So, thread for cool ideas on how to run good games, including strategies and props.

Index cards are handy for loads of things: spell cards, NPCs, equipment, etc.
I played a high level 3e game as a wizard, and I found an index card for each spell with colored paperclips to denote prepared instances of each spell handy -- cast the spell, pull off a clip (or move it to the other side, if I wanted to keep track of what my typical loadout was).

LEGO figures and minifigs. If you have kids or otherwise like LEGOs, they can make simple miniatures. Minifigs are nice because they fit on a single 'dot,' so the effective map is larger.

Tents. If you have a simple character sheet, you can fold it in the middle so it makes a little triangle/tent thingie in front of you. Can be handy if you have multiple things to track, almost like having a DM screen but not as tall.


In-game stuff:
Playing Delta Green, I found it was very conducive to busy people who sometimes couldn't make a game.
Basically, an 'adventure' was pretty much handed to the players: your bosses want you to investigate X. There was a lot of freedom to do things within that scope, limited oversight, yet the ability to yank people out or put new people in or just halt things, because it was all covert.

In other words, if someone didn't show up the next week, they were recalled to Washington for their day job. Oh well! Someone shows up? They are tapped as extra resources.

It's almost a railroad, except all the adventuring in the middle can be left utterly up to the PCs.

It made for a surprisingly easy game to run with people who weren't necessarily very good at motivation -- here's your mission, now GO.


Another set-up type thing that worked well was a fantasy game where the party were part of an extended family. And their people had been pushed out of their homeland by necromancers.
It gave an easy campaign goal (reclaim our homeland!), as well as party bonding (we are kin), but left a lot of freedom for the details. Family, after all, don't necessarily like each other or agree on ... anything.


Any interesting physical or game tricks/tips you have gleaned?

Quote from: Will;792636LEGO figures and minifigs. If you have kids or otherwise like LEGOs, they can make simple miniatures. Minifigs are nice because they fit on a single 'dot,' so the effective map is larger.

One of the other members in our gaming group - the other primary GM - has a shit-ton of Minifigs - standard and specialty-purchased ones. They've worked out nicely for the past half-dozen or so campaigns. He's got enough variety in his collection to handle most genres (fantasy, scifi, '20s horror). He's also got hex bases for them, for battlemap use. (And he's mostly a Gurps GM, so that's perfect for him).

QuoteAny interesting physical or game tricks/tips you have gleaned?

Nothing hands-on that immediately comes to mind. These days, pretty much everyone in my group has a tablet (mostly Surfaces). So at any time, nearly everyone will have rules docs, house rules, equipment lists, adventure logs, etc. on-hand, available and shared out. And, we have a dedicated 'gamer-stenographer' recording all our sessions to OneNote online, which is handy.

Quote...and props.

I run Call of Cthulhu about 75% of the time, so I'm all about the props.

I have found that having the PCs belong to an organization immensely facilitates play in the manner you describe with Delta Green, where the PCs do, in fact, belong to an organization. Military, investigative, espionage, executive, whatever - it doesn't really matter. The organization directs and supports the PCs, and often gives them license to, well, act like PCs.

-clash

Dice as a prop or figurine. Also coins work well, too, especially nickels for grids. One of the fun tricks is shake a bunch in your hand and then roll them out onto the table. Wherever they land is their placement.

Great technique for things like NPC crowds, debris piles, surprised monster groups, etc.

I'm getting MILEAGE out of the Fantasy Tool Cards by Postworld games. I backed both Kickstarters, got a PILE of them from the first one. You can POD the cards from DriveThru!

Before a session I prep at least 20 NPCs. This way I can quickly grab a name and description. I then add notes as needed during play.

I personally use Evernote to organize my games. I am going to try the Realmworks tool again, but during the beta it wasn't shaping up fast enough for me to get into. Evernote is wonderful because I can prep on my PC, sync to my laptop, and back again. It's super handy. You can organize notebooks into "stacks", so it has a folder structure for the notes.

I like to build combat trackers in Excel, so I can just put in initiative and "sort" the list by that column.

