New Gamemaster Month Session Prep Part 4

New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.

There is a virtual tabletop advice section with each post. Up until now I’ve found it to be stuff I already know and/or consider basic. Last week did have good advice about dealing with distractions. However, I really like the virtual section for this Tuesday and how it mentioned people might have virtual session fatigue. A proposed solution was that since people don’t need to commute to the location, maybe you would schedule more frequent, but shorter sessions. Building on that, I think one important thing to think about is how hard it is for the other players to arrange time to play. There may be other factors, but what comes to top of mind for me (because of my brothers and other TTRPG players in my office at work) is that if your players have kids it’s worth having a conversation about whether it’s easier for them to get someone (baby sitter, spouse, parents, older siblings) to watch the kid(s) for one extended period or many short periods.

I continue to learn a lot and I’m excited for next weekend’s game.

• DM
• GM
• Game-Master
• Dungeon-Master
• Tales of the Valiant
• ToV
• Black-Flag-Roleplaying
• FoundryVTT