Like all GMs, there are times when I know I need an idea, I know what the reason is and what will be done with it – I just don’t know what it is. There’s this empty spot in my mind labelled “Idea goes here”, but I’m absolutely bereft of inspiration, and the deadline is fast approaching. I found myself in this exact situation in January, while preparing for the Pulp game I co-referee (run using the Hero system), set vaguely in the mid-1930s.

The Background

We currently have the players investigating a ‘Sons of The Serpent*’ riff in which the KKK are agitating Black factory workers in the northern states to strike for equal rights, pay, and conditions, creating industrial dispruption, which is creating disaffection amongst the caucasian workers and bolstering their credibility outside the Deep South, while reinforcing the prejudices of their normal constituancy. This creates a situation in which the players are being forced to take a stand against something they personally believe in, purely to stop the bad guys from exploiting it for their own ends, and setting the embrionic civil rights movement back decades or more.

*”The Sons Of The Serpent” are a modern-day KKK who attempted to use racial tension to take over the US in Marvel Comics’ “Captain America”.

This is all the handiwork of one particularly charismatic and fiendishly clever master villain, who could potentially ride the issue all the way into the White House. The PCs mission is to not only derail the plan, but to discredit the villain in the eyes of the KKK to remove him from a position of power before he can come up with a backup plan.

The Problem

The assumption we’ve (the co-GMs) been going with is that the PCs will need to manufacture a skeleton in the master villain’s closet in order to achieve this, but more and more over January I found myself thinking that we should have a real one ready to go in case the players aren’t as clever as we hope (and they think) they are. At the same time, I wanted to avoid all the cliche ideas, simply because the villain would never have risen to the rank of Grand Dragon with anything so obvious in his past (and besides, cliches are so anticlimactic).

So that defines the needed idea in terms of its purpose. But all day long, my mind has been coming up empty. So, what do I do when this situation manifests – given that we’re playing tomorrow? (NB: This is actually being posted months after it was written, so as not to give secrets away to the players, at least one of which is a regular reader).

The General Solution

My usual technique, which rarely lets me down, is to define exactly what it is that I don’t want, and what criteria the right idea will have to contain. I then generalise the ideas that I don’t want, and look at what, generally, will both fit the criteria for success but isn’t one of the solutions I don’t want and am trying to avoid. I can then refine and polish the result to a specific.

Applying The General Solution To The Specific Problem

The obvious (and cliched) solution is for the villain to have a non-caucasian ancestor somewhere in his past. Another cliche to avoid is having the villain be a Nazi agent. The right idea has to be neither of these, but has to be something that will irretrievably damage the villain’s credibility in the eyes of his organisation.

The first cliche can be stated generally as a flawed ancestry. The second can be stated as an ulterior political motive – the racial equality theme loses its punch if the Grand Dragon is not a True Believer. So those are what I don’t want.

What else would a redneck member of the KKK believe in? There are only two things, really: Religion and The South. The idea that the bad guy – or one of his ancestors – might not have the right religion would work, but would also cloud the story and detract from the power of the theme. But the notion that the bad guy’s direct ancestors opposed the South, or better yet, betrayed the South, would be the sort of skeleton that would definitly achieve the objective. The concept that the bad guy’s ancestors were actually spies for the North during the Civil War fits the empty space labelled “idea” perfectly.

Conclusion

Problem solved. From here, it’s just a matter of adding details as necessary. Drop in referances so that the PCs know that he’s proud of his Civil War heritage. Add an idea shamelessly stolen from the West Wing about a Southern state having had its copy of the Bill Of Rights “liberated” by a Northern state during the war – it’s somehow ended up as part of this guy’s inheritance, and is proudly displayed on his wall – and wait for someone to put the pieces together, that “A” doesn’t jibe with “B”. A little shoe leather later, and some research in Northern military archives (the South never knew his ancestor was a spy), and the PCs should be able to find all the ammunition they need. (This also fits another of the key background subplots of the scenario, which is that the PCs are being sent to do someone else’s dirty work because the Government sees them as an easy answer; having the government in posession of the solution the whole time is just so appropriate!)

That’s how I usually solve a mental block. Try it for yourself and see if it works for you, too!

credit: insomniac142

A couple of weeks ago we chatted about the top dungeon master screen hacks. This week, we cover a related topic – do-it-yourself screens.

Have you ever made your own dungeon master screen? If so, how did you do it, and what materials did you use? Through the years I’ve cobbled together my fair share of screens because I couldn’t afford the official ones, or needed different information on the panels. Roleplaying Tips readers have also written in with their homebrew dungeon master screen recipes.

Following are what I’d consider the 10 best DM screen recipes.

1. Duct tape extravaganza

I had this one for years until I threw it out because the tape was peeling back, leaving sticky residue that transferred to my other stuff.

I cut three chunks of cardboard from boxes and taped them together. I remember taping both sides to make sure the screen would be strong, only to realize I couldn’t bend the screen. So, I had to take a knife and make incisions along the outside seams just to get the thing to bend.

On the panels I used glue stick to post up my tables.

Great screen. It would’ve survived nuclear war.

2. Restaurant menus

This tip appeared in Issue #139. Use restaurant menus or covers for your DM screen. The ones with the plastic sleeves for inserting the latest menu into are perfect. Just whip up your own charts and slide into the menu.

The Menu Shoppe sells them online, and specialty print shops might have them as well.

3. Tiny chunk of cardboard

As you might know, I use a double dog dish for my dice while DMing. Dice go in one side and I roll in the other. This works great and corrals my dice well.

I wanted a small screen around this for one campaign just to keep prying eyes away from my rolls. So, I found a thin cardboard box and trimmed it down to be about 4 inches tall, and wide enough to fit around two sides of my dice dish.

I got a rubber band, looped it around the dish, and slipped the cardboard into it. This worked perfectly for many moons. While my notes on the screen were few, it worked well to hide my rolls, and its low profile didn’t create a barrier between me and the group.

4. Cardboard and page sleeves

Another Roleplaying Tips reader wrote in with the excellent idea of gluing plastic page sleeves to cardboard or to old screens. Just print out your charts, slip them into your sleeves, and you’re set. Great idea!

5. Binder with sleeves

I bought a binder with plastic page sleeves bound into it specifically to use as a dungeon master screen. This worked well, though it was too tall to see over so I kept it to the side.

With all the interior pages it felt like I had a ton of information at my finger tips. The pages would sometimes flip over on their own while standing up, so I just a paper clipped to keep the binder open to the pages I needed at any given time.

6. Plexiglas screen

A reader from Issue #50 of the Roleplaying Tips E-Zine wrote in about his Plexiglas dungeon master screen:

One of my best tools was my folding GM screen. I make a point of saying folding because it was made from 1/4″ thick Plexiglas and the panels had metal posts in the bottom so it mounted in the base (also made of Plexiglas). I clipped my charts and tables to the inside of the panels and then used the base to make quick notes on what was going on. For the encounters I would make a quick chart of the monsters (each with their own ID #), their level, total hit points, damage taken, and initiative. This saved me from messing up or misplacing the sheet once the encounter got under way AND since I was writing in grease pencil it was easy to change and erase after the encounter.

7. The castle wall screen

Another time, for another campaign, I made a huge screen with five panels and a hole in the bottom of the middle panel. We were playing first edition D&D and I was a chart monster DM at that time.

Aside from the sheer area of the thing, the screen’s greatest asset was the small rolling hole. I cut it in there so players could cast their dice through to behind the screen for secret rolls. It worked great, actually, though it’s a bit of a head-shaker today. As expected, the players loved the skill test of trying to get their dice through the hole.

No one lost an eye, mom. Told ya.

8. Laminated pages

Jay suggested in Roleplaying Tips Issue #76 to get two or three pages of charts built and then laminate them. Use a thick laminate so the pages are stiff enough to not curl. Tape the pages together at their edges and you have a great dungeon master screen.

9. Cereal boxes

Who can’t resist staring at the Corn Flakes logo, or making new words out of the letters displayed on the outside of the Alpha Bits box? For awhile I was making DM screens from cereal boxes. Cut down, they worked well, but only for a short period of time. The cardboard was too thin to hold up to general wear and tear, and I didn’t think of gluing a couple boxes together until just now, twenty years later. Am I getting smarter, or just catching up?

10. My hands

Sometimes I don’t use a DM screen at all. So, if I want player rolls to be secret and made by the players I’ll have them roll the dice at me and I’ll put my hands around them to hide the results. I suppose if I was clever I’d write charts on the inside of my hands. I’m not that clever. I’ve also stopped requiring players to do secret rolls nowadays, and I’ll either roll for them, or I won’t make the roll secret and will let the players roll and see the result.

11. Google Docs, Microsoft OneNote, My Info

Today I use a laptop at the game table. It has all my information on it, and it doubles nicely as my DM screen. I use Google Docs to record session notes and manage combat. I use Microsoft OneNote and Milenix’s MyInfo for campaign and world information, including charts and tables. I use other software as well, but the ones above get 90% of my screen time while DMing, pun probably not intended.

Bonus round: the dice tower

This homebrew item made in grade 10 wasn’t a screen, though it eventually was taped to that 5 panel monstrosity I mentioned earlier, which officially dubbed that screen as The Castle.

I saw a TV show that demonstrated how to make a periscope from a cardboard milk carton and small glass mirrors taped to the inside. I made the periscope, it worked, and it amused me for five minutes.

Then I realized the periscope had a better use! I cut out the bottom a little more and taped a cardboard fenced corral around the base. I could now drop dice into the top, they’d hit the mirrors like a Plinko game, and eventually come out the bottom.

That sucker lasted for more than five minutes and was a ton of fun. My players loved that thing. d4s didn’t work so hot with it, but every other dice rolled out and into the corral like a charm.

Ok, your turn. What are your best, favourite, and fondest dungeon master screen recipes?

The Gates by Murat Turan - art from Nobis © Pantheon Press LLC

Nobis is a game supplement about to be released by Pantheon Press for the d20/ D&D 3.x game system. Campaign Mastery was priviliged to be amongst a selected number of blog sites given a pre-release glimpse of the new release for review. Although this commentary will focus on the Background to the city-state that is at the heart of the supplement, its potential as the basis of a new campaign, and its capacity for integration into an existing campaign, I want to start with a couple of general comments.

General Concept:

Nobis is a world on the cusp of a paradygm shift in its social, technological, and philosophical foundations. Small pockets of civilization have suddenly made monumental advances, casting aside the feudal caste system in general usage and embracing democracy. They are “expanding rapidly, moving into uncharted territory with often violent and unexpected results,” to quote the supplement. New communities are being founded on the peripheries of old Kingdoms, sparsely populated nomadic lands are now home to thousands. Alliances have formed for mutual protection, for potential profit, or by conquest. More than ever, wealth equates to power, and once-important political figures find their authority waning. To some, ‘thinkers’ place the world in greater danger than it has experienced in living memory, as they meddle with powers better left undisturbed, while others see new opportunities opening before them; while the city-states offer “modern conveniences and access to information on an unprecedented scale, crime is rampant and organised guilds vie for control”. The campaign setting, in other words, is early Renaissance in nature, not the medieval background most common to D&D, but the old ways are not going to vanish without a fight.

Nobis cover art by Eren Arik © Pantheon Press LLC

Contents:

The Nobis supplement is divided into 18 chapters of varying length:

• Nobis Calender
• A Brief History Of The World
• Map of Nobis
• The City-States
• The World Beyond
• Major Guilds
• Secret Societies & The Underworld
• The Gods of Nobis
• Magic & Spellcraft
• Races of Nobis
• Classes in Nobis
• New Feats
• Fencing Discipline
• Firearms
• Reputation System
• A Nobis Campaign
• Adventure Hooks

In addition, the chapter on Gods contains some new domains.

Utility of the setting

This is incredibly high – if your existing campaign is ready for firearms, and you’re ready for the politics to move beyond the standard feudal system of D&D into something with which a modern audiance will be more familiar. The utility is equally high if the campaign is to be a new one. The supplement is brimming with ideas – inspiration leaks out from virtually every paragraph.

Let’s look at a couple of concrete examples:

The World History

YR 6973 – The earliest records of elven society date to this period. The few tattered remnants depict a time of great darkness. Some speculate that the Elves of Illysium closely guard a more detailed history and a secret too dangerous to reveal to the world. Myth and legend are all that remains from the ancient world.

YR 7142 – Powerful Druidic sects, disciples of Derrin, band together, forming the first great Empire on Nobis. Isolated along the southeastern coast of the great continent, Sigrast would stand for more than 200 years.