I use a laptop with a 2nd monitor as my GM screen, and I do everything on the computer. If I can get proficient with Realmworks, I may put together a small computer with multiple monitor outputs. This way I can have a monitor facing the players, to show off images, maps, etc.

Johnn Four's Roleplaying Tips is a fantastic resource, great newletter, and his products are fun. Lots of great advice in there over the years.

I'm digging the Kobold Guides to world building, game design, magic, et al. In an "essay" format, so you can peruse for nuggets. :-)

Also, Engine Publishing guides are great (as is 1000 masks! NPCs!). I just picked up the art of improv one, just cracking it open this week. Good stuff here.

Of course, Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering from SJGames is a great work for GMs. Good advice in here.

I swear, if I ever do finally publish a proper game, I will just build a GM's section with all these links in it. No need to waste a bunch of time on GM advice, when literally HUNDREDS of pages have been published on the art in recent years. :-)

Dice towers: These are pretty simple to make from foamcore board you can get from a dollar store and theres a pattern you can download even.

Some excess d6 make for viable quick minis when you just want to plot out marching order or a quick example of initial positioning. Coins and glass crafting gembeads work too. Also minis from board games. HeroQuest and HeroScape for example.

I keep around some examples of coin volume for my games. 1000 pennies (copper pieces) fits in a mason jar. 100 nickles (silver) fits in a asprin bottle. 100 quarters (gold) fits stacked in an old Chessex dice tube. Or any given one of those is fine for showing volume in a setting where all the coins are the exact same size.

Another option mentioned previously is stickering coins. you can get results like this. The files are on BGG for various appearances but I think you'l get the general idea.

CCG cards. Using Magic: the Gathering cards is a great resource for wandering monster tables, artifact ideas, and enchanted "Mythal" effects. They even come color coded for terrain, rarity. And now they have enough Culture/Theme settings to adjust around those tropes, too (Mirage, Ice Age, Theros, Innistrad, Khans, Kanigawa, etc.).

Quote from: Opaopajr;792705CCG cards. Using Magic: the Gathering cards is a great resource for wandering monster tables, artifact ideas, and enchanted "Mythal" effects. They even come color coded for terrain, rarity. And now they have enough Culture/Theme settings to adjust around those tropes, too (Mirage, Ice Age, Theros, Innistrad, Khans, Kanigawa, etc.).

I'll add to this.

If you ever need a random fantasy idea to jump start your brain, go to gatherer (http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Default.aspx) and look at the bottom of the page for the "random card" button. Hit that and you'll get a random magic card. After you hit it once you'll notice the random card button is henceforth at the top of the page under the search bar.

Expanding on the CCGs beyond just M:tG:

L5R is good for East Asian tropes.

Vampire/Jyhad & Rage is good for Vampires, Werewolves, and other 'Ravenloft' tropes (albeit modernized). Great for NPCs.

Doomtown for Westerns.

Legend of the Burning Sands for Middle East, Africa, & India.

7th Sea for Swashbuckling Pirates.

Heresy for angels & demons & esoteric weirdness.

Netrunner for Shadowrun's tech side, and other low level sci-fi.

Disk Wars for some mass combat ideas.

etc.

There's real potential sitting in those piles of card stock.

Props:

Use index cards folded in half in front of players for character names for one shots.  Write with a marker, not a pencil, so you can see them across the table.

Or I suppose if you were really planning ahead, sticky name tags aren't that much.  I haven't done that yet.

9x12 foam sheets with one sticky side are like a buck each at craft stores.  If you use character tokens or wound and status counters, you can print out a sheet of those on card stock or regular paper, slap it on the sticky side of the foam, and cut out the pieces, for something easy to grab.

The times I've tried dice towers, someone always has to stretch across the table to reach the top.  Or slide it around; either way there's a very slight delay to it.  I do like playing with a dice corral of some sort in the middle of the table, to keep from chasing dice and put them somewhere everyone can see them.

