It’s early because it’s Thursday, not Friday, but also late because I didn’t do a rodeo last week. It’s special because it contains a metric ass-ton of GMing links (the metric ass-ton, of course, is an official gnomish unit of measure…).

Gnome Rodeos are our regular link roundups. Provided everyone doesn’t simultaneously stop talking about GMing for a week, you should see one most Fridays.

GMing Regulars

→ Dungeon Mastering: Yax reviews Keep on the Shadowfell, the first 4e adventure, and tackles the GM as general manager in response to our own Patrick Benson’s post here on the Stew, GM Means “General Manager.”

→ Musings of the Chatty DM: First he did the DMG, and now Chatty has reviewed the D&D 4e PHB. He’s also got a killer contest going with Johnn from RPTips — see the Contests section, below.

→ Roleplaying Tips: Issue #406 is all about easy GMing with one-sentence NPCs, and Johnn’s keystone article is one of my favorites to date. Tip #4 is solid gold: Make your NPCs’ traits relevant. “I would spend an hour on an NPC’s history, for example, but during games that information would have no impact, or worse, become obsolete or contradictory due to shifting details.”

GMing All Over the Place

→ ars ludi: Is treasure in your fantasy campaign just GP in a less convenient form? Read Treasure Tells a Story and you’ll never look at it the same way again.

→ D&D Insider: The Compendium is up. I’m much more interested in the rest of D&DI, which is still “coming soon.” (Via Dungeon Mastering.)

→ Deeper in the Game: Bankuei’s airships for his 5 Blades of Bahamut campaign are insane: “At the heart of each airship is a piece of a fallen star, which gives it the power of flight. The wind is channelled through a series of pipes to the fragment (the “core”) which produces tones and songs which remind it of the sky it once called home. Longing for home, it rises and sings in return.” Tell me that doesn’t make you want to use airships in your next game! He also includes a great rule that, should I run an airship game again, I will most certainly use: “Player characters who fail? They fall off and either catch on to some protrusion half way down the ship or fall into something which does not kill them[.]”

→ How to Start a Revolution in 21 Days or Less: In Teamwork and Storming (watch out for Shadowfell spoilers!), Oddysey makes a surprising point about D&D 4e: fighters now require more experience and tactical acumen than wizards, the exact opposite of previous editions — so if you’ve got a new player, don’t automatically suggest they play a fighter. Sounds reasonable to me. (Via Trollsmyth.)

→ Portfolio of Jesse van Dijk: All of his stuff is amazing, but Project Indigo — a vertical fantasy port city — is one of the best campaign concepts I’ve ever seen. Think Cauldron, from Paizo’s first Adventure Path, only cooler. Just looking at it makes me want to game. (Via Digg.)

→ of Dice and Dragons: Scot has a good post up about natural disaster-proofing your campaign, all about going low-tech and having offline resources ready to go.

→ Pen and Paper Portal: Coop’s Premade Campaign series continues with The Book of Time, The Broken Clocktower and The Shipwreck.

→ Worldwide Adventure Writing Month: From July 1st to 31st, GMs all over the world have been challenged to write a complete adventure for their favorite system. Six of the authors here on Gnome Stew are stepping up to the plate with, ahem, a short adventure. How about you? (Check out last year’s free scenarios.)

Contests

→ The One-Sentence NPC Contest: The Chatty DM and Roleplaying Tips have teamed up for this awesome contest. There are a shitload of cool prizes, and you can enter as many NPCs as you like (or just read neat single-sentence NPCs).

→ Obsidian Portal sponsoring featured campaigns: You can do some pretty amazing stuff with Obsidian Portal, and now in addition to making organizing and presenting your game online easy, they’re giving prizes to featured campaigns. No specifics yet (books are involved), but here’s the current featured campaign: Rain Like Blood.

Have a great weekend and, should you happen to be celebrating it, a great Fourth of July. Alysia and I will probably spend ours playing Lego Indiana Jones, which I’ll be following up with my first session playing D&D 4e on Saturday. How about you?