Right away, ideas and exciting, unanswered questions erupt. What is the relationship between the Druids and the Elves? Did the Elves instruct them? Or did the Druids seek to emulate the elves? Multiple campaign possibilities quickly emerge – it would be quite easy to construct a campaign in each of these time periods, in effect writing parts of that ‘lost history’ with a succession of PCs taking centre stage. These don’t have to be long campaigns – two or three adventures might be enough – but by the time you’ve worked through 1220 years of historic “highlights” like this, divided into 86 key ‘snippets’ (the first two of which I’ve quoted), I would be surprised if you couldn’t get half-a-dozen or more linked campaigns from this section alone!

Alternatively, using all this as backstory (the way it’s intended) would give an extremely rich campaign, with sources galore for scenarios. What is the elvish secret – and can it re-emerge to threaten in modern times? What was ‘the time of great darkness’ – was it simply a time when societies were primal and primitive, or was there something more going on? Are there druidic secrets lingering from the time of the Sigrist Empire? Where does the dating system come from? “Year One” in any dating system usually commemorates something significant, though the likelyhood of that event being remembered almost 7000 years later (the earliest records) or 8100+ years later (modern game time) is pretty much nil. But the long-forgotten sometimes has a way of becoming significant, especially in a world where uncharted territories are being explored for the first time. Both high fantasy and low fantasy can work in this setting, with equal facility.

The looseness within the descriptions of events not only leaves the GM free to devise his own answers, lending a uniqueness to each campaign set within Nobis, it makes it much easier to integrate Nobis with an existing campaign. The names of places may have to be changed (either in the supplement or in your world) to make them fit, but there is almost always a way. Show me a campaign that isn’t either set in a period that could be described as “a time of great darkness”, or doesn’t have such a period in it’s history, or both! Heck, that’s where the adventure comes from!

With so many ideas bursting from these pages, you don’t really need the campaign suggestions on pages 78-79 or the Adventure Hooks on page 80, but they are the icing on the cake. This section ALONE is enough to justify buying the supplement just to strip-mine it for ideas and inspiration!

The City-States

The supplement only presents one of these in full detail, known in modern times as “The Gates”. It includes a detailed map, descriptions of key locations, and details of the High Council that rules the city-state. In fact, everything you need to base a campaign from the location is provided; given the right style of campaign, PCs need never leave to have a full and entertaining career. The supplement uses 14 pages of its 80 in describing The Gates; only three more are dedicated to the other city-states and points of interest within the area collectively known as “The Advancement”. I got the impression that further supplements will detail other city-states and locations in as much, if not more, detail, and this was later confirmed by Pantheon Press.

Old Rules Expanded

It’s virtually an unwritten rule of the 3.x supplement market: You don’t have to include new spells, you don’t have to include new domains (but Nobis does), you don’t have to include new classes, but you virtually ALWAYS have to include new Feats. Nobis has 4 pages of them, falling into three broad categories: Feats associated with the new rules for fencing & firearms, feats relating to the higher educational standards achieved by ordinary citizens within the City-States (but not those beyond it), and general feats. The first two are so intrinsically linked with the new rules that they can’t really be considered in isolation, though perhaps some of them might be adapatable as general feats even if the adventure-setting and its implicit foundation assumptions are not taken into your campaign. In terms of the last category, there are some ideas that I’ve seen before (because they work) and some new ideas that were exceptionally good. There will probably be one or two that I don’t like – that’s the usual mix – but I didn’t notice any. I’ll leave it to others to cover the feats in more detail, and to the judgement of the audiance what they like or don’t like.

New Rules

More significant than the expansions of the new rules in the supplement are the new rules for Fencing, Firearms, and Reputation.

I have to admit that I was very pleased to see these included. It’s my personal philosophy that Campaign considerations trump Rules system (and are trumped in turn by playability); House Rules are, or should be, an integral part of any campaign setting, to emphasise and control those aspects of the game that make one setting different from another. The rules should evolve to match the campaign, instead of the campaign being constrained within the existing rules. The authors of Nobis seem to share this philosophy.

Fencing

It took only a quick glance to tell me that this subsystem add-on to the rules needed closer inspection than a quick glance! Which it should; it has a difficult job to do. Not only does it have to be balanced in its own right as a widespread combat system, it also has to capture the flavour of Fencing – preferably with the swashbuckling style of the Pirates Of The Carribean movies – and, thirdly, it has to integrate with the existing styles of combat without giving one side or another too much of an advantage. At the same time, it has to present a clear advantage over the old style of heavy armour and heavy weapons, or it would never have displaced those techniques. This is a fine line to tread, and an in-depth analysis of the attempt presented here should be left to a dedicated blog post – hopefully, someone else reviewing the pre-release will be doing just that. I can state that a few minutes contemplating the problems started giving me my own ideas for achieving them, so it’s fair to say that at the very least, Nobis has fired my imagination in this respect as well, and I look forward to reading this section in greater depth.

That means, of course, that even if the rules the supplement offers don’t work for my campaign, they can still contribute material towards the system that I ultimately employ, so Nobis won’t be wasted, either way.

Firearms

This faces essentially the same problems as those raised in discussing Fencing, with the added complication of achieving balance with the Fencing system as well. Again, it took only a couple of seconds contemplation of the problems entailed to appreciate that this was another subject that needed to be dealt with in some depth, an impression confirmed by a preliminary glance at the rules pages on the subject in Novis. In fact, everything that I wrote about the Fencing rules applies equally to the Firearms rules.

But I’m particularly interested in this section because Pantheon Press claims that they have taken a radical new approach here, simply because they were not very satisfied with any previous attempt on the subject. I have also been underwhelmed by the techniques offered elsewhere in this department, so I’m going to be approaching this chapter of the supplement with considerable curiosity. There’s one fairly obvious technique that’s occurred to me after glancing at the chapter in question, but it hasn’t been tested as a concept, never mind translated into functioning rules; it will be interesting to see how closely my undeveloped & untested idea matches their fleshed-out and tested one!

Reputation

If there’s one part of the Novis supplement that I approached with some apprehension, this was it. I’ve tried in the past to adopt a reputation system, and to integrate it with a social class system, and while it was not an abject failure, it never quite satisfied, either. I’ve also tried to adapt the Hackmaster reputation system into a Piety system, and it was a near-total flop, not only failing to completely achieve its intended ends (though it might have done, with a little more tweaking), but also being completely unworkable in terms of playability, slowing play to a crawl despite my best efforts at streamlining the system. The good news is that the Nobis system completely avoids the pitfalls and traps that I had previously tripped over.

I’m also of the opinion that no game system should give any subset of characters an advantage without conferring a matching disadvantage; otherwise, internal game balance can be too easily disrupted. For all that a reputation system gives characters with a good reputation an advantage, it should also give characters with a bad rep a disadvantage. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the Nobis subsystem meets this test, though I would have to examine it more closely to be certain.

Even that failure, if present, is not necessarily a rejection of the system; if the Nobis system disadvantages the characters it subsequently advantages in equal amounts, it might still be viable. The final criterion that I will be examining closely is how well the system projects into epic levels; some perfectly viable rules systems can only work for a limited number of levels, and some of my campaigns are projected to run to characters of 60+ levels.

Flaws

The biggest flaw not already discussed is what the supplement doesn’t contain. I would have liked to have seen a larger map, or series of maps, at a scale intermediate to that of the whole World and that of the City-state.

I would also have preferred the map that IS there to preceed the history section, or even for a series of reduced-detail single-column outline maps to help establish the relationships between the entities being discussed in the reader’s mind. How big was Sigrast, for example? You can’t tell.

That’s my biggest gripe, and it’s relatively trivial. What’s more, Pantheon Press have advised that the map will be available from their website as a free download in both high-resolution jpg and campaign cartographer formats!

Production Values & Conclusion

I could not end this review (and I know it’s gushed with praise at times) without mentioning the production values. I don’t know what sort of paper the supplement will be printed on, but in every other respect the production is first-class. I particularly want to mention the artwork, some of which is (deep breath) simply the most beautiful and inspirational illustrations I’ve ever seen anywhere, never mind in a game supplement (something you buy mostly for the words). PDFs of some of the illustrations in A4 size or even poster-sized prints of things like the panorama of The Gates on page 17 (reproduced in reduced size at the top of this blog) or the seascape on page 8 would be great extras to make available to the public (even if they charge for them). [I’ve been told that Artwork may be made available in several possible forms at a future date, as downloadable content, individual prints, or in a future book “The Art of Pantheon Press” (working title). If there is sufficient demand, a limited number of high-quality posters suitable for framing are also possible.] Not all the artwork was included in the review copy, but what was included said that this alone is almost worth buying the supplement for!

With so much useful content, and so few flaws, this is a supplement that is worth buying for ANY fantasy campaign. What will vary from campaign to campaign will be the manner in which you extract a return on the investment.

Want to learn more about Nobis? Read on…

• Atomic Array: Nobis (Atomic Array 024)
• Game Cryer: Nobis Review
• campaign Mastery: Gaming Renaissance and Loving it
• Dice Monkey: Orgs & Sects
• Vulcan Stev: Looking at the Religion
• Unnatural 20: The Magic of Nobis
• allgeektout: The Play

Drop by Pantheon Press and pre-order Nobis today!

Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/woodsy

Please your players, reward roleplaying and creativity, and keep game pace moving along by saying yes to player plans, actions, and ideas.

This is a classic tip mentioned in Roleplaying Tips Issue #303, Roll Dice Or Say Yes and I’ve seen various wise websites post this advice over the years as well.

There are a couple of nuances to saying yes I’d like to talk about today. Some game masters might be worried their players will take advantage of them. Others could be concerned their games might not be challenging enough if everything is always working out in the players’ favour.

Be Reasonable

You don’t need to agree to everything. Make sure a yes answer makes sense, doesn’t ruin your plans, or derails the campaign.

Making sense: If the situation doesn’t make sense to you, pause and hash things out. If only one player or part of the group is up to speed with the discussion, make sure you have agreement from everyone, where applicable, before saying yes. A forceful player might be trying to drive something through and take advantage of your good nature, while leaving his friends in the dust. It also has to be consistent with previous rulings or game details, and not break sense of disbelief.

Ruining plans: Always assume your plans are moot in their first contact with the PCs. However, sometimes saying no can rescue a lot of prep work, or corral precious game time that might otherwise be wasted pursuing unproductive ends for the party. This is general advice, as sandbox play, improv GMing, and other factors might put zero importance on your plans. However, I won’t hesitate to say no if I think it’s best for the game and the group, and I take that stewardship role seriously.

Campaign derailment: Sometimes saying no saves the PCs’ bacon, and you should say no using the same criteria you employ to fudge dice rolls behind the screen to help the PCs out (if you fudge rolls, that is). I won’t say no just to protect a villain’s bad tactics, or to pursue some specific end-scene or encounter set-up I think would be cool.

This is a major point, actually, so let’s pause on it for a sec. You will have great ideas, expectations, and visions tied to specific outcomes, decisions, or set-ups during the game. Perhaps you want the PCs to use a specific entrance to trigger a magnificent cascade of events, or you want the villain to escape, or you imagine how great it would be if the characters offended the Great Druid because you have a killer side-plot idea.

Your ideas will often be great. And it will be tough letting them go. But you must. Please do use the GMing tools in your toolbelt to influence or guide the PCs towards desired results, but you can’t control the characters or the players. If the players feel that, no matter what they do, consequences and events are preordained, they’ll lose interest or get rowly.

This is age-old advice, but in our moments of inspiration, we all still fall prey. For example, something that angers me as a player is when a certain type of encounter will trigger regardless of our actions, but the GM sets up the illusion that we have a choice. The group will talk about our choices, make plans, wrestle over tactics, and then, regardless and unbeknownst to us, the result is inevitable. In that case, I prefer the GM to just let us know. Roleplaying aside, it would have saved so much game time, saved us a lot of energy, and made that bit of gameplay meaningful.

Giving control over to your group is tough. Many authors say how tough it is to give up a phrase or section they are proud of or excited about, but if it doesn’t serve the book, it must be cut. Stephen King mentions this. He cuts 10% from his first draft. Then he’ll cut another 10%. It’s painful, but it must be done.

So, say yes even if it means postponing or averting your desires or cool ideas.

Say yes, but

Another tactic is to allow success but with a condition or string attached. This can be abused, so be careful, as too many uses of “yes, but” cancels the positive effects of saying yes at all.

An ideal condition or string generates interesting tactical considerations for the PCs. It validates the players’ idea or request, but gives them something extra to mull over or factor in.

“Yes, your plan will work, but you might not have enough time after crossing the chasm to get your rope and pitons back.”

On rare occasions, you can create dilemmas where all choices are yes, but each has a downside and there’s no clear winner. This can generate excellent roleplaying and party discussion, but I caution that you use this rarely unless difficult choices is the theme of your game.

