Stay in touch between sessions! Trials and triumphs of a full-time nerd in a part-time world

Stay in touch between sessions! Trials and triumphs of a full-time nerd in a part-time world

February 22, 2017

There’s all manner of real-life demands for time that can make for infrequent RPG sessions. Try using time away from the table to enhance your game!

By now, after leading the way to muster a group of roleplaying gamers, throwing their characters into the middle of an exciting situation, and letting the players guide the direction of the narrative, you’ve got yourself a campaign going. What started with your ambition to preserve and foster your gaming hobby, sharing the joy with others, has been a success!

With a few sessions under your belt, your players have started looking at their characters as more than just a collection of numbers on a piece of paper. They have hopes, dreams, ambitions and fears. Their pre-game pasts have become more detailed, enhanced with flavor and details based on their adventures and what they’ve experienced in the world so far. During play, they consider what the character would do, how the character would react to situations. They’re hooked … but then the inevitable happens.

Real life gets in the way.

Children, spouses and significant others, changing work schedules and a million other demands on attention draw players (and GMs!) away from the table on semi-regular gaming days. It might be one or two weeks until the next get-together, or maybe a month or *gasp* several months. The last session might have wrapped up neatly, with the heroes completing their quest and enjoying some downtime before the next opportunity arises. Alternatively, the session might have ended on a cliffhanger, or simply in the middle of an adventure.

With the fate of the characters – and your next gaming session – indefinite, what’s a group of nerds to do? Put your imagination and the internet to use and invigorate your game using online resources to keep players engaged and help your campaign world to flourish.

To me, my Internet

Now, it’s not uncommon for game groups to play their sessions in online environments to begin with. Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds are incredibly popular platforms for online RPG play, and Nerdarchy itself provides a great example of using tools like Google Hangouts to host gaming sessions as well.

Personally, I prefer in-person gaming because the social interaction generated when people gather together is one of the things I enjoy most about tabletop gaming. However, every game group I’ve been a part of for the last few years has made good use of online tools to enrich the game beyond the bounds of the sessions when we gather to play.

One of the simplest things you can do is create a Facebook page for your gaming group. If you’re looking at a gap in gameplay, use the time between sessions to share links to interesting content your players might find useful for their characters or simply about RPGs in general. This is especially useful if your group has players who are new to RPGs or are simply unfamiliar with the broader rules and options. If you are the one who introduced them to D&D or whatever game you’re playing, chances are they don’t know the rulebook inside and out or in-depth concepts about their own character’s race or class. There are thousands of blogs, websites, videos and the like you can share with your players to open up their awareness of tabletop gaming culture and the breadth of options out there.

For starters, Nerdarchy’s YouTube channel has nearly 1,500 videos covering every topic you can think of, from one of Nerdarchist Dave’s very first videos on embracing his inner nerd, to tips on gameplay and character creation, DMing advice and live sessions of their own games.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXVLvxbF2gM]

There are multitudes of similar YouTubers as well, and you can curate a steady stream of content for your group to help foster their burgeoning love of the game and inspire them with ideas on ways to play their characters that they can bring to the next session.

Another option is creating a custom website for your game group, something I’ve done several times that players seem to really enjoy. A few years ago, I created a campaign to introduce my friend’s adolescent son to D&D. My friend, his wife and their son all created characters that were around 12 years old, and their campaign started with a bang when they woke up to discover all the adults were missing. All of the children in their small village were naturally frightened, but the characters took charge and began investigating, soon realizing all the adults in the entire region were gone – including monsters. Using WordPress, I made a website that included short posts about some of the game rules particular to the characters, tidbits of lore about the game world, and lots of art to inspire their imaginations. There was a page where the players could manage a log of their adventures, and after each session I would write a short narrative of what they’d accomplished.

While playing through “Princes of the Apocalypse” with another group, I created another WordPress site meant to represent our adventuring company’s website (if websites existed in the Forgotten Realms). Dubbed the Red Larch Irregulars because of our group’s attachment to the town of Red Larch and because we were all non-humans, the site contained their mission statement, bios of all the characters, testimonials from the folks for whom we’d completed quests, the costs for our services, a bestiary of all the monsters we’d faced and a section for each character to keep their own blog. My half-orc assassin’s column, “Zorax’s slices of life,” was particularly popular with the other players.

For my current group, we have a vibrant Facebook page that fulfills several purposes. Chiefly, we can all stay in touch and coordinate when our next game session will be. Essentially, this means I post when I’m free and able to run the game for them, and whichever players are able to show up that evening will let me know. It’s also a handy way to share some of the resources I come across that the players might find useful, like the Battlemaster Maneuver Reference Sheet I found at the DM’s Guild that the group’s battlemaster fighter can use, or the homebrew Pugilist class that the party wanted to apply to the goliath impound lot attendant they hired as the first crew member of their spelljamming ship.

It also serves an important function as a way for me to work with the players to develop their characters and the sorts of adventures they’d like to have, in preparation for our next session. Between meetups, I ask the players to think about what their characters would like to do next, and this crucial feedback gives me direction to prepare multiple options to present to the players when next we get together.

Full Critical Role cast

You could take a page from Critical Role’s playbook and create Twitter accounts for NPCs in your campaign. There are quite a few of these I’m aware of, notably a number of villains the party has faced that tweet some pretty hilarious stuff. Obviously something like this is breaking the verisimilitude of the game, but if it gives your players another avenue to enjoy the story you’re all creating together, give it a shot and see what happens.

If you want to keep things simpler, start sending out a weekly e-mail to your players. You can recap their adventure so far, elaborate on details that might have gone unnoticed, offer tales beyond those the party is involved with, and all manner of things that aid in bringing your game world to life, all while away from the table. I started a document called “Thus Far …” for my current group, an ever-growing narrative version of their exploits that the players love. Very often the incredible and outrageous things that take place during sessions can get overlooked in the heat of the moment, and fleshing these events out can really help to illustrate to players just how adventuresome their characters’ lives are, the danger of their situations and the heroism they display.

All of these options and more are ways you can keep your game alive between sessions and provide an additional outlet for your creativity as a GM. More than that, they inspire your players to start doing the same. One of my players has fallen in love with D&D again after decades of being away from the game. He now enjoys listening to Acquisitions Incorporated podcasts, has his own Player’s Handbook and makes a real effort to roleplay his wood elf monk at the table. He recently wrote up a terrific backstory for the character and we had a great moment at our last session when I worked some of the details from what he wrote into the story.

It’s definitely worth noting that you don’t have to be in a sporadic group to use any of these ideas. Even if your group gets together on the regular, adding some of these elements between sessions strengthens the bonds not only between the characters, but between the players and GMs who share their enjoyment of the wonderful hobby of tabletop roleplaying games. GMs can gain invaluable feedback and ideas from their players, and the players can be introduced to content beyond their character sheet or even the specific campaign they’re playing in.

Using online resources is also a great way to keep players in the loop if the same people can’t make it to every session. Intermittent player groups is a problem as old as D&D itself, but there’s plenty of ways to work around that as well. Hmmm … sounds like a great topic to explore next week.

Until then, stay nerdy!

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