Category: GMing Advice

1/3/2019

Hangouts On Air Guide

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by Yoshi Creelman, Keeper of the Triton's Blessing (@yoshicreelman)

One frequent request for folks new to gaming online is: “How do I record my Hangouts session?” Things have changed over the years and they will change again (there will be another UI change later this year that’s already being beta tested and foreshadowed). Even if you don’t want to record your hangouts session, this method of setting up the session will get you a more fully featured hangouts.

For example two additional features are:

The ability for the host to adjust volume and mute other participants.
Keyboard shortcuts. For example, for muting yourself: Ctrl+D. The 'normal' Hangout doesn't have that and the additional 500 millisecond it takes to click the button to mute yourself make such a difference when playing.

Google has recently announced that hangouts will be discontinued in 2020. While nothing is certain, this method will likely survive, as it uses YouTube and is integrated into the new beta UI.

Steps
1. Go to YouTube and click on your profile image and select “Creator Studio”.

2. Click on “LIVE STREAMING” to expand it. This will actually navigate you and load the page, not just expand the accordion section. You will automatically be dropped into “Stream Now” of the live streaming section.

If you are already in the new UI (such as the beta), you won’t see a “LIVE STREAMING” Section. You can also hover over the “Other features” then click “Live Streaming”, which will get you the same place as above (in a new tab).

Click on “Creator Studio Classic” and go back to the old UI and retry this step. This will change the default UI setup you use back to classic. You will have to fill out a “why reverting” form.

3. Click on “Events”.

4. You probably don’t have any scheduled events yet, so let’s create one. Click the “New live event” button in the upper right hand corner.

5. Fill in the form with appropriate information. Don’t worry too much about the details. You can change all information including the title after the session. The “Go live now” button will change once you add a time.

will change to

a. If it’s a multi session campaign I put the session number in the title, like “(1 of 5)”. If the session is not in English, you might want to put something like ‘[German]’ in front of the title.
b. I like to add an “End time” but it’s not needed.
c. In the description I like to include things like:

‘This session was organized through the Gauntlet Community’s gaming calendar.’
Content warnings, which can be edited after you’ve recorded, so while you might not know you’re going to talk about self-harm now… you can update after a recording.
Where to purchase the product and who created it.
A short synopsis of what happened. I try to write this after the session (while the video is processing). One, so I can remember what happened (especially when looking at it later trying to prep for the next session). Two, it will help for posting the video to the Gauntlet Blog, or just other advertisement you would like to do.
I usually add some tags… even though I set my videos not to be findable by YouTube UI… I still do it. You could use this list and copy-paste it as a starting point RPG, TRPG, TTRPG, roleplaying, Tabletop RPG, The Gauntlet, Gauntlet Hangouts, Gauntlet Community, Story Games, Story Game, Indie RPG.

I change the access to “Unlisted”, because I mostly don’t care about building up my own YouTube presence. But you can leave it as Public (which means others can find and watch your streams and the resulting video and those who have a subscription to your channel will get a notification and can watch you play live - please ensure that all participants have agreed beforehand that they are fine with being live on Youtube) or you can change it to Private (which means no one can watch it). Unlisted means they need a direct link to watch, but it won’t be publicly findable through YouTube UI. Unlisted means I can post a direct link to it, and it can get incorporated into The Gauntlet’s playlist, but folks can’t just search for it or find it through my page.
I leave “Type” as “Quick (using Google Hangouts On Air…”

There is also an “Advanced” tab for settings. Take a look at it, but I mostly leave those as they are. The only one you may want to consider is the license. Only the Standard YouTube license allows others to make use of your material.

6. You now have an event. You can start it early (or at the time of the event) by clicking the “Start Hangout On Air” button.

7. I like the “Control Room” on the left hand panel which gives the host the ability to mute and adjust the volume of participants.

Right side gets a panel.

8. Once started the green “Start broadcast” button on the bottom will start the recording, it takes a few seconds once the button is clicked before recording starts.

You’ll get a pop up.

The dots in the lower left are you current audio output.

9. Click the red “Stop broadcast” button when done, it will take a few seconds for the broadcast to actually stop.

10. The video will now be moved out of your “Live streaming” section and into the “Video Manager section.

11. Wait for the video to stop processing. It can take a while. So don’t worry if your video doesn’t appear yet or if the recording time seems much shorter than what you expected. It will eventually be complete and ready to be edited.

At this time you can still click “Edit” and change things like the Title, Description, Tags, and findability. This is when I go in and modify the description with what actually happened in the session and possibly new content warnings. I also typically remove the “#hangoutsonair”, “Hangouts On Air”, and “#hoa” tags, as I personally do not care for them.

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12/4/2018

Emotional Choices for Deepening NPCs

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By Mikel Matthews, Keeper of the Scarification Blades (@ImprovGM)

I was a groomsman in a good friend’s wedding. We’d had a great reception where I’d been talking to a very pretty girl that I hit it off with. While, sadly, she couldn’t go, the rest of us went out to some bars afterwards and I got to spend a truly wonderful evening with my best friend and people who mattered to him and his bride, who was like a sister to me from the first time I met her.

I was exuberant. I was so happy that I wanted everyone else to be happy, too. After waiting 15 minutes at the cab stand at 4am, a cab finally pulled up.

“Hello, my good man. I need to go to the Hilton.”

“Which one?”

“Downtown.”

“That one?” He pointed across the street.

I could have thrown a rock and hit the side of the hotel which, in fairness to myself, looked a LOT different from the other side that I had seen before.

I was overjoyed. “Well…. Let’s go.”

“There’s an $8 minimum.” The cab ride would be about 30 feet.

“It’s been a good night and this is fantastic. Let’s do it!”

He laughed as he pulled out of the cab stand and across the street. I gave him $16 total, wished him a great evening, bought hotdogs off a street vendor because I’d seen other people with them, and ended a wonderful day.

I was a random guy to that taxi driver. I was an NPC in his life and I guarantee he’s told that story. I certainly have. Nothing that happened in that situation had anything to do with what he did. It was all down to the emotional state I was in that night.

And this can be a fantastic technique to take into your GMing to make an NPC the characters run into someone who is interesting, memorable, and who the players want to meet again.

I’ve got a bit of a leg up on making NPCs interesting because I’ve been doing long form improvisational performance since 1995. There is, however, a fairly easy technique that I use with new improvisers to get them to go places they might not have considered before.

   Make an emotional choice for the NPCs reaction BEFORE the PCs interact with them.

This is great practice for making NPCs more interesting and learning how to justify on the fly. This skill will do a lot of work towards helping you learn how to improvise when it comes to story, plot, and characters.

