Tabletops Blog

“I want to go buy some gear.” Those seven words are like a cheesegrater on the eardrums of every GM. In nearly every case, your player has just said “I want to waste an hour looking through books to find things I want to buy.” This usually causes the GM to pick up a heavy rulebook and quietly ponder whose noggin to pound on (“mine or his, mine or his…”—look carefully next time you go shopping, most GMs really do this.) Of course, the other 10% is normally the equivalent of “I want to magically exchange the money I’m carrying for an item I want without any effort or interest.” Less of the GM’s time is wasted in this case, but it’s no less asinine—inherent to that statement is the assumption that if money can buy it, the player can get it. And that nothing else interesting will happen along the way.

If a character has an inventory, then shopping is something GMs will just have to deal with. Naturally, no GM likes being told “eh, you’ll just have to deal with it”, so here are six ways to turn that in-game shopping time into something fun. And by ‘fun’ I mean ‘more interesting than flipping through pages of splatbooks.’

0. But First, An Important Rule 0!

Okay. Before we go any further, you need to pay attention to this. This is Rule Zero for adding roleplaying value to your party’s shopping trips: There is no such thing as a freakin’ Wal-Mart. Sure, a modern-day RPG can get by with big-box store runs for things like duct tape and rope, but there’s no store anywhere that blithely sells everything, up to and including suitcase nukes, under one roof. If you’ve got such a store, get rid of it—now. Retcon if you must. We’ve all played in games where the lazy GM invents a magical superstore that has everything you’d ever want. All else being equal, this is incredibly boring. (To the credit of my current GM, who does this, he’s using some of the tips I describe below to make his Wal-Mart much more interesting; but you’ll have to keep reading to learn which ones.)

“Wal-Marting” generally encourages every bad behavior we’re trying to prevent and permits very few roleplaying opportunities. Everything at your fingertips with no personality and no reason that this massive economic and magical/scientific powerhouse hasn’t conquered the world yet? Embarrassingly bad. Don’t do it. Ever.

1. Specialty Shops

This is sort of the counterpoint to Rule Zero. Every business naturally has a specialty and a market it caters to. Even the big-box stores specialize; Wal-Mart sells a lot of stuff, but it all falls into the category of “household necessities” (and also NASCAR kitsch and crappy meat, but whatever.) In most RPG settings, individual sellers will specialize much more than they do in real life. Blacksmiths, gunsmiths, wizards selling scrolls, etc.—nobody makes everything and nobody has everything for sale.

What this means, of course, is that unless you’re in a very wealthy and populated area that’s got a wide variety of stores, it’s very unlikely that your players will be able to find a Holy Avenger or grenade launcher in a shop somewhere. This is not a bad thing. It’s the lesson of  The Incredibles—”When everyone’s super, then no one will be.” Having the neat stuff available to everyone cheapens all of it! Not to mention that making your players keep track of who sells what where (and maybe when—and we’ll get to ‘why’ in a moment) keeps them thinking about the world and keeps them immersed in the game.

Incidentally, a lot of games have “availability” ratings for exotic items. Those are sort of a take-it-or-leave-it thing for me—if I’m on the fence about something being available to the PCs I’ll use them, but most of the time I’ll make a quick “you can/can’t find that here” decision based on my idea of where they are. I’m especially wary of ratings you have to roll, though. Your mileage may vary, but don’t think you’re stuck using those and don’t let your players convince you to roll them if you don’t want to.

2. Make Individual Shops and Shopkeepers Memorable

This is one of those things that, when done right and with restraint, can make your game fantastic. Most GMs know to at least give most NPCs some sort of interesting quirk to differentiate them in the minds of the players; accents and speech impediments are the most common (because they’re easiest) but you occasionally get the peg-leg, eyepatch, etc.. Take that as a starting point, and expand it massively for the occasional shopkeeper you want your players to remember. Don’t worry so much about the NPC’s backstory, because players hate stories that don’t involve them; rather, make the NPC as full of life and character and uniqueness as you might make your own PC. This does two things: First, it imprints the NPC onto your characters minds—”guy with the limp” pales in comparison with “Jack the mechanic, who’s got two sons he yells at constantly and who keeps misplacing his tools, but who instantly warms up to anyone that treats him like a Good Ol’ Boy and threw in a free oil change on that account. Oh, and his dog humped the mage’s leg, and that’s now a hilarious YouTube hit.”

Naturally, the stores or stalls that such unique and fascinating individuals do their business in must also be unique. Fantasy games offer a lot of unique opportunities for this. Imagine a basement alchemist who works without light to avoid open flames, or a blacksmith whose forge is kept hot by a fire elemental, or a shop precariously balanced on a cliff’s edge or the top of a tower. Why does this livery stable have the right to do business from inside the local church’s walls when no other such shop exists—an ancestral right? a reward for a heroic deed? a corrupt priest? Be inventive and don’t be afraid to make crazy ideas work—the real world’s a strange place and you have to be stranger. And even if you don’t make the shopkeeper memorable, your players may well remember “the guy who sells potions from the blue barge at the docks.”

