This is a sequel to Random GM Tip: Calling in the Big Guns. That article dealt with strategies for dealing with PCs who go to powerful patrons for help; NPCs that logically should want to help them with their current situation, but whose involvement would effectively sideline the PCs and possibly remove them from the scenario entirely.

This article deals with a similar problem: What happens when the PCs, when confronted with some horrible crime or circumstance, do the logical thing and report it to the proper authorities? For example, the police. Or the CIA. Or the army. The big, organized forces of Little Guys who enforce civilization.

Many of the techniques from the previous article will also work for this situation (and vice vera), but in practice they’re different enough to pose unique challenges. For example, while it’s relatively easy to explain why Elminster is busy and can’t help right now, it’s more difficult to explain why the entire police department would be so preoccupied that none of them can respond to a crisis.

(Realistically, of course, the difference between the Big Guns and the Little Guys is a spectrum with plenty of gray in the middle of it: The Chicago PD is definitely the “proper authorities.” A small town sheriff without backup looks a lot more like a solitary patron.)

In my experience, calling in the Little Guys also tends to be more disruptive than calling in a Big Gun. I think this is because most RPGs are structured around small bands of extraordinary heroes. Whereas Big Guns tend to work in the same paradigm, the inclusion of Big Brother seems to simply drown the PCs out. To mix my metaphors, the PCs end up being a fish out of water.

(This assumes that it’s the players who are deciding to reach out to the NPCs. Oddly, if the situation is reversed and it’s the GM who’s pushing the NPCs into the scenario I find that the exact opposite is true: Big Guns become far more disruptive and the Little Guys are manageable. I suspect this is for the exact same reason. The Big Gun operates in the same paradigm as the PCs, so when the GM tries to shove one of them down the players’ throats it feels as if the PCs are just being replaced by a newer, shinier model that they don’t get to play. Whereas when the Little Guys show up uninvited, they tend to be interpreted as simply another obstacle that our strong, independent heroes need to figure out a way to overcome. But I digress.)

So the PCs have picked up the phone and called the cops.

What happens next?

#1. THEY DON’T BELIEVE THEM

This solution can be basically a genre convention for any modern campaign featuring the paranormal. Think of shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural: If you go to the cops babbling about werewolves, they aren’t going to believe you. They’ll probably just end up making the problem worse.

You can even use this paradigm in campaigns where the PCs are the authority. In fact, if you frame it correctly, it can let the PCs both simultaneously belong to a government agency AND be a small band of extraordinary heroes. Think The X-Files.

But this conceit doesn’t require the supernatural, either. Think about the beginning of Die Hard, where John McClane is continually trying to convince the LAPD that the terrorist threat is real, but they keep dismissing him as a kook or prank caller.

#2. LOST IN BUREAUCRACY

Alternatively, the PCs detect an oncoming crisis, warn the appropriate authorities, and… nothing. The authorities don’t do anything. Or they do something, but it’s misguided and doesn’t actually solve the problem. Or there’s a committee that’s going to figure out what the proper course of action is, but it’s clear by the time they’re done deliberating that the asteroid will have already obliterated Venice (or whatever).

Look no further than restraining orders that take three weeks to process when the guy bought a gun yesterday, the government response to the climate crisis, or the clusterfuck pandemic response in places like Brazil, England, and the United States. If anything, it becomes even easier to find malfeasance, mismanagement, and neglect at the local level.

You can send a strong signal early in a campaign that the Little Guys aren’t going to help the PCs by sending the bureaucracy looking for them first. Think about Walter Peck, the abusive EPA rep in the original Ghostbusters.

#3. THE BAD GUYS ARE CONNECTED

Coming back to Die Hard, do you remember that scene where McClane is celebrating because he can see the cop cars coming down the boulevard… but then the bad guys call it in as a false alarm and the cops flip off their sirens, turn around, and leave?

This scenario covers any number of possibilities for how the bad guys can counter the PCs notifying the authorities, like the horror and suspense movies where the heroes see something suspicious and call the cops, but by the time the cops show up, the bad guys have had a chance to make everything look normal.

It may be even more insidious than that, however, with the bad guys having already infiltrated the Little Guys: That might just be a few crooked cops so you don’t know who to trust, or it could be a conspiracy that secretly controls the entire local government. (Or an invasion of body-snatchers to the same effect.)

#4. THEY DEFER TO THE PCs

At the opposite end of the spectrum, let the Little Guys recognize that the PCs are the most qualified, the most skilled, and/or have the most insight into what’s happening. They’ll either partner up with the PCs or simply put resources (and manpower) at their disposal.

One variant of this that can work particularly well is for each PC to be put in command of a squad of NPCs. You can let the players run the whole squad or, if the squads split up to pursue multiple objectives simultaneously, you can use troupe-style play (in which all the other players take an NPC in the current PC’s squad).

But what really makes this technique work is to actually put the players in charge: Give them access to the resources, but let them figure out how they want to utilize them.

This can be a fine line to walk if you want to make sure that it doesn’t permanently transform the campaign, but it’s usually not too difficult to justify why this is a temporary circumstance that only applies to the immediate situation. (Although maybe permanently shifting the campaign is exactly the right way to go!)

