PAX 2013 - The Art of the Table: GMing Beyond the Basics Panel

Reporting on the games you love by people who love to game the mmo reporter network welcome to the art of the table jamming beyond the basics yeah uh now normally i would say it's my pleasure to introduce our panelists but that's part boring so we're just gonna jump right in and then we can start talking about who the hell these good people up here are so You have all run games who are all malicious sadistic horrible people that live only to lick the tears of ultimate suffering for your players faces don't deny it it's true

so i would like to start this off with a moment of you as a badass gm what did you do once that made you feel like you were truly the ultimate evil of your table or perhaps those before some good amber would you start sure um for me so uh this particular adventure the Players were currently in between various towns and they stopped for the night to rest they did not set a watch well they would be cold while they were asleep they failed their their spot checks obviously and um some kobolds came in and

ransacked their camp you won't believe the fun stuff they've had on the packs nobody woke up no one no one heard anything morning they woke up and um the remainder of the game session was Dealing with recovering all of their stuff and dealing with the cobalts who are only trying to find a few things because they're missing a few things and and we're hoping they could barter their way into some stuff the players enjoyed it but by the end of the game i was tackling with glee excellent eric um can you hear me yeah so

uh recently i ran an adventure uh pathfinder adventure Set in a dungeon where the uh players were going in to wipe out a litch um and in the first encounter they fought a giant clockwork automaton that looked like the uh the wizard that they were going to kill and after they killed him inside the uh the automaton's chest they found a clockwork sphere that kept going like a heart and one of the players decided to examine it and touch it he said i'm gonna push it up to my chest and see what happens So i

said oh well okay i have some good news and some bad news okay great and i said the good news is it sinks into your chest cavity and you get a plus two bonus to your constitution and he said well that's awesome and i said yeah and i said the bad news is your normal heart is permanently destroyed and he said oh but i have this clockwork power and i said yeah and he said great so he went on the rest of the adventure with a few more hit points and a Healthier pep to his

step and finally they got to the end and they got to the lich and they made relatively short work of the lich actually and killed him um but they couldn't find the liches by laughter so they had to get creative and it was in his chest i think mine was uh actually a tag team effort um i wasn't actually the gm i was their assistant and uh played in a game for a good six months where i had Brought in my character and was just having a great time it was a great party building and

that kind of thing and after about six months revealed that um she was actually an npc she'd been a black spiral dancer the whole time which is very bad it was it was really fun to see the difference in how the players treated the character because they perceived that she was a player character as opposed to an npc and so then the storyteller got to do The big reveal and i got to do the happy dance so it's playing a game of monster hearts which is about teenage monsters with relationship problems buffy the vampire slayer

the two characters in question one was uh the giant uh who is this uh she's the daughter of a professional mma fighter and she had a crush on this really this Really cute guy uh he's about five foot tall happened to be a selkie which is uh someone that can transform into a seal so the two of them uh they shacked up that night in uh her garage uh her mom's garage that she kind of converted into like a little mma boxing gym she wanted to be just like her mom who was off on tour

and uh you know so some sexy stuff happened and the uh The giant has a special move when whenever the giant has sex they gain the condition fast to sleep so the the selfies there trapped underneath the giant's enormous limbs uh and like can't really like get out it's like ah and just sort of like sitting there kind of trapped in this garage listening to the sound of the ocean Waves and starts thinking about you know the the land of the deep where this uh selfie was from remembering their family and uh you know makes

it makes a role to gaze into the abyss which is like a monster hearts move totally blows the role so it's my i have to like i have to do something bad and i'm like okay cool so you're sitting there you guys are butt ass naked on the futon trapped underneath her limbs when the garage Door opens up and her mom comes back home it's like this like mercedes benz pulls out the door opens up it's like you know huge woman with like you know black mini skirt covered with russian prison tattoos just like walks

over and sees sees and there's like what the hell are you doing here with my daughter mine comes from a an rpg called midnight and midnight was A 3-0 and 3-5 add-on published by fantasy flight that basically took place in a world 100 years after sauron wins so in order to get my players into the spirit of this game i ran each of them through a single one-shot uh situation to to have them understand how difficult the world was going to be and one of the players was a quick link Which is basically an elf

halfling mix who are really fast and so she was living with her halfling family and she goes out one day to uh to tour the planes and she comes home that evening and her family is gathered around the the table and is is preparing for dinner the midnight world has this problem where the souls of the dead can't escape so they just kind of stay in the bodies of dead people most of the time which creates Very well preserved undead called fel so she gets home you know she's ready for dinner and she sits down

with her family and then her family turns and tries to eat her because they have all turned into fell over the course of the day they have all been killed yeah so that was that character's introduction to the world of midnight and how things were going to run And i will suggest that you keep in mind after whatever you learned today to please take a collection for any ptsd that may or may not happen in your players so what we're going to be talking about today is that most magnificent of foes the gm in previous

years at this very panel we've had the debate rage is this cooperative storytelling are we all truly in this together crafting one Big beautiful epic or sometimes can a little bit of an adversarial relationship be good i mean this is pax so we all know rule 1 don't be a dick but at the same time maybe there is room for the black-hearted gm that merely wants to see the players squirm rocks fall everyone dies so I've assembled for your enjoyment edification a panel of some experts on the subjects let's do some real quick introductions and

then we're going to start with the questions today who the hell are you somebody do you have a name i'd say smart ass but that might get me in trouble my name is amber eager i have been jamming for several several years um 3-5-3-0 a bunch of obscure titles i'm not going to go into the entire list i'm also an avid larper who's also done a lot of work on the staff side so plot and organizing and a lot of basically larp gma so it's very similar uh i'm eric mona i am the publisher at

paizo publishing we do the pathfinder role-playing game um prior to that i was editor-in-chief of dragon and dungeon Magazines and i helped launch the living greyhawk and pathfinder society organized play campaigns um i've been gaming since 1983 primarily with all different systems of dungeons and dragons and pathfinder but also lots of other systems as well and that's kind of my deal hi i'm jess hartley for the last 10 years or so i've been a novelist writer editor and game creator predominantly for White wolf studios for their world of darkness and exalted lines and play a