Say yes, but get there quick

Now we come to the main point of this post. My GMing advice is, if you’re going to say yes, then figure this out right away and get to yes quickly.

This is a skill you might need to learn. It took me a few tries at it, because you need to think ahead a bit, first to determine if the likely outcome is yes, and second, what trouble could lie behind that answer. If the coast is clear, then you will serve your players and the game better by getting to yes fast.

This often applies to situations where you are going to say yes anyway, so why bother saying no to a bunch of player ideas somewhat arbitrarily until the magic moment arrives when you give an idea your approval? Why make the players pitch ten ideas to you, and then you choose idea eleven.

We are critical, analytical creatures. We can find a problem with anything. We can especially find holes in PC plans and ideas, because we’re all working with a limited set of information. We’re not actually there, in the game world, trying to do things. So, GMs can always find reasons why something might not work and poke a hole in a plan or idea.

“Can we jump the chasm?”

“No, it’s too wide.”

“Can we find a narrow point up or down along the chasm and jump it?”

“No, the chasm is too long.”

“Can we tie a rope and climb across?”

“No, this side is barren, there’s nothing to tie a rope to.”

“Can we climb down this side and then up the other?”

“No, the chasm is too deep. And there’s lava at the bottom.”

The GM senses now the PCs are running out of options. He better say yes soon, else the PCs will be stuck.

“Is there a tree on the other side? Can we attach a rope to an arrow, embed it in the tree, and while two of us hold the rope the others climb across. Then, we carry over a second rope, so the last two can just swing across the chasm?”

“Yes.”

Sometimes problem solving is fun. But a scene like the above, which I have actually GM’d, is painful. I should have just said yes to the first request. I knew the PCs had to cross anyway, so why not just let them cross with the first reasonable idea?

Say yes and add friction

You might have legitimate concerns over letting poor ideas slip through or of sending signals that the easy train has just come to town. Mitigate this, carefully, with friction before saying yes:

• Ask for additional explanation or details. “Talk me through this, and try not to leave out any details.”
• “Yes, but…”
• “There are a couple things that might cause your ideas to fall flat – this thing and that thing – what can you do to solve those problems?”
• “Are you sure that’s what you want to do? Double-dog, no dice fudging, no take-backs, you’re ready to do this thing?”
• “Thanks for the run-down on your plan, Frank. The group is all agreed then that’s what you’re all going to do? Great, let’s start. From the top, Bill, tell me how the group executes the plan.” (This one is evil, and catches players who aren’t paying attention.)

As cautioned before, adding friction can counteract the benefits of saying yes to keep the game flowing along well. It also cancels somewhat the benefits of getting to yes fast. Adding a little friction helps generate extra challenge or hesitation, when needed though, so it’s a valuable tool in your toolbox.

Is this the hill you want to die on?

A friend at work told me his wife once asked him in the middle of a heated discussion whether this was the hill he wanted to die on. Now that’s funny. It’s also a wise temperature check. Ultimately, the point of this tip is to not waste time squabbling over details or issues when you’re going to say yes anyway. It’s also about saying yes often because it’s too easy to find holes in any reasonable idea or plan, just as in real life, but that doesn’t meant something wouldn’t work or isn’t available or isn’t possible.

So, say yes. Get there fast. And if you find yourself balking or arguing over trivial details, ask yourself, is this the hill you want to die on? Is this the issue you want to ruin game pacing, momentum, fun, or progress on?

I can understand the appeal of on-line RPGs, especially MMORPGs. I thoroughly enjoyed games like “Knights Of Legend” and SSI’s line of computer-based AD&D games like “Eye Of The Beholder” and the “Krynn” trilogy, back in my Commodore-64 days. Even at the time, I thought to myself how cool it would be to be able to network six computers together so that each character could be controlled by a seperate player without the need to swap seats. More recently, there was “Age Of Empires” and “Heroes Of Might And Magic II.”

The latter was an important step forward for me, because Heroes II came with a scenario/map editor, which I still use from time to time to make maps for my D&D campaigns. The thought of uniting that concept with the AD&D computer games to construct more interactive RPG campaigns was very exciting, but it never happened.

It’s easy to see why people get hooked on MMORPGs, as well – being able to game at any time you want, with no need to allow for the fickle schedules of others, is obviously appealing. The main reason that I never got involved is quite straightforward – I couldn’t (and can’t!) afford it, either financially, or in time. For me, they would be a black hole into which too many of my other projects and interests would vanish (hence the illustration that accompanies this blog post!)

That doesn’t mean that computer technology is not part of my roleplaying; it’s a massive part. It might not be essential, but it comes close to it. Utilities to help generate the scenarios, word processing to write them, the internet for research, art programs with which to generate illustrations and images and maps, email and instant messaging for communications, spreadsheets for rules analysis, even business software for time management, the list goes on and on and on.

But the fact remains that I never got into online gaming. I can’t speak for Johnn, but it’s my impression that his on-line gaming experience isn’t that much greater – we’re primarily (if not exclusively) table-top gamers. Which made it rather difficult to answer an Ask-the-GMs question that came in from a GM named Ruan:

I ran an [online] campaign but a few players stopped posting and the game almost came to a standstill.

So I mailed them all and gave them a deadline to tell me if they are playing or not. Im not interested in the campaign anymore (Its my first time, and I’m kinda drowning in all the plots etc etc.)

Can you recommend a good site which gives a detailed noob-DM campaign with maps and images?

Ruan

This was followed soon afterwards by another question from a different GM:

I’m interested in starting an online/PBEM game. Which RPG system translates over well to PBEM/online gaming in your opinion? I was considering perhaps Hero’s Sidekick system or D20 Modern.

I am curious about how some RPG systems translate to PBEM or do most GM just ‘wing’ it? Perhaps using the sourcebooks as general reference but adjusting for online gaming; if so how? Currently I have WOTC’s D20 Modern RPG and Mage: The Gathering-Revised sourcebooks, but was looking at Hero’s “Sidekick” system since it seems to be rules light, and perhaps is easier to translate to a PBEM?
Thanks in Advance!

TS

Can anyone else out there give answers?

To start the ball rolling, here’s some advice from Johnn for TS:

Hi TS,
I have some tips coming up in the Roleplaying Tips E-Zine that might help, though they don’t specifically address system selection. If you don’t subscribe, you can do so for free here:

In addition, you might find these helpful:
Tips For Setting Up PBeMs & PBPs
10 PBEM Etiquette Tips For Beginner Players
Comparing Play By Email (PBeM) With Other RPGs
Guide to PBP / PBEM By Scott Sylvester
Roleplaying Tips Weekly Supplemental #10: “Subscribers’ Online Games”

To the best of my knowledge, game systems with complicated combat or skill rules are often modified for PBeM. GMs either handle the dice rolls or choices too complicated to communicate efficiently via email, or they use software to help arbitrate. For example, unless the group does desire long combats (i.e. 2 months+ real time), D&D / d20 is either not selected for PBeM, the GM handles combats herself and just reports back results based on certain criteria, or the group agrees to daily posting frequency.

WOD games are good for RPG, as I believe their dice pool systems and task resolutions systems don’t bog down too much via PBeM.

Hero’s systems are number-heavy, through I haven’t played Sidekick. It might be worth checking out, though I’d hedge that a GM would need to handle a lot of the mechanics herself offline. So, the answer does seem to be that GMs just wing-it.

Does anyone know of a site with more specific information on the subject that they can provide a link to? Or have any advice or assistance that they can offer to Ruan or TS?

credit: Gamer Bling

Dungeon master screens are often talked about, especially customizing them. I’ve been following a thread over at Roleplaying Pro where I commented on a few tips for customizing your screen. The potential of the game master screen has also been covered at RoleplayingTips.com, and numerous readers have responded with their tips over the years.

Published DM screens are great, but unfortunately, one-size does not fit all. Dungeon masters have different tastes. They also have different styles, varying experience levels behind the screen, and unique needs based on their current campaign and character group make-up.

While buying a DM screen can get you started if you’re new to a game system, you’ll want to upgrade over time. For example, I reviewed the 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master screen at Dungeonmastering.com and thought it was great for DMs new to 4E, but eventually the EXP and Food Prices tables will be wasted space. Other tables could be too, once you know the rules. Also, the screen never truly serves your unique campaign, your homebrew world, or the different tables you reference more often in the books but weren’t chosen to be placed on any of the panels.

At some point, you’ll want to customise your own screen.

Following is my list of the best dungeon master screen hacks. Use these to customise to your heart’s content to make a dungeon master aid that works for you as your DMing skills – and campaign – continue to evolve.

1. Page protectors glued to cardboard panels

From Roleplaying Tips E-Zine Issue #80 a reader suggests gluing plastic page protectors to cardboard to make a customisable DM screen. Whenever you need a new chart or page of reference notes, just slip the page into a sleeve and you’re set.

2. Folded index cards along the top edge

Photos at the Sly Flourish blog demonstrate well how you can place folded index cards on your dungeon master screen. Sly’s pics show him using the cards for initiative. Don’t forget to use temporary cards for foes.

You can also just use folded slips of paper. Regardless of paper or card, you can put anything you need that’ll fit on those suckers.

3. Recycle old screens

I don’t know about you, but I’m on my fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. That’s not only four official screens for me, but I’ve got some homemade ones too. You can resurrect old screens by gluing new charts or plastic page sleeves over them. You can cut and glue old screens together. If you’re like me, you have enough to build a fort with.

4. Clips along the edges

Roleplaying Tips reader Perry Rogers recently wrote in with his tip about using clips on DM screens. Similar to folded index cards, you can get specific clips with surfaces for pasting things onto them, such as PC portraits, to make another easy initiative tool.

Here’s a photo with the monster leader’s turn. His troops’ initiative clip (color coordinated with the leader’s clip) is at the end of the turn.

View from the player’s side of the screen.

The dwarf has two ongoing effects: Stunned and -2 to Attack
rolls.

The turn indicator and a player’s clip. Note the magnet on the turn indicator. The magnet does a great job holding the
marker in place atop the screen.

Another hack is to clip things to the screen. Papers, printouts, photos, whatever. You can not only clip things to your side of the screen for reference, you can also clip things on the other side for player reference. You can also use different types of clips to best suit your screen’s thickness.

5. Extend your screen with flaps and panels

Have you ever seen the Hackmaster GM screen? It’s a work of art with two dozen panels and flaps tucked away in a three panel display. Why not do the same? Use your existing screen, hack an old screen you don’t use anymore, or build your own from scratch. Create additional panels and tape or glue them to your screen:

• Extend your screen to a third or fourth panel
• Add interior panels you flip back and forth through like a magazine
• Add flaps that go up and over to reveal inner panels, and perhaps new useful panels on the players’ side.

6. Post-It gods

P0wn your DM screen with Post-Its. Don’t just paste them onto your screen. Paste notes onto each other. For example, monster powers and feats often come in groups or categories. So, make a stack of cheat notes with one power per note, paste ’em together on your screen in alphabetic order, and flip through ’em as needed when dungeon mastering.

Do the same with spells, combat actions, and any other groups of rules that you can stack half an inch high on your screen.

It doesn’t need to stop at Post-It Notes, though. Take a trip to your local stationery store and check out the whole family of Post-It products and see if organizational inspiration strikes. There’s Post-It Cards, Tabs, Pages, and more.

If you have any Post-It Notes left over from this hack, get a pencil and make a mini page-flip book of PC decapitations.

7. Paste over useless tables with your own

Who says you have to settle with the charts the publisher gave you? Make your own charts, print them out, and tape or glue them over useless ones. Measure up the space you will be covering and build your new charts to spec. You might even have a colour printer at home to design awesome charts with, but black and white serve just as well.

8. What’s with art on the players’ side?

A dungeon master screen pet peeve of mine is reference printed only on one side. The players get to look at pretty art. That’s great, until the players have stared at that art for so long they no longer see it, and don’t give it another conscious glance for the rest of the campaign. Use the hacks in this post to put some useful information on that side of the screen.

For example, how about putting EXP and level-up tables on the players’ side? Maybe print up random insults and post a new one every session to goad your group on. “Divide and conquer is the GM’s best friend. It works on you every time.”

9. Build card holders

If clips don’t grab you or the deep real estate of your screen, then consider building card holders. Imagine printing or writing anything you wanted on index cards and being able to swap them out anytime depending on what’s happening in the game. Use tape and paper or chopped-up index cards to make a pocket on your screen, and then fill it with cards, the face-up one being what you need at the moment.

