GMs sometimes ask more than one question. Where these directly relate to each other, or the context is important to the answers, they are generally lumped together. When they aren’t, which is far less frequent an event, they get split up and answered separately. Which brings me to today’s topic: Writing characters out when players leave the game.
	This question comes from Nic, who wrote (regretfully, more than 5 years ago): Hi guys, I have three questions which I hope you can answer (though not all at once, as they’re unrelated to each other): 1) What kind of “trapdoors” do you use to ensure characters can be written out of a campaign? Sometimes a player can’t continue to play for whatever reason, and I’m sick of the clichéd, “He got killed,” “He just left,” solutions. It’d be nice to have a story fueled reason, and one that does not preclude a character from making a return at a later point. 2) Do you utilize handouts for campaigns/adventures? More specifically, I’m about to begin a campaign in my own world setting, and I’m wondering should I provide a handout with some background reading? If yes, what should I include and how detailed should I get? 3) I often have the need to bounce my campaign ideas off others, to point out massive plot holes and the like, or just for some extra inspiration and ideas. My problem is that anyone who I could plausibly do this with is someone who I already game with. Can you recommend any decent online forums or the like where GMs congregate to help each other out? If there isn’t one in existence, are you guys in a position to begin one? Many thanks for your time. I love your website and hope you can answer my questions and gain some interesting topics to post about. Keep up the good work! Cheers, Nic. PS, Thanks for all your help with my campaign so far!
As I explained in the last ATGMs, I don’t know whether Johnn offered Nic some guidance at the time, but I dashed off a quick note in reply that – in hindsight – was barely adequate. Because these questions are completely unrelated, as Nic himself suggests, I have been answering them properly in separate ATGMs posts – here’s a link to Answer #1 and here’s Answer #2. A while back, in preparation for these articles, I discussed the questions with a number of my other GMs, and between us, came up with answers of… let’s just say, “varying” depth. Their thoughts have been folded into the response presented below.

There was a time when this question would have been so much easier to answer. But that was a long time ago – a couple of years at Internet Speed… what follows is a potted and possibly myopic review of RPG-related inter-GM connectivity. Bear with me, it will all make sense in the end.

Person-to-person

In the really bad old days, GMs were expected to make – and learn from – their own mistakes. It wasn’t that asking another GM for help with a problem was socially-unacceptable or anything, it simply didn’t seem to occur to people. I was lucky in that I had a fellow-GM first as a player-peer and then, as a mentor. Most people didn’t.

That didn’t mean that we didn’t learn from each other – we did. We stole ideas and techniques from each other all the time, absorbing them by osmosis, and bull-session, and from Dragon magazine’s columns, and by playing in each other’s games. But we didn’t solicit advice from each other.

I can still remember the first time I admitted to another GM that I was having trouble coming up with a plot solution to the corner the players had painted themselves into, and asked for suggestions – though I no longer remember anything else about the event! He looked at me a little strangely, and then offered a couple of ideas – none of which I used, but which did spark my own creativity and give it a bit of direction.

After that, it somehow seemed to become more acceptable amongst our circle of players/GMs to reach out for assistance when we needed it. It still didn’t happen often, but every now and then, someone would ask for input.

Bulletin Boards

For the truly geeky, the 80s also brought the home computer, and with it, access to Bulletin Boards. As home computing grew, as shown in the graph on the right (sourced from this Ars Technica article, where it is available in much more detail), these became more popular – at least until the coming of the web, but I’ll get to that in due course.

The basic principle of a Bulletin Board is this: someone starts a discussion on a particular topic, and anyone who visits the board can read what’s been said. Anyone who signs up (and sometimes anonymous visitors) can post a reply, which forms a permanent part of the conversation.

Some bulletin boards were very general, and may have had a category of threaded conversations about RPGs (well, about AD&D, I expect, given the era); others were more specific. You could visit this board to talk about technology, another for politics, and so on – and, given the synonymy of audience, game-related bulletin boards were fairly common.

