Recurring Elements: Bond’s Fast, Sexy Car

Think about James Bond for a moment. He’s defined in part by recurring elements — character traits and actions, of course, but also something more interesting for our purposes as GMs: fast, sexy cars.

Bond always drives a sports car (tricked out with rocket launchers and so forth, of course). Think “James Bond,” and “Drives a really hot car” will be near the top of the list of things that come to mind for most people.

In an RPG, Bond’s player might simply have spent the points to always have a sports car available — that’s nothing new. But if Bond’s player didn’t spend those points, there’s no reason that Bond’s player and the GM can’t work together to introduce that recurring element into the game.

This isn’t about giving PCs stuff they didn’t pay for; it’s more meta than that. It’s about the fact that working in this recurring element brings fun stuff to the game:

This isn’t limited to cars or super-spies, of course: You can use recurring elements like this in any genre. Sometimes a player will do something nifty the same way twice, and that will suggest one of these elements on the fly. Other times you can work together to introduce stuff like this — or bring something in on your own, and if your players enjoy it, keep bringing it back.

Gaming Books that Offer Unexpectedly Good GMing Advice?

I picked up Spirit of the Century at this year’s GenCon, in part because I enjoy pulp games but mainly because I’d heard that it was full of good GMing advice.

And so far, it is — and not just for Spirit, or even just for pulp games. It offers good foundation-level tips on writing and running adventures, on putting your players first and on all sorts of other useful topics. In fact, page for page, it offers more digestible, immediately practical GMing advice than any other gaming book I’ve read recently.

The thing is, browsing through a copy in the store, you might very well miss that aspect of the book — and I’m sure there are plenty of other gaming books out there with similar surprises for GMs.

So how about it: What gaming books have you read that offered solid GMing advice with broader applications — stuff you can use in lots of games, not just the one where you found the advice?

Update: I’ve taken all of the recommendations made in the comments and listed them below for easy browsing. My thanks to everyone who has contributed to this list.

Campaign Prequels

TT reader Joaquim Ball-llosera (Quim in the comments), co-founder of the Spanish indie RPG company Maqui Edicions, emailed me this nifty idea. He was gracious enough to let me share it with you — thanks, Quim!
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While designing my new Rifts campaign, I came up with an idea for introducing PCs. I call it the Campaign Prequel.

My players are reluctant to create PCs with a lot of background information. They say that the PCs’ histories before the game are not important, as they forge their own “legend” during the campaign. Besides, if a PC dies, there isn’t work/time “lost.”

As Rifts is a “complex” world never played before by my players, I have designed one mini-adventure for each PC where he is the main character, and where the other players role-play the other members of the group. These other members will be then re-usable as NPCs in the campaign.

These prequel adventures serve us with a triple purpose:

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What I really dig about Joaquim’s idea is that it takes White Wolf’s prelude concept — a mechanic that’s already easy to drift into other RPGs — and expands it without losing that portability.

It also tackles two issues that a lot of GMs run into: players who’ve been burned in the past on creating PC backgrounds that never got used, and players who don’t give you usable background material without some prodding.

What do you think of Joaquim’s campaign prequel idea?

What Intimidates You as a GM?

Pink shirts are all well and good, but when it comes right down to it I can think of at least two GMing challenges that have intimidated me for years:

So how about it — when it comes to GMing, what intimates you? And what used to intimidate you until you just bucked up and gave it a shot, and what did you learn in the process?

The Boot of Doom: One Cool Prop

This past Friday, Tom Bisbee (AKA Gospog) ran the first season finale session of his steampunk campaign — in which the PCs fought a 300-foot golem:

It goes without saying that in addition to being an all-around nice guy, Tom is an amazing minis painter and sculptor. I’m an evil overlord in Tom’s game (check out our PDF: Evil Overlords: Faction Players in Your Game), and it’s things like this that make me wish I was part of his face-to-face group.

I mean, if you had the option, wouldn’t you like to kick out props like this? And as a player, wouldn’t your jaw have hit the floor when Tom popped that sucker on the table?

I know mine would have, and that’s why I wanted to share this photo (thanks, Tom!) — I can’t paint or sculpt like Tom, but this prop is definitely an inspiration.

Contributions to the Game: PCs are Focused, GMing is Expansive

My friend Don is really passionate about making characters — he pours a ton of detail into their backgrounds, and spends hours getting the mechanical details just right (or at least, that’s how he’s done it as long as I’ve known him).

When you run a game, your players’ characters are their primary investment in the game world — their single largest contribution to the shared setting, and to the overall story.

Conversely, as the GM you make a host of contributions to the game world and to the game itself, from small stuff like descriptive details all the way up to the real macro-level stuff, like writing adventures.

Thinking about Don’s passion for character creation, what hit me was that this disparity bears a striking similarity to the difference between expansive and focused campaign settings.

Like a focused campaign, a PC will often be created to fully explore one or two things in the game — aspects of that character’s personality or background, specific elements of the world, themes or other emotional stuff or even specialized mechanical abilities. And like a focused setting, PCs become richer as their players mine the depths of whatever interests them most about their characters and about the game.

On the flipside, your contributions to the game as a GM look a lot like an expansive setting: they’re broad, cover lots of ground, run the gamut from small to large in terms of their importance and, of necessity, come out wide and shallow. That’s not to say that you can’t explore things in depth, too, but it’s a lot less likely simply by virtue of the fact that you have your fingers in so many parts of the pie at once.

Much like my comparison between focused and expansive settings, I’m not sure what to do with this analogy — but I thought the idea might be useful in some way, so I figured I’d share it with you. What do you make of it?

Musings, Collusion Kills and Excel Maps

To celebrate TT’s new three-column layout (ahem), how about three GMing links?

• Musings of the Chatty DM: Phil’s got some good stuff to say about GMing (and other topics, too) — try The Rule of Cool to get started, or dive into part one of his four-part series about workplace team development applied to gaming groups.

• Collusion Kill: Robin Laws takes the approach to PC death found in Primetime Adventures — where a character can die only with the player’s consent — one step further, and suggests introducing PCs with deliberately limited life spans. Interesting stuff.

• Excellent Maps: Cayzle offers tips on using MS Excel to draw fantasy maps, particularly useful if you’re running an online game (PbEM, PbP, et al). Check out the sequence in Humonculous Quest to get an idea of the versatility of Cayzle’s technique.

What Good Improv Looks Like

At this weekend’s D&D game (in which I’m a player), our group took the game in a completely unexpected direction right out of the gate — and our GM wound up improvising the entire session. Virtually nothing he had prepped wound up seeing the light of day, and he improvised like a champ.

While there’s nothing at all wrong with letting your players know that you’re winging it, it’s much more satisfying to pull it off so well that they have no idea you were improvising at all. And that’s what our GM, Sam, did: At the end of the night, when he told us he’d improvised the whole session, I was surprised — it was smooth, it felt planned and we had fun.

From a player’s perspective, Sam nailed his improv not just because he’s a good GM, but because he did these five specific things.

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