bunch of stuff but uh golf course kind of my my fave it's a cute sound hey everybody my name is ross cowman i am the author and designer of i don't know what the difference is but serpent's tooth and life on mars and i'm one of the organizers of story games olympia as well as fabricated realities which is a King convention that happens in olympia and um yeah i'm 34 and i've been facilitating and dungeon mastering and jamming lots of different things since i was about eight years old do the math my name is jeff

fasenfest and i'm a veteran gm with 20 plus years experience jamming a bunch of games i started out when i was also about eight years old on d third and so dungeon d and d not a d And d d and d third the revised and then moved on from there through d d third three five pathfinder i'm also a huge fan of shadowrun since i haven't heard cyberpunk kind of represented yet here huge cyberpunk fan especially since we're in seattle and i but i love pretty much all role-playing games all right my name is

ben mandel i run The art of the table right for a game trend and do all kinds of other weirdness like this so one of the problems we had last year was we just had too much ground to cover so i'm going to put out a call for questions right now if you are a new or a veteran gm who has a problem and issue a question for our panelists could we just make a quick line right there throw it on out i can't guarantee that we'll get to every question but we'll Give it a

good try um we'll get a little bit of a line going once we've got like i don't know about 10 people or so or if we just get five whatever um i'll put out a second call for questions if we can all right i'm gonna say if you're not standing right now we'll call on you later so um again i promise we'll do our best if we Don't get to your question my apologies for the moment just throw out a question real quick um we're going to go through all the questions right now some of

the james will be willing to take a few notes then we're going to do a general discussion you sir what would be your question please okay i i recently got my bones kickstarter i decided this would be a good idea to get my whole family into i haven't really dm since college but so now two weeks from now i'm going To be running basically a seven person party of people that have never played pathfinder before do you have any advice for me thank you for an easy question all right if you wouldn't mind saying we're

just going to go through all the questions hi actually i'm sorry hold on one second do you guys mind or would it be easier for you guys if we did it one by one it Would be way easier way easier okay sorry we have to keep you all standing there for a second um okay so let's get to it eric okay um so starting with pathfinder i would say my biggest advice would be to um start with the beginner box actually if you're familiar with that where did the questioner go sorry hello there gentlemen hi

okay uh so we Created a product called the beginner box that's kind of exactly for your experience level or for the experience level of your players um and i think that's a lot easier to start with than the full four rulebook yeah do you have that product are you familiar with that i would i would recommend picking it up because it's got character sheets that explain like everything they're gonna need to know on the sidebars and like we did it with behind one-way glass with Fifteen-year-old kids and stuff and washed and tore our hair out

and cried and rewrote it and did it again and again and again and it was all geared toward introducing people barring that um i kind of find that at least for pathfinder because tactical play is a big part of the combat anyway that a dungeon crawl is a pretty easy way to start because you the players don't need to worry much about what is beyond them Other than what's in the room or the next room or whatever and they're kind of focusing on their moves and that's the hardest part i think to learn and then

that'll load them up with gold pieces and things like that then you can send it back to town and they can buy treasure or buy equipment and do all that kind of fun stuff but i would recommend doing it simple because they've been painting the bones kickstarter stuff as well they're Already focused on the miniatures part so they have a big investment in that and they'll like moving that stuff around and fighting and killing and learning to be do you have any other recommendations for your favorite first uh level yeah i mean we published uh

uh i mean do you want to do a published module or do you want to okay so there's one called um they uh what the hell is it called uh crypt of the everflame is the first adventure we Publish for pathfinder role playing game and it's designed specifically to introduce new people to the game we also just published a new module called the dragon's demand that is like first i think i just picked that up well there you go that's first level and it's fight against kobolds and dungeon crawly and stuff i think that's probably

your best bet did any one other jam on the panel want to throw in on this yes something that i think you can do especially for Brand new people is create a simple list for them of like here's things you can do during your turn so that people can be thinking about what they need to do and they're not overwhelmed every turn with i've got like 300 numbers on this character sheet and i don't know which one means what i'm going to do so you Can set out a list of like here's how you move

here's how far you can move and here are four or five different actions that your specific character whatever class you you end up giving them or they end up choosing can do each turn so that they don't have to thumb through a huge page of rules and especially if you're a newer gm and don't have all that memorized that you don't have to thumb through a Huge page of rules and they can simply say i want to do this and you can say okay read how the next line there says this is what you roll

this is what you add this is what i'll tell you what happens next if you create those kinds of crit sheets for them it will help them what would cards be better cards work out fine if you wanted to just have like a card that said here's an action you can do and just Like color code them or label them for for like standard and move equivalent that that gives the chara the players an easier feeling of how to do the stuff that they want to do and then you need to be sure they know

this isn't everything you can do these are just the simple things that that you're likely to want to do all right i'm going to cut it for now so we can move another question thank you very much sir what is your question hi i'm a newer i am just Getting into jamming i'm really into a burning wheel system and um so because i'm really into this and no one else in my regular group has really heard of it before i have to run it i'm trying to figure out how i can create a a coherent

theme for the game that i can easily communicate to my to my players so that we're all on the same page and we're not all trying to play different Games at the same time and just not not working coherent theme would anyone like to throw themselves jess one of the things you can do is basically write a tv guide blurb for your game two three sentences that says um you know in general this is why you're tuning in we're playing it we're looking to play a uh a cooperative uh exploration based game uh that will

have A lot of focus on alignment or or something like that so that that way you as the gm have kind of established you know what your what you're going to try to accomplish in the adventure and giving it to them in a really concise way that all of the players can read and then when they get that they may go uh that's not really what i want to play and then you can renegotiate that anyone else want to jump on this grenade ross amber sure Just helped me just so my ideas so okay well

