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Tools of the GM's Trade
21 Plays5 months ago
In the this episode of Tabletop Tune Up, Mark and Ben explore the myriad tools available today to enhance player immersion and spark imagination in tabletop RPGs. From sourcing evocative music—like soundtracks from iconic films and ambient tracks on YouTube—to the importance of maps and miniatures, they discuss how each element can elevate your game. Learn about the benefits and costs of using miniatures, the role of dice and accessories like dice trays and towers, and the power of concept art to fire creativity. Tune in for practical advice on how to create an immersive environment that captivates your players and enriches your storytelling!
We mentioned Stat Trackers for D&D 5e, you can check them out here. If you want to get into painting, check out the Miniac, and if you want to try your hand at building terrain, visit Black Magic Craft. Chessex Battle Mats are a staple item for many GMs. The music by Jo Blankenburg you can sample on YouTube.
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Transcript
Casual Greetings and Catching Up
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, my queen. um How are you? I'm fine. You look well. So do you. Does it yes she? Yeah, she does, actually. Does she? So, what are you up to? Oh, you know, just... just keeping busy. Missing you a little bit. Yourself?
Community Traditions in Pipsy Hollow
00:00:29
Speaker
Usual boring pageantry. You know how the people of Pipsy Hollow love a parade? What are you doing here? Sorry. Sorry. Bear with me bear with me
00:01:07
Speaker
Wow, we got some new stuff today. me. Bear with me.
Innovations in Music: Blending Genres
00:01:10
Speaker
Mark, what are we listening to? You're breaking the mold. If you listen to the whole track, it has our traditional chorus in there. But, you know, I figured it'd bring it in a little bit of a breakdown, a little bit of a rap tune for us. But Ben, that was, I don't know if you ever watched the IT crowd. I did, but I don't recognize that because I didn't get through all of it. In this clip, Moss is running a game for his friend who's undergoing some heartbreak, you know? And as he's kind of, you know, running this game and this player is vulnerable, he's futzing with his music, trying to get the music to play the right track that he wants to play. And that's kind of where this came
Advice for New Game Masters
00:01:52
Speaker
in. And today we're going to be kind of talking a little bit about tools, tools of the trade. Tools of the GM's trade, you guys. That's what we're about today. You guys have probably picked up if you're a long time podcast listeners or frankly, the few of you that we know are listening, we're pretty sure you're old too. We, we know that there was a lot more on the market today than there was when we started playing these things back in the eighties and nineties and some of us in the seventies even. So what we wanted to do today was because we do aim this podcast at UGMs, people who are maybe early and starting out, I was really touched by a one person who I think was on Twitter somewhere, reached out to Matthew Lillard. Who's the guy who does the Beatles and Grimm stuff. They've got these really wonderful premium, you know, collections of props and things like that. They make maps and whatever. And he said, well, do I need this stuff to play Dungeons and Dragons? And he had the most Lillard had the most wonderful, beautiful reply. He just said, you don't need anything. You need your dice, a pen and paper, the books, and your imagination. And that beautiful game will unfold itself all on its own. And he's right. When we started out, we didn't have a whole lot of stuff. But as I said, the market's kind of come up. There's a lot of great new stuff. And so we thought it would be really cool to go through and just talk today about why we use the stuff we use, what stuff we do use, because we do use more than we did when we were just starting out. But it's not necessary. I think that's a fair point. Yeah, we definitely have accumulated things, I would say, as we've been playing games. And some of these things can be very inexpensive, but they do help your game in ways that we will discuss. And we think that we can add something of value to your game with some of these items, some of these tools of the trade. All of the stuff we're going to talk about is a way of doing probably one of two things. The first thing and the kind of the biggest thing is really helping your imagination and your players' imagination and really helping people immerse in the game. The other thing that's useful here is there's a lot of other things that are a little quality of life upgrade. And so we're going to talk about those as we go as well. So Mark, let's get into it. Let's talk about music and
Music's Influence in Gaming
00:04:03
Speaker
