The answer is always more dragons, right?

I feel I kind of suck running published adventures. I have been running RPGs for over twenty years now, but I feel like I skipped a step in the standard GM skills evolution by going straight to homebrew campaigns and adventures. Adventures written by someone else always feel like a bit of a struggle.

Earlier this year, as I was angrily typing away at my computer attempting to hammer a published adventure into something that would work for my group, I pondered why these were almost always a problem for me. It occurred to me that when I first began running games back in 2005, I was doing everything on my own. It was all homebrew, with me coming up with prep, adventures, adversaries, and tying it all to the player characters. Why did I do it that way when most people start by grabbing a pre-written adventure of some kind? And then I remembered. I was desperately broke.

Back then, I was struggling to dig myself out of a financial hole caused by layoffs and unstable employment. There were so many bad temp jobs during the early 2000s. The one constant in my life that kept me sane was my Saturday game group. They started encouraging me to try my hand at running games, so when I finally said yes, there was no extra money to pick up a published adventure. It was all what was in my imagination and the core books I already owned.

Eventually things turned around and my life is comfortable now. Well, other than – vague gesture at the state of the world around us – inflation. I have been able to buy published adventures to add to my book collection and my gaming repertoire. For a few different campaigns, I’ve chosen to run published material. Some have been better than others, but I still struggle getting them from the page to the table.

Now to be clear, anyone running published adventures will need to do some level of work. You can’t just grab it off the shelf and bring it to the table with no preparation and still expect to give your players a good game. I understand this, but I’ve found I have issues balancing the benefits of using published adventures without feeling like I still have to tear it all apart and rebuild it from scratch. 

The other day while prepping for my Saturday game, I was growing frustrated because of hidden information that can’t easily be discovered by the players. In the adventure, there is a conflict devastating a region that is the result of someone becoming corrupted by an artifact that wreaks havoc over a large region. While the adventure obviously sets up taking down the big bad, they can’t actually solve the problem until they destroy the artifact. Nowhere in the adventure is set up for the players to learn any of that, let alone the name of this artifact. At least, not that I could find.

I should take a moment and confess something else about the way my brain works and why I struggle with these adventures. When I was in school as a kid and a returning adult student, I could never deeply read textbooks. My process involved skimming and taking notes. That was always good enough to gain the knowledge to pass tests and write papers, but it doesn’t work with published adventures. They’re not textbooks and I’m always missing some important detail not called out in an obvious, skimmable way. 

Heck, during one campaign where I was using an adventure series, I had to look in another OPTIONAL adventure to figure out the truth of the series’ biggest mystery. You’d think it might have been important to put that blurb towards the front so the GM could at least understand what was going on and why.

So, here are some things I’ve learned over the years on this subject: 

• Published adventures are not GMing on easy mode. While they can be a good way to see how adventures and campaigns can be structured and a good resource for new and old players alike, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to make sure it can run smoothly.
• It helps to create your own notes separate from the text. You do not want to have to page through a book or a PDF in the middle of the game to make sure you have all your details ready. The authors have put together something they hope will help you run the game, but only you know what format is going to work best for you.
• Sometimes you will need to create material that fills the gaps. Good adventures offer hooks that you can adapt to your group, but very often you still need to figure out how to put it in front of your players in a way that makes sense. Sometimes the hooks presented don’t work for your group, or they’re not there at all. What’s going to make your players want to engage with the adventure?
• These are not sacred texts. Unless you are running for organized play or a game company, when it hits your table you can do whatever you want with the adventure. Pull it apart and put it back together again in whatever is going to work best for your group. There is nothing that says you have to stay true to what is written on the page. Add, subtract or modify in whatever way is going to make it fun for you and your players.

Ultimately, your mileage is going to vary. For some people, running published material is the way to go and it makes their lives easier. Some of the heavy lifting of campaign creation and world building has been done for you. But for other people, the effort to adapt to their play style makes it harder. I’m enjoying the material I’ve been working with, but I do wish I had unlimited free time to just do it all on my own.

What are your thoughts on published adventures?

Join Ang and Jared as they sit down with Mike Shea from Sly Flourish and talk about his latest GMing advice book, Rise of the Lazy Game Master, as well as a bunch of other topics related to creating content for the RPG community.

