Here’s an adventure I see from time to time: The PCs are in a city or a space station or the Keep on the Borderlands and Something Weird™ is happening.

• Random people are turning purple.
• Invisible goblins are causing chaos.
• A false hydra is eating people.
• A new bratva is shaking down local business owners, triggering a gang war.
• A druid’s curse or escaped nanotech is causing the local plant life to become mobile.

The idea is that the PCs, while doing their own stuff around the village or space station or keep, will see this background stuff happening and get sucked in.

Here’s the tip: These background adventures are MUCH easier to run if the PCs do, in fact, have their own stuff to do.

This might be as simple as a standard post-adventure shopping trip: You’ve got weird stuff keyed to the general store, the magic item shop, the fletcher’s, the town square (as they pass through it), the inn where they’re staying, etc. and you’re good to go.

But I really recommend running this type of adventure in parallel with a completely unrelated adventure: So while the PCs are investigating the Neverland Murders, they keep encountering random people who have turned purple as a background detail. This lets you pace the purple people in a subtler and, often, more effective way.

(This is why I refer to these as background adventures: They play out – or, at least, start out – in the background of whatever adventure has the group’s primary focus.)

Without that parallel adventure, a background adventure tends to fail in one of two ways.

First, if there are leads the PCs can follow, the adventure will resolve too quickly. With nothing else to do, the players will immediately focus all of their attention on the not-so-background adventure, speed run the path back to whatever’s causing it, and cut short the full timeline of weirdness you had prepped. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but if you want the background adventure to feel like a long-term development (as opposed to a flash-in-the-pan), then you need the players’ focus to be somewhere else.

Second, if there’s nothing else going on AND there are no leads for the PCs to follow (e.g., Annie the Flower Girl turned purple, but there’s no way to figure why that happened from either Annie or her flowers), then the PCs will be left adrift — just kind of awkwardly waiting until the GM arbitrarily triggers the next background event. (And then doing so again until they finally get to an encounter with leads they can pursue.)

As long as the players have something else to actively pursue, though, you can now deliberately eschew keying access leads to the first several events in your background adventure, thereby assuring that the events have a chance to build before the PCs meaningfully engage with them. (Probably. Players can be devilishly clever at finding ways to conjure forth leads from thin air that you never suspected were there. And good on them for doing it!)

In the last month alone I’ve had three people tell me they were feeling overwhelmed trying to prep an entire campaign and ask me if I had any advice for how to push through that prep when all you really want to do is start playing!

Well, the good news is that at least nine times out of ten, you don’t need to push through that prep. You almost certainly can — and should! — start playing a lot sooner than you think.

I think the prevalence of this “I’ve gotta prep the whole campaign before the first session!” mindset is due, at least in part, to the prevalence of published campaigns, particularly for D&D 5^th Edition. Obviously if you’re publishing a book, you need to write the whole book before you send it to the printer. Looking at these printed books, however, it can be easy for a new GM to think that this must be a model of what they should prep for their own campaigns: Literally hundreds of pages of notes detailing adventures that will take months or possibly even years to play through at the table.

And, yeah, that’s a pretty daunting prospect.

In So You Want to Be a Game Master, I actually recommend almost the exact opposite approach for first-time GMs: Start with a one-shot. Prep it, run it, and only then prep the next one. I think this is particularly important if you’re a new GM, because you’re going to be learning a lot in your first few sessions of play: What works and what doesn’t. What the players loved and what blew up in your face. What you need and what you don’t.

You’re going to want to be able to immediately apply those lessons to the next session and the next adventure so that you can keep growing and learning as a GM, and it’s a lot more difficult to do that if you’ve already prepped two dozen adventures before ever sitting down at the table. If you instead lean into an episodic campaign structure, you’ll be freeing yourself to learn and explore — and you’ll also able to embrace your excitement and start playing as soon as possible!

HOW MUCH DO I PREP?

But let’s say that you want to run a larger, more interconnected campaign.

You want to run a larger, more interconnected campaign.

– Leslie Nielsen (probably)

You still don’t have to prep the whole thing ahead of time. This raises the question, of course: How much do you need to prep?

In my opinion, you’ll want to start by creating a broad, comprehensive overview or outline of the entire campaign. What this looks like, exactly, will depend on what the primary structure of your campaign is going to be, but it will generally be no more than one or two pages in length.