This post contains SPOILERS for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.

A unique challenge to running urban campaigns is figuring out what happens if the PCs, confronted with some horrible crime or circumstance, do the logical thing and seek help from powerful allies. And the scope of this problem tends to grow as technology (or its magical equivalent) improves communication, travel speeds, or both. (Low level D&D characters in the middle of the woods tend not to have any recourse; modern teenagers with cellphones are a completely different story.)

In my experience, the problem also intensifies in what I’ll call mythological settings, where single individuals (powerful wizards, Sith lords, starship captains) can be possessed of immense power. This is because it can be both easier for the PCs to get access to these characters and often harder to explain why they don’t want to get involved.

Let’s take a step back for a moment: Why is this a problem?

First, it really mucks up the challenge level of the scenario when Batman calls in Superman to deal with the Joker. Second, it’s dramatically unsatisfying to go through all the preamble of a conflict only to be sidelined while Elminster heads off to experience the end of the story.

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room: There’s often an unspoken genre convention and/or table agreement that calling in the Big Guns is generally poor form and shouldn’t be done because it’s disruptive to the desired experience. If you want to make that a spoken agreement more power to you, but there are a couple things to be aware of:

First, this can actually create a different sort of problem for some players because it creates a tension between what their characters should be doing (based on their understanding of who that character is) and what that character is allowed to do. For some players, making this an explicit, spoken agreement can resolve this problem (because with the option definitively off the table the tension disappears). But for other players, it will actually make the problem worse because either acknowledging the tension or explicitly prohibiting the choice is even more disruptive to their roleplaying.

Second, calling in the Big Guns is not exclusively a problem. It’s also an opportunity. And there’s a lot of really cool experiences that you’re taking off the table if you just flat out ban these interactions. Superman shouldn’t just swoop into every Batman story, but World’s Finest crossovers can be really awesome.

On the flip side, this also means that sometimes players call in the Big Guns because it’s what makes sense for their characters to do… but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to do it as players! They don’t want to be sidelined while the Big Guns take care of everything, and they’re actually hoping that you’ll reject the offer so that they can have done the right thing in roleplaying their character truthfully AND get what they want by continuing to be in the starring roles in the rest of the adventure.

All of which means that, at some point, you’re going to run into a situation where the PCs decide that it’s time to call in the Big Guns.

What happens next?

#1. IT WORKS

They call in the Big Guns, the Big Guns have a good reason to be involved, and they come in and deal with the situation. Problem solved!

The trick here is to frame getting the help of the Big Guns as being the major accomplishment and then just letting loose and really enjoying the curb-stomping done by the Big Guns as the reward for a job well done.

If you want an example of this from another medium, look at The Lord of the Rings. Most of The Two Towers consists of the heroes trying to convince one major ally or another to put some skin in the game: Theoden, Treebeard, etc. Or take this scene from the movies:

Pippin literally summons an entire army to help solve his problems.

This approach works if the players see the Big Guns as a manifestation of their will; no different than a fireball or a powerful magical artifact. THEY were the ones who called on the Big Guns. This can be a tricky balancing act to pull off, but it can be immensely satisfying when you do.

#2. THEY’RE BUSY

The Big Guns are busy doing something else and therefore cannot help.

This can be used preemptively if there’s a time crunch (“Sorry, Harry, Dumbledore isn’t in his office right now”), but it can be equally effective if the conflict comes up at the last possible second: “Great. Glad we’re all gathered here to go down into the Vault together. Now that we’re fully committed to this course of action, let’s— Wait! There’s a tarrasaque attacking the harbor! I’ve got to go!”

This works better, of course, when it emerges naturally out of the narrative. For example, in my Dragon Heist campaign the group had recruited Renaer and the Black Tears to assist in raiding the Cassalanters. That gig resulted in them “arresting” (i.e., kidnapping) Lord Cassalanter and taking him to the Blackstaff. At this point, I could clearly see the risk of the PCs’ contributions for the rest of the campaign getting washed out by a confluence of powerful NPCs: The stakes had gotten high enough that it would be hard to justify the Blackstaff and the Open Lord of Waterdeep not getting directly involved. So I framed the Blackstaff’s response accordingly: She called up Renaer and the Black Tears to help her perform a rapid-fire investigation of the Cassalanters to accumulate the evidence necessary to “make the arrest legal after the fact.”

The Blackstaff and Renaer were still helping the PCs, but only off-screen and tangentially.

You can also bake larger priorities into the setting. For example, in my Ptolus campaign there’s an invading army that’s marching towards the city. No matter how dire the stakes are in whatever scenario the PCs have gotten themselves involved in, it’s not hard to argue that preparations for a literal war are more important, giving me an easy trump card that I can play any time I need it.

On the other hand, you don’t actually need to go into a lot of detail as long as you’ve firmly established that the NPC in question is tied up in more important affairs; that they’re operating at a higher tier than the PCs. For example, when the Dragon Heist PCs later sent word to the Blackstaff that they’d located the Vault, the Blackstaff simply replied, “Good luck! Let me know how it goes!” The implication was that she was busy doing something else and trusted the PCs to take care of it.

