Once again, something I posted over on Treasure Tables bore repetition here. I’ll probably be doing this sort of thing from time to time.

Always, always remember that, as the GM, you are within your rights to cheat like crazy. In fact, it is absolutely your responsibility to cheat, provided that you’re doing so in order to make a better game for everyone. If the PCs are fighting a particularly difficult (or merely resilient) monster, and you either fear a TPK or a stalemate, adjust the monster’s difficulty on the fly. You can simply lower its hit points, or you can give it a great weakness, and hint at that weakness to your players (“Make an Intelligence check. Ok, you notice that, though the creature is covered in hard, chitinous armor, there seems to be a plate missing on its right side, under its arm.”). That way, the players can bypass the monster through some clever maneuvering, rather than simply beating on it forever.

As for the puzzle that just won’t stop: I think you should come up with a solution beforehand, but you shouldn’t be afraid to throw it out the window if the PCs come up with something better. A puzzle in an RPG should be challenging and satisfying, not a frustrating roadblock that disrupts the flow of play.

There is, of course, another solution: let the players cheat. Kind of. In my upcoming Iron Heroes/Eberron campaign, I plan on giving the PCs access to Story Tokens, so that they can exhert more control over the world around them. Remember that roleplaying is a collaborative storytelling art. This isn’t about you telling a story to your players, it’s about the entire group telling the story. You, as the GM, get to guide the story and have to come up with a lot of the plot points, but that doesn’t mean that the PCs can’t help you out with that.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at 10:01 pm and is filed under GMing Methodology, Gamecrafting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.