Running Adventures
Running Adventures
You’ve successfully brought the player characters into the adventure. Now you have to keep them focused and enthralled with the plot. If you see their eyes start to wander, or they fall into a conversation about the last game (or worse, what they watched on television last night), you know something’s gone wrong.
Setting the Scene
Your first job is to vividly depict the scene unfolding before the player characters. Where are they? Who else is there? What’s happening? These are the questions you must answer immediately.
Description
Most published Star Wars adventures contain “read aloud sections” at the beginning of each episode. To set up the scene you can just read out loud or paraphrase the text. At that point the players usually either ask you questions about their surroundings (“How many stormtroopers do we see?”) or tell you their reaction to the situation (“I blast ’em!”).
The key here is to engage the players’ senses, just like a good movie, novel, or television show. Try to use evocative words to give the players a clear and vivid view of their characters’ environment.
The best way to learn how to provide such lifelike descriptions is to picture the scene in your mind and do whatever you can to convey that same scene to your players. You may incorporate movie footage or collectible cards (as mentioned above), maps and diagrams, or even illustrations you’ve drawn yourself. Sound effects and audio can also help you set the stage for the characters.
Just remember that your players have five senses. Don’t just rely on the sense of sight. Describe what your characters hear, smell, touch, and (sometimes) taste.
The Five Senses
Sight. For most people, sight is the most important sense, so the bulk of your descriptions will be visual. To make the most effective use of sight, you will have to learn to arrange your descriptions so that the most important or most unusual visual detail about the setting comes in a spot where it is emphasized (usually near the very beginning of the description).
You might also want to classify what the characters see by how hard they look. Make notes of what the characters see if they take a quick glance, then what they see if they stop to look around a bit, and then what they see if they make a detailed search. A character taking a quick glance isn’t going to notice how many tables a cantina has, for example, but a character making a detailed search will know. Characters who only glance around a location are likely to miss important visual clues unless they make a good Perception roll.
As an interesting diversion, you might want to put the characters in a situation where they cannot see—such as a dark cave, a black nebula, or the inner reaches of a dead alien starship—and force the players, and you, to operate without the sense of sight.
Smell. Next to sight, smell is probably the most important sense to consider in your descriptions of settings. A smell is something that cannot be easily avoided; it will fill the area. The sense of smell also lends itself to some very expressive adjectives—fragrant, ambrosial, putrid, fetid and rank.
You can also use specific scents that the players are familiar with. For example, describing something as “smelling like burning motor oil” is a lot more expressive than saying it smells “bad.” A planet where the atmosphere “smells faintly like cinnamon” will seem instantly more alive.
Hearing. Sound can also be a powerful part of a description, ranging from the proverbial eerie silence that precedes an ambush, to the annoyingly loud banging and clanging of an industrial planet. Like a smell, a sound is something that is hard to avoid and it provides detailed information.
Wherever possible you should try to simulate these sounds by using your own voice, or pre-record sounds for playback during gaming.
Taste. Taste is hard to work into most descriptions—excluding, of course, food and drink that is ingested. However, you should remember that the senses of taste and smell are closely connected, and strong smells often carry with them the sensations of taste (as in, “the air near the ocean tasted salty”).
Touch. Characters will usually have to make an effort to experience the textures of an object, but you should remember that touch also registers air temperature—an important aspect of any description.
Touch can be used in a variety of ways, such as when describing a new artifact. It takes on a whole new light if it looks smooth but is “slimy” to the touch. You can also make comparisons when using the sense of touch. For example: “When you grasp the end of the handle, it feels cold and frigid, like metal left outside in the middle of winter.” These kinds of descriptions give the players a true sense of what their characters are experiencing.
Other senses. Certain alien species will have unique senses. For example, Gotals use the cones on their heads to “see” radiation, the Verpine have a limited form of telepathy amongst members of their own species, and the Defel can see ultraviolet radiation. When you have characters who are members of that species, you should carefully think about what they will perceive with their limited senses and work that information into your descriptions.
Qualities
There are a number of areas that you may want to consider in the physical description of a location. Remember that anything from a small business to an entire continent (or even planet) can be described in these types of terms, depending upon the scale of the location being created.
