Gamemaster Month Lessons

January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).

Thursday’s generic lesson was about character creation/choosing characters. One thing I learned here was that the Game Master should allow for some adjustments early on if the character isn’t jiving with the player. There’s definitely some potential for things going wrong there, so I would probably set a deadline of locking character traits in by session 3. After that I would probably at least make it a mission to visit a wizard (or some other mission) to change their own traits to prevent ridiculous min-maxing breaking the RP part of the game. For the virtual section they had good advice about setting things up ahead of time, but I think they probably should have had this information a little earlier in the month. I was getting this stuff locked in a couple weeks ago. The Tales of the Valiant section of the Thursday’s lesson was the Player’s Guide chapters for character creation. They also included a Game Master’s Guide 20% off coupon.

The Game

Leading Up to Game Night

On Kobold Press’ Discord server they have a LFG (looking for game) channel with a bot that allows you to create a sign-up for the game. I had a pretty good numer of “tentative” sign-ups with 2 weeks to go. I spent the next couple weeks firming things up with those folks until I had 4 people confirmed. Players had various levels of experience with Tales of the Valiant and with FoundryVTT (the Virtual Table Top) I’d chosen for the game. I gave the players a link to a youtube video for new players to FoundryVTT, a link to the Valiant 6, and created accounts for them on my FoundryVTT server. (Hosted via Podman container - Red Hat’s version of Docker)

As each person logged in, I either gave them ownership over a blank character or access to one of the Valiant 6.

In the last week I created both a voice and a text room on my Discord server just in case things didn’t work with Foundry’s built-in A/V.

Pre-gaming (eg Session 0)

One of my players happened to be logged in a couple hours before we started. I was able to test audio and video (webcam) and it worked fine. At game time 2 other players were able to also come in just fine with their audio. The fourth person had issues and kept popping in and out. I don’t know enough about FoundryVTT to diagnose what that means, but we decided to move over to Discord (glad I set that up ahead of time!)

Tales of the Valiant recommends using DOPS as a way to have people anonymously share the topics they would prefer avoided. We ran that, I got the info, and we quickly reviewed it. Everyone was aswesome and this did not lead to any issues.

After that I gave time for people to introduce their experience with TTRPGs since we didn’t know each other (other than a few interactions over the month of January on the New Gamemaster Month and Kobold Press discord servers). It was cool (to me at least) to get to see everyone’s experience. We ran the gamut all the way from players who were playing D&D back in the 80s to someone who’s played many, many systems over the last couple of years. The majority of us only started GMing within the last couple years.

Especially because this was just a one-shot, I asked the players if they wanted their characters to already know each other. (If this was meant to be a long-running campaign, they would have time to get to know each other over many sessions). The players decided that they were a pre-existing group of heroes.

I then moved things to a scene I had created in FoundryVTT to practice combat because I knew that most people were new to FoundryVTT. This turned out to be a VERY good thing. The 10-15 minutes we spent working out the kinks of how to run battles in FoundryVTT meant things went more smoothly later. Players learned how to use their sheets to roll against AC as well as for damage.

Finally we were ready to go. I explained to them that the characters were answering a job board request to help out the mayor.

The Game

The heroes, consisting of:

• Rhusekke - A Truscale (Swole-bold) Kobold barbarian.
• Holjrim - A human paladin
• Ghada Zayd - A human fighter
• Hendrian Kaska - an orc mechanist

enter the reception area of the mayor’s office where they see a dwarf, the mayor’s secretary. He asks if they are there to answer the mayor’s call for heroes. After the heroes assent, he leads them into the mayor’s office and introduces them.

The mayor explains that the goblins have set up in the fair grounds. They need to be removed so that the festival honoring the goddess Solana, the Lady of the Light can take place. The deputy mayor was sent to ask the goblins to leave, but they shot him with an arrow and he narrowly escaped being hit by boiling oil. They offer 100GP and the promise of future contracts if the heroes are successful.

Rhusekke, the kobold barbarian, asks if they need to bring back goblin heads or if ears will suffice as proof they have cleared out the goblins. The mayor is taken aback and says they will take the word of the heroes if they say they were successful. She dismisses the heroes.

The heroes arrive at the fairgrounds. Their nostrils are assaulted with the stench of the half-completed moat around the wagon. They hear the goblins bickering inside so they decide to sneak around. At first two of them go west, but then the kobold decides to climb the wagon. She does so stealthily, leading Holjrim to follow her. The lack of coordination among the team makes sense because they are relatively new heroes (level 1). They begin to group up on the eastern side of the wagon as Rukseke removes the wagon door hinges that are closest to her. When one of her companions attempts to rip the door open, the goblins are alerted and they begin to attack. The heroes are relatively lucky during the attack, not taking too much damage.

