Category: GMing Advice

4/10/2019

Polishing Your Online Character Keepers

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By Michael G. Barford, Keeper of the Eternal Chime

I’ve been working on a character keeper for Offworlders to demonstrate using Google Sheets for online character keepers. In the Advanced post, we ended up with something like this: https://goo.gl/fhNiZW. If you haven’t been following along, you may want to start at the Introduction post.

As you can see, this sheet is looking pretty barren and drab. Grayness abounds. Nothing is visually distinct. Functionally, all the mechanisms are in place for this car to drive, but it’s time we slapped on a fresh coat of paint and some upholstery.

Initially, I’m mostly concerned with how we can leverage formatting to aid in the use of this character keeper. You can see how I’ve already taken advantage of borders and background fill to organize information and emphasize headings. One glaring thing that this sheet is missing is color. Color is an easy way to visually distinguish our character sheet columns from one another.

The easiest thing to do is color your heading cells a different color for each sheet. Using the “light 3” or “light 2” colors provided in the Fill color tool works well enough. The nice thing about coloring each heading: if you scroll down away from your character name, you can still remember which column belongs to them based on the colors. You can also use colored borders to achieve the same goal with a bit more subtlety. Here’s what my sheet looked like when I added some colors to the headings:

Next, we can look to formatting the text of different cells. Bolding your headings or increasing their font size helps them to stand out amidst a sea of character info as landmarks to navigate to when you’re looking for something in particular. To make these changes across your sheet quickly, you can highlight whole rows by clicking their number on the left, and adjust the format from there. You may also choose to change the alignment of your headings. I prefer to keep things left-aligned in general, but in my Attributes grid I will center those elements:

When you’ve updated your sheet with color, you can then use gray as a tool for a different purpose than emphasis. I’m going to color my Ability description cells with a light gray to communicate that these cells do not need input from the player, and to break up the lines of the list a bit (quick tip: holding the Ctrl/Fn key while clicking allows you to highlight multiple individual cells at once):

A couple of additional changes I’ve made here are worth noticing. First, I italicized the Ability names to highlight them. This creates a hierarchy of headings: the Ability category is bolded, the names of each Ability are italicized, and the descriptions use plain text. If I had bolded the Ability names, they would have blended in with the other heading categories and weakened that structure. Italics allow me to emphasize the Ability names from the descriptions without undermining that hierarchy. Additionally, I have formatted these cells to be top-aligned and to have wrapped text. I recommend formatting almost all of your cells this way, so that all of the information can be clearly seen while keeping the same structure for each sheet. To highlight all of the cells in your sheet, you can click the empty square in the top left where the axes of your rows and columns meet.

In the last article, I mentioned that the checkboxes we added to the Advancements section can be used for conditional formatting. When I click the checkbox next to an Advancement option, I want both of those cells to turn gray and to strikethrough the description text, in addition to having the box checked. To do this, I go to the taskbar and click Format>Conditional formatting. A new rule set-up will pop-up on the side of the screen. I’m going to select the ranges for each of these character sheets individually, so my first section will be B33:E38. For the Formatting style, I will set the background to “gray” and apply strikethrough to the text. Under rules, I will choose Custom formula, and the formula I will use is: =$B33=TRUE

In this formula, the $ symbol in front of the column reference will apply the rules to all columns within that row. Likewise a $ in front of the row reference would apply the rules to all of the rows within that column, and both would have it affect the whole range. When a box is checked, the value is set to “TRUE” - this formula will read that and apply the formatting rules to those cells. These rules are automatically applied for each row in the range this way, so you can select the whole Advancement section to apply them and it will work as intended. It would be nice to cover multiple ranges with the same rule, but unfortunately that $ symbol would apply the rules across each range. That is, if Character 1 checks a box, that will grey out the same Advancement option for all of the other characters’. Therefore we will need to select each character’s Advancement section range individually and adjust the formula accordingly.

We can use a similar technique to override the formatting in the Abilities section if a relevant box is not checked. Way back in the Basics post I left room for five Abilities for each character, even though they only start with two. We can use conditional formatting to gray-out those extra Abilities until they are unlocked with an Advancement. Now, since these rules will only affect one column at a time, we can be a little bit more liberal with the range selection. However, one checkbox will be affecting two rows, so we’ll still need multiple rules to cover each ability for each character. It will end up looking something like this:

Notice how multiple ranges are separated by commas: B20:E21, G20:J21, etc. The custom formula is referencing the first “Get a new class ability” checkbox but automatically applies it as intended for each section. We do put a $ symbol before the row reference so that both the Ability name and description get grayed out. This formula looks to see if the box is unchecked (aka displays FALSE) to apply the rules, so until the checkbox is marked, the cells will be grayed out. You’ll have to duplicate these rules for the other two extra Ability slots; make sure to update the formula to reference the relevant checkboxes. To speed this process up with each new rule, try using the four-square range selection icon and Add another range to select the ranges with your cursor instead of typing them out individually.