With your outline in hand, you’re then going to prep just enough material for the first session. But what does that mean? Once again, it depends on the campaign structure.

For example, if you’re planning a megadungeon campaign, then your campaign overview is going to be a list of all the different levels in the dungeon. This might include short, one- or two-sentence descriptions of each level, and you might even put together a side view showing how the various levels connect to each other. This initial list might expand and the connections might shift over time, but this gives you a place to start.

Arneson and Gygax, way back in the 1974 edition of D&D, recommended having three levels of your megadungeon prepped before running your first session, and that’s still pretty solid advice: Most groups, during their first session, will likely never leave the first level of the dungeon, but there’s a chance that they might find a staircase down to the second level and decide to check it out. So you want to be prepared for that. You might even have a situation where, through pure dumb luck, that group makes a direct beeline to another staircase and ends up down on the third level. No reason not to have your bases covered.

In addition to not wanting the players to go charging off the edges of your prepared content, prepping a little bit ahead like this also lets you backfill and foreshadow, knitting the dungeon together into a more coherent environment. (For example, once you’ve prepped the dragonborn cultists on the second level of the dungeon, you might seed the goblin treasure on the first level with Tiamat artifacts they’ve captured from the cultists.)

If the level connections of your megadungeon are heavily xandered, I recommend modifying this advice: Prep the entrance level of the dungeon and any level directly connected to the entrance level. (For example, if Level 1 connects to Levels 2, 4, and 1A, you should prep all four of those levels, because you have no way of knowing which way the players might decide to go.)

After the first session of the campaign, make a list of which levels the PCs have visited. You should now prep all the levels which are connected to those levels. The great thing is that you’ll often discover you’ve already prepped some or all of those levels, which means your prep load will generally decrease over time. (For example, they might gone down to Level 2, which connects to Levels 3 and 4. You’ve already prepped Level 4, so all you need to do now is fill in Level 3.)

Repeat this after every session, and your megadungeon will expand, filling out the details of your original campaign overview at a nice, sustainable pace.

You’ll find that these same basic principles — prepping roughly one scenario ahead of wherever the PCs currently are — can be applied to a lot of different campaign structures. For example, if you’re using a node-based campaign structure, then your campaign overview will be a revelation list of all the adventures plus the clues that link those adventures together. You can include any number of scenarios on this list and, once again, you’ll be free to expand and rearrange the scenarios as you flesh them out into fully playable notes.

For your first session, you’ll obviously start by prepping the initial adventure. When you’re done, look at all the clues in that adventure which point to other adventures, then prep those additional adventures. (Because it’s fully possible that the PCs might discover one of those clues during the first session and choose to immediately follow it, possibly never realizing that it leads to a “separate” scenario in your notes.)

For example, consider the classic introductory node-based structure:

Here the initiating adventure has clues pointing to scenarios A, B, and C, so those are the four adventure you’d ideally want to have ready to go when the campaign begins.

After the first session, as with the megadungeon example, simply look at which scenarios the PCs have broken the seal on (either because they’ve already followed a clue into the scenario or because they’ve told you they’re planning to do so at the beginning of the next session), identify the clues in those scenarios, and make sure you prep all the scenarios those clues point to.

Once again, you’ll find that you’ve often already prepped these scenarios: For example, if the PCs head to scenario A, they’ll have access to clues pointing to scenarios B, C, and D. But you’ll have already prepped scenarios B and C, so all you need to prep is Scenario D. If they wrap-up scenario A in the next session and head to scenario C, you’ll discover that all your prep is already done.

These same basic principles can be applied to mixed campaign structures or even larger adventures. For example, imagine a node-based campaign in which several of the linked adventures are large dungeons. If the PCs have access to clues pointing to one of these dungeons, you don’t necessarily need to prep the whole thing: You could just prep the first couple levels and wait to fill in the rest of the dungeon until the PCs show up and actually start exploring it.

PREP-INTENSIVE CAMPAIGN STRUCTURES

Both of our examples have featured campaigns with a single point of entry — the first level of the dungeon; the initial scenario. But what if we wanted multiple potential points of entry? For example, what if the megadungeon has multiple entrances leading to multiple levels? What if we want to start the campaign with a job board or by giving each PC a set of rumors that they can choose to follow up on?

