You probably know this technique.

Problem: Combat is taking too long. The players have analysis paralysis or they’re not paying attention.

Solution: Add a timer, requiring each player to wrap up their turn before the timer runs out.

It seems simple, but I’ve seen a shocking number of GMs screw this up. It turns out there’s a fairly large amount of finesse required to pull this off to best effect, so let’s take a deep dive.

MAKING THE TIMER WORK

A lot of what follows boils down to my personal opinion, but it’s also based on a lot of practical experience – not only mine as a GM and a player, but also my discussions with other GMs and players who have used combat timers in their games. There are some pretty common pitfalls, and often those who have gone astray won’t even realize they’ve fallen into a pit. Conversely, there are several best practices that will maximize your results when using combat timers.

A combat timer should not be standard operating procedure.

The first mistake is thinking you should always be using a combat timer. In reality, it’s an emergency measure that you deploy when something has gone wrong and you need to fix it. If combat at your table is moving at a good clip and with satisfying pacing, then you don’t need a combat timer. In fact, you definitely shouldn’t be using one. Even under the best circumstances, the combat timer introduces additional complexity – it’s one more thing that you, as the GM, need to keep track of. If you don’t need it, then focus your attention somewhere else.

More than that, combat timers are usually a temporary measure. In more than three decades of GMing, I’ve only had to implement combat timers a handful of times. In every case, we were able to drop the timer a little later with the game significantly improved as a result. Once people get a feel from what a properly paced combat feels like, they don’t want to go back.

Make sure you’re not the problem.

On that note, before introducing a combat timer, make sure you’re not the problem. If combat is bogging down because you’re the slow one, then that’s only going to exacerbate the problem. At a minimum, in my opinion, if you’re introducing a combat timer for the players, then you should also abide by the combat timer. Also spend some time practicing multitasking and other techniques for speeding up the group resolutions for  your NPCs.

Use a generous timer.

“If I’ve got six players and each of them takes 5 minutes, then every round takes at least half an hour. If the average combat lasts five round, then every fight is burning up two and a half hours!”

That math checks out, but it can lead to a mistake: “I want my fights to take up no more than half an hour. There are typically twelve combatants in every fight, so if we assume the fight will last five rounds, then every turn needs to be no more than 30 seconds. But we’ll want a margin of error, so let’s set the timer for 15 seconds.”

At first glance, this makes sense. But in practice it’s WAY too aggressive. I recommend nothing shorter than 90 seconds, and even two or three minutes might be the right fit for your group.

What happens in practice is that people don’t wait out the timer: The slight time pressure keeps them focused and, usually, decisions are made in 30 seconds or less even though the timer is longer. Occasionally they’ll take more time because the situation radically changed just before their turn or they misunderstood something and now they need to look up a rule or reconsider their options, and that’s okay.

Missing the timer delays your turn. You don’t lose it.

Time’s up? You’re obviously frozen in a moment of indecision. I’m going to resolve the turn of the next character in the initiative order and then we’ll come back and see if you’ve figured out what you’re doing.

The goal of the combat timer is NOT to punish the player. It’s to create a sense of purpose and focus through time pressure.

It’s a hard cutoff.

Making sure the timer isn’t too punitive also removes the temptation to ignore it, which is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. If things have gotten bad enough at your table that you need to implement combat timers as a corrective measure, then you have to stick to it!

Once you start letting the combat timer slide, the time pressure evaporates and it all falls apart. Now the combat timer is just meaningless busywork and you’re wasting everyone’s time with it. (This is also why it’s important to use a generous timer! So that you don’t have to make exceptions!)

Time to decision, not resolution.

On the other hand, generally speaking, the timer is for the player to declare their action. If the timer runs out while they’re resolving their action, that’s okay.

This is partly a matter of practicality (putting half-resolved actions on hold can create all kinds of weird mechanical issues), but it’s also because the primary thing I’m trying to tighten up with combat timers is the decision-making process. That’s almost always what’s kill the pacing.

If you’re also having problems with players taking too long to actually resolve their actions (e.g., the guy who shakes their dice for ninety years before finally rolling the damn things), you might want to address that by expanding what the timer covers. But I’ve found it’s usually more about helping the players refine their resolution techniques in other ways.

