Shotgun Game

When I got into gaming in the 80s, my other gaming friends and I used to say "shotgun game" when we got together and had no plans and decided to play some D&D. "I'll run a shotgun game" was a common phrase. It just meant you were going to run something on the fly, zero prep or low prep.

Comes from the idea of a shotgun wedding, where a guy knocks up a girl and then her father forces him to marry her, at the point of a gun. The idea, I think, is that since you are typically the DM, you're kind of forced into the arrangement when you friends wanted to game all of a sudden.

I've fished around online for this phrase and I can't find where it is in use in this context. If anyone knows otherwise, has used it themselves in the past, or understands where it came from, comment and let me know. I'm just curious about it.

Is this hyper local RPG lingo? Maybe just my gaming friends invented it. I don't know. I picked it up from them, though. I didn't originate the phrase. I believe one of my original DMs got it from some older kids who taught him how to play D&D in the early 80s. 

The Hole in the Oak Adventure Module

The Hole in the Oak, an official adventure module for Old School Essentials, is now available at DriveThruRPG. I illustrated this adventure, which was written by Gavin Norman and published by his imprint Necrotic Gnome.

A hole in an old oak tree leads characters down to

a maze of twisting, root-riddled passageways, the

chambers of an ancient wizard-complex, and the

banks of an underground river where once a reptile

cult built their temples.

A classic dungeon adventure for characters of 1st to

2nd level

Babies. They're going to get you.

Thieves' Skills

WHAT DO THE THIEVES SKILLS ACTUALLY MEAN?

You're playing a Thief. You want to pick a lock. You take a peek at your sheet and see that your chance is 15%. That sucks! Surely you can do better than that?

I think you can. I think the Thief's skills are not meant to replace existing stealth rules (such as they are), but to augment them. This is what I mean:

You try to sneak through a room where some orcs are playing bones in the corner. The dice are thrown and the result is 55%. That's well above the 20% you needed to move silently. What does that mean? It means you didn't move silently. It does NOT mean the orcs heard you. It simply means you made some kind of noise that might be heard. So the DM should then make the normal roll to determine if the orcs heard a noise or not.

If you were a Fighter sneaking through the room you'd only get the second roll, not the first one too. So the Thief has an added layer of rules to cover stealth.

Same for hiding in shadows. A failed skill roll means you could be seen. It does not mean you actually were seen. When the Thieves' skill rolls fail you simply fall back to normal rules such as a surprise check or hear noises.

I don't know if this was how the rules were meant to be used or not but this is how I've been thinking of them for a long time. It makes a thousand times more sense to me now than before and it means I don't necessarily have to house rule the Thief (though in all honesty I still do...).

Hyperactive World Builders Beware

A note to the world-builder DM.

Hey DM...nobody cares about your lovingly crafted, delicately balanced, softly nuanced epic fantasy realm and quasi-Tolkienian meta-story. They mostly just want to find treasure, throw fireballs, and behead some orcs. This may be a bitter pill to swallow, I know. But if you want players at your table you need to choke it down.

I remember an incident in the 90s when I gathered about 5 or 6 good old gamers under one roof to play. It had been several years since I played and I was excited. I was so excited I spent the previous weeks prepping an elaborate setting. This culminated with me handing each player a little packet of information about the world. I figured they would read it at the table, then create a PC that fit MY world.

The game never got played. The handouts never got read. The characters never got made. I suppose I realized my mistake when I handed one player the little packet of my mini-epic and she smiled, rolled it up, and began socializing.

Defeat!

It's a common problem. You might call it the Seminar Yawner Syndrome. The players, upon being handed a stapled packet, feel like they just walked into a seminar. Cue the desire to look at a clock and wonder when it will be over.

This problem has other manifestations as well. What about the Storyteller Syndrome? When I was younger I had a DM who loved to weave tales...about his own character. This got so bad that one of the last sessions we ever played involved his own character caught up in a fantastic trial with emotional moments, heroic struggles, and a trapped audience. We rolled no dice and made no important choices that night. And it sucked.

That's not to say you can't weave tales and offer handouts. Quite the contrary. Players appreciate goodies...as long as the investment of their time and energy is accompanied by a payoff in play. Nobody wants to read about the history of the kings of your version of France unless it is going to have an immediate and visceral impact on their play experience. So do yourself a favor and don't force it upon them!

If you want players to come back they gotta have fun. And "fun", subjective as it is, involves agency. Choice. Involvement in what's happening at the table. That kinda stuff. If the game isn't about the PCs then the game isn't about ANYTHING THAT MATTERS. Your epic setting be damned, these people want to behead some orcs.

So you better damn well let them. The world builder in you needs to cut back on the energy drinks and allow itself to become a partner in the creative act of shared storytelling, dice rolling, and the beheading of evil things. Consider it a give-and-take. You get to create a world as long as you are willing to share some of that creative space with your players. If you don't let them in they will simply walk away.

At that point you might as well just write fiction.