RPGaDay2024 Day 24 - Acclaimed Advice

I often give advice to other GMs on Reddit, Discord, etc. and I strongly "new GM month" in January in any way I can. And there's a lot of great "starter" advice to get new GMs going in terms of sizing their adventures to the time available, handle the unexpected, reminding them to have fun, etc. But today, I'll be talking about a few pieces of (related) advice that have really helped me as an experienced GM.

Assume Players Can do Anything

The 3.x Epic Level Handbook by Andy Collins and Bruce Cordell was designed to allow campaigns to go past 20th level. It included special spells, currencies, feats, class levels, target difficulties, and other such mechanics for the things that happened above 20th level and into very high levels. For that, it was fine, though no campaign I ran ever got past 17th level.

However, what was REALLY valuable about the book was the (paraphrased) line "Assume that players know everything, can get anywhere, and get around anything." This line and in the pages that followed, I got a lot of solid and direct-to-play advice that was valuable in helping me think differently about framing encounters and events in higher-level campaigns. It even gave me a different approach to framing lower-level events.

As an extreme example of high-level characters overcoming a challenge: What if the 17th-level characters use "Wish" (or Miracle) to obtain the teleport coordinates for the Epic MacGuffin. As a GM, there's nothing you can do to stop that, other than nerfing the Wish by declaring divine intervention. And potentially there goes 3 sessions of prep work that you'd planned to have around info gathering, gone, as the players teleport to the item.

The "Assume Players Can do Anything" advice taught me to think through the challenges, what they brought to the table, and how I could make things challenging, in spite of spells that could bypass the most obvious elements of the challenge. Another way to look at it: It's said that a good GM never requires a specific die roll or a specific solution to a puzzle as the only way to accomplish an objective. That can get the characters story-locked which is frustrating to everybody. If you reverse that, a better GM won't have a single solution or die roll open the doors to the end of an adventure; rather, they will make success an advantage towards completion, but not sufficient.

This same advice can easily be applied to lower-level characters who might use Augury (Weal or Woe on an action) or a "nat-20" on an Information Gathering check to get a jump start on their next steps of an adventure. Rather than nerf their efforts, it taught me to find ways to turn those efforts into an advantage toward solving their problem. 

There Are Always More Monsters

I heard Monte Cook say this in an interview or an article. As a GM, it's tempting to use a huge boss fight to be the completion of an epic adventure. When the players roll an 18 on a vorpal blade, or the boss mob fails their "hold monster" check, this can be a huge letdown to hours of planning. And so as a GM, it's tempting to nerf the player's abilities so that the BBEG can fight on, and make it the challenge you were hoping for. But it's not for the reasons you are hoping for, and can be anti-climactic for the players, who may feel cheated that their initial. 

Instead, give them the easy win or lucky roll. It might seem anti-climactic if you planned a whole-session (or multi-session) combat. But from a player side, they get to crow about the BBEG rolling the Nat-1 on their save against "hold monster" and how you surrounded and eliminated it the following round with 8 crit attacks by warriors, rogues, and wizards with "roll to hit" spells. That is the stuff that campaign legends are made of. I once cast "Dominate Person" on a mini-boss, overcame his magic resistance, then I blew his saving throw. Instead of a big battle, I now had to decide what to do with a dominated holy warrior who was going to be really pissed when he got free. I didn't want to kill him (mind control ethics), so we had to instruct him to "guard this exact spot from rats, while taking time for rest and eating" or something like that. The GM made a big show of him carrying out my instructions, as we left and climbed higher into the tower--where more challenges awaited.

This was great advice on its own merits, but it also got me thinking about encounter creation. Instead of one big boss who was a single point of failure in the encounter, give him backup support who can keep things going if you take him out. Make them bigger than they original were, if you want to maintain some challenge. Have your big-bad have a multi-phase fight, where overcoming one aspect of him leaves a few other challenges. Or better yet, don't have everything in one combat be the lynch-pin to completing an adventure--which connects beautifully to the "assume players can do anything" should  

But ultimately, remember that as GM, you control the entire world outside of the 2-8 people sitting in front of you, so don't take away their accomplishments--give them new challenges, instead.