Author: Jade

Good players are golden and as GMs, we need to treat them that way. Here’s a list of ideas to keep your players happy and coming back.

1. Make every player feel like their PC is your favorite character. Focus on each PC in the party for a set period of time: one session, one month, one adventure. The length of time doesn’t matter as much as making sure that every PC gets the same amount of time.
2. Listen to your players, in and out of character. Players are great sources of inspiration.  Treat your players with respect.
3. Read what your players give you. It’s important to them, or they wouldn’t have given it to you in the first place. Find a way to incorporate something from that information into your game, even if it’s just having the character run into a college roommate and say “Hi.”
4. Try to give every player the same amount of attention every game session. You don’t need to set a timer for exactly 10 minutes (though you certainly can, if it makes it easier); just rotate your attention on a regular basis. If circumstances cause you to spend a greater amount of time in one session with one or more players, try to give the same amount of time to the other players over the course of the next few sessions.
5. Let the PCs have a lasting and real effect on the game world. Reward creativity and good thinking with more than gold and experience points. Have a grateful city name a street after the party, let one of the PC’s songs become a popular hit, have the party overhear bards telling stories of the party’s latest acts of heroism, etc.
6. Never tell a player how her character feels about something. Unless the PC is under mental influence from an outside source (Charm spell, Dominate discipline, etc.), the player alone controls the character’s feelings and actions. Tell them what happens, don’t tell them how to feel about it.
7. The same goes for PC actions. Unless the PC is under some type of compulsion, never tell a player what their character does in a particular circumstance. Similarly, try to avoid telling a player that they can’t do something. Let him make an attempt. Give him an impossibly low chance of succeeding, but let him try. Use common sense with this; most players would be okay with you telling them that their normal human character can’t pick up the Empire State Building or fly unaided.
8. Don’t get bogged down in mechanics during the game session. Make a ruling and move on, unless the players want you to look something up. Include you players in this by asking one of them to look up the mechanic in question.
9. Make sure the NPCs are there to help the characters, not to do things for them. It’s okay to have an NPC participate in a party’s victory, just make sure that the crucial actions are performed by the PCs.
10. Respect your players’ time. Show up on time to game sessions and try to avoid canceling on at the last minute. Understand when non-game obligations interfere with play. After all, most players have jobs, spouses, kids that will sometimes take precedence over play. Real Life always trumps game. And for God’s sake, if someone tells you not to call after 8pm, don’t call them after 8pm.
11. Keep control of the game. Don’t let players bully you into making decisions you don’t like. If you have to boot a player to keep the game fun for everyone else, do so politely. Cut off rules discussions that threaten to become arguments. Stop the session and/or separate players when they start to argue or get angry with one another (out of character).
12. Be organized. That doesn’t mean your game notebook needs to look like it came out of DayTimer ad. Just be sure you can find what information you need when you need it. Be particularly careful not to lose information your players give you.
13. Be a gracious guest. If you’re not hosting the game, treat your host’s home and family better than you would treat your own.

(This is an excerpt from the GM’s Field Guide to Players, the up-coming book from rpgGM.com, due to be released this fall.)

You hear it all the time: “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” You know it’s good advice; what you may not realize is that it applies to your GMing, as well as to your life.

“But I haven’t promised anything!” you protest.

Think again. We make promises to our players all the time without realizing it. Do you ask your players to provide a character background? Your players are going to expect you to use things from their background in the game. Do you provide your players with detailed information about weapons? They’re going to expect a lot of combat. Do you ask them to provide a miniature of their character? They’re going to expect the use of a battlemat (at the least) and a more tactical approach to combat.

In his information to the Game Lifestyle Program, Johnn Four of Campaign Mastery and Roleplaying Tips recommends that designers notice whenever they use the word “will” — there’s usually a promise attached to that. The same goes for you and your players. Johnn’s suggestion–and it’s a good one–is to write down every time you say “will” as a to-do item. For example, if you say “I’ll look up that rule after the game session,” write down “look up rule about [situation here].” Then review these items regularly and do them.

It’s helpful to put a list of game-related “to-dos” in the front of your campaign notebook. Then scan your to-do list at the beginning of each preparation session; find the things that are important to complete to be ready (including all those rules lookups) for your next session and do those first. Then find one or two other “to dos” and do them, as well. That will help keep them from piling up until your back’s agains the wall and you suddenly need that stuff right now.