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Just a little peek

The more I DM, the more I want to roll in the open. Mostly, it keeps me honest and it dampens hard feelings when the rolls go against the players. But I still want my adventure notes, which are in a three-ring binder, behind a DM screen. The logistics get complicated. I think I need a dice roller that doubles as a DM screen. I guess a visit to the wood-working shop is in order.

Ker-plunk, thunk, take out a chunk

Big oversized dice and dice made of metal gouge holes in my kiitchen table. Sorry guys, but they’ve been banned.

Hoist the colors

I think my blue dice don’t like being in the pouch with my red dice. A lot of low rolls since I mixed them in. So far, my white dice haven’t changed. The perils of having patriotically-colored dice.

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Immortal. Classic. Throbbing with manly manhood. Everything a roleplaying game should be. Synnibarr! All others are just pale imitations.

Never heard of World of Synnibarr? You owe it to yourself to buy a copy on eBay (mine was $10), or at the very least to read the classic RPGnet review.

Thus Continues the Gospel According to Synnibarr

III. Ptoing! Your puny missile cannot penetrate my medieval plate armor!

Armor in Synnibarr offers logarithmic protection. And makes no sense. So not only is the armor system terrible, but let’s go get our TI-83 graphing calculators and figure out how terrible.

My character is wearing Sunstone Plate armor. (That’s plate armor in the true sense, not some powered sci-fi robo-armor.) Sunstone Plate reduces damage by a factor of 10,000 — so for every 10,000 points of damage I should take, I actually take one point.

You shoot a tactical-range Cobra Shadow missile with a 200′ blast radius at me. It does 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 points of damage. I’m fucked, right?

Nope.

My plate armor knocks that down to a paltry 100-1,000 points of damage. Every race in the game except gnomes (wait, WTF?) can survive 100 points of damage. Many could live through several hundred and a couple could shrug off max damage.

Think killing PCs should essentially be impossible? You’re in good hands. This is what happens when a player who has only had abusive GMs designs an RPG.

(Thanks to Gnome Stew reader DaveTheGame for suggesting this entry in the gospel.)

IV. Any monster can be improved by adding wings.

Sometimes you can amp up an otherwise meh game element by giving it a little extra kick — something cool that makes it stand out to your players and turns it into a memorable part of your campaign.

Wings, for example. Wings are cool, right? I mean, who hasn’t dreamed of being able to fly?

Welcome to the Synnibarr school of game design (max flight speeds are in parentheses):

• Flying deer (120 mph)
• Flying elk (120 mph)
• Flying lion (100 mph)
• Flying sea-horse (150 mph)
• Flying tiger (200 mph)
• Giant flying fish (120 mph)
• Giant flying grizzly bear (100 mph)
• Winged cobra (400 mph)
• Winged horse (112 mph — why 112, specifically?)

This is the same bestiary section that features killer dolphins, temporal were-wraiths and, of course, the giant mutant fire clam, so I take the presence of flying elk, et al, as a signal that the authors were out of ideas. Given the rest of the monsters, maybe that’s a good thing.

As a GM, when your creative well has run dry, take a break and let it recharge. It could be burnout, it could be you just need to play instead of GMing for a session or two. It happens to all of us (sometimes more than once), and it’s OK — stop before the flying grizzly bears put in an appearance.

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A few years later (but still several years ago…darn I feel old!), I was discussing this arrangement with a fellow gamer buddy. He had a rather heated reaction against it, as he felt that he shouldn’t have to pay anyone to play an RPG and if a GM at a table he was sitting at tried to institute such a plan, he’d leave the group in a heartbeat.

My reaction was different. As the regular GM for my groups, I often fork out $100s more in game materials than anyone else at the table. I also invest a lot of time in prepping adventures. It didn’t seem out of line to me for a GM to ask for “financial aid.” My inner gnomish capitalist wouldn’t even mind if the GM charged a compensation (pure profit) fee if she could get the group to agree.

The only time I’ve ever actually paid a fee was for LARPing, which primarily covered the cost of the venue (although the GMs involved did pocket the remainder). In other cases, I’ve borrowed books while running a campaign. I’ve never seriously considered charging for my time and expense.