Nominated

Velcro: This did not make the official list as every Velcro experiment I’ve tried has failed. It’s heavy and takes a bit of a rip to separate. When I first learned I could buy Velcro in a roll for cheap I immediately thought about using it for my dungeon master screen. I was hoping to attached it to charts and props that I could mount on my screen and swap in and out as I pleased. In practice the idea was a flop.

Magnetic strip: Another eureka moment that died a thousand deaths. What could be better than a magnetic strip running along the top of your screen, right? With bits of magnets attached to cards, charts, and props, I could mount and replace items on my screen fast and easy. I didn’t get very far. Actually, I only got to the stage of getting a magnetic strip and cutting it up. Then it dawned on me that someone invented Post-Its. Hey, no one said I was the sharpest tool in the shed.

So, those are my top dungeon master screen hacks. What are yours?

Credit: Falashad

Let me start off our discussion of doing game session post-mortems with some definitions:

Retrospective: contemplative of past situations (dictionary.com)

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Albert Einstein)

Kaizen: a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life (wikipedia.org)

The goal of many Campaign Mastery readers is to level-up their game. That means one part ongoing GMing improvements, one part helping players be better, and one part tweaking the group itself.

Post mortems involve reflecting on past game sessions to spot ways to improve your game, and are an awesome tool in your GM toolbox. Just the act of thinking about how a game session played out, and documenting observations, is guaranteed to help, assuming you take follow-up action.

Rather than letting coincidence lead to improvement, such as an impromptu discussion about the game with a player you bump into at the grocery store, post mortems are reliable, purposeful, and predictable tools. You initiate them as you see fit, and the situation of improvement-by-chance is overtaken by improvement-on-purpose, which is faster, easier, and more effective in the long run.

A good post mortem involves asking insightful questions, taking an objective look at the past, and recording your observations. At the same time, you can also note ideas for how to improve things.

Alternatively, you can make all your observations first then go into a problem-solving second stage, whatever works best for you.

Here are a few tips for running successful game post mortems. At the end are a few questions to help you do a game session self-post mortem.

Focus on what you can change – yourself

Of the three people-oriented dynamics in a game – the game master, the players, and the group – the only one you can be sure of changing is yourself.

The number one help request email I receive at RoleplayingTips.com is about dealing with problem players. How can I make a player roleplay better? How can I make players behave better? How can I make the group enjoy my style of GMing?

Please realize you can only control your GMing and yourself. You can influence players and the group dynamic in many ways, but you can’t force the change. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink, especially if it was in that Clint Eastwood movie where the bad guys had poisoned the pond. Err, I think that’s how that saying goes.

So, tip number one is to set an expectation with post mortems that you can use them to change yourself, and if you can make a positive change in players or the group, that’s a great bonus, but not essential.

Lead by example

The biggest influence you can have on players taking an interest in self-improvement and levelling up gameplay is to lead by example. Demonstrate improvement in your own game mastering. Perform post mortems on yourself. Document. Ask for feedback. Make efforts to become a better game master. As GMing is a set of skills (a large set) you are guaranteed to achieve Kaizen if you put effort into it.

Once players see how you are improving, how post mortems are helping, they might be inspired to follow suit. Once the group sees how you treat game mastering as a craft, something to master over time and with practice, your players might reflect upon the skills of being super players, for that is a craft to master as well. Then, if one or two players decide to take an interest in improving their game, they might inspire others at your table.

Rather than beating your group with a stick, harsh words, or sharp dice, focus on improving yourself, and lead by example. Be patient. Take great satisfaction in your own progress, and hope that others become inspired and motivated to level-up as well.

Method 1: Do a post mortem on yourself

It’s tempting when looking back at game sessions to find things wrong with the players, the adventure, the rules, the game environment, and so on. This might be true. We are critical thinkers. We can find room for improvement in everything. However, based on time invested versus reward, you will become a better GM faster by focusing on yourself.

For example:

• What did you do to prepare for last session? How did that pay off, or did it?
• How did you react to various behaviours, situations, events and developments last session?
• How were you as Master of Ceremonies?
• How were you at rules refereeing?
• How were your descriptions?
• How well were you organized?

Method 2: Try a group post mortem after the game

If you think your group is up for it, do post mortems with them for a few minutes after game sessions. Have a short list of questions ready, if you want to target specific issues, or just launch with an open-ended question, such as “How do you feel the session went tonight?” and see what conversation ensues.

Take notes. Try to objectively, and dispassionately, record group comments. Often you’ll superimpose your own language or slant on comments as you transcribe. It’s better to record exact feedback, then do interpretation afterwards. Don’t hesitate to follow-up with anyone if your notes are unclear or you want more detail on a comment made.

This method can be bumpy. You must be gracious and non-judgemental about accepting feedback. Communication, the core of this method, is always tricky, especially for folks who might not be the best communicators. Be aware that words and tone might not come out as intended. Just smile, record, and look for the spirit of the feedback.

A benefit of group post mortems is that the idea of improvement becomes a group awareness thing. While participation is optional, it’s a great way to get players to reflect on their own gaming skills, should they choose.

Method 3: Do post mortems with players between sessions

Some people, myself included, do better providing feedback one-on-one. If you are wanting to get player feedback about your GMing as part of your post mortem process, then consider doing one-on-ones with some or all players between sessions.

In-person, perhaps over coffee, is the best method. Voice chat is the next best option. A distant third is text chat – there are too many ambiguities and communication issues with email, IM, and other text-based communication for it to be highly effective, but it can complement in-person or voice, or it can be a last resort when needed.

As with group post mortems, have some specific questions prepared, or just start with an open-ended question. Record objectively.

To do list: make a single list of issues, update progress

Once you’ve got observations recorded, make a list of all your interpretations and ideas for fixes or tweaks. Best case is to number each observation you want to address, then use the same number for your to do list. Use letters to identify specific ideas or actions if there is more than one per observation.

Right now, with your post mortem notes, what you’ve got is observations. Any ideas for solutions, changes, or improvements are just theories based on your interpretations of observations.

You can get lost in the details of improvement, and the first principle of self-improvement is to always go back to your source, to test assumptions, to make sure you’re on the right vector before even starting to play with solutions. By tracking your theories to their source observations with a number code, you can reflect back after trying an improvement.

Steven Covey, Mr. Seven Habits, tells a story about a bunch of dudes chopping through trees. They get lost. One dude climbs a tree to look around. A dude from the ground asks, “Are we headed in the right direction?” The dude in the tree says, “We’re in the wrong forest!” Well, it goes something like that. :)

Before you aim at specific trees, re-check your post mortem notes to make sure you’re even in the right forest. Never fear to go back to the source of the observation and confirm the facts or reinterpret before getting to solutions.

Was your observation correct – did you record it verbatim or correctly? That’s the first thing I’d check before criticizing a solution that failed or fell flat.

Here’s another story. I know someone with high cholesterol. Their doctor gives them pills to help lower it. The pills cause side effects. My friend goes back to their doctor and gets another set of pills to deal with the side effects. Those pills help but cause new side effects. A third trip wins my friend a third set of pills. Apparently, the strategy is to brew the right chemical cocktail to balance everything out. I’m no expert, but I think my friend should find a doctor who talks about diet, exercise, and some natural remedies.

The point is, though, that GMs can get trapped into forever curing symptoms caused by efforts to cure previous symptoms. So, it’s always recommended to return periodically to the source – the observations and interpretations – before trying to fix multiple levels of solutions that might not be dealing with the main issue. Do this by numbering each observation and interpretation in your notes, and using that unique number for your to do list of actions, tweaks, and research.

As you build up your to do list, reflect on it between sessions. Avoid having multiple to do lists lying around. This will get confusing. Just maintain one list. Feel free to record your post mortems and ideas in various places, but keep your list, which is your ongoing action plan, in one place.

As you try things, do post mortems on those. Use your numbering system so you can trace observations > interpretations > to do list items > attempted improvements > follow-up observations > interpretations > revised to do list items.

This might sound like a lot of work, but it isn’t. Explaining out the steps just makes things seem complicated. What you’re doing is identifying an opportunity to improve and tracking how you are getting on with that.

For example, you recorded one player as saying combats are too long. Knee-jerk interpretation might be the game rules suck. So, you add in house rules. You might reduce hit points of foes by half, maybe. Then you play again. How did that go? Were combats still too long? There are a hundred reasons why combats might be too long.

Heck, even that’s an assumption. Could be the combat isn’t too long, it just feels like it’s long. What if you become 25% better at combat descriptions to engage and entertain players better each round and encourage them to roleplay better in combat as well. This might make hour-long combats feel like half-hour combats, even though the clock measures the same amount of time. Remember how long a minute is depending on whether you’re pacing outside the bathroom door dying to get in….

What worked well?

It’s easy being a critic. “Everyone’s a critic,” I believe, is a common criticism. Make a point to note the positive things of your games and your GMing. Looking through the lens of problems all the time will get you down. Tracking improvement is motivational. So is tracking the good things about your games. At the very least, you can make a list of successes you should try to repeat – create a recipe of success so you know what to keep on doing.

Next post mortem, slip in the question, What went well?” Record. Congratulate yourself. Keep doing that.

Look to change structure, not the end results themselves

This tip is a tricky one. A Roleplaying Tips reader, Aki, pointed me to a great book called the Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. It discusses Systems Thinking. For the purposes of this article, systems thinking is looking at how things actually work during game sessions and addressing the true causes of problems, and identifying improvements that will have a real impact.

If you look at the structure of something, you can understand it, whether it’s a bridge, a process, or a relationship. With this understanding, you can reveal the true causes of issues and address those, instead of just treating the symptoms, or fixing the wrong things altogether. Could be cholesterol is a result of a trans-fatty diet. Fix that and there’s no need for pills that fix pills that fix pills for the symptom of high cholesterol.

For example, one of your players might be a poor roleplayer. He always states his actions out of context, with nary a word of description, in-character personality, or flair.

One approach might be to think up a bunch of remedies. Maybe have a chat with him, or encourage him to roleplay, or send him a bunch of roleplaying tips and articles.

Or….you could look at the structure of things. What’s the actual chain of events that happens with this player? Perhaps the player sits next to you each session. On his turn he states his action. He usually goes first, because he’s on your left. Then everyone else takes their turn.

With this simple example, the structure reveals some interesting possibilities. Is the player scared of going first? Being first to declare actions carries a bit of responsibility and is sometimes risky. Perhaps the player is intimidated by going first all the time due to the unfortunate seating arrangement.

Perhaps the player is intimidated by sitting beside the GM? Due to bad seating the first session, and the human habit of sitting in the same place as last time, the player got stuck with a permanent seat beside you.

Could be the player is being bullied. So, he wants his turn over quick without much spotlight.

Could be the bully is you? Maybe you are always correcting the player? Maybe, in trying to help, you always offer corrections or hints the player should change his action. This has eroded the player’s confidence.

All this is hypothetical. And Fifth Discipline does a much better job than I am at showing how to see the structure of things so you can break negative feedback loops and get to the heart of matters.

Post mortem sample questions

Here are a few questions to get you going on your post mortems:

• How did you feel last session went?
• What were your favourite parts of last session?
• What were your least favourite parts?
• Were you ever tired or “out of it” last session? When?
• Were you ever distracted, causing poor GMing? What were the circumstances?
• When did the players seem most engaged?
• When did the players seem least engaged? What did you observe to make you think players were not engaged?
• Describe the session’s pacing. What was happening in the game and at the game table during high and low points?
• How did you prepare for the session?
• How well did the preparation serve you for the session?
• How did the session end – or a low or high note? Why?

Light or thorough, both are good

How you want to handle post-session analysis is up to you. You can go through a formal post mortem process, using the tips above. You can also just quickly jot a few notes for improvement and see what works over time. You could blog out each session, or leave it all in your head.

Both approaches – light and thorough – have pros and cons. It just matters that you are thinking about how to improve your craft and are trying and learning new things all the time.

How do you ensure that every player gets a fair share of the attention when one of them has a dominant personality?

