I do a few thing that i think help the game run pretty smooth, but I find my self wondering what ever one else is doing
So to start things off I have two thing that i have been doing to help out my game.
One I give my players Jobs Like "James you are running Initiative tonight" and then I give James the GameMastery Initiative board and he keep track of it for the rest of the night with Me giving him the magnets of the badie's Initiative. At first i did not like the idea because as a GM it has always been my Job to Track Initiative but it as made my job easier just by handing that off.
The Next thing I do at he table is I keep maps under a Large sheet of Plexiglas and every one keeps has dry erase markers and takes notes about HP, conditions, There insanely chart (don't read that book). This lets all the player see all the other player stuff but I also keeps everyone honest and saves room a Character sheets. Also it keeps the maps Flat and it make it easier to mark on them. (not that the flip mats need it but other ones do)
So that is do things that i do to make GMing easier. Cus GMing ain't easy. What are some thing that you do to make life as A GM easier
Delegating is a great start. I have someone else at the table track initiative also on our dry erase board. The players will see the enemies act so them knowing the initiative numbers isnt a big deal.
Another thing i do is my improvisation kit. The players ALWAYS do things i dont anticipate. No matter how much I plan its always 5 or 6 players worth of ideas vs my own. I just cant think up every cases. So i've created a 'kit' that helps me deal with those cases.
First and foremost in my kit is skill DCs. If a skill doesnt have a set dc but is either opposed or is up to dm discretion, I use this DC list. I determine for my pc's level what I think an easy, moderate, hard, and crazy hard skill dc should be. Then based on the situation I decide how 'hard' the skill check should be. So if the players decide to swipe an old lady's purse to see if she is in a secret cult, the check might be easy. Sneaking into the mage's college on the other hand might be considerably more difficult.
The next thing in my kit is npcs. I have npcs on cards ordered by type (mage, healer, brute, skilled) and then CR. So if i need to throw together an encounter with the town guard i wasnt anticipating because the players tried to assault a local noble, then I can throw one together in a few minutes instead of half an hour or more.
I also have a set of maps that i've drawn. It contains generic locations for things like a town square, market, inn, temple etc. I keep these in an organized and indexed binder. So if the players decide to pick a fight in the local tavern, I have a map ready to go. I the players decide to storm the palace, got a map for that too.
Basically every npc i've ever made AND liked and most of hte maps i've come up with, i keep, index and keep near me at the table, for those situations when the party does the unexpected (you know, always)
What are some thing that you do to make life as A GM easier
The GameMastery board has been great in this regard, helps me keep things moving along, and keeps me from having 5-6 notebooks full of combat order :)
Not stating mook bad guys- I just keep them up until they need to die, assign arbitrary stats based on how tough a fight I want it to be, and go. Leaves me more time to focus on BBEGs tactics and motivations.
From being a church musician, I adopted a "flip chart" method of keeping track of character sheets and such. I put them in sheet protectors onto a clip board, but "upside down", so the clip holds the bottom of the doc, and I can use gravity to flip through rapidly. Wet erase markers for tracking damage/conditions, and when they go to the NPC graveyard, I can just wipe off the protectors and use em again.
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Nice Jimmy... :D
GMing is easy for some, and not for others. The intiative chart being run by a player is a good start, I also do the same thing, however, I play with 3gms and we all switchout after each campaign, so anything we can do to help our current GM concentrate on running his encounters is something we do willingly.
As for me personally, I am a very organized person, so I can do low and high level encounters without to much fretting involved.
I do give one of my trusted buddies the responsibility of keeping track of spell effect durations, (player spells, not my own) but all three of us have that intiative chart, so it is easy to hand that off, and I trust them to be honest, but I also watch it closely too.
Hope that helps.
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The next thing in my kit is npcs. I have npcs on cards ordered by type (mage, healer, brute, skilled) and then CR. So if i need to throw together an encounter with the town guard i wasnt anticipating because the players tried to assault a local noble, then I can throw one together in a few minutes instead of half an hour or more.
This is an excellent idea. I do something similar as I went through numerous pathfinder products and printed out numerous types of guards/undead/animals/skilled experts that I thought might be encountered in the campaign I was running.
This has been the most handy tool in my dm kit. :D
Excellent info Kolo.
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Frankly, half the stuff I come up with is completely off the cuff and spontaneous. I love to ask my players "ok, you are in such and such place, with so and so, and there are evil bad guys over yonder....what do you do?" and let them tell me. Often, if its not a pre-ordained encounter, its a lot of fun and exciting to kind of get a feel for how the players want the action to go and where they expect their characters to be and what they want them to do.
That said, for mooks and just spur of the moment encounters (whats that, you DO mouth off to the bouncer in the bar? ok, lets roll some init plzkthx!) and give an arbitrary amount of hitpoints....usually based off my characters ability. There are times where they need to mow thru stuff, and there are times where something needs to be challenging, I just keep the bad guy up until its challenging and then it drops if they do enough damage to it. Further, I am a huge proponent of not every fight lasting until death.
Descriptive language is also very important...your players really need to feel the setting to really get into it I think.
For speciffics, I downloaded a sheet that had several slots on it for bad guy mooks, I forget where I got it from. Lists slots for HP, AC, Init, Combat stuff, equipment. Preplanned adventure guys go in there. Again though, I don't research terribly much...the Beastiary and the NPC section from PFRPG are just guidelines, imho. For example, if I have a 2 hand fighter with a great sword, and he power attacks and has 18+ STR, I know he is going to do about 15+ points per hit, so, mooks might get a 22HP (enough to maybe survive a hit if he rolls poorly) and the lieutenants might get 40hp, and the main boss dude gets 65. Makes for a challenging fight, as long as you dont have the BBEG solo fight the encounter.
