Do you know how to take notes? I’m not talking about transcribing the events at your table verbatim, or jotting down panicked phrases from random sessions that may or may not be in chronological order.

I’m talking about actual, useful, player notes.

For the longest time, I trusted my memory as a player. I relied on my brain for story to remember the events in the order that they happened. Now, either I got older, or I just got more honest with myself. I’ve realized that my memory wasn’t sufficient. In fact, it was pretty dang fallible. I also, unfortunately, realized that even though I’d spent more time in school than not, I didn’t actually know how to take good notes.

So today, let’s dig into how and why we take notes as players, and figure out how we can do it even better.

START HERE

How are notes handled at your table? Does everyone contribute to a collaborative notes document? Is one person the designated record keeper, and thus the single source of truth for everything that transpires in your campaign? Is it the Wild West, with everyone taking their own notes in whatever format they find most useful?

My tables tend to default to that last option. We all take our own notes and reference them at the beginning of our sessions in a recap. But we also never really talked about how we would take notes for our campaigns. Our process developed organically, but I think it’s valuable to discuss it at session zero, because how you take your notes could greatly enhance everyone’s experience at the table.

For example, a campaign based around a team of arcane investigators all contributing their skills and expertise to solving major magical crimes would benefit greatly from a shared notes document. That way everyone can contribute and share information.

Likewise, a back-stabby game about a thieves’ guild almost requires everyone to keep their own notes (and keep them secret)!

Single-source tables, where one person essentially acts as the “board secretary” (very different from a “bored secretary”), can also make gameplay a lot easier on folks who might have attention problems.

But also…imagine that back-stabby game with a table secretary acting as the only one taking notes and doing recaps…what if they’re the traitor?

Deciding who’s taking the notes will help make the other choices later in this article a lot easier to figure out, so make sure it’s one of the first things you discuss as a group.

IN CHARACTER OR OUT?

Let’s say you’re the one taking notes. Maybe not the only one, but definitely one of the ones. The next thing you’ve got to decide is whether or not you’re taking your notes in character, because that will determine what you actually write down.

If your notes are in-character and you’re not in a scene? You’re not writing down what happened there, unless one of the other characters recounts the events later. And at that point, you better be writing down exactly what your character heard.

Only taking your notes in character can lighten the cognitive load for you, since you don’t have to constantly track what everyone else is doing beyond what you would normally do to stay engaged at the table.

Plus, your notes document becomes a kind of in-world artifact as it is essentially your character’s diary.

Taking notes out of character, though, allows you to connect elements from disparate scenes, make observations your character might not realize, and collaborate with the other players on a more meta-level as you try to figure out the BBEG’s doomsday plans.

Regardless of your choice, I highly suggest you stay consistent, because if you flip-flop between the two styles, you’ll find you won’t remember what is and isn’t character knowledge. If you absolutely have to note something that goes against your chosen style, make sure you flag it in your notes as something aberrant.

KNOW YOUR TYPE

Personal story time: right out of grad school, I got a job working for a closed captioning company. I spent most of my days transcribing Discovery Network shows and late-night television. While I’m not as fast as a court stenographer, I can transcribe what I hear in almost real time.

If I reach a flow state, I can let my fingers do their thing while I stay engaged with the story. (But I don’t, because it’s exhausting and feels too much like work.)

The Stenographer type of note taker does this to some degree, either in structured paragraphs or multiple bullet points. They go deep, and they go detailed.

The Mind Mapper, on the other hand, focuses on tiny snippets, grazing on the events of the session like a hungry person going to town on the appetizer table at a fancy party.

Mind Mappers are also more visual, preferring non-linear note-taking. (And often coming off like Charlie Day in that one Always Sunny gif about conspiracy theories.

Lastly, there’s the All Vibes note taker, who somehow manages to grab a name here, a phrase there, a good quote, and maybe the stats of a magic item, but can still look at those crumbs of data and recount exactly what happened in every session.

In truth, we’re all probably a little bit of each, but knowing where you lean helps you figure out the next bit.

PICK YOUR MEDIUM

Once you know your style, you’ll know the medium that works best for you: physical or digital.

For example, nine times out of ten Stenographers will type faster than they write, and a Mind Mapper might prefer paper.

Each medium has its pros and cons. Physical notebooks are versatile and usually cheap (unless you go overboard).

Digital, meanwhile, allows you to share, search, and back up your notes a lot more easily.

There are also plenty of apps available to you, both free and paid. Phil and I have each talked a lot about Obsidian (here and here), and there’s always OneNote and Google Docs if that’s your jam, just to name a very few.

ACTUALLY TAKING NOTES

All of that out of the way, you’re ready to actually start writing things down.

Cool.

What do you write down? How do you actually note?

If you want to get real fancy with your notes, I highly recommend looking at YouTube channels devoted to students and studying tips. There’s a lot of really cool mindsets and frameworks you can practice that will help you take in, note, and process information like a pro. (And on the plus side, the skills transfer over into your life as a student or someone working in an office or corporate setting.)

However, if, like me, you don’t have time to rewire your brain, then here’s a solid starting point: The Five Ws (+ extras).

