If there’s one aspect of our hobby that I truly adore besides the immersive interactive storytelling, it’s maps and miniatures. I’ve thrown an inordinate amount of money at plastic minis and vinyl wet erase mats, spent an inordinate amount of time lovingly painting every small detail on a Reaper or Heroforge figure, and wasted an inordinate amount of ink crosshatching around the edges of a map I’ve drawn just to make it pop a little more. Tactical combat and terrain can add a lot to a battle, and absolutely nothing elevates the aesthetic of a game to the next level like a really cool looking map. However, the fact of the matter is I don’t need maps and minis, no one needs maps and minis. As awesome as I think they are, there’s also plenty of valid reasons not to use them at all. The game flows a lot better from narrative to combat or vice versa without the giant speedbump of having the set up minis and possibly draw a map in between. If you prefer to draw your maps beforehand, then not using one obviously cuts down on prep time. Combat moves a lot faster and bogs down less as players focus more on what they’re actually going to do than on counting spaces on the board. It forces players to pay attention more as they can’t simply glance up at a map when their turn rolls around, and players will also naturally start using their environment more, thinking in three dimensions without having a grid to tell them expressly where they can and can’t go. Eschew the map, and you’ll see more innovation from your players than you ever have before, that’s a promise. Unfortunately, in my years of running games at conventions and local game stores, I’ve still met far too many gamers who think of gaming without a map as an inconceivable occurrence. I’ve seen people deride it as “playing ‘Mother May I’ with the GM” to simply assuming they won’t be able to keep track of what’s going on without ever giving it a shot. Well, there’s a way to do things and a way to do things, right? Lots of people talk about doing it, but guidance on actually making it happen is sparse. As a Game Master who’s run many successful Theatre of the Mind games in just about every conceivable system from 5th Edition, to Pathfinder/3.5, to Star Wars Saga Edition I’m hoping to show you how easy it is to add a versatile new tool to your GM’s toolbox. 1) You Need Your Players’ Trust This should go without saying, a good Game Master should possess their players’ trust regardless, but when there’s no communal visual aide and the table is relying on what’s in your head, it’s absolutely crucial. They need to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re not going to use this as an opportunity to screw them or give yourself an advantage. Organically, this comes with time, but I’ve been able to bring players I’ve never gamed with onboard with a simple mission statement: assuring them that as the GM I’m on their side, I want them to succeed as much as they do, and I’m simply eschewing the map so the game will flow a little better and offer them more options than being confined to a grid. If I think it will be a particularly hard sell, I’ll even offer to go back to maps and minis if they try it and don’t like it. By following the rest of the rules on this list, I usually have a group of true believers by the end of the session. 2) Handwave Distance That might sound like sacrilege, but hear me out. Does anyone actually care if the goblin is precisely 15, 20, or 25 feet away? No, they care about whether they can reach it in one move action or not. When is the last time you encountered a character built for ranged combat that couldn’t shoot across an average sized battle mat without leaving the first range increment? I’m not suggesting that you ignore distance entirely, it’s valuable in certain situations to help make educated guesses. What I am saying however is that in most circumstances, precise distance is not necessary or even useful information. My rule of thumb (and I always make sure my players are aware of this) is that any creature I present in an encounter can be reached in one move action, unless I specifically say otherwise. The only time I will actually specify distance is if there’s something I specifically designed to be difficult for the melee guys to get to, or an element meant to provide something for the ranged guys to contend with, for instance a mage 80 ft. away up on a 10 ft. high ledge. Unless a fight occurs in a very small encounter area, near the door, or the tanks have specifically wheeled the enemies around, I usually rule that Flanking requires two move actions, one to actually reach the creature and another to maneuver behind it, as that’s the way it usually shakes out on a battle mat anyway. It usually takes about 15 - 20 feet of movement to circle all the way around a medium sized creature on the grid, more if you’re playing Pathfinder/3.5 and are trying to do so at a safe enough distance to avoid Attacks of Opportunity. Having to travel any appreciable distance to get to the creature makes it infeasible to do in a single move. (Though I may be inclined to cut them some slack if they’re willing to risk the AoO or Tumble through the creature’s space) At some point, you will undoubtedly encounter a player who absolutely insists they need to know how far away something is, or some other specific measurement. When that happens, I’m going to teach you a phrase that will make your life significantly easier. Learn it, practice it, remember it because it has served me well these many years. “What are you trying to do? The answer is probably yes.” Looking for reasons to say yes to your players is a completely different piece of GM advice, but that probably yes part goes a long way to engender trust and ensure to your players that you’re not trying to use the maplessness to unfairly rule against them, as well as nip in the bud the “Mother May I” mentality I mentioned earlier. The above phrase came to be because once during a game I spent a minute or two debating with a druid player Wild Shaped into a big cat who swore up and down he needed to know how far away the Shambling Mound was. So I hit him with the phrase. It turned out he was trying to figure out if he could gain the benefits of the cat’s Pounce ability. Again, he didn’t really care how far away the Mound was, did he? What he really wanted to know was whether or not he could Pounce. He hadn’t joined the fray yet, there was no reason to deny it to him, so of course I said yes. That’s not to say I would’ve let him Pounce repeatedly or Charge repeatedly, however, at least not without moving back out and risking an Attack of Opportunity. 9.9 times out of ten, what the player wants to do isn’t going to break your carefully designed encounter, and for the 0.1 times it does, honestly the player probably deserves the easier encounter for their ingenuity. 3) Put Players First There’s going to come a time when a player has a different idea of the situation in their head than you do. When situations like that occur, as long as their interpretation is reasonable, it’s always best to give the player the benefit of the doubt. In six months you probably won’t remember or care about the discrepancy, but it will help every player feel more comfortable without a map and not feel as though they need one to “prove their case.” The key phrase is as long as their interpretation is reasonable.” I.e. don’t let them cheat either. With me, this used to happen a lot if I tried to make an attack against someone who was still in the hallway. “I haven’t entered the room yet.” Over time, you’ll learn to mitigate situations like this by asking for specifics, such as “Is everyone walking inside?” before starting the encounter. If they’re looking for traps, ask them how they’re looking for traps. If they don’t specify they’re crawling on the floor, then they have to make a save against the burning hands trap three feet off the floor if they don’t see it. If there’s a pit in the center of the hallway, ask them how they’re walking down the hallway. If they don’t specify hugging the wall, then they’re not. Ask if they’re walking single file or two abreast to figure out who falls in, etc. Since I’ve gotten in the habit of asking for specifics, this type of situation arises exceedingly rarely anymore. Make sure that every important facet of a room, terrain, or combat encounter is included in your initial description. (Besides traps and things meant to be a surprise, of course) Nothing is going to piss players off more than a Barbarian attempting to charge an orc only to hear, “Oh! You can’t, there’s a giant pool of water in the center of the room” or “Oh, I forgot the floor is covered with ice, make an Acrobatics check.” If you’ve been playing with your group for a while, you might be able to get away with that once or twice, but either way, it makes it seem like you’re treating them unfairly by pulling stuff out of thin air. On the other hand, if your players suggest something, such as, “Are there any chandeliers in this room?” If it makes sense, go ahead and throw it in! Always follow the Rule of Cool, your players will love you for it. 4) Use The PCs To Track The Monsters’ Positions How do you keep track of where everyone is in Theatre of the Mind? Simple. Tordek, Regdar and Mialee (the old 3.5 iconics just don’t get enough love anymore) are fighting four goblins. Tordek runs up and engages one of the goblins in melee. Regdar runs up and engages a different goblin in melee. A third goblin attacks Tordek in melee while the fourth stays back with a bow. So what’s the situation look like? You have two goblins on Tordek, one on Regdar, and one standing in the back. If Mialee wants to Magic Missle one of the goblins, you can just ask: “Do you want the one on Regdar, one of the ones on Tordek, or the one with the bow?” Tracking hit points for them isn’t very difficult either. You can mark them however you like, Goblin 1, 2, 3, and 4. Goblin A, B, C, or D. Carl, Bob, Stu and Hoseface Larry. You just need to remember who went to Regdar, who went to Tordek, and who’s got the bow. When I have trouble keeping track mentally, I notate it in my notes like so: Tordek C (7) Regdar B (7), S (4) Mialee HL (7) I usually track it in the same place I do initiative. As the fight progresses, circumstances will arise that will help your players more easily determine the target they want: “Do you want an injured one or a healthy one?” “Do you want the one that Tordek just hit or the one Regdar knocked prone? 5) Make Combat Visceral “Your arrow hits, the orc takes five points of damage” might cut it when using maps and minis, but that’s largely because the dynamic at work is that of a board game. A large part of the fun comes from trying to outmaneuver the enemy and use the board to their advantage to stack the encounter in their favor. However, in Theatre of the Mind, the players’ main vector for entertainment is their imaginations, and as the one who acts as narrator and sets the stage, it’s up to you to make what they imagine as entertaining as possible. There’s been a lot of advice written about not being too florid with your combat descriptions. It’s all crap, all of it. Maybe don’t write a five page soliloquy for every kobold that dies as they breathe their last, pleading to the kobold gods for forgiveness, but don’t be afraid to inject some passion into the combat either. The orc does not miss the fighter with his axe. “The orc’s axe howls through the air in a downward slice, but the fighter deftly twists his sword around to catch the blow on the flat of his blade as he plants a boot in the orc’s stomach, forcing him back. The zombie doesn’t get hit by the warhammer. “Its pallid form shudders beneath the dwarf’s hammerblow, its spine separating with a sickening crack as the top half of its body sloughs to the earth in an unnatural contortion. With grotesque motions it pulls itself back together and stumbles forward to redouble its assault.” This viscerality is one of the most compelling things about Theatre of the Mind. As much as I try to evoke this same experience when using minis, it’s way too easy for me to get bogged down in the pedantry of trying to keep track of position, staying mindful of each monsters abilities, and trying to remember which health tally corresponds to which mini. Sometimes I’m just grateful to get a mini off the board and be done with it. Theatre of the Mind lifts a lot of that mental strain and just lets me focus on what’s going on in the encounter. If you can evoke a vivid enough image in your players’ minds, if they can see the cutting arcs of blades and the flashes of spellfire, hear the ring of metal and the earth crunching softly beneath their feet, it will be vastly more entertaining than watching a bunch of tiny statues stand around. 6) Resolving Area Of Effect Attacks This is admittedly the trickiest part of playing in this style, and even I have been known to break out a map from time to time if there’s a big dragon battle coming up. It’s far from impossible however. The 5e DMG has a nifty equation to help when this situation arises, but I think I have a better way. Dude, you’re the Game Master. Just do what you do a hundred times a session and make a call. If you’ve followed my other steps and properly engendered trust in the players at your table, they have no reason to doubt you when you say that the Dragonborn’s breath weapon can hit two of the eight flying kobolds. If they do disagree with you, hear them out and if it’s reasonable either amend your call or explain to them why you came to your original decision. This method might sound a little flippant, but there’s a couple bits of common sense that I use to inform the situation. In the case of something like Fireball, creatures are usually going to have about 5-10 ft. of space between them, including players if you’re using PCs to mark positions. Even dumb creatures will instinctually stick together for protection, but they’re not going to pile on top of one another and invade each other’s sword swinging space without a deliberate reason. Usually, you won’t have to worry about players being caught in the blast as most players will place their AoE behind the enemies to catch them in the very edge and spare the friendly melee. (It’s an exploit used every day on the battle map and there’s no reason to deny it to players here) If something like Flanking or odd maneuvering places a player behind the line of enemies, you’ll know and be able to adjudicate accordingly. A Cone Effect will always catch whatever’s in front of it unless the player specifically maneuvers to avoid hitting their teammates, which may require going adjacent to the melee depending on the circumstances. Anyone who’s ever tried to run a Blue Dragon boss fight on a battle mat will tell you that a Line Effect will almost always hit precisely one target, unless they specifically maneuver to line it up like a billiard shot, in which case it might get two. Conclusion The point of this article is not to convince the reader to throw away their maps and minis, it’s to hopefully add a powerful, versatile tool to every GM’s toolbox that can be alternated between as the need arises. Each style has its pros and cons, and getting comfortable with both can help elevate the Game Master’s quality of life to the next level. It’s daunting at first, I know, I too once played with only maps. When I finally took the plunge, I found an exciting new way of running my games that made them flow more freely than they ever had before. Try it, just once. We can always go back to maps and minis if you try it and don’t like it. Chaz Lebel is a fiction author, freelance writer and member of Caffeinated Conquests, a YouTube channel dedicated to nerd comedy and tabletop gaming. He and his team once produced some promotional videos for High Level Games that they probably wish they could forget. Chaz can be found on Twitter @CafConIsOn Image Resource: https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?686046-Do-the-BECMI-books-have-the-same-art-as-the-Rules-Cyclopedia/page2 If you want to help High Level Games continue to produce great content and launch the careers of the next generation of creators, we'd love it if you stopped by our Patreon to show your support. Of course, if you'd like a little something for your hard earned money, you could always pick up one of our fine game products as well. “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” -Carl Sagan RPGs all boil down to a simple formula: the GM presents a conflict, and the players work to resolve it. When Walter Bradford Cannon described the fight-or-flight response, he was describing two of the three basic strategies not just of survival, but of conflict resolution. (Survival is, of course, the ultimate form of ongoing conflict resolution.) About twelve or thirteen years ago, when I was sitting down to think seriously about how to run and play my games better, I found it helpful to examine these basic survival strategies, and how they relate to RPG interactions. 1) Fight (Or Opposition) “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” -Jim Malone (The Untouchables) The most basic form of conflict resolution PCs are familiar with, Opposition is meeting the conflict with force (physical, magical, mental, political, etc) and overcoming it. Even groups that pride themselves on how far they’ve evolved from their knuckledragging murderhobo ancestors still tend to solve the lion’s share of their problems with this way. Using Charm Person to talk your way into the duke’s palace is a form of Opposition. Likewise, the Ventrue Primogen who uses his political favors to have his rival cast out into the wilderness has used Opposition; he’s just using political machinery rather than his fists. Players expect their enemies to attempt to defeat them with force. It’s rare that a foe can use Opposition as a survival strategy and get the drop on PCs. Still, sometimes having a bigger stick is enough. Giants have used this particular strategy for years. If you want an enemy to be able to compete with players while still using this form of conflict resolution, you may want to think about changing the avenue of Opposition they use. Goblins charging the adventurers with pickaxes flying isn’t anything new. Goblins pooling their wealth to bribe the local magistrate into passing laws to hamstring adventuring groups (such as taxing dungeon crawlers heavily, or outlawing spellcasting, or banning certain adventurer-friendly religions) is definitely an avenue the players won’t be expecting. 2) Flight (Or Avoidance) “No problem is too big to run away from.” -Charles Schulz PCs are extremely loathe to use this survival strategy once a fight has started. Retreat is often seen as cowardice, and thus anathema to a hero. If there are innocent parties (or valued assets) at risk, this tendency can be magnified. Avoidance isn’t just retreat though: it’s also avoiding fights in the first place. Against monsters of animal intelligence, kind-hearted groups can occasionally be found using this strategy to avoid having to kill ‘natural’ creatures. If resources are being tightly controlled (say, in a dungeon where sleep or rest won’t be an option, or behind enemy lines) then players can display a shocking level of deviousness when it comes to solving problems with Avoidance. Many a GM has a tale of woe in their history involving flight spells, rings of invisibility, or cunning washerwoman disguises being used to circumvent hours of diabolical preparation. A bad guy who used Avoidance as their preferred strategy can end up being the most frustrating enemy to deal with. PCs build their combat routines and capabilities with the underlying assumption that the monsters are going to try to fight them. How infuriating is it then, when the villain teleports away, or has alarms set up so they can scarper off before the heroes have worked through the first half of their lair? Dr. Claw and Carmen Sandiego, of children’s cartoon fame, are great example of villains of this type: they always skip out just ahead of the heroes’ arrival, leaving their pursuers frustratingly empty-handed. All of the most rewarding victories in my gaming career have been over villains of this type: after so many encounters where thwarting their plans came with the bitter aftertaste of their escape, their final defeat was so sweet that each would be a high I would ride for years. 