I’m running my first DW session tonight. I’ll be starting with a written dungeon (The Bloodstone Idol, which is included in the French box) and I have some ideas for the setting (The Keep on the Borderlands, 30 years later).
But I don’t want to rob the players of their narrative rights and I’ll need some kind of hard rule to prevent me from doing so. Yeah, I tend to sit at the frustrated writer end of the GM spectrum, but I’m working on it 😉
So this is why I’m going to give worldbuilding responsabilities to each player:
*The Fighter has a say on everything connected to armed conflict, secular law and the feudal system.
*The Wizard is in charge of magic and the supernatural, as well as ancient history.
*The Cleric answers questions about religious power, dogma, cults and sects, etc.
*The Thief is the underworld and trade consultant. He’ll advise me on crime, guilds and legitimate commerce.
Has anybody done something of the sort?
That’s usually how it works, but I wouldn’t necessarily put that out there from the get go. Just remember those things and ask questions as they come up.
Remember, though, it’s fun to switch it up. Ask the Cleric about breaking the law. Ask the Fighter about the next magical menace. You’ll get more interesting answers that way.
There are two simple rules of thumb that will help you. They are more on educational side and when you’ll learn feel free to break it, but for now really stick to them.
First, really respect player input in every form and detail. Even if your ideas seem better. Second, every time you can’t come up with something really cool (and this is often for me), consider asking a player.
Also, what Adam said.
Thanks Adam. What I’ll do is put a post-it with these areas inside my GM screen so that I don’t forget to ask questions.
That’s what I’ll try to do. I’m just wary of falling back to my veteran GM routines – my players are also old gamers and they won’t volunteer narrative bits if I don’t prod them.
Our Monster of the Week series started with a lot of questions and progressively devolved into traditional adventures. But hey, working on it! =)
Well, that’s what second rule is about: it actually forces you to ask questions. You can also try timer and ask a question every 15 minutes or something like this.
Just be aware of when you are making decisions and try to practice turning those decisions over to the players.
Also, answer questions with questions.
Thanks guys, I’ll try and use these strategies. I’m off now!
That sounds like a good idea, I also like Adam Koebel ‘s idea of rotating the tasks so that it’s not the usual suspects that cover those areas. Especially if you thief player is a perpetual thief player.
I like the note of answering questions with questions.
Quick update: it went very well. I got very good answers from the players and loads of material to build upon. Now we only played one encounter/scene, so that was easy. In the future, I’ll have to be careful not to revert to all-powerful GM mode…