Take an NPC interaction that’s not terribly important—asking for directions, a minor official or guard, etc. Someone that could easily be hand waved with a bit of exposition or done entirely out of character. Before the PCs talk to them, decide on a strong emotional choice. Do not make that choice with an eye towards what the players are doing. There’s nothing wrong if it fits, but leave yourself open to surprise.

A strong emotional choice is one where the NPC is genuinely moved one way or the other. Apathy doesn’t often work. My drunken exuberance made for a fun encounter. Your NPC's grief, church giggles with their friend, flirtatiousness, crankiness, aggravation, or exhaustion can do much the same.

When the players interact with the NPC, let that emotion drive their response and then justify it to yourself.

The initial thing they say or do can be based on instinct. “This person is in emotional state X. What do they say?” You don’t have to figure out why immediately, but at some point make a decision why they’re this way and don’t tie it into things that the characters have done or will do.

If it’s grief, maybe they had a loss in the family, a pet dying, they’re getting fired, or a friend is leaving. Maybe they’ll apologize and explain. Maybe they can overshare. Maybe they’re not going to say what’s wrong unless the players say something.

Any way you choose, that NPC now feels like someone who’s had a life. They’re not simply a random menu the players buy something from or find out where the next MacGuffin might be. They’re a person who’s had a day. Maybe a great day, maybe a bad one, maybe a strange one.

Choosing the emotion is the easy part. It’s the practice of justifying that will allow you, as a GM, to start to learn how to roll out threads of plot or character without having to struggle with them before a session.

By using an emotion and then justifying it, you can create a chain of events and emotions simply by asking “why?” with each one.

For example: your PCs in a Wild West game high tail it to another town because they had a bank robbery go bad. It doesn’t make sense for the sheriff at the new town to know what they did, so you have a decision to make when they met the sheriff over there.

Here’s the chain of Emotional Choices and Justifications that lead to a story you hadn’t anticipated.

Sheriff’s emotion: Relieved.
- Why: Needs help to bring in a gang who set fire to a ranch.
The gang’s emotional state: Righteously angry.
- Why: Turns out the ranch owner was intimidating the sister of the gang leader to sell her land.

(I choose the Sherriff’s why because, in a situation where the actions of the players might come back to haunt them, it’s more interesting if this sheriff has reasons to look favorably on them. I chose the gang’s why because a gang that’s just out stealing and being awful is a dime a dozen and would end up being an encounter, not a story. If they have a good reason for doing what they did, the players could explore that and the question of justice.)

Now you’ve got a plot that could last several sessions and puts the characters in a position where they might find the gang just to go back to the Sheriff and see about going after the rancher. All because you kept choosing emotional states and then asking why they felt that way. All you need now is a name generator, decide on why the ranch owner wanted the sister to sell her land--and that probably won’t come up for a session or two--and you’ve got all you need.

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11/27/2018

RPG B-sides

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By Tomer Gurantz, Keeper of the Squamous Beast Below

What is an RPG B-side?

Occasionally a scheduled roleplaying session does not run as planned. This can happen for many reasons. Perhaps the game has a minimum player requirement or recommendation, and not enough people have shown up. Maybe the game session was for an ongoing campaign and some critical members are not available. Perhaps the GM themself had to cancel. Maybe the game requires certain technologies or preparation that have prevented the game from running.

Regardless of the reason, and whether or not this is a face-to-face or online game, you have a group of players who were motivated to play, and are now left with… nothing? This does not need to be the case! Salvage the situation, with an RPG B-side.

An RPG B-side is a one-shot alternate game that can be run without any preparation. In the best case scenario, having one or more flexible B-side games means that you can handle situations of any group size, and you can include a GM-less game in your arsenal in case nobody is able to take on the “GM” position. This means that the session doesn't have to be cancelled or wasted, and all the motivated-to-play peoples are given what they came to do.

Where did the term come from?

Well, sit down young’uns and remember a time when music came on large fancy vinyl discs called “records”. The term “A-side” and “B-side” referred to the front and back side of records. When a famous artist released a hit track on a record single as an A-side, very often the back side had tracks that were rare, sometimes even unavailable, on the full albums… the B-sides.

(Editor's note: The specific use of the term "B-side" being referenced in this article was created by Jason Cordova right here.)

Preparing for running B-sides

Being able to run an alternate RPG at the drop of a hat sounds great, and simple. However the degree of simplicity in doing so depends heavily on the RPG itself. It could be as simple as having a one-shot adventure with pre-generated characters ready to go, for whatever system you all already are playing in. However, for maximum flexibility, having a set of alternate games means you can handle different sets of players, game tones, and moods.

Having RPG B-sides ready to go may require some prior setup. Carrying them along in a “Games on Demand” style folder or bag means that you already have the rules, or often a cheat sheet of those rules, as well as any character sheets or other related tools such as index cards, playing cards, dice, and so on. This is no different in online games, where some games require character keepers or the use of other online tools such as white boards and online dice rollers.

Gauntleteer Answers

We posed this question of some Gauntleteers and got a wide variety of answers. Here are a few:

Anyone who has heard me in the last few months knows that For the Queen is my new jam. I will play that in a heartbeat, because it's easy, requires no prep at all and just glides into play mode. In fact, I've already used it twice in the Gauntlet as B-sides (a cancelled GauntletCon game and a postponed pickup game), so I know it works through experience! -Tomer Gurantz, Keeper of the Squamous Beast Below

For me, my go to is Fall of Magic. I can spin up a Roll20 instance in like 5 minutes. It requires ZERO prep, so the time it takes to get the Roll20 up and everyone to join, I can be in a place to facilitate it. It's not a game for everyone, as it puts a lot on every player to improv on the spot and spout some self-indulgent fantasy bullshit... but for those who like that stuff, it's great. -Yoshi

So the pick up games that I like off the top of my head are duet games. I had a great time doing a pick up of Our Mundane Supernatural Life with Vee during GauntletCon. I think Strange Birds by Lauren McManamon and Kyle Thompson (currently in beta) would also work, and probably a lot of the short duet games from the new You & I: Roleplaying Games for Two collection, like Connection Lost. Actually I think that Mission! Accomplished by Jeff Stormer would also be a great pick up game, especially if you have one of the premade scenarios. Super fun and super easy. -Noella

Cheat Your Own Adventure (easy to run on the spot, works for most numbers, fun). -Jason

For me B-side usually = maximum self-indulgence and not too many mechanics (hence Fall of Magic is a popular choice ha ha). However I think anything that is designed to play out in a single session is a pretty great B-side. Outside the vast mountain of duets that are great B-sides, there's Swords Without Master, The King is Dead, and to be super self-indulgent there's a couple of our games I tend to use as B-sides as well as they are single session experiences. -Hayley

B-sides for me needs to be a one-shot that is no prep, easy to get playing, and importantly, something I remember how to play. With my goldfish memory, I usually have space for only two or maximum three B-sides in my mind at a time, which I cycle through in the year. Current B-sides I am ready to run are Warrior Poet, Swords Without Master, and Our Mundane Supernatural Life. -Vee