3) Surrender (Or Capitulation) “You are my only friend, O’Connell.” -Benny (The Mummy) This is my absolute favorite strategy. Don’t negotiate, don’t argue, don’t run: just throw down your weapons and surrender. Abject, total, humiliating surrender is the one outcome that almost no one thinks about. For PCs up against a villain that’s about to wipe them out, total and complete capitulation is forcing your DM to play Russian Roulette with her campaign: either it works, or you’re all starting from scratch. If the Hail Mary play is all you have, it can take you surprisingly far. For a GM, the Capitulation can be even sweeter. Players who can navigate complex puzzles and organize intense tactical plans in combat can find themselves dumbfounded by an unconditional surrender. I’ve seen players spend nearly an hour arguing over what to do with a surrendered enemy. In most games, there’s no clear cut ‘right’ answer. After all, very few characters are going to be in a situation to have the legal authority to try and execute someone on the spot (and very few groups will be morally sanguine with doing so). If they don’t give in to the impulse towards cold-blooded murder, what are their other options? Dragging the enemy back to town means protecting them from wandering monsters, expending vital resources feeding and protecting them, and to what end? In many cases, there aren’t authorities to turn such villains over to. Even if there are, there is the question of whether the prisoner will receive a fair trial (or worse, if turning them over to the authorities guarantees them getting off scot free). If you’re looking for a way to put your players in a no-win situation, or at least a situation some of them are guaranteed to be unsatisfied with the outcome of, a Capitulation can be the most rewarding method of achieving this. Who wants to live forever? “I…I will survive.” -Gloria Gaynor It may seem a little elementary, but understanding the basic fundamentals of conflict resolution can help us as players find innovative solutions to encounters. As GMs, it can help us come up with unique and memorable encounters, which translate directly to a unique and memorable game. Jim Stearns is a deranged hermit from the swamps of Southern Illinois. In addition to writing for the Black Library, he puts pen to paper for High Level Games and Quoth the Raven. His mad scribblings can frequently be found in anthologies like Fitting In or Selfies from the End of the World, by Mad Scientist Journal. Follow him on Twitter @jcstearnswriter, or listen to Don, Jon, & Dragons, his podcast. Picture Reference: https://ironshod.deviantart.com/art/Run-Away-32743482 Hands down, my favorite accoutrement for any game is the Game Master’s screen. The evocative art on the players’ side, the tables and reminders on my side to minimize flipping through books as much as possible, and last but not least, the prestige, the unmistakable badge of honor that marks one as the Game Master, the universal sign that conveys to one and all “Yea, I am the creator of worlds! Join me that we may weave our story together!” Unfortunately, it’s exceedingly rare that I find one I would honestly say is perfect. Some of them are mired in superfluous information (looking at you, Original 5e Screen), some of them don’t have all the information you want, (I still have to dig out the book every time I need to see the Renown charts for Werewolf the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary) and some of them just aren’t right. The Paizo Pathfinder GM Screen would be damned near perfect if it wasn’t only available in Portrait orientation. Personally, I vastly prefer Landscape, it makes it far easier to see the map and reach for minis if I’m using them, and affords me much more real estate at the table. Trying to keep my notebook, GM books, and laptop organized behind a Portrait screen can sometimes be an exercise in frustration at our table. As a result, I’ve recently segued into what might be a strange sub-hobby within RPGs, creating my own custom screens for my personal use. It isn’t terribly difficult either. For the most part, all that’s required is a pdf of the rules, image editing software like Photoshop, (or the free alternative Gimp) and access to a printer, which are usually available at the local library if you don’t have one at home. 1) Figure Out What Will Actually Comprised Your Screen The first step is to figure out what the “screen” part is. The Cadillac option is to spring for a The World’s Greatest Screen from Hammerdog Games (not sponsored, I’m just a big fan). I bought the landscape one years ago, and since I use it in just about every game I run I can easily say it’s the best $30 I’ve ever invested in the hobby. TWGS is a durable, high-quality vinyl screen with four clear pockets on each side to hold any inserts the GM wishes, swappable at any time. It’s even compatible with wet erase markers, so you can stick a sheet of graph paper in it and it doubles as a battle mat. Plus, when properly adorned with player side art, it just looks slick as hell at the table. Of course, for those looking for a cheaper alternative, it’s a simple matter to simply construct a screen. Speaking from experience, I don’t recommend using cardstock for the body. It’s far too flimsy and has a hard time standing up even without having a fan or AC going. Conversely, cardboard that’s too thick will make it difficult for your screen to close properly. For me, the gold standard is the type of thin cardboard used for 24 packs of soda cans. After you’ve constructed your screen panels, cut the cardboard with about an extra ½ of an inch on all sides. Affix the front and back panels to the cardboard around the edges with 1” Masking Tape (Painter’s Tape, it’s far more durable and flexible than scotch tape and won’t lose adhesion as easily) Tape the panels together, and then add one more layer of tape around the edge of the entire screen to seal it together. Fold it carefully, (you might have to place it under a stack of books for a while to get it to behave) and you’ll have a lightweight, flexible, durable screen that will last a very long time. Back before the release of 5e, Fourth Edition DM screens were difficult to find (at least in my area) and commanding ludicrous prices on Ebay and Amazon. I used this method to make myself a DM screen in 2011 and it’s still in excellent condition today. If you use this method, however, I highly recommend building a Landscape screen. The lower center of gravity and having longer panels to support itself will make it far more stable and nowhere near as easy to blow over if you happen to be playing in a room with a strong fan. 2) Screen Grab The Necessary Information Once you’ve figured out what information you want to feature on your screen, the next step is to turn the information you want into a jpeg or other image file usable by your image manipulation software of choice. Open your pdf in your pdf reader of choice and take a screenshot (the Print Screen key by default on a Windows PC), then paste the image into Microsoft Paint or similar program. Your screen grab will appear and you can save it as a jpeg. At this juncture, saving your jpegs into a dedicated folder will help make the process go far more smoothly as you’ll probably end up with quite a few. The most important part of this step is trying to screenshot the pdf at an appropriate size. While you’ll have full autonomy to resize everything later, you won’t be able to do too much before the text starts looking distorted and blurry. Personally, my GM screen is equivalent to my notes for me, so I’m not terribly picky about what it looks like so long as I can read it. Of course, different folks will have different sensibilities on the matter. 3) Create An 8.5” x 11” Project Open a new 8.5 x 11 inch project (The size of an average sheet of paper) in your image manipulation software. Which measurement corresponds to height and width obviously depends on which style of screen you intend to create. As you begin to arrange your screen panel, consider the fact that the final product will actually print out slightly smaller than what you see here, as even printing with the “Fit to Page” option enabled will leave you with a small margin around the edges of the page. 4) Place Linked Your Images Import/Place your collection if jpegs into the project, trimming them as needed with Selections, Cropping, etc. The actual procedure for this will vary based on what program you’re using, so if you’re unfamiliar with the practice, searching Google for a tutorial is unfortunately the best advice I can give. Arrange your images as you see fit, but keep in mind what I said about text becoming distorted if you attempt to transform it too much. When you’re finished, save your screen panel as a jpeg itself, and start constructing the next panel. 5) Print And Assemble Print out the finished panels for your screen and either insert them into your screen of choice or assemble them as directed previously. 6) Player Facing Art This is the most fun part, decorating your screen so the entire room knows what kind of pro GM they’re dealing with! When it comes to finding art for your screen, bigger is better. I’m sure most people know by now what happens when you resize a small image to be much bigger than intended. Simplify your life by searching for Wallpapers, they’re large enough and can be proportioned to the size of a sheet of paper without looking distorted. Paizo.com has a great selection of Fantasy and Sci-Fi wallpapers and other appropriately sized illustrations to inspire your players, and of course, a good old fashioned Google Image search for Fantasy Wallpapers, Horror Wallpapers, Cyberpunk Wallpapers, etc. will yield an embarrassment of riches no matter what genre of gaming you prefer. For best results, print your player facing art on cardstock. It will absorb all that ink better than regular printer paper and make the images noticeably more vibrant, whereas images printed on regular paper are often marred with lines as the printer spits it out little by little. Conclusion Yeah, it’s a little bit of work, but when you have a GM screen perfectly tailored to give you the exact information you need when you need it, the results are well worth it. At GenCon 2016 I had the honor of running Pathfinder Society in the Sagamore Ballroom, a giant event with over 150 tables all celebrating their love for the game at once. It’s truly a sight to behold. In an enormous, packed room filled with some of the best and brightest Game Masters the Paizo community has to offer, I still had complete strangers come up to me to complement and ask me about my screen because it stood out from every other one. My greatest pride that weekend was when players enjoyed the games I ran, but that was a very close second. Chaz Lebel is a fiction author, freelance writer and member of Caffeinated Conquests, a YouTube channel dedicated to nerd comedy and tabletop gaming. He and his team once produced some promotional videos for High Level Games that they probably wish they could forget. Chaz can be found on Twitter @CafConIsOn Image Resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRMVTmbe-Is I’ve often heard people discuss being a GM like it was akin to being a writer. In some ways, I can understand this viewpoint, such as when devising one’s own setting or coming up with overarching plot for a game. A common thread in many of these discussions is either the players doing something unexpected that “derails” the game, or the dice rolls being poor and thus “ruining” the story. Stories like that, including such that I could tell about my own experiences, have lead me to believe that there must be a better way to think about GMing. Writing may serve a purpose in this hobby, but it’s by no means the only skill one should rely on. Enter improvisation, an artform most commonly employed in theatre, and an integral part of shows such as Whose Line Is It Anyway? This isn’t a mode a theatre that can be easily understood or performed just by reading a book, (or article on your favorite tabletop gaming website) but there are a few shortcuts that can help get you into the right mindset. 1) “Yes, and…” “No, but…” This isn’t quite a shortcut so much as it’s a cardinal rule of improv theatre: always say “Yes,” and follow up with something to add onto the other actors ideas. I bring this up because it’s a recurring theme for many of the following points. They will all involve accepting what has been established, and working within that framework by adding more details. Improv theatre has a corollary rule: don’t say “no.” Saying no to an idea kills any momentum the scene generated, slows things down, and makes for a much less entertaining spectacle as the troupe attempts to get things moving forward again. Improv is a collaborative storytelling activity, after all. Despite this similarity, there are times in tabletop gaming where “no” can or even must be said. With this in mind, I’d like to redefine this rule: if you must say “no,” it’s best to provide an alternative idea for the player to work with. Consider these examples for opening a locked chest: “No, you’re unable to pick the lock on the door with that roll, but those hinges do look a little rusty.” “Yes, your acid vial is strong enough to corrode some of the mechanisms in the lock, making it easier to break open.” 2) Baiting the Players This particular tool doesn’t necessarily refer to “baiting plot hooks,” so go ahead and banish that thought from your mind. This was an idea I first encountered in the game Mountain Witch by Tim Kleinert. It’s a tool that gives the players more purchase in the setting and story. The way it works is like so: you set a scene for players, but finish the scene by proposing an open ended question. Here’s an example of how to set it up in a modern setting: “After a long day of work, you’re sitting listlessly in bed trying to go to sleep when your phone rings. You look at the caller ID. Who’s calling this late at night?” With this technique, NPCs who might otherwise never show up or be considered can be brought in as either the bearer of bad news or some other plot hook. However, in order for it to work, players it is used upon have to be cooperative. Often times, when employing this or other techniques that hand narrative control over to players, I’ll follow up by informing them the only wrong answers are “I don’t know” and “This wouldn’t happen.” (Read: The “Don’t Say No” rule of Improv Theatre.) 3) Schroedinger’s Gun Schrodinger's Gun is a mix of the concepts of Schrodinger's Cat and Chekhov’s Gun. Schrodinger's Cat is a very nuanced thought experiment about quantum physics, meaning I can’t concisely explain all the fine points of it within the scope of this article. For this purpose, though, just know that it involves a cat that is both alive and dead until somebody checks on the cat. Chekhov’s Gun, on the other hand, is a literary device that states that if a gun appears in a work of literature, it MUST be fired at some point. Otherwise, there wasn’t any point to mentioning it. When we take this gun and give it to Schrodinger, it becomes a gun that is both loaded and unloaded until somebody tries to fire it. Basically, the rule here is that nothing is true until it is established as true. (GM notes be damned!) Let’s go to an example that doesn’t involve guns: In a game of Dungeons and Dragons, let’s say there’s an important letter the players need to find on the corpse of somebody. Though before anybody can check said corpse, one of the player’s, in a fit of being Chaotic Stupid, burns the body to ash. One way to salvage the situation is to say that the letter somehow survives, or the body doesn’t catch fire, or some other implausible statement asserting that the GM notes should trump what might reasonably happen. This is where this tool comes in: if you never stated there’s a letter on the corpse, that letter can just appear elsewhere, such as in a desk or in a steel lockbox nearby. 4) How Do You Know Sarah Palmer? Starting a game can be tricky; even if you know what you want to happen, how things start, and what the details of the setting are. You present all this that you’ve poured your heart and soul into to the players and...they don’t share that same passion you did. This can be a soul-crushing moment, and rightfully so. However, consider this: it’s easier to take a vested interest in a work of fiction when you’re the one creating it. Not quite so when you’re just consuming it. Enter our tool: at the start of the game, during character creation, go around and ask the players “How Do You Know Sarah Palmer?” No answer is off the table, and each answer gives opportunity for more details into this one mutually known NPC, as well as how some of the world works. If one player states they were once a business partner of Mrs. Palmer, then what of that business? Is it still going on? Are they still partners? If they’re no longer partners, how has this affected their relationship? The best part of this tool is that it can easily be retooled for other purposes. If the party is already together, and you need to give them a new destination to keep plot going, ask the players about the next city they’ll be travelling to. What’s along the way? What’s the city known for? Who’s in charge of the city? Do you know anybody there? 5) The Iron GM Challenge This is a technique we’ve mentioned before at High Level Games in another article we ran about how to master improvisation. The article itself is worth reading, but there’s one particular passage I want to reiterate here: There’s a competition called Iron GM that holds their World Championships at GenCon every year. No, I haven’t won yet, but they haven’t seen the last of me. The competition provides contestants with a Creature, an Object, and a Place, and gives them one hour to create an adventure that prominently features those three elements. Just pick one of each and let your imagination go from there. This works for any game. Toreador, Book of Nod fragment, Nosferatu warrens. (Vampire the Masquerade) Nexus Crawler, Klaive, high rise apartment. (Werewolf the Apocalypse) Great Race of Yith, manhole cover, police department. (Call of Cthulhu) If necessary, ask your players to provide the elements. -Chaz Lebel, 6 Steps To Mastering Improvisation As A Game Master This particular technique was introduced in a section using random elements to spin together a plot, and it illustrates another key element of improvisation: the ideas presented won’t always be your own, but you still have to be willing and able to work with them. Thus, it’s important to learn how to compromise. Improvisation is a skill like any other, the only way to improve at it, is to get out there and practice. The above tools, however, will give you a good framework to begin your practice. Just remember these principles of improvisation: let others present their ideas, build off of the ideas that are present, and be willing to compromise. Don’t worry if you mess up, and keep moving forward. There’ll always be more for you to work with down the line. Aaron der Schaedel isn’t actually trained in improv theatre, or any form of art, fine or otherwise. He’s just a doofus that realized saying “I can’t do that” is a fast way to stop yourself from learning new things. One day, he’ll get around to making something with all these watercolor paints he has lying around. Until that day comes, you can mock him for being lazy via Twitter: @Zamubei Picture Reference: http://handpickedatlanta.com/atlanta/hand-picked/atlanta-improv Call of Cthulhu is its own monstrosity. As it lurchs up from the seabed, this system breaks the shoreline and demands a different storytelling method from its game master. In Dungeons and Dragons, players find themselves in a dungeon with reaching the monster at the end as their goal. It asks the players, “How many die rolls will it take to beat this monster?” Call of Cthulhu asks instead, “What if that monster cannot be defeated; even worse, what if that monster cannot even be comprehended?” The game master, officially referred to as the keeper, has a unique challenge ahead of them when designing a Call of Cthulhu campaign. The climax of a campaign is often deadly, but there needs to be more to a session for the players leave satisfied. This buildup of tension is pivotal to Call of Cthulhu, and it can be difficult to create. Here are five tips for making that challenge a little bit easier. 1) Design Your Encounter Backwards When a keeper creates a storyline for the first time, it doesn’t matter where the players start the campaign. Forcing a beginning will be counterintuitive when it comes to starting a compelling narrative. A keeper should let the players decide where the story begins; whether that be in one player’s private eye office or the occult ward at Miskatonic university, it should not be part of the keeper’s plans. They simply provide the hook and let the players pull at the string. The best place to start is right at the end, and a keeper should first ask themselves where and how it’ll be. A Call of Cthulhu campaign is a horror story, and a horror story without a compelling ending is simply going to be forgotten. When a keeper knows some of the ending details before it even starts, they will have a solid resolution that they can build towards. This can include clues that, when pieced together, point the players towards that resolution. These details will supply the leads that point the players towards the campaign’s climax with a series of sensical and connected events that will keep them engaged. Every campaign has a bad guy, but a keeper shouldn’t spend too much time on their villain. To keep this simple, the villain (likely a cult) needs a who, a where, and a what, as they are the only important questions for building the conclusion. Who is the Old One they are summoning, where is the ritual happening, and what are they doing to complete the ritual? For a first design, a keeper shouldn’t plan too much for their villain. Instead, focus on the resolution and plant clues for the players to discover their enemy’s plan as the story unfolds. Working backwards allows a keeper to plan a campaign without having to solve their own mysteries. 2) Plan Specific Discoveries That Progress The Story Forward Due to its investigative nature, Call of Cthulhu can hit roadblocks that leave the players at a dead end. A good mystery will have details hidden beneath layers of misdirection and red herrings. Keepers may find this compelling, but more often than not, the players will find this frustrating. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t include red herrings or tough puzzles for players to solve; instead, a keeper should plan their mysteries with a balance of leads and dead ends. Using a tiered discovery system can be very beneficial to first time keepers. In a tiered discovery system, a keeper plans a structure in order for the players to make discoveries. Instead of having every piece of the puzzle available for the players to find, keep some clues hidden until players find enough background to make sense of these new discoveries. To better understand this concept, let's say the players need to investigate a series of missing person reports at a hotel outside the city. Naturally, they’ll want to look into the history of the building and the disappearances; this is the first tier. Instead of allowing the players to immediately discover the shady hotel owner and his criminal past, the keeper should hide some of the mystery and allow the players to make smaller, more thematic discoveries. It’ll set a mood when they arrive at the hotel if the only clues they’ve come across have been from newspaper clippings, police reports and rumours. It’s only when they find themselves stranded at the hotel do they discover that the hotel owner isn’t as friendly as they initially seemed. A focused structure will keep the story moving and ensure that the players and the keeper don’t lose themselves in the details. There is a fear of planning a story with such simple hooks will lead to a linear storyline. This fear of linearity stems from the fact that, as the keeper, all the answers are already known. The players get to turn over the rocks and uncover the clues one by one and make their own theories that could soon be turned on their head by a future discovery. A simple structure of clues and discoveries is what will make a campaign compelling for players. 3) Don’t End With The Big Bad As part of a keeper’s initial planning they may want to plan an ending where the players go face-to-face with someone like Cthulhu himself. As exciting as a moment like this would be, it’ll very likely end with the entire investigative team either dying or going insane. This may be memorable, but such a climax should only be considered if the entire play group is aware of such a possibility. Most players will likely want some sort of resolution, but that doesn’t stop a keeper from making it as Lovecraftian as they can be. Due to the mechanics, Call of Cthulhu is a very unforgiving system. It’s realistic in the sense that a gunshot or two will kill most characters and NPCs; or the sight of some sort of unfathomable, cosmic monstrosity will cause a person to lose all sense and reason. Player death is often unavoidable in this game. It’s because of this that a first time keeper is recommended to make the villains human. A cult is a very good tool for this. The climax can be about stopping the ritual that summons Yog-Sothoth instead of fighting Mr. Yog-Sothoth itself. This gives a chance for the players to achieve some sort of victory; they stopped the evil machinations of the dark forces in their city, but they also learned of unimaginable forces that lurk between the stars or beneath the ocean. This mark will have a lasting effect on the character that is a lot more tantalizing to the player than killing them. This may compel players to continue their adventures past this first campaign. It’s this headstrong attitude that allows keepers to be even less forgiving the second time around. 