#gmtips

[norameld]

MY NEW ONE-SHOT IS LIVE! I’ve been working on it for months, and normally it would be accompanied by a video, but with the new OGL1.1 dropping any minute, I had to squeak this in before it hit us all. The video will be out within the week most likely. This one-shot is designed to help new GMs learn how to run a session, teaching each of the fundamental skills one at a time. If you’ve never Game Mastered before, please give this a shot and report back with how it went! I’ll be refining this and making it the best thing I can! I also forgot to mention it has been fun as hell to run the times I’ve playtested it. Give it a shot at your table, and give your GM a break for a week! It’s COMPLETELY FREE too! Download it here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XuAyfAmsHcZWXQk_d2bVqBB2Hj-3hkf1?usp=sharing

[geekandsundry]

https://geekandsundry.com/gm-tips-how-to-bring-clarity-to-open-world-storytelling/

GM Tips is our series to help Storytellers and Game Masters improve their craft and create memorable roleplaying experiences. Last week we talked about getting your player group to try new systems, and this week we cover what to do when you get there. Dungeons & Dragons offers a clear ...

[dungeons-and-dumbler]

Tips for making a puzzle for your players

Take what you think their intelligence is and divide it by 2 at least.

Riddles are lit.

I'll add more later. Toodles

[creativerepositoryblog]

The good guys always win or do they. It isn't often at the end of a movie the villains go over. But failure can be a great learning experience for the heroes if you can find the right balance of wins to losses. Its a hard thing to find but today lets talk about some of the issues with your players facing defeat. Have you ever handed your player's a decisive defeat mid game? Have you ended a a story arc with the party's loss? How many wins to losses do you hand your opponents?

[origami-goblin]

