The Black Campbell

I’ve often had plenty of time to research, plan, and set up for the games I game master. I’ve been doing it for three decades and the practice in getting ready, quickly, for a game has made me a lightning fast researcher and writer — which has been handy in my varied professions and in my doctoral studies. With a four-month old in the house, I’ve been surprised at how much of your useful time is eaten up with having to simply pay full attention to the kid — she needs picked up and carried around, she needs talked to and played with on the floor, she needs fed. Before you know it, ten hours have blown by and you’re exhausted…and you really haven’t done anything.

And it’s eating into my study, my professional writing, and my game prep time. So what to do? I tried to get others to GM — one decided to bail on the game he was going to run a year ago, another is just as busy and not as interested in doing it as he thought, and the new couple of gamers I tried to vet were flaky on their schedules and preparation. So once again, I’m running the games. And doing it on a lot less free time. So how to “wing it” and be successful?

First when GMing…never go full retard. That is to say, if you’re going to wing it, you still have to have something to improvise on. Like any good bit of jazz or rock, you need that three chord/basic 4-8 bar tune to work from.

Second: KISS — “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” You can improvise some of the other elements but keep the main plot simple — for example: My Hollow Earth Expedition game has been pretty straightforward. The first few episodes were an attempt to find a mellified man. They were sidetracked by Japanese agents and rival communist gangs in Shanghai. Then they get a line on the ancient monastic order/former rebels against the Qing that have the prize and they have to find the monastery in question. They find it and have to get the caskets of mellified men.

Time to throw in a twist to slow them down…I throw in a new storyline they have to address first: one of the monk/warriors had eaten some of the meelified man to heal their wounds and is infected with the evil spirit of the human confection. She is looking to wake the petrified army of teh first sovereign emperor…now they have to chase her to Xi’an and stop her from doing so, otherwise she’ll rule the universe from beyond the grave. This story is a simple capture the flag/stop the bad guy plot. Once done, they’ll be able to recover the meelified men and finish the initial adventure.

I have an upcoming Supernatural “pilot” — the characters will get together to stop a monster in Manhattan. Find it, kill it. Simple. I have been adding the bits to make the investigations more interesting, but it’s a one or two night and done deal.

Keep it simple. What’s the ending? What’s the goal or McGuffin? (The thing that motivates the story, whether important or not — like the case in the car trunk in Repo Man or Rosebud in Citizen Kane.) Who’s the bad guy and their major henchman? Where’s it happening?

This is my technique: What’s the mission? (Say, it’s stop a terrorist bomb plot.) Who’s the bad guy? (The new SPECTRE [or QUANTUM, if you must) led by Hans Yodelson. Henchman — big, bad ex-Spetnatz guy, Rostov. How do they get the lead? (An investigation into Russian mob gun running yielded it.) Beginning and ending done. Now the filler:

INTRO: give the intelligence. Action Sequence 1: Breaking into a bad guy office building. Clue 1: Reveal Yodelson’s invovlement. Action Sequence 2: Meeting Yodelson or surveilling to gain intelligence. Clue 2: Meeting with known terrorists. Action Sequence 3: Team discovered — car chase or firefight. Clue 3: If captured, the line of questioning tells there is an attack coming in a day in [pick place], or they will learn it from their pursuers. Action Sequence 4: Trying to follow terrorist to attack site. Clue 4: Something to get them in them to next action sequence. Action Sequence 5: fight in bomb location and stopping attack. Car chase to get bad guy. END: Kill/capture bad guys. If escape, next mission…

After that, I like to fill in the locations. Sometimes I actually do this first — “wouldn’t it be cool to have a base jumping sequence off that building?” or “a car chase on that alpine road would be cool.”

Basic plot: simple.

Third: Know your players. This is pretty important, period. It allows you to anticipate their most likely actions and not only plan for it. If you know the player/character has a tendency to do X, plan for it. Give them a problem/action sequence that is not their usual forte from time to time, but play to their strengths and weaknesses. If you know they love kids, put kids in danger every once in a while to direct them how you want them to go. If you know they always go after the bad guy like a guided missile, even when the baddie has to escape in that sequence, have the bad guy lead them into a trap.

