Angry's latest post resonated for me - in my VtM game the players are usually driving the action, so most combat encounters are easy because they're full- up in terms of resources (blood, willpower). Their decide if they're going to fight and when because they're driving the next step in there plot. In most exciting fiction, the pressure is usually on the main characters.

What techniques do you use to keep the pressure on the PCs?

Angry's latest post resonated for me - in my VtM game the players are usually driving the action, so most combat encounters are easy because they're full- up in terms of resources (blood, willpower). Their decide if they're going to fight and when because they're driving the next step in there plot. In most exciting fiction, the pressure is usually on the main characters.

What techniques do you use to keep the pressure on the PCs?

Quote from: PencilBoy99;863684Angry's latest post resonated for me - in my VtM game the players are usually driving the action, so most combat encounters are easy because they're full- up in terms of resources (blood, willpower). Their decide if they're going to fight and when because they're driving the next step in there plot. In most exciting fiction, the pressure is usually on the main characters.

What techniques do you use to keep the pressure on the PCs?

Give the setting a life of it's own i.e World in Motion in both small scale and large scale events. Eventually the PCs will wind up in competition with one of the setting's inhabitants and the pressure is on.

However players can be smart and in some campaigns, they will nearly always be a step ahead of the opposition especially if their goals are specific and limited. In which case I just live with it.

Villains don't wait for the heroes. They are busy making their own plans and putting them into action. They don't respect the PCs time, only their own.

Also, as soon as they discover the PCs are interfering, the Villains will take countermeasures to make sure the PCs are thwarted.

Too often, RPG villains are passive and I blame 99% of published adventures. The BBEG just sits in Room 22 waiting for the PCs to make their brunch date for the final fight.

If you're running VtM, then your PCs are vulnerable during the day. Awakening to find out that somebody thrashed your false lair or secondary hide out is certainly going to spook PCs - especially when its clear the Villain is hunting them.

A duplicate thread 2 hours after the original? How queer.

Closed.

I don't generally go out of my way to apply pressure, but it can be more fun when it happens (esp. when the PCs are overly cowardly). Time limits would be one way to keep them moving, so is having an escape route collapse so they have to move forward. (E.g. ye olde 'the teleporter drops you onto level 6...where now?' approach.)

Quote from: Spinachcat;863688Too often, RPG villains are passive and I blame 99% of published adventures. The BBEG just sits in Room 22 waiting for the PCs to make their brunch date for the final fight.

I've been playing in a megadungeon campaign that feels very much like that... and it's a bit surprising because it's been years since I've had a game feel that way.
Combat in any location never seems to draw attention from nearby enemies... every challenge is portioned off into bite-sized chunks. Any room is safe to sleep in once we've cleared it. The priests and wizards have run with it and will use their spells with abandon and start asking to stop and rest just as soon as they run out of their best tricks. Last session I made a snarky joke about saving the game before we went into a room... because it is feeling a bit like some old video RPG.

Meanwhile our Pathfinder GM is very good about following up on consequences of everything we do... sometimes many sessions later. Resources run out and underground places are dangerous enough even when they're uninhabited (gas, flood, cave-ins).
I don't see as 'keeping up the pressure' so much as not letting us off the hook for dumb stuff we do.

The issue takes care of itself when you have live players on both (better, several) sides of the contested issue. Failing that, the GM needs to play the roles of NPCs just if they were his/her own PCs. What would you do if you were in their position? What precautions would you take? Would you undertake things so carelessly that it would be easy even for lazy, lackadaisical opponents to bring them to nothing if you knew there was such opposition?

Quote from: Spinachcat;863688Villains don't wait for the heroes. They are busy making their own plans and putting them into action. They don't respect the PCs time, only their own.

Also, as soon as they discover the PCs are interfering, the Villains will take countermeasures to make sure the PCs are thwarted.

Too often, RPG villains are passive and I blame 99% of published adventures. The BBEG just sits in Room 22 waiting for the PCs to make their brunch date for the final fight.

If you're running VtM, then your PCs are vulnerable during the day. Awakening to find out that somebody thrashed your false lair or secondary hide out is certainly going to spook PCs - especially when its clear the Villain is hunting them.

This is totally true, for any RPG, and the problem is a lot of RPG players are so used to this concept that they don't know how to react, or even feel like it's 'unfair' when the Villain is pro-active instead. They don't know how to effectively handle that situation.

This would be a great subject for a whole new thread...

Quote from: RPGPundit;864132This is totally true, for any RPG, and the problem is a lot of RPG players are so used to this concept that they don't know how to react, or even feel like it's 'unfair' when the Villain is pro-active instead. They don't know how to effectively handle that situation.

This would be a great subject for a whole new thread...

Running D&D before 3e my villains were always highly proactive. When 3e came along I realised I had to largely stop doing this because the buff spells gave such an enormous offensive advantage, it was just too easy to TPK the PCs. 4e is also not very well designed for proactive villainy, in that case more because of the encounter-design system, nothing outside of a narrow band works well, but all take ages to play. You can do set-piece villain ambushes in 4e though, but it can feel a bit artificial when they're still beatable. 5e seems to go back a long way towards a 1e/2e feel, far more limited buffing and lack of tight encounter balancing make it a lot more practical to play my villains naturalistically. I've not been giving enemy casters any Scry powers though, it looks like it would still be too easy to TPK PCs with scry-buff-teleport.

Quote from: S'mon;864155Running D&D before 3e my villains were always highly proactive. When 3e came along I realised I had to largely stop doing this because the buff spells gave such an enormous offensive advantage, it was just too easy to TPK the PCs. 4e is also not very well designed for proactive villainy, in that case more because of the encounter-design system, nothing outside of a narrow band works well, but all take ages to play. You can do set-piece villain ambushes in 4e though, but it can feel a bit artificial when they're still beatable. 5e seems to go back a long way towards a 1e/2e feel, far more limited buffing and lack of tight encounter balancing make it a lot more practical to play my villains naturalistically. I've not been giving enemy casters any Scry powers though, it looks like it would still be too easy to TPK PCs with scry-buff-teleport.

i don't see where's the problem. you kill, you tpk, you win! :borat:

Quote from: ostap bender;864187i don't see where's the problem. you kill, you tpk, you win! :borat:

If the players have no chance, it's unsatisfying.

Quote from: Simlasa;863704Last session I made a snarky joke about saving the game before we went into a room... because it is feeling a bit like some old video RPG.

THIS is exactly what spurned me to action.

It was the early 80s and all my high school friends played the Ultima and Wizardry games and saving / rebooting was pretty standard way we played. During one RPG session, I got accused of the monsters just waiting around like a video game.

What's WORSE was that Ultima's monsters actually don't wait around outside. They bee-line for the player once activated, so one of the major play tactics was spotting a monster before it spotted you to avoid the combat or set up the combat on your terms.

So...I was actually doing it worse than the video game.

That stuck in my craw because I was just following what I thought the game was supposed to be like based on reading modules.

Ever since then, I take the time to roleplay the denizens and antagonists, considering how they would react to intrusion, strange sounds or just noting that hey, what happened to those goblins I sent out to patrol?