Re: [DL] Are We Doing It Correctly?

["Bart Auringer" <shiva51@home.com>]

I have to agree that fudging against the players is always a bad thing.
Part of marshalling is being able to think on your feet, especially when the
posse totally fubars your plans.
People hate to be controlled, I know I do.
For example, my group was playing HOE. The marshal decided that just about
anything we tried wouldnt work.
You see he had this big plan where we were supposed to be captured and all
this, only just one character got caught.
So he tries to escape, hes locked in a cell and tries to pick the lock. He
gets a 15. He fails. He tries to punch the guards when they come in.
Hes instantly incapacitated. Everything he did resulted in him failing.
Suffice to say he hated the whole session.
Likewise half the things we (the rest of the posse) tried failed miserably.
He fudged dice rolls for the big bad guy of the scene, who the captured
character went off to fight one on one. By sheer luck the ex-captured PC
rolled great and beat him anyway.
We never let him marshal again.
Instead we started a WW game up with me as the marshal. I dont know how many
times they've foiled my plans or screwed with my ideas, but in
the end the best sessions were almost all ones I was forced to improvise.
Dont restrict characters to YOUR story, let the story happen. Lay out what
will happen in a fairly general sense and if they do a 180 on you, adapt.
Its what seperates the good marshals from the bad ones.
It isnt always easy, but its always worth it.