How Your Players See NPCs, and a Bad Metaphor

Over on Avonia d20, Patrick (who is Patrick on the TT forums, too) has recently written two excellent GMing advice articles: NPCs Don’t Sit on Fences and Bad Metaphor, Part 1.

NPCs Don’t Sit on Fences makes the point that it doesn’t matter how you intended your players to perceive a particular NPC — what matters is how they actually see them. It’s simple, cogent advice for creating useful NPCs — good stuff.

Bad Metaphor, Part 1 argues that while the process for creating an RPG plot and the plot of a novel are similar, comparing the two after that point is a bad idea (and a poor metaphor) — and one that can get you, as the GM, into trouble.

(And for d20 System GMs, many of Patrick’s other posts — like this in-depth look at trapfinding — may be right up your alley.)

Treasure Tables RPG Glossary: 216 Terms

After putting out a call for glossary suggestions to TT readers almost two weeks ago, I’ve finally completed all of the revisions.

The newly re-christened RPG Glossary is ready for primetime. My thanks to everyone who contributed — you rock!

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Have You Ever Padded a Session?

Whether due to lack of prep (“Crap, there’s no way this’ll last four hours”), an encounter taking a lot less time than you expected or any other factor, have you ever padded out a gaming session to make it last longer?

Ways to pad a session include adding an encounter on the fly (“Ninjas kick in the door!”), making a puzzle more complicated than it should be or drawing out a conversation between the party and a key NPC.

Doing things like this to make the game more fun, or to adapt to changing conditions, is part of being a GM. Doing them just to stretch out a session is padding (the key difference is intent).

And as a follow-up question: Is there such a thing as good padding?

Initiative: Tips, Tricks and Fundamentals

Nearly every RPG uses an initiative system for combat, and handling this aspect of combat is a fundamental skill for all GMs.

Here are a few simple tricks you can use to make the most of your game’s initiative mechanic.

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Looking for Players?

After exchanging a few emails with Peter Harkins, who runs NearbyGamers, I created a new page called Ways to Find RPG Players. It collects a range of player-finding tools and resources in one spot, with NearbyGamers front and center.

This is an evergreen topic for gamers in general, and for GMs in particular. Everyone has had to find a new group after they moved, or lost a player or two to work or school and needed to bring new folks into their existing group.

I highlighted NearbyGamers as the featured resource because I think that with enough members (and over 450 have signed up in the past week) this site could become the destination for finding players — and that would benefit the whole gaming community.

If you know of any player-finding resources that I missed, I hope you’ll share them with me in the comments.

Double Features

Last night, my group’s Stargate SG-4 campaign had a double feature: Our GM, Don, ran two short adventures back to back.

We took a dinner break partway through the first one, and then a levelling-up break before starting the second scenario, and it worked really well across the board. We weren’t too tired to do two sessions in a row, they didn’t feel rushed and we had a great time.

Don was looking at the double feature as a way to make up for calling off a couple of previous sessions (which was very nice of him), but I don’t see any reason that this approach wouldn’t work as a change of pace for any group.

It was good stuff, and I’d love to do it again sometime. Have you ever tried a double feature?

Creating and Running Guide NPCs

Issue #349 of Roleplaying Tips has some great advice on building and managing NPC guides — NPCs that accompany the party as long-term companions.

The author bases their advice on two concrete examples of successful guide NPCs from their own game, which is an excellent approach: “Bordon’s success was unusual because he was not only twice as powerful as the rest of the party members, he was also the PCs’ employer.”

Highlights include giving your NPC a specialized skillset (so they don’t trample on the whole party) and little in the way of leadership abilities (so the players can take the lead). We’ve got a permanent NPC ally (not strictly a guide NPC, but not that far off) in my group’s Stargate SG-4 campaign, and those two traits are part of what make her work so well in the game.

What’s the Longest Campaign You’ve Ever Run?

The “standard” model of the neverending campaign is a lot less standard these days — it’s enviable, but gets harder and harder to pull off the older you get. Multiply moving, having kids and other responsibilities by the number of players in your group, and it quickly gets tough to keep a game running for that long.

There are groups out there doing it, though (including at least a couple of TT members I can think of), but more and more often lately I see, hear about and participate in shorter-term campaigns.

Personally, the longest campaign I’ve ever GMed lasted somewhere between three and four years (1989 to 1991 or ’92, which is why I’m a bit fuzzy on the details). How about you?

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