You’ll need to break larger items into a series of smaller “to-dos”. Write down each of these steps on your list as separate items. For example, if you’ve said you’ll provide painted minis for your game, don’t write “Make minis” on your list. Instead, write “order minis,” “clean minis,” “prime minis,” etc. That helps keep you from becoming overwhelmed by the enormity of a task. Make steady progress on the small items and, before you know it, you’ll have the whole project completed.

Mostly, it’s a matter of paying attention to what you say. Try not to say you’ll do something, if you’re not absolutely sure you can carry through on it. And watch what you ask of your players–they may see a promise you don’t know you’ve made.

You’ve written your adventure and double-checked everything. You carefully planned the traps, lovingly made certain that the monster challenge ratings corresponded with the party’s level. You’ve created encounters tailor-made for each of your PCs and their players. You’ve got fiendish traps, challenging but not overpowering monsters, engaging roleplaying encounters — everything is perfect. Now you’re ready for the moment of truth: actually running it.

You’ve put weeks (or at least days) of work into creating this perfect adventure; will your players see this as the labor of love you know it to be?

No. They don’t care that it took you a week to balance the challenge rating of all the monsters. They don’t care that you spent hours constructing traps or researching the effects of cold on the human body for the climatic encounter with the ice wizard. They generally don’t even care if the name under “written by” is yours or Monte Cook’s. They only care about one thing: was it fun?

And in the name of fun, your players will take your finely crafted work and turn it inside out and upside down. They’ll shred your carefully laid-out sequence of events and turn it into a plate of tangled spaghetti.  They’ll insist on exploring unmapped areas. They’ll ascribe motives to your NPCs that never remotely crossed your mind, make major conflicts out of minor encounters you intended to be “local color,” and occasionally come to the right conclusions for all the wrong reasons.

What can you do to prevent this? Nothing.

That’s right: you can’t. You can’t stop players from running roughshod over your adventure. Nor should you try. Let them make a hash of your carefully planned time-line, and follow their lead. You wrote the plot: let the PCs write the story. They’re the stars of the show, after all. They’re the reason the show exists in the first place.

Granted, this is a lot easier said than done, especially if you have problems “winging” it. But no matter how carefully you planned your adventure, there’s going to be some point during it when you’ll have to improvise. This is one of the advantages of writing your own adventure: you know it inside and out, which will make it easier for you to adjust on the fly. You know what needs to happen and why it needs to happen. You can try to gently steer the PCs back on course, if that’s really necessary. You can drop hints, move important clues to where the PCs will find them, create an NPC on the spot who will send the characters back to the main storyline, if you need to.

If you’re feeling really confident, you can simply follow your players’ collective lead. When the PCs are way off, this is the time to step back to the core of the adventure. What is the basic conflict the PCs have to resolve? How can they accomplish that goal from where they are now? You may be able to shuffle around some events in your adventure or re-organize the time-line. You may find yourself creating encounters on the spot. The important thing here: let the players think they’re still on your time-line.

Pretend you planned all of this, that you foresaw the PCs’ actions and planned for them. The players will think you’re a genius. More importantly, the players will feel like they’re geniuses for having correctly “guessed” your intentions. And that’s the feeling that will keep them coming back to your table for more. The more you can give your players a sense of ownership of the adventure, the more you let their actions influence the course of the adventure, the more fun they’ll have. Let them surprise you. You may find that what they create will be even better than what you planned in the first place.

This is an excerpt from The Adventure Creation Handbook, due to go on sale at the end of February 2011.  From RPGGM.com

It’s a problem: you give your PCs an objective, a goal, and they spend most of their time pursuing every side distraction they can think of. You need to get them focused on the task at hand, but how to do that? One way to help keep the PCs moving forward is to give them a time constraint—a deadline. If the PCs don’t accomplish their objective by an appointed time, something bad will happen (or something really good, if they do make it).

Deadlines can give your adventure a sense of urgency and help keep players on track, making them less likely to take unnecessary side-trips. But they can also push players too fast. With the threat of time looming over them, PCs will be more likely to rush through the adventure, perhaps missing necessary clues and information. It can also cause them to finish the adventure well before you were ready for them to, as the adventure you’d planned to last four weeks or so gets resolved the first night.

