Rule Zero

I buy new dice every time a new campaign starts (or I at least try to, anyway). It’s a way to commemorate the start of a new game. I try to use these dice exclusively for that particular game.

Unfortunately, I’m not always able to keep that promise. Sometimes, the dice are just out to screw you and revel in your misfortune. Take this story, for example.

Imagine a beautiful set of dice, a shiny, cloudy blue set. You’ve done your practice rolls, you see the high numbers, and it’s time. It’s time to rock faces. This was me, some 8 years ago. My character, primed and ready.

I have never seen the fates laugh so hard.

In the first game session, my sorcerer missed his shocking grasp spell. Fumbled it, actually. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but we had a critical fumble dice at our table. Instead of just falling over, I instead shocked myself and was dazed for a round.  Then the thing we were fighting took me down with it’s next hit while I was messed up. I don’t think I hit a single time in combat with a non Magic Missile spell.

Other roles suffered a similar fate. I rolled 7 or below for any check I needed to make. I tried (and failed) a lot of things that night.

Finally, the time came for me to scale the mage tower we were in. We were trying to get to the top floor, but we were stuck. I elected (I don’t know why I did, really. I had a 8 strength and no climb ranks) to climb out of the window and climb to the next floor’s window and find the door to the previous floor to open it.

I started out fine. I got a decent roll, and began my accent. The tower was high, and was also surrounded by the living dead. I couldn’t risk failure, or I’d fall into death (if the fall damage itself didn’t kill me). Of course, by this point I didn’t trust my dice, so when I found myself about half-way to the next floor and needed to make another climb check, I said “screw that”, and took ten.

Took ten on a climb skill when I had a -1 to all strength based skills. I wish I was making this up.

I immediately fell, failed my chance to catch onto the window I climbed out of, and straight into the undead horde. I don’t know if the fall damage killed me or if the zombies and skeletons did, but that was the end of the line for my sorcerer. I looked down to my dice, shaking my head at them, then threw them into the bottom of the dice bag to be forgotten. And they stayed forgotten until I ended up using them without remembering the hell they put my poor Halfling Sorcerer through.

They actually rolled pretty well since then, actually. Maybe it was just my Halfling they didn’t like.

I find that the more I prep for a game, the more likely it is that the group will ignore what I’ve got ready.

For example: One time I prepped a whole bunch of things for this port city my players were about to visit. I had various NPCs readied with personality quirks for each one, everyone of them was going to have just a small nugget of info for them regarding their eventual destination. There was a three day wait for the boat they needed, giving them plenty of time for them to check out the town and maybe gather some information.

None of that happened. The group simply stayed at the inn for the three days and didn’t talk to anyone, essentially skipping everything I had prepped. I smuggled one nugget of info in there, but other than that, a chunk of the mystery surrounding Shiny Pebble Island was missed.

I find that prepping a little outline for what I want to happen, and then winging the rest is what works best for me.  I’ll give you another example.

Another group of mine wanders into a desert town, stopping to restock before heading to their destination. As I described it, one of the players got excited, and asked if it was like one of those old west towns you see in westerns, and while I didn’t really plan on that, I decided to go with it. We only had about…45 minutes of game time in, and were down two players that night, so going to the temple they needed to get to seemed like a bad idea, as I knew the temple would require all of them there. Instead, I made up a quick bounty quest at the sheriff’s office. A band of outlaws, with crimes including cattle theft and robbing the stage coach, has evaded capture for too long. Their leader, McGriddle, was also wanted for assaulting the bar keeper’s wife in an argument.

The groups Gunslinger (the one who was excited about the town) rolled out of town to find the criminals. He was accompanied by the group’s Magus, and the two of them eventually find them hold up in a old shack near a water hole. After quickly ambushing the outlaws (they weren’t too tough), they find a woman in the shack screaming after hearing a fireball explode outside and smelling burning flesh. They calm her down enough for them to find out that she was McGriddle’s woman, and she was pregant with his outlaw baby. The Magus, after a short yelling match with the woman, knocks her out. The two players find the missing cattle outside, and decide to stride into town (woman strapped to one cow) riding the cows.  They turn in the bodies of McGriff, McGriddle, and McGraff, and collect their bounties.

I had never seen the gunslinger’s player so happy before. He ate the whole thing up, and loved it.

That town actually stayed a place where I just made things up. The next session was another completely off-the-cuff story involving the town and it’s inhabitants (turns out it was actually a ghost town the whole time!), but that’s a story for another time.

In a few months, I’ll have been running table top games for a year. It’s not the longest length of time by any standard, at least compared to my brother and other long term game masters, but for me, who was always a player first and GM/ST/DM third (not playing was always second), it’s a long time.

I was always a player. The few times I tried my hand at being a DM in 2e were…disastrous, to say the least. In my very first game, I ran things completely off the cuff, didn’t even have an inkling of a plot or story or who the NPCs were at all, I just threw a dragon at my brother, weakened by all the arrows it had taken from the guards, and my brother ended up getting the killing blow, then retired after scrapping all the coins off the dragons’ body (I don’t know why I told him there were coins stuck to the body). Another misstep of DMing was with my cousin; The first being when I told him he tripped over a dune in the desert (which prompted my cousin to explain to me that a dune was not a small build up of sand like I thought of), and the second being when I let him stop an iron golem with a bucket of water, ruling that it would rust him out and he wouldn’t be able to move.

So when it came time for me to start running a game regularly, I was pretty nervous. I had run a few games here and there over the last year and a half (using the Pathfinder system), each lasting about 3-5 weeks, with varying results each time.  I almost relented, but thanks to the support of my brother (who helped a lot with the fleshing out of the story, among other things) and the urging of my would be players, I managed to go forward on it, and ran a story involving a demon possessed paladin trying to reclaim the different pieces of himself in order to be whole again and pick up where he left off before being stopped (you know, the usual demon stuff).

I’m glad I’m a GM, as it fulfills that storytelling itch I’ve had for so long (I always had ideas in my head for different stories, but never got them out). I’m actually running two groups now that alternates each week, which is pretty exciting itself, but also kind of daunting, and a wee bit scary too.

Regardless, I’m eagerly waiting for this Sunday to roll around (the day I run my game), as I can’t wait to meet with everyone and entertain them for a few hours.