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With regards to creating pre-game character history amongst the player characters, I quite like the way it is handled in many of the games based upon the FATE system whereby all the players and the GM have a hand in picking some overarching themes of the world itself and also link their characters together by being present in their pasts.

So, as an example, my getaway driver character in a Dresden Files game had been the wheelman for the Mafia in a bank heist in which the cousin of another players character had died. This linked us together by more than just the cliche "you all walk into a bar" bit and created a relationship between our characters which could be roleplayed from the get go, i.e. that he and his family felt that I owed them compensation for failing to look after his cousin, compensation that came in the form of my services as a driver and hired gun. After all, when the Mafia think you owe them a favour it's best not to argue.

You are all going to be playing co-operatively, so co-operatively designing the world and your characters, even if it is just minor story details and themes, can help get the players invested in the world from the get-go.

Splitting the party in certain environments whilst also keeping players whose characters are not currently active involved can work if you give the players whose characters are not in the current scene NPC roles to play instead.

So, one could play the curmudgeonly guard called over by the GMs angry shopkeeper who is accusing the party rogue and wizard of stealing. The GM gives a brief description of the NPC and their mannerisms then assigns the role to one of the unused players, or the player could could come up with mannerisms of their own. This allows more people to be active in a scene and reduces the possibility of the GM having to have a conversation with themselves as more NPCs get involved. Can also lead to great stories if a player comes up with a memorable NPC and basically allows you as the DM to trick your own players into designing NPCs for you

However, as others have said, tryinging to avoid split parties unless your players have a set time and location to meet back up might be a good bet until you're more experienced and comfortable in the role of the DM. Otherwise it can lead to whole sessions of trying to herd them back together (such as the aforementioned Dresden game in which it took several sessions for our characters to be in the same room as each other, let alone work together as a group! ).

 Orlanth wrote:

 Rune Stonegrinder wrote:

Next thing to consider

YOU MUST BE OK WITH LOSING ALL THE TIME....Your job is to entertain and set challenges not to win against the players.

Excellent point well crafted, while obvious to us techniques are often hard to describe to others.
The above is short and crystal clear, it sums up the role of a GM. Mental notes have been taken.

As an addendum to this...

If you have an NPC that is not intended or designed to die? Don't give it stats. Keep its abilities vague and ill-defined. And, most importantly, use it sparingly! If this character is meant to be the main "bad guy" in a long-term story, don't let the PCs meet him/her face to face once they know it's an enemy. Use video-calls, recorded messages, signs, tele-screens, psychic powers, crystal balls, whatever... but don't allow them to be in the same room where combat might erupt unless and until you are ready to give the NPC up.

As another addendum: If the PCs *do* manage to kill the NPC somehow, make sure his/her "death scene" is appropriately dramatic, and done in such a way that the body cannot be recovered. If there's no body, they aren't really dead, and you can bring them back (via magic, cybernetic reconstruction, cloning, whatever) at another time.

Generally, I don't agree with that advice. I've always allowed the players to kill or defeat anything that they manage to, fair and square. This is sometimes annoying for me, but generally satisfying for the players.

Of course, sometimes, when it makes sense, I do bring villains back from the dead or from defeat. But I don't do it often, so when it happens my players don't feel cheated.

Of course, YMMV.

Generally speaking, those I play with get mad if they aren't winning all the time; the idea that everything isn't meant to be won or beaten right away isn't a thought.

 Ahtman wrote:
Generally speaking, those I play with get mad if they aren't winning all the time; the idea that everything isn't meant to be won or beaten right away isn't a thought.

Play with fewer insecure neckbeards.

 Chongara wrote:
Play with fewer insecure neckbeards.

Well none of them are 'neckbeards', and a few are ex-Marines. I just think they play for different reasons then the people who want to...ACT. I sure wouldn't cal any of them insecure. Well one of them and he is the other player that has been doing this for a long time. He also would probably have a neckbeard if he could grow one come to think of it.

Neckbeard? Really?

Can we leave off with the Geek on Geek crime?

