Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 6 - Managing Your Table Part 2

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

If brevity is the soul of wit, Jeremy's been witless these first 6 episodes.  He continues the discussion for GMs to manage their table, including how to handle politics, party infighting, PvP, character secrets, and other topics.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Taking20, Episode 6, Continuation of DM Table Rules. I'd like to ask you to please rate and subscribe to us, or if you don't want to rate or subscribe to this podcast, please give some love to another one that you listen to. Trust me, it really means a lot to podcast creators. Since the topic hasn't changed, neither has our made-up sponsor, the TCPIP Protocol. It's how cat videos make it from their phones to your eyeballs. On the previous episode, we talked about how to manage yourself, how to set expectations before the game starts, and we talked about some difficult topics that may come up during gaming and how to

address those with your players. Today's episode will expand on the previous topic and talk about other ways to help manage your table. Once again, it's important to keep a delineation between players and characters. Remember, characters are the things that if you kill them, someone gets sad, and players are the things that if you kill them, you go to jail. So there's a distinct difference. Make sure you keep that in mind. One topic I didn't specifically mention last time, but I think it's important to discuss, is I also do not allow politics at my table. Discussions about politics can be very polarizing, and you don't want a gaming group to develop issues and problems communicating with one another just because one of them believes in X and the other one believes in Y, and the two aren't really compatible. RPGs and RPG groups and gaming does not exist to push your or your player's political

agendas. So in my mind, the RPG table is not the place to argue beliefs on things like veganism, trickle-down economics, gender identity, religion, abortion, or whether pineapple belongs on pizza. Hint, it doesn't. Oh, I probably just lost listeners. When you step to the gaming table and when you come over to play gaming, just leave the political baggage at the door and let's just play this hobby that we all enjoy. Do you allow your party to fight amongst themselves non-combat related? Do you allow characters to bicker at each other or yell at each other? Maybe it's a situation where the characters work together and occasional dust-ups are allowed as long as they're reconciled. But is that even allowed at your table or is the expectation that the characters will work together at all times and put any differences

aside for the adventure at hand? Even if you allow characters to yell at each other, I would strongly recommend that you as a GM not allow players to yell at each other. If one player has a problem with another one, they probably deal with it away from the table or out of the game. If two players are having a major issue with one another and it's distracting to the game, you need to pull those players aside and ask them to cool it, ask them to try to work out their differences, or maybe one of those times where you have to end the session early and talk to the players one-on-one to figure out what the problem is. If you're going to allow party infighting, everyone has to be on board.

This is where you need to understand your group's dynamic. Can players in your group argue in character and keep it in character without it being detracting to friendships some groups can do it some groups can't one of the groups that i've played in and actually gm for as well we generally say if we don't tease you we don't love you and believe me they can be merciless when i was playing a rogue with eight intelligence a few years ago i made a tactical mistake because I thought that's what my character would do and I still get crap about it. It's good-natured. We've known each other since college. We bicker and infight amongst one another and we all know that

we love each other and support each other in the real life even if our characters do give each other crap. That group also has my brother-in-law, and our characters rarely like each other. There was one campaign, probably that would be the exception, where I was a four-intelligence barbarian who could barely speak, and he was a gnome sorcerer who had charmed me. We played it like Master Blaster from the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't go out and watch it. I'm not exactly going to call it a good movie. Be careful allowing characters to bicker and especially allowing players to bicker. It may make some players uncomfortable and they may not feel like they can dissent if everybody else is on board. So if characters can bicker back and forth and fight back and forth outside of combat,

do you allow your players to fight each other in combat? PvP, in other words. Is this allowed? If so, when is it allowed? Once again, only allow it if all players are comfortable with it, because the last thing you want is someone who feels uncomfortable about player versus player combat and the rogue backstabs them to steal that ring that they claimed in the previous fight. Another thing you need to be mindful of are secrets. Can players keep secrets from other

players? For example, if a player knows that she rolled as high as she possibly could on a skill check, maybe she rolled a natural 20 and the skill check still failed. Can she keep the fact that she rolled in 20 hidden from the other players? It could potentially create hurt feelings as players have their characters try and try and try when success isn't an option, but maybe the rogue has the highest skill modifier and so no one else could ever beat her number and she's done as best as she can and still failed. Can characters keep secrets from other characters? For example, if you're in a social encounter and a character makes a sense motive check and discovers that the Viscount is lying, can she keep that from other characters? Notice the difference. If players can keep secrets

from one another, maybe their characters aren't keeping secrets. If players can keep secrets from one another, maybe their characters aren't keeping secrets. And then flipping the script, if characters can keep secrets, but players can't, it's a different level of communication. For example, if players can keep secrets, then the DM can whisper information to that player, and the player can whisper information to the dungeon master that other players just don't know about. Meanwhile, if there's no secrets whatsoever about a certain check or a certain ability, then maybe the result of one person's check, the DM just announces it out loud to everyone. Just make sure you talk about it with all of your players to make sure everyone is comfortable with the level of secrecy that you use. Under no circumstances should DICE ever take away player agency.

