5 GM Things I Learned Running Daggerheart at Gen Con

Use card binder pages for character cards

I’ll write another blog post about my equipment and table setup at the convention. However, it will suffice to say that I wasn’t nearly as well equipped and improvised a lot of my setup.

Rachel (from The Faint Divinities), however, was on point. When I rolled in Thursday morning with my odds-and-ends, Rachel already had her table setup, including beautifully hand-drawn battle maps.

I’m never going to do that, but she did pull out one more thing that caught my eye. As she was distributing character sheets, she pulled out the characters’ ability cards.

In 9 pocket card binder pages.

So good! Even when players have leveled up and have too many cards, they can rearrange them to figure out which are available and which are in the vault.

And for storage, players can punch holes in their character sheets and notes and store everything together in a thin binder.

I run too quickly

In our room of six tables, we all received the same one-shot adventure to run in 4 hour slots. Most GMs finished between 3 1/2 and 4 hours. Some even went longer.

Over five sessions, I never took more took more than 3 1/4 hours to finish. And one of my tables finished in 2 1/2 hours. Bless those players for getting me to the Critical Role live show on-time when I double-booked myself.

This blog post would be more useful if I could explain, but I can’t. I didn’t think I was running too quickly. In my 2 1/2 hour game, I apologized for not filling the time slot, and a player said, “Don’t worry. It didn’t feel like you were rushing us.”

I’m rationalizing it by saying that I run an action-packed, high adrenaline, punchy game.

Stand up and act

On the Star Trek personality scale, I’m more Spock than McCoy. When I’m running games, I deliberately amp myself up to put on a good show. Maybe not every town guard needs to be an extrovert, but games are generally more fun when the GM is pumping everyone up.

So what sort of person can do that?

Other than an unhealthy obsession with Daggerheart, the other GMs in my room at Gen Con were pretty normal people. And yet, when I finished early one session and had a moment to look around, I was so impressed by what I saw.

All of them were transformed. A moment ago, they were just people who might stand behind you in the grocery store checkout line unworthy of a second thought. However, in that moment at Gen Con, they were deeply captivating figures delighting their players.

It’s hard to dissect what exactly charisma is, but I did pick out one detail: I can do more physically.

I rely almost exclusively on words to tell the story. Others were moving about and gesturing grandly. Some stood for their entire session. There was even some acting out combat moves.

I feel embarrassed even imagining adding that sort of physicality to my storytelling style. However, I also play with my young children. Also there’s probably nothing more embarrassing than my attempts at non-American accents, so I probably should just go for it.

Start fights within Far range

I have always had a hard time starting fights.

Well, in real life, I also maybe have some conflict avoidance issues, but in running TTRPGs, I’m not sure how to get starting positions correct.

How far away are the PCs and adversaries when they notice each other? Can anyone get into position? Where does that fit with the map?

In my D&D 5e games, I also felt like turn order mattered a lot, and maybe in a bad way. If a player starts further than 30 feet away and goes first, they might just spend their turn running into range for the enemies to run up on their turn and hit them.

At Gen Con, I ran into similar issues with starting positions.I had a large dry erase board, and I just put the PCs at one end and the enemies on the other and worked on terrain in-between.

Unfortunately, the board was bigger than far range, so several of my players just used their entire spotlight just running in. What a bummer of a turn.

Going forward, unless there are other tactics or strategies in place, I intend on having the players and adversaries start within far range of each other. If they want to run away, then they can, but at least they can get into the action quickly.

Stick to small tables (for now)

The tables at Gen Con were setup for six players, which happened a few times. My smallest table was three players when one of four left half-way through the session claiming physical illness unrelated to my GMing style.

Six is a lot more than three.

I could keep track of three or four players. Each player got opportunities to take actions, roll dice, and contribute to scenes and decisions. They could all make an attack before fights were over, and we shared the spotlight easily.

I could not keep track of six players. I forgot about quiet players. More side conversations cropped up. Some fights were over before all of the players landed a hit.

I get why a convention game would want to have more players involved, but for my home games, I will definitely try to cap at four players.