Four: Steal. Steal your stories from movies, books (preferably ones they haven’t read/seen), from the news. For espionage games, I almost always get my inspiration from a story. Iraqis are busted helping Sinaloa cartel members in San Diego…go from there. Theres the bad guys. What were they moving? To where? How did you find out? Pick locations in San Diego or Tijuana…you’re 3/4rds of the way there.

Five: Keep notes. As you make up NPCs remember KISS: give them a hook — a look, skill, or a mannerism. A name. Jot it down for later — you never know when they might come in useful or the players will take to a character and want to contact them again.

Six: KISS — keep the maps simple, if you need them. Try to simply run on narrative, where you can. Use set pieces — standard office parks, high-rise buildings with the classic three corridors between two adjoining corridors on either side (you’ve been in this building…trust me.) Steel mills — operating or abandoned. Subways. Use set pieces from movies: “It’s like that classic James Bond bad guy set up — the two levels with staircases with no handrails and a central metal support for the steps, the ceiling’s oval and higher on one side, bridge over a small stream running through the middle of the room…” “It’s a loading crane like the one from the end of The Losers…”

There’s plenty of ways to wing it, but the prep time on an adventure like the one above averages me 30 minute to two hours, depending on complexity of the plotline. Find something that catches you imagination, drop the basics in (villain and villain’s nefarious plan), add cool locations or chase/combat sequences. Shake. Run.

Tower of the Archmage is hosting this month’s RPG Blog Carnival with the topic “Animals in RPGs”…so let’s jump in!

Animals have been companions to humans since time immemorial — from work animals to pets, people surround themselves with these creatures. They care for them, name them, and sometimes view them as part of the family. Who hasn’t gotten at least a bit misty when a family dog or cat dies? Before cars, horses weren’t just your transport, they were your companion — selling a prized horse just didn’t happen unless you fell on hard times. Farm animals might be less “familial” for people, but they were no les important — they were your food or your money made incarnate in noise and crap.

Yet, outside of fable-based games like Mouse Guard how often do animals play an important role in role playing games. Yeah, you ride your horse to the dungeon…then what? A horse doesn’t do so well in a 10×10′ room with other people and some nasty…in fact, the horse can, at that point, become a seriously dangerous liability. I’ve seen people buy a falcon in a D&D campaign, only to forget it’s even on the sheet; they don’t know how to use it as an item, so it gets forgotten with those climbing stakes until last minute.

If animals are so important in most peoples’ real lives, why do they disappear in the game world?

One reason is obvious: Who’s playing the dog? Is the dog an NPC? Is he the GM’s responsibility? Tracking the creature’s stats, actions, and location can be distracting from the main character, thinks Runeslinger. (Good guy, by the way; check out his blog!)

The trick, if the character is managing his animal companion, is not to think of the creature as separate from him, necessarily, but an extension, a familiar… I have a cat named Vishnu that knows my moods well – he knows when to try and comfort, he warns me when my infant daughter is waking up with a meow and a nose on the eyelid, he eats bugs… So make the critter an extension of your character.

We had a Serenity campaign where one of the characters had a shepherd mutt named Asshole. He picked him up as a pup in the Unification War, and the dog grew up through the combat. It warned the characters of intruders, of things not right with the ship (he heard strange noises and prodded the engineer awake), he attacked villains, he crapped all over the ship providing comic relief…he was useful. The players originally hated Asshole, then grew to love him. When he got injured by a thug, they made that person their sole focus of ire for an adventure. The dog provided story.

I had a ferret in an old DD campaign that would hunt rabbits and other things for the character. That’s how he got his meals when they needed meat. I would forget about him periodically, until he was killed by an arrow. He stopped the arrow, actually, and saved the character. He was useful. and I made the OIQ (orc in question) pay for it dearly. It provided motivation and story.

“I find I prefer the understanding that the animal companion is a specialized form of NPC and as such is not merely a tool for the player, but a being with whom the character has a close and very personal relationship…” opines Runeslinger. If the GM is running the animal, it can get lost in the shuffle of NPCs…hell, major NPCs have gotten lost in the shuffle when running a game. “Say…wasn’t Trapp Sommers with us?” Oops! But if the GM infuses the animal with its own character (I played Asshole as a bit stupid, lovable, and codependent on his owner, and had a ball with him…so to speak.)

