How to Set Up a Scenario – Suggestions

Setting up a scenario for a group of players requires a few key things, depending on the scenario. In order of importance, you should consider first:

- How long the scenario should take the players to complete

- How many players there should be

- What level the characters involved will be

These three things determine how much resistance you as a game master can and should throw in the way of your characters as they go about their journey. For a particularly long session or an ongoing week-to-week campaign, lots of time-consuming combat encounters interspersed with roleplaying opportunities can be fun and engaging to a party. For a single-session game, combat should be kept to a minimum because it can be time consuming, and roleplaying should be emphasized to make the best use of time.

Similarly, how time consuming combat or roleplaying turns out to be depends on how plentiful and powerful your player characters are. Larger or more powerful groups of characters can handle combat situations more quickly than smaller groups, but take more time to roleplay through non-combat situations. The opposite is true of smaller or weaker groups of characters, which can make roleplaying segments proceed much faster but can take much longer to dispatch the same set of enemies.

From there, you can structure your campaign or scenario. We recommend starting with a goal in mind; something a group of players can, will or must initially set out to accomplish. Choosing or establishing such a goal is much easier if all of the characters come from a common background, such as a single small settlement or a stable, because it gives them a common background and reason to be associated. First time GMs should insist that characters start in the same location, or that otherwise their entry into the campaign should be staggered across multiple sessions. Staggering character entry can allow time for characters to develop motivations and make for a better experience overall, even if it does mean that at the start of a campaign some players won’t immediately get to play.

Creator’s Note: Over the course of making this system I’ve constructed and run three separate single or double session games, two ongoing campaigns (one of which has now lasted over 20 months), and helped in the construction of multiple other ongoing campaigns. Most of these were designed for 4-7 players, and in the process of creating and running I learned quite a bit about what most players are looking for when they hear about a new game of Fallout Equestria starting up. I’ve compiled a short list of helpful hints, below, to help GMs new to this system or new to running games in general out.

- Setting is key. Most of what people associate with Fallout is the background – a bleak, barely-survivable wasteland interspersed with factions trying to rebuild or trying to reclaim artifacts from those that came before. If you can master your setting, almost any scenario is possible. We recommend making a map, if at all possible, and then filling it with locations as you continue play.

- Don’t worry if it’s not Fallout Equestria canon! Most players, even those with intimate knowledge of the setting, won’t even notice. Most players who do notice don’t care. This is especially true if the canon conflicts with other stories or their own head-canon. Feel free especially to include elements from the show or from any of the games with a twist to make it fit the setting. As long as it’s appropriate for the setting, it should be fair game for you (and that includes things that might alter the setting!)

- Try to stick to one or two sub-genres per adventure. The Fallout Equestria universe is equally well-suited for a horrific escape from an unimaginable monster or a super heroine showdown as it is for a stand-your-ground firefight, a gumshoe-style mystery or an exploration-based 200-year-old tomb-raid. Mixing these subgenres can be fun, but if you’re trying to tell a unified story then switching between too many can be detrimental to the players’ immersion.

- If you don’t want to write your own adventures, there are plenty of stories already out there – every FoE fanfiction has a story of its own, and many segments of those work very well as 1-shots if you can find a good starting and stopping point. Of those authors I’ve had the good fortune to speak with (admittedly very few), they were quite flattered to have their story become the basis of a campaign.

- TV Tropes can be your friend, if used sparingly. Many tropes can make for fantastic plot ideas or highly enjoyable background characters.

- From a GM perspective, fewer NPCSare easier to deal with, period. This goes for friendly as well as non-friendly NPCs.

- You don’t need to have combat to deal damage to players. Try out some traps or environmental hazards!

- Dice rolls can frequently betray you as the GM – if something needs to happen, either thematically or to advance the plot, don’t leave it up to a roll of the dice (even with GM luck cards), and always have a plan to make it happen regardless of what the players decide to do. Having a critical event happen as a result of what the players do should be a bonus, not a requirement. Wizards’ choices and xanatos gambits are always good GM tools.

- Characters should always have a goal, whether it’s something as broad as survival or as specific as object retrieval. This goal should be difficult (or at least, not easy) to accomplish.

- Remember: the first rule of GMing in any system is to have fun, and to build a scenario that lets your players have fun too (barely escaping with their lives can be fun). In other words, all people involved should be able to enjoy themselves!

- The second rule of GMing is to tell a story. In any good story, at least one character must survive to tell the tale. Your goal as a GM should never be to kill all of your characters, though more often than not they can handle that job on their own.

“What Genre is this?”

Fallout Equestria can be a confusing setting to many people because it allows for a fusion of differing settings. In truth, it isn’t a single genre or setting at all, and it can rapidly change between genres no matter how you try to establish literary boundaries. The ‘core’ genre of it could be described as “Action/Adventure”, with the heroes fighting for their lives to survive and win the day against powerful enemies and near-insurmountable odds. At the same time, it contains strong elements of horror, particularly with regards to the prevalence of Cannibalism, Alicorns, Ghouls, and necromantic magics, high fantasy, with mythically inspired monsters and the strong prevalence of magic, and Science Fiction, with the presence of robots, the stables, artificial intelligences, and advanced cybernetics. And all of these subgenres are wrapped up in an overall post-dystopian apocalyptic landscape backdrop that has strong overtones of rebuilding and reconstruction.

So what genre is it? This is going to sound like a cop-out to many of you, but it is all of those, as well as possibly a few others that I didn’t even get to list. Depending on the specific location within the setting and the method in which the storyline of a specific campaign is handled, any single adventure may focus on, emphasize, or contain any single one of those major sub-genres. This doesn’t mean you have to pick a genre within Fallout Equestria; in fact, it means quite the opposite. Almost any influence is fair game, which allows for a veritable roller coaster ride in extended campaigns where characters can bounce between areas or storylines that fall more heavily into one subgenre than another.

The genre is whatever the GM decides it should be for the story to progress – and even that is subject to change without notice.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1054