One caveat: The Incredibles rule applies here, too. Use this sort of character and location depth judiciously—often enough to make your players excited about the world they’re playing in and the people in it, but not so often that it becomes exhausting for you and your players to keep up with. It’s easy to burn your players out with fantastic descriptions, and constantly trying to one-up yourself will quickly lead you from “fantastic” to “utterly ridiculous”. Again, though, used correctly your players will remember these shops and tradesmen for the entire campaign—and beyond.

3. Things Happen in Stores, Too, You Know

No shopkeeper has a “No pants, no plot, no patronage” sign hanging on their door (well, okay, one of mine now does, but only because he’s a dwarf and doesn’t want to see things at head height and… well, nevermind.) Got your players out shopping in the various stores you’ve come up with? Awesome! Now they’re in a semi-public place that plenty of other people may need or want to go to. Time for things to occur!

When I was jotting this list down on my lunch break, I came up with this list of things that could happen while the players are shopping. And this is just what I thought of while eating half a sandwich:

• The PCs have a ‘chance’ encounter with the servant of a lord in need of assistance.
• The PCs are interrupted by a violent robbery that leads to a fight in a crowded shop filled with fragile goods.
• The PCs walk in to find the shopkeeper being threatened by a creditor or extortioner.
• Enemies of the PCs spring an ambush on them in a shop they know the PCs must visit when they return to town.
• The PCs enter the store to find the shopkeeper dead, and quickly find themselves framed for the crime.

Surely you can do better than what a ham sandwich and I ended up with. Start thinking.

Read it all..

This particular topic comes to us by way of Mike Shea’s blog, “Sly Flourish“, which had an article this morning about player resistances in 4th Edition D&D. The article is a good read on that particular topic, but the last paragraph hints at a larger concept that a lot of GMs fail to understand:

Above all, however, remember that resisting damage is one of the things players enjoy about their characters. Don’t steal it from them. Let them resist most of the attacks of a loathsome beast if it happens to work out that way. For normal encounters, players should feel powerful. For those particular boss battles, however, you may need to step in to ensure the threat stays high.

Emphasis mine. Mike’s point can be summed up with just a paraphrase of that emphasized bit: “If your players enjoy something they’ve worked for, don’t take it away from them.” This is a corollary to the Rule Of Fun—the entire gaming hobby is pointless if its players aren’t having fun, so keep it fun by letting your players earn and keep rewards.

How many times have you seen a player acquire some new ability in a game, whether passive (like resistances or an ability to overcome damage soak) or active (like a new spell-like ability or a teleportation power), only for it to quickly lose relevance because in practically every encounter the GM negates it? I’ve seen it happen far too many times (and it’s happened more than once to me.) While this occasionally stems from the insecurity of a power-tripping GM (which are otherwise well beyond the scope of this article), I believe that most of the time there’s a more benign (though still unacceptable) explanation: Creative inertia.

Most GMs (including myself) tend to fall into certain habits when creating challenges for the players to overcome. New character abilities can quickly make those challenges, and even entire categories of challenges, far easier than they once were if the GM doesn’t adjust. (A classic example is the acquisition of mind-reading powers by a psion or enchanter in D&D; such powers dramatically change how investigations play out.) An intellectually lazy GM who can’t adjust to the new circumstances is often very tempted to say “Well, this guy’s immune to your new power” or to up a target’s damage or to make them immune to mind-reading–in short, the uncreative GM simply declares that things are as they were previously.

Here’s the problem: In doing so, the uncreative GM is declaring that the resources the player has spent in-character–perhaps by saving up money to buy a particular piece of equipment, perhaps by spending time adventuring and recovering magical artifacts, perhaps simply by spending experience points to level up–didn’t actually have any effect on that character. Not only is this immensely frustrating (after all, the player put a lot of time and effort into this too!), it shatters the suspension of disbelief. After all, if there are hundreds of enemies immune to your new power, where there weren’t any before, the world is pretty clearly not internally consistent!

When players earn some new ability by spending resources–whether those be adventuring time, money or experience–they’re doing so to acquire some advantage over the challenges you’ve been throwing at them. It’s critical that the GM let that advantage stand. If that new ability makes your current challenges too easy, the solution is not to take away that new ability; rather, you need to find new challenges for that player (and her character.) And don’t be afraid to let the new abilities lead the way; in the case of resistances, perhaps the character’s new-found resistance to necrotic damage means the party can take on the lich villain at last. In that case, the enemies they’ve been fighting should remain as they are, because they’re no longer the same challenge they were; the players will naturally seek out the greater challenge because they’ve got an advantage that’s in their favor.

This is not to say that the GM should never negate a character’s abilities in some manner, or be careful to never bypass them–but they should do so only to make that challenge stand out from the others. A good GM is constantly looking to make each encounter unique and memorable in its own way; if a player takes on a new ability that makes certain encounters easy, roll with it. They’ll naturally progress to new, challenging encounters and when you do introduce a negation of that new ability in one or two unique encounters, the PCs will remember those all the more readily.