If I'm not too disappointed to be able to run something alternative immediately, I prefer games with a very short run time, so it's easier to convince the players to indulge in a one-hour game than a full session of something they hadn't expected to play that night. When I offer to facilitate, my B-sides are 2-5 players, < 1 hour, no prior knowledge / prep necessary, and on the not-so-serious side of gaming: Cheat Your Own Adventure (starting at difficulty 6), my own Tuk Fast Tuk Furious, my hack of Happy Birthday, Robot called Happy Birthday Mr President, and Society of Vegan Sorcerers by Wendy Gorman (found in Codex - Yellow), which can be played as a laog (live action online game, or digital larp). -Gerrit, Keeper of the Voice of the Silent Emperor

The Final Girl! Fast to the table, and I’ve never not had a good time playing it. Plus, I usually have at least one person who hadn’t played it before. And who doesn’t like learning a new game that is so easy and so fun? -David LaFreniere

I love Warrior Poet it's so good and melodramatic and yo people write some good poems when you play that game! My go-to is either Microscope or Star-Crossed. Nice and zero prep. -Agatha

I think any game you have a lot of experience running can be a B-side. For me it would be Swords Without Master, The Final Girl, or Cheat Your Own Adventure. An OSR game or a PbtA game could be a B-side as long as the GM has the experience to set it up to run quickly. -Patrick

Monstegur 1244, Leverage, Dusk City Outlaws, Don't Rest Your Head. -Mikel Matthews

I love Forsooth! Setting and PC are made in a few minutes, if you already know it as GM. Everyone has a rough idea of the settings. Almost no rules. -Marco

My B-side used to be Fiasco or Cathulhu but recently it became Cheat Your Own Adventure. -Ludovico

I’ve never had not enough players with The Gauntlet, but in face-to-face I have a strong tolerance and will run the scheduled game even if I’m down to two other players. For 2-player games, I pack a Murderous Ghosts or S/lay w/me, just in case. -Donogh McCarthy, Keeper of the Nine Dread Names

My go to's usually are Cheat Your Own Adventure, Lovecraftesque, and Murderous Ghosts. (Could probably swing a Cthulhu Dark scenario too.) But... I got to play For the Queen this morning... I totally understand Tomes' fervor over it and I think that will likely become my main go-to, once I get a copy. -Shane

Not having a B-side is OK too!

When asked about B-sides, Jim Crocker gave the following response: I don’t have any, and won’t. If we don’t get enough people to play, I cancel. When I’ve spent 4-8 weeks prepping mentally to run an instance of my planned game, I don’t really have the capacity to switch gears. I admire people who can do it, but last-minute cancellations really kneecap me emotionally.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and recognizing what you can and can’t offer is a hallmark of a great person and great game facilitator!

What about you?

What are your RPG B-sides? Let us know in the comments below!

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10/18/2018

Sharing the Cognitive Load

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by Gerrit Reininghaus, Keeper of the Voice of the Silent Emperor

Summary

Recently, I put together a template free to use for everybody which can serve as an actionable guideline for facilitating online RPG sessions, laogs (live action online game), GM-free and traditional set-ups alike. This article shall explain each step in the guideline and give a bit of background and lessons learnt.

This guideline is not about technical aspects like how to set up a session or how to handle last minute drop-outs, etc. This would be worth an extra article. Here, we solely focus on the social dimension, on how to facilitate the conversation on a universal level.

The guideline is my attempt to combine the best practices on how to introduce a game to players and how to structure a session. But more so, it contains my take on sharing responsibility roles, a concept I first saw in Jason Morningstar’s Winterhorn, and which I adapted to online play. Finally, it contains a proposal on how to do a proper debrief which I consider especially relevant in games with higher emotional impact (and believe me—that can quickly become the case even in your standard dungeon crawl).

The template can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/OnlineGamingTemplate

Simply make a copy if you want to make use of it.

CATS & Safety

CATS stands for concept, aim, tone, and subject matter. It’s a procedure which was once an entry for the 200 Word RPG contest. It has been described elsewhere in greater detail, so I will only quickly talk about why it’s a structure I consider worth being in this guideline.

When you begin a game session, specifically when playing online with new people or a game new to you or them, it helps tremendously to take some time to get everybody on board. You might already have covered parts of the CATS discussion when inviting players to your session. Actually, following CATS when announcing your game session is good practice, too.

So, giving some thoughts pre-game and making a few notes about what concept you have in mind for your gaming session, what your aim with the session is and which tone you strive for, gives you a great starting point when entering the session. Don’t hesitate to share the text you wrote and simply read it out loud.

Five minutes in - everything goes smoothly

After having gone through CATS, you survived already the first five minutes of your session and probably feel already more at ease with guiding several other people through the next hours. CATS serves its purpose of bringing everybody on board directly but also indirectly serves as a warm up for you as the facilitator.

Don’t forget that subject matter is an interactive step: other players should be asked to bring in subject matters they would prefer being treated with care or exclude altogether.

Responsibility Roles

Responsibility Roles is a way to reflect the many aspects the facilitator of an online game usually has to consider while running a session.

Reflecting on these responsibilities serves two purposes: keeping them in mind and honouring that they all require work and partly a different mindset. Secondly, that in some of your games it might make sense to share some of these responsibilities with your players.

Aspects of facilitating an online game

The template provides a table with the standard tasks a facilitator usually has to handle: keep track of time, check-in with players who possibly don’t have a good time, explain what the game is about and how the session will proceed, answer rules questions, support others and take action in case of technical difficulties, and moderate a debrief or feedback section at the end. There might be more things depending on the game.

In some games, people like to have an image board or a map of an area where the characters move through, for example. Then it’s good to have somebody responsible for keeping these up-to-date. Same goes for taking notes for specific events in the game, tracking counters, updating a list of NPCs, etc.

Share the burden

So before you start the session, consider if you as the facilitator would like to source some of these tasks out to players. Ask a player directly if they would take over a certain task or ask openly if anybody is interested to share some of the work you as the facilitator usually would have alone on your shoulders.

Some things like having a specific person responsible for checking-in with players not having a good time (if possible on a private channel) shouldn’t be understood that everybody else would be allowed to ignore their responsibility in doing so. From my experience though, it helps a lot if you have somebody having their mind fully on such a task. This lowers the imposter hurdle (‘should it really be me pointing that out’) and encourages action.

Handing out the debrief moderation is something I can personally highly recommend. I’ll talk more about further below.

Keep what you prefer to keep

Surely, sharing some of these tasks is not everybody’s taste and doesn’t have to happen at all. I would still recommend taking a look at everything that you as the facilitator are balancing while in a game—helping you to understand how much work you are actually doing in a session you facilitate.