Note: The exception to this, for me, are systems where characters get multiple actions per turn. In the second edition of Pathfinder, for example, it’s not unusual for a turn to consist of decision-resolution-decision-resolution-decision-resolution. In those cases, you may want to have the combat timer apply to the character’s full turn. (Although, obviously, you’ll likely want to get a little more generous with the timer to account for this.) If the timer runs out, finish resolving the current action (if any), and then put the rest of the character’s turn on hold.

Two hourglass timers.

A few features you want your combat timers to have:

• The timer should be visible to the players. It puts pressure on them.
• As soon as a turn ends, the timer for the next turn should immediately begin.
• You don’t want to have futz with your phone or some complicated interface.
• In my opinion, you don’t want something that beeps. Paradoxically, you want the timer to apply constant pressure, but when things are flowing well you also want it to seamlessly fade into the background.

The solution I’ve found works best is to have two hourglass timers: When a turn ends, flip the unused timer over and place it on the table in front of the players. Simultaneously grab the previous timer and place it behind your screen. Then repeat, switching back and forth between the timers.

This way you don’t have to wait for the timer from the previous turn to run out before starting the new one (which is a distraction and can create delays). If the players are resolving their turns so fast that the timer from the previous turn still hasn’t run out when it’s time to cycle back to it: Congratulations, you’re winning. You can flip that timer out whenever it finally runs out, which might not be until the start of the next turn.

Help the players.

Make a habit of putting the next player on deck, particularly when they’re losing focus. This will give them extra time to think about what they want to do.

Keep an eye on the timer and give them a ten second warning (or “sand’s running out!”) when appropriate.

Again: The purpose of the timer is not for the players to suffer the consequences of a timer running out.

The goal of the entire table — including you as the GM! — is for the timers to never run out. You should all be working together to accomplish that. So help ‘em out.

You need this book in order to play Lejendary Adventures. You have my sympathies.

Review Originally Published in Games Unplugged Webzine – July 14th, 2000
Republished at RPGNet – May 22nd, 2001

Gygax, who you can always count on to deliver by the bushel, has crammed a ton of material between the covers of this book – over two hundred densely-packed pages give you details on over 500 creatures. Unfortunately almost all of this material can be characterized by a blandness that is truly depressing to behold, compounded with poor execution, sloppy design, and a host of inconsistencies.

The creatures themselves combine both an astounding lack of originality with an incredibly shallow depth of coverage. For example, centaurs are expanded into a family of three different creatures – with the bucentaur and stacentaur replacing the equine portions of their anatomy with other animals. Unfortunately, the book neglects to tell us what animals the bucentaur and stacentaur are derived from, instead opting to throw at us a plethora of numbers.

Opening the book to any given page will leave you instantly confused: Dense text is made nearly unparseable thanks to the fact that nearly identical fonts were used for both headings and sub-headings. Pictures of the creatures are strewn haphazardly, sometimes appearing on entirely different pages from the descriptions of the creatures themselves (and some creatures, usually the ones most in need of them, seem to be lacking pictures entirely). The listing practices for information are inconsistent – sometimes with information appearing only in the chart at the beginning of a section; sometimes only in the creature’s description; and sometimes in both. Some entries refer to other entries which, as far as I can tell, simply don’t exist.

Adding to this confusion, Gygax has repeated his old trick of pulling mythological names out of a hat and then randomly creating new creatures with little or no connection to the original entities that bore those names. To this bag of tricks he has also added some new ones: For example, there is the Gryf, and then there is the Gryffon. Both are creatures created by mixing up the parts of lions and giant birds, but the former is used to describe the mixture that every other fantasy game in existence describes as a “griffon”.

Mixed in amongst this chaos of chaff are some genuinely worthy bits and interesting concepts: The section on Dragons and the section on Living Dead, in particular, are first-rate idea mines.

But don’t be fooled: This one just ain’t gonna fly. Pass it by.

As with Lejend Master’s Lore, Hekaforge Productions has expertly kept the price of this book a deeply concealed secret. The Illuminati itself is not privileged to know this information.

Grade: C

Writer: Gary Gygax
Publisher: Hekaforge Productions
Page Count: 202
ISBN: 1-930377-06-1

Bucentaurs have the hindquarters of an ox. They’re a “real” creature from medieval literature. Stacentaurs? Your guess is as good as mine. (I’m guessing the hindquarters of a deer; i.e., a stag-centaur.) 