media. Where should we start? I love music. Music is something that's in my life at all times. And so I start creation with music. I often have music playing when I'm working on things. And I like to have music on when I'm playing my games. What about you, Ben? Where are you at with having music? If I can find the right music, it's great. I'll give you an example. One time, I remember when the Wonder Woman 1984 movie came out, and one of the best places to go find music is movie trailers, because they've got to be short, they've got to get real punchy and tell a story with that music. And so it's almost like a little taster of a full film soundtrack, which are also really great. And so Wonder Woman 1984, I wish it had been a better movie, but you know, it was the music in the trailer was amazing. And I went back and I found some of the trailer music and it was by this guy, Joe Blankenberg. And I got this whole album that he had, I think it's called Vanguard. And this album became the thing I listened to when I was coming up with an entire segment. We've talked about the Goliath campaign that I ran, big Northern campaign going on up in the icy wastes of our Northern Kyrus. There were so many different scenes and parts of that really just came from what kinds of inspirations came to mind when I was listening to that music. Yeah. And a lot of that stuff really enriches the tales that you're telling. And I remember that game and I remember you bringing in some of the music from that as just kind of background. And it worked wonders. So it kind of makes me think of some of the early stuff we used to listen to. You probably have a top 10 list here on here somewhere, don't you? I mean, my top 10 really is the top one is Basil Pordoris's Conan soundtrack, of course. It's true. I mean, that was just the drumbeat of all of my early memories of playing D&D. But, you know, I can't even imagine playing a Star Wars game without some John Williams in the background. That's right. I mean, there's a lot of different soundtracks that are connected to IP at a really fundamental level. I mean, whether you're talking about Star Wars, John Williams, or you might be talking about Star Trek, you might be thinking of any of the soundtracks have gone from them to me. I think one of my favorite things actually is to find kind of little known Star Trek tracks and then sort of sneak them into a game if I'm playing. And then all of a sudden people hear that Star Trek sound and they respond to that. I've been playing that Western game I've been running for quite some time and I've got a lot of Western music in there. And I find one of the things I enjoy doing is before the game even starts, we're kind of sitting around the lobby, kind of chewing the fat. And I always got some Johnny Cash or something playing in the background, just kind of getting us quietly in the mood for... Nothing puts you in the mood like the, I think it's called the Ecstasy of Gold. It's that Eddie O'Marricone track from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Yeah. So, you know, you guys just enjoy the music that you like at your table. It could be music related to like, you know, some of your favorite anime games or your anime films, things like that. Just let them roll and just have fun with the type of group that you play with. Find out what they like, find out what you like, have it be something you guys do together. So music isn't just the end of the sound experience. There's all sorts of other directions you can go.
Enhancing Games with Sound and Visuals
00:07:14
Speaker
Sound effects, if you're playing online, might be something you want to break out every once in a while. Don't make a habit of it, but it's fun. Yeah, I think sound effects can be really cool. I think it's easy to overuse them, but I will say that if you think about a sound effect not as a thing you're going to do every time somebody swings a sword, but as a thing you'll do when the big moment happens. And you as GMs are going to know when that big moment is. It's the moment when in a recent game we were playing Mark, we were playing Traveler. You guys had to crash start the big ship's engines so we could get out of the way of this missile. And as soon as you guys made that roll, I hit this button, found this big booming rocket engine sound. And what a great moment it was to kind of get pepped up by that. Yeah, I've used in the past too, Ben, I've used a sound of a dragon to kind of foreshadow what was coming. That's great. And I think you guys all heard that sound and was like, this may not be good. Yeah. If you hear that sound, that's definitely bad. And I love that everybody kind of knows what it sounds like, even though no dragon exists. Yeah, that is a fair point. It's not like a big like meow or something. Yeah. I like, nope, that's a bear. That's a lion. Oh, no, that's definitely a dragon. You're like, really? One of the things I tend to like a lot, and I think you and I differ a little bit about this, Mark, is I'm a big fan of having some concept art around. And that might be vehicles or creatures or locations or whatever, because I just cannot get that in my head. I need to have a tactile version of that that I can show players and go, okay, here's kind of what this thing is. And that's definitely something like I, because I am a very visual, like I can imagine things in my head quite easily. Sometimes I forget that maybe that's not everybody's way of seeing things. So maybe a visual element, a handout could go a long ways to helping that type of player. So that's probably should be using that more than I do, to be honest. One thing to kind of think about too, friends, is sometimes you're going to get in that session zero people who don't want certain kinds of things in your game. One game I played, somebody was like, I really don't like body horror. Now, I'm not a body horror kind of guy, but it did make a difference to what kinds of concept art, what kinds of sound effects, what kinds of written depictions I might use in that game. So keep in mind that this is going to be something that you want to do with sensitivity to your players. No body horror. There goes the whole Tetsuo the Iron Man campaign I was going to run. So much for that. No's move on to dice.
