Trips

• Sure, you like going to the store once a week to get those snacks and go over that “to buy” list of supplies. Especially when that store is more than five minutes away. Why not ask a player if they can get the stuff on their way to the game? Instead of having them chip in money, you and the other players pay them back when they arrive (or before hand of the next game session you have).
• How awesome is it when you have to wait on your players to slip off and go to the bathroom or grab a snack, only to have them come back and you explain what is going on all over again? Instead, try preparing break-points, aka “Save Points” within your games. Natural pauses that allow players to go off and come back, or for people to get prepared to do something else.
• The dreaded, Aside. You know, that thing where a player wants to take you off to the side of the game table and explain his or her plans ‘secretly’. Don’t, it’s not original for one, and it makes you look bad to the other players; not to mention wastes their time. Instead, if that player wants to let you in on ideas, tell him or her to write it down and give it to you during a Save Point, or at the end of the game session.

Ticks

• Rolling the Dice. How often do you have to roll in a dice based system? The answer is… Too much. Everyone taking certain rolls for this and that. Instead, make some stats… static. Give the option to roll when it’s really needed, or to spice things up, for the rest of the rolls, give the players a chance to do what they came for; role play, not roll play. Also, as the game master, you don’t always have to roll. Instead, determine hits and misses as needed, provide better gameplay through descriptions, this massivly increases your game speed.
• Prepare for yourself. That’s right, make sure the players are prepared before their turn begins. At the beginning of the game get a set turn order. That way the players know who is next. Give them, at most, two minutes per round to come up with a nice response. This includes yourself.
• Writing on the walls. Not really, but sort of. If you have  a notebook or gm screen. You better have the most common problems already solved. Roll checks for this and that, generic responses and descriptions, your hand outs. If you don’t already have it written down, you’ll have one hell of a time figuring it out during the game, or remembering it.

That’s all for this segment of The Budget Game Master! If you have any ideas or suggestions for future articles, drop a line at adventamp@gmail.com or leave a comment here!

I have compiled a very small list of some things that you can do to prevent having to watch your budget so carefully. After all, if you make mistakes, or your players can’t afford to keep coming to you; you loose a gaming session. I call these Budget stoppers, because that is exactly what they will do! You don’t want that, my friends. So try putting these into practice! Let me know how well they work for you!

Job: What do you do for a living? How much money do you make per week? How much do you spend at your job, driving and eating?

In this case lets say, you live by yourself. You make $350 a week. You drive a good 15 minutes back and forth to work a day. During your break at work you spend about $5 a day. Let’s say you get $10 in gas a week.  If you work 5 days a week that’s $25 bucks in lunch food you spend at work. So just to work you spend $35 of your $350 dollars. That’s %10 of your income gone, just to work per week. Sucky, eh? So now we can say you actually only make $315 dollars a week.

I’d like for you to figure this exact formula out for yourself too, follow along with me so you can have your own budget pre-made.

Driving: When you plan your gaming sessions, how much do you have to drive?

Let’s say, since you maybe rent an apartment, it’s not the biggest, and your friend has a nicer place to play just about 5 minutes away. That’s going to probably be included in your $10 a week in gas. Maybe another dollar or two here and there.

Budgeting: How much per month do you spend on bills? Now, weekly?

So let’s say, between car and renter’s insurance you spend about $110 a month; utilities, internet, and cable $150, $500 in rent, and maybe $150 in groceries. So that’s $910 a month and almost $230 a week. So that’s leaves you an epic sum of $85 bucks per week to do what you like doing, or to save in case something happens. Not a lot of room, but, this is a rather common budget.

Spending: With the information above, we can now make a budget, a great budget.

In which, we can now sort things out to do, or not do, based on how much we want to spend per month or week on gaming. So let’s say you want to spend no more than $10 a week in gaming. It is a tough budget, but if you are the GM, and you are trying to supply everyone. You do NOT want to spend more than two or 3 dollars per person. Typical games usually hold about 5 people, not including the GM. So that’s going to deffinently stop your budget in its tracks.

As always, you can have your players bring their own food or cash, maybe just a dollar from each would cover it. And, surley they all have some spare change to lend. At LEAST a dollar. If you’re already getting them to donate a little bit of money, you can now start saving a bit of your own budget, weekly to get a monthly set of supplies. Maybe a new book every month, or some mini’s. You never know until you see exactly how much you save up.

