User:Oznogon/PaizoCon 2024 GM Tips and Tricks panel

JASON KEELEY: Hello, Paizocon. How's it going? You can't answer me. I can only talk to the people here on this Zoom call with me. Anyway, welcome to the GM Tips and Tricks, and possibly tics and also, I guess, other lice, I don't know, panel.

>> And trips.

JASON KEELEY: And trips, and all the trip offs of the tongue, of course. We're gonna get to your questions. If you wanna post them, pop them into the Twitch chat, our moderators will scoop them up for us. But in the meantime, let's talk about us and who we are and all of that stuff.

My name is Jason Keeley. I am a senior designer of Pathfinder, and I have been around doing all sorts of things for Paizo. And frankly, when we talk about GM stuff, my GMing style is a little experiential, I like to do the voices, and 95% improvisational when I can, as you can tell. I'm always saying very silly things.

And of course, I'm joined by all these wonderful people here. Brian, why don't you start off with the other introductions for us?

BRIAN BAUMAN: Sure thing. I'm Brian Bauman. I'm a software architect at Paizo, and I've been playing tabletop RPGs for about 25 years. I find that the most consistent thing that I do across games is making all the little quips and little meta commentary bits that keep the game sort of light and free-hearted so that people focus on just having a good time.

JOHN COMPTON I'm John Compton. I'm a senior developer on the Pathfinder narrative team. I certainly have a long background of antagonistic GMing that I grew out of. Of course, like the past 12 years.

So there's a lot of lived experience of what not to do that I can provide a lot of recommendations. But one of my big things is I have learned, especially over the past decade, to celebrate every victory that the players have and to never take it personally when one of your bad guys happens to get totally pasted by the opposition of the PCs.

Check out our live play for the narrative team from last night if you want to see some examples of that as I cry on the inside.

(laughs)

>> Shay.

SHAY SNOW: Oh, hi, I'm Shay. I am a Pathfinder Society developer and my GM tendency is long obnoxious villainous monologues. And you didn't know that I was the one who kicked the chicken in the coop and blamed it on you when you were a child. And now it is my ultimate revenge.

And then my players go, okay, are they done yet? And I'm like, yeah, okay, now you can kill them and wipe them across the board.

>> Shay's the sort of person who, when we have long Pathfinder Society in her background sections that never gets explained in the scenario, she's, they say, why is that a problem? It's going to come out in the monologue.

(laughs)

JAMES CASE: Hi everyone, I'm James Case. I'm senior designer on the Pathfinder rules and lore team. We're working on the hardcovers and I am the GM who maybe printed out a couple of statblocks, but is otherwise just like rearranging the dungeon rooms in front of the players. 'Cause I don't know what's going to be in that room until they open the door and collapse the singularity.

>> Tom, why don't you tell us about that?

TOM NELSON: My name is Tom Nelson. I am not of the Paizo crew, but I have for the past year, I've been working on a product and safety tool called the Deck of Player Safety that is designed as a really quick session zero. I call it a three-minute session zero from when you don't have time for a session zero. So it's really meant for convention games, organized play, now in-person or online, 'cause there's a digital version as well. And Paizo has really embraced the concept and where we're going with it.

So in terms of GM style, I think there's the spectrum of the rules from rules that's written all the way to, rules don't matter. And I used to be very rules as written and found that I'm just in the middle. It's all about keeping the flow going.

And like, hey, best guess, let's keep it moving. I do like to do the voices too, but I find that between turns or just whoever spoke next, the accent typically changes to something new.

>> It's relatable.

>> The same accent as mid-conversation. But my players seem to be okay with that.

>> Yeah, that's a thing. Thank you, Tom. Some great points. I think that it does bring us to a little sort of overview of GMing a little bit and talking a little bit about player safety and session zeroes and that sort of thing.

As John pointed out, and I totally agree, that it's important to celebrate the players, be fans of the players. You're here to facilitate everyone having a good old time. And sometimes whether or not that means to sort of bending the rules or occasionally sort of fudging a little some things here and there, that's perfectly fine on my account. Does anybody else have any sort of thoughts on general GM ideas and maybe something a little about session zero?

>> Yeah, before I do a session zero, once I got people confirmed that they're like, yeah, I definitely want to play this game. Here is my schedule because we all know scheduling is the ultimate beast of tabletop games. But once we get all that settled, the thing I do actually is the very first thing is I send out a consent sheet to all of my players where I'm like, here are all the things that could possibly occur.

And depending on the game, it could be bugs, it could be eyeball stuff maybe, things like that. It also includes other generic things. Do you want to see transphobia or homophobia in this game? Do you just want to ignore it? I do a lot of historical game theming. So it's like, do you want to see these things or do we just want to ignore it? And once I get those back from players, I'm like, okay, I know how to start our session zero.