Links:

Sly Flourish

Rise of the Lazy Game Master Kickstarter

Three Game Mechanics I Want

There is a lot about the mechanics of Blades that makes it a great game; it is to heists what Gumshoe is to investigations. Honestly, it was hard to pick three things I loved the most about the mechanics of this game. The way I made my decision was along the lines of “what mechanics would I steal and put into other games I run”. In doing that, I found three obvious candidates. Here are my top three:

Clocks

I love clocks! I love that Blades gives you an option for a task that is more than just one Action Roll. Sometimes, it takes some time to complete a task. This is where clocks come in. In Blades, clocks represent anything that takes more than one roll to complete. Clocks have several ticks, and as you make various checks, you fill in the ticks on the clock. When the clock is full, what it represents comes true: a safe cracked, a guard patrol finding the characters, etc. 

In Blades, clocks get used everywhere, and there are several different types of clocks. Sometimes they represent things in the moment, like Cracking the safe, and other times they represent longer-term objectives like The Bluecoats Plan A Raid. 

There are so many other games that lack this mechanic, and as a GM it’s frustrating, because I don’t want the safe cracked in one roll; it lacks a certain amount of tension. Also, using clocks to foretell future dangers is fantastic. A clock called The Guards Are Alerted, that is slowly ticking up, creates fantastic table tension.

Porting This Mechanic

Stealing clocks for your game is not that hard. It’s a bit more than I can write about here, but clocks need some ticks based on the complexity, a mechanism for adding ticks (an optional mechanism for removing ticks), and an understanding of what happens when a clock is full or is emptied. The trick is calibrating the number of ticks based on the action economy of your game, but tinker a bit, and you can put clocks nearly anywhere. 

Phases of Play

Blades has three distinct modes of play: Free Play, The Score, and Downtime. You are expected to cycle through these modes. Have a bit of Free Play to play out various scenes in the lives of the characters, move to The Score where you do some crime, and then into Downtime, where the consequences of your crime are played out.

What I like about these phases is that they set expectations at the table. Both players and GM know the purpose of the phase and know their roles within it. Also, some of the game mechanics are tailored for each phase. So everyone knows what rules and options are available in each phase. 

Phases also set the expectations for how a story in the game will go. Players know that they need to move from phase to phase, so they tend to work towards the objectives that allow them to switch phases. You need information and a loose plan before you start the Score; you have to complete the Score Clocks to get to Downtime. It creates a North Star for the players. 

It also makes prep easy for the GM. You know what phases you need to prep, and you know what the players need to get from phase to phase, so that gets rolled into your prep as well. 

Porting this Mechanic

This is another easy mechanic to take for your game. How it looks will have a lot to do with the game you are playing, but your phases might be something like: In Town, Delve the Dungeon, Return to Town, where each phase has specific actions that occur. You may even make some custom rules for each phase. 

Fortune Roll

This is a smaller mechanic in Blades, but one I love. The Fortune Roll is a roll that the GM makes when they don’t want to make a specific decision about an event. Perhaps the Bluecoats are investigating a crime scene, and you don’t want to decide how successful they are; you then make a Fortune roll for the investigators, and based on the roll, determine how good the clues are that they find at the crime scene. 

The dice used for the Fortune roll are tied to a specific attribute, but are often tied to the Organization’s Tier (how powerful they are in the city). If the Bluecoats are a Tier 3 organization, when they need to make a Fortune Roll they roll 3d6. 

The Fortune roll can be used in many places within Blades, and exists anytime the GM wants to let fortune determine how successful something is. I love this mechanic, and I use it during play and during the campaign downtime, where the other factions in the game are going through their machinations. 

When it comes down to it, I love being surprised by the game as much as the players, so I don’t like deciding things by fiat. It would be easy for me to say, “Oh yeah, the Bluecoats found enough clues to pick up your trail”, but for me, it is way more fun to roll and then have to play off the result. What if they do get enough clues? What will they do if they hit a dead end? Not knowing that until the Fortune dice roll creates a level of in-game excitement for me.

Porting This Mechanic

This is a somewhat more difficult mechanic to port, but not impossible. The gist of the fortune roll is that it produces a gradient of results moving from failure to partial success, full success, and critical success. Your fortune roll has to be able to emulate that range or something similar for your game. Then you just need to know how things that are advantageous and disadvantageous affect your roll, such as the Faction Tier, mentioned above.

