only real impression was that I'd have done the
layout differently, but I can't recall whether it was just a matter of
preference, or if there was any actual readability issues that I spotted.
> This was all a lot of effort, but I felt that my main task was not to
> learn the text of the adventure as written, or design well-balanced,
> optimised characters. Instead, I took on the task of being ready for
The real problem isn't so much optimizing the pre-gen characters. It's
making sure that none of the characters are so un-optimized that
frustration is likely to occur in the player who plays that character.
In traditional roleplaying gaming, combat is likely to occur with some
frequency, so a good place to start is to ensure that all the PCs have
some combat ability, so that they can participate.
Other than that, one could simply base things off my "4 (5) key in-party
abilities" list. Everybody should be able to fight, but it's okay if not
everybody can fight at range. Unarmed combat could be the specialty of
only one PC (or two PCs in a larger party). One PC gets the specialty of
stealth, another investigation, and a third medical (provided that
medical skills are useful within the rules, or are required at least
twice during the anticipated adventure).
> improvisation, coming up with quick answers and bullet-point
> descriptions with which to help the players understand what their
> characters were experiencing. I had to stop myself writing things in
> prose, and instead go for *coverage* of the material and *breadth* of
> sensory descriptions.
How did you handle Perception rolls? It seems to me that if one
pre-plans as much as you do, there's a strong obligation to also include
things which the PCs will only notice if they pass Perception rolls at
various difficulties...
> As a consequence, I did almost no embellishment of the adventure
> plot. Instead, the format I chose for locations, scenes, and character
> descriptions forced me to come up with many *ways* of describing each
> of them, rather than a lot of detailed prose on each one. The
> interesting effect I found was that having the structured format for
> these items meant that I was forced to be creative, *ahead* of time
> when I could afford to take several minutes to think of an answer,
> rather than not have that answer at all during play.
>
>
> Being an introduction to role-playing for two of my players, I did
> decide to change the plot of the adventure in one way. Rather than
> start with "you have all been called together for blah blah blah, your
> mission is yak yak, how will you go about it" -- I took a cue from one
> of the PCs, to whom I had given the disadvantage of "Nightmares".
>
> I decided that the plot would begin with *no* introduction, instead
> immediately describing all the characters ****d and running through a
> dark forest, pursued by a monster that turns out to be a dinosaur; and
> use the game mechanics to play out this scene however the players
> decided to react. Then, once the scene had take a few interesting
> points and required a few game mechanics to resolve, the character
> with Nightmares would wake up in a cold sweat, realising it was all a
> dream.
I've often thought about starting out with a sort of short "obstacle"
scenario, similar to what's found in computer games such as Half-Life or
Deus Ex, where the player is given the op****tunity to learn about the
game and about his character's abilities.
One could do the same in an RPG. For instance, a reduced version of the
"Robin Sage" training programme used by the Green Berets, or a physical
obstacle course, complete with some wrestling against an NPC trainer and
use of the First Aid skill, and some kind of Stealth skill to sneak past
a guard.
> This turned out to be a great success. Having lunched with the
> players, handed over their characters, let them read about and to each
> other about who they were and what their backgrounds were, this sudden
> fight-or-flight scene with no explanation was an ideal way to snap
> them to attention and get them using the game mechanics in
> earnest. Maybe some players would be put off by such an introduction,
> but my players found it a fun, risk-free way to learn how the game
> would work -- and also introduce the plot, because the nightmare led
> naturally into the "here's why you're here" scene, which I described
> as a past event, *leading to* the nightmare as a result.
>
> The rest of the adventure proceeded well from that point. Having got
How many hours did you play? Did you have scheduled breaks?
My plans are to have regular breaks, every 60 or 90 minutes (this being
much superior to people taking un-scheduled bathroom breaks), and to
include a longer meal break in the session. The meal break in particular
gives the players a chance to chatter about non-game issues, which is
especially useful if they're friends who don't often get to meet except
for those roleplaying gaming sessions.
> their attention, I was able to keep it by using several different
> senses of each location, several different external points of each
> character, and making sure to mix up which of these I would use for
> each one, so that the total effect was that the descriptions, while
> short, were very varied and easily memorable to the players.
>
> Using the printed images and photos was also a great aid as well.
> Putting an image down and *then* describing the salient points of the
> location/character/creature, meant that I didn't have to *name*
> anything: the dinosaurs never got named, and the characters were often
Good thing none of the PCs had any Dinosaurology skills, then.