In my article on GM Prep in Obsidian, I talk about my “Five Ps”: Plot, Persona, Places, Props, and Procedures (rules). That helps my GM brain organize things, but when I’m on the other side of the screen, I find it easier to think like a reporter:

• Who – Note important NPCs, the ones that have names, or the mysterious nameless ones that your GM keeps describing. Get more than just their name if you can. Context matters. Writing down Delilah won’t tell you much, but writing down “Delilah, New York City, recently broke up with the bard from her hometown” tells you plenty.
• What – These are goals. What people (PCs or NPCs) are trying to do. Noting these things will help you get back into the story after you’ve been gone for a week or a month or three. Think of it as your quest log, if that’s helpful to you.
• Where – Locations you’ve been, places you’re going, spots where big stuff went down.
• When – If any information is time-sensitive, you should note when it’s going to expire.
• Why – Motivations, again yours or NPCs. These are different than goals. Your whole party might have the goal of “Getting to San Francisco,” but each of you will likely have different reasons for making the trip. Noting down motivations helps you get back into character faster and stay there longer.
• How – You overcame the encounter! How’d you do it? Conversely, you failed to overcome the encounter. What did you already try? I’m not talking about results on the die. I’m talking about the actions you took. The important ones. The ones with consequences.
• Level Ups – This one isn’t so much an in-the-moment item, more so an in-between-the-moments note. Whenever you level up, or advance your character, I highly recommend noting what choices you made at that level. Nothing is worse than having to reverse engineer a 15th-level character to figure out when you forgot to take a feat or where you got that +2 to your reflex save.

Now, I’m obviously a note nerd, but I firmly believe taking notes will help you stay engaged with the game and make it easier for you to get back into the story and into character between breaks.

What are some of your favorite note-taking tips and tricks? Leave them in the comments. (And let me know if you’d play in that back-stabby game with the (maybe) less-than-truthful single-source notetaker. It would require the right table, but it could be hella fun.)

Last week, I ran the first of those five sessions, and as we finished the session, the crew, after making a large score, was able to move up in tier to Tier 3. At that moment, as the table was celebrating, having reached this important milestone, I wondered, “Did we just finish the campaign?”

I thought about the remaining 4 sessions. What could we do in those four sessions, two of which were scores, that would have the same climactic feeling as the crew moving up to Tier 3? They had, months earlier, won a gang war, before that helped their ally win their gang war, and recently released an imprisoned demon who became their own faction in the city. In addition, their array of scores was many and impressive, from stealing a body out from under the Spirit Wardens to a bold mid-auction heist. They had done quite a bit. 

Suddenly, for the first time that I can recall, I had a unique problem. I had more sessions than I had story. The players finished the campaign early. 

Finishing Campaigns Strong

I think that a good campaign needs to check a few boxes to end well. First, it needs to complete at least one campaign arc (a series of stories that complete a larger story). The completion of an arc is a nice ending point for a campaign, as the series of stories completes the larger story. Second, it should resolve at least one storyline per player, more if you can. Third, is that the characters should rise in power such that the game at its default becomes easy, and you have to start ramping up encounters to keep up with their power level. 

Normally, I sense the third item first. I start to notice that the characters have become powerful enough that normal encounters are becoming too easy, and I start to get creative and ramp up encounters, and then watch them start to overcome them. Once that begins to happen, I take inventory of where the current campaign arc is and where the character sub-plots are. That gives me an idea of what needs to be resolved to bring the campaign to a satisfying close.

Some Seventh-Grade English

One way to end a campaign is by following Freytag’s Pyramid [LINK]: a climax, falling action, and denouement. It’s not the only way, but it’s reliable. The climax is the peak of the big conflict. It is whatever needs to be done to be able to bring the campaign arc to resolution. The Falling Action is the aftermath that happens after the climax, and it’s where you tie off the main story’s loose ends. Then the Denouement is how to close the story. This is where you can finish tying off any character subplots that were not tied off earlier. 

I rather like this structure, but don’t feel beholden to it. Like anything, you can use it as a guide but make your own variations, subvert it, etc. 

Premature Endings

The least satisfying way to end a campaign is prematurely. That is often before the conclusion of a campaign arc. This often happens because something has disrupted the game group, such as someone leaving, or the overall interest in the game dies. The idea is that it’s just better to stop playing than to bring the game to a planned conclusion. Not every game gets an ending, but if you are the kind of person who likes to tie things off neatly, this can be frustrating. It happens, and don’t feel bad about it.

Planned Endings

My favorite is the planned ending. This is where you plot out how to bring the campaign arc to its climax and then take it through the falling action and denouement. This requires a sense of where you are in your campaign arc and for you to decide if you want to end on this arc or start another arc. For me, when I sense the game getting too easy for the players or I am starting to have trouble making encounters believable or I am starting to “chase the curve” (where every encounter is being designed to top the last one), that is my sign to take inventory and start planning out the ending. From there I can come up with a plan, discuss it with the group, and once we agree, bring the game to conclusion. 

Spontaneous Endings

This one is tricky. On one hand, it’s better than the premature ending, because there is a satisfying ending that you just uncovered through play. On the other hand, you have not planned out a falling action or denouement. So you need to switch gears and get the game ready to conclude. 

My Blades Game

For my Blades game, the group talked and figured out how to wrap up the campaign with the sessions we have left. While their last score led to the climax of rising in Tier, there is one more score that will be good for a falling action, allowing the crew to wrap up some loose ends. After that, I plan on using any remaining sessions for Free Play, and let the characters wrap up any unresolved personal storylines. Then we will end with an epilogue where we can narrate the resolution of some of the other faction’s arcs and such. 

Did I Do That?

As a person who loves to plan, I am pretty good at planning out the endings of my campaigns, but the beauty of this hobby is that there is always something new to learn. Sometimes the best plans are thwarted right at the table. In those cases, it’s time to pivot and do what the campaign needs to bring about a satisfying ending. 

Have you ever finished a session and realized that it was the right place to bring the campaign to a close? What did you do? 

Join Ang, Chris, and Josh as they talk about the greatest foe that any gaming group faces: SCHEDULING! They talk about why it’s such a struggle and offer some ideas on how to defeat this particular BBEG.