If they have a purpose, they’re less likely to forget them. In the current Battlestar Galactica campaign, the characters are serving in Aegis, a light battlestar that is new off the line. During construction of the ship, a cat somehow got onboard and has been with her ever since. The crew named it Kevin and we learned from the previous commander that Kevin is considered not just the mascot of the ship, but her good luck charm. They had put Kevin off and within days suffered major engine failure. When Kevin was brought aboard once more from Scorpia yards, things just seemed to work themselves out…or so the crew says. Kevin is, in many ways, the living expression of the ship for the characters to become attached to. He’s fat, cantankerous, and shows up in places he shouldn’t be…but the characters have taken to him already.

Not every campaign requires a pet companion. The sword & sorcery genre is a good one for having animals that hunt for you, or that you ride from place to place. So are Victorian-period/Western games: the English are crazy for their dogs and often would drag them on holidays (or adventures) — how the hell did Tintin get out of half his scrapes? Dogs are useful for cowboys in herding or warning of danger. And they are good companions. In space-based campaigns, a dog or cat might not be the best addition. For one, the dander and loose fur get in the air filtration systems…it’s a mess! they may not always be appropriate, but they can add to the fun.

Most of us want to play big, strappin’, competent characters — the clever mage, the powerful fighter, the ultra-suave spy, the tough or  sexy femme fatale…but sometimes, stepping out of the usual can provide the player and group with a bit of fun. One thing I’ve rarely seen people rush to play is a child. Not a toddler, mind you, but the pre-teen/teenager.

Why would anyone want to play a kid? 1) In the case of prepubescents, and unless you’re a member of NAMBLA or B4U-ACT, it removes the sexual aspects from the character. This is especially nice for the younger player, or for that newbie that doesn’t want to get wrapped up in the weirdness of intercharacter relationships. 2) Children provide both particular challenges and benefits in many settings, that aren’t the case with most adult characters. 3) It makes the players have to think and work at the play…and that’s fun!

Point 1: My wife recently started playing. She’s new to gaming and she’s seems a bit uncomfortable with the idea of inter-character relationships (but I could be reading into things.) Her favorite character was a toss-off, a recovered character from a then-abortive campaign set in 1936 China (now resurrected and running well): “Shanghai Sally” — an 11 year old street urchin and thief that works for one of the other characters. There’s no sexual tension between her and the other characters, there’s no distraction with boys, etc…she’s all about the fun and the score.

Point 2: Sally provides some unexpected benefits to the player. As a child in a city full of homeless or itinerant children, she’s invisible for the most part. People don’t notice her doing surveillance while playing in the street. People don’t concern themselves much with an underage, dirty street girl poking around the bad guys’ hideout, save maybe that she might steal something. She doesn’t tend to attract violence, save a disdainful cuff to the head by the local toughs and cops. She’s small and fits into places the adult characters can’t. No one expects her to pull a Colt .380 Pony out of her pants. She’s been able to play the cute factor a few times to keep from getting pulped by bad guys.

The downsides are obvious: she’s not strong, big, or particularly talented in fighting. In fisticuffs, she usually comes away the worse for wear if someone lands a blow. She’s not as fast as adults, but she is quicker, able to dodge, weave, and use small spaces to escape. She has no real rights as a minor — the state can do what it likes with her. She only garners a certain level of respect, no matter how effective (she’s their “monkey”)…because she’s a kid. She doesn’t have money or a real job.

Point 3: Unlike what I expected, she’s turned Sally into a fantastic part of the campaign — our Short Round, if you will. Sally has just enough fighting skills to get herself into trouble if no dealing with a mook, and that leads to complications and more fun. She has to think her way out of trouble and uses her surroundings to her advantage (I think that’s the first time I’ve seen a hotel luggage cart used as a weapon!) She provides comic relief by making the other characters have to worry about the kid in their midst. She’s fun, and she makes the game fun.

So kids…an interesting role to take on for a game, if you’re thinking about something different.

Our Hollow Earth Expedition serial “Thrilling Actions Stories” brought our heroes — tomb radier Dr. Hannibal Drake, his dim-witted but heroic friend Jack MacMahon, their half-Chinese mob lieutenant ally Roland “Boss Banana” Kessik, and wee Shanghai Sally (who has been having strange and terrifying dreams of Prince Yinreng since she ate a piece of the man in the last adventure to heal her wounds.) back to the monastery of the White Lotus, looking to recover the coffins with the mellified men in them. (Here’s the original post on this campaign…) They fly to the location in a DC2 piloted by Trapp Sommers — a Clark Gable-esque American Volunteer fighting with the Chinese Air Force — and find the monks are evacuating, taking not just the coffins but the mysterious, ageless woman in a magical golden cage that they saw and promptly forgot about. They are trying to get out on barges, but with the arrival of the airplane, fighting breaks out.