I want to try using conditional formatting for one more thing. I also left room for a third Skill on each character sheet, even though most characters will only have two. That’s because the Geek has an ability called Polymath that grants them an extra Skill. I’ll make a new rule, select each of those Skill slots, and use this custom formula: =COUNTIF(B16:B25,"Polymath")=0

This formula looks in the selected range for the number of instances of the word “Polymath”. If there are zero instances of it (like if that character hasn’t acquired the Polymath ability), this formula will be TRUE, and the rules will be applied. I’ll set the formatting style to gray, and presto!

With the style I’ve used for the sheet so far, I think I’ll make the margins a dark color to make the sheets stand apart even more. I went with “dark gray 3” instead of full black:

The last bit of functional formatting I’ll do is mostly a nitpick: I like to delete the extraneous ~900 rows that sit at the bottom of a sheet. It doesn’t really do anything practical but adds a bit of finality to the sheet. You can always add more later if you need them.

There’s a couple more features I’d like to draw your attention to. The first is the Freeze rows option. You can freeze a number of top rows on your sheet by clicking View>Freeze on the taskbar. Try it out for yourself and see if you like it! You can unfreeze those rows without messing with their content. Next is the Hide feature. We talked about how you can hide whole sheets, like your Data sheet, to keep them tucked away but still functional. You can do the same thing with individual rows and columns. This is helpful if you want to hide character sheets. For instance, you have a PC who will not be present for a session in the middle of your campaign/series, or you only have three PCs to start but may need more later. Just highlight those columns, right-click and choose hide. There will be little black arrows near the column headings you can click to reveal them again. That’s another benefit to the IMAGE function: inserting images directly doesn’t allow you to hide them within that space.

And with that, I will call this keeper complete! It accomplishes everything I’ve set out to do:

It collects all the information that the players and GM would want to see in one screen.
It streamlines the character creation process by automating choices and input.
It uses formatting to organize this information in an effective manner.
It leverages the technological capabilities of Google Sheets.

Here’s a link to the completed sheet: https://goo.gl/7z2Jwk

But the fun doesn’t stop there! We’ve really only begun to scratch the surface of what you can do with online character keepers. This sheet is perfectly functional and not-hideous, but it’s also kind of generic. You don’t have to be a professional graphic designer to put your own visual spin on your keeper. Try using a custom color palette or matching the theme of your design to the game. I’ll show you a couple of quick examples.

Here’s a variation on this sheet inspired by Material Design principles: https://goo.gl/WKU3TK
And here’s one made to look like a retro spaceship terminal: https://goo.gl/BWFpqy

I’d like to share a few more awesome examples of character keepers I’ve come across in the Gauntlet. These keepers have been designed from the ground up by their games’ designers. If you want to play around with them and take a peek under the hood, just click File>Make a copy.

Look how @puizlaulo uses multiple columns and merged cells to create grids to his liking for the layout of these keepers. Also check out his use of images and symbols to communicate meaning, aesthetic, and theme:

Digimon RPG: https://goo.gl/EY4qic
Melody of a Never-Ending Summer: https://goo.gl/vRGtFQ
Hope and Despair: https://goo.gl/shFLxi

Be prepared to be blown away by the level of detail in @pawper’s keepers. His Mass Effect sheet is nothing short of a masterpiece, but even the simpler sheet for Colony Farout has some clever techniques: see how he created an embossed effect with colored top and bottom borders? Genius!

Mass Effect SR-X: https://goo.gl/Pbvjbp
Colony Farout: https://goo.gl/oJQVSm
Alone to the Wilds: https://goo.gl/DGXo9K

@nahualrpg does some smart things with this (beta) keeper for Nahual: https://goo.gl/E8RqTa
There’s some automation with data validation, VLOOKUP, checkboxes, and conditional formatting. Notably, each playbook has been given their own column in the keeper, instead of just each character. This allows room for those moves that don’t fit the mold, like the Perro’s Pack, while still maintaining a consistent parallel appearance to each section. If you want to make a more exhaustive automated sheet for a game with more unique playbooks like Masks or The Veil, this might be a good route to take. Also check out the sheet for the Changarro as a good example of how to use Sheets to track other aspects of your game.

