Forums and Archives Open, Blog on Hiatus

Over the past few days, I’ve had enough time — and an amazing amount of feedback — to fully think (and rethink) through my decision to stop writing Treasure Tables. My thanks to everyone who took the time to comment and let me know what TT meant to them.

As much as I would like to try one of the many excellent options that readers suggested — such as doing away with my daily posting schedule and turning TT into a group blog — I’ve concluded that what I really need is a hiatus. I had a great break in November (albeit one in which I did rather a lot of writing!), but that break needs to be upgraded to full-blown hiatus status.

• The Treasure Tables Forums will be staying open, thanks to the efforts of our four community moderators, Rick_TWA, Scott M, Telas and VV_GM. The TT forums were created in the same spirit of friendly, practical GMing discussion as the blog. If you’d like a place to discuss GMing while the blog slumbers (perhaps indefinitely), I highly recommend the forums.

• TT’s archives aren’t going anywhere. I have credit with my web host for at least several more months, and as rerun month showed lots of TT readers haven’t seen everything that’s in the archives — there’s a huge amount of GMing material on this site! I’ll probably reconfigure the front page to emphasize the best posts from the archives (and to direct folks to the forums).

• One reason I’m not closing the site is that, as many of you pointed out, I might want to start writing about GMing again — and if the site is down, where would I go to do that? If do start posting again, it won’t be on a daily schedule. As crucial as that was to building the TT community, it burned me the hell out.

If you’re already subscribed to TT’s RSS feed, please don’t delete your subscription — if I start blogging again, or my batteries recharge and I invite TT members to join me in a group GMing blog, you’ll be the first to know about it. And if you’re not already a subscriber, sign up! It’s hassle-free, and you’ll get instant notification if the blog comes back.

Thank you for making this blog’s run — from July 11, 2005 through today — a great one. I’m glad to have been able to help fellow GMs run better games, and to have had this site become the hub of an awesome GMing community. Thank you for everything, and I’ll see you in the forums.

Treasure Tables is Unlikely to Continue (Updated Dec. 12)

From November 1st through yesterday, December 9th, I put Treasure Tables in rerun mode so that I could take part in National Novel Writing Month, and to give myself time to consider whether or not I wanted to continue running this site.

It wasn’t any easy decision (in fact, making it really sucked) but I’ve decided that I don’t want to continue running Treasure Tables.

Update Dec. 12: Thank you to everyone who has commented so far — it’s pretty amazing to see all of this support. I’m still mulling things over, but I wanted to let you know that it looks almost certain that the forums will being staying in business. As for the blog, I don’t want to rush into anything — I’ll keep you posted!

The clincher was when I realized that in the past 39 days of reruns, while I’ve missed interacting with the TT community, reading your comments on blog posts and spending time on the forums, I never once missed writing my daily post.

To put it another way, I missed having a blog with a great community of readers and participants, but I didn’t miss writing or running that blog. That seems like a pretty clear sign that it’s time for a long break, if not a permanent one.

So why did I title this post “Treasure Tables is Unlikely to Continue”? Because I’m open to the idea that there’s a balance to be struck that I haven’t thought of or considered — one that will let me recover the fun I had writing posts here — and make me want to continue.

I’m not asking to be talked out of my decision, or showered with recognition or pity and inspired to keep going, but this is and always has been a community; if you’ll miss TT and think you might have a solution for me, I’m happy to hear it. I make no promises.

Over the past month, TT members have emailed with a number of good ideas, and I’ve thought of a few on my own. Here’s the list so far, in no particular order:

I see the merit in all of those ideas — and thank you to everyone who wrote to me with suggestions. The simple fact that there are several people willing to join in as regular contributors, or otherwise give freely of their time to keep TT alive, is incredibly gratifying. Ultimately, though, nothing I’ve thought of or heard so far overcomes three basic problems: burnout, progress so far and my impending lack of mental real estate for running TT.

Burnout’s pretty straightforward. Posting daily for over two years did me in; it’s not nearly as fun as it used to be, even though I think my posts have gotten better overall. (And again, that lack of fun has nothing to do with you — it has to do solely with writing a new post every day feeling more like an obligation and less like a fun.)

Progress so far is a matter of perspective, but when I switched to Java-based stats (apparently much more accurate than the logfile-based stats I was using before) in September, I found that instead of 2,000+ daily visitors, TT receives more like 800-1,000 visitors. For two years of daily blog posts, that’s not nearly enough. I’m not great at marketing (nor do I particularly enjoy it), so the prospective of going back to serious readership-building doesn’t sound terribly attractive.

The third one — mental real estate — requires some explanation. During NaNoWriMo, I spent about 30 hours on my novel — roughly an hour a night. Finding an hour a night wasn’t a problem, but fitting anything but my novel into my head would have been; there’s no way I could have written TT posts at the same time.

Flip that around, and I know I couldn’t maintain anything close to a daily posting schedule, or to the 6-8 hours a week it takes to write and run TT, while revising my novel in the coming months. Writing that first draft was one of the best things I’ve ever done, and I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid. If I have to choose between novel-writing and blogging, it’s going to be novel-writing.

There are other factors too, which I’ll be happy to get into if anyone is interested, but this is already a long post. At the end of the day, this is the most important stuff.

