Go DDDigital, part 3

...wait, wait.  Not 2, but 3 parts?  How can there possibly be more than 2 approaches to running your game?

Well, dear reader, let me share with you a secret: software can do many things.

More importantly, though, your players love the experience.  Being wrapped up in the your vibrant bard yarns is a lovely thing, but what do you do for visualizations?  When there are no battle maps, is there anything on the table?

One thing, which I’ve long been wanting for my tables, is art.  That’s right: art, the handmaid of culture.  Especially in that 50% of the game which is not combat, and doesn’t have a map, but also especially in that other 50% of the game which is combat, and could use more flavor than my line-drawing maps, a more immersive tale can be bigly fun.

...which brings us to my 3rd dddigital setup: the remote-controlled presentation.  Presentation; as in “boy howdy, that 2-hour meeting, on the validity of our metrics, sure was exciting .”  Slide decks.  THAT kind of presentation, using THAT kind of presentation software.

For me, this is actually kind of a revelation, to be able to have a DM reference, in the palm of my hand, which can be broken-out, scene-by-scene, but also comes with a player-facing view.  While I don’t relish the idea of using Powerpoint in a D&D game, I do love that player-facing element, and also, I don’t use Powerpoint.

My presentation of choice is Apple’s Keynote.  It’s super easy to setup, design, and manage, aaaaaaaand use the workflow already described in part 2, aaaaaaaand it’s ***super-easy to setup a mobile device as a remote control***.  You can even use 2 mobile devices....OR MORE, with the right devices and OS and/or mirroring software.  I’ve used this approach with 1 display device, but I look forward to the day when I have 2 player views, 1 DM monitor, and 1 DM remote control.  Can you tell that I used to do professional Audio/Visual?

So, here’s what it looks like:

The players see this:

while the DM sees this:

My only complaint is the lack of formatting options in the presenter notes.  Of course, if you have even the slightest knack for visual organization, you can use plain text to introduce easy-to-readness into your DM notes.  There also isn’t a good solution for pasting images of stat blocks into the notes, but this is where I treat the remote control device as the adventure text, and have stat blocks in a separate reference, and double-fist that sweet sweet DM iPad.

...and you should too.  You should do this, because it is beautiful and strong.

Go DDDigital, part 2

Now, where were we?  Oh yeah, in part 1, the ADD DM discusses running your game, using digital resources.  In part 2, we won’t be using any apps!

Yeah, that’s right, no apps!

When I first had the thought, that I needed to not use so much paper, and take my game digital, I immediately thought of finding the right app to do the job for me.  ...and while I did find a very good app, it still left some very big gaps to cross.  “It’s a shame that the app can’t use non-SRD* content,” I found my self thinking, “because my paper templates didn’t have those problems.  Since I own the Player’s Handbook, the Monsters Manual, and any adventure texts which I run, I do have access to any content that I need, and I can just use pictures of the stat blocks, and paste them into my favorite word processing software.”  I said it exactly like that, too.

“But wait!”, I now say to myself, “Who says that I need to print paper copies of those pages from my favorite word processing software?  What if I have that same word processing software on a mobile device, and I have access to my word processing files from a cloud storage service???”, I said to myself, exactly like that.

*note: the SRD is Wizards’ open-gaming content, which is free to use, but it doesn’t contain everything from the Player’s Handbook or Monster’s Manual.  It’s wonderful that it exists, and anyone can play the game without actually buying a single book, but you can’t run most hardcover adventure books with it because most of the most interesting content costs money.  Stand-alone adventures seem to do a good job of including monster stat blocks which appear in the adventure, but you still might be out of luck when your wizard polymorphs into a dire bunny, or your druid summons 16 ostriches.

As a refresher, I wanted to create my own reference documents for convenience -- so that I wouldn’t have to constantly flip between the 2 different pages in the adventure text and however many different pages in the Monster’s Manual.  In my paper templates, I preferred to group all of the things which I need to access during a particular encounter: creature stat blocks; area notes for developments, traps, treasure, or whatever else.  ...I’ve kept the combat table in a gaming-specific app, because setting and managing initiative order in the same reference as the HP tracking is most easily done in digital format.

Just grouping an encounter’s worth of creature stat blocks is such an easy way to make such a huge improvement, that it’s silly to not do this.  i.e., if I’m running an encounter with hill giants, ice spire orcs, and a remohaz, I might use stat blocks from 3 different references -- the Monsters Manual, the adventure text, and a second adventure text.  Once again, that’s 3 separate reference texts for 3 creatures (not even including the area description from the adventure), which would be ridiculous to rotate, in the middle of combat.  This particular encounter did happen, in DDAL_05-11: Forgotten Traditions, which contains a modification to orcs; hill giants, which have a modification in Storm King’s Thunder; and remorhazes, which appear in the Monster’s Manual.  ...even if they were all in the Monster’s Manual, i’d be flipping between different pages, which is still not good.

