If a GM runs systems where they call for specific skill checks (e.g., “give me a Computer Use check”), my experience — from both sides of the table — is that they’ll often develop biases in the skills they call for. Sometimes this will just be a natural consequence of skill design (Spot Hidden in Call of Cthulhu has a far more universal application than Geology), but often it’s just familiarity and comfort: They habitually reach for Field Medicine, even though Cybernetics or Pathology might be better fits. Or maybe they just never think to call for Mysticism checks.

These biases affect both rulings made at the table and adventure design. Either results in a flattening of the game world: If you’re not calling for Cybernetics checks, for example, then it likely means that you’re not including cybernetics meaningfully in your game. (Or, at least, keeping it out of the spotlight.)

If you’re running a system with skill overlap, of course, it’s fine for multiple skills to be applicable, but the bias will still have an effect: Skill checks are a way of asking questions about the game world, and if the only questions you’re asking about Cybernetics are the ones fully covered by Field Medicine, then you’re still missing the chunk of Cybernetics that makes it unique.

You can see this really clearly, I think, when it comes to designing mystery scenarios: If you’ve got an unconscious blindspot when it comes to Chemistry tests, then there are lots of different types of clues that you aren’t including. Your mystery scenarios, by necessity, will be less varied and interesting.

SOLUTIONS

Start by putting the skill list on your GM screen. Having that list at your fingertips from day one while running a new system is a great way of making sure you take advantage of all the tools the game is giving you. A skill bias often develops because you just keep coming back to the first dozen or so skills you learned, so if you can avoid falling into that rut in the first place you’ll never have a problem.

After five or six sessions, review the skill list. This shouldn’t take more than ten minutes or so, but really put in the effort to look at and think about each and every skill: Have you been using this skill? If not, are there times when you should’ve used it? What are some fun ways you could use the skill in designing your scenarios? Is there stuff you could add to the environment? Ways that your NPCs could use the skill or force the PCs to use their skill? If you’re struggling, re-read the description of the skill in the rulebook and/or check out the pertinent Wikipedia article.

Pay particular attention to skills the PCs are proficient in. Make a separate list or highlight them on your GM screen. Hitting these skills will spread the spotlight around and give the players opportunities to show off how awesome their characters are.

Then use these lists — both the game’s skill list and the PCs’ skill lists — to inspire your adventure creation. Need a clue? Pick a skill and ask yourself how the PCs could use the skill to get the lead they need. Designing a monster-of-the-week? Think about how the PCs could use skills to interact with them, either directly or indirectly. (Where does Cybernetics take you as compared to Pharmacology, Xenoesotericism, or Zero-G?) You can do the same thing when filling your environments with cool details — think not only about things to interact with (e.g., you can use Chemistry to analyze the strange liquid puddled on the sofa) but how skills can become an extension of the character’s senses (e.g., Chemistry lets them recognize a distinctive fragrance compound).

In my Mothership open table, a character named Manny Vasquez recently died. One of the other PCs, Dürmig Ableton, decided to use one of his downtime actions to arrange a memorial service for Manny — a chance for everyone who had worked with him to share their memories and commend him to the wisdom of the stars.

I loved this idea, but it was also problematic.

Sure, we could play through the memorial service with the four players who were currently at the table, but what about the other twenty players who are currently active in the campaign and their characters? In fact, even Manny’s player wasn’t at this session! (Dürmig had heard the news of Manny’s death from one of the other PCs in the session, who had been working with Manny when he died.)

What Dürmig was really proposing was a communal event that, ideally, everyone playing in the open table could choose to participate in.

The problem is that I’ve tried organizing community events like this before — where a bunch of open table players all get together — and they’re pretty antithetical to what makes an open table work: The whole point of the open table, after all, is flexible scheduling so that you’re NOT trying to coordinate everyone’s schedules. Therefore, not only have I found that events like this often never come together at all, I’ve seen the efforts to coordinate real-world and game-world schedules actually wreck the entire open table and end the campaign.

(This may be difficult to understand unless you’ve seen it in practice. Basically, characters and/or players got put on hold waiting for the communal event to happen. When the event inevitably got delayed because of the logistical issues, people went into a “holding pattern” where they were waiting for the event to happen. Attendance dropped at the other sessions, which killed the forward momentum of the table and even caused whole sessions to be canceled. This caused players’ commitment to the game to flag, which increased the attendance problems while also making it harder for everyone to come together for the now much-delayed communal event, and the whole thing slipped into a death spiral.)