um another thing you could do is involve the players in the creation of that that's a really great way to get player buy-in perhaps sit them down and come up with a list of actual this is an idea from ben robbins and microscope come up with a list of ingredients that you want to like include and want to ban from the environment it's kind of like Ordering a pizza you're like hey i really like pepperoni and i really like uh bell peppers and someone's like oh actually i'm vegetarian could this just be like a cheese

pizza with like you know the belt you know whatever it is so like you know if you come up with that list beforehand you're going to ensure that a couple sessions in the players aren't like checked out because they actually really wanted like a high magic Setting when you were really hoping for something different as a follow-up i've tried the player player buy-in method and i ended up with the problem of everyone doing insufficient connections between the uh between the players and and the environment they all created created sort of badass characters with no connections

yeah we will actually be touching on exactly that a little bit later on Thank you very much next question please sir all right so i'm new to gma and i started this uh um i just got into it with the uh sci-fi the star wars deep the star wars d20 system and i haven't really found anything else so i was playing a video game while creating codex of information i decided to uh sort of create my own system to run that on pen and paper and what would you Have to say on creating your own

game pen and paper system awesome question answered i think we're done here i'd say briefly just um i think it's good going in with the players that you have knowing that it's a work in progress and so you're going to learn a lot about how your game plays just by playing it and don't be afraid to change things between sessions or whatever and kind of engage them in Helping you design the game not sort of handing it down from tablets on high okay thank you hi um i'm also a new pm um or attempting to

be and my first attempt was at d d 3.5 which is a lot of story to jump on a lot of mechanics jungle so i was wondering if you had ideas of other systems that are good stepping stones in both in cases of story responsibilities that you have and Mechanics let's just go down the line real quick then get everyone's first you know top two suggestions um well this is this kind of hard on this is because i always look at it as are you wanting to be more mechanic or you're focusing on story because

there's so many different systems um i myself i enjoy storing i like checking mechanics out the window if they get in the way of my story i have no problem Doing that there's a relatively new system that's just come out called 13th age that really gets rid of a lot of the nitpicky um bookkeeping and puts a lot more focus on the story and it's very much more story driven and gets back more into a lot of the role play rol role play so i really i played that song and i really enjoyed that so

that might be one you might want to check out okay thank you Um probably my favorite sort of light rpg these days and it is almost entirely chopping system out entirely but it helps with like cooperative storytelling and things is this game called dread um where the uh the mechanic is actually a jenga tower and it's like a horror game and as you do things the gm says okay draw three bricks out of the jenga you know and when it falls you're dead and so it like really focuses people on Storytelling on the character and

i think once you've sort of got that cohesion of the group where they're they're comfortable kind of making holes themselves in front of each other and whatnot then it's going to be easier to transition into a more heavy system there's a lot of uh indie games right now that are designed to kind of rather than ongoing chronicle with like a huge amount of game books and supplements like that they're really designed to sit Down and do like a one evening kind of game and because of that they're mechanically much lighter magpie games has a couple

with some really cool things one called last best hope that's where you're basically playing people that are the the only thing that is standing between the end of the world and and uh survival and then um they also have a shakespearean one called the Game's the thing and they're small little books and um they're you know all of the rules are right there really easy lots of focus on on having a purpose defined for the game as opposed to trying to figure out what the purpose for the game is and they're a great starting place

okay thank you um what city do linden san diego san diego okay cool i don't know if Groups like that there in san diego but some story games i could recommend would be uh the top of my list will be like monster hearts fiasco which is actually gm list um also uh by joe mcdonald the quiet year is just a really really great really unique game and uh yeah i'm trying to try those three yeah a couple of again touching more on the the indie side of of the game system a Couple of really good

games that you can build into very complex stories and put as much into as you want but are very light on mechanics our games like dungeon world and apocalypse world as well as mouse guard mousekers is great because it also draws the players in and forces them to during the off episodes because it's very episodic there are sections where the players get to drive the story and tell what they want to do specifically As a mechanic in the game and so it helps give them more investment into what's happening in the game okay thank you

very much and before we get to the next question while you're still up here don't worry you're getting your questions something i've been hearing a lot already is i'm a new gm and so question to the general room who here is a new gm yeah all right you know what i owe you Because all of you are the future of our hobby thank you for doing this thank you very much for your question hi so i'm about to start i've never jammed before i've only been table topping for like three or four years and about

in the next month i'm about to start jamming a tabletop and a larp and i'm wondering um what are the major pitfalls that i should be wary of and avoid and then what is the Best way to create an environment that is safe for my characters to take risks and conducive to them to take over communicate talk way more than you think you have to with your players keep asking questions keep asking for feedback keep trying to get more information from them on what they're enjoying what they're not enjoying what they want to do where

they want to be going And no story line no system no no plan you have survives contact with the players it will never it will never go exactly as you have it in your mind but it will always be fun as long as you keep communicating with your players i would add to not just verbal communication uh learn how to read your Players as well so this is more of a tabletop thing but i think we're also applying for a barb if you've got players who are sitting forward and really engage and pay attention they're

interested in what you're doing if you've got players who are leaning back and looking on their iphone or whatever they're disengaged try to get a sense of how what kind of elements of the game attract the attention of which players and one trick i do is when i see Somebody's not very engaged i'll jump to them and i'll you know i'll have the npc go over to them and say what do you think you know and then that pulls them out i don't let people fall asleep at the table you know just really look at

listen to what they tell you but but listen to what they're not telling you and pay attention to sort of their nonverbal cues as well um for tabletop but also for the larp Side i always make sure that when i'm doing stuff i provide a list of expectations um of what i expect from my players but also what my players can expect from me and that way we've set up part of that social contract um regards to feel free to find me afterwards because i could ramble on probably for the rest of the time on

this But there's some really good resources i can point you towards we'll go through a lot of the pitfalls of larp and working with larp and that whole side of things thank you the only other thing i would like to add i i have seen a lot of people do this to great success don't be afraid to give the players power if you're playing say a vampire alert don't be afraid to say hey would you like to be the prince of The city you might die but you'll have a great time and do not be

