sharing – James Alan Gardner

Accelerated RPG Campaigns

February 9, 2020 Posted in about me, pastimes, role-playing, RPGs, sharingLeave a comment

I am the Dungeon Master for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and I recently had a great insight. Let me share.

Like many a DM (I think), I adapt published adventures for my players. This means I use the published adventure as the backbone of a story, then I add or modify material to meet the specific interests of players and given them an interesting character arc.

For example, one of the player characters in our group seemed to be leaning evil, and I knew the adventure I was using would eventually lead the party to a city that was a hive of scum and villainy. I therefore dropped hints that the character might be able to join an assassins guild there. When that prospect seemed to catch their interest, I arranged for the character to meet someone who told them how to contact the guild. Eventually, when the party reached the city, the character had to decide how much or how little to become involved with the guild.

The guild wasn’t part of the published adventure, but going to the city was. Thus while the party followed the plot-line of the adventure, the character had personalized opportunities that (I hope) made the game more interesting than just following the predetermined plot.

As I said, I believe a lot of DMs do the same. This approach provides a nice mix of plot (from the adventure) and character material (added by me personally).

So now my great insight: I could throw away huge amounts of the published adventure and still have a great game.

For example, suppose the adventure calls for the party to work their way through a 30-room enemy castle. Why not toss out 25 of those rooms (or more accurately make the rooms pretty much empty)? The only rooms I’d keep would be ones I found really cool, or else ones where I could insert character-based material. In other words, I could drop the “crawl” from “dungeon crawl” and distill the whole thing down to a few rewarding set-pieces.

In the old days, you crawled through a dungeon so the characters could accumulate experience points through the slow process of killing monsters. There’s some value in that—it takes a long time to achieve significant milestones, so the players feel great when they finally kill The Big Bad (or whatever). It also gives players time to learn how to use their current abilities to best effect, and to yearn for the cool new stuff they’ll get when they reach their next experience level.

But my group only meets once a month or so. Grinding through a generic battle means that no one advances their story, even if the battle is a memorable challenge. So new plan: follow the adventure’s plot, but cut it down ruthlessly to its bare essentials so that the added character material takes on a much larger percentage of the action.

Also accelerate character advancement—discard keeping track of experience points at all, and allow players to go up a level every four or five sessions. If that’s too fast, use incremental advances: let players take partial advances now and then, e.g. increasing their hit points or taking one of the new abilities they’d get at the next level. Incremental advances are a great trick I learned from 13th Age.

In this way, the campaign will make faster progress through the published adventure and through D&D levels, finally reaching the adventure’s conclusion in a reasonable time. This avoids one of the major problems of D&D campaigns: petering out before you get to a satisfying end, because the DM gets busy, or a player has to quit, or whatever.

In other words, I plan to speed things up by dropping 90% of the published material. This should let us actually reach the end of a well-rounded story, while still not feeling too rushed. I recommend the same to all DMs reading this.

My To-Do List(s)

July 11, 2019 Posted in about me, sharing, writing practiceLeave a comment

As I said last time, I’ve decided to share how I keep my writing schedule on track. Daily logs are my way of looking back and making sure I’m keeping up, as well as just maintaining records of when I do various things (laundry, dentist appointments, etc.).

For looking forward, I use to-do lists. No big surprise. Over the years, I’ve used several to-do list apps, and I still use one called Errands for chores that recur on a regular basis, e.g. clipping my rabbit’s toenails. This is useful for monthly tasks and for things that take place even less often. I can just set up a schedule and have the software tell me when the time comes.

But for me, this kind of to-do list isn’t great for daily or weekly chores. I end up with so many entries popping up every day that important things get lost in the shuffle. Instead, I use a straightforward Google doc for my daily to-do lists. It contains daily lists covering the upcoming two weeks. I review the day’s chores every morning and every night, as well as multiple times during the day to make sure nothing is falling through the cracks.