I discussed this in a previous episode. It's like one player saying that he wants to seduce another player and you allow a role to determine whether that happens. That should never take away a player's choice. In this case, basically what you're saying is, hey, player two, player one wants to seduce you and he's going to make a roll. Ooh, natural 20. I'm very sorry. You have to have sex. No, that's not what we're going for. A less extreme example is a player who wants to use his character's intimidate role to force another character or player to agree with him.

to force another character or player to agree with them. That's obviously taking away player agency. Never allow that to happen. At your table, make sure your players know how rules are handled. In just about every gaming system that you can find, you as the DM or GM are the final arbiter of the rules. Does that mean you know every rule off the top of your head immediately? Not necessarily. There's nothing wrong as a DM from saying, oh gosh, I cannot remember if a natural

20 on a skill check is an automatic success. Do you guys remember? Don't be afraid to ask your players and there's nothing wrong with that at all. My previously mentioned brother-in-law is a rules encyclopedia. He knows the rules. We play in about three different gaming systems together and he keeps them straight in his head and wow am I envious. But he only volunteers rule information when asked. At no point would he ever say to the DM, no, no, no, that's not how that works. Because he understands that the DM makes the adjudication on the rules. By the way, I'm kind of convinced he listens to the rules while he sleeps. That's about the only way I could figure out that he could

possibly have this encyclopedic knowledge is that he plays it for seven hours at night while he's sleeping, which gives me an idea for a podcast that would breach intellectual property laws, so I'm just going to move on. The DM makes the rule determination. If there's a dispute, feel free to discuss it with the player, but at some point you have to say, I've decided it's going to be handled this way and move on from it. If the player can't, then there may be a problem with the player, not the rule. Do you allow electronic devices at the table? Yes or no. That's laptops, tablets, phones, any sort of electronic device. They are so handy to look stuff up.

There's a huge divide on this because in one way they are so useful. In the other way, they really can be a huge distraction as people are browsing social media or people are responding to email or people are goofing off, sending messages back and forth. Nothing to do with the game and it distracts everyone from being able to successfully play the game. My advice, allow them at the table, but only address it if it really becomes an issue. I've only had to say something about it once or twice in my career, so it's really usually not that big of a deal. How do you handle absences? Not character absences, player absences.

When a player is absent, what do you do with that character? Do you run them as a DMPC where they are effectively under your control? Do you have them not be available for that particular session and come up with an in-game reason of why they would not be available? There was one group that I had a full house for the very first session. It just so happened that the first session ended as the players were outside of a tomb and they discovered that some of the townsfolk who'd come to visit the tomb had been murdered outside of it. They're them and their horses. So at the start of the second session, one of the players could not be there because he had a family commitment. So I jokingly said, oh, he's outside burying the horses. That became the code word for someone who is not available for the entire

campaign. Later on, they're actually in one layer of the abyss and oh, where's Wesley? He's out in the abyss burying the horses. How do you handle players that miss every other session, every third session, two out of five, whatever? Someone who misses so often that it becomes a problem. It becomes an issue for the party at large to try to successfully complete the campaign because they're continually one person down. Talk to that player and find out whether they can commit to the gaming schedule. If they can't commit to the gaming schedule as is, you can either adjust the schedule or maybe adjust the player count for the campaign. A variant topic of this would be adjusting encounter difficulty based on the number of players that are there. That deserves an episode all its own, but you can do that by adding

additional combatants to the field when there's a full house and maybe taking a few away when not. Reducing hit points, reducing the attack role of various NPCs or baddies, things that you can do to try to keep the encounters balanced even as the player count adjusts. How do you handle critical hits and critical fumbles? For gaming systems that have these, a lot of times they have standards for the way these can work. Some of them may just be bigger damage numbers so that you roll the damage dice twice or you roll it once and double it and so the numbers just change and that's how critical hits are handled. Or maybe they use something like a critical hit or critical fumble deck that has

