My Best Mistakes
This article contains affiliate links, meaning that if you decide to purchase a product through my link, I get a Commission at no additional cost to youI’ve noticed that a lot of Directors are worried about mistakes. Mistakes will happen, you can’t help it. All you can do is try to handle them with grace and fairness. Those are the type of mistakes where you realized a player should have had something, resulting in a disasterous turn. There’s being unfair due to outside factors. There’s new Directors that worry about making the wrong call. Those mistakes aren’t fun but they do happen.
I am not talking about those mistakes. The mistakes I am talking about bring great joy to my players. They may be aware of the error or not, and the perverts decide to roll with it. You might not believe that making mistakes is OK but you cannot deny the fun results from these errors.
Gooseposting Followed
Untitled Goose Game (2019)
Gasdra, that is a Gander-Hydra aka Goose Hydra, from the Grim Hollow Campaign Setting have a three headed and seven headed Monstrosity versions. I knew the seven headed was Large, so I didn’t double check the stat block for the three headed. Obviously, it would be a Medium Monstrosity. Well, apparently not. So now the three headed Gasdra in my game is Medium-sized which has my players fall in love with the obstinate creature. One of the players managed to raise a Gasdra from a hatchling and wanted to make ‘Ryan Gasdraling’ into a Monstrous Companion from MCDM’s Beastheart. The eventual plan, as the character was a Goblin, was to also train it as a Mount so he could ride a Gasra into battle. Unfortunately, the player’s character died achieving a pyrrhic victory in assassinating an opposing Faction’s leader.
I’m kind of glad I don’t have to deal with a Mounted Monstrous Companion that flies, but I am also sad my player won’t be able to enjoy such nonsense. A fun knock-on effect is the amount of Goose Posting that has happened in the Discord.
If you’re looking for a Gasdra Monstrous Companion, I will be posting a picture of Ryan’s Stat Block on my Patreon for you to use if you want to follow in my footsteps of a big, ornery, three headed goose. No sign up necessary, unleash this demon upon your player’s foes.
How to make Big Bucks
One of the cities in my game uses paper currency instead of gold. This leads to a funny situation where the city citizens and the party think the other is weird. At one point, I said off-handedly “Twenty Bucks” and one of my players pressed me on ‘What does that mean?’ I immediately made up that the one dollar bill has a male deer on it. A few months pass, the party has recruited people from that city and they’re going around adventuring. When the party bumped into a Djinn tourist, that city slicker helped suggest some locales to the tourist out and was granted a Wish. Without missing a beat, the player said “A million bucks.” Now I have to figure out how to deal with a hex that has an overcrowding issue; oh, and it is spring, so they’re combative as well.
JCVD is a Time Cop
The main reason why I did a conversion of 3.0 Dungeons and Dragons Quarut is because I needed a being that would hunt down those who broke temporal law. A few of the characters were locked in a ‘time sink’; they had spent a long time, relatively, in a Fey realm. Instead of advancing the calendar by the 50-odd days, I told the players that they couldn’t use those characters until the calendar ‘caught up’. A few weeks later, I wasn’t paying attention when one of the players picked one of these characters that should’ve been in time jail. It wasn’t pointed out to me until later, I don’t think it was done maliciously, the player had probably forgotten.
I had pondered what to do when I decided that they caused a Temporal Paradox and until it was resolved, they would be able to bend time at a cost. One of the unmentioned parts was I made the conversion and if the party ever rolled on the ‘Bounty Hunter’ Social Encounter, then that character was about to have a bad day. Fortunately or unfortunately, the character died before it was relevant. But it did open the door into this brand of Inevitable as a random Social Encounter where the party could stumble across the Quarut erasing the paradoxial part of that adventurer in six second intervals.
If you wish to take a look at the original Stat Block for the Quarut, you can find a PDF copy in the Fiend Folio on Drive Thru RPG.
My advice to new Directors is thus: don’t be afraid to make mistakes, they may become the best part about your game.
