Reorganization

Here's some more information about the organizational changes I mentioned last entry.

Prior to these changes, I was using a combination of computer laptop (MacBook Pro) and Paizo's Pathfinder GM Screen.   Paizo's screen is pretty good, but I looked elsewhere for four reasons:

1. I would prefer to have information specific to my game on the panels.
2. The style of the Pathfinder Iconics (the heroes you see depicted on the players' side of the screen) does not match the look and feel I am trying to achieve in my world.
3. I wanted a shorter screen so it would be easier for me to see my kids.
4. We play two systems besides Pathfinder:  Savage Worlds, and AD&D (1st edition).

As for the Mac, I tried running my games from it, but I always ended up with too much stuff open.  A browser window with a dozen tabs, an Excel spreadsheet for combat tracking, another for NPC stats,* and Evernote for story elements.  I was all over the place, and while some people thrive in these conditions, I do not.

To remedy the situation I hopped on Amazon and ordered the Savage Worlds customizable GM screen.  This screen is nothing but clear plastic sleeves on both sides of three connected black panels.  I can decide what information to put into the sleeves, and I can swap out inserts for different games or systems.   The orientation is "landscape," so the screen is shorter and I can see my players.

The question then became what to display on the inserts.  The players' side was easy:  for each panel I put the name of the city, a name for the adventure, and a thematic picture pilfered off the Internet, printed on gold-colored card stock as shown in the picture.

What the players see.

The GM's side was tougher.  In the end, I decided that I wanted a few things:

• Pathfinder's grappling flow chart.  Grappling is complicated; the flow chart helps.
• A symbolic map of the larger, turtle-carcass dungeon.  I want to know where things are relative to each other.
• Stats for NPCs the characters are likely to encounter in a given session.
• A brief description of the more commonly occurring conditions.
• My custom confusion effects table (confusion happens a lot in my world, I have learned).

Some of these are a work in progress (for instance, I want the encounter stat blocks to be flexible enough for me to include traps).  Here are pics of what I used this past weekend:

NPC stat blocks.  Six blocks on one insert,
takes up the whole panel.

Pathfinder grapple rules on the left,
symbolic map** of subterranean, inverted,
four-animal-headed turtle-carcass city on the right.

Conditions, confusion effects, and
a quick reminder of the oracle's prophecy.

From there it was just a matter of printing them out on card stock (because the plastic sleeves are tight), sliding the inserts into the sleeves, and draping the tent cards over the top.  Behind the screen I had nothing but dice, a pad of graph paper to take notes, and my dungeon map for the section they're in.  I kept my laptop on a chair next to me and only used it to look up spells.

From a game management standpoint, this setup worked well for me.  Combat moved quickly, and I felt uncluttered.  I was able to focus better on what was going on in the game, and I found myself improvising more than usual.  We played for four and a half hours and covered a lot of ground.

We'll see if it stands the test of time.

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* Don't get me started on all the combat tracking and NPC generation products out there.  First, the dearth of good RPG software for Macs out there is a real sore point.  And second, most of the products I have tried tend to break down under the strain of my free-wheeling GM style and my custom, homemade monsters.


...and by homemade monsters, I don't mean starting with something known and adding a template.  If that was all I needed, Hero Lab would be all I need.  But I mean starting from scratch with a brand new monster.


** The map style, with images just grabbed from the Internet and assembled to graphically represent denizens, locations, terrains, etc., is an approach I got from Zak Smith (adults 18+ years only).   Zak has more bright ideas in a day than I have in a year, it seems.  I think some of my confusion effects may be lifted from his blog too.

GM Tent Cards

Just a quick shout out to Hit on Crit for their idea for tent cards.   I made my own custom tent cards this weekend and put them into use in our game.  The combat has never moved so quickly.  The kids got it right away and were consistently ready to act when their turns came up.

Looks chaotic, but worked like a champ.
Click to biggify.

I made some other organizational adjustments this session that I'll cover in more detail soon.

What a wonderful moment!

"What a wonderful moment!"

Those were the exact words shouted by a girl (a neighbor, age 9) who joined us today for our Pathfinder session.  Here's what happened.

Her druid, Wren, was standing on a ledge 20' above a churning subterranean stream.  It was 20' across to the far ledge, which was also 10' below her position.  Norma the dwarf had already jumped over and secured a rope to a column on the far side, then scooted through a door while ratfolk cultists rained tiny crossbow bolts down on her.  Wren wanted to follow, so she removed her belt and tried to use the rope like a zip line.  She rolled an acrobatics check but came up short.

Splash!  And into the drink she went.