SHAY SNOW: I think that when you're GMing, like TTR reviews(?) are really cool because there's this really improvisational element. You know, a human is kind of adjudicating the game with you and with a bunch of other humans. So it can go in a lot of directions. And that's definitely a thing where knowing your players or checking in with your players and being like, some people really want to do that like gritty, like if the dice kill everybody in the first round, then that's just how it goes and we'll pick it up.

Some people are like, you know what? This is my fun Sunday afternoon activity. That's my escape from real world. And we just kind of want to live in a world where we can use magic to take care of our, I'm going to keep saying chicken coop because it's behind my head, but you know, and so, you know, safety tools are definitely important, but they're kind of like, they're one facet of this.

You know, we're all here to do this experience together. What are we here for? Are we here to like beat up monsters? Are we here to have fun? Are we here to have like a very deep dive into a certain historical period or a tone, that sort of thing.

>> I think it's important to keep in mind that it's not just about your fun as the GM, but remembering that every player is there to have a good time. And you should want them to walk away thinking like, that was great, you know, and no one thinking, I wish that, you know, at least I hope that doesn't happen again, whatever that may be, you know, so yeah, being in tune to it is always good.

>> And kind of tied into that also is that it's also about the GM's fun. And I think that can be something that as we harp about, like it's about the player experience and all that stuff, it can be easy to bury your own enjoyment or hear that as the message, but it shouldn't be. And this is kind of one of those points of like communication.

A lot of things that I've heard in terms of horror stories is like people just being kind of passive aggressive with each other or not communicating or things like that. And if the players have reached such a point where you're no longer able to challenge them and challenging them is one of your goals, it's one of the ways that you have fun is having kind of tighter back and forth combats. Maybe that's the thing to kind of talk about them with. So one of the things that we've done in some of my games is we've had to tone back a little bit of our min-maxing style and like,

I'll give a recommendation at the beginning of our campaign to say, I want people to build B plus characters. Don't go A plus or A, but do something that is going to be competent and fun and fills your niche and is going to be memorable, but don't make it something that's going to break our combats. That way we all kind of have a general sense of where we want our power level to be.

>> The GM is a player in the game too, in a way, right?

>> Yeah.

>> And I feel like some of this stuff happens before session zero. Usually the GM will spend more time on the game than anyone else in the game. And so it's really important that they're running a game, not necessarily the game that they'll have the most fun with, but a game that they will feel fulfilled running. And so in some ways before session zero, when like you're picking the people who you're going to be invited to the game, having kind of already a general theme in mind and being able to like bloat that to them.

So that people don't all show up to session zero and you're trying to reconcile completely separate views of like what the game might even look like. You should already have a sense of that going into session zero, I think.

>> I'm laughing only a little bit because Wes Schneider, when he first introduced me to Dread, did not tell me what Dread's theme is. I should have known from the name.

So I answered the questionnaire and had a comedic veterinarian as my doctor who spent the first hour being kind of a chucklehead and sure was crying by the end. Those are the sorts of moments that just as Brian was saying, like convey the theme.

>> Dread is a full on crucible for any character you put into it. It'll burn away all the sort of extra bits and you'll be just a lean, mean block pulling machine by the end for sure.

>> One other thing I'd like to throw into the general GM tip idea is as the GM, you are the window into your player's knowledge of the setting and the encounters and all that. And when I develop adventures or when I am playing in somebody's game where I'm GM, I'm always looking to see what is the information that's being conveyed and in what media.

So there's, you know, you can be verbal, you can be gesticulating using your voice voices, you know, Jason, you can point at the map and now you have kind of a visual learner sort of perspective but when you provide a couple of details of the place, you provide a couple of details of the NPC, then you are seeding little possibilities, little hooks that every player can latch onto to come up with creative solutions that surprise you.

So if you say the NPC has an eye patch, they'd be like, all right, here's our plan. We're gonna sneak in on his left side. It's like, okay, great, fantastic. We can have a bar fight and rather than waiting for the player to say, is there a chandelier for me to swing around on like a complete kook? You can say, hey, there's a chandelier that is within, that is high up enough that you'd have to make a really good athletics check to jump up and grab it. Okay, now they have ideas, but you gotta give them that information if you're going to have that creative gameplay.

>> Coming from sort of an improvisational and theatrical background that I have, those sorts of things are called gifts. You give them to the scene and the players or your other improvisers can take them and use them. And that's something to definitely keep in mind.

And speaking of gifts, we've been having some lovely gifts of questions from our Twitch chat. So let's get into that. Thank you, thank you.

Let's start with this question. What are your toughest and easiest types of adventures that you have run at time? Basically, what's your go-to type of adventure? What's the thing that you have the most trouble running?

>> Myself, I think this may be in my mind 'cause I haven't dared venture into it, but anything feywild. That I see as being the most difficult because even though I can draw on references, well, I think media references, perhaps I don't know of any good ones to draw on and a true feywild experience that's just not just a small shift from the norm, but really immersive. So I think the feywild for me is a really difficult one. The easy ones are the classics like giants and typical fantasy. And I can lean into that easily, but yeah. Feywild scares me.

