War Cry
Speaking personally, there’s nothing I like better than inventing setting details on the fly. Coming up with cosmological explanations for flying islands or improvising weird holidays on the spur of the moment is fun for me. And on an intellectual level, I guess I’m aware that this is an acquired skill. What I struggle against is this weird logical fallacy that happens with a lot of gamers. You wind up assuming that, just because you think a thing is fun, everybody at the table thinks it’s fun too. This is where you get accusations of bad wrong fun. It’s also how, as a GM, you wind up making your players uncomfortable.
Case in point, my players were at a costume ball in a French-inspired setting. They’re chasing down this criminal, hoping to find him in the crowd before he does something dastardly to His Majesty. In the midst of the chase one of the PCs bumps into an impressively dressed general, spilling his drink and mussing his chapeau. Thinking this could be a fun world building moment I put her one the spot, asking her to describe the guy and give him a name.
“Umm… Fuck,” she says. It doesn’t take long for me to realize that she’s drawing a total blank.
“OK,” say I, feeling like a dick. “So General Fa’Huick’s mustaches twitch in vexation as he wipes champagne from his lapel. He glares round at you and etc. etc.”
It didn’t make the game more fun. It made the player feel like she failed at being creative, where in point of fact I was the one who failed to deliver a fun moment. As I thought a bit more about the situation, I came to realize that I’d been guilty of similar screw ups in other games. I’ve asked bards to come up with clever insults or song lyrics, paladins to recite their prayers, and cavaliers to come up with a formal challenge before entering into a duel. These moments might have been fun in my imagination, but they fell flat at the table.
For me, the lesson is a simple one: Know your players. Know how comfortable they are with off the cuff world building. And in a more general sense, know their likes and dislikes. We play these games to entertain one another; we play for the benefit of the other guys at the table, not just ourselves and our own predilections. Give your buddies the game they want. And if at all possible, try not to giggle too much when their war cries miss the mark.
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Whatever you do, beware Hamhock, Demon Pig of Haydenford. He looks kinda pissed right now.
The heroes are in his pen, and and they’re taking up valuable wallowing time. I’d be pissed too.
Yeah, I’ve done the exact same sort of thing to my players before. And had it done to me. I’m terrible with coming up with people on the fly. Ask me to name some mystical geographical feature and why it’s there and people tolerate it, that I can do offhand. Think of a name? I’ll be back to you on that somewhere around the end of a campaign.
I think I may have nightmares about that pig.
Proper nouns are the worst. Take your average moon goddess for example. You can make up any number of equinox rituals and midnight ceremonies for her, but as soon as you’ve got to come up with the names of her angels: “Ummm… Well the one with the sword is Archangel Bob, I guess.”
Also, I’m pretty sure Dr. Robotnik had a hand in making that pig.
I’ve always felt replacing proper vowels with ‘y’ works quite well.
Now the Archangel Bob becomes the Archangel Byb.
“Nay adventurer, it is pronounced as ‘Bibe’, not ‘Bib’.”
One of my characters in a current Pathfinder game is a black kobold named Skraa who wants to be a famous bounty hunter.
His name comes from a sound that was heard outside that scared the other a kobolds. They thought it would make him more fearsome.
So that’s his war cry now. SKRAA IS LEGEND!
My father-in-law’s group tell the story of a goblin PC. The little dude was the least respected, least fearsome monster in the entire dungeon. So when he heard that all the other monsters were scared of this legendary boogeyman called a “paladin,” he knew what he wanted to be. I think he would have got on well with your kobold.
Sounds like the begining of an epic adventure.
He is honestly one of my favorite characters too.
He managed to pin an invisible assassin without having ANYTHING to aid his grapple checks.
The DM was less than pleased with their dice that day. 😛
This only fuled his confidence… Though he has also taken a Scorching Ray to the face on two seperate occasions and a mundane sap on another so…
On second though, I’m pretty sure Gobladin would just mistake your guy for a dragon and try to smite him. Not the sharpest halberd in the rack, that goblin.
Just found your comic, have been going through the archives and loving it! Special props to Explosive Runes, it has a special place in my heart from OoTS and a friend who once handed out Christmas cards with a little slip of paper in them that read “I prepared Explosive Runes this morning”.
Welcome to the comic, Andrew! I will have you know that I just spent the last five minutes googling “handbookofheroes explosive runes,” trying to figure out when I’d done an explosive runes gag. Having failed in my task I came back here to ask for clarification, then actually looked at this comic. I am not a clever man.
Fun story about explosive runes. It’s only ever come up once in my games, but it was a perfect moment. The obnoxious little kid alchemist had found some obscure text in an abandoned wizard’s study. The title was written in Infernal, which he did not read. Turning to the tiefling nobleman of the group he says, “Hey Tiefling! What’s this say?” He opens the book up directly into the tiefling’s face. It was pure Daffy Duck as the book exploded.
“You’re despicable,” says the soot-blackened nobleman. Instant classic in my group.