The Core Worlds

WISH: Quick Ones

There are a couple of WISHs for me to catch up on, but I don't have a great deal to say about either.

First up we have That's my Job:

Does what you do for a living have any impact on your gaming? Have you had occupational details intrude on your descriptions of how something works? Have you ever dared a player to go "Hotwire a car, then, if that's how you think it's done?"

Aside from a brief time when my IT background intruded on a Star Trek PBEM half a dozen years ago (where I probably bored everyone else ridged), the short answer is 'no'.

So we move on to Left Turn at Albuquerque:

GMs can spend hours designing an adventure and have their players take off in an entirely unexpected direction. How does a GM handle this - try and steer the players back to the designed plot, or hang back and see where the adventure goes? How does a player handle this? Stay on target or go with the flow?

And so my woeful lack of experience at GMing comes to the fore again. I've run a grand total to two scenarios, the first of which was a total failure and has been all but erased from my memory (probably a good thing), and the highly successful B5 intro that one day I'll finish writing up.

I'd spent quite a bit of time planning the trip to Ragesh III, and the players did what I expected for the most part. There were a couple of unexpected bits where I had to improvise, but they were easy enough to work around.

The first of these was an attempt to bypass a section of the plot avoiding meeting with their contact and diving straight in to the investigation. They could have got away with it (without offroading the plot at all) if someone hadn't failed his "Driving while hanging his head out of the window to examine the warehouse their were passing" roll. The resulting crash resulted in them being unable to find anyone who would rent them a ground vehicle and left them with little choice but to borrow one from their contact.

The second was when they attempted to make contact with the criminal underworld in an attempt to acquire some weapons. This was something I had planned for in advance (one of two ways I had foreseen for them to arm themselves), so I wasn't worried. Then one of the players (who I'm considering banning from playing characters with a Wisdom over 10 or any ranks of Diplomacy) shouted something to the effect of "He's the one we want!" across the bar, freaking the poor unfortunate who could have helped them, and sending them on a chase around several city blocks before he escaped.

In hindsight I shouldn't have let him get away. It would have been better for them to capture the fellow and generate some interesting tension with the local underworld powers. Lets chalk that one up to experience and move on.

The third unexpected result was when the players decided to hire tools and tunnel into the secret base through the sewers. This didn't have much impact except that they had to fend of several alligators (way way way too easy now that they had smuggled weapons past customs) and really surprised the lone enemy left in the base (which made the fight a little easy there too).

All in all, no major cockups, but some lessons learned.

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