To be clear, I’m assuming that you’ll want to create your reference documents on a desktop computer, for ease of work.  I am also assuming that you want to display your reference docs in a mobile device, and not on a computer, for the sake of portability.  This blog is most applicable to Adventurers League (or Pathfinders Society, or whatever) DMs, after all.

So, in this setup, we will need only 2 things: • Software to create your reference docs, and software to read them.  Ideally, they will be the same software, just on different devices. • A cloud storage service, to store your adventure reference pages

For the documents, themselves...

Since I have PDF copies of my texts, I can simply copy-paste all of my stat blocks into a single document.  ...even if I had only paper copies, I could just take pictures of my stat blocks, and use those.  Let’s say that that’s all that I need from my reference, and I can save it, now.  I do that.  I save it.

Specifically, I save it to my cloud storage service.

Then, I simply open that same document, on my tablet device, in the mobile version of the software which created it.  ...or as a PDF, if I saved it as such; as long as it goes like this:

Honestly, there are a ton of setups (sets-up?) which will work.  As long as it can make a file which you can display on your mobile device.  My endless quest for the perfect workflow is only reason for me to want the exact same software on both devices.  PDFs are great, of course, because so many different software and OS platforms can display them; and, had I my druthers, I would probably choose to create and edit PDFs in Acrobat Pro, just so that I’m working working in PDF format, natively.  However, the ADD DM is a cheap-ass, so he don’t.

Instead, what I use is Apple’s Pages.  Editorially, I adore Pages, for many different reasons.  What’s important here, though, is that is has a great mobile version, which is super easy to navigate, for reading documents.  The only complaint, which I have, is that there isn’t any Read/Edit mode switching, and that would be great because it’s too easy to accidentally select and move images in the mobile version.  Not a big deal, and not a deal at all, if you’re willing to export PDFs, instead of reading the .pages documents.

For cloud services, nearly anything will do, as long as you know how to navigate your computer’s file system, in order to save to your cloud service, and how to read from it.  I actually use whichever of [Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud] best suits my collaborative needs, but I prefer Google Drive for my own doc storage.

...and, honestly, it’s super easy: Create, Save, Read. ...or, because I’m an ice hockey fan: Pass, Shoot, Score. OK, maybe you’re not a hockey fan.  Whatever.  Just do this setup thing.

Go DDDigital, part 1

The ADD DM has a troublesome habit, which he’d like to discuss, for a moment: when implementing a workflow, immediately trying to find a better one, even after recommending the older one to his readers.

Now that he’s established a passive voice for only one sentence, let’s switch: I used to have my encounters ready to run from a sheet of paper, which included stat blocks, area notes for developments, traps, treasure and such, and it worked pretty well.  Since the player group changes constantly, for me, it’s hard to pre-ADD the combatant list, though, and that would have to ignore initiative, anyway. So, these sheets were great for reference, but incurred some time cost for writing—not an uncommon drawback, and the benefits were legion, especially grouping stat blocks and area notes, such that I can just look and find.

However, I couldn’t resolve myself to the enormous paper use, and immediately sought a digital solution.

There are a number of problems to solve, for the perfect experience, in addition to the perfect experience being subjective to DM workflow, so it’s good to establish, right away, that a perfect solution doesn’t exist yet. Not for me, at least.

I need a solution which:

• requires minimal setup for PCs and NPCs

• has the 5th edition SRD (public domain content--the same stuff that Wizards publishes in the free basic rules books) available without setup, and accesses it easily

• switches between initiative order views and stat block views quickly

• configures and updates initiatives easily

• tracks encounter information, especially HP, but also conditions and effects, and their durations

• accesses encounter notes quickly

It’s good to note that there are plenty of apps available, which are encounter managers, and are solid solutions for tracking HP in initiative order. They don’t give you stat blocks, though, and certainly not adventure-specific information, for developments and treasure and such.

It’s also good to note that there are plenty of apps available, which are solid solutions for managing character sheets. They won’t help you run an encounter.

There is an app series called Game Master, made by Lion’s Den, who also make the Fight Club series of character manager apps.

Game Master 5e has a solid system for managing PCs and NPCs. It has 5e SRD content preloaded. Any PCs and NPCs which you create are available to add to encounters. It runs said encounters, with lots of features, like auto-rolling initiative, and grouping creatures of the same type. The encounter manager switches between your list of combatants and their stat blocks quickly, and scrolls or swipes around easily. It tracks HP and conditions. So far, really good.

