The example given in the original article was pretty good, so I’ma copy paste that instead of thinking up something of my own:

Tell:

He was obese.

Show:

There walked a man, heav­ily breath­ing as if every step were a quest. Eyes mov­ing fast, head hang­ing low try­ing to spot those who would silently laugh at his body and, at the same time, if it were indeed pos­si­ble to hide its huge, amor­phous shape.

First of all, this glut of information will draw attention to the fat man.  Players looking for hooks will assume there’s something there.  Wherever the GM concentrates details is usually where he expects you to go.  Players who read into this will look at the fat man and hope for more game.  This isn’t a good or bad thing, just something you must be aware of.  If you’re describing a throwaway NPC in this manner, the players will expect more from him.

More importantly, all this information does is tell people the facts.  Showing off this NPC’s obesity can be done as show or tell.  It may build a vivid image, but doesn’t change the player’s perception of the fattie.   However many words you use to say it, this guy is fat.

So where would a vivid description hold more weight?  Opinions of course.  Use your descriptions to shape your players opinions of the game instead of to tell them the cold, hard, facts.

Let me back up into an example.  Let’s say your GM is running a spelunking expedition into some long forgotten tomb.  As you set camp and encounter happens.  Incorporeal ghosts rise up from the ground and attack your party.  The GM describes these ghosts as “scary.”  What’s your reaction to being told something is scary?  Mine would be “no it isn’t.”  Especially if I play a bold adventurer, I’m gonna be defiant and run right up to “scary’s” face.  Maybe I’ll form an image in my head that’s a collage of things generally considered to be scary, but there’s no way in hell my character will be scared.  It just doesn’t work that way.

Instead, what if the GM described the stale air taking a sudden chill and the torches winking out one by one?  Tell the players what happened and let them come to the conclusion that “that’s scary.”  They’ll take that conclusion to heart.  They may even act scared.

(And yes, I had this opinion before I saw Inception )

Basically what I’m getting at is that you can’t tell your players what their opinions are.  They’re in charge of their characters, not you.  You can tell them what the facts are and they’ll react to those facts.  Even if it were okay to tell a PC their opinion, they’re not obliged to believe it.  If you want to shape the players’ opinions, show them some compelling facts.  They’ll draw their own conclusion.  If you picked the right facts, it’ll be the conclusion you wanted.

So back to the original topic.  When do you show details instead of telling them?  When you’re trying to help the players form an opinion.  Details about the NPC’s weight and hygiene can be left out (although if you’re trying to convince them that an innkeeper is trustworthy, showing them his saggy mantitties and cheetoh dust encrusted sausage fingers ought to work nicely.  Trustworthy is an opinion – use details to arrive at it.  Fat is a fact.  Just tell them he’s fat and move on.).

Anyway, what I realized was that my style of writing complex games with lots and lots of subplots may actually be easier to write than the simplistic one plot at a time approach.

Whenever other GMs complain about having to write out all the possible paths their PCs could take, I silently scoff at them.  I’d never write out a branching path of where the game could go.  That’s just so below me.  P’shah!  Those GMs struggle with a single plot line, while I, master plot tapestry weaver, handle 6-12 concurrent plots in any given game session.  How dare they assume that one plot at a time is hard work?
Well.  It is.

A plot run in serial is going to progress a lot farther in a game session than four parallel plots.  The farther that plot goes, the more decisions the PCs will reach.  More planning simply becomes necessary.
Look at it this way.  Let’s say that every hour of plot results in a decision that branches.  Let’s also say you’re running a four hour game session.  A serial plot would split into two, then four, then eight, then sixteen possibilities in a single session.  Four plots on the other hand, each getting an equal amount of play time, would each split once.  Those four would double and you’d have eight possible plot lines.
Here’s a plot splitting into two paths at each hour mark:

Each dot is a decision.  Each of the line segments is an hour of game time.  Lots of possibilities to plan for.

On the other hand, if after each major plot decision, you switch to another plot, you end up with far less material to write.

Consider that at each branch, if the PCs choose right, the left side is wasted planning.  On the multi plot chart, that’s 4 segments total.  On the serial chart, that’s 15 segments lost after the first decision!

What I’m getting at with this isn’t that I should show some respect for people who branch out whole campaigns at a time.  Quite the opposite!  Those people should try running more plots at once.  It saves time and it makes your game look more complex.  It’s a win-win!