Check out the hidden Data tab on Dylan’s World of Dungeons keeper to see how he made the character creation instructions work. Super thoughtful idea and a very clever execution: https://goo.gl/4tMXkX

I’d also like to draw your attention to this game info page that @tgurantz made: https://goo.gl/z6JTmP
Did you know that if you right-click on the sheet name at the bottom you can copy it whole-cloth to another spreadsheet by clicking Copy to...? If you find this info page to be useful, it’s super easy to add it to your existing keepers.

Do you have any more questions about online character keepers? Are you struggling with a particular bit of a keeper you’re working on? Are you proud of one you’ve designed or want to share one that you think is particularly cool? Let me know in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter @michaelgbarford!

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4/4/2019

Advanced Techniques for Character Keepers

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By Michael G. Barford, Keeper of the Eternal Chime

I’ve been working on a character keeper for Offworlders to demonstrate using Google Sheets for online character keepers. In the Basics post, we ended up with something like this: https://goo.gl/JR1zS1. If you haven’t been following along, you may want to start at the Introduction post.

This sheet has space set aside for most of the information that a player would want to record for their character. You’ll notice, however, that most of that information will have to be entered manually, or at least copied and pasted over from the digital document. Most of the time, when you copy from a PDF, you’ll also encounter a tricky hurdle for spreadsheets: line breaks. When you paste it into your spreadsheet, if you don’t enter it directly into a single cell, it will spill over into the next ones, and if you do enter it into the cell directly (through the formula bar), you will still have to go back and delete those line breaks, which is a hassle!

In this article we will look at some ways to reduce manual input of character info to increase the ease-of-use of the keeper and decrease the length of character creation. Feel free to follow along with your keeper, or start with the basic one I’m working on and go from there!

I’m going to go top-to-bottom while covering these features. The first function I want to cover is data validation. Basically, for our purposes, this allows us to create a drop-down list for folks to use to pick from a list. For example, in our Offworlders keepers, we can list the Classes we want to have available. In my sheet, I have left an open box next to my Class heading. If you right-click a cell, at the very bottom of the list you’ll find the data validation option. Go ahead and click that, and a SCARY INTIMIDATING WINDOW will pop up. Don’t worry! I’ll break it down for you:

So, here’s an opportunity to make a choice. The easiest thing to do here is to just choose a List from items and type out each Class. But I’m going to go a step further and List from a range. I’m going to create a table in another part of the sheet to list this data. In order to keep this data separate, I’m going to create a second “Data” sheet. At the very bottom of your window there’s a list of sheets, on the left side is a plus icon to create new sheets:

So, this Data sheet will be a bit of a playground for us. We can put information in here as organized or disorganized as we wish, and later we can right-click on the tab and Hide it from the public eye. Later, we can click on the View tab at the top of the sheet and recover it from the Hidden sheets. So why have I decided to use a range of cells as a list instead of just listing the Classes as items? One reason is, if I ever want to add more Classes for players to choose from, I will just need to add them next to my range in the Data sheet.

Speaking of ranges, there’s one more shortcut we can use here. First I will highlight my cells with the Class names in the Data sheet. Then, I will right-click, and choose Define named range. I’ll call this range “classes”.

Now when I create the drop-down list for Classes, in the Criteria box, I can just type “classes” instead of the much more cumbersome and forgettable “Data!A2:A5”. Additionally, when I add those extra Classes to my Data sheet, I can just edit the “classes” named range to include them without having to change every related data validation function. Nifty!

Now I want you to imagine a truly terrifying scenario...a player shows up to your game of Offworlders and *GASP* they haven’t read the rules yet! Okay, maybe not so scary for a game as easy to pick-up-and-play as Offworlders, but nonetheless...the first mechanics-related choice they have to make is revealed as a list for them. They don’t need to go read through the rules to know that these are the Classes they can choose from.

Our next heading to consider is Look. Offworlders doesn’t offer much in terms of suggestions here. To be fair, characters in science-fiction have some of the most potential to appear radically different from one another, even within the same Class. What Offworlders hopes to achieve in this description is, “Anything that will help everyone start getting a picture of your character in their imagination.” What easier way to do this in an online character keeper than with a digital image?

