Use Foundry VTT for hassle-free online roleplaying ¶

The Foundry Virtual Tabletop is cheap and is slowly becoming the only way I’m willing to roleplay online.

Foundry is customizable to a fault, you can play just about any game with it but it’ll require a few hours of setting up. In my case, that was time well spent because running sessions with Foundry is the most effective way of roleplaying online for me and my group. It just works.

If the game you’re playing is well supported then everything that’s hard about roleplaying online without a good VTT (syncing up character sheets, running non-theater of the mind play, etc.) is solved by Foundry so your players can focus all their attention on roleplaying their characters and you can focus on running the best game you can.

Bring your characters to life with vocal quirks and accents ¶

I’ve always been curious about voice acting but I’ve never put in the time and effort needed to be good at it. Now that I’ve put in some the required time and effort, I’m still NOT good at it BUT I’m confident enough in my poor voice acting skills to use them…

With my most recent campaign I made a commitment to try to give each NPC I embody a unique vocal quirk. My players seem to get a kick out of me doing this despite my inexperience which is great. Even slightly changing my voice allows for my online players to easily differentiate between me speaking as the GM and me speaking as an NPC which makes it much easier for me to go back and forth between the two.

Even if your voices are not consistent (mine aren’t) and if your voices are kind of shit (mine are) do it anyway, that’s the only way to learn. If you’ve got players with good voice acting skills at the table with you like I do, feel free to ask them to help you out with vocal work that’s out of your range (for now) and learn from them.

What does Beelzebub sound like? I don’t know but thankfully one of my players really does.

Write a one-pager for your campaign (or one-shot) ¶

Before the first session of my current campaign, I wrote a one-page document describing everything I thought my players needed to know about the campaign that I wanted run.

It included information like: the campaign’s premise and flavor, the unique parts of the campaign that would differentiate it from other campaigns that we’ve played, the details that would help players creating their characters and content warnings.

Writing this document helped me understand exactly what kind of campaign I wanted to run and forced me to express this in a concise way to my players. This document was also an effective recruiting tool because I was able to use it to both recruit players and get players that were already interested excited about the specifics of the campaign I wanted to run.

The characters my players created for this campaign were top notch and were a great fit for the setting of the campaign, I take partial credit for this because I gave my players all the context they needed to create these great characters.

Refer to page 10 of Sly Flourish’s The Lazy DM’s Companion by Michael E. Shea for more details on this.

Force players to think about relationships between their own characters and the setting during character creation ¶

Some tabletop roleplaying systems enforce this kind of initial relationship building as a core part of the character creation process but not all of them do. Even if I’m using a tabletop system that doesn’t explicitly call for this kind of rule (like Shadowdark RPG), I’ll likely house rule some version of it anyway because these initial relationships are just so useful.

Each player character starting off with a pre-existing relationship with at least one other PC as well as one NPC provides a solid foundation for the player to roleplay their character right from the start and to give something for the GM to build on before anything even happens during the first session of a campaign. For example, the relationship a PC has with an NPC defined during the character creation process can lead to a recurring NPC. Maybe this NPC will provide the group with their first “quest”?

These relationships tie the PCs together initially and grounds them all within the setting. As the GM, you can use these initial relationships as the foundation for further integrating the PCs in the world. When you need to come up with a character on the fly, maybe it’s an NPC that’s on one of your PCs sheets?

For example, Blotbug the goblin witch can start play with a relationship with the leader of the Cult of the Shattered Moon. This person tried to ritually sacrifice Blotbug to the Dark God that the Cult worships. Blotbug barely escaped with his life and went into hiding, eventually joining the party.

Is the Cult of the Shattered Moon still after him? If so, why? Why did they try to sacrifice him in particular? How has this near-death experience affected him and his outlook on life? etc.

Use the Stars and Wishes system to create a constructive feedback loop that helps you GM better sessions for your players ¶

The Stars and Wishes system (described in more detail here) has players provide positive and constructive feedback to each other and the GM at the end of each session.

A Star is a positive comment on one part of session, this can be another player’s roleplaying, a voiced NPC, a fun combat encounter, etc.

A Wish is something that the player wants to change, improve or conjure into existence for the next session, this can be something meta like wanting the group to have a leader to speed up the process of deciding where the party goes next, a story beat that they want their character to have or a spotlight they want to shine on a particular PC.

I’ve been using this system in my most recent campaign and it’s been working as expected. By design it creates a helpful feedback loop where players are given ample opportunity to say what’s working for them and what isn’t so that as a GM I can change subsequent sessions accordingly and be confident that everyone is having as much fun as possible.

Considering how much effort goes into the GMing process, having players spend a few minutes at the end of each session is a small ask, and in exchange it provides many benefits for my own sanity and my players’s enjoyment of the game. This system is simple but it’s very effective in ensuring that as a group we’re optimizing for fun and that every session we play is building on the previous one in a way that everybody at the table likes.