If you have your players paying for their own stuff, then that is $40 a month you can have to spend on bigger things for your games.

The best way to save. ONLINE!

It’s already included in that tight budget like yours. You can always go to sites like http://www.roleplaygateway.com where they actually have full support for games like D&D with dice rolling feature built into their chat rooms. On top of that you have the option to play by post if you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to gaming. Lately, online role playing is what has kept me in the worlds of role playing, especially with my budget and little amount of time.

Until next time, good luck and happy gaming,

-Vexar

The first thing I worry about when creating a new role play. Is getting interest in it. To do that I have to create content for people to read over or look at. When I do this, I want to spend as little effort on it as possible. Why? Because it could turn out that no one is remotely interested in it. After I gain interest, I will work on creating more content. Even then I focus on less is more, I do less and get the players more interactive with the environment. I will go over this later on in the article.

Gaining Interest

This can be the most difficult part of starting up any role play. Whether it be on a forum, in a chat, or even with a few of your friends. Often times you have great ideas, but they just don’t catch on. Usually it all goes on how you actually present that idea. Honestly, if you aren’t acting that interested in your own idea, why should anyone else?

What you need to provide is just a basic idea, gather up any great thoughts that you have about the idea and go from there. Don’t tell too much about the story, or that there is some awesome surprise twist to the plot. Instead, give details about the world, and stuff that can be done in it.

All your potential players need to know, to be interested, is just the very basics. Imagine this as you going out to buy a new movie or game. That box is key to gaining your interest (aside from other people’s opinion.) So place your idea on this movie or game box. Picture those cut-scenes as your own cut-scenes. Think of the most important things you can say about your role play, while using as little possible to get it out.

“Airship pilots will collide in massive battles over the open seas as each fights for a stake in the new world. An uncharted world is waiting for the first pilot to take it by the throat and use it for all it is worth. What will you take your land for?”

Something as simple as that gives just enough information for the player to go “Hey? What do you mean? We can have our own land?!” That’s what interest is. Getting your potential players to ask you questions about the role play. Once they ask, it means their interest is peaked.

Getting Interactive

Now that you have your players asking you questions, it is time we get interactive. What does this mean? It means that you give them answers, feedback. This doesn’t mean tell them the story, give them the entire plot line. No, this means you use them to help create your very own world. Sure you may have great ideas, but so do your players. To shunt out their ideas would be as moronic as writing a book and calling it a one person role play.

If they have questions about location, or they want to help make stuff. Let them, this is being interactive, and it only increases activity and interest for your role play. There is nothing wrong with that. Never be afraid to say yes. In fact, the only time you should really have to say no, is if it is something that directly interferes with the story you have already come up with.

Starting it all up

Once you have finally gotten your setting fleshed out and going. It’s time to dive in character. Once again you want to get more out of less. After all, being able to have more time, saves you money. Remember that shorter descriptions work better for you. Make sure to vaguely describe the surroundings. Let the players fill in the meat of the details. After all, you are the game master, you simply narrate and play along. Leading your players through your awesome world and stories.

Keeping it going

With all of this said, make sure to keep your players on track. Never let them loose sight of their main goal. It is okay for them to have side “quests” and the likes. However, you do not want them to be running through an endless landscape with no clear accomplishment in sight!

Any ideas for future articles? Or anything you want to add? Leave a comment or send an email to adventamp@gmail.com

Good luck and cheap gaming,

Vexar

Our first project is -drumroll- Cutting down on time! That’s right, in today’s world time is money. The more time you save, the more money you save. I’m going to go over my own top ten ways you can reduce the time it takes to create and manage your role plays to save you money.

1.) Keep it simple. Images are awesome! But, saving things as a .jpg or .jpeg can take some extra time to download and upload; especially if you want to keep them at high quality. Instead try saving images as .png. Not only is .png faster, you don’t loose quality! If you can use text online instead of images, do so! It’s faster all around, and easier for others to search.

2.) Think before you write. That’s right, take notes if you are planning a role play. During your lunch break at work, or at school, take down notes of some rocking ideas that you might have had about a role play you wanted to start. This way, as you get more ideas, you can just add to the list. By the time you want to get to a computer and type everything up, there is no needless time wasted of having to sit there and think up this and that. Instead, it will be in that notebook filled with chicken scratch that you call writing. 

