First time GMing -- GURPS Supes campaign

[#686578]

So a few friends and I have started trying to play GURPS together. We started out with one of my other friends trying to GM a Zombies campaign and things didnt go out too well. I was the only one with any real tabletop RPG experience, I've played a few GURPS campaigns and a couple of D&D campaigns, the guy GMing and one other guy had played GURPS with me in one campaign like 4 years ago, and then there's two other guys and two girlfriends with no experience whatsoever.

Well that didnt go so well, it was kind of a clusterfuck, our GM didnt really know what he was doing too well and I tried to help him out a lot especially with the combat sequence but it's like he just didnt "get" everything. Like, for instance, he didnt understand difficulty modifiers and assumed if you raised a skill to 16 then you autowin unless you crit fail (just as an example of one thing that he was kind of naive about).

[#686578]

Well I woke up with what I THOUGHT was a good idea. Our group is kind of newbie, and they're kind of... stuck in some very bad habits.

• They expect the GM to tell them everything
• They think they have to roll perception for every room they walk into (they literally think they have to roll to see the table and chair in a room)
• They're not really used to RPing at all... the very beginning of that first session for the zombies campaign he set up our setting and how we met and et cetera and then set up what just happened and our situation we were in and everyone just was like "what?"
• What little roleplaying they do do they do terribly, for instance one person had loner or something so he was constantly like "Okay, well since the group decided to go this way I'm going to roll against my will to follow them." and I'm just like... really? You're taking that way too far, he did it for basically any decision the group made
• Kind of like a subpoint to the above, they also dont really get the idea of NPC vs PC reaction, they're trying to be like oh yeah I'm going to use my fast talking skill on Michael to get him to come with us

So what happened when I woke up, the campaign that I thought of was essentially, they're going to be super heroes, and in the first session there's almost nothing but battle, they're just going to dive through tons of enemies and it's going to be super easy. The main villain is Doctor Ominous/Professor Ominous (I switch back and forth every time I say his name), so they go through all the fighting and at the end of the session he traps them in a plot-strength force field (basically just bullshit forcefield they cant escape no matter what, I'm the GM fuck you, no you cant punch your way out of it), and there's also a Plot Device in the middle of the room, the villain gives his monologue saying he's going to take over the world and sort of foreshadowing the rest of the campaign, then pulls a switch and leaves, after a minute or two of panicing there's an energy pulse and then the heroes pass out. Then they wake up the next day at the villains lair seemingly unharmed, they dont know that they lost their powers yet and I'll make up some situation to let them find out before they leave the Villain's hideout or more than likely they'll try to just fly out or something. The session should end with them back at the headquarters, knowing they lost their powers, and wondering wtf. The next session will kick back up with them finding the Villain making major moves against world powers and hearing rumors about how to get their powers back. The campaign will revolve around slowly getting their powers back (and maybe some new ones along the way). Oh right, they're going to flat out lose SOME powers, but most of them should just be extremely degraded, like going from 1000 points to 200 points characters.

Effectively I want them to start out REALLY strong and have some fun with it, they're still new so they dont even really get how fighting works, so that'll introduce them to that. They dont really understand how much freedom they have, which is sort of good for me, but I want to encourage them to freestyle instead of punching the robot pick two up and smash them together, or punch the ground to demolish a group! It'll force me to improvise a bit, but I understand that GMing is 10% planning 90% improvisation. The first session is supposed to be a good introduction to their characters and the feel of the gameplay. Also, I've never GM'd before, so them having super powers will allow me to make a lot of mistakes without killing them, and if all else fails I can just say they ignored the damage and the bullets bounced off their chest or something.

[#686578]

What I'm looking for is if anyone can give me any advise for a newbie GM (who's more or less experienced with the mechanics from the players view at least), newbie PCs and how to get everyone towards a better playing style? What sort of tricks or techniques could I use to FORCE them to role play more? And for me, is there any tips for creating enemies? Perhaps any templates or something? I found a few robots in the Ultra-Tech book for some mass produced robots that they can just trash through, but I'll need way more variety to keep things interesting. I kinda just need a lot of tips on how to improve my GMing and what I might be able to do to improve them as players.