>> I think just a quick riff on that or plug is yesterday we had a whimsy in TTRPGs. That was absolutely fantastic and insightful. So when it comes to having the videos posted online, I also encourage people to check that out for the whimsy versus comedy and how they're not the same sort of thing. So might have some good fey tricks there too.

>> I definitely think, I agree with what Sam is onto there in that when you have a strong genre, and one that's very well-known, people can kind of come in with a shared set of expectations.

Like if you say this is like a heist in the vein of something like Ocean's Eleven, that's like a very kind of specific thing. If you're like, this is a very classic fantasy, that's easy. When you have things that are a little softer on the edges in terms of genre or have a lot of different ways it can go, it can be hard to get people, people might be coming into it with different expectations. Some people might think of fey and they might think of like, oh, this is like whimsical and funny. And some people might think, oh no, I just bargained away like my middle name. I hope that's not gonna be a problem.

>> So yeah, anything where you have those strong genre touch points are usually, those are usually pretty easy or easier rather, especially if it's with a group who you're playing for the first time at a convention or you might not know as well, for me at least, I think.

>> I find I'm really good with extremes. So like I can run like a horror game really well. And I find it very easily. That sounds like bragging. I find it easy to run an intense horror game. I also find it easy to run an intense silly game.

I recently ran Deep State Dogs, which is a one-page TTRPG in which you play pets of government employees, specifically dogs of government employees. And it is on you to defend things. Like ours were like, oh no, there's like these cats with the fungal infection and they're coming in and they're infecting all the humans. So we must fight them. And it was great. And it's very silly.

And on the flip side of that, like I said, horror is very easy for me in that, I'm currently running a Monsterhearts campaign, which is very, take an Appalachian manor home and put it in Silent Hill. So it's very cyclical and things like that. And you're learning deep things.

I find it very hard to kind of get in the middle of that, to kind of like balance everything. I'm a very extremes kind of person. So it's like back and forth and back and forth.

>> Cool. Shay, you gotta run a horror game for me at some point, I guess is what I'm getting out of this.

>> I'll do it.

>> Brian, what about you? What are your go-tos?

BRIAN BAUMAN: So I tend to try to run settings with twists. I try to straddle the line of being a genre bait and switcher while still being sure to give players like something that they'll enjoy. It's a lot of fun to present them with a concept for what the game world is going to be, and then slowly start peeling away at the edges of that until they come to realize that they've actually been in a different genre the whole time. As long as they're still able to engage in the parts of the setting that drew them into the first place. Usually the juxtaposition works out well for me.

So I tend to do that a lot with horror. Sometimes some settings become horror. Sometimes I start in horror and the setting actually ends up being very whimsical and lighthearted. And yeah, just kind of play with genre conventions. That way I tend to play with a lot of people who tend to be pretty genre savvy. So they tend to enjoy that sort of juxtaposition of styles.

>> Great, cool. Jon, you just sort of jumped in about the whimsy, but do you have a go-to?

JOHN COMPTON: Yeah, so the hardest thing for me to run is a concise adventure, which is one of the reasons I haven't given some insight when I volunteered to run orders today. It's like, this is a four-hour adventure. It's a seven-hour adventure.

>> Not if you check out everything.

JOHN COMPTON: And that's partly because I tend to go with whatever creative solutions or diversions or whatever people go with. One of the things that I tend to be best at is running either sandboxes, especially urban sandboxes or heists. Heists, infiltrations, influence encounters, things like that, where there are going to be these long periods of concoction ideas, conversation, coming up with plans, stuff like that. And then we start throwing some dice at the thing to execute it and then we kind of move on to the next little narrative island.

Those are ones where I tend to really thrive, especially when you take a system like Pathfinder or Starfinder that have the bulk of the rules that are kind of focused on the combat-oriented part. I really thrive when I can play in areas where we are not doing the combat thing, if only to be kind of a way of juxtaposing the different play styles.

>> I think my go-to is always, it's kind of Weird West stuff. I kind of really enjoy getting into that kind of cowboys and zombies and mummies on trains. And for me, the really high-concept stuff is always difficult to run.

And sort of what James had mentioned here, if no one knows the world that you're kind of really interested in playing in, it kind of, it's hard to make everyone be on the same page. I think John, when I ran like Unknown Armies for you and Diego, it was always like, this is a weird modern-day weirdness. But it was like any weirdness, but it was very difficult to describe what the weirdness was. And it becomes a thing that's like, everyone needs to read this. Please read this 20-page background document before we get into it, which never really works of course.

>> I would say just one last thing to conclude with, anybody thinking of GMing for the first time, go with whatever subject matter feels the most comfortable you're the most familiar with, because you'll enjoy it. You'll be less stressed. And also you will have no shortage of players looking for somebody to run a very standard adventure. So yeah, just go with it. And then broaden yourself.