Sometimes it can be hard to determine exactly what the problem is when someone asks for advice. When that happens, we do the best we can to interpret the request, dissecting every word in a bid to analyse the question so that we can give the best answer we can. Most of the time, we’re successful, and a clarifying email clears up any obscure points. Sometimes we have to resort to a more generic discussion of the type of problem in hopes that it covers the question the GM couldn’t articulate. And sometimes,we just have to roll with our best guess. This is one of those times. I have two players (in my 6-player group) that seem to get along okay but are also vying for some so-called non-existent group leader position. This seems to be a difference between players than anything else, but I don’t know how to handle it. They joke and otherwise get along okay both in character and out. Styles of play are quite similar. Matter of fact, I go out of my way to make sure no one is ignored. They’re both good players and are among the primary ‘movers and shakers’ in the game. I’m wondering if there is some way of reconciling what I call the ‘alpha male behavior’ so the whole group can game. Unfortunately, this still left us scratching our heads as to the exact nature of the problem. Perhaps the leadership battle was resulting in the other players having less participation due to various factors related to the leadership battle? But that seems contradicted by the statement that the GM is ‘going out of his way to make sure no one is ignored’. Perhaps the two players are competing to be the person ‘in charge’ of the group – a real-world conflict. Is there an issue of mistrust? Is it a question of ambition, or bragging rights? Possibly the two are competing for the position of ‘caller’ for the PCs party (something recommended for D&D and by various other sources, but which I don’t use). Or perhaps they are competing because their characters both want to be the ‘leader’ of the group of PCs, even though the players get along fine? But further reflection and dissection of the information provided has left us with an interpretation that seems conclusive (to us), and that’s the one we have tried to address in our replies. Hopefully, we’ve got it right. The problem actually seems to be that the GM has to go out of his way to ensure everyone a fair amount of DM attention because two players are trying to dominate the group and hog the spotlight…

Mike’s answer:

There is no one solution to this problem. Instead, there are a number of different techniques to apply, ranging from targetted subplots and scenarios to real-life behaviour modification techniques.

The problem with personalities

Let’s be honest: there are people with assertive personalities, and people with retiring personalities. It doesn’t matter too much what the character’s personality is supposed to be if the player isn’t capable of expressing it; a shy player can’t play a frothing egomaniac effectively, and an assertive character will have to force themselves to play someone who’s meek and hesitant. If the source of the trouble is an incompatibility between character personality and player personality, there is a limited amount that can be achieved at the gaming table.

That said, it’s amazing how much a player can grow in assertiveness and positivity when given the opportunity through a roleplaying game. The simple act of placing yourself in someone else’s shoes can sidestep any number of impairments and personal experiences that make someone shy and hesitant. I once knew a player who, when she started, had trouble raising her voice above a whisper through sheer insecurity. Three years later, she was running her own game and slapping down unruly players whenever it was necessary; the turning point came when she found she was able to pretend to the confidence that her character felt, even if she didn’t feel that way herself. After a while, she found the pretended confidence had become real, when she corrected a mistake in another player’s interpretation of the rules without even thinking about it, THEN realised what she had done.

Miracles do happen, and roleplaying can be therapeutic, but you can’t rely on that.

Communication is the foundation

The first step to be taken is to inform your players of the perceived problem and that you intend to trial a number of solutions to see what works for the group and what doesn’t (if the players claim that it isn’t a problem, point out that you’re entitled to enjoy yourself, too – since you probably put more work into the campaign than anyone else, it could be argued you are entitled to have more fun! This problem is creating additional work and stress during the game for you and you intend to resolve it). Be firm, but friendly.

This achieves two things: it puts the players on notice there are going to be changes trialled in the way the campaign operates, and it puts the offending players on notice that their behaviour is starting to have a negative impact on the game. Hopefully, they will moderate that behaviour and some of the more draconian measures proposed later in my reply won’t be necessary.

Your players may also have suggestions for resolving the problem – add them to whichever category they seem appropriate, wherever in the sequence of measures to be trialled that seems appropriate. (And tell US about them so that they can help others with similar problems!)

Character-based solutions

These are the best and least-painful solutions to implement, but they won’t be applicable all the time.

Have the players discuss the situation, in-game, in character
Having two people who are competing to be in charge is uncomfortable. The characters should feel the same way, and should talk about the situation.

Make the expert the voice of authority
When a situation involving magic comes up, the mage is the expert. When the situation involves religion or theology, the cleric should be the expert, and so on. This should be regardless of relative skill levels, because the specialist class hasn’t just studied the theory, he’s seen the practice and has an awareness of all the peripheral issues and how other skills relate to the primary subject.

To reflect this broader expertise, I set the DCs for any task five higher for a non-expert unless the expert is in charge. If the party is being led by a fighter, and a theological question arises, either he puts the cleric in charge, or the tasks before the party become more difficult.

Whenever the expert makes a skill check related to his class expertise, I permit him a +2 synergy bonus from a skill that is representative of the class – it might be knowledge (religion) or spellcraft or pick pockets, or whatever.

If it becomes necessary to compare a non-expert but learned character’s skill with that of an expert who is less learned, I permit them to add their relevant character class levels to their skill – So a 6th-level cleric with knowledge (religion) 12 is at the same level of expertise as a non-cleric of any level with knowledge (religion) 18. To keep the difficulty of tasks at the same effective level as they were intended if running a canned module, I will also add this number to the DC required on the skill check.

These measures, either singly or in combination, inflict penalties on the party for inexpert leadership and grant bonuses for expert leadership.

In extreme cases, I will add the cleric’s level to any encounter as virtual CR – that is to say, I’ll make the encounters tougher for no additional xp reward – if the wrong character is in charge. This represents the inexpert leader failing to target vulnerabilities, making tactical mistakes due to lack of expertise, etc. You want to convey the feeling to the PCs that “we didn’t have this much trouble when Percy was in charge”.

NPCs listen to the expert
The self-declared leader(s) of the party can attempt to take charge of any discussion the party has with an NPC, but if the NPCs ignore them and speak directly to the character with the appropriate class expertise, the would-be ‘leaders’ are just back seat drivers. If they still try to decide matters for the group, when they are dealing with a figure of authority, the NPC can instruct them to “Be silent or I’ll have you gagged. I want to hear what Percy the cleric has to say.”

The same holds true for low-level NPCs like hirelings and peasants. If these are instructed by the self-appointed leader – a mage say – to attack a demonic being NOW, at the very least they will turn to the cleric and say “Should we do what he says?” or “Protect us, Holy Father”, or similar. They will look to the cleric for leadership under such a circumstance.

Use reputations against the back-seat drivers
Furthermore, the self-appointed leader who tells the NPCs to attack in such a situation when the cleric wants them to wait to be blessed first is likely to start getting a reputation for panicking in such circumstances. There are analagous situations for every circumstance – characters may be tagged with “overeager” or “greedy” or “headstrong” or whatever. The self-appointed leaders can find these reputations impacting on their performance even when they are the appropriate expert to lead the group.

Ultimately, NPCs ‘hiring’ the PCs for a mission will put an inappropriate character in charge “because I want this expedition to be led by someone who’s level-headed.” (In which case, the penalties for inappropriate leadership come off the table, without telling the players!)

Use an egg-timer to create peer pressure
Whenever the characters are faced with a major decision, whip out a 3-minute egg-timer. The players have until the sands run out to decide what they are going to do, including any debate about who’s right or who’s in charge. Failure to decide in time reduces the treasure to be found in the session by 10% and starts the egg-timer going again. If you run out of treasure, start cutting xp. If you run out of XP, start adding hit dice to encounters and CR to traps. Each 3 minutes represents 15 minutes to an hour (GM’s choice) in game time; don’t forget to roll for random encounters attracted by the noisy debate, and don’t award any xp for such an encounter.

Think of the Council Of Elrond scenes in “The Fellowship Of The Ring” as being analagous to what the PCs are doing!

Distracted Characters
You can also rule that if two characters are giving contradictory instructions at the start of a battle, they are distracted by their argument over who’s in charge and lose their first-round actions.

Metagame Solutions I: Design Appropriate Scenarios

If your party consists of a rogue, a fighter, a cleric, and a mage, then 1-in-4 scenarios should be about stealing something or finding and extracting lost treasures; 1-in-4 should be about religion and theology; 1-in-4 should be about magic; and only 1-in-4 should be straightforward dungeon-bash or militaristic encounters.

Most of the measures suggested previously won’t work if the self-appointed leaders are the characters who should logically be in charge. Design your scenarios to play to a single character’s strengths and the overbearing players’ characters’ weaknesses.

Player-oriented Solutions

Rotate the leadership
Another method is for the players to rotate the party leadership amongst themselves. This isn’t entirely realistic, and can negatively impact the campaign’s plausibility, so it is not a solution to be trialled lightly.

Rearrange the seating
Make sure that whoever is expected to be in charge is sitting right next to you. Put characters who don’t tend to speak up closer to you on the other side. There is a natural tendancy for those who think themselves in charge of the party to position themselves close to the GM, especially in a noisy environment. This might involve merely adjusting the seating of the players, or it may involve you moving as well.

Set the ‘leaders’ aside
Run the occasional subplot for the ‘non-leaders’ – and physically take them aside to deal with the events. Nothing frustrates someone who thinks they are in charge more than events over which they have no control, and which will eventually become their problem – or for which they will eventually be blamed, because they were ‘in charge’.

Metagame solutions II: Draconian Measures

If the suggestions made earlier don’t solve the problem – and they will need some time to take effect, habits are hard to break – then it’s time to get more serious.

XP Penalties for bad behaviour
I use small glass beads of the type sold for the bottom of fishtanks (and frequently used by card-players like Magic) for rewards and punishments. I have two different sizes, and a bunch of colours – white, blue, red, and black. I dole these out during play as rewards and punishments. The interpretation varies from game system to game system, but in D&D, they mean:

• White: Great suggestion, brilliant idea, or a side-comment that had everyone laughing. Worth +5xp each, doubled for every 2nd one. So if a player gets 4 of them in a session (rare), that’s (4x5x2x2)=+80 xp. Not much, but it adds up.
• Blue: Great roleplay. Worth +10xp each, doubled for every 3rd one. So if a player gets 4 of the in a session (rare), that’s (4x10x2)=+80 xp. Most players will get one in a session.
• Red: Minor behavioural infraction: interrupting the GM unneccessarily, loud side conversations, talking over the top of another player, telling another player how to run their character, and so on. Also awarded for bad roleplay – using out-of-character knowledge, doing something that their character wouldn’t do, etc. Worth -10xp, doubled for every 2nd one. I’ve only ever had to hand out three of these in total in the ten years that I’ve been using this system.
• Black: Major behavioural infraction, something that seriously impacts the game: leaving their character at home, reading another player’s character sheet without permission, deliberate cheating, usurping the GMs prerogative, refusing to accept the GM’s ruling, talking back to the GM, arguing with another player, etc. Worth -50% xp for the session or -200xp (whichever is higher), doubled for each 2nd one. Earning one of these also costs the player a -1 on all rolls for one future session per black bead issued. At the end of any session where a player gets a black bead, each player (and the GM) is handed a black and a blue bead for a secret ballot over whether or not the player in question should be kicked out of the game; any black beads earned as penalties are also counted as votes, and the majority rules. That means that if a player earns two strikes in a single session, there are already two votes to exclude him. Black beads are taken seriously! I’ve only once handed one of these out.

Elect A Leader
At the start of each scenario, after the introduction (so that the players have some idea of what’s in front of them), hold a secret ballot. The GM also votes, but can abstain. Whoever gets the most votes is considered the party leader for the session. If everyone votes for themselves, the GM’s vote is the deciding one. If there is a tie, the GM removes the lowest-placed candidate from the running and players vote again; this process continues until one person is declared the winner.

Auction The Role Of Leader
Each player writes on a piece of paper what percentage of the xp they are going to earn in a session they are willing to forego for the job of party leader. A good leader will be confident in his ability to earn more xp for the party than they would get under someone else’s command, and will vote accordingly. Other players can name a preferred leader on their ballots, indicating that they will give up X per cent of their xp to have Bob in charge (or whoever). Biggest total xp sacrifice wins.

Beware Of Excess

It’s tempting to come on strong to force an immediate change, perhaps with the intention of easing up after a session or two, but some of these measures can provoke ill-feeling amongst the players, especially if they feel they are “only roleplaying their character”. It’s no accident that most of the solutions offered force the players to confront the problem at a character level.

My advice is to take it slow; introduce one measure (or, at worst, one suite of measures) per game session at most, and give the players time to mull it over and change their way of thinking. It won’t happen overnight, but it will eventually.

Johnn’s answer:

What to do when two players – or even one player – tries to hog or steal the limelight?

You have excellent answers, Mike. I concur. In addition, I’d propose the following few game mastering techniques for consideration:

Wield eye contact

In my games, eye contact means you’re on stage. Whether it’s fielding an out of character question or listening to in-character narrative, if I’m looking at you, it’s your turn to speak.

Get into the practice of not multi-tasking when listening. Give the player you’re looking at your full attention. This means the other players do not have your attention. It’s a subtle signal for others to not jump in or interrupt.

We play a friendly game, so we interrupt all the time, but almost always for constructive purposes, which is the difference.

Note I didn’t say glare or stare. I save these looks for when roleplaying NPCs. :) Just keep your gaze steady, and don’t look at other players when they try to butt in.