Dice and Gaming Accessories
00:09:48
Speaker
Mark, tell me, what are your feelings about dice? Love them. I just can't have enough of them. How many sets of dice do you have? Do you even know? I just need a few more. One or two less than I really want. Friends, I went to Gen Con with Mark a couple of years ago. And for those that don't know, Gen Con's the big central RPG convention. It was originally the home convention for D&D, for Dungeons & Dragons. But at any rate, you go there and they have a vendor floor. And on this vendor floor, you will find everything in the hobby. You will find dice. You'll find GM screens, books. All the new releases are there. It's an amazing experience. I highly encourage people to go try it out at least once. And my friend, Mark Lehman, I am pretty sure you hit every dice vendor in that whole place. Don't you dice shame me, Ben. All right. No dice shame. Because I'm sure you'll remember I was hitting all the miniatures places too. Yes. I was on a mission from God. He told me, Mark, you must have the dice. And I said, how much dice should I have? He said, all of the dice. All of the dice. But I'm a man of humble means. He's like, mortgage your house. You can get those dice. It was awesome. I'll do it again. yeah Yeah. well Well i think we're gonna go back to gen con one of these days it should be fun in terms of how many dice you need friends just the ones you use it's fine i mean have enough that if some of them are disappointing you you can fire them or put them in dice jail and switch it up for uh something else and if you're running the game it's really nice to have a few sets of dice particularly if if you have some new players who don't have them. So just, you know, if you're going to a table with some new people, make sure you have a few extra sets. There's a lot of interesting accessories for dice too, like dice towers and dice trays. I don't tend to use them a lot, but you know, I will say they're very useful if you are at a table and you don't want your dice going everywhere. They keep that dice roll contained. Yeah. I remember playing at a really cramped table once and we had to work out a dice tray, which I don't normally use, but like, oh my gosh, everybody used it. Like we all just kind of like, it saved us a lot of time tracing down dice on that table. All right. Well, let's move over
Cost-Effective Gaming Setups
00:11:59
Speaker
to maps. Mark, you have a really cool setup for maps in your home. Tell us what you do. So this is something we found many, many years ago. I know that there's Chessex maps, things like that that people use, but I've always liked having, I'll go to like a print bureau, you know, like just the FedEx store and I'll print out a big sheet of hex paper. You can find these places online that can make a PDF of whatever size you want, whatever kind of grid or squares that you want. And I just print that out and I throw it underneath a big sheet of plexiglass and I draw on top of the plexiglass. It's easy to clean up, much easier than those Chessex maps. Of course, it is a giant piece of plexiglass and this is going to be on the table that you're not going to be, you're going to be playing at every week, hopefully. So it's not portable. And if you have like printed maps or things that you can get, like Gen Con, like maps, you can slide them right underneath the plexiglass and just play on. Yeah. It's really easy. Good times. I don't tend to like drawing them as much. So I tend to look for maps that I can get printed out. And there's a lot of great stuff out there. If you go check out Patreons and online places, you can just Google like RPG battle map or RPG encounter map. And they'll have a lot of interesting options. If you tell it what kind you want, you know, RPG battle map, dwarven mines or something like that, right? Whatever it is that you want to do. Very easy to find out and track it down. Free, cheap, and fantastic. Hey, one more thing real quick about that acrylic top. You could go to like Home Depot and buy some acrylic top and you're going to be spending a lot of money. However, you could go to like a frame store or like a place to buy, like a poster frame. And you could spend like 10 bucks and you have yourself a giant sheet of plexiglass for $10. So like you can save some money by, you know, being a little smart about it. There you go, friends. Go get that clear plastic. Whether you're hand drawing your maps on top of it or whether you're using it to cover the printed maps that you've got printed out, those are all good. Another thing I'll do sometimes is just to save myself the printing costs. And it sounds like a weird way to be cheap, but I did buy like a little 32 inch TV, like one of the cheap ones you get from Best Buy that's only like a hundred bucks maybe or something. And use a, like a VTT client and put it on that TV and you can essentially have the map projection right there on your table. I've seen people do that. I've actually played at a table that did that. It was great. They made a little custom box for it and they just put the box down on the table. The wires were a little bit of a thing, but once you kind of got past that, it was pretty cool. So there's a lot of great stuff you can do out there. A lot of neat stuff that didn't exist in the early days when it was all just graph paper. I would say also we're not haters on the Chessex vinyl mats. I think those are great too. Oh yeah. They have their place for sure. They're certainly portable, which is not something for your big acrylic sheet. 100%. Yeah. They're fantastic for just rolling it up and going. Just don't let those markers stay on that mat for too long. Maybe maybe a a week week tops. Cause like, I tell you that stuff sometimes can be hard to get off the map. If it stays up for whatever reason, if it stays on there for like a month, forget about it. Yeah. It's now a part of the stuff. Well, yeah. So keep them clean friends. And then, uh, yeah. And then Google up, uh, battle maps from all kinds of different places, um, Pinterest and Reddit and wherever it is that you need to find them on the internet. Hey, let's talk about miniatures real