3.) Ask around. Before you even want to start role playing a certain setting or idea, ask first. You might have the most epic idea for your role play, but it does nothing if no one wants to play in it! Why spend countless hours working on a perfect story and setting, if no one is interested? Ask your friends, or whatever community you are part of. Some sites like Role Play Gateway even offer a forum just for interest checks!

4.) Remember the important keys to role playing. I’ll call them the three S’s of role playing. Story, Speed, and Spark! Story being the main idea behind the role play; the beginning, middle, and end. Without story the role play will have no purpose. So make sure you have these vaguely planned out before beginning the role play. Speed being where you are role playing. If you are in a chat, everything needs to noted before hand. All the big events planned and pre-typed, this will shave HOURS off of a chat role play. In a play by post setting, you only need small notes of what is going on. If you are playing at table top, make sure your players know when to prepare for their turn. It’s best if you set a turn order before the game. That way players know when their turn to say something is about to come up. And finally, Spark! Without this, there is no true role playing going on. You need to keep your players ignited. You must always provide them fresh content, give them something to want to strive for. Make sure you are rewarding them for their time and effort as well!

5.) Respect. That’s right r-e-s-p-e-c-t. Without your players, there is no game. While you are the final rule decider in the game, respect your players ideas and opinions, especially in a dispute. If two players are duking it out with one another, you’ll end up to a game ending scenario. That means you’ve done nothing but waste time. How do you handle this? Use the turn order, let one player prove their point, then let the other. After that, make a desicion. If no decision can be made, just continue on with the game how it was being played. Tell them “For right now, let’s just keep playing, it’s not that important to the story anyways. So how about we just get back to the game? We can worry about that later.” Just try and swiftly shift gears to get back into the role play. Personal matters can always be taken care of after a gaming session, or in private. 

6.) Pre-Made Content. Whether you download images or you end up making your own. Do it BEFORE you start your role play. Make sure any major content is ready to go, even hand outs to your table top group. This will allow the games to go one without pause, keeping your players’ spark up.

7.) Rules. Yes, rules ARE needed. Things such as turn order, no meta-gaming, etc… You need to limit how your players play; this prevents them from trying to become all powerful god-modding players. Let them know that they need to wait for another player to finish before they can go. They need to know that the game is for all of the players, not just them. Everyone is the star of the show. Also, just because the player may know something, doesn’t mean their character does. It’s a good habit to remind them what their character should and shouldn’t know, that way story-ruining scenarios do not unfold.

8.) Rinse and repeat. If you are a table top gamer and use monsters to battle. Don’t come up with tons of different monsters to have to manage. Instead use only a few, the players never get to see their information anyways. So after combat, just reset them and save them for later. This goes for chatting and play by post as well. If you have a certain description set for monsters, save it, or modify it after you use it the first time, that way you can make it shorter. If a player sees a monster, give it a name, that way you can just say “name” pops out from the dark. Since they’ll already know what it looks like!

9.) Less is more. A five page book on how your setting works and how everything looks, isn’t needed for a good role play. Remember that players have an imagination of their own, let them use it. Leave some things out so they can imagine their own ideas in that setting. In all forms of role playing, you don’t need massive descriptions of how things look either. This just wastes time of you having to read, or players having to read an overwhelming amount of information. Only describe what is important. Such as a rusty lever at the end of a dark corridor and the hint of raised platforms. I didn’t say anything about a blue, dimly lit corridor with markings on the wall, or anything about traps and moss hiding things. But I’ll bet that is what you pictured. I’ll be explaining how to write less and get more in a later article. 

10.) The beginning is the end. Remember, role plays are nothing without a goal! Put that goal in the very beginning of your role play’s introduction. Players need to have some basic idea of what they have to do to successfully finish the role play! Without that goal, it’s just aimless wandering and adventuring for nothing. Which WILL get boring rather fast. This also speeds things up since you know what the ending is already supposed to be. You have that clear cut goal, and can always use that to get players back on track if they are deviating too far.

That is all, I hope these few tips help you out in getting your role plays off the ground. I really hope they save you more time, and money! Any ideas for future articles? Or anything you want to add? Leave a comment or send an email to adventamp@gmail.com

Good luck and cheap gaming,

Vexar