Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 42 Part 1 - Ask the DM with Johnn Four

Episode Date: October 11, 2020

In the first of what I hope will be many more to come, Jeremy sits down to answer listener and reader questions with Johnn Four of www.roleplayingtips.com.  The rest of the interview will be released Tuesday and Thursday this week.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very special episode of the Taking20 podcast, as we have a guest, John Fore. John is the author of, among other things, www.roleplayingtips.com, 5 Room Dungeons Ultimate Guide, 650 Fantasy City Encounter Seeds, the Campaign Tracker Notebook, and other great resources that are available on his website. He also has a great product for taking notes called the Campaign Logger and teaches numerous courses on great dungeon mastering. John, welcome to the podcast and it's an honor to have you here.

No worries. I reached out to John while crafting my 5-room dungeon episode to get his permission and perspective and he had a great idea of putting an episode together where we answer questions from his readers and my listeners. We have each compiled a list of questions, and we have not shared them with each other beforehand. We're doing it live. We have quite a few questions. I like to cover as many as we can, so let's jump right in. Perfect. Gene Soshevsky. I'm sorry, Gene, if I messed up that last name. Gene asks, how do you make encounters and monsters more interesting? The first is if we look at any kind of element in your game through three lenses,

system, story, and setting, then if you looked at your monster through each of those, so if we looked at say system first, system is meaning the game. So that's in the mechanics and the game of the monster. And then the second one is story. So how does this story matter? If the characters win, how does the story change? If the characters lose or avoid or ally with whatever the outcome, how does the story get impacted by that? And if there's no impact, then I would say that would be an uninteresting monster from a story perspective. And then your setting is a little bit about simulation.

It's about your world and it's about how how your monster kind of fits into the like why is it there how did it get to be there not from like you say a big background perspective and a lot of prep but just its congruency after encountering the monster it makes sense that they would be in this place or be doing this thing or on this mission so So you combine all three quickly with a monster. You can make them really interesting. My main point or my main tip in this article is going to be what I call the creature feature, which is find one thing that you like about the creature, the monster, and then celebrate it. And you would celebrate it in terms of, okay,

this is how I'm going to portray the monster. So the example I use in the article is an ooze. And so I look up a gray ooze in fifth edition rules. And one thing that I saw was it's one of its attacks is by a pseudopod, which means that this thing can make like appendages out of its amorphous body. So when I look at that, I want to look at what is going to make an interesting scene with this creature in it. If I just put this ooze in the middle of a room, that's an uninteresting monster because the room is boring and the context is boring. stalactites in the cave and it's a dark cave and the stalagmites are done in such a way that it can put its pseudopods through them and in between them and from unexpected angles the walls perspiring there's puddles and in the ground there's dripping from the stalagmites and stalactites and it's like riffing off the theme of an ooze being like a wet creature not to mention the ooze can be uh hidden

in water and whatnot. But then you see, just imagine you're in this dark cave and you don't know what to expect. You don't know what's on the other side or if there is an exit. And then the water starts moving a little and then an appendage comes out of the water. And if you just think of the appendage as just a, like, it's a fact, like, I don't know, is it going to attack? Could it be delivering me some kind of sign language you just kind of build it up but it's all based on okay i'm going to pick one interesting thing of the monster and then i'm going to celebrate it through any kind of angle that i can any kind of lever that's available to me and i think that's a possible approach for

making monsters interesting as well i'm writing an adventure right now for my Fire Room Dungeon zine. It's number three, and it will be about an ooze druid. And so I'm taking the spell Awaken, and I'm making a sixth level version of it that awakens oozes and puddings and slimes. okay, what if these creatures, A, could communicate, and two, what if they're under the control or influence or loyal to a villain? And so that's the premise there. And I guess that's why I channeled this ooze thing in my creature feature example. But yeah, funny you should mention that. That's terrifying, and I love it, and I can't wait to see it come out. Hopefully it's fun. Hopefully it'll be fun.

Well, I've got a question from Eric, actually just a pure logistics question. How do you take notes during play? I don't know, quickly. I wrote laptop with less is more. That's good. Like in answer, my macro answers, I created an app just for that purpose called campaign logger. The idea is that if you have a computer or not at the table and if let's say you don't have a computer then you'll want some kind of uh note-taking apparatus like index cards or papers or whatever or my favorite a player takes the notes and then after the game you want to curate it into a source of truth so that means you take your notes and then you're going to just write a log or you're going to just refine the bullet points or whatever into whatever system that you want. I like electronic because control F

gets me all what I want. If you're using a computer at the table, well, then I would say pick an app that you're really comfortable with so that you don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to use it, obviously. And then you're not staring too much and getting kind of disengaged from the game.

A good one is MyInfo. There's Google, of course, Google Docs and Word. There's OneNote. There's my campaign logger. And then there's a Wikis. There's just so many options. But once you start using a system, then figure out how you want to organize it. The way I like to organize information is in buckets.

