It’s the start of something new
New office space. New year. It was time for a change.
After the successful completion of our recent quest, we’d recently reached a satisfying pause point in our daggerheart campaign. There is something very freeing about setting aside your current adventure to build something new. I came in with zero prep sans a d100 table of starting options and it went..
Amazingly.
A classic preparation blunder is to prepare enough so that you can feel comfortable knowing what is going to happen next. The uncertainty is the sweet spot where the dice fall. It’s the thrill of seeing a 20 and the anticipation before it lands. If you already knew everything that was going to happen there would be no reason to share the story with all your players. Show them a problem and let them resolve it, as their answers might as well be as random as a dice roll.
I feel like I spoke about this practice in a previous blog post. Embrace the chaos. Let your players name all your npcs, roll all their stats and build an encounter around something mentioned offhand in a character's backstory. We can use the dice to help us when we don’t know the outcome. To provide a little structure, I tried to build around an existing oracle dice and put my own spin on it. Normally a D20 roll is a binary result of yes or no, above or below the determined Difficulty Check (DC). This time I turned just passing the DC into a “Yes, but” and just failing into a “No, but”. This small change adds a surprising amount of depth to your average skill check; Yes your player succeeds on their stealth check, but their quarry closes the window preventing their easy escape. Each roll gets us a little closer to the drama until a significant resolution. Which is something I could write an entire blog post about.
The takeaway for this week is to prepare what you cannot improv and embrace the chaos for the rest. Make a dice system that solves your moment to moment drama, use a d100 table to help start the adventure, then let the players create/destroy your world together.
