Tricks to make your RPG experience better!

[Jib]

another idea is to use bits of string or wooden rods cuts to measure various ranged attacks. Lets the player know instantly if the target is in range.

We have also used a felt board with no pre-made 1" squares and instead used a tape measure to check the distance for movement, weapon and spell ranges, etc.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I used to be in the habit of trying to put as much dungeon as possible on the table. Whether it was with wet-erase markers, dominoes and glass stones, or dungeon tiles, it's just always a great big hassle. Precious (boring) time ticks by while the DM sets the scene, and then, once the players explore their way off the map or decided to descend down to the next dungeon level, everything has to be cleared away or messily erased.

My salvation came from an obscure section in the D&D Basic Set (and I think it's in the Rules Cyclopedia too). It's the part at the beginning of the book that suggests that during play, one player should be the "caller" and one player should be the "mapper." That is, one player acts as a party spokesman who collects actions from all the other players and relays them to the DM; and another player pays careful attention to the DM's description and maps the dungeon on graph paper.

I never used to pay any attention these ideas, but when I tried them out, man oh man what a difference they make! It really speeds up the game!

Now, as the party explores the dungeon, we just track it on graph paper. Super easy, super quick, and no need to erase anything when the party explores a new area. We only need to shift to the battlemat when a fight breaks out, and then, it's just a matter of putting a few tokens or dominoes on the mat to mark the dimensions of a room and the locations of exits (or, say, roads and terrain features, if the party is outside).

Likewise, having a single player tell the DM what everybody else is doing is actually a good idea. It clarifies things and speeds everything up, since the DM can basically just go down the list, adjudicate all the actions, and report all the results.

I never would have thought to look for the best tabletop advice ever in my flimsy little red-cover booklets from 1983, but there you go. The wisdom of our forebearers. Makes the game burn by at warp-speed, at least compared to how I was doing things before.

 

[Noumenon]

I like Jib's idea of going to Kinko's to turn normal sized maps into big ones, since I've downloaded a ton of maps from Wizards' Map-a-Week archive and other sites. I wonder how much it costs.

It seems like it would take me longer to describe a room to a mapper, even a not-too-detailed one like this, than it would to draw it myself. With my big battlemat, I draw big sections of the dungeon at once while the players take a bathroom break. Breaks are important for pacing too, I think.

 

[Jack Daniel]

It seems like it would take me longer to describe a room to a mapper, even a not-too-detailed one like this, than it would to draw it myself. With my big battlemat, I draw big sections of the dungeon at once while the players take a bathroom break. Breaks are important for pacing too, I think.

I didn't say that I actually have a player map what I describe. I, as DM, actually draw the map on graph paper for the players. It's the quickest and easiest way to get the job done.

Other tricks I've picked up from recent campaigns:

- Scrabble tiles. They make an astonishingly ideal replacement for miniatures or monster tokens, provided you have at least two sets in different colors.

- For those of you playing OD&D or AD&D, I've found that turning a few sacred cow conventions on their heads can really speed up the game and make it more fun for everyone. For finding traps, secret doors, concealed treasures, etc., I just make a "passive search check" (using whichever character, usually the thief or the elf, has the best chance to search) that I roll in secret. That way, players don't have to repeat the old mantra, "Another door? We search it for traps," ad nauseam as they move through the dungeon.
But since this does mean more secret die rolls on my part, I check for wandering monsters less frequently than the game suggests. In OD&D, you have a 1-in-6 chance of encountering wandering monsters for every twenty minutes that tick by in the dungeon. Instead of this, I check every hour of game-time at a 1-in-2 chance. To make it more intimidating, I have a big golden novelty pirate coin with a skull and crossbones on one side that I flip onto the table. When the players see that skull come up, they know that random monsters are upon them!

 

[timbannock]

Not very fantasy-esque, but here's one I used to great (and annoying!) effect in a PARANOIA adventure (Mr. Bubbles, from the XP Rulebook):

The players got an email virus. It would send them junk emails to their PDAs...sometimes constantly. I took a bell like the ones at a hotel front desk and made a bazillion copies of the included emails. I crumpled them all up.