afraid to ask really weird questions because i might have this awesome idea for a neo-nazi skinhead plot and would you like me to discriminate against you madam and if i actually asked her that she said oh you know i think it'd be awesome if you're some horrible neo-nazi that i killed because you're you know evil great but she also never do say you know Ben i'm not really down with the neo-nazis these days so uh maybe give that plot to somebody else thank you also um well all of these are great advice they're they're not

going to you're going to run into things three months down the line six months down the line that you don't you're not going to know how to handle you don't have to reinvent the wheel go to people like amber get some resources where they're people that you Trust their judgment you trust their experience so you can go to them when you say oh crud i have this situation come up i have no idea how to handle it have you dealt with anything like this because there's no new problems it's been you know somebody has dealt

with it and that can give you some ideas on where to turn to in the future thank you thank you next question please Hi um so i'm running so i'm running two i think two at the moment new players uh through this basically they keep on borderlands but it's kind of hard to get them really really incentivized because they're like never available so i'm having a lot of time on my own so because somewhere down the line i'd like to have Some sort of uh chaotic neutral race thing that i'm going to throw at them

so i want to figure out how it would play a chaotic neutral creature that because it usually goes from non-intelligent to like super genius so i'm trying to figure out how i would play an animal intelligence chaotic neutral thing get a pod um anything really because my dad says that There they can be more dangerous than chaotic evil because you know that the evil chaotic evil people want to kill you the character neutral might be able to kill you but not at the moment so i'm trying to figure out if you have any like advice

on how i would play a chaotic neutral thing i think of chaotic neutral is just very selfish they're what what whatever at the given moment seems to be in their best odds sometimes That's helping people sometimes that's stabbing people in the back they're they're out for whatever their particular goal is and they'll do whatever it takes using the rules and working within the system or not in order to uh in order to accomplish what it is that's important for them they're also very willing to change what they want at a moment's notice they may have

been really interested in this Shiny thing over here and it may have been what they focused on for a day or a week or even five or ten years and then something cooler comes along and they're completely willing to subvert or drop whatever plans they had set up in order to get what they want at the moment and specifically a question for those of us who might run um alignment less systems anyone who runs an alignment-less system have a Suggestion just for this kind of personality oh yeah sure no no i'm sorry i'm talking to

our panelists yes i know but i had a really good look up mania i manic personalities that's what you're looking for pure manic episodes Actually you do bring up a very good point sir research uh reading books on say animal psychology um abnormal human psychology these kinds of articles can give you a lot of good stuff uh ross you were going to say something oh sure i would just say um when trying to put myself in the shoes of a character in general a lot of times i cheat by instead just like imagining a friend

of mine or a famous actor or character from A book or a movie and just like you know in my mind you know this owl bear is actually tom cruise you know this goblin lord this goblin lord and his minions are actually the hanson brothers and i'm not telling the players this where i am afterwards are you sure you want to kill talkers yeah right Yeah yeah exactly so that can just be a really simple thing because it get like uh those personalities they're kind of like a handle for you to hold this really complex

idea and that way you don't need to get too cerebral about it you can just be like oh yeah what would my brother do and that's who this albert is he's like my brother right thank you very much thank you next question please uh hello uh hello My name is sam uh i i've been i've been dm for a few years and i'm currently playing a pathfinder campaign off my own sort of idea for setting priority but uh at the moment i run into a problem where there's one or two members in the party that

even though they've been really only using the basic stuff seem to just crush everything i put in their path and if i make it but when i've been increasing the you know Strength of the monsters and stuff the other four members in the group just get annihilated and when the two guys that have been doing all the work suddenly can't do it so i'm trying to i don't want to say hey all the character you put a lot of work in and make a backstory and all this i i just don't want to say you

can't play that guy anymore but how do i make it like a trade-off between difficulty and Not killing everybody one suggestion that i would have is uh so if you can't quite figure out why the couple of players are dominant you know if it's not just that they had you accidentally gave them a plus five sword or something like that yeah um you know you could always take a look at the characters who kind of aren't pulling their own weight in terms of their abilities and maybe drop some treasure in the campaign that's more geared

Toward them like if one of the bard for example some kind of magical instrument that the other players aren't going to want to use and so you might try lifting the other players up to the same level as your your kind of uber bunnies are uh and then you might also i mean at that point once you've got it right you can tinker with the challenge rating of the monsters and things and try and train yeah i i mean i myself when i'm a player I'll i'll i tend to try to make my characters as

physically as just you know terrifying right i mean the fact of the matter is there's gonna be some players who are just way into like maximizing every plus one and you know and just making the most powerful characters possible then they're gonna be some that are just couldn't care less about that kind of thing and you're gonna have to find other ways to kind of bring those characters up to parody i Think so where else are you admitting that this is a sin of yours as well i mean i don't play games with complex combat

mechanics usually but whenever like i have like any opportunity even in a story game to like try and win as a player yeah i just can't i can't break that habit one thing i was taught by um eric frank house two-time iron gm champion of gen com uh you see the monsters hit points The players don't so if eric has been playing the badass who just dealt 60 points of damage in a hit yeah i'm gonna reward him oh that was awesome the guy is really staggered by the blow he's looking terrible but if jess's

character hasn't really gotten to be very effective guess what that monster just grew blank many hit points and whatever jess's next attack role is oh my god you finally took him down another thing you can do And this works better if it's something other than just a straight dungeon crawl type campaign is look at your plot and look and see if there's ways that you can throw out challenges where those characters who are not necessarily the the tanks get an opportunity to shine because they may they may have made the characters the way they did

it may just be that they didn't know how to min max the system but it may be that they really Wanted to put those points into underwater basket weaving instead it's part of your responsibility to make certain that those players are getting the chance to to see the parts of the story that are important to them so you know all of a sudden in your next plot there is something where having botany is really important to the plot and it gives those characters a chance to shine in something other than how many hit points They're

