Go to Part 1

GM: Okay, the orc stabs Derek’s paladin. Let’s see… We’re on… 17. Anyone on 17…?

16…?

15…?

14…?

Julia: I’m on 14!

GM: Okay, the goblins are, too. What’s your Dexterity score?

Julia: 12.

GM: You’ll go first.

(a minute later)

GM: Anyone on 13? How about 12?

Don’t be this guy.

If you’ve never experienced this at the table, you might find it hard to believe that this is a thing that actually happens, but it’s surprisingly common. I constantly find myself playing in games like this at conventions. I’ve even seen it happen in games using a VTT, which I find particularly baffling since it’s usually pretty trivial to set these up to auto-track initiative results.

It seems that for some people this is just the way they think RPGs are supposed to work.

The problem, of course, is pacing. Or, rather, the complete lack of it. In addition to wasting huge swaths of time with this inane call-and-response ritual, it also completely disrupts any sense of flow or build in the combat encounter. Each action becomes an isolated island floating in a vast sea of numeric chanting.

It’s also prone to mistakes and confusion, as calls are missed or initiative check results are forgotten.

WRITE IT DOWN

The solution, of course, is to simply write down the group’s initiative results, sorting them into a list so that you can tell in a single glance whose turn is next.

This list not only eliminates the dead time of the call-and-response, it can also unlock other techniques for improving the pace of your combat encounters. For example, it allows you to put players on deck.

GM: Derek, you’re up. Julia, you’re on deck.

This lets the player know that it’s time to figure out exactly what they want to do, making it far more likely, when their turn arrives, that they’ll be ready to jump straight into action.

(The advanced technique is that you don’t always need to do this, as you’ll learn how to read the table and know when upcoming players need the cue to refocus. With some groups you may even be able to build on this by having player pre-roll their attacks and so forth, further improving the pace and focus of play.)

Of course, in some roleplaying games it won’t be necessary to write down initiative scores at all. For example, in the Infinity roleplaying game I designed, the PCs always go first (in any order they choose), but the NPCs can “jump” up and interrupt their actions if the GM spends a meta-currency called Heat. The only thing you need to keep track of in that system is which characters have gone on the current turn.

In other RPGs, however, writing down initiative may be easier said than done. To take an extreme example, consider Feng Shui, which uses shot-based initiative in which:

• Characters roll their initiative and that is the Shot in which they take their first action of the round, starting with the highest Shot.
• Each action has a shot cost, which is subtracted from the character’s current Shot value, creating a new Shot value.
• When the round counts down to that Shot, the character can then take their next action, subtracting the shot cost, and repeating until all characters have hit Shot 0 and the round ends.

It seems as if this system would basically require the GM to count down, right? Who’s going on Shot 18? Who’s going on Shot 17? Who’s going on Shot 16? And so forth.

But all that’s really required is a different form of recordkeeping.

This is, in fact, why Feng Shui includes a shot counter: a physical track that can be used, in combination with counters or miniatures, to keep track of which characters are acting on which shot. In practice, this counter should be placed on the table in full view of the players, allowing everyone to see at a glance the sequence of upcoming actions.

(See Feng Shui: Using the Shot Counter for a longer discussion of advanced techniques this tool can also unlock.)

GM DON’T #16.1: DON’T WRITE ANYTHING DOWN

Flipping things around, initiative is not the only part of a roleplaying game where you can run into these inefficiencies. Pay attention to any interaction where you’re repeatedly asking the players to deliver the same piece of information over and over again, and then eliminate that interaction by proactively recording the information so that you don’t have to ask for it.

Armor Class in D&D is a common example of this. How often are you asking your players what their AC is while resolving attacks? If it’s more than once a session (at most), it’s probably too often.

A good place to record this information would be a Post-It swap note for your GM screen, putting it literally at your fingertips whenever you need it.

There are, however, a couple of exceptions to this that are worth noting.