The bit at the end about pricing was due to the complete lack of MSRP. The price wasn’t listed on the book. It also wasn’t listed on the publisher’s website. Neither I nor Games Unplugged could get an intended price from the publisher. I believe Games Unplugged eventually got a “cover” price ($24.95) when the book appeared in distribution catalogs.

Over the years I’ve sampled many of Gygax’s post-D&D games. Describing them as “unplayable drek” would, frankly, be doing them a kindness. Some of their faults can be laid at the feet of the increasingly byzantine measures Gygax would take in an effort not to be sued by TSR, who were apparently terrified that the cult of personality around Gygax could pose a meaningful threat to D&D’s popularity. But for the most part they were just fundamentally bad.

When I was younger, I would wonder, “How could he possibly be running this stuff?”

When I got older, I realized that the ultimate root of the problem was that he wasn’t.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Go to Campaign Status Documents

A lot can happen during a campaign, and you can never be sure what sort of mischief your players going to get up to. The trinity toolbox is a method of prepping for these unexpected dynamics of play. It helps you keep creative focus even when things are collapsing into chaos at the table. Examples of trinity toolboxes include:

• Conflicts
• NPCs
• Locations
• Atmosphere
• Campaign Clues/Rumors
• Themes/Motifs

We’ll discuss each of these in more detail below and there many other possible trinity toolboxes you might want to create. You don’t need to use every trinity toolbox for every campaign — you might only use one or two at a time.

Here’s how it works: For each trinity toolbox, you’ll create three elements. List them in your campaign status document. Then, during play, you can (and should!) reach in, grab these elements, and incorporate them into a session. You might use them:

• To respond when your players head in an unexpected direction.
• To flesh out a scene or make it more complicated.
• To make sure you don’t lose track of long-term planning.
• To buy yourself time.
• To make the game world feel alive.
• To smoothly transition from one scene to the next.
• To provide interesting filler for someone left behind when the players split the party.

You can think of your trinity toolboxes as a box of raw elements or a menu of cool stuff. Exactly how you use them, of course, will depend on the trinity toolbox in question. So let’s take a closer look at some examples.

CONFLICTS

Create three conflicts for the PCs to be confronted by. The easy default in most RPGs is a fight. (A man with a gun who can kick down a door! Or challenge them to a gunfight. Or drunkenly throw a punch in the bar.) But it can often be useful to think further afield than that, with a mix of physical, intellectual, and social challenges: A debtor coming to collect a debt. A political debate. A tense negotiation. A chase through darkened alleys. A crisis in hyperspace navigation. A riddle battle or tricky puzzle.

Another easy default is to frame all conflicts as an opponent vs. the PCs. But you can also create conflicts between others, stick the PCs in the middle of it, and let them figure out which side to support and/or how to extricate themselves.

Conflicts are often the focus of a scene, but your trinity conflicts can also be used to complicate existing scenes (they’re hear court Lord Chambers, but this drunken lout has interrupted them and wants to debate their vote on the Tariffs Act!) or even provide an exit strategy from a scene that’s drawing to a close (this conversation is played out, so let’s have some ninjas leap in through the windows!).

NPCs

Stock your trinity toolbox with three characters appropriate to the campaign’s current milieu. I find a stat block to be essential and you may also find the Quick NPC Roleplaying Template useful.

The more diverse your trinity NPCs are — in temperament, background, social class, expertise, etc. — the more likely it is that one of them will be useful at any particular moment. Make sure to give each of them a strong motivation — a goal that they want to achieve. It may or may not be directly relevant to whatever scene you end up throwing the NPC into, but you’ll be amazed how often even a tangential goal will (a) make an NPC come to life and (b) become relevant in the most surprising ways!

The PCs go on a shopping trip? Your trinity NPC might be either the clerk or another customer. They go canvassing information? One of the trinity NPCs is the person who can tell them all about it. They decided to seduce Lord Chambers and you want to add a romantic rival? Or they’re hiring a new henchman? Or they’ve gotten arrested and meet a cellmate in the county lockup? Those can all easily be trinity NPCs!