Newsgroups

For even longer than there have been home computers, there were newsgroups, and they function in a very similar way to a bulletin board – they just did it through email software. Post a question to a newsgroup, and you could get back hundreds of replies – or none.

Bulletin Boards through the web: Forums

The Web changed everything, or so it seemed. Certainly, as computers became more graphical (spurred on in part by the growth of the web’s graphical capabilities), bulletin boards (which are inherently text based) were forced to evolve. Nevertheless, they remained popular through the initial website boom.

They worked in essentially the same way that they always had. You went to a website, clicked on the entry in a master list of subjects or categories, and began reading curated discussion threads.

Chat Rooms

The next big development was the chat room. These made it easy to drop into a themed room on RPGs – avoiding those rooms in which people were actually playing by chat! – and chatter to other GMs from anywhere in the world about the hobby, about life in general, or about some problem that you might be having. The actual help that you got was sometimes a question of pot luck, but you soon learned which times of day were most likely to be productive (unsurprisingly, these synchronized with US and English/Western European work/study practices – usually between 8 and 9 PM (their time), respectively.

The big problem with Chat rooms was that, for the first time, conversations were ephemeral – they didn’t last. That slowly began to change as storage media became cheaper and of greater capacity, however. But eventually the chat rooms either became forms of social media or vanished.

Yahoo! Groups

At about the same time as Yahoo were setting up their chat system, they also created their own version of Newsgroups, which they called (strangely enough) Yahoo Groups. It’s a sign of how contemporary these events are becoming that Yahoo Groups are still around, though they are relatively unloved these days, slowly being strangled by dedicated Facebook pages.

Google Groups

It was only a few months later, as I recall it, that I started hearing about Google Groups. These took about another year to actually manifest (again, from memory), and – again – they are still with us, though slowly becoming depreciated in the face of social media. They even survived the transition into Google+ more-or-less unscathed.

As evidence of how interconnected all these ideas were, Google Groups also provides access via the web interface with Newsgroups (remember them?)

The biggest difference between Yahoo and Google Groups, and what had gone before, was that you didn’t need to run special software or do anything fancy in order to create one; these suppliers provided everything you needed. All you had to bring to the table was an idea, and an email address – and they would even supply the latter if you needed one!

Some people suggest that it’s easier to join such a group than to leave one. I’ve never had any problems, but YMMV.

Rise Of The Blog

If the web was the killer that (almost) killed bulletin boards, WordPress almost killed everything else when it made the blog easy and accessible (well, relatively so). Forums like Barrock’s Tower (on which I was increasingly active until it died) shut down. Google and Yahoo groups began to evaporate – the group never goes away, it just doesn’t get much use any more. Dedicated websites were either shut down or migrated onto the WordPress platform – or one of its less ubiquitous rivals. (This is a pet peeve of mine – the Wayback Machine preserves the web pages to tell you how great a resource used to be without conserving that resource if it was designed to be downloadable. When people talk about how big the internet is, they don’t realize that we’ve literally thrown away most of what there was before the year 2000. Don’t get me started…)

In fact, Campaign Mastery exists because Johnn Four and I had an email discussion about archiving past articles on his website and whether or not to migrate Roleplaying Tips onto the WordPress platform – something that Johnn eventually was able to do, using expertise gained while getting Campaign Mastery up and running…

These days, there are hundreds of RPG Blogs. But 90% of the blogs that were alive and kicking when Campaign Mastery was just starting are now dead. And so are 90% of the blogs that started at about the same time we did, the “Campaign Mastery” generation. And 90% of the ones that replaced those. Longevity alone has made CM one of the great RPG blogs (of course, I like to think that content is the reason we have survived, but it’s honestly equally attributable to the old publishing virtues of regularity and reliability – in other words, hard work over a long period of time).

Publisher-hosted Forums

At much the same time as Campaign Mastery was having it’s second birthday, game publishers began getting very serious about their in-house blogs and public forums. Sure, these are going to be system-specific, but there will be a certain amount of portability, even if the system in question is not the one that you are playing.