[#686578]

I've already DONE this first session by the way, I meant to write this up and post it before hand, but things went pretty well over all. I was able to keep control of the group and they didnt get out of hand and start doing just bullshit or fighting with eachother. If they ever tried to leave the place or use their psychic powers I just said there was some ultratech that was blocking them, I didnt want to be too constrictive so I let them blow shit up and stuff, but I was trying to constrain them to the environment (our last GM didnt really understand how to do that well).

What I ended up doing for characters was I asked them to give me a backstory, or even a vague description of what kind of hero they wanted to be. They'd give it to me and then I made their super hero and tried to keep it around 1000 points and balancing as I went. I did this 'cause they're really new and honestly their other characters sucked dick and I knew they'd fuck it up. I kind of fumbled around the Supers and Powers books to create the heroes but I dont really feel I did it too well. Next I'm going to have to decide how I'm going to scale them down and reduce their powers so that's going to be tough too, if anyone has any tips they could give me on creating GURPS super heroes that'd be great. I've been using GURPS Character assistant fully updated with the proper books added and using loose templates in the Supers book. I kind of looked at the templates and the role it was meant to play, the advantages and skills they had, and sort of mixed and matched to whatever I wanted the hero to be. I'd REALLY appreciate if someone could give me some tips for creating Heroes and enemies.

[Komm Suesser Tod]

While I've never played GURPS, I've played plenty of other games, in a lot of different runs.

One of the best things you can do to get players involved in role playing is to give them characters to interact with. You have to try and distinguish the player from the character as well, make it not just your friend if he had super powers. Giving them things like goals, enemies, allies, things that they can interact with to make the world have more depth and reality to them can really help them become immersed in the world.

As far as enemies go, while I have no experience with GURPS, having one tough enemy every time is usually a big mistake, because you either have to make them so powerful as to provide a challenge for the group that they can wipe the party if luck swings the wrong way, or you make them weak and they provide an underwhelming encounter. Save big tough enemies for boss fights, and instead provide encounters that involve several smaller enemies. Those fights are usually far easier to balance and they often provide a much safer challenge for the players.

Another thing to consider is adding non-combat challenges. Focusing on combat often hurts the immersion factor, as all combat all the time tends to detract for the world around them. Who cares if there is a really interesting bit of machinery in the corner if there are things in the room that are providing imminent danger?

Traditional things like locked doors and traps are good, and in a super hero campaign, a super villain leaving hints to toy with the heroes, or maybe them finding some clues they have to figure out at the scene of a crime could provide for interesting challenges that help make the players to care a little more about the world.

The atmosphere of the game can add some interesting elements to the game. Say you want your game to take on a grittier tone, you could have the heroes come across a violent murder and describe the scene in detail. Any detail at all could support that, have a dangerous psychopath roaming the city taking victims as he pleases that the heroes have to stop as soon as possible, show the reaction of the city to this, how the citizens turn from being afraid to an outright panic that threatens to envelope the city. Have every person who has tried to stop the villain show up as just another victim, police and other heroes alike. These are all details that could help them put themselves in the world and help with them roleplaying.

As for forcing roleplaying on them, have roleplaying encounters. Have them have to talk to people, and reward and punish them accordingly for success or failure. I'm not saying that you need to just start docking them points or what have you if they aren't getting into it, but there have to be clear rewards for being into it for it to work as incentive.

The more emotional involvement players have, the more roleplaying will come naturally. Success and failure are a big part of that, not just in specific encounters like I just suggested, but in the game as a whole. If there are no consequences for their actions, it's harder for players to get emotionally invested in what they're doing.

Take my gaming group for example, we had a huge fight against a duke of hell we had been battling our way to for weeks, and we finally manned up and fought him. It was tough as hell, but fucking-a, we won, and we got excited. The whole fight was tense, and the feeling of relief at the end was great. There was jumping, and shouting, and on the crit I scored that dropped him, I about lost it with excitement. About half of us almost died, and by the end of it we were so weak we could have been taken by a rather agitated paper clip, but the danger and the possibility of failure made the success that much sweeter. In over five years of regular gaming, we've never had a fight that epic, and that was because on top of everything else, if we failed, the city above us would have been decimated.

tl:dr: Getting the players emotionally involved in the game is the best way to get them to actively participate.