maxing with the blow and to get that powerful those characters have probably made some sacrifices somewhere else so i would take a really close look at their charisma and i would take it really closely with their sleeping throws particularly i had a character in a dnd 3.5 campaign that i was running and he uh he used a some kind of like druid animal companion thing oh yeah my one of my guys decided to do that octopus yeah Well yeah that needs water but anyway so yeah so anyway so he had like this it was basically

like a saber-toothed tiger animal companion and it make matters worse it was from a dragon article that he had edited and it was totally and so like it made me so mad because this this saber-toothed tiger was more powerful than every character in the party right but that saber tooth tiger had a he Will save and so i took it over and i actually killed a character with it and then like the novelty of that tiger kind of wore off on that same very specific note i found that very powerful mages have real problems when

they get grappled because if you can't use somatic components to cast your spells anymore it's really hard to do anything the anti-magic shell All right thank you very much and thank you all thank you so much quick question the remaining panelists does anyone here want a random encounter if yes throw up your hand all right you wanted a random encounter sir so you aren't getting it cool all right panelists whatever this question is you are only allowed to answer in the form of a pop culture reference movie song Actor or singer good luck sir what

is your question lucky for them my uh i'm getting the star wars um but let's just say i have i have two really quick questions one i have a character who's or a player and every single character he makes is the super op crazy ridiculous backstory uh you know you can't kill me because of this this this this because my backstory Uh so how do i deal with that and second i have a lot of characters that decide on splitting the party um what would you recommend doing should i run like a second game session

with just them or what all right guys what you got for me it is dangerous to go alone take this any suggestions about his uh first question luke i am your father just because he gets to write his backstory doesn't mean You get to add don't get to add components to it i like it in terms of splitting up the party mine would be i've got a bad feeling about this ross amber anything you'd like congratulations when that's happened to me i've always made sure that to bring them back that um they're either directed by

another npc or the split off group ends up in big Trouble and the only way to fix things is to bring everybody back together somehow or have them battle each other or that your mind control can be a i i do have something to say about the first thing uh this is related to the song by pearl jam jeremy where oftentimes people are create characters to allow them to express certain parts of their Personality or you know maybe this is a person that like is you know doesn't have a lot of opportunity to like really

like feel empowered in their daily life and also you know a lot of times when people are first playing a role-playing game and they're like whoa wait i can i can be a warrior i'm going to be the craziest warrior no one can ever defeat me and this is really exciting when you first start playing and then it's not until like later on When you sort of realize like oh you know wait a second yeah i've like gained levels before and you know i've like beaten lots of role-playing games and actually now i'm really excited

about like relationships or you know i want to create a character that has lots of problems and explore those problems and explore our relationships with other characters so yeah it's a phase your your player is going through a phase and like Find a game like play anima prime or play some game where yeah it's about like crazy over-the-top final fantasy cut-scene battles and just letting them go wild right all right yeah cool thank you thanks very much great question next question please all right so i love playing the cackling villain with uh ludicrously over complicated

plots and crazy like networks of spies that uh keep track of everything that players Are doing um how do i stop my players from calling you don't your players are going to think it even if you can stop them from saying it out loud so start incorporating that into your story as i said earlier no story line no plan no plot nothing a super villain does survives contact with the players and That unexpected is what creates the best stories so let let them catch you every once in a while especially if you can set up

things that they can catch you in so they think they know what's happening and then you spring the real thing on them red herrings are a lot of fun i've suggested just about having Villains in your story in general and this is this comes from vincent baker in apocalypse world he talks about this a lot where um uh he he says in an apocalypse world one of you our jobs is to create uh pc like triangles between players and npcs and you want those relationships to be asymmetrical it's a lot more interesting so if we

have like a super villain that's just like a total dick and like Everybody hates them they're kind of boring too what's a lot more interesting if like maybe over here this person really hates this guy but over here they're actually like you know maybe the super villain actually maybe that that relationship is uneven maybe there's a reason for one character to like the super film like they're related to them or it's their uncle or their child or something like that so um i would look to create a more Complex complex more complex relationships between the

players and npcs also um you can you can in order to keep your players well give your players less of an idea less of a feeling that you are cheating to make you know make your uh make certain that um that your villain is not entirely invisible that they're that you're seeding your plots with things that when they get to the End scene and you do your big reveal that you've had enough things that they'll go oh my god that's what was happening in that first scene and then that third scene and the forts oh

geez so that way they're not you're not because you're you're omnipotent you know everything about what your villains doing give them enough so that they don't feel like everything was happening Completely behind the screen so that way they get that aha moment and then the computer is really clever not that you're cheating to try to win against them don't be afraid to give them a different role if you want to show how the evil overlord is evil that's great but if you maybe want a moment of he's actually a decent guy to work for then

you know all right you are the minister of war you are the high Archmage you are the high priestess and we're gonna play one scene where you guys all get to be the advisers to the evil overlord talking about how we're gonna deal with these goddamn heroes that keep messing with us thank you all right thank you for a great question even evil overlords provide jobs gm's we are important to a lot of imaginary economies so firstly thank you for this panel it's Been awesome so far i'm looking forward to more secondly i'm idm for

a while and so i have your basic dungeon crawls well i have like basics save the world plots but i'm interested in moving into things with more complex themes possibly or or being able to kind of i do like these sort of expanding plots that the last guy was mentioning so i was wondering if there's any advice like for like For any sorts of themes that like for when i'm trying to capture the themes or when i'm trying to capture how i essentially want to push forward my dm sort of artist straight forward and so

i'm wondering if any of you would have suggestions for like the sorts of things that help push you most as a dm as far as sort of plots that and experiences that either were really Awesome for your players or we're seeing this kind of artistry for me again going back to the system i talked about at the very beginning in midnight it's really easy to just win your your pcs are completely overwhelmed that they are badly outnumbered it's death to carry a martial weapon without a rule without a a pass to do so and so

