[Twilight Time] GM Dabbling

[Heather Grove]

November 27, 2006: GM Dabbling
Volume 7, Issue 4


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Good day!

Just a quick update on the cafepress shop; I hope you'll forgive the 
plug as we have a few developments for the holiday season! We've split 
the gaming stuff into one area, and added in a ton of tabletop designs, 
in particular a whole line of "Adventurers' Last Words" and the first 
of our holiday designs, "I'm on Santa's Ignore List":

http://www.cafepress.com/burningvoid

We've split the rest of our material into a new store, Caffeinated 
Chicanery, including designs related to writing, reading, and random 
twisted stuff. We're still moving some of those designs over from the 
old shop:

http://www.cafepress.com/chicanery

We've discounted all the level 60 designs (for you warcraft players) in 
the gaming store since we're introducing the 70s. We've also discounted 
our best-selling "I'm not lazy, I'm just out of mana" dark t-shirt 
through 12/24:

http://www.cafepress.com/burningvoid.87210139

I think that's everything, so I'll get out of the way and get on to the 
article. If I don't get around to sending out another issue before 
then, happy  holidays to you all!

Best wishes,
Heather

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Game Master Dabbling

Sometimes it seems like people are looking for "the" answer to a given 
gamemastering (GMing) question. What is THE way to do X or Y? Like the 
GMs & writers on some of the other sites I love to visit, I prefer a 
more dabbling-oriented approach. You try different methods, see which 
one works best for you, and stick with that. Or maybe you find that 
different methods work for you for different campaigns, so you change 
them around now and then.


A Brief Case Study

My husband and I are working on campaigns in parallel, but we have 
totally different approaches to world-building. He takes something of a 
top-down approach, drawing a world map and creating a pantheon first, 
then working his way down from there in successive layers of detail. 
It's a bit like looking at a high-altitude satellite map, then 
selecting an area and zooming in, repeating the process again and again 
until you're working at a level that provides enough detail for 
day-to-day campaigning. At some point I hope to kick him into writing 
up his process since he takes some nifty approaches with it. You could 
also think of it like the jigsaw puzzle player who builds the frame 
first and then works inward.

I, on the other hand, work in an almost entirely opposite manner. I 
believe the first thing I decided was, "it takes place on a largely 
desert continent." The next thing I created was an NPC. I take a very 
haphazard and fine-detail approach, like a jigsaw puzzle player who 
builds random pieces of the puzzle as he sees details he recognizes and 
then fits them together later. I'll be sitting around reading a book 
and out of nowhere turn to my husband and say, "oh, by the way, the 
city you live in is built into the sides of a deep gorge."

Both methods work. Both methods produce a viable campaign world. It 
could be argued that my husband's method is more likely to result in a 
consistent and highly-detailed world, and it could also be argued that 
my method is more likely to result in a campaign that's ready to run 
quickly because you don't have to work all the way from the top down to 
the bottom before you're ready to go. But what's really important is 
that these methods suit us as GMs.

If I were to try my husband's method I'd never run a game, because my 
thought process simply isn't that organized and linear, whereas he'd 
probably go nuts if he didn't finish one thing before moving onto the 
next, logical thing. His campaign will probably be more beautifully 
detailed than mine, with absorbing arc-plots and the like, whereas I'll 
be able to put together an adventure for mine very quickly because it 
will be easy to get random inspiration from, say, a dungeon generator 
and toss it into a blank spot in my world with just a handful of 
modifications. From the outside, both games will likely seem relatively 
similar, however, in their execution.

One of the best ways to figure out what suits you, or to find a 
solution to a particular problem you're having, is to look around at 
other GMs' methods of solving things. In this I've found a couple of 
resources to be unusually valuable. Just in case you haven't seen them 
yourselves, or haven't visited them recently, here's a pointer.


Roleplaying Tips

Naturally one of the long-time leaders in this set of resources is 
Johnn Four's "Roleplaying Tips" email newsletter:

http://www.roleplayingtips.com/

He's presented his loyal readers with more than 330 issues of tips, 
methods, tools, and more. In turn he's passed along hundreds of tips 
from his readers adding to his own articles, suggesting additional or 
alternate things for GMs to try. You could spend hours at his site 
without ever getting bored.


Treasure Tables

Treasure Tables is a blog, wiki, and forum setup that allows GMs to 
communicate about their problems and share solutions and ideas. 
However, unlike many of the communities that have gone before, it's a 
friendly, creative, active environment that constantly turns up new 
fodder for GMs:

http://www.treasuretables.org/

It's constantly updated with new material, provides great resources on 
quandaries large and small, and is enjoyable to read.



And with that, since those two sites will provide you with more than 
enough material to keep you busy for a while, I'm going to cut things 
short this month. Have a good one!

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