Rules Mastery For Dummies & Busy GMs Part 3: Student, Tutor Thyself
Back when I was first given a copy of the Champions Game System, it was only the third genre of game that I had ever been exposed to: The first was FRP (In the form of AD&D) and the second was Science Fiction (in the form of Space Opera). As a comics fan from way back, I was immediatly super-enthusisastic, which made learning the rules a breeze.
For the next week, I did nothing but learn the rules, and in the process created a campaign background. But most people can’t game 24/7 and certainly can’t do it for six days straight.
Nevertheless, the fact that I ran myself through 32 scenarios of solo play in the course of that week means that a more manageable version of the same approach should be within the reach of most people. I’ve divided the process into 18 key sessions, which represent what I did in the first 24 hours or so of my Champions marathon; some will take half-an-hour or so, some will take a couple of hours, but most will be complete in minutes. You don’t have to do these back-to-back, but I would try not to let more than a couple of days pass between completing one and starting the next. If you can manage that schedule, then you can learn an entire game system in a month.
Session One: Create A Character
The first interaction that most of the players will have with the game system is character creation. So you, as GM, should go there first. This character should have something that he’s good at, something that he’s bad at, should be capable of the different ways of getting around within the system, and should otherwise be modelled on some character that the GM knows well. For my superhero game, I chose Superman, because I wanted to be able to run scenarios with that sort of power level. For a fantasy game, I might have chosen to do a psuedo-Aragorn – knows how to ride a horse, knows how to handle a boat, but spends most of his time on foot; good in a fight, but not weighed down with a lot of armour and weaponry. For an SF campaign, I might have chosen Ripley from Alien, or Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, or Luke Skywalker. These are characters that I wouldn’t have to think about very deeply because I already knew them pretty well.
The first “session” was spent on character construction, following my nose while making no real attempt to understand more than isolated snippets of the rules – My Superman-analogue had to be strong, so I had to know what “Strong” was in terms of the character stats, and so on.
Session Two: Getting from A to B
The second step is to figure out the rules covering movement. Slopes, slippery surfaces, rough surfaces, unstable ground, how fast can you run, climbing, swinging from chandeliers, swimming, flight, and animal handling. Once you’ve looked at those – and we’re generally talking 4 pages of rules or less – add in how much you can lift, and how that affects movement.
Session Three: Hitting A Target
Next up, start figuring out what you’re likely to want to do in most RPGs after you finish moving – hitting something! Start with a generic punch, then a knife, then a length of 2×4, then some sort of ray blast or gunshot, and so on. Get used to how the combat system works. Once you’ve done those things, start looking at how environmental conditions and other adverse factors affect combat.
Session Four: Using Your Head
For the fourth session, it’s time to learn how the skill resolution system works. One of the best ways of doing so that I’ve found is to lead your character through the process of making a cup of tea or coffee. That’s looking for a cup or mug, locating the sugar (and not getting mixed up with the salt), making a fire (operation of a gas burner or stove), adding the right amount of sugar, locating and adding the right amount of milk, adding the boiling water, stirring, checking for how good a cup you’ve made, then trying to convince someone else that the coffee is better than it actually is, or worse. Yes, all of these are trivial tests – but at the end of them, you will know how the skill system works. Then you can look at how much harder it might be in, say, lunar gravity – which will quickly give you both a baseline and some feel for how more difficult tasks are different in their handling.
Session Five: Exotic Powers
Next up, pick one or two exotic powers and learn the game mechanics of using them. It might be turning undead, or firing a blaster, or using a teleport, or programming a computer, or setting a starship course – whatever is appropriate to the game genre.
Sessions Six-to-Ten: Create an Adversary
Now it’s time to get more serious. Create an adversary so that you can have a couple of one-on-one fights with them. Give the adversary one ability that is opposed by a strength of the original character and one ability that targets a weakness. Otherwise, make the two as opposite as possible.
Session Eleven: An Off-The-Cuff Encounter
Next, Referee a casual encounter between the two. No context, no preliminaries – someone goes first and the other person responds. This will give you a basic understanding of the initiative subsystem and a preliminary feeling for how characters interact, as well as the damage handling and recovery subsystems.
Session Twelve: Revenge Is Sweet
Follow this up with a second encounter, in which whoever lost the first encounter either goes looking for the winner for a rematch, or lays a trap for them. This gives you your first taste of how characters interact with the world around them.