Aside from being slightly buggy (it sometimes fails to save updates to my encounter combatants), it falls a little short, in quick-adding PCs, and in managing really big encounters.

Adding PCs is a big deal for me, because I might have walk-in players at the game store. Game Master seems to assume that you have a steady roster of players, and provides a full-featured character manager, when what I need is just to add a name and maybe HP.

The other short-coming is that running massive encounters means scrolling and swiping through a massive list of combatants, which could have a really simple UX solution, by expanding/collapsing the groups of similar creatures....but doesn’t.  Also, the tablet versions don’t suffer this flaw as much as the phone versions; with bigger screens, Lion’s Den splits the screen area into panels, so you can see initiative order and stat blocks at the same time (or encounters and notes, and others, depending on your current navigation context), and that’s a much better experience.

So far, then, probably not deal-breakers.  However....

The other other, pretty big short-coming is that it only includes SRD content.  So, any time that you need to work with anything that’s not in the free basic books, you’ll have to enter it as a custom entry.  Having to do this one time is not terrible, but it happens a lot.  You will definitely use items, class options, races, backgrounds, spells and monsters, which are outside of the SRD, and it’s a pretty big time cost to add them all.  That part really isn’t Lion’s Den’s fault, that Wizards keeps most of the content locked under copyright.  If you want all of that stuff in a digital format, there is always D&D Beyond, in which you can buy all of that content, and for cheaper than the paper editions.  ...and it STILL won’t get you an encounter manager; just reference materials, and a character manager (but only in the web version).

So, while the best app that I’ve found is pretty good at being usable, it still leaves a lot of gaps, and you’ll likely trip over them during a spot in the game, where you want to keep up the tension, drama, and pace.  So, the next question for me is: is it better to stick with your usual paper setup, and just make it digital?

Next time, I’ll walk through a couple of setup options for doing your usual paper setup in a digital format.

Regarding the Gentle Art of the Passive Check

Raise your hand, if your Dungeons & Dragons character is supposed to be a master of ancient magics, or whatever, but can’t ever seem to accomplish any test of intellectual and arcane skill, because you, the player, keep rolling 2′s on your d20?  Go ahead and raise your hand, and really confuse the people around you, in the coffee shop.

Now, raise your hand, if you’ve ever DM’d games of Dungeons & Dragons, where the heroes enter a room with secrets to be discovered, and when you ask the players to make a Perception check, they respond by obsessively searching for the things which they aren’t supposed to know are there.

These are well-known dilemmas for anyone experienced in playing roleplaying games, and Dungeons & Dragons has answers, but is extremely vague about them, because they want to empower DMs to make their own decisions about things that they don’t understand.  Said answers are Passive Checks: when the DM evaluates the result of a character’s effort, without rolling the die, and instead using the equation of 10 + Skill Modifier.

The Player’s Handbook is sparse on the details, and the Dungeon Masters Guide even sparser, but the essence is any of a handful of mechanics:

1) when the DM wants to test the player characters ability to accomplish something, without letting the players know about it, the DM may use a passive check (A.K.A. seeeeecret check).

2) when the narrative situation is such that DM would be asking the player to make many consecutive ability checks, the DM may, instead, use a passive check (A.K.A. make one average check, so you don’t have to make a full-days’ worth of regular checks).

The second mechanic is pretty harmless and makes a lot of sense, but the question of whether checks should be made in secret has a range of fans and detractors, depending on how much the DM trusts (or wants to trust) their players to not meta-game, or how much the DM wants to create a sense of drama in their game.

3) There is, however, a more interesting issue, in a 3rd mechanic, which is *not* in the core rulebooks, but has been described by Jeremy Crawford, lead writer for the Player’s Handbook, as the intended mechanic: that the value for a Passive Check is intended to serve as a minimum value for a regular check, at least for Wisdom (Perception) checks.  The idea is, that there is a baseline level of awareness, which is available to the character when they’re not paying particular attention; it’s the difference between spotting something which you’re looking for, and just happening to notice it.  (take a gander at this podcast episode, for more details about this concept: http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/james-haeck-dd-writing)

This leads us to the fascinating question, of whether it makes sense for a character to have a minimum-possible value for any check, if they have one for a Perception check?  Maybe the wilderness-guide ranger should be able to get a sense of direction or danger intuitively as well as analytically.  Perhaps the worldly bard should be able to sniff out a liar before they even speak, without having to take in their cadence and micro-expressions.  In other words, maybe sometimes you just get a feeling about something.

