I ordered My Life With Master and might be running it this weekend.  I haven't been the ST at a game in a very long time, so I'm in need of some advice and confidence-building.  Do you have any tips on smoother play?  Should I have ANY ideas about how the Master should be, what his plans are, or should I be a blank slate, allowing the players to create the whole thing at the table, and then ad lib?  It feels scary to ad hoc a game like that, but if that's how it's done, I'll try it.  I feel like I should be armed with SOME idea anyway.

Thanks for any advice.

Spiral

Hey,

I've never run MLWM, but I did play it in a Con scenario (which, in my experience, is the most legitimate place to pre-make PCs and NPCs and "plot"), and we created everything there at the table.  Making up the Master was one of the funnest parts.

What I'd do if I were going to run it is have a handful of ideas of things that you find evocative for Master traits, but throw them in as suggestions with equal weight to all the other players.  You might want to even email your players beforehand and give a brief description of MLWM, and ask them to begin brainstorming on their own for Master traits they'd like to see.

Check out Michael Miller's Manifesto on Mastery: http://www.chimera.info/daedalus/articles/spring2005/mlwm-manifesto.html

Here I explain about my prep for a con game of MLwM: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=15555.0

Hi, Spiral. Welcome to the Forge!

I've condensed much of my Mastering advice into: A Manifesto on Mastery. So give that a read and feel free to ask any questions.

Also, check out the advice in Running a con game of MLWM or DitV or what? It's focused primarily on convention play, but should suit any time-limited scenario.

Hi Spiral, Welcome!!
What is your real name?

I've tried my first session of MLwM yesterday, I will surely post something about it in Actual Play soon.
Don't worry, it is easy and smooth to drive. I used the advice on "A Manifesto on Mastery" with a high degree of success.

If you have not done it yet, you can also check the thread Topic: collecting data: Fear, Reason, etc. and length of game to have an idea about the relation between Fear and Reason values and the expected time of play.

Good luck, and enjoy it,
Arturo

Read this answer carefully: you shouldn't have any ideas going to the table, you should be a blank slate, yes. More or less. But then at the table you should be a full participant in the process. But you want to participate in such a way as to create a master that you feel you can play well, one that will, following Mike Miller's advice, get you to really crush the players.

So, no, don't decide at all on anything up front, do so as part of the process of designing the master. What this should produce is master that you love to play, and the players love to hate. Once you have that, you're ready to go.

Without the master, any other planning is pointless, really.

Mike

OK, I've read the Master's Manifesto and other related threads.  I'm really excited to play this.  I plan to have 3 Minions and maybe play 2-3 4 hour sessions, including chargen and Mastergen.  Any pertinent advice to steering the game towards this length of game play?

I also wonder what I can do to play the Master more effectively.  I simply am not capable of towering over or physically intimidating my players.  It's not my style, and frankly, it'd be vaguely ridiculous, since I'm a 5' tall woman and my 3 PCs are 6 foot+ tall men.  I'd rather use vocal style and verbal battery to make my point (and I think I'll be good at it, frighteningly enough).  Any tips for doing that in such a way that it won't veer into the comic but also won't be taken too much to heart by the PCs?

This game reminds me of DitV in the sense that the very idea of it makes me vastly uncomfortable at the same time it intrigues the hell out of me.  I think it's the power trip that I worry about... maybe it'll be too much fun?  Maybe the players will take the abuse personally?  I guess the scenario has to be clearly hammered out ahead of time, and the whole catharsis concept discussed.

Thoughts?  Advice?  Comments from actual game play?

Thanks!

Spiral aka Paula

Another question occurs to me:  how important is Minion background?  I haven't really seen it mentioned in any of the game creation or play threads I've read, though it has always been a key part of chargen in other games I've played.  Can that bit be glossed over? 

Spiral

Hi Paula,

Spiral wrote:
I also wonder what I can do to play the Master more effectively.  I simply am not capable of towering over or physically intimidating my players.  It's not my style, and frankly, it'd be vaguely ridiculous, since I'm a 5' tall woman and my 3 PCs are 6 foot+ tall men.  I'd rather use vocal style and verbal battery to make my point (and I think I'll be good at it, frighteningly enough).  Any tips for doing that in such a way that it won't veer into the comic but also won't be taken too much to heart by the PCs?

how important is Minion background?  I haven't really seen it mentioned in any of the game creation or play threads I've read, though it has always been a key part of chargen in other games I've played.  Can that bit be glossed over?

Spiral wrote:
I also wonder what I can do to play the Master more effectively.  I simply am not capable of towering over or physically intimidating my players.  It's not my style, and frankly, it'd be vaguely ridiculous, since I'm a 5' tall woman and my 3 PCs are 6 foot+ tall men.  I'd rather use vocal style and verbal battery to make my point (and I think I'll be good at it, frighteningly enough).  Any tips for doing that in such a way that it won't veer into the comic but also won't be taken too much to heart by the PCs?

Mike, I don't know how to tell you this, but when I'm standing and they're sitting, we're the same height.  Not going to work.  I think I'll steer towards playing more of a Dr. Finkelstein (from Nightmare Before Christmas) type Master than a Count Dracula/Darkness from Legend type Master.  That way the abuse can be mostly verbal and psychological rather than physical intimidation.

