Three Updates: Player Finding, TT Forums, Game Space Photos

I keep tabs on lots of things on TT and elsewhere in the GMing community, and just recently these three have jumped out at me:

• Since March of this year, when I first posted about the site, NearbyGamers has grown to include over 1,800 players. If you’re looking for players, I recommend starting here — NBG is slick, useful and free, and well worth checking out.

• The Treasure Tables Forums recently crossed a pretty cool milestone, signing up our 500th member. The GMing Q&A board remains the flagship of the forums, where GMs of all skill levels can ask and answer questions about any RPG, conundrum or tricky situation. If you need help with a GMing issue, you can find it here.

• Gaming Spaces, the Flickr photo group I started at the end of April, now has over 30 members and more than 50 photos of game rooms from around the world. If you like seeing where other GMs game, come check it out.

You Can See It from Space

If you make your rolls in the open, consider using jumbo dice — like this 55 millimeter d20. (I’ve only seen d6s and d20s in sizes this large, but I’ve seen slightly smaller versions in d4, d8, d10, d% and d12 as well.) If you’ve got plenty of rolling space, you could even go super-jumbo with a 6″ foam d20, although that seems silly for most applications.

Using bigger dice makes it easier for your players to see what you rolled, and if you’re rolling outside your screen, easier for you to see as well — doubly so if you stand when you’re running combats, like I do.

I’ve had at least one player who really disliked my jumbo d20s, so take this tip with a grain of salt (like all GMing advice!).

A Zillion Goblins: Timesaving Products for GMs

Via Gaming Report, I just saw that Creative Conclave has released a d20 product called The Lazy GM: Goblinoids, which includes several hundred pre-statted goblins, bugbears and the like at a wide range of levels.

I loathe creating d20 statblocks with every fiber of my being, so this is one aspect of game prep that I can always use help with. Even in RPGs with lighter statblocks, I prefer having plenty of pregenerated mooks and sample villains available.

Most GMs have at least one common prep task that they don’t enjoy, or that they’d prefer took less time. What’s your least favorite prep activity for your game (or games) of choice? Are there any timesaving products that you use to make that task more bearable?

GMing for Kids: An Actual Play Report

Veteran game master John Kim (who I interviewed for TT back in 2006) has posted an account of running D&D for an eleventh birthday party.

With the gaming area decorated like a D&D dungeon, John ran a dungeon crawl for seven kids that sounds like it was blast for everyone involved. If you’re interested in GMing for a group of kids, there are some excellent ideas in his post.

I know there are lots of TT readers who have kids of their own, and there aren’t neatly enough GMing resources online about how to run games for children. Teaching children to roleplay, on the TT forums, offers some good links, but on the whole this topic seems ripe for some comprehensive coverage.

Have you ever GMed an adventure for kids? Do you know of any articles, sites or other resources geared towards helping GMs run RPGs for children?

Better Ways to Handle PC Failure

Over on the always-excellent ars ludi, Ben Robbins writes about learning to explain PC failure:

As a GM the urge is to overlook failure, just nod at the bad roll and move along to spare the player the shame. Big mistake. The worst insult to a character in the game world is to have no impact.

He goes on to talk about describing failure as the result of bad luck or other unfortunate circumstances, and not just a screw-up on the part of the PC — much like Jonathon Tweet’s Kirk Rule (Captain Kirk never fails!).

Good stuff all around — every GM should consider this often-overlooked topic.

Spheres of Influence in RPG Planning

Issue 357 of Roleplaying Tips features the article 9 Spheres Of Influence: My Broad RPG Planning Checklist, which ranks game planning considerations in order of importance.

Here are the first two “spheres,” the idea being that more important spheres contain and influence successively less important ones:

  1. GM preferences
  2. Player preferences

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, as the author says, “There are many exceptions to this, and if the list doesn’t reflect your group’s structure, then feel free to re-order it,” and I like the overall concept — it’s a neat framework.

On the other hand, I think the first two spheres should be reversed, with player preferences in the top spot. Without a group of interested players, it doesn’t really matter what your preferences are as a GM — your game won’t be much fun.

…Except that if you, the GM, aren’t really jazzed about the game, then there won’t be a game at all — which suggests that GM preferences are paramount, at least in some ways. This is a toughie — what do you think of the “sphere” concept, and the order of importance?

How Soon Do You Start Planning Your Next Campaign?

When you’re actively running a campaign, are you:

  1. Not thinking about your next campaign at all?
  2. Keeping ideas for your next campaign on the back burner?
  3. Sketching out possibilities for your next campaign?
  4. Planning your next campaign in detail?
  5. (Something I didn’t think of)?

And whatever your answer might be, how has that approach worked out for you?

Pulling Punches in Combat: A GMing Dilemma

Bill and the Gnome Punters wrote to me about a common GMing dilemma: Do you use PC tactics against the PCs — specifically, focusing attacks on a single target rather than spreading the love — or do you pull punches in combat?

Bill ran into this situation with his group a little while back, but he didn’t mention how he handled it in his email. (Care to share here, Bill?) There are really only two choices here, though, so I figured I’d take a look at both of them — along with four things you should take into account when making this decision.

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