4) Design With A Sense Of Dread Call of Cthulhu provides a completely different kind of atmosphere over something like Dungeons and Dragons. The players should feel tense and uneasy as they dig deeper into the strange happenings of their keeper’s storyline. This doesn’t mean there can’t be any room for some jokes and comedy, but the scales should be tipped more towards the serious side. To balance this successfully a keeper should plan out encounters that provide a constant flow of dread. A good way for a keeper to learn this kind of mood is by actually reading some of the works of Lovecraft. There are various pieces by him and other writers of his time that provide excellent examples of dread. The flavor of horror in these stories is a lot different from that of the conventional horror most people are used to. This doesn’t stop a keeper from adding these ideas into their story, but if the end result is about an ancient one being awoken, the horror should be about the hopeless of human existence against the entity as opposed to being chased and running away from it. Once again: if the players are already face to face with the ancient one, they have already lost. This idea should be the fear that provides the horror. The fact that these characters are fragile is what can push players into really embodying the spirit of the campaign. Push the fact that they may win today, but that doesn’t mean another victory for humanity will happen tomorrow. 5) Don’t Feel Locked Into Lovecraft This one is a small simple point that is important for keepers to know. Call of Cthulhu is a fun roleplaying system. It works very well with an unforgiving pass/fail system but provides players with a lot of customization and roleplay design. However, Lovecraft isn’t for everyone. Some people find issue with the racist overtones of his writing, so a keeper shouldn’t force anyone to play through a game set in Lovecraft’s world. There’s an entire world of horror that the Call of Cthulhu system could be adapted to. Instead of focusing on the idea of players specifically going against an Old One, a keeper may take influence from other sources. There are a variety of authors out there continuing the feeling of Lovecraft without being explicitly in his style. Weird stories of horror focus around the fears humans have on a primal level: weaknesses, insecurities, the mistakes they can’t come back from, etc. These are all aspects of horror found within the genre that Call of Cthulhu strives in. If Lovecraft doesn’t resonate with the group, a keeper should find something that works for them. A simple, mysterious piece of horror can sometimes be a lot more interesting to a group than sticking specifically with the source material. The magic of Call of Cthulhu is the unique perspective a keeper brings to their storylines and their own taste in horror. There is something uniquely human about telling scary stories; a strange desire to experience fear lurks within all of us. Creators have been sharing what makes them scared since the dawn of time. Hopefully these tips allow new keepers to do the same with their playgroup. Justin Cauti is a writer and Twitch streamer. He plays board/roleplaying games on the internet at http://www.playingboardgames.tv. Follow him on Twitter for updates on his boring life and writing projects @LeftSideJustin. Picture Reference: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/tech/gaming/681400/Call-of-Cthulhu-preview-Could-this-be-the-PS4-and-Xbox-One-s-next-cult-hit-horror-game You finally get your friends around the table for a night of dice rolling and storytelling. You’ve been looking forward to this all week, and have prepared a fantastic adventure. But somewhere along the way, the night of laughs and mayhem turns a little sour, the game begins to lull, or you find yourself unsure of where to take the story next. In the middle of a gaming session, tensions can get high and emotions can spiral out of control. Many gamemasters have expressed a desire to solve their issues at the table, or keep trudging through a slow combat scene. Whatever their reasoning, some GMs dislike the idea of taking a break, as if it says something about their abilities. The truth is, a well-placed break can keep a game going and help relieve tension. Here are five instances where I have it found helpful to take a step away from the game table and collect my thoughts. 1) Tensions Are High Angry players are a very tricky problem for running a smooth game. Whether they are unhappy with one of your rulings, the decisions of another player, or something as simple as bad luck, this is a perfect time to call for a break. It is important to remember that you shouldn’t be taking this break in order to find a way to prove you are “right” in a rules argument or something similar. Instead, state you want a break so everyone can cool off and come back to the table with leveled emotions. Stepping outside for a moment or simply distracting yourself with your phone can be a good way to get your mind off of things for a few minutes. 2) For The Sake of Drama Perhaps the NPC who hired the heroes turned out to be the villain, or the scorned lover of one of the heroes just showed up seeking vengeance. Whatever drama has just presented itself in the story, this can be a great time for the players to take a bathroom break, refill their drinks, and bust out fresh snacks. During the break, a dramatic revelation will probably come up in conversation, and players will inevitably find themselves headed back to the table feeling ready to see what will happen next. 3) Collect Your Thoughts You can’t prepare yourself for every situation, and eventually the players will do something that knocks you for a loop. Perhaps they are fixated on an NPC you considered relatively unimportant, or they have decided to leave behind the evil necromancer to loot the ancient wizard’s tower they heard about several adventures ago. Players can be a fickle and unpredictable bunch; there is nothing wrong with taking a bit of time to figure out how you wish to proceed. 4) Distracted Players We’ve all been in this situation. You’ve planned out the perfect encounter and are ready to reveal the villain’s master plan, when you notice the player next to you is Googling something unrelated on their phone. A player on the other end of the table is stacking dice as high as they can before it comes crashing down with a resounding clatter. Don’t take it personally, sometimes we all just need a change of pace for a few moments to renew our sense of focus. Sitting in one place for too long can be enough for some players to lose interest, so let them get up and stretch their legs! 5) Uncomfortable Player As a gamemaster, it is vital to be sensitive to the wants and needs of your players. This is particularly important with touchy subjects like politics, race, gender, etc. If a player is acting awkward at the table, they may be uncomfortable with the topic at hand. Hopefully, you’ve established at the beginning of your campaign exactly what topics you planned on covering, so players know ahead of time what will be discussed. Regardless, something may come up that feels unsafe to a certain individual. Confronting them right there at the table could easily make the situation worse; so instead, simply call for a break and take the player aside and ask them how they are. Their problem may not be related to the game at all, but it’s always a good idea to check. Implementing a tool like the X-Card can be very beneficial as well. No one is perfect, and eventually we’re all likely to need a breather every now and then. As the GM it is our job to facilitate fun, and sometimes that means stepping away from the game, even if it is just to grab more pretzels. Nathan Carmen is the founder and head writer of the Indie RPG company, Tricky Troll Games. Nathan loves building worlds and improving his craft when he’s not busy parenting. Reach Nathan at trickytrollgames@gmail.com or check out the TTG website at https://nathanccarmen.wixsite.com/trickytrollgames Art provided by JESHIELDS. Find and support his work at https://www.patreon.com/jefantasy Nashicon 2018 was the first time I was explicitly invited out to be a GM at a convention. While this isn’t the first time we at High Level Games have covered a first time experience as a con GM, I find it worth noting that my experience is different from what we’ve covered earlier. Primarily because Sean was at the longest running gaming convention in the world, while I was at a comparatively shorter lived anime convention that happened to have a tabletop gaming room. While I believe I did a competent job as a GM at Nashicon, I’d be a fool to believe there wasn’t areas I could improve. So for your reading pleasure, I have compiled this list where I reflect on what went right and where I screwed up as a GM for an anime convention’s tabletop room. 1) Limit Yourself Nashicon’s Tabletop Director invited me to run games for them because I’m knowledgeable about various Japanese RPGs. In my excitement to show all that I knew and was capable of, I prepared to run every such game in my repertoire and then some. This turned out to be a mistake. I was prepared to run seven different games. By the end of the weekend, however, I had only run three of them, and each of those games was only run once. Having a wide assortment available did spark a lot of conversations, as well as attract many curious attendees. However, my broad selection worked against me when it came time to ring these attendees in; I couldn’t decide for myself what it was I wanted to run. What was more important to limit was how much I wanted to convey in a game. The staff overseeing me at the convention suggested that I try to keep my games to just two hours if I could. While I wasn’t keen on the idea initially, as the weekend went on it became apparent to me why: it’s a lot easier to sell somebody on a game if it’s only 2 hours of their time they’ll be spending. 2) Handouts Are Your Friend Familiarity is a boon in tabletop RPGs. Rules explanations can be kept to a minimum, or even done by other players at the table, lessening the GM’s burden to do so. By running less familiar games, I couldn’t rely on this, but I otherwise had a plan to work around this limitation. Said plan was to prepare printouts of vital rules to use as a reminder for players. This alleviated a problem I’d often have running personal games when there was only one copy of the rulebook to go around: the players could have a quick reference to how the game worked. To make these reminder sheets more interesting, though, I printed some images on the backside of these handouts. When I set up my table for a game of Ryuutama, I spread out two sets of my reminder sheets. One side with the artwork of the character classes displayed, and the other side with the abilities of that class. An unintended side effect of this was that it made it made my table much more identifiable, and also drew the attention of passers-by. 3) Pregen Characters Are Too I didn’t have any pregenerated characters for any of the games I ran over the weekend; every game I ran we made characters for on the spot. By contrast, my Dungeons and Dragons playing neighbors had an entire table dedicated to displaying pre-made characters so that they could quickly jump in on a game that still had room. From the glimpses I got of these character sheets, it seemed like many of them were the official pregenerated sheets provided by Wizards. For the uninitiated, these sheets have class feature explanations reprinted from the rulebook, as appropriate for the level. Functionally, this made them similar to handouts I created Ryuutama. 4) Assistants Are Your Best Friend One challenge that I consistently encountered was gathering players. It wasn’t that there was a shortage of interest. That was far from the case. The difficulty was that I couldn’t get enough people gathered at one time to play a game. Towards the end of the weekend, though, the idea came to me to use my fellow staff to fill out the roster. (After they had done the same with me for another game.) In fact, I would be inclined to say that help from the other staff was instrumental in making the game room successful. There were members of staff who were keeping tabs on which GMs were doing what, and would guide the players to the GMs they were looking for. These staff helped coordinate both D&D games, as well as independent RPG GMs such as myself. 5) In The End, It Comes Down To You You can have the best support network and all the preparation in the world, but when push comes to shove, it’s exactly as the the title of this point says: it all comes down to you. Tabletop RPGs may be part collaborative storytelling, but getting one off the ground without a GM is more or less impossible. As a GM for Nashicon, I was expected not only to run the games, but also to do the legwork to find players and organize these games. I didn’t expect this to be difficult, and it was the one thing I didn’t really brace myself for. (By contrast, I had literally hundreds of pages of character sheets and handouts at the ready.) It turns out that selling somebody on a game they haven’t heard of that belongs to a genre they’ve only scratched the surface of (if they’ve even heard of it) takes more than showing up and having a sales pitch ready. I wasn’t able to get people to play anything until I or other staff insisted they sit down. Once I got my players around the table though, it wasn’t much different than any other time I ran a game. I knew how to entice players to participate and let themselves be involved in the creative aspect of gaming. I knew how to keep things moving along and when to take short cuts: I was back in my element. Even though it was a familiar activity in a familiar setting, being GM staff for this anime convention was a much more novel experience than I expected it to be. It made me more aware of some shortcomings of mine, and thus gave me plenty to work on should I continue down this path. Aaron der Schaedel, despite his love of conventions and festivals, has yet to attend any dedicated specifically to tabletop gaming. He can’t be there, but thinks you should totally check out HLGCon. If you do go, you can gloat to Aaron about how much fun you’re having there and he isn’t via twitter: @Zamubei It can be argued the NPCs are the RPG games that we play. They’re the way the GM interacts directly with the player characters. For me, they’re at least on par with the locations and sensorial information, in making the experience of the game a bit more intense and realistic. I’ve recently changed my approach to NPC building dramatically. I’ve had really great feedback from my players, and here is what I did: 1) Voices Everyone can do a different voice. Cast it higher or lower, make it distinctive. Give him/her/it a characteristic speech cadence. When you come back to the NPC in a few sessions time, the players will remember him/her/it, and what he/she/it did. I am a horrible impersonator, but I have a couple of good ones (e.g. Mr Burns, Palpatine, HAL 9000, Watto, Admiral Akbar on a good day, a posh, quiet guy from a previous game, cockney on a REALLY good day, etc). It truly doesn’t take much, heck, just an accent or a cough will do. 2) Three Times Three Give the NPC three things they are, three things they’d want to achieve and three things that define them. Not much else, at this stage. Let’s say we have a dodgy pawn shop owner. Untrustworthy, Greedy, Astute / Money, Respect, Status / Sniffly, Hunched, Darting eyes. And there we go. I know, I know, I punched all the stereotypes of ‘dodgy money lender,’ but you get what I mean. Don’t overdo it! This is the main thing! Keep it vague so you can adapt it on the fly (more on that below). 3) Randomization This is the greatest change I’ve made to my NPCs. Now that I have an idea of what and who they are, I then write down tables. I make a series of numbered bullet points of events, and then I roll a die. I find this works much better for me, keeps me on my toes and forces me to roll with the punches. I used to plan too much and became much more inflexible when things - inevitably - went off track. I used to plan everything, write massive backgrounds to each NPC, and then, the players would say ‘hello!’ (if that) and move on. I then had to find another way for them to find the info and there goes Miss So-and-so background as an old merc. Don’t. Stay loose, roll with the punches. 4) Take In EVERYTHING I am now picking up on every single silly thing me and my players say, and weave it into the narrative, no matter how stupid. Believe me, these will become the groups’ memories that they will retain years after the game is long forgotten. 5) Use The Players Now and again, I tell the players, I need an NPC, and vaguely describe what I need. You’d be surprised how well this works and how much the players will contribute to the cause. 6) It’s All In The Past Before the game starts, ask a few random questions of the players, about places where they grew up, people that were important to them, etc. They then basically have done all the work for you. You now have half a dozen NPCs you can bring over at any stage to destabilize things/make them more interesting. 7) Box Of Sand Here is where my love for sandbox rule systems shines through. RPGs are a sandbox. Allow your players to play with the sand. Allow them to ask and try and do things (within reason) with the NPCs that you didn’t think of. Make it hard for them if its weird, but what are you going to lose? 8) Bringing It All Together By definition, an NPC is not a character. It’s not ‘alive’ in the real world, but there’s no reason why he/she/it wouldn’t be so in the narrative. In this sense, I keep coming back to something I read years ago, about some long forgotten sci fi show where the characters were so forgettable and two-dimensional that one episode, when the fate of each of them was hanging in the balance, there was simply no drama, no stress. I remember reading someone’s comment on a forum, ‘If they all died, would you actually care?’ No. No, I wouldn’t. You don’t need to make the NPC important, vivid or interesting in any shape or form, but they need to be relevant. The fact they’re imaginary is beside the point. At the time of the game, they are important. If they died, would the characters/players care? If so, those are the NPCs that will stay with them. Rui is a Portuguese scientist that, after ten years doing strange things in labs, decided to become a teacher. Then, three years ago, like he was bit by a radioactive D20, RPGs came into his life, and he’s now juggling teaching, playing and GMing quite happily. He lives in the UK with his partner Joana, an ungodly number of potted plants, 4 to 5 RPGs at various stages of completion (and across as many rule systems), and maps, cursed idols, evil necklaces, and any other props he can get his hands on. He’s been writing for HLG for a few months, and is one of the resident vloggers. He can be reached at @Atomic_RPG. Picture Reference: http://3dnpc.com/forums/topic/3d-npc-look-overhual/ Something I've learned about myself is that creating backstory is my favorite part of character creation. You get to choose their life experience and place it in the world. Backstories are vital to characters in all creative writing. For example; If you look closely, movie script writers will always have a backstory written for the character even if that character isn’t in the movie. It gives the actors (or in this case our players) the ability to understand who the character is and how to play them. So, let's talk backstory, shall we? 1) Backstory Inspires Your GM As a player you are vital to the world building process. The world is literally being built for you and around you. A player should put the same amount of work into a character that the GM puts into a world. And though backstory is only a small piece of the symbiosis, it allows the GM and player to easily collaborate. We know how invested our world builders get; railroading is a growing pain of gaming. I know for me it helps me think outside of the box. One of my players placed a city in his backstory and now it’s a major place in my setting. You’ll get them thinking about your character, you’ll get them thinking about how to shape their world. 2) Creating In-Character Bonds Creating our backstories allows for the party to connect and grow as characters. It brings a depth to the table allowing players to have an ultimate understanding of why they act the way they do. A group that has a rich array of roots also encourages roleplay when players want to learn about each other’s characters. The unique dialogue that arises from this creates a strong, in-character bond. In the longest campaign I have ever been a part of, I played a character that went through a drastic morality shift. I had suffered a loss in game because of my backstory, my character was emotionally defeated, but my party did everything they could to pick him up. It was an empowering moment for this character because he became less selfish. He never saw these people as friends until this moment. They were only tools, but because of a small background detail, our relationship had changed. 3) Practice Becoming A Better Player Character backstory is an easy problem with a complicated solution. The first two points work in tandem with this concept to make you a better player. Putting time into your backstory is a big investment, but has a pay off well worthwhile. Compare your game to a spider’s web that you weave with your GM and other players. Plucking a strand in the web you created can cause an interesting vibration. Messing around with structures will only increase your understanding of how these games can work, which can lead to more fun. Isn’t fun the point of our hobby? I believe the backstory of a character is the most important part to a game. Paying attention to how you build your character’s backstory allows you to create characters that can do great things. I will leave you with a warning though: everyone in the hobby has different levels of investment. Follow the golden rule; know who you’re playing with. How important is backstory to you? Benjamin Witunsky, artist, writer and nerd savant. Cofounder of the NerdMantle Podcast available on Soundcloud, Itunes and Google Play Music. Image Source: The Hollywood Reporter Many RPGs deal with life and death, the biggest stakes for your character. Sometimes the risk is in a private duel in a back alley, but more often we’re thinking about melee, small groups or even armies clashing in a noisy, terrifying, violent storm of chaos with lives in the balance. Such is the like to thin the veil between the living and the dead. So many moments from passing through that veil could have some very striking effects on reality, on what the living perceive, or even what the dying see as they pass through the veil. A recent episode of Vikings, the TV series on the History channel, did the best job I’ve seen of exploring this with a culture who truly believed in the gods and in the glory of battle. Let’s examine some ways that the battlefield can get weird for the player characters. 