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.

Colin R. asks: “What tricks or devices do you have for generating memorable NPCs? Especially for creating them on the fly when players go in unexpected directions.”

This will not attempt to be an exhaustive discussion of how to create memorable characters. You could write whole books on the subject, and people have. But perhaps a grab bag of techniques I’ve found useful as a GM will prove useful to you, too.

1. Give them a distinct mannerism. I talk about this in the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template, which is itself a good, quick structure that you can pour characters into. A simple, physical action that you can perform at the table — crossing your arms and stroking your chin, scratching your knee, tapping the side of your nose, winking, speaking with a particular accent, scratching the top of your head, a notably colorful preference for a particular swear word — will make it much easier for you to slip into and out of a given character, and make that character more memorable and distinct for the players.

2. Give the NPC a strong agenda. Make them want something. Better yet? A pair of agendas. If they’re agendas that partly conflict with each other, even better.

It actually works best if this agenda is not aimed directly at the PCs. Something that simply overlaps the PCs’ areas of interest is usually more effective. If the PCs’ actions/knowledge/connections/whatever could help (or hinder) the NPC, I’ve found it’s often more effective for the NPC to discover that during their interaction with the PCs. (Or for the PCs to discover it and then decide what to do with that knowledge themselves.)

This is not a universal rule, obviously: There’s nothing wrong with a patron showing up and wanting the PCs to do something for them.

But the less the players think “X exists because the GM wants us to do Y,” the more they will think of X as an actual person.

3. Throw out lots and lots of NPCs and then pay attention to which ones “click” with the players. Focus on those and be OK with letting NPCs that aren’t clicking move on with their lives. I talk about this a bit in Party Planning.

4. Neel Krishnaswami’s Law of the Conservation of NPCs is also useful to remember here:

In our last Nine Worlds session, I introduced Perseus, a captain of the Lunar space fleet, who was married to Nick’s PC’s wife. In the session before that, the players had been boarded by a Lunar ship which had confiscated our engineer’s robot as technological contraband. That ship had a captain, who went unnamed. So when I first mentioned Perseus, the players’ first response was “Hey, is he the same guy?” and my answer was, “Of course — the law of conservation of NPCs demands it!” The players chuckled, and we went on playing.

The principle of conservation of NPCs actually is one of my GMing strategies. Whenever I introduce a new conflict into the game, I try to see if existing NPCs can be integrated into this role before I consider introducing a new NPC. I find two big benefits from doing this.

The first is simply that the size of the cast stays under control — I’ve run plenty of games where NPCs multiplied without limit, and that meant that months of real time could pass before we saw an NPC reappear. This limits the amount of shared history the players can develop with a character, and is often a little unsatisfying as a result. So reusing NPCs helps prevent the narrative from fizzling out.

Secondly, re-using NPCs means they will have multiple facets relevant to the players. In our 9W game, Perseus’s family became a center of the narrative — each of the players was off doing something else, but they affected each other because their actions influenced Perseus and his family. So despite the characters being separated the players were still interacting with each other.

5. Have NPCs connected to each other and give them strong, contradictory opinions about each other. If everyone thinks Lord Bakersfield is a pompous asshole… eh, whatever. That’s fine. If some people think he’s a pompous asshole and other people think he’s the greatest man they’ve ever met (and they both have cause to think so), Lord Bakersfield is a much interesting character.

You’re also basically forcing the players (and their PCs) to make up their own minds about Lord Bakersfield. That means they’ll need to think meaningfully about him as a character, and that’s step one to memorability.

TOOLS FOR IMPROVISATION

Something that I talk about in Smart Prep is that if you’re looking to improve your improvisation, then you should prep tools that make it easier to improvise the stuff you find hard to improvise. What these things are is different for everybody: Some people find it hard to come up with cool names on the fly; other people find that trivial.

So which tools you find most useful is going to vary a lot.

NAMES: I put together a list of Fantasy Names by culling cool names I ran across in a data entry job and I’ve used that list over and over and over again in the last couple decades.

I recently prepped a name list for the Infinity RPG by doing a lot of research into real world cultures and their names, specifically to highlight the rich panoply of cultures found in the setting.

On a far more focused scale, Feng Shui 2 does something similar by distinguishing between characters from Hong Kong, characters from mainland China, and characters from Ancient China by using different methods of Romanizing Chinese names.

The globe-hopping Eternal Lies campaign very wisely includes a list of first and last names for each location the PCs go. Notably I did NOT follow the same practice in designing my Severn Valley expansion to the campaign because I felt confident in my ability to to improvise English names.