>> Yeah, the more you GM, the better you'll get at it. That's a sort of an overall arching, sort of like a practice, practice, practice kind of mantra.

>> For those of you who are like, just real quick for like, well, how do I prepare to be a GM? How do I make that first step?

Just do it, just, you will never prepare enough. You will never have enough NPCs. You will never have enough setting. Just do it, just start GMing.

>> And if you have other GMs in the area, then you might even kind of co-GM with one of them or ask them for some help prepping. That way they can set you up for success, even if they're not necessarily holding their hand the whole way. But they're onboarding techniques.

>> Yeah, Chad is saying that you never need to prepare as much as you think you do. And I think that's true. You can also always just sort of ask, as mentioned in the chat, ask for a moment. Hey, I need a minute to think about this everybody. And you know, we're all there to have fun and enjoy each other's company. So I think that's what that's...

>> That's what 10 minute bio breaks are for, for you to frantically churn out another step.

>> And you're also not like, even though you are the GM and you are, you know, you don't have to be like the sole judge and adjudicator of the game.

Like there's a lot of ways, there's a lot of strategies you can do where, you know, if you are in the middle of running something and you're not quite sure how to roll those, but it's like, they rolled well. Just be like, yeah, yeah, you probably get, you get a success, that's probably fine. You know, we can look at the specifics of it later, or you can have something where, you know, one of your players who's very much like one of those gear monkeys really likes playing the system. You can just be like, hey, could you, you know, could you look up how much, what this spell should do just while we kind of move on with the rest of the thing. And we can go back and move the bonus up by one. And it'll, you know, she'll have the bonus by the time it gets to be her turn anyways.

So it's fine, but you know, you can delegate some of those responsibilities to your players. You don't have to fly solo for the whole thing.

>> Absolutely.

>> And this touches on something that we talked about earlier, which was giving gifts to your players by seeding in aspects of the world for them to make use of in their improvisation later. But I find it's actually also really helpful to facilitate in your players doing the opposite so that they're contributing to the scene so that they're like, is there a fireplace in this room? Like that sort of thing.

And I'm actually curious what you all do to try to help your players develop that sort of conspiratorial improvisation with you as a GM so that they're helping to build the world as much as you are. Because I find that when both sides are doing that work of creating a shared world to inhabit with players, everybody's improvisation goes up a notch. Everything gets better because everyone is now realizing, oh, we're collaboratively crafting a story. We're not just playing through a GM just like defining everything for us.

How do you all help your players who maybe aren't there yet kind of move into that sort of collaboration? I mean, I have ideas, but Shay looks puckish.

SHAY SNOW: Well, so I have a Monsterhearts game that has been running for almost five years now. We started with a one-shot and we just kept going. And if you don't know anything about Monster Hearts, the way that it works is once you hit five advancements, so five levels, once one person hits that, you wrap up that season. You have exactly one more session left. And then you go right into the next, and then we just go right into the next season and right into the next season. We've just continued on.

And over these five years, we have slowly compiled an enormous Wiki of just like the world. I have an entire sheet filled with just, okay, here is my whiteboard. Here are all of the gods. Here's how they all interconnect with each other. Here's their relationships. Here's their children. Here's their exes. Here's their this. Here's when they became gods and when they became humans. It's a whole thing.

And the thing that I have found that is very helpful is yes, and so I will, my spouse is in the game, and my spouse is the one who kind of tends to be a little bit more reserved on just throwing out details about the world. My other players, boom, boom, boom. I'll tell you everything.

But when I turn to my spouse, my spouse can kind of be like, I don't know, is there like a fireplace in the room? And I'm like, yes, there is a fireplace and it has blue fire in it. And they're like, okay, well, why is the fire blue? And I'm like, I don't know. Roll a check to gaze into the abyss to find out. And then we'll build on that. And I've just found that really enabling anything they throw out. If they're a little bit unsure about it, take it and be like, what do you want to do with this thing? I don't know. Can I throw the demon baby into the fireplace? Absolutely. And just moving forward.

>> There's a couple of strategies that I've seen in some other games, especially when you're putting a party together. I think maybe someone that does this, but you know, you say like, you have all of the players there and you're like, this is an anecdote that you guys have from your past. What is it? It says, yeah, it says you on the other hand, you have some sort of tension. What is it?

And I really liked that when starting a group, because it kind of, it makes the, you all meet in a tavern a little more, a little more connected, which is often a lot of fun. I think that letting the players decide minor details of the world, like Shay, kind of what you were saying, especially like if they're rolling knowledge checks, because that also avoids the thing where, you know, Shay might be like, I roll a check on this monster to figure out what its abilities are. And I say, oh, it can breathe fire. And then Shay like just turns the party and just parrots exactly what I just said. Oh, it can breathe fire. Yeah.