When @greininghaus polled some of our Gauntlet Slackers about the best features of online keepers, one of the most commented-on was the IMAGE function. You see, there are two ways to get an image onto a sheet: clicking Insert>Image from the taskbar or using the IMAGE function. What’s great about the function is that it secures the image within the cell boundaries and maintains a predetermined size. Let’s leverage that capability to change up our Look heading.

First let’s find an image on the internet we’d like to use and copy its URL. Let’s use this piece by Olivia Gulin for example: https://images2.imgbox.com/33/df/iCEREKaC_o.png

Next, clicking on the Look cell will show in the formula bar (that’s the one with the “fx” symbol next to it) just the text we have put in: “Look”. We’re going to delete that and replace it with this:
=IMAGE("https://images2.imgbox.com/33/df/iCEREKaC_o.png")

Yay! A...tiny picture. That’s because by default the image will be resized to fit in the cell while maintaining aspect ratio. Let’s make this row a little bigger so that we can see our image clearer. For now I will resize it to five rows’ height.

Well, that works just fine for us, the illuminated folks who now know how the IMAGE function works. But we don’t want our future players to have to read all of these articles just to use the sheet. How can we make this easier for them? I’ll add a second row beneath the image cell and indicate that the URL should be entered there. Then I’ll edit the function to say:
=IMAGE(B6)

I’ve also centered the image and text, made the URL font smaller, and shrunk the row containing it to make it less intrusive, but that’s completely optional (and similar suggestions will be made in a future post). Sometimes when I’m prepping to run a game I’ll create a Pinterest board to share with my players. They may find some potential character portraits there! If anyone has an image they want to upload, point them to a service like imgur or imgbox.

Next let’s look at the Attributes. You’ll see here that I have chosen to abbreviate these to make them fit together more easily. In doing so, I have sacrificed some clarity, but we can alleviate that by adding a note. Right click on one of these abbreviations and choose Insert note. You can add as much information as you’d like in this note, but I’m content with just defining “STR” as “Strength”. Hovering over a cell with a note, as indicated by the marker in the corner, will show the note in a window.

Now, go ahead and try to type “+1” into a cell under an attribute. You’ll see that it displays just a “1”. That’s because spreadsheets are designed to do math stuff, basically. Now, we could instruct our players to type in =”+1” but that’s a bit of a pain. This is a great opportunity to use the list of items for data validation. Here’s a little trick: we’ll use some Unicode symbols to fool the formula bar into not math-ifying our modifiers. We’ll use the full-width versions of the symbols so they look pretty close. You’ll want the list to look like this: －1,0,＋1,＋2,＋3

Moving on, we have Skills. You know what to do there. Abilities, however, may prove to be a little more complicated. There’s a couple of problems to tackle here.

Firstly, different Classes have different Abilities, so it’s not so simple to create a drop-down list for them. There is a solution, but it will require us to learn some new functions. Before we do, let’s set up a table with each of the Ability names in our Data sheet, next to our Class list. It will end up looking something like this:

Go ahead and make B2:G5 a named range as “abilities”. Now, in Column A, underneath the classes, we’ll make rows for each character on the sheet, like so:

Now we’re ready to learn about a powerful lookup function combo: INDEX and MATCH. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that figuring these out and getting them to work properly can be a little tricky. VLOOKUP is simpler and easier and will work in many situations, but this specific circumstance is a good opportunity to demonstrate INDEX/MATCH. If you want to read more about how these two functions work in tandem, I would recommend you check out this article. In the meantime, we’ll get to work on our formula, starting in cell B7.

Okay, there’s a lot going on here! Let’s try to break it down. INDEX asks for a few things: a reference, which I like to remember as “what I want it to output from”, and then a number of offset rows or columns. To determine the number of offset rows, we’ll use MATCH, which generates a number corresponding to a search key’s position in another range, which I like to remember as “where I want the formula to look”. The 0 at the end makes sure that MATCH looks for an exact match, which we’ll need. You can see from the highlighted boxes which range corresponds to our key names here, and the search key is a reference* to the drop-down list for the first character’s Class (take note that it’s not the C4 cell in this sheet, but the C4 cell in the Characters sheet - we distinguish that by adding the name of the sheet and an exclamation point before the cell reference). So, when we change Character 1’s class to Warrior, this happens:

Cool! ...so what? Well, let’s make a data validation box for one of Character 1’s Abilities and reference that range in the criteria (making a named range like “character1” is easiest). Now, when that player chooses their character’s Class, the list of Abilities will be restricted to those available to that Class. Nifty!

