GM's Tip of the Week

Cruvis has written a series of GM’s Tips: Ten Things Every DM Should Know About Running a Play-By-Post Adventure, and is sharing them with us as a guest blogger! Please direct questions, commentary and kudos to him.

This week’s tip is: Transparency

This one was a huge learning curve for me. I began playing D&D back in the 80s and I think the DM in those days was sometimes culturally entitled to be a jerk. It is easy to conceal things from the players on PbP. You want only one player to know that there is a magical ring hidden in a niche at the far end of the room? You can have that character make his perception check. You can even use descriptions of the PCs to influence how the other players feel about that character. Believe me, I’ve done these things and it is easy to influence every aspect of the story. Try not to do this for your players. You get to influence every other aspect of the story. It requires practice, but allow the players to represent their own characters as much as possible. Ask them for permission when you must do so on their behalf. If there is a risk of character death, you should seriously consider stating that clearly as well. Hard feelings can persist longer in PbP because you don’t have the benefit of seeing your players face-to-face. If someone gets miffed, they will drop out pretty quickly. Transparency will greatly reduce conflicts in your game. Remember: Trust, once lost, is difficult to regain.

1. Condense Chapters – Earlier, I spoke about not allowing the mechanics to bog down the game. Find clever ways to compress combats so that they do not dwell too long in weeks of anticlimactic mop-up duty. Likewise, think about shortening adventures so that they are completed in chapters with roughly 3-6 battles. These chapters should often result in characters levelling and should contain healthy doses of  exploration, problem-solving, and character interaction. PbP gaming moves slower than tabletop campaigns so it is a good practice to make the rewards and accomplishments achievable in shorter blocks of time. This will make the game and story more engaging and motivating for the players. The challenge here is not to fill a four or five hour RPG session. It is to engage players as much as you can each  time they check their inbox. A quicker achievement rate helps strengthen that sense of accomplishment.

Learn from Others and Stay Fresh – Not only is it important to recruit new players to give others a chance to learn this great experience. Seek out opportunities to play with other great DMs and players in other adventures. If I spent all of my time only creating a campaign of my own, I would actually miss out on the chance to learn the tricks of the trade that other great story-tellers are using. The only way to stay current with the best DM practices is to chat and play with the DMs you admire the most. Ask other DMs questions, like: “How do you manage combat?” Or better still, roll up a character and see if they’ll take you in as a player.

1. Stay Fresh – This one is a little tricky, but I found that stepping away from PbP after about ten years of intense play did me a great deal of good. I went back to school, I played lots of Magic the Gathering, I helped launch a monthly tabletop club, I read and viewed lots of great books and movies. Then, when I came back, I was refreshed and ready to resume the story. I am enjoying PbP more than ever now. Sometimes as a game master, we might be so focused on entertaining our players, we might lose sight of the fact that it is necessary that we, the DMs, are having fun – first and foremost. If the person building the story is having a blast, the players will find your enthusiasm and engagement to be contagious, and then it will be! Play-by-post gaming genuinely offers a different experience than tabletop, and both formats of RPGs provide rich opportunities to develop your skills as a referee, a story-teller, a teacher, and a learner.

Hopefully something in this list will cause you to reflect in some way. In my opinion, running a PbP game is harder than refereeing a tabletop session. The greatest challenge is not launching the game or initially recruiting players. The hardest thing to do is to maintain all the key aspects: pace, critical mass, engagement, writing, consistency, and transparency. When life gets busy or real life claims some of your key players, it’s easy to let any one of these key aspects slip. Keep my list in mind and see if it doesn’t help you in your next epic PbP adventure!

Mind the hippogriff!

Cruvis