trying to build that world to the point Where it was scary and difficult but not impossible tiptoeing that line where every second it was really easy for me to be overpowered and just just kill the party and pulling back from that helped me a lot to know that yes my players have to think about all of these additional things so i need to be nice to them every once in a while in These areas that they would normally be focused on because they're simply focused on making it through town without someone identifying that that's an

elf and it needs to be hung that that kind of thing is helped me a lot to to see the the difference in perspective anyone else like to throw tonight yeah i would say one thing i was just putting a plug for um organized play campaigns so one of the things that i did a lot in The 90s is i was into the rpga's living city campaign which is like forgotten around this dmv game and i traveled all around the country um and played with a whole bunch of different people um you don't have to

go that far you could just go down to the local game store you know a story game meetup or a the pathfinder society game or something like that and the what i found is that the more different gm's that i played with the more tricks that i picked up You know i read the books i had my own expertise but until i saw other people put their own sort of best practices into play there was a lot of stuff that i was missing um for example um until i went to college and started playing with

people i'd never played it before i never really used miniatures at the table and with a game that's as tactically complex as pathfinder or d um i found that that added a totally different dimension to play and i've Been using them pretty much ever since another trick that i picked up from other people is i almost never sit down when i'm jamming i'm generally standing up and if i'm you know you can really do a lot with atmosphere by doing that you know so maybe you you want to kind of get up close to someone

and kind of whisper something to them you know and that that really kind of helps them immerse themselves into this situation a lot better um and then when it's quiet You know sit back and and another trick that i've i've learned is that sometimes the players just want to feed off of each other and they just want to bounce you know role-playing with each other about something and that's kind of my that's my excuse to sit my ass down and relax a little bit so look at how other people do it and steal the best

things that you see from them there's that um don't be afraid to experiment don't be afraid to go i want To try this and potentially try i also love props and i love props that can complement the game so if i'm running a game and the players are expected to find this letter or this treasure or whatever i try to keep graceful props here that i can quickly grab i just really have this really cool looking box like a chest that i can throw stuff into really quick and you find this plunk and then let

them Poke around when say they've got a letter that comes from a courier from from the mayor or the king or whatever i will hand them a wax seal of letters you were handed this and that gives them the chance to open it up feel crack of the seal opening up feeling the parchment and then reading the letter so that helps i think i said don't be afraid to experiment to think a bit And go hmm what might i find fun if i was in their shoes yeah thank you very much i mean i have

to cut you here because we do have a few more people behind you but thank you that was a great question thank you uh quick question everybody enjoying themselves all right so one thing i was told by the amazing enforcers that are working this theater is that we are the last one here today so we are allowed to run just a Couple minutes over i can't go too far but this does mean if any of you need to be somewhere exactly at 3 30 i'll let you know when that is we may end up going

a couple minutes over but please if you want to just hang out have a nice intimate conversation just to what 200 of us feel free to say sir what is your question uh so our group has been together for a bunch of years and like over time we've gradually Picked up more and more players so we're at eight now which so seven players which is one gm is just unmanageable so one trick you've been trying to do is have two gms uh and i was just one and like we've had about a 50 success rate

between really cool and didn't quite work and i was wondering for i was hoping for any advice with yeah i that Some advice um one the the challenge with i've participated in two gm campaigns and experimented with that in a bit in design and the biggest challenge is that when we sit down at the table together one thing that we're doing is creating this shared imagined space which is the story it's kind of like being on a road trip with your friends where after a while you develop all these little like inside jokes that wouldn't

be funny to anyone that wasn't On this road trip so when you have two different tables it's like we're all on two different road trips and those little like funny things aren't going to be funny to the other people so if you're looking for so i would say that tabletop rpgs in general have a little bit of a limitation with that regard if you are looking for things to do uh with larger groups um i you know either like split into two groups and Then like kind of share stories afterwards or maybe try like a

chamber larps or there's like other other things that work a little better with larger groups i'm done running games for more than five people um i i've done it enough and it's torture for me um just because there's too much going on and i also find that one of the best um signs of a good game is a game where people come every single time and when There's seven people it's very easy to say well if i don't come they'll still run the game you know so um basically what i did about a year ago

because when you work in the game industry particularly in seattle you have a lot more people you want to play games with then you have the ability to play games with so i just split it up i'm running the same game with different groups of people in the same city at the same time the same fake city at the same time and Then that gives me the opportunity later on to like mix up groups and things like that it's a huge challenge i mean i i'd be perfectly honest it's probably easier just to pick five

friends and just play with them um but you know i wanted to play with all these guys and so i would recommend splitting your group in half and finding another player to to make it five and five or four and five or whatever um seven players is just really really hard for everybody to pay Attention and i think when people are not paying attention to the game it's when the game starts to suffer are you telling him to split the party yeah i guess so yeah all right risky advice but thanks very much i was

going to say really quick on that um if you're if you're bound to be determined to keep everybody together my suggestion is you really need to be communicating with your co-gm set up some time where you get together Before maybe even after each game and plan out who's going to be responsible for what um and and who's going to be covering what etc so when things happen you know who right who to go to and who you look to and instead of actually splitting it up into two separate tables you could share the jamming uh

responsibilities like for example in the world of darkness game that i'm playing in with uh uh werewolves uh we've got we've got one gm Who's in charge of the main narration stuff and then we've got a gm who handles all the umbrella spiritual stuff so the party goes into the umbra that person tag teams out they have to keep track of all the spirit stuff and and that kind of thing so they've divided the responsibilities um and then they just use a a really streamlined version of the areas where you tend to bottleneck like combat

they've got okay initiative cards that Line up so you don't have to you you you have a card for each person or each character the the person with the highest initiative goes in front when they take their action it gets moved to the back so they can see whose initiative it is if you don't have your action ready when your card is at the front you have flubbed your chance to have an action that time your card goes to the back so it goes really really fast tools like that that allow things To to address

the the bottom left point and i'm gonna have to cut it here guys just because we do have a few more questions thank you very much that was great next question please hey i've been uh gm for about six years and i've been running actually the same group for the last two to three um and we're about to finish within the next coming months a few sessions away we're about to finish and i've never Ended a campaign before do you have any tips for how do i kind of bring everything together for one nice sealed

ending why does it have to be sealed that's true if your players love their characters they can move on to becoming npcs and the next story that you run the the storyline i imagine that that you're creating has a Kind of stopping point that you've come up with and that's fine but it doesn't have to tie everything up into a neat little bow your players get to maintain that interest and that that love for characters that they've been playing for for several years if you leave a few tidbits here or a few tidbits there i

think trying to tie everything into a neat little bow is going to end up causing people more Stress and more troublesomeness than letting them have a few things that that either aren't told by you or maybe you let the characters tell themselves you let the players do a little aftermath of each of their characters after that you've reached the end of whatever storyline you were telling them the animal house thing where it's like five years from now this character did this and i'm going to steal my own uh random encounter for a moment and we