So the pile and file system. I learned this from cleaning my room, well, rarely. But when I did, it's easier for me to pile like things in like piles. And then later, if I need something, I know at least which pile to sift through. Whereas when I tried to find, like, put something specific away in the best spot possible for it, A, I would forget what that spot is. But then I wouldn't get my room clean because, okay, let's say I'm organizing my books and putting my books away. All right, I decide this is great. I'm going to put them in alphabetical order. I'll never not be able to find a book again.

So I get three books done. I sort out my bookshelf. I still have a pile of books and I'm tired and I give up and the job doesn't get done. Or I just put all my books in a book pile. Hey, I know all my books that are off my bookshelf are right over here in a stack or a couple of stacks that are all taken care of. So therefore, the spirit of that goes into note-taking and put your notes in a bucket. So the buckets I like are gazetteer, which is everything about your world. Rules, which is everything about house rules, especially interpretations, so that your group has this consistent record to go back to. Hey, how did we decide to do that last time? We'll do it the same way. Then there's NPCs or cast of characters, which has characters and NPCs in it. There's items, which is treasure, equipment, transactions,

and things like that. So you put your information into like categories so that you pile on file. So if you ever look for an NPC, then in OneNote, let's say you have another section open and that's called NPCs. Great. I don't know exactly where my NPC is, but I know exactly where all my NPCs are and I can find that specifically. And so when you're taking notes in the game

and outside of the game curating, if you can just generally put things in buckets, then you will be able to find things out of those buckets quick, which I think is another, the other side of the coin, you have to do a lot of referencing in the game is in addition to writing the notes. That system has worked for me. The favorite is to have a player just open a Google Doc or a collaborative document, and then all the players can go in and read it and some

will contribute more than others. And then I will go in and type the spellings of things. So it doesn't have to slow the game, typing things that are spelling the name of the NPC out and whatnot. That to me is a fantastic solution as well. How about you? That makes sense. Especially the, the, the bucket method. One of the things I do is obviously I keep a laptop. So that's got my DM notes. I try to only take notes about stuff that the players don't know. And I do ask players to take notes. And sometimes they're really, really good. And sometimes they're E.E. Cummings, stream of consciousness, no punctuation, barely any capitalization. Everything is misspelled because they can't remember the exact way to spell Zilvazarat, who is their mercane merchant.

It becomes Silvercat or something like that. And so you go back and read it later. When did I have a silver cat? Oh, yeah. But having the players take notes, I think that takes the burden off of the DM and it frees the DM up just to have notes about the very specific things that you need to know.

They killed X NPC, which means this is going to happen down the road. And then I would encourage the which means part to be done between sessions if you feel the pinch of trying to take notes. But if you have the bandwidth, otherwise, I would encourage GMs not to put pressure on themselves to make complete notes. What they're doing is making reference or memory flags. So when they go into after the session, they can go in and do a quick brain dump on that and uh and the consequences or whatever their style is of uh of jamming and then move on so yeah good call excellent excellent what do you got for me a game master plays infrequently with casual players

they're shorter sessions let's say about three hours they don't play every week but it's like whenever we can get together that could be next month or it could be in 2021. The Game Master has trouble getting the players engaged. The Game Master already tries to leave the previous session on cliffhanger. And they also have a recap at the beginning of the session so that all players are brought up to speed or kind of remember. But the Game Master says it's still difficult kind of maintaining the energy and the excitement with such long breaks and the kind of more casual players. I guess that means they won't be taking tons and tons of e-coming notes and whatnot. So he was looking for tips just on how to keep the excitement, the energy level up for his campaign. I mean, that's kind of a challenge, especially when you have a long period of time.

I mean, that's a heck of a challenge, especially when you have a long period of time. One of the campaigns that I was actually playing in recently, we had to take a very, very long break because our DM wound up being not available for an extended period of time. And so we took a month long break. And that first meeting back, I'll admit it was a challenge. We all went through and we looked at the notes and we still were looking around going, okay, where'd we leave off? Did we loot that guy? Is that corpse still there? It was a heck of a challenge. As far as trying to keep the energy up,

I generally tell my players, you get out of a game what you put into it. Nice. If you're willing to engage in the story and say even an hour before you get together to pick up that gaming session, two weeks down the road, three weeks down the road, review the notes, kind of have that fresh in your mind. I mean, anytime you have to backtrack and say, okay,

guys, remember, this is what we did last time. You can hear the brakes being hit for positive momentum. I mean, you still need to recap that if players don't remember, but I love it when my players come to the table and they basically say, we had just left the hut. We were about to enter the compound. And is it perfect? Yep. That kind of starts building the hut. We were about to enter the compound and is it perfect? Yep. That's that, that kind of starts building the momentum. It becomes, and I'm going to use my boss's phrase. It almost becomes a self-licking ice cream cone at that point. I hate the phrase and I hate that it's entered into my jargon, but I can't shake it loose now. But it basically becomes there. They become more engaged by engaging themselves just before the session.