ALSO, though, this mechanic doesn’t have to assume that the character isn’t paying literal attention; instead of it being “oh, I didn’t realize that I was attempting a feat of Acrobatics,” perhaps it can be “this feat of Acrobatics?  No sweat; I don’t even need to try.”

This is a SUPER-contentious item amongst the dungeon master community, since it boils down to pure philosophy of gaming.  Shouldn’t skilled characters be able to consistently succeed at their skills, even if their player can’t roll to save their imaginary life?  ...but shouldn’t characters also be able to fail catastrophically?  Shouldn’t players be better than meta-gaming, and shouldn’t the DM trust them to be?  As I often do, I believe that the real answer is revealed with MATH!

Looking at the numbers, characters with a +0 to a skill will automatically succeed at a DC 10 check; we’re talking about a character being able to walk through Very Easy and Easy skill checks, and the DM gives it to them automatically, even if they aren’t particularly good at that skill.  ...unless a character has a penalty to that skill, in which case their passive score is probably 9, maybe 8.  Keep in mind, that, we’re talking about Very Easy and Easy checks—mundane tasks; things that anyone could do, and the only questions might be how well they do it, or how long it takes.  It could be something as minute as opening an unlocked door, or something as neutral as chopping firewood, where a skilled person can do it magnificently, but a complete derp can still accomplish it.

(conversely, a check with a DC of 15 almost always requires a character to be proficient in that skill, to pass it with a Passive Check.  The keyword, here, is ‘proficient’ -- a character needs to be actually good at this thing, for the DM to just give it to them, and this is for a check which is considered to be only Moderately Difficult.)

...and that’s the part that I think most people miss, thinking about Passive Checks -- EVERY DM hands out automatic successes for most things that a character does.  DMs don’t require a die roll, for a character to open an unlocked door.  It’s something extremely easy, the DM says “yeah, you can do that,” without going to the d20.  ...and, why would they?  That’s a task that’s well-within that character’s ability to accomplish perfectly-well, nearly every time.  This DM just used a Passive Check, against a task with a really low DC.  The big variable in every DM’s usage is how extreme is the ease of the task which is being attempted.  Of course a DM wouldn’t require a roll for opening an unlocked door, and of course they would require a roll for picking a locked one.  It’s the stuff in the middle that’s the question -- the checks with a DC of 10, 12, 15, which are the question, and Passive Checks simply offer a consistent mechanic answering that question.  Would the scholarly wizard be able to find common information in a book?  Probably.  How about the barbarian?  Maybe not.  On the flippy side, a check which isn’t a gimme is not going to be accomplished passively, except by a character who’s reeeeally good at that thing.  So, is it a given, that the barbarian could make the 5-foot jump over a pit (let’s say it’s Athletics, DC 12)?  Almost certainly.  ...but the wizard?  Not at all.  This is a mechanic that provides quantifiable justification to answer the question of when to grant an automatic success, or when to require a roll -- something that every DM has to think about, throughout every game.

Personally, I prefer a somewhat middle road for Passive Checks.  My guidelines are:

For Passive Check Mechanic #1: Seeeeeecret checks,

Does it make any damn sense for the skill to have a sub-conscious baseline level of that skill?  When making this check, the question is literally whether the character is aware of needing to use this skill, and if they could just happen to notice something, or get a feeling about something.  So, physical skills probably don’t make sense, here, ie., Athletics, Acrobatics.

I use Perception, Insight, Survival, Medicine.  ...Wisdom skills, basically, for that gut-feeling factor.  I can see an occasional use case for Charisma skills, for those situations the character’s vibe is affecting a whole room, and the character hasn’t taken particular notice of every person there.

Is the situation such that a sub-conscious baseline level of that skill would be available to the character?  Sure, a character keeping watch over a quiet campsite could happen to notice a hidden monster, but what about in the heat of battle?  Other roleplaying games (see: Kids on Bikes) have standardized this distinction as a primary mechanic in their system, distinguishing decisions or actions made in calm situations versus stressed situations, and, if you want to allow Passive Scores to ever be used in these situations, D&D can handle this with Advantage and Disadvantage (which modify a Passive Score by +/- 5).

For Passive Check Mechanic #2: Make one check instead of a billion,

Will the character be doing this thing repeatedly for more than 6 seconds? This one is useful for a whole day of library research, or hours spent climbing a mountain, crawling a dungeon with constant searching, or anything that takes a while; more than a minute, even.  Its flaw is that it does assume the law of averages -- that the character will never achieve an extraordinarily good or bad result.  That don’t seem right to me, so I think it makes sense to ask the player for a roll, first, to give them that chance to roll really well, or reeeeeally badly.  Then, if they didn’t roll a 1, the Passive Score can be their result.