Now our second problem comes into play. As a GM and a player, I can’t be bothered to just memorize exactly what the Hardy or Brute Abilities do, so a rules reference here is handy. We can use our INDEX/MATCH skills here to similar effect! You’ll want to add the description of the Abilities on the same row as their names, in the same order you’ve listed them, like so:

Oh boy, that wasn’t time consuming at all, was it? We can only hope that our efforts will save people time in the long run, perhaps by sharing our work with the gaming community or typing up multiple long-winded articles on the subject. Now that we have our table set up, make sure to give your range a name (I’ll call mine “descriptions”). Insert a new row under your Ability drop-down, and get ready for another formula:

Oh right, that’s what Brute does! So, this formula should look mostly familiar. Let’s go over the differences. First, the output we’re pulling from is different: the “descriptions” range. The row offset stays the same*, but we also want to pull out a single cell’s contents instead of just pouring all of them out. Hence, we add an additional MATCH function, searching for the ability name in our list of those available to “character1”. Think of it like the classic Battleship game, where the first MATCH calls out which row we want based on the class and the second MATCH calls out which column we want based on the ability name.

Okay, now you may be thinking, “Geez Mike, that’s a lot of work to save not a lot of time!” Unless you’re a programmer, in which case you’re probably really jazzed right about now. But you may still have a point. In Gerrit’s slack thread, @GauntletRPG pointed out the downside with these intricate and advanced keepers with all of their automated bits and bobs: they’re prone to falling apart under even light stress. For example, if you want to use an alternate class or playbook, or copy over cells to other parts of the sheet.

Additionally, if there are Abilities that require you to make a choice within them or aren’t otherwise symmetrical (good luck following these steps for Masks’ playbooks, for example), trying to edit those into the cell’s text will require you to copy the cell’s contents, paste them back into the same cell as “values only”, and edit from there. That’s a little bit beyond the scope of technological aptitude that I expect from players using my keepers. If you find yourself in that situation, I may suggest that you just leave your abilities and descriptions in a table format on a separate sheet in your keeper. Players can then just copy the contents of those cells into their character sheets. If necessary, you may need to ask them to paste the text into the formula bar to maintain your formatting.

Now, you’ll notice that those INDEX/MATCH formulas that don’t have Abilities chosen to reference yet return an unsightly #N/A error message. If you want to hide that, you can wrap your formula with an IFERROR function, like this:
=IFERROR(INDEX(descriptions,MATCH(C4,classes,0),MATCH(B16,character1,0)),"")

If your eyes haven’t fully glazed over just yet, there’s one more feature I would like to share with you that’s relatively new to Google Sheets: checkboxes! To insert a checkbox into a cell, highlight it and click Insert>Checkbox from the taskbar. Check out how I’ve used these for our Advancement heading:

You can see here what it looks like when a checkbox is marked, and I’ve also left notes for the XP costs of each Advancement. Checkboxes can also be leveraged for conditional formatting, something I will cover in the next article on polishing your online character keepers.

*As a footnote, I want to mention how handy locking cell references can be when it’s time to copy and paste your cells for new characters’ sheets, etc. Especially since I forgot to do so in the screenshots for these formulas. Let’s say I’m copying over the INDEX/MATCH formula for my first Ability slot down to the next one. We move down two rows, so Sheets automatically adjusts the reference down two rows as well: C4 becomes C6. Handy, except for when it isn’t. So we can lock the reference to that cell so that when it gets copied over it doesn’t move. You lock a cell reference by putting a $ symbol in front of it. So, if we change the reference to $C$4, when we copy it over it will still reference C4. But, what about when we want to copy over this whole sheet to the next column for our other characters? We don’t want to be referencing C4, but rather H4, and so on. In that case, we will change the reference to C$4 - the 4 stays the same, but the column automatically adjusts. Also, all of our named ranges will stay the same. Again, this is usually a good thing, but you may need to change some of those formulas to reflect those changes (references to “character1” come to mind).

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3/28/2019

Basics of Online Character Keepers

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By Michael G. Barford, Keeper of the Eternal Chime

This is the second post in Michael's Character Keeper series. You can find the first post here.