A good place to start is temperature and “general atmosphere.” These qualities might be mentioned if they aren’t “comfortable.” A bar that is described as “hot and sticky, with uncirculated air that is thick with smoke” instantly has a certain character.
A variable factor is gravity, especially for businesses that cater to a variety of aliens with a non-standard gravity range. Some places will also have special atmospheres for aliens—if the characters have to venture here, they may have to don breath masks or even environment suits.
Some businesses will have certain cycles; some places will be closed all day and only be open at night (or vice-versa). Or a particular location might have different kinds of patrons depending upon the time of day or even the season. For example, some areas are tourist spots at certain times of the year, and thus the location will be much busier during tourist season.
Some bars will attract certain kinds of clients during the day (for example business men), and attract a completely different crowd at night (perhaps university students and artist types).
An example of qualities that affect location on a planetary scale is Ryloth, homeworld of the Twi’leks. The length of day and year are equal: one side of Ryloth always faces the planet’s sun while one side is always dark. The dark side of Ryloth would be uninhabitable were it not warmed by the raging winds generated on the bright side. This unusual planetary system—where the Twi’leks are forced to live in a darkness ravaged by harsh “heat storms”—accounts for the cunning nature that the Twi’leks have developed.
On some worlds or in some specific locations, you might want to make note of the tech level. Some worlds will be fairly primitive, so blasters will be uncommon or even wondrous to the population. Even on civilized worlds, there may be areas where blasters, droids and vehicles are uncommon or possibly outlawed, so a portion of the world effectively has a lower tech level.
You will also want to make note of any landmarks for a given setting. If a planet is famous for a particular oddity of nature or a social event, or if a bar is reputed for a colorful moving hologram of the galaxy, this kind of information should be noted for added color and information in the description of the location.
Exceptions
Once you’ve established a look for a particular setting, you may decide to add an exception or two. Anachronisms can give character to a setting.
Suppose the centerpiece to a disreputable bar was a delicate statue that would be more at home in one of the Core World art museums. What would this say about the owner of the bar? It could imply that, at one time, the owner of the disreputable bar was a wealthy art collector. From this exception to the general look of the bar, you could develop a history which would give the owner—and the bar—a unique personality.
Believable Characters
The player characters will inevitably encounter other people who live in the Star Wars galaxy. Your job is to make sure that these gamemaster characters appear real to the players. Their words and actions must seem appropriate in the context of their histories, personalities, and ambitions. If a stormtrooper suddenly took off his helmet and started joking around, the players would probably just stare at you for a minute as the game came crashing to a halt.
Play each character to your best ability. Make sure he does everything in his power to achieve his goals, whether he’s trying to thwart the player characters or earn a transport-load of credits. This does not mean that every gamemaster character should act overtly. Part of his goal may be to achieve his objective undetected, or to make it look like someone else was responsible.
Rather, the idea is that the gamemaster character should use all of his resources—his skills, allies, finances, etc.—to accomplish his immediate as well as his long-term goals.
For more on gamemaster characters, see the chapter on “Gamemaster Characters.”
Grabbing the Players’ Interest
Once you get the adventure underway, you spend the rest of your time trying to maintain the interest of the players—just like any other story, whether it be a novel, comic book, or movie. You have several options for moving the plot along and making the players focus on the situation at hand.
Using Elements From the Movies
People play Star Wars because they loved the movies. If you incorporate images, characters, settings, or plot threads from the films, your players will immediately feel that their characters are truly part of the Star Wars galaxy. Player characters could encounter one of the secondary characters like Wedge Antilles, or visit a locale like Cloud City, or become involved in the theft of the Death Star plans.
Action and adventure. The movies were full of action and movement. The characters in the Star Wars movies do not sit around and wait for adventure to come to them—they go out in search of adventure. Their lives are filled with action. For your games to have the feel of the Star Wars movies, they also must be filled with action and adventure.
Blaster bolts should fly fast and furious, characters should have to undertake chases through dangerous ice geysers or cave-ins, and characters should have to battle Imperial TIE fighters and pirates in the depths of space. All of these elements are uniquely Star Wars and reinforce the right “feeling” in your adventures.