For Passive Check Mechanic #3: Passive Score as mimimum-possible-value for an Ability Check,

Is the DC for the check below 10?  It’s in the every-day, low-difficulty tasks, where a character really should be able to perform how we expect them to, since they have the time and room to set up for it.  Probably less so, for the more difficult tasks, although there is an argument for pressure actually sharpening one’s senses, which is totally a thing in real life.  How to measure if a character is a pressure performer?  Imagine me shrugging.  (if it helps, I’m 5′7″, average build, with brown hair and eyes, and a short beard)

Is the situation such that the player would ask to make the same roll over and over again?  You can’t just keep rolling until you get a 20, but if the character has the time and the freedom to keep trying something, they truly should get something more than just that one roll.  Then, the situation falls under the purview of Passive Check Mechanic #2, so just use the Passive Score to back up a single roll.

As contentious an issue as this mechanic is, I believe that it’s really just a sensible way to codify the long-standing common-sense practice of allowing characters to auto-succeed certain tasks, and lets skilled characters be skilled.

Have You Considered NOT Playing Dungeons & Dragons?

So, there are two types of people in the world. The first is clear—people who play Dungeons & Dragons. The other, you may not have known—people who play roleplaying games which are not Dungeons & Dragons. Those are the only two types of people in the world.

Many of us, who grew up in the 80’s, might remember playing games by Palladium, which are similar to D&D’s d20 system, but more confusing. I had some experience playing West End Games’ Star Wars roleplaying game, which is also kind of confusing. Pathfinder exists, of course, and is similarly more difficult to learn and master than D&D.

Ok, yeah, other games exist. Why is this helpful? Very simply, it’s helpful because there are games which scratch that fantasy roleplaying itch, but are much easier to learn and play, and especially, to run.

Caveat: if you’re running Adventurers League games, you obviously can’t run a different game system. That doesn’t even make sense, and no, you are the one who is the crazy.

Second caveat: if you’re not running AL games, you probably don’t actually suffer some of the setbacks that I do, since you know who is playing at your table, and might even be playing at your own house. However, you still deal with running encounters, with initiatives and conditions and environments and such; and even without the extra concerns, D&D is still a large or larger, beast.

So, let’s look at a few alternatives for your fantasy RPG game night.

1st, there is a fascinating open-source game system out there, called Powered by the Apocalypse, based off of the dystopian future game, Apocalypse World; it didn’t take very long for a fantasy skin to be developed for this system, and it is highly regarded, for good reason. This game is called Dungeon World.

Dungeon World, like most Apocalypse games, focuses on narrative, characters, and smooth gameplay, using a streamlined ruleset which replaces minutia with motivations. Its primary dice mechanic of rolling 2d6 + Modifier, adds the possibility of a Mixed Result, instead of the simple hit/miss; then, for straight-up successes and failures, there is a well-defined framework for providing consequence.  When there’s a question of who goes when, or how long something lasts, or how much area a spell affects, Dungeon World simply asks the GM to decide what makes sense.  If it sounds like a lot of on-the-fly for the GM, it can be, but DW also provides a really nice framework for responding to PC actions -- when a player makes a move and rolls a failure, the GM selects their own move, as is appropriate.

Then, after all the monsters are bested, and treasures gained, the GM awards XP based on what decisions the characters make, instead of the killing and looting.  It’s just much more about telling a great story of heroes being heroes.

Fate is another game system option, which is similarly open-sourced and similarly narrative-focused.  It also has an extensive family of skins in various settings, topics, and atmospheres, for whatever genre you’re feeling for your game night.

Fate uses collaborative character and world building, to start the game with strong group chemistry, and plays the individual character-building exactly right, asking only for a few short descriptive blurbs about what defines your character (Aspects), and for a selection of skills and how good the character is at them.  Playing to the character’s Aspects is something that reward the player with Fate Points, which they can exchange for that x-factor in the heroes’ story, when they need a bump.  Skills are tested with a die roll, which could be seen as 4d6 + Modifier; but the skill level is expressed qualitatively (’average’, ‘fair’, ’good’, ‘great’, ‘superb’), and each die can result in -1, 0, or +1, simply moving the result or your action up or down the scale.  So the spirit of the skill test, in Fate, is something like “you’re usually good at this type of thing, but this time, you were superb.”