At this point, you have a few options.

First, you can modify things to collapse the campaign back down to a single point of entry. For example, the dungeon might have multiple entrances, but only one of those might be known or accessible to the PCs at the start of the campaign.

Second, you can give the players access to all of their options (e.g., telling them about all of the entrances or giving them all of their rumors) during Session 0 and have them make a decision about which one they’re going to choose when the campaign begins. You won’t want to completely forget about the other options, but this will still let you focus your initial prep.

Third, you can look at each point of entry separately and prep each of them using the principles described above. For example, if the megadungeon has entrances to Level and Level 4, then you’ll need to prep both of those levels and all of the levels either of them are connected to. This will obviously be a lot more prep, but that’s okay as on as (a) you feel the benefits justify the costs and (b) you have the time and are willing to do that much prep.

As you can see, the same general principle applies: What scenarios could the PCs choose to engage in the next session? Prep those and, ideally, one step more.

This means, though, that some campaign structures are inherently prep-intensive. Hexcrawls, for example, are extremely prep-intensive, since the PCs could hypothetically head in any direction from their starting point and can easily travel multiple hexes in a single session. With no idea where, exactly, they could end up at in their wanderings, a typical hexcrawl requires you to key dozens of hexes before play begins, many of which could and probably will contain full location-based adventures.

If you can put in the effort, however, prep-intensive campaigns can be very rewarding. Partly because they give the players a lot of freedom in exploring the world or situation, but mostly because, as the campaign continues, all that prep will already be done! That will free you up to focus on other stuff during your inter-session prep. (Or, alternatively, just lean back and take it easy.)

REDUCING PREP

If you’re looking to cut down the amount of prep you need to do, there are a few techniques you can use.

First, if you’re comfortable with improvisation, then you get away with reducing your safety net. Broadly speaking, you can usually get away with just prepping the scenario for the next session. Most of the time, the PCs won’t skip ahead to the next dungeon level or jet off for the next scenario. If you’re comfortable  just improvising when this does happen, then you don’t need to account for those possibilities in your prep.

Zero-prep games like Technoir and various procedural content generators can, of course, help you with improvising various types of content.

Something else to consider is downtime spacing between scenarios. This may be as simple as travel time: If the current scenario is in Geneva and the PCs find clues pointing to a different scenario in Dallas, then they’re much less likely to pop out in the middle of the Geneva scenario to check out what’s happening in Dallas than they would be if the other scenario was also located in Geneva. This can be generalized into anything that imposes a cost (in time, resources, etc.) for bailing on a scenario early or swapping between scenarios.

The other alternative is a downtime activity that consumes actual time at the table: If the players unexpectredly jag towards a scenario you don’t have prepped yet, you simply trigger the transitional content and use it to fill the rest of the session.

In some games, for example, you might just tell the players to level up. Then, while they’re spending twenty or thirty minutes advancing their characters, you can be throwing together the notes you need for the next adventure.

Blades in the Dark, on the other hand, has a structured downtime period between every job in which time in the game world passes, various events are played out, and crew development happens. This kind of downtime content requires more of your attention as the GM, but you don’t actually need to get an adventure prepped at the table: You just need the downtime spacing to chew up enough the session that you can wrap things up and come back next week with the scenario prepped.

(For more tips on handling the endings of sessions, check out Cliffhangers & Conclusions.)

It’s time for the thrilling finale!

The villain gives a little monologue, the initiative dice roll, and now it’s time for an epic—

Oh. Never mind. The PCs already killed him.

It turns out it’s quite difficult to keep a single target alive when five highly trained killing machines (i.e., the PCs) are highly motivated to simultaneously release all of their death-dealing abilities on them. (Particularly if your stat blocks are simulating reality and/or you want that same stat block to function as Not a Boss™ in other situations.) So this is a systemic problem that you’ll find in a lot of different RPGs.

There are various solutions to this – mechanical, structural, and otherwise – but here’s one that works surprisingly well:

Have the boss show up AFTER the fight starts.