There was a time – only a few short months ago – when that alone would have been sufficient answer to Nic’s question. But then came the news that WOTC was shutting down its forum, a decision that was to take effect on October 29th, but was delayed a few days (without explanation). Any content not migrated elsewhere on that date was simply deleted, lost forever. The Killer: social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter. What I can’t answer is whether or not the lost pages can be found via the Wayback machine – can anyone shed light on that?

So far, to the best of my knowledge, they are the only game company to have taken this step, and the social media fallout was (ironically) quite critical, which may delay or even defer any such decision by anyone else.

That said, many of these publisher-hosted forums are extremely picky when it comes to following their rules. I got kicked off the Hero Games forum, for example, because in my first post I announced that I had written an article offering some house rules for the system. In fact, I was kicked off so hard that I couldn’t even read the announcement that I had been evicted. Less than community-spirited of the moderators, but that’s their prerogative; I simply didn’t go back. But follow their rules and you should be fine.

Social Media

These days, the killer is social media. And that’s a problem, because the other interfaces (even chat, though it didn’t start that way) all curate their content and enable users to search it. Facebook will let me know how many people have liked an article but won’t let me see anything that they’ve said about it. Twitter was more content-creator-friendly – until an update a week or so back meant that the counter stopped working, and with it, the click-able link that automatically searched for tweets linking to the article by link. You can still attempt a manual search using keywords from the title – but wont find everything, no matter how recent it is.

That’s the other problem with social media in this context, a I mentioned above. On twitter, once a tweet is more than 24 hours or so old, the odds of your ever being able to find it again start going down – fast. Heck, even getting too many comments too quickly “loses” some of them – sometimes just for a few hours, sometimes for a day or two, and sometimes forever.

Facebook is better in that regard, but has a policy in place of not showing you everything unless you are specifically named as a recipient.

Social Media is designed for immediacy, and disposable consumption. For Nic’s purposes, it’s fine – but it is not a replacement for a forum, not without software enhancement, anyway.

Facebook

Facebook is the Godzilla of social Media. Twitter may have overtaken it in popularity amongst some specific demographics, but the 2015 numbers speak for themselves: 156.5 million facebook users, 60.3 million instagram users, 52.9 million twitter users, 44.5 million pinterest users, and 19.1 tumblr users, according to this breakdown. (Interestingly, those numbers bear no relation to the number of visitors Campaign Mastery gets from the different social media: StumbleUpon (which didn’t even rate a mention in the article) 43,645 visitors; Twitter, 5,470; Reddit 3,354; Facebook 3,103; pinterest 862; tumblr 8; and instagram 0!

Be that as it may, EnWorld’s discussion thread concerning the delay of closure of the WOTC forums also has a number of posts discussing alternatives. Here’s what one user had to say about the RPG community on Facebook: “Facebook D&D talk is quite active. Its biggest problem is that it’s hard to find information, because there’s no organization whatsoever, so the same things get asked, then answered, a lot.” Morrus, the admin, replied, “Facebook recently announced that public posts (like those on pages and public groups) will be archivable and searchable. That will be the thing, I think, that bridges the difference between a forum and a social network.” (You can read more of the discussion at this link (takes you to the last page of the discussions).

However, you probably have to be a member of a particular group/page before you can search it. So it’s not “outsider-friendly”; it’s more like a closed-door chatroom. Having said that, overall, I would have to describe Facebook as the heir to the BBS way of doing things, minus the navigation tools that made bulletin-boards and forums easy to navigate.

If there’s a group that fits your needs and interests, join it. You’ll generally find it fairly active, or obviously inactive; there’s not a lot of in-between room. For example, I know that there’s an active Puerto Rico Role Players group on Facebook (shout-out to Roberto Micheri [facebook, twitter]) who’s been active in promoting Campaign Mastery there :) )

If you don’t find one, you may need a broader exposure.