Wide scope. The movies had a wide scope. None of the movies were confined to single locations. The characters traveled to many different locations, both across planets and throughout the galaxy. Similarly, the actions of the characters were widely felt. No matter how insignificant their actions may have seemed, they were of great importance and had repercussions throughout the galaxy.
Background material. The movies contained a large amount of background material. Plot is not all that a story needs. A story also has to occur in a setting—a place. Background material helps define this place without slowing the story down for explanation. Background material is important to the look and feel of the story, but it is not important to the plot, so its details can be left unexplained.
The cantina scene in Mos Eisley, with its many quick glimpses of aliens, is a good example of background material in the Star Wars movies. In this short sequence, the immensity of the Star Wars universe is increased one thousandfold. It becomes a place that is brimming with intelligent life in a multitude of different forms; a place where Humans and aliens can exist together.
These scenes add much to the movie, but mean nothing to the plot. Luke and Ben could have easily met Han and Chewbacca in the landing bay next to the Millennium Falcon, and the story would have progressed nicely, but the look and feel of the Star Wars universe would not have been the same.
You can simulate these scenes by describing to the players what they see, hear, touch, smell and taste. Make sure to specify little details that stand out—the alien who seems to have three nostrils and whose eyes change color depending upon his mood.
When describing scenes or acting as a gamemaster character, don’t be afraid to drop brand names of equipment and vehicles (for example, the characters shouldn’t be given “blaster pistols” when they can be given “SoroSuub 035 blaster pistols,” which have a long, thick stock and are a lot heavier than standard models). Have the gamemaster characters talk about their history, or discuss events that happened elsewhere in the galaxy. In your descriptions, mention the names of worlds, important personalities or locations.
Adding this kind of detail reinforces the realism of the Star Wars universe.
Humor. The movies had an element of humor. A story is not a Star Wars story unless it has some humor in it. Think about the Ewoks, and the bickering between R2-D2 and C-3P0. A large part of their importance in the movies comes from the humor that they provide. Han Solo’s sarcasm is another type of humor that can be injected into an adventure. Other examples of humor can be sarcasm in narrations, comical aliens trying to beg for “funny light sticks” (blasters), droids pleading with Wookiees not to be disassembled and other items of humor that are inherent in a particular situation. By using humor, you can also help control the tension level of the game.
For example, after the characters have leveled an entire Imperial research facility, one of the characters comments, “We’d better get going. There’s not much more we can do here.” The sarcasm is funny, and at the same time points out to the characters the consequences of their actions.
Heroes. Another aspect of the Star Wars style is heroism. The characters in a Star Wars adventure should be heroes!
However, while the characters can act heroic in any adventure, this is very different from having the characters actually be heroes. You, the gamemaster, will have to orchestrate plots to allow the characters to become true heroes. To do this, you will have to keep in mind several facts about heroes: • Heroes are flamboyant. Not only are heroes willing to take significant risks in order to succeed, they are also willing to make those risks even greater if it will allow them to do something spectacular—in other words, heroes will show off. It is up to you to make sure that the characters have ample opportunities to take flamboyant actions. Don’t simply put them in a situation where they have to shoot at TIE fighters when you can give them the opportunity to stand on the bottom of a crippled ship that is madly careening—upside down, no less—through the atmosphere and shoot at TIE fighters with their hand blasters. This is the kind of thing that heroes will want to do. And, if the characters do this—if they take the flamboyant, heroic path and do something that has little chance of success but has a high entertainment factor—you should give them a break. Anytime a character attempts something creative and exciting enough to qualify as true heroism, that character should have a better chance at success. A good way to do this is to streamline the rules—instead of having the characters roll every round to see if they can keep their balance on the upside-down ship as it plummets to the surface, have the characters roll once or twice for several minutes worth of activity. This decreases the likelihood of a bad roll that results in tragedy. • Heroes should overcome great odds. For the characters to have a chance to be heroic, they should always have the deck stacked against them. Their opponents have to be strong, and their obstacles formidable. They should not have to fight two or three stormtroopers—they should face whole squads of them. Real heroes will have sufficient skills and talents to find their way out of these situations. To give the characters the feel of the dangers that they face, you should take every available opportunity to emphasize to the players that their characters are only millimeters from death. Heroes may not die, but they should come very close. • Heroes have responsibilities to others. The characters shouldn’t always start the adventure with the fate of the Rebel Alliance or the Republic, or the galaxy, on their shoulders, but that responsibility will often be theirs before the adventure ends. Heroes are responsible for more than just their own lives. The lives of others—of helpless, innocent beings—depend on their successes. An immediate way to emphasize this is to have helpless gamemaster characters tag along behind the player characters so that the characters have to consider the safety of those around them. Using this, you can then project on them the responsibility of protecting the faceless millions whose lives are depending on the success of the characters. • Heroes are remembered after their deaths. Survival is important to everyone, but reputation is more important to heroes. A glorious death that results in the salvation of millions of innocent beings could be more satisfying than continued existence. The death of a hero should be a significant event, and it should advance the story. It should be well-planned and, as much as possible, it should be a situation where the character, in an effort to save someone else, chooses a course that will surely lead to death.
