Fan Club Video #4: On "Being a Fan" of the PCs

I love this I've heard you say it before and I generally try to do it as both a GM and a player but having a little bit more of a tangible and well explained version will help me parse it out for my players I think!

jus10

I love the bit about coming up with relationships during session 0, it sounded so obvious once I heard it I couldn’t believe I wasn’t doing that

Micah Clemence

Came back here to say that this advice has fundamentally changed and improved my GMing, ty cool cat Quinns 🥰🥰

JustDave

I love the tips. I'd love to see a video about how to zest up a longterm campaign, as opposed to making the campaign pop from session zero. What are great things to do to shake things up (in-game and at the table) for an established campaign and plot?

John Hutchinson

Asking questions can really help get folks thinking about this. Sometimes I'll send questions to the group during the week and ask them to marinate on it. Or ask who taught them a certain skill or power. Asking those questions can help flesh those characters out through play, especially if the questions are linked to what is happening. "The owlbear you've just killed is still twitching. Maybe it reminds you of your first kill - what was your first kill?"

Judd

I'm rewatching all of these old fanclub videos because they're great! 🔥 I have a question though. My group likes quick character creation by rolling on tables. Typical OSR stuff. I think the expectation in the OSR is that the relations between PCs aren't decided beforehand -- it's "play to find out" all the way. Nobody has the patience to think of this stuff beforehand. There is an obvious downside to this. I find in my games that the relations between players stay very superficial, even 10 sessions in. I think that campfire deck could be an interesting way of improving this, but if you have any other tips, I'd really appreciate it <3

Fabian

For pre-written modules, it's usually good to align the characters to the module during character creation. Then, session by session, during prep, think about (and write down) how whatever part of the module you're prepping could interact w/ the player characters' goals/abilities -- tweaking/re-flavoring encounters to match either. Eventually, you might find that you'd start tweaking/re-flavoring encounters during the sesh in order to spot-light a specific character, playstyle, or mood. (or, if that's tiring, roll for disposition/reaction)

Brickshitter

love the advice when it comes to designing a session with the pcs in mind, but how does that come into play with a prewritten module?

Cameron Jo

Quintin Smith

The jacket is very on brand with the slightly oversized beige but… can we all chip in and buy you one a size smaller? Your shoulders are distracting me from the hawt takes 😅

Benjamin Nickolls

RE: pro-player GMing. A fun thing I'm trying when setting up a location: "You enter the [location] and see A, B, and C. As observant adventurers, you ALSO notice 1-3 more things. It could be as small as a smell, or as large as an interesting NPC. Tell us all about it." Really fun at the table! They inject chaos, interest, and immediately have a "hook" they placed themselves. If they take the bait, think fast and tie it into the big adventure.

Ryan the GM

Hey Quinns! Love your work! I’ve been wondering if you had any tips for running session zeros, specifically how to make them fun and feel worthwhile to the players. I’ve done a few sessions zeros where the focus was on gauging player interests, making characters, and addressing safety tools, but they often feel more like work rather than play. A session zero for me is still a session so I’d like to get players at the table for it, but I feel like I’m cheating my players by needing them to “eat their veggies before they can kill a dragon” so to speak. I know the session zero doesn’t need to include an actual session of play, and the questions answered by session zeros are important, but do you have any advice for how to make session zero as exciting or enticing as any other session?

Thorin

A video on the different VTT would be very useful! Not sure if you have done it much but as it is getting harder and harder to get groups togrther for a lot of people I'm sure seeing the pros and cons of each from a great GM like yous self would be a great help.

Lamont A-R

It’s already on my shelf ! I really rate it!

J

It's always such a wonderful thing when players have a very emotional response of excitement or fear to what happens to the other characters! It helps to know what your fellow players are really good at and reinforce their success with those skills they picked for themselves are PROVEN as the correct choice.

ISAWdano

@J try Stephen Kings book On Writing.

gm_naahz

The idea of "which PC from your games have you been most attracted to" was actually a really interesting prompt (not unlike some great ones James D'Amato used to do in their "bottle episodes" of their Star Wars RPG - the Mynock - on Campaign Podcast, super funny if you can find it!). My answer was none and never which makes me wonder if that's because I've never played a campaign with a female character or player for more than a session or two, but it might also just be that my games have not really gotten into depth of personality ... I love story but I think in most of my campaigns its much more likely for that sort of thing to come out from the NPCs I'm playing. Maybe its my players, but maybe I'm not being enough of fan of my PCs? Hopefully it won't take me a decade to figure that out.

gm_naahz

For some reason Quinn's use of the measurement "yard" threw me, then all I could notice was the baseball on the shelf. And then I'm focused on his pronunciation of words like 'Master' and 'attracted to... on a Saturday'. Now I'm all confused about where Quinn is from. I'm sure its a variety of places and such (and maybe people in Britain use yard more than meter for some reason?) , but I guess this is the nature of listening to a focused conversation on a topic you enjoy and your human brain being fooled into thinking that you are having a conversation and know this person on the internet. Anyone else experience this?

gm_naahz

This is good advice and a good observation. My current challenge is that I actually think what I need is some new blood in our players group. Players are tending to fall into the same general vibe of character and when we move to a new game but the old character peaks through it really demotivates me (why didn't we just keep playing the old game, OR, why cant we try something new). I am starting to think that maybe the best way to play is not to have one band that stays together for 20 years but rather an orchestra that breaks up into quartets every three months. We should be so lucky right?

gm_naahz

I bought AGON but really hadn't taken a look because I wasn't sure my group was really one to enjoy a more story first type of game. Thanks for mentioning this as its likely to get me to flip through a few more pages. I can suggest you may enjoy The Clay that Woke (read it cover to cover because the examples are a good string of stories).

gm_naahz

We’re all quite experienced TTRPG’ers but even we had to wrestle a bit to get our heads around AGON at first but now we love it. I strongly agree, everyone should check it out.

