Game Mastering: Pandering to the Unwashed Masses

I know what you're thinking. "I've spent days doing historical research, crafting a magnificent and believable world for my players to inhabit. Every corner of it is inhabited by complex, three dimensional characters with genuine wants and needs. My villains are vile yet sympathetic. Their victims are pitiable yet unbowed. My King is a dauntless pillar of flawed regal nobility. How could anyone not enjoy this campaign, my greatest opus?" Well, Billy, it's simple. Your players probably don't care about any of that stuff. Most of them aren't interested in what you've done. They're interested in what their characters can do.

There's a big difference between writing good stories and writing good adventures. It's a lot like the difference between designing a statue and designing a toy. You can make an absolutely fantastic statue, with twenty paint applications and anatomy so exquisitely detailed you can see the Rhomboidius major underneath the Trapizius. But if you can't make it fight Optimus Prime, it's still not a toy. It has all the play value of a paper weight. And not one of those cool snow globe paperweights, or the deactivated handgun ones. No, this is just a brick of resin, pretty to look at, but not much else going on. Books are the same way. You can read them, and postulate what's going to happen next. You can speculate about the different characters motivations. But you can't interact with it. No matter what you do, events will unfold as the author wrote them. That's fine for literature, but we're talking about gaming. We need a little more interaction.

Continuing the toy analogy, there are things you can do to improve play value in an adventure. In toys, things like this are called finger food. For our purposes, we'll call them "player bait". The classical form of player bait is combat. Chuck them into a room full of orcs/werewolves/mooks and put the janitorial staff on standby. And there's nothing wrong with combat. It can be fun. It can be lots of fun. But you should accommodate other styles of play. Sneaking around enemies can be as much fun as fighting them. Let your players do things, don't just put them were they need to be. If they're walking down a dungeon corridor, put a fast moving underground river in their way. Then sit back and watch them. The best swimmer might take a rope across for the other members to pull themselves along. Somebody might be able to just jump across and do the same thing. You might be able to throw a smaller party member across. And these are just genre unspecific examples. You'd be amazed what happens when players have access to magic or technology.

The important point here is not just to let the players play, though. Let them play the game they want. That's more than a consideration of genre. Yes, a dungeon crawl when you're entire group wants to be in space isn't going to go well. It also isn't going to be well received if your party would rather be back in town interviewing suspects in a murder case. Style is going to effect the quality of play much more than genre. Get to know your group well enough to be able to anticipate what sort of bait they'll take. Also realize that play style preferences aren't going to be the same throughout the group. One player is going to really enjoy combat, another might prefer solving puzzles, while a third is interested in interacting with different groups. Put out bait for everyone. It'll keep the group happy, but it'll also add variety to the play.

That's your Game Signs for the day. See you in 48.