D&D Geekery

[ralphmelton]

Mike's taking over DMing a game, and had seemed to want a bit of help with statting out NPCs and finding challenges for the players and so forth. So I volunteered to help him out on Monday night, because
a) it's fun to do that sort of geeking,
b) Lori wasn't home, so I was fairly idle anyway, and
c) I feel that I've asked so many people for help developing my own campaign that I owe a karmic debt to try to help others.

It was fun. I picked feats and magic items for some of his NPCs, and I suggested a challenge for the PCs to face. It ended up being kind of a nifty challenge, if I do say so myself--I don't want to give any details, since I think some of his players read my journal, but I look forward to hearing how they deal with the challenge.

Planning out GMing is so much easier with a friend to bounce ideas off of. Maybe I should try applying Extreme Programming principles and organize a game with two GMs and N players.

Comments

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of the team teaching thing that we do for Sunday school. Rick and I usually divide it up such that one of us is the primary teacher for the day and the other is secondary. The primary plans the lesson and runs things. The secondary one supports the primary one when needed and adds opinions/insights and other assistance along the way. I could see something like that working for gaming.

BTW, thanks for the help!

[dlatimer.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a fairly good idea. After talking through adventures with Mike, I thought that the 2 GM concept could work rather well.

XP as GMing...

[skington.livejournal.com]

From what I remember of XP, the point is that one person is coding, while the other person thinks about tests and what could go wrong. One person is allowed the keyboard, the other one is definately not.

So if you end up as being the second person in a GM planning session, you should aim to think as a player. With all that that entails.

FWIW, I never fully stat NPCs, because that gets in the way. If the players like NPCs, they end up major NPCs, even if they were previously minor NPCs or even throwaway characters. The challenge from NPCs is just enough to get the characters scared (if you want to scare them), and to get them do cool things.