Our Social Contract

• What do we expect of the GM?
  • Listen and ask questions.
  • Be a fan of the characters and the players.
  • Be fair, honest, and patient.
  • Lay out what needs to happen between sessions.
• What do we expect of players?
  • Show up on time and prepared.
  • Know the rules.
  • Advocate for what you want to see.
• What do we all expect from each other?
  • Respect boundaries.
  • Communicate openly and honestly about problems.
  • Share the spotlight fairly.
  • Default to saying "yes."
  • Play to find out what happens.

Miscellany

A handful of articles, tools, and resources I usually share with my new players. Totally optional. I love stuff like this, so send me anything you have.

General

• 11 ways to be a better roleplayer (Grant Howitt, 2013). I generally find Howitt to be abrasive and off-putting, so it should say something that this is nonetheless the first thing on the list. It's a collection of advice I (slowly, painfully) learned and passed on piecemeal over a decade without realizing someone had already written it all down.
• Four minutes of a fucking podcast episode somewhere in a backlog of 500 episodes that I can't hunt down and it's killing me (Friends at the Table, 20xx). Dammit. I'll find it eventually. The gist of it is this:
  • Any beginning writer in any medium is advised "show, don't tell." And this is good advice in almost every situation! Even in RPGs, it's better than the strict opposite - "I use Attack against the dragon." 😴
  • But! In an environment where you're improvising, where you're both describing and consuming the world, where everything you say has to be interpreted in real time by other people - "show and tell" is better advice. Consider:
    • (show) "I get up in his face, trying to tower over him, you know, and asking questions - 'where were you last night? Anyone who can vouch for that? I heard you and Agnes weren't on good terms. Maybe you hit a breaking point?' You know, trying to put him off balance...
      • (tell) "...I'm hoping to read him by making him so uncomfortable he slips up," or
      • (tell) "...I'm trying to threaten him by invading his space and implying violence."
  • The explicit clarification helps everyone get on the same page about what you're after and resolve ambiguities in the rules and/or your description.
• TTRPG Safety Tools (many authors, credits in link, 2019). An explainer of safety tools and why they're used. "Redundant" reading as I'll cover the ones we'll use in session 0, but you can check it out.

Character Creation

• Knife Theory (iveld, 2018). This is aimed at GMs, but it's basically telling GMs "tell this to your players," so. I think this is a bit excessive, actually - it's certainly aimed at a style of play that emphasizes overproduced backstories, of which I'm not a fan. But in play, you should have things that you(r character) care(s) about, not in spite of the fact that it makes you vulnerable but because of it! Meaningful stakes are fun! Don't be the loner orphan who's too cool to care about anything.
• The 3x3x3 (Scott Martin, 2012). Sometimes I ask players to do one of these. Maybe I'll offer XP if you do it and that's why you're reading this now. Again, the article is written toward GMs (everyone assumes players won't read anything), but the conceit is easy to understand.

Tools

• dice.run - A quick, visual tool for seeing probabilities and probability distribution for different dice combinations.
• Character makers
  • picrew.me - Tends toward anime-style portraits, but there're some good ones in there.
  • meiker.io - A little on the weird side. Lots of animal/fantasy options.
  • itch.io character customizers - People are bad at tagging their shit on itch. There's more stuff out there but you have to hunt for it.

PbtA Games

• Fictional Positioning (Christopher Chinn, 2008) and Fiction First (2023). Kind of theory-dense stuff, but it (hopefully?) clarifies the terms, which are often bandied about without much in the way of explanation. PbtA uses these concepts a lot. Usually it's people coming from trad-gaming backgrounds who have trouble - I think you'll all be fine.
• Beyond Success & Failure (Jason D'Angelo, 2018). aka "why tf does FW call a 6- a 'Snag' instead of a 'Failure'?" etc. It's a subtle distinction, and kind of a weird one, but is an important framing for what moves mean in PbtA games.
• Fantasy World vs. Dungeon World - 14 Differences (Alessandro Piroddi, 2021). The beginning of some developer diaries on design principles of FW. Enlightening but not necessary reading. Fantasy World was loosely inspired by Dungeon World (Adam Koebel & Sage Latorra), a(nother) game Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA). Both games owe their origin, as well as lots of core principles and mechanics, to Apocalypse World (D. Vincent Baker & Meguey Baker). You don’t need to read them or even know anything about them, but they're there if you want to dig through some inspirations / "source" material.

Bonus

• Every thread, Q&A, and blog post ever written on table troubles (thousands of authors, since the beginning of time). If you're having a problem, talk about it - with me, with the whole table, whatever. Doesn't matter if it's interpersonal or related to the game itself or anything else - talk it out. Otherwise you're banking on me becoming a mind-reader (which would be sick, but I'm not holding out hope) or on the situation spontaneously changing (which it almost certainly won't) while you gradually grow more miserable. And if you're not having fun, we're all on your side in wanting to fix that!