NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertsconley" data-source="post: 9040360" data-attributes="member: 13383">The point is to be a fair referee. One way to be fair is to organize your prep in a way that when a group of players do a particular thing or go to a locale the referee knows what is there. There are other things one has to do to make it work well. But that is the basic gist. However, there is a problem with the Nth level of detail. For example, you have this village detailed from my Blackmarsh.[ATTACH=full]287138[/ATTACH]It can be argued if the above all you have then all the details of the village are a series of on the spot abitary judgment calls. Sure you could handle things this way. An experienced referee can make this work in a fair way that feels consistent to the players given that above is a viking fishing village. But what about a novice to refereeing a campaign, or a person who doesn't much about Viking cultures? Well, that is where aids like random tables and terse summaries come into play. The virtue of random tables in this instance is that they can be designed to encode how a setting works in a consistent matter. In this case what and who can be found in a Viking fishing village. This and other techniques help both the novice and experienced be fair in their rulings as the campaign unfolds.Also unlike in past decades, authors can leverage digital technology to make detailed aides if they wanted too. It can be a simple as a portable website and javascript usable on just about anything digital even without internet access. Like this <a href="https://www.batintheattic.com/traveller/" target="_blank">Traveller Character Generator</a> I adapted.  Or some of <a href="https://www.batintheattic.com/tables_1974/" target="_blank">the OD&D tables</a>.</blockquote>

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