   All Aboard! Railroading in Tabletop —- Taking a quick break from my Starfinder Themes series to make a brief post about the concept of 'railroading' and some GM tips on avoiding common pitfalls that may arise in your campaigns.   Railroading is a term used to describe instances where a group of players are put on a specific track by the GM, where they lose a lot of the free-will and agency that their characters should have. The term comes from the idea that trains are bound to their rails and can really only move forwards or backward, but never laterally. Trains have specific departures and destinations, meaning that you can't stop wherever you want to visit the World's Largest Ball of Yarn or the Biggest Skillet West of the Mississippi.   Now, a tabletop campaign may not be akin to a cross-country road trip, but it is important for the players to retain their ability to do whatever they want. Not without consequence, of course. However, if the players want to spend some time outfitting a fortress, starting a small business, or just venturing out to a secluded area to relax from the constant stress of battles, they should certainly be able to put the greater campaign on hold to accomplish those goals. The world isn't going to stand still while they are out galivanting, and the BBEG will certainly be building up their forces, putting additional plans in motion, etc. As a GM, you should be taking care of that stuff off-screen while you estimate the time that the party is spending on their extra-circular activities.   That being said, it is incredibly important that before starting a campaign that the group discusses what they want to get out of the game. Do they want to manage a kingdom, essentially performing accounting and forecasting for grain yields and military costs? would they rather run a gauntlet of battles and focus on combat? Do they have interest in character development and role-play? As long as the group agrees on the answers these questions before the campaign begins, everyone should get more enjoyment out of each session and the GM knows what to prepare. If you have a group that wants to hack 'n slash until the cows come home, then the GM shouldn't be throwing them into a campaign centered around diplomacy in the King's court. Know your players!   So, how does railroading manifest in a game? Here are some common pitfalls that GMs can fall into:   Story Time - Many times, as GMs, we may have an overall story that we're trying to tell with the players, but we can get wrapped up in the telling of that story instead of allowing the players more leeway into how the story unfolds. If the entire story is written out ahead of time, there's no room for the players to contribute to it. That's a problem. Instead, we can have a more general synopsis of how the story might unfold. For example, the focus of a campaign might be stopping a tyrant who is rising in power. In might start out dealing with local henchmen, who are employed by the tyrant through a complex network of higher-ups. The goal would be to have the party work up through the ranks to learn more about the tyrant's identity and uncover a plot or coup. However, the party could find out more about him through different events like township raids, poisoning attempts, mysterious wizards, etc. There should always be more than one way to reach the goal, so entice the players with multiple options using plot hooks.   A Tale of Two Paths - How many times has it happened where the party is walking along a forest highway where there are confronted with two paths? Left or right. Each path should lead to somewhere else, but it is easy for the GM to have them both lead to the same destination because the players will be none the wiser. Even though the players won't know, the issue lies with giving them a choice that essentially doesn't matter. If both paths lead to the same place, then don't offer the choice to begin with (editor's note - if the path forks but comes back together before the destination, then that's a different story). As a GM, we shouldn't be giving choices if the decision itself doesn't matter. Two paths should result in two scenarios.   The Disappearing Man - In order to introduce the party to the BBEG, GMs like to let the players experience the 'final boss' in the beginning of the story. There's nothing wrong with this - it can be helpful for the players to know what they're up against and it really grants an insight into the character pulling the strings. What if, however, the players get incredibly lucky and successfully land a sleep spell or trap the BBEG? GMs need to prepare for these possibilities, and not just give the BBEG a new ability on the spot to be immune to sleep effects. Doing this will take the thrill of success away from the players and make it seem like they can't affect the story. So, what if the BBEG is captured? Surely there will be a loyal henchman who will coordinate a rescue, throwing all available resources to have their boss home, safe and sound.     Adventure Path Rigidity - I am a huge fan of running modules and Adventure Paths; everything is right there at your disposal - NPCs, Settings, Plot Info. It's great! However, don't forget that the adventure can be altered and changed depending on what the players do. They might skip an entire section by accident or do things 'out of order’ (which shouldn't really be a phrase used in campaigns). Pre-written campaigns tend to be more railroad-y than normal, simply because of their nature of being a self-contained story. If your players want to visit a cave before they're 'supposed to' you can't just put a big boulder blocking the path and have it mysteriously rolled away after they have satisfied some prerequisite. If you want to lead your players in a certain direction, that's perfectly fine. You can give them incentive to go a certain way or peak their intrigue through use of an NPC or event. In a haunted dungeon? Maybe there are some rattling bones beckoning the party from a certain room. Out in the forest? Something could rustle a nearby bush. There are always ways to lead breadcrumbs without forcing the party to go a certain way.   Fear of Failure - Every dice roll should have meaning and there should be consequences for every action. If there isn't the threat of players to fail, then the dice rolls lose their purpose. For example, if a player rolls an adjusted 1 on a Climb check, but you say that you just don't get up right away without any real consequence, then the dice roll doesn't matter to begin with. You might as well not have the roll! Instead, there should be a reaction - maybe the player suffers a sprained ankle and has their speed halved for the day, or some rocks come loose and fall on the player below them. Now, this is a bit different than having a player roll for something even though you know that the result won't matter. For example, a player may want to do a Perception check to see if they find a clue. You, as the GM, know that even a max roll won't uncover anything, but you should still let the player roll because if they roll low, then they really don't know if they missed something or not. A high roll tells them that nothing noteworthy is there. If players want to make a roll, let them, but the GM shouldn't force them to make a roll if the result doesn't matter.   It can be very easy to get attached to the rails, but unless it's something that your players WANT, then we should do our best to stay off them. I've been a part of groups where we had limited time to game, so we preferred to play through a pre-written module and be more plot-driven so that we could experience the story. If rails are what your players crave, then by all means throw some fuel into the tender box! In any case, let the players do what they want, but react to their actions by presenting consequences, good or bad.

[goldravensguild-blog]

Check out this awesome interview our campaign’s DM, Ryan Green!!  Here he discusses how he runs his campaigns based on character with Geek and Sundry’s Satine Phoenix!

We’re really lucky to have Ryan as our DM! His improvisational skills and willingness to work with our wishes for our characters make for a really, really great time whenever we play!! 

[tabletop-rpgs]

Hey Folks!

There’s a new episode of GM Tips with Satine Phoenix, this week covers Permission.