Exciting Locales
Use settings that evoke a sense of wonder. You could create a community situated amid dozens of cascades and waterfalls, or a crimelord’s fortress suspended above the ground by massive repulsorlifts, or a spaceport built into the sides of the cliffs of an ancient series of canyons.
Try to make each place the player characters visit seem different from the others. By doing this, you can make these sights engaging and memorable for the players. For more on creating exciting locales, see the chapter on “Designing Adventures.”
Deadlines
Another way to keep the players enraptured in the story is to give them a deadline. They have only four hours to rescue slaves headed for an unknown location in the Outer Rim Territories. Or maybe the Rebel Alliance needs to warn a remote outpost before the Empire arrives to destroy it, but communications are down. Or one of the player characters may have contracted a fatal disease that can only be cured by a particularly enigmatic doctor working somewhere, far far away, in the Corporate Sector Authority.
When the players know they have only a limited time to accomplish their objective, they don’t waste time meandering about the galaxy, which is usually when they get bored with the adventure.
You can even enforce a real-time deadline. You give the characters four hours of real time (as opposed to game time) to achieve their goal. Then, throughout the adventure, you keep reminding them about the time constraint. When you get down to the last hour, just watch them do everything in their power to help you move the story along!
Mysteries
Human beings seem to possess an obsession with discovery and solving problems. If you present your players with a strange quandary that either cannot be explained by normal phenomena or lacks several key elements, they’ll do whatever they can to uncover the truth.
Maybe a bounty hunter starts stalking the characters. They don’t owe anyone any money and they’re not wanted criminals, so who is after them and why? Or maybe a Rebel outpost suddenly goes silent. When the characters arrive they find no one at the base and no signs that would indicate a sudden mass exodus. What happened?
Be careful using mysteries. Keep offering players pieces of the puzzle throughout the adventure so that they don’t get too frustrated and give up. If halfway through the adventure they feel that they’re no closer to the truth than they were when they started, they’ll figure that the mystery is unsolvable and forget about it—and there goes the rest of your adventure.
Personal Stake
One of the best ways to engage the players is to provide them with a personal stake in the outcome of the adventure. Maybe one of their siblings has been captured by the Separatists, or a crimelord has sent bounty hunters after them, or the Republic mistakenly believes they have become traitors.
The characters need to deal with these situations, although the whole adventure need not focus on that storyline. While the characters perform a supply run for the Alliance, for example, they could receive word that the pilot’s father has been taken in for questioning on his home world. Between accomplishing their mission and returning to the Rebel base, the characters could travel to the pilot’s planet to find out what’s going on and to extricate his father from the (apparently) unwarranted incarceration.
Every once in a while you should ask to see the players’ character sheets. Look for background information and personality traits that might lend themselves to a personal stake. If a player has written that his character is extremely competitive, for example, you could create a rival group of Clone Troopers (or smugglers, or whatever, depending on your campaign) who seek to outdo the characters at every turn.
This character will do everything in his power to make sure his group succeeds more often and more quickly than these newcomers.
