You Reap What You Sow - Consequences in Stars Without Number

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Well, it finally happened.

My Stars Without Number game has turned out very differently than I expected, not unusual with a RPG mind you, when you put players into a scenario it rarely pans out the way you expect.

Still, I had expected that they would spend the first 10 sessions or so doing exploration of alien worlds. However, I couldn’t foresee that one of the PCs would throw in with one of the NPCs who had done something bad (killed another NPC to smuggle an alien life form back to earth). Once he did that (the NPC was the engineering tech, the PC was the engineer), they concocted a plan to deceive the rest of the PCs into believing that they had engine problems and had to return to the Sol system.

At that point I had planned for them to be exploring planets for the foreseeable future, instead we returned to the populated Sol system. So the game immediately shifted from exploration and alien environments / creatures to intrigue and politics. Not what I was expecting, but such is the life of a sandbox DM.

So they had been interrogated by the military when they got back, as some of the alien creatures the engineer and engineering tech had smuggled home managed to escape containment and destroyed a space station, killing hundreds of people. 

Of course, the PC engineer hadn’t seen that coming, he sold off the aliens to an unknown buyer and forgot about it, collecting his credits and walking away. However, he hadn’t bothered telling the buyers that the aliens could replicate. I’m not exactly sure why he didn’t share that piece of information, perhaps he forgot (unlikely) or perhaps he figured it wouldn’t matter. 

At the end of the day, it gave me a GREAT hook to continue the game.

Thanks to some favorable rolls the military did not initially discover that the PC had done this, so they were let go and accepted an invitation on a private spaceship (the Gold Star) to be the guests of a wealthy industrialist who wanted his special passengers to get to meet the second crew to have successfully returned from an intergalactic mission.

As a DM I prefer to let the player decisions drive the game. So when the buyer of those alien creatures didn’t get his delivery, he sent out an android bounty hunter named Rinnix Phol  to find the PCs and collect, either get the credits back from them or get more alien creatures from them.

The bounty hunter attacked one of the PCs on the Gold Star, unfortunately for him she was a teleporter and escaped his grasp. The android bolted and hid on the engineering deck. The PCs went to the captain of the Gold Star and told him that there was an assassin on board, and they offered to track him down and subdue him. At this point the PC engineer had made a deal with one of the wealthy passengers to give him all of the remaining aliens he had hidden away on his secret asteroid base, as he was starting to realize that they were going to cause him no end of trouble. He wanted to neutralize this android before more of his plans were revealed and he was prevented from fulfilling his deal with the wealthy passenger.

So the PCs armed up along with a few of the guards from the Gold Star (the Captain insisted on sending out a few of his guards without the PCs, he was suspicious), and there was some blaster fire heard on the lower decks. The PCs arrived to a hallway with blaster fire burns on the walls and two Gold Star guards with their necks snapped, dead on the floor.

They searched room by room until they arrived in the cargo bay where the two shuttles were stored. Then Rinnix Phol, who was waiting on top of one of the shuttles, leapt down and tackled one of the PCs, doing a good amount of damage. Then he hit the PC pretty hard, knocking him down to 0hp. 

One thing I have come to realize with this game is that, even more so than D&D, combat is fast and deadly. You enter it at your peril. The players, however, aren’t picking up on this quite as quickly. So when this android bounty hunter was tackling their fellow PC they ALL TOOK OUT LASER PISTOLS TO SHOOT HIM.

Ay caramba.

So they shot, and of course a few of them missed. And when you are all standing around a pair of people fighting each other and you shoot and miss… Things got real fast. There were some friendly fire hits, which didn’t kill anyone but sure as hell got their attention.

Then, the PC engineer, who has “talk” as a skill, decided to step in. He shouted out to the android to stop and asked him what he wanted. I made this a difficulty 10 check, as Rinnix Phol had a specific mission, bring in at least one of the PCs to his employer so they could either find out where the aliens were being kept and the employer could get his cargo, or she could blackmail the rest of the PCs to come in to retrieve the kidnapped PC.

