TT Overhaul: Nearly Done

A quick Sunday morning update, after installing two plugins and doing some more fiddling:

• Post archives are accessible again.

• Recent comments are back. I don’t know about you, but having this page completely changes the way I interact with TT — I’m glad it’s back! It looks different now, so we’ll see how that goes.

• The way previewed comments work has changed slightly. Now, instead of taking you up to the top of a new page to review your comment, it just pops it into the existing comments framework as a preview. Very slick. You can now also post without previewing (I may change that back, but I’d like to see if it works out well for commenters).

More to follow!

Update: More little things are done. Eyestrain = time to call it a day. Apart from the layout of a few pages and the placement of images in older posts, pretty much everything is done.

Thank you again for bearing with me during this redesign. I’m happy with how it’s turned out, and I hope you are as well. Suggestions, feedback and reports of anything that’s broken are very much welcome.

TT Will Be Weird this Weekend

I bit the bullet last night and updated my WordPress install — the first step in a series of upgrades and updates for TT. The site will probably look funny, and things will temporarily be missing or broken, but hopefully nothing will catch fire.

One of my main goals (which may not be accomplished this weekend) is to better integrate the forums and wiki, and I think that that change — like the others I’ll be making — will improve TT’s usefulness for you.

Stay tuned, and as always feedback is welcome.

Update: The theme has been finalized, barring that I wake up tomorrow and realize I’ve made a terrible mistake. Not all of its elements are up and running yet (notably recent comments and access to the categorized post archives), but plenty of them are. Some stuff still looks funny, too.

Thanks for bearing with me — I know how weird it can be when a site you visit regularly undergoes a drastic change like this. I think you’ll be happy with the results, though.

Update 2: More finicky stuff has been dealt with. The main page is nearly at “completed first draft” status. Images still look weird almost everywhere else, archives are still down, the post/comment ad slot is still empty — you get the idea.

I’m off to my weekly gaming night shortly, so I won’t be back on the update wagon until tomorrow morning. At this rate, though, I should have the blog 99% complete tomorrow — then it’s on to integrating the forums and wiki, which I’m really dreading.

Serious Intra-Party Conflict: Usually Not Sexy

It can be tempting to include or encourage strong intra-party conflict when you start up a new campaign, partly because internal strife isn’t usually a part of most campaigns. Unfortunately, there’s a reason it’s often left out: it tends to sound sexier than it often turns out to be.

There are exceptions, of course: RPGs like Paranoia, which is built on a foundation of dead PCs; Amber, which neatly balances conflict with a mutual urge to remain true to the spirit of the novels; or most White Wolf games, which generally assume at least some level of conflict between player characters.

But as one ingredient in an otherwise fairly traditional campaign, intra-party conflict has a tendency to either a) backfire, leading to intra-player conflict (which is never a good thing), b) fall flat, adding nothing to the game or c) take over the campaign, morphing it into something no one is really happy with.

If you’re thinking of going this route, I’d recommend making it part of your social contract discussion before the game — or better yet, trying it out with a one-shot to see how your group responds to a shift in dynamics. Trying new things is good, but this is one new thing that should be tried with caution.

One-Shots: Take the Gloves Off

I was thinking about my all-time favorite one-shot, the Call of Cthulhu scenario “In Media Res” (from Pagan Publishing’s excellent magazine, The Unspeakable Oath), and one of the things I enjoy so much about it is just how brutal it can be.

CoC one-shots are always pretty unforgiving, but this one is doubly so — I don’t want to spoil it (if you like CoC, you should track it down and run it, stat), but it’s entirely reasonable for the party to kill each other in the opening scene. At least in my experience, that sort of gloves-off, bring-the-pain approach isn’t something most GMs get a chance to employ on a regular basis.

That kind of scenario definitely isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s the beauty of one-shots: They free you from all of the many constraints placed on you — and your players — in a campaign game, and let your whole group try things in-game that they’d never consider in their regular adventures.

There are lots of things to love about one-shots, but reminiscing about running “In Media Res” reminded me that this is one of the best things about them. If you’ve never run a scenario like this, I encourage you to do so — if nothing else, it can be quite an experience.

