Shopping Expedition
The best way to improve your craft as a GM is to play with a lot of different people, picking and choosing the best techniques and bringing them back to your own campaign. Insofar as I live in the biggest city in my state–a teeming metropolis of 60,000 souls–that’s easier said than done. That’s why I’ve been listening to a lot of Critical Role lately. You can get a lot out of the experience as a player, but I’ve also found it instructive as a GM. In particular, I’ve been paying attention to the way Matt Mercer paces his downtime activities. Or rather, the way he doesn’t.
I tend to get antsy about pacing when I’m behind the screen. If I sense a lull in the action I’ll flash forward to the next day or introduce a random encounter to get the game rolling again. But if you pay attention to the flow of play in Critical Role, it’s never Mercer who decides to advance the action. It’s always the players who determine when the game moves on to the next thing.
“Do you have anything else that you want to do before you go to sleep?” is a common question. It’s easy to miss the first couple of times, but the longer I’ve watched the more I’ve heard that question repeated: Is there anything else you want to do? That question gives power to the players, meaning that they’ve got plenty of time to engage in side conversations, intra-party pranks, and yes, even shopping.
If you ask the average GM, they’ll tell you that downtime activities might be interesting every once in a while, but that it’s best to take care of shopping and crafting and all the other “bookkeeping stuff” between sessions. I’m beginning to question that common wisdom. The “boring stuff” has a way of giving players room to breathe. It allows them space to incorporate their own ideas into the flow of play. To add some dynamics to a game, bringing contrast to the moments of high drama. Or at least, that’s what I’m beginning to suspect.
What do you guys think? Do you like to linger over the “bookkeeping stuff,” or do you think that it’s better left to emails and forum posts and between-sessions play? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I think it depends on what the players want. There are some who simply want to hack n’ slash their way to the next battle and everything is just in the way. You’ve got people who love to RP and want to explore the world the DM set up. You can have munchkins who want to get the best gear, best stats, best everything. There’s players who want to do the Batman approach and want to solve puzzles and have something for whatever situation they can come up with.
Ultimately I think what you should do, as the DM, is ask what they want to get out of the story. You can plan for months crafting a setting but it flops if the players don’t care and just want to fight whatever’s next or murderhobo their way into the world. For one player he said that having a break between fighting to get a sense for the story was something he was looking forward to so having downtime between encounters is something easy to add in.
Asking what players want to do gives them a feeling that they can do things and that their actions matter, even if it’s just to themselves.
In a perfect world, the GM can pick up on subtle cues from the players and get this information intuitively. In reality, most GMs are woefully lacking in telepathic ability. I’m nobody’s champion poker player, you know? While reading the table is a good skill to develop, I think you’re you’re spot-on: Simply ask the players what they want to do rather than guessing.
In addition to reminding players that they can do things, it also puts them in a frame of mind to start thinking of things to do. If you want your players to drive your plot, you’ve got to put them in a situation where they can say, “Actually, I’d like to visit the blacksmith’s” or “Since we just arrived, I’d like to commune with nature and get a sense of the area.” Hew too closely to your session notes and players go into auto pilot mode, and that’s not the kind of mind frame you want for creative and engaged humans.
Had this problem with the guys I play for. I kept getting complaints that my games were focused too much on NPCs and other things. I watched my players carefully and reshuffled things to a more traditional dungeon crawl experience and player enjoyment really picked up. I tried going back to the more intrigue style game I had been running and got more complaints about the NPCs. I eventually came to the conculsion that my players wanted Dungeon crawls, not stories involving characters other than them.
I’ve found that the NPCs that are allowed are BBEGs, Hostages, Survivors looking for a hero, and the occasional Tragic Villian, but only occasional. My Players object to anyone roughly their power level. They don’t mind characters stronger than them and don’t mind NPCs weaker than them, but apparently NPCs that are about the Player Level bother them. It’s an odd quirk.
Good on you for aligning your game to your players. It can be frustrating when you’ve got big ideas and cool plots to unveil, but that’s just setting up for frustration if your players aren’t the type to appreciate them. In my mind, the helpful paradigm shift is this: It’s my goal to entertain my players. It may not always feel like the story you want to tell, but you can always write the novelization after the campaign is over.