The check was successful (the game has a “roll again” mechanic that helps out here), and the android stopped and talked.

The android told the party he represented his employer who wanted his cargo delivered.

At that point the rest of the party was unaware of what the PC engineer had done. For the last 5 sessions he had kept his subterfuge secret, and had made millions of credits in the process. But the chickens had finally come home to roost.

It was one of those pure gold role play moments that you live for as a DM. 

So he told the rest of the party what he had done, and why this android was after them, and why the military was after them. They had assumed the NPC engineering tech had done all of this as he had taken off right after they returned to the Sol system. Now they knew it was both the PC engineer and the NPC tech who had done this.

They had a group discussion and decided to go with the android and meet the buyer to sort this out, as they were very soon going to be wanted by the military as well (as they would eventually track down the NPC engineering tech and their psi’s would find out what had happened).

So they left with the bounty hunter, he had a ship nearby paralleling the Gold Star. They went to their ship which was also nearby and followed the bounty hunter to Jupiter. The bounty hunter’s employer, Jia Rees, was a wealthy star drive manufacturer who lived in a biodome city on Lysithea, one of Jupiter’s moons. These biodome cities are filled with plants to create oxygen, and get water from ice deep within the moons and from passing comets. 

They went to Rees’ home, a fortress like building bristling with armed and armored guards, and they were brought before her and seated at a large table.

She got right to the point, she had paid for 100 alien creatures to be delivered, they were not delivered, she wanted her cargo, or alternately her credits returned, plus costs for the lost ship and lost employees who were killed when the alien creatures destroyed their ship.

There was some fun RP and conversation around this, the PC engineer tried his best to convince her to change her mind, but rolls couldn’t save him and she wasn’t going to go easy on him, she had taken a huge loss. I played her as a no nonsense business person, she wasn’t going to get snowed by this guy, she was ruthless and greedy, and wanted some of these creatures for herself so she could militarize them and sell them for a profit.

So they agreed to go to the PCs secret asteroid base where he was keeping his one alien creature, duplicate a hundred of them for her, and bring them back. The rest of the PCs had no idea that the PC engineer had a secret asteroid base, so they were gobsmacked by this as well. She insisted that Phol accompany them to ensure there were no shenanigans, and sent them off.

So they all returned to their ship, the TLS Tartarus, and they made their way back to the asteroid belt to retrieve the alien creature and put this to an end.

I decided that Rees wasn’t the only wealthy industrialist that was in the know on this. There were corporate spies that kept an eye on her operations, and they had discovered that she was after the PCs to get access to these alien creatures. So one of them sent a ship after them to try and muscle in on the action.

So when they were arriving at the asteroid base, their comm officer discovered that there was a ship closing in on them. The Tartarus is a former prison ship, converted for deep space exploration, it is heavily armored but slow. The ship pursuing them was fast, and it came up on them guns blazing. 

So we started ship to ship combat. I ADORE ship to ship combat in Stars Without Number, it is collaborative and dangerous, a perfect combination.

The Tartarus is heavily armored, so they took the first shot but their armor absorbed all the damage. They returned fire but missed. The ship came around and took a second shot, the Tartarus absorbed that one as well (I wasn’t rolling particularly well either), and returned fire and missed

That’s where we broke for the session.

One thing that came out of all of this was that the PC engineer who managed to do all this underneath their noses got HUGE PROPS from the other players for pulling this off. Yes, his actions meant they were essentially wanted men, yes, both a wealthy industrialist and the military was after them, and yes, they were fleeing for their lives.

But he pulled this all off without anyone knowing what was going on, and that made him a rock star. 

This game continues to impress me greatly, high adventure, exploration, politics, intrigue, space battles, deadly combat, it’s the whole package, a perfect fit for a sandbox game, and utterly unique (nothing like Star Trek or Star Wars). 

Good times.

