Find a GMing Mascot

I can’t take credit for this idea — it comes from two of the other GMs in my group: Don, whose yeti bobbler (illustrated here) has been his GMing mascot for years, and Sam, who keeps a little skull on hand to improve his die rolls.

I’ve enjoyed both of their mascots for the past couple of years, and at this year’s GenCon I decided to pick up a mascot for myself — B.A. Felton, the GM from “Knights of the Dinner Table.”

I had B.A. at the gaming table for the first time at last week’s Burning Empires session, and it was fun to have a mascot. That’s the whole reason for this post: I’ve never had a GMing mascot before, and I enjoyed starting a new gaming tradition.

It didn’t improve my GMing (and I’m not convinced the skull improves Sam’s die rolls…), but it was neat. If you’ve never had a GMing mascot, give it a whirl — you might enjoy it. And if you do have a mascot, I hope you’ll tell us about it in the comments.

Campaign Worlds Should be Shaken, Not Stirred

In the same way that you should drive your NPCs like a rental, you shouldn’t be afraid to shake up your campaign world — whether it’s a homebrewed world, a published setting, a variation on the real world, etc.

Unless you’re ending your campaign with a bang, shaking things up doesn’t mean crashing a meteor into the planet, having all the gnomes die of a mysterious plague or anything else that drastic. It just means being willing to set aside sentimental concerns and change cherished elements of the game world, small or large.

This is pretty common advice for fiction writers, too: Don’t be afraid to let your main characters change. Killing off Sherlock Holmes might not have been the best idea (and the subsequent public outcry that led to his return certainly suggests that nope, it wasn’t the best idea), but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was on the right track. Characters, places, themes and traditions need to change.

When it comes to gaming, the PCs are changing all the time — resolving Beliefs in Burning Wheel, leveling up in D&D, switching their home base to a new ship in Star Wars — so why shouldn’t the world change with them? Shake things up a bit, and you just might surprise your players.

What’s the Longest Session You’ve Ever Run?

Back in 2004-5, I ran a D&D campaign for my friends back in Michigan that only met once a month. To make up for having fewer sessions, we played long games: 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM, with some wiggle room on the back end to run over.

There was at least one session where we did run over, playing until 5:00 or so, and even setting aside our break for lunch, I’m pretty sure that’s the longest session I’ve ever run. So that’s my record: about eight hours.

Predictably, it ran long because we wanted to reach a good stopping point. We were all a bit more tired than usual, but it was a good experience overall. Although I’d run a game that way again if there were no other options, I much prefer more frequent shorter sessions — four to six hours seems to work best for me.

If you’re so inclined, I hope you’ll share a little bit of backstory on your longest session. I don’t think of this question as a pissing contest — I’m more interested in the details: Why did you run such a long session? Was it fun? Would you do it again?

The Californication Principle

Alysia and I have gotten sucked into Showtime’s Californication, which is much better than its premise — washed-up writer has lots of one-night stands while trying to fix his life — suggests, largely because of David Duchovny.

Before we started watching it, I read a review of the pilot that stated that Duchovny was the only actor who could play this role in this way. And the reviewer was absolutely right: Californication just wouldn’t work with anyone else playing the lead. Duchovny has just the right mix of charm and sleaziness, sex appeal and regular guy-ness, to pull it off.

So: the GMing angle. It strikes me that this is a pretty good analogy for tailored campaigns. A tailored campaign is one where the adventures are explicitly about the PCs — not just because they’re the PCs, but because they’re those specific characters.

The opposite of a tailored campaign is one where the scenarios would be pretty much the same no matter who was in the party. Running a published module is a good example of this: Barring a few mechanical changes you might make to accomodate character abilities, you could slot in any other group of PCs and the adventure itself would be nearly identical (though the outcome might be different).

A tailored campaign, on the other hand, should be like Californication for every single PC: Without this specific group of characters, the campaign just wouldn’t work. Not only does it revolve around them, but their backgrounds, personalities and accomplishments are part of the fabric not just of the world, but of the adventures themselves — it’s written for them, and it would be a completely different game without them.

Nonstop Pulp Action, HP Piles and Cartography

Good stuff for GMs from around the web:

• You Could Learn A Lot From Lou Scheimer (Part I): Over on I Waste The Buddha With My Crossbow, Dr. Rotwang has a great post about running pulp sessions where the action literally never lets up. His jumping-off point is the 1979 pilot of the animated Flash Gordon series, which features a ludricous number of fights and chases in just 22 minutes.

• d20 Hit Point Piles: Always one to take rules in different directions, ars ludi author Ben Robbins proposes that similar mooks pool their HP, rather than being tracked individually. He’s talking d20, but I can see this applying nicely to other systems, too.

• Cartographers’ Guild: If you like creating maps, take a peek at the Cartographers’ Guild website. They’ve got forums for works in progress, discussing mapping software and more. I’ve never seen a site devoted to mappers before, and it looks like they’ve got a good community going.

Going Screenless Rocks

As promised, I went screenless for last night’s game. As the proud owner of somewhere in the neighborhood of nine GM’s screens and a screen fanboy of nearly 20 years, this was big change for me.

And it was awesome. I felt more engaged with my players, I had more room to spread out my stuff, I didn’t feel naked because my players could see the major NPCs or my game notes — it just worked well across the board.

Part of that was probably because Burning Empires doesn’t require much Secret GM Stuff — no dungeon map, monsters awaiting their big reveal, etc. But it also worked because it’s a good approach in its own right, and I’m very glad I gave it a try. I’ll definitely be doing it again.

Building a Soundtrack for Your Game

For the Burning Empires pitch session I’m running tonight, I tried something new: I put together a custom soundtrack. (That’s Treasure Tables HQ in the picture.)

I’ve used music in my games before, but in the past I’ve always just popped in an appropriate CD and let it run.

This time around, I pulled together a custom soundtrack from my iTunes library — which seemed like a much better approach. It was a lot like making mix tapes back in high school and college, except it was easier and I’m not angling for a date…

My process wasn’t revolutionary, but I figured I’d share it so that we could compare notes — maybe I missed something obvious, or tried a step you usually don’t take.

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GMs, Put Your Players First

If there’s a Treasure Tables philosophy (as longtime reader John Arcadian suggests that there is), then this is its cornerstone — number one with a bullet, a gold star and a chorus of angels playing little trumpets:

Always put your players first.

Don’t ignore your own fun, but apart from that let this be your touchstone. Whenever you have to make a game-related decision, ask yourself what would be the most fun for your players — and then do that. When your players are having fun, 99% of the time you, as the GM, will also be having fun.

If this sounds obvious, then rock on. It should be obvious, but it isn’t always — and yet nearly everything you do as a GM should flow either from this principle or towards this goal. For example, leading with the cool stuff, keeping your players’ flashlight beam in mind and using the encounter formula all come back to putting your players first.

In fact, it’s time to update my maxims for GMs with this one, plus a couple of others that have emerged over the past two years:

  1. Always put your players first.
  2. Be confident.
  3. Make mistakes.
  4. Never stop learning how to be a better GM.
  5. When you run games, try new things.
  6. Learn from both sides of the screen.

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