LOCATIONS

Three cool, interesting, weird, unique, or dangerous places. You’ll want to make sure they fit in with your campaign’s current locale (no town squares in the middle of the forest! … probably). They might be specific locations (Rick’s Nightclub), but more “generic” locations that could be located anywhere in the Old Forest or Casablanca or the Obsidian Plains may be easier to use. (The trick is to design something interesting, while still leaving it flexible.)

If you’re using battlemaps in your game, make sure to prep them for your trinity locations. If you’ve ever felt frustrated when the players jump in an unexpected direction and you don’t have a map prepared, this is one way of solving that problem.

Tip: If you’re running an urban campaign, you may already have a bevy of locations keyed around town. You can use these to seed your trinity locations (creating locations you want the players to learn about or just have more focus at the table), but I’d also take the opportunity to create some cool locations around town that are perhaps below the threshold of what you might typically prep.

ATMOSPHERE

List three images, sensations, impressions, incidents, or vignettes that can capture the “feel” of the campaign’s current location.

This is a trick I picked up from the globe-hopping Eternal Lies campaign, which provided both Hopeful beats and Sinister beats to establish the “mood” for each location the PCs visit. For example, in Malta the Hopeful beats are:

• Gulls sing and cry over the harbor, drifting through the air on invisible air currents, careless and free. It’s a lovely day.
• An old couple play chess outside of a tiny Baroque café. The woman makes a joke in Maltese and they both laugh and smile.
• The wind carries the smell of spices and tea down from an open window. Someone is plucking idly on a guitar up there.

And these were the Sinister beats:

• A storm blows in, its thunderhead rolling in dark and low, lightning playing across the sky and touching the sea.
• A dead gull lies rotting in the street, half-crushed by passing cars, its feathers matted and sticky with blood.
• Walking the streets of Valletta at night, a nearby streetlamp bulb pops and goes dead.

The extra layer of Hopeful vs. Sinister atmospheres was designed to help the GM reinforce or reverse the mood at the table, but the more general concept of trinity atmospheres is simply small bits of “local color” that you can opportunistically drop into any scene. I recommend choosing stuff that uniquely characterizes the current setting. What makes Venice different from Berlin? What makes Staten Island different from Manhattan? This is a tool for pushing persistent description at a macro-scale.

CAMPAIGN CLUES/RUMORS

At any given moment during a campaign, there are likely revelations you’re waiting for the PCs to discover: The location of a hidden crypt. The Phantom Jackal has secretly escaped from prison. LX-510 has become infested with pseudomilk predators. The terrifying truth of the Yellow Sign.

If you’re using node-based scenario design and the Three Clue Rule, then you’ve probably keyed clues pointing to these revelations into one or more scenarios. But there’s also stuff like permissive clue-finding and proactive clues. That’s where this trinity toolbox comes into play: It’s a collection of clues that you can drop into the action. You might use them when the players have lost their way, but they can often be used to add color and intrigue to almost any scene; or, as is the case with so many trinity elements, to respond when the PCs follow an unplanned lead.

Trinity clues tend to take one of two forms.

First, you’ve got floating clues. These are specific, possibly unique clues without a canonical location; meaning that you can drop them into any appropriate moment. This might be a treasure map, which could be given to them as a reward; looted from the bodies of a random encounter; or turn up when they make a pilgrimage to the Library of Lacunae. Or perhaps it’s a particular Mythos lore book, which could easily turn up in any collection or be found moldering among a madman’s possessions. And who had access — or stole access? — to the Barcelona Dossier? It could be almost anyone.

Second, there are pervasive clues. These are elements which are very much not unique. This might be noticing cult graffiti cropping up in town or werewolf pawprints out in the wild, or it could be a recent newspaper article printed in a thousand papers. Rumors are also a common form of pervasive clue. In some campaigns, in fact, rumors might be distinct enough to be a completely separate trinity toolbox from your campaign clues.

Trinity clues can involve a great deal of prep, including handouts and the like, but they can just easily be one or two sentences. You might even get good mileage out of simply listing the revelations you want to keep in focus and then improvising appropriate clues for them at the table.

THEMES/MOTIFS

Thinking about what you want the major themes and/or motifs of your campaign to be is something of an advanced technique: Very few GMs, in my experience, think about this sort of thing at all, and those who do often find it difficult to stay focused on their chosen themes and incorporate them into actual play.