Try to note these things during character generation; perhaps you can even use these ideas to create unique twists and turns that appeal to the individual characters, and players playing them.
Giving Options
Don’t constantly force your players to follow along the prescribed path of the adventure. They may have devised an alternate scheme for success not covered by the scenario, and you shouldn’t penalize them for their creativity. Instead you’ll have to use your judgment to run the remainder of the adventure.
If the players feel that they never have a choice, that you have predetermined what their characters will do and say—and therefore, how the adventure will turn out—they’re not going to have any interest in playing. Part of the fun of a roleplaying game is the almost unlimited possible reactions to any given situation. Take that away and you’ve lost much of the reason for participating in this type of game.
Sometimes the characters will have only a few choices—or at least, a few obvious choices—and that’s fine if it makes logical sense in the context of the scenario and doesn’t seem like an attempt by you as gamemaster to dictate their characters’ paths.
Reward creativity. Give the players a reason to exercise their brains. The more freedom they believe they have, the more they’ll enjoy the adventure. When their characters make a mistake, they have no one else to blame it on, and when their characters succeed they feel a genuine sense of accomplishment.
The Art of Misdirection
If the players can correctly guess the conclusion of an adventure while they’re progressing through the first episode, the following episodes won’t provide much excitement.
This is where the subtle art of misdirection comes in. The goal here is to keep the players (and their characters) guessing and then revising those guesses through the whole adventure.
You can do this in small ways: make die rolls, smile for a moment, and then don’t say anything about it; have the characters roll Perception checks, ask for their totals, and then just continue with the episode; ask a player for detailed information on how her character is going to close a blast door (“Which hand are you using?” “Do you have a weapon in your hand”), but then have the door close uneventfully.
You also have the option of throwing in major red herrings. A gamemaster character starts tracking the characters. The players will immediately attempt to mesh this new person with the rest of the adventure. In reality, however, he’s just a common thief looking for an easy mark, or he thinks that one of the characters looks familiar but doesn’t want to say anything until he’s sure he’s not mistaking that character for someone else.
The character could receive a death threat from a large criminal organization operating in the sector. Unfortunately, the message was delivered to the wrong person, and the crimelord has no interest in them. Of course, you won’t let them know that.
Loading the Dice
The most important part of a roleplaying game is the story. Don’t let the rules get in the way. If a flubbed die roll would normally indicate that the main villain dies a few minutes into the adventure, fudge the roll. Say he just barely escaped. For this reason you should try to make all of your rolls behind a gamemaster screen or hidden from the players by some other object (like your hands).
If the players make a roll that would destroy the scenario, or would make it less exciting, you can fudge the difficulty number.
For example, you’ve set up a situation where the characters must pursue a fleeing Imperial spy out onto enormous struts suspended high above a duracrete floor. One player decides that her character will just turn off the lights and wait for their quarry to fall. You hadn’t thought of that possibility when you designed your adventure (or it wasn’t addressed in the published adventure), and there’s no reason the character can’t attempt such a feat.
You tell her to make a security roll to bypass the computer lockout on the lighting system. She rolls high, and even though it’s enough to accomplish the task, you say that she just missed it. Now the player character will have to risk their lives balancing on the struts to apprehend the spy.
Don’t go overboard with this technique. If the players suspect that you’ve been altering die rolls and difficulties, they’ll start to lose interest because it will seem that their free will has been taken away. You should fudge rules only at critical moments and you should always be fair, giving the benefit sometimes to the gamemaster characters, and sometimes to the player characters.
Judgment Calls
During an adventure you’re in charge. You can always discuss rules questions or arguments with the players after the game (see the “Getting Feedback” section below).
While this general guideline provides you with a great deal of power, it also gives you the responsibility of using that power wisely. You have to be fair. If a referee in a ball game started randomly penalizing one team, the other team would get extremely frustrated and eventually quit once it became obvious that there was no point in continuing.
While you take the role of the villains in the adventures you run, do not think of yourself as the opponent of the players. Your job is to make sure the players have a good time, not to beat them. While you should try to provide the players’ characters with a challenge, you shouldn’t try to devise an unbeatable adventure.
