Category Archives: GM Advice

My wife and I often joke that I never do the same job twice. I just pick up a job that I’ve never done before and they keep employing me. So what about planning a campaign like that? Pick, or even better randomly roll for a skill, then build a game based on that skill. If you want to let the players in on the concept, that’s up to you. I’d keep it a secret and see how long it takes them to figure it out. There will be some frustration because it’s likely you’ll hit some skills that the players don’t have. If skills can be used untrained, then let the players struggle through. If not, include some way of them employing someone who does have that skill. Don’t have an NPC steal the spotlight, have the game be about finding the expert and getting them to the place they need to ply their trade. Then just gloss over them doing their job. I’d only roll for their success if there’s a time restraint or other pressure the players have to deal with while the NPC is doing what they do.

In a system with a lot of skills, some are really going to challenge your ability to make a game about it. I’d say try not to skip the really odd ones because you’ll probably come up with a strange game to match. Pull it off well and you may just end up with a really memorable game.

Just a fun idea if you’re out of them for your next campaign. Have you ever done anything similar? Let us know in the comments.

Over at Intwischa they’ve come up with a really cool idea for tracking consumables. I’ve talked about this before with tracking food saying the players can carry either 4, 8 or 12 days of food depending on how much of their pack the characters use for other things. This is a cool system for food, ammo, water, whatever you don’t want to bother tracking but know it would make your game more interesting if you did.

Their system consists of rolling a die each time you use the consumable. If you roll a one on that die, you drop down a die size. For example a d20 represents about 61 of the consumable, a d10 is about 29. If I roll a d20 and get a 1 then I’d go down to a d12, if I got a one after that I drop to a d10. For a more complete description, check out their post and the playtest post they did.

The players mark their character sheet with the die they have left, not the actual number. This makes tracking simple with almost no math while playing. Very nice! I can’t say how amazing an idea this is!

What About Big Numbers?

In The Artifact there are some big numbers for consumables like ammo. An ASO Footsoldier starts with 300 rounds for the G-82. Fortunately there’s a simple solution to this. Those 300 rounds are broken up into 10 clips of 30. Now there’s something interesting about clips, I’ve never had a hard time getting players to track what’s in their clips, just how many clips they have. So this is where this gets really useful, the character has d6 for clips. When they use up a clip, they roll. If they roll a 1 it goes down to a d4. The idea here is that when the character uses groups of a consumable, track the groups.

EDIT: Oops, looks like they already had tracking clips in the optional rules. Sorry, got too excited.

Now the Scimrahn Laser Gun is a different story. It starts out with 100 shots in a clip, so many that we’ve never bothered to count them off. It’s functionally inexhaustible. Even worse, the backpack power supply gives the laser 500 shots. So how can the Die Roll Ammo Tracking system work here? I have two thoughts on how to do this.

Each d20 adds about 20 to the number of shots the character gets so for the energy clip the character gets a 3x1d20 meaning they get to roll a one on a d20 three times before they move to a d12 etcetera.

For the 500 rounds we don’t want to write down 23x1d20. Thats just going back to tracking ammo again. Instead 4x1d100 should work as long as we remember that the last d100 drops to 3x1d20. I readily admit, even this is a little silly. The numbers are so big that it’s effectively infinite. I doubt that any character we’ve ever played fired a laser 500 times. Still, I like having an answer to how to handle that.

Is there a more elegant way of handling larger numbers with Die Roll Ammo Tracking? Is there a better way than writing 3x1d20? I thought that 3d20 would be confusing, making people think you would roll 3 d20s at a time. It’s possible to have the players record 100 of something as a d20 and a d12. Once the d20 is used up (as in dropping all the way to a d4 and then rolling a 1) then you go to a d12. That almost sounds more complicated for some reason. The only other option would be to break out the exotic d30 and d40s. If you’ve got a better idea, let me know in the comments.

How many times have you heard that? The PCs are going to stay up for a portion of the night to keep watch. If you’ve been GMing for a while, I’d say any time the player characters are not sleeping in a fortress (and even then. . .).

It’s a good strategy but let me ask you, when was the last time you tried it in real life? If you stayed up for a quarter of the night, just 2 hours, how would it effect you the next day at work? Sure you could do it, but you’d probably feel lousy. If you’re a teen then you’d at least feel sub-par (whether you want to admit it or not). For some reason there might be a day or two that you could actually pull it off but I’m looking at the majority of the time.

I’m always looking at the effects of inadequate sleep in psychology studies. They seem like they’re minor, that the person can handle it but sleep debit has real and lasting effects on people. Anything from decreased alertness to weight gain. Put it simply, when you don’t sleep your brain and body suffers.

What about it?

Should a game really pay attention to that? Yes, but not a lot. I wouldn’t start an epidemic of obesity because you’re characters are staying up through the night but it should have some effect. Think about it. Why is night time dangerous? Okay there is the lack of light but it’s also because we’re afraid of something happening while we’re not fully aware of our surroundings (aka sleeping). Remove that danger and you’ve removed a powerful pressure on the characters.