So the Hot Button question is this: Under what circumstances would you deem it okay to charge money to run a regular gaming group? Do you currently charge (or pay to play) and, if so, what are your circumstances?

Bonus question: Would you have different expectations of a GM if you paid a fee?

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Last year’s WoAdWriMo generated seven free adventures that you can download or read online. The guidelines last year included a goal of 32 pages, but that suggestion is gone from this year’s event — you can write as little or as much as you like.

The many lazy gnomes who write Gnome Stew will be climbing out of our stew pot and creating a WoAdWriMo adventure together. Maybe “assembling a possibly unplayable mess” might be more accurate, we’ll just have to see.

We asked for an extension (see: legendary gnomish laziness), but the pitiless master nice gentleman cracking the whip while cackling madly organizing WoAdWriMo, Jeff Rients, said no. So we get 31 days (minus Independence Day and July 5th, Hangover Day), just like the rest of the world.

Want to join us and hopefully lots of other GMs in writing a free adventure for your favorite RPG? Of course you do! If nothing else, join in so you can write something better than our Frankensteinian monstrosity.

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It’s not in their makeup. They’re adventurers! They’re goblin-killers and tomb raiders and dragon-slayers, for goodness sakes. They don’t punch-in at a timeclock and they aren’t worried about the 401K. 

If they want something, they go for it. When they see injustice, they take action. And if there is plunder involved, don’t stand in their way. You just might get run over.

So, why as the DM, do I suggest (note, I don’t say insist) that the PCs invest ranks in either Craft, Profession, Knowledge or Perform? Short of crafting magic items or bardic music, they have little application in your basic dungeon crawl. If the game is about adventuring, why am I worried about how the PCs make a living?

Because …

It’s a shortcut backstory 

If you’re blessed by players who love to craft elaborate backstories explaining how their PC came to the adventuring life, great. To be honest, I’ve found few gamers who fit that mold. A lot would rather not even bother coming up with a name for their character for the first few levels if I didn’t insist on that much, at least. 

But asking them to devote at least a couple of ranks in one of the trade skills at least gives them a shorthand version of their apprentice-aged years. The trade skills aren’t a perfect fit. But it’s a beginning.

And maybe next time, you might inspire the players to write (or say) a sentence or two about the character’s origin.

Heroes are special people in a (largely) mundane world

This second bit presumes something on my part, I know.  Your game world may well differ. But I see the baseline D&D fantasy milleu filled with ordinary people doing ordinary things, just as in our medieval times. But the heroes (and villains) who occupy this world have special abilities, command powerful magic, and perform feats that outshine most folk.

But they didn’t start out that way, obviously. Training, luck or divine intervention fashioned them to be heroes. But to give them a sense of place, a sense of the world they belong to, it’s fitting they at least have something in their skill set that allows them to relate to the world at large. Doesn’t it make sense to have a heroic ranger demonstrate the capability to craft his own longbow? Shouldn’t a wizard brew her own alchemical mixtures? Certainly the fighter once made a living hiring out as a merchant or city guard? Those are the things I mean. 

Now I’ve toyed with the idea of instituting a house rule, allocating 2 bonus skill points to every character so they can apply them in the trade skills. Two ranks in a given skill won’t unbalance anything, the players don’t feel like they’re being “forced” to buy ranks in a largely background item, and it accomplishes my goal of having them fit into the world around them.

What do you think of my solution? Or should I try to tie Profession more closely to wealth, as the d20 Modern rules do? Have you tried something else that works in your campaign? I’d love to hear what works for you.

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Back when I was collecting Star Wars Starship Battles minis, I found a site I was really pleased with for ordering them: Miniature Market. They shipped promptly and offered good discounts, so they were my first stop for D&D minis singles.

For about a buck a mini, I snagged 26 great PC choices for $27 plus shipping. I opted for a broad mix of races and classes of both genders, and chose versatile minis that could stand in for multiple classes.