First, any value that is frequently shifting during play, since this increases both the hassle of bookkeeping and the likelihood of error. A technique that can work here, however, is to enlist the players’ help by making them responsible for keeping the reference up to date: This might be a tent card that sits in front of each player with the relevant values. Or, in a VTT, it might be a shared note or file that everyone can keep updated.

Second, you don’t want to accidentally preempt mechanics or abilities that allow the players to react to specific actions, particularly if it might modify the value in question. (“What’s your AC?”, for example, also doubles as a convenient notification that a PC is being attacked and has the opportunity to activate their salamander cloak.) You can frequently route around this by simply being aware of the issue and making sure to include the appropriate prompts without the extraneous numerical exchange, but it’s definitely worth being aware of the potential issue.

FURTHER READING
Random GM Tip: Collecting Initiative

Go to Part 17: Too Many Players

So You Want To Be a Game Master was a double feature on Heath’s Geekverse.

First up, Heath dived into the book, giving an extensive sneak peek between the covers, on the Morning Grind.

Then, later in the evening, I joined him for a session of Table Talk, where we took questions from viewers. We ruffled some feathers with this one!

Morning Grind / Table Talk

M. writes:

With everything going on in Israel and Gaza, I’m struggling with my game. I know too many people who have been affected by the war. The idea of running fantasy raids and having monsters kidnap villagers and innocent people being threatened by dragon fire just isn’t fun right now.

I’ve been running my current campaign for over a year, and we’ve been building up political intrigue, abductions by slavers, secret cults, and a simmering civil war… And I just don’t know what to do.

Do you have any advice? Where do I go next? What sorts of adventures could I run?

The trap you’re feeling stuck in is the ubiquitous combat structures that are the default structure and backbone of play for most RPGs. I talk about this in Game Structures, and also the way in which play tends to gravitate towards structure. Combat is what most RPGs give you, so both your adventures and the actions of your players gravitate towards it.

It can be tough to think outside of that box, but your question about what types of adventures you could run instead shows that you’re already heading in that direction. Personally, the first thing I’d look at would be some sort of mystery scenario. Mysteries are flexible and also very conducive to combat-free scenarios. (Or, if combat is featured, it can be structured to not resemble the real world events you don’t want to be reminded of.)

You may be able to pivot the ongoing events of your campaign into a scenario you won’t find problematic, but given the prevailing themes and threads you describe, it’s probably going to be hard to get away from it entirely. So I strongly suspect that you and your group need to take a break.

There are a couple of approaches you can take for this.

First, you might be able to take a break within your current campaign with something like a beach episode. This is a concept from anime/manga, where all the main characters in the series head to the beach together. This usually involves hitting the Pause button on all of the current, ongoing story lines.

You don’t literally need to take your campaign to the beach, of course. (Although you could.) The point is to contrive a reason for your PCs to all hit the Pause button on whatever they’re doing and go do something else for a while, and this will likely be easiest to do if it’s accompanied by a change of venue. They could be:

• Sent somewhere by a patron to deal with a problem.
• Invited to a grand party.
• Sucked through a portal into a demiplane.
• Get sent back through time to explore an historical epoch.

The second option is to literally put your campaign on pause. Take a break for a few sessions and run some one-shots or a short campaign. This might be a good opportunity to experiment with some new games you haven’t played before. Zero-prep games like Lady Blackbird or Technoir would be the first place I’d personally start looking, and it might also be a great time to check out some more “experimental” games that aren’t based in the tropes of pulp fiction at all.

Regardless of which option you choose, I’d frame things up by having an open conversation with your players about where you’re at personally and why you need to take a break from the campaign. Discuss the options you’re comfortable running and get their input on what you should do next.