1) My Life Flashed Before My Eyes! Death and near-death are the same thing in many ways. Those who have experience either of them and lived to tell about it talk of their life flashing before their eyes. This would be a great way to have a supernatural or weird experience for one of your characters without dooming them to die to have it happen. It could happen as the killing stroke is descending. Before the blow lands (or deflects off armor) the character has a series of visions and only afterward do you determine their fate. The visions should tell their story from the most impressionable moments in childhood, young adult years, and beyond. When did they first kill? Who was their first love? What were their greatest moments of achievement and deepest failings or tragedies? Tell their story and spin it as epic as possible to infuse this next die roll with dramatic energy. 2) The Dead Came For Me In the midst of battle with life and death all around the character might have visions of people they know but who were long dead. The appearance of their parents or ancestors might beckon them to pass through the veil into the welcoming arms of family. Even a friend newly dead elsewhere on the battlefield might urge them down a path to ‘elsewhere’ to escape harm. Perhaps these are mischievous or simply cruel spirits masquerading as those the character might trust. If their urging is heeded, the character might step into the path of a killing sword or axe, sending them to the lands of the dead when they might not have gone otherwise. If the battle is being fought on a field of past battles, the chances of such interference from the dead is much greater. Personally I would never be explicit with the players regarding the veracity of their characters’ visions; whether they are the actual spirits of people they knew, or evil spirits of manipulation. It serves to preserve some of the mystery and wonder of your setting. 3) I Am Changed! There is such power in the death happening all around that supernatural forces manifest themselves. The battlefield may begin to look haunted, with skeletons fighting each other or even the bodies of the newly slain. Odd lights, shadows, and mists may penetrate the atmosphere and great chills or heat flash over the combatants. They might meet odd people or creatures walking unconcerned through the death and bloodshed. Visions of the impossible or bizarre could occur and the player character be swept up in transformative magics. After the battle, they might discover their hair has turned white, they have aged, or suffered some other physical change. Their sense of their native tongue might change to a language they never spoke in their life. Nagging injuries or scars from disease might be washed away. A missing limb might be restored or a healthy hand lost. More serious transformations involve new abilities such as spellcasting or magical powers. Gifts such as foresight or the ability to know when others are lying might play into a greater purpose. They might have been imbued with these powers by a great spirit from beyond the veil. So chosen, they feel a great purpose as well, bent on achieving the goal of the spirit who gave the gifts. Someone might have to die in vengeance. A king or great person might need to be saved from their enemies. A monster who slew what became the great spirit might need to be hunted and slain itself. The demands of the spirit may not be reasonable (“Slay every member of the Thuava clan!”) but should certainly encourage the receiver to new lands and new adventures. 4) I Was Already Dead Not everyone makes it out alive from a melee, obviously. True, player characters are the heroes, the named roles who appear to wade through battle without consequence, their every weapon stroke a killing blow. That said, even they can be felled by an arrow from nowhere or the master stroke of their vilest nemesis. In RPGs it isn’t really fair to ‘fate’ someone to die unless this has been a big build-up for the character and the player would find it dramatically correct. So this version comes into play after circumstances kill the character. A series of visions play out as if they had survived the battle, made it home to family or friends, breathed in the sweet air of the morning dawn, and the like. The ‘reveal’ would be that they are already dead on the field. You might make this a representation of how they journey to the next life, however their religion may define their mind’s inability to accept death for a time. If done powerfully enough, this might even herald their remaining in the area as a ghost, trying to go through the steps of this continued life even though they did not survive to live it. They might be confused as to why they are still hanging around this battlefield and angered as they try to get home and fail. That sets up a quest for their companions or even strangers to find his body and take it to his home for burial, giving him peace. Great battles turn tides in war and the conflicts of nations and kingdoms. In terms of roleplaying, they can be a challenge when the heroes aren’t the focus of the action. I recommend bringing something extra and very personal to the table for each character by letting your battles get a little weird. Jim Davenport founded Dragonlaird Gaming Studios in 2005 as a channel for his original tabletop RPG work. He’s an accomplished freelance writer with Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine (as a columnist) from Kenzerco, Margaret Weis Productions (Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Cortex), and many others. He published Savage Characters Volume 1 a couple years ago and has plans to release a series of Savage Adventures soon. You can find his website at www.dragonlairdgaming.com. Picture Reference: https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.-vR_vMKZ-U4fg2_pIR2aXwHaE8&pid=Api Editor’s Note: Enjoy reading articles about your favorite hobby and engaging with fellow gamers? We do too, but hosting and producing our site isn’t free. Please consider visiting our Patreon page and supporting us at any amount. We put every dollar back into the site and its production, and your help has allowed us to have certain paid article months for our contributors. Thank you for your continued readership and your support! -David Horwitz, Blog Manager In an article of his now-defunct blog, The DM Experience, (Which I hold up to this day as one of the greatest repositories of free Game Master knowledge for fantasy games. It was written during the days of 4th Edition, but 99% of the advice is system neutral) Wizards of the Coast’s Chris Perkins said that the number one tip he gives to DMs is, “Improvise.” It’s not a new concept, in fact it’s usually one of the first pieces of advice most Game Masters who know what they’re talking about will give you. There’s a very good reason for this. Naturally, being able to improvise will make it far easier to react to your players’ choices and increase their enjoyment with your campaign, but what they usually don’t mention is how much easier it can make your life. At least 50 - 60% of everything I do behind the screen is completely improvised. Sometimes my notes for a session are just a single sentence in a notebook, and if you watch our Actual Plays over on Caffeinated Conquests, you’ve seen me do it. However, while I like to flatter myself that over the years I’ve cultivated a fairly skillful approach to the craft, the honest truth is, it really isn’t difficult at all. Anyone can do what I do, and I’ll be happy to show you how. 1) It’s Not As Hard As You Think It Is The first step is to remove the mental blocks. Trying to improvise at the game table can be scary if you’re not used to it, a bit like a tightrope walker taking his first tentative steps without a net. The truth is, you can do this. Say it out loud, repeat it to yourself in the mirror if you need to. No matter how long you’ve been GMing, the skill is absolutely within your ability. The brutal truth is, you’re going to have to do it at some point whether you want to or not. Even if you run nothing but prewritten modules for your entire Game Mastering career, eventually your players will do something the module’s writers didn’t think of, and you’ll hear the bells tolling in the distance. It’s not difficult to do. I’m not a member of an improv troupe, I didn’t even take theatre in high school. I’m just some guy that has cultivated a skill, and you can too. 2) Release Your Scenarios Into The Wild The famous quote by American writer William Faulkner goes, “In writing you must kill all your darlings,” which means, in exceedingly simple terms, to cast aside our emotional attachments so we can do what is objectively best for the project. We’ve all been there. The players one-shot your Big Bad Evil Guy in an encounter they weren’t meant to fight him in, (free bit of advice, don’t ever introduce your players to a character unless you’re prepared for them to die a horrible death) or you design an entire dungeon and somehow the players circumvent the need to ever travel there in the first place. Once in a Pathfinder campaign, after the players had acquired a ship, I spent a week designing an entire nautical adventure that would occur on the way to their next destination, complete with washing up on a strange island of undead that not only advanced the plot but planted valuable foreshadowing for the future of the campaign. I showed up at the next session only to be respectfully showed on the official map of Golarion that the party’s next destination was connected by land. Here’s the trick: When stuff like that happens, let it. I like to think of the ideas I put into my campaigns as baby birds that I’m nurturing. When the idea has matured enough for the players to encounter it, I release that bird into the wild, and whatever happens, happens. It might soar majestically into the sunset, it might get picked off by the neighborhood cat, but it’s no longer up to me. This frame of mind makes it easier for me to accept two truths: Things might not go the way I intend, and that I need to be ready to adapt if they don’t. Sure, I try to steer things so they go the way I want, but I’m not dependant on it, and I don’t panic if I can’t. The real benefit to this mindset is that I’ve become vastly more comfortable with saying yes to my players when they come up with something I hadn’t anticipated, I’m not instantly thrust into a defensive posture trying to protect my perceived outcome of a situation. I’m not shocked if my players have an idea that can trivialize an encounter or bypass a puzzle, I’ve already accepted that as a possibility long before it was ever proposed. 3) Harness Player Agency If you let them, your players can take a great deal of the heavy lifting off your shoulders, as several sessions worth of play can result just from the players cleaning up a mess they themselves created. Wind ‘em up and let ‘em go, they’ll build your adventure for you. All you really need to do is provide an objective, a reason for the players to care about the objective, and a few complications that make achieving the objective interesting. (Bonus points for providing complications that can’t be simply resolved through combat. No matter how difficult you make the combat, it’s still an “easy” problem to solve) Whenever your players do something of some level of import, ask yourself one very simple question: “So what happens now?” Take a step back and look at the big picture. In your world, what is the most logical thing to result from what just happened? Let’s take the above example. Your players just killed the BBEG way before they were supposed to. So what happens now? Exceedingly few villains operate in a vacuum. Truly ingenious masterminds always have a plan B, and a villain who believes his actions are justified may even have one in the event of his demise. Everything from goblin hordes to Cthulhu cults and demonic legions have hierarchies, and where there are hierarchies, there are underlings gunning for their boss’ job. They’re not exactly going to weep inconsolably because some adventurers happened to expedite their promotion. Conspirators have co-conspirators, who probably aren't willing to dump several months of scheming down the pot, or better yet may suddenly need to cover their tracks. Again, think outside the box of combat. A duplicitous noble who sends assassins after the PCs will buy you 20 minutes of game time while the party beats the snot out of them and interrogates one for their employer. However, a noble who uses one of the ranger’s arrows to frame the PC’s for the murder of another political rival, thus making them appear as crazed murderers while keeping herself in the shadows will buy you an entirely new adventure. Even the lone sorcerer might have demonic pacts unfulfilled or latent magics waiting to trigger, and if you think a necromancer doesn’t have a back up plan for death… Let’s say you’re playing D&D and the party is on a quest for the magic sword Aelthrys, Talon of the Ancient Kings. You’ve spent weeks designing an epic multi-level dungeon filled with clever puzzles and fiendish traps at the bottom of which lays their prize. Wouldn’t you know it, the wizard just got a scroll of Wish from a random treasure table and used it to Wish for the McGuffin. (I’ve seen this happen more times than you might think) So what happens now? Well now there’s something very valuable, powerful and rare that’s much easier to get than it was before. Gee whiz, if only the PCs lived in a violent fantasy world overflowing with unscrupulous sentience. Maybe Garm the Brigand King knows the power foretold to the bearer of Aelthrys and isn’t opposed to slitting a few throats to get it. Maybe the local orc chieftain knows well the stories his ancestors told him of Throm’gar the Orc Hewer and he wishes to capture it as a trophy to unite the other orc clans beneath his banner. Either of them could have spies in the next town the PCs visit. There’s also the question of why the sword was so heavily guarded in the first place. Maybe it was the lynchpin of the prison of some ancient evil. Maybe the sword’s creator, an angelic commander of celestial legions feels the evil stir once more and intends to hold the party accountable. Maybe you’ve suddenly got a campaign for the next few months. (You can always reuse the dungeon somewhere else) 4) Keep Some Randomizers Handy Pulling a game out of thin air can be next to impossible with nothing to go on. The human brain can do some amazing things, but sometimes it needs a jumpstart. That’s why I like to keep something handy to give my creativity a jumping off point when necessary. Pathfinder has a great set of random tables in the Game Mastery Guide. When I was running my campaign I would, on occasion, deliberately not prepare anything that week and challenge myself to come up with an adventure from the tables on the spot. It was quite a lot of fun, actually. The D&D 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide has a metric ton of random tables in it, but in my opinion too many random pieces can muddle the mixture and turn what’s supposed to be a jumping off point into an obtuse pile of disparate pieces that needs to be clumsily hammered together. My advice would be to choose about three or so. My personal favorites are Dungeon/Wilderness Goals, Adventure Villains, and Twists from Chapter 3. Employ the Random Dungeon Generator as needed. What about games that don’t have random tables? You could create your own, but there’s an easier way. There’s a competition called Iron GM that holds their World Championships at GenCon every year. No, I haven’t won yet, but they haven’t seen the last of me. The competition provides contestants with a Creature, an Object, and a Place, and gives them one hour to create an adventure that prominently features those three elements. Just pick one of each and let your imagination go from there. This works for any game. Toreador, Book of Nod fragment, Nosferatu warrens. (Vampire the Masquerade) Nexus Crawler, Klaive, high rise apartment. (Werewolf the Apocalypse) Great Race of Yith, manhole cover, police department. (Call of Cthulhu) If necessary, ask your players to provide the elements. Here’s the catch, whatever the dice or the three elements suggest, stick with it. Challenge yourself. The less the individual pieces seem to fit together on the surface, the better. It’s an opportunity to flex your creative muscle and figure out how they can fit together. You’ll find yourself running adventures you would’ve never thought of otherwise, and your skills in improvisation and Game Mastering in general will grow before your eyes. 5) Don’t Be Afraid To Borrow From Your Future Self This is less of an issue with adventures that are only meant to last a session, but if you show up to a session expecting to piggyback off the events of the last session, (as I do frequently) then the greatest danger you face is that the players may end up lacking a goal that carries them to the end of the session, either by them accomplishing their mission sooner than you anticipated, or just the path to the goal becoming muddled somehow. The best thing to do in this scenario is to borrow from your future self. You have at least some ideas of where the future of your campaign will go, right? Drop some foreshadowing for the next arc of the campaign. Pull the trigger on the machinations of a future villain. Just give them something to do until the end of the session. You have until the next session to reconcile everything and put it back in order. If your players start putzing around with nothing to do and no clear objective, no matter how good the first part of the session was, it will diminish everyone’s enjoyment of the game, including your own. 6) Building Encounters Alright, that’s all well and good, but right now my Pathfinder and D&D players are saying, “That’s great Chaz, but what about combat encounters? How am I supposed to build balanced combat encounters on the fly? I can’t reference all those charts and do all that math that quickly!” I know because I used to be you. My advice is going to sound like heresy at first, but if what I’ve had to say has made sense up to now, you owe it to yourself to hear me out. Ditch the encounter building rules. Firstly, you may not realise this if your main avenue of the roleplaying hobby is some form of D&Derivative, but encounter rules are actually a fairly rare occurrence in RPGs. Vampire isn’t going to tell you how many frenzied Sabbat are a good match for the player coterie, Numenera won’t tell you what Tier the players need to fight an Erynth Grask, etc. Secondly, D&D itself didn’t even have these rules for decades. It wasn’t until after the Wizards of the Coast acquisition and Third Edition that encounter building became a part of the Core Rules. The absolutely earliest instance of it that I know of was in the 1991 D&D Rules Cyclopedia, and there it was clearly demarcated as an Optional Rule. No matter how you slice it, that’s still a full 17 years in which DM’s were happily pitting goblins against their players without a problem. Thirdly, characters in modern roleplaying games are significantly more resilient than the rules might suggest, exponentially so as they gain levels. A “balanced” encounter in most games is designed to drain the PCs of about ⅕ of their resources in exchange for experience points. That’s not high adventure, that’s grinding. Lastly, the rules don’t (because they can’t) account for the vagaries of the dice. I recently ran the Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure Sailors on the Starless Sea for two seperate groups of completely different people. There’s an encounter with seven beastmen about halfway into the adventure. The first group completely steamrolled the beastmen without them being able to land more than one or two scratches on the player characters. The second group, having one more person than the previous, very nearly TPK’ed (as in one player left with one hit point remaining) because my dice chose to rain apocalyptic fire upon the table that night. For that matter, encounter rules also can’t account for tactics, terrain, or any other extenuating circumstances. Encounter rules aren’t the perfectly calibrated mathematical formulae they might at first appear to be. They are suggestions, guidelines for new DM’s who aren’t yet comfortable enough to evaluate a monster’s abilities on their own. There’s a much easier, faster way to handle this. Just look at the numbers. Compare a creature’s AC, Attack Bonus, Hit Point and Saves to the party’s. In a fair fight, a monster should be able to land attacks on the moderately armored members of the party about 50% of the time, (hitting with an 11+ on the d20 after adding in their attack bonus) and vice versa for the party. Same for saves. You can translate this up or down a few points to increase/decrease the difficulty. Don’t expect all of the numbers to line up perfectly, monsters are designed to excel in certain areas and lag behind in others. Now, look at HP. Assume half the attacks will hit and the damage dice will roll half its maximum, (a balanced die’s average roll is usually half, of course most will roll higher or lower but they’ll usually balance each other out) you now have a decent idea of how long it will take one side to win the fight. As long as the PC’s have a reasonable chance of doing that to their enemies before their enemies do it to them, you’re golden. Some readers may be frustrated that this method lacks precision, but as I explained earlier, not even the official methods can technically give you precision. However, my method can be done at a glance without having to spend precious time dinking with math and numbers. Did you get into this hobby to tell fantastical stories or practice accounting? (Also, let’s be honest, the encounter building rules in the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide is one of the most abysmal systems ever put to paper) Improvisation is not a skill we cultivate just for our players. It’s a huge quality of life improvement for us. When properly utilised, it can remove the laborious parts of our hobby and let us focus on the parts we really enjoy. It can help to mitigate GM burnout. It can help to make the games we run games for us as well, instead of a second job. Not to mention, your players can never derail your campaign, they can only change the plan. Chaz Lebel is a fiction author and member of Caffeinated Conquests, a YouTube channel dedicated to nerd comedy and tabletop gaming. He and his team once produced some promotional videos for High Level Games that they probably wish they could forget. Chaz can be found on Twitter @CafConIsOn Picture Reference: http://uptv.com/shows/whose-line-is-it-anyway/ The one thing you want to avoid when you’re running a game outside your own space is to be too heavy. I’ve run games where I took a camping backpack, a rucksack and a map case filled with playing mats. One day, waiting for the bus, trying to move a small South American village’s worth of gear, I thought: There has got to be a better way to do this. What follows isn’t necessarily smart, but it is something that I’ve done and I found works for me. Use it at your own peril! 