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100% GMing
Treasure Tables is dedicated to game masters, offering GMing advice and ideas and a community of GMs helping each other run great games since 2005. I'm Martin Ralya, and I've been GMing since 1989 and writing for the RPG industry since 2004.
Overloaded: Stuff and Info
Sat. August 12, 2006
The game I’m currently playing in (Trinity: Al Sadima) is very background-heavy, and we’ve gotten lost in the sea of information several times. This can be frustrating, although it’s a very fun game overall.
Similarly, years ago when I played through part of D&D’s Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, we actually had to use a quartermaster, several pages of notes (referencing module page numbers) and waaaay too much time to keep track of all the stuff we picked up. This was one of the reasons we stopped playing the game.
In both cases, things that are generally good — game information and cool gear — became problems. How can you prevent information and stuff overload?
Less is More
The simplest solution, of course, is to give out less of it. I’m not being flippant — this actually works quite well!
Many players don’t care how the Quorun Half-Farthing is minted, or who the senator’s uncle is — for them, those details don’t add to the game. By focusing on the details that do enrich their experience, you’ll save time and frustration. (Some players do care, of course, and will be disappointed without those kinds of details.)
With stuff, when you give out less of it you need to make sure of two things: that you don’t change the power curve, and that what you do give out is interesting. So instead of lots of stuff, give out less but make it better and more entertaining.
Information
When it comes to information, organizaton is key. The better organized and more readily available your information is, the less overwhelming it will seem to your players.
Sam, who runs our Trinity game, has used campaign summaries to help keep us on track. In the past, I’ve used a campaign website to do the same thing. (If I were to do that again, I would blog my game sessions, instead.)
But the best tool of all might be a campaign wiki, which will let you dispense, edit and organize information to your heart’s content. TT offers some excellent advice on this front, in the form of Using a GMing Wiki: It Slices, It Dices, a free 289kb PDF by Amy Vander Vorste and John Arcadian.
Stuff
With stuff, you can speed up item management in several different ways, from having a quartermaster to handling it between sessions. Making item index cards for expendables (grenades, magic arrows) and other items can also be a big help.
Most other solutions for stuff overload are game-specific. In a Stargate campaign I was in a little while back, for instance, most of our team’s gear wasn’t our property at all — it belonged to the SGC, and we requisitioned what we needed. Voila, no stuff overload.
Similarly, in D&D you can take a shortcut around the need to use identify on magic items — which tends to make players hold onto things for longer — by simply not requiring it, or letting other skills or abilities stand in for the spell (like Bardic Knowledge).
Have you run into overload problems, either as a player or as a GM? What tricks do you use to stay on top of stuff and game information in your campaigns?
(TT is in GenCon mode from August 9th-13th. I won’t be able to respond to comments or email, but there will be a new post every day, just like always.))
More posts about: Common Problems, Organization
Comments
3 Responses to “Overloaded: Stuff and Info”
I’ve got a gaming wiki for our newest playtest up at http://www.silvervinegames.com/imperialwar/
It’s what I’m using to detail the background and make it available to the characters.
When I’ve run one of my two grandiose vampire games I’ve run into some overload problems. The one was set with every character being from a different clan with different goals that were against other players. We had seperate mini sessions for each player, or groups whose plots crossed each other. What often happenned was that a player would forget what went on between other players or plots they were in because they didn’t focus on their goals. It was less a matter of information overload, and more of the group being split and rejoined mutltiple times. No one focused on what went on with other players, just their own plots.
In the end it worked well for that one game type only. A central location, wiki/blog/etc. would have helped but I wasn’t going to invest that amount of time into the game half way through it when I was barelling down on the end of the chronicle.
Yeah, we’ce overloaded in both senses.
For Stuff overload, your solutions (quartermaster, between session item management, treasure & item simplification) all make sense. It can be frustrating to the player who has the quartermaster role– I remember, not fondly, making a big loot list of all the items after a big battle, toting up the values with excel, and presenting it to the group. It was a couple of hours of tedium.
Plot overload is combatted by interest or a cmapaign log. A campaign log is a good way to keep track of what happened– but making a log doesn’t mean people will keep up on it or make the connections in session. Interest, on the other hand, is an excellent way to focus the game. The general idea is this: what matters to the game is what interests everyone, not just what interests the GM. If you have a politics sub=plot and the players could care less, drop it. (That’s the core of Person or Furniture distinction– NPCs and plots only become real when embraced by more than one player.)
