Go to Part 1

Misapplying the technique of multi-step action resolution results in a problem I refer to as rolling to failure.

Perhaps the most common example of rolling to failure is the way a lot of GMs handle stealth: They’ll have a PC roll Stealth checks every single time they move or every single time they encounter a new opponent. If the PC has a 75% chance of success on a Stealth test, after just three checks their chance of success has dropped to 42%. After five checks, it’s dropped to 23%. And the first time they fail a check, of course, their attempt at stealth is over. (And the odds get even worse if the GM runs each of these checks by having all of the PCs roll Stealth, all the NPCs roll Perception, and if even a single Perception check is higher than a single Stealth check the gig is up.)

The consequence, of course, is that the players will simply stop trying to be stealthy. And, as a result, an entire set of tactics (and the really cool stuff that can flow from those tactics) vanishes in a puff of smoke.

“Why do my players always just charge in mindlessly?”

It might be because you’re not giving them any choice.

LET IT RIDE

The solution here is to Let It Ride.

When a PC is attempting a particular endeavor, make a single check and let the result of that check ride forward: If they’re trying to ascend a cliff, make a single Climb check to determine whether or not they get to the top (even if it would take them several rounds or minutes or hours to do so). If the intention is to “sneak through the enemy base”, then you make one Stealth check for the entire op and it determines how stealthy you are for the whole thing. (And the answer may be, “Not very stealthy, so someone is probably going to spot you.” And that’s OK.)

CONTINUING THE INTERACTION: A common mistake when letting it ride is to have the GM just summarize the entire attempt. For example, a player says they want to sneak into the orcs’ camp, so the GM calls for a Stealth check, sees a success, and says, “Okay, you manage to slide past the guards patrolling the border of the camp, make your way to the chieftain’s tent, and grab the tiara.”

That’s certainly an option, of course. But what’s great about letting it ride is that a player can still make meaningful choices while their result continues to roll forward. By leaving the player in the driver’s seat, the GM might discover that they want to knock out the sentries or eavesdrop at a tent to learn the orcs’ plans.

These choices could also impact the success or failure of the endeavor. For example, if they choose a path through the camp with higher security, it’s possible that their check won’t be high enough to handle it.

FAILURE POINT: Speaking of failure, how can the GM determine at what point during an attempt failure occurs if they’re using the let it ride approach?

Where the result of the check is being sequentially compared against a series of variable challenges (like a Stealth check being compared to various sentries and guards), this can be relatively easy. (You get spotted by whichever guard first exceeds your Stealth check.)

But what about something like that Climb check for scaling a cliff? On a failed check, how far up the cliff have they gotten before they failed the check?

(As with any check, of course, you still need to determine what failure means: Does it mean you fall? That you have to catch yourself before you fall? That you get stuck? That you realize you can’t reach the top for some reason and need to make your way back down?)

In general, there are three approaches: You can make a judgment call based on whatever result you think would be most interesting. You could determine it purely randomly. (For example, you could roll percentile dice to determine how far up the cliff they’d gotten or how much of their money they lost at the casino.) Or you could use the margin of failure on the check to calculate the result (or inform your judgment call).

POINT OF UNCERTAINTY: Another technique I’ve developed when letting it ride is the point of uncertainty. At the point of uncertainty, the original test result has been put at the risk of failure, but the character has the opportunity to save the result by taking some sort of action.

The point of uncertainty may be the result of the original check actually failing. For example, while sneaking into the orcs’ camp the PC encounters a scout whose Perception score is high enough to spot them. Can they knock him out (or take some other preventative action) before he raises the alarm? (If you wanted a mechanical cue, you might determine that a small margin of failure triggers a point of uncertainty and only a large margin of failure results in an immediate catastrophe.)

However, a point of uncertainty could also be the result of some tangential action coming in and interfering with your original check in an orthogonal fashion. For example, you’ve made a riding Social check while running a con job. You’re in the middle of chatting up the mark at a fancy party when you spot a former mark across the room. If they spot you, they’ll ruin your new cover. Can you make a Stealth check to avoid being seen?