Tools

By now, there are so many different ways and practices people have while playing online that there isn’t a set of tools that will for everybody and every play culture. Some people stream live on Twitch with audience interaction, others play voice-only but with battle maps on Roll20.

So the list of tools the template provides is just reflecting one of many different play cultures. It is the one most common in the Gauntlet community, although even in the Gauntlet many different styles are present.

Managing information

The tools listed here are all browser based. I strongly recommend to have each tool in a separate window so you can easily switch between them. You will probably have the video window, a dice roller, a character keeper, a picture board, personal notes and a search engine open. Additionally, you might have one or two PDFs with the game text open (full rules / reference sheet). That’s already three to eight windows to move between and hence a lot to keep up with.

Take a moment to think about how you can manage all these tools efficiently for yourself. Ask the other players to check if they have access to all tools before the game starts and if they feel comfortable in using them.

For dice rolling, it’s always an option to have people roll their real dice on their own table. Some people though prefer the excitement of sharing the dice result in a tool and our own Shane Liebling has given us rollforyour.party as a wonderful gift. It’s an open source dice roller without registration and provides tools for many different games. It also has a built-in X card and other safety tools.

The Play Aids folder of the Gauntlet community has character keepers and play aids for over 100 games ready to be used.

Character Keepers

A character keeper is one of the amazing things online play has to offer which works (from my point of view) better than in face to face groups. A typical character keeper is a spreadsheet shared among participants with all information about your characters on one page. So no matter if you want to look up the player characters’ aspects in Fate or check which Bonds somebody has in Dungeon World or which Skin Moves the Ghost has picked in Monsterhearts, it’s all there and instantaneously updated when changes are made.

How to end a session / Debriefing

Early ending

An online session often goes between two and four hours. My preferred length is three hours. We are sitting on a chair watching one or two screens and although we will have breaks sessions which go longer can have a tendency to not being fun anymore. Reading other people’s emotions, listening through not always perfect connections and controlling several tabs and windows with information is work and we will be exhausted (but hopefully also excited) at the end of the session.

So most importantly, end the game when you don’t feel comfortable anymore with going further. In the end, it never pays out to continue beyond your limits. ‘Life is more important than a game’ is what my son (6) always tells me in such situations, giving me a hug, and so should you be good to each other if one does not want to continue any longer.

When the game is over

When the game is over, the template recommends to switch off cameras and mics for a moment and to stretch your body. Since our hobby is mainly an intellectual exercise we tend to forget what our body needs. We had an exciting times, were totally immersed in our story—so now be gentle to your body. In intense games, this is also the opportunity to de-role. Remind yourself and your players that the game is over and you are not the characters any longer you incorporated. Don’t use character names anymore and talk about your character and NPCs in third person.

Begin the debrief

It’s then time to hand over to the debrief moderator (if that is somebody different than you). The template provides people with different options and a text they can read out loud if they want. One proposed option is to focus on appraisal and excitement, the other focuses on emotions and reflections. There are many other possibilities, so these are just examples. It’s nice to shuffle your procedure up a bit every other time and to find out for yourself which procedure works best for you. It probably isn’t directly the first one you tried.

In the case you are recording your session for others to watch, make a decision as a group if you want to record the debriefing as well or not. People who enjoyed your Actual Play, might be very interested in the debriefing, too, and we can all improve play culture by making debriefing a visible part of our online play. However, people sometimes have good reasons why they don’t want to do debriefing publicly. Then stop recording, no questions asked.

Debriefing does not equal feedback

Most importantly, debriefing is not the same as giving feedback. From a work context, many people have learnt to keep feelings out and feedback procedures in the workplace context focus on rational pros and cons, stuff which worked well versus what didn’t. Feedback is good to get. But this isn’t the kind of debriefing we might need after intense roleplaying sessions. We are allowed to have feelings and we shall have space to express them. (Side Note: that this should also be the case at work is my strong opinion but not the topic here).

My proposal therefore for debriefing is to keep debriefing and feedback conceptually and as agenda items separate. It depends on your preferences how much space you offer to each of them. It’s alright not to have a debriefing in some games or not to ask for feedback at all.

Debriefing emotions

Debriefing should therefore focus on personal emotions experienced in a game and explicitly offer them a space. Pick a moment in the game which stood out in reference to your play experience. Talk about it. If possible, focus on emotions, on what you felt. It’s tempting and indeed we are trained to hand out positive feedback and compliments to other players. If that happens, that’s ok but try to focus on your own experience. Keep the celebration for the feedback time.

Debriefing reflections back into real life

A second and equally important dimension is to allow players to talk about how their play experience connects for them to their life. The game session was just a three hours slice in our lives.

Our life is what happened before the session, while the session was going and after it ended. We came in with a state of mind, business to do, emotions we worked through (aka bleed in). We related to a fictive world, with the escapist dimension of a game while playing but we also related to real people who we might know well from ‘real life’ or had never met before the game.

When the game is over these relationships continue to exist while the characters we played become just a memory. But still, although our story, the world and the characters were created by us, they might still mean something (aka bleed out). Maybe the old grandmother I incorporated reminded me of my recently deceased grandma. Maybe the oppression our group of rebels suffered is something my sister had to suffer.

Use the debriefing to reflect how the game related to your life. It’s totally ok to discuss something light-hearted—if you found a game design element super interesting and this is what you want to talk about—do so.

No need for strong emotions

To emphasise the last point, a debriefing shall not turn into a show-off of how emotionally impacting the session was. It’s alright to have no strong feelings, nothing serious to add. A simple state of happiness or just feeling not moved at all by the game even if everybody else said so, is as good as talking about how life changing the game was for you. Both can stand next to each other. You might also not feel anything you like to talk about but in a couple of hours after the game, after a discussion with your partner or a good night sleep it starts to keep you thinking. If that is the case, reach out to someone in the game you trust and do another debriefing when it feels right for you.

Feedback

When the debriefing of emotions and reflections (or any other form suitable for you) is over you can ask for feedback towards you and between players.

You might be interested just in positive feedback or you want constructive feedback about what went sup-optimal. It’s your decision as the facilitator to decide which type of feedback is welcomed. Especially for playtests, you might ask for written feedback or if anybody has time to look in detail about some material.

My personal taste is to take positive feedback only directly after the session. I’m often pumped by adrenaline and feel happy to have finished the session. But since I still want constructive feedback on how to improve my GMing, game material or how I facilitated the session, I ask that people come back to me a few hours after the game only with such feedback. I have also already reached out individually to people in such situations.

Another recommendation for players who don’t feel comfortable with handing over negative feedback: you could ask the debrief moderator or another player you trust to hand over the feedback they have anonymously.