Over the Edge is another interesting example because Jonathan Tweet basically invented a set of naming conventions for the island of Al Amarja, subtly emphasizing the strangely akimbo nature of its place in our reality. I developed a cheat sheet of Al Amarjan Names to encourage GMs to lean into this. It can be found on Atlas’ official website.

MANNERISMS: Here’s a quick, one-stop shop: Maze Rats. It has a one page “Character Creation” sheet which includes random tables for appearance, physical details, costumes, personality, mannerisms, and hobbies.

You can get a lot of mileage by, say, randomly generating a part of your body and thinking about what you can do with it. If you have one of those dedicated hit location dice, here’s a really creative way you could use it.

AGENDAS: These are trickier to generate meaningful, high-quality random tables for, because they are generally going to be heavily dependent on the specific context of the game setting.

Assuming that your setting is already well-stocked with NPCs, however, one thing you can do is basically just co-opt an existing NPC’s agenda: In the real world, after all, there’s not just one guy who’s pro-Brexit or seeking to buy real estate in the Guildsman’s District or aligned with the Mafia or engaging in anti-android-apartheid activism.

So add this new NPC to one of these existing factions of interest. It works best to then give their agenda a twist so that it’s providing a different angle or insight into the agenda. The easiest twist is to simply flip the agenda and have them opposed to whatever the other NPC is trying to accomplish: So they’re anti-Brexit, trying to protect middle class property rights in the Guildsman’s District, a gangbuster, or an android-tester enforcing the apartheid.

KEEP A FILE: Something else you can do is to start keeping a file of cool NPCs you’ve seen in various adventure modules. I talk about this a bit in Strip-Mining Adventure Modules.

You don’t have to limit yourself to characters from RPG products, or even from the same setting or genre. A lot of the stuff that makes characters cool and memorable — their beliefs, their look, their mannerisms — all tend to translate well.

If these characters are a little too well known, this can be less effective. (Although, honestly, Ian McKellan’s Gandalf is basically an archetype at this point and it’s perfectly acceptable to have a wizard show up smoking a pipe, waggling their eyebrows, and speaking cryptically in dramatic whispers.)

Genre flips often solve this problem in any case: Use Gandalf’s mannerisms for a mafioso or Luke Skywalker’s characterization for a petulant halfling and your players will probably never even realize where you drew your inspiration from.

Vagabundork asks, “Why would the PCs accept these missions? Why would a satanist neuroscientist, a self-hatred writer, and a Colombian telenovela actress get involved in a scenario like this? (…) It usually falls to the, ‘we are a paranormal investigation agency’ which (…) removes all that makes cosmic horror awesome.”

There are a few ways to handle this, generally speaking.

First: Get the players on board during the character creation process.

It’s not solely your responsibility, as the Game Master, to explain why all these characters are hanging out together. As they’re creating the group, make sure the players figure out why these characters are operating together.

“We all have a job in the same organization” (i.e., the paranormal investigation agency) is an easy fits-all-scenarios answer to this, but it’s hardly the only one. What do they care about? What common goal do they all share? What secret do they all have in common?

Once you know what makes them a group, you can hang your scenario hooks off of it. This works even if their connection seems mundane and unrelated to whatever the scenario is. For example, let’s say they decide that they all work at the same comic book shop. Great, now you can threaten the store. Or have some strange person/creature come into the store. Or maybe the whole structure of the campaign becomes tracking down rare issues of comic books for resale, and the weird places, people, and estate sales they track down to obtain those issues also get them tangled up in whatever the scenario happens to be.

If they all share a dark secret, then a scenario hook just needs to threaten that secret in some way to pull them all in. Or they can all be blackmailed by the same mysterious patron.

Note: Just because the players are all collectively figuring out what binds their characters together, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the characters all know each other when the game begins! For example, they can all want to find the Ruby Eye of Drosnin or figure out the Truth About the Templars and be actively pursuing that without pursuing it together (at least not initially), which can also tie into…

Second: Use separate hooks.

If you design scenarios that are awesome situations instead plots, then you’ll discover that your scenarios aren’t generally limited to a single scenario hook: The cooler and more dynamic the situation, the more places there are to hang your hooks. Vagabundork’s question actually came in response to one such discussion (Scenario Hooks for Over the Edge), and you can also check out Juggling Scenario Hooks in a Sandbox for a different perspective on the same basic concept.

This also means that you don’t have to come up with a single explanation for why all of the PCs are involved in the current scenario. They can all be there for completely different reasons, quite possibly pursuing very different agendas.

