Campaigns: Starting Up Again After a Hiatus

Tomorrow night, my group is picking up our D&D campaign after a couple months on hiatus (due to time commitments, travel and the like). Our GM, Sam, knows his stuff — this isn’t a roundabout way to tell him what to do tomorrow, I just thought it would be an interesting topic to consider.

Whenever you take an extended break from an ongoing game, that first session back should look slightly different than a normal session.

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RPG Blog II, Obsidian Portal, The Groovecast, TT Photos

For today’s roundup, four markedly different GMing links:

• RPG Blog II: After closing the original RPG Blog due to time constraints, Zachary Houghton is back with a new incarnation of his site. This time around, he’s focusing not only on general RPG-related stuff but on being a judge for the ENnie Awards. Although not strictly a GMing site, the first RPG Blog periodically delved into GMing stuff — I’m betting version II will do the same. Welcome back, Zack!

• Obsidian Portal’s map tools: The excellent campaign management site Obsidian Portal now allows you to add zoomable, scrollable maps to your campaign’s subsite. Coming on the heels of a similar offering from Kayuda Maps, I’m glad to see that the use of Google Maps as a campaign tool is spreading — it’s a great concept.

• The Groovecast: This new podcast is “the first and only Podcast that discusses specifically tabletop gaming online through play by post, play by chat, and play by email,” and according to an email from Mark Reed, one of the show’s hosts, about 50% of their content is GMing-related. I haven’t had a chance to listen to one of their shows yet, but I dig their focus.

• Treasure Tables meetup photos: I’ve started using Flickr for my photos, and the four that were taken at the first-ever TT meetup are now online. (You can also check out all of my GenCon 2007 photos, if you’re interested.)

Name Your Campaigns and Adventures

A few observations on naming campaigns and scenarios, from both sides of the screen:

• Neither individual adventures nor entire campaigns need names, but it sure is cool when they have them.

• Campaign names are a useful shorthand, and one that helps evoke the tone of the game. “Sara’s campaign,” “Our GURPS game” and “You know, that campaign with the elves” are a lot less useful than “The Demonhaunt campaign,” “The Outsiders game” and “Elfland.”

• Naming your campaigns also prevents what I think of as the “Little Kitty Problem.” Back when we were kids, my best friend’s family got a new kitten, and they called her Little Kitty as a placeholder until they could think of a suitable name. Guess what Little Kitty’s name wound up being? (And naturally, she was huge.)

• Adventure names are not only fun, they can be useful: assuming you announce them, and refer to them later, they can help your players remember what’s happened so far in your game. They’re also enjoyable as teasers, as in my group’s just-completed Stargate game, where Don would give us the episode names at the start of each “season.”

• Giving each scenario you create a name will change the way you think about the structure of your campaign — and make it seem more official. Instead of just gaming, your playing “Vengeance from Below,” in the Ark of the Ages campaign.

Do you name your adventures, campaigns or both? Does your group enjoy your naming practices?

The Six Million Dollar GMing Wiki: An Overhaul

These days, I don’t often follow a question post (yesterday’s Are You the Most Dialed-in Gamer in Your Group) with another question post, but I’m gearing up to overhaul the GMing Wiki — and that’s not something I can do (or want to do) without feedback from the TT community.

I have three ideas in mind, namely:

1) Dump MediaWiki, our current wiki software. It’s clunky; after using it for awhile, I’m not happy with it; and several TT members have expressed concerns about it.

2) Archive everything, and put back the cream of the crop. There’s a ton of great material on the wiki, and while I don’t think every single thing needs to come back, most of it definitely should. (The wiki’s Creative Commons license is set up to handle this.)

3) Most importantly, approach the new wiki with goals in mind. This iteration had one goal: Be a repository for GMing material. That’s a good goal, but as it has shaken out, I think it’s too general. I’d like to narrow things down for the new one, perhaps even to the point of only having a handful of topics unlocked at a time.

I’d love to hear your suggestions on anything and everything related to the GMing Wiki: what should stay or go, what software to use, how to give it a sense of direction — whatever jumps out at you. Thanks in advance for your help!

Are You the Most Dialed-in Gamer in Your Group?

As the GM, are you the gamer in your group who is most up on new and upcoming releases, errata, web forums, blogs and news sites related to your game(s) of choice?

And if so, is there any connection between being your group’s most dialed-in gamer and being the GM?

In my case, I’d say no: I definitely don’t fill this role in my group. When it comes to D&D and White Wolf, I’m way behind Sam on all of the above. When it comes to industry news, I lag behind Don in most cases.

With indie games and a couple of other niches, I’m usually out front. Of the four of us, Jaben is the least interested in this kind of stuff, so all three of us are usually more dialed-in in this sense than he is.

How about you?

My Group’s Social Contract

Social contracts are a popular topic here, and one that I’ve found readers often associate with TT (which is great!). That’s due in large part to Chris Chinn’s guest post, Social Contracts for RPG Groups, which I consider to be the definitive introduction to and overview of the concept of social contracts in gaming terms.

With as often as social contracts come up on TT, I thought it might be interesting to share my group’s social contract. Why? Because like most groups I know, our social contract is largely implicit, fairly informal and has evolved over time.

There was never a time where we all sat down and said, “Okay, let’s come up with our social contract.” And there certainly isn’t an actual physical document involved (signed in blood, one would assume) — that would just be silly.

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Opening Credits via PowerPoint

At this year’s Mastering Your GM-Fu seminar, RPG freelancer and TT reader Walt C. mentioned that he uses a PowerPoint presentation to do opening credits for his game sessions. I thought that this sounded awesome, so I asked him if he’d be kind enough to share his technique with the GMing community. Thanks, Walt!
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While I was sitting in the “Mastering your GM-Fu” seminar at Gen Con, someone asked about rituals to use in order to signal that it’s time to game. Many good methods were offered, including the “sitting silently behind the screen” method, the playing of music, and the traditional “ask if we’re ready to play?” method. I offered one of my current methods, which was to create a PowerPoint presentation.

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New GMs, Editable Campaign Maps and Map Printing

In today’s link roundup, tips for new GMs, and maps, maps, maps:

• Four Common Pitfalls for New GMs: Kit Reshawn’s excellent Roleplaying Tips article covers GMPC issues, spotlight time, clues and PC deaths — all great topics for folks who are just getting started on their GMing careers. As always, when I see GMing advice like this now, I wish I’d known this stuff when I started out.

• Kayuda Maps: At GenCon, fellow GM-Fu panelist Zachary Houghton gave me a link to this site, which is currently in “private alpha” mode. I usually don’t link to stuff that’s not live, but I’m breaking that rule because Kayuda sounds so cool: it will let you upload and edit campaign maps, Google Maps style, complete with the ability to zoom in on specific areas. Bookmark it now and check back in a couple of weeks.

• Gamer Printshop: Billing itself as “An RPG map printing service and more for game masters and RPG publishers,” Gamer Printshop can print your campaign maps — in sizes up to 36″x48″, with lamination and mounting options available. $36 for a full-color jumbo map ($48 laminated) seems pretty reasonable to me, although I don’t know how favorably it compares to, say, Kinko’s or Office Depot.

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