Nod and use body language to show you are engaged with what the player is saying. This also tells the others you’re listening intently, and sends a signal to let the player have his say.

If you provide attentive listening to everyone, you lead by example, and most gamers will get the hint and follow suit.

Note that if you aren’t actually listening, your cover will soon be blown. People can tell you’re distracted, even if you’re making eye contact and nodding. If you attempt this deceit, assertive players will leap upon this opportunity, and are more likely to have their way because you’re already distracted.

Inflict the index finger

I point to indicate that a player is on the stage. This not only lets a player know it’s his turn, but it lets everyone else know as well.

My pointing will often reflect the atmosphere or mood of an encounter. It’s a small thing, and not a GMing requirement, but it’s something I enjoy doing.

It turns out there are many ways you can point. Why not experiment, have fun with it, and be creative in coming up with new gestures?

For example, during combats where I want a fast pace, I jab at players sharply, and aim for the eyes. This gets attention quick and tells them I mean business.

Another style is the flourish. During roleplaying encounters I’ll do a twisty, turny, airplane-in-the-air gesture and end with a point.

And then there’s the finger itself. It can be rigid, wiggle at bit, wag, bend, and so on.

Inflict the index finger to activate a player’s turn to the exclusion of the others, and to add a bit of style from behind the screen.

Acknowledge interrupting players

You can also point or nod to another player when it’s not their turn to indicate you know they’ve got something to say and you’ll get back to them. This is very effective.

Sometimes half the battle from the players’ point of view is getting the attention of the busy GM. During loud, chaotic, or freeplay periods, you want to enforce a measure of protocol so the game doesn’t get louder and louder because more volume is the only way to capture attention. Save that for the bar.

When acknowledging an interruption before refocusing on the active player, you need to actually get back to the player who’s on hold. If you don’t, your system fails and the attention-getting gimmicks of players will resume.

Don’t interrupt, lest ye be interrupted

If you interrupt, you’re sending a signal that it’s ok for players to do so. You might have special powers of the referee, but in real life you’re all peers, and interpersonal interactions are about respect, so by committing the error you are chastising others for, you erode your position.

Work on your words and tone

You might just need to get verbal with over-assertive players. “Bob, hang on, it’s Pete’s turn.” Two things you need to watch out for: what you say and how you say it.

You could say the perfect thing, but make a player angry or sulky because of unintended tone. And vice versa with using great tone and poor choice of words.

Your best tactic is to practice. As referee you are a neutral body in the game. Make your tone neutral as well. Remove judgement, irritation, and command from your tone – all these are interpersonal hot buttons.

Also, determine ahead of time what you’ll say in common situations that are having a negative effect on your game or group. Knowing what words to use ahead of time makes a verbal callout a lot easier. And, with less stress, you’re more likely to execute well on tone.

“Hang on for a sec Bob, I want to hear what Pete has to say.”

“Dude, it’s not your turn.”

“Ok people. I can only listen to one of you at a time. And, out of respect for each other, we have to take turns and then stay quiet when it’s someone else’s turn. Feel free to step away from the table to talk in private.

“Shhhhhhh! If grandma wakes she’ll pound on the floor with a broomstick. After two warnings she unchains Spike. For the love of all that’s holy, keep it down.”

Ask the GMs with specifics

A note on Ask the GMs. Thanks very much for the great questions! Chances are if you have a question others do as well, so this is an important service and your emails are appreciated.

To help us out, though, please try to get specific in what help you need. Giving us a full backstory or context helps, but before you send that email, be sure to tell us exactly the problem you want tips and advice for.

It would help to tell us your desired final outcome. What does success look like in your case or problem? What would a successful resolution create or bring about? What would the successful GMing moment be after applying our advice?

Knowing your desired outcome plus the current situation lets us get to the heart of the matter and help solve things for you with speed and accuracy.

Some questions are simple, such as “Tell me the best mapping software”, but others, especially involving social issues, require more specifics.

Thanks! I look forward to your Ask the GMs questions and help requests.

Cheers.

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The third dimension of the battlemat has long been a problem. How do you represent it with minis, other than by holding them up with your hand and making airplane noises?

The first problem is marking which minis are going vertical because they are hovering, levitating, swimming or flying.

The second problem is tracking height or depth. How high is the character or their foe in the air?

The third problem is stacking minis who are in the same vertical space but are at different heights.

Here are several methods for elevating your game into the air, and tracking miniatures on the battlemat that do so. Unfortunately, while some solutions are interesting, short of a crane, there is still no perfect solution. This is disappointing, because the new edition of D&D, for example, recommends you explore three dimensions in combat. Without a good minis solution, I think GMs will continue to make do and put up with a bit of battlemat chaos.

Dr. Wizard’s Elevation Indicator

This game aid is available at Emerald’s Emporium and Paizo’s online store.

An Elevation Indicator is a three inch tall, one inch diameter, plastic rod. It has numbers marked along the side for use with coloured bands you move up and down to indicate height. Place your mini on top of the rod and the rod on your battlemat and you have a flying combatant. You can track fliers thousands of feet in the air this way.

You can get Elevation Extenders for this product, which are plastic bases to optionally make the rod more stable and to hold a larger number of minis – or bigger minis – at the top in flying position.

Conversely, you can use the rod and its bands to show how far a PC is falling into a bottomless pit. :) Hey, it might happen: stealing an idea from a Planescape TSR novel, I once ran a couple sessions where the PCs were falling but could control their lateral movement a bit, and so could fly down and over to things. We had several encounters this way as they met fellow fallers, debris, and interesting situations. The PCs never hit bottom as they came across a dead wizard with teleport in his spell book, which a PC learned and, two weeks later, was able to teleport the group out.

This product is well-crafted. It’s a clear, buffed rod, no sharp edges, and stands well. The numbers are white on a clear plasctic surface, therefore not the easiest to see from certain angles and in certain light. The numbers and the bands do, however, make it easy to track height or depth, so problems #1 and #2 solved well.

Drawbacks are you need one rod for each combatant. The Elevation Indicator also does not solve problem #3: stacked combatants at different heights. The rod is solid and nothing fits below or above it. The extender base, if used, adds stability but uses up neighbouring squares, making those spaces tricky to place minis in at the battlmat level.

Combat Tiers

Whoa, these things are nice. Combat Tiers from Tinkered Tactics (and also available from Paizo) are multi-tiered plastic platforms, gridded out, with elevation blocks to create different heights. They are clear plastic and feel solid.

My set came with three platforms of different sizes, each big enough to hold large minis and several medium-sized minis. The tiers have good weight and are quite stable. Assembly was easy.

Cons with these are their large footprint. If you have terrain, then the base might not squeeze in well. The square columns used to support the tiers, though, can be used standalone in 1″ grid battlemaps.

They also don’t solve problem #2: tracking height for large heights. The columns are nicely segmented to 1″ / 5′ ratios, but my set’s height maxes out at 16″ / 80′ if all columns are used. This is not an issue for low-flying encounters, such as in caverns or interior spaces with low roofs.

Pros are problem #1: marking who is flying is solved, and problem #3: stacking is partially solved. I guess problem #3 might also be a con, because you can only stack three vertically (unless you get more sets) as my set came with 3 tiers. Potatoe, tomato.

Another pro is the clear base. If you don’t use 3D terrain, then the base should fit easily into your combat areas, and the clear plastic lets you see what you’ve drawn beneath, on your matt. Also good is the large tiers. You can wage limited space close melees on the tiers. The bottom tier is 5 squares by 5 squares, and the other two tiers are 4×4 each.

Pizza stands with straws

Our group shares dinner duties. Each session we take turns feeding the group. The default, and most frequent meal, is pizza. It comes to your door, it’s already sliced, and feeds several easily. :) In the middle of each ‘za is a plastic, three-legged stand designed to prop up the pizza lid during travel so the cheese doesn’t stick to the cardboard. These plastic stands are great for height indicators.

The little “tables” are the perfect size for a mini. They are also very stable. The tables are raised up about an inch or so, so you can place them over terrain and other small combat mat bits.

As an experiment, I attached straws to the legs to elevate the tables about half a foot off the battlemat. This was a miserable failure though, lol. First, the straws were a pain. They were not sturdy.

Second, all they did was provide a little extra vertical space so you could place a mini underneath. Aha! Two stacked minis. Unfortunately, the mini at the bottom was difficult to squeeze between the straw legs, and larger minis would not fit underneath at all.

Pizza stands solve problem #1: who is flying? They don’t solve problems #2 or #3 well: tracking how high and stacking minis vertically.

Dice and large objects

Currently, we use big objects in special cases to quickly identify flying or swimming minis. I have some big foamy dice, and there are other items around, including film canisters, empty pill bottles, and candy containers. These work in a snap, but sometimes aren’t suitable for some combat arrangements, such as close quarters fighting.

We also use small dice for flying indicators. I have a bunch of square Vegas d6s. These are the perfect size, are stable, and even have 1-6 numbers for some potential height tracking. Large minis and minis with unusual base shapes don’t sit well on these, though.

Poker chips

Ah yes, sweet sweet poker chips. These things are quickly approaching index cards and Post-It Notes in our games as universal game aids. We use poker chips to track a lot of details, including hit points, conditions, player Pocket Points, ammunition, and durations.

Poker chips are also great elevation markers. Pick a colour to indicate flying or swimming status, and then stack up the same colour to indicate height or depth.

This solves problems #1 and #2, but not #3: vertical stacking.

However, poker chips are cheap, useful for many things, and available at many stores.

Summary

There are lots of solutions out there. Of the commercial solutions, Combat Tiers are great, but possibly too bulky for you setup, so Dr. Wizard’s Elevation Indicator might be more to your liking (don’t forget, though, that you can use individual columns from the Tiers for single column elevators).

One snag is the cost. What if you have two or more pockets of swimming or arial combatants far apart from each other? One set of Tiers or one Elevation Indicator won’t solve the whole problem.

The other solutions, pizza stands, poker chips, and dice are cheap and available in multiple quantities (depending on your diet). Having game mastered with all these options, the cheap solutions lack the impact and cool factor of Dr. Wizard’s Elevation Indicator and Combat Tiers. We save those products for the best combats, in the case of multiple arial combats in a single encounter. And we sometimes just use poker chips when we want to be lean and fast.

However, no solution I’ve seen yet solves all three problems: denoting who is flying, marking how high, and having multiple combats stack in vertical space. Perhaps this is a hologram-only solution. :)

For more tips and solutions on elevating your game, read Roleplaying Tips Issue #310 – Airborne Minis Tips.

Over to you now. How do you elevate your game? How do you solve problems #1 – identifying who is flying, #2 – tracking height, and #3 – vertical space and stacking?

RPGs use rules, usually relating to dice rolls and modifiers, to simulate the world around the PCs, resolve character actions, and provide an interface between the game mechanics and the simulated environment. But this is not the only approach that can be used, and there are times when alternatives should be considered by the GM.

This not only affects the behaviour that can be simulated, it alters the surrounding rules paradygm and has a profound effect on the psychology of the players and hence on their behaviour and choices.

Consider, for example, the paradygm of playing cards instead of rolling dice. Many GMs resolve the results of gambling by characters with die rolls; why not actually play a few hands of poker when the characters play poker? But this is the merest tip of the iceberg; popular games, with well-understood rules, can be used as a metaphor for the resolution of character actions in a similar manner to rolling dice, but can bring additional strategic elements to the encounter, because there are natural mechanisms in the world of card games that are difficult to comfortably simulate with dice (though it can be done). The concepts of a “hand”, of “impoving” that hand by discards and draws, of “matching” sets of related cards in some fashion, can all be employed to simulate more complex behaviour and interactions than simply getting a higher total than an opponant or achieving a target number.

By examining a given situation, an appropriate metaphor can be chosen, and appropriate trappings and interpretations selected, and this is the recommended approach for GMs who are interested in employing this technique – selecting the metaphor to suit the situation.

This article, however, in order to be a comprehensive primer to the concept, will deliberately put the cart before the horse, and cherry-pick applications appropriate to a number of games to illustrate the strengths of each as a metaphor and how best to harness it to the game’s benefit.

You can even change the rules of the card game to suit your needs!

Solitaire: Trial & Error Skill Use

Let’s say that a mage is trying to analyse a strange form of magic that’s never been encountered before, or a scientist is trying to solve a chemical conundrum, or a detective is trying to put clues together to form a convincing theory of the crime, or a starship engineer is trying to string technobabble together in the right order to solve the latest problem his starship has encountered, or a thief is trying to pick a difficult lock. These are all easily simulated by die rolls, and there are any number of ways of interpreting the roll to ascertain not only the quality of the result but how long it takes to achieve it, in game time.