You can watch previous episodes HERE

[thesfid]

Watching you watching me. @geekandsundry 's #GMTips with @voiceofobrien and @satinephoenix.

[glasscannonnetwork]

GM Prep - Get Your Priorities Straight

Since we started the podcast, one of the questions I get asked the most besides “What the hell do you actually do for a living, Troy?!?” is “What goes into your GM prep?” In an effort to share what I do and hopefully start conversations so we can all learn from each other along the way, here’s the first in a series of posts geared at scrutinizing what goes on not only behind the GM screen but before it even goes up.

Unless you’re a professional GM who gets paid a handsome six-figure salary to run Pathfinder Adventure Paths for your ungrateful friends, you only have so much time to devote to getting your sessions prepped. (By the way, if that job exists and you’re hiring, I’m available.) Since I’m in the unique situation of broadcasting one of the games I run to—at last count—billions of people all over the world, that means I have to put a lot more prep into my sessions than most GMs have the time, interest or permission from their non-gaming significant others to do. But there are times when even your old pal Troy only has X amount of time with XYZ worth of material to prep. So, one of the most important things a GM should do when approaching both session and long-term campaign prep is PRIORITIZE. And if you’re like me, hopefully you’ll find prioritizing fantasy game prep a lot easier than prioritizing important life things like paying bills on time or not opening that fifth IPA at one in the morning.

I could (and probably will, eventually) write a whole post on adventure prep versus session prep, but in terms of the importance of priority, I would say play to your strengths for session prep and play to your weaknesses for adventure path prep. What does that mean? To me it’s the difference between “hard prep”—the actual focused prep you’re doing for a specific session—and “soft prep”—the kind of reading up and studying you do between sessions to familiarize yourself with deepening your understanding of the overall world and the game in general. So, if your bread and butter is crafting exquisite combats and encounters, then make sure you know your monsters’ every single special ability inside and out. Likewise, get character sheets from your players (an easy process which usually entails no less than 40 emails begging for them until you break into their houses and photograph them with a tiny spy camera and a flashlight in your mouth while they sleep soundly nearby) and know all of their powers and spells so that you can give them multi-layered encounters geared specifically to them at their next session they’ll never forget. Or let’s say you really love the role-playing aspect of the game. Then maybe spend your prep time writing out dialogue for the enemies or NPCs they might face at the next session. When I’m focusing on that, I like to walk around my apartment talking to myself and telegraphing how I think the role-play will go and then making notes if I come up with a good line or recording myself if I find a fun voice. Then when it comes time to put it into action, I refer to notes I’ve scribbled in the margins of the adventure path with bits of dialogue I can throw in at the right time. If you have two hours to prep a six-hour session, focus first on what MUST get done to keep the session moving without constantly having to refer to the book, then spend the rest of your prep fleshing out the other details that won’t grind things to a halt if you have to pause to google something. For example, the day before a session I like to re-read the sections I think the PCs will be going through. Then the day of, I re-read it again taking notes along the way. Then I draw my maps, pre-roll all of my enemies’ initiatives and cross-reference all of the feats and spells I’m not familiar with. Then, time permitting, I re-read it AGAIN taking even more detailed notes and outlining as much as possible with boxes that I can check off as I go.