The Mythical DM - Running Dungeons and Dragons 

Image by Don Maitz

Since the earliest days of the hobby D&D has faced a stark reality: there are far, far more players than DMs. I have no reason to believe that this has changed much, for better or for worse few people are willing to take up the mantle of DM and run games.

I think this is unfortunate, creating and running a living campaign is one of the most rewarding experiences, I run three concurrent campaigns at the moment (two 1e AD&D and one Stars Without Number) and I look forward to each session with great anticipation. The interaction between a group playing a TTRPG is almost a unique thing, different than video games or board games or sports, there’s nothing quite like it. Running games is exhilarating, energizing and SUPER FUN. 

So I want to do my part to encourage people to run their own games, to embrace the role of referee and help to create that magic that happens at the table.

However…

I think it’s important to be realistic about what it means to be the DM. I have seen a lot of advice about DMing online, and frankly a considerable amount of it is misleading at best, harmful at worst. I’m going to tackle the biggest examples of this here.

You Can Run Sessions with “Zero Prep”

I’ve seen this or variations on this so often it’s almost comical. 

Now, just for context, I run two after school games on a weekly basis, I sit down with 7 kids, ages 9-11, and we play D&D for 2 hours once a week for each group. I also run a biweekly Stars Without Number game for 8 players. 

I also run a fully sandbox game, my players do what they want and go where they want, I don’t direct it, nor do I have every contingency planned ahead of time. I improvise almost every reaction to player choices in the game. If I had to do a ton of prep work for these games I wouldn’t be doing anything else. So clearly it is possible to do this without TONS of prep ahead of time.

But that’s not the same thing as saying that you don’t do prep at all, or you do “zero” prep. 

EVERYONE does prep. But rather than admit that, people try to convince you that you can run games entirely on the fly. I appreciate the sentiment, but that’s not the way it works for most people, for a number of reasons.

1. The Rules of the Game.

If you run a game then you have to know the rules, not perfectly mind you, I ran AD&D back in high school and I’d conservatively estimate I knew about half the rules, and of the rules I knew I probably had about half of those right. But every DM who has ever run a game of D&D or any other TTRPG spent time learning the rules. That’s prep time, and it’s not trivial. When I fired up our current Stars Without Number game I spent about 30 hours or so reading the rules to get comfortable enough to run the game, and I didn’t really hit my stride until about the 6th session or so. The first five sessions were fun, don’t get me wrong, but I spent a good amount of time looking up rules and checking things to ensure I was doing it at least somewhat like it was supposed to be done.

2. Setting

If you run a game you need a setting of some sort. You are of course more than welcome to do that entirely on the fly, e.g. decide on the spot whether or not your game world has elves, or democracies, or how many towns there are, or whatever. You don’t need a completed setting to run a game, but you need SOMETHING. Most DM’s don’t leave all of that to decide at the table, they come up with some of it ahead of time. That’s prep. If you buy a premade setting you will spend some time familiarizing yourself with it, if you create your own then you put in the hours making it. In either case, you have prep to do. 

3. Experience 

I have mad improv skills, I can run a game and pivot on a dime, taking the seeds the players plant and spinning them into plotlines and events. However, I’ve been DMing for 30+ years and I know my system (1e AD&D) like the back of my hand. I also teach, I regularly lecture to groups of 250 students or more, so I have zero anxiety or nervousness about public speaking or having everyone look to me for a decision. The reason I can improv sessions so well is that I have done this for a long time. Just like a musician can play a song without having the music in front of them, I can improvise on the spot without rules or plans in front of me. If you are new to the game this isn’t as easy to do. Most of the time you will need some prep so you have materials to riff off of.

4. Tricks

Here’s one example. In a recent game the players made a decision that put them at the gates of a city I had not prepared in any way. I had no maps, no encounters planned, absolutely nothing. I could have ended the session right there, but instead we pushed ahead. There was an opportunity for some role play at the city gates which kept us busy for a bit, then one of the PCs was pick-pocketed when they entered the city. A chase ensued and they cornered the thief, he tried to talk his way out of it and by then we were done for the session.