Mark O'Neill

Agon is an amazing game for this and I feel like it didn't quite make the splash it should have done. It's an astounding bit of design that I would recommend everyone to take a look at.

Jim Rossignol

Great video and it has really sparked some ideas. We are currently playing AGON which is both a great game and completely dependent on players and GM all being engaged with one another’s characters. It has these really useful moments built into the game where not only can you “campfire” but your character can literally step back to support another player by giving them your dice to add to their rolls. What makes that especially powerful narratively is that your dice change in the course of the game to reflect deeds and relationships and secondly you co-narrate how you worked together to succeed (or fail) in the action you were attempting.

Mark O'Neill

These are great tips, thanks for sharing!

Joey Campanello

What a thumbnail. Personally, I believe ALL patron questions should begin: "Hey daddy cat..."

Ashley Turner

I'm blessed in that my younger brother, our semi-perpetual GM, is just naturally pro-pc.

Max Brannan

Have you read “The Science of Storytelling” by Will Storr? It’s really interesting and one of the central points about the human brain being primed to be stimulated by sudden, unexpected change is a really relevant to this discussion. In some ways, what’s interesting to players is their character being subject to sudden, dramatic change, or at least being given the opportunity to go through a moment of change. If you’re too fixed on your own majestic narrative as a GM, you don’t have the freedom to just drop their players into these character-changing moments and just seeing what happens, since this might just break your planned story. I would definitely be interested to hear more about non-ttrpg resources/reference books that you have found useful as a GM.

J

I agree this is a great video with fantastic information in it. As someone who runs both published adventures and craziness that I conjure up; I have some advice about creating your narrative inside of the modules you are running. Now, first things first. Captain Barbosa those published adventures. If you've seen Pirates of the Caribbean you will see that when he talks about the pirate's code he says they are more guidelines than rules. Published adventures are the same way. You don't have to follow them line for line. Beat for beat. The best part about modules is that you can use them as a skeleton for a grander story. It is perfectly fine to change things to fit into your character's narrative. I used to get hung up on diverging too far away from a story in the books I ran. It felt wrong to add something, which is weird because why would it? lol You have the spark already, saying you want to work on your character's experiences. And the good news is, probably won't be much work since you already have a published story you are running, just needing a few tweaks. The second thing I will say, NPCs in your published adventures can be changed to fit your story. Don't be afraid to turn a bad guy into a friend who is trying to do better at life after running into the PCs. Or maybe a shopkeeper who is their go-to has an actual connection to their backstory. Stuff like that is easily modified and in my experience players enjoy that stuff. If you've been running games for a while, you already know how to work with narrative or see how it flows via published adventures. And my third piece of advice is this. Just do it. Go for it. If you want to work more on your character experience for your players, just do it already. Start small, go big; whatever. You know your table and your capabilities. If you have the spark, use it. <3

William Rigby

Your comment about the players being invested in the protagonists over my story hit home. My campaign has slowly been shifting from my story arc/plot to setting up possibilities and letting them lead and indeed create the story. It’s in some ways harder as I have to be nimble, but oh so much more satisfying.

Roger Leroux

As a lifelong Forever DM, I have found myself constantly trying to not get into a slump. Call it burnout or whatever, sometimes running sessions can be mentally draining. Especially if the stakes are in in story, or if the players need more from me than I expected. Being a fan of the characters in my games and pushing narratives surrounding their characters has been the core of my games. And that has helped me through some of the burnout I am feeling. This is FANTASTIC advice. I never considered the wording though haha I just always say focus on a player's character but legit, being a fan is what you should be doing. For example, a couple of weeks ago I had a game session where one of my characters met his great-grandfather in a dream. It was off the cuff, unexpected, and truly great fun. He even said afterward that it was really enjoyable to have that as a part of the session and would help with the growth of his character. As a DM I also get connected to these characters that my friends play. I want to see them win or overcome adversity. Great video and great advice. I feel like everyone should see this. It's just sound advice.

William Rigby

I need to get quinn's quest patreon memberships for all my players just so they can watch this video. The investment into other PCs sound incredible. It's been a while since I have run a non-prewritten game, and I really am jonesing to spend time thinking about what experiences the characters need instead of just what the book says happens in the story next.

birdmilk

Quinns

One of my group’s gms took that campfire deck one step further with “the campfire game.” In the game, you ask a player a question about their character and then each other player gives a suggestion. The player then picks their favorite suggestion (or makes up their own if they didn’t like any of them, which usually doesn’t happen after like the first time), and the player who made that suggestion gets a little bonus (in the system we were using, the game had a fate point style mechanic so they got one of those, but you could easily just do like a small stat buff for the next day). Really got everyone interested in everyone else. I think he got it from a blog somewhere, but idk where.

kegna

The reference to El Hijo del Vikingo is delightfully niche. As a fan of wrestling, I have to say I approve!

Backpack Boom Bap (Tom)

Thank you Quinns :) I'm a new GM and I didn't do this in my campaign that I started recently. Now my characters have conflicts with each other :D. What's your suggestion for bringing the players together so they care for each other?

Sadegh Boroomand

I've been in a ttrpg rut lately, feeling like all my sessions are a slog, and it's been sooo hard to get amped for prepping for games, even thinking about them has felt laboursome. And then Quinns strolls up. Your passion for this hobby seeps out of every qq video, and these tips especially always amp me up to try new stuff, filling me with that warm hope that yes, this is a skill, and one that can be learned. Thx for what you do.

Ahti Katiska