Rule Zero

One of the biggest problems I have as a both a GM and a player is trying to shift through all of the ideas that pop in my head. At any given time, I’ve got several ideas for both characters I’d like to play and story/campaign ideas.

This normally isn’t a bad thing; I mean, who wouldn’t like to have so many ideas to run with? The trouble comes when I get excited about new concepts and do not give enough credit or thought to older ones. Worse yet, sometimes I will flat out abandon older ideas if the new idea is striking my fancy. This happens a lot during character creation, and I’ve lost perfectly viable and interesting characters to this madness.

If you happen to have the same problem, or maybe do a similar thing, the best thing you can do is keep a notepad file on your computer (or just a notebook if you find yourself without a computer often) and jot down every idea you come up with in these regards. If you get excited about a new character idea, jot both the new idea and the old idea down, as you’ll maybe want to revisit the idea later on and use it wholesale who even incorperate it into a new idea. This goes double for GMs.

Also note that you don’t need to use new ideas, even if they’re seemingly more exciting. If you’re a GM, it’s not just your game, it’s everyone else’s game too, and you have to consider that suddenly dropping in your new ideas might very well throw the entire game off for everyone else at the table. If you’re a PC, there is such a thing as bogging down a character with too many plot points.

That’s all for today’s advice. Join me next week when I report back that I didn’t listen to my own advice and made a Half-Orc cleric/oracle that fights with two scythes and doesn’t cast spells because he’s afraid of divine magic.

I once almost ended a game pretty early on in it’s life due to a stupid plan of mine.

We’re going through this dungeon, and we reach the end of the second level. The last fight of that floor is against some sort of large aquatic worm type deal. The exit to the next level was behind this gate in the back of the room, and we had to kill this thing in order to open the gate.

Somehow, the words “Kill this thing in order to open the gate” became “It has to pass through the gate in order for the gate to open” in my head, and so a bold idea formed in my head.

Earlier, by chance of the dice, we found an efreet bottle on the second floor, and it had one wish available. Presented with the situation described above, we sat on our little mound of earth, water surrounding us with that worm thing swimming around, just waiting for us to mess up. We began talking strats, and after about ten or fifteen minutes, we got nowhere. I took charge of the situation and pulled out the efreet bottle and summoned our wish maker.

The group looked at me like I just shot our last silver bullet, but in my head, they were soon going to fight over who was going to high five me first.

I turned to the genie, and took a deep breath. Locking eyes, I told the genie my wish:

“I wish for the creature in the water to go behind the gate to the next floor.”

The genie smiled, and moved the creature behind the gate, then disappeared in a puff of smoke. Silence filled the room, the smile on my face slowly fading from my face.

“What?”

They all told me how much of a dumbass I was almost in unison. I realized my mistake and looked at Pedro in horror, who just shakes his head and calls the game right there, citing that he needs to figure out where to go from there.

Somehow, some way, we ended up finding a solution to that problem (something about a dominate monster spell or something? I don’t recall the specifics too well). All I know is that I wasn’t allowed in strat meetings for a few sessions after that.