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Today we’re going to talk about that little detail that can add spice to your RPG sessions and take them up a notch.
What I will focus on are three ways to enhance your tabletop RPG sessions with video.
First, I want to start off with a few general things you need to know.
Video? What Do You Mean?
What do I mean by video? I’m talking about things like cut scenes in an MMORPG, so these are not very long. You want to keep these to somewhere between 30 seconds and five minutes. It just depends on what you’re making the video for. You don’t want to make them too long and you don’t want to do this all the time. You want to use this technique sparingly. Every time you use this for your RPG sessions, the idea is for it to be fresh and have maximum impact. If you play every week, maybe you use this every five or six sessions.
Not only can you use this for online sessions, but you can use it for live sessions also. In a live session, as long as you have a laptop, phone, or tablet, you can display your video on that screen for everyone around the table.
For More Than GMs
It may seem like this article like this is for GMs or those who are thinking about being a GM. That would not be true. Characters can use this as well to add certain major elements about themselves and reveal it to other players. Think outside the box, folks.
I do not recommend you do this if you are thinking about being a GM and you don’t have enough experience. Get some RPG sessions under your belt before implementing or trying out this tip. This is more for GMs who have experience and been doing this for a while.
Everybody who GMs already knows this, but it bears repeating — this will add to your workload. This is why there are GMs getting paid to run RPG sessions for people. It is a time intensive hobby, or for some, a time intensive part-time job (I’ll talk about the pros and cons of that in a separate post). The time investment is hours, especially if you have never made a video before. It’ll be much longer than you think, so if you don’t have any experience creating videos, I would keep the videos to an even shorter duration — 30 seconds to a minute. Then, when you have more experience creating videos, you can increase that time to a couple of minutes.
Now, let’s take a look at a few ways to use video for our RPG sessions.
#1. RPG Session Recaps
Recaps are summaries of what happened in the last session. What this will do is focus your player’s imagination and get them engaged in the story if you’ve created something compelling. It means you need to pop this off about 10 to 15 minutes before your session starts. It forces everyone to pay attention to the same thing and get them in that frame of mind to play.
After they watch the video, they can ask questions about the video. Maybe they didn’t attend the last RPG session. Or they forgot some things because they didn’t do what a seasoned tabletop RPG gamer would do — keep notes.
When everyone has asked their questions, when it gets to the top of the hour, you’re not cutting into any of your play time. You have the full amount for adventuring, maximizing the RPG session activity.
Recap videos can be anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes. Five minutes is long. It means a lot of things happened in the last RPG session. If the only thing to happen was a major battle, your recap video should be rather short. However, the sweet spot is probably around 3 to 3 1/2 minutes.
Now, I have three recap videos on my YouTube channel that I’ve done for my The One Ring 1st Edition campaign that’s been going on for some years. Here are some links to a couple of those videos.
Heroes or Eriador Recap: Episodes 9 & 10.
Heroes of Eriador Recap: Episode 8
The idea is for you to get a sense of what I recap video is supposed to do in setting the tone and mood of the RPG session.
#2. Major Location or Object Introduction
The next place you will want to use video in your RPG sessions is when you introduce a significant location. A major location is one you will use repeatedly. You can also use this for an object that will be a focal point of the campaign.
For example, if you have a sci-fi campaign in Classic Traveller, and the players will be at a starport. The first time you introduce the player characters to that starport is when you want to play a video. It doesn’t have to be right at the beginning when they get there. It could be after they’ve been there for a few minutes or an hour or so. You have to time these things where they will have the best effect on the story and therefore on the RPG session.
How you would do this is to create a brief summary, a concise description of the history of the starport, recurring NPCs, and any other details the player characters are likely to encounter that would be known generally to everyone.
The video also acts as a library, a place the players can go back to replay the video if they want to get those details again. You won’t have to repeat yourself as a GM. They would just need to click a link or a button to replay the video.
It’s the same thing with a major object or artifact. It’s like the trope of an artifact the PCs embark on a quest to find. There are four pieces to the artifact. The PCs have to travel all over the galaxy, or all over the world, to find these four pieces for whatever reason the story gives. If you give all the pertinent information in a video, the players won’t bother you about details they have at their fingertips during the RPG session.
Here’s a side note — don’t be afraid to make the players work. You did the work, so make them perform the bit of work of clicking a link and pushing play. You have already done the heavy lifting. Plus, this work is engaging. It increases immersion for the players instead of them waiting around to do something when they can just take the initiative and do it themselves. So keep referring them back to that because you have done it for a reason.
#3. BBV (Big Bad Villain) Reveal
The last one, which is I think probably the coolest one of all (they are all cool, but this one fits for a video) in the reveal of a major villain. This will be the shortest kind of video you will make, anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute max.
The point of the video is not to give a full description and details about the villain. It’s to add drama and tension to the RPG session. You want to make this big with mood music and visuals. This is a situation where short is better to have maximum impact. Watch movies when they reveal the villain and note the details on how it’s done. Then attempt to copy that to the best of your ability for the RPG session.
(Bonus) As A Map
This one is only for virtual tabletops.
With mapmaking software like Dungeon Alchemist or Chronos Builder, a GM can now export their RPG session maps as videos themselves. This means things are moving on the map like steam, torch flickers, fog, and other things. This is more of a subtle way to use video, but it does the same thing in increasing immersion for your session.
In order for video maps to have the effect you want, players will need to have a halfway decent computer or video card. It’s not like playing a video game, so they don’t have to have top of the line GPUs. However, you want to have a mid-tier one to make the experience seamless and unobtrusive of video glitches. I suggest the EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 SC Ultra. It’s what I have in my computer and it works like a champ.
So there you have it folks. Three…well, four ways to enhance your tabletop RPG campaign with video.
A question for you if you have made it this far in the post. If you had to choose just one, player or GM, which one would you choose to have in your campaign? Let me know in the comments.