Once the door is ripped off, Rhusekke jumps inside, spooking the goblins into going underground. After a debate on whether they should burn down the wagon to smoke the goblins out, the heroes flip the wagon (meta: since this phase of the battle was over, I thought it would be silly to have them do the checks needed to flip it. There’s no detriment to taking a while, so they just flip it) A bit of searching finds a sack poorly hidden under a rock. Inside is 25SP.

The team went underground and down a narrow tunnel. Perhaps in their excitement, they didn’t check for traps and one of our heroes took a bit of damage (he was able to somewhat jump back so as not to take full damage). The goblins attack with their bows as the heroes enter, and the fighting ebbs and flows. One of the goblins is killed. Ghada is grievously wounded. Hendrian has been offering for the goblins to surrender rather than die in bloodshed since the beginning. Eventually, Dib feels too threatened and he and another surrounded goblin surrender. Two others, who had ganged up on Ghada, and were responsible for the near-death status, did not want to give up. However, Holjrim uses his imposing figure and hammer to intimidate Dib into making his troops stand down.

Dib attempts to run away, but eventually is trapped between Rhusekke and another hero. He starts crying about just wanting to have his own fortress. As the heroes search the cavern they find money and Dib’s plans for the fortress hidden in Dib’s “throne”. The orc offers to rehabilitate the goblins. When the heroes go above ground they decide to rebuild the wagon (picture a montage of finding mismatched parts and fixing the wagon). They then go to see the mayor.

In the reception area the dwarf, who has never adventured, is shocked at all the blood and filth and quickly shunts them in to see the Mayor. At first the mayor is skeptical about the goblin rehabilitation, but comes around. When some of the heroes decide to stay until the festival for the goddess, the mayor goes full into advertisement mode - talking up the taverns and thinking about how she will use the fact that heroes are staying in town to increase attendance to the festival, attracting more tourists to the town to shop at the local shops and visit the local taverns. As she leaves, the deputy mayor hands the adventurers their reward.

GM Commentary

This was the first time I ran a game for people unrelated to me. It was a blast. I had fun planning things and it was fun seeing how the one-shot unfolded.

I wanted to record the session to be able to go back and watch how I did. Becaues my computer had been acting up in the week leading up to the event, I didn’t want to record on my computer. I was going to sign in with a “viewer” account and record that one of my other computers. Unfortunately, since we had to move to Discord audio, I wasn’t able to capture any audio.

Some things I learned from this session:

• especially in a virtual context, I need to work on making sure each person has a chance to contribute to the roleplay. I think, if we were running a campaign, this might have solved itself as things went along, but I think we ended up without each person being able to contribute as fully as they might have wanted to. In person it’s a little easier to look at people to make sure they can see you are recognizing them and giving them an opportunity to participate. I will have to work on this for virtual games.
• Within FoundryVTT I need to enable the feature that keeps people from moving when it’s not their turn in initiative. My players were great, but there were one or two turns that got slightly chaotic when people moved when it wasn’t their turn. Some people also fell out of initiative once or twice and I didn’t put them back into the right spot.
• FoundyVTT-wise need to work on automation for cover/half cover, etc. Dib and the goblins were supposed to be in half-cover. I just let it go since it was a just a one-shot to learn how to GM, not a one-shot to learn FoundryVTT.
• Your players will always surprise you. I had no idea that someone would go for a non-violent ending. The reason I included the deputy mayor having asked the goblins to leave nicely and being attacked was supposed to get the players to feel that the goblins could not be reasoned with. It was also neat how other players decided to “yes and” and contribute with an intimidation check to force Dib to make everyone surrender. I couldn’t argue with the player logic once they had Dib on the back foot. He would definitely value self-preservation and order his troops to surrender.

Final Thoughts

A big thanks to everyone who joined in to play so that I could practice being a Game Master.

Also, I’ll get to be a player in one of their games next week and, as a forever GM, I’m happy to have a chance to be a player. Most of the other players will be strangers to me, but know each other, so it’ll be a potentially interesting dynamic.

Finally, if you’ve ever been curious about being a game master, but were intimidated at the concept, check out New Gamemaster Month next year. I think it does a great job covering all the important topics.

• DM
• GM
• Game-Master
• Dungeon-Master
• Tales of the Valiant
• ToV
• Black-Flag-Roleplaying
• FoundryVTT