I wouldn’t feel right saying goodbye to a community of GMs who have given me so much over the past two years without giving that same community — you — a chance to weigh in. If you’ve got an idea for sustaining TT, even one that’s been mentioned above, I’d love to hear it.

This will be the only post here this week, to give everyone who is interested in weighing in, or in commenting on TT’s almost certain closure, a chance to do just that.

Two last things (really, I promise!). First, I hate it when sites close down and simply disappear. TT’s RSS feed crossed the 1,000-subscriber mark for the first time during rerun month — there’s a ton of useful material here, even with no new stuff, and it won’t be disappearing from the web anytime soon. I might publish it down the road, in which case it could go away, but for the next few months at least you have nothing to worry about on that front.

Second and much more importantly, thank you for supporting Treasure Tables. This site is what it is because of you, the community of GMs that make it awesome.

Thank you for listening.

Relax and Have Fun: Notes from a Clueless GM (May 2007)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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Thinking about GMing in the car (you know you do it too), it hit me just how clueless I was for the first several years. Oh, I figured plenty of stuff out on my own, and I developed aspects of my GMing style that persist today, but by and large I had no idea what I was doing. (There’s still tons of stuff I don’t know, but that’s another post…)

Social contracts, player feedback, the encounter formula, what not to do, what makes running solo campaigns different, spotting player likes and dislikes, the flashlight — I could fill pages with all the stuff I know now and didn’t know back then (and I have).

The funny thing is that even with all of these gaps — shit, gulfs — in my GMing knowledge, we had fun much more often than not, and in some ways that fun seemed easier to achieve. When you don’t know what you don’t know, you’re less afraid to make mistakes, and more likely to just roll with things and see what happens.

What I took away from that little bout of reminiscing was these two points:

  1. Don’t get so bogged down in learning every last thing about being an awesome GM.
  2. Just relax and have fun.

The irony of writing this post on a site dedicated to helping, teaching and inspiring GMs isn’t lost on me, but I also don’t see a conflict between wanting to improve and needing to remember to just go with the flow sometimes. GMing advice, like just about everything else, should be taken in moderation.

That’s easy to forget, at least for me, but now I know what to do when I feel like there’s just too many aspects of GMing I still need to work on: relax, dive in, and just have fun.
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Normally there’d be a discussion going on in the comments below, but due to time constraints I’ve turned off all comments during reruns — sorry about that! You can read the comments on the first-run version of this post, and if you need a GMing discussion fix, why not head on over to our GMing forums?

When in Doubt, Take Five (July 2007)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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Few arrows in your GMing quiver are as versatile, valuable and powerful as the five-minute break. If a problem arises, whether it’s on your side of the screen or not, taking a short break is nearly always a good idea.

It gives everyone a chance to hit the bathroom, refill the snack bowl, grab a drink or stretch their legs, and it gives you a few minutes to clear your head and find a way to solve the problem.

Here are seven common situations in which stopping the session for five minutes will help you keep it from grinding to a halt (usually for a lot longer than five minutes):

Breaks are a good idea every couple of hours even if everything’s going smoothly, especially after long battles or scenes with lots of intense roleplaying — but if something is amiss, taking five is always a good place to start.
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Normally there’d be a discussion going on in the comments below, but due to time constraints I’ve turned off all comments during reruns — sorry about that! You can read the comments on the first-run version of this post, and if you need a GMing discussion fix, why not head on over to our GMing forums?

The Hub: Home Sweet Base (Sep. 2006)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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Regardless of genre or system, it can be a lot of fun to give the PCs a hub — a home base, even if it’s not actually home (although it could be). Hubs are fun on several levels, not the least of which being that they make great gateways to increasing player involvement.

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Dry-erase vs. Wet-erase Maps and Battlemats (July 2007)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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Setting aside digital map projection, the two most popular reusable RPG mapping solutions out there are dry-erase boards and wet-erase mats.

The former come in a variety of sizes, from commercial white boards to options designed specifically for RPGs, like the unbelievably awesome Tact-Tiles. The latter most commonly come in the form of gaming-specific flexible mats, offered with a wide range of grid and hex options.

I got my start with reusable gaming maps using one of those giant wet-erase battlemats, and have since switched to Tact-Tiles. I much prefer dry-erase maps to their wet-erase counterparts — here’s a point-by-point comparison of dry-erase vs. wet-erase mapping options.

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6 Tips for Maintaining Momentum (Oct. 2006)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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Every GM has experienced slow spots, hiccups and other delays during gaming sessions. There are so many moving parts involved that it’s almost inevitable — but it’s not unavoidable.

Here are 6 tips for keeping your sessions flowing smoothly.

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Make Them Choose: Devil’s Choices for PCs (July 2007)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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When it comes to the PCs, hard choices are the steam that powers the engines of character development. Without that steam, that energy and motive force, the PCs won’t develop nearly as quickly, nor in such interesting ways.

I’m not a big advocate of forcing anything player- or PC-related, but this is an exception: hard choices have to be forced. A hard choice, also called a “devil’s choice,” is one where there is no perfect outcome — no matter which course the PC chooses, something bad will happen simply because she did not choose the other option.

Something good will happen, too, in the resolution of the option the PC did choose, but it’s how that PC changes as a result of her choice that makes for memorable gaming sessions.

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