What the point of uncertainty lets you do is to add complications while the overall resolution continues pushing forward. (Watch any heist movie ever made to see why that might be useful.)

Note that you’re never making a Stealth check to maintain your Stealth check or making a Social check to maintain your Social check. If you’re sneaking around and you’ve reached the point where the only way to succeed is to try sneaking again, that doesn’t mean that your original attempt is at risk. It means your original attempt has failed.

ENDING THE RIDE: With that being said, when does one attempt actually end and a new attempt starts? Failure is certainly one way. If the PCs fail their check to sneak into the orcs’ camp, fight the orcs who spotted them, and then attempt to reassert their stealthy approach, then that’s a new attempt and they should make a new check.

In the absence of failure, the first thing the GM should look for is a change in approach. If the PCs are sneaking along, decide to ambush some orcs who failed to spot them, and get into a big melee with them, that’s also the end of their stealthy approach and if they later decide to go back to sneaking they should probably make a new check.

(Note that these are not the same thing as an interrupted attempt. If you’re climbing a mountain and you fight some yetis halfway up, that doesn’t mean that your Climb check to reach the top of the mountain has failed or that the PCs have changed their approach. It’s just been interrupted by the yeti fight. The original Climb check should ride on through.)

More rarely, the GM can also look for significant changes in circumstance. This gets pretty fuzzy, though, because it’s really easy to fall into the trap of, “Every sentry they encounter is a change in circumstance! New roll!” Which is, of course, the exact opposite of what you want to do. But in some cases a seismic event will occur and things really will change so much that it’s basically a completely different task. For example, if the PCs are sneaking through the orcs’ camp and halfway through it a huge platoon of fire giants attacks the camp, the GM might decide that “middle of a battlefield filled with fire” is sufficiently different from “sleepy orc camp at night” as to make it a completely different situation requiring a new check.

(Another technique you can use to handle changing circumstances is to just modify the original check. For example, if a PC’s cyberdeck gets hit with a nasty virus while they’re hacking a mainframe, the GM can just apply a penalty to the original check result to reflect their debilitated equipment instead of calling for a whole new check.)

Next: Has the original goal been met? If the PC was attempting to seduce Baron von Isbury and the baron has now been seduced, then that ride has come to an end. (Insert bad sexual pun about the next ride beginning here.) If they were climbing a mountain and they’ve reached the top, then they’ve successfully mounted the obstacle. (Insert bad sexual pun about mounting here… Okay, I’ll stop.)

In a similar vein, however, you can also look at whether a significant landmark or accomplishment has been achieved. This can get fuzzy, too. (“Every time you get past a sentry, you’ve accomplished something! Make a new check!”) What you want to look for are the accomplishments that can’t be trivially negated as the result of a later failure. For example, instead of having a single Climb check for the entire mountain you might have a separate Climb check for achieving each base camp: On a failed check, instead of being forced to retreat to the bottom of the mountain they can instead return to the previous base camp (making it a significant accomplishment to achieve).

Similarly, after the PCs have penetrated the outer defenses of an enemy compound and planted their remote access device on the mainframe, you might have them make another Stealth check to get back out of the complex.

MULTI-STEP vs. LET IT RIDE

You may have noticed that at this point I have now advocated for breaking a single intention into a multiple steps AND for resolving broad swaths of time with a single check. Aren’t those contradictory?

Not really. These are different tools, and they can be used in different ways to achieve different effects. But how do you know which one to use?

Well, to a certain extent, this is another one of those areas which explain why this is the Art of Rulings and not the Flowchart of Rulings. But here are a couple things to keep in mind:

First, notice that if you’re properly applying multi-step action resolution, then each vector terminates at a meaningful consequence or meaningful choice. You’ll also notice that one of the ways that a riding check can come to an end is if the PCs choose a new approach or if they’ve reached some from of landmark (i.e., there’s been a consequence). In many cases, these mechanical approaches are actually two sides of the same coin.