Where to go from here

The online facilitator template is just one of many possible ways to structure an online session. I personally look forward to see variants diverging widely from this one and to continue my own learning experience. I especially look out to how I could incorporate more best practise lessons from the Nordic Larp and American Freeform scene who – from my point of view- are several years ahead in terms of how they facilitate good sessions and good aftercare. Finally, with online streaming there is a dimension in online play whose consequences haven’t been thought through yet (by me): how does a live audience change our games, our safety, what structure would work better for an audience, how to do aftercare as part of the audience etc?

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10/8/2018

Making Combat Interesting

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by Skyler Nelson, Keeper of the Child Dressed in Borrowed Skins

Combat in tabletop RPGs is often boring. It’s a bit ironic. One might think that the point where tensions boil over, swords start swinging, and bullets start flying would naturally be exciting, but I’ve heard many players lament how their games seem to slow to a crawl or lose tension during action sequences, and that the fighting is their least favorite part.

This doesn’t have to be the case. Combat isn’t inherently boring. It’s just that games (even ones that are very mechanically focused on fighting) don’t automatically provide the things that make combat scenes interesting or exciting—that stuff has to come from the GM and the other players, and it’s not generally in the rulebooks.

This post is about what you, the GM, can do to make combat scenes in your game more interesting.

The Anatomy of a Mediocre Combat Scene

A boring combat scene starts like this: the bad guys are here, roll for initiative! It can take place anywhere but most commonly happens in a kind of large, flat, mostly empty room. As it proceeds, the combatants approach one another and form little clusters where they stand around taking turns hitting one another. When all the folks on one side (usually the baddies) have all been biffed to death, combat ends.

I’ve been in games where there wasn’t really much more to it than that—we went back and forth saying who we attacked, noting whether we hit and how much damage we did, and then at some point it was over. The players spent a lot of time between turns looking at their cell phones.

This won’t do. You've gotta spice it up. There are four basic ingredients you need:

Vivid Detail
Real Stakes
Interesting Choices
Dynamic Action

Vivid Detail

Right off the bat it’s worth saying that while a lot of GM advice focuses on adding vivid descriptive detail, when it comes to combat scenes, in my experience, it’s actually the least crucial of the four ingredients listed above. Spicing up the scene with fancy descriptions of what’s happening in combat only goes so far, especially if what’s happening is still just a bunch of folks standing in clusters taking turns whacking one another. In fact, long descriptions can slow things down even more. If you’ve got all kinds of dynamic stuff going on in your combat scene (which is what the next sections will focus on), you honestly don’t have to go into too much detail about it. If players have multiple things to worry about or consider doing, the picture they form in their head as they evaluate the situation will often be plenty vivid.

There are a few techniques you can use to enhance the action or retain player interest, though:

Let the players narrate their own actions whenever possible, but add your own detail at the end. They know what they think is cool, and you can tie it into the rest of the scene. Your job is to make things flow by adding the bit that connects the effects of that action to whatever follows it, e.g. by opening up an opportunity for the next character to act.

Be creative with what counts as an attack. There are only so many ways to describe hitting or getting hit with a sword. Add physical comedy or irony or a small chain of events instead of basic strikes. E.g. instead of “She winds up and hits you with the warhammer really hard” try “You were expecting her to swing the warhammer but she caught you off guard by just heaving it forward at you. The impact doesn’t hurt, but getting pushed backwards into her companion’s spear does.”

Keep the story going during the battle. Sometimes adding to a combat scene means adding stuff that isn’t combat. Let the baddies talk and reveal information, make the fighting uncover clues, tell the players what their characters notice (without necessarily making them roll) and let them ask questions, etc. Some GMs are so good at this that it’s easy to forget that big parts of plot-heavy sessions technically take place during a very long battle.

Real Stakes

Some of the best writing advice I ever got was this: “Don't write action sequences. Write suspense sequences that require action to resolve.” This point is as valid for GMs as it is for writers.

The core of a good scene is an interesting question, and the purpose of the scene is to answer that question. In order for the scene to have any tension, it’s important that the answer isn’t obvious and that it has consequences for how the story goes on. In bad action movies, the question is often “will the main character die?” and the audience already knows the answer. In order for a scene to have emotional stakes, you want the characters trying to accomplish something that they could believably fail at and the story would go on and their failure would mean something.

In a boring combat scene, the question is just “Who will win this fight?”, or even “How long will it take us to win this fight?”

The worst version of this is when there just happen to be enemies around. “A bunch of orcs jump out of the bushes! Roll for initiative!” In this situation, the player characters either fail and die or they run away or they win. So the story either ends suddenly or goes on almost as if nothing had happened.

In a good fight scene, the characters aren’t just fighting, they’re fighting over something. Often the best stakes are medium-sized. The loss of a well-liked NPC is usually a lot scarier than the end of the world.

As a GM, there are a lot of ways to add meaningful stakes. An easy way is to establish something that the antagonists want to destroy that the players have an incentive to protect. A town, a caravan, a batch of priceless eggs.

Maybe the antagonists are creating a bigger threat or an advantage for themselves. They’re constructing a weapon or waking a demon that won’t end the world, but will make the upcoming fights a lot harder. Maybe they’re trying to start a war or a conflict that will give them a political advantage.

Chases and races are great for setting up stakes. Will those scoundrels get away with the artifact they’ve stolen? Will the crooked city guard catch us noble artifact thieves? Who will reach the well of power first?

A few more notes about setting up stakes:

It’s good to have a spectrum of partial success and failure states. Maybe the players can’t save every villager from the attacking bandits, and the question is “How many, and who?” This sets up interesting choices.
Mechanically speaking, clocks and counters are the GM’s best friend. Make a clock for the destruction of the sacred shrine or the progress of the race to the clocktower, and tick segments at narratively appropriate times.
It’s okay to have fights that only end when one side has destroyed the other, but it’s often more interesting to set up situations where the players can succeed without killing the enemies (or kill all the enemies but still fail).
A fight scene can have multiple sets of stakes, especially for characters with different concerns. One PC might be driven to capture captain Calhoun, while another just wants to keep the boat from sinking.

Interesting Choices

While stakes add tension and give the players reasons to care about how the battle turns out, even a scene with well-developed stakes can sometimes devolve into a bunch of characters standing around biffing one another. That kind of action can get stale pretty quick. For one thing, the situation doesn’t change much from moment to moment - the next section will focus on how to make scenes more dynamic. But another reason why standard combat scenes can grow tiresome is just that there’s not much for the players to consider doing on their turns. Especially in games with traditional combat mechanics, most player characters have a handful of basic attacks or abilities that they can use and many of them are variations on “damage the enemy”. Choosing which enemy to attack, or whether to burn a spell slot for extra damage isn’t going to stay engaging for more than a round or two.

Here are a couple ways to give the players more interesting stuff to think about:

Make the environment useful or dangerous.