Twitter

Twitter has advantages for this purpose well beyond what Facebook can offer because Twitter has hashtags. A hashtag, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a keyword preceded by a “#” mark – there can’t be any punctuation or spaces, otherwise, it can be anything. Depending on the search options you choose (and you can change your choice after a search) you can look for individual posts or “tweets” containing the hashtag, or people whose name contains the phrase, or groups. You can filter the results to only include people “near” you (geographically) or in other ways.

What’s more, I can state from personal experience that the RPG community on Twitter is as exuberant and engaged as you can ask for, and extremely tolerant of total strangers saying “Hi, I run an RPG, can you…” Twitter is more of a conversation, in other words.

The only thing you have to watch out for is that there is often no distinction made between computer-based RPG games and -gamers and the tabletop variety. Helping with that is that most people take advantage of the ability to pen a brief profile (strictly limited in length) which is usually enough for you to make that distinction for yourself – and, if not, you can go to that person’s twitter page, look at what they have been saying (and how recently they have said anything, for that matter) and whether or not they reply to others. So twitter gives you all the tools you need to make up your own mind whether they are a relevant fit.

#RPGChat

Twitter has one other Grand Attraction when it comes to RPGs – a regular “virtual gathering” where players and GMs talk to each other about gaming, using the hashtag “#RPGChat” (I don’t get to attend anywhere near as many of these as I would like). To quote The Illuminerdy, who facilitate #RPGChat, it is “the ultimate role-playing game brain-trust. Use the hashtag any time to summon a geeky think tank willing to discuss your pressing gaming quandaries or join us during the “official” chat Thursdays at 9pm (Eastern US Time) for a more structured RPG-related discussion.”

#RPGChat is the brainchild of @d20blonde, known in real life as Liz Bauman who is definitely one of the first twitter accounts you should follow if you’re into RPGs! (And if you want to help her keep making it better, you can support her efforts through Patreon for $5 a month. But it’s free to all to participate, so join in and try it a time or two first).

While it’s possible to join in using the normal twitter interface, there is a specific *free* piece of kit that helps immensely – Tweetchat.

Here’s what Tweetchat does for you: You type in the hashtag that you want to monitor, in this case RPGChat (I don’t actually think it’s case sensitive, and I don’t think you need to include the hash-mark, it does that for you automatically). It then extracts and displays ONLY those tweets that have the hashtag, and automatically inserts the hashtag to everything you type while logged on through Tweetchat.

But for Nic’s purposes, he would probably be better off befriending a dozen or so other GMs on twitter and having more in-depth conversations with them. It’s easy to use twitter as pseudo- chat software, I do it all the time!

A myriad of partial solutions

Most of these options have never completely gone away. Newsgroups are still around for example, but because most ISPs no longer carry them, you have to search for a host, and know how to configure your settings to connect to that host. Also, because most e-mail is now handled on-line through a web interface and not off-line, you may want a piece of specialist software for the purpose.

Similarly, as EnWorld shows, there are still a few RPG-oriented forums out there.

While none of these – for one reason or another – may completely be the answer to your needs, between them, you can connect to a very large community indeed. Between them, there is no reason to ever feel that you are alone as a GM!

Resources

I’m going to close this article with a list of specific resources. This list is not complete – I haven’t linked to any of the game publishers’ forums, for example, because these should be easy for anyone to find. These are more about the exotic solutions – though I’m starting with a very mundane one…

Person to person:

• Go hang out at your local game store, talk to the other customers and to the staff, make friends, then call on them when you need help.
• Talk to your players, they have a vested interest in the game, and it’s better to have good ideas than to keep secrets.

Newsgroups:

• You can get a list of newsgroups dedicated to RPGs from this page at rpg.net – but it was last updated in 2009. Most newsgroup software will let you search for groups (and will require you to download a full list of the many thousands of newsgroups hosted into the software before you can access one) so I am quite sure there are more.
• This Wikipedia page lists different newsgroup software that’s currently available; read up on them through Wikipedia’s links until you find one that you like, and go from there.