In other words, the PCs get into a fight with a bunch of the bad guy’s minions, and then two or three rounds later the bad guy shows up:

• The door is slammed open dramatically!
• The summoning ritual completes and the demon materializes!
• They teleport in with reinforcements!
• A helicopter swoops down from the sky and they jump into the middle of the melee!
• They were invisible the whole time and suddenly reveal themselves!
• A car with blackout windows drives through the wall of the warehouse and the vampire lord leaps out!

However the bad guy makes their dramatic appearance, this has three effects.

First, it’s a cool and memorable moment. This really shouldn’t be undervalued.

Second, the PCs will already be engaged with other bad guys. Their tactical positions may be far muddier than they were at the beginning of the fight. They are likely to have already blasted some of their most powerful combat options. In other words, it will be much more difficult for the PCs to focus their fire on a target that appears in the middle of the fight than one that’s available when the fight begins.

Third, even if they do wipe out the boss nigh-instantaneously, you’ll have pulled off an important bit of legerdemain: Yes, the boss died in two rounds. But that didn’t happen until the fourth or fifth round of the fight. So it will, no matter how illogically, feel like a big, satisfying fight instead of a curb-stomping.

Another variant here is to have the bad guys retreat to wherever the boss is, drawing the PCs after them in pursuit. This inverts the dynamic while expanding the encounter’s theater of operations and giving it a more epic scope.

It should also be noted that this whole dynamic can often organically arise if you’re using adversary rosters (either because the PCs are pulled into a running fight that takes them to the boss or because the boss is drawn to them).

You shouldn’t do this every time, of course, or it will become predictable and trite. (Although with enough variation in the boss’ dramatic entrance you can cover your tracks quite a bit.) But it’s definitely something to keep in your toolbox.

Roleplaying games use a lot of different initiative systems: individual, side-based, hot potato, fixed, freeform, and shot clocks, to name just a few. And these initiative systems can, in turn, interact with other combat mechanics in myriad ways — readying, delaying, interrupting, reacting, and such-like mechanics being common examples.

This means your best practices for handling initiative at the table will vary quite a bit depending on what system you’re running, but this particular tip is going to assume that you’re using a system in which a separate initiative check is made for each character and their actions taken in order from best to worst result. This is, of course, a fairly common arrangement, and most or all of the techniques I’ll be sharing here should be useful across common variations (like reverse declaration or rerolling initiative each round).

BATCHING INITIATIVE

Having individual initiative checks that set a specific turn sequence has a lot of advantages:

• Separate turns for each character create clarity in resolution and declaration.
• It removes the analysis paralysis of players trying to figure out who should go next.
• It allows the GM to use advanced techniques like on-decking players to speed up play.

On the GM’s side of the screen, however, it can begin creating big headaches as the number of NPCs in a fight grows. If twenty goblins led by an ogre and accompanied by a couple of earth elementals show up, for example, the GM not only needs to roll twenty-three initiative checks, they also have to keep track of them.

The solution is to batch initiative: Instead of rolling a separate initiative for every cyber-ninja in the fight, for example, you can instead roll a single initiative check for all of the cyber-ninjas and have them all take action at the same time.

Not only is this easier when it comes to rolling the initiative check, it also tends to speed up resolution. First, it lets you consult the cyber-ninja stat block once per round instead of needing to flip back to it multiple times per round. Second, it makes it a lot easier to use techniques like rolling fistfuls of dice that also speed up combat.

This technique is so useful, in fact, that it’s not unusual for RPG rulebooks featuring individual initiative checks to nevertheless recommend that the GM batch NPC initiatives. What’s oddly less common, however, is explaining exactly how you should batch the checks, particularly as enemy groups become larger and more diverse.

Here’s how I’ve learned to break it down:

First, start with the bosses/leaders. If a group has a leader, the leader gets a unique initiative, even if they’re using the same stat block as their minions. (This might also be a narrative lead rather than a diegetic one.)

Second, take all the enemies with the same stat block and group them together. This gives you the simple efficiency of the cyber-ninja.