I have three types of entries in each day’s list. At the top of the list are actual appointments: things I have to do at a specific time. For example, today’s list contains one such entry:

5:15PM—Help Teach Kung Fu

I’m expected to be at Waterloo Kung Fu Academy ready to teach by 5:15, so it’s right at the top of my to-do list. Timing doesn’t really matter for anything else on the list, but that one is a fixed commitment.

The next type of entry I enter in bold face, one chore per line. These are things which are special enough that I’m worried I might forget them. For example, today I have Grocery Shopping on the list. I need milk (among other things) and I don’t want to forget that I should shop; otherwise, tomorrow morning I’ll have to drink coffee without milk. If that happens, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s undesirable.

The final type of entry I enter in normal font. These are things I do pretty much every day, and I just want to keep track of whether I’ve done them. For example, I’m on a 1113-day streak with Duolingo and I want to keep the streak going. I’m probably not going to forget to do it, but I like deleting the line on the list so that I know it’s done. When I review my list at the end of the day, I can see whether Duolingo is still on it or not, and take appropriate action.

Writing is definitely on the list: there’s an entry for what I intend to work on in the morning, and what I’m going to do in the afternoon. These are just “normal” entries; I’m not going to forget that I always write in the morning, but it’s good to be clear about what I’ll be doing.

I also use this kind of entry for things like meal-planning—I have entries for breakfast and supper, and what I intend to eat for each. If I haven’t filled in the blank (as in “Breakfast: ?”), then I know I should make a decision before it’s too late.

Doing all this with a Google doc makes things simple—no special software involved, and I can edit the list on any device I own. As I said last time, the best system is the one you’ll actually use…and this one works for me.

Daily Logs

July 9, 2019 Posted in about me, sharing, writing practice1 Comment

In a few weeks, I’ll be a guest of honour at When Words Collide in Calgary, and while I’m there, I’ll be giving a 15-minute keynote address and an hour-long presentation on…something. I’m in the process of planning those presentations now; I haven’t finalized what I’m doing yet, but it’s got me thinking about planning. As a result, I thought I’d share some of what I do in order to figure out how to spend my days.

Today, I’ll write about my daily log. This records what I consider the most important information about what I’ve done during a day. Each day’s log has eight lines:

Writing AM: What I wrote in the morning and how long I spent on it; for example,; Haunted House novel, 2:45.
Mornings are my most creative time, so I schedule my most important writing then. On a first draft, I usually record word count rather than time spent, but during later drafts, I record time.
Writing PM: What I wrote and/or edited in the afternoon/evening. This is usually when I write short stories and commissioned work. Again, I usually record time, but sometimes word count.
PR: Anything I do as self-promotion…like this blog entry. PR is one of my weak spots, so I really want to keep track of what I’m doing; I need to make sure I’m not letting it slide. It’s a danger sign if I see too many days in a row with this slot blank.
PD: Professional Development: Anything I do to help myself improve as a writer and/or businessperson. Yes, I still read a lot of books on writing and creativity…but I also read stuff on promotion. Typically, this entry will list what I’ve been reading. (As I read PD stuff, I take notes in a separate notebook. The log just records book titles and article headings.)
Reading: What books I’m reading for “fun” (including audiobooks I listen to)
Push-ups: Since I’m trying to get better at push-ups, I record the number I do each day.
Exercise: Other exercise I did during the day including walking, jogging, going to Kung fu class, etc.
Life: Anything else worth recording, like getting a haircut, going to a movie, buying gas, etc. Basically anything I think might be worth keeping track of.

I write all this down by hand in a notebook. At some point, I might switch to keeping records on my computer and/or iPad, but for now, I find it simplest to keep a notebook on my dining room table and scribble log entries throughout the day.

As always with any kind of note-taking, I recommend choosing a medium you’ll actually use. Fancy record-keeping software is pointless if you never fire it up…and for myself, if there’s any friction at all to making a note, I just don’t do it. (Someday I’ll tell you the story of how I stopped watching TV.)

So there, that’s my method: at the start of each day, I write those eight headings in my log book, and then throughout the day, I jot down log entries. This helps me keep on track. If, for example, the Push-ups line is still blank near the end of the day, it shames me into doing some. I admit I don’t like doing them, but how else will I improve?