One important step for game designers in designing a game is designing a character sheet. It encourages players to step back and consider exactly which elements of the game designer’s design a player will interact with and which parts are necessary or overlooked. For a potential player, designing an online tool that we call a “character keeper” can be a similarly illuminating experience. A character keeper is an online tool for all the players to keep the information that would otherwise be on their character sheet. Character keepers are especially helpful in online play because it allows all the players and the game facilitator to access all the information any of the other players have about their characters including rules for moves, descriptions of characters, and other relevant statistics and modifiers. You may find that reading through a rules text through the lens of, “How would I create a character keeper for this,” is a helpful exercise for learning and synthesizing the most relevant player-facing aspects of the game.

Most games that need character keepers for online play will come with character sheets already. The task, then, is to translate that character sheet into an online character keeper. Having the character sheet as a resource certainly makes things easier when designing your character keeper, but with practice you could feasibly make a character keeper from scratch.

In order to demonstrate this process, I will be creating a character keeper from the ground up for Offworlders, a rules-light sci-fi game that’s (as of this posting) free. You may find it helpful to follow along and practice making this character keeper yourself! Read through the text with this goal in mind; How does it inform your understanding of the game?

On page 27 you will find the character sheet presented for play. It is presented in a pretty straightforward and simple manner, useful for our purposes today. Check out the headings and see which information the designer thinks are important for players to have noted. It looks like the designer thinks the following are important to note: Name, Look, XP, Attributes, Health, Supply, Abilities, Skills, Advancement, and Gear. These are things we will keep in mind as we design our own character keeper.

Next, let’s go to sheets.google.com and start a new blank spreadsheet. Wow. A blank canvas. So many rows and columns. A little intimidating! Let’s just go ahead and start getting some stuff on the page so that it seems less scary. Up at the top, click Untitled Spreadsheet and go ahead and give your character keeper a title. Then, click on a cell to start editing it. I like to start with B2, because I think a small margin around the characters looks nice. Cell B2 is the one positioned in Column B, Row 2.

You may have guessed that the first thing we will have at the top of each character is their name, and you would be correct! There’s a couple of ways of approaching this, though. When we design this character keeper, we want to keep future players in mind. How do you want them to interact with the character keeper? One method is to make headers that suggest which information should go in the box below, like so:

Or you can indicate that the text within the cell should be replaced with the player’s input. This is how I usually do it:

In either case, take note of how we can use borders and colors to organize our information. Later we will use more formatting to help indicate how users should work with the character keeper. For now, let’s stick with a very simple format and one sheet at a time. When we’re happy with our layout, we can copy it over for the other characters.

You’ll also want to add a space for including the player’s name to distinguish ownership. After that, let’s go ahead and add some of those headings from our list and get them on the page. Line them up in Column B. Think about how your players will be looking at this info. We want the most relevant information to be at the top so that players will be scrolling up and down less often. We should also keep in mind that if we order the steps of character creation from top to bottom, it can make the process smoother and more intuitive. Further, think about which parts of each character sheet the other players will want to be able to look at. Remember, this a unique advantage of online character keepers that we absolutely want to take advantage of!

With this in mind, I want to reorder these headings in a way that makes sense to me. I also added another heading to the list that wasn’t on the original character sheet: Class. This is the order that I chose, but you may like to order this differently:

Now, let’s use those borders and colors to organize this information some more. When you have a cell highlighted, you can click on the paint bucket icon to change the fill color. You can highlight multiple cells and click on the four-square border icon to choose a border style. Don’t forget to leave room for folks to input the relevant info! I’ve zoomed out a bit here to show the full layout:

You’ll see I’ve chosen to line up the attributes together in one row (and shortened their names). But now we have this unsightly panhandle sticking out of the side of the sheet, and parts of our cells like the Name sections are cut off! Our solution here is to use the merge tool. I’ll highlight the top row (cells B2:E2), then I’ll click the icon with two arrows pointing to each other to merge these cells. Et voila! Doesn’t that look better? To save time when merging the rest of my single-line items, I’ll select multiple rows and columns and click the dropdown arrow next to the merge icon and select merge horizontally (otherwise they’ll all get lumped into one cell). If you ever make a mistake, the undo button is your friend!

When making your character keeper, you’ll want to keep the final image in mind. You’ll notice I have five rows designated for abilities. Don’t you only need two? Well, if you’ll recall, the Advancement rules allow for a character to gain up to three more abilities. By putting them in now, I’ve saved the hassle of figuring out where to put them later after characters advance. I’ve also made room for a third skill slot in case someone takes the Geek’s Polymath ability.