From a purely practical standpoint, make a point of setting a specific date when you’ll revisit the discussion and see if you, and everyone else, is ready to go back to the main campaign. Aim low for this (e.g., “let’s take a break for the next month” or “we’ll touch base again once we finish up our mini-campaign on Kepler Station”). You don’t want to wait too long, because then the campaign might just fade away. And if it turns out that it’s still too soon, you can always kick the can further down the road when the time comes.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #12

I was utterly thrilled to finally be able to hang out with Dael Kingsmill. She had the incredibly clever idea of using the table of contents from So You Want to Be a Game Master as a map for exploring what books, films, graphic novels, and games have deeply influenced me as a creator. If you want to watch us geek out about both GMing and Narnia, this is a video to watch ASAP!

Welcome to MonarchsFactory! On this channel you can find videos covering D&D, mythology, games, ridiculous fun with friends; all kinds of stuff. Today’s video is a chat with Justin Alexander, the author of the Dungeons & Dragons blog The Alexandrian AND the brand new book So You Want to Be a Game Master.

Watch now!

In my review of The Shattered Obelisk, I said that buying the book in the hopes that you could remix it would be a bad idea: The book would actually have a negative value compared to just reading the basic pitch and designing your own campaign with the same concept.

Nevertheless, the first thing several people asked me was: Will you be remixing The Shattered Obelisk?

Obviously, no.

So what are we doing here?

In addition to my remixes of adventures like Dragon Heist and Keep on the Shadowfell, I’ve also done a couple of Remixing essays, one for Hoard of the Dragon Queen and another for Call of the Netherdeep. These are basically How I Would Remix It, If I Were Going to Remix It. You still have to do all the heavy lifting, but insofar as you find my advice useful, this is my advice.

But I said you shouldn’t buy the book and it would have a negative value if you did!

So, again, what are we doing here?

Well… I did say you would be better off just reading the basic pitch and designing your own campaign with the same concept.

So let’s talk a little bit about what that might look like.

SALVAGING THE LOST MINE OF PHANDELVER

Before we dive into the concept of the The Shattered Obelisk, though, let’s briefly touch on the first half of the book, which is a badly marred reprinting/remastering of Lost Mine of Phandelver. If we wanted to salvage this part of the book, how would we do it?

Fortunately, this is pretty straightforward:

1. Find a used copy of Lost Mine of Phandelver (from the 2014 Starter Set).
2. Buy it.
3. Run it.

That’s it.

Reclaiming Lost Mine of Phandelver from The Shattered Obelisk is literally just laboriously scraping the graffiti off. If we, sadly, get to the point where the only viable means of getting Lost Mine of Phandelver is in the altered form it takes in The Shattered Obelisk, hopefully there’ll be a wiki out there somewhere that will do the work of listing all the changes so that you can reverse them.

THE CONCEPT

Let’s start with the core concept we’re working with:

1. A powerful obelisk was shattered and the pieces are scattered in the region around Phandalin.
2. A group of mind flayers want to re-assemble this obelisk (or as much of it as possible) so that they can use it in a powerful ritual.
3. The PCs need to race the mind flayers to obtain the various pieces of the obelisk. The more pieces the PCs stop the mind flayers from getting, the less powerful (or more difficult?) the mind flayer’s ritual will be.

What does the ritual do?

Whatever you want it to do. Here’s some quick brainstorming:

• Rewrite reality so that the mind flayers never lost control of Gauntlgrym.
• Forge a spelljammer that will allow them to travel through time.
• Create the powerful illithid tadpoles required to ceremorphosis dragons.

Something to keep in mind is that, unless your campaign structure makes it plausible that the mind flayers could actually win, their objective is only really significant for (a) setting stakes and (b) the cool lore you can pull into the campaign. So you’ll want to be make sure to build revelation lists to pull that lore in. It’ll be even better if you can make it actionable in some way: For example, the illithids are also collecting spelljammer components (and that gives a new vector for the PCs to track their activities). Or they’re collecting the various dragons scattered around the Phandalin region so that they can transform them once the ritual is complete. (The PCs might find a mind flayer team engaged with one of the dragons from Lost Mine of Phandelver or Dragon of Icespire Peak; or they might even be able to forge a draconic alliance in response to the mind flayers targeting them. This activity could also bring in the Cult of the Dragon as an additional faction.)