Since I don’t care about them as pieces for the actual D&D Miniatures game (yet, at least), I found that common and uncommon minis could be had for $0.50-$2.00, most of them in the $1.00 range. That seems totally reasonable to me, and a whole lot cheaper than buying boosters and hoping for PC minis.

I know this isn’t exactly a news flash — D&D Miniatures singles can be had on the cheap! — but I thought it was worth sharing anyway. For about the price of a hardcover gaming book, I got over two dozen PC-suitable minis, and a nice start on my collection. (Next up will likely be a bulk order of cheap, common monsters like orcs and skeletons, and the few cheap PCs I didn’t snag this time around.) Though I bought them primarily for D&D, there’s no reason I couldn’t use them for any fantasy RPG.

If you’re in the market for cheap minis, I recommend this approach. What do you do to get your minis fix? Any other good ways to score useful prepainted minis in bulk?

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Last night I typed out a reference guide for my players. The reference guide covers the basics: core game mechanic, common modifiers, basics of combat, typical manuevers, etc. Over my years of GMing, I’ve found that reference guides are very useful when there is only one copy of the core book at the table.

Another great reason for personally designing a reference guide is that it forces me, the GM, to look critically at the system. What is important to know, and how do the different rules fit together? Before I started making my reference guide, I thought I’d boned up enough on the system. While writing it, I realized that much of my knowledge was incomplete (or, in some cases, outright wrong). After writing the guide, I had a far deeper understanding of the system.

A few thoughts on reference guides as a way to better understand the system:

• While you’d think that a section on the core mechanic would contain everything you need to know, many RPGs scatter their rules throughout different sections.  You may find a rule that you missed on your first or second skim (okay, I skim. Guilty as charged).
• Reference guides should be as light as possible, which means that you should be able to explain things succinctly in plain English (or Gnomish, or whatever your language of choice) to your players. If you can’t, then you probably don’t understand the rules as well as you should.
• Some games include a lot of options, such as big spell lists or specific combat maneuvers. A quick-and-dirty reference guide enables you to understand, for example, all of the combat options available to the players and what makes “charge” or “lunge” different.
• It enables you to troubleshoot potential problems or broken mechanics before starting the game.

In sum, writing a reference guide is like making an outline for the final exam. It enables me to distill all the rules into something more digestable and easier to understand how it all works together. What say you? Do you employ self-made reference sheets? What benefits or issues have you had when using them?

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Almost a month later to the day, there was a bit of a small groundswell of support for them actually making a game around the concept (What other kind of groundswell do you get from a game about gnomes after all?) and in the discussion, Chris coined the phrase Gnomecha.  It was an instant hit.

Within another month’s time, OKG was announcing their newest product: Gnomecha. Everyone that had been in support of the idea over on YouMeetInATavern (at the time still TreasureTables) was excited about the new product.

*Cue Ominous Music*

We don’t know how the Grue managed to catch the staff of OKG, but their site and forums haven’t been updated since June 2007 or so and despite attempts to get in touch we haven’t heard from Chris. (and if anyone out there reading this knows more on this, please drop us a line.  Chris was a nice guy who genuinely wanted to bring awesome RPGs to his customers and the fact he’s not answering e-mails makes worry-warts out of several of us gnomes)

This casts the release of Gnomecha into a gray area. Thus, I’ve decided that if I want Victorian gnomish steam-driven battle-suit arena gladiatorial combat, it falls into my own hands to produce. So after careful consideration, I’ve decided to write it myself.

Because of the sticky issue of giving the concept to Chris and his company actually starting development on a product and inability to reach them to get consent to work on a project of my own, I’ve made the following decisions:

1. What I’m working on has to be sufficiently different than what OKG had planned.  Thus, I’m sticking to my original concept of steam driven battlesuits as opposed to large-scale mechs as featured in Gnomecha
2. What I’m working on has to make an attempt to be compatable with anything OKG may eventually produce.
3. This isn’t standalone.  This is a suppliment to OKG’s vision of Gnomecha.  It’s an alternate setting/timeline and a rules system tweaked for work with that

So that’s the story of what I’m doing and why.  The last important question is: “Why here?”  Why Design Gnomecha Victoriana at Gnome Stew? Despite the immediately obvious thematic appropriateness,  I still need a DMing hook.  Luckily for me, designing new settings, rules, etc… is bread and butter for most DMs and the decisions I make in designing Gnomecha Victoriana will be familiar to every DM out there. Which is really good because I’m just flying by the seat of my pants on this one so I’ll be milking everything I can out of the comments.