1) Clipboard Do not underestimate the power of the clipboard to keep your notes/sheets away from the players and simultaneously collated in the same place. Amazon has some really cheap ones, and if you’re feeling a bit wilder, you can always get one of those that have a clipboard on top of a box, maximizing the number of papers you can have on you. The biggest one I have can easily accommodate a corebook. 2) Laptop More and more, I’m using my Mac for games. I can have my text files, Youtube and Apps (see below) ready to go at all times. My only issue with it is that, at some tables, it simply eats away too much space. So plan ahead if you’re using it. You don’t want to have to stop half way in because the corebook is under the laptop, and then you need to move the minis to put the laptop on the other side, and now where has that goblin model gone….? (You see what I mean.) 3) Plastic Boxes I LOVE plastic boxes. For props, for models, for pencils, for paper, for everything. I am very disorganised AND methodical in my chaos, so to be able to box stuff makes my life a whole lot easier. You might need to pad some with kitchen paper/foam if your transporting fragile stuff, but it’s still better than any other option I’ve come across. 3) Youtube Obviously this requires a laptop or tablet. Youtube has thousands of videos useful for providing ambiance. Some actually say ‘RPG dungeon/cave/castle/spaceship/ocean vessel’. I’ve used them in the past for my Faith game. When the players entered the abandoned space wreck, I played ‘Abandoned space station’. That changed the mood completely. Now it was ON. 4) Syrinscape This app is designed for RPG’s, and there are two variants, Sci Fi and Fantasy. Although the app itself is free, each sound stream needs to be paid for (typically a couple of dollars). That said, each stream has about 8 different components that can be adjusted to taste. Believe me, ‘Futuristic Market’ replicated the feel of Blade Runner to the nearest decimal place. You could even add/remove the sounds of rain, hovercars, footsteps, even mecha walking past! (I make no money from Syrinscape, I’ve just used it in the past and really liked it.) 5) PDF’s PDF’s are a two-edged sword. Although you can easily have a 500-page corebook on a tablet, I still find it awkward to scroll through for a minute or two to find the right page, and Cthulhu help you if you need to cross reference anything. I really like how easy it makes transport, but I really dislike the difficulties when a players asks for a particular stat or creature, and that’s pretty much your next 10 minutes. This is usually the point when the action just slowly grinds to a standstill. 6) Sticky Notes Ah the humble, small, yellow, glue-stripped piece of paper. Where would the modern GM be without them? I use them primarily to make notes in the corebook, write down names of things/NPC’s that were suggested by the players, or to pass a message to one of the players without the others seeing. I have tried to plan whole games on them, and then gluing them to a bigger sheet, but the probability that one or more will just drop off is quite high, and you KNOW that it would have something essential on it. 7) Tablet A possible compromise between the size of the laptop and its awkwardness around a busy gaming table. Possibly the ideal venue for PDF’s (see above) and having all the advantages and disadvantages of both. I like it for soundtracks (see above), but use sparingly when it comes to PDF’s. So these are some resources that have helped me in the past. What have you tried that has made you GM life easier? Rui is a Portuguese scientist that, after ten years doing strange things in labs, decided to become a teacher. Then, three years ago, like he was bit by a radioactive D20, RPG’s came into his life, and he’s now juggling teaching, playing and GMing quite happily. He lives in the UK with his partner Joana, an ungodly number of potted plants, 4 to 5 RPG’s at various stages of completion (and across as many rule systems), and maps, cursed idols, evil necklaces, and any other props he can get his hands on. He’s been writing for HLG for a few months, and is one of the resident vloggers. He can be reached at @Atomic_RPG. Picture Reference: https://makezine.com/2015/12/08/how-to-build-a-high-end-gaming-table-for-as-little-as-150/ Everybody’s been seeing the foreword about Patreon on here these days, and it’s easy to scroll by and pay it no credence. As someone who regularly produces content for this site and helps do some of the back-end stuff, I can vouch for the fact that Patreon support has a beyond huge impact on this site. We put out a good chunk of content on the weekly, and some special stuff for our Patrons too. Know that you never have to support us, that coming to the site to read and interact is definitely humbling, but also know that you’re making dreams come true through our Patreon. High Level Games is a community that helps gamers’ creativity flourish. -Sean, the Heavy Metal GM \m/ Clothing, letters, strange objects, puzzle boxes; props at the game table have a lot to offer. Sometimes you buy ‘em, most of the time you make ‘em, but what doesn’t change is the fact that they’re really awesome! So today, for your viewing pleasure, I bring you some points about props. Points, though? What the hell does that mean? Well, it means that we’re going to look at two pros and two cons of making props for your games. 1) Immersion A good roleplay exchange can really suck a person into whatever game you’re playing. The power of words, of human interaction, stands paramount among methods of immersion. With that in mind, it still can’t even hold a match to the feeling of pure joy when you see someone’s face light up as you hand them an object. For me, the most recent iteration of this was when I handed a player the letter that’s pictured at the top of this post. Everybody at the table was instantly engrossed in the exchange that had just taken place, waiting eagerly for the player to read the message aloud. She chose to keep the contents to herself, giving the group a short summary, but it was still amazing to see everybody focus within a millisecond. Regardless of how fleeting that moment of pure focus is, your prop will do its job of drawing attention. 2) Memory So we established that using props weakens the veil between our world and the world we create. If we think about it like the Conjunction of Spheres from the universe of The Witcher, it paints a good picture of the shockwave it can send. Considering that the conjunction happened long before we hear of Geralt, I think it’s safe to call it a more than memorable event, as we see remnants of it constantly. See where I’m goin’ with this? That increased immersion makes the moment your prop comes out ridiculously memorable. Especially if it’s a cool bauble or magic item that’s important to the story; maybe something that the party is protecting. Not only is the item crucial to the team’s success at that point, but the players, being swept up in their immersion, feel that anxiety too since it’s literally sitting on the table staring them in the face. If you genuinely felt like you were being hunted by a lich because you have its squirrel skull (its phylactery), I’d say that would be a pretty memorable feeling! Creating those moments that people talk about for years is what we chase in gaming, and props are almost like a cheat code to do that. 3) Time This is less of a problem if you buy your prop. Going on Amazon to buy some little plastic brain in a jar is likely not that time consuming. When you take the time to actually create a prop, regardless of what it is, you’re investing time. As we know, it’s the most important resource we have, something to be cherished. Making something like a letter doesn’t take too much of it, but the more complex and interesting your prop is, the more time it takes to make. Sadly, there’s a direct correlation of how kooky/elaborate your item is and how interested people are in it. Of course, that generalization has exceptions, but we can assume it to be true most of the time. Especially since when it’s not true, it only benefits us. If you’re someone who’s used to playing war games, I don’t think this point will be much of an issue. For the rest of us? Well, I think I’ll be sticking to easy props like letters. 4) Money Unfortunately, whenever you talk about time, money finds its way into the conversation too. Unless you’re crafting your prop out of junk you have lying around the house, you’ll probably have to buy something. Again, a reason why I think letters are fun enough. This point is especially true if you are using something most people can’t make, like a scrap of cloth or puzzle box, as your prop. Most of the time, I would imagine a lot of us shoot low with these just to save both commodities I just mentioned. Play it smart, and this point is far less of a deal breaker than it would be otherwise. Props are great, no question. Personally, and this could be because of my age, time and money are two things that are more important to me now than they’ll probably be later. Hopefully, you’re someone in a better position that can really go all in on these things to make the best gaming experience for both you and your players. Though, I must say, if props are really your thing, maybe your group should just do LARP! Not my thing, but there’s plenty of people in the HLG community that could point you in the right direction, should the concept be new to you. Cheers and Stay Metal \m/ Sean is the Heavy Metal GM, a freelance writer and blogger that loves the roleplaying games more than life itself. As a person who’s always up for a good discussion, his blog covers general gaming advice as well as specialized advice/homebrew rules for 13th Age RPG. You can find his website at www.heavymetalgm.com. Join the conversation. Image Source: A prop made by yours truly! Editor’s note: There are always wheels turning here at High Level Games. I have been involved in a small handful of the many little projects we are undertaking. I have been creating new player character races for 5th edition, and have also released a small document on Time Demons. There are also one page adventures, and much much more coming to high level games. Help us grow by supporting our patreon, and get access to cool stuff! It’s a win win. If you were to ask Matt Mercer if he was at the peak of his DM skill, he would most likely tell you that he’s always striving to improve each and every session, so that he can become, and remain, the best Dungeon Master that he can be. Now imagine yourself, whether you consider yourself a new, or experienced dungeon master. Are you at your true potential? Is there anything you could be doing to improve your game even further and expand and enhance your skill set? In earlier editions of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, there was an Appendix N, which contained other tools, works, and materials that can inspire DM’s to improve their story, writing, and other skills. In the 5th edition this is Appendix D instead, but many still refer to it as Appendix N by force of habit. Matt Colville has also talked about his own Appendix N that he uses. The context of your Appendix N doesn’t have to be a rulebook, novel, or website. It could be a video, a stream, a podcast, or something different entirely. Anything that helps you become a better dungeon master can be put in your Appendix N. Let's go through some things that I recommend all dungeon masters add to their Toolkit, in their Appendix N. 1) Matt Colville Matt Colville is by far my favourite Youtuber to watch for DM advice. His “Running The Game” series is immensely helpful, as are his campaign diaries, where he tells you about his own campaign, decisions (and mistakes, which all DM's make!). From my standpoint, he's a down-to-earth DM who, while experienced, wants to make DMs aware that it's easy and fun to DM, and that you don't have to be some kind of divine being to do it well. Here are a couple of his videos on Bad Guys, Losing, and Alignment. 2) Reddit Reddit has a large selection of Dungeon and Dragon and other RPG communities. There are over 400,000 subscribers to the r/dnd thread, and that’s just the generic Dungeons and Dragons thread. There are great subreddits for DMs at r/dmacademy and r/dndbehindthescreen on a regular basis. You can talk to the DMs there and get more tools on your belt. a platform for general DM questions, story advice, and any other questions that DMs may have. Behind the screen however, is a subreddit filled with lore, worlds, information, and other ideas for you to tweak and utilise for your own D&D games. It is a growing archive of hundreds of years of D&D experience, with contributors pouring thousands upon thousands of words from their own worlds and creations. I'd also recommend to check out r/d100 and r/behindthetables for some extra random inspiration for cool things to throw into your sessions. These can be used as generators, or just to provide yourselves with some new ideas - for example I recently constructed stats for some CR30 enemies using demon lords from the r/d100 subreddit. 3) Angry GM The Angry GM is probably my favourite DM tips blog, it's quite easy to read, and he presents things in a frank, rambling manner that can really shed some life on some things to try and adopt in your own game. Check out the below blog entries that are among my favourites of his: Building Encounters Skill Challenges Size and Scope 4) Critical Role A lot of people have heard of critical role. A fair amount of people have not. And I’m not going to come out saying that it’s the greatest D&D group ever. I’m not going to say that Matt Mercer is the best D&D in the world, though he is a good storyteller. I find watching D&D is a good resource in your downtime. Myself, I find that Critical Role makes for a great painting soundtrack. The fact that the whole group are voice actors means that you can witness some very cool interactions, and potentially be inspired by some of the events that occur during the show. Matt Mercer is an excellent storyteller, and good at putting on distinctive accents for his NPCs. Sure, they’re a little rules-light. Don’t look to this group as “the way to play D&D”. Instead, take it as a fun, enthusiastic group playing D&D and making a cool narrative. Link to season 1, episode 1 Link to season 2 character introductions 5) The Monsters Know There are more ways for a DM to play monsters harder than to simply buff their stats. The Monsters Know is a website/blog which gives advice to DMs on how to play monsters harder, better, faster, and stronger. They also include tips on making some slight modifications to them to help make them that little bit more difficult or unique. Check out some of my favourite advice blogs by them, below. Mind Flayer Tactics Lich Tactics Orc Tactics 6) Tucker’s Kobolds I follow a lot of RPG subreddits, and I follow a large D&D facebook page. Every couple of days I see a post about low-level monsters being “boring” or “not even a challenge”. And in almost every thread, I see at least one person make a reference to Tucker’s Kobolds. This infamous DM is renowned for one thing - his terrifying kobolds, which were just plain regular kobolds, who utilised equipment and tactics which made them a dangerous threat for even a 10th level party. If you have yet to read the small post on Tucker’s Kobolds, I highly recommend you to take a chance and read it now! What’s in your DM Toolbox? What’s in your appendix N? Let me know in the comments! With any luck you will find at least one of these tools useful in the improvement of your own DM skillset! Peter is an avid dungeon master, role-player, and story teller. When he's not running homebrew campaigns, he is creating new worlds, or he is reading and writing fantasy stories, forever immersing himself in the gaping black-hole known as the fantasy genre. Picture Reference: http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/stuff-we-love-dungeons-dragons-critical-role St. Valentine’s Day makes thoughts turn to love. In an RPG setting, love can be complicated to handle. Several attempts over the years have addressed it from the “lust” perspective, but there have been many mostly “indie” games that try to address it in a much more nuanced manner. If your genre includes romance at its core, an approach has been worked out to avoid the pitfalls and I recommend that you investigate one of those games. I think there are ways to address it in a more typical campaign (fantasy, horror, pulp, western, sci fi) that neither stray into uncomfortable areas nor ruin the feel of the campaign. Many television shows handle this very well by arranging for the more intimate moments to occur during a commercial break (or fade to black if you’re streaming). I’m going to look at this from the view of romantic love between two people and leave the many other kinds of love off the table until another blog. Let’s examine some ways that love can provide dramatic opportunities for your characters and campaign world. 1) Love As Distraction This is the typical case that comes up. Two characters see each other from across the crowded court, run into each other at a tavern, or find one another in a moment of drama as she breaks open the cell to rescue the Prince in Distress. There is electricity in the air either by proactive choice of the PC or the seductiveness of the other person. Whether this is handled purely through roleplaying or by some social mechanics, let’s assume there is a potent connection established. This connection will have a tangible impact on the character’s decision-making. Whether you are a courtier, hero, henchman, or noble, new love can be a serious distraction. Your thoughts turn constantly to the person you love and everything else seems much less important. Your quest, your oath, or your plots and designs can be easily derailed if you aren’t giving them your attention and energy. Others tend to notice and some are surely not happy about the situation. For characters that are pledged or devoted to a god, a king, or a cause, this provides a real challenge for the commitment. Generally those commitments don’t tolerate someone failing to live up to their word. Forgetting your duty to the king can get you imprisoned or even sentenced to death. Forgetting your duty to your god could imperil your soul and have you face difficult trials to earn your place again. Fellow devotees of a cause might find your wavering to be a threat to their success or even a sign of treason. Putting the character in a situation of having to choose between their new love and a commitment is critical to make these choices real and trigger the interesting consequences. 2) Love As Devotion On a more positive note, a character might plot the course of their life by a great devotion to their love. They will make choices that keep them in a position, role, or profession to stay near their love unless that proximity would endanger them in some way. Great devotions are sometimes lived through distance in that case. A character might have chosen a profession to honor or serve their great love. This works well if the love is high born and the character is a commoner. They might become a castle guard to do what they can to protect their love. Or become a caravaneer if their love travels often, hoping to follow them around the known world. Such love can survive even death. If ones true love has died but left the character charged with accomplishing something, it would be proof of their devotion to strive for that quest the rest of their life if necessary. 3) Love As Obsession If distraction is chaotic and devotion is good, obsession is the darkest form love can take, if love it can even be called. The object of the obsession may have refused their overtures or might not even be aware the character lusts for them. In a truly twisted version, the loved person might be fully aware and manipulate the obsessed person for their own purposes. The obsession can grow over time, starting with an infatuation but quickly escalating, exposing the obsessor’s underlying madness or evil intent. They would take ever increasing risks and make ever more grand gestures to prove to the loved person their devotion. Each time they are ignored or rebuffed only makes things worse. This is most appropriate for an anti-hero or an NPC. It would make an excellent basis for a villain, willing to cross all sorts of lines in their madness. Their obsession might be taken to epic proportions if they gain a position of power. The Trojan War began over obsession with the most beautiful woman in the world. The obsessed might seek to impoverish the object of obsession in order to drive them into their arms out of desperation. These techniques can be applied with player characters but also add a layer of reality and drama to NPC-NPC relationships as well. Consider the prince who has fallen for the wrong princess, upsetting the political plans of the king as just one example. I recommended bringing some love to your campaign this St. Valentine's Day. Jim Davenport founded Dragonlaird Gaming Studios in 2005 as a channel for his original tabletop RPG work. He’s an accomplished freelance writer with Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine (as a columnist) from Kenzerco, Margaret Weis Productions (Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Cortex), and many others. He published Savage Characters Volume 1 a couple years ago and has plans to release a series of Savage Adventures soon. You can find his website at www.dragonlairdgaming.com. Picture Reference: http://flick-chicks.blogspot.com/2016/02/valentines-day-my-favourite-tv-romances.html A tabletop roleplaying game is a communal and oral narrative experience shared by members of society. Though we have evolved out of the group hunts and dinnertime by the campfire, we still have that urge to tell and hear stories. Part of that evolution includes the implementation of group storytelling, enriched by different viewpoints brought to the same narrative. Tabletop roleplaying games are one such example, composed of narratives that stem from various sources, from the game’s conception to players’ real-time decisions. 