Adventure Notes: Read and Share

Commenting on Adventure Notes: One Page per Encounter, TT reader Millsy said:

“On a related note, I’d find it really useful to see links to other GM’s notes. [...] Is there any more demand for this?”

I thought that was an excellent idea (thanks, Millsy!), so I figured I’d get the ball rolling with notes I wrote for a session back in 2005. This campaign was a mixed bag, and it’s pretty easy to see why from my notes: I look at them now and think, “That was supposed to be a session?” Oy.

In any case, here they are: Selgaunt-Session-Six.rtf.

I’d also love to read your notes, and to share them with the TT community. If that sounds good to you, you’re welcome to email notes to me at martin(at)treasuretables(dot)org and have me host them here, or share a link in the comments. I’ll update this post with any notes/links I’ve received when I’m back from my trip.

Update: I’m back, and I’ve got notes from fellow GMs to share!

• Uncle Dark’s notes for Episode 5: Skinwalker (.doc)

• Troy Taylor’s notes for Murder of Constance Grace (PDF)

• Millsy’s own notes for Little Shop of Pink Horrors (.rtf)

• SoCalGamer’s SG-1 Scenario Library

(Not included, unfortunately, are Philippe-Antoine’s incredibly detailed TiddlyWiki files for one of his D&D adventures (inspired by TT’s own Using a GMing Wiki: It Slices, It Dices PDF, no less!). Philippe-Antoine scans in maps from Dungeon, and while that’s not going to cause any problems at home, I don’t feel comfortable posting those scans here.)

Thanks to everyone who sent in their notes! Reading them feels a bit like seeing into another GM’s brain, which is an interesting experience.

(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)

Great Campaigns: One Out of Three Ain’t Bad

This guest post by longtime GM and fellow GM-Fu panelist Phil Vecchione grew out of a comment Phil made at the first-ever Treasure Tables meetup. Knowing that Phil is a great GM, hearing his success ratio was a light bulb moment for me — I suddenly felt a lot better about the campaigns I’d bombed, and a lot more confident about myself as a GM.

I figured there’d be plenty of GMs who could benefit from that same experience, and Phil was generous enough to turn his comment into a post that’s packed with excellent advice. Enjoy — and thank you, Phil!
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After 20+ years of being a GM, I average one great campaign to every two to three that I run. When I say great, I mean a campaign that my players find exciting and memorable and that lasts at least one calendar year. The rest die for any number of reasons: they are sometimes boring or flat, the mechanics are too difficult, the players lose interest, I lose interest, etc.

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Not Dead Yet, Player Psychology and Rusty GMs

It’s been a while since our last forum roundup, and there’s one piece of news and two threads I’d like to share:

• Not Dead Yet: We now have a forum for non-gaming discussion. I’ve held off on creating a forum like this for ages, but I think now is the right time. Enjoy!

• Psychology and Problem Solving in RPGs: TT member Rust opened up a can of worms with this thread, and there are strong opinions on all sides of the issue that he raised: Is a “hunt and peck” approach to tackling adventures a sign of lazy players?

• Coming back to GMing after a very, very long time: New forum member Restless needs your help: He hasn’t GMed in ages, and he’s not sure how to get back into the groove. I usually try to avoid fragmenting discussion like this, but I know there’s a lot of non-overlap between folks who like to comment here and folks who are members of the forums. If you’ve got suggestions for Restless (and other GMs who’ve been away from the screen for years), share away!

I’d also like to welcome TT member maikeru back from his crazy surgery. It’s good to have you back, Michael!

(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)

Adventure Notes: One Page per Encounter

In the comments on Metagame Elements and Transparency, TT reader Chris mentioned successfully reworking an encounter while improvising part of a session. Chris’s comment got me thinking about different ways to write up adventure notes — specifically, writing them with adaptability in mind.

Adventure notes are a funny thing: I don’t know about you, but outside of published adventures I think I’ve seen a grand total of two sets of adventure notes written by other GMs. In a way, that means there’s an echo chamber element to writing scenarios: How the hell do you know what you’re doing right, except by trial and error?

When I’m writing an adventure, I just type the whole thing up in roughly the order I expect it to happen, with a few reminders and notes up front. I use the method I outlined in the free PDF How to Take Simple (Yet Badass) GM Notes, which works well for me. This results in several pages of stuff in what might not turn out to be a very useful order — or format — at all.

