You could say that different metals are attuned to different planes (like brass is the plane of fire and silver is the plane of ice and whatnot) and just say you have a, I dunno, unobtanium fork in your pouch. It's just a matter of telling your GM, "this plane is a very surgical steel feeling place, so I use the surgical steel fork."
I enjoy the idea of adding a more esoteric and roleplayed aspect similar to The Oldest Game from the Sandman comics. Opening of that sequence below. http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4ccnh9YsK1qb4ukso2_500.jpg
My group sandboxes a lot. Like almost exclusively, and I have GMed quite a few. My biggest tip is this: Spend a metric crapton of time making the world. Flesh out the cities, regions, countries, etc. Make laws specific to region (they hang you for stealing in city X, or city Y has a completely corrupt law system). Figure out what attitudes to races are in specific places. The players are a huge resource in this. As has been said, involve them. Their backstories and fleshing out their homes will give you huge swathes of information. Go so far as to design things like the uniforms worn by town guards or favored foods in certain places. This is your world; people can't pick up your book and figure it out. Your job is to make the world as immersive as possible. It is a lot of work, but if you have a good group, they will appreciate everything you have done. The second biggest tip is a tip to all GMs. Be flexible and improvise. Your players will never go exactly where you want them to in the way you want without railroading. This also functions as a caveat to the above tip. If you find that The Holy Order Of Lawful Jerkwads you made are detracting from the fun, introduce a couple NPCs from that order who are actually nice. Have a list of random names in case you have to name NPCs on the fly because they will talk to someone you haven't made. It may end up that a random NPC is a great boon to the party. The previous tip sounds like a lot of work, but if you just have a list of things to bring up for an area instead of fleshing the whole thing out in detail with maps, it makes it easier. I try to have a list of at least 20 words per area where the characters would stop for a while. They can be things like "bagels made here, people are annoyingly nice, and talk like they're from Wisconsin." It makes a huge difference as you don't get obscenely attached, but you have a lot of material to flesh things out. The third tip is argot. People talk differenty in different places. Perhaps there are racial slurs for certain unpopular races in country X (in my buddy's game, we call all orcs and half orcs "underbites"). Have naming conventions. Country Y has people with Germanic sounding names, for example, while Country Z is more Gaelic. Make up a curse word. Battlestar Galactica has "Frack" instead of the f-bomb and Farscape has "Frell." Don't go overboard with that, but just a single made up expletive can make the players get into character and into your world so much easier. Another one of my GMs had a world with no gods, and he made us redact any statement including the word "god," so we would say something more setting fitting. It was annoying at first, but after the first two sessions, we got into it and the game was much better for it.
I've only ever had three in my time roleplaying. The first was a woman in her mid forties who came to my local comic shop and hung out with the older gamers (aka the people who weren't high school/college kids) and played Second Edition D&D. I was in high school at the time, but she started a game for some of the younger players, and it was fun. She did pull a Robert Jordan and make every female character in the entire world obnoxiously bossy and hardcore, but it ended up being a fun game. The second was also a woman in her late thirties from the same comic shop and ran with the same crowd of experienced gamers. She invited me to a game and then immediately played favorites with all her friends, and it was horrible. The third was a good friend who also happens to be my best friend and normal GM's girlfriend. After playing with us for about two years or so, she decided that she wanted to try her hand at GMing. She wasn't overly comfortable with the rules, mostly because she'd played the same character for most of the time she was playing with us under her boyfriend (it was a long and epic game, BTW), but she proved very capable after her initial misgivings. We all had to remind her of rules from time to time, but she learned fast and kept us on our toes as much as we kept her on hers. She also ran some of the most challenging encounters I've ever had to deal with in my gaming career, because she didn't understand challenge ratings and just picked monsters before we realized what she was doing and filled her in. However, she was graceful about it and scaled down the encounters, made them fit the world, and made us work for it instead of backing off completely or getting discouraged. It's sad that she's in grad school now and only has time to play, because I'd happily play one of her games again. At least she still plays, because she's a pretty hardcore player that adds a lot to our group. Basically, female GMs are really no different than male GMs. There are sucky ones and there are amazing ones. The only issue that I find is that most of the female gamers I know are not as proficient in rules knowledge as the male gamers in my circle, and the girl who I enjoy having as a GM is pretty much in Patfinder research mode as often as I am. |