Essentially what’s happening is that the more sections you divide your game session into, the less you have to look into the future to figure out where your PCs may go.  Any plot advanced 4 hours is going to have some decisions.  But any plot advanced 1 hour will have fewer decisions, and thus fewer contingencies for you to plan.  This method also has the benefit that if the players go in a direction you didn’t see coming and could never have planned for, you don’t have to improvise for quite so long.  Go on a tangent for an hour and then recover by the next session.

I wrote a script that adds margins to the PDFs produced by Character Builder.  It’s available as a website.  Just upload your PDF and download a new one with margins.  At some point I’ll add an option to control the margin size.

http://files.sagotsky.com/pymargins/index.py

Fudging is one of those topics in gaming that can go either way, but people will always argue about.  Some players want to do everything by the dice.  Some players want the random elements fixed in the name of fun.  Either way is valid, yada, yada, yada.
What I’m wondering is if it’s possible to run a game with fudging preferences determined by each player.  Gorak’s PC is very attached to his character and doesn’t want to lose Gorak and have to reroll.  He opts to have death fudged away so he can keep his favorite character.  Rofelio’s PC likes challenges.  He wants to believe that he overcame all the challenges of game on his own.  So he opts to stick with each and every die roll, even if that means losing to a crit happy kobold.  I want to think those players could co-exist.  I also have high expectations for player maturity.  I’d hope that if Rofelio’s PC didn’t like the idea of another PC being immune to death, that he’d speak up before the GM asked for preferences, rather than throwing a hissy fit when Gorak somehow lived through the Tarrasque’s digestive tract.

Can it be done?  I dunno.

Will I try?  Probably not.  At least not for a little while.

And my other thought…

I was talking to one of my players about the fact that I don’t really do dungeons in my games.  Or travel.  He pointed out that they’re easy to write.  You can spend an afternoon setting up a dungeon that has 3-4 sessions worth of play time. I have to admit that that’s appealing.

But then I thought about what kind of effect the dungeon would have on the game and how I see dungeons when I’m a player.  The thing about dungeons is that they take you out of the game world for a while and isolate you from what’s going on.  That can be a good thing.  I like giving players a session off from the main plot every now and again.  But if you do it for too long, they’ll lose the plot.  The world will move on without them.  Even if it doesn’t (maybe the dungeon was in another dimension where time moves differently), the players will have been away from the main plot so long that they’ll have lost bits and pieces of it.

Long story short, you can’t put the players in a hole for months at a time and expect them to remember (or care about) what was going on on the surface while they were away.

Each game session I’m going to focus on one NPC.  Not at the expense of the party, mind you.  The NPC may not even get that much screen time.  But all my mental prep for the game leading up to a session will take place in one NPC’s head.
What I’d been doing up until now is spreading the love around all the NPCs pretty evenly.  I made sure to give them all memorable traits and I even tried to hit each of those traits whenever the players met with that character.  There were a couple problems with this technique.

1. Mannerism overload.
2. What’s really memorable?

In the first session I fed the players 20 quirks in 20 minutes.  They met up with 6 or 7 NPCs, all of whom had 3 unique mannerisms.  All in rapid succession.  No wonder they thought the game was weird and quirky.  Even if they liked all those quirks, there was no way they were going to remember which NPC had the eversmoking cigar or which one rode a bobcat named Fefnir.  All these details did nothing but stress them out (see previous post).

What’s more is that I tried to give the NPCs certain traits that I thought would be memorable.  This is backwards.  Instead I should throw the NPC out there and see what the players found memorable.  Then the next time they see that character, show them that aspect.  Telling them what they think is memorable is just silly.  I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea.

The other thing we discussed was how I divide my roleplaying attention over several characters.  I think my RP ability deteriorates exponentially.  For n characters in my head space, I’m roleplaying at approximately 1/n^2 of my capacity.  This is why I rarely like to be a PC in more than two games at once.  I just don’t have the brainspace to hold that many characters, so all of them get played poorly.  As a GM, I’m holding 10-25 characters in my head at any given time.  You do the math.

However, if I pick an NPC and stick with him I’ll have the whole week between sessions to get into that character’s head.  He’ll get a solid introduction to the party.   Even if it’s someone who was previously neglected, that’s okay.  From then on I’ll be able to reinvoke that character very easily by mentioning what the players remembered (instead of what I told them to remember) and hopefully I’ll have an easier time conjuring up a character I’ve already spent time with.  That’s the theory anyway.  We’ll see if it actually works.