Third, split large groups into smaller groups. This is really where the art comes into it. What constitutes a group that’s “too large” depends on you, the system you’re running, and the specific circumstances of the encounter. Generally speaking, if a group has more than five to eight NPCs in it, I’ll probably start thinking about splitting it up. I’ll sometimes make exceptions for large groups of mooks, but there are a few factors to consider:

• Action economy. From a balance standpoint, you don’t want too many bad guys ganging up on a single PC and beating them half to death before they have a chance to do anything about it. Sometimes that will happen naturally because the PCs rolled poorly on their initiative checks, but the risk increases substantially if you batch a dozen bad guys together. So split them up.
• Tactical interest. Flipping that around, fights also tend to be more interesting when your bad guys can respond to what the PCs are doing. If all the bad guys are clumped up, then you can also run into a situation where all the PCs are taking their actions without interruption. Since everyone at the table (including you!) is a fan of the PCs, this is generally less of problem. But breaking things up a bit can also make for a more interesting encounter.
• Complexity. Batching bad guys together will generally make you more efficient in running them, but — depending on the system you’re running and your comfort level with it — there will be a point where trying to deal with a large number of bad guys all at the same time becomes a liability. Pay attention to your experience here and learn where, in the current system, you need to break them up.
• Pacing. Along similar lines, no matter how quickly you’re resolving things, if you can feel your players checking out in the middle of resolving your thirteenth goblin attack, that’s a sign that you should be using smaller batches in future encounters.

VARIANT: SQUAD LEADERS

As a variant to this approach, instead of batching NPCs by stat block, there are times when it makes more sense to batch them according to tactical groups. (For example, you might have a mixed group of goblins and hobgoblins on one side of the PCs and a different mixed group on the other side.) You might also find this approach useful if you’re using adversary rosters and multiple action groups converge into a single encounter: There was a reason you grouped those baddies together into an action group in the first place, and that reason can often persist into combat. (Particularly if you have a group joining the fight after combat has begun.)

But if a mixed group has different initiative modifiers, how can you roll a collective initiative for them?

If you think of the mixed group as a squad, who’s the leader of that squad? This might be a formal or informal designation, but in either case you can simply roll initiative for the squad leader(s) and have their squad(s) take action with them.

TRACKING SPLIT BATCHES

If you have identical creatures in multiple batches, how can you keep track of which batch each creature belongs to? You don’t want Goblin A taking action as part of Batch 1 on initiative count 15 and then accidentally taking another full turn as part of Batch 2 on initiative count 8!

The first thing is to keep the batches clearly delineated in your notes. Don’t, for example, mix all the goblin hit point totals together into one big group. Keep the hit point totals for Batch 1 separate from the hit point totals for Batch 2.

If you’re running combat in the theatre of the mind, check out Random GM Tips: Visualizing Combat.

If you’re using a battlemap, there are several ways to can keep things straight in the chaos of the battlefield:

Different miniatures. Just because they’re all goblins doesn’t mean you couldn’t have one type of goblin miniature for the goblins in Batch 1 and a different goblin miniature for the goblins in Batch 2. This also works with other tokens, of course. For example, I’m a fan of using glass beads, of which I have several different colors. Each color can be used to indicate a separate batch.

If you’re painting your miniatures, it can be useful to keep this utility in mind. If you’re painting a dozen goblin miniatures, for example, you might make sure that six of them have red shirts and six of them have blue ones.

Tag tokens. If you only have one type of goblin miniature, you can still distinguish them by adding an additional tag. For example, I can also use my glass beads for this purpose, although it has the disadvantage of needing to move both miniature and bead at the same time.

You can also make discs of colored paper and attach them to the miniature’s base using blu-tack. Colored Post-It flags can also be effective.

Geographic separation. If you can keep the batches physically separate from each other (e.g., Batch 1 goblins are attacking the paladin; Batch 2 goblins are attacking the barbarian), then you may not need any additional indicator to keep them straight in your mind.

POST-INITIATIVE BATCHING

Whether you’re batching initiative checks or not, what you’ll discover is that initiative orders will often create de facto batches. For example, here’s the rolled initiative roster from one of my recent games, with PC names in italics:

18 Spider-Eaters
17 Chieftain
16 Tee
15 Harpoon Spider
14 Spider Goblins
14 Agnarr
12 Elestra
12 Nasira
8 Ranthir
6 Giant Spiders

In this case I’ve pre-batched the Spider-Eaters, Spider Goblins, and Giant Spiders by their stat blocks, rolling a single initiative for each group in addition to the initiative rolls for the Chieftain and single Harpoon Spider.

