Four words - an exercise for Game Masters

If you want to become a good game master, nothing is a better than practise. Recently, however, I came up with an exercise which, first of all, trains your imagination, teaches you how to respond quickly on unpredicted events on sessions, and leaves you with ready-to-use ideas or story hooks.

The whole idea of this exercise is to take four random words, ignore one of them, and by connecting the remaining three formulate a story hook.

Where I can get random words from?

The easiest way is to use random word generator, however, in that case I recommend to take six words and ignore three of them. Those generators draw, apart from nouns and adjectives, prepositions for instance, and even if you get none of them, it is hard to make a good story hook from three adverbs. By generating six words and picking three of them you get rid of this problem.

Another source of random words are people around you. This is much better than generators because people hardly ever choose prepositions or pronouns and tend to stick to nouns, adjectives and verbs. In that case there is no modification to this exercise needed. You can ask your friend for those four words, or, to include a little more randomness, ask several people for less words which, in the result, will give you four.

One more source: lately, when I have to attend a very boring lecture, I pick four words from the surroundings, for example from lecturer's speech, or random things which other students write in their notebooks around me. This way I can do something useful instead of wasting my precious time!

Is it all what can I use it for?

No! If you have more friends who are game masters you can organise some kind of training session for all of you. On a piece of paper each one of you write down four words, and put them into a bag, jar or something alike. Later on, you draw four cards from the container and you have to run a short session prepared from three of those words. The rest of your friends do not know what words you have drawn until the end of your story. After you finish, you show your friends the words out of which you have made your story and their task is to rate you and tell you which elements you should improve. When your turn is over, the next of your friend repeats the whole procedure. In this way, you not only train your imagination, but also practice your game-mastering skill in the same time.

What is more, you can prepare a deck of cards with spare words on them. In case of emergency, when you are short on ideas during the session and you have to run something, you just simply draw four cards out of your deck, discard one, and you can help your improvisation skill.

I will gladly read your story hooks created that way. If you have anything interesting, put a comment with that story hook and the set of your four random words. I am waiting for your feedback!

Mature RPGs for mature people: romances, marriages and sex on your sessions

Some time ago I have read an interesting thread on /tg/ on 4chan.org generally connected with sex in RPGs and I have decided to cover this topic in an article on this blog. Since my latest group of players consisted of only females and romances and sex was a big part of my campaign, I have few words to share about, especially that everything has gone smoothly and added only positive aspects to the game. There are several facets of the presence of this kind of relationships in RPGs and I will discuss them one after another. The whole purpose of this article is not to encourage GMs to introduce sex and everything connected into their game. I want to enlighten you on all advantages and disadvantages and what it can bring if you decide to let your players have opportunities to have sex with your NPCs or other player characters.

Maturity of players

First point to consider is the maturity of your players: are they mentally ready and prepared to approach the subject in the mature way? My advice for you is not to underestimate the importance of this question. If your players are immature childish people who laugh whenever they hear the word "bosom", after the introduction of sex your sessions will become some kind of pathetic meetings for guys pretending they are the biggest lady-killers in the world, and your great ideas and plot twists will be overwhelmed by piteous sex scenes which will kill the whole spirit of RPGs.

Pros & Cons

Before you decide to introduce one of your player to a sexy NPC and let him begin seducing her, make a simple list of pros and cons. You are the person who knows your players and your skill in GMing well, so such a list will be completely different from another GM's list, but I want to give you some clues. I am going to cover the most general pros and cons which comes to my mind.

First of all, romances can make your game more developed. Think about your favourite movies or books: in most of them, apart from epic plots, intrigues and stories, you can find romances. The greatest heroes always can find some free time between fighting and killing dragons/aliens/dark presence and spend it seducing farmers' daughters or visiting ladies of their heart. If you put such seducible NPCs into your story, make them a part of it, it will appear to your players as deeper and more complicated one, without too much afford which you would have had to put to achieve such an effect just by means of plot twists.
Secondly, by putting romances into your game you can easily get your players more engaged. When a player's character starts a serious relationship, a player has to develop character's personality and has another reason to care more. He starts treating the character as something more than a few numbers on a sheet.

As I have said in the beginning of this article, the biggest problem with romances in RPGs is maturity of your players. I do not want to repeat myself, but you should seriously think if introducing romances and, fist of all, sex will not make your sessions a disaster during which nobody will be able to have fun.
But if you decide to do so and everything will be O.K., everybody takes it seriously and so on, there is another thing which has to be said: Your players can start to like it too much. It is not necessarily a problem; a GM's role is to provide fun to his players at last, but it can become quite tiring when instead of Lord of the Rings you have to run Dirty Dancing. You have to either get used to it or clearly explain to your players how much time you want to spend on characters' relationships.

Conclusion

One thing at the end of this article. I have one rule about sex in RPGs: The whole role playing stops when all protagonists concerned head to bed and I am pretty strict about it. Every situation like that I end with words: "...and the rest is in your imagination." 

I am the game master, not a porn director!

(Art by Drathe: http://drathe.deviantart.com/)