Hello folks,

I know it’s been awhile.  Real life’s been kicking my ass in a good way, so I just haven’t had time and/or energy to invest in Dice Stew for the last couple months.  Also, thanks to my ADHD mind, I’ve been having a hard time to kickstart my brain into creative mode.  That lackluster executive function part of my brain can be quite a bitch.  

Anyway, Xenon, the co-designer on our Project Hunger game, recently released their first Substack issue.  I’m very happy to read it and I think y’all should check it out.  I’ve crossposted it, so I think you should be able to find it in my previous issues section on Substack.  Now, this gives me a little kick in the ass I need to get back to being more active.  So, thank you friend!

What have I been doing?  Nothing related to RPG?

Actually yes, I’ve continued running and playing games whenever I could.  I fell in love with tabletop gaming by playing, so I’ll never walk away from that.  I’m glad I’ve continue despite real life being crazy.  I’m going to list out my current campaigns:

Campaigns

Vaults of Vaarn (OSR)
This is my monthly online group of 3 players and our sessions are around 6 hours long including several breaks.  My schedule’s been pretty packed so I wanted to experiment and see if a monthly campaign with longer session time would work out well compared to my typical biweekly 3-4 hours set up.  We started back in August and managed to have a session zero, three main story sessions, and one side story session.

The Party

Pearthika, a Mycomorph being obsessed with acquiring alcohol as a fuel being stored in their belly and has terrible bedside manners. RIP

Olm, a crawling Cacogen who is terribly shy and awkward as hell.

Uz, a Cacogen folk with striped skin and smell delightful to anyone nearby.

Wermouth, a Lynx-Newbeast who is kinda an oracle and proud of being a nudist.

Hall of the Blood King (OSE)
Biweekly online group of 2 players and our sessions are approximately 3ish hours with one break.  I wasn’t sure about running an OSE campaign with just two players since it’s often designed for 4 or more.  However, I’ve ran The Incandescent Grottoes over the summer-fall with the same format and the group had a blast.  What have helped a lot is providing them an opportunity to hire retainers to join the party in the beginning of the campaign.  The players also heavily relied on teamwork strategies and avoiding combat as much as possible.  We’ve played 5 sessions so far and we started in end of September.

The Party
Zora, an insane magic-user with wild and out of control hair, and exiled from a magic academy.

Percival, a barbarian who is very anti-magic and lousy businessperson.

Quark, a desperate and cowardly elf who just want to live a boring life. [Retainer]

If you are curious about one-shots and other campaigns I’ve ran in the past or played as a player, then let me know and I’ll write up a section on that next issue.

GM ADVICE

I’ve ran a lot of sessions over the years, and I think dealing with aggro players is probably one of the most challenging situations to deal with while running as a GM.  It’s way too easy to resort to default of dealing direct consequences to the aggro player, but it can easily become too “targeted” and just doesn’t go anywhere narrative wise.  This is where I try to re-frame what type of consequences to deal regardless of that certain player’s actions.  For example, they always attack any NPC that comes up in their travels, and that always lead to combat where they beat each other up until one of them dies first.  It’s just fucking boring and no one wants that on repeat.

So, what do I do?  Putting the burden of the consequences on the whole group, instead of the aggro player.  This could look like many things such as:

• NPCs losing respect for the group and not willing to barter/work with/whatever.  This could lead to a nice side quest trying to earn that respect back, especially if those NPCs are key in their campaign or one-shot goal.
• Combat leading to some kind of consequences for the other PCs - ie: the NPC/monster/whatever has back up showing up and ambushing the other PCs.  This could help with the character devlopment where the aggro player can RP their character to “ learn a lesson” about teamwork or whatever.

Now this goes without saying but I recommend having an OOC meta discussion with the group about how to narratively “correct” the issue.  This does mean being blunt with the aggro player and discuss why they think being aggressive or a murderhobo is a good idea and how that negatively impact the fun of playing the game.  A honest discussion does go far in helping resolves the issue from my experience.  I’ve never had any player quit the group due to being called out for this problem in a respectable way.

I’m curious what other GMs’ experience with this and what’s their approach for resolving the issue.  If you have any to share then please comment on this article, or if you have any questions then I could answer in next issue.

Interested in trying out Project Hunger?  Check out our quickstart here!

The Mole Combine by ManaDawn Tabletop Games: ​Excellent faction to add in a Mausritter dungeon adventure for the players to hire.  Although this is designed for the Mausritter Megadungeon Mayhem, it can be dropped in any dungeon with little modifications.  The one page is full of content but I do wish the dungeon map is a little bigger for my poor eyes. Rating: 4.5/5

Cheers,

Root

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