Tools In Your Toolbox

The wonderful thing about playing a variety of games is encountering interesting mechanics. Some mechanics sit so well with you that you wish they were in every game. With a little work, they can be. For me, Blades in the Dark has some great mechanics, some that are perfect for the game and some that are universally great, and I want them in every game. And that is what I am going to do.

What about you? What mechanics from games are your “must-haves”? What are those mechanics you want in every game you play?

Join Ang along with JT and Tomas as they talk about what they think makes for good players. What qualities in a player make them excited to see someone coming back to their table again and again?

Links:

Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster

Crypt of the NekroLych

Masks: A New Generation Second Edition

Bob, Chris, and Phil take over the Gnomecast for a special return of the Misdirected Mark Podcast, at least for one episode. This time, they dive deep into initiative in tabletop RPGs, exploring different types of initiative systems, how games handle turn order, and what those choices mean for pacing, spotlight management, design, and player engagement at the table.

Patreon.com/mmp

It got me thinking about how players can sometimes limit their own ideas without the GM’s input. That made me think there has to be a better way to do it. So let’s talk about it. 

Limiting Thoughts – What are they?

A limiting thought is when a player comes up with an idea for an action or a plan, and then shoots it down for some arbitrary reason. Both ideas can come from the same person, or they can come from two different people at the table. To be clear, not every idea is a good one. There are plenty of ideas that won’t work within the game you are playing. Limiting thoughts are ideas that could work, but for some reason, the player talks themselves out of it by having another idea that counters the original idea.

A quick example. A player is thinking of ways to sneak into a compound to reach a magical gem that the group intends to steal. They start thinking out loud and come up with an idea to zipline down to the roof of one of the buildings in the compound from a nearby building using their magical rope. Then, in the next breath, they say, “Nope. I am sure they have guards on the rooftops.” Like that, the idea bloomed and was cut down. 

One thought limits the other. 

Why do we limit our thoughts? 

I am not a mind reader, so I don’t know why my players have done it, but I can tell you what has gone through my mind when I have done it, as a player.

Imperfect Shared Narrative Space

Aka – I thought I heard the GM say that. The image of the game world we hold in our mind is a shared narrative space, one that is built mostly with words and occasionally with some images. We all try to maintain the same narrative space in our heads, but it’s never perfect.  

If we misheard or misremembered a description, we could then build a flawed logical argument. In our example, one player may have thought they heard someone ask the GM about guards, and thought they heard they were on the rooftops. 

Being Too Smart 

We sometimes assume something is true because that is how we would have done it. We all know the thing about assuming… 

Why we assume this can be for several reasons:

• We assume the NPC has enough resources and insight to account for every possibility.
• We think the initial idea is too simple and assume that the GM has accounted for this possibility.
• If you were GMing this, you would have made that precaution.
• We could think that the GM is going to try to outplay the table and has come up with a dozen counter plans. 

The reason does not really matter. Once you start assuming you are limiting.

Mimicking Competency 

You could be trying to mimic the competency of your character, and are limiting your thoughts because your professional thief would never do something so simple or lazy. The thing is, you are not a skilled thief; you are playing one, so you really don’t know the answer to that question. It really is just another assumption. 

The GM Secret

For experienced GMs, there are a few things when it comes to limiting thoughts.

One – I may have thought of your idea and may have even come up with a counter, but if you are excited about it, I may make some on-the-fly changes to let you give it a try (often with some kind of skill check). 

Two – I can’t think of everything, it’s nice you think I do. So sometimes, when you assumed I thought of it, I did not. But also, I will fake or hide my reaction so that you think I did, and then go back to One. 

Three – most of my opposition is flawed in some way. I like them to be normal people. So they likely don’t have every possible contingency covered. If a magic rope is a rare item, then it’s unlikely I’ll let the NPC have a counter for that.

So, what is the better way? 

So how do the players and the GM work together to stop using limiting thoughts? 

Player-Side

Ask, don’t assume. If you are worried about there being guards on the roof, ask the GM if there are guards on the roof. If that knowledge is knowable, I am going to either tell you or ask you for a roll. 