I think this approach is actually very close to what Lost does.  Not the part about making up bizarre, inexplicable storylines, and giving the audience more questions instead of answering anything.  The character focus.  When the show started, everyone was vague and indistinct.  Each character got an episode.  You got some insight into their past and mostly saw the episode from their POV.  After those episodes, those characters became more real.  You could relate to them and you knew what they’d been through.  I think that’s what I’m aiming for with this idea.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I use index cards for NPCs.  To force myself to mention the details of NPCs and to play them like caricatures, I’ve been making sure to write down three distinguishing traits and three distinguishing acting hints on each card.  This way when I look at an NPC I can instantly bring up his surly demeanor and magically everlit cigar.

Anyway, the criticism I got early on in the game was that it was too quirky and silly.  I thought this might have something to do with the NPCs.  I myself am quirky and silly, so maybe that got reflected in their defining traits?  After all, why would I define an NPC by his brown hair and glasses?  I probably did go a little overboard in some of those traits.

So this weekend I ran the 5th session.  It went a lot better and all involved said it was the best one so far.  One of the fights was particularly memorable.  The players were explored an abandoned mine that had recently developed an infestation of cultists.  The big fight scene took place in a collapsed area of the mine.  Rather than the ceiling falling in and blocking off paths, what happened here was that the floor had sunk inward.  Rubble remained along the edges of the chamber, effectively creating stadium seating.  The finely crafted mine cart rails (did I mention it was a Dwarven mine) still hung above the room.  Best of all, we played the combat on Construx.

Afterwards one of the players said it was the best low level combat he’d played in 4th ed.  What really made it awesome in his eyes was when the minions on the far side of the room rode across the still standing rails in a mine cart.

Now, I don’t disagree that that was awesome.  What confused me is that, as far as I could tell, it was the same sort of quirky detail that they hadn’t taken too kindly to in previous sessions.  Why did this detail get a good reaction and the other ones fail so badly?

To be honest I haven’t figure out an answer yet.  But I have a working theory.  What I’m thinking right now is that the details effectively amplify whatever the players are already feeling.  I can’t help but avoid the cliched food analogy, so let’s just roll with it and pretend I came up with something original later.  Details are icing.  When the game is going well, they’re the icing on the cake.  But when the game is going poorly, instead of a cake you have shit.  And the details are icing on that shit.  And the players are sitting there wondering why you just frosted a turd.  Did you think you could write a bad game and disguise it with a little humor?  Or are they wondering why you wasted your time on some meaningless fluff when you could have written a better, if blander, game session?  Either way, they resent those details.  And if the details are memorable and quirky, you’ve given them an easy way to remember what they hate.  So don’t waste your icing on a shitty game.  Let steaming turds lie.

Anyway, that’s the theory I came up with as a GM.  I’ve tried to switch back to my player mentality and look back at some of the shitty games I’ve played in (where shitty games applies to the game written or run, ignoring circumstances caused by other players).  More often than not I can remember the wasted details.  They made bad sessions memorable.  In some cases, those details are all I can remember.

Even if that theory falls flat, I do still believe that details count positively and negatively.  I’d like to say that I’ll find some way to test my theory, but I’m much too lazy for that.  What I will do however is skim the details whenever I detect unhappiness in the game.  If the players are upset at a plot, I’d rather not give them something else to dislike, especially if skipping those details can bring us to a better part of game that much more quickly.   I’ll let you know how that works out.

1. Open Character Builder
2. View Character Sheet
3. Print
4. Choose PDF printer.  (Set this up yourself.  Google will help.)
5. Click preferences
6. Click on the layout tab.
7. Click the advanced button.
8. Towards the bottom of the advanced settings you’ll find scaling set to 100%.  Set it to 90%.
9. Okay, okay, print.

Then you’ll be asked to save the pdf.  It’s still not quite right though.  The height and width are 90% of the normal page, but the character sheet starts at the edge of the page leaving no margin.  Here’s how I added margins.

1. Open your character PDF in Adobe Acrobat.
2. In the document menu select crop page.
3. At the bottom right, set page range to all.
4. Change the page range size.
5. Custom should be set to 8.5in width and 11in height.
6. Center should be set to 0.44in and -0.44in.  This will push the sheet to the middle of the page, correcting the marins.
7. Save.

I apologize for instructions that depend on Adobe Acrobat.  That said, they may still be applicable for other PDF editors, or at the very least point you in the right direction.

