Sorry to be so slow replying.
Between Christmas meals (and yet another tomorrow), a major power cut (and a briefer one today) and complete collapse at the weekend (12 hours sleep Friday night, 12 hours sleep Saturday night), I've been a bit tardy here.
You might well be over thinking it there, Prime Minister. Were you not
intending to refer the honourable member to the speech you gave on the
subject to the House this 12 September last?
<grin>
At least you are aware of your major shortfalls as a GM - now you have
an idea what to work on. Such is fairly solid evidence you aren't too
acquainted with Messrs Dunning and Krueger (?).
Must admit I've not come across this.
So, an inability to recognize a lack of ability.
OK, I *think* I'm avoiding that. Swapping it out for an inability to see any ability. Or an ability to see inability.
I've come a cropper a few times on an inability to let go of carefully
prepped hooks when the players say "Sod this" - after some more growing
old disgracefully, I've found it less wear and tear on the scalp turf to
leave the hook-location link somewhat inchoate and slide it in
underneath where the natural-disaster-looking-for-place-to-happen (ie,
the PCs) turns up next.
Yes, as I think I mention in that last write up. I'm very loathe to 'let go' and while I tell players they can do what they want they infer otherwise from the head banging on the table or the sound of paper being scrunched up and thrown in the bin. Even if the latter is metaphorically.
For example, if I had planned for them to pick up the hook at Derryn
Dodgie's Slightly Used Starships and they instead end up having to talk
to the law firm of Bleedum, Grabbit and Scarper (such as for a salvage
claim, where one of the PCs ended up bribing an apparently-unbribable
His Honour - the PC in question managed to frame the respondent for the
attempted bribe, getting Mr Grabbit in hot water), I'll rework the hook
to make sense near the law firm.
Yes, I like this tip. I should try and be better at it. Snipped as an example for folder, thank you.
Especially with more complex rules, such as ship to ship combat, I've
found it's more important to go with a consistent set of rules, even if
wrong, for a given session, then cop to your mis-steak afterwards and
fix the worst of your goof for the next session. It beats losing oodles
of time to rules-lawyer yammer and you yourself spinning out - the goal
That's a good tip. Particularly if we get to ship combat I'll remember that if I can.
is to tell a good yarn and have fun (ok, maybe not if you've dropped in
a hefty dose of Cthulhu Mythos),
That was never my cup of tea but I recently read a collection of Lovecraft short stories to see what the fuss was about, and I have been slightly tempted to see if I could do more of a horror thing. Maybe just once. I did sort of try to give it that kind of atmosphere as we transitioned into Annic Nova. I may try a bit more next time.
not dive into <JeffZeitlin>"Accurate
Adventures In Accounting"</JeffZeitlin>.
I'm still waiting for him to do that RPG.... ;-)
If you're talking to Jeff semi-regularly anyway and he's happy to try to
help you, why not dry-run your ideas past him? Worst case, he's a
trans-little-pond rubber duck - he might not be able to help you _per
se_, but the process of organising and clarifying your ideas so you can
tell them to him will probably knock something loose. Best case, he's a
greybeard (literally, I think) with oodles of rat cunning and can point
out holes in your (especially implicit) assumptions before your players
do. When I talk to him, I learn something - usually, it's not that I
was right.
Yes, he's very kindly brilliant at that and have been trying him out this weekend. Aside from sleeping for much of it, in the awake moments I managed some scribble to send him.
I have long steered away from running prepped modules in their original
system - I find them too constraining, my players find them boring,
etc. That hasn't stopped me from taking such a module, wire-brushing
the serial numbers and VIN off, then running it in another system.
Maybe I should try adding a bit more than just a couple of critters to Annic Nova.
There was a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy module which I ended up converting to
Pathfinder, getting many kudos about originality.
I have very fond memories of Dom Mooney running Shadows but with the Travellers comic strip characters and some extra stuff about clones. (I must have written about that in an issue of Freelance Traveller). It was a wonderful mix that took something that could have been a bit dull as published so many years ago and made it magic.
Me: "You all meet in an inn."
Players: *GROAN* "Now what?"
Me: *smugging* "Zombies rise up out of the ground."
Players: "WTF?"
Me: "Better start running."
LOL!
Pacing, again, comes down to experience. I've found if I prep what I
think will take around half to two-thirds of the next session length,
that usually works out well enough to have the session end off with a
bang (in some cases, very literally - such as PCs popping some
thunderballs). Maybe take a page out of Agile sprint planning - if you
went roughly X % under on what you wanted to do this session, then
reduce your ambitions next session by that amount?
That sounds like a handy tip I'll have to think on.
Thank you again, very helpful
tc