Which leaves one character spending whatever amount of game time working on the solution, and the player twiddling thumbs, while the rest of the party get to roleplay. Or the referee dismisses the waiting time with a hand-wave. As metaphors for the action within the game, die rolls suck at certain types of activity.

Using a game of patience gives an inherant way of telling how long it takes – the game proceeds while the player is trying to find a solution; and it takes however long it takes. A die roll at the end gives quality of solution, or the GM can hand-wave this and get on with the game.

There are all sorts of alterations that can be made to the standard rules to permit a solution to be found more quickly when the character is presented with an easier problem, or vice-versa. Perhaps you permit the game to start with one or more of the aces already out. Perhaps there is a rule that says when a card is revealed in the exposed stack that a card already in play at the top of a chain would follow, you have to either add that card from the stack to an existing chain or pick up the matching chain and add it to the exposed stack (this greatly increases the chance of successfully solving the game). Not clear on what I mean by that? Let’s say there’s a red-six-black-five-red-four chain of three cards. When you expose a black seven from the slush cards, you either have to have a red eight to add it to, or the six-five-four chain gets picked up and added to the slush stack on top of the seven – which has the consolation of revealing a new card, or creating a space for a King.

Characters can roleplay their progress as others interact with them, it gives the player something to do instead of his character being locked away in the lab (or whereever) working on the problem, and it brings the task itself to life.

Blackjack: The Chase

Chase sequences are often difficult to GM well, regardless of the game system in use. Existing rules mechanisms for combat and skill use generally disturb the free flow of events with table after table and modifier after modifier; what’s needed is a metaphor that is quick to resolve and simplifies the interpretation of situations into game-play. Blackjack is perfect for the situation.

It is a 1-on-1 situation, and so reflects the driver-vs-driver duel. It is fast to resolve, and produces easily-interpretable results. Bias can be built into the game as necessary through various rules mechanisms.

Let’s say that an NPC is being persued by a PC in chariots (or Dodge Vipers!) through the streets of a city. Each player gets a certain number of chips, which reflect the degree of difficulty of finalising the chase outcome; if the DM is cleaned out, the PC has caught the NPC, if the Player runs out of chips then the NPC has escaped. The gap between the two can be assessed by the number of chips. Relative character skill levels can be interpreted by the GM as changing the minimum total below which they are forced to draw an additional card, a requirement that the character doesn’t have; under standard blackjack rules this is normally 15. The higher this number, the more likely it is that the GM will go bust on a hand; the lower it is, the less likely, until (at 11), the GM and player are on an equal footing.

If necessary, you can add rules that certain cards require an immediate draw by the other side, regardless of what is in their hand, or rules that certain cards are “dead” and count for zero, or that they only count for zero if they are in pairs. You can play around with the basic rules of the game-within-a-game quickly and easily, to accommodate whatever circumstances need to be simulated.

For example, having a passenger in one chariot/car shooting at the other can be reflected by giving that character a single card that can replace either of the driver’s cards if the archer/gunman hits the target. This gives the side with the gunman a much better chance of a good draw because they don’t have to take the card that is on offer – the game becomes “draw three and choose the best two”. Or perhaps the diver HAS to replace one of his cards with that of the gunman, but if the gunman hits, he has the choice of which; if the gunman misses, it has to be the lowest card in his hand, or the highest.

The difficulty of the manouver being attempted by each side in a given round can be reflected in the size of the bet – provided that the DM (the ‘bank’) is required to bet as well, and the winner takes the pot, not some multiple of the amount that they bet. Limits to the size of the bet prevent all-or-nothing gambits, ie the chase ending too quickly.

Road conditions, temporary circumstances (dodging around a donkey-pulled cart in the street or whatever), etc, can be described by the GM simply by interpreting the cards showing at the start of each hand, letting the flow of the blackjack game dictate the flow of the action in the same way that a series of die rolls would. You don’t need a table for this – make it up to suit the moment.

By combining the flexibility conferred by house rules with such a simple metaphor for the action that is occurring, what was abysmally slow action becomes fast and furious (especially if a time limit is imposed on people considering their choices)!

Poker: Negotiations

Trade and diplomatic negotiations are, almost by definition, dull. Endless repetition of the same statements, time after time, varying just a little bit every now and then. In an RPG, the GM usually abbreviates the whole process, making all sides more willing to strike a deal and less obstinate than they are supposed to be. Often, the hard grind of negotiation is simply hand-waved. And much of the unpredictability, the give and take, the unexpected twists in the bargaining, the very essence of the plausibility – is lost. How much better – more beleavable, more interesting – would it be to find a way to simulate all that competition and unpredictability in a way that is both a more accurate metaphor and more entertaining to the players?

Every negotiation has at least two parties to the agreement, but innumerable factions, each with its own objective and agenda, its own idea of what will achieve the overall ends of the faction – or satisfy their own personal ambitions. The negotiation is a labyrinth of offer and counteroffer, of twists and turns, of people giving way on small things that are more signifiant to another party until compromises acceptable to all are achieved. Inevitably, some people will have the better negotiators or the stronger bargaining position, and will end with a result more to their liking.

All this is practically synonymous with poker. Heck, a “stronger bargaining position” is commonly referred to as having “the better hand”! Each player can represent a faction (for a large negotiation between multiple parties, such as the terms of the German Surrender at Versailles) or can represent a splinter of one of the major factions – defence minister, trade minister, etc etc. Multiple rounds of poker represent the multiple rounds of diplomacy.

As with Blackjack, the rules of the game can be changed to suit the situation. The relative strengths of a faction at the negotiating table can be represented by changing the number of chips the player starts with. Alliances and side-deals can be depicted by players swapping cards AFTER bets have been made – until then, one player can lie to his partner about what he’s got in his hand. Does the player really have the Jack he just offered me (which would improve my hand) or is he lying to strengthen his own splinter faction’s strength by sabotaging progress toward the ultimate goal? Perhaps cards can be bought and sold between factions.

Interpretation is everything. Using chips of two colours, worth different values, permits one to be labelled “political capital” – if the player wins a bet using one, he doesn’t get his “political capital” back, so he has to be sure that he will gain enough from victory over the opposing factions (as distinct from his allies) to recoup his expenditures. Perhaps he can gain additional political capital by folding a winning hand on an issue he doesn’t care that strongly about, or can “buy” an extra card with political capital to better his chances of a winning hand?

In order to make this all work, the GM has to to a bit of prep work; he needs to spell out the agenda for the negotiations, he needs to list the issues to be discussed and ensure that each representative has his own priorities, and that these are opposed. He needs to spell out loyalties and relationships between the factions, as well as points of disagreement. A couple of guidelines as to the personalities of the negotiators would not go astray, as well as opinions of each about the others.

The result is a game within a game, and the cut-and-thrust of politics coming to life in a way not otherwise possible without plot trains to direct the course of negotiations.

Poker 2: Character Construction

Heck, for that matter, why not let players build their character’s stats from the total value of their poker hand? +5 to the total for a pair, +10 for three of a kind, +20 for a full house, etc. This is similar to the ‘roll x dice and pick the best 3′ approach, but it lets players customise the characters towards what they want to play while bringing literal meaning to the expression “Play the cards you’re dealt”. Allow one card per stat, and you’re set. The number of discards and redraws permitted controls the ultimate likelyhood of successfully getting high-value stats.

Note that I’m not advocating this approach, or dismissing it either – just suggesting it as an interesting alternative that transforms character construction into something more interesting! Especially if the process of discarding and redrawing hands can be interpreted somehow into the character’s life story…

Roulette: Divine Intervention

Perhaps the ultimate example is using a miniature roulette wheel when a character seeks divine intervention. The character could just roll percentile dice – but it doesn’t quite have the same desperate flavour or symbolism of spinning that wheel and hoping for 00 to come up…

Practice Makes Perfect

Of course, there is one caveat to this approach. The GM must be able to simulate all skill levels of “player”, and that means practice.

Solitair is easy – there are a host of computer versions, and you can always fall back on an ordinary deck of cards. There is no need for an opponant, so this is something that the DM can do anytime.

Blackjack is similarly easy – in fact, it’s even easier to do on your own, because you can try all the alternative courses of action and record the results, and so learn what works, and how often, and hence what sort of risk is entailed.

Poker is quantitatively different as a game. To practice on your own is to practice less than half the skill involved. Even practicing against the same opponants all the time is insufficient. What you need is a real competition, preferably one where you can learn without it costing you an arm and a leg. This site should be very helpful, with strategy guides, beginners tips, links to free sites where you can learn one of the most popular variations of the game, and a rating of many Online Poker Rooms.

And of course, roulette is simple – just buy a cheap plastic roulette wheel and play (I’ve seen them just this last week for only $5 Australian)! But there are also various downloadable roulette sims and even some flash games that you can use, if you search around for them.

So there you have it – a new way to change up your game, and simulate things that are difficult to do with die rolls, or where the die roll mechanics become intrusive and break the mood that the situation should engender.

Art from Arolos Weyr

The following essay has been written as my contribution to this month’s Blog Carnival, hosted by RoleplayingPro. It contains a great many personal opinions. These may be wrong; feel free to disagree with me. No offence is intended towards anyone involved, and I apologise for any offence inadvertantly caused. Comments and discussion are welcomed, but flame wars and attacks will not be tolerated.

Part 1: The Past Is Prologue

Back when I first got into Roleplaying, AD&D was just coming out. The core rulebooks had been released, Deities & Demigods was still a few months away, and you could count the number of game systems on one hand unless you thought VERY hard. Homebrew supplements were synonymous with the hobby because there was virtually nothing else (aside from the Judge’s Guild product line, which looked like homebrew supplements made available to the wider marketplace, with obviously hand-drawn maps and illustrations). TSR were the perveyers of the undisputed number one game, the aforementioned AD&D, and they published more game modules than they did game supplements.

In the years that followed, more publishers entered the fray, and the games industry seemed to explode. Champions, GURPS, and dozens more followed. TSR released “Basic D&D,” aimed at providing a younger audiance with a simplified game system, and kept right on publishing modules.

Part 2: Collapse

In the late 80s and early 90s, Roleplaying seemed to experience an implosion to match the explosion that had preceeded it. On the surface, the industry was going from strength to strength, but there had been a fundamental shift, starting with the release of 2nd Edition AD&D. For the first time, supplements seemed to outnumber module releases, and many of the older games like Top Secret quietly vanished, only to be resurrected (in some cases, such as Traveller) with much fanfare and limited success. There were dozens of game systems, publishers that I had never heard of before, and a smorgasbord of material – some of it brilliantly innovative, some of it fairly passe, and much of it both in parts!

But this health was only superficial; internally, game companies were struggling. The wealth of material was not a sign of a massively-growing marketplace, it was a shotgun, as companies threw anything and everything they could think of at the market in the desperate hope that something would be a success. Too many of them had tried to become “the next TSR” and failed, leaving the publishers unstable and close to insolvent.

For me, the writing on the wall became aparrant when a non-RPG game company, Avalon Hill, went out of business. They had been the unquestioned king of their particular niche market, now they were gone. At the same time, I started hearing stories of waning interest in Game conventions, and started noticing a gradual reduction in the amount of shelf space being set aside at the Military Bookstore that had been my FLGS throughout my interest in the hobby. I can remember forecasting that if Avalon Hill could fall, so would TSR, and being ridiculed by some of my fellow gamers for the suggestion.

Well, TSR DID fall, and so did a great many other game companies. And then a funny thing happened, called Wizards Of The Coast…

Part 3: The d20/Open Game Licence era

WOTC bought TSR, and created D&D 3.0. The publishing standards went through the roof, the books themselves were works of beauty. And they created a paradygm shift in the industry by recognising what fans of the old game system had been doing anyway, by creating the OGL – in effect saying, “use this content in any way that you see fit; only these bits are proprietary”. In the process, they gave a focus to all the young startup publishers that had arrived, and they all started publishing d20/OGL supplements. Hundreds of them. Occasionally, these suffered from mutual incompatability, but for the most part, they were “plug and play” supplements – buy it today and add it to your game tomorrow. Effectively, a large part of the game industry put their shoulders behind a single product line, and – unsurprisingly – it thrived.

D&D 3.0 was eventually supplanted by a revised and revisited version, 3.5; while there were a few differences, some of which were significant and some of which seemed superficial, for the most part the new edition remained compatable with all the third-party supplements already in print. More, the core game system was repackaged to give d20 Modern and other such variations, and for a while it seemed that d20 had consumed the entire market – you either published in line with the ‘Unified Game Licence Theory’ or you went home. D&D 3.x remains arguably the greatest success story of the roleplaying industry, and it engendered a new explosion of game publishing companies and a resurgant game industry.