It doesn’t matter how much you describe the setting, it’s effectively no different than an empty room if there’s nothing there to interact with. When in doubt, add something to fall off of (or to push an enemy from). Or a river that might sweep you a ways downstream, or a trap to trigger, or more enemies to alert. Put a scene in a factory that has levers that reconfigure the environment dramatically. Make some things that provide cover, or areas that are harder to move through (and put the archers on the other side). Use stored kinetic energy, i.e. ways to accomplish things or change the situation dramatically by interacting with the environment (exploding barrels, an enormous and obviously breakable aquarium, a sleeping giant). Let both sides threaten each other with those dangers.

Try to avoid dangers that are most likely lethal, and focus instead on things that tilt the balance of the situation. Falling off a ledge and having to climb back up is better than disappearing into a bottomless pit.

Make sure your environment features opportunities as well as threats (many things are both) - a prominent chandelier to swing from is just as good as a banister to fall off of.

If a player asks whether something is present in the scene that you didn’t picture, it probably should be - ask them why, because they likely have a cool idea you can run with.

Engage with the stakes, present dilemmas and think in terms of risk/reward.

Some of the best situational moments are directly connected to the scene’s stakes. Put your characters in a race with inter-vehicular combat, à la Mad Max: Fury Road, and make it clear when there’s an opportunity for a player to board and try to hijack an enemy vehicle, provided they can muster the courage to jump across the gap. Anyone who falls (or gets thrown) off their vehicle isn’t necessarily dead, or even entirely out of the race, but they’re going to have to find a way to catch up.
Sometimes dilemmas will come up naturally, but it’s good to emphasize them. A sentence or two of narration between turns can highlight the obvious choices that are available, e.g. “The orc you’ve been sparring with is definitely starting to slow down, but it seems like Wilfred is in quite a bit of danger behind you...”

Other times you can use situational or environmental threats or opportunities to create choices with different levels of risk and reward. “Boris’s strike goes wide and he tumbles over the edge - he’s hanging on with one hand. The pirate who took the treasure map scoffs and starts making off across the gangplank toward her ship. What do you do?” or “The paper golems are advancing quickly, and they’ve backed you into the shrine you’re supposed to protect. Their faces are blank in the flickering light of the hanging oil lanterns...”

Dynamic Action

In boring combat scenes, the only difference between the situation before a player’s attack and after it is how much HP their target has left (and not even that, on a miss). I’ve seen combat where the players tune out when it’s not their turn because they know that when it comes around to them the only noticeable narrative difference in the situation (if any) will be which enemies are still standing.

The solution is to make every action in the scene feel dynamic, and there’s a simple principle for how to do that: everything that happens must change the situation in a qualitative way.

Keeping that principle in mind (and following the advice from the previous sections) will go a long way toward keeping the action going, but there are a couple more general tips worth bringing up:

Focus on the visible consequences of player actions.

If a player hurts an enemy (or even tries to), that enemy should react in some way. The riot cop who was handcuffing your friend is trying to point his taser in your direction you after you beaned him with that rock. The giant shakes you off and starts wildly flailing after you poke his eye. The guard is visibly favoring one leg after catching an arrow to the knee. A lot of this can be achieved through narrative detail. In games with crunchier combat systems you may want to throw in mechanical effects where it makes sense and doesn’t feel too much like breaking the rules (e.g. halving the movement speed of the aforementioned guard).

Hits can damage armor and disarm or displace enemies. Having people tumble and move around (especially in response to solid blows), or break other things in the scene (e.g. tables and glass) can make it feel like there’s more going on.

Missing a dice roll should put the player in a noticeably worse situation: maybe their weapon is caught, they’ve been forced into a place where they’re surrounded or they’ve created an opportunity for the baddies to prepare a more devastating attack. Tick a clock segment and explain how the failure advanced some looming threat. This is basically the PbtA philosophy but you can import it into any game.

Focus on how the consequences of what just happened change things for the next player. Player interactions make it feel like the characters are all in the scene together, rather than engaged in separate skirmishes.

Change the scenario in broader ways.

The fire is spreading and it’s about to cut off half the room! A third party has arrived and it’s unclear who’s side they’re on! The goblins have stopped fighting and are trying to escape with a character that got knocked out! The giant woke up and everybody should probably run away! We tripped the magic security system and everyone’s weapons teleported to the armory!

The stakes can change half way through a scene, and so can the threats, opportunities and everything else that affects how the characters fight over whatever it is they’re fighting over. This can happen as a direct consequence of a character action or you can just throw a curveball if it seems like things are getting stale. In a PbtA game, you can use a failed roll with no obvious direct consequences as an opportunity to suddenly flip the script.

One Final Tip: Give Peace a Chance?

I have one last secret trick that players love: if there’s an obvious way to resolve the scene’s stakes without combat (or without more combat), go for it.

Violence is troublingly prevalent in tabletop games, and sometimes it’s presented as the inevitable consequence of disagreement or as the most obvious solution to most problems. Before you start a scene with combat, it’s worth asking if it’s what you actually want.

One reason why combat might not be what you want is just that even if you have ways of making it fun, you pay an opportunity cost if there are even more fun or interesting things your players could be doing with that time at the table. Sometimes this means finding sneaky or diplomatic ways of avoiding a confrontation. Sometimes this means getting back to the story that was in progress before the fight started. I’ve been in campaigns where every tense situation (e.g. a pickpocketing incident) resulted in a drawn out, unnecessary fight to the death. If it seems like things are slowing down or the stakes are easy to resolve without further violence, have the enemies give up and retreat, or call for a truce, or have friendly reinforcements arrive and arrest them.

Finally, it’s worth noting that a lot of the above advice applies to non-combat scenes as well. Keeping an eye out for opportunities to add vivid detail, real stakes, interesting choices and dynamic action to any scene will add a lot to your game. If done well, you can make every session exciting and action packed, whether or not the swords are ever drawn.

Did I miss anything? Feel free to add your own tips or share the best combat scenes in your games in the comments.

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8/22/2018

Stars and Wishes

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words and doodles by Lu Quade, Keeper of the Cloak of Logan Stormbreaker

We all want to run better games - and the best way to run better games....is to ask! To share what we are loving, what we want to see more of, and what we would like to see changed.

Stars and Wishes is a simple tool that encourages positive feedback and gentle forward-looking criticism.

I originally introduced Stars and Wishes to the Gauntlet community in response to negative experiences I had using Roses & Thorns - a popular debrief tool used within the Gauntlet and the wider rpg community. The metaphor it relies on is strong: sometimes when you try to pick roses, you catch yourself on thorns.