Evolution of Gaming Miniatures
00:15:28
Speaker
quick. Okay. Because I remember playing before we had miniatures. We just didn't buy them. I know they were probably around back in the early days of my gaming experience, but it was an expense I just couldn't jump into. Oh, yeah. They've gotten a lot less expensive now, I would say. And there certainly is an amazing variety of them. And a lot of quality improvements. Friends, way back in the way back of times, these things were made out of lead. They were the things you didn't want to let near your mouth. You didn't want to chew on them because it was going to do whatever it is that lead poisoning does to you. That's how you got them clean though. They moved from lead to pewter at some point. And then the reason I think they did that was because it was still better than plastic in terms of the quality of the sculpts you could get, but then the plastic processes got better. And today we have an amazing line of plastic miniatures. The best people are using plastics for their best stuff. I think there's a lot of great stuff out there if you want to go looking for it. Amazing stuff. And even like, don't just limit yourself to like what Hasbro puts out or anything like that. There are patrons who have 3D sculpts that people have made, like real artists that are just right up there with the later days of the pewter ones, which were the artists really had kind of hit their peak. I would argue that some of the stuff you're going to find on some of these patrons for these, these files that you can download in 3d print are just unbelievably talented. Hero Forge, Mark is something you've subscribed to. And have you made some miniatures from Hero Forge? I have only printed out a couple, to be honest with you, but I use that subscription. It's like a cup of coffee a month. And I can make endless tokens for my VTT games very easily, very quickly. Players can make their own characters, send them to me, and I can make a token for them. So I love it. It's a really inexpensive way to make an endless amount of VTT tokens. But they're printed tokens. God, the quality is fantastic. We're talking about the miniatures, but there's also a whole culture around painting and terrain building. I'm going to give you two names of people that I found really useful. I like painting, but I'm not especially good at it. I'm kind of middling. It's enough that when you put it down on the table, it looks good. It's a big time investment too, learning that and doing it. But man, when you see it, it's really cool. Well, and I think also there's a real Zen quality to it, right? It's something you kind of just get into and it's very relaxing. We'll put some links in here, but check out the Miniac. He's a YouTuber. He's really into painting and I think he does a great job. And then there's a guy who does terrain, which just blows my mind. Is that the Black Dragon or something like that? What is his? His name is Black Magic Craft. Oh, that's it. Black Magic Craft. Yep. He's amazing. He used to be an actual construction guy. And so he then basically just took all of the kind of skill and technique that he had in doing contracting work. And he brought that into working on all of the miniature terrain that we all use all the time. And he's got some amazing stuff. So we'll put links in the episode description. Yeah. If there was a, if there was a YouTube channel that makes me drool, it would be that. And just the stuff he makes is just like, you just, ah, your draw just drops. Like really? Did he just make that? Well, and he makes it look easy too. And you kind of go, I'll bet I could give that a shot. I've got a, I've got a big honking square of styrofoam in my basement. That's waiting for me to go after it one of these days. And one of these days I will, Mark. But between then and now, we're going to talk about GM screens and initiative trackers
The Role of GM Screens
00:18:51
Speaker
now. So do you use a screen? No, I don't actually. If I do, it's usually to hide books and maybe monster stats if I ever do. But no, I like to roll in the open as a thing. I like to roll in the open too, just because of that three-part discussion we've always talked about between the players and the GM and the dice. I typically have my screen set up actually to my right. And I do put the screen up, but it's like to my side protecting my monster stats. But I don't like it in front of me as a barrier between myself and the players. What about you? I'm kind of the same way. It's almost like having a GM screen there. If you want that distance and that mystique, that's cool. We've all wanted that from time to time. I do think though that that can signal to your players that maybe you're feeling adversarial or maybe you want to be a little distant. And if that's the kind of game you want to run, that's fine. But to me, it's almost like having your body length. You know how when somebody has their arms crossed, you know, and they kind of lean back, you