Second, any place where you’re rolling the same skill check repeatedly and the consequence of any failure is to effectively wipe out all of the previous successes… You should probably be defaulting to letting it ride at least 99 times out of 100.

(The exception to this are endurance checks – i.e., situations where eventually failure is assured and it’s a question of how long a character can stave off that failure. For example, how long can you stay conscious in a vacuum? How long can you keep swimming in a terrible storm? How long can you survive exposure in the middle of a blizzard?)

Finally, you usually can’t go too far wrong by boiling this down to a simple question: Which one sounds like more fun?

Addendum: Let It Ride on the Death Star

Go to Part 9

You may remember that Places to Go, People to Be translated the Three Clue Rule into French last year. Now they’ve begun translating Node-Based Scenario Design as Création de scénario en noeuds.

Unlike the Three Clue Rule, I have nothing particularly clever to say about this translation. So here’s a semi-interesting factoid about Node-Based Scenario Design: After finishing the original set of essays, I somehow managed to lose the Photoshop file I’d used to create the various multi-colored node diagrams. (This is uncharacteristic for me: I actually have an entire directory dedicated to housing the original work files for the graphics here on the Alexandrian. The directory dates back to when the site launched in 2005 and exists for explicitly this purpose. I still have no idea how I managed to lose the PSD file.) As a result, whenever I’ve done a follow-up on the original series which requires a similar node diagram I have crudely patched it together by copying and pasting the original JPGs.

I keep telling myself that some day I should rebuild the original file. But I also keep telling myself that some day I’ll learn how to use Adobe Illustrator properly so that I stop abusing Photoshop by using it for anything even vaguely graphical.

Go to Part 1

Another resolution convention which GMs habitually fall into without really consciously thinking about it is the belief that every action needs to be resolved in a single check.

This is not universally true, of course. Combat is an obvious counterexample. And, indeed, it’s often intuitively understood that actions taken in the physical realm should be broken down into discrete steps: You can’t walk through a locked door until you figure out how to open it. If you want to shoot a rocket launcher from a sniper perch at the top of a cliff, you first have to climb the cliff.

These techniques, however, can be fruitfully applied in a much wider capacity. When we fail to recognize that, we end up robbing our gaming experiences of the depth they could possess. And, in some cases, we end up struggling with action resolutions which should be relatively straightforward to adjudicate.

MULTI-STEP ACTION RESOLUTION

Before we delve into how a multi-step resolution can be designed by the GM, let’s first consider a few ways in which multi-step resolutions can organically arise during play.

The first, and perhaps most straightforward method, is an incomplete declaration of method. To take one of our earlier examples, a player declares that they want to climb to the top of a cliff. That action is resolved. Then they declare that they want to shoot someone from the sniper perch at the top of the cliff. In this case, the player’s intention was always to take their shot from the sniper’s perch, but they broke that intention down into separate chunks. There is an instinctual understanding that X has to happen before Y.

Second, a multi-step resolution can also be the result of a partial success or failure: Your intention is to get to the other side of the chasm, but your Jump check was a partial failure and you ended up clinging to the ledge on the far side. Now you’ll have to take another action in order to complete the intention.

The take-away here is that resolutions which are potentially multi-step can be of a variable length and, in some cases, will even collapse down into a single step. (To invert the example, you might think that someone would need to leap across the crevasse, grab the edge, and then haul themselves up. But then they roll an extraordinary success and that multi-step resolution conflates down to a single leap that carries them all the way across.

Finally, there’s action economy. Multi-step action resolutions often crop up in combat, for example, because there’s a hard limit to how much you can accomplish on any given turn: “I will go here this round so that I can go over there next time.”

Looking at these organic examples, we see that they tend to break down into a pattern of X then Y then Z – i.e., X needs to happen before Y can happen. This is similar to the end of Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The landing party needs to successfully make a hyperspace approach to the planet before they can deactivate the shields, and they need to deactivate the shields before the Resistance can attack with their X-Wings.