Also, tell me your intent. Sometimes players ask these oblique questions, like “Is there a guard on the roof?”, so sometimes I give a basic answer. But if you tell me your intent, I can do a better job giving you my answer. So rather than ask me if a guard is on the roof, tell me something like, “I want to zipline down to the roof using my magic rope. Is there a time when the roof is clear, where I can do that?” 

I now have a lot of options for my answer. You don’t need there not to be guards on the roof the whole time; you need a window of time for your action. More often than not, I am going to say yes, and build some kind of check around your action to make it exciting, since we know the stake for that roll is going to be getting down off the roof before you get spotted by a guard. 

GM-Side

Clear up any mistakes or misunderstandings. While I listen to the players plan or brainstorm, I will interject anytime they are working with bad data. Make sure the shared narrative space is as aligned as possible. 

Ask for intent. Help your players get good at this skill. When they ask one of those oblique questions, don’t answer it; ask for the intention first. Once you understand the intent better, then answer.

Provide as much information as possible. Players will overthink things when they have a lack of information, and overthinking will also lead to limiting thoughts; again, working from limited data. Make sure players have as much information as they can reasonably obtain. You don’t have to just give it away to them; they can work for it, through skill checks, spent resources (spells, money, etc). Be generous with information so that they can work through their ideas and plans. 

Break Through Your Limits

Limiting thoughts is a problem for both sides of the table. For the players, it can prolong coming up with actions and plans. For the GM, it can remove potentially cool ideas from coming to the table. Both sides can work on policing limiting thoughts, and removing them from play. Doing so will make for more engaging and exciting play. 

What about you? Do you, as a player, have issues with limiting thoughts at the table? As a GM, do you run into this when you are running a game? From either side, how are you dealing with them? 

Join Ang, along with Jared and friend of the show, Carl Lehmann, as they talk about all the little details you need to have in place when playing RPGs in certain genres. We talk about genres with broad strokes, but when you dig down in, there are a lot of small details to decide before you get started.

Links:

THAC0 with Advantage: Genres of Fantasy

Your Mileage May Vary

Umdaar: Rebel Broadcast Edition

Symphony Entertainment

Join Ang, Josh, and JT as they talk about how to teach new rules to your tables. They cover their best practices, the difference between one-shots and campaigns, and many other aspects of incorporating new rules, systems, and mechanics to your table.

LINKS:

How To Make Your Own GM Screen

Libra Valoris

Edge Cases Series

Vox Machina Season Four Trailer

Prepping Your Game In Obsidian

Last year, Josh wrote a great intro article to Obsidian using it for prep: here. You should read that article as well. 

Obsidian In a nutshell

In essence, Obsidian is a low-tech database (vault). The application is quite smart. At its core, Obsidian data is just markdown (formatted text) files in folders. The application sits on top of that structure and provides functionality and formatting. 

What is great about this setup is that the data is yours. Should you want to change applications or Obsidian vanishes one day, your data is sitting in readable text files in a set of folders, and not trapped in a proprietary database container. You can port this data anywhere you want. 

Markdown text gives you a good amount of formatting options, and if you get handy at the syntax, you can format your text without having to take your hands off the keyboard, speeding up text entry, while still having a clean and organized look. 

Finally, Obsidian has plugins that are community-created and extend the functionality of the core application. 

Obsidian as your Campaign Manager

I do not use Obsidian to prep my games. I have been a OneNote fella for years, and OneNote is still my go-to for prep. Where I find the best use for Obsidian is as my Campaign Manager. 

Campaigns require managing a lot of information, and a lot of it is kind of small. Some entries will be large and detailed, but there will be an equal number (or more) of short descriptions for things like that Bartender in that town the characters went through in session 12. You won’t always know when a campaign element will be important again. 

Before Obsidian, I kept this data scattered in session prep pages and index cards that I filled out during the game. It was haphazard and required that I remember when something happened in order to track it down. It was inefficient during prep, when I had the time to look through things, and worse during the session, when I wanted to avoid “dead air” by looking things up. 

Using a database for managing the data is much better. For starters, I can see all my entries in a tree format, or I can search my notes, and there is a cool web tool that shows me the linkage between pages. Looking up items during prep or during play is much faster now. 