There are many ways to impose deadlines: the villains can give the PCs a specific one, as can the PCs’ employer, if they have one. The PCs can also stumble across the deadline during the course of investigating the adventure. Perhaps their research tells them that the evil cult will perform their next blood sacrifice at the summer solstice, or something like that. Note that deadlines don’t have to be specific date; they can also be a particular event, such as needing to find a lost child before an impending blizzard begins.

Before you give your PCs a deadline, you need to know what will happen if they meet the deadline, and what will happen if they don’t. You need these to be things that will really motivate the PCs: make the rewards for success extremely mouthwatering, or the consequences of failure truly awful. These need to be things your players will find compelling, otherwise your deadline may be greeted with a yawn. And you have to be ready to follow through with the  consequences, for good or ill, or your players will never take another deadline seriously.

Even if the prepared adventure you’re using doesn’t have a deadline written into it, you can set one yourself. Figure out why your PCs would go on this adventure in the first place, then set a logical reason why it has to be completed with a particular time frame.

Not every adventure needs a deadline. In fact, this is a trick that’s easy to overuse. Deadlines are particularly appropriate for adventures that have real-world time limit, such as convention games that have to run in a specific span of time, such as four hours. Use them too often, especially for adventures that don’t really need it, and they lose their impact.

Adventure writing is often viewed as a free-form creative exercise where the “sky’s the limit”. The fantasy genre, with its emphasis on magic, can especially leave the adventure ideas open to pretty much anything our minds can imagine. Science fiction isn’t as open-ended, since it’s supposed to be at least theoretically scientifically plausible (or at least feel like it is), but even here, the adventure-writer’s options are legion, as they are with any other genre, from modern horror to steampunk to superheros.

You would think that such openness would be liberation, allowing our many ideas to flow effortlessly and for some writers, it is. But for others of us (including myself), this sense of infinite possibility actually causes us to freeze up. There are simply too many choices and our ideas run dry. How do we get around this?

There is a surprising answer: limit our choices. It seems counter-intuitive. Yet, by placing limitations–rules, if you like–on your adventure-to-be, you restrict yourself to a more limited set of choices, something you can handle more easily. The trick here is to strike a balance: too many rules and you can make your adventure feel stiff, shallow, or trite; too few and it can become unfocused and leave players wondering what they should do next.

How do you know you’ve got the right amount? I’ve found that applying rules one-by-one, I’ll reach a point where my ideas start flowing. That’s the point to stop restricting and start brainstorming. Some rules are already set for us, even if we don’t think of them that way. The first restriction we usually have to take into account is the genre we’re playing in. Unless you’re in a homebrew or cross-over game, you’re not going to want to place magical wards in your Traveller game.

Another common restriction is setting, whether you’re using your own or a published one. The worlds has some established rules, rising from how the setting “works”. Does magic come from ley lines and the further you are from them, the weaker magic is? Then you know you can’t place a magically dense area far from ley lines, unless you have a good explanation about how it can exist. Does your SF game contain alien technology? If not, then any seemingly Clarke’s Law MacGuffins* are going have to have rational explanations that fit in with the available technology of the setting.

Can you see the plot ideas developing here? With the SF idea, for example, the PCs find a piece of technology that seems way to advanced to exist. Intrigued, they track the item back to its source or set out to find someone who can analyze and explain it. Along the way, they’re shadowed by the company that created the item and want to get it back because either a) it doesn’t actually work or b) they’ve developed some proprietary new technology and don’t want anyone else getting their hands on it before they’ve developed and introduced it to the market. Or it’s a military secret and they can’t risk the PCs putting it into the wrong hands… You could probably take this adventure from here.

That’s the idea behind setting rules. You’ll want to be careful about not violating the rules of your setting without a good reason. It’s okay to look like you’re violating the rules, as long as you have an explanation that makes sense within the game setting. One note: you don’t have to give the PCs the explanation right away; make them work for it. That’s where your adventure comes from.You just need to make sure you actually have one and that your PCs can eventually find out what it is.