know, that's kind of their way of saying like, I'm not really game to be talking with you right now. I'm not really feeling super social. That being said, you know, if we're talking about body language, when they get up, when they stand up and kind of like looming a little bit over that GM screen, it feels like they're extra engaged, doesn't it? They're like, they're now getting past that barrier and they're reaching forward and it feels, there's an excitement there when they're standing. Yeah. I'm with you. I tend to, I tend to not use the GM screen between me and the players. I tend to use it off to the side. I like them though. I, every game I buy, if there's a GM screen for it, I will buy that GM screen just so I can have an easy cheat sheet of reference material nearby. Agreed. What I'll do is I'll actually even have the GM screen just flat on the table in front of me. Yeah. It's a wonderful thing to have those easy to grab stats and rules that you might need. So yeah, we encourage it. How you want to use it is up to you though. While we are on the subject though of GM screens, it's worth talking about one of my favorite accessories. There's actually a stat trackers product by this group that basically has folding strips of paper that on one side of them have the monster stats on the other side of them have the monster's name and you kind of fold them over the top of the GM screen. And so what the players are seeing on the front will be the initiative order. And you just kind of read the monster's initiative going one direction to the other. That's kind of cool. Do you have like ones for the players as well? Or how does that work? Well, they've got blanks. So you can write in your own and then you can add in the player stats. And so that's a nice way of keeping track of the player too let me let me visualize this like there you got the jam screen in front of you and they're kind of hanging over and is it is it that they're in order of initiative you just kind of place them yeah so when you change them from round to round obviously as an issue changes or combat to combat whatever the system requires this is for fifth edition hundreds of dragons how are you notifying which one's turned? Do you have like a marker that you move? I mean, I think if we all know whose turn it is now, everybody knows whose turn is next. Okay. So, I mean, it's just the order is visible from one end to the other. And I mean, I could do a thing where I kind of slide them a little bit, maybe, or something. But that's a good question. That's cool. Yeah. What was that one called? They're called stat trackers. I'll have to look those up. Yeah, I'll get you a link. All of this, friends, has been basically us talking about different versions of things you'd go buy. But there's also a whole sort of set of things you can create for yourself. Some of them are really, really helpful.
Quick Reference Tools for GMs
00:22:21
Speaker
Other things are kind of neat, interesting, maybe highlights. Mark, what kinds of things do you actually make from scratch that you use at your table? I don't even know if this counts as a tool or not, but I never start a game without a list of names. I have a list of names and I often break them down by maybe cultures, civilizations and stuff. So I'll have my list of dwar dwarves i might even have them gendered so that i could quickly draw on because players are going to immediately ask what's that character's name and i'm like yeah it's funny you can have some fun with your friends if they're if they're not well prepared as gms where like every npc that they come to every town you come to you just kind of go what's the stable? What's the innkeeper's name? What's the barmaid's name? I walk up to the barmaid and say, hi, my name's Paul. What's your name? Yeah, exactly. You'll watch your GM struggle. Don't do that to your GM, you guys. Yeah, yeah. Well, another list of names that you have recommended we try out is historical artifacts, not capital A, right? But like all the little history things that you might add to your adventure as you go. Just little things you want to like throw in and color the realm a little bit. There might be times when you just want to quickly draw upon something. You just pick something off your list, check it off, let yourself know that you've used it. A little set of artifacts? Yeah, it's a very unique thing. Excellent. Mark, you have a practice here that I like that we have next on our notes that I just, I have suffered under it for years. I respect it, but gosh, I hate being on the wrong end of it. Can you just tell us about this? When I'm running the game, my mind is moving in so many different places. It's really hard for me to sometimes settle my mind to focus on certain types of dialogue. So I like to have a little sheet of villain sass that I could use when the time is right. There's going to be times where your players are going to be face-to-face with that villain. Players love to trash talk, don't they? Oh, they do. And I like to trash talk them. But I need to make sure I have some sass ready, some quick retorts just in case. Don't let yourself go in unprepared. Keep in mind, there's maybe four or five players against you. You got to have your sass, your remarks ready. That's right. Because they will bury you if you don't. Yeah, that's right. Here's some other things you want to do, maybe. One of the things I will keep in mind as I'm planning an adventure and executing an adventure is a lot of times I will make it just a quick little list of highlights, things I want to make sure I hit