Links:

Questing Beast’s Survey

U-Con Gaming Convention

Philadelphia Area Game Expo

Running GAGG

Buckeye Game Fest

Tabletop Treehouse

I asked a number of people who GM very little or not at all what they would want to know if they were going to start GMing. This was one of the responses.

What are the key points to decide and write first to build the storyline around? Do I decide on a main antagonist? A town or area the story takes place in? What is the main storyline? Where do you start putting together a campaign?

I felt this was the next appropriate question to answer after “How Do I Pick The Right Game?” It’s from the “If You Were Going to Start GMing” series I’m working on.

First thing. I’m writing to you under the assumption that you’re looking to build your own campaign and aren’t running one from a product you’ve bought. If you have a campaign setting, most of this will still apply, but if you have a campaign book like Curse of Strahd or The Wild Beyond the Witchlight then a lot of this work is already done for you. Imma start with an old campaign I ran called the Airy Peaks as our working example.

The Airy Peaks

What if there was a great dragon that lorded over the lands for several centuries, popping up every few years to pillage different parts of the world, and then the dragon just stopped?

• This dragon has a lair, a whole ass small mountain range.
• This dragon has taken a Smaug amount of treasure over the years. A Smaug amount of treasure is “many-much treasure” in adventurer standard language. If you’re still confused, read or watch The Hobbit for the reference… or just Google it.
• The dragon broke its pattern of appearing and hasn’t been seen in 20 years.

Adventurers went to see what happened to the dragon and found that its lair was a labyrinth of caverns and tunnels throughout the mountains, with many wondrous and strange biomes within. Many monsters made their home there, and there was many-much treasure to be claimed.

The reason the dragon stopped? It wants more, and the only more it can think to get is to become a god. So the dragon has turned his mountains into a soul collector for his ritual to become a god. Any creatures that die within the mountains become fuel for the ritual. The dragon lured monsters here with dreams and promises. The treasure lured the adventurers. Now there’s just a cycle of death that will culminate in the rising of a dragon god very soon.

Start with ideas, then find the conflict

Starting points can be tough. When I came up with the Airy Peaks, it was a bunch of ideas that came together in a moment of inspiration.

• I wanted a dragon fight at the end of a campaign surrounding a funhouse megadungeon.
• I wanted to have an experience where the adventurers adventure and then return to town to rest, recuperate, spend loot, and then go adventure again. Classic stuff.
• I wanted to do it in Dungeon World because I loved the idea of the 12 HP dragon and had run a dragon fight in Dungeon World for a friend’s bachelor party. It was a lot of fun.

Inspiration and moments when lightning strikes are great and all, but that’s just leaving it up to chance. There’s a way to generate the start of a campaign, and that’s by hitting a bunch of things on a checklist. The first thing, for my money, on that checklist is to start with a conflict. Whatever ideas you have, make sure there’s conflict attached to them. My conflict arose out of those three points of inspiration. It was the dragon wanting to become a god by perpetuating a cycle of death and making sure that my adventurers had reasons to come look for treasure in the Airy Peaks.

Generate Ideas

Step one is generating ideas. This isn’t hard as long as you don’t try to be original. Just remember, whatever idea you have has probably been done before… or at least 90% of it has been. If you’re having a hard time generating ideas, just start writing down stories you like and the parts of those stories that make you smile or give your brain that chemical rush. Just generating that list may inspire your next campaign. If your list is too big, then pick the 3-5 things that make you feel the best. This part of the process is a lot of vibes because you want to GM a game that makes you feel good.

For my money, there are three primary places where ideas can lead to conflict: history/lore, a town/starting location, or an antagonist. Your list will probably have some of these concepts on it. Let’s look at them a little closer.

History/Lore

These are the important events that have led up to what ends up being the first session of your game. They’re the important bits that give you enough feel for the setting so you can create scenarios for your PCs to engage with. The important thing is making sure the history of the world creates big conflicts you can create scenarios and smaller conflicts out of.

An example would be the evil empire that occupies the setting. See Star Wars or Avatar: The Last Airbender. When their stories start, the oppressors are already in control. The events leading up to this allowed the evil empire to be in control, and that history creates details and the conflict inherent in the setting. Here are a few examples:

• Rebels fighting against their oppressors.
• People who look to curry favor with the oppressors.
• People just trying to get by in a space where they could have more of their freedom, or even their lives, taken from them at any moment.

If you go this route, you’ll need to decide how much of this history and lore you want to create before you start playing or even getting your group together. My suggestion is to create enough to be comfortable creating scenarios for your game, but not so much history and lore that it’s all you’re doing or you’ve solved all your setting’s problems. Remember, the goal is to have big conflicts you can make smaller scenarios out of that begin dealing with the larger conflict.

Town/Starting Location

Locations in the world are great starting places. A town, a neighborhood in a city, a lone tower of apprentice mages in the wild, a spaceship, or a pirate ship. Any of these locations can be filled with interesting places and people for the player characters to interact with. The trick is finding something about the location that creates a conflict for the players to deal with.

Let’s say we have a fantasy town called Pirin in the north of a country. This town is near an important river and just south of some woods they log as a primary export to the capital. The town also has a dead necromancer’s laboratory beneath it. An excommunicated enchanter from the local enchanting guild has discovered it and started to learn necromancy. He hates the town. Also, to the north are a bunch of chimeric humanoids who live in the forest and don’t take kindly to the people of Pirin starting to encroach on their lands.

We have a location with a dungeon to deal with below, especially as undead start to appear in the town. We also have a group of people who have a legitimate issue with the town in the chimeric humanoids. Those conflicts have plenty of potential to create scenarios surrounding the town. That doesn’t even count what happens when you start deciding how the town operates with its logging operations, any bandits that might hit the river caravans that ship wood downriver, and the individual NPCs’ stories and issues they might have.