While we’re thinking ahead, we have to keep in mind that one of the advantages of an online character keeper over a regular character sheet is the ability to be able to see multiple character sheets on the screen at one time. As it stands, my character sheet in this character keeper is looking pretty wide. At this rate, I’ll only have room for about two character sheets on the screen! I tend to play with at least three or four players at one time (and I’d like to save space for more characters in case I have a new crew member join), so I’ll have to find some more real estate here. One way I can do that is to adjust the width of each column. There’s are a few ways you can do that. When you hover your mouse over the border of the column heading, a double-sided arrow will appear. You can click and drag that to manually adjust the width. If you double click, it will automatically resize the column to fit the width of its contents. And, if you right click the column heading, you can then click resize column to set the width in pixels. You can also highlight multiple column headings and right click>resize column to do them all at once. Here I’ve resized the columns to a conservative 50 pixels, and narrowed the margins as well:

Much better! With this, you have the skeleton of a basic character keeper. If this level of functionality is all you need, then go ahead and copy the sheet over to next columns. BUT! In order to retain the column widths you’ll want to highlight the column headings not just the cells themselves before you copy and paste them over.

Thanks for sticking through the basics. However, if you’re interested, there are further modifications you can make to your character keeper to make it even more functional and accessible. If you’re willing to put in more work, keep an eye out for future posts in this series! We’ll cover such wondrous things as checkboxes, dynamic drop down lists, images, and conditional formatting.

Stay tuned next week for the next entry in this series.

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3/21/2019

Introduction to Online Character Keepers

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by Michael G. Barford, Keeper of the Eternal Chime

When playing RPGs online, there are some obvious downsides. Anyone who has come from a background of playing face-to-face knows this. But there are also some considerable upsides that technology can provide to gaming!

With online games, we can play with people halfway across the world. We can find people who like the games we like, even if the games are less well known. We can attend conventions without exposing ourselves (or others) to germs and other hazards of large meeting places.

If you want to improve your online gaming experience, you should try to maximize the strengths of using online platforms while minimizing its weaknesses. One unique advantage of gaming online is access to online character sheets. Many popular games like Dungeons and Dragons have extensive, advanced character sheets capable of handling the large amounts of information that a player needs to track; often these sheets can be accessed from a service like Roll20 or Tabletop Simulator. Here at the Gauntlet, we tend to avoid those platforms when possible for a few reasons:

We try to avoid asking players to install additional software onto their devices. Browser-based solutions are strongly preferred.
We try to avoid asking players to create accounts for platforms outside of our own services (which usually only require a Google account, a necessary and ubiquitous ask).
Most relevant to this discussion, here at the Gauntlet there are many indie games being played which do not have premade online character sheets (although in the future we hope to see that change!)

With these points in mind, the most practical and accessible solution we’ve found for character sheets is Google Sheets, which are Google’s online, collaborative version of a spreadsheet very similar to Microsoft Excel. Noble Gauntleteers have already created a number of character sheets for various games. We prefer to call them character keepers because they keep all of the characters for any given campaign in one place! You can find the tons of our character keepers in our Player Aids folder on the Community Resources page. The benefits in using Google Sheets character keepers include:

Easy access and sharing! It’s browser based and doesn’t even require a plug-in to operate. You can find/share a view-only version as a template, make a copy for yourself, and then send a link with edit permission for your players.
Everything you need can fit on one page. Being able to see every player’s character sheet all at once is something that paper sheets can’t achieve. This is a helpful way to keep an eye on everyone’s names, preferred pronouns, abilities, etc.
A well-formatted sheet can streamline and simplify character creation.
Different tabs on your sheet can allow you to keep all of your notes and hand-outs in one place. You can have a tab for maps, NPCs, lines & veils, or rules references.

Some people have found Google Sheets so easy to use that they use it to design the rough drafts of their games (looking at you, Hearts of Wulin!). But not everyone has had experience with using Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or other spreadsheets, and at first it can seem overwhelming. In this series of blog posts I will walk you through how to create your own online character keepers.

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1/22/2019

Creating Useful Character Backgrounds

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

Previous Article: “Emotional Choices for Deepening NPCs”

So you’ve got your character and you’ve showed up to game with a 15 page story written about your character’s background. You know where they’re from, why they left, what tragedy befell them in the past. You can tick off this person’s most influential people and what music they would listen to if the game only took place in the modern day.

And you bring this lovingly crafter character who….

Well…

May not mesh at all with the game that’s being created at the table. Whose background and motivations may be at odds with the story that’s being created around you. Sometimes, all that work you did just shut your character out of the game. Even if it doesn’t, it still limits your ability to grow into what’s happening.