On that note: You usually want the NPC, even though they don’t have the time or resources to deal with the problem, to acknowledge how clearly important the information the PCs are bringing them is, rather than belittling it. (Unless, of course, the PCs really are just wasting their time with trivialities.) This validates the players’ actions AND ratchets up the stakes.

The quickest way to achieve this effect is for the NPC to say, “This is clearly very important… which is why I’m deputizing you to deal with it.” In my Ptolus campaign, for example, I had the Commissar specifically deputize the PCs to deal with the local activities of the chaos cults. Ergo, any time they discovered some new, horrible thing that the chaos cults were involved with, the official response could neatly default to, “Keep up the good work!”

Another effective way of handling this brush off is for the Big Gun to give the PCs’ some form of assistance, even if they can’t get directly involved: A suitcase full of cash. A platoon of elven archers. The phone number of an old friend in Cairo they should talk to. Et cetera.

This idea of rewarding the PCs for going to the Big Guns is a common theme here: Even if the Big Guns turn the PCs down flat and refuse to help, if there’s still some sort of reward for having gone to them in the first place, then the players will feel validated in their choice. (It also tends to just make sense, unless the PCs were completely off-base in their belief that the NPC would care about what’s happening.)

#3. THERE’S A REASON THEY CAN’T HELP

Later in my Dragon Heist campaign, when Lady Cassalanter kidnapped one of the PCs’ adopted kids, the PCs sent a message to the Blackstaff.

Since we’d already established that the Blackstaff was investigating the Cassalanters, there was no good reason for her not to drop everything and come to help. But I knew that a fight with Lady Cassalanter would become trivial if the Blackstaff was involved, so Lady Cassalanter erected some wards around her location that would have specifically detected the Blackstaff’s approach (since she knew that the Blackstaff was now involved and had been investigating her family). The Blackstaff detected the wards, warned the PCs, and veered off. She’d be nearby, but with Lady Cassalanter holding a hostage it was just too risky for her to come barreling in with the PCs.

(This was also a hybrid because the Blackstaff actually gave them valuable intel on where Lady Cassalanter might be holding their son, so she’d already helped them to a certain extent and the PCs had been rewarded for calling her in. You can read about what happened next in this campaign journal.)

In my Ptolus campaign, another major element of Act II is the exploration of the Banewarrens. These, once again, pose a potentially existential threat in the middle of the city, and there once again needs to be some explanation for why the city authorities and other major players don’t come barging in to resolve the crisis. In this case, I simple turned the Banewarrens into a point of religious dispute. The two halves of the schismed Church effectively checkmated each other, and the civil authorities in the form of the Commissar refused to get involved because of the tangle of Church politics.

#4. SPLIT THEM UP

“We have not come here by chance. I do not believe in chance. When I see three objectives, three captains, three ships, I do not see coincidence. I see providence. I see purpose.” – Morpheus, The Matrix Reloaded

Now that the Big Guns have been called in for the actual op, split the group up: While the Big Guns do one thing, the PCs need to do another.

For example, we could imagine a Dragon Heist campaign where the PCs have successfully recruited the Blackstaff or Manshoon or Laeral Silverhand to come into the Vault with them and retrieve Neverember’s stolen hoard. But as the Vault cracks open, the bad guys suddenly arrive with something so incredibly dangerous — the Cassalanters summon a pit fiend, or Xanathar himself shows up with a bevy of gazers and mind flayers, or Jarlaxle teleports in with a platoon of elite drow mercenaries — that the Big Gun has to deal with it. They turn to the PCs and shout, “This could all be a distraction! Get into the Vault! Make sure the gold is secure!”

This is also a good example of how, as the GM, you want to pay attention to why the players want to call in the Big Guns. For example, they may have concocted some incredibly convoluted scheme that requires them to be in nine places at the same time and they have no idea how they can pull it off by themselves. That’s a perfect opportunity to just lean back, let them bring in the Big Guns without fuss, and then peel them off into separate action groups.

#5. FLIP IT AROUND

Now that the Big Guns are involved and putting themselves in charge, they send the PCs to do something crucial for their success.

Returning to our example of the Dragon Heist Vault, when Jarlaxle shows up with his force of drow mercenaries, the Blackstaff turns to the PCs and says, “Hold them off here! I’m heading into the Vault!” Once the drow goons are defeated, the PCs follow and discover the Blackstaff standing over the dragon she’s just slain. A dragon?! Phew! Good thing they called her in!

If you’re more dramatically inclined, you can also frame this so that the PCs show up just in time to take the shot that finishes off the dragon. “Thank you!” says the Blackstaff. “It was a more difficult foe than I had expected!” Or whatever.

You can also reverse expectations here by making it LOOK like the crucial part of the mission (i.e., the thing that the Big Guns are going to go do) is one thing and the ancillary goal is some other thing, while in reality it’s actually the exact OPPOSITE. So the PCs get sent to pursue the ancillary goal in a supporting capacity, but then it turns out they’re actually doing the absolutely vital thing that’s going to save the day! (“I thought Griznak was going to be at the fort?!” “Yeah, well, he’s here, and we’re out of time. Let’s go!”)