Lastly, the Fate system shines with a simple mechanic for consequences, something which D&D barely acknowledges.  In Fate, if you’re in a really bad way, you might suffer and injury which takes a really long time to heal, or lose stuff that’s important to you.  Your actions matter, in this game, and I love that.

One of the most beautiful aspects, which both of these games offer, is that character creation can be completed in about 15 minutes, and anything beyond that is collaborative.  It’s an obvious thing, that D&D has only started to incorporate -- that your social gaming experience shouldn’t actually prevent you from talking to your friends.

As much as we love Dungeons & Dragons, it doesn’t make it super easy to get into gaming, or to start a new campaign, even if you are experienced in it.  It has flaws, or at least caters to a certain focus in gameplay; more simply put, it’s not for everyone.  So, if you are interested in a more narrative game, a smoother-flowing game, or a game which demands a character more than a pawn or token, I seriously recommend giving Dungeon World and Fate a try.

Please, Please, Please, Don’t Forget Your Environment

The ADD DM can do many things, but remembering a damn thing isn’t one of them.

So, when a party is crawling a dungeon, and I’m supposed to be periodically rolling for random encounters, or requiring saving throws, or imposing disadvantage for low visibility, you can be pretty sure that I will not remember to do any of those things.

Enter the environmental condition tracker™️. ...it’s not actually trademarked, but it is extremely hacked. I just took a clothes pin, and attached the stick from a foot-long corn dog (seriously), as a standard for environmental condition markers. The actual condition flags are just sections cut from a ballpoint pen, with a type of masking tape wrapped around them. Then, season to taste.

As a bonus, it’s another vertical layer to my DM area, to continue its march toward becoming a DM fortress.

I’ll be adding another standard for tracking time, just dropping beads, or something, onto another stick. ...which, honestly, might be an excuse to eat more corn dogs.... The actual time conversion is something that I will need to pre-ADD, but there is a nice guide to travel time in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, which breaks it down as:

- character’s speed X 10 = the distance that the character can cover in a minute....typically 250 or 300 ft. Cool, makes sense. Then, adjust for stealthing or for dashing. Then,

- for 10 minutes, yeah, that X 10, and

- for an hour, multiply by 60, instead of by 10.

Spend some time with your area maps, and you’ll have a decent idea of how long it takes them to crawl the dungeon.

Tracking the time that characters spend investigating the paintings on the wall is a different matter, and I’ve settled on the notion of tracking actual rounds—when a player says that they want to do a thing, that’s a round; if other players don’t have anything to add, then their characters just sit there for that round.

The other hack that I’m using is for things that occur in initiative order—encounter developments, lair actions, conditions, readied actions, ongoing damage, etc. Since I already have handy initiative cards hanging on my screen, I add more markers to remind me that a thing should happen.

Needless to say, there are a lot of things happening behind the screen, so I need to have a routine for encounters which involves me never having to move stuff around on the tabletop. It’s already kind of a one-man-band situation, and streamlining to compensate for all of the reminders is super necessary. The idea of a digital encounter tracker, that can deal with all of that stuff with simple notifications at the proper initiative count, just makes me drool, like even more than usual.

On the plus side, having physical trackers that stack up and change, as the game progresses also adds an interesting dynamic element to your table, and also makes your DM screen feel like an actual castle.

Switch Maps Real Fast.  Like, REAL Fast.

If you’re like the ADD DM, you enjoy using maps.  You enjoy using maps because they give the players a clear idea of the space around them and what is happening over the course of the encounter.

However, if you’re ADD, like the ADD DM, it’s a challenge, to provide decent maps for every encounter.  One could pre-make really nice maps, but it’s hard to store and transport them; one could draw maps on the fly, but they’re not very nice; one could go digital, but it has a lot of setup cost, a lot of dependencies, and a lot of ways to fail.  It seems like an steeply inverse correlation between quality of experience and time/storage/transport/attention cost for the DM.

Now, certainly there are ways and circumstances to make many solutions work well.  Playing in the DM’s basement make lots of awesome things possible, but most of us are not Joe Manganiello, except for Joe Manganiello.  ...and if you are, in fact, Joe Manganiello, you have an amazing home basement/dungeon, where amazing maps can be conveniently stored and dropped in whenever they’re needed.  Also, you are handsome enough for players to not care, even if you provide shitty maps.  For those of us who DM in the local game store, and are not as handsome, we need solutions that are portable, usable, and hopefully reusable.  This is how it looked, to the ADD DM:

 - Digital:  quality of the maps could be amazing, but flat screens are a fixed size and are too hard to transport, projectors take too much table space for a stand-rig-thingy and cords, and the scale of the grid could be thrown off by the resolution of your display.