Reading Chris’s comment, it hit me: Why not break adventure notes down into encounters, and give each encounter its own page? That way, when your players take the game in an unexpected direction (which, inevitably, they will), you can more easily shuffle encounters on the fly, tweak scenes to fit their new place in the session and slot in entirely new encounters.

What do you think of this approach? What approach do you take to writing adventure notes?

(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)

Have 2+ Copies of the Rules on Hand

This is a pretty basic tip, but one that took me a bit of time to figure out when I first started out as a GM: The more copies of the rules you have on hand, the better.

• For character creation, one copy per player is ideal.

• During the game, having at least two copies around is handy — one for you to reference, and one for your players to use.

• Between sessions, everyone needs enough time with the rules to choose new abilities, plan for the next game, level up, etc. Again, one per person is ideal.

It can be cost-prohibitive for every player to have a copy of the core rules, and while it’s ideal it’s certainly not mandatory. You can have just as much fun sharing one dog-eared book as you can with five copies.

PDFs — and printouts you make from those PDFs — can be a great way to save money in this department, though. If you have a laptop on hand during games, both PDF copies and online versions of the rules (like D&D’s SRD) can be readily available — and in the latter case, usually free.

GMing Short Weeknight Games

Summer is always a bad time for my group when it comes to actually getting a chance to play, and that’s due in part to the fact that we game every Saturday: when stuff comes up, it’s often on Saturdays. One option might be to throw a weeknight game into the mix — much like having a backup RPG on deck, only with a bit more planning.

So what should a weeknight game look like, assuming everyone has work or school the following day? With the caveat that I’ve only ever run a couple of weeknight one-shots, here’s what comes to mind:

• Short. Four hours is going to be tough to wrangle, and six is probably out of the question. Two or three hours seems like a good length: finish dinner by 7:00, done with the game by 10:00 — that sounds reasonable.

• No lead-in. With so little time for the game, I’d want to keep the pregame socializing to a minimum — 15 minutes tops. As much as I enjoy that aspect of gaming, much longer seems like it’d turn game night into hangout night (not a bad thing, just not what we’re after).

• Focused and intense… Like a convention game, being short on time suggests packing in lots of action while minimizing item management and other momentum-killing activities. In his TT interview, Mike Mearls talks about running a lunchtime D&D game at work — it’s all combat.

• …or beer and pretzels. On the flipside, a weeknight game could also be a good showcase for a light, fun system like Og: The Caveman RPG, Toon, Paranoia or plain old hack-and-slash D&D. In some ways, this sounds like the best option overall — a break from longer-format games in every sense of the word.

Those four elements seem like they’d just about cover it, but like I said, I’ve never done this myself. If you’ve run a weeknight game — whether one-shot, semi-regular or as a full-on campaign — I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Metagame Elements and Transparency

Over the years, I’ve observed that a certain amount of transparency on the GM’s part about metagame issues is pretty widely accepted by most gaming groups, particularly when it relates to the survival of the PCs.

If the party is headed for Certain Doom™, most GMs I’ve encountered (myself included) will give the players at least one out-of-game warning — something along the lines of “You know this is going to be really, really dangerous, right?” (Talking things out when PCs are on the line is a permutation of this.)

But what about other aspects of the game, not just life-and-death situations for the PCs? Burning Empires got me thinking about this, because the one-shot that I ran for my group assumed that we were going to explicitly discuss the climax of the session before we started playing, and then work towards that goal.

If the transparency spectrum starts with “Are you sure you want to do that?” as the lowest end, BE’s “Okay, this is the climax — how do we get there?” is the far end, with maximum transparency. BE’s level of transparency is a long way from the more traditional model, where the players might or might not know what the climax of a scenario is from the outset — if they figure it out, or guess it, they’ll know; otherwise, it’s probably a mystery.

So while the far end of the spectrum might not be to everyone’s tastes, the middle — not zero transparency, not 100% — merits consideration for most GMs and most groups. Your group has a limited amount of time for each session, and sharing metagame information can help you maximize the amount of fun stuff you can pack into that time.

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Music to Prep To?

Sitting here listening to MC Frontalot’s “Secrets from the Future” while writing this post, it hit me that I’ve never tried doing game prep to music.

You can build soundtracks for your game — so why not have background music keyed to your prep? I’m not very musical, and I usually need quiet when I write (and by extension, prep), so I think that’s why it’s taken me so long to think of this on my own.

I’m willing to bet that plenty of GMs have been doing this for years. Are you one of them? Do you have specific CDs or playlists of background music that you use to get yourself in the mood for your games — to get your ideas flowing get into game mode? And if so, can you share some of your favorites?

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