Bangs ¶

A bang is a scene/moment/NPC that you’ve come up with and you know that you want to have your PCs encounter… Eventually. This is a simple but useful tool because the tabletop roleplaying experience by design makes it hard to predict exactly what’s going to happen due to the unpredictable nature of the dice and your players.

Bangs allow me to prep particular scenes, whether they’re combat encounters or encounters with NPCs, putting them into a list that I can review before every session so that if the opportunity to bring a bang to life presents itself then I’ll be ready to do so.

Refer to So You Want to Be A Gamemaster by Justin Alexander for more info on Bangs.

Find a good adventure/module/dungeon and run WITH it ¶

Using good source material as a foundation for my campaign has allowed me to spend my creative energy on adapting to what my players do and on expanding the parts of the setting that they’re enjoying the most instead of forcing myself to build everything from scratch every week. I’ve tried doing that in the past and forcing myself to create everything from scratch every session often left me with little time to do the important creative work that my players would have appreciated most.

On a bad week, when I’m low on ideas and my players haven’t given me anything in particular to work on during the Stars and Wishes segment of the previous session I can always fallback on just running the module as-is. The alternative would be improvising really bad sessions and nobody at the table will be having fun when this happens (I can tell you that from experience).

NB: I’m thinking of a particular session of Mork Borg I ran where I sent the party on a quest for a maguffin through Zelda Tears of the Kingdom-esque islands in the sky, with their Eldritch beast and unholy patron flinging them into the sky to reach the islands. It wasn’t all that bad but it wasn’t a good fit for the setting of Mork Borg and fell flat in more ways than one (that campaign was fraught with issues because of the way I chose to run it but that’s a story for another day).

Good improv requires good prep. For me, that means using an off-the-shelf module and tweaking it instead of creating everything wholesale.

Write session summaries (even if you don’t plan on sharing them) ¶

The process of writing post-session summaries has helped me recognize and remember all the notable, cool, interesting moments and decisions players made during a session. This makes it much easier for me to come up with ideas and bangs to bring to the table in subsequent sessions.

In the campaign I’m running now, at the start of each session I verbally summarize the previous session’s summary and that seems to be both appreciated by at least some of my players and helps with getting players back into the appropriate roleplaying headspace by setting the scene and letting them take the wheel after that.

In previous campaigns, I’d try to write down key decisions players made and how the world reacted to them during the session but I’ve found that running a session and taking extensive notes was too much for me to handle. For whatever reason, after the session is over I’ve found it much easier to write down a summary…

So that’s what I do.

Make PC decisions matter ¶

If players choose to react a certain way to an NPC or interact with the world in particular way, remember this (maybe write session summaries to help you remember) and, if appropriate, find a way to acknowledge this decision by providing an in-universe reaction to it, either in the moment or in a subsequent session after putting some more thought into it.

Did a PC give a convincing off-the-cuff argument to encourage a crazed chaos demon to help the party out? Let the demon, who everyone at the table knows was meant to be a tough boss fight, become friends with the party. Let it happen and try to build on this new relationship.

Constantly ask questions about how the world reacts to the PCs actions, hopefully your players are thinking about how their PCs are reacting to the world and roleplaying accordingly.

There you go. That’s 99% of roleplaying solved.

Yes! And? But… ¶

Yes, and-ing is a technique from the world of improv. Essentially, your response to any idea, within reason, presented by a player should ideally be “Yes!” followed by the “And?” which is your constructive building on top of the idea presented by the player.

These ideas can extend beyond the scope of the character a player is roleplaying as. For example, letting everyone pitch in with ideas for what happens when a mage critically fails to cast their favorite spell can be really fun. As the GM, you have final say but the more I can include my players in the collaborative storytelling process the more invested they become in the story and the more fun they have.

There’s a balance to strike here, and every group will expect a different level of agency and control over the story that’s told at the table. Find your group’s comfort zone and stick with it.

Secret Death Timers ¶

Most of the tabletop games that I’ve played have a rule about PCs being in a “downed but not dead” state when they take enough damage. If their allies can get to thems in time, they’ll be OK. Otherwise, they’re dead.

Keeping the number of rounds a downed PC has left before they die a secret can ratchet up the tension at the table and make for more tense and memorable close calls.

For example, in the Shadowdark RPG rules, when a player is downed, a D4 is rolled publicly and the PC’s constitution modifier is added to the roll. This number is the number of rounds of combat that the PC has left until they die.

Instead of doing this, roll the die privately and track the number of rounds yourself. Then, watch as your players scramble to try and come up with a way to save their fellow player’s character from dying (while you giggle maniacally).

I stole this rule from the Mothership RPG rules and I’m likely to house rule into any high-lethality system I run in the future.

Conclusion ¶

That’s about it for now. GMing is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But I’ve also found that it’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve done. GMing is one of the most fulfilling creative activities for me because of its collaborative nature. Everyone’s creative energy at the table combines to create stories and moments that are greater and more personal than I could have ever come up with on my own.

I plan to continue roleplaying for as long as I can and getting better at it along the way. You can expect me to write a follow up to this post once I learn some more about GMing.

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