Session Thirteen: Make Some Notes
Okay, so now you’ve developed some notion of how the different rules systems work. It’s time to start analyzing the results. Look for commonalities – do you always have to roll low in order to achieve something? Or have the designers hedged against biased dice by requiring some rolls to be low and some high? Are there any quirks to the system that you’ve noticed? Does +1 or +2 seem to make a huge difference, or is this a fairly small change? Is there anything that seems to have a disproportionately large effect?
Session Fourteen: Redo The Character
You will also almost-certainly have noticed a difference between the character you intended to create and the one you actually ended up with. With some experience under your belt, it’s time to redesign the character with the benefit of a little hindsight. Once you’ve finished doing so, make some more notes – every change that you’ve made to the character encapsulates some lesson in the way the system really works. It might be that some characteristics are more, or perhaps less, important than you thought, or something is less effective.
Session Fifteen: Revise The Adversary
And the same will be true of the adversary, as well. So redesign him using the lessons learned from redoing your test character.
Session Sixteen: A proper plotline
The two quick encounters, and the character redesigns, should give you enough ammunition to run yourself through a proper adventure, with beginning, middle, and ending. At the end of which, you need to assess the performance of the combatants and reward them just as you would if they were PCs being run by someone else.
Sessions Seventeen & Eighteen: A larger adventure
And with that under your belt, you should be ready to tackle a larger adventure. Grab one off the net or use an old pre=-packaged module if you have one handy – the practice at converting characters on the fly will help reinforce the understanding of the system that you’ve gained.
The Key To The Process
…is to not go cover-to-cover (which I have already described as the worst way to learn rules), but to learn by having your ‘character’ DO things. Learn the game by making small, practical steps. Ten minutes a day is enough for most of them. By keeping your attention focussed, and having an immediate gain from each session, you can divert attacks of the yawns. And before you know it, you’ll be well on the way to mastering the rules of your game.
There will be more of this series in 2011, but for the moment it’s time to switch into “Holiday Season” mode for me, since my next post is due to go out on December 23rd and the following one on the 30th…
- Rules Mastery For Dummies & Busy GMs Part 1: Introduction
- Rules Mastery For Dummies & Busy GMs Part 2: Getting Enthusiastic About Rules
- Rules Mastery For Dummies & Busy GMs Part 3: Student, Tutor Thyself
- Rules Mastery For Dummies & Busy GMs Part 4: The Quality of Rules
- Rules Mastery For Dummies & Busy GMs Part 5: Rules Touchstones – Combat
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December 16th, 2010 at 9:02 am
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December 16th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
Totally agree with this, Mike. Most introductory modules follow a similar teaching method, because they recommend that you become a player first, and then a GM.
There’s not really much more to add here, as this pretty much covers all the basis of a standard campaign. You will probably want to expand sessions dependant by the system and the type of campaign you have in mind.
Fore example, if there’s a lot of exploring, overland movement, and random encounters, you might want to put this in as sessions before the Proper Encounter, so you know how to handle such things as when PCs wander off the path.
Likewise if there’s campaign development advice with actual rules, it can be worth looking into these after the proper adventure stages, particularly if there’s things for down-time actions and the like.
You need to plan out your own course for the system at hand, but a lot of introductory versions of systems include such courses and use them, so if you get stuck, find and adapt one of these formats for your own use.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Maelstrom of Combat
December 16th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
Thanks, Da’Vane. Perhaps the only thing to add (which I hadn’t thought of at the time or I would have included it) is that running yourself through a miniscenario is a great way to teach yourself how to handle a part of the game system you’re unfamiliar with or out of practice with, long after you’ve mastered the basics.
December 16th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Mike, what are the final two parts of this series focusing on? I would comment with some more specific tips for self-study and self-development that might be useful, or maybe some more specific approaches for various sessions or systems, but if you are covering these as later parts it might be worthwhile saving such tips for that.