Gave you a line from a.a milner cause i'm sure you have a few people that grew up on winnie the pooh here and that is in that enchanted place the top of the forest a boy and his bear will always be playing don't be afraid to just let them walk into the sunset and have that moment of who knows what's next all right thank you guys so much all right we've got miss atomic university what you got for us sir yes uh so somebody else already asked my Primary question so my client did not survive

contact so i have a backup question uh my friends and i my regular gaming group really do enjoy the more tactical play of pathfinder and more recently wfrp3 but the problem i have with the gm is that they tend to look for very tactical solutions so i like to sprinkle a lot of investigative opportunities in the story and some Intrigue opportunities but they feel like if they when they're faced with such a challenge their first answer is usually i attack when i try to mitigate that by basically telling them not in so many words you

know this is not really an encounter that you can win and the corrupt guardians are watching you and cleaning your swords and the wizard is sort of looking at this spell book In your shift jack or something like that they fled out just believe me and then i have the option of either wiping them or fudging something to turn this unexpected combat encounter into something winnable so how do you which would you guys suggest for me to be the wife they don't they don't have to win every combat but just because they lose doesn't mean

they die They may get capped they may all get knocked to zero or less than zero hit points start bleeding out and then the evil wizard decides i need subjects for my next experiment and they wake up in a jail cell with none of their gear i always have fun when i have players like that and i overpower them by use in a way that it forces them to rethink their choice um in the process of role-playing How to get out of the situation with the guards they end up in the city jail cell stripped

of all their stuff and out now they have to face the magistrate and now they're gonna have other penalties to pay um so i always think and look at other options rather than just flat out kill so if you take anything away from today's panel it's strip or wipe your plate on the other side at that point a win doesn't necessarily have to be a win Either just because they've killed the guards and destroyed the wizard that sort of thing doesn't mean they've accomplished what they needed to accomplish in that scene and to once you've

given them a couple of opportunities where the the winning killing everything does not get them what they were looking for it doesn't get them the information they were wanting because that wizard had it he knew the path to the thing it wasn't Written down in his spell book for them to recover after he they killed his dead body they'll start once you've made it a pain for them to handle things after the win they'll start trying to figure out whether this situation is one where they should be using diplomacy or whether they they can't you

know do can go in and wipe everything out and still walk away i would say also actually i'm thank you very much that's a great Question we've got one two three four five left all right i think we just might pull it off all right uh kind of a two-parter i'm uh first time d i'm gonna start uh fourth edition dnd campaign real soon in the next couple weeks just running uh the first published adventure to keep on the shadowfell one thing i'm kind of dreading is that looking at my own skill set i'm not

very Good at the improv the social interaction stuff i like to say i think i'd make a good dungeon master but not necessarily a good game master and the second thing it kind of along with that is uh my friends that i'm gonna be playing with we've done some other rpgs before with other people dm'ing and it's probably once or twice a session somebody will crack a joke out of Character and then the whole session goes completely off the rails so i'm wondering if you guys have any tips for our first time dm and specifically

how to handle those two kinds of situations how do we keep them on the rails guys eric i uncensor you i'm not sure i have a brilliant answer to this but you know i mean part of it i think that the most fun game sessions that i've had over the course of my gaming career have been game sessions Where everybody's laughing and having fun and sometimes that's been because of what's happening in the game and sometimes it's been because somebody threw in a funny monty python quote or whatever i i think as long as it's

not super distracting a little bit of kind of fun is over that's kind of more i was asked not so much how to prevent that happening but how do i bring them back to the game i just think just jump right back into it you know and i mean one of The things that i said at the beginning of my current campaign to all my players is i'm going to do the best job that i possibly can to engage your interests and we're going to have fun and i'm going to try and make the coolest

story i possibly can and in return i would appreciate if you guys kind of stay focused on the game and stuff like that and you know we still joke and there's still i mean everybody's drinking beer in my game so i mean it gets it gets it Gets hilarious but um you know but but at the end of the day we're here to keep playing and so i think that really you as the gm is the you're the facilitator of the game and if you find yourself getting pulled into you know a seven minute conversation

about venture brothers or something like that you are not you are not doing your job your job is to pull people back um so let them laugh let them have their phone a little bit and then surprise Attack and whatever works or something we really quick we use the term dead puppies um so you know everybody's going off thing and and then the gm or the storyteller would be like okay guys dead puppies three two one back in character and it's just kind of it it's another funny thing but it just reminds us okay we're

laughing okay let's i'll get back to where we you know pull on the aux Again and then on your other question how to deal with the the parts of being a jam that you you feel like you aren't as good at let your players know hey my my dialogue isn't going to be polished for the first couple of times but the way you get good at those things is by doing them you're not going to be great none of us up here came to our first game session as fully Formed perfect gms it doesn't happen

and the way we got good at what we're good at is by doing it over and over and over again and some stuff worked and we kept doing it and some stuff didn't work and you know we kept doing it too because we didn't realize it didn't work and eventually we realized it was your question so this is a fairly general question but when you're scripting a plot for an adventure or maybe an Overarching thought arc or even just a hook to get an adventure started do you ever run into writer's block and so what