Along the way, Jack hoses down the monks with the cage and it rolls into the river where the barges are and sinks. Moments later, the woman levitate, glowing, out of the water. This is Wang Cong’er — the leader of the White Lotus in 1799…but she’s infused with the spirit of Yinreng. A battle ensues, with Wang absorbing the life essence of several monks. She shorts out the DC2 — they’re stuck fighting the sorceress. Jack is blinded (light comin’ out of her mouth!), Kessik panics, and Sally appears entranced by the woman. Drake shocks Sally out of her spell by throwing a rifle at her and knocking her into the river.

Using some kind of Chinese black magic (telekenesis rules), she’s tearing up the barges with the mellified men’s coffins on them, the DC2, the heroes…then Sally resurfaces. She’s had that little bit of the prince in her activated: she has Magic and Psychic Aptitude now. She is able to drive off the sorceress, as she has a particular insight into the mind of the demon inhabiting her. They are linked. Sally knows Yinreng/Wang is headed to Xi’an in the north to “wake the army there…”

The team grabs a few of the coffins, repairs the plane and flies back to Shanghai, only to have to dodge Japanese fighter interdiction. Once on the ground, they start researching this “army” and find out the first Sovereign Emperor had created a supreme army and he and the army were entombed through sorcery when his quest for immortality drove him to try and imprison a witch with the power to give him everlasting life.

Yinreng aims to wake the army and take over China. They have to stop her!

To make matters worse, they can’t just waltz in: “the Young Marshall” Zhang Xueling just took Chian Kai Shek hostage there in an attempt to force the Kuomintang to join forces with the communists to fight the Japanese…

Gathering Trapp’s Sky Rats (Foreign Volunteer Force), they are headed for Xi’an to save China!

Next issue — Hannibal Drake and the Terracotta Army!

Love ’em/hate ’em…we’ll usually buy ’em: gamemaster screens. Back before you had your notes, maps, die programs, and game books on a tablet or laptop, we wanted to protect our notes from prying eyes and make some dice rolls in secret — hence the GM screen, which also conveniently pulled together all of the more important (on the good ones; the bad ones…well, let’s say you’d have been better off just planking down a roll of toilet paper) charts for your quick reference. They were usually utter crap, materials-wise, made of lightweight cardboard with only one side having charts, the other having bad, setting-referential art, and were an anathema to good layout design and good sense. (The first really good GM screen I ever had was the James Bond: 007 screen — you could pretty much run the whole damned game off it; better yet, the player side had useful chart that the players needed to speed things along. Brilliant!) Occasionally, you’d get a well designed one with everything you really needed in a pinch. Rarely, you’d get one of decent stock or even heavy book hardcover stock (I think the first i saw of that was the Babylon 5 screen Mongoose did. Beautifully made, crappy on the charts.)

For rules or charts-heavy games like Dungeons & Dragons, Heros, or GURPS a GM screen was almost a necessity. When folks didn’t buy one, they often cobbled one together out of cardboard, copied bits of the game book, tape, and dispair. These were usually more tailored to the oft forgotten or oft used rules that a GM needed.  I did up one for the house rules Castle Falkenstein game I was running…it’s still around here, somewhere.

But with the computer/iPad era, I find I don’t need a screen so much. When writing up an adventure I tend to throw in the dice challenges that will be necessary instead of winging it. I only show the players what I want (the iPad is much better I find for this than the laptop.) Most of the systems I run now are dead simple — Cortex for Serenity and Battlestar Galactica, Hollow Earth Expedition (wonderfully strong screen but once again…crap choices for the charts.) About the only system we’re using right now I need a chart for is James Bond.