RPG Forums:

In no particular order:

• En World – most functionality is free, but there are exclusive bonuses available to paying subscribers.
• RPG.Net
• Roleplay Social

…and don’t forget about the publisher forums for specific help. If D&D’s your passion, EnWorld is the place to go.

Chat Rooms:

In no particular order:

• Roleplay Chat
• Roleplay Social also have a chat room facility.
• Rolepages
• Stack Exchange, which also has the benefit of curating (storing) transcripts of each day’s chat. I don’t know how long they keep them for, or whether or not they are searchable for keywords.

Yahoo Groups:

• Yahoo Groups offers a browsable list by category, or you can search for a keyword. A search for “RPG” produced a list of 19,010 groups (not all of which will still be active, but Yahoo tells you when someone last posted in the group, and you can sort by that or by other criteria like number of members. “Roleplaying Games” gave 1,310 additional results, and “D&D” produced a further 1,918 groups – though there may well be considerable overlap amongst all these. If you have any trouble, do a Google search for “How to use Yahoo Groups” as Yahoo’s help system is an equal blend of frustration and assistance, and always has been.

Google Groups:

• Once again, the Google Groups options are browse or search, though they aren’t quite as obvious as Yahoo manages to make it. There are 1137 groups with RPG in the title (Yahoo requires descriptions of the groups which are also searched when you enter a keyword). I personally have the impression that Google Groups is a neglected stepchild within the Google structure – and certainly the relative number of groups to Yahoo indicates that this is one battle that the search giant isn’t winning. Nevertheless, the reduction in numbers might mean that there’s less rubbish to wade through before you find what you’re looking for.

Blogs:

I could list a hundred or two Blogs here. I’m not going to do so.

Charles Akins at Dyver’s Campaign puts out an approximately-annual list of active RPG Blogs called The Great Blog Roll Call. I’ve linked to the most recent (2014) version of the list. Here’s an FAQ about it, which includes a statement that he’s aiming for the 2015 version to come out in January.

I couldn’t hope to match his efforts for comprehensiveness – so, so far as I’m concerned, if you’re looking for something specific, load up a copy of the Blog Roll Call and search within the page for any entries containing your keyword.

I note that there’s none that use the terms “beginner” or “novice” or even “newbie”, though. So I’ll list a few specific ones to redress that (in no particular order):

• Philippe-Antoine Menard, better-known as The Chatty GM, has a series at Critical Hits specifically targeting beginner GMs.
• Justin Alexander has a group of articles aimed at beginner GMs called “Gamemastery 101” at The Alexandrian, and adds to it. I was going to link to several of the articles, but they are all indexed on this page.
• Leaving Mundania has a single great post of Advice for first-time GMs that was too good not to link to (even though it’s targeted at LARP GMs, much of the advice is transferable).

Most blogs don’t have anything like Ask-the-GMs, but are happy to answer questions, especially if you pose them on a relevant blog (heck, Ask-the-GMs has been closed for a couple of years now, after it became clear that it was getting too long a list to manage – but I still answer privately if I can). If the post has closed comments, look for a “contact” link. However, it takes time to operate and maintain a blog, so replies may be shorter than you would like.

That said, there are one or two that do nothing but answer questions (which eases my conscience over keeping ATGMs closed for so long, no end). I don’t have any links to specific ones, but I have come across them in Google Search results in the past – though not today, or I’d have mentioned them!

Finally, I can’t go past my old collaborator, Johnn Four and Roleplaying Tips. He’s a very busy guy, so it might take him a few days to reply (though he tries to be faster), but if he can’t answer you to his own satisfaction (or at least point you to a couple of relevant articles in RPT), he’ll pose your question in a future issue – provided that it’s not so esoteric that no-one else would be interested, of course! – on the general principle that if one person wants to know about something of general interest, others will also find the information to be of value. Strictly speaking, RPT is a newsletter, but it’s archived as a website, so it’s close enough for my purposes!