Stars and Wishes has been criticized as just a softer version of Roses and Thorns: but I’m a big word nerd, and think that semantics - the implications and feelings associated with words - is a big thing. This is clearly visible in the case of Thorns vs. Wishes: a thorn has already pricked you, and you speak about a negative experience/element of the game that occurred while you were playing. Wishes are forward facing: an optimistic request for change, and when a thorn is reframed as a wish it becomes positive and productive.

It is softer - it’s also kinder and more generous, and closely aligned with how we aim to communicate and treat one another within the Gauntlet community.

The first little section of this post - Basic Stars and Wishes - will show you how to use it. The second - Advanced Stars and Wishes - will introduce you to how some great GMs have employed and adapted it themselves!

Basic Stars and Wishes

At the conclusion of a game session everyone who played (including the facilitator, if any) offers a Star to another player, to a moment in the game, or to an element of the overall experience (you can give out more stars if you have time). You can award a star for - amazing roleplay, great character moments, amazing descriptions by the GM, the feeling you had at a certain moment, another player’s generosity, a mechanic of the game system that really sang, etc. A star is a thing you loved about the game - if the game you played was amazing it is often hard to choose!

After stars have been given, everyone makes a Wish. Each player tells the table something they would like to see happen in a future session. You can make a wish about - something you want to see happen with your own character, an interaction you’d love to see between two characters, a mechanic you would like to see come into play that you haven’t seen yet, places you hope the story might go, etc.

Advanced Stars and Wishes

The following section includes examples of extensions of Stars and Wishes beyond a simple debrief tool.

1. Allow wishes to inform your planning for future sessions!

This is not so much an extension of the tool as it is part of the intent of Stars and Wishes that I wanted to highlight. Why ask for feedback if you’re not gonna use it, right!?

Stars and Wishes in Action: You can see Sid scribbling down notes about all of our stars and wishes, and he drew on these heavily in future sessions:

2. Shane’s Bookending technique - for every session after the first one, bookend play with Stars and Wishes. Make a wish for the upcoming session at the beginning of play, stars as usual at the end.

I have personally also used stars at the start of sessions as a refresher entering play, often framing them as opening credits scenes. This can get everyone back on the same page after a break.

3. Tyler uses both Stars and Wishes and Roses and Thorns, as he personally desires stronger criticism at the end of a series. He wants to know specifically what didn’t work - particularly when playtesting or running a new system. I have experienced him using Roses and Thorns in the final session of a series to great effect.

Of course, if as a game runner or game designer you want more specific or stronger criticism - ask for it!

Big thanks to Sid Icarus who responded so enthusiastically to my vague musings in the Gauntlet Feel Club about an alternative to Roses and Thorns. He helped me to clarify my thoughts for this post: his enthusiasm is largely responsible for the small but powerful proliferation of Stars and Wishes within the Gauntlet, and for me actually adopting my own idea! Thanks Sid! XO

Bonus age old wisdom ‘One That Plants Thorns Must Never Expect To Gather Roses’

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7/25/2018

Paint the Scene

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by Jason Cordova

I like to create a high level of player engagement when I run a game, and I employ a number of tools to achieve it. The most important of those is the technique most closely associated with my GMing: Paint the Scene.

I created Paint the Scene back in 2016 and have been refining it ever since. Today, it is a cornerstone of my GM prep and one of the things that makes my game sessions exciting to be a part of.

Here’s how it works: if there is an idea, theme, or visual motif that is particularly important for an encounter or scene, ask the players what their characters observe in the scene that reinforces that idea, theme, or motif.

Here are some examples from actual game sessions I have run:

Scene: The dilapidated main street of a small town in Kansas during the Dust Bowl (from a game of Crossroads Carnival).
Paint the Scene question: “What do we see that is evidence that this town used to be prosperous but is now a dried up husk?”
Player answers:

“A department store has a dress in the window that is clearly out of style.”
“The parking lot of the shuttered bank is being used for an impromptu flea market.”
“Flyers for the Christmas festival from two years ago are still hanging up.”

Scene: The beautiful palazzo of Lady Eshrigel (from a game set in Vornheim).
Paint the Scene question: “As you walk around the palazzo, how do you know Lady Eshrigel is a medusa?”
Player answers:

“There are an impressive number of statuary gardens.”
“The ceiling of the main foyer is set with a decorative illusion of thousands of snakes writhing around in a massive ball.”
“Instead of mirrors, the walls are adorned with sheets of highly polished black glass.”

AN IMPORTANT NOTE: The technique is somewhat deceptively named. “Paint the Scene” suggests we are only concerned with the visual, and that simply asking the players to describe their surroundings is enough. That is wrong. This technique is about exploring ideas. We don’t ask “What does your character see when they enter the opium den?” Instead, we ask “What does your character see that reminds them that this opium den is a place where the social classes meet?” The first question is serviceable, and may even lead to good outcomes, but the second question is better: deep, interesting, and focused around an idea.

Paint the Scene leads to many happy outcomes:

The cognitive load of the players is tightly focused, which helps them be awesome.
The level of player engagement is high because the players are the ones telling us all the cool details, not just the GM.
Players take more ownership of the setting because they have connected with it on a personal level.
The GM’s workload is significantly reduced because the players will be pulling their weight in terms of making the setting compelling.
Coming up with Paint the Scene questions forces the GM to start thinking in terms of theme and motif, which will eventually make them into rockstars.

Inserting Paint the Scene questions into your GM prep is extremely easy. If you’re running a module, pick out the four or five coolest parts of it and attach Paint the Scene questions that reinforce ideas within those parts of the module. Or, better yet, pick out the four or five dullest parts of it and attach Paint the Scene questions to them in order to liven them up. If you’re doing something like my 7-3-1 technique from last week, add a Paint the Scene question to draw out a theme or add some player-generated texture (making it 7-3-1-1, I suppose). What about Apocalypse World fronts? Dead fucking easy: think about what kind of vibe or personality you want Rolfball to have and then add a Paint the Scene question that explores that vibe or personality (“When you look at Rolfball, how do you know he is a person not to be fucked with?”).

Paint the Scene is the most defining aspect of my personal GM style. This technique, and the frame of mind that comes with it, is the reason my games fill so blazing fast. Do you want to take your game to the next level? Do you want to add thematic richness and depth to your sessions? Do you want to be a “rockstar” GM? I’m giving you the keys to the castle, here.

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7/20/2018

Questions and Random Tables

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The Crying Spider - Odilon Redon (1881)

by Horst Wurst, Keeper of the Yellow-Eyed Mask

When I first played a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game, the magic happened within 5 minutes when I asked a player – a friend of mine with whom I had played trad games for 30 years – to add an important place to the map and to tell me why his character was afraid to go there. His eyes lit up and he produced a grim tale about the Island of the Finstermann, where shadows roam, whispering secrets and lies. Months later, in the final session of our epic Dungeon World campaign, they finally reached the island, slew the antagonist, and brought hope and light back to a place that was cursed for centuries.