THE RACE FOR THE SHARDS

The core structure of the campaign is the race to claim the obelisk shards.

As written, The Shattered Obelisk has the mind flayers automatically grab four of the seven shards before the PCs can even get involved in the race; two more shards are claimed through a completely dissociated trigger; and the third is pursued by a mind flayer who is inexplicably stuck waiting for the PCs.

It’s underwhelming. But the problem probably largely boils down to the fact that the designers simply don’t have a good scenario structure for handling this. They can’t present the mind flayers as a truly active, responsive challenge to the PCs because they apparently don’t have the tools to do that.

Fortunately, we do have those tools.

Start by having a single fragment in the Phandalin region, the stealing of which is structured in a way that clearly reveals what’s going on. My suggestion would be to frame this after the conclusion of Lost Mine of Phandelver: The PCs have helped reclaim the Wave Echo mines. A little while later, the dwarves at Wave Echo find an obelisk shard and they bring it to Phandalin so that the PCs can help them figure out what it is.

Design Note: This hook directly protagonizes the PCs. It’s also a great way of signaling the transition from Tier 1 to Tier 2. The PCs aren’t just anonymous wanderers anymore. They’re local heroes who have built a rep for themselves and are now leaders and experts who are sought out by the community.

The dwarves disturbing the obelisk somehow brings it to the attention of the mind flayers, who dispatch their minions to steal it.

At the end of this sequence, there should still be a lot of unanswered questions about what exactly is going on — what the obelisk is, where it came from, who the mind flayers are, what they want, etc. Resolving this enigma will help drive the campaign forwards and get the players invested in solving these mysteries.

Structurally speaking, however, the key thing is that some combination of investigating the shard itself, the attempted/successful theft of the shard, and/or backtracking to Wave Echo and seeing the site where the dwarves pulled the shard from (which may have also been targeted by mind flayer operatives) points the PCs (and the mind flayer agents) in the direction of a second obelisk shard.

This triggers a Race for the Prize, which is a scenario structure where two or more groups are all pursuing the same McGuffin.

Design Note: We’re structuring the campaign this way — an initial shard that points to a single additional shard — to kind of “prime the pump,” because things are about to get really crazy. This initial phase will help prep the players for race-based activities, so that when we step things up in the next phase, they’ll have had time to grok the basics.

One key thing you’ll need to prep for this scenario structure is the team that’s competing with the PCs to grab the shard. The mind flayers probably aren’t doing this themselves, so you’ll want to figure out who their agents are.

In the original module, they use psionic goblins. I would recommend not doing that, unless you take the extra effort to connect them to the goblins in Lost Mine of Phandelver, because otherwise the players will probably assume there is a connection and create unnecessary confusion. Finding some other option — even if that’s just adding the word “psionic” to literally any other creature in the Monster Manual — will eliminate that confusion, and also offer a valuable change of pace. (We’ve already been fighting goblins for a bunch of sessions now; let’s fight something else for a while.)

The other thing is that these McGuffin-based scenarios tend to become more fun if there’s more than two factions involved. So you might want to think about who else might be interested in the Obelisk and toss them into the mix. (Zhentarim? Cult of the Dragon? Zariel cultists? Thayans?) Alternatively, maybe the mind flayers — while all being loosely aligned — are each competing to see which one can claim the most shards.

At the site of the second shard, you’re going to plant all the clues pointing to the remaining fragments. This will include a method to find the shards, because in addition to launching multiple Races to the Prize, this phase of the campaign will also kick off a McGuffin Keep-Away, as the factions (including the PCs) not only seek to claim new shards, but also steal shards that have already been recovered.

(How many additional shards should there be? That’s entirely up to you. I’m guessing the sweet spot is probably four to six.)