When I’m gearing up to prep a four- to six-hour session, I need to focus on what’s most important to that session, but when I’m just lounging around killing time between sessions, I like to do “soft prep” on the aspects of the campaign that I don’t usually prioritize during #seshprep. It’s embarrassing the number of times I’ve found myself sitting around at home reading the seemingly endless section on Gamemastering Combat at d20psfrd. Or, if I’m noticing that my players are focusing on the historical or religious significance of what they’re discovering in the adventure and I haven’t spent any time learning about those topics in advance, I’ll take that time between sessions to familiarize myself better with geography or deities at sites like Pathfinderwiki.com or archivesofnethys.com. When fellow Glass Cannon Podcast castmate Joe O’Brien GMs games, he devotes a lot of his prep to knowing the geopolitical history of the area where the adventure takes place. He recently started running Curse of the Crimson Throne and our Session Zero included a two-hour lecture on the history of Korvosa and the surrounding area. I’m not exaggerating. Two HOURS! And you know what? We were hanging on his every word. That shit is fascinating to nerds like us, and because of that we were able to create our characters each with rich backgrounds steeped in the reality of this fantasy setting. I, on the other hand, give cursory glances at best to that sort of stuff, because my main focus is on creating intense drama and humor out of story, character and action. Here’s the thing: you can totally do one or both or neither. As a GM, you have so many things you NEED to do, it’s up to you to choose what’s most important for your campaign and what best suits your GM-ing style. I say I’m not big into knowing the nitty-gritty about the cities and towns etc., but if I was running an urban adventure set in one static location like Curse or Council of Thieves, you can be damn sure I’d know the name of every street, important building and the best public restrooms in town if my NPCs need to recommend good spots to piss on the fly. Likewise, and this is a fun trick, if I’m under-prepped for a subject that a PC tests me on during role-playing, I’ll just improvise/stall while I’m googling that town or deity or important location and then I work that information into the dialogue. You know how many times I’ll mention something casually and one of my PCs will say, “I’d like to do a Knowledge (History) check on that.” While they’re rolling, I’m both 1. hoping they fail (since it wasn’t important enough for me to look up beforehand) and 2. quickly googling it on my iPad so I can give them a little nugget to make them feel like their high roll meant something. The moral of the story is you need to figure out for yourself before you start any adventure what your priorities are, what you want to devote your prep time to and what is best to focus on to do justice to the Adventure Path. Then you just have to try your best to let go of the antagonizing ever-present feeling right before your session starts that you didn’t prep enough.

Do your homework, play to your strengths, prioritize first what absolutely needs to be done for your session to happen and then—depending on how much time you have left—what other things you’d like to focus on to spice things up. And the best thing is that the more you GM, the more you’ll be able to prep in the same amount of time available to you. I remember prepping an early encounter in my Jade Regent campaign where four PCs face a Sinspawn and it took probably two hours to prep. Now I find myself briefly glancing at CR 14 encounters for five minutes and being like, “Oh cool, I know these creatures and how their 17 metamagic feats work. I got this shit.” Prep will eventually go faster, and then you can spend more time crafting cryptic NPC dialogue ahead of time or drawing fancy multi-colored maps. Or, if all else fails, get your players drunk and then they’ll never notice how unprepared you are—one of the oldest GM tricks in the book.

- Troy Lavallee @troylavallee

[dr-archeville]

In recent games, I require players to write 5 rumors related to their character's reputation: 2 good, 2 bad, 1 false. I later pass these out to other players as things their PCs would have overheard. It spawns early roleplay. #GMTip

— Pink Dice GM (@PinkDiceGM) January 3, 2018

[geekandsundry]

https://geekandsundry.com/gm-tips-for-handling-troubling-or-tough-topics-at-the-table/

GM Tips is our series to help Storytellers and Game Masters improve their craft and create memorable roleplaying experiences. Last week, we talking about turning botched rolls into wins, and this week we pivot gears to talk about handling tragedies and tough issues in games. There is no right...

[thefrankgm]

Taking notes is a very imporant habit of every GM. Let me tell you why and what notes you should take to up your game.

[dax-micro]

Oh wow, I need to remember that if I ever GM another game one day.

This is amaaaaazing advice

[origami-goblin]

Memory Lapse - Missing Rules in Tabletop Games

—

My memory isn’t the greatest and I know I’m not alone in that admission; there are dozens of us! One of the first points made on the first season of the critically acclaimed podcast “Serial” is that human memories are fragile at best. Most of us can’t remember what we did fifteen days ago if it was a nondescript, ordinary day like any other. As a result, we make mistakes and have to accept the consequences that come our way. Tabletop rules are no exception.

There are plenty of lighter game systems that require less memorization than others. For example, 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons is often considered to be more accessible than Pathfinder due to the removal of crunchy, one-off rules in favor of GM interpretation for the corner cases that don’t manifest themselves as often. Now, I’m not here to debate the validity of that opinion or to step up to the plate for which system is better; I’ve played both and find joy in each. But I will comment that, in general, trying to remember all of the rules of any tabletop game can be an impossibly daunting task.