Is it really necessary to play a female Master?  I think I could play an effete male Master just as well, and I hate to limit the player's ideas for what their Master is like based on gender.  I often play male characters to good effect in tabletop games, so I'm used to it.  Some amount of distance between the real me and Master is healthy, I think, and I'll have to "get into character" to play him/her anyway.

Maybe I'll post an account of how this goes in Actual Play, though I'm sure I'll be back with questions for y'all after I meet with the players tomorrow night to brainstorm ideas.

Spiral

Paula:

Ring the table with an outline of milk crates.

Spiral wrote:
Mike, I don't know how to tell you this, but when I'm standing and they're sitting, we're the same height.  Not going to work.  I think I'll steer towards playing more of a Dr. Finkelstein (from Nightmare Before Christmas) type Master than a Count Dracula/Darkness from Legend type Master.  That way the abuse can be mostly verbal and psychological rather than physical intimidation.

Like Rob said. Or put the players on the floor. Crosslegged. And then that chair that Mike talks about. Stand on it. If you must play at a table, at some point get up on the table (be careful of the cieling fan) and walk over to the player whose minion the master is lecturing, stand at the edge of the table, and proceed to berate looking straight down at the player.

You can be taller than them if you want to.

Mike

Well, the trick of talking from above is nice, but I think you can also live without it.
I talk from my experience in other games, but my group learnt how to hate the nasty sneaky NPCs that seemed to appear always at their backs or between them by surprise. I was doing it physically some times.

I can imagine you can play with this. If you have enough room around the table, you can abandon your chair and begin to walk silently around them when the master is coming. This will force them to either, not to look at you, or painfully turn their collars around. Anyway, it should create an uncomfortable feeling, which is the purpose.

Arturo

Definitely the psychology of moving from where they're expecting you is useful.

Also, keep the house cooler than normal :).

Hi Paula,

Spiral wrote:
I also wonder what I can do to play the Master more effectively.  I simply am not capable of towering over or physically intimidating my players.  It's not my style, and frankly, it'd be vaguely ridiculous, since I'm a 5' tall woman and my 3 PCs are 6 foot+ tall men.  I'd rather use vocal style and verbal battery to make my point (and I think I'll be good at it, frighteningly enough).  Any tips for doing that in such a way that it won't veer into the comic but also won't be taken too much to heart by the PCs?

I've run the game a lot, but interestingly enough I don't do the whole "talking from above" thing, or any other "tricks" (standing on a chair... huh). My Master-work is always completely done with voice, words and slight gestures. Read again what Marc said, those are all things I use (except for instructing players to complement; they'll do it naturally if they roleplay their characters, and otherwise there's no point), and I consider them very important to good Mastery. Actually, I'll add one: if you're going to fiddle with something like a pen, use it to hit things and tap the table, emphasizing your convinction as the Master. And when he uses the stick, hit the player with the pen.

Also, I would actually suggest that you not play a female or effeminate Master without reason. That's a "trick", and thus might backfire. Better to go for a thematically solid Master of whatever gender and play him/her with full seriousness; there's no danger of comedy as long as you take the Master seriously. I've played whiny, weak-willed Masters in drunken stupor talking like Donald Duck and hanging on the lapels of their minions, and the players have been terrified anyway, because we shared the imagined vision of this... creature... running the characters' lives.

So the intimidation doesn't ultimately come from the GM. If it did, playing MLwM would be just base thuggery, cheap thrills out of mistrust between players.

How to prepare for the game: here's what I do when I start a game of MLwM. It might be useful for you, too.
1) Get together with the players to create the Master.
2) Create minions for the Master.
3) Send the players out for pizza or something, to get 15 minutes for yourself.
4) Prepare missions for each character based on the following:
More/less mission: Whichever is the more evocative, use that as the basis. The Master wants the minion to do something that pertains to either one.
Connection mission: The Master sends the minion to deal with a connection in some manner. Doesn't have to be his connection, and it doesn't have to be capture or assassination, as long as it's interesting.
Task mission: Whatever it is that the minion is for, prepare a mission for that.
Sadistic mission: Figure out one or more missions that will be the most horrible possible thing to do to that minion. Could be a mission they do, or mission for some other minion (in which case group it with the missions from the next step)
5) Prepare the following general missions, which can be given to any minion:
Need mission: Whatever the Master needs, the minion will get. Prepare several, if applicable.
Outsiders mission: Whatever the Master's connection to the outsiders, prepare a mission to deal with that.
You won't probably make all of these for all minions, but regardless you will have more than enough missions.
6) When the players come back, start playing. Give out whatever missions seem most interesting, and play the Master and the town to the full extent of how they should act. Everything else comes together on it's own.

One thing:  A number of people warned against humor.  I wonder about that.  While the game I played was extremely disturbing, one of the funnest parts was the humor of it.

You probably want to avoid its just being nothing but hahahaha time, but it seems to me that laughter is a part of this game, even if it's semi-nervous laughter.  Catharsis can come from laughter, too.

Now, I don't think people here mean to suggest there should never be any humor at the table, but I didn't want the impression to be left that that was so.