#6. THEY ARE THE BIG GUNS!

The zero-to-hero dynamic of D&D tends to get ingrained to the point where we sometimes forget that it’s fully possible to have a campaign dynamic where there AREN’T any Big Guns to appeal to because the PCs are the biggest guns around.

This can be particularly true within a specific set of parameters.

Even in D&D, it’s quite possible to run a campaign where, once the PCs hit mid-level play, they’re the most powerful people in town (and possibly for hundreds or thousands of miles around).

On that note, even if they aren’t the biggest guns in town, this is nevertheless a great time to have low-level adventuring parties come knocking on the door with problems that they need a Big Gun to solve for them.

FURTHER READING
Random GM Tip: Calling in the Little Guys

In “On the Use of GM Screens” a few years back I shared my personal best practices when it comes to using GM screens. Probably the biggest reason I like them is the vertical reference space: One of my secret weapons as a GM is simply arranging my reference material so that I can lay out multiple elements (stat blocks, room descriptions, campaign status document, maps, NPC roleplaying templates, etc.) simultaneously. I can thus cross-reference material by just flicking my eyes back and forth, and can often easily compare information directly instead of having to flip back-and-forth.

The vertical reference space of the GM screen, therefore, is basically free space. I’ve already covered every inch of table space in front of me (and often have a TV tray to one side for additional reference material), so basically creating more space in the third dimension is a huge advantage.

Now, the most common thing I put in that vertical space is my system cheat sheet. It’s virtually always useful when running a game, and putting that information into the vertical plane means that my horizontal surfaces can be focused on scenario-related material. These cheat sheets can also be prepped ahead of time

But this is not the only way you can utilize that vertical space! This is a trick that I didn’t think to include in “On the Use of GM Screens” because I don’t use it very often, but it can be very effective upon occasion and you may find it even more useful than I do.

Basically, 3M makes these removable restickable glue sticks:

They can be used to essentially turn any piece of paper into a Post-It note. And that, in turn, means that you can turn any piece of paper into a swap note that you can quickly paste up or remove from your GM screen.

For example, you can print out the stat blocks for your current scenario. Here I’ve grabbed an Orc War Chief accompanied by a warband of Orcs, and also a second encounter featuring a Werebear and his pet Owlbear:

And then, while running the game, you can quickly use the restickable glue stick to attach them to the GM screen for easy reference during an encounter:

Other stuff that you might find useful as a swap note:

• A list of upcoming, timed events for the current session that you don’t want to forget
• The map of the dungeon
• NPCs in the current scene
• The standard features (door types, ceiling height, light sources, environmental effects) of the current dungeon
• The daily weather forecast for the next several days of a sandbox campaign (so that you don’t forget to make it rain)

As I’ve talked about before, what reference material a GM finds useful will often be very specific to that GM, and will often change over time. So experiment with different options, and pay attention to the type of information that you had to stop and scramble for (or just really wish you’d had handy) during your last session.

You can also just keep a straight-up stack of Post-Its that you can scribble out transient-yet-important information onto.

This is also works on the other side of the screen, too! If you have visual references for the players (like, say, all those photo handouts that are part of the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies), you could similarly turn them into Post-Its and slap them onto the front of the screen. If you’re going to do this a lot, it might argue for using a simple pattern for the player’s side of your screen. You could even go for a collage approach, where instead of removing the references you just keep layering them on top of each other, creating an ever-evolving visual motif of the campaign that continues to grow as the campaign goes on.

PROVISOS

In my experience, this technique only works passingly well with the old, thin cardboard-style screens. But it works great with the modern, glossy, board-stock screens that have become de rigeur. It works even better with modular screens like those from Pinnacle, Strategem, and Hammerdog.

You don’t want to leave the notes attached for an extended period of time. I first used this technique with my Eclipse Phase screen and I ended up leaving a few swap notes attached when we moved on to other games. When I opened the screen up a couple of years later, I found that the glue had chemically deteriorated and left a chalky residue that was difficult to clean up.

If there’s one fundamental lesson I think you should take away from Don’t Prep Plots or Smart Prep, it’s to think of your prep as a collection of tools that you can use during the game rather than a story you’ve written. Or as a box full of toys that you can play with at the table (the same way the players are playing their characters) rather than a script to be read from. Or whatever other metaphor works for you.

Those previous articles already discuss this principle in both general and specific terms, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time today retreading that ground. I’m going to assume that you’ve already discovered the joy of actively playing scenarios, and what I want to talk about today are the toys you could be playing with, but may not realize that you already have in your toybox.

Perhaps the best way to explain what I’m talking about is by way of example.

NEWSSHEETS

For my Ptolus campaign, part of my campaign status document is a list of upcoming headlines/articles in the local newssheets. For example:

• Another high-profile robbery in the Nobles’ District. Attributed to Shilukar. Said to have broken into Dallaster Manor and assaulted the Dallaster’s daughter and heiress, Tillian.
• Ratmen openly prowling streets of the Warrens after dark. City Watch refuses to patrol the area, although they’ve increased patrols along Old Sea Road to keep the problem contained to the Warrens.