But another option is for multiple requirements to be met before you can attempt a subsequent action – X, Y, and Z all need to be accomplished before you can do A. This is, roughly speaking, what happens at the end of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace: Amidala needs to capture the Viceroy, the Jedi need to defeat Darth Maul, and Anakin needs to destroy the droid control ship before the Trade Federation can be forced to negotiate a new treaty.

The other thing to notice is that this can become very fractal: It takes X, Y, and Z to accomplish your goal, but accomplishing X means doing A, B, and C first.

THE PATH OF MEANINGFUL CHOICES

Now, let’s turn our attention away from multi-step resolutions that emerge organically and instead look at how the GM can deliberately choose to resolve an action through multiple steps. When should you do it? Why are you doing it? How many steps do you break the action into?

One way of looking at this is what the Angry DM refers to as a visible benchmark: When you’ve completed one step of the multi-step resolution process, there should be a clear benchmark representing progress towards the goal. For example, imagine a generic scenario in which a PC is picking the lock on a door and the GM decides to resolve it as a sequence of three Lockpicking checks. After the first check has been completed, the GM says, “Do you want to continue picking the lock?”

That’s nonsense. Why is the GM asking that question? It’s meaningless. And you can imagine similarly meaningless interactions: “You’ve convinced him a little more.” “You’ve driven a couple more blocks towards your appointment, do you want to keep driving?” “You continue following the tracks.”

If we look back at our organic examples, we can see how they naturally include visible benchmarks: Once you’ve climbed the cliff, you’re no longer at the bottom of the cliff. After your leap across the chasm comes up short, you are now clinging to the opposite side (giving you different options than you had before). If you attack someone in combat the question could easily be, “Do you want to keep attacking him?” but if you succeed on the attack then you’ve dealt them damage and if your attack failed then you’ve afforded them an additional opportunity to attack you.

Coming back to our meaningless examples, we can also add visible benchmarks to them: For example, you might model picking the lock on a door as requiring three checks in order to determine how long it takes them to get the door open, measuring that against either a hard deadline (there’s a guard coming around the corner) or a fluid one (combat is raging around them and every extra round it takes them to open the door is another round their comrades have to hold off the orcs).

The vast majority of the time, these benchmarks should be visible to the characters, but there may be some instances – like the approaching guard – where the benchmark is meaningful in the game world without the characters (or possibly even the players) being aware of why.

In fact, we can probably generalize this concept of “visible benchmark” to “meaningful consequence”: Each step of a multi-step resolution should have a meaningful consequence. (And it should preferably be meaningful whether the resolution of that step is a success or a failure, for the same reason that this is the gatekeeper for single-step action resolution.) And this often means returning to our familiar friend, the meaningful choice.

In other words, if you look at the totality of an action resolution and you break it apart at each moment in which there is either a meaningful choice or a meaningful consequence… those end up being the individual steps of the multi-step resolution.

VECTORS

Another way of looking at multi-step action resolution is what Technoir refers to as vectors. To paraphrase from the game, you have a clear vector to your objective when:

• The player’s description of the action is feasible.
• There is a clear path for the action. There are no obstacles the character must surmount first.
• The objective is a logical consequence of the action described.

A vector is, in short, another name for a method, but imbued with the conceptual idea of a straight line: Look at where the vector is being aimed. If it can’t hit what it’s being aimed at (because there’s an obstacle in the way), then you’ll first need to identify a vector which will put you into a position where you can hit what you’re aiming for.

This process can be almost absurdly obvious when you apply the thinking to a physical objective. For example:

• You want to go into a room, but the door is shut.
• You want to open the door, but the door is locked.
• You want to pick the lock.