An Antagonist

Having an overarching antagonist is a good place to start too. A lot of people think it’s Darth Vader in Star Wars but it becomes quickly apparent that it’s the Emperor. Fire Lord Ozai is the antagonist in Avatar: The Last Airbender. You could have the leader of a criminal organization in a more urban-based game.

Ideologies Plus Power

All of these antagonists can create conflicts because of their ideologies plus their power. You’ll need to decide how their ideologies would influence their use of power, decide how much power they have, probably a lot to be an effective antagonist, and how they use that power. The trick here is deciding whether they will be influencers like Iago from Othello or the Emperor from Star Wars, who use influence, scheming, and deception as weapons, or whether they’re simply powerful like Fire Lord Ozai, who built a strong army and navy on the back of his immense personal power and power base, along with cunning military strategy.

Mixing power with an ideology can give you a solid concept for how the antagonists will function in the game. The Emperor’s ideology was about gaining as much total personal power as possible, and he would use whatever tools he could to do so. Fire Lord Ozai is a little more complex, as he believed in radical imperialism, supreme authoritarianism, and social Darwinism. Say you stripped off the names and trappings and just used those two concepts in different genres and with different characters, but kept the power base and ideology. That would give you some solid points for how they’ll behave in a game and can even let you decide on some motivations for them.

To go along with that, most antagonists are also the heads of organizations, which means they have underlings. These underlings also have motivations, ideologies, and power. This starts getting into organization building, and that’s not what we’re doing at the moment. But you can flesh out as much or as little of the antagonist and their organization as you want. Just don’t get bogged down writing a story. We want potential for conflict, not plot.

Now Factions

What you should have at this point is an idea and a starting point with some bubbling potential conflicts. You might even have some ideas about the other NPCs and factions in your setting. This is the time to give them a little more attention by understanding their goals and motivations, along with how they might be operating and where they might be living. You’re still just generating the base parts of the setting and the conflicts you think you’ll need to get your game going. I don’t think you need too much, but start with seven people and/or locations. Take a look at them and decide if you feel like you need more. If you do, jot down a list of what else you think you need and why, make the locations and NPCs you decided you needed, and ask yourself the question again. Don’t do it endlessly. Just do enough that you’re satisfied and you can remember at least the rough concepts of all the locations and NPCs.

Plan Out Your Session 0

This isn’t running your session 0, it’s planning it out. It’s just making a checklist of the things you need to go over so you have enough information from the players to get the game up and running with a firm foundation. It is also a way for the players to have some contributions to the game too.

Decide Who You Want to Play With

First things first, you need some players. You have some ideas for the game and a rough set of NPCs and locations to use, along with some conflicts that you can drop PCs into. If you have the choice, maybe you select people who would fit the game you’re playing and send them the pitch to see if they’re interested.

The Pitch

This is a tight 2-3 sentence pitch for what the game is about. This is so your players can make an informed choice about what they’re getting into. I also like to add to the pitch the schedule of the game, which is just as important as the pitch itself. Timing and setting aside time for stuff like this is important if you want your games to happen.

Information

Create a 3-6 bullet point information document for the players with the most important setting elements and game concepts. Really, this can be expanded into whatever you think is important for the players to know so they can understand some of the more interesting thematic, tonal, or rules-based elements you plan on using. The trick is to make sure you don’t overload them with information. That’s why it’s 3-6 bits of information. You can even send it out early to the people who agreed to play after you pitched the game.

Character Connections

Decide on how characters are connected to the setting. This will be important so the players can understand some of the constraints on character creation. This can be done with prompt questions. Prompt questions are leading questions that push the players to give answers within some parameters specific to the question. For instance:

“You’re a member of the Crosswater Adventuring Guild, a guild of professional adventurers with a fairly exclusive membership. How did you gain a spot in this prestigious adventuring guild?”

That is a question I asked my players who participated in my Arch Mage’s Legacy campaign, since the Arch Mage’s Legacy was connected to the Crosswater Adventuring Guild. It put them in the middle of the primary conflict of the game.

I like these questions a lot since they can do a lot of work to bake the characters into the fabric of the game. You can bring up important NPCs to provide connections too, organizations like the guild I just mentioned, items, historic beats, etc. Whatever the major or minor conflicts of your game are supposed to be, these questions can tie the characters right to them. The trick is to make sure that the question, while guided, has plenty of wiggle room for creativity on the players’ end in their answer. In the example, they’re going to be a part of the Crosswater Adventuring Guild. That’s what I needed, but they got to tell me how they ended up in it.

One of them ended up being the granddaughter of the guild master. Another was the prince from a foreign country. A third was an elf who’d been a part of the company for 80 years but hadn’t gotten out much to adventure in the past 50, and their skills had atrophied, but they also had a granddaughter who was just joining the guild. She was an NPC and not the PC. Another was a dragonborn who rose up out of their tribe and came highly recommended for their swordplay and ability to create artifice and machinery. It created interesting ideas I could, and did, use for the length of the campaign, which is another reason to do this.

Safety Tools

Decide on what kinds of safety tools will be useful in your game. When I’m running fantasy, I tend to use Lines and Veils, Script Change, and Stars & Wishes. In reality, I use those tools for almost every game I run. Lines and Veils cover an upfront set of protections. Script Change is a great in-game set of protections and storytelling tools for editing and veiling things we didn’t think of earlier, and Stars and Wishes is a good review tool so we can tune the game as we go.

With that, you have your plan for your session 0, which will allow you to build the rest of the foundation for the game with the players with confidence. When you get off track hanging out and chitchatting about games, and pop culture, or whatever your friends do, you’ll have this to reference to get back on track. You’ll also have an endpoint for session 0, and knowing when something will end helps people get through things.

