Casting Shadows

We leave it up to you what screen means in the standard prompt for #RPGaDAY2024 ‘s Day 26. While we are sure many will take it as a chance to talk about how they make use of GM screens, we are also sure that quite a few will talk about cool features on VTTs their group uses. I believe some will talk about finding the right people to play an unusual game or two. With luck, there is an interpretation of screen for everyone – but if not we have alternates. Life is good.

It is indeed Day 26 which puts us in the final series of prompts for this year’s event. That has nothing to do with any interpretation of screen, but it is a superb feeling to do a quick search with the hashtag and see how many folks are still engaged with RPGaDAY and how many are posting daily! Superb!

To keep things simple, I am going to limit my post to how I use ‘screens’ in my online games. A short will be released today which shows off a GM screen, so let’s vary the output for today as a metaphor for the information flow control that might occur with a GM screen to moderate things.

With my online gaming, one of the major differences that I find it has from play at a shared table is the degree of body language that is typically viewable, including facial expression. As a result, whenever possible, I like to have the players sit a little farther back from their cameras so we can see more of them. Things like attitude, conscious and subconscious gestures, reactions, and attention can enhance the play of a session, if you can see it. That means I like to have the player video feeds maximized and on my largest display. I do not use a GM screen very often, preferring to use my memory unless there is a chart to draw inspiration from, so you might think that would be the end of it, but I do use other screens – to varying degrees. To one side of the main display I tend to have a screen, usually my Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, in split screen to show the notepad and my short form versions of the character sheets (in Word or Excel) when we are likely to meet lots of NPCs. I can use the S-pen to jot whatever notes I might need during play (such as improvised names, specific dates and appointments, etc.), on one side, and I can scroll through the mini character sheets to reference whatever is relevant in the moment on the other. On those rare occasions when more information than this is needed, I add another, smaller, tablet to the other side of the display. I might use this for arguments in heated and complicated debates, for tools like the BRP resistance table or Pendragon’s Trait pairs, for mass battles, or on those vanishingly rare times when I am using a map.

I do not find displays to be as useful for finding things in the moment as a book or a set of notes, but I find them to be ideal for rapid switching between specific pages, apps, or documents that I have arranged in advance. So, on each of my three displays I will also have a pdf of the game open to its index – just in case. When we are familiar with a game, this tends to fall by the wayside, but when we are learning a game and we want to check something in the rules, I switch to the PDF reader so I can scan the index while heading to the page on the smaller tablet or the actual book. This lets me find what I want quickly, but also build an understanding of where things are in the book. I also annotate the PDF with the S-pen to mark off what we referenced in play, and how often, in order to use time more efficiently when reviewing the rules for the next session. I find this makes the learning process much faster.

Want a more traditional take on “screen”? Check out this Short!