Blog, Jvstin Style

The use of Randomizers for GM Creativity

My session of Exalted that I ran yesterday for my newly reminted quartet of Exalted players (two new players adding to two of the original four) ran really, really well. The players all had opportunities to shine and do *their* thing.

The big thing, though, was how randomizers...that is to say, dice, inspired GM creativity and a plot twist.

While much of the RP that I do these days is diceless, I do some diced gaming. Much of the Indiegamers play revolves around games with dice, and of course there is my Exalted game here.

I've mentioned before, i think, the use of dice as a random element that helps reduce determinism in a game. However, in the last session, I used it as a plot twist.

The situation unfolded thusly:

The four PCs were at the site, a manor and farm, of the disappearance of the two former PCs, trying to determine the nature and bounds of the shadowland that connected to the Underworld that the PCs had deduced the former PCs disappeared into. One of the current PCs had advocated an approach of mapping out the bounds of the shadowland from the outside. The shadowland was weak enough only to be seen by night--however that is precisely the time when its the most dangerous, since crossing the bounds at night from the inside leads not back to the real world, but to the Underworld.

The PCs saw the danger and rode around carefully. A few undead inside approached menancingly and my envisioned plot was for the PCs to take them on, just outside the shadowland. (I am not so deprotagonizing or railroading to trick the characters unfairly into putting them into the shadowland by fiat.

And still...

In Exalted, there are several possible results for die rolls for skills:

Success, that is you rolled enough successes on the stat+skill (7 or higher on a d10, 10's count as two)
Failure--you didn't roll enough successes.

And then there is the botch. A botch occurs when you fail to roll any successes, and you roll a "1". Botches are when bad things happen.

In one of her riding rolls, Viola's character rolled a botch and so I had her horse plunge toward the shadowland boundary. The other PCs swung into action and so I let them make rolls to intercept and stop Viola's headlong flight.

They succeeded.

The trip around the circle continued, and the menacing undead came closer. I had the PCs roll a riding check again.

This time, Viola rolled even worse, with two "1"'s and no successes. I can be as dense as a neutron star, but even I could see that the dice were telling me to go with it. So I ruled that Viola's horse panicked and she went across the boundary into the shadowland.

Naturally the other PCs went across and it was there that the PCs and NPCs faced off against the undead foe. They defeated them, but now have a new problem, encapsulated by one of the players as "From Dusk to Dawn"

The PCs can't leave the shadowland until dawn, or else they will cross into the underworld. So they have to hole up into the manor until the break of light and survive as creatures from the underworld come and get in. That will be the next session, and I totally did not anticipate or expect it.

I will work hard to make it memorable and fun. And the plot is only possible--because of the inspiration of a die roll.

Posted by Jvstin at January 14, 2008 6:42 AM