At some point you need to trigger your endgame. I see a couple of options here:

• Throughout the shard race, the PCs can start collecting clues revealing (a) the mind flayers’ intentions for the obelisk and (b) the location of their final ritual, giving the PCs a chance to take the fight to them.
• The PCs figure out how the obelisk ritual is supposed to work, and they’re able to stage their own ritual. Depending on what the mind flayer ritual is actually doing, this might put them directly in conflict with the flayers (their version of reality vs. the flayer reality); or they might actually be doing a counter-ritual. If this ritual doesn’t need to take place at the same location as the flayer ritual (the site where the obelisk was broken perhaps? or Netherese site of power? or the Phandelver spell forge?), I recommend some kind of schism in reality that can connect the PCs’ ritual to the flayer ritual and allow for a final confrontation.

And, of course, both of these might be true with the PCs being able to figure out their own strategy for bringing things to a conclusion.

LINKING PHANDELVER

Most of what we’ve discussed for our version of The Shattered Obelisk doesn’t require the adventure to be run as a sequel to Lost Mine of Phandelver. But if you are running it as a direct sequel, you’ll want to make the effort to add foreshadowing to Lost Mine that will help set the stage for The Shattered Obelisk.

I listed several possible options for this in my original review of The Shattered Obelisk, and I’ll repeat them here for convenience:

• The titular shattered obelisk is a Netherese artifact. The original adventure includes a Netherese archaeological expedition, so you could plant lore about the obelisks there.
• The titular lost mine of Phandelver includes the Forge of Spells, a site where dwarves once studied arcane secrets. Maybe they studied the Netherese obelisks!
• There’s a nothic in the Redbrands hideout, a type of creature with specific ties to the Far Realms, Vecna, and the mind flayers in this adventure. We could link him to the mind flayers, perhaps as an advanced scout in the region?
• The Spider, who is the main mastermind villain of Lost Mine of Phandelver, seeks the Forge of Spells. Maybe he could also be looking for pieces of the shattered obelisk, allowing us to plant lore in his lair. (This could also set up the Spider — or the organization they work for — as an additional faction during during the obelisk chase.)

I discuss other techniques for this sort of thing in The Campaign Stitch.

As an additional note, the published module also features a plot thread where the mind flayers kidnap a bunch of people from Phandalin. If you decide to do something similar, do yourself a favor and create a cast list for Phandalin, establish the characters on this cast list during Lost Mine of Phandelver, and then kidnap NPCs the PCs have established relationships with.

For a completely different alternative, you could spread the obelisk fragments throughout the existing locations of Lost Mines of Phandelver (and/or Dragon of Icespire Peak): Whichever piece the PCs happen to discover first becomes the instigator of the obelisk chase, and the two adventures will become much more tightly interwoven as a Tier 1 epic.

As an alternative to this alternative, you might have three or four of the shards scattered around existing locations in the Phandalin region:

• The first is a curiosity.
• The second forms a pattern.
• At the third, there’s a mind flayer scouting team present.
• Then a mind flayer team tries to steal a shard.

This lets you spread out the initial lore dump a little more, hints at the machinations of the mind flayers, and sets the stage for when things explode with the discovery of additional shard locations.

MAXIMUM SALVAGE EFFORT

“But I already bought The Shattered Obelisk! And I want to get some use out of it!”

That’s fair.

Here’s my recommendation: Don’t try to salvage everything.

Instead, identify the stuff that you personally find fantastic and nick it. Maybe that’s an encounter. Maybe it’s a map. Maybe it’s a whole dungeon.

I’m not going to try to guess what that stuff is for you. I know what the one or two gems in the dung heap were for me, personally, but that may or may not match your list.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you don’t need to do a full rebuild of The Shattered Obelisk to do this. You could grab your favorite stuff and build a completely new campaign. Or you could likely just add it to a Storm King’s Thunder or Spelljammer campaign.

Which is ultimately my point here: There’s so much amazing D&D content out there — and even more lurking in your imagination and just waiting to be released — that there’s just no reason to think that you need to save the soul of every $60 hardcover from Wizards of the Coast.

ADDITIONAL READING
Review of The Shattered Obelisk
Phandalin Region Map – Label Layers