After that, she had a series of skill rolls to make.  First, a Swim roll to see if she could get her head above water and control her direction.  She succeeded.  Next, the current was dragging her into a whirlpool, which she understandably wanted to avoid.  Her choices were swim into the whirlpool ("Nope!" she said), try to swim directly upstream away from the whirlpool, or swim along with the current while trying to bear to the left of the hazard to bypass it and get further downstream.  She chose the third option, rolled the die, and succeeded again.*

With each roll her excitement was mounting.  The stream rounded a u-turn bend, and soon Norma, high atop a different ledge overlooking the water, saw the druid floating downstream toward her.  Thinking quickly, Norma withdrew four spare pairs of trousers from her pack, and tied them together.  I made her roll a DC 17 dexterity check to see if she could finish in time.  I set that level because her plan seemed ludicrous to me, but it was such a colorful idea I didn't want it to be impossible.  Her dexterity only affords her a +2 bonus, so Sophie would need to roll a 15 or higher on a d20.  She rolled a natural 19, went prone, and dangled her make-shift "rope" over the ledge.

Wren's player was jumping up and down.  "We did it!"

"You're not out of the water yet!" I countered.

Realization dawned.  "Oh!" she cried, grabbing her d20.  "I reach for the pants!  What do I need?"

"A fifteen,"  I replied.  "And don't forget to add +1 for your swim bonus."

"Ok," she said, her excitement peaking.  She rolled...

...and got a natural 14, which meant she succeeded with her bonus.  "You did it!" I said.  "You successfully grab the pants!  Norma can pull you up out of the water."

The girl's fists were clenched, her knuckles white, her eyes about as wide open as they could get.  There was a weird pause, like she was gonna pop.

"WHAT...A WONDERFUL MOMENT!" she cried, jumping up into the air.  Then it was fist bumping and high-fives all around the table.  "That was amazing!"

This pic was taken a few minutes later.
The action described took place near the top center of the image.

Not five minutes later she jumped back into the water on purpose.  Think she's hooked?

---

* Failure to avoid the whirlpool would not have meant death.  I had a whole little spelunking/climbing kind of area planned for anyone who accidentally got flushed down the whirlpool.  Of course, the cave fisher down there could have been a challenge.

A Matter of Perspective

You enter a large, irregularly shaped cavern with peculiar walls made of something like petrified wood.  There are seven large holes high in the walls and ceiling, maybe 7' in diameter, randomly arranged.  On the floor in the center of the room there's an iron spike about about 5' long.  If you listen closely you can barely make out deep, hushed voices, too muffled to make out the words.

Suddenly, a gigantic hand reaches in through one of the holes and starts groping about blindly.  You dive out of the way to try to avoid it.  If you succeed, the hand eventually finds the iron spike, picks it up, and pulls it through the hole.

A second hand enters from behind you.  This time you stab at it in self-defense, and it quickly withdraws.  You think you hear someone huge in the distance let out a muted "Ow!"

Or maybe you aren't quick enough, and the hand grabs you and roughly pulls you through the hole and into an enormous chamber, where an armored giant and his friends examine you curiously.

***

Later, perhaps in the same dungeon, perhaps not, and after much exploration and general adventuring, you come to a room with an irregularly shaped stump placed in the center.  The stump has seven holes in it, 6" in diameter each.  An inscription on the boulder instructs only the bravest of adventurers to choose a hole and reach into it to find an amazing treasure.  You decide to give it a try.

You reach in and pull out a tiny adventurer.

Flash!  Aaaaaah!  Inspires every one of us!

Organic Curriculum

In talking again with my wife about this post, she thinks I'm giving short shrift to the role of RPGs in our homeschool environment.

She doesn't see our gaming as a supplement to the core curriculum that she focuses on.  Instead, she sees it as a curriculum in its own right, and one that develops organically, without a whole lot of structure.  The way she described it reminded me of unschooling.

It's definitely a different way of looking at it than how I have been presenting it in this blog.  I have talked about RPGs supplementing the curriculum, or even being "part of" the curriculum, but she sees it as a second curriculum, and one that isn't as tightly controlled as the more traditional schooling she provides in the classroom setting.

That's a more accurate way of describing what we're doing, I think.

Another Music Puzzle

The characters will arrive at the edge of a huge pit.  They must get to the far side to retrieve another instrument for their quest.  Eight stone discs, big enough to stand on, float magically in open space over the pit.  Each disc has a number associated with it from one to eight as indicated by diamond-shaped markings.  The markings are configured like the symbols on playing cards, while the discs are arranged in a pattern relative to each other as shown in the diagram to the right.