And so forth. The current version of the sheet has the next fifteen or so days of newssheets mapped out and I do the same thing in my Dragon Heist campaign for broadsheets in Waterdeep. Some of the news items tie into future scenarios, others reflect the ongoing activities of the PCs, and some are just random events unrelated to the PCs.

The primary reason I started prepping these is the obvious one: My players were routinely checking the local newssheets to see what was going on in the city and it was useful to give some thought to what they’d find when they did.

Although designed as a single-use tool (PC wants to look at headlines → give them the current headlines), once I had the tool in my campaign status document I began discovering that there were actually lots of different ways that I could use it. For example:

• When canvassing local taverns for gossip.
• Conversational topics for NPCs, both generally and when using the party planning game structure. (Particularly true when improvising a party in the middle of a game session, like the one described here.)
• Feeding content into conversations they’re eavesdropping on.
• Local color. (A scrap of newspaper blowing down the deserted street; a news boy shouting headlines on the corner. Graffiti about the current scandal sprayed on a wall.)

To find these hidden tools, I just had to stop thinking of the list as being specifically “this is what appears in the newssheet” and started thinking of it in the more general sense of “this is what’s going on in the city / what people are talking about / what’s in the public consciousness.” What looked as if it was very specific content actually had a much broader general utility.

One of the interesting consequences of identifying and using these “hidden” tools is that it will often highlight places where, as described in Smart Prep, you can completely eliminate unnecessary prep. For example, when I first started prepping news stories for a campaign I would often get very specific: What newspaper were they published in? What was the headline? Et cetera. When I started using these tools in different ways, I realized that these details were often superfluous waste. The thing that was actually useful was the core piece of information. Everything else could be improvised during actual play depending on how the information intersected with the PCs.

This is not to say that the contextualization isn’t important. (Exactly the opposite!) It’s not even to say that this sort of contextualization shouldn’t be prepped. For example, you can see here how I researched specific newspapers from the 1930s for my Eternal Lies campaign. Note how easily you can grab one of these newspapers and combine them with a news item like the examples above and instantly contextualize the information: You don’t need to prep a specific newspaper for every single article in order to get the same effect in actual play. Similarly, it’s quite probable that if the PCs are getting this information from a PC or a tavern, then it’s also something you’ve prepped.

You can also think of this as prepping a collection of more generic tools that can be combined together in order to flexibly respond to any number of possibilities, rather than prepping hyper-specialized tools that can only be used in one specific way. Looking for your “hidden tools” is one way of taking a specialized tool and making it more widely useful. (Note, though, how this greater utility often takes the form of less prep, not more!)

But it’s important not to mistake this for a reductio ad absurdum where the goal is to eliminate all specificity. If you look at that same Eternal Lies campaign, for example, you’ll find any number of instances where I prepped very specific newspaper articles, books, or the like.

PERMISSIVE CLUE-FINDING

The principle of permissive clue-finding, described as a corollary to the Three Clue Rule, is actually another example of using hidden tools.

Basically, when you design a mystery scenario, you prep a specific list of revelations that are necessary to solve the mystery and then you prep specific clues that point to each revelation so that the players/PCs can figure it out. The principle of permissive clue-finding is simply to provide meaningful clues in response to PC-initiated investigations even if they are not the clues that you prepped ahead of time.

The revelations on your revelation list are, effectively, your hidden tools: You know that solving the mystery lies in grokking those revelations, so when the PCs start pursuing an investigatory path you hadn’t anticipated, all you need to do is figure out how (or if) it can be related back to one of those revelations.

HEXES & RUMORS

Here’s a technique I used when running my OD&D hexcrawl.

I wanted to seed the campaign with rumors, so I decided that new characters would begin play with 1d4 rumors and existing characters could make a Charisma check in the downtime between sessions to pick up a rumor. I experimented with a traditional 1d20 and, later, a 1d30 rumor table, but because it was an open table with several dozen players and even more characters the rumor table would basically get burned up as soon as I stocked it. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time restocking the rumor table (particularly because many rumors were never pursued, which felt like semi-wasted prep), so rather than rolling on a rumor table I started just randomly selecting one of the hexes on my map, looking at what the hex contained, and then just improvising an appropriate rumor.

So, for example, I might randomly select Hex C2 and read:

C1 – WHITE DRAGON LAIR

Queen of the Claw – Elder White Dragon (AC 2, 12 HD)

• Suspicious of Dyre (hex A1)
• Daughter (Paicyro) ran away and knows a secret entrance (hex C8)
• Remembers a time of Ashardalon and opposed him when she was a wyrmling

Sired a pack of half-dragon dire wolves (AC 2, 4+2 HD).

Served by the Twelve White Claws, elite anubian warriors chosen for the honor in a gladiatorial combat once every 10 years.