LOCK → DOOR → ROOM

But once you understand the basic concept of vectors, the same logic can be fruitfully applied to more abstract situations. They’re great for modeling social encounters, for example:

• You want to convince the rep from LVC (Lunar Venture Capitalists) to fund your zero-point energy generator, but you need to convince him it’s profitable.
• You want to convince him it’s profitable, but you need to convince him it works first.
• You want to use your scientific presentation to show him it works, but he’s busy and is brushing you off.
• You want to fast talk him into listening to you.

FAST TALK → PRESENTATION → PROFIT → FUNDING

And although these examples have their vectors drawn backwards from the goal (I want to take my shot at X, where can I see X from?), it can be equally useful to draw vectors from the opposite direction (particularly for GMs designing a multi-step resolution). Take a research test to discover information on the Serpent Crowns of Valusia for example:

• A web search doesn’t reveal much, but does tell you that there may be more information in H.L. Menckel’s Beneath the Waves: Arcane Archaeology of the Mediterranean, a rare volume.
• Additional research at the local college library indicates that the only known copy of the book was recently purchased at auction by Johnny Marcone.
• A networking test reveals that Marcone frequents the Velvet Room.
• A seduction roll gets you past the bouncers at the front door.

And so forth.

HOT-SWAPPING VECTORS

One of the major conceptual advantages of this approach is that you can easily hot-swap vectors: Instead of picking the lock, you can seduce the concierge to give you the key. Or pickpocket the master key off the bellhop. Or break the door down.

SEDUCE → DOOR → ROOM

PICKPOCKET → DOOR → ROOM

BREAK → DOOR → ROOM

Alternatively, instead of going through the door, you could climb through the window. Or break through the wall. Or teleport inside.

Of course, this also works great with non-physical vectors: You can get the LVC rep to talk to you by fast talking him. Impressing him with your past accomplishments. Seducing him. Using a display of your zero-point energy device to amaze him.

I find this concept of “hot-swapping” incredibly useful: It allows the GM to construct a framework for resolving complex, multi-step sequences without constraining the options of the players. It keeps your adjudication flexible and loose, allowing player creativity to flow through the structure.

Correctly interpreted, it also shows that the distinction between “organic” multi-step actions and GM determined multi-step actions is, in many ways, a purely arbitrary one. The “organic” examples are simply those where the GM and/or the players instinctively see the vectors involved, whereas the “determined” actions are simply those where they need to think about it. Over time, and with practice, more and more of these interactions are likely to become instinctual and second nature.

BREAKING VECTORS

In general, a vector should terminate at the point from which the next vector is being launched (i.e., the point at which the action changes direction). If you finish resolving a vector and the next vector is pointing in the exact same direction, you’re generally left with one of those meaningless questions we talked about earlier. (“Do you want to keep picking the lock?”)

Partial successes and failures, however, can often be expressed as broken vectors: You were running towards point X, but you slipped and you fell. Or something blindsided you. Or you smashed into an invisible wall (or other obstacle you were unaware of). In some cases, these broken vectors will create obstacles which will force the creation of new vectors to route around them, but in many cases they’ll be transitory delays after which the character can point themselves back in their original direction.

For example, let’s go back to that locked room:

LOCK → DOOR → ROOM

On a partial success, the character picks the lock to the door but is spotted by a security guard. This inserts a new vector, after which they resume their original trajectory:

LOCK → FAST TALK GUARD → DOOR → ROOM

Broken vectors can also be found in situations of endurance. For example, if a character is trying to hold a door shut while a werewolf pounds on it from the other side, they can end up with a vector that looks like this:

HOLD DOOR → HOLD DOOR → HOLD DOOR → HOLD DOOR

Probably repeating the same check over and over again from one round to the next while their friends desperately try to figure out an escape route.

You can see a similar pattern in what I refer to as operatic actions for purely idiosyncratic reasons (because I perceive a pattern in opera music where emotional crescendos are achieved through a series of cyclical builds in the power of the music). I also see this pattern a lot in anime or manga, where a character has to build up power over time and the longer they can sustain that build the more effective the result. (A more mundane example might be convincing members of the jury.)