The session becomes more engaging. Therefore, they become more engaged in starting the next session, hopefully a little bit sooner. Nice. Excellent. I agree. Players ideally meet the GM halfway so that it's not the game master who bears the burden of fun. The game master can just kind of set the framework and then the players embrace it and then do what they can to have fun and help each other have fun as well. I'm halfway through an article on this

and I have a few bullets on approaches that you could take to help build or create excitement in games when you're playing frequently and the players aren't heavy RPGers. I think one thing that might help is having a clear and single goal for your adventure. Not necessarily for your campaign,

if it's a campaign that has multiple adventures in it, but if everybody remembers what the purpose is when they come to the table, and it's not a sandbox, it's not a hex crawl, it is just, all right, here's the villain and we're on route to the villain. And I remember the villain, we really hate this villain. That clarity helps people jump in right away.

I also think having players who have clear character concepts allows them to sit at the table with this strange piece of paper in front of them once more to figure out, okay, what is it I'm trying to portray? And if they have a few words written on their character sheet that I'm a surly dwarf who knows everything about rocks, that allows you and them instantly to sit down and just be that character. And if everybody is doing that, that really adds to the atmosphere and gets the energy up. I also think there's something to be said about mystery and curiosity.

And I'm researching how to help people become curious, because I know that some aren't and some are. So for example, looked at my Google history. And the other day, I looked up what was it like, what are the Canary Islands? What's the capital of Belgium? And just like, if it's in a conversation, I'm on my phone googling it, because I'm curious about it. I mean, not while the person is talking to me. But afterwards, I'm saying, Okay, what was that thing? I didn't know that. What is that about? But some people don't have that kind of curiosity or they're only curious about certain things. And so I think curiosity means that the players want to find out what's happened next. They're

wondering what's going on. If you can create those moments of curiosity, that'll hook them into the game fast. And I'm thinking, okay, how do you do that? And so one mechanism I think is to GM and mysteries. And one sense of mystery means, okay, who killed the poor victim in a classic murder mystery book sense. But I think the broader meaning of mystery to me is there are unknowns about this. There's something interesting going on and the story is incomplete. And another word for that in my lingo is open loops. And so if you can create mystery or an open loop, then they're going to be, and assuming they're interested in it, then it's going to be gnawing on their brains. Like, I want to find out either like,

who did this or what it's about or the secret or what was the cult supposed to be doing or whatever the thing is or what's making these footprints or whatever. And so by adding those mysteries and open loops, I think then it engages players in the same way that they stick to a movie or book because they're suddenly becoming engrossed in the story. Between long gaps and sessions, you want to remind players, not the timeline of what's happened in the campaign. You want to start your session and remind characters or players what the open loops are. You want to say, hey, you guys,

we're trying to find the identity of this thing that is constantly doing these bad things in the village. Or you're just trying to resolve these mysteries and these open loops. And you just need to remind people about the loop that is unresolved. And then their brain, their problem solving brain is going to take over. I think you'd get engagement that way. Oh, that's fantastic. If you can make it easy that, hey, there's this

eldritch God that needs four of these seven things in order to reenter the world, they can kind of go, oh, that's right. Cause we've got two and they've got two and we need to do this and this and this and it kind of, it does reinforce things's right, because we've got two and they've got two and we need to do this and this and this. And it kind of does reinforce things. But yeah, keeping it absolutely simple. I love that idea. And so riffing off your story to beat that dead horse from my mystery angle, I would encourage the GM, at least for, say, two thirds of the adventure, to just have the situations occur where these people are, you know know the things are being apprehended and kidnapped and stolen whatever now the players are wondering like what's going on like that's the loop that we have to create as a gm to get them engaged if the the players already know who's doing what

and why then there's no mystery for them like they know okay i'm on a quest now i'm on a task and so the purpose is to complete the task but as soon as you introduce that fog of war for players and the task that they don't really know what's, that they have a purpose, but they don't know exactly why they're on this purpose in a way, then you're going to engage them, I think, really well. And that's a good point.

And something I just thought of is there's a homebrew campaign that I did a few years ago where I didn't have the name of the big, bad, evil guy until about we were halfway through. You've got this little bad thing happened over here. And this little bad thing I've had over here. And that little bad thing happened over here. And I had some loose ideas about how they would connect.

And the other benefit that you get is every now and then your player is going to come up with a crazy idea that was better than you ever thought of. For sure. For sure. They're going to say, Oh, it's, these are all happening simultaneously because it's approaching the new moon. Yep. That's what I had. Yeah. You solved it. Doggone it. You're so smart. You're able to figure that out. So that means you've got seven days in order before the new moon to figure out exactly where they're going to strike next. You know, that kind of thing. One final thing I think

you could do is send a pre-session email. So the week of, create an email that would do anything that you wanted for bookkeeping, get all that boring stuff out of the way. And then you would finish it off or hook them with the beginning of putting these open loops. Like you guys were on the quest to find these things that are missing and you don't know why they're missing and what they're being used for. And then the other thing you were doing was this. And that'll put it in their consciousness. And so as the week slowly wins on, they get forward to the session.

They're going to like gnaw on this. And then I think that'll build up more energy when it comes to, to engaging with this longer part, a long time between sessions. Good point. Very good point. It looks like there's far too much for one episode here, since I want to keep each episode to 20 minutes or less. We'll continue our interview with John Fore on the next episode of the Taking 20 podcast.