in a given adventure. One of the things that you can do as you're planning out longer adventures, and we'll talk more in another episode about adventure design, but just having kind of a list of kind of just high points you want to hit. I want to make sure that that person has a moment of weakness, that NPC, and then the PCs see that they're maybe in doubt. I want to see this moment where that sword breaks or where the weather turns foul and the players have to kind of hunker down a bit. Just whatever it is that's going to lend some color and some real value to your stuff, have a list of those things maybe written down ahead of time, just like those artifacts or that villain sass. That's fantastic. These are all things that we would qualify into, like notes. These are tools that you're going to want to use as you come in. But there's a few other little things that Ben and I have enjoyed at the table. These are more for in-person. Oftentimes, both of us have run games for groups of new players or maybe their game store, hobby shops, things like that. One little trick we like to use is we might have some game coins, like some in-game currency that we can utilize in a bag of loot. This could include maybe some in-game coins, maybe some little gems. And then we would also sometimes have like little cards, like playing cards, which might have magic items or things like this. And I think both of us have found solutions where we can home make these and print them out so we can customize into our game. Yeah. In terms of these little artifacts, the jewels, the coins, the various little, you know, the letters written on parchment-y looking paper, your local hobby shop, the Michaels, the Hobby Lobby, the places like that, Hobby Town, whatever. These are all going to be places that have that kind of stuff. Go hang out in the section that the scrapbooking people usually use, and you'll find a lot of interesting stuff in there that you can start appropriating and borrowing. And then, yeah, in terms of the cards, I think of this as kind of like a user interface for your game, you know, especially with crunchy systems, having a way to break out a little bit of information that you need, like what does this weapon do? Or what does that spell do? They're great things that are used in Dungeons and Dragons. There's a whole kind of secondary market in cards like this that have magic items and monsters and all kinds of other things on them. But if you want to try something interesting, try doing that with other games that are a little crunchy in other genres. Having a sci-fi deck or a monster deck or an NPC deck for a modern suspense game or a spy game or a take your pick. Those are really fun, really interesting ways to kind of pep those games up. I've seen one of our players use a, I think he had a shadow run or a cyberpunk. I think it was a cyberpunk deck. It was a card game. And when we would resolve his cyber runs and his hacking, we would quickly just break out that card game and we would do a quick exercise of it. It was really fun. It was a great way to resolve the hacking. So sometimes think outside the box of some of the stuff that you might have existing that you could kind of utilize in your game in creative ways. Another quick example would be a Western game I ran and we used playing cards to determine initiative. Oh, so it was like dealing poker. Yes, it was like dealing poker. It was kind of a fun, easy way. And then you would just look around the table. You could see who was going to go next. Well, a couple of these examples are bringing up something I think is really interesting, Mark. And that's what you're telling us you're doing is you're using house rules and then you're reinforcing those house rules with some really interesting, cool, fun props. And so I think it's really neat to think about the way that those two things can contribute to each other. So friends, feel free, you know, get creative, have fun with the tactile parts of the game, see what kinds of things you can add to make it really useful. Yeah. And if you have a really cool idea or something that you utilize at your table, Ben and I would love to hear about it. So let us know, like send us an email at tabletop tuneup at gmail.com. Feel free to post in the, uh, the YouTube channel. We'll always keep our eye on that. And, uh, we just want to hear some of your ideas. We love it. One thing we're not going to talk about today because this episode is already running long enough is we're not going to get into virtual tools. We're going to have a whole separate episode on that. Later on, expect to hear more about how to play at a distance. Dang, that's a serious noise there. What's going on? It is tune-up time. So for this week's tune-up segment, we have one of our good friends and listeners says, hey, I'm very curious about how and when to use downtime and all the different kinds of activities and personal goals that people do in downtime. How do I essentially execute that smartly? Yeah, let's think real quick about some of the downtime activities people might want to do. Oftentimes when we talk about downtime activities, these are things that we might maybe want to pull them back from the table in a certain capacity so we're not clogging up the entire session with downtime. That could be things like crafting, building. They could be non-romantic NPC relations or romantic if that's the type of game you want to play. Information gathering, maybe that there's some things you want to do in between sessions about that. There's a couple of different ways to