However, now that we’ve talked about how to break an action resolution down into multiple parts, let’s do the exact opposite…

Go to Part 8

The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher primarily consists of fifteen novels, but Butcher has also written a dozen or so short stories and novellas (which, while generally not essential, often have events which reflect back into the novels). Butcher’s website has a list of where the various short stories fall into the Dresden Files continuity, but unfortunately every entry on the list includes a spoiler description of the story. While reading the series, my efforts to find an alternative list duplicating the chronological order failed. So now that I’ve finished the series, I’m putting together a spoiler-free version of the list in the hope that it will prove useful to others.

There are currently two short story collections: Side Jobs and Working with Bigfoot. Butcher plans to collect the rest of the stories (along with some not yet written) in a collection tentatively called Brief Cases, but since that doesn’t exist yet I’m including references below to where the stories can be found.

INTERNAL CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

“Restoration of Faith” (Side Jobs)

1. STORM FRONT

2. FOOL MOON

“B is for Bigfoot” (Working for Bigfoot)

3. GRAVE PERIL

4. SUMMER KNIGHT

5. DEATH MASKS

“Vignette” (Side Jobs)

6. BLOOD RITES

7. DEAD BEAT

“I Was a Teenage Bigfoot” (Working for Bigfoot)

“Something Borrowed” (Side Jobs)

8. PROVEN GUILTY

“AAAA Wizardry” (Dresden Files RPG)

9. WHITE NIGHT

“It’s My Birthday Too” (Side Jobs)

“Heorot” (Side Jobs)

10. SMALL FAVOR

“Day Off” (Side Jobs)

“Backup” (Side Jobs)

“The Warrior” (Side Jobs)

“Last Call” (Side Jobs)

“Curses” (The Naked City, ed. Ellen Datlow)

11. TURN COAT

“Love Hurts” (Side Jobs)

“Even Hand” (Dark and Stormy Knights, ed. Pat Elrod / Beyond the Pale, ed. Henry Herz)

“Bigfoot on Campus” (Working for Bigfoot)

12. CHANGES

“Aftermath” (Side Jobs)

13. GHOST STORY

“Bombshells” (Dangerous Women, ed. George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois)

14. COLD DAYS

“Cold Case” (Shadowed Souls, ed. Jim Butcher and Kerrie Hughes)

15. SKIN GAME

RECOMMENDED READING ORDER

My recommended reading order for the series is basically identical to the internal chronological order, except for “Restoration of Faith”. I think that story functions best as a proper prequel, and I would hold off on reading it until some point after Grave Peril.

If you’re less interested in the short stories, the novels largely stand on their own. However, there are five stories which are prominently referenced and which I recommend seeking out if you’re looking for an “Essentials” reading list:

• “Something Borrowed”
• “Heorot”
• “Backup”
• “Aftermath”
• “Bombshells”

Also: The first three books in the series are pretty good pulp fiction. They’re entertaining, but they’re not really anything special. If you start reading them and you’re thoroughly “meh” on the whole thing, skip ahead to Summer Knight and read from there. (That’s where Butcher starts kicking the whole series into a different gear and it just keeps getting better.)

But I don’t recommend doing that, because the first three books do lay a lot of pipe that will enhance your enjoyment of the later stuff.

The use of a GM screen can be a surprisingly contentious subject in the running of a roleplaying game. The critics consider them superfluous at best or intrinsically damaging to the dynamic of the game (due to inducing issues of trust and social separation) at worst. But I, personally, find them valuable more often than not, and I’d like to share my thoughts on how they can be used to best effect.

First, I don’t like the older style of portrait-oriented screens. Their height does, in my opinion, create an unnatural barrier between the GM and the players. They feel like a giant wall, cutting off the natural expression of body language.

Landscape-oriented screens, on the other hand, don’t have that problem. As the GM, I can see everything that’s happening on the table and the players can freely see my body language. As long as you’re playing with a table surface, there’s no meaningful disadvantage to the use of the screen and, in my experience, there are two significant advantages.

