Author: Leo Breebaart

Damn. My fourth DW session as GM with my sortof-newbie-group was a big disaster. The players said they had fun (I have very nice players), but I certainly didn’t.

Because one of us couldn’t make it that night, I thought I’d do another one-shot ‘flashback’ episode based around a Joe Banner starter, this time Altai Keep (http://joebanner.co.uk/altai-keep/). That approach worked so great last time, but this time it just… didn’t.

A big problem was that the objective “find out what happened to the missing villagers” was ultimately not very satisfying: they pretty soon discovered the villagers had been desanguinated and turned into walking undead. But since there was nobody for them to rescue (because I didn’t think of that in time!), there were no stakes left other than dealing with this horde of undead (which the players did by setting them on fire — that at least was a novel solution that led to a nice scene) and searching for the “whodunnit”. I completely failed to keep the subsequent fight with the big bad vampire priestess from just turning into a ‘keep whacking until she’s dead’ grind. The other big reveal in the scenario (that she was in cahoots with some resurrected minotaurs) went even worse, partially because by then I had ran out of time so I had to hurry up and infodump a lot of information, partially because I could already see I was not going to be able to stop the fight with the boss minotaur from turning into another grind, and partially because my players were getting bored and no longer taking anything serious (you try to project an air of menace and atmosphere when everyone’s giggling).

I hope next time (when we’re back to the main storyline in our campaign) things will go better. But I fear for the worst, because there we have also just reached the part where they need to confront a Big Bad monster — and I now really worry about my ability to make a scene like that engaging. The smaller puzzles & combat stuff I’m doing okay with, but the bigger fight scenes remain problematic, no matter how often I reread the “16 HP Dragon” inspirational story.

http://joebanner.co.uk/altai-keep/

My most recent DW session led to two GM questions that I am hoping you guys can, once again, help me with.

First, I cannot seem to get a proper grip on the Volley move. For example, my Ranger player frequently wants to do fictionally sensible things that involve using her bow in ways other than just shooting to kill. However, ‘Called Shot’ explicitly requires a surprised or helpless target, so what do I do when during a fight against a non-surprised opponent she says things like “I aim for his legs”, or “I just want to disable, not kill him”, or even “I want to shoot out the lights”? Until now I’ve just said, sorry, Volley doesn’t work like that, you can’t shoot unless you mean it, and it is a fighting move so it has to involve an opponent — but to be honest neither my players not myself find that very satisfying. How do you guys handle this? Any pointers to better deal with this sort of thing?

Second question: as I understand the rules, player Bonds are uni-directional in terms of XP. Although both players should agree with the Bond when it is created, and agree that it is resolved, only the Player who has it written on his or her sheet gets XP when it is resolved. Is there a specific reason why a bond doesn’t give XP to both people involved? My players really seemed to expect that, and I was a bit unsure of how to explain the reasoning behind this not being the case.

As always, many thanks in advance for your advice!

I recently GM’ed my 3rd DW session with my now-no-longer-quite-so-newbie group of players. It was a blast, definitely our best session so far, and that is in no small part thanks to all of you who took the time to respond to my previous GM’ing queries here in the Tavern.

Your advice on how to deal with 6- rolls in particular (basically: (a) the effect doesn’t have to be related to the attempted move, and (b) you can always just ask your players themselves for good suggestion) has really made a difference. The players liked it, I liked it, and everything was just a lot more relaxed as a result.

I built the session around Joe Banner’s Call The Locksmith one-shot (https://www.patreon.com/posts/call-locksmith-3458579), which also turned out to be a really good idea. It supplies just enough hooks and support for a GM not so experienced at on-the-fly improvising yet, making things, again, a lot less frantic.

So anyway, I just wanted to say thanks to all of you. And of course the session has also resulted in some new questions I’d like to get your advice on, but I’ll leave those for a separate post.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/call-locksmith-3458579

Last weekend I GM’ed my second-ever DW game with my group of mostly-new-to-RPG players, and with no experience and five players it was both exhausting and exhilarating to do, because of all the mental multi-tasking and improvising it required from me.

There were two situations I think I handled badly that I would like to get some feedback from more experienced GMs on, if possible.

First, I did not just want to throw endless slugfests, so I tried to set up enemies with annoying, even life-threatening moves that had to be ‘solved’ in other ways than just brute force: e.g. a tiny 1HP, blood-sucking, stun-inducing bampf lizard that when hit by anything immediately teleports away undamaged to another player, that was controlled by a magic object hidden nearby that needed to be found and destroyed.

In the end this worked out quite well (they threw the object away instead of destroying it, so I spontaneously had to decide on whether there was a range-effect involved, etc. etc.), but the thing is that by the end there were only two party members left unstunned. Instead of this giving my players a sense of major stakes (a la the 16 HP dragon), and a satisfying feeling of danger overcome, it turns out that the stunned party members just kinda felt left out of the fight, and started zoning out during the gameplay. (Which because of my inexperience probably also took much more wallclock time than it should’ve.)

Does anyone have any specific tips and tricks for course-correcting something like this when you see it happening halfway through, without it coming across as the GM again just starting to make arbitrary God decisions?

My second problem was coming up with 6- moves to make when my players kept rolling low. Yeah, I know about Suddenly Ogres, and I know I can sometimes just say “no, sorry, turns out you don’t remember anything relevant to this mysterious inscription after all”, but you can’t keep doing that without things derailing completely (or at least I couldn’t).

So again, does anybody have any generic tips and tricks for dealing with this? I suppose I could try and predict some likely situations in advance of the session (i.e. I told them about the inscription, so I could have been better prepared for a failed Spout Lore), but that also smacks too much of them following my ‘designed world’ on rails rather than discovering stuff together.

I realise that the the above is perhaps all a bit too vague, and that the answer may boil down to simply “you will get better at this over time”. But I thought I’d ask anyway.