You know, you might say like, hey, roll a check to remember something about the Royal Guard. And they say something. And I was like, okay, the Royal Guard is carrying some kind of insignia. What's the insignia? Just tell me what you want the insignia to be. And that's kind of the, which is great because then I don't have to think of all those minor details. I am a very lazy person, but it also, you know, I'm also the kind of person who, if you say like, describe literally anything. And then I'm like, well, I can't, I don't know what to describe. That's too many things.

If you're like, describe the insignia that they wear, you know, oh, it's a falcon. You know, it kind of brings it down to the place where it's a little easier for people to just kind of snap it and then move on.

>> Right.

>> Terrific. Well, let's move on to another question from chat. I've actually got two questions that are here that are a little similar. I'm going to kind of smoosh them together.

If you're running something like an established adventure, do you have tips for engaging players who aren't vibing with the modules? And are there tips for people who you want to, who are, want to get involved with the plot, but are only more reactive and you want them to help them be a little more proactive?

>> For-

>> It starts two questions in one.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> I would think one thing about player styles if they are more reactive and you're, you would like them to get more proactive, give up on wanting them to become more proactive. I've learned to like, just accept that people have different styles or at least don't put too much stress on making them change their play style. Some people love to sit back and enjoy the show and allow them to do that. That is, they are having fun in that way. So don't stress too much if you don't feel they're as participatory or proactive as some of your other players. Let the others run with it. Let them enjoy the show. And of course, communicate this, make sure that they're still having fun in the same process.

>> The reactive side of things is sometimes a player being more reactive, most proactive, doesn't have the tools information wise to be more active or more proactive. So it could be that they are waiting for you to give them information that they can react to because like, let's say you throw them straight into the lost children setting. They don't necessarily know all the countries and nations for creating character ties or this organization, that organization, that daily. They don't know which guns they can call out to, whatever the case. So one of the things you can do with players, if that's what you are identifying, might be holding them back a little bit from a proactive angle, is to give them some, give each one of them or their characters a couple of little information style seeds to things.

A game that Keely and I were both in, well Jason joined a little bit later on, was a Mummy's Mask game that was an office game that the GM had like, he basically had us draft little cards at the beginning of the campaign that were like, like they opened up ancestries, they opened up class options, but they also were like, you have a connection in the palace. You have a villainous nemesis, whatever. And some of them, even when they got to the end, if nobody had drafted them, were ones that had drawbacks, where it's like, there's now an arch villain who is out to get the party. So you might have to draft that just to save the party some trouble.

But that's the sort of thing where you could be like, hey, when we're creating your character, let's go ahead and build in a couple, like a guild organization that you're tied into, let's work with you to kind of seed a couple of NPCs that, especially me as the GM looking ahead in the campaign, I know will be relevant, and maybe give them a couple of little back pocket secrets. And if you give them like a little deck of, like half-index cards that they can have next to their dice or whatever, and whenever they're like, gosh, is that a thing that I have? Wait, I have the treasure map for that sort of thing. Or I checked the mystery key and everybody rolls their eyes and they're like, you have checked the mystery key on the last 15 locks. It's going to work on one of them. Again, though, it will work on one of them, but it's a 37th store(?).

Like those are things that can give them tools to start using proactively or to consider proactively so they can come up with those schemes.

>> Yeah, when it comes to adventure paths, I find it's really tempting, especially with like those adventure paths tend to be incredibly comprehensively written. They're long, they have a lot of detail in them. It's really tempting to just run them as written. And I think that can be a bit of a trap because all of the things that a player will connect to in the world are their unique experiences and are the things that are happening that aren't on the page. They're the specific dice rolls. They're the random NPC enemy that managed to escape because of luck of the dice and then comes back as a recurring minor villain for the next two books.

And so it's really trying to get away from just run the adventure as written rather than using that as a framework to inject all of your group's personal anecdotes and personal victories and losses and story in between all the gaps between what is written and what isn't written. So I find it really important to not try to just run it straight down the page 'cause then it's just, oh, make this check, make this check, run this fight, run that fight. And you lose a lot of what makes it unique to your players.

Yeah, and they won't buy in as much because they know that you're just, they can tell that you're just reading off the page too.

>> Any designer and lots of wonderful designers out there, any designer who can write the one adventure path that is perfect for every audience would be, obviously a godsend. Understand that your group is gonna take it and do it differently and just keep it fun for your group.

>> One other quick thing for the reactive players is also you can introduce an NPC or subplot that is tied directly into them. So, Shay has not been speaking out much in the game. So, Shay's bard who should be singing more. I'm going to introduce a rival bard in town who is doing a show that's gonna be at the exact same time as Shay's bard's show. It'll get a little bit of a rivalry.

And anytime Shay, within reason, anytime that Shay's starting to look a little bit bored and we're doing some more urban sandbox, I can just mention that Maserico the Magnificent is in town again. And I know that Shay will start making strangling motions. But that way you develop a little vocabulary of friendly triggers that you know can kind of inspire and elicit some reactions out of the players and get them more involved.

