A New GM

[masterbleu]

First i would like to thank Jason L Blair for making a Vary cool game little frears. i have been GM ing  it for a few months and haveing a great time.
but i have some questions.
My group have been playing got a few quest and i'm trying to find out how do i reward my players ? PGP? i think that will messup my game. so what do i do?

PS thanks for you time.
also "when the monsters came" is vary cool.

[Mike Holmes]

Rewards in LF are in-game. The character makes a new friend, or creates a new item powered by belief magic, or finds new parents, etc.

Ask your players what they want to see for thier characters. And then have the potential rewards of the next couple of adventures focus on the possibility of them getting these things. Then later, you can threaten these things, thus creating more adventures.

Also, have you been passing time for the characters? Are they getting older? Start to consider how you think these childrens' stories might end. One of the reason that there are no gamey rewards is that LF seems to me to be designed to create either single stories, or a set of stories with an end. Look at the character goals, and project them out long term.

Does Bobby want a friend? Perhaps Bobby's issue is acceptance. In the short run his player can be "rewarded" by giving Bobby friends. In the long run, however, he needs social skills, or self-confidence or wahtever it is that's making it hard for him to be accepted by other children. So his long term quest should be about growing a bit and becoming something more. Another character mishg have short term goals of having parents, but long term goals of having loving parents.

Work towards these sorts of goals, and then bring the game to an end. A cool end. That will be the biggest reward of all.

Mike

[masterbleu]

Well thanks for the ideas. I think that will help. a thing that is still bothering me. is i'm working vary hard on the horror aspect of LF so most of the stories they have solved have been a bit bitter sweet. they will stop the evil but at a high cost. so they all lose a little inoccence and gain a little fear. so they seem to be slowly getting weaker, so when they find out about the kings. they will be too weak to stop him. if this is a game of horror i'm not planning on a happy ending. it will let my players down.
so i still need to keep them working hard but not make it too easy.
so i still need a ingame reward.
thanks for your time

[Mike Holmes]

Interesting.

I would tell them. That is, I would let them know that you are planning a negative end to the game. So that you can co-opt their efforts in achieving that. If they think that they can win, and can't in actuality, then they are just going to be disappointed at the end.

OTOH, if you ask them to participate, and they agree that this is the sort of game that they would enjoy, then they will look foward to their characters' eventual demises.

There is no way to incentivize failure. You have to make the players see the character failure as a success for the players.

Mike

[masterbleu]

well I'm not planning on killing the character in cold blood.
they will always have a good chance to win the quest and live to fight another day.but the cost will be great and they will have to work at it.
i have found in all roleplaying games and LARP that if the players don't think you will kill them they won't work as hard as they can. hoping that the GM,DM or storyteller will save them. i believe that this is a key part in LF the keep the horror up. one day i hope to have one of my players pee their pants while playing the game then i will know that i have run a good horror LF game.[/code]

[Mike Holmes]

well I'm not planning on killing the character in cold blood.

Nor was I intimating that you were. But you as the GM can plan to an extent some of the types of outcomes that can happen. And you seem to be of the opinion that negative outcomes for the characters (whether that involve death or losing loved ones, or just being scarred emotionally, whatever) are a good way to heighten the horror for the characters. And this makes sense in a horror game.

What I'm saying, however, is that perhaps your players will not like it if their characters have such ends. Perhaps they are thinking that in the end it will all turn out alright. Lots of horror stories do have happy endings. Take for example Poltergiest where the family is terrorized but comes out more or less OK.

The point is, once you have them thoroughtly terrified, will they be happy about it? That is, it's one thing to be terrified in a way you like, and quite another to be terrified in a way you don't.

All I'm suggesting is that you discuss these things with your players.

I am not much of a believer in "You could die" or "Bad Things might happen" as a motivator. This only engenders a certain style of play that may not really be all that satisfactory. If you read some here on the Forge, you'll see that there are a lot of people here that would espouse the idea of communicating with your players, and trying to engage them on a level that they will find more enjoyable. This is a less adversarial role for the GM, one where the GM works with the players.

Little Fears isn't a game about survival, IMO, where it's the GMs job to terrorize the characters by just presenting them with Bad Things. It's a game about children. And as such, the players need room to address these issues. It can't just constantly be about "losing" the game by losing Innocence. That's just part of the equation.

That all said, this might not be what your players want. You know them, I don't. Maybe they want exactly what you're giving to them. But it's often hard to know for sure unless you ask. And that's all I'm saying. Before you take this adversarial position where it's the players trying to survive the GMs plots, just talk to them and make sure this works for them.

Hmm. Can anyone out there say this more clearly than I am?

Mike

[masterbleu]

well i thank you for your thoughts. my players asked me for something very different. i have been DMing them for a long time in D&D and they are big ravenloft fans. they say they hate the land but when we get together with other gamers that's all they talk about. the legends are groiwng in their minds.
Your right i haven't asked the players how they want the story to end. i think that would kill some of the magic of the game. normaly when i'm making a new D&D quest I ask them what they want and i get some good ideas. but as a norm they say."you think of something to suprise us." i think they're all rollercoster addics.
i hope you will keep the messages comming as far as i know i'm the only one in kelowna that has a copy on LF and i'm the only one here who has read it all. so i dont have any one else to talk about it.