Dunno, GMming has always been easy for me, pimpin'....not so much.
Are you not entertained!
I'm always a little surprised at how much of the advice people give GMs centers on logistical stuff. I guess that's the low hanging fruit.
Stuff that has helped me:
Justin Alexander's rule of three: If the players need to know some piece of information, give them three chances to notice it. If there's only one chance to learn this information, don't subject it to the randomness of a roll, just give it to them.
Corollary: Don't ever roll a die unless you're comfortable with any outcome it will give you. There's no point in rolling a die if you're just going to overrule it anyway, and don't roll thinking that you'll never get that 100 on the percentile that will ruin your campaign, because it will come up.
One of Richard Garriot's design principles: Design a solution to a problem, not the only solution to a problem. You generally shouldn't go out of your way to make sure players only solve things through the way you envisioned it; you make one solution so that there is a solution, but otherwise things you didn't think of are fair game.
Flesh out NPC/BBEG motivations heavily. This is your insurance when your players inevitably skip or trivialize what you had planned. NPCs are the most dynamic part of your adventure, as long as they are still in play, they can react to the change in circumstances your players brought about. But you will need to know what they would do in those situations.
If you're bad at adding things quickly in your head (I know I am) and you're not using some electronic aid, reintroduce Thac0 into your game. Seriously. You know your player's armor class. You know your monster's to hit. Subtract the monster to hit from the player armor class and you get the number you need to roll on the die to hit. You do the calculation once before combat so you don't have to do the math in your head with every. single. attack. you. make.
Conditionals can make this a screwy system, but it works well enough at the lower levels before there's a billion different situational modifiers.
Fudging surreptitiously: if you find that you need to fudge combat for whatever reason, don't fudge attacks and damage. It's fairly noticeable when monsters start wiffing or hitting for half of what they were a second ago. Better ways:
Hit points are a bit more concealed. Your players might have an idea of how many hitpoints your monster has, but with new monsters they don't. You can generally lop off a quarter or so hitpoints without anyone noticing.
Bad tactical decisions are another way. Just play the monsters less efficiently than you would normally. Spreading damage around to several characters rather than focus firing, for example.
In our games, we have a large dry erase board that I turned into a GameMastery Board that we have mounted on the wall near me. I have tokens with PC Names, BBEGs and Mooks on it. On the side I have a condition area showing Buffs, Situational Mods and things like that. The PCs are welcome to use the Big Board of Woe ( They named it that after the first fight when all the Bad Guy magnets were everywhere and they had 5 >.< )
The players I have are old school and also keep track of stuff on the Battlemat that I don't keep track of on the Big Board of Woe.
Having your PCs help you is a great idea if they don't mind.
I also like Bomaz's of the cuff style, it's a little tougher on new GMs but if you can swing it, it gives the PCs the feeling that they REALLY have a say in the campaign! They have to live with what they decide to do, but THEY chose it and some PCs ( Mine included ) LOVE that!
Ender_rpm's Flip Chart Idea is also a great idea.
Hope some of this helps.
Have fun out there!
Frankly, half the stuff I come up with is completely off the cuff and spontaneous. I love to ask my players "ok, you are in such and such place, with so and so, and there are evil bad guys over yonder....what do you do?" and let them tell me. Often, if its not a pre-ordained encounter, its a lot of fun and exciting to kind of get a feel for how the players want the action to go and where they expect their characters to be and what they want them to do.
That said, for mooks and just spur of the moment encounters (whats that, you DO mouth off to the bouncer in the bar? ok, lets roll some init plzkthx!) and give an arbitrary amount of hitpoints....usually based off my characters ability. There are times where they need to mow thru stuff, and there are times where something needs to be challenging, I just keep the bad guy up until its challenging and then it drops if they do enough damage to it. Further, I am a huge proponent of not every fight lasting until death.
Descriptive language is also very important...your players really need to feel the setting to really get into it I think.
For speciffics, I downloaded a sheet that had several slots on it for bad guy mooks, I forget where I got it from. Lists slots for HP, AC, Init, Combat stuff, equipment. Preplanned adventure guys go in there. Again though, I don't research terribly much...the Beastiary and the NPC section from PFRPG are just guidelines, imho. For example, if I have a 2 hand fighter with a great sword, and he power attacks and has 18+ STR, I know he is going to do about 15+ points per hit, so, mooks might get a 22HP (enough to maybe survive a hit if he rolls poorly) and the lieutenants might get 40hp, and the main boss dude gets 65. Makes for a challenging fight, as long as you dont have the BBEG solo fight the encounter.
Dunno, GMming has always been easy for me, pimpin'....not so much.
Are you not entertained!
I use this style as well. I don't play off specific HP so much as a "feel" for how tough a bad guy is and when he should go down. That being said, I do try to keep it fair and in line with they players, since over half my table are fellow GM's, and they're watching...
I like for encounters to have a more dramatic, story-telling feel, so I put a lot of emphasis on how the bad guy is moving, indicating his level of injury without stating numbers. If one of the players scores a mighty swing against him at a appropriate moment, I just let the BBEG drop/surrender/etc, even if he has a few HP left. I've had too many encounters drag out with 1 HP left, and seen bad things happen. While it is fully within RAW, sometimes you have to go with your gut and go with what is more fun for everyone, RAW be damned.
Mooks/minions are really there just to absorb some damage and heighten the scene, so I don't worry too much about their HP. I throw the occasional curve ball to my more experienced players if they raise questions about HP; "Well, these guys are individual people, so why wouldn't they have different HP?"