Yeah, Rule Zero is having fun after all. While it isn’t my favorite jam, the more “GM as Adversary” style they prefer is somewhat fun. The look of panic when they overwhelm themselves, the elation they get when they completely steamroll an encounter due to a good roll or strategy; it’s all fun. The thing I wanted people to take away is that sometimes Players key in on the oddest things to nit-pick. Note that it is specifically NPCs around their power level that appear like they might also be protagonists rather than supporting cast that my group dislikes.
Any theories as to why that is?
Personally, I am a heavy advocate of getting the majority of it done in the session itself. There are some things you can get done out of session, little small things people want to do wholly by themselves, but I prefer it all happening with the whole group there if the whole group is there in the game.
My group tends to be half extremely combat focused and half more interested in the RP. However, I just about always do shopping in session, and most of the more memorable NPC’s have come from such expeditions, especially when they are doing shopping in evil cities (My group is quite evil). Like Skullport. Probably one of their favorite NPC’s is a bugbear shopkeep I made up for there that showcases the effectiveness of his weapons by killing off a bunch of goblin slaves he has. They’ve just outright spent gold on weapons they had no intention of ever using just because they liked him so much.
Crafting I’ll mix a bit, but I also tend to be a proponent of crafting being more than “I turn my gold into items.” Right now, one of my player’s is actually placing a major focus on doing research and resource collection for the crafting of a legendary magic item, and he is really enjoying the process for it a lot more than if it was just turning gold into an item. Now, I’ll tend to let research be a bit more ‘out of game’ just since that can be literal hours of spending time reading, asking people, learning stories about powerful figures that have had similar items in history, etc.
And I think it allows players more opportunity to become familiar with the world, with attempting to negotiate prices for purchase and sale of items, and with what they bloody hell look like. It also gives the perfect opportunity for people to react to the group that at one point was (because I let my player’s roll just about anything, so long as they realize I am making the stats for their race): A drow, an Orog, a pixie, an Aarakocra, and a fucking half-gargoyle, half- fang dragon (Started from a joke, in pathfinder where gargoyles are monstrosities, not elementals, and we made it work. He is the ugliest person in every city).
This comic turned out to be well-timed. One of my groups just had a Pencils & Paychecks session last night. We spent the first two hours of the game tallying loot from a run-in with some goblin airships. Selling ~130 size small masterwork weapons turned out to be pretty easy, if a bit dull: we just got rid of them wholesale. Same deal with distributing our looted potions and scrolls. It was an exercise in Excel sheets, and only intermittently in-character. These are the kinds of activities that, in my opinion, can be better handled away from the table. (Sadly, we didn’t have access to the party loot sheet between sessions, so we had to take care of it then and there.)
What I think works better is the shopping itself. Meeting proprietors and haggling for new loot can be an interesting RP opportunity. Case in point, we concluded our shopping expedition by helping the local crazed enchantress get a handle on her “personal anti-sneak attack device.” It’s a jetpack. It blasts anyone who hits you from behind while propelling you 1d10 x 10 ft. forward, usually into a wall. Ours for free if we agreed to field test the prototype and take notes.
For me, that’s the good and the bad exemplified. Do as much math as possible away from the table. Interact with NPCs when it’s A) an interesting social encounter or B) the PC’s idea. My two cents anyway.
For freetime i always like to have little interparty conflicts worked out with my group of friends that i play with often (i dont really trust randosbwith them though) and have those plots be worked out in downtime. For shopping in particular i usually go by settings, in the grand planet wide mega city, the underground black market will be a good place to explore if you want anything magic ot rare. In the vast wastes, just pray the caravan has something not terrible. When my party finally found the hidden arcane city where magic could be cazted peacefully in secret it was a special occasion, lwtting them buy whatever they can afford within reason.
They don’t get talked about much, but I think dynamics are a key concept in good GMing. Varying it up is a good idea for encounter difficulty, overland travel, and shopping. Turning a shopping trip into an exciting reward is rock solid. Kudos.
Any examples of the kinds of intra-party conflict you employ? Do you work with the players to come up with the conflicts, or do they tend to do that on their own?
Before the entire campaign starts i like to work with each player to see their plans and have some sort of secret. Also my parties have a tendancy to bicker, in the megacity campaign i had a paladin with a pet dog want to kill a baby fey they had found that was evil at birth that everyone else wanted to try to adapt. Having the notsobaby fey take the rogues poison and slip it into the dogs food. They were really ate eachothers throats for that little prank and eventually the players noticed me laughing a bit, and that ruined the fun. I generally just like situations where there isnt total trust or full information.