Now that I’ve rolled initiative, however, other batches naturally appear: The Spider-Eaters and Chieftain will both be taking action together before the PCs, and the Harpoon Spider and Spider Goblins will, similarly, be taking their actions together between PC turns. Notice, too, that the end of the round is also connected to the beginning of the round: At the end of the first round, the Giant Spiders, Spider-Eaters, and Chieftain will all become batched together after Ranthir takes his turn and before Tee takes her turn.

In some cases, for the sake of simplicity, you’ll still be better off ignoring this post-initiative batching and just resolving each group one at a time. But there are often times when I find that recognizing and using these de facto groups can be very useful. For example, if I’m looking ahead while Tee is making her attack rolls, it would make sense to not only grab two red d20’s for the harpoon spiders, but also five blue d20’s for the spider-goblins. (Then I can roll all seven dice at the same time.) This can also open up more interesting tactical options, such as having the harpoon spiders and spider-goblins working together.

Flipping things around a bit, this post-initiative batching also applies to the PCs! For example, here’s another initiative roster from the same adventure:

19 Elestra
18 Harpoon Spiders
15 Spider Goblins
12 Ranthir
8 Nasira
6 Tee
5 Agnarr

Here you can see that Elestra will go first, but after the harpoon spiders and spider goblins have taken their turns, the PCs will effectively all be batched together. (Remember that Elestra will get grouped in as the round loops.) What this means, in practice, is that the PCs are now free to take their actions in any order. (And the same thing is true for your NPCs.) This fight is now effectively using side-based initiative, and if you – and your players – recognize this, then you can take advantage of that to gain all the benefits of side-based initiative (e.g., making it easier for PCs to coordinate their actions on the battlefield).

There are a couple caveats with this, though. First, some systems – including, notably, D&D 5^th Edition – will resist this batching by locking down the initiative order. Most RPGs, however, will include some method for characters to change their position in the initiative order (e.g., the Delay action in D&D 3^rd Edition), which will allow this batching to just naturally flow from the mechanics.

Even if your RPG locks down the initiative order, though, I encourage you to embrace this post-initiative batching: It unlocks creative collaboration and enables multitasking that can greatly enhance your combats.

Your players, of course, may not recognize this opportunity. You can help them learn this technique, and also help prompt them by saying things like:

GM: Okay, as Tee ducks under the last of the swooping griffons, Agnarr, Ranthir, and Elestra are the next group. What are y’all doing?

GM: Agnarr’s up next, with Ranthir and Elestra on deck. Who wants to go first?

Usually, once they get the feel for this, the players will start naturally taking advantage of the batching. You won’t need to prompt them as much, particularly if the initiative order is visible to the whole group.

The other nice thing is that, while this post-initiative batching lets you gain many of the benefits of side-based initiative, it can also avoid some of the disadvantages because there’s still a default order you and the players can fall back on to keep things moving. It can often be the best of both worlds!

Sometimes, though, this won’t work out. Whether your system locks down the initiative order or not, you’ll find that some players adapt poorly to this. They’ll either resist embracing the freedom of the batch initiative, or they may even push back and say things like, “But Teresa has to go first!” There can be a lot of different reasons for this, but it’s okay. If you’ve got a group that’s more disrupted than helped by batching initiative, then this is also a situation where you can just fall back on the default order.

PATTERNS OF ACTION

The last thing to point out is that you can use post-initiative batching for the PCs even if they aren’t all bunched together. Looking at the first initiative roster above, for example, we can see the PC vs. NPC groupings:

• NPC: Giant Spiders / Spider-Eaters / Chieftain
• PC: Tee
• NPC Harpoon Spider / Spider-Goblins
• PC: Agnarr/ Elestra / Nasira / Ranthir

Looking at your initiative rosters through this lens of batching will make clear the pattern of action, and you’ll quickly learn that different fights will naturally have different patterns, creating different pacing. Side-based initiative has one feel to it. Staccato back-and-forths have another. One-half of the PCs being separated from the other by a single creature will feel differently from when there’s a large group or multiple groups separating them.

And if your RPG allows for initiative orders to shift, then these patterns of action can, of course, also change over the course of a fight. Even barring that, as various groups are eliminated or added to the fight the pattern will change.