Also, take a look at board games and such and see how they build up in terms of complexity and introduction. One of the better ones, which is sadly out of print now, is Warhammer Quest – which featured a Basic Game, an Advanced Game, and a Roleplaying Game. In fact, the first steps of learning to be the GM or the Roleplaying Game was to run other players through the Basic then Advanced games, both of which did not require a GM, and used random generation principles for most things. Thus by the time you needed Rules Mastery for authority, you already had it, because you had been using the rules as a player previously for a considerable length of time.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Maelstrom of Combat
December 16th, 2010 at 8:02 pm
I’m not sure that there won’t be more than two parts still to come, Da’Vane! I want to take each of the suggestions/requests that Johnn gave in the conversation I excerpted to form part one and dedicate at least one post specifically to that point. That’s my roadmap and blueprint to the series.
I can’t tell you what the next 2 parts will specifically cover, as I havn’t written them yet! But any contributions you want to make will be happily and gratefully recieved. If you post each one seperately, I can extract any that cover ground that I still have to cover and quote you within the article.
December 16th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Cool. The study tips themselves are fairly simple. You mentioned taking notes as a few of your sessions, but ideally, a period of note-taking and self-reflection should be part of every session.
The cycle of knowledge itself, and the scientific method that evolved from that, is to formulate a question, provide an answer to that question, test the answer, and the question the results. In a similar way, the notes for self-studying any topic should follow a similar vein, even if the question itself is “What have I learnt?”
The process of note-taking and questioning helps us process what we’ve learnt, and we can build upon that by talking to others about it. Studying is always better in a group or community where questions can provide ideas and debate, but even just trying to explain what you’ve learnt to someone else is a good way of consolidating the process.
It can get tedious getting others to listen to you talk about what you’ve learnt, but in the internet age, the ideal tool is the blog itself. These are wondrous therapeutic and learning tools that are very useful for helping us consolidate our thoughts.
Johnn himself provides a tip for when members of the Gamer Lifestyle get stuck writing – write it as if it was a blog piece, and then place it in your content. The same advice goes for any form of learning. In fact, to prove this point, the Legend of Zelda Roleplaying Game (www.legendofseldarpg.com) is currently featuring a series of articles which work as a walkthrough for campaign development using the new version of Chimera RPG 3.0 rules with the setting to create a new campaign. I have learnt more in doing these walkthroughs and playing the game, then I ever did just reading through the rules, even when I was enthused, skimming, and using the other tips advocated in part two.
This is just the same as I learnt more about D&D 3.5 thanks to the Legend of Zelda Roleplaying Game project itself. I have been working with D&D 3.x since the day it was released, and it’s almost 10 years old now. Yet it was only last year that I finally got around to learning the exact details of every spell in the PHB and every power in the EPH. This was only because of the extensive mechanical changes that the Legend of Zelda Roleplaying Game required that somebody go through every single spell and power in the setting and make sure that the correct version was visible on our forums at http://z12.invisionfree.com/Zelda_RPG/ It was a gruelling task, and not something I’d recommend if you want a fun way of learning this information, but it did how me a lot of things I’d missed and provided a deeper insight into the way things worked, to the point that I could correct issues with the spells so they worked better with how our system worked.
Ultimately, I learnt the most about the system by getting my hands dirty with the system. Speaking about it, answering questions others asked me, and writing about what I was learning also helped immensely.
In fact, Johnn, a good follow up for this series would be for you to put these tips into practice and talk about your experiences learning a new system. This is why apprenticeships and mentoring/coaching programs help so much.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Maelstrom of Combat
December 17th, 2010 at 8:28 pm
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December 18th, 2010 at 4:12 am
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February 25th, 2012 at 9:34 pm
This series keeps bringing me back. I’m actually thinking about a similar blog post aimed specifically at players, but the advice here is really meaningful to me as a GM right now.
Some questions: when designing your adversary, did you design him along the lines of one of Superman’s adversaries like Lex Luthor? Was the scenario you played out similar to something Superman would have faced in the comics? My guess would be yes, but I’m interested in a few more specifics.
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February 26th, 2012 at 7:50 am
Glad it has shown such longevity, Rodney – thanks for the kind words!
The short answer to your question is sort-of-but-not-really.
The character that I had created as a test vehicle was technology-and-science-based, just as was Superman, so the villain I created was magic-based. But note that the hero had no specific vulnerability to magic, just a difficulty comprehending it. The good guy was a great believer in the welfare of the individual, so the villain was a megalomaniac who believed in his own best interests and the individual ranked a remote second.
The initial scenario was this (chinese) villain waking up with his memory restored after being in an auto accident and attempting to carve out a personal empire. So he was far more Fu-Manchu based than Lex Luthor.
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