If setting rules aren’t enough to get the creative juices flowing, you can establish rules for this one adventure. Perhaps all the PCs are trapped in a single room for the entire adventure. This idea leads to questions:

* Why this room?
* Where is the room located?
* Why are they trapped?
* Who put them there?
* What conditions do the PCs have to fulfill to get released?

By the time you’ve answered these questions, you’ve created your adventure.

By selectively applying limitations or rules to an adventure-to-be, you can actually increase your creativity and your ideas. Take one rule at a time and explore it’s implications, thinking about the questions it raises and answering those questions. This can lead to many interesting adventures you would never have thought of otherwise.

[This article is an excerpt from rpgGM.com’s upcoming product The Adventure Creation Handbook.]

*Clarke’s Law, posited by SF writer Arthur C. Clarke, states “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  A MacGuffin is a plot element that drives the action of a story.

GMs aren’t the only ones with responsibilities. The players are co-creators with the GM and that gives them certain responsibilities.

Below are lists of player do’s and don’ts:

Game Preparation

• Be on time. If possible, try to be a little early. That will give you some time to get settled and ready to play.  If you can’t be on time or have to miss a session entirely, call your GM.
• Be prepared for the game session. Have your character sheet, dice, or whatever else you need to play.
• Try to create a character that will fit in the rest of the group. If everyone else in your group is playing good characters, leave your anti-paladin at home, unless the GM and group say otherwise.
• Recognize that your GM may have to cancel a game session occasionally.  The GM has a real life, too.

During the Game

• Be honest with the GM and other players. Your character doesn’t have to be honest (unless that would severely disrupt the game), but you, as the player, should be completely honest about die results and other game-related information.
• Share the limelight. Don’t hog all the GM’s attention.
• Stay focused on the game. Keep conversations about the latest movies, etc. to before, after and during breaks in the game session. Don’t play on your computer during the session. Even when your character isn’t currently involved in the action, you can be updating your sheet, taking notes, planning strategy, etc.
• Find out your group’s policies on notes to the GM and/or pulling the GM aside for individual conferences. In my games it’s not only allowed, but is actively encouraged as long as they’re kept short; other groups absolutely hate them. Find out your group’s preferences and stick to them.
• Don’t talk about how you could run this game better or how things would be different if you were running this game. You’re there to play, not to GM.
• If you have a suggestion on how the GM could improve the game, bring it up to him outside of the game session. Also, be willing to accept your GM’s decision on the suggestion; he usually has valid reasons for declining your idea.
• Similarly, accept your GM’s ruling. If you disagree with her interpretation of a rule or with an event that happened, discuss it with your GM after the game session.
• Look for ways to involve your character in the game without trying to monopolize it. Don’t leave it completely up to the GM to tell you what to do. However, if you’re lost and don’t know what to do with your character, ask the GM and the other players. They’ll usually be happy to help.
• Keep game events in the game; try not to take them personally.
• Leave personal issues outside the game.
• Don’t look at the GM’s notes/adventure/other game stuff.
• Trust your GM or be willing to leave the game. Often the GM will have reason for something happening in the game, but may not be able to reveal that reason until several game sessions down the road.

As a Guest

• Be a courteous and respectful guest in your host’s home.
• Clean up after yourself.
• Unless your host says otherwise, confine yourself to the game room, the bathroom and (with the host’s okay), the kitchen of your host’s home. Don’t go wandering into other rooms of the house and, above all, try not to disturb non-playing members of the host’s family.
• If a member of your group is violently allergic to something, don’t bring it, unless the individual gives the okay. For example, in my group, our GM has a severe allergy to pork. Even accidental contact with pork grease on his hands can send him to the emergency room. Any pork item is barred from our gaming table. On the other hand, I’m allergic to dairy, but only if I actually eat it.  I don’t mind if other people in the group bring dairy products.
• Asking if anyone in the group has severe allergies and then being careful of them is a great way to make yourself a player who gets invited to many games.
• Don’t hang around the host’s home long after the game session has ended. Unless you’re invited to stay by the host, thank her for hosting and leave when the other players do or when the host asks everyone to.
• Don’t pick up or touch things in your host’s home without his permission.

And Above All:

• Be willing to gracefully leave a gaming group that you don’t fit in with. Don’t flame the GM or other players; recognize that everyone has different play styles. You can be friends with people you don’t like to play with.