> already well described before they got introduced by name. The players
> all thanked me for this help, giving them something to focus on and
> differentiate people and places as we charged through the adventure.
>
> Running the game turned out to be more chaotic than I remembered from
> previous times; this was likely because of a longish hiatus in my
> GMing, but also because I had to explain the rules as we went along
> (the new players would never have stood by for a long rules
> introduction before play, so this was the only option for learning the
> game).
It shouldn't be difficult to get players to read a two-page rules
summary in advance.
I've written one such for Sagatafl, and given that Modern Action RPG is
much simpler (being much more focused on traditional roleplaying gaming
subject matter, without all the de-tours of systems such as GURPS or
Sagatafl) it should be easy to write a very good two-page summary, or
even a fairly good one-page summary.
(In fact I have a one-page summary already, where the one "Master Roll
Table" takes up almost half of the page, but that's all more than a year
old, and I'm sure I could make something better now.)
> Here again, the preparation paid off: I had all the necessary
> game-mechanic details of equipment, locations, characters, and
> creatures in a box of index cards. Leafing through books happened a
> few times, but if I couldn't find the answer in fifteen seconds, I
> fudged a result. No-one minded, because they were enjoying the steady
> pace of the story.
>
> I was also able to avoid the impression of railroading the players by
> allowing them to choose how to proceed, and making sure the
> appropriate prepared scene happened in the places they chose to
I believe there's a rec.games.frp.advocacy term for this.
> go. Both success and failure were defined for each scene, meaning that
> I knew how much to help the PCs or NPCs in the next scene, and also
> had a way of getting them there.
>
>
> I asked the players afterward if they felt like they were in charge of
> the story and they gave a resounding affirmative. Having lots of
Being newbies, that reply is pretty much guaranteed.
> immediately-understandable information and clear game mechanics with
> prompt answers from the GM meant they felt in control of their
> actions. Having interesting things happen relevant to the places they
> chose to go, it felt like *they* were the ones driving where the story
> went, which was of course true.
The truth of the matter is much, much less im****tant than the perception
of the players. If they percieve themselves to not be railroaded, that's
what counts. The problem is, fakery cannot be maintained for long, if
the players are experienced (and are not Dramatists), and that's why the
GM should be honest rather than a fake.
> Everyone was excited by the idea of playing another, multi-session
> adventure next time. The newbie roleplayers had found their groove,
I'd be very interested to hear what they thought about their character's
abilities, and how much they wanted to change, and how great changes
they wanted to make.
> and were encouraged by their introductory adventure that *they* asked
> *me* for access to the rules to make their own characters -- a
> complete reversal of their attitudes before we played, where they said
> they didn't want to do a whole lot of character preparation. This was,
> of course, the desired result: I'd showed them how the GURPS rules
> could be used to create interesting, detailed characters with
> directly-understandable effects on the game mechanics.
Hopefully you also made sure to give each of the pre-gen characters
interesting abilities, instead of always going for the simplest and
easist types of abilities.
> Things I'd do differently next time I need to introduce GURPS and/or
> role-playing to a new group:
>
> * Try to get the players together to discuss it, rather than trying
> in one-on-one meetings to garner interest. This was constrained by
> mismatched schedules, but it was a significant (months-long) delay
> to have to discuss things pre-game with everyone individually.
Probably best for newbies, yes, but I'm not sure how necessary it is for
experienced roleplayers.
> I'd try hard to get together for a dinner or something and spend
> time discussing with all of them, to keep the interest alive. I
> lost a couple of potential players because it was simply too long
> between when I got their interest and when I said we were ready to
> set a date.
>
> * Try to find a group of *all* newbies. While the players worked
> well together, the fact that one of them had RPG experience meant
> the tendency was for them to defer to him for ideas. I had to work
> hard to get ideas from the newbie players, and perhaps would find
> it easier if there wasn't a clearly dominant player.
I'm not so sure, but if you give it a try, I'd like to hear how it went.
> * Choose an even simpler adventure. _Time of the Tyrants_ was great
> fun, but it really needs two or three sessions to do it justice,
> especially with a group learning how to play. We crammed it into
> seven hours, which was draining on all concerned. They won their
No meal break?
> victory fair and square, but I had to strip the ending down a lot
> to get to the resolution.
I haven't read that adventure. In fact, I make a point of not ever
reading any adventures or scenarios. But you're probably right that
something simpler would have been better.
Better, for newbies, to have an intense four-hour one-shot than a longer
and more drawn out seven-hour sessions.