For this first session I had prepared: a starting situation, a rough map from a D&D module, and a million questions: who is following you? Why do they follow you? What monsters are rumored to be in the dungeon? Etc. What happened at the table was the emergent story of a duke who had sent his guards after the players, a dragon that was rumored to have inhabited the dungeon, which in turn was actually an abandoned dwarven city, and so forth. Not necessarily Hugo Award material but it didn’t matter: it was our story.

Why questions?

In PbtA games, almost every decision by the players is a flag waved at the GM: this is what I’m interested in. If they pick a Driver in Monster of the Week, there better be a car chase, a Fighter picked in DW demands epic fights against epic foes. Questions allow the players to more intimately contribute to the fiction and to give them a more personal stake in the world. A good question has enough context to inspire them and is open enough for the answer to surprise everyone at the table.

Last year, we had a similar "Eureka!" moment. We were playing Uncharted Worlds and they botched their Wild Jump. I had prepared a couple of random tables inspired by Impulse Drive and Stars without Numbers about what could go wrong, which ship systems were affected, what kind of place they would end up at, etc. We found out that the star system was dominated by a gigantic black hole, had a mysterious ship graveyard just outside the gravity well and that the character's life support had stopped working. Eventually they managed to transfer their warp core to a freighter carrying precious metals, escaped the system, and started a trading mini-campaign. I never asked a single question about the world around them, instead every twist and turn that changed the course of the adventure was randomly rolled and it felt… somehow more relevant, more consequential, more “real” than if I had just picked it from a list or if I had asked the players to contribute to the fiction.

Everywhere eyeballs are aflame - Odilon Redon (1881)

Why tables?

In sandbox games, tables can reinforce the themes of a setting (swampy results in a swamp, fairy-tale results in the dark wood) but can allow for surprising results, especially when using the synergy of two or more tables at the same time. A table where all results are aggressive monsters is boring. A monster table linked to a reaction roll is better: maybe the blink dogs are aggressive and attack immediately, maybe they are curious and can be tamed by treats and the ranger finds a new companion. Even better, if there are linked tables like two encounters and a Die of Fate (see John Harper's World of Dungeons 1979 for more info on the Die of Fate). A good recent example of the synergy from rolling on multiple tables is The Gardens of Ynn where a random location, detail, and encounter give rise to hundreds of interesting results.

Loaded questions and random tables ultimately serve the same purpose: to prevent railroading, to unburden the GM from coming up with all the cool stuff, to allow emergent story and to surprise everybody at the table. Using random tables requires an additional risk: we completely surrender ourselves to the fates, we resist the urge to just pick the coolest result from a list. Sure, we might end up with a boring or unfitting result, but I claim it is well worth taking that risk.

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7/18/2018

The 7-3-1 Technique

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by Jason Cordova

I often get credit for being a good improvisational GM. The players can take the story in whichever weird, unpredictable direction appeals to them and I can quickly adapt to that situation with NPCs and encounters that seem like they were always supposed to be there. There is a seamlessness to it; a sense that I have considered every possibility beforehand. Of course, that’s not the case at all; I have simply had a lot of practice rolling with the punches. That, and I use a GM technique called 7-3-1.

7-3-1 is… an exercise. I’m hesitant to call it “session prep,” because the point isn’t necessarily to end up with a bunch of notes I can use during the game. Rather, the point of 7-3-1 is to help interrogate my setting so I understand it at an intuitive level. I developed the technique around four years ago using bits of advice from the Vincent Baker game Dogs in the Vineyard, Jared Sorensen’s “Rule of Three,” and an episode of the Jank Cast.

Here’s how it works:

Before a session, I come up with 7 total NPCs, locations, and encounters. I give each of these a motivation. I then come up with 3 sensory details for each that I can describe at the table (sights, smells, sounds, and so forth). Finally, I think of 1 way I can physically embody each at the table (a distinct noise, voice, verbal tic, body posture, mannerism, etc.). I write all these things down.

Here are a couple of examples for a zombie apocalypse setting (2 of my 7 items that I’m going to write):

Charlie Steele, leader of the Decatur survivors

Motivation: to convince the player characters to join him in his campaign against the Mohawks
Sensory details: the smell of old cologne; an ill-fitting, frayed suit; the sound of his boot heels clacking on the concrete
At the table: a soft, lispy tongue

Willowbrook Mall, a makeshift refugee camp

Motivation: to remind the player characters of what used to be
Sensory details: towering, plastic palm trees; children playing and crying; refugees dressed in fine clothes scavenged from the department stores
At the table: loud, boisterous “Ho, ho, ho!” of the man wearing a Santa suit trying to cheer up the children.

Importantly, these 7-3-1 notes don’t necessarily have to “fit” anywhere in the ongoing story, nor do they have to be connected to one another. Remember: the purpose of the 7-3-1 exercise is to interrogate your setting. What do the people look like? What do they sound like? What sorts of places are there? What sorts of dangers can arise? What sorts of things do people want? We’re not creating a campaign world in the traditional sense, with each location and NPC mapped out. We’re answering the question “How does this world respond when the player characters take action?”

Sometimes I have my 7-3-1 notes at-hand when I run the session, sometimes I don’t. If it’s early in the campaign, I might have them available for inspiration, but it’s just as likely I won’t because simply performing the exercise causes a swarm of characters and details to buzz around in my head. When we start playing, I just pluck from my brain whatever feels right in the moment. Perhaps I created a terrific uncle character during my 7-3-1, but the players choose to interact with the grandmother. Well, I’ll just take those cool details from the uncle and slap them on the grandmother. In the Charlie Steele example above, perhaps the players don’t wander over to the Decatur camp like I hoped they would, but instead choose to talk to the man trading guns off the back of his truck. If I am particularly enamored with Charlie’s lispy voice (that I have been practicing all week) maybe I take that element and give it to the gun trader. I can figure out the new way I’m going to embody Charlie later (or never, if it turns out the players don’t give a damn about the Decatur camp, in which case I’ll just keep picking Charlie’s bones for cool details to give to other characters).

At some point after the session, perhaps when I am preparing the next session, I’ll pull out my 7-3-1 notes and revise them. I’ll make adjustments to the items that didn’t turn out exactly as I planned, cross out the items that are no longer relevant or useful, and write new ones so I am back up to 7. If the player characters are moving to a drastically different setting or environment, I’ll do an entirely new 7-3-1.

Being a good improvisational GM takes practice. Sometimes, no matter how much you have thought about your setting, the players are going to stump you. And that’s ok. But if you develop good habits and use techniques like 7-3-1, you’ll get better and better at avoiding those situations. Eventually, you won’t even need 7-3-1; you’ll develop your own toolbox for interrogating the setting, your own methods for creating a seamless world on the fly. And that’s when you’ll know you’re getting to be a really good GM.

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