TREASURE: 8000 silver, 30,000 gold, 98 gems, 10 jewelry

And come up with any number of rumors like:

• Traders coming through the Gap have seen a White Dragon circling a mountain peak northwest of the Cloud Spiral.
• In an ancient Thracian text kept by the Temple of Minerva, you discover references to a “Queen of the Claw” who opposed the dragon god Ashardalon. She is said to have been entombed with untold wealth in a crypt “in the peaks directly north of the Tower of Wind”.
• A caravan passing through the Gap was found slaughtered. Those who found their ruined bodies heard a reptilian howling in the hills to the north. They quickly buried the bodies and fled.

You can probably come up with another half dozen such rumors yourself, even without knowing the wider context and lore of this particular campaign world.

Note that the hexes are still fulfilling the primary function I had designed them for (being discovered during a hexcrawl). It’s just that they were now also being leveraged and put to new use. (With, you’ll note, no additional prep on my part whatsoever.)

CONCLUSION

The point here is to reprogram your brain so that when you prep X in order to do Y you don’t lock down on the idea that Y is the only thing you can do with X.

Along the way you may discover that, instead of trying to prep something in order to do Y, it makes more sense to cut out the middleman and go straight to prepping something that’s directly designed to be flexibly used in multiple ways. That’s great! Y will still be taken care of, but now you can also take care of a bunch of other stuff.

At a macro-level I say don’t prep plots, prep situations. At the micro-level, we might describe this as prepping content instead of writing outcomes.

From one point of view, the playing of a roleplaying game can be described as the organized exchange of information between players. Particularly numerical information.

GM: Give me an attack roll.
Player: 17.
GM: You hit.
Player: I do 18 points of damage.
GM: The orc falls dead at your feet!

The player generates a number (rolling their attack skill plus a d20 roll) and gives it to the GM. The GM performs a mathematical operation on that number (comparing it to the orc’s armor class) and the result of that operation causes him to request an additional number from the player. The player generates that number (by rolling the damage for their weapon) and reports it to the GM, who once again does an operation on that number (comparing it to the orc’s remaining hit points) and determines an outcome (the orc dies).

This seems simple and intuitive. And, in this case, it largely is.

But it turns out that how we process and pass numerical information around the table can have a big impact on play. For example:

GM: The orc’s AC is 17. Give me an attack roll.
Player: I hit. 18 points of damage.
GM: The orc falls dead at your feet!

By passing a piece of information (and the associated mathematical operation) over to the player, this GM has significantly improved the efficiency of their communication. If the orc hadn’t died (or if there are other identical orcs), this efficiency compounds over time because the GM doesn’t have to keep passing that piece of information to the player.

Of course, efficiency is not the be-all and end-all of a roleplaying game. There are any number of reasons why a GM might want to keep the orc’s armor class secret from the players (either as a general principle or due to specific circumstances). My point is not that these other considerations are somehow “wrong,” but rather simply that in choosing those other things the GM is sacrificing efficiency.

In many cases, however, the GM isn’t aware that this is a choice that they’re making. And often there are no reasons that might justify the inefficiency; the flow of information (and the impact it’s having on play) just isn’t something the GM is thinking about.

For a long time, this wasn’t something that I understood, either. I’d have discussions with people complaining that such-and-such a system was super complicated and a huge headache to play, and I would be confused because that didn’t match my experience with the game. It would have been easy to pat myself on the back and think, “Well, I guess I’m just smarter than they are,” but I would also have players say to me, “I’d played such-and-such a system before and I hated it, but you really made everything make sense. Can’t wait to play again.” And I’d scratch my head, because I really hadn’t done anything special in terms of teaching how the game worked.

The difference was in the flow of information. Not only can the flow of information around the gaming table be inefficient, it can also be confusing and burdensome.

ECLIPSE PHASE

We think of game mechanics primarily in terms of numerical values and how those values are created or manipulated. But in actual practice, many mechanical resolutions are performed by multiple people at the table. If you think of the resolution as a ball, it often has to be passed back and forth. Or you might think of it as a dance, and if we — as a table of players — don’t coordinate our actions in performing the resolution we’ll end up stepping on each other’s toes.

This efficient passing of information is an example of system mastery. Often, as a table gains experience with a particular RPG together, they’ll intuitively find the patterns of behavior that work. But this doesn’t always happen, and when it doesn’t we can benefit from consciously thinking about:

• What numbers we say
• Who is responsible for saying them
• How we say them

Let me give a simple example of this, using Eclipse Phase.

Eclipse Phase is a percentile system. You modify your skill rating by difficulty and then, if you roll under that number on percentile dice, you succeed. In addition, your margin of success is equal to the number you roll on the dice. If you roll 30+ (and succeed) you get an excellent success; if you roll 60+ you get an exceptional success.