1) The Players First and foremost, the players’ in-game decisions affect the world on the diegetic level with an immediate effect. Once the player’s turn arrives, the action is declared, and the dice are cast, the story moves to that reality instead of any other possibility. Every action and the result of said action affect the story directly. The Japanese replays, books that detail the events of a game like a script, show their importance and relatability. The players can also affect the story out-of-game as well. The players, more often than not, would suggest to other players what to do; they will joke around the table and claim that they want to achieve something for its added narrative value. This can be to make the situation more epic, dramatic, humorous or anything else. 2) The Game Master The Game Master, the Dungeon Master, the Master of Ceremonies, the Host, whatever the name or the scope of responsibilities of the person in charge of the story, the Game Master has more responsibilities than other players. In-game, he or she takes charge of all the non-player characters on top of introducing and concluding the scenes. With the description provided and character behavior displayed, the players can decide on their actions in response to the non-player characters and the situations in hand. The Game Master can steer the situation knowing his or her players. On top of setting up the narrative, the sandbox or the railway, the Game Master clarifies rules, mediates, and delegates logistical necessities. Every table creates a unified set of house rules alongside the game’s that are malleable and adaptable. The Game Master indirectly affects the story by defining and limiting what can and cannot be. The Game Master can also outright limit and redefine things that occur. 3) Outside Influences The game designers define the basic set of rules, backstory, and how the former is expressed by the latter. This affects every narrative created in the game since they are limited to the actants, the things that can appear in the chronotope. This focus creates a singular unique game world, with themes and styles of stories that can be told on top of the various actions that can be taken. If the Game Master has decided to run a module or to draw inspiration from one, he or she can focus on running and adapting the story to the players rather than creating a story of their own. This limits his or her influence and increases the designers’, but it makes it easier to run the game. All of these things are affected by the social presuppositions to various themes and tropes. No narrative exists in a void. Tabletop games draw from tropes in literature, pop culture, gaming, and even personal jokes or throwbacks to other games. Whether it is fulfilling the expected trope or going against it, no game is truly in a bubble. The experience of a tabletop game is an inclusive one, in terms of who can tell the story. Players and Game Masters can contribute in-game or out-of-game. The game designers and module writers frame their experience, which in turn is framed by our collective consciousness and familiarity with our own intrinsic culture. Asaph Wagner is a writer, editor and game designer currently residing in Israel. He also has the largest pro-wrestling and pop-culture lapel pin collection in the universe. https://twitter.com/asaphwagner . Picture Reference: https://geekandsundry.com/five-famous-tabletop-rpg-tales-too-epic-to-believe/ High Level Games’ articles are created by gamers, for gamers. Gamers know that gaming isn’t exactly the cheapest hobby; and hosting a site isn’t either. For those who want to support HLG, an avenue one could take is supporting us, at any level, on our Patreon page. The funds raised go back into the site and helps to keep our content coming. Thanks for the support! -Sean The Heavy Metal GM It’s daunting to run a roleplaying session for the first time. Building a unique world requires the design of compelling NPCs, interesting plot twists, and engaging encounters. Even picking up an Adventure Path requires a surprising amount of upkeep and work to make an enjoyable session for players. Even then, sometimes players just take the DM’s plans, throw caution to the wind, and leave all the carefully planned notes on the cutting room floor. Here are five tips for a first time DM to hopefully make the first few sessions a little more organized. 1) Plan Everything “Everything,” actually means, “almost everything.” It isn’t required to plan out what the random silk salesman is shouting out at the side of the road, but it does mean that everywhere the players are expected to go (and even the places they aren’t), a plan is required. The plan doesn’t need to be detailed, but having bullet points about each location, and any interactions at that location, can be very helpful. If a DM plans their encounters, they can be ready for when the players enter the area. Planning ahead allows a DM to stay focused on the gameplay as opposed to trying to remember what was supposed to happen in a given encounter. It takes away stress and reduces some of the reliance on improvisation. Of course, this doesn’t mean that adaptation on the fly is forbidden; planning “everything” merely creates a framework to follow, allowing for the possibility of organic surprises to form as the game plays. 2) Make Cheat Sheets There is a lot of information that DMs are required to remember at the drop of a hat. In Pathfinder, players can be affected by a vast array of similar sounding conditions like Frightened or Panicked. They’ll players will rightfully ask, “What does that do to my character?” and the DM will have to answer. Rather than looking everything up in the sourcebook or online in the moment, making a cheat sheet is a surefire way to keep the game focused and reduce stress on a first time DM. Conditions are a good example of the lesson: taking time before a session to familiarize oneself with rules leads to a smoother session. Writing a brief description of what each condition does to a character not only allows the DM to become familiar with them, but makes that information quickly accessible during a game. Conditions are overwhelming. Taking time before a session to familiarize oneself with rules leads to smoother gameplay. Writing a brief description of what each condition does to a character not only allows the DM to become familiar with them, but makes that information quickly accessible during a game. Doing the same for other complicated mechanics such as spells and monsters will also be beneficial for starting DMs. 3) Be Prepared To Improvise Even you think you’ve planned for it all, players will be players, and will find a way to put themselves into unimaginable situations. A DM can look at a situation and design a handful of reasonable routes to take. Yet, players can concoct a plan that goes against the very idea of reasonable and, somehow, it works. It’s the job of the DM to steer the ship back to the original plan as seamlessly as they can and make it look as if it was all meant to happen. This tip is essential because a DM may fall in love with the plans that they designed only for the players to never follow them. A good DM won’t railroad the players (force them on a specific path), but will instead adapt to what unfolds while considering their original plans. It’s a tricky balance, especially for the first few games, but it’s a skill to be practiced. Eventually, it will become quite comfortable. 4) Keep The First Few Sessions Really Simple There’s nothing wrong with a DM’s first session being a simple dungeon crawl. It’s a great place to learn how to make the game flow while also learning the play style of your players. Custom designed dungeons allow your personality find its way into a session, though they take a lot of work. In the first few games, it’s easy to forget something as essential as roleplaying. When a DM is just beginning, the rules should be the main focus and roleplaying will naturally begin to burgeon after some time. A dungeon is the perfect place to start, if you’re dead set on designing your own adventure. Focusing on building a small handful of rooms with their own unique encounters can help flex the creative muscles. The linear form most dungeons take also provides help in ensuring that the adventure follows a fixed path. Although, don’t be shocked if your players still surprise you! Dungeons can also provide their own semi-closed narrative, with the players starting in a specific room and being forced to find their way out. This allows players to have agency but there isn’t a larger, open ended plot. If a DM is looking for a premade adventure there are a variety of options online. Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons have a good variety of modules to play. High Level Games has released a great one page adventure that makes for a good starting point. It provides some encounters in a city/town, followed by a small dungeon. It can be run in a few hours and after completing it, the players can perhaps continue their characters into a new campaign, should it inspire you. Find The Cat’s Meow for 5th edition here. 5) Don’t Expect The First Time To Be Perfect Running a session is very challenging. Even an experienced DM can face situations that they don’t run well, or encounters that end up being boring. When, starting out your goal should be learning what works for you and your group. Mistakes are what help someone understand what’s effective, so welcome any missteps that are made with open arms. This is not saying that you should just try everything and see what sticks. A DM will take what they find interesting, wanting to push those ideas onto their players. That can be a good idea; but if the players seem to pull in a different direction, then for the next session, try adding a little of what they want to see. Finally, there’s nothing wrong with anyone simply saying, “Give me a second to look that up.” The players won’t lose anything if the DM needs to take a few moments to pull up a monster block, or ensure they are doing something correctly. There’s a lot of information in these games, and it’s against all reason and sense to memorize everything. My first session as a DM was in 2016. I’ve learned a lot from running a full scale campaign that was way out of my comfort zone. In retrospect, I wish that I had started smaller. I wish I knew the tips above. Instead, I learned the hard way. It has been a fun and amazing experience, one I think anyone holding interest should try at least once. Even if it scares them. Justin Cauti is a writer and Twitch streamer. He plays board/roleplaying games on the internet at http://www.playingboardgames.tv. Follow him on Twitter for updates on his boring life and writing projects @LeftSideJustin. Image source: Neuronphaser’s Books to Help You Become a Better Game Master Editor’s Note: Enjoy reading articles about your favorite hobby and engaging with fellow gamers? We do too, but hosting and producing our site isn’t free. Please consider visiting our Patreon page and supporting us at any amount. We put every dollar back into the site and its production, and your help has allowed us to have certain paid article months for our contributors (such as this month). Thank you for your continued readership and your support! -David, Blog Manager Since time immemorial, human beings have used art as a vehicle to express philosophies and ideas of all kinds. Taking a closer look at history, you can see that things like allegories stir up conversation, time and time again, about serious issues both new and old. We all agree gaming is an art, right? This begs the question: what keeps you from using this art form as a differently shaped vehicle for things you have been wrestling with? Everybody who’s reading this just had a different reason pop into their mind, if they can conjure any reason not to at all. With that thought, we arrive at our first stage. Before we dive in, I do want to point out that I’ll be exploring this idea in depth on my website, starting with a post about reasoning. 1) Why Go Through The Hassle? The most important stage is determining that reason for your allegorical campaign’s story arc. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t ask themselves why they do things. There are just as many reasons to go ahead with it as there are not to. To make one fact very clear: I’m not claiming that all games need to be rooted in or inspired by real life events. Funnily enough, stories (especially ones we use for our games) often times find their own way to mirror the real world. Just know that a GM doesn’t have to actively choose that pursuit. It’s no secret that gaming has often been used as a tool to confront difficult problems, fictional and factual, with this post serving as a possible starting point for people who choose to go ahead with this concept. This is a post to get the ball rolling only! There’s a lot of thinking required before deciding your campaign will be an allegory; thinking I highly encourage before you begin your process. 2) Subject and Stance You have a real-life issue (political, emotional, societal, etc.) that’s all encompassing of your brainpower. It could be the age-old question of, “What are we doing here,” or something more relevant for the time. The actual subject is just as important as where you stand on the matter, both things should be considered equally. Good practice for any person who thinks is to write down the major questions about the subject. Be challenging, ruthless to yourself even. Ponder long and hard in order to define your stance on the subject. Regardless of your findings, your personal stance is not the important part of your allegorical game! Remember this, recite this to yourself in the mirror every morning while you’re brushing your teeth. The goal of an allegorical game is to pose a loaded question that the players should challenge themselves on, not to pose a question that directly challenges them. Diametrically opposing your friends’ viewpoints is generally a bad idea, even more so when using a non-sensitive medium to open lines of communication on a potentially sensitive subject. The subject and stance together serve as the starting point for you to write your content, a general idea of the problems your characters will face. Coming to your personal stance serves only as a reference point to interpret how you players take it all in later. Always take your players’ personal experiences into consideration when determining your subject. Always, always, always; I can’t stress it enough. If that subject may cause issues, even when hinted at in the most subtle of ways, don’t use it. If you don’t know whether it’ll cause a problem, you have two options: Scrap it, or make a private inquiry. In situations where the latter is not comfortable and/or possible, simply choose the former. Period. 3) Delivery With the subject and stance already determined, it’s time to decide how to deliver the issue. Long story short, your subject should never slap your players in the face. If you outright ask them your big question, or even present your dilemma in a too overtly obvious way, it could do a number of things to your game. Worst case scenario, all your players see it, get angry, and call you on your shit. Then your game night is ruined, everybody is either going to want to argue or debate the topic, and at the very worst, someone leaves the group or it just disbands all together. Pretty high stakes, if you ask me. Of course, that situation assumes that your players have strong views, disagree with you, and don’t want this in their game. This brings us back to a basic piece of advice that every GM has said millions of times: Know your table! That simple phrase sums up the delivery of your allegory nicely. Of course, there’s more though. Make your delivery digestible, focused on the game and story itself (opposed to your subject), and fun. If any of these elements are missing, your allegory will fail in one way or another. Maybe not immediately, but it will fail. In addition, your overall delivery should have small bits of your own view and opposing views available within the story itself. Not only does it add some reality to the situation, but it masks your stance while still presenting the subject. Be wary of stereotypes, as they will show that you’re hiding behind the curtain. This can be delivered through NPCs most easily. Much of the advice in the NPC field is directly applicable to this kind of game and should be considered seriously. Mannerisms, statements, demeanor, clothing; all of these things should reflect the character’s stance on your subject in a subtle but understandable way. If a detail you give your NPC is pointing too overtly to the subject, add some layers. Putting these bits under layers of seemingly unimportant detail is the best way to set up for a gentle landing of the subject you’re trying to show. Again, you want your players to arrive at the subject on their own. These rules also apply to environments, situations (comfortable or sticky), consequences of actions and all manner of other things that take place within a story. Subtlety is key. Immersion should hide your subject in plain sight, as your stance should only ever be revealed outside of both game and the table. This is a game, fun is the primary purpose. In addition to the silence of the subject, there should be a climax where your subject comes out from the background, in the most miniscule sense. Turn the volume from four to a solid five-and-a-half. In such a way where it’d be akin to you pointing at someone on their phone a quarter mile away from you, asking your friend, “What do you think they’re reading?” Some friends will say that they don’t see who you’re talking about, some people will be sour that the person is on their phone instead of living the moment, and other friends will happily entertain the infinite possibilities of what media that person is consuming. Problem is, do you know which of your players fall where? 4) Reception This is the most important part of your allegory! The subject? Sure, can’t have the allegory without it. Your stance? Well, it does define how you present the many facets of the situation, after all. How about delivery? Landed more gently than someone in their bed when they’re not in the mood for sleep. At the end of said delivery, if you’re not receptive to how the players, your friends, are affected by your game, then what was it all for? When this point comes and you’re not receptive to the impact, then all you did was stand up on a soapbox and talk about a problem. If your point was to show people a subject, and even potentially your stance, without consideration of their own resolutions, you’re just being a jerk. Instead of going through the effort of making a whole game centered around your subject, you could’ve just had a one-sided conversation. Don’t make this mistake. Listen to your friends, be open and honest, and most importantly, be considerate. Agree to disagree, if that’s what needs to be done. Stimulate thought, not fiery emotions. When having these conversations, it’s easiest to work through the subject in the context of the campaign, rather than real life itself. Particularly opinionated people may want to specifically talk about it in the context of real life, but it’s up to you to determine if that conversation will be fruitful or not. To take this back from the dire social situation that could be potentially created, let’s ask, “What happens when your players don’t even see anything at all?” Best case is that your game spurs a constructive conversation, but this situation is the middle of the road. You can’t have an opinion on something you don’t know about, can you? Well, you can, not that it’s worth much, but that’s not my point. When the subject goes over the players’ heads, you still win. If they miss the subject, they feel neither positively or negatively about the allegory itself. What makes it a win is that you still confronted an issue with real people, through staged but usually genuine dialogue, and may or may not have benefitted from this experience. Go, you! When nobody else gets it, you did this for yourself in a way whereby everyone gets something out of it. Even if it was just a fun campaign or a way to hang with some close friends. Creating an allegorical campaign is a lot of work, carries a lot of risks, and makes your game art within art. Just as everything, choosing to do it this way comes with pros and cons that could be debated until the sun decides Earth is ready for consumption. A solid piece of advice on the matter: Be very, very, very aware and conscious of exactly what, how, and when you’re doing this. No room for negligence or jest when considering this one, folks. Exercise the muscle of reason, and have fun doing it. But let us not forget what’s most important… Stay Metal! \m/ Sean is the Heavy Metal GM, a freelance writer and blogger that loves the roleplaying games more than life itself. As a person who’s always up for a good discussion, his blog covers general gaming advice as well as specialized advice/homebrew rules for 13th Age RPG. You can find his website at www.heavymetalgm.com. Join the conversation. Picture Reference: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gaming/reviews/nier-automata-review/ Enjoy reading articles about your favorite hobby and engaging with fellow gamers? We do too, but hosting and producing our site isn’t free. Please consider visiting our Patreon page and supporting us at any amount. We put every dollar back into the site and its production, and your help has allowed us to have certain paid article months for our contributors (such as this month). Thank you for your continued readership and your support! -David, Blog Manager My players are well aware that my preferred method of storytelling involves an open world and a similarly open narrative. I find it supremely satisfying to hand over control of the game to the players and watch them do what they will with the characters, locations, and plot threads that I’ve created. This collaborative process feels more fulfilling to me as a GM than simply guiding players through a preconceived story, allowing them a mild measure of freedom or, at worst, the illusion of freedom. The more challenging road, in the case, proves the more rewarding one for me and those GMs like me, so I’d like to provide a few tips to assist those who enjoy the sandbox style. 