- Paper: small maps could be printed with great-quality imagery; big maps are easy to do in paper, but not with quality imagery, and are hard to transport without folding or curling; both are not reusable, which creates a storage problem if you’re doing a lot of adventures, and want to hang on to those resources.

- 3D Models: obviously amazing, and obviously expensive and only portable through great efforts.  Most of us don’t have the time and money for that kind of production value, and the ADD DM definitely can’t carry all of this stuff on his bike.

- Erasable Surface: could have quality imagery, could be very portable, could scale up or down in size, is totally reusable.

This one seemed pretty clear -- dry erasable, interlocking, gridded tiles.  They’re highly portable, highly reusable, highly scalable, and are capable of both the quality and the fluidity that I need, with a little creativity.  Look for Gaming Paper on Amazon or at gamingpaper.com for a few different versions of this concept.

The most basic use of this map is still very effective, being an excellent platform for drawing a simple map, whenever it’s needed.  It’s not an instant map, but is still a pretty quick map.  If you’re running a dungeon crawl, and there are a ton of rooms to explore, I pre-draw maps on clear acetate sheets, in the before-time, and just lay them on top of the grid, when it’s time.  If you want high-quality imagery, there’s an easy answer in printable acetate sheets, and since the grid isn’t on the image, scale isn’t as much of an issue; there is a money cost in printing color transparencies, though, so there’s that.

Combined with the encounter reference sheets(monsters, progression, treasure, round-by-round tracking) that I pre-ADD, each encounter becomes a fairly easy bundle of information, and can be flipped-to quickly, and less flipping is definitely what the ADD DM needs.

Are this am what your need?  For we game store DMs, I highly recommend it.

Keep Better Track of Encounter Stuff

As with the damn maps, much of the time that I spend tinkering with DM workflows is about finding ways to avoid flipping between sources and references.  I mean, how can an ADD DM be expected to access the information that they need, when character stats, monster stats, maps, module texts, rules, and current hit points and stuff are all in different places?  It’s probably not reasonable to expect to find a solution that incorporates all of this crap into a single convenient reference, but I want it to be perfect, and I can’t help thinking about it.  ...that last one might be more of a topic for my OCD DM blog, so let’s move on.

The thing that I did, to consolidate, at least a little, was to group the information that is most relevant to an encounter, in the same place.  I decided on the monster stat blocks, their XP thresholds, treasure and combat progression, and the scribbly space where round-by-round numbers are tracked.  ...why, here comes one of these references, now....

Even just putting the monster stat block next to the description of the treasure, that I would otherwise be forgetting about and stiffing the player characters out of, helps a ton. Lots of encounters have progression notes, too, and I like having those handy.

Also, having a pre-ADD’d guide to the difficulty of the encounter is great. Otherwise, I feel like I would likely begin an encounter by looking at the monster stats, thinking that the characters are definitely going to die, and starting the monster 20ish HP lower, then spend the rest of the encounter worrying if it’s appropriate. By spending a bit of time looking at the monster, in the before-time, I can scale the encounter up or down, in the moment, comfortably, appropriately, and quickly. ...and, if I’m being honest about myself with the internet, feeling in-control is the best way for me to not subject my players to completely arbitrary bullshit.  ...which is not to say that winging-it is not beneficial for the game (that time when my players accidentally skipped most of the dungeon, and I made up a magic lock, to force them to explore and level-up, made for a really good session), just that making more informed and confident decisions has a really big upside.

EDIT: in Adventurers League games, the only legal change to monsters is to their HP (so that the adventure’s XP rewards don’t change from DM to DM).  This makes life a lot easier, by not having to figure a range of difficulties.

I’d like to take a moment to refer back to my previous mention of the scribbly space. This is a really simple thing that I’ve been wanting to improve for a while, but have felt too scattered to OCD. I’m pretty sure that keeping track of encounters by writing down current hit points, then crossing those out and writing new numbers, is perfectly normal, and usually sufficient. I’m not adding much, but by going row-by-row for each round, I have a really easy record of most things that happened in the combat. It’s a lot to write down, and most of it is sincerely useless, but it’s great for tracking the durations of stuff. STUFF, people. ...conditions and effects, really, but some of that stuff is literally life-and-death for our precious characters, like suffocating.

Caveat emptor: making pages like this has a time cost, and I guess a paper cost, too (I’m thinking of ways to go digital with it, saving paper and making the data entry part faster).  The time commitment can be a lot, but it does get smoother when you get a satisfactory template and a comfortable workflow. Is it worth the time? Maybe. Probably depends on how ADD you are. As for me, well, I think you know the answer.