> * Have at least one large map ready for a full-blown combat, even if
> I don't use tactical combat rules (which I wouldn't do with a new
> group in any case). Simply being able to see relative positions of
Why not? Tactical combat movement is a great way to involve everybody in
combat.
> situations was very im****tant, simply for helping the new players
Yes, especially with regards to combat participation.
> keep track of what was going on. A scribbled pencil map, and using
> dice for miniatures, was sufficient, but would have been better
> with simple figures and a prepared map.
There's a new set of Cardboard Heroes from SJ Games, for the Modern
genre. I haven't bought them yet (I expect I will sometime in the late
summer or early autumn), but if they're as good as the fantasy genre
ones, they're great.
> * Use a table big enough to have the GM screen off to one side, so
> that I've got somewhere to keep all my notes accessible but
> hidden, but don't have a barrier separating me from the
Yup. My ideal GMing position is to sit half behind the GM screen, so
that I can write with my right hand, with my left side exposed.
> players. Moving it as far to one side as I could on the small
> table was nevertheless a big improvement in getting the players'
> attention and involvement.
I've got a 2 square meter table (1.4 square meters when in "compact
mode"), specifically bought to be used for roleplaying gaming. It takes
up some room in my small apartment, but it'll be worth it.
> * Drink and eat stuff without so much sugar in it. Cra****ng from a
> sugar high several hours into a session isn't good for the
> momentum.
Yes, that sucks. But why not include a pizza break, half-way through the
session? Or 1/3 way through might be even better?
> Things that worked great, and will be repeated:
>
> * Using GURPS. The fact that its core mechanics are simple, can be
> essentially explained in a minute, and that it encourages as much
> up-front calculation as possible to allow pre-figured quantities
All non-dinosaur systems utilize up-front calculation.
> to be used in play, meant that I could do all my preparation work
> and run from compact index cards for everything without extensive
> referral to the rule books.
An interesting question: Can the new GURPS Character Assistant be used
to print out NPCs in "index card mode"? (For those of us who are
severely challenged in the handwriting department.)
> GURPS was also useful in its flexibility and descriptiveness. The
> players were able to guess what most of their abilities meant,
I won't always have that luxury, although I intend to bypass the problem
by, as much as possible, including an extra character sheet page where
each special ability of the character is explained.
> once they knew where to look, because they're named by what they
> do for the most part. The adventure chosen involved time travel,
> 1930s pulp heroes, ultra-tech bad guys, and dinosaurs; the
> consistent handling of all this by GURPS meant that they never got
> tripped up by weirdness in the rules, and were able to explore any
> conceivable option and have me quickly describe a playable game
> mechanic for it.
>
> * I converted all GURPS statistics and mechanics to use SI (metric)
> units, since we don't live in the USA. This was invisible to the
I've always been an SI kind of guy. I've read enough English language
fantasy and science fiction to be able to effortlessly concert from
Imperial to Metric and back, but few of my potential players can do
that, and anyway once you get to volume measurements Imperial gets real
strange (even area measurements are kinda odd).
> players -- they never knew it was any other way -- but it made
> things much smoother, as they were able to understand measurements
> without needing to convert them all the time in their head.
>
> * Stripping back the rules, and fudging results to keep the story
> moving. During initial discussion about game style, all the
> players were concerned about any exciting scenes slowing down and
> devolving into arcane rules discussions -- the experienced
> roleplayer because that's what his previous games had been like,
Much of that has probably been the fault of previous game designers, in
that they've failed to do their duty which is to provide clear and
fudge-light rules.
I've read most of GURPS 4E by now, and I see a clear tendency in that
kromm and Pulver has attempted to make the rules very clear and very
unambiguous, so as to minimize the *room* for rules discussion.
> and the newbies because that's the stereotypical image. Keeping it
Most RPG rules systems, especially older ones, leave lots and lots of
room for rules discussion, because GMs prefer it when they can interpret
the rules according to current whims, and in the bad old days (i.e. up
until very recently), RPG rules systems were marketed to GMs and not to
players.
> light meant that I could hand each player as much game-mechanic
> involvement as they wanted, and fudge the rest.
>
> * Using a one-shot adventure with disposable, GM-created
> characters. Their first session isn't the time to be getting the
> players into long abstract discussion of how abilities will work
> in play, before actually playing a game. The characters they play
True to some extent, although giving each PC a couple of really cool
abilities will almost certainly make the game more interesting for them.
> will be useful for inspiring them, but they shouldn't be tied to
> their initial character choices until they have some play
> experience.