The “trick” here is that you only have to keep the players busy until the end of the session, anything else you need can be done between sessions. Once I realized that I became much less concerned about improving a session, if the party made a decision that required me to come up with something big on the fly, I can usually just keep them busy for a half hour or so until we break then have something ready the next week. So it’s not “no prep”, its “prep between sessions”.

5. Carryover

You can improvise everything if you want, but if you do so the campaign will start to feel detached and unconnected. What makes a campaign world real and immersive is the sense that what you do has impacts on the game world. So what this means is that I take notes during sessions so I can have consequences return to the PCs in later sessions. For example, in an early session of one of my current campaigns the PCs shot an enemy warlock in they eye, blinding him but not killing him.

Fast forward to 7 sessions later, that warlock caught up with them and exacted his revenge in a super-fun session. The “prep” for that was running the earlier session where the warlock was wounded. 

Also, if you do improvise a lot then you have to keep track of what you do in some way, otherwise you will forget things and the campaign seems disjointed. I take notes about my improvised decisions so I can be consistent and ensure that there is some continuity to my game. That’s prep too.

6. Tables

Here’s a dirty little secret: many of the biggest “I do no prep” DM’s rely on tables and charts to roll up stuff in the moment so they don’t have to pull everything out of their ass. I do it myself, it’s a fantastic way to produce content without having to carry around tons of material, however, making those tables is prep, getting familiar with those tables is prep too.

7. Hacks

There are any number of examples of gaming materials that are designed to help you DM with less prep work. I have no issue with those, and they can be an extremely valuable addition to a DM’s toolkit.

However, obtaining and getting to know those materials, learning their methods, THAT’S PREP TOO! You don’t just buy a book on easy DMing and instantly become competent at using that material, you have to read and understand it. 

I tell this to my students all the time, EVERY method to reduce your time doing something or “hack” a process takes time to learn, so that is prep you have to do. In short, there is no such thing as a “free lunch”. 

I think the sensible way to talk about this isn’t to tell people that you run games with “no prep”, or “zero prep”, but instead to say that you don’t have to do a ton of prep, and that you shouldn’t be afraid to tell your players, “I don’t have anything ready for that, so let’s break and next session I will be prepared”.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with admitting that you want to stop and start when you feel better prepared to run the session. DM’s aren’t machines, and they have the right to pause the game and come back to it when they feel confident and ready.

As is often the case, the designers of older editions understood all of this. Gygax for example told you explicitly that you don’t need to design a whole campaign setting. Start with a town near a spooky old crypt. Then work out from there. You don’t need to have it ALL sorted out, just a kernel to build on, and a group that is patient enough to wait if you need them too.

And don’t be afraid of “getting it wrong”, unlike many other games and activities, you can mess up the rules of D&D incredibly badly and still have a ton of fun! Ask anyone who played D&D back when they were kids (we started when we were 14) and they will tell you that they got almost everything wrong and had a GREAT TIME playing anyway. You don’t need to get it right, so you don’t need to prep everything. 

But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to prep anything either. 

Anyone can DM

This is another harmful argument I see all the time. I want to be very clear about this, on one level I agree that anyone can DM a game. You don’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to “get it right” all the time, and even when you don’t follow the rules as written you aren’t “playing it wrong”.

Having said that, DMing is a job that fits certain personality types and skill sets better than others. If you are particularly introverted, if you don’t like public speaking, if you don’t like improvisation, then you will find DMing to be an onerous and unpleasant task, and you likely won’t be very good at it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t improve. When I started I was super nervous, forgot a ton of stuff (not just rules, but important events from the adventures I was running), I got anxious and upset at developments in the game, I argued with the players a lot, and felt guilty when things went wrong for the party. In short, I was a hot mess. But I wanted to run the game, I enjoyed creating adventures and exploring the game world, and I stuck with it. Eventually I got good at it, but that took a lot of time.