My Core Obsidian Setup

For any given game, I have a core Obsidian configuration that I build from. I keep this template as its own Vault in a folder. When I start a new campaign, I deploy a copy of this vault and finish customizing it. You could just use one vault for all your games, but I like having a vault per game. Keeps things tidy.

Community Plugins

I have some default community plugins that I find useful:

• Buttons – lets me make clickable buttons in a page that link to other pages.
• Dataview – this lets you write queries on pages (i.e., all the NPCs associated with a location). 
• Homepage – this creates a landing page for me anytime I open the vault.
• Paste Image Rename – this cleans up image names when you paste things into the vault.
• Tag Wrangler – I love using hashtags on my pages. Tag Wrangler helps you organize, fix, and migrate tags.
• Templater – allows you to create templates for certain types of pages (i.e., NPCs)

Core Folders

As Josh mentioned in their article, you can create folders to help organize your Obsidian entries. I have a core set of folders: 

• Assets – holds images and other attachments
• Characters – a page for each character in the campaign
• GM Notes – a place for my own notes
• Ideas – a folder for future ideas for sessions
• Locations – contains the various locations in the campaign. 
• NPCs – this contains entries for each NPC in the game
• Setting Materials – any entries for setting information in the game I am running.
• Templates – holds page templates for things like NPCs.

For each game, I will add folders based on the needs of the game. My Obsidian vault for Blades in the Dark has folders for Scores (where I keep a summary sheet of each score) and Factions (where I have a page for each major faction in the game). 

Custom Theme

I will also find a custom theme for the vault that is easy to read and reminiscent of the game I am running. For me, the most important thing about the theme is that I have different themes for each vault, to help me tell the difference between them.

Technical Considerations

By default, Obsidian resides on a single computer. If you want to use it across more than one device, you can either put the vault into a shared drive (iCloud, Google, Dropbox) or you can use their online service (there is a cost). I keep mine in a shared drive. 

What that allows me to do is to manage my campaign at my desk using the desktop client, but access the data from my iPad while I am running my game. 

Things I do for Campaign Management

As my campaign manager, Obsidian holds information about various campaign elements. An element gets added to Obsidian during prep or after a session, depending on where it was created. If an NPC or location was created while I was prepping the session, then I will add it to Obsidian before the session. If the element was created during the session, then I will add an entry after the session. 

Some other good information practices: 

• Hyperlinks – Obsidian, in a very wiki-like way, will help you create hyperlinks to other pages. Where possible, I will use hyperlinks to connect an entry to other entries. This turns your information into a web rather than a filing cabinet. 
• Tags – Organically, I create tags for pages. Some tags are for the type of content (#npc), and others may be for a specific PC (#mist), or others for session names (#deepmoor). I can then search for things by using these tags.
• Dataview – Dataview will let you create queries for page links, including searching for tags. I used dataview to create a dynamic list for things like NPCs related to a given PC. 

Updates

For me, this is where Obsidian became my killer Campaign Management app. At the bottom of each entry (regardless of type) have a Notes header. Under this header, I add a bullet for each session where this element came into play and add some notes about what happened. This way, if I go and look at a recurring NPC, I can see a list of all the times they came up in the campaign and what happened to them. 

In my Post-Game Debrief, I will go into Obsidian and add these entries to the notes section while the game is fresh in my head. It is a bit of work, but the payoff has been noticeable. 

First, the act of adding the notes to the pages reinforces in your own mind what happened in the game. Second, it gives your campaign that dynamic feel, that things do grow and change during the game. Third, during your prep or sessions, your ability to look up a given element is aided by the fact that you can search by session number or name. Or you might have Dataviews built to show all the elements updated in a given session. 

Manage Your Way

Obsidian is so flexible that there is no one way to use it. It’s lightweight framework and active community of plugins make it highly customizable. I found it easy to get started. Just a bit of working knowledge is enough to be able to start using it. If you do get into it, you can get into much more advanced features. There is a vast amount of information on YouTube for Obsidian. There are some videos for TTRPG use, but to get down the basics, you can watch the non-TTRPG ones, as many do a great job of getting you started. From there, you can set your vault up similar to mine or go off and make your own. 