Think about it. Isn’t the whole “We’ll sleep in shifts and keep watch” idea to disarm the GM? Why would a PC ever sleep a normal night in their lives? If the players want to take away a valuable tool from me, they need to pay something for it, even if it’s just a little bit. The first time they miss that INT roll by one because they stayed up on watches, they’ll be thinking of how to get a full night’s sleep.

A Minor Inconvenience 

Skipping a small amount of sleep or even disrupting sleep should only be a minor problem at first. If it’s continued, it gets worse. For every night a character doesn’t sleep 8 hours uninterrupted they get a -1 CDF to REF, INT and IQ for every two hours missed or interrupted. It can only be payed back by sleeping the missed hours. The first time they fail a roll because of that CDF they’ll be hitting the sack early.

Thank You to those brave souls that submitted their RPG Elevator Pitches! It’s August 4th and so the contest is now closed. The official entries are in the comments of the original post and can be viewed HERE. I’ll pick one of the entries tomorrow, in the mean time if one of them grabs your attention, let me know in the comments.

John Michael Crovis submitted this entry

Movies, Video Games, Television, Books – what do these have in common? They are all multibillion dollar industries that tell stories – and we pay a premium price for them. There is an alternative, more interactive than video games, for pocket change! Let me tell you about role playing games…

Bubba Brown recorded some entries for us.

FLAC: http://www.bestwithstuff.com/YoureRolePlayingNow.flac
WAV: http://www.bestwithstuff.com/YoureRolePlayingNow.wav

Chainsaw Aardvark gave us the bulk of our entries

* A book, a few friends, a handful of dice, and limitless possibility.

* Some people play for a couple of points and bragging rights. Others gamble for a few dollars. When we play, we save worlds.

* You take the blue book – the story begins, you wake up in an unknown star-ship, and believe you’re near Centauri Prime. You take the red book – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the Labyrinth goes. (Yes, this paraphrased from “The Matrix”)

* Because you can’t but “last of their kind transhuman space-pirate destined to topple the empire” on your actual resume.

* Batteries, lag, network outages, our style of role-playing has none of that.

* Sixty dollars spent on videogames grants you twenty hours of staring at a screen, shouting at people you’ve never met. Sixty dollars spent on RPG materials means months of adventures with your best friends.

If you want to go anywhere and be anything, all you need is a few rules in your head and dice in your hand.

Its like being the star of your own movie. With no props, script, budget, or back end scale compensation rights. (OK, You might not be Alec McGuninness, but you can still have fun.)

Good stories end when you close the book. Great stories continue when you open the book with friends.

Thrives on Thursday, Smugglers Saturday, Mercenaries Monday – but heroes all the time. RPGs make the world a better place, one roll at a time.

Critical thinking, resource management, probability, asset optimization, strategic movement, negotiation – skills for real life, and skills for players. Make yourself a better person, one die at a time.

The first rule is have fun. The rest is just details.

Rule number one is enjoy the game. Rule seven-hundred fifty-eight has something to do with four-slice toasters, but it probably won’t come to that.

If you don’t find it awesome, you just simply haven’t found the game that fits you yet. Keep trying, there is an RPG for you out there.

Last but not least, Dan Houser came over from RPG.net to give us three entries.

You’ve been shot in the arm by federal agents, you’re on the top of a tenement slum, and they’re just about to break down the roof access door. What do you do?

The young man in your arms is unconscious, but thankfully your superhuman abilities may get him to the hospital in time…when a fire breaks out between you and the ER. What do you do?

I roll dice, and I find out. That’s a role-playing game.

Crunchy RPGs can take up time and the more time you give your players, the more they’ll take to decide on what to do. They want to get their bonuses all counted, make sure their defenses are optimized and use exactly the right equipment for the job. That desire is understandable but is it realistic? Is it even fair?

I would suggest it isn’t. If the character really were charging into a situation, are they really going to change up tactics and equipment mid leap? Hardly. It’s also not fair because one player can spend 15 minutes deciding what they want to do and how to do it perfectly when other players know exactly what they’re going to do and have to wait.

That’s why I like the idea of limiting a player’s time to declare and roll for their actions. The GM might take longer to resolve those actions, calculate its effects etc but when it’s a player’s turn, I think 30 seconds should be enough to say what they want to do and roll for it. In The Artifact RPG that’s three times longer than the turn actually is so I’d say it’s reasonable. You might ease into it by saying each player has 45 seconds but that’s quite a bit when you get down to it.

Other reasons to use time limits

Limits meta gaming

Lets face it, a lot of a turn can be used up with players discussing what they’re going to do between each other. If this was real, this kind of planning would have to be done before hand. Coordination would have to be with quick shouts to each other. Players might argue that their characters are experienced and so would have set these plans up before hand but are they really? Most characters start off at low levels with no experience. The players are likely to be even more experienced than their characters if they’ve played several in the past. If the players don’t have that level of planning and coordination then the characters probably wouldn’t either.