Oh and yes, I have printed PDFs made in this fashion.  They’re crisp and clean looking where my other attempts at making nice 4e pdfs (which involved printing to a 8in x 10.5 in page and centering that on letter paper) were blurry.

Hope someone else finds this useful.  If not, I hope someone else finds a way to make this useful and posts it in the comments.

Also, hopefully this will be the last of my PDF posts for a while.  If I have any more they’ll end up on my code blog where they belong instead.

If you haven’t heard of vim or LaTeX (the typesetting system, not the material) this post doesn’t concern you and should be ignored unless you’re having a really boring day.

So I tried D&D Insider for a month and was unimpressed.  I liked having access to the data itself, but the tools to access it were unacceptable and I couldn’t justify paying to use them.   So I made my own.

The first is a syntax highlighter for vim.  This takes plain text and attempts to colorize it to look vaguely like a 4th ed book.  I ended up deviating from 4e style quite a bit when I started thinking about printing, but I think this will still be familiar enough to be useful.

To start with, here’s a 4th ed NPC I made called the Belligerent Sysadmin.  I didn’t look at any books for this, so don’t even pretend it’s usable for a game.  It’s a text file that uses the same layout as WotC’s compendium.  Well, same layout if you copy and paste the compendium files into a text editor, which is what I did while my account was still active.

By itself, the file is a wall of text.  With vim highlighting, you get this:

Much more readable!  At-will and encounter powers conform approximately* to WotC’s color scheme.  I made up the purple color because I wasn’t sure what else to use for a recharge ability.   Certain keywords are highlighted.  Numbers are too.

To get this in vim, download 4e.vim and put it in your ~/.vim/syntax folder.  It will apply 4e syntax to any file with a .4e extension.  You’ll have to rename the Belligerent Sysadmin above – I made him .txt for the benefit of your browser.

There’s some additional code at the bottom of the file for leveling characters and applying templates.  It’s incomplete and non functional.  If I ever finish I’ll post updates to it.  Or feel free to finish it on your own.

Also note that .4e is an extension I made up.  It’s what I used for the compendium text I copied and pasted.

Anyway, I’ve been using this for a couple weeks to read through enemies.  I quite like it.  The next problem is that vim sucks at printing.  I had to use gvim to get colors to work.  And even then it never came out quite right.  So I kept the regexes from vim and wrote a script to make a LaTeX file with similar highlighting.  That .tex file can be converted to a pdf for pretty printing.

Here’s a sysadmin pdf I made.  It includes 4 sysadmins to show how they’d appear if there were several enemies on the page.

I will point out that this is sloppy as hell.  It’s my second attempt at LaTeX and there was more trial and error than I’d like to admit.  But it does the job so far.  Here’s 4e2latex.sh.  Usage notes are in the comments at the top.  Colors are slightly different than the vim colors, because nobody wants to print a black background.  I believe you need the texlive-latex-extra package for pdflatex.  You should check pdfs before printing them.  Some NPCs get cut off between the columns.  Others don’t render right, especially if they have conflicting abilities.  (At least one WotC monster has a recharging at will.  They end up getting highlighted as both recharge and at will abilities.  I don’t plan on correcting this becuase it’s not a bug in the highlighter, but I failure by WotC to adhere to their own syntax.  Had they used a syntax highlighter when writing their rules maybe they wouldn’t have so much errata.)

* Colors are approximate because I’m restricted to 256 colors chosen by xterm.  Yes, you probably want to ensure you’re running a terminal with lots of colors.

As a sidenote, all my links thus far have bene to Gnome Stew articles.  I really enjoy their blog, but sometimes I feel like I pimp them too much.  Any other good GMing sites worth of linking?

I’m not going to spend too much time discussing it, because plenty of other people already have, but google wave is what email should be.  It’s somewhere between mail, chat, and document.  And it can embed all sorts of funky widgets.  Why am I talking about it?  Because it just might be perfect for online RPGs.  People use forums, but they’re kludgey.  IRC works well enough for text and dice, but only for synchronous games.  Wave on the other hand is simple enough that it should get in the way of the game and advanced enough that you can (probably) incorporate dice rolling.  I won’t be surprised if you can (eventually) embed a map of some sort to replace MapTool.

I really don’t want to babble on about it for much longer.  Just read up on Google Wave and keep an eye out for how it could apply to gaming.