>
> The introductory adventure should also be playable in a single
> session; getting the rush of a complete adventure with a
> resolution is a big motivator to wanting to play some more.
Yes.
> * Making a variety of brief flavour material available in summary
> form to the players about their characters, and just as
> im****tantly, making it clear that it was all optional -- they were
> to come up with their own characterisation using the material as
> inspiration, not doctrine. They were empowered by this, and made
> great use of their characters, right off the bat.
>
> It also got them immediately interested in "fixing" what I had
> done with the characters by making their own next time -- just
> what I wanted.
That's excellent.
> * Starting with action straight away, as a way to get the players
> immediately using the game mechanics to learn by example. The fact
> that I gave *no* plot introduction until after this scene was over
> worked in my favour here: the players had no information to work
> with except their characters' immediate situation, so they were
> free to make quick decisions about what to do without considering
> what this meant for the plot. It was also obvious to them that I
> wouldn't let any of the players get removed from play without
> first understanding what the hell the story was; but it was also
> clear that they didn't yet know quite what the consequences
> *would* be, so they made their decisions earnestly, and learned
> quickly.
>
> * The bait-and-switch. I can't take credit for this, it's part of
> the adventure as written: a trip back to the Cretaceous to
> photograph dinosaurs turns out to have a totally different purpose
> when they discover what's waiting for them there. Done right, in a
> way that doesn't make the players complain "this isn't what we
> signed up for", it gives the players a sense of discovery and
> surprise, and they feel like they're also in control of the goals:
> they choose to abandon or de-emphasise their initial goal in
> favour of pursuing the more im****tant one.
However, any kind of giving the players a campaign premise other than
what you've promised them risks invalidating their character creation
choices. Sometimes severely so.
> It does need a decent initial hook though. It was clear that "you
> go back in time to photograph dinosaurs" didn't have much appeal
> for the newbie players; it was only with the "... and, of course,
> something goes horribly wrong and you have an even bigger
> adventure" that I managed to get them to agree, without revealing
> what the twist was. When it was over, of course, they thanked me
> for the plot twist; but if I had to do it again, I'd make the
> initial hook something more appealing.
It doesn't sound as if your "plot twist" was all that big, after all.
> * Shredding a linear plot into component scenes, and creating hooks
> for each scene to progress the story without dictating what the
> next scene must be. I was able to spin a consistent story that
> went wherever the players wanted, and while many of the scenes
> went unused, I was glad to have all of them there as material to
> immediately draw on for progressing the story.
>
> * Describing scenes, locations, characters, and creatures using
> suggestive bullet-point phrases in the formal descriptive
> structures shown above, rather than blocks of prose with mostly
> abstract or visual description. This was a gold mine of creative
> inspiration during play; rather than confused looks and distracted
> players, I had them hanging on my words as I talked about sounds,
> smells, temperature, textures, and insignificant but evocative
> details.
Did you include any subtle clues in your sensory descriptions? The kind
of clues that would warn off thoughtful players about lurking dangers?
> I was also able to pick and choose how to characterise NPCs based
> on their external descriptions using many facets, which naturally
> involved the players in interacting with them rather than waiting
> for a description to be fed to them.
>
> * A big climactic conflict or combat scene. Keeping the rules simple
> meant all the players were itching to test their capabilities
> against the bad guys, and this was definitely the high point of
> the adventure for everyone -- not least because it proceeded at a
> faster pace than any other combat I've run :-) This pace allowed
> me to spend more time on colourful descriptions of actions,
> sparking off the ideas the players expressed before and during the
> combat.
>
> * Pictures, props, and anything else to look at or handle. The focus
> and ideas this gave to the players made them immediately more a
> part of the environment, and made them react far more as their
> characters might. When describing how nasty a dinosaur's claws
> were, they weren't thinking impassively in terms of game
> statistics: they were looking at the actual claws, and reacting
> viscerally to it as their characters would.
In order to do this, wouldn't you need to have some kind of scale
included in the dinosaur pics? Like a human-sized silhouette, for
comparision?
> This game was a blast for me to run, even though I'm exhausted as I
> write this. I got a lot of help online from discussions and articles,
> and I hope that this write-up can help some future GM plan a successful
> introductory role-playing session for a group of newbies, using GURPS
> or any other simple, flexible system.
>
> Thanks for reading this far, and good luck in your gaming!
>
>
> [0] From William H. Stoddard, but it probably didn't originate with
> him.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
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