The First Game

This is getting your first scenario together. You might do this after your session 0, once you have all your stuff together, or you might do it early and modify it after your session 0 when you have new information. The trick is to decide on the first problem you want the characters to solve. I would make it a symptom of the overarching conflict developed from your starting point.

Once you decide on the problem you want the characters to deal with, you need to come up with a first scene. I would do the following things:

• Make sure the characters are in it.
• Give the characters a chance to introduce themselves in some way.
• Start the scene with a hook that the characters will care about, along with providing some conflict or mystery.

This hook is important. It’s the moment that draws all the PCs into the narrative of the game. It needs to motivate them to act. It should do these things if your session 0 questions provided enough motivation for why the characters are involved in whatever the premise of the game is. But things happen, and if the PCs don’t seem to care about the hook you can just ask them, “Why do you care about this?” Now, this is a last resort if the ideas generated during session 0 don’t work.

To go along with this hook, you should make sure there’s a strong start to the game. This means you need to give the characters something to do right away. This something could be a fight, but it could also be a chase, a clue that they can follow up on right away, an intense conversation that leads into a choice that needs to be made right there and can affect things going forward, or something else I couldn’t think of.

After that, you put together the rest of the scenario. If the players make it through the scenario successfully, you’ll want it to solve the symptom problem. Now, what this scenario looks like depends on the game you’re playing and what the game supports, so if it’s dungeon crawling, they go dungeon crawl, and if it’s an investigation, they start having scenes where they look for clues and talk to people. These are two types of frameworks for play, and your game should give you some advice on how to put them together. I’m still gonna give you these last few pieces of advice:

• Make sure there’s a solid resolution for the characters at the end of the scenario.
• When you play the game, just let it play out and don’t try to steer the game towards moments you want. Use the framework of play based around the scenario you’ve put together.
• Write some Bullet Points of Potential related to the characters and the scenario that you’ve put together. Bullet Points of Potential are things that would be fun to have in play, but you don’t need to force them. If the opportunity presents itself during play, then you can introduce them.

With that, you have your first game prepped and the foundation for your campaign built out. After that, it’s about deciding on what problems the PCs should be dealing with or which problems the PCs will start choosing to try to deal with based on the conflict. But that’s dealing with story arcs, scenario design, and campaign design, which aren’t about how to start a campaign. So I’ll talk about that some other time.

So what did I miss? What would you do to start a campaign if you’ve never really GMed before? What advice would you give if you have? This is my take on it, but I’d enjoy hearing yours.

Join Ang and Tomas as they have a conversation about how to pitch campaign ideas to your players. What’s the information you need and other things you should keep in mind? Give a listen and they’ll let you know what they think…

LINKS:

Rush & Punch

The Art of the Convention Game Description

What I have found time for — in airports, on planes, alone in hotel rooms, or just on the road — is reading.

I’m a firm believer that you cannot create without consuming. In particular, if you’re gonna make a good story, you need to experience good stories in return. Basically you are what you eat. So to get me back in the game (both here in the Stew and at my table) let’s look at a handful of the (non-RPG) books I’ve read this last year, and how they can make me (but more importantly YOU) a better gamer.

FIRST BOOK: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Carl is taking the world by storm right now. When my 80 year-old, non-reader father recognizes the title, you know a book has gotten popular, but just in case you live on the sliver of the Venn diagram of Gnome Stew readers who haven’t heard of it, here’s the deal: aliens turn Earth into a giant dungeon crawling reality TV show, and Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat have to navigate the various levels in order to survive…and maybe start a revolution.

This book is peak LitRPG, and Dinniman uses the language of RPGs both video and tabletop to create a compelling world and even more compelling characters. Now, Matt doesn’t go into the mechanics of the systems of the game as deeply as some LitRPG authors (and that’s to his credit IMO) but there is a lot we can learn from Carl and Donut to bring to our tables.

Mostly: tone. Dungeon Crawler Carl is over the top banana pants ridiculous on purpose. The absurdity of goblin tanks and random loot drops is not lost on anyone. But. BUT the lesson I want to take away from Carl and bring to my table is this: the ability to be ridiculous and serious at the same time.

These books are, at their core, satire. Fun as heck satire with explosions and dirty jokes. But satire all the same. And they poke fun at some pretty serious social issues. So whether you’re reading this series for the first time, or the fifth, I challenge you to notice how the author uses fun shenanigans to make the serious commentary go down easy, and how the brutality of the characters actions undercuts the levity of their attitudes. They go hand-in-hand and enhance both.

If I can harness that wombo combo to make my players walk away from the table saying, “Damn. That was a serious session. Really made me think. Also, I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in weeks!” Then I will die a happy GM.

SECOND BOOK: When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory

What if the world was a simulation and not only did you know it for a fact, but so did everyone else? And what if this simulation had glitches that became tourist traps? And what if you decided to go on a cross-country bus tour of all of the great North American Glitches with your best friend? Well, then you might be a character in Daryl Gregory’s When We Were Real.

The characters in this book grapple with a lot of existential questions about what it means to be real and what parts of life matter when you know it’s all made up. Which is, as Marty McFly might say, “pretty heavy.”

As a roleplayer, this book helped me connect with my silly little blorbos on a whole new level. Even the shenanigan-prone doofus I play in the beer pretzels game is real if I invest real emotions into him, and there’s value in living a pretend life for a few hours every weekend. Like Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are what we pretend to be” and even simulated lives can improve our real ones.

Read this book if you want to find ways to up the emotional bleed between your players and their blorbos.

THIRD BOOK: The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

Okay, enough philosophy. Let’s talk romance.