think about downtime too, right? And as our listeners know, we've been playing traveler a bit lately. And Mark, we've talked about how between sessions or sort of small encounters, sometimes there's like days and weeks between those where your characters have plenty of time to do stuff. So a couple of points here, right? Number one, downtime could be anything from, Hey, between today and tomorrow, you've got a couple hours. What do you want to do? And that's useful. And then it could also sometimes be, Hey, you've got actually like a month. What do you want to do with that month? And so it's good to know kind of going in, like what kind of interval are we talking about? And as you say, like if there's some kind of an extended project, somebody wants to do, you don't want to have one player essentially monopolizing all of the GM's time in that group talking about, well, here, let me tell you what I do on day 16 now. So it's important to kind of get a sense of what you want to do at the table with everybody around and what you want to do with just the GM and the player offline. Talk about that, Mark. What do you do with the whole group around? We're really kind of looking at this as like backstage things and in front stage things. So, you know, in the backstage, we might want to be collaborating with our player behind the scenes. This could be maybe if you're using Discord, it could be some private messages. It could be just some conversations. Hey, you know, what do you want to do with your downtime? And they'll tell you, hey, man, I'd like to make a, you know, I want to craft this epic sword, you know, and it's going to be really cool. And I got these ideas for the sword and I've collected all these different items that are going to incorporate into it. And you as a GM, you're going to listen, you're going to gather that information, and then you're going to take it to the front stage. So the next session, you could think about like, how am I going to showcase this to the other players? And then also like, how are we going to get them involved, the other players? So like, what would you think about getting other players involved in it? What would you do? Well, depending on the game, I think some of them have collaboration mechanics you could use. Traveler has one, doesn't it? It has like the chain thing. Yeah, they have task chains. That's really kind of fun. Even games that don't have it, I think what you could do is you could have really neat moments where your magic user has to cast a coordinating spell to get the forge started. Or you can make up all kinds of stuff that are part of the process of this. Because remember, what's happening here is not a general instance of a general thing happening in the abstract. It's we've got these rules that tell us how to, in your case, craft a magic sword, or in another case, you know, engineer a remote drone. Those are all happening in a very particular place in time. Those are all happening with a very specific set of resources around. And you may need to then draw a story into that process of what they're doing with their downtime. Can I give just a really brief example of what we're talking about here? Yeah, hit it. Let's go. Let's say this person wants to make this epic weapon and you think about it, you've heard them out and now you're bringing it to the front stage and they want to bring in some of the other players. You kind of encourage them to do that. So you got maybe the strong man working the billows and he's got to keep these billows warm. So he's going to maybe have to make some sort of endurance checks at some point to keep these billows going. You've got the Arcanist who's now mixing these different concoctions. He's going to pour into the, the, the thing that you're crafting and now you're crafting and you got the Arcanist working and you got, now you got three people working on your awesome item and they're all feeling like a part of it. And it's exciting. It's really cool because then when that weapon gets created, created, when when that that thing gets smithied, everybody feels like they were a part of making that character successful and making that event really cool. And also, if they screw up a role, you know who to blame for the fact that your sword is now a little borked. It's just fun.
Creativity and Immersive Gaming Experiences
00:34:01
Speaker
Who hasn't had a game where the guy wanted to intimidate the local thieves guild? And they brought along the dumb, tough guy, barbarian right behind him to just sit there and grimace, dude. Just flex. That's all I needed to do. Yeah, that's great. And yeah, we're talking about crafting, but there's a lot of examples of that. Think about all of the things you might want to do that you just don't want to take a lot of game time for. Good candidates for downtime activities. Thank you for that idea, dear listener. We are about wrapped up with this long-ish episode of Tabletop Tune-Up, but I hope you've all found it interesting. And I think the thing that we want to come back to is the thing we said at the very top. It's important to help your people get immersed in their imaginations. But frankly, at the end of the day, you don't need a lot, friends. Let's follow that advice from Matthew Willard. Bring the dice, pen and paper in your books. Have a great time with your friends. Anything else there, Mark, before we sign off? No. Sign us off, man. You guys, until next time, keep those dice rolling.
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Check
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