Here’s how things often go when I’m introducing new players to Eclipse Phase (particularly those new to roll-under percentile systems entirely):

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got a 47.
GM: What’s your skill?
Player: 50.
GM: Great. That’s a success. An excellent success, actually, because you rolled over 30. Here’s what happens…

The players don’t know what numbers to give me, and so I need to pull those numbers out of them in order to perform the necessary operation (determining if this is a success or failure and the degree of success.) As players start to master the system, this will morph into:

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got an excellent success.
GM: Great. Here’s what happens…

They can do this because they’ve learned the mechanics and now know that their roll of 47 when they have a skill of 50 is an excellent success. (In this, the exchange mirrors that of a player attacking an orc in D&D when they know it has AC 17, right? They don’t need to pass me the information to perform the mechanical operation because they can do the operation themselves. In fact, many people like roll-under percentile systems like this specifically because they make this kind of efficiency intuitive and almost automatic.)

But there’s actually a problem with this because, if you recall, Eclipse Phase also features difficulties which modify the target number. This disrupts the simple efficiency and we would often end up with discussions like this:

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got an excellent success.
GM: There’s actually a difficulty here. What did you roll?
Player: 47.
GM: And what’s your skill?
Player: 50.
GM: Okay, so you actually failed. Here’s what happens…

This creates all kinds of friction at the table: It’s inefficient. It’s frequently confusing. And either the outcome doesn’t change at all (in which case we’ve deflated the drama of the resolution for no reason) or the player is frustrated that an outcome they thought was going one way is actually going the other.

The reason this is happening is because there is an operation that I, as the GM, need to perform (applying a hidden difficulty) but I’m not being given the number I need to perform that operation. The player has learned to throw the ball to a certain spot (“I got an excellent success”), but I’m frequently not standing at that spot and the ball painfully drops to the ground.

What I eventually figured out is that the information I need from the player is actually “XX out of YY” — where XX is the die roll and YY is their skill rating. I could catch that ball and easily carry it wherever it needed to go.

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got 47 out of 55.
GM: An excellent success! Here’s what happens…

And I realized that I could literally just tell players that this is what they needed to say to me. I didn’t need to wait for them to figure it out. Even brand new players could almost instantly groove into the system.

ADVANCED D&D

As you spend more time with a system, you’ll frequently find odd corners which require a different flow of information. In some cases you may be able to tweak your table norms to account for the special cases, but usually it’ll be more about learning when and how to cue your players that you all need to handle this information differently (and the players gaining the mastery to be able to quickly grok the new, sometimes overlapping, circumstances).

Let’s go back to D&D, for example.

When I’m a DM and I’ve got a horde of orcs attacking a single PC, it’s not unusual for me to roll all of their attacks at once, roll all of the damage from the successful attacks, add all that damage up, and then report it as a single total to the player. It just makes sense to do a running total of the numbers in front of me as I generate them rather than saying a string of numbers to a player and asking them to process the verbal information while doing the running total themselves.

And, of course, it works just fine… right up until a PC gets damage reduction. Now it’s the player who needs to perform a mechanical operation (subtracting their damage reduction from each hit) and doesn’t have the information they need to do that.

Even PCs with multiple attacks usually resolve them one by one for various reasons, so the reverse (players lumping damage together when the GM needs to apply damage reduction) rarely happens. But two of the PCs in my 3^rd Edition campaign have weapons that deal bonus elemental damage, and they’ve learned that sometimes I need that damage specifically broken out because creatures are frequently resistant against or immune to fire or electricity damage.

When we first started running into this difficulty, the players defaulted to always giving me the elemental damage separately. But this was an unneeded inefficiency, and we quickly figured out that it was easier for me to simply tell them when they needed to give me the elemental damage separately.

These are simple examples, but they hopefully demonstrate that this sort of mastery is not an all-or-nothing affair. There’s almost always room to learn new tricks.

FENG SHUI

Let’s also take a look at one of these systems that’s fairly straightforward in its mechanical operations, but which can become devilishly difficult if you don’t pass information back and forth cleanly.

In Feng Shui 2, the dice mechanic produces a “swerve”: You subtract a negative d6 from a positive d6 in order to generate a bell curve result from -5 to +5. (Sixes actually explode and are rolled again, so the curve is smeared out at the ends, but that’s basically how it works.)

When you want to make an attack, you do two things. First, you check to see if you hit:

Roll Swerve + Attack Skill – Target’s Defense

If you hit, you then calculate damage:

Margin of Success + Weapon Damage – Target’s Toughness

Looking at those two equations on the page, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly exotic about them. In practice, though, I’ve seen players and entire groups get completely tangled up in them. There tend to be two major problems:

1. The attacker feels as if they should be able to complete one full step of this process and then report the result… except they can’t, because neither step can actually be completed without information that the defender posseses.
2. Upon completing the first step, players want to report a flat success/failure outcome (“I hit”), but if they don’t pass the margin of success to the damage equation they can’t actually calculate damage.

What frequently happens in the latter case is:

GM: The target’s Defense is 17.
Player: (does math) Okay, I hit!
GM: So your damage will be equal to the margin of success plus your weapon damage. What was your margin of success?
Player: Uh… crap. I forgot? Three? Maybe four? Hang on… (does the math again)

Another interesting thing that will happen in this kind of situation is that the players — who don’t like being confused or frustrated! — will try to find ad hoc ways of routing around the problem. In Feng Shui 2, for example, I’ll frequently see players basically say, “Well… I know what this guy’s Defense value is because I attacked him last round. So I’m just going to attack him again to keep it simple.”