Since I do episodic play, I don’t run into plot or information overload too much. Though I do run into a related form of overload - source material overload. I’m not yet quite sure what the ideal is for game source material, in an ongoing campaign, it is nice to introduce more source material, but at some point it just becomes too much.
I’m not really sure how to improve on stuff overload. One thing I do do is that long ago I started handling generating the treasure list. It’s cool if a player keeps track also, but it’s a lot quicker for me to tally up values as I’m identifying anything that doesn’t get identified until they get back to town. One reason Cold Iron hasn’t been running well for me since college is that it’s a game where most of the strategic planning is in stuff buying (compared to D20’s feat and class progression strategizing), and players don’t seem to be taking to it. RuneQuest isn’t quite as bad, though the fact that they haven’t been getting much treasure, and not a lot of opportunity to spend it, means that RQ’s strategic play of skill training isn’t coming into play much (and as a result, character advancement is slow, and ONLY in a few core skills that get used all the time, no one is making any progress towards becoming a Rune Lord because they aren’t advancing enough of the right skills).
In one stuff heavy Traveller campaign, I kept the master list of everything (I think including PC posessions - which there weren’t many of) in a text file (this was back in the DOS days, I ran Borland Sidekick and had the note pad open with the campaign log, and in the foreground, one thing I would run was a program that handled the fuel expenditures for star travel). The note pad also facilitated keeping a detailed log. Of course since then, I have rarely used a computer at the table (I did have an initiative program in Quatro Pro for a game system I was working on, and in one RQ campaign, I used a program that had all the PC evaluation skills and I could type the program name, and a list of gem (or other stuff) values and it would spit out the value each PC rated them at (handling value spread from failure and fumbles).
In some sense, part of me is really excited about Dogs in the Vinyard. Because it gets rid of this stuff problem. It’s totally episodic (more so than the way I run D&D etc. - sure, the GM tries new angles on how the players reacted in the past, but what actually happened in the past doesn’t have direct influence on the future, you don’t even need to keep track of stats if you re-use an NPC - they get entirely new stats the next time you use them). And I think when players find they have acquired too many d4 traits from fallout, they will start to realize that it’s totally cool to loose traits…simplifying their character sheet again.
And I guess the lesson I would take is make sure the stuff you have, be it loot, campaign history, or anything else is relevant to what your game really is about. Also, especially for loot, make sure the game has something that will allow things to phase out and re-simplify (which suggests to me, for Cold Iron for an example, that although the charged item economy is really important, there’s also a good reason for PCs to be able to get those permanent items - because suddenly they don’t have to hassle with replacing charged items and potions for something they use a lot).
In D&D, making trade in worthwhile helps a lot. A PC can trade in a bunch of now less useful items for a single really cool new item. A thought though is that the system really needs to consider a way that the PC really only has to care about say 3 levels of spells (Cold Iron, by using an MP system, and a point system for memorization, and having most of the higher level spells be better versions of the lower level spells, and the fact that having the higher level spell memorized gives you access to all the lower level versions for free, is very effective at this simplification [which is great when writing up a high level caster, 3/4 of their memorization will be spent on their top level or two of spells, with just a handfull of key lower level spells thrown in]). In RQ, since most of the treasure goes into training, and most characters focus on perhaps 10 skills, keeps the characters from ever getting TOO complex (of course they have access to a bunch more skills, but I’ve never seen a player really struggle there). Magic items are also pretty scarce, some potions, and perhaps what seems most common in my games, power storage crystals (and maybe a spirit or two bound into them), and a handfull of rarer oddities. In the Traveller campaign, each PC had 1-3 weapons, armor, and maybe a few gadgets, the group had as many as say 6 ships (mostly shuttles and fighters), fuel was kept track of for each ship, some cargo, spare parts, and a handfull of oddities they had found (things like the room temperature super conductor that they found where their jump drive should have been when they jumped to a “star” that was travelling at light speed - see their jump drive disappeared when it tried to match velocity… - I don’t think they ever used it, but it was a cool reminder of a really fun session - and a reminder of just how wacked out and funky the campaign was [it was ok, they got a new ship from the people on that star - they had a museum of ships from all sorts of different SF universes, including an Enterprise class Star Trek type ship...They ended up with a ship from CJ Cherryh's universe, which had some advantages, and a few disadvantages over the more normal Traveller ships, or at least my mod on them]).
Frank