Here we begin to delve pretty deep into the true art of running a roleplaying game: As you get a feel for these patterns of action and the pacing that naturally flows from them, you’ll also learn how to take advantage of them, leveraging them and enhancing them and building on them.

The batching of dice rolls we discussed earlier is a simple example of this, but another advanced technique is to wait until you’ve mechanically resolved multiple actions and then batch them into a single description. Instead of resolving the Andorian’s attack roll, describing how it misses Kirk, and then resolving Kirk’s phaser fire and describing how it hits, you can instead resolve both attacks mechanically and then:

GM: The Andorian makes a break for the door, whipping out his pistol and firing wildly in your direction. Ducking under the glittering beam, you return fire, striking him in the back. He collapses in a heap, the automatic doors hissing open to let him fall into the doorway.

This technique lets you weave the action together and opens up new descriptive palettes to keep your fights fresh and interesting.

Batched initiative also creates natural groupings for this batched description – e.g., Boromir being struck by a flurry of orcish arrows; a barbarian holding a door against the battery of a dozen spider goblins; a tactical team sweeping a room. (This is particularly true if you’re rolling all those arrow attacks and door-smashing checks at the same time in one big fistful of dice.)

Recognizing the mechanical beats of the fight can help you form and pace these batched action descriptions ­– either by taking advantage of them or playing against them. They’re a key that will let you begin exploring the art of running combat at a deeper level, beginning a whole new journey for you as a game master.

Mouser: Okay. Let’s get out of here. I open the door.

GM: When the Gray Mouser opens the door, where’s everyone standing?

Pippin: Ahhhhhhh!!!!!!

Merlin: As far away as possible!

Conan: Rogue go boom!

On the Alexandrian Discord, CorpCord asked, “How do you avoid revealing that a decision is important by framing it, when the characters wouldn’t know?” In other words, there are lots and lots of little, incidental things that our characters do in the game world — e.g., choosing exactly where to stand in a room; picking which tie to wear; deciding whether to drink the white or red wine — that we don’t typically call out or interrogate at the gaming table.

But if a situation arises where that information suddenly becomes vital — e.g., the trapped door is about to explode— the fact that the GM is suddenly asking for it makes it difficult or impossible for the players to make the choice as if they were their characters: Their characters don’t know that their choice of wine is vital (because it’s poisoned), but the player does. And that metagame knowledge will either influence their decision, affect their immersion in the scene, or both.

Let’s consider a few other examples:

• They’re walking down a hall and a trap goes off… what was the marching order?
• The pressure plate for the trap is in the middle of the hall… so are the PCs walking there or are they hugging the walls?
• They’re all back at Suzie’s “safe” house when someone throws a pipe bomb through the window… who was in the living room at that moment?
• The businessman they’re meeting is a close friend of Adlai Stevenson… so is the PC wearing their I Like Ike button?

When dealing with a situation like this we can start by asking ourselves how much benefit of the doubt we should give the players. (For example, is it reasonable to assume that the group is always cautiously backing off whenever the rogue is opening a suspicious door?) This is actually a subset of figuring out the threshold for player expertise triggering character expertise, as described in The Art of Rulings.

The answer here is situational. (Do we assume PCs are as cautious opening a door at the local tavern as they are opening a door in the dungeon?) But it’s also about achieving desired gameplay. I generally recommend leaning towards giving the players the benefit of the doubt (because capricious or unfair “Gotchas!” usually aren’t fun), but if we just assume that the PCs are always doing the optimal action — they always check the chests for traps; they would have obviously hired an NPC security team to keep watch outside their safe house; their character would clearly know to make polite inquiries about the political allegiance of the businessman — then the game starts playing itself, and that isn’t fun, either.

In other words, you need player expertise to activate character expertise. Which means, sometimes, you have to ask the question and tip your hand.

So what can we do about this? Let’s break it down.

First, specific declarations by the players should, obviously, always be respected. For example, if someone said they’re standing in the hall keeping a lookout for goblins, then they’re in the hall. None of the techniques below will cause them to suddenly be standing by the door when the explosion goes off (unless, of course, they make another declaration changing their location).

Next, if there’s a particular type of information that you’re constantly finding yourself wanting, you should set up a standard operating procedure with the players to provide it. Marching order in a dungeon is a good example of this, whether it’s determining who gets hit by a trap or where people are standing when the group is ambushed.

