The Deadly D8

[kenneth]

Eventually, even the best players want to run off by themselves and monopolize your time as DM. For the longest time in my own games I'd indulged them, as they were all my friends and the groups were usually fairly small. Eventually the groups got bigger and the people less familiar until I was playing and running for large groups people I barely knew.

When you have eight or nine people at the table (not including yourself) and one or two of the folks wants 30 minutes to themselves it can seriously impact everyone's else's enjoyment. That and once you indulge one fellow, the rest all feel entitled to the same consideration. Just telling people no all the time and insisting the group all stay together also tends to squash role playing and personal initiative so I had to come up with a mechanism to deal with this.

Enter The Deadly D8.

I made it clear that I would not run for one or two people while everyone else sat and waited. Every time I started a new game or someone new joined, I would explained The Deadly D8. mechanic.

Tell me, in a concise manner, what you plan on doing. I then pull out an eight-sided die. It's best to do so with a bit of flare and perhaps a cocked eyebrow saying, "Are you suuuuure?" Any die would work, but I always used an old, beat up, clear plastic red one. It got so little play time I felt it deserved a chance to shine.

You then offer to roll the die or let them roll one of their own. (I always rolled terrible for myself and really well for the players so they usually had me roll.) On a roll of 1, the best possible result happens, on a roll of 8 the very worst. Anything in between is scaled to fit the situation.

Now you have to use a little discretion. Obviously a roll of 8 shouldn't get someone killed just because they want to go buy a new helmet. On the other hand, if the player in question wants to sneak into a town where he's wanted dead or alive, well things could go very badly.

It's been my experience that everyone learns to love The Deadly D8. . Whenever I'd reach for it, the gleams of perfect malice the looks of excited anticipation in the eyes of my players was very gratifying. Everyone loved to see something extremely cool happen, whether for good or ill. Mediocre results usually brought a disappointed chorus of Ahhh.

You just have to keep a few guideline in mind when using it.

1. No matter what the roll, keep it interesting! You want your players to look forward to you pulling the evil thing out.

2. Players, for the most part, want to look cool. Even if they fail miserably, make sure they enjoy getting hosed if at all possible.

3. Always, always, always tell the player ahead of time if there is a chance they could die. Also give them the chance to back out or rethink what they want to do.

4. Never use this to punish people, even if they're being stupid. Again, you want them to look forward to it.

as an example, I had one player who wanted to run off with this other NPC adventuring group for a specific task. He rolled a 2 so I spent 5 minutes or so spinning a tale about the glory of the victory and how cool he specifically looked while it happened. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and he didn't seem to mind having nothing to do for the next two hours.

On the other hand, I had a player who took it upon himself to return an item to this far off elven kingdom. It was a journey of several weeks and a very dangerous one at that. I explained all this, about how dangerous and what a long trip it was before the roll, but he insisted. He rolled an 8.

I spent a bit longer than usual on this one as he died.

This works less well in PbP as taking care of folks who want to do their own thing is a whole lot easier in this format.

[RonarsCorruption]

That is a great mechanic, I like it. It's a pretty good way to handle the players breaking off from the group deal. It'd be perfect if they could rejoin the group before too long had been spent with them sitting and not doing anything.

[Snickersnack]

What a fantastic idea!

[DukeofDellot]

You know, I read this as soon as you posted, and thought it was a rather clever idea. I didn't post anything then, because, quite frankly, I didn't have anything intelligent to add. This could help me out greatly with my gaming group as they tend to prefer secretive characters that want to keep each other out of the loop... even though the players themselves know what each character is doing.

I will have to present this to my group and we might adopt it.

Though I will be using my d30... I can't keep it out of my games, but I can't find any systems that mention it.

[kenneth]

Thanks one and all. Glad to see folks like it.

[Maken]

I highly approve of this. While I've never had to deal with this myself (I usually DM a small group of players that are happy to die together, haha), this seems like a very efficient and fun way to get that sort of stuff out of the way relatively painlessly.