Then again, if the players do something stupid, you shouldn’t coddle them. The first time they make a particular mistake you may want to alert them and reduce the damage it would have caused, but the second time you should adjudicate the error fairly.
Tread carefully on this aspect of gamemastering. It’s easy to fall one way or the other. Just remember that you’re all playing this game to have fun.
Keeping the Game Going
As a gamemaster, only you have the full knowledge of the intended direction of an adventure or campaign. The goals and steps needed to get to the conclusion are already predetermined and your task is to get the players to that ultimate destination.
But players will be players…
Sometimes (almost always?) your players will find a way to alter the steps and perhaps even the final goal of the adventure. At these times, when your players have shown a bit more ingenuity than you expected, you have to fall back on that old gamemaster tradition of improvisation.
While the very word improvisation would suggest that the activity is completely spontaneous and unrehearsed, there are many techniques you can use to prepare yourself for the process of having to improvise an adventure situation.
When the players do something unexpected, jumping in headlong and simply reacting to the players’ actions can lead to some disastrous results. Careful thought and planning are what it takes to get an adventure back on course and flowing smoothly. First though, let’s take a look at what to do when the plot goes astray.
Immediate Reaction
If your players have taken an unexpected jump from the planned route of an adventure, your first reaction is to steer them directly back to the plot line. Do not fall prey to the old tenet that the plot as written is absolute!
Roleplaying is a mutual give-and-take between the players and the gamemaster, and putting up roadblocks in your players’ way—or leading them by the nose back to where they “should be”—leads to player dissatisfaction.
If some new encounters immediately spring to mind that will eventually lead things back toward the original plot, run with them. Make up the details as you go along, but write them all down so that you can make sure you are being consistent.
If the players have really thrown you for a loop, your best bet is to ask the players if you can take a ten or fifteen minute break to think things through. Try not to let this downtime last more than a half hour, as you are likely to lose your players’ attention to the television, books, or other distractions.
While you’re figuring out how to get the adventure moving again, the players can be running out to get food, looking up some game information they were curious about, or finding some other activity to entertain them for a short while.
Regrouping
Once you have some time to gather your thoughts and get back to work, what are the next steps to getting the players back on course?
The first priority is dealing with whatever actions the characters want to carry out next. It may be necessary to spontaneously generate a few locales and gamemaster characters to flesh out the new scenario.
In this kind of situation, you’re advised to go for stereotypes or cardboard cut-out characters that are easy to conceptualize and describe. Don’t worry about making this new situation the best scenario you’ve ever run; instead, try to make it interesting enough to hold your players’ attention and get them to the plot point they need to reach.
Hopefully, the players haven’t taken a course so wild that a major rethinking of the plot is needed. More than likely this won’t be the case, as the players should have a feel for what the major goals of an adventure are before they are too far into it.
The first step is to take a look at the whole overview of the adventure and see how far the characters have strayed. Every scenario, no matter how well written, has points where the story can diverge, and this is exactly what your players have done. They have found one of these divergent points and decided to take a route not accounted for.
This does not make their new direction implausible—just unexpected.
You have three options: • Retrofitting • Branching • Winging It
Retrofitting
Direct retrofitting is the process of changing an “old” plot to fit a new situation. It involves changing the plot the least amount possible while still getting the players back into the story.
Most of the time, adventures revolve around a “who” or a “what,” as opposed to a “where.” If the plot you’ve written calls for the characters to go to Cloud City and the players decide that they want to tromp off to the Isen Asteroid Belt, they’re going to go there. However, ask yourself if you can retrofit the “who” or the “what” of the adventure to that new location.
Can the major villain have gone there? Can you have the characters come across that vital information in the new setting?
Can you create one or two new encounters in this new location that give the characters information leading them to the location they were supposed to visit in the first place—if they uncover a fraction of that information and learn that they have to go to Cloud City for the rest of the data, the players have been directed to where you need them to go.
Can you have them meet a few traders who give them information that leads them to Cloud City, maybe on a completely unrelated matter, and then once they go there, have them bounce right back into the thick of the story?