So, I wasn't up for saving the world until you told me Maserico was the lieutenant of the main villain. And now I just want to stop him.

>> Just to prove a point. For proactive versus reactive characters, one thing that I've, players, one thing that I've really found is very helpful, especially when having reactive players is to limit things. And that sounds counterintuitive, but if I go, "Here is Golarion, what do you want to do?" Then you're going to have a reactive character who goes,

>> Too big.

>> I don't know.

>> Farm first. And you're like, "Great, cool."

So instead what I boil that down to, okay, you have an airship, do you want to go to Taldor or do you want to go to Cheliax? Here is a brief description of Taldor. Here's a brief description of Cheliax. Both of them have plot hooks. Where do you want to go? And then they can go, "I want to go here." You're like, "Great, I can build off of that."

So like, if you just throw like, "Here is the entire sink of stuff." That can be very overwhelming for people sometimes. So just sort of boiling that down into, "Here's three options, which one feels better to you?" And then they can go, "I like that one." It's just, it's a lot more, it's a lot less overwhelming. It's a lot more friendly to especially new players and people who are a little bit quieter.

One of the things that's sort of also, Tommy sort of mentioned is just the communication aspect. If someone is not vibing with the adventure path that you're running, it's all right to sort of like, in between sessions, to be like, "Hey, is there something, what is it about it that you're maybe not into? Is there something maybe that we can change that gets you more into this sort of setting?" And if it's like, "I just don't like the entire idea of it." Then maybe you can go to the whole group and be like, "Hey, look, we want to do this and we want to move on."

There's no shame in like not finishing a campaign or an adventure path or something like that. You can always just have everyone that's just kind of like blase about it. Move on, play another game. We're all human beings with finite lifespans. So if the group as a whole isn't having fun with something, go on to something else.

>> And to add on that, there's a stars and wishes mechanism that perhaps people have heard of, which is instead of even singling out an individual, you get the group together, end of a session, just stars being, what were the highlights? What did you enjoy most? And wishes, like everybody gets a chance to express where they, what they would like to happen next. And that just sets some, they're laying the groundwork for you to build something you know they will enjoy.

>> Cool. Here's another question that I kind of a little bit want to talk about because it's something that I use. Someone is asking that, "Do we enjoy using films in order to help players understand your game pitch?"

>> Yes.

>> Yes, indeed. Exactly. I mean, it's a short answer.

>> Buy me a feywild film. I need to go.

>> We got to find you something. Depends on what kind of thing. 'Cause like, yeah, I'm in a group. I do a group that meets every week and we do lots of different campaigns with lots of different short campaigns. And before we make characters, we always try to watch a little something, maybe an episode of a TV show, maybe like a 90 minute movie that has the sort of vibes of what we're going for for a campaign. And it really sort of locks people in. And a lot of times it'll be like, help people come up with character concepts too. Like, I didn't know what to do until I saw this actor do this, I want to be that. But like maybe, you know, with a twist in some fashion. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Not necessarily films, but I will use films. I will also use music. Music videos have been a big inspiration for me. No, Shay, don't mention that one. Sorry, I'm like, how about this one? Okay. But like, for instance, in one of my games, I put together a big playlist and I was like, here's the playlist. And it's inspired by this book and this movie. And also let's just sit down and watch the music video for ghosts, rats. And then you'll feel like this is the kind of vibe I'm going for with this world.

And a lot of people kind of, and I've found that a lot of my groups kind of, you know, bond with that.

>> Are you all able to get more buy-in for somebody to watch like a feature length film compared to like reading a 20-page study document? Like it's more work, but if it gets more buy-in, like that's worth it.

>> I think it is. I mean, it is part of your group, but I find it's a little easier to kind of sit and watch something than it is to read something, to be perfectly honest.

>> I think it's also, and this is also 'cause like I tend to play with, you know, with people I've known for a while. So that obviously takes some of it out. But like there's also kind of just like a general pool of media touch points in general, you know, that I think are easy to point out.

Like I maybe will not bring up like one specific movie a lot of time, but I like to kind of throw a couple out there just 'cause it helps to, and if you give one reference, people might lock in a little too strongly on that, which is like useful if we're playing, you know, like literally the Star Wars RPG, you know, but if we want something that's kind of there, I'm like, well, it's kind of maybe a little bit Star Wars and like a little bit Outlaw Star and a little bit something. And it just kind of gives you a little more space to play within.

>> Yeah, that tends to be my approach is, yeah, throwing out a dozen titles and being like, if you've seen a couple of these and hopefully a picture general enough titles that they have, then yeah, I haven't tried a movie night. Maybe I should try that sometime.

>> I think it's World of Darkness, is it? That's, it's like page three. They're like, here's all of the movies that inspired us to make this thing. And you're like, ah, yes, wonderful. I can start picking at things.

