Are You Standing Too Close to the Microphone Too?

If you've been following the dust up surrounding the "Build a Better DM" challenge culminating here and here, (and oh yeah, here) then I don't need to explain anything to you.  If not, go there and there (and oh yeah, there) if you're going to bother reading anything further.  Trace it back for as far as you want to go.

I've been playing the guitar for about 21 years or so now.  I've been composing and playing my own music for almost as long.  About 10 or 11 years ago, after leaving the service and coming home to find a job and start a family I had the fortune of also starting up a band that was good enough to get some local attention and a little airplay on a few indie and college stations.  After I and another founding member left the group suddenly, damn our luck, the band went on to secure a pretty sweet opening act gig for a pretty big festival tour and put out several more albums, largely and regrettably as ignored as the first one.  Clearly the dead weight had been thrown off when I left.  Ha, ha, ha.

Anyway, I say all of this not to relive my glory days, meager and quickly over as they were, but rather to further another analogy  regarding this whole "Better DM" tête-à-tête coincidentally related to music.

You see, when I formed the band with the other primary songwriter, I had been playing and composing for about a decade or so.  I was good enough not just to be in a pretty good band that you never heard of, but to have been at the creative center of the band when it formed and to have personally written songs or parts of songs that were played and recorded well past my involvement as an active member.   Despite this apparent competence, I stood too close to the microphone when I sang live, especially when I played a riff that required more than just my passing attention on the ol' axe.  In rehearsal or in the studio I was fine.  I knew how far away my mouth should be given my vocal ability or lack thereof.  Something about doing it live was different.  Maybe it was all of the whiskey. 

So, despite ten years of playing, singing and writing, mostly as a solo act or in small groups, when the lights were on and drunken slatterns were throwing their panties at me (ok, in truth they were hipster kids in too-tight jeans and ironic t-shirts) I was still standing too close to the mic most nights.  A friend pointed this out to me and it was quickly rectified.

The point is, my and I imagine many submissions to what became Chris's compilation of advice was for anybody else out there standing too close to the mic despite having done this thing a time or two.  I wasn't intending nor did it seem to me anybody was presuming  that the result would be the comprehensive how-to guide on DMing.  Just some old hands sharing tips.  Maybe the tips themselves could have been more practical and tactical in nature, lord knows we get a lot of nickel and dime philosophizing to comparatively little usable or actionable content 'round here, but I still appreciated the efforts and the end result.  I'm also looking forward to less ink being spilled on tearing down the small and ultimately inconsequential and more on the practice of playing and running this game.

But ultimately you get to be a better DM the same way you get to Carnegie Hall.  Practice. 

Stay Dry East Coast

This week I was supposed to be enjoying some sun and leisure time with my family, but the combination of a sick family pet (cancer, she's only got a few months they say) and a large rain storm perhaps you've heard mention of sidetracked us.  That said, summer is winding down with or without my blessings and I expect to begin blogging more regularly.  Provided that my home and place of work don't blow away in the wake of Irene and that the wonderful state of New Jersey remains relatively intact, I'll be back next week some time.  In the meantime, stay dry and safe East Coast.

Gauntlet thrown, I accept your challenge sir!

Obsessing over my own DMing skills (i.e. am I really any good or am I just the one most interested in and willing to run the games?) is a recent favorite pastime of mine.  I haven't come to any conclusions, to be honest, and I've perhaps not-so-coincidentally taken several months off from DMing.  I plan to play for a bit and maybe get some perspective on my own skills.  

Alexis at Tao has recently stirred the pot a bit regarding what truly ails the hobby and a recent post by another one of my favorite bloggers, Chris K. @ Hill Cantons asks three related and pointed questions.  So, while I recover a bit from an awful summer cold, prepare for a week-long vacation and continue work on a longer blog post regarding a proposed system for generating magical schools and societies to kick this blog out of neutral, I'll pick up the gauntlet thrown by Chris.

He asks the following:

1. Name three “best practices” you possess as a GM. What techniques do you think you excel at?
2. What makes those techniques work? Why do they “pop”?
3. How do you do it? What are the tricks you use? What replicable, nuts-and-bolts tips can you share?

So here goes, apologize in advance for the navel-gazing but maybe you'll find it useful:

1.  I speak with my whole body when DMing.  I've read some opinions online in recent months and years regarding the use of boxed text vs.  paraphrased text when running adventure modules.  While I see merits in both, recently I realized that for me personally it made little difference whether I was reading or paraphrasing text, it could be equally engaging and evocative or laborious and tedious depending on how well or badly it was presented.  What mattered most, of course, was the delivery. The times when I was moving around a bit, emoting, pacing my speech like a good spoken performance and treating it as such the game seemed better.  

So recently I've been more consciously engaging the players with eye contact, standing up and throwing out my arms to describe rooms or scenic vistas and that sort of thing.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not LARPing.  I don't do funny voices often nor change my physicality much when taking on an NPC.  I don't fault anybody that does and appreciate those who can.  I'm just naturally more comfortable with a more detached voice as a DM.  The problem is that detached can easily morph into dull.  