It’s not unusual to have an initial scenario that works like this, but then the expectation is that, at the end of the scenario, all of these characters will decide that this was a jolly good time and they should all hang out doing similar stuff from now on. This can work very well in games that have a strong in-fiction conceit for small groups of freelancers coming together like this: D&D adventuring parties or Shadowrun teams, for example.

This is also, however, only the most generic version of this, and you can get a lot of mileage out of the same technique by making it specific. For example, during the first scenario all of the PCs get sprayed by a strange blue goo and now they share a common curse. Even if they don’t decide to all team up to figure it out together, they now all have a common goal… which means we’re back in scenario one and you can easily keep hooking them back into the same blue goo-related scenarios. If you can figure out a way to do this that ties into their specific character arcs and backgrounds, then you’ll get results that are even more specific and, as a result, powerful and meaningful.

This technique can also work well when combined with time skips: If the PCs are all pursuing different agendas, then it would be weird for those agendas to all coincidentally cross paths with each other every couple of days. But if you have a really cool scenario, wrap it up, and then deliberately skip a few months or years (or decades) until the next time these characters all happen to cross paths again, that can be a really cool conceit.

A specific variation of this technique is…

Third: Make them enemies.

Or, more specifically, set them in opposition to each other.

This is a technique I discuss in more detail in Technoir and PvP. The short version is that a good, situation-based scenario doesn’t actually need the PCs to be working together. It can often be even more interesting if they’re working in opposition to each other.

The simplest variation is to have different characters who both want the same thing and are in competition with each other for it. For example, Belloq and Indiana Jones from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film not only contains two completely separate scenarios between these two antagonists, it reveals that they’ve been crossing paths like this over and over and over again for years. If you imagine them both as PCs, that sounds like an incredible campaign.

Another variation is to set things up so that one of the PCs is literally the objective of the other PC. Putting a bounty on the head of one of the PCs is a one-size-fits-all solution to this. The TV show The Fugitive, for example, uses this gimmick. If it was a campaign, the GM only needs to figure out how to hook Richard Kimble into each scenario… and then Lt. Philip Gerard will come following right behind.

This state of antagonism doesn’t have to be entered into with the expectation that it will last in perpetuity, however. When the PCs discover that their antagonism was all a big misunderstanding or, after being forced to work together, realizing that they actually make a really great team, this can collapse into Scenario Two above. (See, for example, basically the entire The Fast & the Furious franchise.)

When using this technique, however, you need to be prepared to actually lose PCs, either because they’re killed or because they just don’t want to work together. That can be OK. (Having one of the PCs leave only to return several sessions later as an antagonist not only for the original PC but for the new PC played by the antagonist’s player can be really cool.)

Fourth: Give them a patron.

When all else fails, patrons make scenario hooks easy: They tell you what your next gig is and then you do it.

The other nice thing about a patron is that you don’t need to figure out why all the PCs know each other or want to work with each other: You just need to figure out (a) why the patron would want to hire each of them individually and (b) why each of them would be willing to take the gig.

The fact that PCs tend to be hyper-competent usually provides the generic answer to the former. Money is a one-size-fits-all answer for the latter.

Nothing wrong with these generic answers, of course. Shadowrun basically builds a whole game around those answers and it does so very successfully.

But, once again, making things more specific instead of generic is generally going to give you better results. Fortunately, it’s generally easier to do this specifically because you don’t need to have the same answers for each PC.

You can also, once again, get the players onboard with this process during character creation. For example, the first time that I ran Eternal Lies, I simply asked the players to make sure that their character backgrounds explained why someone would be interested in hiring them to look into paranormal weirdness. The answers they came up with were all over the map (Chicago cop who got a string of weird cases; girl detective and her brother working amateur paranormal cases in London; combat pilot; author of Fortean nonfiction masquerading as ‘weird fiction’), but also chock full of awesomeness that made it easy to explain why their patron might want to pull them together to investigate her father’s mysterious legacy.

The second time I ran Eternal Lies, however, some of the players ended up with concepts that weren’t as clear-cut in terms of why a patron would seek them out. But we were still able to work together to figure out more personal connections justifying the hire. (For example, one of the characters had been previously involved with a friend of the patron. Another had briefly encountered her father and was, as a result, mentioned in the mysterious notes the group was being hired to investigate.)

Alternatively, maybe the PCs all DO have the same reason for working for the patron: Making that infernal pact so that you could all open a comic book store together sure seemed like a good idea at the time, but…

Another good variation here is to make one of the PCs the patron. See Ocean’s Eleven, for example. This, once again, narrows the focus of the scenario hook down to the desires of a single character, while simplifying everyone else’s involvement down to the question of why someone would want them on the team (which will generally boil down to expertise).