Branching
This method is called “branching” because it is a lot more convoluted than retrofitting. No matter how many smaller branches there are on a tree, and no matter the twists and turns on these “branches,” they all lead back to the “trunk” or the core of the story. Likewise, the players will in time get back to the story.
Branching takes a little more effort but has the advantage that it is a less heavy-handed approach to dealing with these situations.
Take the players’ new idea and develop it as much as possible. How many different events can happen as a result of their actions, and how can these results lead back to the plot?
The players have come up with a new plan, and if it’s reasonable, it should have an opportunity to succeed. Take whatever locale the players have decided to visit and visualize it in your mind and jot down a few notes. Make sure to note the general condition of the location: • the sights • the sounds • the people in the area
Is it clean or dingy? Noisy or quiet? What stands out as your mind’s eye looks around the place?
The furnishings, the smells, the lighting, noteworthy equipment and props all add to the overall feel of a specific location. Take the time to sketch out a general layout of the area if necessary and keep it handy.
The next step is to take some of the characters visualized in the scene and give them depth and personality. If appropriate, use a character template for each of the notable characters and make some quick notations as to species, skills, general outlook, behavior and quirks. Normally, you will only need one or two “personalities” for such an encounter, and the rest of the people in the scene can be background scenery and unimportant to the action of the story.
If a template doesn’t fit your conception, make a quick list of notable skills and attributes that fit the character’s general conception.
Make sure you give every necessary character a name. It is one of the easiest things to overlook, but can also be one of the most difficult things to come up with on the spur of the moment.
After the gaming session is over, take the time to further flesh out the characters if the player characters are going to have continuing contact with them in the future. Other things to note are roleplaying notes for the character like accents, physical features, habits, behavior, props and equipment. Easily created on the spot, all of these are easily forgettable after the session is over.
With this technique, the gamemaster gives the players an interesting new encounter or story, but they still get back to the plot.
Winging It
This can be the hardest option, but sometimes it turns out to be the most entertaining. Rather than trying to get the characters back on the plot, an idea will jump up in front of you and demand to take precedence. Go for it.
Take the opportunity to make this new story fit properly into the campaign. Since the players won’t know the particulars of an adventure, they’ll never know that you changed things in mid-stream.
This gives you the freedom to take new suggestions from both yourself and the players and expand on these ideas. This can lead to all kinds of complications if not thoroughly planned out, but sometimes the new story is so entertaining and exciting that it is worth the added strain and pressure of making up the new story.
It helps to go through your collection of old gamemaster characters and pick one especially suited for the adventure. You might also want to use a familiar plot from an earlier adventure and update it to the new setting—maybe even making the new adventure a sequel to what happened in the original adventure.
This type of approach relies on the fluidity of roleplaying, and that flexibility is a key ingredient in any game.
Prepared Improvisation
Your players, as they adventure and gain Character Points and experience, will have the opportunity to try things that are more and more out of the realm of the realistic. This is especially true of those characters who have training in Force skills. You must learn how to deal with these situations.
Though seemingly a contradiction in terms, prepared improvisation is one of the most useful tools a gamemaster has at his command. A little preparation can head off a lot of scrambling around and on-the-spot creation of scenarios and characters.
Whenever you get ready to run an adventure, whether you bought it or wrote it yourself, take the time beforehand to give the adventure a thorough read. Become totally familiar with all the elements of the adventure: the locales, the gamemaster characters, the overall plot and all the scenes that make up the total adventure. Once you are familiar with the adventure it becomes much easier to roll with any player changes and identify where these changes might occur.
To find the possible divergent points of the adventure, sit down and scrutinize where you, as a player, might take actions that change the adventure. Are the characters expected to do the logical thing? What encounters can you throw in to get them back onto the story, or how can you encourage the characters to do what is expected of them?
As always, take notes of where you find these and detail the possible changes at each of these points. This gives you a good basis on what types of encounters you may have to come up with during the course of running the adventure.
Having identified the possible trouble spots, consider whether your players would actually take advantage of these jumping off points. Knowing how your players will react to a situation can give you clues as to when and where it will become necessary to improvise and fill in the holes.
Once you have made your best determination as to where your players would deviate from the given plot, look at all the alternatives for that situation. Choose one or two of the alternatives that seem most likely and create these as possible encounters if the need arises.