Have I missed something?/Disclaimer

I freely admit that this is not my area of expertise. The resources above were compiled with a series of Google Searches and selecting the results that seemed most relevant, guided by my awareness of the history of personal computer use. That means that I am quite certain that there’s more out there that I haven’t found. Feel free to drop a comment, especially if you know of a blog that focuses on beginners!

Nor do I have personal experience with many of these services and software. If you have a cautionary tale, or want to be the first to champion something that works well, please leave a comment. The goal here is to help others who know less than you do!

About the contributors:

As always, I have to thank my fellow GMs for their time and their insights:

	Mike: Mike is the owner, editor, and principle author at Campaign Mastery, responsible for most of the words of wisdom (or lack thereof) that you read here. You can find him on Twitter as gamewriterMike, and find out more about him from the “About” page above.
	Blair: Blair Ramage was one of the first players of D&D in Australia, using a photocopied set of the rules brought over from the US before they were on sale here in Australia. When the rulebooks finally reached these shores, he started what is officially the fourth D&D campaign to be run in this country. He dropped out of gaming for a long time before being lured back about 15 years ago, or thereabouts. For the last eight years, he has been co-GM of the Adventurer’s Club campaign with Mike.
	Saxon: Saxon has been vaguely interested in gaming since the early 1980s, but only since going to university in the late 1980s has the opportunity for regular play developed into solid enthusiasm. Currently he plays in two different groups, both with alternating GMs, playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th ed., the Hero system (Pulp), a custom-rules superhero game (also based on the Hero System), Mike’s “Lovecraft’s Legacies” Dr Who campaign, WEG-era Star Wars, FASA-era Star Trek, and a Space 1889/Call of Cthulhu hybrid. When it’s his turn he runs a Dr Who campaign. He cheerfully admits to being a nerd, even if he’s not a particularly impressive specimen. He was a social acquaintance of both Mike and Blair long before he joined their games.
	Nick: Nick also lives in Sydney. He started roleplaying (D&D) in the mid-1980s in high school with a couple of friends. That group broke up a year later, but he was hooked. In late ’88 he found a few shops that specialized in RPGs, and a notice board advertising groups of gamers led him to his first long-term group. They started with AD&D, transferred that campaign to 2nd Ed when it came out, tinkered with various Palladium roleplaying games (Heroes Unlimited met Nick’s long-term fascination with Marvel’s X-Men, sparking his initial interest in superhero roleplaying), and eventually the Star Wars RPG by West End Games and Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set. This also led to his first experiences with GMing – the less said about that first AD&D 2nd Ed campaign, the better (“so much railroading I should have sold tickets”). His second time around, things went better, and his Marvel campaign turned out “halfway decent”. That group broke up in 1995 when a number of members moved interstate. Three years later, Nick heard about what is now his regular group while at a science-fiction bookstore. He showed up at one of their regular gaming Saturdays, asked around and found himself signed up for an AD&D campaign due to start the next week. A couple of weeks later, He met Mike, and hasn’t looked back since. From ’98 he’s been a regular player in most of Mike’s campaigns. There’s also been some Traveller and the Adventurer’s Club (Pulp) campaign, amongst others. Lately he’s been dipping a tentative toe back into the GMing pool, and so far things have been going well.
	Ian: Ian Gray resides in Sydney Australia. He has been roleplaying for more than 25 years, usually on a weekly basis, and often in Mike Bourke’s campaigns. From time to time he GMs but is that rarest of breeds, a person who can GM but is a player at heart. He has played many systems over the years including Tales Of The Floating Vagabond, Legend Of The Five Rings, Star Wars, D&D, Hero System, Gurps, Traveller, Werewolf, Vampire, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and many, many more. Over the last couple of years he has been dirtying his hands with game design. He was a contributor to Assassin’s Amulet, the first time his name appeared in the credits of a real, live, RPG supplement. Recently he has taken to GMing more frequently, with more initial success than he was probably expecting (based on his prior experiences). Amongst the other games he now runs, Mike and Blair currently play in his Star Wars Edge Of The Empire Campaign.

In the next ATGMs: When characters put down roots – handling strongholds and bases