Stay tuned for Part 2 when I start discussing the first three steps: Getting Player Buyin, Research, and Picking a system…

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Death-proofed PCs

Everything I’d heard about Fourth Edition D&D was how hard it was to kill first-level characters — they’re resilient, they’re loaded with offensive capabilities and they’ve got a batch of hit points. If that’s true, they’re probably Troy-proof. It’s unlikely I’ll kill a single PC when I take a turn behind the DM screen for a crack at the new game.

Well, that’s what I told myself.

My hobgoblin longbow is awesome

I see no reason why a second hobgoblin archer should gain a +2 attack bonus on an identical target if his fellow archer scores a hit — but that’s the rule. To all the PCs I skewered this way, I’m sorry.

To Kill a Marking Bird

I kind of like this marking ability, but for the life of me I can’t keep the marked opponents clear from the unmarked ones — and we’re using minis! (That’s because I love minis!) First thing Wizards of the Coast needs to do is produce a game aid — some kind of disk or chit — that lets me indicate which minis are marked. And they need to do it fast. (Otherwise, I may be forced to house rule marking to games rule oblivion.) I want to avoid conversations like: 

PC: This one’s the one I marked with my paladin’s Divine Challenge.

DM: You mean that one over there. 

PC: No, no, this one over here.

DM: I could’ve sworn you said that other one, instead. 

PC: No, I was clearly pointing at this one. 

DM: Whatever …. he’s marked. And he will attack the wizard.

PC: For attacking someone else, he takes damage. That should be enough to kill him.

DM:  You’re right. He’s dead. And that means this entire exchange was for nothing. Who’s turn is it next?

Spending Your XP budget

I built every encounter according to Encounter Components formula on pages 56-57 in the DMG. No more Challenge Ratings, just figure out the XP for a typical encounter appropriate to five PCs of that level and plug in the monsters until you reach your target. Easy as pie. In fact, this system makes designing encounters go very quick.

So what happens when the PCs forge ahead, and the monsters from the first encounter sorta get rolled into the batch of monsters lined up for the second encounter?  You get a giant melee on the first floor of the watchtower against which first-level characters are clearly overmatched.

It was a slaughter, plainly put. The hobgoblin soldier, his goblin minions and the goblin sharpshooters proved to be too much. Heck, the hobgoblin archers from the first encounter really didn’t even enter the fray — and the minions were too busy fighting over the dead tiefling’s backpack like some strange “Dora The Explorer” episode (Backpack! Backpack!) to be a factor, either. 

Total Party Kill. Right out of the gate. And I played fair, darnit!

Clearly some adjustments are in order.

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Almost all settings and campaigns seem to assume that pcs are a breed apart. They may start weak but, if they survive, they can eventually become extremely powerful and/or capable. Ok, suppose there are such special people in the world and that they are born with something extra that gives them this superhuman potential. Now suppose that the pcs are not such people. How to make a game where they are, say, peasant conscripts in some noble’s war of revenge for some imagined slight or they are henchmen of an adventuring party with a disturbing habit of using them as cannon fodder and trap springers, or perhaps low powered mages specialized in household spells exciting? And how do you run such a game where the characters are takers, not givers, of orders without turning it into a railroadfest? Finally, what sort of goals can the players have beyond day to day survival that will keep their interest in spite of their knowledge of their limited potential?

Scope

A good way to make this work is by shrinking the scope. People don’t ask random peasants to act like special forces troops- while that’s fun for heroic PCs to play, it doesn’t fit the tone of the world that you’re trying to create. If you were running a campaign of say, the hundred years war, you might spend weeks roleplaying the tedium of forced marches, the friendships that spring up under pressure, the difficulties of keeping fed in a hostile land, camp duties and relationships, etc.