In a recent Rise of the Runelords game, there was a significant rules error that would have resulted in the death of a PC. That’s pretty major. Let me run through the situation.

The players were underground fighting a trio of Shadows. Statblock here:

—

Shadow CR 3 XP 800 CE Medium undead (incorporeal) Init +2; Senses darkvision 60 ft.; Perception +8

DEFENSE

AC 15, touch 15, flat-footed 12 (+2 deflection, +2 Dex, +1 dodge) hp 19 (3d8+6) Fort +3, Ref +3, Will +4 Defensive Abilities incorporeal, channel resistance +2; Immune undead traits

OFFENSE

Speed fly 40 ft. (good) Melee incorporeal touch +4 (1d6 Strength damage) Special Attacks create spawn

STATISTICS

Str —, Dex 14, Con —, Int 6, Wis 12, Cha 15 Base Atk +2; CMB +4; CMD 17 Feats Dodge, Skill Focus (Perception) Skills Fly +11, Perception +8, Stealth +8 (+12 in dim light, +4 in bright light); Racial Modifiers +4 Stealth in dim light (–4 in bright light) Languages Common (unofficial errata)

SPECIAL ABILITIES

Create Spawn (Su)

A humanoid creature killed by a shadow’s Strength damage becomes a shadow under the control of its killer in 1d4 rounds.

Strength Damage (Su)

A shadow’s touch deals 1d6 points of Strength damage to a living creature. This is a negative energy effect. A creature dies if this Strength damage equals or exceeds its actual Strength score.

—

Let me draw your attention to that last bit:

“A creature dies if this Strength damage equals or exceeds its actual Strength score.”

One of the characters had their Strength completely sapped by one of the Shadows, thanks to their initial Strength score being low to begin with. When this happened, I referenced the normal RAW for a character’s Strength score being reduced to zero which entails the character being too weak to move and falling unconscious. Which is exactly what happened, meaning that the PC lived when they should have died.

Had the character died and come back as a shadow, the party might not have been able to overcome the situation. It might not have been a true TPK, because the shadows were written to stay within that specific room and wouldn’t have given chase to the party. The character was also relatively new; the player’s previous character had died only a handful of sessions before this encounter. At the table, we had only really begun to scratch the surface on this character, who was shaping up to be a very fun, enjoyable character to interact with!

That being said, after the session ended I finally caught the special Strength rules in regards to shadows. At that point it was too late to do anything about it. And how would you even go about retconning that to begin with? Start the next session and have the character undergo some strange, shadowy breakdown resulting in their death? That doesn’t seem right, and certainly wouldn’t sit well with most players. Do you replay the encounter? Again, you can’t penalize the players and make them defeat an encounter all over again just because you, the GM, overlooked a rule.

This brings me to my point - everybody makes mistakes and rules are going to get missed, especially in a game like Pathfinder where there are so many fringe-case, obscure, and crunchy rules. It’s borderline impossible to memorize them all, unless you have the world’s greatest memory. However, I’d warrant a guess to say that the majority of us have to look up rules every once in a while, and there’s nothing wrong with that! If you discover that you did something incorrectly in a session, make note of it and learn from the experience so that the next time the rule comes up you get it right.

When I write the session recaps for my players, I always include a section in the bottom to list any rules errors that we made. I will point out our interpretation of the rule (or what we did) and then list the correct rule. In this way, I can communicate to our group that we messed up and everyone can be aware of it. It doesn’t change anything that already happened in the game; that’s set in stone. But, hopefully, it will change things in future sessions down the road. Even so, if rules aren’t really the focus of your group, then don’t even sweat it!

Play the game that you have the most fun playing.

[geekmyclass]

Teaching through playing RPGs via Geek & Sundry. I use a lot of RPG elements in my classes. You should too.

[thesfid]

@jasoncharlesmiller & @satinephoenix dropping some #GMTips plus a lovely nugget of #GodHead trivia. #RollForInitiative @geekandsundry