1) A Tale Of Two Cities I most often plan out two starting locations for my open world games. Contrary to some of the advice that will follow, these city or location plans should be extensive, including a history of the locale if possible. Several interesting people, places, and plots should be developed for exclusive use within this place to serve as hooks to get players excited and involved quickly. What’s the reason for the second city? Sometimes players want to test your open world very early on, and will want to escape their starting location quickly and with complete disregard for your creations. Show them you mean business by introducing a completely separate area for them to explore with equal depth. You could take it a step further and keep planning cities and townships until your fingers cramp up, but I would recommend only fully preparing the two, then generating a few facts about surrounding spots that players can explore. Let them decide on a destination toward the end of the session, then flesh out that location in detail. 2) Malleable Monstrosities In preparing for your open world game, you’ll want to have a few adversaries set and ready at the starting line. Your players may find themselves running afoul of cultists, underground beasties, or angry mobs as early as their first session, so I recommend preparing some easily adaptable stats that could apply to any scenario. What’s located in Old Man Miller’s basement? Well how about enemy supplement #3, complete with acid breath and physical resistance. Establish the basics of a low level encounter, but leave room for minor variations (such as the aforementioned acid breath). That way you’re not scrambling to look through monster manuals when your players stray from the expected path. The basic stats for the underground monster and an angry cultist don’t vary so much at lower levels, only their unique abilities. Keep those stat blocks around and add a dash of improvised creativity, and you’ve got a monster for any occasion. 3) Roll With The Punches Always expect the unexpected in a sandbox game. Work on your improv skills through practice and, if you have the time and interest, by listening/watching other people GM. Don’t be afraid to suffer a few setbacks in the overarching narrative; allow your players to wander down side roads and experiment with weird situations and creations. The goal of any sandbox experience is to provide players with a real sense of agency that goes beyond which attack they’ll perform on their next combat round. If that means sacrificing some narrative cohesion or dramatic tension, than I would argue that its for a good cause. With time and practice, you’ll be able to maintain momentum in your story while letting players keep the reins. To help achieve this lofty goal, I have one final piece of advice. 4) Lists! Having multiple lists at your disposal can make any game easier, but it really facilitates the operation of an open world. A list of names is a must, but you can also include a list of strange phenomena, a list of random encounters, a list of dramatic turns, and even a list of city features that you can apply to any place the player characters wander off to. I have gone so far to produce a list of side quests that were relevant to the PCs and their connections, so that they could bring their companions on a meaningful (if tangential) adventure while waiting for the main plot to catch up. If you’re feeling really bold, let your players roll on the lists. In one instance, I created a village of assassins that fired diseased darts at their enemies. The players that failed their Constitution Saves rolled three times on three tables to discover the random illness with which they were now plagued. Some combinations proved to be as entertaining as they were deadly! My final piece of advice to prospective GMs is to not fear the open world. Taking just a few preparatory steps can lead you into a world that players not only explore, but also help to create. I think that everyone at the table will find this to be rewarding and enjoyable, no matter which narrative carries them through the game. Share your advice with me and the community! Comments and questions are welcome, as always. David Horwitz is a gamer and freelance writer with an obsession for exploring new forms of leisure. If you’re looking for an inquisitive mind and a deft hand, or just want to chat about gaming, contact him at www.davidhorwitzwrites.com/contact . Picture Reference: https://noplatform.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/can-the-witcher-3-become-a-good-open-world-story-based-rpg/ Editor’s note: Enjoy reading articles about your favorite hobby and engaging with fellow gamers? We do too, but hosting and producing our site isn’t free. Please consider visiting our Patreon page and supporting us at any amount. We put every dollar back into the site and its production, and your help has allowed us to have certain paid article months for our contributors (such as this month). Thank you for your continued readership and your support! -David, Blog Manager Milgrak advised me to contact you as soon as you brought him an unusual gown your slain vampiress was wearing, apparently the work of the peerless Borcan fashion designer Bertold Iacomo. On your life, let no one know you possess the Iacomo Rose! It’s not cursed in the typical sense, but it’s hunted by many desperate and resourceful parties, servants of the one who took a thing of beauty and made it a venomous weapon. Many who have vanquished immortal creatures of the night have been unprepared to face the true ruthlessness of mortals in the daytime. I will tell you what I can…. Master poisoner Ivan Dilisnya’s creativity and cruelty have borne strange and bitter fruit that take many by surprise. PC’s with plenty of antitoxin can still fall prey to these stranger facets of Ivan’s poison politics. 1) Borrowed Time Ivan’s inner circle of guards knows that if he dies, he takes with him the formula for Mercy, the temporary antidote that delays the fatal Borrowed Time in their systems for one more day. Of course, these servants cannot travel far without additional Mercy to take with them, but there are rumors that a few have magical delivery methods for long distance travel. Having learned the hard way that some would spend their last day in suicidal revenge, Ivan considers carefully before starting the week-long process of poisoning a new recruit, and prefers condemned criminals who genuinely see the poison as a reprieve. 2) Gravitas Gravis The faux-Darkonese name is painful, but no one would dare correct Ivan’s grammar. Upon hearing of Somnos wine from Darkon, he created his own fast-acting intoxicant to loosen lips. A mind clouded by it is prone to rambling and finds everything funny, but nothing more hilarious than divulging their own secrets. Many screams heard in Degravo are actually the sounds of people recovering, realizing that they have gleefully destroyed themselves with barely any interrogation at all. 3) The Iacomo Rose This blush-colored taffeta gown was worth more than a small farm when Ivana gave it to a foreign agent provocateur to help seduce Ivan. Wise to their intrigues, Ivan used his Envenom ability to infuse the dress with strength-draining contact poison, but the woman inexplicably ignored the effects and fled to Dementlieu with the dress. Now Ivan seeks the dress in the hopes of understanding what went wrong. The lethal poison actually prevents mold and mildew, and if handled with the accompanying unvenomed gloves someone might live long enough to try it on. 4) Varcolac Similar in some ways to catalytic poison, banewort preparation is blended with another plant to make the victim allergic to that plant for several hours. Some of Ivan’s quislings are fond of blending it with wolvesbane to make “varcolac,” which makes it appear the victim is infected with lycanthropy. Victims may isolate themselves from their allies if they believe the ruse, and may draw the attention of monster hunters either way. Rumor has it that Ivan has created similar alchemical preparations that create temporary allergy to a specific metal, such as silver, gold or cold iron. 5) Lampwick A form of catalytic poison combined with ether, naptha and a sample of the victim’s hair, this oily liquid slowly evaporates to create thick vapors that cause one specific person to lose consciousness. The poison runs out faster when burned but the effect is much stronger, and dried tobacco can absorb quite a volume in lampwick and still remain flammable. Many of Ivan’s more subtle hunters are fond of lampwick pipes or cigars, surrounding themselves in clouds of smoke in situations where they might confront a target in public, and even blowing a puff of sleep-smoke as a direct weapon. 6) Night Ride This poison has two possible effects, both diabolically subtle. A single dose up to four hours before sleeping will disrupt sleep ever so slightly, causing the victim to talk or even walk in their sleep. A clever person can manipulate the sleeping victim into confessing secrets, implant a suggestion, or direct specific actions of the sleeper. A double dose will allow the victim to sleep normally to observers, but they will wake exhausted, the poison having prevented them from getting any rest. The former is popular in situations where blackmail is preferable to murder. The latter is generally part of a gaslighting campaign, or to keep a foe from restoring strength. 7) Veridian Ivan’s obsession with eternal youth led him to rumors of a Valachani sorcerer’s elixir of immortality. All attempts to reproduce the formula yielded only spectacular deaths, but Ivan saved one of the failures for when he isn’t concerned about collateral damage or cleanup. A bottle of this bright green liquid grants acid and fire immunity and fast healing, but the victim suffers increasing nausea, interspersed by vomiting monstrous oozes and slimes made from their own dissolving organs. Over the course of three days, the victim continues to live sans spleen, stomach, lungs and finally heart, growing thinner and paler with each purge until they collapse into a featureless puddle. No one knows if the original person’s mind remains intact. If so, and if they are truly immortal, this may be the worst fate Ivan has inflicted on anyone. I don’t mean to frighten you, nor would I extort your property from you. My offer is a fair price for a dress that cannot be safely worn and attracts unwanted attention, and none of the others hunting it will make such an offer. Indeed, you may be lucky if they let you keep your life. Dr. Phillippe Delapont Leyshon Campbell has been playing and writing for Ravenloft for over twenty years, from the Kargatane's Book of S series, playtesting D&D 3E in a Ravenloft campaign, to the ill-fated Masque of the Jade Horror. He married his wife on Friday the 13th after proposing to her on Halloween. By tradition, the first story read at birth to each of their three children was The Barker’s Tour, from Ravenloft’s “Carnival” supplement. Picture Reference: https://io9.gizmodo.com/strychnine-a-brief-history-of-the-worlds-least-subtle-1727903421 Editor’s note: Enjoy reading articles about your favorite hobby and engaging with fellow gamers? We do too, but hosting and producing our site isn’t free. Please consider visiting our Patreon page and supporting us at any amount. We put every dollar back into the site and its production, and your help has allowed us to have certain paid article months for our contributors (such as this month). Thank you for your continued readership and your support! -David, Blog Manager In the last several years we’ve all witnessed an increasing number of natural disasters in the U.S. and around the world. From record-breaking firestorms in California to a series of violent hurricanes striking the eastern parts of the United States, Mother Nature is upset. If we think of our gaming campaigns, these sorts of things often get overlooked. It’s true that our campaigns should be about the heroes and their stories but those stories are about challenge, struggle, and defeating insurmountable odds. Confronting a master villain and her undead army is one level of challenge. Doing so during a monsoon is yet another level. And what if that disaster was not so natural? Let’s examine some causes of “natural” disasters and see how they can be used to enhance your gaming campaign. 1) The Gods Are Angry! In a campaign where magic is real and the faithful of a deity can be granted the powers to heal and more, gods are a fact of life. If they are remote entities such as in Game of Thrones, it is unlikely that their wishes or influence will touch the mortal realm. But if your gods and goddesses are more like the soap opera of the Greek or Roman mythos, there are countless ways to find yourself out of favor. If you are important enough or perhaps the country you are in offends one of the gods (not enough sacrifice, uttering sacrilege, favoring a rival deity), they might unleash true wrath. The form of this anger depends upon the god. A god of the seas would likely send a typhoon to drown the mortal insects that displease him. A goddess of health and vitality might turn a blind eye to a virulent plague to which no prayers or spells are effective. A god of the earth itself? Well, get ready to rock and roll and perhaps have half your country slide into the sea. The adventure comes in surviving the wrath and finding a way to placate the offended god or goddess. A harrowing quest, a great sacrifice, or a holy crusade against believers of a rival god may end the pitiless disasters. 2) Things Man Was Not Meant To Know If there are deep, unspeakable forces of evil hell-bent on destroying our world or reality itself, delving into their secrets can have drastic consequences. The impact might be everyone in an extended family, a whole town, or even a whole nation. If a mortal were so foolish as to attempt to draw power from such an abyss of evil, to even craft deals with forms the abyss conjures before him, an evil surge might be released of epic proportions. These sorts of disasters would feel less… natural. Storms might bring tornadoes and boiling rain. The earth would quake over and over again, disrupting any attempts to save people or fix the damage. All birds and animals might become hostile and blood thirsty. Closing the gateway to such evil would challenge the mightiest of adventurers while dealing with a world gone mad. 3) I Am All-Powerful! Perhaps great power is all around us, a magic without its own purpose, accessible only to those who sacrifice, toil, and study. If someone makes years of such sacrifice, they could wield tremendous power and bend it to their own purposes. Simply the release of such power for any purpose could incidentally cause huge natural disasters. Some might occur immediately: firestorms, tornadoes, or torrential rains. Other consequences might only appear over time: plagues, drought, and famine. Still, the cause of these disasters would not be apparent. They might even be attributed to natural events. But if our great and powerful mage wished to bend these events to their own purposes, perhaps inflicting them upon countries which would resist his rise to power, we would return once again to great destruction at the will of great evil. Consider if the mage did not expect these far-ranging disasters to come from their magic and inflicted it on their own land first by accident. To divert attention or blame, he might inflict it on his neighbors as well, confusing who is behind the disasters and what purpose they might have. This would certainly create a multi-layered villain that would challenge our heroes. A disaster is a great way to shake-up your campaign world, even reshape it in some ways. Tying it to a classic fight against great evil would make for an engaging and challenging adventure arc. Jim Davenport founded Dragonlaird Gaming Studios in 2005 as a channel for his original tabletop RPG work. He’s an accomplished freelance writer with Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine (as a columnist) from Kenzerco, Margaret Weis Productions (Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Cortex), and many others. He published Savage Characters Volume 1 a couple years ago and has plans to release a series of Savage Adventures soon. You can find his website at www.dragonlairdgaming.com. Picture Reference: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/339177415659538518/ Ah, campaign openings. Where should I start? Providing a solid introduction to your new campaign gives you a foundation from which to build your characters and settings, while simultaneously enrapturing your players and helping them invest in your narrative. There are several ways to do this, and some are more effective than others. I’d like to explore some of the more common methods with the goal of evaluating them for common use. 1) The Tavern Perhaps the most common setting for beginning a campaign, the “tavern” can be any common place where adventurous types might meet up to undertake quests of any stripe. Typically, players are asked to introduce their characters to some degree of familiarity, depending on whether or not the group has been traveling with each other up to that point. This latter notion can present a few problems. If the player characters already know each other, they will have to mutate their individual narratives to fit the group purpose without allowing it to naturally develop during play. If the characters are just meeting each other for the first time, their personalities or desires may chafe to the point that they might not want to travel together at all. Concessions will then need to be made in order to get the story off the ground. Furthermore, this approach can lead to a relatively slow start. Players may get bogged down in the opening overtures and lose interest before their interest can be properly captured. All in all, this method does the job well enough, but it is somewhat overused and can introduce a few problems along the way to the story proper. 2) In Media Res Another popular method for introducing any story is to begin in the midst of the excitement. The player characters might be fleeing from some terrible threat, dropping through a ceiling vent to begin an infiltration, or even in the middle of combat. This approach may be viewed by players as bold, though it too can introduce problems. Without a chance to get their bearings, players may have trouble introducing their characters into the narrative, instead focusing on solving a challenge instead of playing their role. There may also arise some confusion regarding the setting or narrative. If you start too fast, especially with newer players, you could have more than your fair share of system issues come up. All that being said, this method tends to be intriguing enough to help players overlook most problems and get into the fun of gaming and shared storytelling. My advice for those looking to try this is simply to be prepared to stop occasionally and answer questions to keep players grounded in the narrative. 3) The Flashback Instead of opening with action or a static setting, GMs can introduce their game by opening briefly in the present, then flashing back to a critical point in the narrative. Perhaps we revert to the scene when the characters meet one another, or when they meet the big bad. This method can be effective when starting new arcs of a campaign as well. The major problem that might arise with this opening style is the issue of information overload. Players already have to deal with how their new characters are handling the present situation (whatever that might be), but now they have to answer the question of how their character will act in a different time setting as well. Unless they’re properly prepared, players may balk at this method. Nevertheless, this can prove an intriguing and perhaps novel method of campaign introduction, especially if used for player characters that have already survived a previous campaign together. 4) Individual Preludes This idea I’ve gleaned from White Wolf games, but it could function conceivably in any RPG or setting. It requires the most time and effort of the methods listed here, as GMs must sit with each player individually and run a solo session of some length and description that explores their character’s story prior to the campaign proper. Therefore, this functions best when used in conjunction with other methods, and for campaigns that you plan on running for a good amount of time. Too much setup can be a negative for shorter games, after all. You’ll still have to decide how you want to start your first joint session, but a lot of the individual character growth and development will be behind you, allowing you to focus on bringing these disparate player characters together in purpose. When I use this method, I often ask players to go a step further and prepare a short backstory for their character so we can really delve deep into the roleplaying aspect of the game. You can expand this even further by running multiple sessions with individual characters or groups of two, forging character traits more naturally before bringing the group together and forcing cooperation to some degree. Admittedly, this would take an extremely dedicated GM with a considerable amount of free time. The benefits of such an endeavor could outweigh the costs, but I haven’t tried it yet! Most often, I find myself using a combination of methods to create a captivating yet practical campaign introduction. My experiments don’t always work out perfectly, but they certainly mix things up for my players, which typically presents value regardless. I’d encourage you to try a few of these methods or some concoction of several, or come up with your own methods and let me know about them. As GMs, we’re always trying to find ways to combat complacency and fight for our players’ attentions, especially in the age of the cell phone. Share your secrets! David Horwitz is a gamer and freelance writer with an obsession for exploring new forms of leisure. If you’re looking for an inquisitive mind and a deft hand, or just want to chat about gaming, contact him at www.davidhorwitzwrites.com/contact . Image is courtesy of JESHIELDS: https://www.patreon.com/jeshields/posts One of the most challenging villains in fiction is the mastermind. Knowing that they’re way smarter than you out of the gate creates more of a challenge than just the high hit points or armor of a big tough guy. They always seem one step ahead and often become a long-running nemesis. I started thinking about this again when watching an episode of the latest season of Longmire on Netflix. (Spoilers ahead!) Chance Gilbert is the leader of a “family” of violent, anti-government extremists. He cloaks his words in the rhetoric of liberty and freedom while arming to the teeth and being willing to kill to get his way. His murder of a census worker sent him down a path of conflict with Sheriff Longmire. Chance is highly intelligent, charismatic to the right audience, and well-educated. He uses grey areas, cracks in existing laws, and nebulous arguments citing the founding fathers to resist paying taxes and obeying laws. In the TV series, he kidnaps one of Longmire’s deputies and tortures her. He is captured but masterminds his own escape leading to a manhunt and final showdown with the Sheriff. Studying the Chance Gilbert example and reflecting on other examples in popular culture, I wanted to highlight the keys to a challenging mastermind villain. 