S.A. Chakraborty’s The City of Brass is the first book in an action romance series set in a magical Middle Eastern kingdom of Daevabad. Street rat Nari thinks she’s a human with a few unusual gifts, but when she gets swept up into a world of dangerous ifrit and conniving djinn, she finds out all of her assumptions are very wrong. If you’re a fan of Brandon Sanderson, I think you’ll dig this series. The action scenes are amazing and the magic is very impressive.

BUT, I didn’t add this book to the list to talk about action. At least not the fighting kind. I added it because The City of Brass did something I haven’t experienced in a book in a long time: it made me cheer for both sides of the love triangle*.

(*Caveat: yes, I know, technically speaking it’s not really a “triangle” if points A, B, and C don’t all have romantic feels for each other. It’s actually a Love “V,” but I digress.)

Both love interests work because both and neither side are the right choice for Nari. We know (most of) the motivations of her potential suitors, and the few motivations we aren’t privy to are closely guarded (and very suspicious) secrets. And that knowledge makes all of their choices hurt oh so good.

If you want to understand how grand conflicts can develop from seemingly innocuous moments, then get ye to a library and find a copy of this book right now.

FOURTH BOOK: Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey

A lonely woman travels to a secluded island community in an attempt to fill a hole in her life. What she finds is belonging and the promise of a life lived without grief…as long as she’s willing to give up everything she is.

Make Me Better examines the horror of high control groups (aka cults) in a way that shows you what it’s like from the inside.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I love adding a cult into my TTRPGs, but the problem I have running cultists is one of reason. I.E. when presented with an ounce of it, their motivations tend to crumble into dust. My fallback choices are to either to make the villainous cultists incredibly fanatical zealots or ridiculous caricatures. Both are easy for the players to write off as stock bad guys. Not so after this book.

Gailey takes you inside the mind of the people in this community in a way that makes their choices (all of them, even the horrific ones) seem reasonable. The entire time I was reading this book, I knew that the people on the island were cultists. I knew that nothing was going to end well. I knew the main character, Celia, should run for the hills! But also, I couldn’t fault her for wanting to stay.

Now What?

If any of these books sound interesting to you, I highly recommend you check them out. And if you want to try to include their aspects in your own games, I recommend you check out my article on stealing stories for use in your campaigns.

But in the meantime, what’s a non-RPG book that inspired the way you run or play in a game? Let us know in the comments! Maybe I’ll add it to my TBR for the next time I’m on a plane.

The paradox of getting older is that your past problems start to work themselves out, but the ones that replace them are not any better. In my 30s and 40s, my concerns were about promotions and finding time to game with young kids. I wrote a whole book (Never Unprepared) about how to prep sessions accounting for the challenges of work and family that constrict your gaming time.  

Now in my 50s, my kids are adults, my career is settled into its third act, but now my challenges have to do with age. A previously broken arm that still aches when the temperature is just right, making some nights at the table uncomfortable. An array of medicine that I take to counteract all the table snacks, questionable gaming dinner decisions, and lack of movement from the past few decades of gaming. I take a nap before every game, just to make sure my energy is up for game time.

The lesson I have learned through these years of gaming is not to deny the reality of where my life is, and to try to embrace a nostalgia of those “good ole days” of gaming that is impossible to reach, and in reality likely never really occurred. Rather, it’s about embracing life right now and the challenges that come with it, and working through them. So that despite the challenges and obstacles that age is bringing on, I can continue to game and enjoy this hobby that has been one of the great constants of my life. 

Issues as Your Table Ages

Aging gamers are going to be more and more of a thing, as Gen X moves into our 50s and 60s. Here are some of the challenges I have observed. 

Diminishing Energy

We older gamers don’t have the energy that we used to have. We get tired earlier; many of us don’t stay up as late. This can show up at the table in the form of people not thinking clearly or a loss of focus (see below). Older players may not be up for a 6-hour weekly session, or not up for a full day of convention gaming. 

Health Issues

Mileage creates wear and tear. The older you are, the more health issues you accumulate. Old injuries, like my arm, can flare up; metabolic disorders such as diabetes; cardiovascular issues, etc. These issues may require some accommodations at the table, perhaps a different chair, additional breaks, changes in table snacks, or they could prevent someone from attending a session. 

Memory and Focus

Even as I list this, I am resisting admitting it. Are my memory and focus as sharp as they were in my 20s? 30s? No. The truth is that as we get older, memory and focus can diminish. At my table, there are frequent occurrences of people forgetting narrative or tactical details, confusing rules, etc., myself included. I do think, with no medical data, that RPGs are a good exercise for both of these things, so it could be much worse. 

Aging Parents

While the challenges of having small children have passed, we now face the challenges of aging parents. Depending on their situations, this can result in players having to adjust their gaming schedules or miss sessions in order to help their parents. This can ebb and flow depending on the time of year, or if health issues intensify. 

Novelty

With 40 years of gaming, I have seen a lot and done a lot. My players are the same. In terms of games, it is sometimes hard to find a game that “feels new”. At a certain level, there are only so many dungeons to raid or unseen horrors to encounter before they feel a bit the same. If you are a person who craves novelty, it gets harder to find those new experiences.

In terms of plots and stories, the older you get, the more games you have played, the more media you have consumed, the more you start to get that George Polti was right — there are a finite number of dramatic situations. My players are quick to pick up when a plot sounds like a previous game or another form of media. 

Nostalgia

By and large, I distrust nostalgia, because it is emotional and founded on memory. Emotions are fickle, and memory is flawed. Many older players long for those good ole days, when honestly they never really existed. They may gravitate to older games to try to recapture that feeling or want to play a certain way. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I think playing older games can be a lot of fun, but when you are chasing something you can’t reach, it can drift into the obsessive. 

