After action debriefings
- Thread starter Quasqueton
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CanadienneBacon
Explorer
I just started doing an After Action Review (AAR) right at the tail end of every session, and it's really working wonders for our group. Because I have one player who is 15, and because his parents mandate that he be home by 1 am, I start the AAR at midnight. It usually takes about 20 minutes total to sit down with all the players. I currently have five players. I have encounter XP tallied ahead of time and then do a quick adjustment, if necessary, based on the difficulty of the night's encounters. I tack on roleplaying XP as well. Takes about five minutes to do all that, then when I'm done I call each player over to the living room, away from the others. I sit down with each player and we go over what was done well v. what was done poorly, what was fun, what was boring. I tell them what things their character did that I thought was good roleplaying, or, if it comes up, tell them what problems I spotted. This goes both ways, of course. The player gets his or her turn to provide feedback to me too.
The fallout of the AAR is that the group is getting along better than ever, I am now able to hand out differing XP amounts to individual players without the whole group knowing and resenting, and that the two young players who had been struggling mightily with roleplaying their characters have come quite a long way toward being better players in only three weeks of us doing the AAR. It's also been a really great feedback tool for me on what the group likes and how I, as DM, am doing.
All the times that we've done the AAR, we've had time to spare and have then gone back to the table for another half hour to 40 minutes of gaming before the younger player turns into a pumpkin and has to go home.
Overall, I highly recommend it!
The fallout of the AAR is that the group is getting along better than ever, I am now able to hand out differing XP amounts to individual players without the whole group knowing and resenting, and that the two young players who had been struggling mightily with roleplaying their characters have come quite a long way toward being better players in only three weeks of us doing the AAR. It's also been a really great feedback tool for me on what the group likes and how I, as DM, am doing.
All the times that we've done the AAR, we've had time to spare and have then gone back to the table for another half hour to 40 minutes of gaming before the younger player turns into a pumpkin and has to go home.
Overall, I highly recommend it!
Whimsical
Explorer
The RPGA used to have feedback cards that the players would fill out and not only vote for the best player, but would also rank the judge (DM) on his running of the adventure and rate the adventure itself.
If someone still has a copy of that form, could you post it? I remember it had rankings for NPC potrayal, rules mastery, making the adventure exiting, and so on. This form would work well for DMs who are trying to get player feedback from their players in their home game.
If someone still has a copy of that form, could you post it? I remember it had rankings for NPC potrayal, rules mastery, making the adventure exiting, and so on. This form would work well for DMs who are trying to get player feedback from their players in their home game.
Morpheus said:I read Wil's column in Dungeon where he commented on helping one of the players in his group playtest The Q. Aristocrat and-lo and behold-you are the writer of said book.
Pretty cool! About as close to a celebrity in my group is MEG Hal. Wil has a connection to Start Trek-the only thing remotely Star Trek-like about Hal is that he has the mannerisms of a Klingon.
Well, I think gaming with MEG Hal would be pretty cool, indeed!
Wil does add a certain level of role-playing to the group that is sometimes missing from the other groups I'm in.
His Star Trek connection doesn't really come up all that often. We're much more likely to bring up his classic work in stuff like "Toy Soldiers".
IronWolf
blank
In a PBeM I run there is some talk on IM between some of the players and I during certain spots.
In a p&p game I play in, my character writes a journal of sorts after each session (which, unfortunately, are quite sporadic). This journal really helps review what happened in the session and since serveral weeks pass between times we game, it really helps jog ones memory as to where we are at.
In a p&p game I play in, my character writes a journal of sorts after each session (which, unfortunately, are quite sporadic). This journal really helps review what happened in the session and since serveral weeks pass between times we game, it really helps jog ones memory as to where we are at.
We stand outside after a session and talk about what happened and often before a game discuss D&D in general and character mechanics specifically at times. We also cover our chracters backgounds and stuff but that actually tends to come up more often in the middle of the week if we see each other than on game nights. I guess because we just finished RPing our characters no reason to cover the ground again.
We do on occasion have a more military style debriefing such as telling the scroll using rogue not to hit the light armored/speedy movement fighter with enlarge since it messes him up, or reminders that we tend to fight by hitting one flank and sweeping in one direction unless one bad guy is noticable a bigger threat. That is mostly becuase we have two characters we try to shield from harm the cleric archer and the rogue who doesn't do much of anything during a fight. So we try to keep them behind us and keep ourselves from being flanked.
Our Gm sometimes fills us in on things our characters know that we might not have thought of and I sometimes start the session with a list of questions about the campaign world most times random stuff that has crossed my mind in the previous week.
later
We do on occasion have a more military style debriefing such as telling the scroll using rogue not to hit the light armored/speedy movement fighter with enlarge since it messes him up, or reminders that we tend to fight by hitting one flank and sweeping in one direction unless one bad guy is noticable a bigger threat. That is mostly becuase we have two characters we try to shield from harm the cleric archer and the rogue who doesn't do much of anything during a fight. So we try to keep them behind us and keep ourselves from being flanked.
Our Gm sometimes fills us in on things our characters know that we might not have thought of and I sometimes start the session with a list of questions about the campaign world most times random stuff that has crossed my mind in the previous week.
later
grodog
Hero
In all of the groups I play in or DM for, we almost always conduct some form of AAR, whether in character or not (often they are IC though). It's a good way to debrief, destress, and to fill the time until the next session. We typically would do our AARs by email, sometimes over the phone if someone's very excited about a topic, but generally by email.
Greylock
First Post
My game group manages to get quite a lot done between sessions via the Yahoo. We keep the tastier IC things for the real game, as well as combat and setch. But most of the rules-lawyering, Monday-morning-quarterbacking, and bartering is done through e-mail.
We don't meet up IRL much, because of conflicting schedules, but when we do, the game talk is kept to a minimum. We hang out because we like each other. We game because of the inner drive to kill and/or dominate each other.
HTH
We don't meet up IRL much, because of conflicting schedules, but when we do, the game talk is kept to a minimum. We hang out because we like each other. We game because of the inner drive to kill and/or dominate each other.
HTH
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