Fill out index cards for NPCs with names, personality traits, common phrases, and maybe skills.  But NOT full character sheets or lengthy descriptions.  Hand them out to players to run anytime you're at risk of carrying on two sides of a conversation, or a PC is out of a scene.

Strategies:

Make notes after each game session.  During as well if you can, but without slowing play.  For me, the benefit going from no notes to short ones is even bigger than that going from short notes up to full session logs.

Have a setting-appropriate name list on hand for every game you run.

For me, contra the "don't prep" school of thought, do prep, but work on prep that won't be wasted.  Focus on things you can recycle and things you have a hard time improvising.

That said, don't get tied to it, be prepared to go somewhere else entirely.  Oddly, I somehow improvise better when I've prepped something else than when I just show up thinking I'll wing it.

Brainstorm.  I keep a notebook with me for ideas.  And for every distinct game I hope to run I start a dedicated notebook, to jot down notes about theme, encounters, hooks, characters.  That gives me kind of a setting bible (brief sometimes) up front, with more detailed prep and session notes behind that for games that actually get run.

Using third party generators and tables of any kind, cross out each result as you use it and write in something new.  Keeps the results fresh and makes it your own.

Quote from: flyingmice;792657I have found that having the PCs belong to an organization immensely facilitates play in the manner you describe with Delta Green, where the PCs do, in fact, belong to an organization. Military, investigative, espionage, executive, whatever - it doesn't really matter. The organization directs and supports the PCs, and often gives them license to, well, act like PCs.

-clash

This is part of the dynamic we have always used.  
Our system is called GuildSchool, because the choice of organizations you belong to determines your ability in your skills (in a skill based system).  But as you mention, it is a tremendous resource for giving the PCs a feeling of belonging and relationships right out of the gate.

I keep everything as wiki entries...and so it becomes very easy to use links to find anything.  Character sheets for PCs and NPCs use links right to spells and items, making everything incredibly easy to and access.  It also means that I can prepare stuff ahead of time and send it to the appropriate player when I wish.

Also, creating a setting/game index is something I always recommend.  As a setting develops, it becomes more and more of a resource.

I have poker chips in several colors I use on occasion. Just to represent any t hing I made need or as Karma/Drama/Beenies If I am playing a game with them.

I also have an old chart organizer that use to be used in hospitals a lot. It fit 5x8 index cards  called davie style card trays The cards laid in plastic holders that showed the bottom line. So on bottom line you write what the card holds and it was easy to flip to what you needed during game. Sort of self indexing. I used one to keep track of characters as one sheet served as char sheet , next page notes I needed. It was easy to update and organize.


I use a magnetic white board for Initiative, With Characters names on yellow magnetic strip and Enemy 1 through 5 on red magnetic strips. Then two white strips with event 1 and 2 to track anything else I needed.

Works well since pulling people out who are holding actions or tilting the name to indicate a held action is easy and everyone can see it. Keeping track of rounds or duration based effects use hash marks with a dry erase pen as you get to that player. Makes it very easy to run stuff even as complicated as high level 3.5 games.

Two props a friend of mine had in all of the games she was in (running or playing):

A large flexible laminated cloth grid. I'm not sure where she got it (I should ask her) or what it was made of -- it looked like stiff cloth, but had a plasticy surface that you can use markers on.

So, essentially, a foldable/rollable whiteboard.

Draw out the encounter, jot initiative and other details on the margin, and if you got interrupted mid-combat, just fold it up for next time.


The other prop that she also had was a huge bag of cardboard chits, with various pictures of people/monsters on them. I suspect it was some past D&D product.
But it essentially served as very easy 'minis' to move around the board. Some of the larger monsters were 10x10 or even 15x15, as needed.

A lot easier to travel with than actual minis.

(She bought them from somewhere, but I imagine if you are industrious you could probably do something useful with a printer and cardstock, maybe something sticky-backed and get an exacto knife)

The most recent games I have run have used a wall mounted whiteboard. Very Very handy for quick maps, writing up initiative order and other "what everyone needs to know" things. Apart from that, "stuff" seems to get in the way.