So with these practical and existential problems in mind, how did we handle Manny’s memorial service?

RUNNING THE EVENT

For context, here’s a few key facts about how this open table is being run:

• We have a dedicated Discord server where events are scheduled. The players’ also have channels for chatting with each other between sessions.
• This is supplemented with an e-mail list, which I use to let people who aren’t habitually checking Discord know when new sessions have been scheduled.
• Time is synced between the real world and the game world, generally at a rate of 1 week in the real world being equal to 1 cycle in the Tempest Cluster.
• There’s a system of downtime actions which we resolve at the beginning of each session. Among other things, this allows PCs to “catch up” to the game clock.
• In my campaign status document, in addition to tracking open table headlines, I’ve also found it useful to track Major Events and the date they’re occurring. It then becomes relatively easy to see, during downtime resolution, which characters are “passing through” a major event and make sure to insert it into their narrative.

With these structures in place, I then did four things to run the memorial event.

First, as I mentioned, Dürmig spent a downtime action getting the event set up. This was during a session, so we played through this and established the broad details.

Second, I asked Dürmig’s player to make a post to the campaign Discord detailing the invent and inviting others to join and (in this case) share their memories of Manny. I also promoted the event to all of the players in the campaign via our e-mail list.

Third, I included the memorial service on my Major Events timeline. It’s very different from the other sorts of events I’ve tracked there (e.g., a major terrorist attack on the station where everyone lives), but the key thing is that it’s getting “triggered” for each PC as they pass through that moment in time. This gives us a chance to play through (and likely add to) the event, making it a living part of the campaign experience.

Fourth, I encouraged those players — if they hadn’t already — to go to the Discord and share what their character does at the memorial service. (This can be a little wobbly if you ask them to do it after the session, so you may find it most effective to take a “break” so that everyone can hop on their phones and roleplay the moment immediately.)

The result is an event that plays out multiple times over multiple weeks (or even months) of real time. It naturally results in the event being revealed/created/built in a nonlinear fashion, but with each pass through the event the group is collectively adding layers of detail and interaction to it. Meanwhile, no one is left waiting for the event to happen, nor is anyone forced to skip the event unless they want to.

FINAL THOUGHTS

To date, I’ve only used this technique to resolve what you might refer to as “low stakes” events: Attending Manny’s memorial service, for example, is a communal event, but its outcome is not going to fundamentally shift the forward trajectory of the campaign. Things might be different if there was, say, a bomb hidden in Manny’s coffin or if the big, shared event was something like the evacuation of the station.

If/when such events arise in the future, I’ll probably use similar techniques of mixing nonlinear Discord resolution, but will need to experiment with other techniques to make it work right. A few things I’ve considered include:

• Special Event Session! I’d use this if the PCs can/should be positioned to affect the outcome of the event. The goal here would not be the futile hope of getting everyone in the campaign to show up on the same day, but rather to run a specially flagged session where the PCs who show up are the ones at the tip of the spear. (Other PCs may still be able to participate in the session’s “pregame” via the event’s Discord thread.)
• Default anyone not participating in the event by such-and-such a date as having been away from the action. (In the Tempest Cluster campaign, for example, we would just assume that they took a low-paying job off-station when the event happens.)
• Alternatively, with the canonical timeline/outcome determined (by a special event session or otherwise), we can now transition the non-linear resolution techniques described above as everyone else figures out how their character was affected by what happened during the special event.
• Multiple special event sessions. This can work if the event is designed in such a way that its outcome is being affected by actions taking place in significantly different places at the same time. For example, maybe every session in March is resolving a different facet of a crisis, with the outcome from all tables being synthesized at the end of the event

As I say, these are currently just thought experiments. But they do open up some really fascinating opportunities I’m looking forward to exploring.

FURTHER READING

Open Table Manifesto
Open Table Headlines
Tempest Cluster

Here’s a piece of bespoke terminology that I often teach my players: low stakes test.

It’s not at all unusual for a roleplaying game or storytelling game to gives PCs a resource that they can use to improve their action checks. This might be a meta-currency, charges from a magical item, or some kind of exertion mechanic. Some games will even make this a central element of the resolution mechanic. (In GUMSHOE, for example, spending points from your skill pools is the only way that your character’s skill will have an impact on the check. This is less true in the Cypher System, but most checks will still see the PCs spending points through Extra Effort.)