do you do to cope with that all right i'm going to declare that this is another um random encounter uh hallucinogens alcohol illicit substances and things that are bad for you yes that's how you can improve that Frankly plagiarize take it from somebody who's done it already let's file the serial numbers off though and also seriously i find myself most creative when i try and work in you maybe a couple hours at a time and then you know go on a walk do some yoga go on a bike ride hang out with your friends do

things other than staring without that computer Maybe try working in a public space like a cafe find someone that wants to come over and hang out and work and bounce ideas off try and surround yourself with other people that are doing creative work and that creative community is what's going to give you the juice to be able to finish projects i think the best part about being in gm is you are always playing the game the players are all the time when you're running it but you're always thinking about it so a big thing That

i have not just for gma but also as a writer is i carry a notebook with me all the time there's a notebook next to my bed there's a notebook in my bag there's no book in my car i am constantly writing down ideas you never know where you're gonna have an idea some of my best ideas are in the shower you know i don't carry a notebook in there but um you never don't don't like prescribe your creativity to be one place or Whatever it's you should be creative some of my best best thoughts

that you come when my mind is off thinking of something else oh my gosh this would be epic also like when you're when you're playing it's like oh oh i think i know what she's going to do oh she didn't do what i thought she was in there but that had been so cool i'm just going to write that down All right you have to cut it here thank you very much sir so i'm a veteran been doing this since about 87 and i keep coming back as a gm as a player to some of

the same issues around spotlight sharing in some cases a planning stage when you have some players more engaged than others and in many cases there are specific subsystems in games i think of decking and rigging and shadowrun i think those Quarter classes in l5r which reward players often aside from what you guys do to bring everyone together one of the things that i've taken to doing especially when dealing with with rigging or decking where the player is going to be off doing their own thing is i sometimes run a separate session for my rigger or

my decker and i pull my decker aside and i tell them you're going to be in the net looking for this information And we go through that entire situation off on the side at a separate time from the from the rest of the group so then when the action is hot and heavy and they need to uh they need to crack that corpse codes and get the people out the door in order to not get caught by the guards i can say okay your deck or debt your decker jacks in and takes care of things

that's all been handled so that way there's three or four rounds that the decker is doing That in game when they're not acting but that's already been you know the 30 minutes or so that it actually takes to go through a decker going through the net and finding all of this stuff and fighting the black ice and so forth so also whether that decker is plugging in or whatever or when your uh wizard is actually projecting himself to the master plane you know his body generally is still where everybody else is and so What's happening

in real time while that's going on so a lot of times what i'll do is i'll just change focus and i'll be like okay so you're hacking this code and i'll be like okay the rest of you guys were hanging out with this body you hear some footsteps coming and you know and then all of a sudden maybe if gun fighting starts over here and so you just switch back and forth as you're you're going because it's boring as hell it was i think that's what actually i Was going to suggest is find ways to

incorporate the others in that story if you can't do a side seam as jeff said find a way to incorporate them in that with something else that they can be doing that they're interested in and if it isn't quite in that way where it's other people seem to be hugging the spotlight find ways to incorporate the others maybe there's a piece of information only one person has or or This npc will only talk to one of these couple of characters that type of thing to give them a chance to come out right sorry jess i'm

gonna cut you off here thank you very much sir great question we've got two more we're in the home stretch okay first um one of my players is in the room this question may contain spoilers you may wish to cover your ears so um i've been playing with the same Group for a few years now and previous years we've always done kind of a self-contained season of the storyline it's been a very compact kind of legend of zelda e uh this time i'm telling a much longer much larger story the players think they're heading towards

the finale now but really it's planning to be a wham episode that's going to make things a whole lot worse for them suggestions for how to pull this off without making it feel like they've Failed because normally this is when they expect to be being the bad guy not getting their asses kicked well is failure bad like yes it's going to cause them to have to refocus their efforts but achieving a successful goal of what they think is going to be the finish and then finding out that the curtain gets pulled back and they get

to keep playing that's one of the best things for me personally So it's what jess was talking about earlier success doesn't mean you've won just because they succeed at the goal that they think that is their big goal doesn't mean they've succeeded at the overarching goal of taking care of everything and that you've succeeded but is the hook that gets them interested in the next session consider having Sympathetic npcs if you've established that sergeant phelps is you know a badass member of the town guard well when sergeant phelps looks over at the heroes whenever this

wham episode happens wow you guys are in a lot of trouble i feel for you well that's going to have a lot more emotional impact if they're just standing there by themselves with no npcs commenting on the situation you can also Make certain that you give them the opportunity when you're running your wham session make sure that it doesn't end like the end of the evening does not end with and look here's the rest of the things you have to do give them just long enough to get started on that next trail so that they

feel like they're like and and this and oh okay we can get started on that so that way they're starting to build a little bit of Excitement for the next thing thank you all right thanks very much after we will be available for a few minutes thank you and before we get to your oh yes we will be doing signings outside um all right we're going to do the last question in just a second but i will tell you all if you have enjoyed this today let pax know because we always hope to come back

we always hope to have A good theater and a lot of time let them know if you had a good time and bring us back next year thank you so much for your patience what would your question be hi um due to an unfortunate series of events our uh d group is now split up all over the world uh two of them in europe some in texas and three of them in seattle so i'm interested in trying to get our pathfinder group on skype And um i'm hoping like pat uh here's a program called hero

lab which has been admits help to um character creation and keeping our inventories and you know just uh just being our character sheet for us so i'm wondering if they're in like in your decades of experience of dming if there is some kind of interactive like map that we can have um i'd like to suggest something different than this crap i believe it's Called roll20 but it's a website that is designed just for your purpose webcam access but gives you a battle mat area what was that called roll20.net google plus has a lot of utilities

for that as well google plus hangouts a lot of people use that and i believe there's actually a map uh thing that's that's free that's an app tool map tool that's What's good all right so we are art of the table amber eager eric mona jess hartley ross what is your last name town man ross cowman and jeff bostenfest thank you so much