Less Backstory Often Equals More Fun

There’s nothing wrong with detailing your world or campaign down to the smallest element (which can be very enjoyable in its own right), but it’s easy to get sidetracked and spend too much of your precious prep time on stuff that won’t see the light of day. I’ve certainly done my fair share of this in past games!

If you want maximum value for your prep time, focus only on what you know will come up — and make those elements as cool as possible. Sketch out the stuff on the periphery if you have time, and don’t spend any time on things beyond that periphery.

For example, if the PCs are going to be infiltrating a secret government facility, you might be tempted to write up the history of that facility. Unless your players will care, ignore that temptation. Instead, use that time to spruce up your map, come up with a really memorable NPC or otherwise work on something that’s guaranteed to enhance your game.

Three Kinds of Encounter: Obstacles, Breakthroughs and Climaxes

In the comments on Encounters: A Similar Formula , Ian Toltz of Asmor.com made a great comment outlining three broad types of encounter. His analysis is succinct and useful, and he was kind enough to let me turn his comment into a guest post.
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If I may put forth this idea, any story-related encounter in which the party can succeed or fail should come in one of three basic varieties: obstacles, breakthroughs, and climaxes.

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Wedding/Honeymoon Mode — Engage!

Alysia and I are getting married on September 23rd (we couldn’t be happier!), and I’ll be incognito starting tomorrow, the 20th. We’re heading off to Maui for our honeymoon on the 24th (woohoo!), and we won’t be back in Utah until October 1st.

There will be a new post here every day, just like always. (I’ve cued them up to appear once a day until I’m back.)

I won’t be able to respond to comments or answer email at all while I’m gone — after our whirlwind of wedding prep, I’m shooting for total relaxation in Hawai’i.

Keep on rocking without me, and I’ll see you on the 2nd!

Yarr! Pirates: Good to the Last Drop

Shiver me timbers, it be International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Here on Treasure Tables, we celebrate only the finest fake holidays (check out our 2006 GM’s Day coverage), and TLaPD is no exception. (Okay, technically it was an exception last year, because I forgot all about it.)

Are pirates cooler than ninjas? Who can say, really (except today, of course, when the answer is an unequivocal “yes!”). What matters, of course, is that for you as a GM, pirates are chock full of awesome.

Here are five reasons that pirates rock in RPGs.

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Spy Games are All About Paranoia

This guest post by Patrick Benson (AKA VV_GM) is the fourth in our continuing Genre Advice for GMs series. In this post, Patrick shares a few secrets for driving your players nuts — in a good way.
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Espionage games are one of the more difficult genres of RPGs to run. This is not a reference to the James Bond-type espionage game, which is not really about espionage at all but instead focuses on the fantasy of being a spy.

This post is for GMs looking to run a hardcore cloak and dagger game that is more likely to resemble a Tom Clancy novel where politics, corporate and military interests might all collide.

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Keep a Rumor List Handy

One of my favorite things about the original Forgotten Realms setting for D&D (the grey box) was the list of rumors that it included. They were broken down by month, and there were a couple of years worth of them. Each rumor was a little adventure hook, and sometimes they played on the assumed course of events from earlier rumors.

As a GM, this gave me a ready source of adventure ideas, and I got some great mileage out of it. And although this never came up back then, if I’d had players who liked to ask around in every town about what was going on in the region, those rumors would have made great unplanned answers to their questions.

This is an extension of constantly jotting down your ideas (you should never be far from a pad!). Whenever you think of a nifty rumor, write it down. You can use them to advance side plots, to answer surprise questions from your players, or to provide fuel for adventures down the road — and this list will work equally well regardless or system or genre.

Sci-Fi RPGs: Handwaving and Color

When you’re running a sci-fi RPG, how much the game world differs from the present day will depend on how far into the future the game projects — but given the rapid pace of technological advancement in the past hundred years, an awful lot is likely to have changed.

This can lead to a sort of paralysis. As the GM, you might be tempted to explain every little thing that’s different about the future — even stuff that the players probably won’t care about, and that has no impact on the game.

Instead, fight that impulse. You can handwave the vast majority of those changes.

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Encounters: A Simple Formula

Here’s a basic formula that you can use to construct an encounter:

Challenge (combat, social, puzzle or other) + unique element (memorable NPC, fighting on a rope bridge, etc.) + a way to advance even if the party fails (although perhaps with penalties) = a successful encounter.

And here’s a brief example encounter:

A band of orcs (the challenge, combat) + the fight takes place in small boats on a rushing river (the unique element) + the orcs will take the PCs prisoner if the party loses (a way to advance despite failure, but with consequences).

By including only a single challenge and single unique element that defines the encounter, you’re keeping prep time and on-the-fly bookkeeping to a minimum, and keeping the focus on what makes the encounter fun (everything is within your players’ flashlight beam).

By making sure the PCs can move on even if they fail (partially or completely), you’re preventing the encounter from being a roadblock to keeping the adventure moving. And when you’re bleary-eyed from prepping for your next session, having a formula to glance at might just come in handy.

There are lots of other ways to build encounters, but this simple approach will work for most groups and most RPGs.

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