SIGHT LINE OBSTRUCTION

The most basic function of the screen is to block the player’s line of sight to my notes and maps. This is important to me not because I think my players are horrible cheaters who are trying to peek at my notes; it’s because I consider it a common courtesy. If I’m inviting people over to watch a movie, I don’t hang a poster with spoilers for the movie next to the TV screen and ask them to avert their eyes from it.

The same principle applies here. In fact, rather than inhibiting a personal connection between me and the players, I often find that a landscape screen enhances it: When you don’t obstruct your maps and such, players will often avert their eyes from your end of the table in order to avoid glancing at them.

VERTICAL REFERENCE

I’m a pretty huge advocate of being able to simultaneously display multiple pieces of information in order to facilitate rapid referencing and cross-referencing while running the game. (This is also why I don’t like running games from a laptop: The search functionality can be useful, but being able to only look at one page of information at a time while GMing is like trying to run a marathon with your legs tied behind your back.)

Therefore, being able to position reference material in a vertical place (so that it doesn’t take up surface space) is, in my opinion, insanely useful. In addition, positioning persistent reference material for the system and/or game world on the screen creates a consistent spatial familiarity that makes referencing that material faster and more efficient. (Instead of figuring out where the cheat sheet packet is currently lying on the table, picking it up, and flipping through it, I instead know that I can reach out to my right, flip up a piece of paper, and look directly at the skill difficulty guidelines. After just a couple of sessions, I basically don’t even have to think about it any more. It becomes autonomic.)

My typical table arrangement when GMing is:

• A customizable, landscape GM screen with four panels of information.
• 2-3 pieces of paper displayed behind the screen.
• One or more TV trays to my left side, which I use to hold my rulebooks and also display 4-6 additional sheets of information (which often includes one or more rulebooks flipped open to the appropriate page reference).

Without the GM screen, my quick reference material not only becomes less efficient, it also begins encroaching into the space I use for other reference material. This becomes a cascading problem, as useful resources get bumped out of circulation. With less information at my fingertips, it becomes more difficult to run complicated, interconnected scenarios.

MAKING THE SCREEN

As useful as the reference material on a GM screen can be, the sad reality is that most published GM screens feature a lot of non-essential information while not including material that would actually be useful when running the game. As a result, I use a modular, customizable landscape (like the ones you can buy here or here).

IMAGES: Buying the PDF version of an official landscape screen is often a good way to stock the player-facing side of your screen. But in an era of Google Image Search, the whole world of art and photography is your playground.

Personally, I tend to avoid trying to find single mural-style images that will go across the entire breadth of the screen. Finding multiple images to make up a polyptych is easier, and it also gives you the opportunity to highlight multiple facets of the game / world / campaign. I also recommend finding images that depict things the PCs could theoretically see, rather than images of main characters who aren’t the PCs doing awesome things. (It’s more immersive and suggestive of the game world that way, while allowing the table to remain focused on the narrative you’re creating instead of some other narrative that’s being depicted.)

(In the past I’ve also played with stocking the player-facing side of the screen with player-relevant reference material. But I’ve found that reading the material at any meaningful distance is usually difficult and, for players (who usually juggle less reference material), it’s easier to just use cheat sheet packets. Your mileage may vary.)

REFERENCE MATERIAL: I design System Cheat Sheets for many of the RPGs I run, particularly those featuring complicated mechanics. These reference sheets can then be conveniently slid into the modular screen.

A major conceptual breakthrough for me was the Hackmaster GameMaster’s Shield, which included flip-up panels:

Copying this same technique, I now use reverse-duplex printing to create sheets that I can tape together and flip up to reveal additional information behind them. This allows me to easily put 12 landscape-formatted sheets within easy reach. (And there’s no reason I couldn’t expand that to a third layer of information to give me 20 sheets, although I haven’t actually found a game so complicated that I would need to do that yet.)

FURTHER READING
Rolling Behind the Screen