Keep Track of Character Stats and Initiative, at the Same Damn Time

Do you like handy references, which don’t take up space on your tabletop, are reusable, track multiple game functions, and provide flavor for your players, too?

Of course you do.  I don’t know why I bother even asking....

I’ve seen a lot of people run games, and so I’ve also seen a variety of ways to manage encounters, but the most amazing tool that I’ve met, so far, has to be the character stat card thingy, which hangs on the top of the DM screen.  These things are the best multitaskers in DM land, accomplishing such feats as:

track initiative, by moving them around on top of the screen

provide basic character information for DM reference

provide basic character information for SEEEEECRET DM reference (I’m talking about passive checks; we’ll get into that, later)

provide spellings of character names, for everyone

provide whatever character or monster visualizations you want, on the player side of the card

...and there are really only 2 downsides:

storing and carrying them

taking time for players to fill them out, at the beginning of the game, and that’s really only for public event sorts of situations; in any campaign with a steady roster of players, the DM could simply reuse the cards every session

How can you get your hands on this miracle product?  Well, I can’t claim any credit for the idea; if you search Google or Pinterest for variations on the terms “combat initiative tent card”, you’ll find a bunch of examples.  Mine was mostly inspired by the ones made by Reddit user Jimmidoe.

Here’s what they look like:

Mine are roughly 2.5 x 8, and I get 4 of them on a letter-sized page.  They are also dry/wet erasable, because I’m running my games at a store, and won’t necessarily get the same players week-to-week.  For your own erasable cards, find printable acetate sheets (overhead projector transparencies), and full-size printing labels (basically big, blank stickers).  You’ll want to reverse the image before printing the transparencies, so that you can write and erase the opposite side, and not wipe off your ink; then, apply the printing labels to the printed side of the transparency, to protect the ink, to provide an opaque white background, for visibility, and so that your words and things will not be backwards. You could probably also print on regular paper, and cover that regular paper with clear contact paper, to get an erasable surface, but I haven't tried it. Transparencies definitely work really well, because they were designed for this sort of thing.

A word about the my choices of stuff to put on them: Since they're erasable, I wanted to make use of that feature, so I have a few checkboxes for temporary things: Concentration, Inspiration, etc. However, I also didn't want to OVERuse that feature, since they'll be hanging on a paper screen, which isn't great for writing and editing; so, I didn't include HP, which is going to get edited just CONSTANTLY; that gets tracked in a separate encounter tracker. I'm actually going to move my tracking of Concentration and Conditions over to a newer encounter tracker, too, because it will be better at indicating when those conditions or effects should be removed.

You probably noticed, as well, that nearly half of the damn thing is devoted to passive scores. Passive checks are a bit of a contentious thing among DMs, but I use the hell out of them, and having information about the scores just sitting behind the screen is really conducive to that.

Should you use them? That's totally up to you, and it's sincerely a philosophical matter, concerning how the game models actual life situations. ...or fantasy life situations, I guess. I'll address that elsewhere; the point is that character info cards are really good at providing character information to the DM, without having to ask the players for it.

Whatever you think of that, you don't have to put the same stuff on yours. You can print out mine, or make your own, but you will have some of your own. This is not an option. You should absolutely use these things, because you're wasting your life, otherwise.

Take Your Area Maps Out of the Sourcebook

Modules and hardcover adventure books have lovely maps, but why, on Melora’s green Faerun, do they not include a separable supplement?  It’s hard enough to keep track of all of the details of every room in a dungeon, without having to constantly turn the page, to look at the map between every sentence.  A tear-out, full-page map could be sitting next to the sourcebook, just begging to be helpful, instead of hiding 3 pages away from the description of the 5 different passageways connecting to the natural cavern that the characters are currently exploring, laughing at your frustration.

You and I are better than the book, though, and we won’t let it get to us.  We won’t let it get to us.

A very simple measure, which I’ve come to appreciate, is to simply copy the maps into a single document, which rests conveniently on the table, next to the adventure text.  I did the ol’ select-copy-paste, from a PDF, into my favorite doc maker software, but taking pictures on your phone, or even the ancient photocopying magics will totally work.

Less page-turning is great for me and my players, and it can also be great for you and yours.

It goes a little something like this:

You probably use a book, but I use a tablet.  Whatever; use the power of your imagination to picture a book, in place of my tablet.  The important part is the the map just sits there, whilst I flip pages in another thing.  ANOTHER.  THING.

It’s so simple.  Do it, now.  Drop your human child, or quit your job, or whatever you’re currently doing, and print your maps in a separate reference.