>> Fair enough, yeah, yeah. We're getting a little close to the end here. So I'm gonna get one more question before we have some wrap ups at the end here.

If I was talking again, going back to sort of official APs, this question is, you know, there's that one part that you really want to run and that the people you know are gonna have fun with, but you haven't gotten there yet and things are getting a little samey and there's a little bit of a waning excitement.

Is there so many sort of tips that you would give for like injecting a little bit of excitement just so you can get to that one part that you know everyone's gonna love?

>> I mean, as somebody who's AP authorship primarily constitutes volume fives of six volume series. Look, if you're on like middle of volume two and people are getting bored and you really want to get to the one that I wrote, then you can always just meet up with people, communicate as we've mentioned, and then do kind of a little calculated fast forward. And what you can do is you can have people rebuild to whatever the level it's going to be and give them kind of a rundown of like what some of the major plot beats are that you're skipping past.

And if you do this in kind of a round-table discussion with them, then as you bring up these little ideas, what you can do is you can have each person give like a couple of minutes of narration of what their player or what their PC would have been doing in that little arc. And then you can kind of incorporate that into set up the jumping off point for once you get to the part that you really want.

But as several people here have mentioned, like there's no need to play games that you're not having fun with, but if you know that there's part that you're going to have fun with, then come up with an interesting way that maintains the narrative, that builds the narrative and keeps the agency of your players intact so that they can kind of shape what that new starting point is.

>> Introduce immediacy, is one that came back on. I remember in one of my groups I was playing, this was actually the Star Wars game. The group had developed a habit in the past couple games of maybe taking too long to come to decisions. And the first session of this game, new first GM playing it, we were all in like the access shaft being like, what do we do? Taking too long.

And he was just like, stormtrooper throws a grenade in. Yeah, it happens. And we're like, oh great, now we have to move. Now we have to start moving. And so, it doesn't have to be complicated immediacy, but it does help to like, you can give people a little bit of a push.

>> Yeah.

>> I think it was Raymond Chandler, one of those noir writers who says, when you don't know what to do with a plot, have a guy with a gun kick down the door. And then figure out why later, basically, right? You just have that action happen. And if you need to figure out why.

I mean, this isn't, you know, we can, you can always look at, looking at talking about written APs, you can always like find something in there that's maybe a semi-interesting encounter that will shake things up and just move it around. Find, you know, hold up, take it too long to plan. Well, maybe all those ghouls come to you.

>> Yeah. Just the idea of like, how do we get through all six volumes before the villain even shows up and is like, you guys have been gaining levels for too long. The idea of the villain, book six shows up in book three and is like, I'm cutting this off right at the nub.

>> This is getting, this is gonna be a problem.

>> I have done this time loop so many times and you have beat me every time.

>> And you just do a one section, like kind of interstitial adventure of trying to escape this 10 levels higher than us threat until we can reset and kind of have the two years later, they returned, but now it was artifacts transition.

>> That's good. That's fun.

Gosh, any other, let's just sort of do, sort of wind it down here. Everyone's got some great questions.

I do wanna point out and Johnny pointed out in the chat that we have a discord channel up for further questions. If you didn't get your question answered, show up there, we're gonna be there for, you know, until about twoish, maybe even a little bit longer if people are feeling on it. So go ahead and ask your question there. We'll see if we can get some kind of answer.

But Tom, let's talk a little bit about the deck of player safety.

TOM NELSON: Oh, well, thank you. So it, you know, we've talked a lot about, well, we've talked to the spectrum of home games with longtime friends. And, you know, right now we're in PaizoCon, a lot of strangers online together, or if you're sitting on a convention with strangers, I run a lot of convention games and I struggled with any single safety tool that kind of covered all of the bases. And what I mean by that is like, how do you prevent a problem from happening to begin with?

And in a convention, just like the stream, we're always pressed for time, right? So how do you do it quickly, efficiently when you're sitting down with strangers? And I came up with this concept last year and kick-started it successfully. And Paizo, as I mentioned at the outset was, has really taken to it and we'll start, you know, incorporating it into their at least web store going forward.

But the gist of the project is that it is a simple deck of cards. It's available in physical form at https://www.deckofplayersafety.com/, as well as a free digital version that Demiplane has created. Because during the kick-started, Demiplane reached out and said they loved it. I said, you can do it for free, just make it available for people.

But the idea behind it and the reason why it works, I feel effectively, is that it's very fast to do. Like I started in the beginning, three minutes session zero. And most importantly, it's anonymous for everybody. So it heads off problems before they happen instead of something, I used the X card forever, but I also witnessed how people after they played the X card, were so stressed about whatever was happening leading up to that. And my feeling is a lot of people in a public setting where they don't note with strangers, frequently will walk away just with those uncomfortable feelings. So the way the deck of player safety heads those off is it's essentially a deck of cards with 30 very common subject matters that come up in TTRPGs.

