GM’s Guide to the Equestrian Wastes

What’re you nosing’ around over here for? You don’t look like a GM at all! Can’t you read the title? It says GM’s guide. The player’s section is in the front part of the book. This is where we keep all the secret fun stuff so that GMs can taunt you with your lack of knowledge. So go on, get lost!

…

Just kidding! (Who’d you think we are, Peg Inc.?) We’re not going to turn you away, but be warned that this section is mostly just information on how to better run a game, with a few helpful tables and things to make your GM’s life a little bit easier. Very few rules are actually included in this section – most of those were deemed useful for the players to know without having to sift through all this stuff. There’s not much in the way of actual spoilers in this section either – we didn’t create the universe or the setting, so there’s nothing specific to hide.

Anyone with a good idea for a story can be a GM, but before you try your hand at it, be sure you have a thorough understanding of the rules for the system.

Cutie Marks and Glyph Marks

So first thing’s first – As soon as you’ve got a story, you’re going to need to help your players create characters. If you haven’t looked through the character creation section yet at this point, you should – characters should fit in with the story, after all, and introducing them can tie in heavily with what traits and hindrances they pick. As GM you may want to encourage some hindrances or traits (i.e. reduce their point cost, provide extra creation points, or simply tell your players that you need someone to take a specific hindrance for story purposes) , discourage others, and outright ban those that simply don’t fit. If you want your characters to start in a stable, for example, consider giving Stable Dweller to any characters that choose to take it for no point cost. The same goes for player races – there are plenty of races that can make things quite awkward for a GM. Having a group of alicorns, zebras and hellhounds for characters might bode ill for a story where the characters have to solve a crime within a large pony settlement.

After you’ve gotten past the character creation point-distribution stage, the second thing a GM should be heavily involved in is helping decide cutie marks and, for zebras, glyph marks. As talked about in the player section, cutie marks should be related to tag skills – but as GM always be aware that they don’t have to be. That way is simply easier than making them up without any point of reference. They can also be related to any number of other things, such as events in the character’s life, or even have multiple meanings. Characters with a well thought out backstory are almost always easier to choose cutie marks for; encourage your players to develop their character’s backstory. It doesn’t need to be complex, but history and past relationships and events in their character’s life are often a great jumping off point for making their character feel more real, not to mention making it easier to choose their cutie mark out of game.

Giving out Karma

Karma is functionally a measure of the morality of a player, and as such it should be handled with care. As GM you should always be at least loosely aware of a party’s morality and their intended course of action with regards thereto. Don’t ever feel like you have to give out karma every time a decision is made; depending on your players’ actions, they may opt to take actions that are neutral. You should try to treat karma as a reward or punishment for player behavior, even if the player is trying to

If you can, it’s always a good idea to try and structure events to lead to moral choices on the part of the players. Good moral choices have depth and complexity involved – there may not be a ‘right’ decision, or the ‘good’ thing might still feel wrong, such as ending a tainted pony’s suffering. It’s not always as simple as “Raiders are bad, peaceful trade caravans and settlements are good.” Consider that the raiders might only have turned to raiding recently to try and support starving children, or that the merchants of the caravan are corrupt and deal in slaves on the down-low. In Fallout Equestria Canon, Arbu is a good example of a difficult moral decision; Project Horizons has a good example early on in the form of Fluttershy Medical Center. Player perspective - what they know about the situation - is important. Their choices should give them karma or lose them karma based on what they know, and the amount of karma they receive should probably vary based on how much they bothered to find out about the situation before making their decision. A character shouldn’t lose karma for being tricked into doing the wrong thing, unless they realize and don’t try to make amends. If a moral decision still feels wrong to a character regardless – like being forced to choose between killing an innocent child and freeing several hundred slaves – just remember that you don’t have to give karma out if you don’t feel like , and that the Guilty Conscience hindrance definitely exists for just such an occasion.

