In thinking more about last week’s piece on mise-en-place, I realized there was one more thing that I often do for the games that I run, that involves setting up a specific space for maximum effect: creating my GM Screen for the game. I don’t buy pre-made screens, rather I prefer to craft my own to ensure that it will have everything I need, where I need it.
To Screen or Not To Screen
There is some debate about having a GM screen vs. GMing au natural. I am not overly passionate on this topic, as I run plenty of games from behind a screen, and am equally comfortable running them without a screen. For the sake of making this article as inclusive as possible, I would like to expand GM screen to also mean other types of reference materials: cheat sheets, secondary monitors, etc. Because I am lazy when I type, I am going to just type GM Screen, but you and I know it means more. Cool.
Advantages of A DIY Screen
Many games have their own pre-made GM screens, full of tables and adorned with fancy artwork. Those just don’t do it for me. I like my GM screen a bit less fancy and a bit rough around the edges. I am not some kind of Hipster GM looking down on those products, but rather, I can’t guarantee that the screen will have the tables I need, let alone have them where my eyes naturally fall when I am behind the screen. For this I would rather lay out the screen myself.
When I do lay out my screen I follow these principles:
Things I Use Often
There are some parts of a game that I need to use all the time, such as the Ladder in Fate or the XS table in Corporation. I want that info somewhere to the left of center on my screen (because I am left-handed and my tendency is to look left when looking for something). This kind of information becomes easily available, allowing me to refresh myself at a glance while running.
Things I need help remembering
There are rules or tables in the game that I have trouble remembering, but I know they are useful and come up in the game with some frequency that warrants me being able to find them at a glance. Things like the Toughness of objects in Savage Worlds, or the Cover modifiers in D&D 3.5. I want those to my right, so that I can find them when they come up, without having to go to the rules.
Things I want the players to be able to see
Having evocative art on the player-facing side of a screen is nice, but there are often things things that can be on the outside of a screen that the players can use for reference. It might be the Ladder from Fate, or the rules for Soaking damage and removing Shake conditions from Savage Worlds. Why not help the players out with some useful info as well?
It helps me learn the rules
Another advantage to making your own screen is gaining knowledge about the system. Having to determine what things I need to go into what parts of the screen, and then cutting and pasting or transcribing the rules, helps me to learn the game. In addition, all that work also makes me more familiar with where things are in the rule book, so that when I do have to go to the book, I have a much better idea where a specific rule or table is located, and that makes my game run smoother.
Tools and Materials
When I create a set of reference materials for a new game, I have three platforms I use:
- GM Screen – For this I like the Hammerdog Games The Worlds Greatest Screen (TWGS). My preference is the mini, which is a 4×6 screen. It gives me the ability to have a screen and still see my players. The TWGS allows you to create inserts which you slide into the screen, thus allowing the screen to serve for several different games.
- Reference Sheets – For this I like normal paper, printing in color. To make them durable I will either put them into a report cover, or run to the office supply store and get them laminated.
- Digital Sheets – For this I will create a PDF and display it on a second monitor, facing both the players and I, so that all the information can be seen.
When it comes to creating the pages themselves, I rely on a few tools:
- Analog – In the past, I would photocopy pages from the game book, then cut and paste them onto a fresh sheet of paper; recalling my middle school newspaper layout skills (yes..layout was once done with an x-acto knife and glue stick, go ask your parents).
- Digital Capture – I have a go-to program for being able to snip out parts of PDF’s and that is Skitch. I use Skitch to capture all the snippets that I want to work with and then…
- Digital Layout – I have in the past utilized all types of programs for creating these pages. I find word processors to be the least helpful, and prefer vector drawing programs like Visio, OmniGraffle, or Google Drawings.
Using those three tools, I can create reference material for any of the three platforms above.
At A Quick Glance
Every GM benefits from having reference material close at hand, be it the classic GM screen or just a few laminated tables laying next to your session notes. Commercial screens can be fine, but they are not tailored to your style of play nor your aptitude with the rules. Reference sheets, when a publisher produces them, have the same issues. With a few free tools, you can craft your own reference material and make exactly what you need.
Do you craft our own reference materials? What kind of platform do you prefer? What tools do you use to create your materials?
I used to do the same thing — cut and paste, or later typing up reference materials I needed and slapping together my own GM screens. There were a few good screens that were laid out in ways I could use, but as I’ve moved away from notebooks to a laptop (starting about 1997), I use them less and less — really more from form than anything else.
Most of the important stuff is on the laptop, now. I still prefer usin hardcopy books for the rules, just because you can visiually index through them much easier than a pdf…”that rule’s about here.†But for NPCs, pics of things, adventure notes — it’s all up in multiple windows on the laptop.
I tend to KISS and do most of my stuff in a word processor. I used to use WordPerfect because it was fantastic for various layout tools, but now I mostly use Pages to create massive NPC files. Certain games tend to more established bit players than others, but for games where the record keeping is less involved (early in campaigns, one shots, etc.) or rules are easier, I just use my iPad as I quick reference source and put up woth flicking from game notes to pdf rule book, to maps…
I’m tinkering with the idea of crafting my own screen for Fantasy Dice. Unfortunately I live outside of USA and getting a TWGS costs more in shipping and taxes that the screen itself.
One idea circles in my mind: using icons/symbols to mark areas on the screen. Something more like those slick symbols the “2010” web and mobole design accustomed us with.
Having a symbol catch the first glance on both sides of the screen can help a lot locating the right table or info. Did anyone tried this?
I haven’t tried it, but using icons does seem like it’d make reference even faster.
For my Delta Green game I use a laptop on a side-table to display Scrivener corkboards of NPCs, locations or my Scapple diagram of how each NPC interacts with the others. Everything else is on paper tacked to my DIY MDF Keeper’s Screen. Here the computer is replacing stacks of index cards rather than the screen.
The problem with a laptop or a tablet is that anything you look at will overlay something you will need to look at soon, increasing the workload as you click frantically around the taskbar (or whatever your OS has).
PDFs are great until you need to speed-flip. I’m running Last Sons a Deadlands:Reloaded campaign, using my laptop as the reference library and have two copies of the campaign PDF, one for the scenario and one for the various things that will be referenced from the extreme other ends of the book. (I should mention I run all SW games “Screenless and in the round”.)
Last Sons is particularly bad for this: Locations,some quite obscure, are described in detail in their own sections at the start of the book and referenced often from adventures halfway through the book, and the bestiary has been expanded so references to monsters often point to the back of the book. How I yearn for the days when I ran Call of Cthulhu, in which monster stats were printed near where the monster in question was going to put in its first appearance.
Of course, a Call of Cthulhu PDF is priced aggressively to stay on Chaosium’s shelves so it all evens out.
There are numerous tricks one can use with Adobe Reader to page around an e-book, but I’ve found a second copy best duplicates a slip of paper stuck in a book as I will inevitably lose my place paging around a single pdf when I, for example, hit the end key instead of page down by mistake. Nothing is a more worthless reason for halting action than a pdf screwup of this sort.
I wish the reader were more configurable. Then I could make the end key only go to end-of-document if double-tapped.
The screen has another use in D.G. – I can use it to display maps, photographs and special charts to the players. I have been trying to figure out if a small flatscreen coupled to my laptop or a Raspberry Pi would do a better job of this, but I always come back to the fragility of the screen compared with hinged slabs of MDF.