The characters will be able to hear a simple, repeating melody playing overhead.  The melody will correspond to the root notes of a standard jazz progression:

I  vi  ii  V  I   (1, 6, 2, 5, 1, or  C, A, D, G, C)

This is the order that the characters will have to tread the discs in order to get to the other side.  Stepping on any of the discs out of order will dump the character into the pit below.  The minimum weight to activate a disc is 50 lbs, so the players won't be able to easily test them. The distances between the discs will be such that the PCs can jump from side to side (e.g., from  #3 to #2), or from one row to the next (e.g., from #2 to #4), or even diagonally to the next row (e.g., from #2 to #7), but they won't be able to skip rows (e.g., from #2 to #8).

You may have noticed that they will not be able to make it back to disc 1 from disc 5.  The players will need to make the connection that #8 can serve as a substitute to #1, just as the 8th note of a major scale is the same note as the 1st note in the scale, just an octave higher.  So the true pattern is 1, 6, 2, 5, 8.

This will not be an easy puzzle for them.  The pit won't be save or die, of course, but I will put something creepy down in the bottom - and a way to get back up on the near side - to add to the excitement.

Spreading the Learning

Last week I posted a link to my blog on /r/rpg over on Reddit, and a user asked me some great questions:

How do you keep your embedded curriculum relevant to each of your children's lessons? I don't have much understanding of how homeschooling works, but I'm interested to see how you can avoid having the eldest child solve all of the simpler problems aimed at the younger two.

I gave an answer over there, and considered just linking to that and calling it a day.  Then I decided that I'd like to answer it again here.  I've given it some more thought, and I talked to my wife and got her thoughts on the subject too, which I'll share.

1. Keeping game content relevant to my children's lessons

This is how I interpreted MrWiggles2's first question.  The underlying assumption in the question is that my kids' curriculum and the content in our RPG games are tightly coupled.  This was actually something I blogged about trying to do early on when I first started integrating RPGs with the kids' homeschool education.  The idea was that my wife and I would look at what the kids would be learning in the coming months, and then I would take that and weave it into my game planning and preparation.  It was a lofty goal.

Sadly, it didn't happen that way in my house, for several reasons:

• Gymnastics and a few other things don't leave us sufficient time to play RPGs often enough for this level of planning to be possible.
• Making dungeons is a creative release for me, and the dungeons I create kind of go where they want to go.  

There, I said it.  My creativity is a beast, and I selfishly give it free reign.  Looking at subject matter and trying to make a dungeon around it feels forced to me.  The dungeon I'm making now, by contrast, has things in it that are good educational content, but I chose that content based on ideas that came to me when designing the dungeon.  

And the time thing really is a big deal.  By the time we got around to actually playing something that I had planned specifically to coincide with their lessons, the lessons would be long behind us.

I'm not saying that you can't tightly weave targeted subject matter into your games.  I'm just saying that's not how it's happening at our table.  

My wife's take on content:  she has observed our kids recognizing in their core curriculum things they have already learned in the game.  This is a happy accident, but it has happened on multiple occasions.  One prime example is the Skull of Fibon.  Just recently they learned about the Fibonacci sequence at co-op, but my kids already had it down cold.  Just one way the RPG complements the core curriculum.

2. Keeping older kids from solving all the problems

In my answer on the Reddit thread, I acknowledged that I hadn't actually thought about this before.  Since then, looking back on our games, I realized that the reason it hasn't been much of a problem for us so far is because I haven't hit the kids with a whole bunch of puzzles yet.  On the few occasions when they faced puzzle-like obstacles, everyone freely offered ideas and there was at least a modest degree of listening and cooperation.  In truth, though, young Nora has been dominated a bit by the oder two, so her ideas seldom make it to the forefront.

Solutions:

• Separation:  you can't solve a problem for your little sister if your character isn't there with her.
• Conditions:  E.g., blindness, unconsciousness, etc.  You can't solve the puzzle if your character can't see the pieces.  And you can't share your ideas with each other if you've been silenced by a spell.
• Class-based puzzles:  Make puzzles where it only makes sense for one of the characters to have the knowledge to solve it.  For example, it's a plant-based puzzle, so the druid has to solve it.  The trick is to make it so it doesn't feel forced.  Easier said than done, I know.
• Just go ahead and force it:  The DM just decides who he/she wants to solve the problem.  "I want Nora to try to solve this one."

My wife's take on evenly dividing the puzzle-solving load:  surprisingly, this wasn't a big deal for her.  She's fine with whoever solves it.  As long as everyone is paying attention, there will be benefits for all.

Finally, I just want to reiterate something I said on the thread:  I don't get bogged down in what the best way is to maximize the academic benefit.  I focus on having fun and letting any learning happen naturally. 

That's how we roll.