So is there a real use for the GM screen anymore? You can bookmark your PDFs for quick rule recovery on the computer of tablet…do you really need to shave a few seconds off the time to find a rule or chart? Answer: maybe. I woud suggest that for games which you have just started playing, a GM screen helps cut down the learning curve and get things moving. Once you’ve become familiar with the rules, you might only need the screen or rule books a time or two a session when you hit stuff you’re not as proficient with (for example, I never remember rules for damage from disease and other stuff like that in games…I have to look it up. Since it’s rarely the things printed on a GM screen, said screen doesn’t do me much good.

I guess it comes down to whether the $15-40 bucks for a few seconds’ fast data retrieval and the usual crappy adventure module is worth it in your estimation.

I came across an interest blog post on the difficulties of science fiction (and especially cyberpunk) settings, the case in point being that they can lead to nihilistic behavior in characters that is hard to GM for as it can derail storylines or make planning challenges for the players moot. I found some of the arguments persuasive, as I’ve seen similar problems in these settings — both as a player and a gamemaster — but I also found that much of this was due to the style of the GM and campaign, as well as the type of players that were at the table.

Starting with the subject of cyberpunk settings. This was a genre which was influenced mostly by noir-style detective/crime fiction (by William Gibson’s own admission, much of his early stuff was built on the style of Elmore LEonard and others of his ilk.) These universes are almost universally oppressive — government and corporative entities hold tight sway over the population either through police might or economic serfdom. The characters were almost always down-and-out street dwellers or criminals (even the wealthy characters.) They were often just trying to thrive ans survive — a setting that is intrinsically nihilistic. That’s the draw. However, the characters often found their fight against these powers-that-be to mold their perceptions — they gain empathy for people (Case and Molly in Neuromancer), they get their impressions of success shattered (Sarah from Hardwired), even when they are part of the system they get screwed (Deckard and Rachel in Balde Runner.)

For a gamemaster to run a campaign of this nature, you have to either embrace being the bad guys or you have to have a very specific goal for the characters as players and the GM…beyond “I wnat to be a bad ass that doesn’t take shit from anyone.” The ways to do this are evidenced in the complaints about the genre in the above cited piece. Cyberpunk (0r Serenity, which he cites later) is an environment where you are always outgunned, outfoxed, outmanned, and ultimately, your fate is not your own. It’s a world of control — so high-powered weapons aren’t as common as you would like. They’re there, they’re expensive, and the people that deal in them aren’t too trusting of strangers — instead of simply toddling over to Guns R Us, you make finding big f’ing guns an episode itself. (I’ve done this often with espionage campaigns where the host agency doesn’t arm the characters in denied countries to avoid legal entanglements…when they need guns, they’ve got to find them on their own. Think the gun buying scene from Ronin…)

The cops have better guns. And more of them. Probably non-lethal stuff, too; use of the latter means your characters don’t die in a blaze of glory — they go to jail, get their cybernetics stripped out, whatever… Use GM fiat (but on the sly!) to reign the players in, if needed. Hit them in other places — family, friends, have their accounts hacked. Get creative.

Or…you work together to define the campaign. Serenity is one of those universes that isn’t “cyberpunk” but is criminal oriented, if you follow the tropes of the movie, and the TV show Firefly. The good guys are forced to crime by an unyielding, meddlesome government and their own intransigence to opt into a corrupt system. Make good guys gone bad, have their heartstrings pulled with jobs that go south ala The Train Job or that protect the “innocent” or powerless (Heart of Gold).

I would submit that science fiction is not unusual in these problems, and would refute the idea that it lends instantly to more powerfully equipped characters, as opposed to a fantasy game setting. Point of fact, I would suggest that the latter is much more individualistic and prone to violence, save where the critter you’re fighting is immune to the effects of your weapons, or can turn them against you. (If you have aliens in your sci-fi campaign, you can achieve the same effect. How many times in Star Trek are creatures immune to phasers but not physical damage…so where’s the damned .45s?) Sword-wielding adolescents out to slaughter scores of “monsters” (genocide? racism?) so they can pilfer their stuff — sounds like the same problem to me. In fact, it’s why I don’t like fantasy settings — well, that and they’re all derivative of the Tolkein with a twist syndrome to my eye.

I would suggest that the problem is 1) players with a power gamer mentality — where the play is a chance to self-actualize through violence, anti-social behavior, and a touch of narcissism. There’s a place for that at the right table and more power to ’em…just not mine. Players interested in role playing — in taking on a character with flaws, as well as big biceps and a sword — tend to be more interested in the storyline, in the characters they interact with. You have less of the power gamer’s direct action and more subtlety.