1) Always Three Steps Ahead Chasing a mastermind should be very frustrating. Their plans are complex and seem to cover every contingency. Heroes can end up running as fast as they can to find themselves just short of capturing the mastermind, saving the victim, or recovering the stolen object. Each failure of our heroes along this path should be a body blow, not a knockout. They need to feel bested but not defeated. The mastermind can strike at their weak spot, their secret vulnerabilities, yet always leave them wounded but alive. For example, a threatening message or even a bombing could reveal that the mastermind knows about their ultra-secret base, revealing a vulnerability. There are several good examples of this in the Longmire-Gilbert plot line. Gilbert makes his original escape from custody using a gun wrapped in plastic hidden in a toilet tank along with civilian clothes stashed nearby. It took careful planning and the manipulation of helpers to set that up. When Gilbert is on the run from the courthouse, he dons a gas mask and tuxedo as a disguise. When the Sheriff follows him around a corner, Longmire finds dozens of people standing around in his exact outfit wearing gas masks; a perfect distraction while Gilbert gets away. The decoy people are oblivious to what is really going on. They had just answered a Craigslist ad with strange requirements that promised them a lucrative opportunity. The mastermind also gains advantage by perverting assumptions. A prison guard who is assumed to be doing his duty is actually aiding Gilbert by stashing the clothing, gas mask, and pistol. If the mastermind can get enough leverage through knowledge or lies, they can turn all manner of law-abiding citizens into witting or unwitting allies. Even our heroes can be twisted if the mastermind can put them in a paradoxical position. The hero has to perform a criminal act to benefit the mastermind in order to save a captured ally or keep a sensitive matter secret. Of course, once the hero does this, the mastermind is sure to capture evidence (video) of the hero aiding him as further leverage next time. Often the hero must face personal loss (bodily harm, loss of reputation/job/standing) by resisting this leverage and making certain they capture the mastermind. 2) The Rare Error of Detail Investigating a mastermind should be pretty frustrating as they are very detail-oriented and have planned for players’ expected reactions. Still the mastermind needs to work with others to execute their plans, and those others are prone to making little mistakes. These little errors are the sort that get an investigator hero’s radar up, teasing that something is wrong without pointing it out directly. In Longmire, Gilbert requires the aid of a prison guard to make his escape work. The guard is supposed to let him use the men’s room to change from his courtroom clothes back to his prison jumpsuit and sends him into a narrow stall. Later, Longmire asks the guard why he didn’t put him in the handicapped stall which was much roomier. This was enough to get the guard to start to crack and then give up what he knew of the plan (which mostly explained what already happened and not much of what was coming next). If the heroes can detect some seemingly minor variation of procedure, they can follow that thread to uncover what happened. Since few of us are current or former law enforcement agents, I would suggest that Gamemasters allow any officer of the law a roll to see if they think the other officers performed correctly. 3) Fatal Flaws If a mastermind has no flaws, they are essentially unbeatable which is not fun for anyone. The real way to take down a mastermind is by taking advantage of their weakness instead of struggling with their strength. If their plans are unbeatable, change the game. Tempt them with something that they obsess over, something that will get them to act without all the careful planning. A typical fatal flaw for a mastermind is their arrogance born of belief in their own massive intellect. They can be played by flattering that arrogance or potentially by challenging it, goading them into a style of conflict that favors our heroes or even just distracts them long enough for backup to arrive. In Longmire, Chance Gilbert becomes obsessed with Deputy Vic Morelli. He tortures her in an early episode but ends up getting arrested. This gives her PTSD and a lingering fear of him. He blames his failure all on her and makes elaborate plans to terrorize and kill her once he escapes. His family writes scary messages on the side of her home and lurks around the hospital as she recovers from surgery. This obsession makes his moves more predictable and forces him to act from emotion instead of logic. Masterminds can be one of the most challenging villains to create for a Gamemaster but they can also be one of the most satisfying enemies for your players to eventually defeat. There's nothing like watching the bad guy get away time and again to amp up the players' desires to get him at last. I hope these ideas help you introduce a mastermind in your next game. Jim founded Dragonlaird Gaming Studios in 2005 as a channel for his original tabletop RPG work. He’s an accomplished freelance writer with Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine (as a columnist) from Kenzerco, Margaret Weis Productions (Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Cortex), and many others. He published Savage Characters Volume 1 a couple years ago and has plans to release a series of Savage Adventures soon. You can find his website at www.dragonlairdgaming.com. Picture Reference: https://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2014/07/longmire-season-3-episode-7-population-25-calls-for-help-craig-johnson-wyoming-edward-a-grainger Before I go into this, I want to say that I am in no way shape or form a professional in mental health or counselor. I am just a person who battles depression. I also want to say I am okay, in case someone were to worry about my well-being. This article is very personal and took a lot of courage for me to talk about. This is for those who are afraid to to talk about it. The numbness felt like a bottomless pit that would pull me in deeper every time I climbed a few feet. I got to the point of pure despair and the only way out seemed to be the permanent solution. Then my father and uncle introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons. After a few sessions, I realized how much this game allowed me to get breathing room. It helped me to start climbing out of the pit. Let me share a few reasons why roleplaying in general has saved my life and helped me battle my ultimate evil. 1) Friends Once a week, my friends and I get together to play 13th age. I also play another game every other week with the Heavy Metal GM. It is a guaranteed day out of the week for me not to be alone. When I am at the table with friends, they distract me from the pit. They make me smile, laugh, and allow me to feel human. Genuine emotions come out of me when I am with them. I feel alive when I am with friends. As dungeon master of my Tuesday game, nothing makes me happier than seeing them have a good time. I am really thankful for the support they give me, for the fact they that can dedicate four hours to hang out. Thanks guys, if you're reading this. For me, being alone just doesn't help. Being surrounded by people who care has made a huge difference in my life, my friends really make life worth living. 2) A Break From Reality Sometimes taking a break from the real world can be helpful. Being a character from a different world is a nice way to escape my own thoughts. Part of my depression is that I have become an expert in separating myself. What I mean by this is that I have a better understanding of my own emotions and separating myself from them is easier for me. In turn it has helped me get into character, allowing me to understand the thoughts, motives and emotions of the character. I get to be this amazing hero that mostly everyone adores. Most of the characters I play are parts of me put into a different situation than my real one. The character I currently play is Crysx Silverleaf, who has an identity problem. He is struggling to find who he is and who he’s meant to be. I often suffer from the same feeling, and playing it out in game helps me find new ways to approach different situations, process emotions and how to comfort myself within. Crysx is also terrified of the dark and what lurks within it. He’s scared of the darkness because of his own problems he had growing up; treating the darkness like a villain he had to overcome. It’s like this overwhelming thing I can't put my fingers around and beat with just my hands. The form the darkness takes is the villain. This is like an imagined version of my depression for me. It's a nice break from reality when I can be someone who can actually fight the villain. I really got to thinking about this when the villain knew I was afraid of him so he dominated my mind, making me fight my friends. Depression can do a lot of things to an individual, sometimes it can take you over before you can do anything to prevent it. It’s beyond enjoyable for me to be somewhere away from my real problems. I’m not sure if it's the artistic side of me, but I can embed myself in my character's shoes so easily. Maybe it's my subconscious telling that escaping reality for a bit is how to keep mental stability in check. 3) Looking Forward I don't tend to look forward to things. Letting myself down, which happens more than I would like to admit, really drags me down into the pit. I have these aspirations that are seemingly impossible to achieve. This hobby gives me a sense of purpose. Instead of being nagged by the wonder and worry of what I am doing with my life, I get to write these articles and produce a podcast. It’s not the only thing that helps me get through the week, but it has had a large positive impact on my life. I’ve met good people, formed stronger bonds with friends, and found a more positive outlook in life. I also want to dedicate this section to HLG, for giving me an opportunity to talk about all the cool things I like with other people. I look forward to writing these articles because of the community, excitement I feel when I get one like or a comment on my posts. It makes me happy. It has been extremely nice to finally have something to look forward to, even when I am pretty deep in the pit. I keep pushing myself because this is a hobby that makes me happy and I don't want to lose hold of it. Just to stress it: I am not a mental health expert in anyway. I want people to know, who are suffering, that it's ok to reach out and talk to someone. This community has some of the nicest and most honest people I have ever talked to. It takes a lot of courage to talk about your weaknesses; don't let it beat you. You're the hero of the story, so get out there and kick some ass. With lots of love, stay nerdy. Benjamin Witunsky, artist, writer and nerd savant. Cofounder of the NerdMantle Podcast available on Soundcloud, Itunes and Google Play Music. Picture Reference: http://www.artofmtg.com/art/healing-hands/ World tendency, put simply, is the usual outcome for a situation most often in reference to video games, board games, and books (e.g. Fire-breathing dragons exist in your fantasy world. Most likely, nearby citizens will build their homes out of something non-flammable, like stone). World tendency has a lot to do with cause and effect, and it can play a huge part in either making or breaking a game, despite not being addressed often. This goes doubly so for world builders. As a world builder and DM, you are responsible for crafting not only a convincing world for your players to romp around in but also for making your world mechanically harmonic with the paradigms of that world. Sorry, let me give you an example. Your human ranger is caught in the smoldering maw of a tower’s highest chamber as, below, a drake continues to spit lashes of flame in an unequipped town. You vault from the tower into a swan dive, and your DM asks you to make a DC 20 acrobatics check (since most world tendencies would state that leaping gracefully from a flaming tower would be quite difficult). Now you say that you intend to brandish your scimitar mid-fall and plunge it into the beast’s neck. You are asked to make an attack roll with some significant penalties because, again, doing this in most instances would be quite a challenge. You make the rolls, slicing through the drake’s scales and deep into its vertebra. Congratulations: you are a badass. But what if that acrobatics check was a DC 5? Or you didn't take any penalties for attacking the monster mid-air? The easy payoff would not be nearly as sweet as the hard fought one, and frankly, it would seem a little contrary to how the world usually functions. All this is to say two things. First, mechanical harmonics in world tendency is just a fancy way of saying, “Make how you work with the world compliment how the world works.” Second, I have 4 tips help you get closer to mechanical harmony. 1) “... Because Magic.” Magic is an important pillar of any fantasy world, if not the most important. It’s what sets the general foundation for what can and cannot be done. A lot of roleplay engines handle the mechanics behind magic very generally, because there is so much possibility to unpack. As a world builder myself, I would determine the properties and rules of magic very early on. You can borrow Skyrim’s approach and think of magic as a latent power that most people can conjure up given the practice whether by study or natural ability. You can treat magic as something a bit more draconian, something mysteriously hidden from most of the population. Anything in between is a valid choice too, but the point is MAKE A CHOICE! Recently, I was sent some info for The Dragon's Horde concerning a campaign about a kingdom plagued by dark wizards. According to the author, magic was a “pretty sparse thing” that was seldom seen and condemned when noticed, yet in the starting village the PCs had met a fortune teller, helped a pyromancer, sold an enchanted crystal, and had an alchemist infuse a potion with frost powers because the players thought it would be cool. The world tendency is laid out pretty clearly as being low fantasy, but mechanically, we see something completely dissonant from that idea. While you shouldn't deny your players things they like to engage with, there is nothing wrong with making them work for it. If you tell them, “Hey, not much magic in this world, buckos,” and they ask you for a frost potion, you are completely within your rights to remind them that they are playing in a world where you can't just pick up that kind of thing from Walmart… but you may have heard an old rumor of a witch who stashed a trove of potions in a chest deep within the forest. Harmonic, engaging; Gygax would be proud. 2) Death And Taxes Death is something that has to be handled carefully in role playing games. Players get attached to characters, and it can be tough seeing them cross over to the other side. Some engines handle this very well; while others really fall short. Personally, I have a strong distaste for D&D’s “three strikes, you're out!” method of death saving throws. It feels so gamey, and it is completely inharmonious with world tendency. When your hero gets gored with a broadsword, in no universe would they lie there in a pile of their own intestinal tract and manage to survive by, what? Willing themselves to just not be dead three times? I hate to sound harsh, but it’s honestly a let down given how seasoned D&D is. Now of the flip side of that, let's look at Pathfinder’s death mechanics. Again, your hero has been gored on the battlefield. In Pathfinder, instead of concentrating your large intestine back, you war and roll against a slowly dwindling constitution score. Your constitution represents your hardiness, your physical ability to withstand blows, and your capacity for vitality. It has this beautifully evocative mood to it, and it is harmonic with world tendency! Hardier people (people with higher constitution scores) are going to be able to stave off the reaper for longer. As odd as it sounds, it is for a similar reason that I feel the board game Monopoly is trite. Monopoly’s world tendency is congruent with its objective, that is: ride around and buy properties to make lots of cabbage. Why then are you punished with jail time, randomly, for following world tendency? You weren't breaking any in-game law. There is zero mechanical resonance. It's a tax, and it always feels contrived and undeserved. Now oppose that with Catan’s robber mechanic! A group of settlers struggle to raise a kingdom from the ground up, and they hoard their resources. In comes a robber, and they lose up to half of their goods, all on the roll of the dice. Both the robber and going to jail are a random tax that definitely aren’t enjoyable when they pertain to you, but one of them feels so much more intuitive. In Catan, the robber is a negative stimuli that encourages you to play the game intelligently by using your resources in a timely, efficient manner. Going to jail just feels like a slap in the face by Hasbro for buying their game. Death can feel very similar, if it isn’t handled with grace. Make it mean something narratively and mechanically; don't be a Hasbro. 3) Deus Ex Another thing world builders have to contend with is determining the spiritual side of their universe. Deities play such a vital role in many fantasy worlds, and really nailing a pantheon down can be a huge boon to a DM. Determining world tendency concerning your god or gods will be your biggest aid in finding fitting mechanics. Are your gods meddlesome? Do they frequently make contact with mortals? Rolling percentile dice, to pray, fits that's world tendency very snuggly, and you, as the DM, can adjust the percent of success based on how likely you feel their deity is to say hello! Percentiles are also easy to understand mechanically by players as well. Sometimes D20s can feel arbitrary to newer players, and they may not really understand why they need to roll a 14 and to add 2 to their roll to contact Pan. However, if you say, “You're a religious guy, and Pan is definitely cool with how you have been rolling. You have a 40 percent chance that he will reply.” Less involved deities may need a ritual to contact or summon them. Maybe your paladin needs to perform a certain act to garner attention from the spiritual force of her choice. It feels more fleshed out to have a player make supplication to a deity than to have them just dial their fantasy phone. Deities are not genies in a bottle, they are powerful spiritual forces and entities that are usually quite engaged with doing… god things. 4) Pearls (and a Kukri) Before Swine Loot is great. Loot is fun. What’s more enticing than finding a glistening, golden sword stacked haphazardly on a mound of coins in a dangerous cave? Well, a lot actually, because people don’t really do that. Too often do DMs throw loot around like candy from a mentally incontinent geriatric on halloween without providing any context for it. Obviously, it would be safe to assume that it was placed there, but why? If someone was perhaps defending himself against cave dwelling baddies, why would he leave his sword behind? And if he died there, why is there no body? While questions like these may seem nit picky, little details (even explained in an implicit way) help to flesh out the world tendency. ANY TIME there is loot lying around waiting to be pinched by a player, you as the DM should know how and why it got there. I once knew a DM who had us running through a mountainous region as a sort of gauntlet, and along the way, we stopped in cave. While we rested, a few people decided to explore the small cavern, and what did they find? PEARLS AND A +2 POISON KUKRI! They promptly ran back to wake the party, and thus begins 4 real-time hours of searching for whomever discarded the opalescent orbs. Long story short, there was no person. There was no quest. There was no story. Afterwards the DM tells us how frustrated he gets when we go off on tangents every time he tries to give us the goods. What followed was a heated discussion on world tendency (someone had to have placed that perfectly good knife there) and the ecology of oysters… Mechanically, the pearls make sense in that they are a valuable item that can be sold for in-game currency. That checks out. That’s definitely a great incentive for money driven characters, but it’s shallow. If a spade was just supposed to be a spade, why not have us find something more harmonic with world tendency like a clutch of crystals or even some small semi-precious stone? On the flip side, why not build a short quest from the pearls and the small knife, even if it is just a quick “find the body” kind of mission? Since rewarding your players with loadouts is an essential part of roleplaying games, you could use them as another tool in your belt to help bolster the game mechanically and narratively by diving into your world’s tendencies. Loot should always mean something in that way. If you keep throwing piles of gold coins on your players, eventually money just becomes a gilded burden. So to answer my previous question of, “what is better than a gleaming sword on a stack of treasure?”: forethought. World tendency is probably a DM’s most valuable tool at their disposal. It allows one to create logical, universal consistencies that are easy for players to interpret. It also aids you in being able to predict their next move, which can be immensely difficult even for the most seasoned DM’s. When world tendency and game mechanics begin to harmonize, players and DM’s alike are more free to create and adventure since the understand how the world works and how to work with the world. In my (almost) ten years of experience, players stop asking for rule clarification as well, and gods know how quickly rule checking can halt the flow of the game. While this list is by no means exhaustive in ways you can synchronize game mechanics with world tendency, I hope you have found a couple ways to make your sessions a bit more harmonious! Andrew Pendragon is the co-host and editor of The Dragon’s Horde where he puts over a decade's worth of role playing experience to work in his pseudo-narrative D&D advice podcast. Image is courtesy of JESHIELDS: https://www.patreon.com/jeshields/posts |
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April 2023
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