And I know on video, the deck of cards will be hard to see, but things like graphic or descriptions, bugs, Shay alluded to bugs earlier, but even swearing, whether it's swearing at the table by your players, spiders, very common, flirting, again, the flirtatious bard, or it could be somebody, just unwanted attention by another player at the table, harm to domestic animals and so forth. So there's 30 different real common subjects that come up in the games. And the mechanism behind it is that after you explain to the players, this is how it works. Each player skims the deck and they would select any topics that they want excluded from the game.

So if they didn't want graphic or descriptions, then as a GM, I'm typically rather graphic. So I would just tone down the blood and guts and all that stuff. I would know to do that. And also the players would know that too.

So everybody would select any subjects. If they are okay with anything, then there are multiple anything goes cards. And that's what keeps the process anonymous for everybody is that each player turns in at least one card. So after they've selected their topics, the cards are collected by the GM, you shuffle them. So even myself as the GM, I don't know who turned in what cards, but you review them with the players. And then everybody is on the same page within just a few minutes about these items we're gonna keep out of the game, but otherwise let's play. And it really can help head things off without embarrassing anybody and can be very quick for either face-to-face and thankfully from Demiplane's efforts, a really good digital one for online play.

Just that the digital one is free. It is system independent. It's https://demiplane.com/dops, D-O-P-S for Deck of Player Safety. And you could launch an online game, start with that. It would reveal all the topics and then you just start playing.

So I'm really happy Paizo is embracing it. I think a lot of the game producers are in game stores as well as, because it's actually effective in trying to prevent those bad feelings.

>> That's really cool.

>> Cool. Tom, I do have one question. What if my, the thing I don't wanna see in the game is a rendition of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes". How do I make that clear that when I turn in the "Anything Goes" card, what I mean is. Anyway, that's my joke.

>> I still include the X card because you can't cover everything in 30 topics. So you can X card any Cole Porter or anything. If it comes up in play.

>> I'm gonna have to remember that if we ever sit down together, Jason.

JASON KEELEY: If you start singing Cole Porter at me, oh, I'm gonna get so mad. Great, thank you all panelists. One, but as we are gonna wrap things up, if there's any sort of, if you wanna be seen on socials, if you wanna give that information.

And for me, I would like to sort of end this. We are all talking about GM things here and we're all sort of the con, probably for our groups, maybe the Forever GM. What's, and as you sort of sign off, tell us a little bit, very brief, one sentence, the next character you're going to play.

I'll start just so we get everything going. I'm Jason Keeley. You can find me on a lot of socials @herzwesten, H-E-R-Z-W-E-S-T-E-N, pretty much anywhere you can find that sort of thing.

And the next character I think that I'm going to play is probably a sort of very, what's the word I'm looking for? A very capitalistic doctor. So, you know, oh, I'll treat you, but it's gonna cost you.

JAMES CASE: I'm James Case. I will be in the Paizo Events Discord for the rest of the weekend.

And the next character I wanna play is a tanuki bard using the new tanuki ancestry coming out in August, which you can find out about on the next panel about Tian Xia.

>> Oh, very good.

SHAY SNOW: I'm Shay Snow. You can also find me on the Discord pretty much all this weekend.

You can find me @spellsinsugar pretty much everywhere that there is social media. It's my only username.

And the next player that I'm gonna play is a secretly snake girl from the deep south named Peaches, who comes from a whole family of very fancy snake people.

>> Love it.

TOM NELSON: My name is Tom Nelson. I'm social media byproduct(?). I put out there @DeckOfPlayerSafety on pretty much all of them. So it's easy to find.

My next character, if I ever sit down to play as a player, is gonna be a bard who will be the first standup comic ever. Because there's never, nobody ever plays a standup comic bard.

I was like, I'm gonna play a known standup comic bard, but I will voice it as Gilbert Gottfried, which will annoy everybody for like, and you know, until they make me stop. You ever wonder what happens? Like, yeah, I won't go there. Yeah, that's the next one.

>> Awesome.

BRIAN BAUMAN: And I guess it's me. I'm Brian Bauman. You can find me on various social media @BrianMBauman.

And I don't know when the next character I'm gonna play is, but the last character I played was a kobold Roman centurion with reach weapons and a lot of ability to poke you with sticks before you're anywhere near him.

JOHN COMPTON: I'm John Compton. I am going on the event server. I'm also kind of hanging out in the various fan Discord spaces for Pathfinder and Starfinder.

And the next character that I'm intrigued to run is going to be a skeleton with the, with some form of nephilim heritage that is a deceased hesperid nymph who died from lack of sun exposure and is now risen as a nymph bloodline sorcerer.

>> Terrific. This was our session zero for our next campaign, everybody. So tune in, https://twitch.tv/officialpaizo, Wednesday nights.

And no, I'm kidding. Thank you all for joining me and joining all of us. And we'll see you around and have a good rest of your PaizoCon, everyone. Bye-bye.

>> Farewell.