Building a trinity toolkit for your themes can be a great cheat code for making sure they remain a tangible and persistent part of the campaign. This can be particularly true if you treat this toolkit as a checklist: Not just three options, but three things that you must include in the next session or scenario.

This is pretty straightforward if you just have one theme. For example, if your theme is Power Corrupts, then the seeds of your trinity toolkit might be:

• The Ring tempts Boromir.
• They hear rumors of Saruman’s warmongering.
• Frodo sees the Eye of Sauron.

If your theme has multiple aspects, consider assigning one trinity element to each aspect. Similarly, if your campaign has multiple active themes, assign one element to each theme. For example, if your campaign themes are the Fallibility of the Gods and the Ethics of Truth and Lies, then your trinity toolkit might be:

• [Fallibility] A broken temple, long abandoned, but with signs that it was ransacked by heathens.
• [Truth] The Landgraf confesses that his wife has been demonically possessed. The news blazes across the city.
• [Lies] Jordayn has promised not to reveal Benedict’s secret. Raethea will confront him and demand to know what Benedict is doing at the Hawk & Talon.

Framing trinity theme elements around dilemmas can be a powerful way of making them an active part of play.

You should not, obviously, feel like these are the only ways you’re allowed to implement your themes. You’ll still be building them into your scenarios and opportunistically looking for how you can frame scenes to feature them.

WHY A TRINITY?

Why not four or five or ten elements? Obviously you can include as many as you want. It’s not at all unusual for me to have a rumor list with ten or twenty entries that I can throw onto a random table. But, from a practical standpoint (and based on experience), there is a good minimum number to shoot for. If the three options are varied and distinct, they’ll give you enough options to cover a wide range of possible needs during the session. Some trinity elements will also become obsolete as a campaign progresses, and keeping the number of elements to a minimum will reduce the risk of wasted prep. Often you’ll get more mileage out of adding a new trinity toolbox rather than doubling or tripling an existing toolbox.

RESTOCKING, RECYCLING, REINCORPORATING

After each session, review your trinity toolkits:

• If you used an element, remove it.
• If an element is no longer relevant (because the PCs have traveled to a new city, for example), then remove it.
• Look at the gaps left in your trinity toolkits and restock them with new options, reflecting the current state of the PCs and the world, with an eye towards where you and the players want the campaign to go.

When you pull stuff from your trinity toolkits, though, don’t just throw it in the trash. Whether you used the element or not, tuck it away in an archive. In the future you can often dip back into this archive for inspiration. Sometimes stuff that became obsolete will become relevant again (e.g., the PCs go back to Malta). Stuff that was used can be directly recycled (you can mention that abandoned church again or include more cult graffiti). It can also be reincorporated, transforming it or using it in a different context

You can also build on previous elements that resonated at the table: The scene with the old couple playing chess developed into a fun scene, so maybe we can bring back one or both of those characters. Raethea collapsed in tears and ran away… what does she do next and how might that vector back in on the PCs?

Sometimes, based on what happens at the table, stuff will exit your trinity toolkits entirely and spin off into new scenarios. That’s great!

Conversely, if your struggling for inspiration in restocking your trinity toolkits, look at the scenarios in your campaign — the ones the PCs have already played, the ones they’re currently engaged with, and those you have planned for the future. How you can bring back elements from the older stuff, show the wider effect of the current ones, and foreshadow what’s to come?

Your trinity toolkits, after all, are just one set of tools among many for running your campaign.

The trinity toolbox was inspired by S. John Ross’ troika method for brainstorming adventure design, as described in the Digital 2.0 supplement for Mage: The Ascension and the Narrator’s Toolkit for the Last Unicorn Games’ version of the Star Trek RPG.

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If you’re an Alexandrite member of the Alexandrian Youtube channel, you can check out the latest After Action report from my Mothership open table. This one has bloodwights!

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I’m also releasing another video tonight: An unboxing video for The Crooked Moon, which you can find over on my Patreon!

You don’t need to be a member to watch this one, but I’ve decided not to release this unboxing video on Youtube because our previous unboxing videos have performed very poorly and they seem to torpedo the algorithm.

But I did want to spread the word about The Crooked Moon, which I think looks really, really cool. Unboxing this one got me very excited to dive deeper! So we’re going to see how hosting videos on Patreon works out.

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