lasting effects or you have a randomized table for critical hit or critical fumble deck that has lasting effects. Or you have a randomized table for critical hits and critical fumbles. If you do have specialized critical hit, critical fumble decks, or random tables, there could be lasting effects for some of these. If your random table says that it chopped off your foot, if that's a random bad guy, that's one thing. If it's your PC, that could have long-term deleterious effects to the performance of that PC. So think long and hard about doing that. And if you're going to use a critical hit,

critical fumble deck against the PCs, let them know early on whether it only works with named bad guys or all bad guys. Over time, these really damaging, wounding abilities in a critical fumble deck or critical hit deck can wear down PC resources and capabilities. Now personally, I love the critical hit and critical fumble decks. I make sure the PCs know that ahead of time, but I also make restorative magic that can regrow a hand or regenerate an eye available fairly early, even if they are fairly expensive. Make sure your players understand the difference between DM roles and character roles. There are a lot of systems out

there that require certain roles to be made by the dungeon master instead of by the PC. Maybe your game system requires sneak or stealth roles to be made by the DM. Why? Because you don't want your players to know, I rolled a 19 on the sneak, so I can do this and this and this and this that I wasn't planning on doing anyway, because my sneak role was so good. DM making the role and the player saying, I want to sneak, and the DM rolls and says, okay, well, it looks like they haven't seen you yet. The player has no idea whether the DM rolled a 7 or 17. There is some benefit to doing that. It keeps players from metagaming. The players really don't know if they can't read that scroll because it was a poor roll or because it's a really, really difficult scroll.

But it also takes away some of the feeling of participation in the game. Prime example, Pathfinder 2nd Edition has a huge number of rolls that are made by the DM. These are called skill checks and ability checks that are made with the secret tag or the secret modifier. The first time I played with one group playing second edition, about midway through the gaming session, one of them said to me that she really felt like she's not playing the game much. She's just making a decision and something off in the distance is deciding whether that's working or not. She really missed being able to make a lot of those roles. So we talked about it very briefly and I decided some of these rolls that were listed as secret I was going to go ahead and let the players make. I did make sure that they

understood that you can't use metagame knowledge like the fact that you rolled an 18 to decide what additional steps they're going to take or make decisions based on the number on the die. Finally, I want to talk about death and resurrection rules. How readily available is the ability to bring someone back from the dead? Make sure your players know that ahead of time. Because if resurrection or raising someone is readily available, the characters don't fear death nearly as much as they would as if this magic or technical ability is rare and exceedingly expensive. If it is readily available, do NPCs have the ability to access this too? For example, if I could raise someone from the dead for 5,000 gold pieces and I were a rich NPC,

if I was a big bad evil guy that had a lot of resources to my name, I would have that ability scattered all over the place with instructions on some of my lieutenants that if I die, you bring this back and I will make you stupid rich. So if the PCs have ready access to this very powerful technology or magic, to a lesser degree give your NPCs access to that as well. If death and resurrection is allowed, is it just a spell that's cast and it automatically works? Is there a role involved? Is there role-playing involved? This very much depends on your deity and your pantheon and in your game, what happens to souls when they die. In Pathfinder, for example, they go to the Boneyard to be judged,

and then funneled to their final plane of existence. The resurrection of a creature pulls them out of line in the Boneyard, or pulls them from their destination plane, but the soul has to be willing to come back. Face it, if you've just spent the last three days being tortured and you have made it to eternal paradise and someone wants to bring you back, probably their answer may be no. One of the reasons why the requirement is that the soul has to want to come back is that you don't want to take away the player's agency of bringing back a character or not. You don't want the cleric to be able to take away the player's agency of bringing back a character or not.

You don't want the cleric to be able to mandate that the rogue comes back when the player is actually kind of interested in moving on from playing a rogue character and maybe wants to play a samurai. This is as good a place to stop as any, so I think I'll just kind of wrap it up here. I'm sure there'll be more on this topic later on in the future. Once again, thank you so much for listening. I wanted to thank our totally more on this topic later on in the future. Once again, thank you so much for listening. I wanted to thank our totally not made up sponsor, the TCP IP Protocol. It's the only source of the non-awkward three-way handshake on the internet. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and this has been Taking 20, Episode 6, and I hope that your next game is your best game.