TT Turns Two: Free PDF on Group Character Creation

Today’s is TT’s second birthday — the first post went up on July 8th, 2005 (Every Campaign is an Experiment), but I didn’t start publicizing the site until July 11th, with Running a Campaign Website. Capped off by Monday’s ENnie nomination for Best Fan Site, it’s been a great year.

Last year, I celebrated TT’s first birthday by giving away a free PDF, How to Take Simple (Yet Badass) GM Notes, and I figured I’d go ahead and make that a tradition.

This year’s free PDF is now available for download: More is Better: Group Character Creation. (Eight other free GMing PDFs are available in our downloads section.)

Over the years I’ve found that creating characters as a group is by far the best way to lay a solid foundation for a fun campaign. I thought it would be helpful to lay out a versatile, straightforward step-by-step system for creating a great party — hopefully this PDF will be useful to new and veteran GMs alike.

Many thanks for making TT’s second year even more of a blast than the first — you rock!

2007 ENnie Awards: TT Nominated for Best Fan Site

Treasure Tables has been nominated for an ENnie Award for Best Fan Site!

TT’s fellow nominees are Dragonlance Nexus, Liber Fanatica, Modus Operandi and Planewalker. They’re all cool sites — labors of love, just like TT — and if you haven’t already, I encourage you to check them out. It’s an honor to be nominated, and to be in such good company.

It’s also a huge relief to be done with this part of the waiting game — I did a little happy dance for my wife last night when I found out about the nomination. Thank you for helping to make Treasure Tables what it is today — without TT’s awesome community of GMs, and without your posts, comments, suggestions, and contributions, this nomination wouldn’t have happened.

Since they began in 2001, the ENnies have grown into the premiere fan-based RPG award: gamers vote to select five judges; those judges pore over dozens of products and narrow them down to five nominees for each category (ranging from Best Game to Best Cartography); and then fans vote for the gold and silver award winners in every category.

Whether you vote for TT or not, I hope you’ll vote in the ENnies later this month — being nominated means a lot to me, and I’m sure the other nominees feel the same. You don’t need an EN World account to vote, and it’s a pretty quick process.

Voting for the ENnies is open to anyone, and runs from July 16th through July 29th, with the awards ceremony taking place at GenCon on August 17th (which is pretty damned cool). Here’s the full list of nominees: 2007 ENnie Awards nominees.

I’ll post a reminder shortly before voting opens, and I hope you’ll consider voting for TT!

The Conflict Rule of NPC Design

Conflict makes characters interesting, and creates roleplaying opportunities.

This principle can be tweaked slightly and applied to NPC design, where it becomes the Conflict Rule: Every NPC who isn’t just there for color needs a conflict.

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The Power of Closure

My group’s Stargate SG-4 campaign has just two episodes left. Last night’s game was awesome, and our GM is clearly leading up to one hell of a season finale. Don, our GM, is ending this campaign according to plan. He’s told us that he’s leaving the door open for future adventures, if we decide to come back to Stargate (as we’ve done once before).

On an intellectual level, I grok get all that. I’ve written about the different ways you can end campaigns (collected in the free PDF How to End a Campaign: Six Approaches), and I understand the pros and cons of the different approaches — including Don’s planned finale approach.

What I wasn’t expecting was the feeling of satisfaction that comes with knowing that a) we’re headed for a grand finale, b) the game will end, not peter out or wither on the vine, c) we can pick up the campaign down the line, if everyone’s amenable and (most importantly) d) this campaign will have closure. That’s a surprisingly powerful thing.

I think of it like watching Firefly or reading the Harry Potter books, to use a couple of recent examples. After loving the first few episodes of Firefly, or getting solidly into the HP series, there’s that double-edged realization: “This is awesome, and it will end.” Applying that to our Stargate campaign really brings home for me how rewarding campaigns with defined endpoints can be.

Have you had a similar experience with a limited campaign? Do you dislike limited campaigns, and prefer open-ended games with no predetermined endpoint?

Create a Campaign Framework by Filing Off Serial Numbers

TT reader and RPG freelancer Walt C. wrote to me a little while back about his ongoing Star Wars campaign, and we’ve been exchanging emails about the technique he used to create the campaign’s framework. I asked Walt if I could publish excerpts of his emails here, and he graciously said yes (thanks, Walt!).

So why should you care about Walt’s Star Wars campaign? Because he designed it by using a simple technique that’s easy to reproduce, and so far he’s had very good results:

I’m currently 2/3s of the way through a very successful Star Wars campaign. While prepping for the campaign, I had no idea what to run. Suddenly, inspiration hit me. I took Star Wars (the original) and made a crude outline from it. I created my own area in the Unknown Regions of space, and I essentially “recreated” Star Wars by filing off serial numbers while using the same general outline. It worked so well that I did the same for ESB. (I’ve begun plotting ROTJ).

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Dry-erase vs. Wet-erase Maps and Battlemats

Setting aside digital map projection, the two most popular reusable RPG mapping solutions out there are dry-erase boards and wet-erase mats.

The former come in a variety of sizes, from commercial white boards to options designed specifically for RPGs, like the unbelievably awesome Tact-Tiles. The latter most commonly come in the form of gaming-specific flexible mats, offered with a wide range of grid and hex options.

I got my start with reusable gaming maps using one of those giant wet-erase battlemats, and have since switched to Tact-Tiles. I much prefer dry-erase maps to their wet-erase counterparts — here’s a point-by-point comparison of dry-erase vs. wet-erase mapping options.

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Your Poker Face is a GMing Tool

Roleplaying Tips had a nifty article way back in issue #139 that I hadn’t seen before: The Art Of The Poker Face.

Not tipping your hand (to continue the theme) to your players is always an important consideration, and being able to maintain a neutral expression is very handy. My poker face is pretty awful, although I sometimes thing it’s working well. I’m sure that over the years my players have been able to read my expression just fine even when I thought I was being sneaky.

I’ve never considered practicing my poker face, though, and that’s what this article advocates. My favorite tip is this one: don’t show your teeth.

Keep your lips together, but not tightly, when showing your poker face. The mouth supports your whole facial expression, and, if you can control your mouth, adopting a good poker face is much easier.

That sounds like a pretty easy thing to remember during games, and a good start towards perfecting your poker face.

Getting Inspired to GM a Game

There are lots of ways to get inspired to run your next game. For me it nearly always starts with a flash of inspiration — a partially-formed idea pops into my head, and I think “I have to run that.”

But that’s far from the only way to get things rolling. Here’s a short list of sources of inspiration, and a couple of big GMing questions to go along with it.

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