I’m sorry if this question has been asked before.
I’m a fairly comfortable PbtA-GM, I’ve been GMing different PbtA-games for the better part of a year and a few other games before that, and I’ve realized that there is something that I’m always struggling with… The length of quests, missions and mysteries.
I sometimes let the players do a quick heist, maybe a two-roll kind of setup where they steal something valuable and other times I drag them through a lengthy dungeon/murder mystery without really rewarding them with information/flavor/loot/XP in any significant way.
In the games we are about to play the fiction is more based around “missions” rather than a flow of story and I’m a bit worried that I’ll either make the missions too granular in actions or too loose and easy.
How do you go about to balance risk/reward for the players? What do they have to accomplish to get that “Surplus: Medicine”/Sword of May Eyes/Established Matrix Overwatch/Apocalyptic MotoKhans head on a pike?
What is a resonable amount of effort?
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What game are you running? The pace for Monsterhearts is different from the pace for Masks, which is different from the pace for an Apocalypse World one-shot.
This is a question for the ages and I think one of the core GM skills in most traditionally GMed games: dramatic intuition.
You have to know when to play which GM move to lengthen or shorten the drama, the risk, the reward. You have to know when the bad guy gets away clean, or if it will turn into a chase scene.
I think the best way to learn is from other media. While you can’t compare a lot of traditional media to roleplaying games, I think you can still learn from them.
Oh and Robin Laws has some books on this topic
My first question is: do you have a stable group?
In the group of adults I GM/MC for, we rarely have the entire group show up for any given session. Thus, I tend to run episodic games so that each session is self-contained, while at the same time contributing to a larger narrative—just like many TV shows.
Because of this necessity, my risk/reward ratio is high—what meaningful thing can be confronted/obtained in a single session? How much risk and danger can they get through in four gaming hours?
Four gaming hours ? I suspect an experienced PbtA group could get through Raiders of the Lost Ark in 4 hours with the right playset.
Otherwise, steal mission clocks from Blades in the Dark. Then make them longer if you think missions are going too quickly.
Frederik Jensen that’s a very relevant question, I guess.
I have been running Dungeon World mostly, but also Tremulus and Kult.
I’d say my players are more focused on the story unfolding generally. But we’re starting up more resource heavy games such as Legacy (2) and a faction-y Uncharted Worlds so I just feel like I should know when to give them stuff such as to not flood them.
Haha yeah Aaron Griffin, dramatic intuition is really something that I feel is slowly growing after GMing a bit. But mine is still thrown off by other media so my games tend to be a slow burn where I ask (too) many questions about the characters intrapsychological events.
Mission clocks is a REALLY good idea that I’ll incorporate, thanks Michael Llaneza!
Since many PbtA games involve some form of, “Play like you are real people with x, y, z. The MC/GM will play everything else like a real a, b, c,” aspect to them, I’ve always based difficulty of a given acquisition around that.
In a Masks game the way I answer the question is by asking myself if a single issue would result in an acquisition or if it would be a multi-issue arc.
In an Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, or even, though I have yet to play it, Uncharted Worlds game I would ask the questions: would what they are asking for be readily available in the world we’ve built? If not readily available, then how hard to get is it? If not hard to get, would it require some work to get it functional once acquired? Etc.
I usually leave meta-game concerns out of it completely as I prefer to let the question of characters becoming overpowered get answered in the fiction. Sometimes you just have to give your PCs a nuke and see if they use it.