Hi, I want to DM for a group of friends a small series of games while our normal DM is taking a sabbatical. I was watching a YouTube video about a different way of DMing that the guy had been trying, and was quite intrigued by the way that the encounters were selected. It goes like this:
The DM writes a handful of encounters on separate pieces of paper, bad ones like attacks by groups of enemies or just some unpleasant stuff like wandering through some poisonous plants. The sort of thing that ruins your day. Next, the players are invited to write down 2 encounters each, one good and one bad, and of roughly equal measure. These are all put in a hat and drawn randomly.
This would seem to encourage the players to take a greater part in how the game runs, since the more players add to the ideas, the higher the chance of good things happening is. It does seem kind of meta gaming-ish, but the DM can of course disallow at their own discretion.
Has anyone used or played with this method before?
Kind of? I haven't actually done what your're describing and I wouldn't be responding if there were any better comments on this post.
I ran a co-op 4e adventure without a DM where my group and I wrote down plot seeds to build a story from. When we didn't know where the story would go next, we drew another. The seeds were mostly either jokes or they didn't make sense in the narrative. Having the DM write the majority of your encounter seeds could mitigate this partially, as would talking to the players about expectations.
The biggest benefit to your proposed DMing method that I can see would be that it gives players a chance to design an encounter that puts the spotlight on them. The ranger may describe a fight in favored terrain with a favored enemy, an acolyte might describe a meeting with another member of their faith seeking guidance. Rather than drawing these randomly, you could try to work them into the story in some way or at least use them as a way to measure what the PCs want to see in an adventure.
The video you watched is probably a better authority on this than I am.
Hi, I want to DM for a group of friends a small series of games while our normal DM is taking a sabbatical. I was watching a YouTube video about a different way of DMing that the guy had been trying, and was quite intrigued by the way that the encounters were selected. It goes like this:
The DM writes a handful of encounters on separate pieces of paper, bad ones like attacks by groups of enemies or just some unpleasant stuff like wandering through some poisonous plants. The sort of thing that ruins your day. Next, the players are invited to write down 2 encounters each, one good and one bad, and of roughly equal measure. These are all put in a hat and drawn randomly.
This would seem to encourage the players to take a greater part in how the game runs, since the more players add to the ideas, the higher the chance of good things happening is. It does seem kind of meta gaming-ish, but the DM can of course disallow at their own discretion.
Has anyone used or played with this method before?
Kind of? I haven't actually done what your're describing and I wouldn't be responding if there were any better comments on this post.
I ran a co-op 4e adventure without a DM where my group and I wrote down plot seeds to build a story from. When we didn't know where the story would go next, we drew another. The seeds were mostly either jokes or they didn't make sense in the narrative. Having the DM write the majority of your encounter seeds could mitigate this partially, as would talking to the players about expectations.
The biggest benefit to your proposed DMing method that I can see would be that it gives players a chance to design an encounter that puts the spotlight on them. The ranger may describe a fight in favored terrain with a favored enemy, an acolyte might describe a meeting with another member of their faith seeking guidance. Rather than drawing these randomly, you could try to work them into the story in some way or at least use them as a way to measure what the PCs want to see in an adventure.
The video you watched is probably a better authority on this than I am.
Never tried it, but sounds interesting. It would be fun to try a one shot with this style, at least.