Kobolds kidnapping your sister sounds like a cliched opening for a D&D campaign, but kobolds are a difficult adversary for apprentices or first level NPC-classed heroes. For such characters a dozen kobolds aren’t critters you slaughter casually and just swig a healing potion. They are a foe that will take planning, cunning, and luck for a few untrained people to beat.

Goals

By picking good goals, you can make any power level interesting. Spend time during character generation to generate PCs with complex relationships. Take advantage of their lack of power and embed them in their location. (They won’t move around as much.) Jealous lovers and cruel guild masters are difficult opponents for anyone under their thumb to oppose. Make the plots personal. Whether you’re level one or twenty, a rival who spits on you will spark passion, even if he’s just another scribe in the copy room and you’re only competing to become the Duke’s seneschal.

A good relationship map of the characters and recurring NPCs can help you brainstorm the new night’s adventure. A mysterious threatening note, your character’s son or daughter caught with their pants down, or the guild master trying to give your hard earned spot to his idiot son can make for a solid plot that doesn’t require tactical nukes to solve.

Setting

Another solution is to pick a familiar setting, like a modern day campaign. Players should have a good idea about how ordinary people can have outsized effects without powers. Playing mortals in the World of Darkness, you could run a completely mundane game- the characters could be ordinary cops inspired by your group’s love of The Wire or Law and Order. Even without magical powers, ordinary police can use their influence for public good or self aggrandizement.

Investigative adventures work well in any setting. Figuring out what happened doesn’t require fiery confrontation- just an interesting mystery. steady work by the PCs, and specialized knowledge. Low level divinations can have a huge impact on these types of adventures, as can a good gather information roll, science skills in a CSI game, or Mythos in Call of Cthulu.

Other Issues

The players need to buy in to a low powered game. If they want to hack and slay but you force them to make low powered characters, they’ll be frustrated when their actions kill them off. Once they aim for a different goal it won’t feel like a poor man’s version of the standard game.

The system you pick will influence the characters that result. If you’re trying to drive home the horrors of war, abstract damage systems like Hero and D&D might not be your best choice. (Break out the old Rolemaster crit tables!) If you’re looking for a way to show normal people in extraordinary situations, make sure that your game can handle ordinary people well. If ordinary people are an after thought in your game’s design, your players may wind up playing heroes who suck instead of ordinary people who struggle.

Railroading can be avoided just as easily in at low power as high. You’ll still need to prepare prompts for the plot, so they don’t just wander around playing out their lives as accountants. Connecting them to the plot can be an extra burden, particularly if you’re used to giving the PCs plots because “they’re the only heroes are in town”.

The best way to ensure that orders don’t become railroading is to avoid ordering things related to the heart of your game. If you’re playing a military game with a focus on how the PCs treat local NPCs, then have the leader give the soldiers tasks (but not specify how to accomplish them). If the characters are caravan guards and you’re interested in tactical play, don’t have the merchants who hire them understand tactics and don’t let the merchants micromanage the PC deployments. If you’re playing a soldiers in war, the whole game can be about the tension of following orders versus your heart and instincts. Easiest of all is soap opera play- orders become just one more hurdle crowding in the path between you and your true love (or this week’s guest star).

Are you excited about playing normal people in an extraordinary world? What advice did I miss for making this type of game practical and fun? Have you played (or run) in a campaign like this? Tell us about your experiences.

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I’m not suggesting that you treat the GM role as work. It isn’t and it shouldn’t be. The role of a GM should be fun, but to maximize that fun you do have to apply a little self-discipline and planning to achieve your goal. What I am suggesting is that you recognize what parts of the GM’s role may not be fun, and then work out a method to make those tasks as painless as possible.

Getting the Band Back Together

Scheduling games is a task that really becomes a pain as you get older from my personal experience. With careers, marriages, and children all requiring more and more of yours and your player’s times it isn’t unusual to spend an hour going around the table saying “Nope, I can’t make that date. How about the next weekend?”. People live busy lives these days, and even the best laid plans can be trashed by the unexpected.