As far as splitting the party goes, I had an instance of that in an early adventure; two players elected to fight their way through the interior of the starship to get to the engine room, while another two took a fighter out to catch the fleeing villain. Unfortunately, I took so long going through the first pair's scene that we ran out of time to get to the second pair. They got their moment the following week, but they'd still sat there for an hour doing nothing, so it was a failure on my part. :(

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
As far as splitting the party goes, I had an instance of that in an early adventure; two players elected to fight their way through the interior of the starship to get to the engine room, while another two took a fighter out to catch the fleeing villain. Unfortunately, I took so long going through the first pair's scene that we ran out of time to get to the second pair. They got their moment the following week, but they'd still sat there for an hour doing nothing, so it was a failure on my part. :(

I've found the best way to handle this is rotate. Rather than wait for the engine room thing to finish before doing the fighter thing, do both at the same time. Spend 10 minutes on the engine room caper, then pause that and spend 10 minutes with the folks doing the fighter routine. Even if the events aren't happening simultaneously so long as they super-duper interdependent you can just go "OK. What do you do, just keep in mind this is actually happening an hour before that other thing we just did".

It can be a bit sloppy but keeps folks from sitting longer periods than they have to.

That was what I was trying to do. Unfortunately, between a rookie GM and no-one else knowing the rules, the "quick" fight scene took all session.

Some other quick advise:

1. Always remember that you set the consequences
2. You can fudge a bit to make things more interesting/exciting
3. NPCs lie
4. Make the characters talk, always refer to players by their character's name and make them use character names with each other.
5. Accents and funny mannerisms in NPC rule!

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
That was what I was trying to do. Unfortunately, between a rookie GM and no-one else knowing the rules, the "quick" fight scene took all session.

That was a bad outcome, not a failure!

You'll learn how to handle timing as you gain experience. It sounds like you had a good idea, and wanted to make a cinematic ending. As always, look for quality of process, not just quality of outcome.

 Polonius wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
That was what I was trying to do. Unfortunately, between a rookie GM and no-one else knowing the rules, the "quick" fight scene took all session.

That was a bad outcome, not a failure!

You'll learn how to handle timing as you gain experience. It sounds like you had a good idea, and wanted to make a cinematic ending. As always, look for quality of process, not just quality of outcome.

Also, if a fight scene is taking longer than expected you could cut to the other players during that scene if there's a suitable point (Bad guy powering up a spell? Cut to the other party for a bit of a cliffhanger and to let them get to play). Just make a note of initiatives and character placements (photo with your phone works wonders) if the table/board/whatever space is going to be needed by that party.

 Easy E wrote:
Some other quick advise:

1. Always remember that you set the consequences
2. You can fudge a bit to make things more interesting/exciting
3. NPCs lie
4. Make the characters talk, always refer to players by their character's name and make them use character names with each other.
5. Accents and funny mannerisms in NPC rule!

I agree on most of these. I also agree on 2 generally. It's good tool, but not one I use often. Just to offer a contrast, I find making everything open as possible can add engagement by enhancing the sense of tension or realness. What I mean is rather than say the exchange going like this

"I'd like to try and improvise some explosives so we can blow up that thing"
"OK Roll Craft[Exlposives]"
"14"
"You succeed"

It'll very often go something like this":

"I'd like to try and improvise some explosives so we can blow that thing up"
"Ah Sure. It's a Craft[Explosives] roll. The basic DC to succeed is 12. If you get a 16 or more you'll be able to get the mixture just right and increase the damage by +2. On a failure, something goes wrong and you catch it but spoil about half the materials. On 7 an or lower you fail but don't realize it, the explosives will go off in half the amount of time your character thinks they will"
"14"
"OK. You got your bomb"

Now these are all the same results I'd use if I was keeping the DCs behind-the-screen so to speak. However it does a few things that I like from a game dynamics standpoint:

1) I can't fudge, which makes the roll very real. There isn't any wondering, guessing or maybe even meta-betting I'm going to just let the roll go through because it's a pretty big deal if it fails. Nor can it feel like maybe I made the bomb fail because that train really wasn't supposed to get derailed.
2) It highlights consequences ahead of time. This adds tension to the roll and bad results don't feel like a "Gotcha". On a 7 The PC tells the other characters the bomb is going to go off in 10 minutes, and when it goes off in 5 the PCs are caught off guard but the player's aren't. The same bad result feels more fair.
3) It makes the results feel more like they belong to the player rather than me. If the player tries and then I announce a result, I'm the last one to be interacting with that roll my dictation is the final word. In this case even though nothing has changed from a practical standpoint the player is the last person to interact with the resolution from a mechanical perspective, their attempt is the last word in the action, they own it.


