Using TT to Prep for a Game: A Case Study

The campaign I was running when I created Treasure Tables ended shortly after I got started the site, and I haven’t GMed anything since then (mid-2005). My group of four includes three folks who GM regularly and one player who GMs occasionally — there’s no shortage of GMs, in other words.

This weekend, however, I’ll be running a one-shot of sorts: a pitch session for Burning Empires (BE), my nerd-crush for the past year. One of the things I wanted to do the next time I ran a game was see what TT could do for me: pull together all of the resources here that I could find related to my GMing needs.

In general terms, that could be nearly everything — but that’d be a cop-out, and not terribly useful. The point of this post is to serve as an example of how you can put TT to work for your games. This site is here to help you, so let’s stretch its muscles, shall we?

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Notes on Alternating Games

I wrote about alternating games back in 2005, and my group has been doing just that for nearly two years now. In that time, I’ve noticed a few things:

• Communication is key. It’s obvious, but it’s easy to miss. When we started alternating games, everyone assumed our two GMs were confirming whose turn it was each week, and that led to some confusion and the occasional missed session. Now, we all make an effort to bring this up at the end of each session — “We’re playing X next week, right?”

• The mix may change. Since we started doing this, the arrangement has gone from true alternation (1, 2, 1, 2) to game 1 in the main spot (1, 1, 2, 1) to game 2 in the main spot (2, 2, 1, 2) — or at least, that’s been my perception (I wasn’t running either game). In any case, those changes haven’t been a bad thing, and now I know to anticipate that when we alternate games.

• There won’t be fewer breaks. As TT reader Vanir put it in a recent comment, for his group March is “a gatling gun filled with D&D-destroying birthday parties.” For us, that’s been this past July and August — and having two games on the go didn’t reduce the number of weekends we missed.

• Variety rocks. I suspected we’d like the variety of having two wildly different games — different GMs, systems, styles, moods, everything — and it’s been good to see that hunch borne out. If you’ve never tried the two-game model, it’s worth it for this reason alone.

Does your group alternate games? How has it gone for you?

How do You Craft a Good Pitch Session?

This Saturday, after fiending to run it for the past year, I’ll finally be getting a chance to pitch Burning Empires to my group (w00t!).

In this case, by “pitch” I mean “run a pitch session” — one shot at hooking all three of my players. If someone hates it, we won’t play it. If no one loves it, we might or might not try a second session. Obviously, the result I’m shooting for is, “Sweet Jesus, we have to play this campaign!”

With that in mind, I’d like to ask the TT community this week’s GMing question: If you’ve taken this “pitch session” approach before, how did you make that session rock?

(If you’d like to help me with the Burning Empires part of the equation, I’ve started a forum thread about the BE-specific side of this question.)

Called Shot to the Nuts

“I make a called shot to his nuts” is one of the most potentially troublesome things a player can declare during a session.

Why?

Because assuming the game you’re playing doesn’t support doing damage to specific areas (hit points, anyone?), it’s one of two things: a red flag signaling that this player is a spotlight-hogging tool, or just something that he thought sounded cool (I mean, who doesn’t like delivering a swift kick to the nards?).

Let’s look at this from two angles.

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Pink Shirts at GenCon 2007

One final (?) GMing observation from this year’s GenCon took a few days to bubble up the surface: The best GMs I gamed with were confident, but not cocksure.

Confidence is the pink shirt of GMing, a key ingredient that will make any game you run better. Even knowing that (and having written that post), though, it was interesting to see it in action.

Observing that a lack of confidence hurt one of my group’s GMs wasn’t a surprise — lack of confidence is always going to lead to problems. She did pretty well despite not wearing her pink shirt, and hopefully she got a bit of a boost from running games at the con.

What was surprising, though, is that our one truly bad GM’s main slip-up was the he was cocksure — not just overconfident, but absolutely certain that he was running his event the right way. It’s the difference between “I know what I’m doing, and I’m not afraid to make mistakes” and “I know I’m right.”

If you don’t think you’re capable of making a GMing mistake — particularly one so fundamental as assuming your players like bedtime stories (one of the guys at our table actually fell asleep) — that’s a real problem.

Nope, We’re Not Doing That

When you present your players with a clear course of action at the start of a session — the adventure, in other words — and they say, “Nope, we’re not doing that — we want to do this instead,” you have an interesting decision to make.

Do you improvise an entire session, or call it a night?

First, decide if you can wing the session or not. This is a crucial decision point, and one that’s based on a variety of factors: your comfort level and experience with improvisation, whether skipping what you had planned will really screw up the game and your group’s social contract, to name three big factors.

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