Having a vault is nice, but it will only pay off if you get into the habit of entering new data and updating existing data. Figure out in your prep and your post-game debriefs where updating Obsidian fits for you. Make it a regular task as you manage your campaigns. 

Do you use Obsidian for campaign management? How do you have yours set up? What are your must-have plugins? If you don’t use Obsidian, what do you use for managing your campaign information?

Last month, I introduced some aspects of GM/player interactions, and I’m going finish off what I have for you on this topic here and now.

Make Things Interesting

GMs should set up and introduce interesting/difficult choices to the players. They don’t always have to be life or death. They don’t always have to be “save the victim or catch the villain” type choices either. Interesting choices are things that will hit with deep, emotional resonance for the players by way of what is important to their characters. There are also difficult choices to make where the PCs can gain advantage in one aspect of the story by sacrificing something important to them or losing ground in a different aspect of the story.

On the flip side of the conversation, players need to step up to challenges and do their best to conquer them. Yes, working around them is sometimes the smart thing to do. Yes, running away from a challenge can also be the proper action, but (as Ang likes to say), you’re playing the Big Damn Heroes, so you really should act like it.

Let Them Shine

GMs need to establish scenes, settings, and scenarios to allow the different PCs in the group to display their competencies. This is part of spotlight management. If there’s nothing to shine a light on, then why is there a spotlight in the first place? This basically means to tailor some challenges to allow PCs to leverage their special skills, abilities, and powers. If you can get a single challenge to require teamwork between the disparate abilities for a better chance of success, all the better.

For players, you’re going to see some amazing things tossed in front of you from the GM. If you want to see more of what you have on your metaphorical plate, compliment the GM on what you’ve experienced. This will naturally encourage the GM to include more of that type of interaction in future sessions. We, as a people, tend to focus on what we didn’t like in an experience, but if you can seek out the positives and reinforce those, then you’ll get more of those positives.

Celebrate Accomplishments

As a GM, be happy when a scenario, die roll, skill check, or some amazing plan of the PCs goes as it should or exceeds all expectations of success. Cheer them on. Even if that “nat 20 with max damage” critical hits your Big Bad and almost kills it in a single strike, cheer on the PCs. This will make everyone happier. Also, if things doesn’t quite go the way the players had planned or if a “nat 1, drop your sword” happens at the wrong moment, sympathize with the player who just had their precious math rocks betray them.

Players also need to celebrate the GM by congratulating them on a well-run session, an interesting experience, an engaging interaction, or a wonderful campaign. This will go a long way to prevent the GM from burning out and stepping out from behind the GM screen. If you want your GM to run more (and maybe longer) games, let them know that via compliments and thanks.

Critique (NOT Criticism)

Some definitions to start this section:

A critique is a somewhat formal process in which the carefully expressed judgments, opinions, or evaluations of both the good and bad qualities of something are delivered to the creator.

Criticism is most often used broadly to refer to the act of negatively criticizing someone or something.

GM’s will almost always have opinions on PC decisions, choices, plans of action, and approaches at overcoming challenges. Hold back on those while the game is actively going on unless a player is making a decision that goes against something their character knows, but the player does not. There are times where “in world knowledge” might be apparent to a character, but not their player. This could be because the player took a bathroom break during a key moment, missed a session, simply forgot a detail from many sessions ago, or maybe wasn’t exposed to that information in the first place. Once some certain set of actions are resolved, let your players know what they did well, how they could have maybe worked better together as a team, and if something went sideways, what they could have done to manage the situation better.

From a player perspective, the feedback loop via critiques to the GM are very important. This helps the GM bring forth more of the “bright spots” of the game to the players, and assists the GM in finding the “rough edges” that need to be sanded down to a more smooth interaction (or maybe eliminated completely). If you, as a player, find anything in the game (plot, story, theme, NPC, setting, situation, location, etc.) especially interesting or inspiring, let the GM know. The other side of the coin for pointing out unenjoyable moments is completely fair game, but try to not focus only on the negatives when delivering a critique. There are always shining moments in every game session.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this two-parter of an article. This particular topic has been sitting in my “Gnome Stew to do list” for a very long time, and I’m happy that I finally got it to bubble to the top. Do you have any interactions that I may have missed between the first and second article on this topic? Let me know! I’d love to discuss it with you in the comment section.