Certainly I don't do this with every roll, either because I forget or the consequences/difficulty are fairly obvious and it'd just be wasted time. That said it's a useful tool to really get players engaged. Especially if your system has some kind of bonus points system that let them enhance rolls ahead of time. I find players tend to hoard these, and feel cheated if they wind up using them on rolls that don't wind up being as important as they thought. With everything on the table like that it makes the choice a bit easier on when to use resources and knowing the failure was gonna be terrible makes the expenditure feel better even if the base roll was so good it wound up being a waste.

A die is a tool that has two functions, so far as I have been able to figure, when it comes to D&D: randomizing a result ... and making dice-rolling noises behind a DM screen. In other words, you can use a die to either (a) randomize an outcome or (b) make the players think you are doing (a). One school of thought holds that DMs should only roll a die when they want to randomize a result. In essence, if you are not comfortable with a consequence being "out of your hands" then simply don't roll a die. I used to believe this quite strongly. But I have come to think that the real issue is making a concrete decision about whether you intend (a) or (b) before rolling. There are times when it is more fun if the players think something is random which the DM actually controls.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Also, if a fight scene is taking longer than expected you could cut to the other players during that scene if there's a suitable point (Bad guy powering up a spell? Cut to the other party for a bit of a cliffhanger and to let them get to play). Just make a note of initiatives and character placements (photo with your phone works wonders) if the table/board/whatever space is going to be needed by that party.

Well, yes, I know the theory. It was the execution that was flawed.

Anyway, we don't bother with tactical maps. A quick scrawl to set the scene if need be, but other than that its all in our heads.

Chessex makes some nice wet-erase battle-mats that, with the markers for overhead projectors or similar, can be used to sketch out a battle-map in pretty short order, as well as record initiatives, statuses or whatever else you want.

At GenCon I got a weird (had one inch of line missing on one outside edge) dry erase mat cheap from Chessex since it was considered a factory screw up.

Got one like that from a game store in Michigan a number of years ago, must have been a thing at one time.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh it's still a thing:

http://www.chessex.com/mats/Battlemats_&_Megamats2nds.htm

If you wanted to spend the money you could also get an online map making program. That is what I wanted to do so I went with Profantasy Softwares Campaign Cartographer system. It's based around a fastCAD drawing system and takes a little while to learn to use properly but once you learn it, you can make some very amazing looking maps.

Here is an example of a map I made for a Dungeons and Dragons Next campaign set in the old Kara-Tur setting of the 1st edition AD&D game. It is from the module Night of the Seven Swords. The module never had a battle map of the Inn but it did have a small map of the inn not suited to miniature gaming. So I made my own and updated it a bit so it is in color and much more beautiful than the original. This is the end result:





What I decided to do was to make many small maps of general encounter areas and just printed them so I had them ready to go. I would rather have used a projector but those are really expensive.

I can also make maps of continents, worlds, galaxies, dungeons, pretty much anything I need/want. To me, that was worth it.

It's not a lack of availability - we simply don't use 'em - in any game. Apart from anything else, it means we all need to crowd round one table, and we don't generally have that much room. We play in each others' living rooms, and the GM sets his screen and paperwork on a little camping table.

I'm pretty old school when it comes to Pen and Paper RPGing. There are no battle maps, only what is in your head. I found actual battle maps led to non-characterful min-maxing with the groups I ran with.

In a real pinch where clarity is essential, I will use a <gasp> drawing on a sheet of paper!

 Easy E wrote:
I'm pretty old school when it comes to Pen and Paper RPGing. There are no battle maps, only what is in your head. I found actual battle maps led to non-characterful min-maxing with the groups I ran with.

In a real pinch where clarity is essential, I will use a <gasp> drawing on a sheet of paper!

My main RPG at the moment uses the FATE system which is quite loose in terms of stats and mechanics compared to some other systems and hence is pretty hard to min-max. Plus side is that if you can think of something and it makes some sort of sense, you can probably do it (one of our favourite misadventures was when our party killed a vampire matriarch by building a homemade claymore mine out of self-cooked plastic explosive and blessed steel balls in a paint tin, which we then hid under a sofa and invited her to sit down. Turned what was meant to be a difficult big bad boss fight into paste in the middle of some ruined lounge furniture )

We use a seminar room at a university so we have access to projectors and whiteboards for maps and things.

The projector is currently being used to show our "Wheel of Problems", a list of all of our current problems/things we have to sort out which seem to build up as we keep ignoring them