In some cases, you might have multiple SOPs and the players can indicate which one they’re currently using. For example, in an urban campaign what you’re wearing might be frequently important, so the group might be in Adventuring Gear or High Social — and, in each case, everyone at the table will know what outfit each PC is wearing.

If you don’t have an SOP, then one technique is to lay down a false trail. In other words, don’t ask the players where their characters are standing ONLY when the rogue is about to open a trapped door. Instead, occasionally ask them for “incidental” details like that when there’s no risk. This obfuscates the metagame knowledge being imparted by the question.

You can also strategically use this technique to build up a bunch of false tension… and then releasing it with a feeling of relief when nothing happens. (If you’re wondering why you’d want to do this, check out how horror movies use this technique.) Even better, this can also result in the players getting lulled into a false sense of security. (“Justin’s just trying to scare us again. You’re not fooling me this—” BOOM!)

You can further throw them off the trail by using these declarations to, instead of assessing danger, paint the scene. For example, you can ask everyone where they’re at or what they’re doing in the safe house and then use that information to give a little description of what everyone is doing. This can help to draw the players into the reality of the game world (by getting them to actually form a specific picture of what their character is doing)… while also setting them up for those moments when the same or similar question is determining where they’re at when the pipe bomb goes off.

Another effective technique is to vary the right answer when asking these hand-tipping questions. Instead of a trapped door exploding and hurting everyone close by, for example, it might be a situation where everyone taking shelter suddenly finds themselves stuck outside the room by a force field. Or maybe when the rogue touches the weird, glowing blue sphere, everyone within ten feet gets blessed.

Building this type of variation into your scenario design means that, even if the players are triggered by the metagame knowledge that you’re asking the question, they’ll still need to think about what their answer will be. (Instead of just automatically running as far away as they can.)

Basically, all of this is aimed at allowing their character to be competently aware of the heightened stakes of a situation, while not necessarily giving them the equivalent of a spidey-sense that unerringly warns them of incoming danger. False alarms, mixed signals, reversed expectations, and the like can all help.

Along similar lines, you can disguise the question by getting the incidental information you need as part of a different question. For example:

GM: The door is locked.

Conan: I’m going to kick it open!

GM: Is anyone helping Conan force open the door?

This is a mechanically significant question (since it will give Conan a bonus on their Open Door check), but you’re also sneakily establishing who’s at the door. (And, using benefit of the doubt, you could then infer that anyone not helping is standing far enough back not to get hit by the trap.)

Another effective disguise can be hiding the question in a little throwaway add-on to a different question. For example, as you’re getting ready to transition to the PCs’ meeting with Paul Dubois:

GM: Okay, you finish feeding the corpse into the wood chipper and then dump the chunks into the tank. You’re covered in blood, but the sharks will take care of the body.

Suzie: Well… I probably shouldn’t walk around town looking like this. I’ll head back to the safe house and get changed.

GM: Give me a Stealth check to see if you can cross town without anyone noticing your appearance.

Suzie: 12.

GM: Great. You make it back to the safe house without incident. After stripping off your blood-soaked track suit, what’s your new outfit?

Here the question of, “What are you wearing?” (i.e., will you mention your favorite I Like Ike pin?) seems to just naturally emerge from the chain of events. You could even reinforce this by waiting for Suzie to describe her outfit, and then saying something like, “Okay, it takes about an hour to get cleaned up, but then Suzie walks out the front door in her beautiful blue dress…” (By using the information to paint the scene, you’ve also provided an explanation for why you collected that information.)

Finally, you can enhance all of these techniques by anticipating the decision. For example, if you know that the door out of the room is trapped, don’t wait until someone goes over to the door to figure out where everyone is standing. Instead, ask the question early. The players might get suspicious… but then nothing immediately happens, so they’ll assume you were just trying to spook them. Or you take that information and use it to re-establish the scene, so they just dismiss it as part of the natural flow of the scene. But then, having established the scene (“so while Conan is poking at the pile of rags, Merlin is studying the orrery”), you now know exactly where everyone is and will continue to be unless they explicitly declare that they’re moving.

Now, when the rogue heads over and starts checking out the door, you don’t need to ask the question again, and the players are never tipped off.

Thanks to CorpCord for asking the question that inspired this tip.