If this sounds like your group do yourself a favor and create an online calendar using a tool like Google Calendar. Work with your group to schedule your game sessions out for the next three months and make sure that all of your players can access the calendar. You can then arrange for email and SMS reminders to keep your group informed. It won’t guarantee that everyone can make every game, but it will make it easier for you and your group to coordinate your schedules with.

On the Road Again

As a GM, I’ve acquired a lot of inventory. Maps, battle mat, miniatures, markers, dice (tons of dice), scenery, pencil box, notebooks, gaming books, and a lot of other stuff. I’ve learned that not only do I need to plan for the needs of the GM, but I also need to plan for the needs of the players (i.e. - “I forgot my character sheet, my book, and I didn’t bring anything to write with. You have all of that stuff right?”). Needless to say, on game day I have a lot of junk with me.

This isn’t a problem when I host the game at my place, but occasionally we game at another person’s home. For those occasions I’ve organized my gaming gear into two categories: essentials that I will most likely use at every game, and non-essentials that may be used only for that particular game. Take all of those essentials and acquire something to transport them with easily. For $20 I picked up one of these mobile toolboxes on clearance. When I need to run a game at a site other than home I just load up the toolbox in my car and grab those non-essential items that I want to use for that particular session. Now I’m ready to GM on the go.

Delegate the Small Stuff, Focus On the Big Stuff

Like any successful manager you should delegate out smaller tasks whenever possible. Have someone else be in charge of snacks and food. Have one of the players make sure that the table is cleared and ready for the game. Put someone in charge of initiative and keeping track of the combat rounds. Don’t just ask for volunteers though, state exactly what you would like to delegate to another person and then ask who will do it. Saying “I need a volunteer.” is the quickest way to ensure that hardly anyone will volunteer.

If you say “I don’t want to interrupt the game to order the pizza. I want a player to take the order for the table and to place the order before 6pm so that we are not starving by the time the food arrives. Who can handle that for the group?” you will probably have much better results. You have given a reason for the volunteer work and you have made it clear what it is that you expect to happen.

Note that I did not suggest that someone else may want to consider taking the task with my choice of words. Instead use a tone that implies that you won’t do the task. This is not meant to boss the players around, but it does send a clear message that gets you the help that you need from the group to run the best game that you can for them. And if your players are helping out with these tasks you should make it your number one priority to show gratitude for their efforts with a game that rocks.

Infinite Problems But One Approach For Solving Them All

Before your next session try and incorporate a few of these suggestions and see if they work for you. Some may, and some may not. You are going to have to think about your own game and come up with what works best for you and your group. For that I offer this final piece of advice:

Make a list of the GM tasks that you do not enjoy doing. If someone else can do it, delegate that task. If you have to do it, improve your process for that task.

That is really all there is to it. Recognize the problem and fix it if possible, make it less painful if it can’t be fixed, or give it to someone else who considers it a challenge and not a problem. Give it a shot and see how it goes.

That is my opinion on the matter, so what is yours? Leave your comments for others to read and share your own experiences with me and other members of the GnomeStew community. And no matter what happens, don’t forget that the GM is a player too! Have fun with it!

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Note from Chef Telas: I apologize for my absence from the Gnome Stew kitchens over the last few weeks. Our first child showed up on June 5th. Not only was she over two weeks early, but the first thing she did was break my wife’s water, probably not the last thing she’s going to break… Everyone’s doing fine, but since then, we’ve been knee-deep in diapers, bottles, breastpumps, books, pamphlets, lactation consultants, doctor visits, relatives, friends, neighbors, paperwork, and various unidentifiable infant accessories. The only thing we don’t have is sleep. I’ll post as time, sleep, and newborn allows.

Random Thoughts on Gaming, Gamers, and Other Things.