I think we do budding DM’s a disservice when we suggest that anyone can run a game, sure, anyone CAN run a game, but some people will be better at it than others, and more importantly, some will ENJOY it more than others. Just like some players like martial classes more than spell casters, and some players like social role play more than “hack and slash”, some people will take to DMing in a way that creates joy for them and the others at the table. 

Rather than asserting that anyone can run a game, why not be clear about what running a game entails so people can decide if they are interested in trying to run games. In my group we did what I suspect many groups did, one person ran the game for a while, then others would take a shot at it and see if they enjoyed it or not. If you don’t enjoy it then chances are the players won’t either, so it’s just fine to say “that’s not for me”.

The DM is “Just Another Player”

I get why this is an important idea to discuss. The DM is not “more important” than any other person at the table. And the DM’s enjoyment is no less important than anyone else’s. If the players are having a grand old time but the DM is not, then that’s a problem. In those senses, the DM is like the players, she has a right to enjoy herself while playing, and is no more or less important than anyone else there.

However, there are important differences between a DM and the players in a TTRPG like D&D. The first and most obvious one is that the players can show up for the game without doing anything ahead of time. My players do ZERO prep for my sessions, so much so that I often have to recap what happened in the previous session, to the point where I will even have to remind particular individual players of WHAT THEY DID in the previous sessions.

The DM has to respond to the actions of every PC at the table, they have to keep track of the ENTIRE GAME WORLD for the players, she has to create material for the game on the spot (Player - “What is the name of the innkeeper”, “is there a stable to put my horse”), and make rulings about things that aren’t explicitly covered in the rules (“can I jump over that chasm if I drop my backpack”...), players don’t have to do ANY of that.

Even if you decide to share some of these responsibilities with your players, so say when the player asks if there is a stable for their horse you say, “You decide if there is”, it is still upon the DM to make that decision. 

Put baldly, the players run their characters, the DM does EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE GAME WORLD. You can share some of that, but at the end of the day it is primarily on the DM to determine the vast majority of what happens in the game world. The players may direct what parts of the game world are interacted with, but the DM does everything else.

I know that there are other games where this is not the case, more collaborative games where everyone contributes to the process, and I know that you can play D&D in a more collaborative fashion. I have a few players in each of my regular games that take on some of the world building tasks because they are interested. 

I also make it a point to hand off certain tasks to my players in game so they can learn how to run their own games. So for example I will sometimes have the players do the rolls for the monsters/NPCs so they can see what it is like on my side of the screen, and they can get a sense on how to run an encounter, and a sense of how the rules work. 

So it isn’t ALL on the DM, but a lot of it certainly is. 

I think the most obvious retort to the “DM is just another player” argument is the fact that from the beginning of the hobby right up until today people are far more willing to play than to DM games. That isn’t “gatekeeping”, it’s just the reality. For all the talk of everyone being the same and the DM not being “special”, the fact is that DMs responsibility is different than everyone else’s, and I think most people understand this, that’s why there are always more players than DMs.

Conclusion

I want to be clear that I don’t want to discourage people from trying to be a DM. I maintain that running games is one of the most amazing experiences, it rewards you every time you do it. I run about 10 sessions a month right now for three different gaming groups, it’s a lot to remember and a lot to organize, but I love every minute of it. 

I would encourage everyone to take a stab at running a game, you really don’t know what it’s like unless you try it, and if you ‘screw it up’ it doesn’t matter, no one is dying on the operating table, and a ‘screwed up’ game can still be super fun. 

So by all means, jump in there and give it a try, you may find that you have a new favorite thing.

I also want to be clear that being the DM doesn’t make you any better than anyone else in the game. Everyone contributes to enjoyment at the table, and everyone deserves to have a good time playing.

But be aware that there is prep work to do, certain people will enjoy it more than others, and at the end of the day you will have a bigger burden on your shoulders than the rest of the people at the table. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, it means you should do it with your eyes open, aware of the challenges and ready to dive in head first.

GAME ON!