Key to a Good Cliffhanger

Ending a session on a cliffhanger is a great way to leave your players wanting more, and get them excited about coming back for the next session. It’s possible to screw this up, though, if you choose the wrong break point for your cliffhanger.

The key to a good cliffhanger is ending your session on a pause in the action, not right in the thick of it.

That may seem counterintuitive at first, but it’s actually pretty easy to implement. Let’s tackle this tip with a classic example: a big battle.

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What Do You do When Your Players are Lost?

We’ve all run into it at some point: You’re partway through a session, and your players are utterly and completely lost.

The main plot is a distant blip on the horizon, either way ahead of the party or way behind them — or it’s not even in their flashlight beam at all. If you don’t do something, it’s going to be a long night (and probably not much fun for your players, or for you). So what do you do?

Depending on your group’s social contract, what you do next will vary: have one PC roll to get a clue, just give your players a hint, have ninjas kick in the door, ask your group to recap what’s happened up until that point — there are tons of options.

As in so many situations, I’d start by taking a five-minute break. After that, my best bet is usually some variation on that last option: have my players summarize what they know, and then give them a nudge or two to get the adventure moving again.

How do you handle this situation when it comes up in your games?

When in Doubt, Take Five

Few arrows in your GMing quiver are as versatile, valuable and powerful as the five-minute break. If a problem arises, whether it’s on your side of the screen or not, taking a short break is nearly always a good idea.

It gives everyone a chance to hit the bathroom, refill the snack bowl, grab a drink or stretch their legs, and it gives you a few minutes to clear your head and find a way to solve the problem.

Here are seven common situations in which stopping the session for five minutes will help you keep it from grinding to a halt (usually for a lot longer than five minutes):

Breaks are a good idea every couple of hours even if everything’s going smoothly, especially after long battles or scenes with lots of intense roleplaying — but if something is amiss, taking five is always a good place to start.

Final Day to Vote in the ENnies

Today is the last day that you can vote in the 2007 ENnie Awards.

If you haven’t already voted, I encourage you to take a minute or two and cast a ballot. You don’t need to be an EN World member, and there are a lot of great products up for awards.

And if you’re so inclined, I hope you’ll support TT with a vote for Best Fan Site (the first category on the ballot). Thank you to everyone who has voted for Treasure Tables — you rock!

RPG Cutscenes and Cutaways

This guest post is by Aluion, whose insightful comments on Cutscenes: One Simple Approach suggested that he knew a lot more about this topic.

And he does: A GM since 1994, Aluion started using a version of this technique for cutscenes and cutaways 10 years ago, and has refined and expanded it over the course of eight different campaigns. Thanks for sharing this with us, Aluion!
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My technique is more of a “cutaway” than a “cutscene,” where the focus leaves the adventure for awhile and comes back later, and where all actions that take place in the cutaway are determined by the players. Done correctly, and with the right type of players, a cutaway can be a handy GM tool in its own right.

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Callbacks, YPAL Updated and GM Types

Three GMing links, three completely different topics:

• Young Person’s Adventure League: Bill Walton, who runs The Escapist, has updated the YPAL with The Tinkerer’s Toolbox, a collection of resources for GMing for kids, and The Navigator’s Notebook, which features convention reports about running Toon and Faery’s Tale for kids at Origins 2007. If you have kids and want to game with them, YPAL is a great resource.

• Robin Laws on Callbacks: “In screenwriting parlance, the act of including a story element to be referred to later is called laying pipe. When you do make that connecting reference, you’re making a callback.” Robin goes on to recommend that GMs encourage their players to make callbacks during play — something that’s easy to overlook yourself when running a game — which sounds like an excellent practice. Very nifty.

• Georgios’ GM Types: Along the same lines as Robin Laws’s player types, GameCraft member Georgios lays out seven GM types: Worldbuilder, Duelist, Plotmeister, Master of Ceremonies, Actor, Director and Provider. I’d argue that all GMs should use the Provider as a baseline — when your players have fun, so will you, and that consideration should inform every GMing decision you make.

PC Backgrounds: Pressure Doesn’t Make Diamonds

After responding to Corrosive Rabbit’s thread about character backgrounds yesterday, I realized that I wanted to go into more detail on this topic.

I’ve been GMing since 1989, but it’s only been in the past couple of years that I’ve formulated this approach to handling PC backgrounds. I’ve never put the whole thing to the test, but I’ve used most of the pieces to good effect — and seen them used by great GMs, too.

The two most common tacks I see GMs take (and have taken myself) are requiring lengthy character backgrounds and not requiring PC backgrounds at all. The problem is that five pages of background may not be useful, but zero background means zero GMing fuel for you.

This approach falls somewhere in between those two, and hits the high notes that I’ve found to be most useful.

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Make Them Choose: Devil’s Choices for PCs

When it comes to the PCs, hard choices are the steam that powers the engines of character development. Without that steam, that energy and motive force, the PCs won’t develop nearly as quickly, nor in such interesting ways.

I’m not a big advocate of forcing anything player- or PC-related, but this is an exception: hard choices have to be forced. A hard choice, also called a “devil’s choice,” is one where there is no perfect outcome — no matter which course the PC chooses, something bad will happen simply because she did not choose the other option.

Something good will happen, too, in the resolution of the option the PC did choose, but it’s how that PC changes as a result of her choice that makes for memorable gaming sessions.

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