What the hell is "coarse games mastering"?

Glad you asked. See, I'm a lazy gm. I hate all that background reading and other nonsense that you are supposed to do. And I really resent the way that players just think they can turn up without making any effort or preparing in any way. So if they're not going to make an effort, I'm hardly about to sweat blood over it. So here are a few tricks I use to ease my workload.

Wing it!

What do you do when you can't be bothered to do all that background reading? Make it up, of course! After all, that's all the "professionals" have done. All you really need is a feel for a world, the details you can make up as and when you need them.

Character Generation

Certain elements of the Circles character generation are deliberately designed to make my life as a gm easier.

• Goals: By forcing the characters to have goals, you are making them seek out adventures and conflict. You don't have to do anything other than put obstacles in their way. Simple.
• Problems: Problems are automatic conflict generators. That's why characters don't get points for being colour-blind or one-handed. Instead, a problem is there to generate hours of fun by causing problems for the characters.
• People You Know: More conflict generators. Everyone has problems - problems they sometimes get their friends, family and colleagues to help them with. Excellent! Plus - you get the players to populate your world. Not all of it, true, but if you've got four players and they each create four background characters, that's an extra 16 names and faces you didn't know you had!

Bit Parts

I personally believe that if you are running a game with four players, someone is probably bored. With five players, that's two bored people. And so on. So instead of being disruptive and a pain in the neck, put them to work. Give them a minor background character to play while theirs is off shopping (or in jail, hospital or whatever). Interested? Good - I wrote an entire article on this subject for arcane magazine. Check out Bit Parts for more information.

Scenarios

So how the hell do you run scenarios this way?

Good question. To be honest, it makes it hard to run published scenarios. (But then as I read very few published scenarios, that's not really a big problem.) Instead, a game goes something like this.

• Session 1: Character generation. This is usually a bit of a discussion. I describe what I want to do - such as play in Slumber Deep, my hard SF world for a while. My players then tell me what they want to do - such as explore the unknown and what-have-you. We then talk about it, and come up with a game plan. For example, one player might be the owner of a small exploratory geotchnical survey company. Some of the other players would be employees, another might be a patron. And from there we develop the characters. From the characters I take a good look at the goals, problems and people - and see where we're going.
• Session 2: By this stage I probably don't have a real feeling for how things are going to go. I usually have a couple of ideas - and I've usually thought of one thing to throw at the players. In the example above, one of the players was hiring the others to do some surveying. All I needed to do was sort out a map, and think of some complications. And some cool stuff to do when they get there.
• Later Sessions: Complications. Look at those characters - and see what you can add to complicate matters. And where I can, I like to challenge people's assumptions. For example, I took two background characters from different character sheets, and assumed they were seeing each other. (One was an ex-girlfriend of one of the characters - very important.) Then I decided that they'd had a row - and both came knocking on their old friends' doors at roughly the same time. At which point, while the player characters are trying to calm them down, I let slip that this was a single-sex relationship. I'd hate to think that my players are homophobic, but the reaction was wonderful...

And that's about it for now.

Copyright © 1999 Steve Hatherley

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