Then, whenever junk email came in, I hit the bell and tossed the little crumpled up piece of paper at the player's face, lap, drink, or food.

One of the players was REALLY annoyed (to the point where I knew I had to tone it down), but the other players loved it. At the end of the night, it only took a minute to vaccuum everything up, so no hassle.

And the one legit email was the only one that I actually scored a hole-in-one on the player's soda...so they never got it! In game, I just said the email comes in all garbled and unreadable.

 

[Jib]

While playing/ running Shadowrun I found that it was tough to keep track of ammo (most players just didn't mark off how many rounds they fired or when they finished a clip). I wrote up a sheet with numbers one to one hundred. I then highlighted the amount of ammo each PC had for each weapon with heavy lines seperating clips (reloading time could be nasty if you had a big critter in your face!). All the player had to do was check off each round he fired (or how many rounds per burst). Worked like a charm!

 

[Jib]

Birthday cake decorations and wedding cake columns can make great terrain and are often thrown out when the party is over.

 

[xnosipjpqmhd]

index cards

I was just reading an older-ish RPG the other day that said something to the effect of "You may want to write the stats for important NPCs on one side of a 3x5 index card and then keep campaign notes pertaining to those NPCs on the reverse side." The book was printed in 1980. I was immediately struck by the fact that this is how people tend to keep track of unimportant NPCs today and, instead, often write several pages of notes or use multiple page character sheets to detail important NPCs. Things have changed a little bit since 1980.

I take a bunch of index cards and fold them in half, so they can stand up like a tent. On each one, I write the name of the character and player on one side, and on the other side I write the character/player name plus some vital stats -- Init, AC, Saves, passive skills, etc. I'll do the same for the monsters they encounter.

The trick I am most committed to that I don't expect anybody else to try out is putting everything on an index card. Everything! You put the monster's AC, its attacks, its resistances, its spell-like abilities, its round-by-round tactics. The downside is it takes a lot of time to figure everything out. The upside is, all that stuff is figured out!

For my current campaign I'm using a rules-lite system halfway between 3.5e and Microlite20. PC/NPC/monster stats fit nicely on index cards (spell effects spill over onto their own cards). This means I can reduce my table footprint and still run large encounters. Paperclipping the cards to your screen (or magneting them to a metal document stand) reduces your table footprint even further.

One improvement to the index card idea is to blank templates for NPCs, monsters, etc., on your PC, print them on cardstock and cut out. This gives you a stack of blank "forms" you can grab and fill out on the fly, if needed. The rules-lite system makes NPC creation a breeze (under five minutes for any class and level combo).

And somewhere I found a "DM's friend" spreadsheet of quick and dirty monster stats. (I copied this to an index card, too.) Then I just pick CR and typical role, transcribe the appropriate stats, come up with some descriptive fluff, and boom... a monster in about a minute flat.

Using a PC, I can drag-and-drop rules-lite spell descriptions into a 3x5 text box, print on cardstock, and boom... all the spell stats are right there in front of me.

For one session, I went so far as to put all of my boxed text, session notes, room descriptions, trap stats... everything... on index cards (using a PC makes this easy). Since my rules already fit in a shirt pocket, I showed up to the game with a stack of index cards, a tiny rules booklet, and a few dice... and was ready to run. At any given time, I had about four or five cards laid out. As monsters or traps were defeated, I would cycle them to the bottom of the stack.

 

[Janx]

My old GM did this for our group, and I did something similar for mine.

He created tokens out of deer antler for each player, representing their primary PC. The token was a flat disk, with wood-burned etching. Everyone in the old group still has theirs in their dice bag.

What they're good for, is EVERYONE now has a marker for initiative or as a mini. This is good for the players who never got into minis. Even if you don't use a battlemat, who hasn't had a question about positioning, and using things on the table, layed out the scene?

For my group, I made them out of wood. Same concept, different material. They worked well as a x-mas present, which is what my DM had given them for.

 

[Dathalas]

Rubber bands work great for marking effects, too. My players love picking up the red rubber bands and putting them on the monster they just bloodied.

They also refer to the one monster marked with the warlock's curse, the ranger's hunters quarry, the fighter's mark, and bloodied as "Rainbow Brite". lol