Why is this not an uncommon problem?

We’re using the wrong tools.

A lot of tools that are used to build characters in RPGs come from acting or writing. These art forms, while sharing some similarities with RPGs, work very differently.

A writer is blazing a path into their story and they get multiple drafts. The background they come up with to help propel the character and story change at will. Is it better if this character is from Illinois instead of North Dakota? You can do it quickly and move on.

An actor has a full script in front of them. They have all the lines and the plot and they know where their character begins and ends in the story they’ll be telling. An actor may come to the 1st rehearsal filled with ideas about the background and past of the character but these are all able to be dropped in an instant if a better idea is found or if how they approach the character isn’t going to work.

Actors and writers can abandon the work that they did if what they wrote no longer works. A player comes in and has often solidified a foundation in their head that can be hard to deviate from. If I’m not from the Village of Seafoam and my parents weren’t Priests of the Sunken God, I wouldn’t have done thing X and Y before this but, since I am, going with the party on thing Z makes no sense!

You’re basically showing up to play LEGO with your friends. They’ve got a Harry Potter playset they want to use and you slam a Tie-Fighter you made at home right in there.

The wrong tools can have you doing a ton of work but the right ones can actually make the work you do more useful.

Thankfully, and I may be biased, improvisational theatre has good tools for you.

In an improv scene, you can’t stop and create everything you need for a character so you make a few decisions quickly and then add on what’s important for the scene as it continues. If you come in with uncommunicated ideas, it’s very likely that those will be overwritten by something another person in the scene says. When this happens, you let it go.

The actual amount of information you need to create a foundation that can be used to justify later character choices is surprisingly small. You’ll have time to dig for specifics later in the game but, at first, general ideas are often better.

Where are they from? How do they feel about it? What brought them adventuring? How do they view the world? Etc. Answering 5-6 questions like this will give you plenty to take someone into a game who can show you who they are.

When I’m working with new actors who are having a hard time coming up with character, I do the following:

Ask a simple, binary question. Choosing 1 of 2 things is easy.
Once they’ve done that, I ask a more open ended question specifically about that 1st answer.
Rinse and repeat until they’re good to go. Doesn’t usually take long.

Me: “What kind of character are you thinking?”

Them: “Maybe a barbarian.”

Me: “A lot of the game takes place in the city. Did you leave your village or town for good or bad reasons?”

Them: “Good.”

Me: “So if you left for something positive, what is it that you wanted that your home couldn’t give you?”

Them: “I wanted to see the rest of the world and meet new people.”

Me: “So you were always excited to meet people from different places?

Them: “Yeah.”

Me: “What sparked that?”

Them: “We lived on a trading route. I got to meet a lot of merchants travelling through our lands and loved the stories they told.”

Me: “Did you have a good experience when you reached your first big city?”

Them: “No. I was looked down on by people who thought I was an idiot because I wasn’t from there and didn’t speak as well as they did.”

Me: “Has this soured you on cities?”

Them: “No. I knew idiots back home. Cities are bound to have a bunch of them.”

So, currently we have an optimistic barbarian who’s travelling for a love of the world, meeting people, and adventure. They’re not crushed by what others think of them and have a pretty balanced view of people in general.

This is honestly all you need to get started. This feel for who the character is will let them grow as they play instead of trying to carve a perfect character out of what you hope the game will be like. Maybe add in how they met the other players and you’ve got more than enough to grow.

Discovery is one of the wonders of the game.

Go. Discover. Play.

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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.

Account Setup

To facilitate and run your sessions through the procedure described below you first need to have a verified Youtube account.

Verification works through a phone number and takes 24 hours.

So do the verification some time in advance.
This is where you find it in the Youtube Creator Studio menu. Click on the camera symbol in the upper bar of your Youtube main page. Select Go live.

If you are already verified, you can continue as described under STEPS. If you are not yet verified, it will bring you to a page explaining the verification process to you:

The verification process looks like this:

When you have entered the verification code the 24 hours waiting period begins.

Have a good time waiting. Then continue with the next steps.

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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The Gauntlet Blog

Polishing Your Online Character Keepers

Advanced Techniques for Character Keepers

Basics of Online Character Keepers

Introduction to Online Character Keepers

Creating Useful Character Backgrounds

Hangouts On Air Guide

Emotional Choices for Deepening NPCs

RPG B-sides

Sharing the Cognitive Load

Making Combat Interesting

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