There's a sweet-spot for me where I'm still the omniscient voice but I'm hopping up and out of my seat and waving my arms to make a point or walking out from behind the screen to really get into it.  The non-verbal feedback form the players is that they're less likely to be staring at a phone or having a side discussion.  This fool just stood up to demonstrate how awkwardly the halfling climbed out of a barrel.  Way more interesting than this tweet or your story about the guy in line at the liquor store is what I'm seeing.  If you don't do funny voices either, but feel your presentation is lacking some pop, just start off by standing up the next time you describe something and see what happens.  Take it form there.

2. I Prepare.  The party may go off on a wild tangent and me right along with them.  On a good night the players can't tell that from whatever it was for which I was originally prepared.  To some people this seems like winging it, but in truth it comes down to a broader preparation than just having the next 20 rooms statted out or an encounter table for the road between Bumbfuck and Timbuctoo.  Know your world, know the beings in it.  If your world is a dungeon and a town, know that.  If its a hex map 200 miles x 150 miles, then know that.  Et cetera, et cetera.  But before you do that, live a little.  Read and learn and go do things and it'll all come that much more easily.  The more you've done, studied or seen the better shot you've got in presenting a believable and interesting world to somebody else.  

On the subject of living I say this:  If your game has gotten better than it was 10 or 20 years ago I would offer that this is not a result of you grasping the rules any better.  Rather, you're an older, wiser and more seasoned human being.  So, take everything you do from hiking through a rainstorm to negotiating a price on a used car to visiting a foreign country for the first time to dealing with a shitty boss and file it away with D&D in mind.  Come back to it and use it as needed.  

Further, if you're getting ready to create a city for campaign use, know something about cities.  You don't really need to buy a city-based role-playing source book. Take a walk around the nearest city.  If that doesn't help, check a book out from the library or hit the internet.  Need some rules on dungeon delving?  Read up on what real-life spelunkers do.  I swear there's probably 40 hours of this kind of preparation, away from graph and hex paper and anything resembling an RPG rule book, that goes into every playable hour of any game that I've ever run.  It's also stuff I'm doing anyway, really. 

3.  I Resist Clutter.  I've found that it's a simple enough practice to explain, but much harder to execute.  But from my experience the extent to which one can limit the amount of crap at the table, the smoother things run.  It's tough to draw on the battle mat when you've got a bowl of chips and a plate of aged cheeses and finely seasoned meats (mmm..... meats) in the way.  Clearly you want the snacks nearby (boy do I!), so figure out a way to keep them around without infringing upon the game. 

If you're like me, and if you read this blog I suspect that in some way you must be, then you're not running the game right out of the box.  You've got a pile of notes, house-rules, stuff you downloaded, stuff you're borrowing from another game entirely all potentially relevant on any given night.  If your playing space is outside of your home, like mine, than you either need to lug all of this shit around or condense it somehow.  

Even if lugging is an option, resist it.  Condense it.  Put it on a computer.  I find that using a computer at the table detracts from the game and prevents me from doing a lot of #1 above, so I at least get it all into the same binder.  Also there's lots of ways to make a pdf for free nowadays, so if you can get everything you need into one doc and hit the print button, you don't need any hardware.  When I resume running a game again in the near future I'll be experimenting with the use of an e-reader at the table.  I'm hoping that cuts down on the stacks of things I need to play given that they seem to handle .pdfs better now.

Sample Dungeon Project pdf

You'll find here as well as over in the right-hand column a link to the recently completed .pdf compiling my efforts on the Sample Dungeon Project into a (hopefully) easier to use format you can have if  you wish to use the adventure for your game.  If you do, please drop by and tell me about it.  Regretfully, I won't be able to use it myself since some of my regular players read the blog.

The project was fun and now that I have finally closed on my final commitment to it, its being put into the rear-view mirror.  I'm not much of an artist or layout person, so what you'll find is pretty bare-bones with the same public domain images I was using for the posts as I went.  I cleaned up a little of the text, added an intro and tried to make the tables easier to read.  Unless there's some reason I need to go back and make a change, that's it.  Fin.

Anyway, I'm still here and kicking and should resume a less glacial pace to my posting once summer is through.

*** Update***

A rather significant formatting blunder was quickly pointed out to me, so I've already reneged and made changes.  If you notice any more, feel free to use the comments below.

Catching Up

I'm afraid I don't have a lot to offer in terms of new content right now.  The summer has been busy, both at work and with planned activities with family and friends.  As far as gaming goes, I have recently decided to put my current primary campaign on hold for several months.  I'm going to take this time to focus on other things... such as actually PLAYING.  Yes, I'm stepping out from behind the screen to play in a post-apocalyptic game being devised and run by my long-time player (and longer time very close friend) Ross A.  I'm looking forward to having a chance to play a bit, not worry so much about prepping for our games and maybe get some new perspective on my own DMing by watching somebody else do it for awhile.  Tentatively I plan to pick up running a game again in January, but that is subject to change.

As such, blog fare may continue to be lean, or perhaps not actively running anything might get me posting more.  Whichever of those two ends up happening in the short-term know that I do plan to .pdf the Sample Dungeon, I will be posting more about the Supers game I'm running for my wife and I've been kicking around some rules for magical orders and societies for D&D that I might work out in part here. So if you're still following the blog hang in there and be patient while I gear up for some more material.  Thanks.  Have a great rest of your summer and I'll be back online and writing soon.