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.

What do you do with your character sheets between game sessions?

If you’re using an online service for your character sheets that everyone in the group can access, this will largely take care of itself. But if not, then this is one of those little technical flourishes that you probably never think about, but which can nevertheless have an impact on your game. (And particularly so with some RPGs.)

Broadly speaking, there are three competing interests when it comes to the disposition of your group’s character sheets.

First, and most importantly, the players need to have their sheets during the game. (Obviously.) So if they forget to bring them or, worse yet, lose them entirely, that can derail an entire session.

Second, between sessions, the GM may want to reference the PCs’ sheets while prepping adventures. (Is anyone proficient in a particular skill? What spells do they have prepared today? Who’s carrying the Eye of Miebalung? And so forth.)

Third, and this is where it gets tricky, the players may want to have access to their sheets between sessions. This will be particularly true if they need to advance their characters between sessions or if there’s any form of intersession play. (For example, some groups might run domain play or downtime actions on their Discord server.)

Laying out all of these competing interests like this, it’s easy to see the points of tension.  In fact, if we assume there’s just one copy of each sheet, it would seem impossible to satisfy everyone’s needs, although whether or not this will effect a particular group will depend on their personal tastes and predilections.

(For example, I mostly prep my scenarios while thinking about the “logic of the world,” so I rarely, if ever, design with the PCs’ characters sheets in mind. In other words, I set up problems and let the players worry about how their characters will solve them. Although there are exceptions, like how the GUMSHOE system spreads its Investigation Abilities between the PCs, and it can be useful to do some spot-checking to make sure everyone is getting access to the spotlight.)

MY SOLUTIONS

In my dedicated tables, my players usually keep their sheets, taking them home with them between sessions. (Many of my players are copious note-takers, and they’ll often have a fistful of handouts they’ve collected over the course of the campaign. So they’ll just keep all that stuff together, sometimes even reviewing it between sessions.)

However, I do make a point of periodically making a copy of their sheets. (This usually just means taking pictures of them with my phone, although if the players are using a digital sheet – e.g., form-fillable PDFs – I’ll just have them e-mail me copies.) I generally don’t do this after every session (too much hassle), but instead aim for the moments where the sheets have been significantly updated. In D&D, for example, I try to remember to do this each time the characters level up. In my Night’s Black Agents campaign, on the other hand, I’ll do it after each major operation (which is, again, when character advancement is happening).

This works well because my copy is generally up to date enough to be an effective reference for adventure prep when I need it. If a player forgets their sheet for a session, it’s also “good enough” (or, at least, close enough) that I can print temp copies for them.

For my open tables, on the other hand, I’ve defaulted to keeping all of the character sheets. I’ve discovered that the more casual nature of the game and/or the long breaks between sessions for some players meant that it was much more likely for character sheets to vanish into the ether if they left the table. For open tables I’m also usually running RPGs with streamlined character creation systems, so players also don’t need as much time to advance their characters and are unlikely to be doing it between sessions.

OTHER SOLUTIONS

This is a good example of how the specific needs of your group may shift from one campaign and game to the next. So what you want to do is keep the general principles in mind, while thinking about how they can be fulfilled and the tensions between them resolved in each specific case.

For example, if the game is being hosted at the apartment of one of the players, it may make sense for that specific player – rather than the GM – to keep all of the primary character sheets. (If they never leave the gaming room, they can never be forgotten.)

As another example, the GUMSHOE roleplaying games all include worksheets that GMs can use to specifically track the Investigative Abilities of the group. By capturing the essential information the GM is most likely to need while prepping adventures between sessions, a tool like this may reduce the GM’s need to make duplicates of the PCs’ sheets.

Similarly, the digital tools I mentioned earlier can almost automatically resolve these issues by making access to the character sheets ubiquitous and the number of copies functionally infinite. But this can create tradeoffs for players who would prefer to play with paper-and-pencil (how often are they required to update their digital sheets? how can printing off up-to-date copies for each session be facilitated?) and potentially raise other questions. (For example, what will you do if an online service goes offline? Do you want to archive older versions of the sheets? If so, how often should you do it?)

There are undoubtedly solutions and creative approaches to this stuff that haven’t even been discovered yet. So keep experimenting!

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 1 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 can 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 of 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.