RPG-a-Day 13: Flood
Today’s prompt for RPG-a-Day is ‘Flood’.
Once, way back, I was GMing and improvising the scenario for a group of fellow computer science students - people from different parts of the country, who all ended up in Nijmegen at the university. I told them that they came to a river, and they started to plan how to cross it. I made the mistake to not clearly communicate the situation (even if the players don’t ask, the GM should always provide any pertinent information that their characters could see, and I didn’t) so they started working from their own images of what a river would be.
To me, a river is a small affair of a few meters wide, like in the village I grew up in. With a few long sticks you could build a makeshift bridge and cross. Most of the players were doing exactly that. But one guy was totally not on board with any of those attempts, and he blocked the progress quite decisively. Until one of the players expected something was up, and asked how wide the river was.
That’s when the one guy stopped the game, and told me: “Hey, you said ‘river’. It’s great you grew up in a village with a river of only a few meters wide, but I grew up in Nijmegen. To me, when someone says ‘river’, I think of the Waal!” The Waal is the busiest river in the Netherlands, and is about 425 meters wide at Nijmegen…
I learned a lesson about being a GM that day!
Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.