DNAphil

It is a fear of every GM that haunts us between every session: that dreaded feeling that comes over you before you write your next session – that you can no longer run your game any more. It could be that the idea well has run dry or that your will to GM has been sapped. In either case, you are moments from emailing your group and pulling the plug on your campaign. Don’t touch that “Send” key until you read this post.

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“I didn’t spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.” — X-Files
That quote has been a running joke in my gaming group for years, but as I started to create Encoded Designs with its dual emphasis on creativity and productivity, I began thinking about the fact that I have transfered ideas and skills from the business world to enhance my gaming style and techniques. Then, just the other day I asked myself, was there anything I have learned from my years playing RPGs that would apply to the business world? So, I started to put a few ideas together, and soon I realized that a number of skills I utilize at work started behind the GM Screen.

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I have been watching the TV show “Life” on NBC. The show is about a police officer who was wrongly accused of a murder, imprisoned for 12 years, and then recently released. At the beginning of the first few episodes, the show had skipped the typical recap, and in turn had it set up as a documentary where the minor characters: the wrongly accused officer’s former partner, the detective who investigated the murder, and the ex-wife talk about the police officer and the events surrounding his arrest, imprisonment, and eventual freedom. It was a great technique for recapping a lot of events that occurred before the show started, and it provided insight into the main character as well as his relationships with some of the minor characters in a unique way. I thought to myself, now that is the way to do a recap.

I have been a fan of using recaps at the opening of my sessions for many years. Over the years I have tried a number of different recapping techniques as a way to make the process a bit more interesting. This past spring, before “Life” started, I came upon a new technique for presenting the session recap and wanted to share it with you this week. For those who are not familiar with the session recap, I will start with a basic description, discuss some of my current feelings on recaps, and outline my current system of recaps.

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One great inspiration for me as a GM was reading, Amber: Diceless Roleplaying. Of the many things I learned from that book was the concept of using a series of questions to help flesh out the backgrounds of characters before play starts. Since my first reading of the Amber in 1992, I have used the “20 Questions” tool in the opening of nearly all my campaigns. It has provided me a wealth of potential plot hooks and information that have allowed me to tailor my campaigns to the characters. Upon reflection on the questions I have asked in the past, I have found that there are several categories of questions that one should ask in the body of 20 Questions. The categories and some example questions are listed below….

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A few weeks ago I wrote an article for Treasure Tables about Great Campaigns. In my career as a GM, I have had about 6 campaigns that I would truly consider to be great. By great, I think of a game that runs for more than a year and becomes an obsession with the players. In most cases after I run a great campaign with a particular system, I cannot run another campaign in the same game system; making me wonder, can you ever go home again?

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There is a tendency in life to focus on those things that we almost had, but somehow were just out of our grasp. Perhaps it was the off-color remark that made us miss the chance of a date with someone special or that glare of sun in our eyes that made us miss that perfect gaming winning catch. Whatever it is, we tend to focus a great deal of energy on thinking about what it would have been like had we not missed that moment. What does this have to do with role playing? One word….Underground.

Let me take you back to the mid-90′s, a time when my closet was filled with flannel shirts, and Pearl Jam (shiver) ruled the airwaves. I was in college back then. It was the summer of 1993, and I was staying at school, spending the summer working in a research lab. I had seen ads for a game called Underground in Dragon magazine. The ads were edgy and gritty, and the reviews I read had piqued my interest. All of those adds led me to the local game store and put the rule book in my hands. (continue reading…)