Part 4: The Path To Now

In time, sales of D&D 3.5 slowed, probably because everyone who wanted one had a copy. Then Hasbro – who had bought WOTC in between the publication of D&D 3.0 and D&D 3.5 – decided to release D&D 4th Edition in an attempt to repeat their past success. Nothing wrong with that; first reactions to the announcement were excitement. But then details and troubling rumours began to emerge, indications that suggested that 4th Ed was going to bite the hands that had fed and nurtured 3.x, with massive licencing fees for the use of so-called OGL material that made third party publishers question the value of their participation. Rumours that some content would only be available to paid subscribers of a new online service to be created. Suggestions that some of the game’s traditional content was to be dropped – Gnomes seemed to suddenly be everyone’s favorite race.

It’s said that no publicity is bad publicity. Following those rumours, the fan community was divided, with firm positions (both pro and anti) firmly entrenched before the product had seen the light of day. The number of people adopting a wait-and-see attitude seemed to shrink daily, and even we (I number myself in this group) were wary and apprehensive – was the glass going to at least be half-full? Controversy raged. I have no doubt that the very success of the OGL/d20 paradygm fueled the debate, and that awareness of the product was greatly increased by the debate, which subsequently translated into sales.

My take on the whole affair iss that Hasbro got greedy, seeing the amount of money that 3rd-party publishers were making from the OGL and decided to try and keep more of it for themselves; they then made the fundamental error of believing their own hype about the scale of success that the product was going to achieve, and made questionable business decisions based on this compound of overconfidence, arrogance, and self-delusion. But that’s just my opinion.

And so D&D 4th ed was released. It’s not a bad system in terms of its game mechanics, as far as it goes – or at least, that’smy impression. However, it works too hard to stereotype characters (refer to this blog post) and forces campaigns into an official straightjacket – a problem that had previously caused problems for another system that I considered innovative and even brilliant in parts, TORG. It seemed to be D&D dumbed down – the difference between Merlin (which some reviewers have described as ‘Fantasy 90210’) and The Lord Of The Rings. Despite production values that are as high as previous releases, if not more so, the whole thing still felt cheap.

One of the great strengths of the 3.x regime had been the inherant variety and degree of customisation that was possible. 4th ed seemed to be doing all it could to undermine that strength. As a result, I doubt that sales of supplementary products for 4th ed are much better than were enjoyed by those of 3rd ed – and shrinking.

Part 5: And so here we are…

Many – even most – of the third party publishers that were so much a part of the ongoing drive of 3.x have opted to take the old OGL material and published their own game systems, hewing individual paths away from a common point. The unity that had been enjoyed has been shattered, and the entire situation is reminiscant of that prior to the last implosion. And then came the current global financial problems, effectively a global recession triggered by the greed and/or shortsightedness of a few American Banks. This has already had an impact on the gaming industry – most of the gaming magazines have folded (in fact, KODT is about the only one still being published!). A few newcomers have arisen, operating through an online/e-book publishing system; but the great flaw in that marketing strategy is that you can’t simply flip through the pages to decide whether or not it’s worth buying. WOTC/Hasbro has reportedly let 270 staff go. Other game companies, some with established names, have folded or dramatically restructured. The immediate outlook is gloomy.

Part 6: Looking to the future

Yet, the situation we now face is different in two major respects to that which has been witnessed in the past: the OGL genie is out of the bottle, and compatability between game systems remains easily achieved (by everyone except WOTC); and a new marketing strategy has arrived, the e-book. The first means that the lost unity can be restored if the game companies can come to an agreement to do so, the second that publishing costs can be dramatically slashed without cutting into production. On the basis of these points, and on the basis that Hasbro/WOTC aren’t complete idiots and will be looking to the future, I’m going to conclude this essary with some fearless predictions for what is to come in the next decade (in no particular order). Not all will come to pass; some may already have occurred without my knowledge; but I will be greatly surprised if at least half of them are not on the money…

• At least one third party publisher will close their doors, trapped by the financial and market circumstances and unwilling or unable to make the necessary changes to their business plans in time.
• At least one third party publisher will stop producing physical supplements and become an e-book / print-on-demand operation only.
• Two or more third party publishers will merge and unify their variant game systems, cutting overheads while expanding their business, in hopes of forming a nexus around which a new OGL coalition can form.
• A bunch of new publishers will emerge. Some will become the major players of the next phase of gaming history – the next-generation FGU and Mongoose.
• There will be a general drop in production values – less full colour, more black-and-white, less glossy paper, etc – to facilitate a drop in price and an increase in profitability of game materials.
• A major entertainment/media company (eg Warner Bros) will buy the rights to D&D from Hasbro.
• AD&D will be relaunched to move the official D&D line back away from the simplified/stereotyping game philosophy at the heart of 4th ed.
• An effort will commence to create the ultimate RPG through a fan-based public Wiki, in which rules can be endlessly tweaked and refined and evolved. From time to time, “snapshots” of the rules system will be released on CD-ROM, but to use the latest rules, you will have to visit the Wiki site.
• An effort will commence to create the ultimate game world through a fan-based public Wiki, the Game-setting equivalent of an author’s ‘Shared World’.
• A new generation of character generation/illustration tools will emerge from the MMORPG scene and be adapted to table-top gaming.
• Sales of ‘universal’ d20-oriented game supplements will improve. ‘Universal’ became a bit of a sales killer during the heady days of OGL/d20; with so many companies now going their own way, it will make a strong comeback.
• Despite predictions of doom and gloom, the RPG/Games industry will continue; it may retreat, but it won’t die. And games will still be fun.

Postscript:

After completing the preceeding essay and prediction set, I got to thinking about the impact that Apollo 11 had on society in general and science fiction in particular. Soft fiction that skipped over the technical details (or just plain got them wrong) declined tremendously and was panned, while at the same time there was a massive increase in general public interest in the months leading up to success; then the public seemed to lose interest. “2001” successfully depicted realistic space travel in a number of ways, and was hailed for it; but the resounding SF success was “Star Wars”, which didn’t go for technical accuracy, it went for a sense of adventure. Spaceships made sounds as they went past. Analogies can be drawn with both the proposed manned mission to Mars, with the public-access spaceplane flights of Virgin, and with the current panic over global warming – as they become hot topics, realistic games and fiction will abound. And within 5 years of the culmination, the trend will be for less realism, better gameplay.

Right now, were I owner of a computer-game company, I’d be looking at developing a civilization-style game in which the objective is to avoid (or minimise) all the possible calamities that could engender an apocalypse. A board game with a similar theme would also be on my agenda, as would an rpg tie-in. And as soon as it came out, I’d licence future development to a third party and start working on a ‘mad max meets indiana jones’ game to follow it up in three or four years…

Not really relevent, but interesting speculation!

Use experience points to motivate

Many games use experience points, and if you game master such a game, you might wonder when the best time is to handout XP – before, during, or after? I’ve done all three, and there are pros and cons to each approach. Here are a few tips.

Character wants

Characters live for experience points. They want to improve and increase their odds of surviving, beat their opponents, win their struggles, and get the loot. Characters also want to learn, as everyone does, what works and what doesn’t. They need feedback. A delay in feedback, as in real life, creates a disconnect between the action, its results, and the reward. This slows learning down.

My current system of XP is to hand it out after each battle, skill check, trap, or puzzle during the game. I try to squeeze these in immediately, while the numbers are still flying around, before another encounter starts. This method doesn’t impair roleplaying or immersion, and gives characters short term feedback.

I’ve also noticed handing XP out after encounters tends to get the energy and excitement flowing again if an encounter was tense, stressful, or fatiguing.

For roleplaying encounters and story-based XP, I hand these out during sessions too, but I wait for the correct moment. A good roleplaying scene gets damaged if you throw XP numbers out there. It forces players to break character as they confirm, “Was that 100 XP Johnn just said?” or chatter about how close they are to leveling up.

This means one or more encounters could play through before a natural, numbers-friendly time occurs where I can toss out roleplaying or story experience point rewards.

As far as the PCs are concerned, life experience gained through interaction and experiencing things is more subtle than swinging a sword and knowing instantly if you should duck in return.

Player wants

Among their many motivations, all players want reward. Even if they don’t want their character to advance quickly in experience (I’ve always liked to stay in the low to mid levels without advancing fast – gotta live in your character’s shoes for awhile before hitting the Big Time) they are always pleased with reward, which sometimes will be experience.

The players I’ve met prefer to level up their characters between sessions. This gives them time to think about their options. It also lets them show up to the game with character already modified and set to go.

So, I advise against giving experience points out just before sessions. I’ve done this, but it’s not optimal. Recently, I got behind on game admin, and gave out XP at session start, and a couple PCs leveled up. The players were gracious about it, but it made them rush to make character updates.

Game master wants

What do I want as GM? I want as little math as possible. Math isn’t bad, and XP math is simple, but it’s one more To Do and another potential point of error.

I also want to be organised. I don’t want to backtrack through monster entries or encounter write-ups to remember all the factors that went into an experience award calculation.

I also want my players to have fun and to feel rewarded. I want to give them feedback about intangible aspects of the game, and I sometimes use experience points to indicate whether something was handled optimally, just ok, or poorly.

After years of handing out XP at different times, including before, during, and after, I’ve found it easiest to hand XP out during sessions. Best case, as mentioned, is right after an encounter if it’s not intrusive.

I’ve also found that group-based experience points is easiest. I used to give out XP bonuses or calculate XP based on actions-per-PC and given each character an individual XP award. This took time, was trickier to organize, and sometimes hurt player feelings.

Nowadays, everybody gets equal XP. If an individual generated XP by his actions, I add the XP to the pool and divide it equally amongst the party.

This method makes calculations easier. It also makes record-keeping easier as everybody will have the same XP awards. Players often help balance each other’s XP accounting because of this, so that’s one less admin task for me.

It also increases teamwork. People are emotional – especially in a gaming environment where there might often be serious stakes. Some players might take an XP award, exclusion, or omission the wrong way and get upset. Equally distributed XP prevents ruffled feathers, and if your group doesn’t mind this method, I highly recommend it.

The problem of mid-session experience points = mid-session level up

If you hand out experience points during sessions, then you’re going to have PCs who level up during sessions. We already discussed how many players prefer to take their PCs home and ponder their options before committing to levelling the PCs. So, there’s a potential issue here.

My answer is to keep a current gauge on how close characters are to their next level, and to use delays when the PCs are close to going up a level.

Do this with quick notes made at the end of each session. Get experience totals from the PCs. Then note the XP characters need to make the next level (calculating the difference ahead of time gives you a faster measure during games).

If the PCs are close, here are my tactics:

• At end of sessions: warn players their characters will likely level up next session and to prepare their choices ahead of time. When the characters level up mid-session, the players will already know what to update.
• Between sessions: send out XP reminders when you send out your game confirmation notices, session logs, or general chatter.
• In-game: delay XP awards for one or more encounters if you know a break is coming up. Then you can break, hand out XP, and the players can level up while the game is paused.
• In-game: if the session end is near, I’ll also delay XP awards by an encounter or two so the game ends with a level-up.

Between session periods also allow players to make changes to their PCs’ powers and abilities. It’s a house rule we’ve had for years and my players love it.

The spirit of the rule is to allow players to change things they are unhappy with about their PCs. The restriction is to not cause continuity or consistency issues with the story told so far. My group doesn’t abuse this, and most changes are based on players’ concepts for their characters and not power-gaming. Your mileage will vary.

The great thing about this rule is hasty decisions made during mid-session level ups can be corrected after the game. This reduces the stress of making such character choices during games, and speeds up the mid-session levelling process a lot.

Tracking experience points during sessions

If you hand out XP during games you need to track awards carefully. Players will usually pay attention and track things well, but there’s always a time when the group needs to do a quick audit to confirm what XP has been handed out.

I track experience point awards by making bullet point notes in my session logs. I’ll note the XP awarded and the reason. All PCs get the same award, so I only record the per-PC amount, not a total for the group.

This is fast and simple, and record keeping takes almost zero time for me. Here’s a copy and paste of a snippet of last session’s log notes:

Guards - 114 XP
Fire ball trap - 20 XP
Archers - 75 XP
Villagers - 100 XP
Good tactics - 100 XP
Fomorian - 210 XP


The Tactics award near the bottom was given because the group displayed great teamwork in that encounter, and I wanted to recognize them for that.

Summary

My advice is to try handing out XP during sessions as the group earns them, when it isn’t distracting. Keep good roleplaying or storytelling going and wait for a numbers moment to catch up on experience awards. This keeps maintenance and admin to the minimum, and gives players recognition more frequently during games. They were going to get the XP anyway, but multiple awards keeps spirits up and energy levels higher.

When do you hand out experience points for your games?