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What We Can Learn About DMing from Joss Whedon
Tweet Topic Started: Jun 7 2010, 11:43 AM (388 Views)
kismetrose Jun 7 2010, 11:43 AM Post #1
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So, rewatching Buffy: the Vampire Slayer has gotten me to thinking about Joss Whedon as a Storyteller / Dungeon Master. While he's by no means perfect, there are a number of things he did well that can serve as models for us.

1. He establishes a sense of place. Even though Sunnydale's map is basically ganked from Santa Barbara, Joss goes about detailing many locations inside of it that start to feel like home. How many people will be able to recognize Buffy's front door without much trouble? The cemetery, the high school, the magic shop, the Bronze, and so on - you can imagine not just their look but their feel easily. You can remember what happened where, which makes you believe the fiction even more. There are many set pieces that aren't just living spaces - they're also battle locations. The blend of important and mundane happenings makes them even more affecting.

This kind of design can help games, as well. If you don't have time to make your own map from the ground up, take it from some place that might suffice. Perhaps you can cut and past your own from several sources (thank you, internets and technology!) in a fraction of the time it would take for you to come up with it from scratch.

And while it's good to establish the feel of a whole town, especially early on, choose some key locations to outfit with texture, story hooks, and NPCs. Keep going back to those locations to cement them in the players' minds. And if you want to establish that time is passing, or the tone is changing, or there's something big coming, you can signal it by changes to your key locations. Blowing up Sunnydale High marked a major shift away from it, for example.

2. He does a good job of surrounding Buffy with interesting characters. The Scoobies are so distinct and quirky that they could be PCs or NPCs, and you buy them as their own people. And folks like Joyce are real gems. She is a subtle but strong cornerstone to the early Buffy experience, and while she might seem like a one-dimensional mom at first, we get to see that she's also a woman on her own hoping to find love again, working to be supportive of her daughter's legacy, and welcoming to those who keep her daughter alive. All Joss had to do to get an immediate response from the audience or Buffy was to put Joyce in some kind of danger, yet he didn't do it every other episode (unlike Chris Carter and the ever-abducted Dana Scully). Joss meted it out carefully.
Kismet's D&D - WoD - SG-1 - FB
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