As with improvising on the spot, the same guidelines apply in the creation of the encounter. Fully detail the aspects of the encounter that you are going to need, such as gamemaster characters, the general area of the setting and all the noticeable details about the locale and the people around it. It is always better to have a little too much detail than not enough, as you can choose to leave things out much easier than you can create information on the fly.
Another advantage you have with preparing ahead of time is you can also deal with player variations from the plot by putting up a series of little roadblocks. These deterrents need not be heavy-handed in their execution since they can be subtly foreshadowed throughout the early stages of an adventure.
Pregenerated Gamemaster Characters
One of the main facets of prepared improvisation is to have a cast of characters ready for any occasion. Players will constantly want to get involved with characters placed only in a locale for the purpose of window dressing. However, the players do not know ahead of time that these characters are unimportant to the adventure.
As a player, it’s easy to assume that any character the gamemaster describes is fair game as far as plot threads go. With prior preparation, any character can be instantly given life and relevance.
Take the time between sessions just to create background characters that can be set to fill a variety of situations. Create a number of these characters using the standard quick write-up formats presented in the “Gamemaster Characters” chapter. Add a few notes and keep these characters on-hand to slip into an encounter when the time is right.
Rather than having to create characters from out of thin air, you can concentrate on getting the story back on track while having fun playing a character you already have a thorough understanding of.
When you do use such a character, keep a note of this, and mark down any history, personal behaviors or other pertinent data that can be used when you play the character in future encounters. Players will remember familiar characters and will look for them when they return to a given locale.
You might also want to create multiple versions of the same “type” of character. We know that there are thousands of smugglers in the galaxy, so rather than putting all of your time into creating one really detailed smuggler, come up with five or six unique smugglers that you can use for different situations and encounters.
Pregenerated Encounters
Another facet of prepared improvisation is that every planet will have a certain number of shops, businesses and other establishments that are common to every other world in the galaxy. These businesses will not vary too much from place to place, and therefore can be written up well in advance of the time they may be needed to fill out an adventure.
The people who populate an encounter are as important as the encounter locale itself. Some ideas as to possible encounter locations are cantinas and bars, droid repair shops, salvage yards, ship repair docks, governmental offices and local law enforcement offices. Take the time to detail these and several others ahead of time and prevent a lot of headaches when it comes to having to generate a new encounter from scratch.
The easiest way to get a feel for one of these establishments is to actually visit its modern day counterpart and take notice of what goes on around that area. For example, a spaceport could easily be created after a trip to a harbor or airport and observing the general goings-on. You could probably come up with a novel Ithorian herd ship after spending some time at a trendy shopping complex (“trendy” because only the wealthy can afford to visit an Ithorian herd ship).
Be sure to take note of the general condition of the area. If it’s busy, are there maintenance crews working? Do they work all day or just part of the day? How diligent is the security? Are the people relaxed or is there a hurried feeling to their activities?
Take special note of those people of importance in the area and those that would make good gamemaster characters. Every locale has its own style and progression of hierarchy. Who are the important people and who do they report to?
Subplots
Subplots are story threads that keep on showing up in adventure after adventure. They normally start as a small part of one adventure, and then are reintroduced in later adventures, always providing a little more information than before.
When you find yourself improvising an adventure or encounter, you may want to drop one of your continuing subplots into the story—or create a new one on the spot.
Subplots are reasonably easy to introduce through the use of gamemaster characters generated to fill these improvised scenarios. Since every person has their own specific contacts and problems, certain subplots could be tagged onto these characters.
One possible way to keep subplots available is to note with every pregenerated character or encounter the possible subplots tied to this character.
Another way is, while reading and becoming familiar with an adventure, log the possible places to add new plot lines—very much like identifying the areas for possible player variance from the plot.
Subplots are what carry a continuing story from adventure to adventure—they are the little segue needed to move the players from one adventure to another. Any information the character gleans in an adventure from a character is fair game for another adventure.
As gamemaster, if you feel that a certain subplot fits well as an addition into an adventure, or you notice a good opportunity to create one on the spot, take the time and do so.
Source: REUP:184