How To Adapt

If you have read enough of my articles, you know that I don’t list problems without some suggested solutions. Here are some ways to help work around the above-mentioned challenges: 

Adjust Your Game Time

Adjusting when you play and how long you play can address issues of energy, health issues, and even aging parents. I like gaming on weekends more than during the week because I am less tired from work, working out, etc. When I run games, I run a 3-hour game because longer games can wear more on everyone at the table. Game earlier, play shorter sessions, pick days when everyone has more energy. This will by far diminish or fix a large number of issues.

Make Accommodations

My generation, Gen X, is kind of known for not asking for help, and worse, accepting help that is offered. We are pretty feral that way. That said, it’s time to break our generational stereotypes and ask for accommodations at the table. Wear your comfy clothes to game night, get a different chair if it’s better for your back, ask that we do away with the junk food for snacks, turn up the lights, speak louder, etc. There is no loss in honor for asking the table for things that will make you more comfortable gaming. 

Notes, Supplements, and Handouts

Memory fades, but printouts on laser printers hold up well. Make handouts for your players of clues or lists of recurring NPCs. Find or create cheat sheets so that everyone can easily look up rules. If theater of the mind is struggling, move to battle maps or whiteboards. As a GM, be forgiving when people don’t remember the details, and just give them out again. The less you ask everyone to hold in their heads, the easier the game will be.

Make Learning New Games Easier

Focus and memory issues will result in it taking longer to learn new games. Give more time for people to read and learn the rules. Use the handout advice above to help people remember the rules. Have patience when you start a new game, with the table and yourself, as you may have to look up rules more than you used to. Depending on you and your group, you may also want to avoid too many new systems, or avoid games that have higher rule complexity. 

Don’t Worry About Being Novel

Since all media is just 36 Dramatic Situations, don’t sweat about being too original. Also, don’t be upset if your players recognize a certain plot or scene as being like some other media. Tying to be eternally original will burn you out. No other media cares about total originality; you shouldn’t either. 

Be Wary With Nostalgia

I told you I don’t like nostalgia. So my advice here is biased. Don’t chase nostalgia. RPGs and gaming groups are like Heraclitus’ Man and the River. No group of players plays a game the same way twice, and no group of players is the same playing that game twice. I am not saying not to go and play old games, but play them as the saged gamers you are today and enjoy it for what it is, not what you remember it to be. 

A Moment for the Good Stuff

While this article was about the challenges facing aging gamers, let me quickly list some things about being an older gamer that are great:

• My RPG skills are honed. I have been doing this for decades, and I keep getting better. I am a much better gamer than I was as a teenager.
• I know a lot of stuff. Both gaming-related and not. I have gone through a lot of school and decades of a career. During that time, I have played hundreds of games. I can draw upon a deep well of knowledge for any situation. 
• I have a wealth of life experience to use for inspiration. I have lived a lot of life, good times and bad, and I can dip into those memories to come up with unique NPCs, to emote in a scene, to relate to all sorts of situations.
• I have adult money. I am not saving up my allowance to buy new games. If I want a game, I can generally afford it.
• I have far greater control of my time. My work times are stable; my kids drive themselves to events. Fewer external factors consume my free time.
• I have more emotional control. Age and a lot of therapy have made me more level-headed and more empathetic. That carries to the table where I work to make sure everyone at the table has a good time.

I do understand that this is not true for everyone, and none, some, or all of these may apply to you based on where you are in your life.

I Ain’t As Good As I Once Was, But I Am As Good Once As I Ever Was

At this stage of my gaming tenure, I am noticing the challenges changing. There have always been challenges in gaming, and in every decade I have figured out how to traverse those challenges. By being realistic and candid, I may not be able to game as long or as late as I used to, but I can still run and play one hell of a game. I may just need a nap before or after.

How has aging created challenges in your gaming or group? How have you worked through or around them? 

Join Ang, along with Chris and JT as they talk about world building, both what you need to have set up before you start and what you can add on the fly when you need it.

Links:

Tabletop Treehouse

Sectors Without Number

Author Amanda J. White

Crows: Fortune or Death

Traveller RPG Map of the Galaxy

The TL:DR Answer: Know thyself and thy group.

Picking the right game is all about making sure you and your group are gonna have fun. To do that you need to know yourself and your group. If you’re not sure about what would be fun for you, I have some questions you can answer to guide you to a game you’ll enjoy.

The Questions

What kind of games do you like playing?

Tactical battles, dungeon crawling, heists, mysteries, resource management, survival, exploration, dramatic interactions, world building, timeline building, deck builders, city builders, other kinds of games my brain can’t pull from its dark recesses. 

What kind of game play do you think you’ll enjoy based on the games you like playing?

As a GM do you think you’ll like having the tactical play of grid based combat? Would you rather facilitate the unraveling of mysteries while the players try to solve things before a timer runs out and the bad guys get away with it? Do you want to craft places for your players to break into and steal stuff from, where heat gets generated by their actions and if they cause too much trouble or take too long they blow the job or get caught? Are you more interested in games that are about narrative storytelling about the characters and their lives? Games that are more on that dramatic side where phrases and motivations on their character sheets change over time as you provide those dramatic situations they’ve let you know they’re interested in before and during play? Is it about building or building up kingdoms, worlds, universes, or even timelines with your friends, either through prompts or resource management? There are games that do all of these things and more.

What’s your favorite genre?

Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Romantasy, Post Apocalyptic Fantasy, Muppet Fantasy (It’s called the Land of Erm), there’s a lot of Fantasy out there. But there’s also Cyberpunk, Pirate adventure, Arthurian Fantasy, Space Opera, Soap Opera, Horror, Super Heroes, Super Anti-Heroes, Interpersonal Drama, Political Drama, Hospital Drama, a Drama Drama, Shakespearean, Espionage, Police Procedural, Hard Sci-Fi, Splatter Punk, Steampunk, Artpunk, Altpunk, I mean if you can think it there’s probably a insert word-punk version of it somewhere. I’m sure I’m missing a few thousand of these.

What’s your favorite tone?

Goofy, serious, grim dark, whimsical, satirical, adventurous, epic, horror, hopeful, bleak, eerie, suspenseful, romantic, tragic, comedic, satirical, gritty, mysterious, heroic, melancholic, nostalgic, unsettling, lighthearted, intimate, surreal, stonered. Stonered is probably not a tone but Dude Where’s My Car might beg to differ.

Do you want a bunch of support for the game you’re going to run?

Dungeons & Dragons 5e and 5.5e has the most because it’s everywhere, but there are plenty of subreddits, Discords, YouTube videos, and blogs for other games out there. Call of Cthulhu if you want some 1920’s cosmic existential mystery horror, but it can also do modern. Delta Green is a smaller game but has a lot of community support if you prefer a more modern take on existential horror with tragic drama and spy game play. Daggerheart is newer but has plenty of people writing about the game and making content for it if you want a different flavor of kitchen sink fantasy that’s not D&D. The Marvel Multiverse RPG is decently supported if you want some super hero game play. There are many others, especially a lot of the OSR (Old School Renaissance) or NSR (New School Revolution/Rules) games that have very active communities, which I would say the BORG games fit inside. That’s MorkBorg. If that’s too weird for you, check out PirateBorg.

Do you like complex or lighter rules?

This one’s a little trickier but I’m gonna say Dungeons & Dragons is in that medium complexity so we have a starting point. It has classes and subclasses for your player characters. There are three kinds of d20 rolls. Spell casting can get to be a lot of load management for players at later levels. There’s a lot of simple math, adding up several numbers from dice and modifiers off your character sheet. There’s also a number of edge case rules. So lots of potential rules packages in feats, spells, class features to layer on top of the core rules. That’s medium complexity to me.

Also medium. Blades in the Dark and other Forged in the Dark games. They have lots of procedures to be followed and require you to understand position and effect so you can improvise many answers to situations based on dice rolls made. The procedures also have a lot of actions that players can take which the GM will need to react to. There’s also a part of the game where away from the table the GM should be updating the factions and what they’re doing as part of the prep.

Lighter would be other PbtA games. (That’s Powered by the Apocalypse) They do require a lot of spotlight management, so controlling the flow of play since who gets to take their turn is entirely dictated by the GM, but the rules are mostly up front and contained on a small amount of move sheets and playbooks. It only requires rolling 2d6 and adding one number along with potentially advantage or disadvantage. The most complex thing is understanding fictional positioning as a concept and leaning into it. The Borg Games and Shadowdark are also pretty easy to pick up and play.

More complex would be games like Pathfinder 2e and Draw Steel. They have more mechanisms to learn and understand, more resources to potentially manage, and more difficult action economies and player builds to deal with, along with complex adversary mechanics. Draw Steel has a subsystem for longer challenges and a subsystem for negotiation on top of its very involved combat system. Pathfinder has bigger numbers and math than a lot of games, with some moving target number threshold play where criticals come into play. The vast amount of material and character build concepts also can be a lot. That said, they’re great games, and would be great picks for you if that kind of play is enjoyable.

Putting it Together

• What kind of games do you like playing?

• What kind of game play do you think you’ll enjoy based on the games you like playing?

• What’s your favorite genre?

• What’s your favorite tone?

• Do you want a bunch of support for the game you’re going to run?

• Do you like complex or lighter rules?

Answering these questions should give you a decent starting place for finding a game you’ll have a good time GMing. Now you need to find some games. The internet is a great place for getting some help figuring that part out. Just Google, Edge, Bing or whatever search engine you prefer some questions about what you’ve learned by going through these questions. For instance:

What Tabletop RPGs do Space Opera? 

I hit enter on Google and some of the top results were Starfinder, Traveller, Stars Without Number, Scum & Villainy, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and Star Trek Adventures. I wouldn’t classify all of those as Space Opera but it’s a space to start. 

So I followed up with “Which ones are Rules Light?”

That’s when I went in and started reading some reddit posts, websites like RPG.net, watched a few YouTube videos at 1.5 speed, checked out some posts from RPGG (RPG Geek).

I still wasn’t there or happy with what I was reading and seeing so I added a mechanic to my question which was: what games do small ship to ship combat?

The one that kept coming up in the different places I was reading was Tachyon Squadron for a more cinematic aerial combat maneuver game. A description of Top Gun in space sold me on checking it out but I put Warbirds with their Space Age expansion, Stars without Number, and Scum and Villainy on my list just in case I didn’t like Tachyon Squadron. Now it was time to do a little reading.

Find Your Joy

The questions are starting places for you to find your joy in gaming. While answering all of them gives you some pretty decent insight into what you’ll probably enjoy, you’ll still need to find out if your friends would also enjoy the game. If you want to find out what they enjoy you can just ask them these questions too and figure out where your enjoyment overlaps. 

I hope this helps at least give you a place to get started when it comes to finding a game you’ll want to GM. Also, let me know how you figure out what games are your joy. I’d love to see other methods of getting games we can enjoy to the table.

Join Ang, Jared and Josh as they talk about different ideas on how to encourage your player to get into their characters and roleplay more. How do you get them from just telling you what their character does to diving into the narrative with both feet?

LINKS:

Mutants & Masterminds 3e Character Builder

Marvel Multiverse RPG Godzilla Sourcebook

I’m a Fan

Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D’ Amato

Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck