Every game master does their preparations for a game in the style that suits them. I have run a few games and have developed a system that works well for me. Especially when I am taking my adventure on the road (not playing at home!), I want to be sure everything is organized and easy to follow. There’s nothing worse than realizing you forgot an important character sheet or your tokens.
Walt has done a number of posts on role playing games and being a game master. He has a good basic explanation of RPGs here and here. He also has written a series on the various roles a game master has under the tag #GM roles.
This post is more about how I prepare my session so that I can have fun while running the game and everyone else isn’t waiting for me to look something up.
Some of the prep work varies based on whether I write my own adventure or if I am running a published adventure. If I am writing my own adventure, there is the work of creating the setting, story, and characters the players will encounter. When I used a published adventure, I need to make sure I have a clear understanding of all the possibilities that might happen during the game.
Index Cards to the Rescue!
I am a big fan of index cards for keeping things organized during a game session. I can take each section of a game and keep all the details together with a clip and it’s easy to grab what I need.
Each card has notes for what the characters see when they enter a space during the adventure. It tells of traps they may encounter and any creatures in the area. I create a card for each creature they may encounter and add it and a token to represent the creature on a map.
A character or monster will have a card with information on skills, saving throws (resistance to poison, for instance), attacks, defenses, and so forth. This example comes from an Old West adventure I created.
Laying it all out there – Maps & Tokens
When you are running an adventure, it can be helpful to the players if there are maps and tokens to show the size and relationship of the objects and creatures in the area. You can describe a room by saying “the room is 25 feet by 45 feet. It has a high vaulted ceiling. A pile of rubble has been stacked several feet tall across the center of the room. You can see doorways in all four corners of the room.” This gives you a pretty good idea of the size and shape of the space, but a drawing is more useful.
Once you add tokens representing the characters in the space, it is easy to see how it all goes together. Cardboard tokens like the ones described in this post are easy to transport.
We like to use different colored bases to help show which characters are on which side. You don’t want to shoot an arrow at your teammate by accident.
Character sheets and notes
Your players can create their own characters or you can provide pre-generated characters. For a single game session, I provide characters so that the game time is not taken up with creating them. If it is a campaign, I like to have the players create their characters.
Some pre-written adventures come with characters for your players and others are just the story. If you write your own adventure, you need to create characters for them to encounter as well. There are a number of good character generators available. We use PCGen for a lot of the adventures we run.
I like to make sure that my players have some basic information about the characters they are playing. I write some backstory to help them understand the character’s motivation. This also helps players decide if they want to play a particular character. I try to have a few extra characters so people can choose from several options.
In addition to a backstory, I like to add information about why the character is in that place and how they may know some of the other characters. This makes it easier to role-play and helps put them into the story more smoothly.
I hope you found this little wander through my gaming prep helpful. Maybe you will want to run a game yourself!
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