• When deciding whether to follow the spirit or the letter of the rules, pick the one that’s going to result in the most fun. Consistency is important, but not nearly as important as fun.
• It’s okay to tell your friends and fellow gamers that they could use some hygiene. Nobody was born with the knowledge that daily showers are a good thing.
• The most important element in a game is the GM. A gaming group can ignore or route around bad rules or bad players, but they cannot deal with a bad GM except by finding another.
• GMing draws on many skill sets: knowledge of the game mechanics, history, philosophy, science, math, popular culture, leadership, communication, listening, managing small groups, scheduling, acting, etc. It’s the perfect hobby, because there is always room for improvement.

Things Overheard at Gen Con:

• “My email address? Um, I’m between ISPs right now.”
• “I kill things on the weekend.”
• (On Saturday, referring to a Friday night get-together) “By the time I got back to the hotel, all my favorite shows were on SciFi, so I just stayed in.”

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One thing I’ve found about this method is that it’s almost inevitable that I’m to going to get GM’s block during prep. I reach a point where I just don’t know what should happen next — I’m stuck. I start by doing a little freeform brainstorming to see if I can get past the block, but a lot of times this doesn’t work.

What always works is hopping in the shower.

When I need to get my ideas flowing again, I count on shower insight to get me through. This shakes out in one of two ways, but in both cases, I spend my shower thinking out loud about the game.

• Poof, my GM’s block is gone! The block clears. I get an idea or two that fits perfectly, and as soon as I’m out of the shower I write them down and get working again. I’m consistently surprised how often this works — it’s not like it’s a highly scientific method arrived at after years of intensive study. I’d say this works about 75% of the time.
• The gears slowly start turning again. I don’t have an a-ha! moment, but I get a couple of ancillary ideas that are useful — and loosen my mental block. When I sit back down in front of the computer, a little brainstorming or staring into space gets me back on track, and I get past the block then. This happens the other 25% of the time.

So far, shower insight hasn’t let me down. I’m sure it will someday, but I hope that day is far off!

Taking a break to get past writer’s block isn’t a new idea, but what surprises me about shower insight is its 100% success rate. I’ve tried different things to clear writer’s or GM’s block in the past, and while they work more often than not, this works the best for me.

You might find that for you it’s best to go for a quick jog, play a couple rounds of Halo, spend some quality time on the porcelain throne or watch an episode of your favorite TV show — any activity that gets you away from the computer and lets your mind roam.

But give shower insight a try — you never know, it might work just as well for you…

What techniques do you use to get through GM’s block?

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He also started a forum at Treasure Tables where many of the gnomes met online and discussed our current games, sought help for problems that we encountered at the gaming table, and posted our ideas for adventures and campaigns to get feedback from the other forum members. All was right with the world.

Then Martin closed down the Treasure Tables blog. The Hutts had a bounty on his head (so I hear), and you know how that goes! The forces of chaos entered into our happy lives and mass panic took hold over the forum members. I’ll never forget the day that I saw one emoticon savagely attack another over a scrap of html code. Those little smiley faces have a real dark side to them.

But then Martin founded Gnome Stew using his secret recipe for Treasure Tables with a new multi-author twist (again, I hear that he choked the head Hutt to death with a chain while wearing a bronze bikini and was free to roam the web again). Order was coming back to our lives. Except, what would happen to the Treasure Tables forum?

Well, dear reader, do not fear! The Treasure Tables forum is now You Meet In A Tavern! A forum dedicted to GMs helping each other out and sharing their collective lessons learned. Martin honored me by agreeing to let me migrate the forum to the new site so that the community would remain vibrant and active. The Treasure Tables community lives on in the form of Gnome Stew for your blog cravings and You Meet In A Tavern for your forum fix.

So check out You Meet In A Tavern at either http://www.youmeetinatavern.com or http://www.ymiat.com and browse through our many posts and threads to pick up great GMing tips from great GMs. Plus registration is free to all, so why not create an account* today and start contributing your own unique perspective to the boards? Trust me, you’ll be glad that you did.

And beware of savage emoticons…

* Existing users of the Treasure Tables forums are already members of You Meet In A Tavern. Your username and password have not changed.

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