General Managing…
My normal blog perusal (thanks Yax) led me to Gnome Stew and an article on how a Game Master has to be a good general manager. This article makes several excellent points, however actually implementing some of them can be a challenge.
Organization and Scheduling, the bane of my existence!
The article recommends several good tips for keeping the same sane and moving forward, including organizing of one’s gaming pile and using Google Calendar or another calendaring tool to get your gaming herd together.
I completely agree with the use of Google Calendar to manage game nights and coordinate the group, but its only a good as the group using it. We’ve had problems in the past with people not checking the calendar. Using notification features of the calendaring software could help this problem, but the easily forgettable nature of email can still lead to failures. This is still generally better than having to call my entire group, plus I hate talking on the phone anyway.
As far as organizing the gaming pile, I have the most trouble with this task. My books are generally strewn everywhere, a few book bags contain my entire collection and they regularly get separated. I have a battle mat, however it often gets left in the trunk of my car or at other people’s houses and tends to be AWOL when I need it.
Be prepared!
What I really need is the equivalent of a “emergency preparedness kit” for gaming nights away from home. The only problem is that you can’t fit large items like a battle mat into a quick-carry kit like that… I imagine things like a set of dice, maybe some miniatures if your group prefers to play with those, a notepad, and if you’re really ambitious a few quickie game session ideas to get the ball rolling.
So what else would you have in your “gaming preparedness kit”?
I would keep
– At least 10 of those little note holder things with small bases for impromptu figurines (labels can be stuck in the note holder part; Gobin 1, goblin 2, orc 1)
– A pad of graph paper, which can be used to make quick floorplans and can be taken to a local Staples or Kinkos to be enlarged about 250-320% in a scanner/plotter for a cheap battle grid that you can draw on.
– 5d6, 2d4, 2d8, 3d10, 1d12, 5d20
– A photocopy of the PHB rules summary
That’s all I can think of off-hand. 🙂