Example: I played in a poorly GM’d Shadowrun campaign that was the typical hack-n-slash players with big ass guns. They were loud, boorish, and had the same sense of invincibility problem mentioned in the other blog. I decided to play a professional elven Irish terrorist. We were supposed to rob a bank for some reasons (it’s been 17 years since this…) and the boys wanted to do the usual big gun bash. I convinced people to do it quick, surgical, and with as little violence as possible…why? To not only do the job, but get away with it Scot-free. The change of style this brought to the game lessened the fighting, but increased the role playing, character cooperation, planning, subtly. And it was fun.

2) Campaigns that don’t have some kind of story arc — even a vague one — are prone to drift in a way that makes them difficult to plan for, and to keep the players on track or even interested. I’ve found that my best campaigns always had some sort of Omega point that the characters were aiming for. Sometimes, once reached, you could throw them another target; sometimes that was the end of the game.

For example, several long-running Star Trek campaigns grew out of what was to be a mini-campaign…but I had a clear vision of the universe where machine intelligence like Data was becoming more commonplace, and the slow decay of the Federation society through sloth brought about by generations of people not working for a living and spending all their time in adult education classes (Ever notice that, besides Starfleet and the occasional sicentist, everyone in the TNG and after universe were mostly artists?) The machines were taking over and trying to save the biological creatures by reintroducing artificial scarcity and other reasons for people to strive. Each campaign was a piece of that storyline with a different set of characters involved in some way.

Babylon 5 was even more direct: they were part of another group fighting the Shadows during the war. When the war ended, the campaign fizzled. My Serenity campaign was running well until they had effectively slipped the bonds of the Alliance and their yakuza opponents. Interest in the campaign died off after that.

I would suggest that sci-fi isn’t the problem when it comes to nihilistic behavior in a game. It’s the parameters of the game and the type of players/characters that are inhabiting it.

Over at Nevermet Press, the boys are having their latest RPG Blog Carnival. The topic was supposed to be Technology and Your Game Table, but they thought that would be boring. So instead, they went with the terrible “What Makes a Roleplaying Game Bad Ass?”

“What, in your view, is the most Bad Ass game out — or ever!? What tweaks, mods, fixes have you houseruled to make your favorite games even more bad ass?Why is Savage Worlds so much more Bad Ass than [insert the rest]? =P And last, but not least, remember the last time you were explaining some new mechanic or story plot point to another gamer and they just simply said “Oh, that’s just Bad Ass!” What was it that was so Bad Ass?!”

I think any game that does the job of helping the players have fun and the GM tell a story (or for those that like the more distributed storytelling — like Primetime Adventures — everyone tell a story) is “bad ass” (read: effective.) Some settings lend themselves to the sobriquet than others — espionage games, superheroes, pulp action… Whatever floats your boat.

For me, the most effective system I’ve used for espionage/modern action is the old James Bond:007 rules set, as evidenced by the support it gets on the website. I’m rather partial to Cortex for its simplicity, but the surprisingly amount of crunch it has; the mechanics just seem to work for me. It’s similar to Savage Worlds but I think it’s more streamlined.

FATE seems like, in the right hands, it could be very cool…those hand just aren’t mine, so that also leaves out Cortex Plus (aka Leverage and the execrable Smallville.) Otherwise, there’s no system that is “bad ass” to me.

Settings are where the “bad ass” moniker is more appropriate. Hollow Earth Expedition is bad ass: Naxis, dinosaurs, and a hollow freakin’ Earth! Space: 1889 is bad ass: Victorian steam powered sci fi on Mars!

What really makes an RPG bad ass is good players, characters, and the fun of doing things you wish you could in real life. It’s getting together with friends on a regular basis and throwing life aside for a few hours a week.

On the original topic: I’ve found the iPad to be an indispensable tool for running a game. I can use Dropbox to transfer files, game book pdfs are in iBooks. Diceshaker for rolling for NPCs, Google Maps for setting information in the latest espionage adventure (set in Ciudad del Este), Penultimate to draw maps, etc,.; hit the internet to call up a picture of a type of car or gun, or snag info from a wiki online. The battery lasts 10 hours, wifi+3G means you can usually get onto the net if needed, the screen is big enough for the players to see maps, pictures, etc.