Design Diary: DM Friendly

By Monte Cook

If you've read much on this site before, or read many of the products or articles I've worked on over the years, you know that I'm a frequent DM and that I like material made specifically for DMs. It's not easy being the one to run the game, and it's good when a product comes along that makes a DM's life a bit easier.

That was one of the driving forces behind Ptolus from the start and, in fact, it's one of the reasons we decided to do the product at all -- to create a setting sourcebook that really made it easier for the DM to run adventures and campaigns in that setting.

But how could we make the book more useful to DMs than such books already are? I mean, all you need is the setting info -- who lives where, and what they're doing -- and that's it, right?

Not in my opinion.

World building is fun, and many people are quite good at it, developing wonderful and imaginative worlds filled with detail. But when you're a DM, you need more than just that. You need more than just a book about a place. You need to have all those details conveniently organized. You need to know how to run adventures in specific areas and understand what would make those adventures different if they were staged elsewhere. You need specific tools at your fingertips so that, when the PCs ask a question, go somewhere unexpected or just generally zig when you thought they would zag, it's all right there for you. This means you need the designer to have anticipated the exact kinds of things that you'll need before you need them.

City Details

A large portion of the Ptolus book details the city itself, broken down by district. Each chapter gives locations, important NPCs, and all the other things you would expect. But I knew I wanted each district chapter to offer more than that, including a section on running adventures and encounters in that particular district and a description of how they would be different than those elsewhere. I designed it this way to give each district a feel and a specific look that you can communicate to the players. Overall, it doesn't just offer details and facts, it helps you understand the area, so you can make it your own.

One thing that I learned from running an urban campaign for years is that you've got to be able to make up some things as you go. You don't want the whole city detailed, building by building, because you've got to have the flexibility to create a new location as needed, where needed. So the Ptolus book empowers DMs to create new locations and gives them the information they need to fit the location into the district appropriately.

How long does it take to walk from point A to point B? How much faster would it be if I hired a carriage to take me, and how much would that cost? How long will it take the City Watch to get to where I am right now if summoned? What are the people on the street around me doing? What kind of people are they? These are all questions that I knew the book should answer. As well as others. I thought about what I as a DM would need, and what kinds of things my own players had asked about, and made sure the book addressed all of them.

For example, you know how player characters will frequently say, "We stop someone on the street and ask them" a question? Every district in Ptolus has a short list of "Man on the Street" encounters. These are ready-made encounters specific to each area of town that not only tell you who the person is and what he or she looks like, but also describe the person's current motivation and where he or she is going at that moment.

Adventures and Encounters

As I see it, when it comes to running adventures in a published setting, there are three kinds of DMs. First, there are those who don't have the time to create their own adventures and want a fully fleshed-out adventure with plots, NPCs, locations -- the works. Second, there are those who would like a cool location with a map, key, and details of what's going on in that location, that they can tailor to their own campaigns. They want to decide why the PCs go there and what they're after. Lastly, there are those who simply want some ideas, just enough to spark their own imagination so they can take it from there.

Realizing this, I needed Ptolus to cater to all three groups, so I designed all three types of adventure presentations into the book. You can use it as you like, and mix and match all three, as well as come up with your own adventures whole cloth if desired. A little later on I'll discuss the adventures, as well as the fact that Ptolus offers enough material for not just a whole campaign, levels 1 to 20, but for multiple campaigns.

But life in a city isn't all adventure, even in Ptolus. That's why I included an encounter nugget with many of the locations. This is a paragraph or two describing a specific encounter the player characters could have in that location. It might be the details you need to run a bar fight in a tavern, it might be something to do with the customer in line in front of the PCs in a shop, or it might be someone skulking around outside a noble's manor house. These aren't whole adventures, and some don't even require a die to roll. However, I wanted to reinforce the fact that there's always something going on in the city, and any time the party turns a corner -- even a familiar corner -- the characters might find something new.

Organization

I know from experience that, in the heat of a game session, a DM needs to be able to find a particular bit of information quickly. So I realized going into the design of this book that I had to consider some new ideas to make it an extremely usable product.

The text itself is fully cross-referenced. Check out this two-page spread. See the special column on the outside edge of each page? There you will find page references for every NPC mentioned in the corresponding section. Where possible, a small portrait of a referenced character will appear as a reminder of who that person is. The book contains similar cross-references for places, organizations, and more.

That outside column allows us to do a lot of interesting things to help provide references, tips, extra details, and more. I'll be discussing that further in future Design Diaries.

In our examination of various full-color reference books -- in particular, travel guidebooks, another type of book whose users need to find information in a hurry -- we saw a heavy use of visual mnemonic devices. Taking a cue from that, we color coded each part of the Ptolus book; each chapter within that part uses a different shade of that main color. Further, each district of the city has its own symbol, which is used throughout as an indicator on maps and in text. In fact, Ptolus uses symbols in many ways like a travel guidebook, to denote a location's type, a service or shop's price range, a restaurant or inn's quality, the character levels appropriate for the locale, and more. If you've preordered Ptolus already, you can see an example of some of these symbols in this week's Delver's Guild feature.

Any page of the book that contains text referring to a location on a map (or with its own map) will have a special, easy-to-find box in the corner that refers you to the page where you can find that map.

Handouts and Bookmarks

Two dozen handouts come with the Ptolus package. While many of these are for the players or are keyed to the adventures or locations (I'll talk about those in a later Design Diary), some are reference cards for the DM that offer the city's important details at a glance. Forgot the name of the major religion, or the name of the most powerful wizard in the city? You can just glance at the cards rather than flipping through the book. One such sheet is meant to be paper-clipped to the inside of your DM's screen, if you use one. I created these for myself long ago, and now I'm just passing them on to you.

And, of course, there are the bookmarks -- two different kinds, actually. In a book this big, at any given time you're going to want to reference multiple sections at once, so it comes with three bound-in fabric bookmarks and four cardstock bookmarks. You can use the labels at the top of the cardstock bookmarks to indicate what section you're marking: NPC stats, location details, game mechanics, or city details.

Basically, I've tried to use my years of running games set in Ptolus to make this product easy for a DM to use, one that actually provides a DM with what he or she really needs to run a game. When it's all done, it's going to be a product unlike any other.

To secure your copy, you can preorder Ptolus now and receive special benefits!

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