Keeps players engaged

If you have to quickly declare your actions, you’re not going to wander off or get distracted. If you do, you’ll learn quickly as your character stands there saying “What’s going on? I wasn’t paying attention.” If they’re talking when their turn comes around, the timer starts and if they take 20 seconds to realize you just started their turn. . . oh well. It’s a little harsh so I’d start off the practice with something the characters can handle relatively easily and up the difficulty later when they understand you’re not joking about it.

Fights off slog

This is the core reason to introduce time limits. Slog is when your turns are moving like they’re moving through waist deep mud. If a round takes more than two minutes for each player (4 players = 8 minutes, 6 players = 12 minutes) then something is wrong and you’re deep in slog territory. Slog can turn even the most exciting encounters into yawn inducing, staring off into space, looking for the snacks, what’s been going on with the kids, dud games.

Exploring in an RPG is tricky since in life and video games exploring consists mainly of moving around and looking. In life and video games people can explore by looking around and filtering their environment for themselves. This breaks down in an RPG because the GM has to filter the environment for them and if the GM includes descriptions that the players aren’t interested in they get frustrated. Long explanations of environments are about as fun for the players as the GM having their own character that gets the spotlight.

Maps

One of the ways of dealing with this is to give the players the map. Either explain that the characters spend time running around mapping or make a map part of the story. You know, the part where the old man offers to sell the PCs a map that will help them in their quest, or some variation there of. So how do you introduce exploration using a map? Maybe the map is accurate, maybe it isn’t. Things may have changed since the map was made. In essence information should be missing from the map and that fact should be obvious fairly quickly. Importantly, there should be several things for the players to discover when examining the map.

Another interesting trick I’ve had a GM use is to manufacture the equivalent of a pixel hunt. The GM drew a picture as part of the adventure to show a scene and encouraged us to look at it and ask questions about it. This is, in reality very similar to using a map, just in greater detail and was a drawing from the point of view of the character.

Combining

One of the tools that a lot of video games use in exploring  is combining. While exploring the players find an item and then later they discover a situation or object that the first object can act on. This can even happen in the form of chaining objects and situations so that multiple objects are gathered and used. Players are used to this kind of “puzzle” and can get board with it quickly since they know that if they find a stone handle, there’s probably something that handle is going to fit into later but combining doesn’t have to be limited to that. Have the players find a stone mortar and pestle that don’t seem to match. The players don’t know that there’s a back story of some transient that found the handle, pulled it out and used it for a pestle to grind his food. That little extra story that the players may never really know can obscure things just enough to make it not obvious.

Layers

Layers are really the core to exploring in an RPG. The players are given what seems to be the full picture only to find a key that opens up another layer that doesn’t change what they know, but adds to it in an unexpected way.

The example of the stone handle is also an example of layers. Layers of story can be stripped away as the player’s explore. For example, that tall thin man that was following the PCs at a distance in town seems dangerous and may even fight them if cornered but he’s really there to prevent someone else from harming the players. As soon as they’ve chased their pursuer off they’re approached by a man that asks the players to go on a quest for him promising riches but is really only using them to get what he wants. One can imagine from that point a series of events that make the players think the tall man is against them, when in reality he’s trying to stop their employer.

To make the revelation of each layer the most rewarding for the players, have them show information that the players expect should be there but have it be more than they were expecting or have events move in a different direction.

Visual or Story

So when you want your players to explore, think about what type of exploration you want them to be doing. If it’s visual, maps or pictures let them filter information visually. If it’s story, combining items and places, with a bit of imagination can be useful. With any type of exploration, layers are what you’re looking for visual or story.

As promised, here’s the Basics posts on two pages of a PDF ready to be cut out.

Basics.pdf

To finish off the Basics series, the Have Fun! card.

Have Fun!

The goal is for everyone to have fun. The other players, especially the Game Master wants everyone to enjoy the game. You don’t have to know everything about the game, especially not right away. If you have more experienced players in your group they’ll be happy to help you out.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If someone is telling you something you don’t understand, it’s okay to tell them so, especially the GM.

Part of an RPG is exploring, discovering new things about the setting and the game. If you’re just starting out in this setting or as a player, everyone understands that you don’t know it all so don’t expect yourself to. So relax, you’ll get there by listening to the other players and interacting with them. If someone mentions something you don’t recognize, ask them about it, we love to tell about our stories. By the end of the session you’ll probably have a story to tell for yourself.

This card is probably going to have the most head scratching associated with it because I get into some very basic play mechanics. Next in the Basics series, the Winning card.

Winning

You win by working together with the other players to beat a situation that the Game Master presents. It can be almost anything so it’s exciting to find out what it will be. Because you’re working with the other players, you get to connect with them and be a team so most of the time they’ll be helping you win. It’s challenging, social and fun.

At times the Game Master will feel that your character can’t automatically do a task and that the character will have to pass a skill roll. The roll is compared against your character’s abilities. To pass a roll, you roll two different colored ten sided die (sides are numbered 0-9). The dice are not added together, they are the tens and ones place of a number between 1 and 100 (00 is considered 100). If one die has tens place numbers on it that is the tens or the darker colored die is the ten’s place. If the number on the dice you roll is lower than the character’s attribute and any one skill the Game Master says you can add, you’ve passed and your character can carry out the task.