The important thing to take away from this is that the players want to solve the problem just as much as you do. But often this kind of ad hoc pseudo-solution just shifts the frustration: They’ve figured out how to make the mechanical resolution flow more smoothly, but they feel trapped by the system into making choices that they don’t necessarily want to make. The insane, over-the-top Hong Kong action of Feng Shui 2, for example, has been compromised as they attack the same guy over and over again.

So let’s say that you find yourself in this situation. How can you fix it?

• Identify the sequence in which mechanical operations must be performed.
• Identify who has the necessary information for each operation.
• Figure out how to pass the information to the necessary person at each stage of the opration.

For example, in Feng Shui 2 who has each piece of information used when resolving an attack?

• Outcome of the swerve roll. (Attacker)
• Attack Skill (Attacker)
• Target’s Defense (Defender)
• Margin of Success (whoever calculated the outcome of the attack roll)
• Weapon Damage (Attacker)
• Target’s Toughness (Defender)
• Wound Points taken (Defender)

If you look back up at the mechanical equations, it should be fairly easy to identify the resolution sequence and the numbers that need to be said:

1. Attacker rolls swerve and adds their attack skill. (The game actually calls this the Action Result.) Attacker tells the Defender this number.
2. Defender subtracts their Defense from the Action Result. (This is the margin of success. The game calls this the Outcome.) Defender tells the Attacker the Outcome.
3. The Attacker adds the Outcome to the Weapon Damage. (The game calls this the Smackdown.) The Attacker tells the Defender the Smackdown.
4. The Defender subtracts their Toughness from the Smackdown. (This is the number of Wound Points they take.)

You can see that Robin D. Laws, being a clever chap, identified the significant chunks of information in the system and gave them specific labels (Action Result, Outcome, Smackdown). Other games won’t necessarily do that for you (and even the Feng Shui 2 rulebook, unfortunately, doesn’t specifically call out how the information should be passed back and forth), but you should be able to break down the mechanical processes in any system in a similar manner.

PIGGYBACKING IN GUMSHOE (AND BEYOND!)

Let me close by talking about a mechanical interaction that has multiple players participating simultaneously (which, of course, makes the “dance” of information more complicated to coordinate).

In the GUMSHOE System (used by games like Ashen Stars and Trail of Cthulhu), some group checks are resolved using a piggybacking mechanic:

• One character is designated the Lead.
• The difficulty of the test is equal to the base difficulty + 2 per additional character “piggybacking” on the Lead’s check.
• Those piggybacking can spend 1 skill point to negate the +2 difficulty they’re adding to the check.

The mechanic is very useful when, for example, you want Aragorn to lead the hobbits through the wilderness without being detected by Ringwraiths: The more unskilled hobbits there are, the more difficult it should be for Aragorn to do that, but you still want success to be governed by Aragorn’s skill at leading the group.

Many moons ago I adapted this piggybacking structure to D20 systems like this:

• One character takes the Lead.
• Other characters can “piggyback” on the Lead’s skill check by making their own skill check at a DC equal to half of the DC of the Lead’s check. (So if the Lead is making a DC 30 check, the piggybackers must make a DC 15 check.)
• The lead character can reduce the Piggyback DC by 1 for every -2 penalty they accept on their check.
• The decision to piggyback on the check must be made before the Lead’s check is made.

On paper, this system made sense. When I put it into practice at the table, however, it wasn’t working out. It seemed complicated, finicky, and the players weren’t enjoying using the mechanic.

I gave up on it for a couple of years, and then came back to it and realized that the problem was that I had been sequencing the mechanic incorrectly. One element of this was actually a slight error in mechanical design, but even this was ultimately about the resolution sequence.

The way the mechanic was being resolved originally was:

• The GM declares that, for example, a Stealth check needs to be made.
• The players decide whether they want to use the Piggyback mechanic for this.
• The GM approves it.
• The players choose a Lead.
• The other players decide whether they want to piggyback or not.
• The Lead chooses whether or not they want to lower the Piggybacking DC.
• The Lead would roll their check.
• If the Lead succeeded, the other players would roll their piggybacking checks. (The logic being that if the Lead failed, there was no need for the piggybacking checks. But, in practice, players would see the Lead’s result and then try to opt out of piggybacking if it was bad.)

Here’s what the actual resolution sequence needed to be:

• The GM declares that there is a piggyback check required.
• The players choose their Lead.
• The other players make their piggybacking checks. If any check fails, the largest margin of failure among all piggybacking characters increases the DC of the Lead’s check by +1 per two points of margin of failure.
• The Lead makes their check.

You can immediately see, just from the number of steps involved, how much more streamlined this resolution process is. The only actual mechanical adjustment, however, is to shift the adjustment of the piggybacking DC from a decision made before the piggybacking checks to an effect of those checks.

The take-away here is that while our passing of mechanical information at the table is often numerical, it can also include other elements (like who’s taking Lead in a piggybacking check) which can also be streamlined and formalized for efficiency.