Numerically speaking, karma should be given out in proportion to two things: the difficulty of accomplishing the good or evil deed, and the difficulty of making the moral decision; both of these should be viewed through the lens of a player’s intent in their character’s reaction. What does this mean? Here’s an example:

Let’s say, speaking purely hypothetically, your characters end up torturing some innocent foals.

How much karma they should stand to lose is highly dependent on the reason for their actions. If the innocent foals (or their guardians) resist, they should lose more karma than if the foals hadn’t. If the foals struck first, say by attempting to carve out a chunk of a player character’s leg while they were sleeping, then the karma loss would be lessened (but not zero – you’re still torturing them). If the character had to torture the foals to save an entire settlement from destruction (unlikely, but this is hypothetical), they might lose even less. If they were doing it for money, they would lose more, etc.

Basically, reasons for a character committing an action matter.

Waiting for us to get to the point and give you guys some numbers? For those of you who are more interested in portraying the world in moral absolutes, we’ve made a simplified karma distribution system outline below.

Karma should be given out (or taken away) in small amounts – five or less – for doing things that are easy and clearly good or evil. Stealing from charitable organizations, kicking foals, and attacking innocents without provocation are all great examples of ways to lose karma. Giving food to the hungry or medicine to the sick, volunteering to guard a caravan for free, freeing a captive from raiders, or sparing the life of a defeated opponent in a duel to the death are good examples of ways to gain it.

Karma should be given out in larger amounts – between 5 and 25 – for doing things that are more difficult, but are nonetheless clear-cut good and evil acts. Liberating an entire caravan of slaves, disrupting a harmful drug operation that knowingly damages pony lives, promoting a local business and re-establishing trade routes, or insisting on a fair trial or a second chance, even for someone who caused an enormous amount of suffering for the party or a group are all worthy of a larger karmic reward. Knowingly participating in cannibalizing ponies or hunting them for meat, raiding a caravan

Karma should be given out in very large amounts for doing impossibly good or despicably evil, inspirational acts – acts that inspire either kindness and hope or violence and suffering in the hearts of onlookers and those who hear of a character’s deeds. Such acts should grant upwards of 50 karma, depending on the size of the audience. A character sacrificing their life to save the wasteland would grant them upwards of 250 Karma (pretty good, considering the ranges really only go out to ±500).

Characters who are only following along with a group, not actually making the decisions should still receive karma, but should never receive more than half as much as the character who actually makes the decisions.

When giving out karma, consider the levels of recognition and speechcraft bonuses it affords characters. For every 10 points of karma away from 0, a character receives a +1 on speechcraft versus those who are karmically aligned with them. Good ponies like to talk to good ponies, after all, and bad ponies are more comfortable talking with those who don’t spout on about goodness and light nonsense all day.

When a character has received at least 100 points of karma, they should start hearing about themselves on the radio. Now, a DJ can be a fickle thing, and DJ Pon3 in particular likes to try and spot upcoming heroes and leaders. As such, the first character in a group who attracted attention to themselves by hitting the 100-karma mark will probably be the only one mentioned or given a nickname, unless another character suddenly takes charge at a later time. This does not mean that other party members will remain anonymous, necessarily, but it does mean that they’ll usually be talked about as “So and so’s companions” rather than given a unique nickname.

When a character has developed a reputation by gaining more than 100 karma, other ponies may start to recognize them, and will treat them accordingly – ponies with bad karma will have a bad reputation, and may send caravans and settlement guards into a panic when they appear on the horizon, while seeing a pony with a high karma reputation might send your average raider or slaver running. This can both open and close doors for parties, especially if they choose a single pony to have as a de-facto leader who makes the moral choices and either gains or loses more karma.

As an optional rule, if a character starts drifting to one of the extreme ends of the karmic spectrum – more than 200 karma away from the zero-point – then forces representing the opposing karmic viewpoint will start tracking them down as they move around the wasteland. This can make for some interesting dialogue and roleplaying opportunity if played right, and even played poorly can still be used to give player characters a little bit of an extra challenge.

In general, try to think of karma as a spectrum ranging from 500 to -500 (but with no ‘hard cap’ limit). This can help you reward or punish your characters accordingly.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 882