The trick is that, when I’m GMing, sometimes I like to interrogate the system for stuff that would be kind of a rip-off if the players decided to spend limited resources on the check. If it’s a situation where I can clearly describe the stakes of the roll before the roll is made, no problem. (The players can decide for themselves whether it’s worth spending resources on.) But sometimes this would be awkward, inappropriate, or anticlimactic.

For example, the PCs might all be searching a room together and I want to figure out which of them finds the hidden tiara. I could make an arbitrary decision, roll a flat random check, or even elide past the question of who actually finds the tiara, but in this case I want the focus, reward, and/or factoring of skill that comes with an action check.

If I call for Find Hidden checks, however, one or more of the players might decide this is worth spending Perception Points on, which I know would be silly because they’re guaranteed to find the tiara – the check is just providing focus, a little bit of color, and a potential roleplaying prompt for one of the players (“Look what I found!”).

This is where the low stakes test enters the picture. Instead of saying, “Give me Search checks,” I say, “Give me low stakes Search checks.” This just literally means, “This check isn’t a big deal and I don’t think it’s worth spending points one.”

Players can, of course, still spend points on a low stakes test, but now I’ve done my due diligence and nobody will ripped off when the true stakes of the check are revealed.

It’s a small difference, but I’ve found – once I’ve taught the players what it means – that it greatly streamlines these interactions. (Some of my players probably think this is actually a published term of art in the games we play: It’s not at all unusual for me to include it when I’m explaining the rules of the game.)

MEANWHILE IN MOTHERSHIP…

In Mothership, every failed check causes a PC to suffer one point of Stress. This is a fantastic mechanic which constantly ratchets up the tensions and helps provided perfect pacing for every session, but it also largely removes small, incidental checks from GM’s toolkit.

I know some will cry out that this is, in fact, the point. I get it. But after a dozen or so sessions, I was still feeling handicapped by the loss of these checks.

So, once again, I’ve introduced the concept of a low stakes test, this time indicating to the player that they shouldn’t mark Stress if they fail the check. And, once again, I’ve found it incredibly useful for streamlining these table interactions, even when I’m running an open table and have to frequently introduce new players to the terminology.

This is very much a finesse technique (like the ones I use when collecting initiative), but it’s another example of how small improvements in your GMing can really add up.

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I like handouts.

I like them a lot.

If you’ve seen the Alexandrian remixes for Eternal Lies or Dragon Heist, then this won’t come as a surprise to you. Those campaigns are fairly representative of what my games look like: There will be dozens or even hundreds of handouts. Photographs, letters, lore books, artifacts — anything I can get into the players hands enhances the experience and becomes a tangible touchstone for what’s happening in the game.

In running a single adventure — like Left Hand of Mythos — keeping track of the props is pretty straightforward. Over the course of a campaign, though? Things can get more complicated.

It’s not at all unusual for my players to pull a sheet of paper out of their notes and say something like, “Hey, this letter from Lady Scarlet to Thornai that we got thirty-seven sessions ago — can we pull that from the evidence bag and dust it for fingerprints?”

Now, somewhere in my notes is likely the information I need to answer that question (i.e., who handed this letter before the PCs snagged it). But where, exactly, is it?

Well, almost certainly keyed to whatever location they found the letter in.

… and where is that?

Damned if I know. It was, after all, thirty-seven sessions ago.

What I’ve learned to do is put tracker IDs on my paper handouts. That way I know where to look up my notes about them later on.

I use alphanumeric codes for my scenario notes. For example, scenarios in my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign include:

• BW03B Alchestrin’s Tomb
• BW06 Chapel of St. Thessina
• CC07 Porphyry House of Horrors
• NOD2 The Secret Meeting

And my current Night’s Black Agents campaign has scenarios like:

• CS03 Paymaster
• CS06 Dragovir Monastery
• PP01 Arkady Shevlenko
• SJ02 Serbian Mafia

These are just generally useful for keeping stuff organized, but are particularly useful for tracking props. In pencil, I lightly write the alphanumeric code somewhere on the prop. No matter how much later the prop surfaces, I can just reference the code and know exactly what notes I need to reference.

If you don’t want to use scenario codes, another option might be maintaining a master handouts index, listing every prop you’ve prepped and the adventure it comes from. The tip here isn’t the specific method of the tracking; the tip is that having some way of knowing the provenance of your props becomes important as you begin running rich, complicated, long-lasting campaigns.