(As an aside, if you’ve been waiting to read other GMs’ adventure notes, your wait is over: Adventure Notes: Read and Share has been updated with links to three downloadable sets of notes and one online archive. My thanks to everyone who sent in their notes!)

Incorporating a New PC: The Magellan

There are three reasons you might need to incorporate a new PC into an ongoing campaign:

1. One of the PCs dies or is otherwise permanently removed from play (goes insane, etc.).
2. To replace an un-fun PC.
3. A new player joins your group.

Not penalizing players for bringing in a new PC is a given, but how do you actually introduce that new character into the game?

One slightly silly (yet eminently practical) approach is “The Magellan.”

Read more

How Much Do You Recycle Between Campaigns?

I’m back from Michigan but nowhere near caught up (we had a great time). Luckily, TT reader Walt C. posed a question via email while I was gone: How much of your material do you recycle between campaigns? (Great question, Walt — thanks!)

And to be clear, Walt’s question wasn’t just about carrying stuff over from one D&D campaign to the next — GMs can and should reuse, recycle and repurpose material from system to system, group to group and game to game. If you wrote an awesome encounter that the PCs never saw, why not use it again? If you ginned up a great NPC who got killed off early, why not bring her back in another campaign?

Especially when you’re short on time, using stuff you’ve already written that your current group has never seen before is always at least worth considering. Personally, I’m often too disorganized to do this properly — I don’t catalog the stuff I prep well, and I can’t always find it when I need it again (assuming I even remember to look for it, of course). Recycling is definitely something I need to do more often.

How about you?

Co-GMing, Campaign Tips and the New Breed of GMing Blogs

For today, two GMing links and a smidgen of commentary on GMing blogs:

• Co-DMing: Heed Your Dungeon Mentor: This recent Stupid Ranger post offers a behind-the-scenes look at one GM’s experience with co-GMing. The author, Vanir, backed up Dante, who was the main GM for the adventure, and he learned some good lessons in the process.

• D&D Instant Campaign Builder - Official Release: Over at Dungeon Mastering, Yax’s Instant Campaign Builder PDF is full of good advice for starting up a campaign. From hype to props to planting, this free PDF collects all 10 posts in the series, and it’s not just for D&D.

When I started TT just over two years ago, it was partly because I couldn’t find any regularly-updated sites for GMs that worked quite the way I wanted them to. There were (and are!) plenty of good sites for GMs, but no one really seemed to be taking advantage of what blogging in particular had to offer.

Dungeon Mastering and Stupid Ranger are firing on all cylinders. With four authors producing quality content, Stupid Ranger delivers more good stuff than any single-author blog (ahem) can hope to keep up with. I’m consistently impressed with the quality of Yax’s work on Dungeon Mastering, and with how often he posts — and his layout makes me think it might be time for another TT redesign.

The GMing community is richer for your contributions. Keep it up!

(I’ll be in Michigan from Thursday, September 20th through Monday, September 24th. As always, I’ve cued up a post for every day that I’ll be gone, but I probably won’t be able to respond to comments or emails. Have fun, and I’ll see you on Tuesday! — Martin)

Gaming Sessions: What’s Ideal, What’s Too Short?

Recently on TT we’ve looked at the longest sessions you’ve ever run, and at some models for GMing short sessions on weeknights.

With session length on the brain, TT reader and frequent commenter Walt C. emailed me to suggest this two-part GMing question (thanks, Walt!): What’s your ideal session length, and what’s the shortest session you’d be comfortable running?

For my part, I love the four-hour session; six hours is a close second (but not five — why is that?). Just enough time to get a lot done, but not enough time to dawdle. As far as short sessions go, I could see running a single robust encounter in one hour, or a couple of linked encounters — for a demo, maybe — in two hours. I’ve never done that, though.

How about you?

(I’ll be in Michigan from Thursday, September 20th through Monday, September 24th. As always, I’ve cued up a post for every day that I’ll be gone, but I probably won’t be able to respond to comments or emails. Have fun, and I’ll see you on Tuesday! — Martin)

Next Page →