Whenever I play, the GM is bad aboot giving downtime. We’re always rushed from one adventure to the next.
You ever play the Lord of the Rings board game? This one:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/823/lord-rings
Check out the secondary board used to track progress:
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/348781/lord-rings
You begin the game by getting resources in The Shire and Rivendell, have your first encounter in Moria, get more resources in Lothlorien, then go through Helm’s Deep, Shelob’s Lair, and Mordor without a chance to rest.
Rushing from one adventure to the next is not in itself bad. But if that’s all you ever do? If it’s all Mordor and no Lothlorien? That quickly becomes exhausting rather than exciting.
In the game I am currently DMing, during what I thought was relatively short exposition, I had a PC magically write the letters “TLDR” in the air. That said, This group uses a lot of downtime, focusing quite a lot of resources (IRL time and energy) on the “bookkeeping” activities, But I realized then I need to be very careful to let them drive how much they want.
I suppose it depends on what you consider to be “relatively short exposition.” Exhibit A: https://shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612
In the group I play with, GMs are good about allowing players to advance things. “Anything else?” Is a common question with us too.
I think it depends on the moment, as far as exposition goes. We have had sessions where we talked at length to different town folk, and we have had those pitstop moments where you are rushing and just need to off-load the corps-hole (read “Portable Hole”) that you stuffed full of bodies in a hurry to get out of the dungeon (what? Taking armor off is hard even WITH help). On a completely unrelated note… isn’t Prestidigitation just the best?
Oh and the corps-hole makes a good bargaining chip for anyone not wanting to cooperate with your party. 😉
I hope that you pronounce it “corpse-hole.”
Ha! yeah there should be an ‘e’ at the end.
Is… is that book titled Spelltaco?
What? You’ve never seen a magical cookbook before?
That is a very thick book to be just about magical tacos. I bet it cheats and has a bunch of other not really taco things in there.
There is a chapter on enchanted chalupas as well.
So why is the shopkeeper blue?
Air genasi were woefully underrepresented in the comic.
Shouldn’t she have windy hair?
I think it may have been a missed opportunity not calling today’s comic “shopping exposition”.
While I try to get my players to drive the narrative and downtime, I often get complaints about how “we haven’t had a fight in a bit” if I let them drive too much. Perhaps it’s a case of them not knowing what they want, or maybe a conflict between what their expectations are and what they really enjoy doing.
I am sorely tempted to go back and change the title, but that would be cheating.
You definitely want a mix of player-driven / GM-driven moments. You can’t have the players do all the work after all. I guess that’s the real trick: give them the space to drive the narrative, but don’t require them to do so.
A buddy of mine and I once took to referring to D&D as “Shopping and Shadows” because we spent a significant portion of our time in towns buying stuff. It’s not too bad in a small group, but when you get upwards of four players all going shopping it can tend to get pretty tedious, and it seems better to do the buying behind the scenes.
You know what I would like? A Monster Hunter type of supplement where you use specific reagents to craft specific items. Shopping and crafting suddenly become a group effort, and the payoff is more rewarding when it comes in-game.
As a worshipper of Brigh, crafting is part of my daily obedience. And sometimes you need to squeeze in crafting time in the middle of adventuring time because of time limits. My DM let me get around this by letting me craft a colossal animated object, which is a workshop with four legs and a big grabby arm (grab and constrict), so I can get the full 8 hours of craft time while travelling as well as serve as shelter and transportation for the entire party.
Last session my character spent most of the available downtime crafting a new clockwork servant (named Gearfield) while the more social characters dealt with local intrigue and we had a great moment of introducing my new buddy to the party.
Gearfield is fueled by lasagna; moves at half speed on Mondays.
Do clockwork servants dream of electric lasagna?
Yes. But they have trouble remembering that electric lasagna is not people food.
My new goal is being able to eat electric lasagna so I can have a nice dinner with my new son
With your Tom Waits reference last last week I thought that this was entirely appropriate. I’ve actually designed entire game shopping lists around this song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2_snSkpULQ
I’ve always wanted to create a “van art” campaign. Every session is based off a metal song from the 80, and the campaign concludes with a mix tape for everybody.
What the hell system would Tom Waits: The Campaign be?
A Mystery Men inspired Carnival Campaign with Waits himself being the on site superintendent/care taker of the machinery.
*Traveling Carnival/circus
He would essentially be himself but with both the character from Mystery Men & Wristcutters: A Love Story